What Do I Do With My Cravings? | Crossroads Church

Well hey Crossroads, my name is Allie Patterson and that's right, I'm going to be at Ignite on June 6th and Crossroads women, I want you to be there. If you wanna know what my heart is for the women of our community, then you need to be at Ignite because it is literally created straight from my heart to encourage you in the life that you're trying to lead. So most of our Ignite team happens to be moms and so we decided we wanted to give moms a special opportunity to get a low price ticket. That's right, right now through next weekend you can go and get a cheap ticket to Ignite. Mom Ignite 2026, you can tap your phone and do it right now. And guys, let me talk to you for a second. If you have a mom or you're married to somebody who's a mom and you might be thinking about a Mother's Day present, guess what she does not need? She does not need another coffee mug. She does need some time to be with God, some time to be with friends, some time to think about her life, her life with God. And so guys, this is a fantastic Mother's Day gift. So get the cheap ticket and then pay the higher price of covering her on that Saturday, okay? I want you guys to join me at Ignite. It's gonna be amazing. Future mom will thank you. Future mom is gonna thank you

when you buy a ticket to Ignite. We've been talking about our future selves. That's what we've been spending a few weeks doing here at Crossroads. We're talking about how the things that we do in our life today are actually creating our future self and the future life that we're gonna live. And today we're gonna talk about our bodies, what we do with our bodies today and the desires and needs and wants that we feel in them and how we respond to those today is actually creating a lot more of our future than we might actually think. I know you might be getting nervous thinking, oh, she's gonna tell me to work out more or wait, she's gonna talk to me about my sex life. And I'm just saying maybe later, but first we're going to go for the vision and design that God actually has for our bodies and why that matters to the future that we are going to have. Let me pray for us. Lord, help us to understand you today, understand your story and your desires for us, not just today, but in the person that we are becoming. Help us to understand what in the world that has to do with our body. In Jesus' name, amen. Well, one of the desires that I've been feeling lately, lately, the last couple of years,

in my body is the desire that this thing would do what it used to do 20 years ago, like all the things that it could do 20 years ago. I like to stay active. And this year alone, I've had, I got like a tennis elbow thing from lifting. How you get something called tennis elbow from lifting weights, I do not understand. But if you've had it, you know, it kind of nags. It's there all the time. I also have a thing in my hip that happens off and on. I like to run. I can't run as much right now. And here's my strategy. My strategy is I want to do what I want to do. So I just do it. And then later on, future me is maybe not as happy that I did that. I might pay for it when I get out of bed the next morning, or I might pay for that strategy after doing it over and over and over again until, you know, a month or a year goes by. But all I know is that sometimes I make the choices because I want my body to do something. And it's not always maybe the best thing for my thriving tomorrow. I think when we respond to our bodies, we don't always think exactly what we're doing. We're not always even thinking, oh, this is a desire my body has.

We just kind of do things. And maybe immediately you start thinking of stuff with your body like food or substances or your sex life or alcohol or whatever. And you think, oh, that's what we're about to talk about. But what about all the full gamut of the things that your body craves? I have young adults in my house, teens and young adults. And I can tell you at the end of a semester, like they are right now, they are craving, their bodies are craving rest and comfort. They're like doubling down on presentations and final track meets and studying for exams. And we put our bodies in a situation where they're craving some comfort or maybe you're hurt. You have an injury or an illness and you're really craving healing. Or it's been a long time since you've had a special person in your life. And you're just craving the connection of either friendship or relationship and just how good you feel, the intimacy you feel with another person. There's all kinds of things. There's all kinds of ways that our body wants, maybe you have signs in your body of anxiety and you're longing for control over something you don't have control over. And you can feel that in your body.

It's crazy how that works. And when we feel these things, whether we think about it like that or not, we tend to do one of two things. We either indulge it or we starve it. Maybe we even bounce back and forth between those two. If we're an indulger, we're like, I'm just gonna get what I need when I need it, as soon as I need it, as much as I need it, at any cost that I need it. We indulge that. We just go for it. And then the other thing we kind of tend to do today is we starve it. Nope, not the right thing, not good, I don't need that. I need to control it or push it down or discipline it or I feel ashamed of it or whatever. And we just kind of shove these desires aside. There's one or the other on this big spectrum, but I think there's a third way that the story of the Bible shows us. But in order to see it, we actually have to see the entire story of Scripture. So we're gonna do a super high flyover. And I want you to see that the story of God starts with a body and ends with a body. And there's actually some really important things about the fact that that's the story of God that matters to what we choose to do with our bodies today. So let's go to the beginning.

