6 min. to read if you read all the footnotes, too.
The words were just a passing line, an impromptu cue from my yoga teacher, but they clanged and reverberated in my mind. I shifted into autopilot, moving through the forms. For the rest of the hour, as my body moved, my mind couldn’t stop turning these words over and over. “Do not lust for results.”
The teacher was, at the most surface of levels, encouraging the room of intermediate yoga students not to stretch too far. There is a tendency among yoga students to push hard to achieve the ideal form of a particular posture. Sadly, flexibility is a quality that grows through practice. Further, every body is different. Prosaic and unalterable facts like the length of your ulna and femur mean that your Downward Dog and mine are going to look different. There can be no other way.
When you push in ways your body isn’t ready for, or in ways that don’t account for your particular biomechanics, you can hurt yourself. Instead of starting with the truth of who you are right now, you contort yourself toward achievement. This is lusting for results. Instead of leaving class more settled and centered, you will leave tight, sore, maybe even injured.
This is what she was talking about, but I heard her words at a much deeper level.
Lusting for Results has Consequences
The Spirit spoke, as I moved through my vinyasas.
“This is what your legalism has always been about, Marc.”
“This is the dangerous drive that undermined the early years of your ministry.”
“This is what kept you from doing your own healing work.”
Lusting for results. Trying to force outcomes. Trying to find that sense of satisfaction and accomplishment in the visible fruit of idealized results.
This is an easy motivation for so many of us to fall into. This drive defines modern American culture. Companies live and die by the quarterly financial report. Social Media algorithms love the language and imagery of results. Hustle culture could accurately be called Results Lust Culture. This drive meshed so well with my personal shadow. Results earned my place, paid my rent on existence, and guaranteed that my family, friends, or church wouldn’t leave me behind. (I thought).
Christianity has not escaped this tendency. Every stream has its set of results metrics. Saving souls? Counting baptisms? Miracles? Or is it hours of devotion and tangible acts of self-denial? Perhaps dollars raised to spread the gospel or serve the poor? The wonderful thing about results like these is that they are visible and measurable. They provide validation. They feel real when so much of the spiritual life can seem abstract. We want this certainty, and so we lust for results.
Where is your attention?
The trouble with this lust is that it redirects the attention. In yoga, if I am straining to perfect a particular posture, I am no longer present. I am not attending to my breath, noticing the stable pressure of the floor upholding me, feeling the many parts of my body working smoothly together to hold me up. My attention is elsewhere. The pain of the stretch. The mental image of the perfect post. Rather than experiencing the moment I’m in, I’m lost in measuring myself against some “vain imagination.”
Is this any different with the spiritual life? If I am lusting for results, I am not attending to the Spirit within me, holding me in union with the Father and the Son. I can be so focused on serving the poor that I am not present with the actual person in front of me who doesn’t have what they need. I can be so focused on the next right act or on resisting the next sinful thought that I lose perspective on the whole purpose of my spiritual life. Lost in the gravity of spiritual accomplishment, I am unable to be present to the One who holds me.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warned against this temptation. “Beware of practicing your righteousness before others in order to be seen by them, for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 6:1 NRSVue) Jesus is not saying that the Father arbitrarily punishes prideful people. He’s telling us how the spiritual life works. If our desire is “to be seen,” we will get what we want, even if it hurts us. This desire subtly shapes what we do and why we do it. Rather than growing in awareness of God’s presence, we grow in awareness of others’ perceptions. Instead of maturing spiritually, we become better at managing image. In this social media age, we’ve all learned what it means to post “for the algorithm.” This is no different.
Instead, Jesus portrays our spiritual life in much more organic terms. In his metaphor of the vine and the branches (John 15), we see that fruit just happens — not because it’s the goal, a check-box on the to-do list, or a quarterly metric on the office whiteboard. Stay connected, and fruit happens. Paul identifies this fruit as the result of the work of the Spirit in us. (Gal 5:16-25) That’s worth remembering. For example, we don’t become more patient by demanding patience of ourselves. We become patient by standing in moments when we are tempted to power up and take control, and instead, we choose differently.
I’m not taking yoga so I can one day successfully pull off a perfect Crow pose. I take yoga because I want to learn how to be present to my body, and learn to stand in the place of suffering one moment longer than I thought I was capable of.
I don’t follow Jesus so I can rest secure in my eternal future while the world falls apart, or because I need an external moral validation. I follow Jesus because he has shown me the character of God, and there I have seen that love is the ground of reality. I want my life to align with and reflect what I have seen in Jesus. I want to live present to the love that upholds us all.
Where is our attention focused? The outcomes that matter are never the ones we lust for.