Losing Lustful Passions
March 24, 2010
Pornography is the most lucrative business on the Internet. The vendors of lust are raking in the dough by the truck full by capitalizing on human brokenness. A close second in popularity on the Internet, not for lucrative purposes, is religion. Ironic? Enigmatic?
Sexuality and spirituality are no strangers. They have been bedfellows (pardon the pun) for a long time. The relationship between the two is entrenched in the Old Testament: Ashtoreth and Baal reigned as king and queen of lustful behavior in pagan religions.
In this article, I will not give techniques to avoid lusting. Techniques may work periodically but unless change happens deep within, techniques lack staying power. What sticks when it comes to dealing with lust? I am convinced that the solution is found in understanding and living a theology of human relationships.
The problem with lust is basically a problem of relationships. It is a problem of using others for the purpose of self-gratification rather than adding value to their lives. We must realize that at the core of lust is a deep disfigurement of life with God in his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.
We need a helpful theology of human relationships that overcomes death by lust. We must no longer take for granted that we know how to love others as we love ourselves, and God with all our being. Without a godly vision of others, it is easy to default to our selfish human natures and mar all we use.
What then does a theology of human relationships include? How does such a theology help us deal with unbridled human sexual passions?
We get our theology of human relationships from the way God relates to his people. God relates to humanity in such a way as to add value and dignity to them. It is never God’s intention to rob us of our dignity or cause us to lose our own dignity in relationships.
First, God relates to us with unbounded love. His love knows no limits. It is not exclusive. It is not bound by a return on investment. His love is sacrificial for the purpose of adding value and dignity to his creation. His love is redeeming and edifying. The deep change that needs to take place in the lustful heart is seeing others (friend or stranger alike) as bearers of the image of God worthy of a love that is pure and holy. There is nothing like unconditional love to elevate our respect and honor of others. This is the love that God gives us. This is the love we must not quench by lust. Lust chips away at the image of God in us and in others. It disfigures as it turns loving beings into objects. It hammers in us the nails of selfishness and self-gratification at the expense of the dignity of others. Loving others who are made in the image of God is the first claw that pulls away at the rusty nails of lust.
Second, God relates to us with grace. He favors us and enables us to do what we cannot do in our own strength. His favor is unearned. His grace is empowering in our weakness. Likewise in learning to put to death the deadly sin of lust, we must treat others (all image bearers) with favor and with enablement. The lustful heart treats others without dignity. It contributes nothing to others. It only has human weakness for ally. In order for transformation to take place, a deep renewing of the mind must take place in confession, brokenness, and repentance, within the confines and with the help of a mature community of believers. Flannery O’Connor said, in the Habit of Being, “all human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and grace is painful.”
Third, God relates to us intimately. A holy intimacy! God has gone out of his way to reveal who he is. He has done so in nature, through chosen leaders, prophets, priests, kings, a people, and finally Jesus and his church. In counseling with others about lusting I have come to understand that there is a deep yearning for intimacy with men and women who are hooked on lust. The search for gratifying human lust is a deceptive mask. It masks a deep hunger and thirst for intimacy with God gone awry. I have seen those afflicted by lust reform their ways and work at reshaping their hearts and minds when they finally realized that they are looking for intimacy with God in the wrong ways and in the wrong places. When a person is hooked on a lustful lifestyle we must look closely at their spiritual lives in order to discover their longing for intimacy with God. And with the discovery rebuild their intimacy with God through a spiritual formation process.
Unconditional love, grace that favors and empowers, and intimacy are the components of a theology of human relationships. This is God’s way of relating to us. It must be the way we relate to others. But this kind of relating is learned when it is taught, and modeled by godly leaders and friends who are willing to invest in others. Those who walk with the Master must not walk the narrow path alone. They must walk with others in holiness and purity learning and teaching the taming of the shrew of lust.
Lust
March 2, 2010
The Slippery Slope of Untamed Passions
Lust is in vogue. Exposure to the sexual avalanche of the media has legalized and legitimized lust for many. Can you buy a car, chew gum, shampoo your hair, and drink a diet Coke, without first having to endure the avalanche of lust? Can you whiten your teeth or Listerine your mouth without anticipating a sexual encounter? Is this how Freud and Darwin would have us be?
