The Dragon & Your desires

In Week 3 of An Apocalyptic Advent, we confront a sobering but hopeful truth: our desires are a battleground. Drawing from Revelation 12, Isaiah 55, and John 1, we see that the dragon’s strategy is not only to oppose God’s people through fear or force, but to quietly shape what we want. The enemy cannot dethrone Christ, so he seeks to deform Christ’s people by misdirecting their loves.

Revelation depicts the dragon spewing a river meant to overwhelm the woman—symbolizing the flood of cultural pressure, deception, and disordered desire that surrounds God’s people. Yet instead of rescuing her out of the wilderness, God carries her into it. Scripture consistently portrays the wilderness not as abandonment, but as formation. It is the place where illusions fall away, excess is stripped, and God retrains His people to listen and trust daily.

This week we explore how desire itself becomes the battlefield. Drawing on Augustine’s insight that sin is “love curved in on itself” and James K. A. Smith’s emphasis that we are shaped more by what we love than what we know, we are invited to see that discipleship is not merely about behavior or information, but about reordered loves. Consumerism, then, is revealed as counter-discipleship—a rival liturgy that trains us to crave the kingdom without the King.

Yet Advent does not leave us exposed without hope. Isaiah’s invitation—“Why spend your money on what does not satisfy?”—points us toward the deeper healing Jesus offers. In Christ, the Word made flesh, God does not shame our hunger; He heals it. Jesus enters the wilderness, listens faithfully to the Father, and becomes the true satisfaction our restless hearts seek.

Together, we are invited to resist the river, receive the wilderness as God’s school, and practice counter-liturgies that retrain our desires. This week calls us to surrender what has been shaping our hunger and to rediscover the joy of desiring Christ above all else.