The Heart of Lust

Much of my adult work has been spent in the classroom, teaching junior high and high school students math and science. Often one of the challenges I faced was getting students to take responsibility for their own actions. The missing homework is always a classic example. I have not heard, "My dog ate it!" but have heard a litany of other excuses, "It's my sister's fault!"  "It's my parents’ fault!"  There was always something or someone else to blame.

This is a common theme in addiction as well. We blame shift or point fingers at others and do not want to take responsibility for ourselves. We blame our family of origin, we blame our wives and kids, we blame our employer, Biden, or Trump. Some of us even dare to blame God. Everyone else is at fault, except us. We want to look to others, to the external environment to find the cause of our problems. We know we have issues and that our behaviors are out of control, but we fail to realize that the problem lies squarely within us, in our own hearts and minds. If we are going to find recovery, healing, and wholeness then we must take responsibility and understand that our sin is not anyone else's fault but our own.

The heart of the problem is a problem of the heart. Sin always finds its origins in our own hearts and minds. In the New Testament, James wrote a letter addressing these issues:

"Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man:

But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed.

Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death." (James 1:13-15)

James breaks down a step-by-step process by which sin grows in our hearts. The first thing that we should notice is that sin never originates with God. He is never the cause or the source of our sin. It is tempting to blame God for our problems, "If God just gave me a wife, then I wouldn't need porn."  "If God just gave me a hotter wife or a more adventurous wife then I wouldn't need porn."  "If God just took these desires away, I would be fine."  Some of us even say, "God made me with a high libido, I need to act out to relieve the pressure."  One I used when I was younger, "God made women beautiful, I am just appreciating their beauty!"  But Scripture makes it abundantly clear, God is never to blame for our shortcomings. He has given us every opportunity to resist sin and walk in righteousness, we just choose sin instead.

Another critical point that James makes is that temptations do not have their source outside of us, but within us. Sin is not a product of our environment. It is not caused by a broken society or family structure. Family, society, and other environmental factors certainly are contributing factors in our sin, but ultimately all sin and addiction have their source in our own hearts and minds, in our own personal, wicked, and unclean desires. Lust was already lurking in our hearts when our circumstances and environment introduced us to sin. There is always darkness hiding deep within, it is part of our nature. We are born with it, it is unavoidable.

The enticement that James describes can come from outside of us, much like the serpent came to Eve in the Garden of Eden and began speaking lies to her. Satan comes to us as well and will feed us all manner of thoughts and ideas. He will place words and images into our consciousness to lure us into sin. Satan is wily and knows his work well, he will fine tune these temptations to our particular set of struggles and difficulties, which will match the lust already lurking in our hearts. He knows our family history and our own history of sin and will use that against us. This is similar to how social media and search engines will track our behavior online and target us with ads specifically designed to promote things they know we already like. I do not believe Satan can read our thoughts any more than Google can, but he knows nearly everything else about us and knows exactly the pressure points to push on that will cause us to buckle and succumb. Many times, we do not have control over these thoughts, they will come unbidden. In therapy, we called these "intrusive thoughts" and while we cannot stop them from intruding, we still have a responsibility to filter and police them.

Lust can be said to "conceive" when it has obtained the consent of our will. That is, we begin to entertain those intrusive thoughts. We allow them to linger. The scene begins to play on the cinema of our mind. We cannot always stop the beginning, but when we allow the tape to continue to play, that is when lust conceives and begins to grow. We are never forced or coerced into sin. If that were the case, we would never be guilty, but the reality is that we are guilty and the reason we are guilty is because we have surrendered our will to sin. Even if it does not feel like it, there is always a choice. The longer we allow that tape to play, the more our desire for that sin will grow. At the first moment when we realize that the thought is wrong and we should not allow it to remain, our willpower is at its strongest and it will be easiest for us to stop those thoughts. The more we allow the thoughts to linger, the more difficult it becomes to stop them. The stronger the lust becomes and the weaker our will becomes. That battle for righteousness is most easily won in those earliest stages.

The battle with sin and addiction can be won, but it takes us coming to grips with the lust in our own hearts and addressing the uncleanness there. Then we must be diligent to combat the thoughts that assault us in our own hearts and minds. It can be a grueling battle, but the victory is always peaceful and sweet. If we do not gain the victory, but allow lust to grow in hearts, eventually it will produce sin, we will look at that next time.