The old order: first comes love (pure and noble) then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage. The new order: first comes lust, then comes porn, then comes sex, then comes living together (and oh, marriage is optional either before or after children are born)!
How did we get here? What do we do about it, as the church, the love guardians we are called to be in God’s Kingdom? No, playing ostrich is not a good game plan for concerned followers of the Pure One. Laissez faire or que sera sera attitudes do not honor the prophetic traditions we inherited from our forefathers in the faith from the Old Testament on. Tolerance (usually meaning forced acceptance and inclusion without reserve) of society’s sexual mores should not be a fait accompli in the church.
The church has a mandate from Christ himself to lovingly enfold the worst offenders of lust into the true fold of love in Christ. Did not Jesus himself model for us the power of pure love toward purveyors of lust as we might call the woman caught in adultery? Drop that stone! Eliminating lust was not on top of the agenda for Jesus. That besmirched distinction goes to pride, greed, and hypocrisy, the deadliest of the sins. In Matthew 21:30 we are told that the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before the Pharisees!
What then is lust? Why is it bad? What to do about it?
The people of God then and now have long recognized that misplaced sexual urges wreak havoc in the church and in society.
The sons of the gods (whatever these creature are) of Genesis 6 were full of lust. A woman in my Bible study called them “h…y little angels,” which caused much laughter. The result of their lust was the taking of as many of the daughters of men as they pleased. Unbridled lust! The slippery slope of their untamed passions, of doing what was right in their own eyes, brought the destruction of the world.
A lustful woman then plagued Joseph. She kept pestering him to give in to her lust and to unbridled natural sexual urges until his refusal landed him in jail. But God was with Joseph. Jail is better than lust for the man who is determined to walk with God.
Then comes David. O David, what an enigma you are? You lust, you contrive wicked plans, and you cause cold-blooded death. Yet your legacy of brokenness over your lust, multiplied a thousand times, earns you the tile of a man after God’s own heart! Of course it would have been better all around had you not lingered with your gaze upon the naked bather.
And your son Ammon, what legacy did you leave this chip off the old block? The old old block, Judah! How Judah used his daughter in law, Tamar, when he lusted, so did Ammon, his descendant through David, did to his own sister, also named Tamar, when he lusted for her (Study Genesis 38 and 2 Samuel 13-14). The sins of the fathers have a dogged destructive tenacity to them. Don’t they? But thanks be to God who will deliver by his grace.
Then there is our Pure Lord who saw lust as leading into the garbage heap that is Gehenna (Matthew 5:27-30). An enigmatic passage to be sure! It is better to live maimed from body parts than to burn in hell? These are the only words of Jesus about having a healthy sexuality!
There is a story behind Jesus’ strong warning. Follow along. Israel often lusted after Baal, the pagans’ god of fertility. For a century, the force of Baal grabbed their imagination under the rules of Ahaz and Manasseh, his grandson. They sexualized their worship by sleeping with temple prostitutes. They sacrificed their children as the pagans did by burning their bodies in the trash heaps of Jerusalem, called the Valley of Ben Hinnom, which later was called Gehenna, the word Jesus uses for hell in Matthew 5:30). When Babylon conquered Israel, shed their blood, they threw their bodies in the Valley of Ben Hinnom (the Valley of Slaughter) the same garbage dump where they previously sacrificed their children. They took the king’s child and slaughtered him before his eyes in this hell pit.
So Gehenna for Jesus was the place where bodies burned and waste smoldered when God’s people luge down the slippery slope of lust. This brings clarity to Jesus’ warning about our sexual lives (for background study see 2 kings 16:10-18; 21:4-9; Jeremiah 7:29-33; 19; 32; 2 Kings 23; 2 Chronicles 28; 33).
Jesus warns that there are real consequences to lust. He peels off a scab from Israel’s past to illustrate them. Jesus was saying that when we lust, “we are throwing our whole lives into a valley of burning waste—a place of death and idolatry and rejectedness and smoldering trash” (Jeff Cook in the book Seven).
How many of our comrades in the faith have eaten the poisoned meat of lust rather than starve their sexual urges and drink from their own cisterns? They deserve our mercy. They need our grace for there we might also go lest we bridle our legitimate God-given sexual desires. Those who desire to walk with the Master are diligent in their watchful tenacity for the sin that crouches at the door. Next, some ways of dealing with lust will be explored.
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