Introduction

We’re continuing our series examining the seven deadly sins. Today we examine the sin of Lust.

The Hidden Danger of Lust

Lust is both a sin we feel embarrassed talking about, yet we often feel like it’s not such a big deal.

After all, lust doesn’t do any direct concrete harm to someone else or their property. While it’s true that no one ever died when someone thought a lustful thought about them, lust causes serious, if insidious harm to people. Lust distorts our thinking about others, and that distorted thinking leads to all sorts of degrading and harmful behaviours ranging from the icky (ogling) to the catastrophic (rape).

Metaphorically we could see sex as fire. Used well, fire can cook your food and heat your house. But abused, fire can burn your house down. If sex is fire, then lust is gasoline sloshed around your living room. It makes controlling what must be controlled virtually impossible. Because lust is so potentially destructive, Jesus has strong words to say against lust:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell (Matthew 5:27-30, NIV).

Contrary to the attitude of our culture, Jesus thinks its a big deal. While it may be a secret sin, confined to the inside, Jesus’ words point out how it has a habit of spilling over into our external actions While Jesus is certainly employing hyperbole when he talks about self-mutilation, his basic point is that if we aren’t ruthless in dealing with sins that seem to be harmless, we will find that they lead to very real and potentially devastating consequences.

Defining Lust

When we talk about lust what are we talking about? First, while the church may have lost sight of this from time to time, lust is not the same thing as sexual desire. Sexual desire is a good thing created by God. So the call to avoid lust is not the same thing as telling us to repress our sexuality. Instead, sex, like other gifts from God, is something that can be used to enhance flourishing in life, or it can be abused to our detriment.

Lust is disordered sexual desire. To lust is to treat another human being—who bears God’s image—as less than human, an object to be used for the gratification of your sexual desire. But people are more than their sexuality, and when we ignore that, it causes problems.

Spirits and Bodies

In order to understand the problems lust causes, we have to understand a Christian perspective on what it is to be human.

The Bible teaches that humans are a hybrid between physical and spiritual beings. These two parts of ourselves are inseparable. One of the earliest Christian heresies, Gnosticism, denied this idea, supposing that our physical bodies were prisons to be escaped. By denying the unity of body and spirit, Gnosticism taught people that their bodies, and what they did with them, didn’t matter. 

But this is a harmful false teaching. First, it fails to grasp how our bodies and spirits are joined together. Our bodies act according to the will of our spirit. So if I sin, it’s not just a body problem, it’s also a spiritual problem. So if I punch or kick you, I can’t say, “That was just my body doing that,” because my spirit directed my body to do that.

Second, the teaching that the body is bad or unimportant denies the goodness of the physical world. In the creation account of Genesis 1, at six points in the story, the narrator says, “God saw that it [creation] was good”. When creation is complete, it says “God saw all that he had made and it was very good.” Creation goes from good to very good when God places his image bearers—people—into creation.

We are made in the image of God – in our physical form we represent God to the world. As John Paul II wrote, “The body, in fact, and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and divine.”

Having a body is a good gift from God. The problem isn’t that we have bodies, but that our bodies don’t do so well in a world affected by sin. So our bodies aren’t disposable, rather they have become corrupted and need to be renewed.

The third problem with the gnostic view of the body is that it denies the incarnation. John tells us that “The word became flesh and dwelled among us.” God took on a human body. If the fullness of God can dwell in a body then having a body is a dignified thing. So our physical/spiritual duality isn’t a bad thing, but a very good thing.

But lust denies that this is so. If I lust after someone, I act as if that person is just a body. I act as if my desire for that person is a purely physical matter that doesn’t affect my Spirit. I ignore or downplay the interconnection between body and Spirit. It says to the person lusted after, “You’re just a body to me, the rest of you doesn’t matter.” When we deny the way God has created us, it distorts how we live.

The Corruption of Lust

Of course all of that theological stuff feels rather abstract when we’re tempted by lust. But the harms of indulging lust aren’t mere abstractions. They’re very real.

