January 12th, 2010 
Jojo Agot 
My pastor once said that the battle for purity is won when the issue of passion is resolved in your heart, or something along those lines. I’m not really good at remembering smart lines like that but the truth behind those words simply struck me.
Oftentimes church people counsel young men (and some women) to battle lust by memorizing Scriptures, taking a cold shower, taking a walk, or simply walking away from a tricky situation. I know some of them sound silly but if it works with other people, then I’m not complaining.
These are all good ideas and at times they work. But not all the time. I know. I am a guy who finds myself confronted with those temptations on a regular basis and one thing I realized in my years of being a Christian is that as long as I am passionate about my relationship with God, I just don’t have the time to dwell on those thoughts.
I’m not sure if it’s the same with other people though but the way I see it, I only find it hard to resist temptation when my relationship with God is not right, when my worship is more of an obligation than joy.
Paul’s advise to Timothy makes perfect sense. “Flee the evil desires of youth, and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, along with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart.” 2 Timothy 2:22
The verse above implies that it’s not enough to run away from sin. We should also pursue God and develop meaningful relationships with other Christians to avoid getting into a vicious cycle of sin. That means accountability with people you trust.
Sounds too spiritual, right? But the battle for sin is a spiritual battle and we’ll never win if we fight it with mortal weapons, not even when you have a no-TV-and-laptop-in-the-bedroom policy. Although I personally think that’s a good idea to begin with.
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This post is part of the Blog Carnival hosted at Bridget Chumbley’s site. Topic for this week is LUST. To read more posts on this topic, please visit Bridget’s blog.
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"…as long as I am passionate about my relationship with God, I just don’t have the time to dwell on those thoughts."
Yeah, that was the point of my take on this today. But…how do we do that consistently?
And by consistently, I mean every day, all the time, even in our sleep, constantly, for the rest of our lives, and maybe even after.
Yeah. I know. Real easy.
(No fair pointing fingers and saying, "I was doing fine until that TV show came on!")
Jeffrey, you got me laughing here with that TV show, lol. We don't really have those kinds of TV shows here in my home country (SE Asia) but that nails the idea pretty nicely.
I guess what I'm really saying is that we need to focus more on developing our relationship with God (the positive) rather than trying very hard (and failing) to stop ourselves from lusting over someone or something.
Ah, I know it only sounds easy in writing.
He wants that intensity of passion for Himself.
And you're absolutely right — it's not enough to flee from something — we need to flee from something and toward something, and the something is Him.
It's a vicious cycle, isn't it? When should run to Him, but instead we want to get as far away as we can, because somewhere along the line we chose to believe that we had to be good enough to deserve His love. When the truth is, we're NEVER going to be good enough.
It is a vicious cycle! We need to be as close to God as possible to help us resist temptations, but when we fail and fall short… we run and hide in shame, which leaves us even further away from where we need to be…
Good post, JoJo.
The bible verse you chose does give us explicit directions for how to combat lust. Great choice.
i can really relay in this discussion which i assume everybody those… lust is really a carnal thing that is really hard to overcome even the great men in faith fail for sometimes or maybe everytime that is why the bible instructed us to walk in spirit…but here comes the other point God knew how it is hard to overcome the work of the flesh that we also read that flesh is the last thing to overcome this means God expects us to sin but what is important if you do so is to repent repent….like david who was called a man after HIS own heart committed a lot of sin…and forgiven because of his repented heart….so maybe we have to pray instead of asking a power to overcome those lust thing pray for a heart that is repentant and contrite…..