ANTHEM: Strategies for Fighting Lust

Lust
A desire that we should not have because it is untethered from the purifying effects of Christ and is therefore directed to the wrong object or is so out of proportion or unsuited to its object as to disorder our thoughts or feelings or actions.

Christ centered, gospel rooted strategies for overcoming lust:
Avoid
No
Turn
Hold
Enjoy
Move

Avoid
2 Tim 2:19-22
But God's firm foundation stands, bearing this seal, "The Lord knows those who are his," and "Let everyone who names the name of the Lord depart from iniquity."
Now in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and silver but also of wood and clay, some for honorable use, some for dishonorable. Therefore, if anyone cleanses himself from what is dishonorable, he will be a vessel for honorable use, set apart as holy, useful to the master of the house, ready for every good work.
So flee youthful passions and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, along with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart.

• What sort of situations have defiling effects on our desires?

Romans 13:12-14

The night is far gone; the day is at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on  the armor of light. Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh , to gratify its desires.

• Avoid the stimulus and associations that drag us towards lust. 

Blessed are the pure in heart-001

• Jesus is concerned with our heart. It is not enough to clean up our act on the outside.
• The aim of Jesus Christ is not reform the manners of society, but to change the hearts of sinners.
• The heart is what you are, in the secrecy of your thought and feeling, when nobody knows but God.
• What you are at the invisible root matters as much to God as what you are at the visible branch.
• Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.
• From the heart are all the issues of life.
• The heart is utterly crucial to Jesus. What we are in the deep, private recesses of our lives is what he cares most about.
• Jesus did not come into the world because we have bad habits that need to be broken. He came into the world because we have such dirty hearts that need to be purified.

https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/blessed-are-the-pure-in-heart

God Demonstrates His Love

God shows [demonstrates] his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Romans 5:8

Notice that "demonstrates" is present tense and "died" is past tense. God demonstrates His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

The present tense implies that this demonstrating is an ongoing act.

The past tense implies that the death of Christ happened once for all and will not be repeated.

Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God.
1 Peter 3:18


...suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame...
Romans 5:3-5

(The goal of everything God takes us through is hope. He wants us to feel unwaveringly hopeful through all tribulations).

Suffering >> Endurance >> Character >> Hope

How is that possible?
...because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
Romans 5:5

God's love has been poured into our hearts.
The tense of this verb means that God's love was poured out in our hearts in the past (at our conversion) and is still present and active.

God did demonstrate his love us in giving his own Son to die once for all in the past, for our sins. But he also knows that this past love must be experienced as a present reality if we are to have patience and character and hope.

Therefore, he not only demonstrated it on Cavalry; he goes on demonstrating it now by the Spirit in our hearts. He does this by opening the eyes of our hearts to taste and see the glory of the cross and the guarantee it gives that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

Money, Sex, Power

Living in the Light

• All of creation was meant to communicate the supreme beauty and worth of God.
• God created the world for His glory. He created the world so that He would be magnified by the way His creatures find their greatest satisfaction in Him.
• Money, sex, and power exist ultimately to show that God is more to be desired than money, sex, and power.
• Everything hangs on what we value as supreme. What is our highest treasure? What is our greatest satisfaction? When God takes that place in our hearts (of the greatest treasure and satisfaction); then money, sex and power begin to find their true and beautiful order. 

Definitions and Foundations

• Money: not just paper and coins but the pleasures, advantages or status that money can signify.
• Money, sex and power are gifts from God. If they sink us, it's not because they are bad. It's because something happened inside of us to turn instruments of grace into instruments of sin, into altars and incense in the temple of pride.

Notes from John Piper's book: Living in the Light: Money, Sex and Power.

Flee from the Darkness

Hunger for God's Presence

• Sin invites separation from God and separation from God should terrify us.
• If we say we have fellowship with Him while we walk in darkness, we lie and we do not practice the truth.
• The presence of the Living God must be something you can't live without. Nearness to Him should be the most desperate cry of our hearts.
• If you develop an appetite for righteousness, God Himself will satisfy you. His presence and love will overwhelm you.

Why were you made?

The Good News of Christianity
We cannot live meaningful lives if we don't know why we were created.