The False Promise

Lust promises us pleasures if we indulge it. Many people say that lust is a good thing. Indulging it allows us to relieve sexual tension that builds up. But giving ourselves permission to lust doesn’t relieve the problem, it just makes it worse. It’s like drinking seawater – the more you drink, the thirstier you get. As the writer of Proverbs says, “ Death and Destruction are never satisfied, and neither are human eyes.” In the end, indulging lust doesn’t relieve the tension, it trains us to look at others as objects. It robs us of our ability to relate to others in a healthy way. and this leaves us isolated, and so more likely to indulge in lust, perpetuating a vicious cycle.

How Lust Destroys

Lust causes harm in many different ways I want to quickly outline how it corrupts in different spheres of life

First, Lust devastates us personally by eroding empathy. When we’ve conditioned ourselves to to see others as objects we just don’t care that much when those apparent objects experience pain or injustice. So, for example, when men start to see women as objects, even if they don’t engage in overtly misogynistic behaviour themselves, they’re less bothered by it when they see it. So when people are catcalling women, or taking advantage of women who are drunk, we’re more likely to think, “what’s the big deal.” When we have learned to treat people as objects, we become unable see their human dignity. And this stops us from building healthy relationships with them.

Second, Lust destroys us relationally by destroying trust and intimacy. A person who is given over to disordered sexual desire can’t experience sexual fulfillment in marriage because they don’t have the tools to build a commitment necessary to sustain an emotionally healthy marriage. A person given to lust begins to associate shame and sexual gratification. So even when they experience sexual intimacy in marriage, they have lingering feelings of dirtiness. Lust destroys intimacy in marriage. If someone is secretly longing for a different partner than the one they have, they will probably start to question whether their spouse does the same.

Also, it ruins relationship because it trains us to see even our spouse as a sexual object, instead of a full human with hopes and dreams and needs that aren’t sexual. We lose the ability to relate to our spouse holistically, and so the relationship with be stunted as a result.

Finally, Lust destroys us socially by building up industries that exploit. The pornographic industry exists because of lust. While we like to tell ourselves that people in the porn industry freely choose to do what they do and are fairly compensated, the reality is that it is much more complicated than that. An alcoholic can freely choose to drink, but they are not free. A person participating in porn may freely choose to do so, but because of brokenness in their life. Plus it is naive to believe that all the women involved in pornography have freely chosen to do it. There is likely a great deal of coercion involved.

Human trafficking exists because of lust. most of the women and girls who are trafficked are trafficked against their will to feed the demand for prostitutes. If our society didn’t normalize lust, it’s likely a great deal less of this would happen.

A Practical Example: David & Bathsheba

We can see the destructive power of lust on display in the tragic story of David & Bathsheba. David is a great king. He is brave, humble and committed to God, But even a man of such renown is susceptible to lust. When David indulges his lust, his decision making process is hijacked by his libido. He finds himself engaging in actions that his normal, God-fearing self would never have even considered. We read about his downfall in 2 Samuel 11

One evening David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of the palace. From the roof he saw a woman bathing. The woman was very beautiful, and David sent someone to find out about her. The man said, “She is Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam and the wife of Uriah the Hittite.” Then David sent messengers to get her. She came to him, and he slept with her. (Now she was purifying herself from her monthly uncleanness.) Then she went back home. The woman conceived and sent word to David, saying, “I am pregnant” (2 Samuel 11:2-5, NIV)

We say it takes two to tango, but this sexual relationship is initiated by David, The NIV sanitizes the account a bit by saying the messengers got her, when the Hebrew says they took her. The power imbalance between David and Bathsheba means that Bathsheba wasn’t free to refuse him.

The unexpected pregnancy that results from the sexual encounter is a big complication. David tries to cover it up by recalling her husband Uriah the Hittite from the battle, hoping he’ll sleep with Bathsheba giving the pregnancy the patina of legitimacy. When Uriah returns to the battle without having relations with his wife, David arranges to have him killed, and then he takes Bathsheba for himself.

The prophet Nathan confronts David for his action, and explains that a number of serious consequences will occur.

