Has your desire for God withered? Is your affection for Jesus a fading flame? In the fight of faith, have you been mostly in retreat? Let me tell you a story.

In a house with three kids under three, few things happen the same way every day. Scheduled flexibility is the name of the game. Yet a few things happen so consistently they might as well be natural law — meltdowns moments before getting in the car, blowouts in brand-new clothes, senseless and ceaseless crying at the witching hour. And this.

My three-year-old son enjoys playing with blocks. He builds with the razor attention of an architect — for about ten minutes. Then interest wanes, and he wanders in search of new adventures.

However, without fail, the more fiery of my ten-month-olds finds her way to those lovely white pine blocks, picks a random one, and begins trying to gum the thing to sawdust. When Strider sees his sister holding that block — a block that failed to hold his attention moments earlier — well, I’m sure you can guess what happens next. The rivalry is real. And for a time, that pine square becomes more valuable than a hoard of gold beneath a dragon, and the war that ensues only slightly less intense than those in Middle-earth.

Now, how does this dynamic work? And more immediately important to you, what do toy blocks and tyke battles have to do with your dimmed desire for God?

You Imitate Someone

To answer the first question, Aurora’s desire for the block inflames Strider’s desire because we inevitably imitate those around us. Man is a mimetic creature.

Man is made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). We reflect God in his world, in part, by mimicking him. Paul makes the connection explicit: “Be imitators [mimētai] of God” (Ephesians 5:1). Man is an imitative creature all the way down. It’s what we were made for.

But God designed imitating others to be a means of imitating him. Holy imitation is a community project. Paul in particular loves godly copycats: “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 1:11; 4:16). Because Paul shows us what it looks like to mimic Christ, we should mimic Paul. But he doesn’t stop with apostles. In Philippians, he exhorts his readers to imitate him and all who imitate him (Philippians 3:17). The writer of Hebrews doubles down on this mimetic chain, calling us to imitate godly leaders and all who walk by faith (Hebrews 6:12; 13:7).

A biblical principle serves as the concrete beneath these exhortations: when it comes to imitation, the question is not whether but what. John warns, “Do not imitate evil but imitate good” (3 John 11), implying that imitation is inevitable. Again, the question is not whether you will imitate — you will. But what will you imitate? Evil or good? Or better yet, whom will you imitate?

Mimetic Desire

We need to add one more piece to this puzzle before we return to our desire for God. From what I’ve said, you might imagine that imitation is always intentional and mainly pertains to actions. But we are far more imitative than that.

Proverbs especially emphasizes that we imitate others unconsciously. Thus, virtues and vices are contagious. To paraphrase Proverbs 13:20, wise he ends who wise befriends, and Proverbs 14:7, from a fool flee or like a fool be. Why? Because you cannot avoid imitating. “Bad company . . .,” as they say (1 Corinthians 15:33).

But the mimicry goes even deeper. We imitate the desires of others. Catholic philosopher René Girard calls this mimetic desire. After assiduously observing Scripture, society, and literature, Girard noticed that almost all our desires are suggested, given, mediated by others. We look at what others desire to learn what we should desire. So, we want most things because others want them first. In short, Girard concludes that desires require someone to model them.

Modern advertising exploits that insight. By showing an appealing person valuing some product, they model a desire for you. But this tactic is as old as the garden. Satan — the first advertiser — leveraged contagious desire to get Eve to ape his own serpentine lust for divinity. Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery because he made Daddy’s favor irresistibly attractive. And, of course, Strider, like a moth to flame, was drawn to Aurora’s block because her desire transformed it into the world’s most desirable block.

These examples show that when the object of mimetic desire cannot be shared (or is perceived to be withheld), envy and rivalry result. However, if it can be shared, mimetic desire forges deep friendships and reinforces our loves.

Company You Keep

Now, I hope you see how our irrepressible impulse to imitate — especially to mimic desires — connects with desire for God. If mimetic desire shapes our lesser longings — what we wear, what we drink, what we drive, where we eat, where we go to school — why would it not affect our longing for God?

