I Want to Want What You Want

I want a lot of things. That shouldn’t be surprising. All of us want stuff. Our human desires are endless. 

• I want the new Honda Prelude (Boost Blue Pearl please). 

• I want to visit Greece. 

• I want Tyrese Haliburton to finish game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals with his Achilles tendon intact. 

All those sound somewhat self-indulgent, I know. But I want more noble things, too. 

• I want my kids to find great jobs in fields they’re passionate about. 

• I want my team at The Stone Table to be unified and on mission together. 

• I want our bottom line to flourish so we can give more to missions. 

Our wants, both selfish and selfless, are a bottomless abyss. These internal longings can bring us a lot of joy—but frankly, they can also cause us a lot of disillusionment and heartache. Some religions teach that all suffering is rooted in desire, so their adherents actually spend their lives desiring to desire less. That’s certainly one approach (just not one I would recommend). 

As You Wish? 

Then we see Jesus frame desire in a totally different way: “If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it” (John 14:14). Ask for anything? And just use your name? I mean, if this is some kind of corporate sponsorship deal, Jesus, I’m in. 

And a few verses later, He doubles down: “…ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you” (John 15:7). Sounds like Jesus is more than cool with my wish list. Maybe I should start an Amazon registry. 

But here’s the deal… 

Faith in Jesus isn’t a magic trick. It doesn’t grant us whatever we want, it reprioritizes what we want. In fact, faith in Christ completely changes what we ever thought we wanted to begin with. 

The missing piece of John 15 above is vitally important: “If you abide in me…” 

Faith syncs us with Jesus. The Gospel renews and resurrects our desires from the ground up. We actually start wanting to want what He wants.  

Even the Good Stuff 

And that’s where the real discernment begins—not just with the obviously selfish wants, but with the good ones too. This can get especially tricky in our work because so many of our wants can sound downright noble.  

We want the business to grow. We want the promotion. We want our work to matter. We want to make more so we can give more. We want to leverage our influence for the Kingdom. 

Those certainly aren’t bad things. Some of them may even be desires God Himself deposited in us. But even our good desires can become idols and are limited by what we can see.  

As Pastor Tim Keller often said, “God will either give us what we ask or give us what we would have asked if we knew everything he knows.” There’s something really important in there. 

So, I still want a lot of things. I suspect I always will. Following Jesus doesn’t mean we begin to want less. It means we begin to want right. And we learn to surrender even those right desires to His will, His way, and His time.