NOTES for Php 4:6-9

Why reveal our desires to God, Who already knows everything? But God is our Father. When we are small, our parents often guess what we would really like. While we are still very young, they even give it to us without being asked. But try telling a teenager, for example, that one thing is good and useful for him when something entirely different seems true to him. All of us, and not only teenagers, do not know what we really want. We constantly mistake our strongest desire for our deepest and truest one. Yet our strongest desires are usually superficial.

If we ask the Lord for what we think we want most, while in response He gives us what we truly want in the depths of our heart, we will perceive it as violence, as punishment. Sometimes even this is necessary if we have become too caught up in our games and lies to ourselves.

For example, a person longs for deep relationships but in practice fears sincerity and depth and spends all his time socializing. If this continues so long that the person entirely forgets the true desire of his heart and no longer senses it even faintly, God may arrange for him to be left completely alone. But the Lord does not always act as a surgeon: as a loving Father, He resorts to painful operations extremely rarely.

Therefore the Lord wants us to learn to be genuine. Then we will be able to ask Him for what we truly want, and this will be an expression of our freedom, a choice between the strong desires of our flesh and the deep desires of our spirit.