Editor's note: The subject of human desires—and how our preaching should take them into account—is complicated. Surely our preaching addresses at the deepest levels the full spectrum of human longings, yet at the same time preachers wonder just how intentional to be in speaking to the yearnings of the soul. To navigate this issue, we talked to a preacher who has written often on the subject of spiritual formation and the human heart: John Ortberg, pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in Menlo Park, California.

PreachingToday.com: When are human longings legitimate?

John Ortberg: If you think about human desires as they existed originally at creation, before they got messed up in the Fall, they are an important part of our humanity. We were made to have longings, and God loves to fulfill human desires. Psalm 103:5 says God "satisfies your desires with good things." Desires are actually one of the primary indicators of God's will for a creature. Fish want to swim; birds want to fly. God makes creatures to do certain things, and then he places within them the desire to do that. We have desires for food and for water. Because sinful desires can lead us badly astray, we Christians can sometimes mistrust them and not recognize the importance of desire and what a good thing desire is. The only way to have sustainable spiritual life is not to quench desire; rather, it is to retrain our desires so that we come to desire what God wants us to desire.

There is an interesting connection between the words emotion and motion. Emotions are what set us in motion. If we didn't have the capacity for emotion and desire, we would never do anything. So we have to recognize that desire is very good. It is central to understanding God's will for our lives. But then we must also understand that sin has messed up every desire we have.

For instance, even when I'm preaching, I have a bundle of mixed desires. I want to declare God's Word, and then I also want people to think that I'm doing really well, so that I can feel good about myself. There is this mixture of ego along with the desire to serve God. We all will wrestle with mixed desires as long as we live.

And so preachers should speak to and appeal to godly longings, the desires that will move people to be the people God wants them to be. We need to teach them what it means to die. The call of Jesus to die to self, to take up your cross in self-denial, is critical, and it's one that we rarely hear from our culture. So we have to teach on that. "Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains a solitary grain." But then we have to explain to people that the self we die to is always a lesser, sinful self, so that a greater, nobler self can come to life.

So death to self is not death to all desire.

Ortberg: That's right. I remember a talk by Lynne Hybels that she titled "I Died to Myself, and Myself Almost Died." The teaching of death to self had gotten confused in her background. Instead of understanding that our death to self is actually the door to the liberation of the self who God wants us to be, dying to self became an end in itself.

It seems that one danger of trying to speak to people's legitimate longings is unintentionally to begin to say what people want to hear.

Ortberg: We need to come out of denial and say, We all do that. It doesn't mean that's all we do, or that it's our conscious intent, but we all have a concern for what people think of us. For some of us that may be because of our need for approval, or there's a concern for control and leadership over an organization. In both cases the starting point for addressing the problem is to say, I have that disease.

Then I need to ask, How do I arrange my life so that my life with God, my identity in God, is rich enough that I don't need the congregation's approval or compliance anymore. We need to have a life with God that is so rich and full that we have something better than what catering to itching ears can obtain.

Although I want to be aware of what people long for, I don't want to appeal mainly to what people long for. I want to appeal to people becoming who God made them to be—moving them in the direction of love, joy, peace, patience—and asking: What would move people in that direction?

There was a distinction that Ignatius made that's always been helpful for me to think about. He had a great crisis when he was ill over whether he should go back to be a soldier and win glory through battle, or serve God. He said when he would picture either of those two scenarios, in the moment both would provide him with a little burst of joy. But as he continued to reflect on it, the joy of serving God would remain while the joy that he felt at becoming a soldier who won glory on the battlefield would fade.

So I think that sense of moving in the direction of the fruit of the Spirit, moving in the direction of obedience to God, produces a joy or a meaning that lasts in a way that the gratification of other desires does not.

Why speak to legitimate longings?

Ortberg: There is no way to speak that does not evoke longings. Psychologists who study this kind of thing say that all words and thoughts have an emotional charge. So there is no such thing as preaching that is just neutral information that carries no emotional weight. So it's much better to be aware of that and upfront about it than to think that sometimes we address longings and sometimes not. We always are, because the people we address are whole beings.

What I don't want to do is try to manipulate longings or make false promises about longings being satisfied in ways that they will not be.

What does Jesus teach us about speaking to human longings?

Ortberg: Go through the Sermon on the Mount. I once thought that the point of the Beatitudes is to tell us what we're supposed to be: a peacemaker, or somebody who mourns, and so on. But now I see them more as announcements of the good news of life in the kingdom, especially for people who thought they were shut out. Jesus looks at the misfits and says, "Blessed are you who are meek." He's announcing to people who feel like they're on the margins that a life of blessedness in the kingdom is available. It's no wonder that people responded to him the way they did.

