He Set Eternity In Their Heart

He has been trying to stop wanting it for about five years and he is losing.

The want is simple: he would like something he made to last. Not for his name to be on it. For the thing itself to still be there, doing its job, after him.

And he has decided that this want is a fault. He has read enough and heard enough to know that attachment to permanence is a mark of not having grasped something, that a spiritually mature man holds things lightly, that the desire for a monument is the ego at work.

So he has been at war with it. He has tried to argue it down. He has confessed it more than once, sincerely.

And it has not shifted by a millimetre in five years, and the effect of five years of fighting it is that he now has the want and a low continuous sense of failure about having it.

He is fifty nine and he walks in the evenings and thinks about this more than he would admit.

You may have your own war. Something you want that you have decided you should not want, and five years of losing to it, and a suspicion you cannot voice that maybe the wanting is not the enemy.

Where the longing came from

Here is one of the most extraordinary sentences in the Old Testament, and it settles the question of origin.

He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.Ecclesiastes 3:11

He hath set the world in their heart.

The word behind world there carries the sense of the ages, of forever, and many translations render it eternity. He has put a sense of the eternal inside human beings.

Read what that means about your five year war. The longing for permanence is not an intrusion. It is not a residue of ego and it is not a failure to grasp something. It was set there, deliberately, by God, in the making of the human being.

And the second half of the verse is the ache: so that no man can find out the work that God maketh. He put eternity in us and did not give us the ability to see the whole. That is precisely the shape of your discomfort and it is described as an arrangement rather than a defect.

You are carrying a longing God put in you Himself, and it was never a fault to be repented of. Ecclesiastes 3:11 has Him setting eternity in the human heart and then withholding the full view, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man of fifty nine stop fighting something that was given.

Now let me be careful about the two errors either side, because both are available and both would hurt you.

One error is the one you have been making: treating the longing as ego and going to war with it. Five years of evidence says that does not work, and the reason it does not work is that you have been fighting God's own workmanship in yourself.

The other error would be to conclude that because the longing is legitimate, the thing you build will therefore last. It will not. The verse does not say that. It says the longing is in you and the full picture is not available, and that is all it says.

You are able to keep the longing and hold it open, without a monument and without shame. The written word sets eternity in the heart and withholds the whole view in one sentence, and the Holy Spirit is not the source of the failure you have felt about wanting.

The honest half. Nothing you build will last, and I am not going to promise you otherwise, and the longing will not go away either. Both of those are permanent conditions and you will be living with both next year.

There is a part only you can do and it is a laying down of arms rather than an achievement. You say out loud where the longing came from. And you stop treating it as a fault, which is a decision rather than a feeling.