Justin Taylor is posting fifteen questions and answers excerpted from an excellent article by David Powlison, “I Am Motivated When I Feel Desire” (published in Seeing with New Eyes: Counseling and the Human Condition through the Lends of Scripture (P and R Publishing, 2003). The last three will be posted in the next couple of days. Here are the questions, with links for the first twelve. Highly recommended:

1. How does the New Testament commonly talk about what’s wrong with people?
2. Why do people do specific ungodly things?
3. But what’s wrong with wanting things that seem good?
4. Why don’t people see this as the problem?
5. Is the phrase “lusts of the flesh” useful in practical life and counseling?
6. Does each person have one “root sin”?
7. How can you tell if a desire is inordinate rather than natural?
8. Is it even right to talk about the heart, since the Bible teaches that the heart is unknowable to anyone but God? (1 Sam. 16:7; Jer. 17:9)
9. Doesn’t the word lusts properly apply only to bodily appetites: the pleasures and comforts of sex, food, drink, rest, exercise, health?
10. Can desires be habitual?
11. What about fears? They seem as important in human motivation as cravings.
12. Do people ever have conflicting motives?
13. How does thinking about lusts relate to other ways of talking about sin, such as “sin nature,” “self,” “pride,” “autonomy,” “unbelief,” and “self-centeredness”?
14. In counseling, do you just confront a person with his sinful cravings?
15. Can you change what you want?