Or he says, "Be anxious for nothing." I think about my life and how much anxiety I have. I get worried about money, about my church, about staff problems, about my kids. What would it look like not to be anxious?

Or think about sexuality and how it can produce in us guilt, desire, turbulence. Then think about what Jesus said about not looking with wrongful lust. What would it be like if I looked at every woman that wasn't my wife like she was my sister or my daughter?

So if you go through the Sermon on the Mount and imagine yourself in various scenarios as a real person hearing those words, you realize how deeply Jesus spoke to human longings.

Later in Matthew Jesus said, "Come to me all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." You think about the people listening to Jesus—the tremendous burdens that most were carrying in their lives—and you can imagine how inviting those words of Jesus were as they spoke to their deep human longings.

I remember Richard Foster telling a story about a father who was really frustrated with his son in the grocery store. Nothing would calm the son down, so the father finally just started to sing this song to his son: "I love you. I'm glad you're my son, and I'm glad I get to be your dad." He sang it all the way out to the car, and he put the kid in the car seat, and then his son stretched his arms out and said, "Sing it to me again, Daddy; sing it to me again." Well, to tell that story to a congregation and then to say there is a God who loves to sing that song to you, to be your Father, to say, "You are precious in my sight, and I love you"—that speaks to a longing deep inside the human heart. When you're preaching, you can feel a kind of melting around that, and that's because the heart was made to be loved by God.

How can speaking to people's longings contribute to or distract from spiritual formation?

Ortberg: I'm fascinated by psychology, communication, and spiritual formation, and there can be some cross purposes there. You can listen to communicators who are really effective; they're great at playing on longings and producing emotional responses in people. That can make a talk popular and a communicator really popular. But it can actually damage the hearers' spiritual formation because they become dependent on a story or a pointed experience during a sermon to have deep emotions around God. Then when they're absent from that, they find themselves not feeling much toward God.

Spiritual formation involves the reformation of my desires. I need to be freed from desires that lead me away from God, and increasingly motivated by desires that lead me towards God and towards the life God wants me to live.

What that means for the communicator is, I have to submit my natural tendency to speak to human longings under the greater purpose of having Christ formed in people. Sometimes that means I may come to a story, and instead of telling it in a way that would evoke emotion in the moment, I need to teach that in a way that explains to people how to arrange their lives so their desires get reordered. The 12 Steps of the Alcoholics Anonymous program are about the reordering of desire: becoming freed from desires that enslave me so I can be moved by healthier desires. I need to teach people how to do that, rather than teaching always in such a way that they become interminably dependent on emotional experiences.

Because I'm a "feeler," as a preacher I can get addicted to trying to create an emotional response in hearers. I can be tempted to gauge the effectiveness of a sermon by the level of attentiveness and emotional engagement—silence in the room, sniffling, people getting ready to cry—rather than the longer-term, harder-to-gauge question, Is Christ becoming more important to my hearers?

What can help us keep in tune with people's longings?

Ortberg: When preparing the message, I need to make sure I'm thinking about real people. When I'm putting a message together, often I will try to think about specific people who will hear the message, such as the guy I know who has adopted 60 foster children. Or the guy in his late twenties who for the first time in his life gave his heart to a woman, and the woman has just broken up with him. Or the guy who launched his own company but just went out of business. If I'm thinking of actual people, I'll become aware of how this message will fall on these ears.

What do the essential themes of the gospel teach us about speaking to longings?

Ortberg: In The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis has a wonderful scene in which one of the characters, a ghostlike man, has a lizard on his shoulder, and an angel comes and says, "You may enter into life, but I'm going to have to kill that lizard." The lizard represents lust, which is an example of one kind of longing. The guy goes through this excruciating internal struggle as the lizard is whispering: Don't let him kill me. If you let him kill me, you'll die. If you let him kill me, life won't be worth living.

So he agonizes over the question Will I die to this distorted longing or not?

Finally, out of desperation, of disgust with himself, and of longing, he says: Go ahead, just go ahead, kill it.

The angel does, the ghostlike figure falls to the ground, and so does the lizard. It looks like there's nothing but death. But then the ghostlike man is revived and becomes substantial, and the lizard not only comes back to life, but is transformed into a fabulous stallion. The man climbs on the stallion, and they enter into life.

The bottom line of the story is that nothing—no desire—can enter into the life of heaven as it exists right now. But no desire, if it is fully submitted to God and broken through the process of repentance, will not be reborn as something so magnificent and noble that we cannot now even imagine it.

John Ortberg is pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in Menlo Park, California.