The wise counselor is, in a sense, a realist. He knows from Scripture that we live between the ages. And so, he helps the counselee to see how his desires and expectations point to a deeper longing for eternal pleasures that are only found in God (Ps. 16:11). Not only that, the faithful counselor points to Christ—crucified, raised, ascended, seated in heaven, and given to and in us by the Spirit. He is our hope of glory.

We live and suffer according to the hopes and expectations we hold. I mean this in a general sense. The things we long for drive how we behave. And that longing makes the wait to be experienced as a type of suffering. To not have what is deeply desired is painful. It makes the heart sick.
The author of Proverbs noticed this reality: “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life” (Prov. 13:12). Like my initial statement, this verse seems to depict a general reality about human psychology. When the object of our longings—of our hopes—is delayed, our hearts grow tired and discouraged. The continuous lacking that is perceived becomes a burden in prolonged waiting.
In contrast, the desire that is met and fulfilled is compared to the tree of life. There is joy and delight in having that which has been anticipated and wanted. When that baby girl is finally held in her mom’s arms, everything in life takes new colors. When the doctor declares dad to be cancer-free, the tastes of grace in life are accented in new ways. When that promotion finally comes after years of hard work, the scents of life grow more fragrant. The fulfilled desire is like a source of new energy and motivation, a tree that produces life.
What Kind of Longing?
It may seem that the solution for our anxieties and angsts is straightforward. All we need is to get what we long for most deeply, and then all pain will fade away. I would say that is true, depending on how we look at these longings. Created with desires, we were meant to long for something. The problem is that our wants are based on longings that shoot too low. We expect ultimate fulfillment from things that cannot deliver the delight for which we were made. And so, our hearts find no peace until they rest in God.[1]
Now, the fact that we do have desires is revealing. The reality that we find delight when desires are met points to a greater reality of ultimate delight. The temporary quality of the delight we experience from inferior desires exposes the reality that our hearts yearn for final peace and permanent blessedness. Our souls are thirsty for God, the only source of living water (Ps. 42:1-2).
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Our duty right now isn’t just to fight the pagans in courtrooms and voting booths and anyplace else where we can make a difference in civic life. We have a higher calling, that of obedience to God’s will. This obedience allows us to consecrate all that has been desecrated.

Addressing senior SS officers in Poznań on October 4, 1943, Heinrich Himmler was in a cheerful mood. The total extermination of the Jews, he told his minions, was going swimmingly; how unfortunate, though, that Nazism’s biggest triumph must be forever concealed. The mass murder, he said, was “an unwritten and never-to-be-written page of glory in our history,” doomed to be denied and obscured because, well, most people just felt icky when confronted with the sight of naked, starved corpses piled high.
A committed pagan who had his SS erect several memorials to the Germanic tribes and warlords who had fought Christianity throughout the ages, Himmler held the idolator’s primitive belief that to become God, a man must show utter indifference to human life. Smash a child’s skull, and you’ve moved beyond good and evil, to a place of sovereignty reserved only for deities—and demons. But never let the world catch you red-handed, Himmler knew, lest humanity’s irritating insistence on human dignity drive folks to rise up and resist.
I’ve been thinking about Himmler’s dark path to transcendence a lot this past month, especially after viewing many of the atrocities committed on October 7, captured by the Hamas terrorists themselves on their GoPro body cameras. The marauders breached an internationally recognized border to rape women, behead babies, and bind parents to children before burning them alive. These acts would have thrilled Himmler and his men. But Hamas went a step further. They had no patience for the arch-Nazi’s bashfulness. They wanted the world to see their atrocities, in close-up and real time. Because the intolerable desecration of the human body was precisely the point.
At the end of October, Carl R. Trueman reminded the participants of a seminar that followed his Erasmus Lecture that the decades that separate Himmler from Hamas are marked by the effort to sever the ties between personhood and embodiment. A fetus is undeniably embodied but, according to abortion advocates, not yet a person. And transgender ideologues insist that a person may also decide that he was born into the wrong body, and choose to mutilate his body at will, a practice doctors and educators call “gender-affirming care.” These convictions are of a piece. The sexual revolution makes little sense unless you adhere to the potent pagan principle that flesh and self are separable.
Which, if you reject that whole bit about being created in the image of God, is easy enough to believe! After all, what is a human body, if it possesses not a divinely ordained soul but some kind of operating system, one that is entirely earthly? Believe that materialist account of what it means to be human, and the body becomes not a shrine but a battlefield, each mutilation a triumph and a testament to our godlike ability to shape our future as we, and only we, see fit.
The devils who slaughtered more than 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped more than 240 were merely taking this logic to its conclusion. They’re neither nihilists nor serious believers in Islam, a religion that, even in its more rigid forms, does not recognize such atrocities as acceptable. They are, simply and terrifyingly, pagans, fighting the very same war described so lucidly in Leviticus, the war against God and those who believe in his mercy.
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As you try to reach the next generation for Christ, you can amaze them with your cleverness, your humor, or your looks. Or you can amaze them with God. I need a lot of things in my life. There are schedules and details and a long to-do list. I need food and water and shelter. I need sleep. I need more exercise, and I need to eat better. But this is my greatest need and yours: to know God, love God, delight in God, and make much of God.

Give Them God (Not Moralism)
I beg of you, don’t go after the next generation with mere moralism, either on the right (“don’t have sex, do go to church, share your faith, stay off drugs”) or on the left (“recycle, dig a well, feed the homeless, buy a wristband”). The gospel is a message not about what we need to do for God but about what God has done for us. So get them with the good news about who God is and what he has done for us.
Some of us, it seems, are almost scared to tell people about God. Perhaps because we don’t truly know him. Maybe because we prefer living in triviality. Or maybe because we don’t consider knowing God to be very helpful in real life. I have to fight against this unbelief in my own life. If only I would trust God that he is enough to win the hearts and minds of the next generation. It’s his work much more than it is mine or yours. So make him front and center. Don’t confuse platitudes with profundity. Don’t proclaim an unknown god, when we know who God is and what he is like (Acts 17:23). And don’t reduce God to your own level. If ever people were starving for a God the size of God, surely it is now.
Give them a God who is holy, independent, and unlike us—a God who is good, just, full of wrath, and full of mercy. Give them a God who is sovereign, powerful, tender, and true. Give them a God with edges. Give them an undiluted God who makes them feel cherished and safe, and small and uncomfortable too.
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