Six Foundational Truths for Understanding the Good News of Christianity

1. God created us for His glory.
2. Therefore, it is our joyful duty to live for His glory.
3. All of us have failed to glorify God as we should.
4. Therefore, we are all dead in our sins and under God's just condemnation.
5. God sent His Son to save sinners and bring them into His eternal joy.
6. All the benefits purchased through Christ's death and resurrection are given to those united to Him through faith.

Glory

• Greatness
• Beauty
• Value

Isaiah 43:5-7
Bring My sons from afar and My daughters from the end of the earth, everyone who is called by My Name, whom I created for My glory, whom I formed and made.

Implications

• That My glory may be known as the greatest treasure
• That My glory be enjoyed as the greatest pleasure
• That My glory be shown as the greatest treasure 
• by being enjoyed as the greatest pleasure and by attitudes and actions that flow from that pleasure in God.

Psalm 115:1 (NIV)
Not to us, LORD, not to us but to Your Name be the glory, because of your love and faithfulness.

Psalm 115:1 (NLT)
Not to us, O LORD, not to us, but to Your Name goes all the glory for your unfailing love and faithfulness.

In Him was Life

In Him was Life

• Ultimate reality is alive. Original reality, absolute reality is a living person. 
• Life gave rise to matter. Physical matter did not give rise to life.
• The life John has in view mainly is new life, spiritual life, saving life, the gift of eternal life, the opposite of spiritual death now and final condemnation later.
• John 5:24 - truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears My word and believes Him who sent Me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.
• God gave us eternal life and this life in His Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son does not have life. 

The Life was the Light of Men

• New life brings light.
• People aren't dead because they can't walk or talk or think or feel or even see with physical eyes. They are dead because "seeing they do not see" (Matthew 13:13). They don't see:
• Jesus as supremely valuable;
• His sacrifice as precious;
• His fellowship as the greatest treasure;
• Jesus said in John 8:12, "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life."
• When you receive Jesus, you receive life. And when you receive life, you receive light.

The Darkness Did Not Grasp the Light

• The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not understood it.
• He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, the world did not know Him. He came to His own, and His own people did not receive Him.
• But to all who did receive Him, who believed in His Name, He gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

The New Birth

• John 3:3 - Truly truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the Kingdom of God.
• Everything hangs on being born again. Without this, we are dead and blind.
• God sends Jesus into the world as the light of life to lay down his life for us; and then cause people to be born again so that they can see him and receive him.
• Receiving light happens simultaneously with the opening of eyes.
• These three events - new birth, new sight, new faith - are all talking about the same thing from different sides.
• When Jesus commands us to believe on him for eternal life, we don't wait for a separate experience called the new birth before we believe, and we don't rush ahead to believe as though we could it without the new birth. Instead, we look steadfastly at Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God who laid down His life for us.

In the Beginning was the Word

• Written for unbelievers and believers alike. As believers, we are to abide in the vine. Believers in Jesus must go on believing.
• The book of John is an eyewitness account.
• It is Divinely inspired.
• "The Word" refers to Jesus Christ.
• John calls Jesus the Word because he had come to see the words of Jesus as the truth of God and the person of Jesus as the truth of God in such a unified way that He is the final and decisive Message of God.
• What God had to say to us was not only or mainly what Jesus said, but who Jesus was and what He did.

After Watching Porn - 001

We too often allow unattainable ideas to dictate what we allow ourselves to say.

God can and does act in that moment of regret.

It is often in the moment after the act that Satan spins his most eloquent web: menacing thinking patterns, bargaining with a distant and disapproving God.... It is in this moment that Satan does his finest work. It is in this moment that we need God to do His finest saving.

1. Know your enemy. Godly grief produces repentance that leads to salvation without regret; but worldly grief produces death (2 Cor.7:10). Recognize that you have a powerful personal agent who is singularly focused on your destruction. Do not forget that Satan is at work. If you do, it is easier to believe hidden, subversive, subtle, destructive lies. Evil gains power when it is forgotten. Don't forget: After you indulge, you are still mid-battle with a tenacious, evil person bent on stealing your life, and he has not yet gotten it.
2. Fight self-hatred. Porn is the twisted manipulation of innocence for the raw crave of erotic appetite. To have a grieved conscience is a good thing... [but] wallowing in self-deprecation and feeling like paying penance to God for sin is a sad and ironclad torture. It is false, and it is a wicked oppression. Not surprisingly, suicide rates are high among porn users. 
• No wonder David uses such deeply physical metaphors when he pleads with God for grace over sexual sin: 
• Blot out my transgressions;
• Wash me;
• Cleanse me;
• Purge me;
• Blot out my iniquities;
• Create in me a clean heart
• Scream that, with David. Replace the groan of human self-hatred with an unbroken war cry of divine love.
• If you are tempted to wallow, don't let your (good) intuitive hatred of sin lead you to hate yourself. 
• Be patient with yourself, because God is patient. He is fighting for your life. He has not forgotten you. He has not left you. Keep fighting with him. Keep gasping for the air of divine life - the Life-Giving Spirit.
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Resisting Temptation

