How to Fight Lust | Kingsmen

The Kingdom of God and the Problem of Lust

Welcome to the Kingsman podcast. I'm your host John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee, and also the host of Theocast, a podcast on Reformed theology. The design of this podcast is to help people think about their life from a kingdom perspective, as Christ is their king.

And when Jesus says, seek first the kingdom of God, what gets in our way? And what keeps us from that? And why is it so foreign to us to live with two kingdoms in mind, this one and the one to come? We're going to talk about, as you've already seen in the title, lust.

The Goodness of Intimacy and the Distortion of Desire

And sometimes when we see this title, we tend to focus in our attention on men, and I don't want to do that today, because men and women both struggle to wrestle with what do we do with affections towards other people.

And not only just affections, but I would say desires, appetites, right? Appetites can be good and they can be bad. They're bad if they're misused. They're great and honoring and glorifying to God if they're used for his good.

And where does this wrestling come from? I know growing up as a kid, I was told to not look at certain things. Obviously, you know, don't lust after women, because it was bad. And there wasn't a lot of positive.

It was more of like, I knew that intimacy, sexuality, is a good thing, but no one ever explained it to me. Like, how is it good? You know, it's just something that goes on between a husband and a wife.

But then it's like, is it just like their marital duty? Is this like, it's just just how we procreate? I had to really learn biblical sexuality after I got married, which is crazy. And then I became a college student for many, many years.

And I asked the college students in premarital counseling, you know, did your parents or your church teach you? And it was always, don't do it. And that was it, you know. And in their mind, they're like, but the world celebrates it as like, amazing.

It's passionate. It's affectionate. People write music about it, books about it, movies about it. And you know, there's that scene where the husband and wife, you know, if their children listen to this, I will, I probably should have warned you ahead of time.

I'm going to keep this as obviously as clean as possible. But you know, you see those passionate scenes, we'll just put it that way, where there's two people, it looks like they're wrestling each other to the ground.

And it's just that the image of attraction and fulfilling this body, and it's normal. We know that it's normal because God talks about us desiring each other. There's books in the Old Testament that really amplify and glorify the intimacy.

And then Paul talks about it being, you know, even a supernatural picture, the intimacy between a man and a woman and how they become one, like the union of their body becomes one. So we're not going to spend a lot of time on the positives of it.

Lust, the Law, and the Internal War Against the Flesh

But I do want to say, before we get into something like that, that lust is a very fascinating part of our culture. And it's been a part of the human world since creation. Otherwise, God wouldn't have put it in the Ten Commandments thousands of years ago.

Like, don't covet another man's wife, right? It's like right there, Ten Commandments. So pretty important. And in His sovereignty, He knows we're going to struggle with it. I want to quote a passage of Scripture to you, a couple of them, in reference to a sermon I had preached recently.

And I was trying to teach my kids about this. So I'm going to try my best to explain this to you. This conversation, it's going to be different today. If you were to be sitting in my office and you were to say, John, why does the world struggle with lust?

This is how I'm going to try this. I'm going to explain this to you. We are already behind in trouble because we're born, as the Bible tells us, we're born with a sinful nature. So if you leave us alone, you throw us into a pit by ourselves, we're in trouble, right?

Our minds by ourselves will already condemn us. Paul says, O wretched man that I am, who will save me from this body of death? It's killing me, right? It's killing me spiritually from the inside out. We don't need any help.

Satan doesn't need to help us. We do a great job on our own promoting His lies. On top of that, in our weakness, He attacks us. And so I think that are times where we deal with the lust of the flesh and our eyes and what's happening, and we deal with it, but we deal with it in such a way where we aren't thinking about there being just an internal war, but there's also an external war that's happening where, you know, I love how the passage of Scripture that Peter uses, he says, he's a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.

I've been referencing this lately. But when we're already wrestling with our own frailties, so we have to be careful, right? We have to guard our eyes and guard our mind. I love how Paul says it this way, he says, make no provision for the flesh, okay?

If you know you're weak in this area, then don't put yourself in a situation, you know, don't be alone with another woman, you know, like stuff like that, right? You know, just be cautious because you know your flesh is already weak.

So there's the internal weakness. In that part of it, I think Reformed theology and Christianity has done a really good job of explaining that you are born at war with your body. Now, thanks be to God when the Holy Spirit comes and He renews us and He lives with inside us, and it says He sets us free from our former passions.

