My dear friend & pastor Jim Minker (who went home with God a few years ago) wrote about struggling with lust. Here is an excerpt from that letter.
In Christ we have been set free from sin. This is NOT a hypothetical or theological freedom ... it is a REAL freedom. The more you and I come to realize what sin really is, then we are not left in such confusion over SPECIFIC sins.
Sin comes from desires of an empty shell that CANNOT be satisfied. Man without God is constantly looking for that special something that will fill the emptiness in order to satisfy it. Realize that nothing of itself is evil, but that it is the DESIRES of the EMPTY THING in its seeking to fill it's longing by any means possible. The flesh will use, manipulate, destroy, kill or steal in order to get what it THINKS will satisfy ... and will justify itself in the process. But as nothing will satisfy but the life of God, man has left behind a trail of destruction in his path.
But we have had the emptiness removed from us by being indwelt by the very life of God. When you and I lust in the flesh, we are operating as insane, since WE NO LONGER HAVE THE NEED. What is it that you are looking for? What emptiness do you think you can fill? It is only insanity that makes you THINK that it will be filled in this way because the life inside you KNOWS that it cannot be.
What is it that makes pornography evil? It's NOT naked women, that's for sure! It's not sex, either. It is the desire of empty man that will steal from or destroy another to satisfy a desire that CANNOT be satisfied.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that you can adjust your desires so that they become pure because that is merely a game. Instead, be glad that God is revealing to you how desperate the empty flesh really is ... and what it is that His freedom has really brought about. The more you understand what things are NOT, the less you find yourself deceived by those things. The Father wants you to know how powerful HIS desires are, and that these desires are the truth of your new life. He is revealing to you the emptiness and futility of the old.
When Paul wrote, "Put off the old man with his desires," he was NOT suggesting a STRUGGLE he wanted us to enter into, but he had been making it clear that the thing to be put off was to be seen as something that is no longer us or who we are. The language is used as in putting off clothing. The old man with his desires is like decayed grave clothes still hanging on one who has been made alive from the dead - like Lazarus who had come out of the grave and was still wrapped up in the embalming clothes. Jesus had to tell the people standing around to help get the grave clothes off of him.
When we are caught up in law and therefore, sin, we have, in picture form, put those grave clothes back on. While we perceive sin to be part of who we are then, of course, we will only be able to hear this as an impossible struggle to be undertaken. But it is NOT part of us because Christ has removed it from us. It hangs on us in our PERCEPTIONS, and because of that, it will produce destruction.
Take off those grave clothes ... you're no longer dead.
Jim Minker