The first stop we're gonna make on our journey is the garden. This is the place that God created for humanity to live. In the very beginning, Genesis chapter one, first chapter of the Bible, here's what it says. So God created man in his own image and in the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them. And God blessed them and said to them, be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, have dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the heavens and every living thing that moves on the earth. Here we have God creating humanity with a body, like a physical existence. You don't just have a body, you are a body. Something about who you are is wrapped up in your material existence. At the beginning, God created us in a material and immaterial sense as one creation. And we actually had some jobs to do. You probably caught that in the scripture. It named some of the jobs that we had to do. Number one is making God visible. God is spirit and our bodies make God visible. We're to represent him and it said rule and reign over all that he made. And also this blessing he gave, he actually designed our bodies to bring forth the blessing that he said to be fruitful

and to multiply on the face of the earth. Your body is all wrapped up in the life that God designed us to live. And so we hunger for these things. When I started talking about like what you long for in your body, the needs, the wants, the desires that you can feel, it's because of this. It's because you were made to do some things. If you're made to rule and reign, of course you want power. You want power and intimacy and joy and beauty and perfection and connection and purpose. And it's all wrapped up in the very, very beginning design where the creator made this body, this person, both material and immaterial. And he was supposed to be close by walking with this person as we represent him on the face of the earth. But see something happened. If you read on in the book of Genesis, it happens pretty fast. Genesis three, we get this whole scenario where sin enters the world and this design gets all messed up. And as we look at the rest of the Bible, God begins to implement a plan to return to this space that he originally made us to live in with him. So as God formed a nation called Israel, who was gonna be keyed to this process of return, how do we get back here? It was lost.

We get a glimpse of some more of what matters to our bodies because God begins to tell this nation, here's how I want you to connect with me. And here's what happens next. He tells them at one point, build a tabernacle. Here's the design. Here's all the pieces. A tabernacle is basically a set up tear down worship center. That's what it was. And he in Exodus 25, it says, let them make a sanctuary for me and I will dwell. all among them. Here is God creating a space for him to come and live among his people through this thing called a tabernacle. And as the nation of Israel got a permanent location, they come into the land that God promised, Jerusalem at one point becomes their center and a temple is built. This is the next stop on our journey. And we see that God creates a permanent dwelling place, a place where his people know that he is, a place where they come to him. They worship, they commune with him. Only his presence is there. It says in 1 Kings 8, the glory of the Lord filled the temple, but God wasn't satisfied with being behind a curtain. His holiness caused the separation. His presence was found in the Holy of Holies,

this one spot that was sacred that housed his presence in the temple. And that wasn't yet back to the original design, it was too distant. So at just the right time, God does something wild. He sends his son, his eternal son, and he sends him to earth in a body, in a human earthly body. John 1 says, the word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. The verb in that sentence is he tabernacled among us. He moved among us, he lived with us. He was able to move with his people just as the original tabernacle was. There's Jesus in a human body, able to move around with his people. And as his earthly life came to an end, the craziest last place that no one ever saw coming was that Jesus somehow indicated another temple was also going to exist. 1 Corinthians 6, 19 says, your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, a new permanent place for God to dwell. Just like the original temple, it was a permanent housed God's presence right in the middle of his nation, his land, his people. And now we have another temple, another permanent location for his spirit, and it is your body. Nobody saw this coming.

How is it possible that the God of all the universe intends to come and live in our body so close? Let's review this journey. The design was to walk together, to image him on the face of the earth, to do the work, the divine work that he created us for, and it was lost, our ability to do it. And he set about bringing us back to the temple. Back and back, closer and closer to the design. The story of scripture shows a God who wants to be back with his people, as close as he could possibly be until your whole body can be filled with him. That's the story of the Bible. Your body was not just made for you, it was made for God. It wasn't, you don't just live in it. God could potentially live in your body. And so the desires we feel, these longings, these needs, these wants, everything from like really raw stuff to, you know, kind of vague aches that we can't even quite put our finger on, all of those things that we feel in our bodies, they are pointing to a design of a creator who had some intentions from the very beginning. And if we will let him, it will bring us back to him. But we've lost this design and we don't really talk about this much, especially where some of our body cravings and needs and wants are.