Why did you despise the word of the Lord by doing what is evil in his eyes? You struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and took his wife to be your own. You killed him with the sword of the Ammonites. Now, therefore, the sword will never depart from your house, because you despised me and took the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your own.’ “This is what the Lord says: ‘Out of your own household I am going to bring calamity on you. Before your very eyes I will take your wives and give them to one who is close to you, and he will sleep with your wives in broad daylight. You did it in secret, but I will do this thing in broad daylight before all Israel.’ ” Then David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against the Lord.” Nathan replied, “The Lord has taken away your sin. You are not going to die. But because by doing this you have shown utter contempt for the Lord, the son born to you will die” (2 Samuel 12:9-14, NIV).

At this point, David’s reign starts to unravel in a series of consequences. Having lost the credibility to restrain his children’s sexual indulgence, because of his own indiscretions, David sees conflict erupt in his own house. His daughter Tamar is raped by her half-brother, David’s eldest sons Amnon. Tamar’s brother Absalom murders Amnon, and eventually tries to kill David to usurp his throne, openly raping David’s concubines (fulfilling one of Nathan’s predictions) Of course this incident ends with Absalom dead. When David’s son Solomon’s takes over, his reign begins with great promise, but it collapses at the end because just like his father before him, his lust leads him into sin. If all of this can happen because of ‘harmless’ lust. We need to take it seriously.

The Virtue of Chastity

As with the other deadly sins, to combat the power of a vice, we need to replace it with a virtue. That virtue that opposes lust is chastity. The word chastity is often understood as a synonym for celibacy. But that’s not what I mean here. If lust is the disordered sexual desire, chastity is properly ordered sexual desire.

To be chaste isn’t necessarily to refrain from all sexual activity, but to limit it to what is approved and constructive. For single people, it means abstinence before marriage. For married people it means faithfulness to your spouse, not just avoiding sexual relations with others, but also relating to your spouse as a whole being, not an object of sexual desire. And, for both single and married people chastity means disciplining our thinking, not giving ourselves permission to objectify others for our sexual gratification.

The Benefits for the Unmarried

For unmarried people, chastity has a number of benefits. First, it allows them to relate to others, even attractive people, in a more rewarding way. Long before I was married, I had many friends who were girls. We’d routinely go out for coffee, and their friendship helped me immensely during a time in my life where I would otherwise have been very lonely. But these friendships would have been stilted if I allowed myself to think of these women as sexualized objects rather than full people. It would have become very awkward and the friendships would have fallen apart.

For some people, a friendship like that later blossoms into a romantic relationship. If that’s the case, the relationship would likely be healthier since from the beginning they have learned relate to the person as a fully-integrated person rather than merely as an object of sexual desire. Being chaste also means that when a single person does marry, they’re not going to be implicitly comparing their spouse to past sexual partners and they won’t bring to the marriage unrealistic expectations they may have received from viewing pornography.

Second, avoiding lust helps single people to avoid destructive decisions where sexual desire might warp their decision-making process. When people are in the throes of desire, they are prone to do things their rational, dispassionate selves would be horrified by. David is not the only person to do things he regretted while under the influence of lust. This is such a part of the human experience that Homer wrote a thinly-veiled allegory for this into the Odyssey. The Sirens are monstrous creatures with enchanting songs that lure sailors to their deaths. Having been warned they he will encounter them, Odysseus has his crew tie him to the mast of his ship and has the crew fill their ears with wax so they can’t hear the Sirens’ call or hear his pleas to be let go. You might say that disciplining our thoughts away from lust is the allegorical equivalent of tying ourselves to the mast. It might not feel good to ignore the sirens’ call, but in the long run, it saves us from disaster.

Benefits for the Married

For the married, chastity also has important benefits. First, by avoiding lust, you preserve the passion in your martial relations. Lusting after someone else will naturally cause dissatisfaction with your spouse. But by choosing not to indulge, you’ll enjoy the sexual relationship with your spouse more.

Second chastity leads us to treat our spouse as a whole person, allowing us to relate to them in a more helpful way. Marriage is hard. It involves learning to lay down what you want so you can generously give the other person what they want. The emotional bond that allows us to love our spouse in this way happens when we relate to them as holistic people rather than as objects. If we objectify our spouse, their needs will become inconveniences we resent rather than opportunities to grow in love.