“Perhaps you don’t desire God because you rarely see anyone else who desires God.”

Perhaps you don’t desire God because you rarely see anyone else who desires God. Just maybe, the pine block has lost its luster in your eyes because no one is trying to chew on it. To put it another way, the company you keep will significantly shape what you long for. You will look like whom you hang with. What you want is a function of whom you observe.

C.S. Lewis identified this principle as the very heartbeat of friendship.

Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, “What? You too?” (The Four Loves, 83)

For Lewis, friendship flowers from a shared love — like soccer or storytelling or theology. When that love is recognized and expressed — “What? You too?” — the shared desire is mutually reinforcing, multiplied and galvanized. Yet Lewis warns that this mimetic effect has a double edge because “the common taste or vision or point of view which is discovered need not always be a nice one” (100). The N.I.C.E. shared an urge that would loose the very gates of hell.

Yet the danger arises precisely because of the staggering goodness of friendship — a goodness that can give us more of God. When you surround yourself with those whose love for God burns bright, the desire for him is contagious. Stand near fire, and your clothes will catch. And with each friend added, the conflagration grows into white-hot worship because every person has unique kindling to contribute. Christian community is a mutual adoration society. You need other toddlers to cherish the block.

Show me the company you keep, and I’ll tell you what you soon will want.

Spotlight Your Models

So, saint, whom do you surround yourself with? Who shows you desiring God? Who are your models?

Luke Burgis (another philosopher) warns, “There are always models of desire. If you don’t know yours, they are probably wreaking havoc in your life. . . . Models are most powerful when they are hidden” (Wanting, 21). For the sake of your joy in God, put a spotlight on your models. Interrogate the source of your desires (or lack thereof).

To help you name your models of desire — both good and bad — consider these four categories.

1. Digital Company

Where do you hang out in Internet land? Who are your digital models? Who’s in your ear, and what gets your eye?

The Net acts as a mimetic amplifier. Instead of two toddlers desiring the same block, digital media enables thousands, even millions, to fight over the same status. The only difference is adults try to mask the mimesis my children do not.

Social media, especially, is an engine of desire. Perhaps your joy in God feels diseased because digital envy is rotting your bones away (Proverbs 14:30). Perhaps you don’t desire God because the podcaster you spend hours with each week doesn’t either.

2. Dominant Company

Who gets the lion’s share of your time? What friends are you around most often, and what is your common bond — your “You too?” Lewis not only knew but demonstrated how soul-shaping a pervasive coterie of friends can be. His group, called “The Inklings,” shared two loves — Christianity and imaginative writing — and the world still rocks in the wake.

Who are the most present models of desire in your life? Family, coworkers, classmates? Do they sharpen your ache for God or dull it? Is the dominant company in your life co-laborers for your joy, “exhorting one another every day” to treasure the triune God (Hebrews 3:12–14)? Mature men and women are models who show us not only how to live but, more importantly, what to love. And these models are not limited to the living.

3. Dead Company

Do you keep company with the dead? And if so, who and what desires do they model? If you are a reader, dead company matters immensely. Books put us into conversation with their authors, and many of the most important books put us into conversation with authors no longer living. They teach us — often explicitly — what to yearn for.

The great benefit of the dead is they often desire differently than modernity. And their deep longings can expose our own as tumbleweeds. Here’s Lewis again: “The real way of mending a man’s taste is not to degenerate his present favorites but to teach him how to enjoy something better” (Experiment in Criticism, 112). The likes of Augustine and Austen, Bunyan and Bavinck, Dante and Donne, Calvin and Coleridge tutor our tastes — and preeminently, that inspired cohort of the dead who penned the Scriptures.

4. Divine Company

Speaking of taste, if you want to develop a hunger for God, nothing will stoke that desire more than keeping company with God himself. The triune God is the ultimate model of our desires, and no one can love God more than God loves God. Unlike all other forms of mediation that work on us externally, God mediates his own desires to us from within. He gives us “the desires of the Spirit” (Galatians 5:17).