So we're gonna zoom in on what we tend to do instead. I mentioned these before. We tend to either indulge it or starve it. And there's a parable that Jesus tells where you can see these two things up really, really close. There's a famous parable. And to be honest, when I was preparing for this message, I read this parable and I thought I've never, I've read this a million times, maybe not a million, a thousand times. And I've never thought about it in terms of the craving that these two sons had. The parable is called the prodigal son. It's named for one of the sons, but we actually meet both. It says there was a man who had two sons and the younger of them said to his father, give me the share of property that's coming to me. And he divided his property between them. Not many days later, the young son gathered all he had and took a journey into a far country. And there he squandered his property in reckless living. This is the classic path of indulging your cravings right. This is this is the classic younger son he takes his money he wants to indulge and he goes and gets exactly what his body wants. I'm sure we can all fill in the blanks of some of that story right. It says he indulged in reckless living that there's so many things that that conjures up but all of them took the money of his father

the independent living he wanted the the power the intimacy the joy the beauty of life but without the connection to his father. To get what he wanted to indulge in all of that he had to leave his father and he didn't just leave him he like grievously insulted him. He basically said to his father I wish you were dead. That that's the equivalent of asking for your inheritance before the father would have died. So this was this was a deep slap in the face to his father just so he could run off and satisfy the cravings of his body without his dad. Now I don't know about you but I've actually had eras of my life like this. I don't know if you've had one but if you have I'll bet you that you know that you're sitting here as future you with the knowledge of where that leads. If you've had an era in your life like this then you know exactly what happens. You're gonna live a story something close to what happens to the younger brother in this parable and here's the heart of it it says when he had spent everything a severe famine arose in that country and he began to be in need. And it goes on to describe that he ended up working with pigs which for the Jewish culture would have been the most degrading unclean absolute bottom of the barrel situation. This younger son comes up totally empty. If you have younger son for a while

you know exactly what I mean. There's always an end to it. When when the indulgence of what our body wants runs our life gets to lead. This is where it goes every time there's there's famine. There's a bottom to it. There's a there's a running out. It does come to an end and the end is often not very pretty. If you battle with addictions which I know we have many people in our community that are in long long term struggles with addiction then you know this firsthand right. Like that's the most obvious physical example but I'll bet if you're an over worker if you're somebody who really goes after their career I've been this person and in a past era of my life I'll bet you know it too I'll bet you know that you come up empty at the end of that journey. I'll bet you know that like there's always the next thing you're trying to get and every time you get that there's the next thing and the next thing and the next thing and you think it's going to fill me it's going to fill me. And at the end of the day somehow even with all of the things that you've done you feel a little bit like you've come up empty. That's because it's this story every time it doesn't matter whether the world calls it good or whether the world calls it bad or we think we judge it one way or whatever

when an indulging of what your body wants runs your life. This is what happens in the end. This is the story we end up living. So we need to pay close attention to this very next move that the younger son makes because this is where everything turns around in his life. It says he comes to the end of himself and he says I will arise and go to my father and I will say to him father I have sinned against heaven and before you. He lets his craving in this moment turn him back to his father. When he's at the bottom of the barrel he goes you know what the people in my dad's house are a lot better off than this. Maybe I could go back there. This is a great idea. Like this is the moment where the younger son goes like this might be the clearest thought he's had in years and years and years. The problem is you and I in these seasons and these eras where we indulge, indulge, indulge something. We're like I can't go back to God now. Like what a slap in the face I gave him. I mean I kind of walked off and I sort of even knew what I was doing here if I'm really honest with myself. Surely I can't just go back to God. Seems like cheating right. Like surely there's something else I should have to do

or I just can't. I'm sure God feels a certain way about me or I'm ashamed of this or whatever. I can't go back to God. And I want you to see what the father does because yes you can. Yes, you absolutely can. Listen to what happens next when he goes home. It says, while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion and he ran and embraced him and kissed him. His father saw him coming and he got excited. This wasn't like the scoundrel who took half his money and squandered it. This was his son. This was his son. And he ran out to him, totally undignified move by the way, for a father in this cultural context, no shame, no scolding, no where's my money, no pay me back for it, no guilt over all the time they'd missed together, nothing like that. Loving, compassion. I'm not sure we believe that that's the God we're gonna meet, that that's the father who's waiting for us if we were to turn around. The father did him actually one better than that. It says, bring quickly the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his hand and shoes on his feet and bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let us eat and celebrate.

He wasn't just home. His idea was that he could work for his dad. He could work it off. He could just go back and have mercy on me, just have mercy on me. And his father goes, what, wait, no, you're my son. And I wanna restore you to your place in the family. That's what's waiting for us. That's what's waiting for us when we turn back. But there's another son. This isn't the only kid in view. This is the one that the parable is named for because of this turnaround. It's a famous turnaround and a good turnaround. But there's some older brothers among us as well. I've totally been the older brother myself at times. I'm sure like me, you've probably bounced back and forth between these at different points in your life. Here's where we meet the older brother. It says, now his older son was in the field. And as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing. And he called one of the servants and asked him what these things meant. And he said to him, your brother's come home and your father has killed the fattened calf because he received him back safe and sound. But he was angry and he refused to go in. He was mad. And we get a glimpse at his heart.

