Our Desires; An Obstacle to Lead a True Christian Life

By Yarangchang Imchen | EMN Our earthly life on this earth is like playing a game. We play a game to win it. While playing a game; we feel thirsty, tired, exhausted, yet concomitantly, we determined to win it. Similarly, our life has also merits and demerits. We encounter everything that comes our way, either good or bad but our ultimate goal in our life is to reach our ‘destination’; be it Job, education, marriage, retirement, which can be sum up as ‘success’. On ecclesiastic point of view, our real and ultimate goal shall be the attainment of salvation. Our only life on this earth is possible to survive because of air, water and atmosphere. Due to adaptability to environment, God had created Human beings look alike to Him. God had made day and night, also nurtured and rebuked us by giving life and death for specific years (birth to mortality) according to His will. Our God being a supreme creator is omnipotent and omniscience and hence God is the only manifestation on this earth. Our God is embodiment prior to the conception of the Universe and is everywhere. Our God is for real and for eternity and is a mystic force that keeps us vigil round the clock. Hence, the only life on this earth is to strive hard by what we can do during our lifetime in order to please God and avoid doing against God’s wishes because, the so called ‘desires’ is inevitable in the eyes of human beings. Desire is a must to every human beings and to be face by everyone irrespective of religion, caste, creed, race, rich or poor, God servant or a layman, literate or illiterate, brilliant or dull; once we arrived to this earth as God creation for it is an obligatory to human existence. But the question is how can we manipulate or resists our desires. Is it simply by our own wishes? Obviously it’s a big NO but, it can only be happen when we live a life of purity, trustworthy, simplicity and honesty with constant relationship with God in order to free us from unblemished, wrongdoings, immodesty, vicious and nasty behaviour and consequently, the door to eradicate or abstaining the desires shall be open to all of us. Our earthly life is full of sorrows and miseries. As Gautama Buddha (the founder of Buddhism) rightly said, the world is full of miseries, the cause of miseries is from our desires, and these desires can be ended by practising the ‘Three Jewels’ or ‘Tri Ratnas’ i.e. Right Faith, Right Knowledge, Right Conduct. But the followers of Buddhism don’t believe in the existence of life after death. Their ultimate goal is the achievement of enlightenment during lifetime by doing good deeds in one’s lifetime. I’m not exaggerating for the propaganda of Buddhist Religion but just a synonymous comparison relating to the concept of our human desires in Christians perspective. On contrary to it, we the Christians strongly believe in the existence of life after death i.e. in paradise as Heaven and Hell. Hence, during our life time we encounter with so many desires and in order to overcome these desires our strong faith, daily devotions, prayers, fasting, meditations, bible recitation, commitment and relationship with God is important and most vital point is by leading a true Christian life in order to defeat our desires during our lifetime. Bible tells us about desires in 1 John 2:17. It says; the world and its desires pass away, but whoever, does the Will of God lives forever. Here again in the 1 John 2:16 says; for everything in the world-the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life- comes not from the Father but from the world. Hence, our earthly life is the ultimate consequences that generate our desires and simultaneously we commit sins. Hence, it is our bound duty to manipulate ourselves and resists our desires which are the root cause of all evil. The desire is of positive desires and negative desires. Positive desires are the desire to succeed, desire to achieve, desire to possess good character, desire to give our best effort to what we are doing at, desire to help others, desire to serve others, desire to possess something etc provided if these desires is achieved in an ethical manner. Negative desires are the lust for power, lust from our physical body, greed etc. It is because of our desires changes take place dramatically by changing the course of our life consequently ending with a positive and negative desires. We easily make pledges to eradicate everything that comes our way but these pledges are done by our left hand and denounce it by our right hand. How injustice we are! It’s simply because of our desires that invade us by living name sake Christians. If we can overcome the desires then our life can be free from the bondage of all evils and temptations and finally our desires can be ended. Our land being a Christian state is full of corruption and injustice everywhere. From Have’s to Have’s not, from privilege to under privilege class, nepotism, myths and misconceptions, observing bad omens, superstitious minded etc, even though we all are from good Christian family. As a desired propaganda, our churches compete from different denominations (Baptist, catholic, revival, Pentecost etc) and considers as a taboo to approach one another when our respective denomination practise and doctrine is concerned. In reality, we all believe in one Holy God i.e. our Jesus Christ. It is viable on our part to have atonement with God through the Jesus of blood. Henceforth, our life on earth has a meaning to breath in and let us repent our past misdeeds and reborn again as a true and dedicated Christians, by taking more responsibilities as a soldier of Christ to take our Nagaland state to another yardstick through sanctity of life with pragmatic manipulation in our daily life. Let us bow down to our Supreme God for abundance blessings and as and when God calls us; let us be bold enough to say that “we’re saved” by avoiding all our unwanted desires that confronts us in order to reach the ‘Gateway of Heaven’.