But the process is not automatic. We become like God as we see God, and we see God most fully in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 3:18–4:6). We are made and remade to imitate him (Romans 8:29). His desires for God and good are perfect, clear, fiery — and contagious. Jesus is our great mimetic model. As we learn to fix our eyes on him, his joy will kindle ours (Hebrews 12:1–2) and start a wildfire of holy desire.

http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15722726/did-paul-expect-to-see-the-second-coming

Sinners rescued from the road to hell love to rehearse and celebrate the mercy of God. Where would we be today without mercy? Where would we be for eternity without mercy?

Without mercy, we would be dead in our sin, a death worse than death. Mercy called us from the tomb. Mercy lifted us out of the pit. Mercy opened our blind eyes. Mercy gifted us with faith, repentance, and joy. We deserved every possible ounce of rejection, punishment, wrath, but God gave forgiveness, love, and life instead. All that we have, we have by the mercy of God. Is there any other god, in all the religious imaginations on earth, who deals so gently and compassionately with sinners?

“Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me,” Jesus says, “for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls” (Matthew 11:29). Knowing how we’ve treated him, all the endless ways we’ve each ignored and insulted him, he has every righteous reason to be severe and merciless, but he’s gentle with us. He stoops low to receive and restore us. Jesus recites these precious lines from Isaiah about himself: “A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not quench.” Who could know himself a redeemed sinner and not love the kindness and tenderness of such mercy?

And yet mercy doesn’t tell the whole story. There’s another side of this king — a holy, majestic, jealous, even vengeful side, a side sinners like you and me are often far less likely to rehearse and celebrate.

Bruised on the Battlefield

When Jesus drew near to bruised reeds and smoldering wicks, he did not coddle or compromise with sin. His mercy mingled with justice:

Behold, my servant whom I have chosen,     my beloved with whom my soul is well pleased.I will put my Spirit upon him,     and he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles. . . .a bruised reed he will not break,     and a smoldering wick he will not quench,     until he brings justice to victory. (Matthew 12:18–20)

He came to establish justice, and he wouldn’t stop until he saw it to the finish. We might imagine these bruised and vulnerable reeds hiding safely in backyards and community gardens, but here they’re crouching on the battlefield of a cursed world.

Why else is the reed bruised and the wick smoldering, if not because they’re caught in the awful, ordinary crossfire of sin? We all relate to that thin, fragile blade of grass because we’ve felt like that at times, if not often. We’ve all felt the sting of sins against us, and we’ve all watched, with sorrow-filled anger, as sin has torn apart marriages, families, friendships, communities, even whole nations. With our hearts aching with confusion and grief, we’ve cried out for justice. We’ve groaned, with creation, for a better world than the one we have.

Until Justice Is Done

Jesus came to bring that better world, to pour out justice like Niagara in spring, to declare war on all who opposed him, to put a certain end to centuries of rebellion. And yet, as he wages his holy war, he kneels down, with infinite strength, taking fire from every direction, to lift and support the weak, humble, trusting souls in his path. Toward his enemies, he’s severe, unyielding, terrifying. Toward his own, however, he’s gentle and lowly.

On that battlefield, his justice is not some dark cloud casting a shadow over his mercy; it’s the sunless, moonless night which makes his mercy shine. His justice and mercy are two parts in one holy symphony. Isaiah 30:18, for instance, plays the harmonies, mingling the tenderness of God’s mercy with the promise of his justice:

The Lord waits to be gracious to you, and therefore he exalts himself to show mercy to you. For the Lord is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for him.

Mercy and justice are not at odds here, but beautifully joined together. Because he is just, God will be merciful to you, in his perfect timing. His grace to you, in Christ, is justice. The purest enforcement of justice ever conceived or executed delights to show mercy.