His heart was actually really hard. And the next part of the parable, we find out why. Here's what it says. He says this to his dad. His dad comes out and he says, look, these many years I have served you and I've never disobeyed your command yet. You never even gave me a young goat that I might celebrate with my friends. I served you. I obeyed you. I never left you. Not like that guy. I've been here the whole time. But wait a second. What did he just tell us? He wanted something all along. He had desires all along. He had cravings and needs and wants. And he never once exposed those to the father. Never once did he go to his dad and say, I want something. And he ended up in a place. Was it really that different than his younger brother? He wanted his father's stuff and he just wanted it without his father. He just stayed and comforted himself with doing the right thing. I did the right thing. Has this been you? What about that guy?

I did the right thing. I never acted like that. I never did that. I never disobeyed. I never purposely did something to offend God. It looks better on the outside, doesn't it? But what about the heart? Where did his heart end up? Same place, same distance, same alienation from the father. And look what the father does to this son as well. He comes out to this son too. And he said to him, son, you are always with me and all that is mine is yours. All that is mine is yours. This son had access all along. How sad is that? He was close to his dad, like stayed on the property, worked his fields, did all the things he was supposed to be doing and never went to his dad with his real heart and his real needs and his real longings. The slow simmering bitterness inside of him finally makes its way out. Like it always, always does. When we older brother what we really want and we're like, Shirley, I'm gonna do all the right things and I'm gonna get what I actually want. But what did he want? What he wanted without his dad. Starving or indulging, it goes the same place.

Every single time when this is what we decide to do with the things we need and want, the aches in our body, the needs that we feel, when we do one of these two things with them, we come up empty, not just empty. It's the literal definition of death, the separating of body and soul. That's what death actually is. That's what these strategies are. They just do it wildly different ways. They teach us to ignore one or the other, either indulge the body and don't worry about what it means for your soul or your relationship with God, or put that all away. You know, put that to the side and just gut it out. Have some self-control, would ya? You know, we just do that thing and we pretend like the desires and needs of our bodies don't matter. Both end in death. Both come up absolutely empty. There's another option. And the other option comes straight out of the story of Scripture that we've reviewed. We could actually go to our Father to be filled. We could actually take those aches, those desires, those spaces that indicate we're yearning for something we were designed for. God's goal is not to eliminate that desire. He wants to come in and He wants to fill it.

He wants those desires and needs that we feel all the time to be formed and fulfilled, but in His presence, in His design, with Him, that's what the neither brother really, really wanted. Let me ask you a question. Do you believe that if you did that, you would meet the Father of the parable? Do you believe if you took the deepest ache that you have right now, the deepest longing, the thing that makes you restless at night, the ache you can't get to go away, the need that you have that you don't even wanna put into words, or the one that you've been trying to meet one of these other ways, do you think if you took that to God, somehow would you meet that Father? I don't think most of us believe that. I think we keep these things from God because we somehow think it puts us in a bad light. And He's going, wait, I put those things in you. You're made to participate in divine activities. So of course you want power and intimacy and love and connection and beauty and joy and purpose and all the things you were designed for. Of course you do. And He's like, over here, look over here. I can fill you up. I wanna talk to the younger brothers for a second. If you're doing this right now, you've run off, you're younger brothering it, you're totally indulging.

I just wanna remind you that that Father, He feels compassion for you, not judgment, compassion for you. He wants to restore your place in the family and welcome you home again in abundance. All the rights, all the best stuff. He's not primarily concerned about what you wasted. He's primarily concerned about having you back again. If you're the older brother, you're a little mad, let's be honest. You've done all the right things and you still have the longings. You've been working and you've been disciplined and you've tried to control it and all the things. And somehow you thought that that was going to do it. And what if you actually took it to God? If you've been older brothering, obedient, disciplined, and now you're kind of just angry and annoyed. The Father you're gonna meet is a Father who's gonna come to you and listen. And He's going to beg you. That's the word in the text. He's going to beg you to realize that He's been right there all along and everything He has is already yours. You have full access. If you would just come in, step in to His joy. I think our biggest problem, we keep these from God. We meet our needs other ways

because we don't really believe that that's who we're gonna meet. We need to relearn who our dad is, who our father actually, actually is. Most of us grew up with parents who even in the best of intentions kind of taught us to either older brother or younger brother our needs and desires. I've been thinking about this a lot actually lately because I have four, yes, count them, four teenagers to young adults in my house. And I probably, honestly, I've probably come at this a little bit too much or directly for my kids liking, but the topic of relationship. Relationships and sex comes up fairly frequently in our house. Seems to be a really big deal right now for most of my kids if not all of them at some stage here recently. How many of us. Let me ask you how many of us have really positive helpful memories of conversations with our parents around sex and relationships. Anybody. Hand up. Not a hand in the joint. Maybe there's one person who's like actually my mom kind of did a good job. Good job. You're the one. Most of us.

