Bryan Craddock - Overcoming Lust

Solomon Northrup was born a free man. He was a responsible citizen with a wife and three children-two girls (ages 10 and 8) and a boy (age 5). He lived with his family in Saratoga Springs, New York, doing manual labor at times and whenever he could getting jobs playing violin. In 1841 he got a job playing music for a traveling circus act.

One night while the group was in Washington D.C., someone apparently drugged him and he passed out. He says, “…when consciousness returned I found myself alone, in utter darkness, and in chains. The pain in my head had subsided in a measure, but I was very faint and weak. I was sitting upon a low bench, made of rough boards, and without coat or hat. I was hand cuffed. Around my ankles also were a pair of heavy fetters. One end of a chain was fastened to a large ring in the floor, the other to the fetters on my ankles.”

Solomon soon found out that he was now the prisoner of a slave trader. When he protested that he was a freeman, he was beaten into submission. It was twelve years before he would finally be rescued and reunited with his family.

The whole idea of slavery is repugnant to us, yet that’s the picture the Bible uses to talk about the powerful control that sin exercises in our lives. Paul says in Titus 3:3, “For we also once were foolish ourselves, disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures.” But in verses 4 and 5 Paul says, “But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy.” As we read earlier, Paul says in Romans 6 that even though salvation frees us from sin and its lusts, we often choose to allow it to continue to reign in us as our master.

Last week we began a new series that I’ve called “Overcoming Life’s Challenges.” Each week through the summer we will look at a different challenge. And today we are considering the challenge of overcoming lust.

With each topic in this series, I plan to give you at least one key passage of Scripture that will give you practical guidance in overcoming. For today, I have selected 2 Timothy 2:22. Let’s read it together: Now flee from youthful lusts and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart.

If you want to experience independence, then you must know what lust is and how God enables you to escape it.

WHAT IS LUST?

The Greek word for lust is epithumia which simply means “desire”. Sometimes it’s used in a good sense. In Philippians 1, Paul said that he had a desire to depart and be with Christ. But most of the time the word speaks of a sinful desire. As I said last week, lust refers to all of the powerful, sinful desires that flow from within our hearts, controlling our lives and corrupting our world.

The Greek translation of the Old Testament used this word epithumia in the Tenth Commandment. The commandment says, “You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife or his male servant or his female servant or his ox or his donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbor” (Exodus 20:17). Epithumia was the Greek term for covet.

1 John 2:15-16 defines three different types of lust. John writes, “Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world. So some sinful desires flow from a drive to have something to brag about. Other sinful desires flow from seeing things, objects that we want to possess. And some sinful desires are driven by physical urges within our body.

Of course, when most of us hear the term lust, we think of sexual desire and that’s the sin that I want to address this morning. Sexual desire in and of itself is not evil. God created us as sexual beings. The problem isn’t that we desire sexual gratification. The problem is that we often seek sexual gratification in the wrong way.

God’s design is that you would only seek sexual gratification from your spouse. If you are single, then God’s design is that would wait to seek sexual gratification until such a time as God may give you a spouse. That is why the seventh commandment says, “You shall not commit adultery” (Exodus 20:14). Any sex outside of marriage violates God’s plan.

But notice, a moment ago I said that God’s design is that you would only seek sexual gratification from your spouse. There is more to sexual gratification than physical intercourse. Jesus made this clear in Matthew 5:27-28: “You have heard that it was said, 'YOU SHALL NOT COMMIT ADULTERY'; but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”

Sexual gratification isn’t just physical. It is visual, particularly for most men. Our hearts are deceitful and try to convince us otherwise. Men come up with lame excuses like, “It’s okay to look as long as I don’t touch.” But that’s not true. In their book, Every Man’s Battle, Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker clarify the issue for us. They write, “Impurity of the eyes is sexual foreplay…Foreplay is any sexual action that naturally takes us down the road to intercourse.”

Men are bombarded constantly with sights that provoke lust. And it’s not just in media that we would classify as pornographic. It’s in commercials. It’s in clothing women wear (sometimes naively) designed to draw men’s attention to certain parts of their bodies. We have to recognize, men, that whenever we feast our eyes and minds on someone other than our wife, we are guilty of seeking sexual gratification outside of marriage.

But lust isn’t just a problem for men. It’s a problem for women as well, although it’s not as obvious. Beth Spraul, a counselor, has written an article about the way “chick-flicks” and romance novels (even so-called Christian ones) lead women to lust, not visually but emotionally. She writes, “Like pornography, chick-flicks take a good gift from God (romance, relational intimacy) that women are created to desire, and distort it by presenting as “normal” an unbiblical and unrealistic picture of men, love and marriage. And just like men who buy into the lies of pornography, women who believe that their husbands and marriages should always be like what they see on the screen will be sinfully dissatisfied with God’s good gift to them of a “normal” husband and marriage.”

Romance stories may not be as overtly sinful as pornography, but the result can often be the same. Most men are tempted to find sexual gratification through viewing the bodies of women other than their wives and fantasizing about having sex with them. But many women are tempted to find some degree of sexual gratification through emotional fantasies of romantic involvement with men other than their husband. The result in both cases is mental adultery.

So the lust we are talking about today is the adulterous desire to seek sexual gratification, whether physical, visual, or emotional, from some source other than your spouse. So how do we overcome lust? Listen to Paul’s words from 2 Timothy 2:22 again: Now flee from youthful lusts and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart. In order to escape lust we must flee and we must pursue.