God of Against

This mercy does not blunt the force of his justice. The justice of God is a soul-shaking, pride-shattering justice. Right before Isaiah 30:18, the Lord confronts Israel for desperately turning to the armies of Egypt for rescue:

Because you despise this word and trust in oppression and perverseness and rely on them, therefore this iniquity shall be to you like a breach in a high wall, bulging out and about to collapse, whose breaking comes suddenly, in an instant; and its breaking is like that of a potter’s vessel that is smashed so ruthlessly that among its fragments not a shard is found with which to take fire from the hearth, or to dip up water out of the cistern. (Isaiah 30:12–14)

Notice, the mercy of God doesn’t keep him from severity. Is the God you worship one who ever smashes rebellion against him? When you close your eyes to pray, is there ever a sense that he could, right now, righteously decimate billions of people for refusing and insulting him — that sin really is that repulsive and insidious? Some regular awareness of his holy furor against injustice, especially all our injustices against him, is vital to a healthy life of worship. The God of all comfort, after all, is also a consuming fire (Hebrews 12:29).

For the Lord of hosts has a day against all that is proud and lofty, against all that is lifted up — and it shall be brought low. . . . And people shall enter the caves of the rocks and the holes of the ground, from before the terror of the Lord, and from the splendor of his majesty, when he rises to terrify the earth. (Isaiah 2:12, 19)

“The God who stoops, in Christ, to gently lift you out of your sin will one day terrify the nations again.”

This is not a cruel God left behind in the Old Testament. This is the God of infinite mercy. The God who stoops, in Christ, to gently lift you out of your sin will one day terrify the nations again. His justice may be hidden, for a time, beneath his staggering patience, but its devouring fire will soon consume his enemies.

Justice Fueling Mercy

All of that makes his mercy all the more stunning. The terrifying flames of justice don’t undermine his mercy, but illuminate and enflame it. “The Lord waits to be gracious to you, and therefore he exalts himself to show mercy to you. For the Lord is a God of justice.” But they were despising his word and trusting in oppression and perverseness — how could he be both just and gracious to them? How could he bless the ones who cursed and despised him?

By becoming the curse they deserved. Revel, again, in the familiar and shocking story of how justice and mercy meet:

All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. (Romans 3:23–26)

“The wooden beams outside Jerusalem frame the wondrous marriage between justice and mercy.”

The wooden beams outside Jerusalem frame the wondrous marriage between justice and mercy. Through the cross, God is both just and justifier, both just and merciful. On that dark and bloody hill, the terrifying justice of God became a servant of mercy for all who would believe. In Christ, justice is no longer a threat, but a refuge. All the sovereign power that would have ruined us now promises to protect us. “‘In overflowing anger for a moment I hid my face from you,’” Isaiah 54:8 says, “‘but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you,’ says the Lord, your Redeemer.”

How could we feel the full weight of his mercy toward us if we tend to ignore or marginalize the fury of his justice?

Justice and Mercy for Me?

We know all of this about our God, and yet some reading this still struggle to believe that God will be so merciful. The guilt and shame they carry make everyday life feel heavy. They hate their sin, and have made efforts to be done with it, but are back on their knees, again and again, bearing the same painfully familiar confessions. The mercy they thought they’d found feels further and further from reality. Could God really forgive and love someone like me?

Others reading this, however, struggle to believe justice really will be done. Some days, it feels like their whole lives have been one long heart-rending headline. They watch the godless enjoy comfort, success, and prosperity, while they suffer for their faithfulness. They cling to the promise that everything will eventually be made right, but they search the corners and crevices of their lives in vain for evidence it might be so. And if they muster the courage to raise their eyes above their own plight, they see many more suffering in horrible, unjust ways. Could God possibly make anything good of all this pain and injustice?

We struggle to embrace the justice of God because we don’t trust him to fully deal with sins against us. We struggle to embrace the mercy of God because we don’t trust him to fully deal with sins done by us. To both groups, the bloody cross and the empty tomb stubbornly say, he can, he has, and he will. He will surely bring justice to completion. No stone in your life will go unturned. Every sin against you will be brought into the light and made right. Justice himself will call wickedness to account until he finds none (Psalm 10:15).

And in the meantime, he will not break a bruised reed. He won’t quench a smoldering wick. His mercy is as wide and deep as you are sinful. Our God is far more just than we realize, and far more merciful than we can now imagine.