In Colossians, He says, your former ignorance, you were ignorant of who you were before, now you're free from that. But the war remains. This is why in the Reformed theology, we so have to preach saint-centered reality.

You are for the rest of your life going to wrestle your flesh. The moment you stop fighting your flesh, flesh wins. That's how it works, right? Paul says, if you don't want to fulfill the lust of the flesh, what does he say?

Walk by faith, right? I love that when he says in Corinthians chapter 10, I believe, chapter 4, chapter 10, I can't remember specifically, but he says, the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh.

So you can't fight the flesh with the flesh because you're going to lose. And so this is why Romans 7, he says, thanks be to Christ. So we're always looking unto Christ by faith for His power to fight against our flesh.

That part of it in Reformed theology, we've done really well with. But there are many of you who've sat in my office, men and women, and when I was in college ministry, it was almost, it wasn't quite equal, but it felt like it was equal of both guys and girls struggling with looking at inappropriate things on the internet.

Satan's Deception and Guarding the Mind

Well, this is the second aspect that I've really thought about for a while, where you are, you're being attacked at two levels. You have the internal issues. You also have Satan who knows this about you and therefore uses it as a weapon against you.

Why you have so many passages of scriptures that say, take every thought captive, right? Guard your mind, gird up your mind. He's a roaring lion, seek him who may devour. Romans 12, be constantly renewing your mind, right?

So when we think about the battle of the flesh, at times we don't pay attention to what's happening outside of us. The way that Jesus and the apostles describe it is that Satan is a master deceiver. He even disguises himself as an angel of light.

To where we can, if we find victory and we're like, man, I haven't really been battling with looking at inappropriate things. I haven't been struggling with lust. We can become lazy and we don't protect our minds.

We don't protect our eyes. And Satan's slowly using all kinds of means. It could be conversations. It could be music. It could be movies, entertainment. I don't know, whatever he wants to use, he uses it all to infiltrate.

And some people have a hard time when I say that. So I'm just going to quote to you a passage of scripture when Paul says, the entire world lives under the influence of the evil one. That he's even in, he's blinded their eyes to the gospel, 1 Corinthians, right?

So when you are thinking about sexuality coming from a non-biblical source. So if it's sexuality is coming to you, not from scripture, you have to filter that, right? You have to. It doesn't mean everything in the world that has this because there are things medically that we need to know about.

Like if someone's struggling and it's hurting or infertility and all kinds of things that could happen where there's something that's just not functioning correctly. Well, the Bible doesn't speak to that.

So we need to be open to reason and listen to what the world has to say because there is wisdom outside of scripture. But when it comes to why we find joy in intimacy, why we do intimacy and where it should be done, if you're not filtering what the world is presenting to you through those truths, oh man, you know what's so common?

It's so common for every heart of every person to think that intimacy outside of marriage is becoming normal. Living with someone before you get married is the norm already, even amongst Christians. I had someone that they wanted me to do a wedding for them, but I told them I wouldn't do it if they're continuing to live together.

And they were like, well, then we're not going to have you do the wedding. And they literally said to me, you believe that? And I was actually offended that they didn't know I would believe that. Yes, I don't believe that you should live together before you're married.

And I don't mean they were living in the same room or the same bedroom. They were acting as bed and wife. But these were people who claim to be believers. And I think they are. I really do. But they have been so trained and manipulated by the culture who is under the influence of the evil one that they were living in sin.

And that sin is so blinding that they gave in to the lust instead of fighting it. And I know I have been there in my own life where you start justifying it. Well, tomorrow I'll work on it. Well, it's not as bad as this.

Well, at least I'm not truly acting on it. At least it's just in private. This is just in my mind. Both men and women, men and women both cheat on each other. It's happened in our church. We've had both instances where the man and the woman have cheated on each other.

So I'm not just speaking to men anymore. I'm speaking to the world. And what I realized is that when someone begins to not take every thought captive, when they realize that they're not renewing their mind with the gospel, I love this one.

When Hebrews says that with boldness, we can run into the throne room of grace and ask for mercy and grace. Why? Because of the weakness of our flesh and on the constant onslaught firing at us by Satan, we are going to give in.

