You think you know what you need. You have a list of desires that, once received, you believe will allow you to enter a state of bliss and joy, a life of winning and dominance over your inferiors. You spend many years to achieve these ends, yet once you have them, you are less joyful than you imagined and for less time, because you merely sated temporal desires—not needs—that thrust you into the arms of Satan instead of God.

I thought I Needed Women for my happiness, not love but fornication, with all the women who were willing. I got that and I still wasn’t happy. So I decided what I really needed was a multitude of women in exotic lands, that I must fornicate with women who had sexy accents. Yet I got that and was not filled. So I decided to make a lot of money from publishing sex guides, that money in my bank account would give me meaning and bliss, an objective measure of my superiority. Yet it didn’t. Then I stumbled upon Zen Buddhism and Osho. Worldly wisdom from slow-talking Asiatic men will save me! Yet it seemed to only save the gurus with wealth and female groupies. Then I decided it was just one Woman who I needed, a secular woman who saw the world as transactional and carnal as I did. Yet that ended in failure and heartache. All the things I thought I needed were distractions and blockages to my true need of salvation through Lord Jesus Christ.

Rarely a week goes by that a man doesn’t email me with his womanly problems. He needs a woman to love and marry, and yet there are no good women, so he is depressed and unfulfilled. Marriage is a sacrament, a blessed institution given to us by God, but first we must be married to God by picking up and carrying our cross, not merely to serve oneself with pleasantries and the comfort and dignified status of being a family man. Men think they need a woman, but they need the faith first. If they land a woman without God, they will soon come to realize that their new need is to escape the yoke of being married to a woman who has not God.

And what about a woman of this generation? She asks for a career and the strength to be independent of men while sleeping with many of them who are at her beck and call. She spends the peak years of her fertility, which were given to her by God to create a family, to damage herself in body and soul. She achieves her “strength” in the form of addictions to food and wine and pills, a mockery of the strength exhibited by Christian mothers who daily serve the little church of a family home, and in moments of insobriety she will wail for hours to a friend of like kind about the cruelty of her “bad luck.” Material blessings are only a blessing if it strengthens your faith in God, but if those blessings allow you to never remember God or run away from committing to prayers of thanksgiving, what you received was not from God.

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.

Whatever I think I need, I can ask God, but if granting my wish puts me on the road to hell, He will not give it. If you ask for what will deliver your soul from condemnation, God will answer, and if you don’t know what to ask, then you should ask Him what it is you should ask. God is not here to satisfy your warped desires and disordered passions; He will not grant you prosperity disconnected from salvation.

We don’t need what we think we need, and as my faith continues to grow thanks to God, I see that there is nothing material I truly need outside of food, water, and shelter, and my true needs for all of my life are God’s mercy and God’s strength, and as long as I have those, the needs that I long ago coveted become revealed as desires, put into me by the demons. Lord, have mercy on me, and allow me to endure tribulation, for only you know what I need, only you know what will exalt my soul.

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