Most people spend a lifetime learning to hide from their innermost desires. Because we can’t feel guilty about what we do not know, some fall prey to the temptation to intentionally blind themselves to what they do not want to see.
In order to want better things, you first need to achieve accurate clarity on what you want now and why you want it. In scriptural parlance, the hidden nature of what you want and why you want it is described variously as excess fat or skin around your heart—the seat of your desire. For example:
69 The proud have forged a lie against me: but I will keep thy precepts with my whole heart.
70 Their heart is as fat as grease; but I delight in thy law. (Psalm 119)
The process of coming to see what you want and why you want it is described as circumcising the heart:
Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no more stiffnecked. (Deuteronomy 10:16)
And the Lord thy God will circumcise thine heart, and the heart of thy seed, to love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, that thou mayest live. (Deuteronomy 30:6)
Can you confidently assert that you understand the depth of your motives?
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? (Jeremiah 17:9)
The Lord can help you understand what you really believe and want, and why:
Man’s goings are of the Lord; how can a man then understand his own way? (Proverbs 20:24)
The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord, searching all the inward parts of the belly. (Proverbs 20:27)
If God can reveal your desires, why hasn’t he? Maybe he has, but you just haven’t noticed. The foregoing scriptures don’t necessarily indicate God’s revelation of your real desires with overt obviousness—though he could. What is guaranteed is that he will at least reveal your true desires to you through your own intentional, honest, rational analysis of your behavior and motives.
While few understand it, the spirit of God is the mechanism of our rational understanding. Rational internal conversations are facilitated by the spirit of God, and so can accurately be described as a dialogue with God:
5 Counsel in the heart of man is like deep water; but a man of understanding will draw it out.
6 Most men will proclaim every one his own goodness: but a faithful man who can find?
7 The just man walketh in his integrity: his children are blessed after him. (Proverbs 20)
The more you treat rational analyses as conversations with God, and the more you treat their results as his word, the more your wisdom will expand, and the better you and your life will be.
Here is the process for analyzing past decisions. Consider past actions. Ask yourself what you did, why you did it, what other things you could have done, why you didn’t choose them, and whether what you did was the best way to do what you intended to do. Consider what would have benefited the most, what you can do to change your decision if necessary, and what you can do to make better decisions in general in the future.
God knows what we feel and what we think, and he can help restore our vision from the natural blindness we experience through a lifetime of occasionally turning away from what we perceived but did not want to acknowledge.