Third and very practically, chastity keeps us further away from adultery. Jesus warns us that lust is adultery because he understands that when we indulge in lust, we erode the inhibitions that keep us faithful to our spouse. Few sins , common among Christians, have as much destructive potential as adultery. Adultery rips families apart. How many kids are there who suffer tremendous emotional damage when their parents’ marriage broke up due to an affair? And what our kids observe us doing becomes their baseline understanding of normal. So setting an example of adultery is a ‘gift’ that keeps on giving, because children who accept infidelity as normal, start marriages at a significant disadvantage. Chastity keeps us from venturing into the place where those dark possibilities become more probable.

Practical Steps to Develop Chastity

Learning to be chaste involves developing strategies to keep us from lust. Here are some practical tips to help us do that.

Train yourself to think about people as a unified whole. When you see an attractive person and are tempted to fixate on their sexual attractiveness, instead focus on the whole person, and pray for God’s blessing on them. And example could be something like:

“Lord I can see that this is a very beautiful woman. But I know she’s more than that. She’s someone’s daughter. She has hopes and dreams, a personality, a sense of humour and other gifts from you, not just an attractive body. So I pray that you will allow me to see her as a whole person, not as an object to be used. Please bless her and allow her to find people who respect her for who she is and not treat her as just an attractive body.”

This serves as a reminder that she can’t be flattened down to just an attractive body.

Set up Accountability Relationships. Another useful tool is to set up accountability relationships with others you trust. Ask a fellow believer to ask about how you’re doing in this area on a regular basis. You need to commit to being honest. It’s not about coming up with some sort of punishment if you fail, but knowing you have to admit your failings to others can help you think twice. An the added benefit of the accountability relationship is that the other person acts as a sort of priest. They can pray for you and can assure you of God’s forgiveness when you have confessed your sin.

Avoid situations of foreseeable temptation. This involves an honest self-assessment, asking yourself where you are vulnerable. You might need to make adjustments, and those may be inconvenient. Maybe you need to install a browser nanny software on your computer and phone. It can send a report to your accountability partner. In our internet connected age, It has become very difficult to avoid lust because because of the ease of accessing things that inflame our passions. Additionally, there may be places you need to avoid going – going to the beach, It might feel like cutting of your hand or gouging out an eye to keep yourself away from things that tempt you. Avoiding lust is hard work, but we must remember that lust (and the behaviours it leads to) need to be taken seriously.

If You’ve Failed

Finally I want to look at what happens when we’ve failed. In the last several years, people have begun reckoning with the unhealthy legacy of the sexual purity movement of the 80s and 90s. The sexual purity movement was a (I believe) well-intentioned way of encouraging right behaviour, but perhaps not in the most constructive ways. I’ve often come back to the realization that as Christians, what we stand for is important, but so is how we stand for it.

On one hand, there are those in our culture who say that regulating sexual behaviour is inhumane. Given the negative consequences we’ve observed from unregulated lust and sexual behaviour, I think this is wrong-headed. Yet, using shame and guilt to regulate sexual behaviour also isn’t the answer As Christians, we need a positive vision for why chastity is good, not just a negative vision for why lust is bad. We need to know God’s expectations, but we also must remember God’s grace.

If you are unmarried, and you’ve blown it, by looking at porn, or by engaging in sex before marriage, your past failures don’t need to swallow up your future hopes. You’re not ‘used goods’ who will henceforth live under a cloud of God’s judgment.

If you’re a married person, the same is also true. However, if you have committed adultery, there may be very serious consequences. However, honesty with your spouse about your failings gives you the best chance of saving your marriage. If your infidelity is discovered by your spouse, rather than confessed to them, the outcome will almost certainly be worse. It is God’s will for marriages to be permanent, but sometimes, adultery so breaks the trust in a marriage that there is no way for it to continue. So, yeah, Sin has consequences, but God is also gracious.

Going back to the story of David and Bathsheba, we see this grace alongside the consequences. In the Torah, adultery, and the murder David committed to cover it up, are capital offences, but Nathan absolves David of guilt when he humbles himself and confesses his sin. David found that God was a forgiving God. Following his failure, he wrote the Psalm we read from this morning, including:

Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones you have crushed rejoice. Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquity. Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me (Psalm 51:7-12, NIV).

So let’s live in a pure way. But also remember that our past failures will never put us outside of God’s grace. Your past failures don’t need to be your future failures, because there is no limit to God’s ability to save and transform.