FLEEING LUST

The command to flee gives us a vivid picture of someone frantically doing whatever they can to get away. How does that work out practically?

1. Fleeing requires confessing your sins to God.

In 1 John 1:9, we are called to confess our sins to God. That’s not just admitting our sin, it’s coming to see our sin the way that God sees it. Our minds are so good at justifying or explaining lust away, but we have to recognize it for what it is—a violation of marital fidelity and a sin against God.

2. Fleeing requires a die-hard commitment to purity.

Job is a good example for us. In Job 31:1 he said, “I have made a covenant with my eyes; how then could I gaze at a virgin?” Sometimes people talk as if we are the first generation to struggle with sexual purity. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. Most scholars think that Job lived around 4,000 years ago, and his words tell us that he faced the same battle then. Have you made a commitment to live a life of purity? Make a covenant with God today.

3. Fleeing requires avoiding temptation.

In Romans 13:14 Paul called Christians to, “Make no provision for the flesh in regard to its lusts.” Even though we say we don’t want to sin, we often will toy with temptation. We will see how close we can get without stepping over the line.

Maybe we know that certain TV shows or movies will tempt us to lust. But we keep that DVD on the shelf any way. Or we check to see what’s on that particular channel or website that always draws us in. Or we try to make contact with that person to whom we’re attracted. We tell ourselves that it’s completely innocent, and that we can handle it. When we do these things we are providing for lust to take place.

We may need to take extreme measures to avoid temptation. This is what Jesus had in mind in Matthew 5:29-30 when He said, “If your right eye makes you 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. If your right hand makes you stumble, cut it off 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 go into hell.”

If internet is a problem, get a filter or get rid of it altogether. If cable is a problem, cancel your subscription. If certain books or movies are a problem, throw them out. If certain people are a problem, avoid them. Don’t seek them out!

4. Fleeing requires policing your thoughts.

Sometimes temptation is unavoidable, but in those moments we can still control our minds. In 2 Corinthians 10:5, Paul said, “We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.” We have to be vigilant. We can’t allow even one lustful thought to take root in our mind.

Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker talk about men developing a habit of “bouncing their eyes.” You can cultivate a habit, men, of looking away immediately when you see an immodestly clothed woman.

All of us can cultivate the habit of responding to temptation by bouncing our minds to something holy and pure. Sometimes the easiest way to do that is through reciting a key verse like Job 31:1, “I have made a covenant with my eyes.” Sometimes it helps to sing a song that focuses your mind on Christ.

5. Fleeing requires accountability.

In some ways, we live more and more private lives. We spend less time with people. We have any entertainment we want available to us anytime of day at the click of a button. In fleeing from lust, it helps to enlist someone else (someone of the same gender) to hold you accountable.

James 5:16 says, “Therefore, confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another so that you may be healed.” That cuts against our grain, particularly here in the guarded Dutch culture of West Michigan. But if you are struggling with lust, you need to find someone you trust who will ask you how you are doing and will pray for you.

PURSUING CHRIST

Fleeing alone is not enough. I’m reminded of the occasion recorded in Matthew 12:43-45 when Jesus said, “Now when the unclean spirit goes out of a man, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, and does not find it. Then it says, 'I will return to my house from which I came'; and when it comes, it finds it unoccupied, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and takes along with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first. That is the way it will also be with this evil generation.”

Jesus was responding to the hardness of heart shown by the Jewish leaders, but I think the same thing can happen on an individual level. If we just focus on squelching one area of sin, we often open ourselves up to other sins. We just replace one sin with another.

The old saying is that idle hands are the devils tools. One of the best solutions to help you resist temptation is to stay busy, but with what?

Paul told Timothy to, “Pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart.” These are the characteristics of a Christ-like life. Righteousness is obedience to God’s commands. Faith is dependence upon God. Love is being devoted to God and to people. Peace is maintaining harmony in our relationship with God and people. We should be spending our time growing in these areas through reading the Bible, meditating on it, and praying.

And note that last phrase. This pursuit takes place with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart. Sometimes I hear people say, “My Christianity is a private thing. I don’t really need to be a part of a church.”

2 Timothy 2:22 is one of those verses that says otherwise. This is a command to pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace with a group of people—not just any group, but a group of people who call on the Lord (that’s a reference to prayer). Plus, they are supposed to be a group with pure hearts. That’s a good description of what the church is supposed to be.

If you are really serious about overcoming lust, you need to be vitally involved with a church. Get to know people. Study the Bible with them. Pray with them. Find ways to serve them. Don’t do it, just out of routine. Do it to grow in righteousness, faith, love, and peace.

CONCLUSION

Wouldn’t be a terrible feeling to wake up and find yourself a slave like Solmon Northrup? Apart from Christ, all of us are slaves of our sinful desires.

Maybe that’s where you stand today. You don’t have a relationship with Christ, and no matter how hard you try, you can’t break free of the sinful desires that control you. Jesus said, “If the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36).

Receive Christ as your Savior, your new master. He said, “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and YOU WILL FIND REST FOR YOUR SOULS. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light” (Matt 11:28-30).

Maybe you have come to Christ, you’ve been set free, but you’ve allowed sin to keep ruling over you as your master. You don’t have to live that kind of defeated life. Run away from sin. Pursue Christ with your brothers and sisters in the church. We’re ready to help you.

Maybe you have been faithfully fleeing lust and you are strong in Christ. If that’s the case, would you seek out someone else who needs your help? Find someone that you can encourage and hold accountable. Pray for them. Encourage them with the things we’ve talked about this morning.