Honestly, part of me still enjoys it. I do not want to want this, but I do, and that feels worse than the failing does.

“Delight thyself also in the LORD; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.”

This psalm was written for people watching the wrong way of living look attractive and pay off. Its counsel is not to suppress desire but to relocate it, on the assumption that appetite follows attention. The line is often misread as God supplying whatever you happen to want at the moment. The older reading is that sustained delight in God gradually changes what you want.

“For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, Teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world;”

Paul writes to a colleague on Crete about very ordinary households, and he says that grace teaches. That is an unusual verb: grace is not only pardon but an instructor, training people over time to say no. Formation here is a curriculum rather than a switch. The implication is that divided desire is simply what a student halfway through the course looks like.