Transcription
Um, I feel like another thing that a lot of people struggle with in our generation, you kind of mentioned it earlier, how like if we don't have a personal God, then love is just like a sex drive and a chemical reaction. I get asked all the time by young people about lust, and they always ask me like, how to defeat it? Like, how do I defeat lust? How do I defeat lust? And I think you kind of mentioned it, but in my mind, I'm like, these guys are like trying to whiten up it. Like they're trying to fight it themselves. Isn't the only sin that it says to flee from, right? So, if you even try to get in the boxing ring with it, you're just going to lose. Like that's what Jesus is saying, or the Bible's saying. Like, how would a young person want to defeat lust? If there's a young person, like, it, it actually breaks my heart. If I open my phone, I get hundreds of messages from 13-year-old boys, 14-year-old kids, 13, 14-year-old kids that struggled with watching explicit videos on the internet, or struggle with sexual, sexual temptation, sexual drive at such a young age, and they're just like, one answer and they feel like they can't defeat it. Like, what would you, like, what would you say to that that young kid that's like, I want to beat this, but I feel like a 10?
First of all, sex is a beautiful gift. God thought of sex, not some Playboy or Playgirl, not some hedonist. God thought up sex. God created us male and female, and sex is a beautiful gift from God. And so Jesus says, no, we don't use each other. Instead, we learn to make a lifelong commitment to each other, and then within the context of that lifelong commitment, we enjoy sex as a gift from God. So how do we deal with that? First of all, we worship. Now, worship is not singing some boring songs. Worship is not, um, wasting an hour going to church. Worship is all of God. Worship is a struggle as I move out of self-absorption into being caught up with God's wonder, majesty, and greatness. So worship is crucial.
Next point is love is crucial. To really know that Jesus loves me, and then to begin to rest in that love, to become secure and stable in that love is a beautiful thing. Then you've got to be a realist. You've got to realize you've got a sinful nature, which means we'll take a beautiful gift like sex and we'll twist that thing all out of what it was meant to be, and that's tragic. But when we realize that, we understand I have a sinful nature. I have a lot of twisted, perverted drives. And now, Lord Jesus, help me. I want to rest in you. Fill me with your Holy Spirit and help me to change.
Practically, I think exercise is crucial. Blow off steam, blow off a lot of energy. Please exercise. And then know yourself. I used to work among prostitutes and pimps in inner-city Boston. I can promise you, I was never ever tempted to pull out my wallet, hand money to a woman so I could have sex with her. Turn off for me, but that's the way I am. But I know very well that there is an issue of Sports Illustrated called the swimsuit issue that I have no business looking at because it's going to drag me straight into lust. So we got to know ourselves. We got to know where we're weak, where we're strong. We got to know where we're going to fall and where we're probably not going to fall. And then we got to steer away from those areas that we know we're going to fall. So it takes a bit of self-led, it takes a bit of thinking through.
And then finally, for me to deal with lust, for me personally, which is, I know it's different and unique, it was really helpful to memorize scripture. And whenever those lustful thoughts would pop into my mind, I would begin, "There was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews, who came to Jesus by night and said to him, 'Good teacher, you must be sent from God, for no man could do these miraculous signs that you do except God be with him.'" And Jesus says, "I tell you the truth, Nick, unless you're born again, you'll never enter the Kingdom of Heaven." I would go through that passage, and it was amazing as I would recite scripture, lustful thoughts would leave. They could not stay in my mind with scripture. But I know that doesn't work for everybody. I'm not saying it does. For me personally, it did work. It was very helpful.