No no we don't have that. And here's let me just give grace to us parents in the room trying to deal with this. We understand the power of this desire right. You understand it in your life now even if you're not this age it just kind of comes onto the scene and in full force. And we know that that desire has the power to create a future for them that they may not even fully see a life that traces back to what they do today with that desire and you're you just want to help and you don't even know how and you accidentally end up going OK just older brother it put it away. Here's all the rules around it. Just tuck it in there and don't get it out and you know just control all of that and just good luck. You know or we just can't bring ourselves to do much of anything so we just decide we're going to look the other way and the world kind of fills in the blanks or their friends do and they just enter this world of sort of indulgent take a pick off the menu sexuality and never once does anyone come to us and say you know that desire is good. Do you know it's real. Do you know it was put there by a God who wants to fill it in every possible good deep meaningful way in your life. It is. You don't need to be ashamed of it. You just need to bring it to the father who wants to form it to his design and fulfill it in your life as a blessing. Has anyone ever said that to you. No we've lost the narrative. We totally lost the design somewhere along the way and so

we just pass the design flaw to the next generation and we just keep making older brothers and younger brothers and nobody goes back to the original design the thing that dignifies that desire the thing that that actually says hey do you know that's put there by something divine instinct in you. And you don't have to do that with it. You don't have to do that with it. There's a God who knows exactly what you need. Do you know that God is enough to fill every need of your body every part of you as an embodied soul. He was designed to fill up and now is the part where I want to tell you how. I want to tell you like and now you just have to do A, B and C and there you go you know except that's not how it works because they get filled in connection with the father in relationship with the father in return to the father in joy with the father. I don't know exactly how he will meet you in that personal moment or or with a personal method but I do know you can bring it to him and you can trust that it will be good and real and it will satisfy the deepest longings of your body and soul. First Corinthians 6 19 or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you whom you have from God. You are not your own for you were bought with a price so glorify God in your body. There is a way to glorify God in your body. It can happen. Future you could be living a life that actually glorifies God more than you do today that actually lives according to his design more than you are doing today. There's a future you but it only happens through the filling of

the Spirit of God in your literal body. This is not a fairy tale. This is where the power to live that way comes from when the Spirit of God fills you and suddenly the original design is possible you're empowered to live out the things that you actually long for body and soul. Do you know the end of the story the story of the Bible and your story if you come to Jesus your story ends in a body a heaven. body. Those verses say that Jesus paid a price for you and you're no longer your own because he gave his body. He had a body, a physical body and he handed it to God and he said here this body is yours and he allowed it to be beaten and bloodied and nailed on a cross and he paid the price so that your embodied soul could return to its original connection with God. That is the story of the Bible. That is what Jesus came to do and so your story ends in a new body just like his did. After his resurrection he visited his disciples and there he was. They knew who he was but he was somehow different. He was in his resurrected heavenly eternal body. Jesus exists in a body. Your story will end in a glorified body and I want to leave current you today with a promise because what we're talking about, these things we desire for ourselves, the longings and the cravings and the needs and the wants that we feel all the time. Boy, if current you could bring those to this loving father, they will become your greatest glory even if it costs you something to do it. How do I know that? Because after the resurrection in Jesus's heavenly body he still had his scars and they became the most beautiful thing about them. The most beautiful thing to the people that were able to see them and believe because he told the simple story that anybody, have you ever thought about that word, anybody given to a good father ends up alive again. That's the truth. So no matter what kind of ache or longing you have, bring it to the father who can fill it up. I want you to give you just a second as we finish. I want you to take a really deep breath and I'm gonna do that with you. We're gonna do it in silence. I want to ask you what does

your body actually need right now? What do you need right now? Let's do that together. Whatever that is, let me pray. Jesus, we know that you sacrificed your body for us. Will you fill us with your spirit? Will you cover, fill, and satisfy the deepest longings that we just thought, this is what I need. And we just collectively say to you, you are enough to fill that need. In Jesus's name, amen. Amen.