Some people think men are the issue here,
that is, men struggle with this.
I have had enough women approach me in
their candor and talk about the issue that
I don't make that assumption anymore.
What did we read?
I forget the percentage, 30% of Internet
pornography is viewed by women?
Maybe curiosity, you know, instead of men's kind
of looking, but maybe not, maybe not.
Women's imaginations are different than men's imaginations.
Harlequin romance novels are not the same as
Playboy, but they function the same.
It's just more relational, more contextual, more holistic.
Women's lusts are not as visceral and immediate
and visual, but relational and situational and dream
and hope oriented.
We're pretty different folks, but sin in this
lusting thing can defeat both kinds of human
being.
Here's my definition of lust, pursuing illicit thoughts
or images, illicit, inappropriate, wrong, thoughts or images
in the mind, so I mean women and
men have your own ways of doing it,
in the mind with a view to stimulating
sexual pleasures or with or without external stimuli.
You can do it in here, you don't
have to see or touch or be around
anything, or you can be looking at a
person or Internet or whatever.
So that's my definition of lust, illicit thoughts
or images in the mind with a view
to stimulating sexual pleasures with or without external
stimuli.
And the question is, how do you kill
that?
Because it's illicit, it's wrong.
How do you kill lust?
And the answer is living by faith in
future grace.
So let's get specific here and analyze this
a little bit.
Lust grows out of suppressing the knowledge of
God and His promises.
Most people in the world don't have a
clue that that's the case, and some Christians
don't believe that that's the case.
But look at these texts, Ephesians 4.22,
"...lay aside the old self which is being
corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit."
What does that mean, lusts of deceit?
It means you are believing a lie when
you lust.
It means you're being deceived as you lust.
And deceive always implies the departure from truth,
some truth.
What would that be?
1 Peter 1.14, "...as obedient children, do
not be conformed to the former lusts, desires,
so don't be conformed to the former lusts
which were yours in your ignorance."
Ignorance.
Peter seems to be tracing my vulnerability to
former lusts to ignorance of something.
It says to me as a pastor, I
need to rectify that.
I need to constantly be rectifying this deceit
and this ignorance because they really matter.
Lust feels very much different from ideas in
the head.
Feels very much like convictions of the soul.
But it is not out of touch with
these.
My concern is not merely to provide some
little short term, here's a way to stop
that, here's a way to stop that, but
rather to build a substructure of life into
your mind and heart in relationship to what
can be known about God and Christ and
heaven and hell, that the whole substructure is
like a rising tide in a harbor where
all the boats are down in the mud
of lust and instead of trying to get
cranes, little cranes of tactics, lift that one
out of the lust, lift that one out
of the lust, the whole tide goes up
and all the boats float out of the
mud.
That's the way I want to preach and
teach and live.
I want to create such an awareness of,
a deep knowledge of, an allegiance to the
superior pleasures of God in Christ over against
the dangers of hellish lust that men and
women find their boats floating free and don't
as often need to use the crane of
technique.
It's just kind of a growing, abiding victory.
1 Thessalonians 4 connects it with God.
Each of you should know how to possess
his own vessel in sanctification and honor, not
in lustful passion, like the Gentiles who do
not know God.
What's he saying?
He's saying if you yield to a life
driven by lustful passion, you act like you
don't know God.
If that's true, then knowing God is a
good strategy for overcoming lust.
It is.
Knowing God.
I mean, really knowing Him.
There are a lot of guys and gals
who, when they fight the fight, they try
to bring some theological or biblical thought to
mind, and it doesn't work, and they say,
blah, that doesn't work.
They don't know God.
How much effort have they given to really
go deep with God, know God, have their
mind full of God and their heart full
of God, and God's beauty and glory and
perfection becomes their treasure.
That's the kind of knowledge he's talking about
here.
If you want to play with God, then
you'll be a sitting duck for every image
that comes across the television and the Internet.
But if you stock your soul and mind
with the fullness of biblical revelation about God,
the boats will float.
