Lust: How You Can Get Lost in The Sauce
Why would God plant within a man the uncontrollable urge to look at every attractive woman and then say, “Oh, by the way, lust is adultery and adultery is sin. Good luck!” If lust is a sin, why did He create me with sexual desires?
Don’t confuse normal sexual attraction with lust.
Sexual attraction is natural. When a good-looking female or male walks by and a man /woman notices (something that happens pretty regularly), it’s not necessarily the same thing as lusting after her/him.
Lust involves a choice and an act of the will. To a certain extent it’s a conscious decision to pursue a desirable object instead of simply allowing it to pass on by. It’s a willingness to give in to natural impulse.
That’s what happened when David, after seeing Bathsheba bathing on the rooftop, went the next step by sending messengers to bring her to his palace (2 Samuel 11:3-4).
Good news: self-control is possible
The Bible makes it clear that personal self-control is possible. Check out Galatians 5:16-25, Titus 2:11-14, 1 Peter 1:13-15, and 1 John 2:15-17.
A man or woman can learn to let sensory stimulation bounce off him /her without taking root in the mind and heart. It’s like this long-shared adage: You can’t keep birds from flying over your head, but you can keep them from building a nest in your hair. That’s what it means to overcome lust.
Will it take commitment and discipline? Absolutely — perhaps more for men than women. But struggle, discipline, commitment, and growth are all part of what it means to live as a Christian in this world. That’s the process of sanctification.
Let's face it: Living a self-controlled and godly life in our hyper-sexualized culture is no small thing. We live in an era in which the idea of restraint, of reining in our sexual desire for some higher purpose — whether living chastely as singles or living faithfully as marrieds — seems a quaint throwback to a bygone age.
Old-fashioned as self-control and purity may seem to those outside the faith, however, Scripture clearly teaches that what happens in our hearts, sexually speaking, matters to God.
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