Beverly Hills Cop
After we got married, one of our first major purchases was a VCR. (This is hard to believe now because some electronic items have gotten much cheaper.) I don’t remember how we recorded the movie “Beverly Hills Cop,” which came out right before we got married, but we did. There were two scenes early in the movie that still are my favorites today.
The first one is during the opening credits. A little boy spits milk through the gap in his teeth, making a “v” shape. I’m not sure why that scene is a favorite, but it always makes me smile when I see it.
The second one involves a scene where some bad guys hijack a semi-truck, with the doors open, of course, and take off to try and outrun the police with Eddie Murphy in the back. The scene is set in the city streets of Detroit, MI, where cars are parked on both sides. The bad guys ram several parked cars, causing them to careen off and occasionally into the path of the pursuing police.
I instantly had a desire to do that—not be a bad guy or steal a semi-truck—but drive a semi down a crowded city street and bash the cars parked along both sides. I must have expressed this desire a few times because my wife told me she had tried to think of a way to engineer that experience for me, but couldn’t come up with a proxy.
So, the first question I asked myself was, "Why did I have such a destructive desire?” There is a pretty easy answer. We are all born as sinful creatures and have many sinful thoughts and desires throughout our lives. (If you are smugly thinking you’ve never had a destructive desire, I’m going to call BS on you right now.)
I saw a video where a pastor who was ministering on a college campus answered a question about why God would make a person with homosexual desires if it were a sin. Responding to a question like this had always worried me. The pastor’s response, which I thought was awesome, was that as a sinful human, God had made him with the desire to sleep with multiple women. However, he chooses to remain faithful to his wife. I thought that was a brilliant answer and explained why I’ve never stolen a semi-truck and bashed parked cars. In other words, we all face sinful desires and must decide how to address them.
“But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” - Galatians 5:16-24 ESV
The second question I asked myself was a lot harder to answer: “Have I not stolen a semi-truck and bashed parked cars because I was afraid of the penalty, or have I restrained myself because of my love of God and my desire to serve him?” Don’t minimize this question; it is important. Do we try to do what God tells us to do because we’re afraid of going to hell? Or do we love God so much that we have a burning desire to serve him? That is the question that I hope you all consider.