Here's a beautiful opening of how future grace,
the promise of all that God is for
us in Jesus, relates to lust.
2 Peter 1.3, His divine power has
granted to us everything pertaining to life and
godliness.
Through the true knowledge...
Okay, now watch that.
His power has granted to us everything pertaining
to life and godliness.
Okay, that would be good.
I would like that.
I would like that power to produce godliness
in me.
How does it come to me?
He gives us some channels.
He comes through the true knowledge of Him.
That's amazing.
Isn't that amazing?
Power for godliness comes through knowledge of Him,
and now it specifies the knowledge a little
bit, who called us by His own glory
and excellence.
So there's some glory we know and some
excellence we know.
For by these...
And I think that's referring back to these
two, glory and excellence.
He has granted to us His precious and
very magnificent promises.
So there's another thing we know.
So that by them...
And now it's the promises.
By them you may become partakers of the
divine nature and having escaped from the corruption,
the lust that is in the world by
lust.
The corruption that is in the world by
lust.
So if you read backwards and say, Okay,
I want to escape this.
I'm so sick of this in my life.
I want out of this dominant power in
my life.
It comes by promises.
Promises so that by them you may become
partakers and escape.
By them you become partakers and escape.
By the promises we escape.
Lust.
This is future grace.
All this glory and excellence, this knowledge of
God that's going to be now and more
in the future granted to us for our
enjoyment is so superior that it severs the
root of this lust.
That's the way that text works.
So fight lust indirectly as well as directly.
Give yourself to reading.
Give yourself to study.
Give yourself to meditating.
Give yourself to memorizing.
Give yourself to savoring the beauties of God.
And pray like crazy that the Lord would
open your heart to see wonderful things that
feel more wonderful than the surge of this
masturbation.
Or just looking.
Or more illicit behavior.
Fornication.
Adultery.
Fooling around at some kinky bar.
It's a lie that losing sex is losing
something essential.
You wonder where's that coming from?
Here's where that's coming from.
I got a, let's see, get the context
here.
About, oh I don't know, it was 15
years.
Those of you who've been in the Twin
Cities will remember this maybe.
There was a big row in the Twin
Cities, in the newspapers about public advertising for
condoms on television.
And I wrote an article for the Tribune
with two other pastors arguing that that would
not be a good idea to put advertisements
for condoms on the television.
And so I got a call from the
TV station.
And they said, can we come over and
do a little interview about that?
They did, and I did.
Then the letters started to come, both from
the TV and the Tribune.
And I remember one letter so clear.
A single man who said, and I responded,
I wrote to him and tried to minister
to him after this.
But he just said, I can't believe that
you would tell me, as a single man,
that I am not to experience the fullness
of my humanity through sexual relations with my
girlfriend without marriage.
What if I have no partner?
You're going to tell me I go through
my whole life without sexual intercourse?
That was absolutely unimaginable to him.
I will not be human if I don't
have sex.
And that really set me to thinking about
what is human and how to think about
that for single people.
Because there are single people who, year after
year, hope maybe that they might be married,
a man or a woman, and it doesn't
happen for whatever reason.
And they begin to think, I may go
to my grave and never have had sex.
It doesn't seem right.
I can't remember all that I put in
the letter to him.
I think I might have it on file
at home.
I forgot to get it.
But here is an important verse from 8411.
The Lord God is a sun and shield.
The Lord gives grace and glory.
No good thing does he withhold from those
who walk uprightly.
Wow.
Do you believe that?
No good thing does he withhold from those
who walk chaste and uprightly.
Which means that if you are not married,
and you walk uprightly in chastity, the Lord
withholds no good thing from you.
It would be far better for you never
to have sex in this life.
Just like Jesus.
What I did say to this man, I
said, I hear you saying that you want
to be fully human.
I affirm that.
I know one person who was fully human.
Jesus Christ.
He never had sex.
I think that is a very liberating thought
to single people.
It should be.
Jesus Christ came into the world to model
the infinite beauty and fullness of humanity.
And he never had sexual intercourse.
Da Vinci Code notwithstanding.