And so we need what I would call a constant washroom. And that's God's prayer room, right? He's like, it's where you're washed. It's where you're cleansed. It's God's grace that leads us to repentance.

Grace, Repentance, and the Limits of Law and Discipline

If you think my solution in this is discipline in law to fight against lust, I think that's what the problem is. We've tried the law to fight sin and it doesn't work. We've tried discipline. We've tried abstinence.

Well, I just won't do this and I won't go there. But that actually doesn't deal with the heart of it, right? The heart of it is that it's down inside here. So I think there's two things that happen. We don't truly believe we need to be washed with the word.

And I mean, the preaching and the teaching and the fellowship and the singing and the praying of the word as saints. I really believe that. But we're also, when we go out into the world, we're not actually thinking someone could come and attack us.

So I want to speak to the person. I only got a few minutes here left. I've gone longer than I thought I would. I just want to take a couple of minutes and say, well, then what do we do? What do we do?

I think that there's nowhere in scripture where there's a moment of rest from our flesh and from the onslaught of Satan until Christ returns. I mean, Andrew and I, Andrew works with me here at Kingsman and Theocast and I said, when do we rest?

He goes, when we die. And it sounds so depressing, right? It sounds so depressing, but it's, it is the truth that the world. So I said this in a sermon recently, the world tells us you can have peace and rest now.

And that's a lie. Now you can, we preach at Theocast, rest in Christ. You're standing before the father, your heart and your soul can find real and ultimate joy and rest, but your flesh can't, right? Your flesh has to remain at war because it hasn't been glorified yet.

It hasn't been redeemed. This is why there's so many passages that like control your body, protect your body, protect your mind, be washing your mind, be walking by faith. And then what does Romans say, right?

It says for the body and the earth is groaning, waiting to be restored. So I think that my encouragement to you is if you've been just pummeled by lust lately, and you just can't seem to find relief from it at all, my encouragement to you is two things is I think you need to confess that to a brother and a sister and just say, I am trapped.

I need to confess this so that I can find some hope. And you want them to give you grace in return, not a plan of action, but grace. And then once you receive that forgiveness, okay, here we are, here's the whole application.

The Gospel of Joy Versus Fleshly Pleasure

If I've lost you, come down right here. We replace the gospel of joy and freedom from Jesus with fleshly pleasure. That's how he gets us, right? The gospel no longer becomes enough. And it's like, you need to satisfy your flesh.

And he's so good. Satan is so good at tempting us. He uses other people, our friends, our family, entertainment. I mean, Hollywood does a banger job here, right? You look at it and you're like, man, they really look like they're having a good time.

And they talk about love and sacrifice. And they create these movies where people are dropping off buildings and planes for each other. It's like, wow, that's passionate love. Yeah, but not the kind of love, like they're not laying their life down as an example of love.

It's passion driven by lust because what ends up happening? Just watch 007, right? How many poor ladies does he have to go through until we realize homie isn't finding satisfaction? Sorry, I made a reference, told myself I wasn't going to do that.

So my encouragement to you is once you find the rest, protect it. Protect it at all costs. You have to keep your mind on Christ and anything that takes it off of Christ, get rid of it. Remove it. Walk away from it.

Because if our mind isn't fully set on Christ, that's when Satan wins and we give back over to the lust. So what are we fighting for? We're fighting for the joy that comes to us in the gospel. You don't want the law.

The law convicts us. It proves us that we're wrong. You want the gospel. The gospel is wonderful once you're corrected by the law. So if you're listening to this and you've had a lifelong struggle with lust, which most people do, by the way, if you think you're going to get to a point where you're like, I haven't lusted in, well, you could probably say, I haven't lusted in three seconds.

Boom, there it is. You know, it's like, that's not the goal, but the goal is to not be controlled by it. The goal is not to allow Satan to accuse us over it. And the goal is to find true rest in Christ.

And so my encouragement to you is, here's the application, right? Run to your father, ask for repentance. Go confess the sin to a brother and sister in Christ that they might administrate the gospel to you and encourage you.

And then live every single day with the awareness that Satan wants to lie to you, to trick you to get your eyes off of Jesus and put it back on your body. I hope this is encouraging to you. It's been encouraging to me and my men and our church.

And we'll hopefully, we'll see you next week in heaven. But if not, we'll be here with another episode of Lord Willing.