The Mirage Moment

A mirage is that hallucination parched people sometimes experience in a hot desert. A real desire for water and the shimmering heat of the sand play disorienting games with the mind and emotions. A refreshing oasis seems to appear in the distance promising the happiness of a quenched desire.

A thirsty person might know that no oasis has previously existed in that location. But his desire to be happy, fueled by the hope that this time he just might find happiness there, or at least relief from misery, tempts him to believe the vision. If he yields, he discovers his hope was hopeless and his desire dashed because the oasis was a sham.

In temptation, the mirage moment occurs as we are tempted by a vision promising happiness. Some shimmering oasis of promised joy or relief from despair appears where God said it shouldn’t be.

The mirage’s appearance taps into our real desire to be happy. Our disoriented emotions begin to respond to this desire with a feeling of hope — hope that maybe this time, even if we’ve been disappointed many times before, the oasis will quench our desire. But weknow that God has told us it is a false hope.

So we are faced with a choice between temptation’s compelling appearance and God’s promise. We are tempted, but have not yet succumbed to sin.

Learning from Eve’s Mirage Moment

The most notorious mirage moment in history is recorded in Genesis 3. And it illustrates a pattern consistent in all the temptations that we face.

The satanic serpent showed up in the garden and questioned Eve about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Eve’s explanation shows that she clearly understood God’s promise and warning (Genesis 3:1–3).

Then came Eve’s mirage moment. The serpent replied:

“You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw . . . (Genesis 3:4–6)

There it is: the mirage. Eve saw something she had not seen before:

[Eve] saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise. (Genesis 3:6)

Eve was experiencing the defilement of evil temptation. She was being told something very different about the tree from what God had told her, and so the tree suddenlylooked different to her and she felt different about it.

God created Eve (and all of us) so that the meaning of her sensory impressions was shaped by what she believed to be true. Satan knew this. He knew that if he could change the meaning of the tree for Eve from the curse of death (Genesis 2:17) to the key to a happy life (Genesis 3:5), the tree would cease to look dangerous and begin to look desirable. It would tempt her to hope in something different than God’s promise and she might fall for it.

Satan manipulated Eve’s God-given desire to be happy and used it against her. He enticed her to corrupt this holy desire by pursuing it outside of God. And Eve indeed fell for it, which corrupted her desire by believing the mirage, which furthermore gave birth to sin and death (James 1:14–15):

[Eve] took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. (Genesis 3:6)

Learning from Jesus’s Mirage Moment

Satan employed the same tactic when tempting Jesus (Matthew 4:1–11; Mark 1:12–13; Luke 4:1–13). Whether using food (Luke 4:3), or a cross-less path to power (Luke 4:5–7), or a public demonstration (test) of his divinity (Luke 4:9–11), Satan was trying to corrupt Jesus’s holy, God-given desires.

Satan knew (as the apostle Paul later wrote) that “everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving” (1 Timothy 4:4). But he also knew that what made these things holy was “the word of God and prayer” (1 Timothy 4:5) and that “whatever does not proceed from faith is sin” (Romans 14:23). So Satan set before Jesus mirages to tempt him with faithless promises of divine happiness.

We who live with indwelling sin don’t know the levels to which the sinless God-man was affected. But we do know that what Jesus experienced were temptations. Jesus was given a choice between compelling deceptive appearances and God’s promises. And to each temptation, Jesus responded, “It is written. . . . ” He refused to believe Satan’s deceptive mirages or the emotions they roused. He kept food, power, the revelation of his divinity, and everything else holy by receiving them only through the word of God and prayer.

Full Article on Desiring God Website