Therefore, you don't have to have it to
be fully human.
And what God wants you to be.
Blessed are the pure in heart for they
shall see God.
That is an unspeakable promise to see God.
I remember in my teenage days of much
defeat in this area, what began to triumph,
18, 19, made that transition, was the thought
of what I was missing as I gave
myself away to lustful fantasies.
What it did to me in blinding me
from what I could see but couldn't see.
In other words, if I gave myself away
toward masturbation, of a fantasy, the thought of
seeing God, or seeing people in their wholeness
and their beauty and their uprightness, vanished.
And I was down like a dog in
heat.
It felt like I was losing the sunrises.
I was losing poetry.
I was losing the possibility of someday having
an upright and beautiful eyeball-to-eyeball personal
relationship with a whole woman and not just
a body.
All that began to just grip me as
what I was losing and what I was
blinding myself to as I gave myself away
to lust.
That's the gift of grace, when you begin
to cherish God more than those little blitz
pleasures that are so fleeting and so unsatisfying
in the end.
Unfought lust will destroy the soul.
I skipped over the warnings on anxiety.
I won't skip over this one.
Warnings are the flip side of promises.
They are gracious.
They make us scared.
But Jesus uses them.
We should use them.
Matthew 5, 28.
I say to you that everyone who looks
at a woman with lust for her has
already committed adultery with her in his heart.
So what should you do?
If your right eye causes you to stumble,
tear it out and throw it from you.
For it is better for you to lose
one of the parts of your body than
for your whole body to be thrown into
hell.
Have you ever thought that if you tear
out your right eye, you can see her
pretty clearly with your left eye?
So it was no help to tear out
your right eye.
The reason that's an important observation is because
Jesus didn't mean literally to tear out your
right eye.
Because it wouldn't help with your left eye.
He meant do whatever you must do to
get this sight and temptation out of your
head.
So I put there See Future Grace, page
329.
Here's what I want to read.
July 20, 1993.
Donald Wyman was clearing land near Puxatawney, Pennsylvania
as part of his work for a mining
company.
In the process, a tree rolled onto his
shin causing a severe break and pinning Wyman
to the ground.
He cried for help for an hour, but
no one came.
He concluded that the only way to save
his life would be to cut off his
leg.
So he made a tourniquet out of his
shoestring and tied it with a wrench, tightened
it with a wrench.
Then he took his pocket knife and cut
through the skin, muscle, and bone just below
the knee and freed himself from the tree.
He crawled 30 yards to a bulldozer, drove
a quarter of a mile to his truck,
maneuvered the standard transmission with his good leg
and a hand until he reached a farmer's
house one and a half miles away with
his leg bleeding profusely.
Farmer John Huber Jr. helped him get to
a hospital where his life was spared.
A man will cut off his leg to
save his life.
Will you cut off your leg and gouge
out your eye to save your eternity?
That's what Jesus says.
Be thrown into hell.
We should fight this lust thing with hellish
proportions.
Hell and heaven.
I urge you as aliens and strangers to
abstain from fleshly lusts which wage war against
your soul.
They want to kill you.
They want to take you down.
Oh, how many pastors.
A statistic a few years ago was 10
% in our denomination in Minnesota had come
down over this.
10% had failed to gouge out their
eye, cut off their leg and do whatever
was necessary to find Christ a superior pleasure.
They threw it away.
They threw their marriage away.
They threw their ministry away for that kind
of pleasure.
Fleeting, hell-bound pleasure.
John Owen, bless his heart, the Calvin of
England said, be killing sin or it will
be killing you.
We don't always succeed, but we better make
war.
The evidence of being born of God is
that you make war on your sin.
You don't win every battle, but you make
war.
You can get that at DesiringGod.org That's
my little acronym for how I fight in
the moment of lust.
But I think I've said enough about lust.
I'd like to move on.
So Anthem, if you type in Anthem at
DesiringGod.org you will get this acronym.
I find it very helpful in the moment
when the thought that you don't want in
your head comes in your head and you're
trying to figure out how to get it
out.