However, understanding the goal, or vision, of what we can and must achieve is the essential starting point. Earlier I explained how I got a grip on the possibility of sexual purity. This knowledge formed the foundation for change in my life. When it comes to sexual purity, our clear marching orders are to avoid every illicit sexual buzz. Such clarity is fundamental. Sin of any kind needs to be instantly recognized. Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double-minded.
Lament and mourn and weep! Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. James At the outset of my struggle to overcome the powerful shackles of lust, the extreme seriousness of being a captive to this sin needed to be pressed into my mind. Truthfully, I thought that once I knew what was going on that it would come together quickly. I failed to see that the essential issue for any believer as to sin is whether or not he will continue in it.
The world and even most Christians may minimize the common illicit sexual buzz but we must not join in this. My failures were painfully common as I started down the right path. However, every single one demanded the same attention and regret. This is a very sobering and thoroughly humbling process. I quickly found the limits of my own power and abilities.
Yet even at times when I stumbled—and even now stumble—I could nevertheless reach out to my Savior for forgiveness and empowerment. Not flinching from the seriousness of my sin made me acutely aware that each time I slipped up, it injured me and created fresh scars.
We are deceived if we think that sin is not a corrupting force and that we can move on without it inflicting damage. We do well to grieve if we succumb to lust. Consider the damage that this sin brings into our lives and into the lives of those around us.
Also, consider the squandering of opportunities for being productive and effective in the Kingdom. Further, we must be ever mindful that our sin causes God to grieve Ephesians If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. For this cause everyone who is godly shall pray to You in a time when You may be found. Psalm I rested in knowing that this did not displease God.
Do we need to be asked this as well? Is there really any other solution? It is precisely when we are intensely struggling to break loose from habitual sin that we need to quickly turn to God. Do you despise the riches of His goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering, not knowing that the goodness of God leads you to repentance? Romans He who covers his sins will not prosper, but whoever confesses and forsakes them will have mercy.
Proverbs Dare we cover up our sins? Repentance goes beyond merely stopping what we are doing. It also includes actively turning and heading in the right direction. In the past, my practice had been to seek forgiveness without effectively repenting. It was not until I finally understood that the unnecessary, destructive sin of lust in my heart did not need to continue that I could effectively repent from it.
As my Christian walk strengthened, this evolved into a more complete and fulfilling walk with God. Since I was exercising the power given to me to resist sin it allowed me to walk in righteousness. Paul, with his word picture of putting off the old man with all of his faults and putting on the new man instead, captures this process perfectly. Challenge: Habitual sin may overwhelm for a season and keep a tenacious hold on you as it wounds and infects you, but the treatment is the same whenever you stumble.
You need to repent. Repenting includes giving up your past ways and thoughts. Are you prepared to do that? Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lusts. Romans While a slave to lust, I would pathetically anticipate opportunities to feed it.
This required a certain level of planning and anticipation. Paul speaks directly against this planning process. I may not have admitted to myself that I would choose a movie, a route, a publication, a website, a Google search or a television show because it offered opportunity for lust, but that is exactly the way a slave to lust makes decisions. In fact, the preparation for and anticipation of lust is an integral part of its appeal.
Looking forward to fulfilling our evil desires offers its own independent pleasure and must be dealt with in its own right. We should kill off the anticipated temptation—carefully circumventing situations where we know we are likely to feed the demands of evil desires.
As an example of this, I have pretty much abandoned popular entertainment offerings presented by television and other media. Fortunately, Marsha goes along with this. When we diligently refuse to provision sin, it is not able to sustain its power. Flee sexual immorality. Every sin that a man does is outside the body, but he who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Even though I left the road well-traveled, I am still very much subject to ambush by temptation.
This is inevitable and expected. However, such ambushes do not carry the same danger, power or draw that they once did. My defense is to instantly recoil from them.
Such a response is possible because my heart and mind have not been mulched with layer upon layer of sin. New lusting does not take root. I do not claim that I have developed any special ability or strength to endure temptation. Lust is such a powerful and swift sin that it can take hold very quickly. There is nothing to be gained by testing my strength or ability to resist.
In any case, the battle is always entered into and decided at the very first impulse to sin. Will I give in or turn away? Given an opportunity to turn our backs, we must make this our first defense. A foolhardy testing of our strength creates an uneven playing field that we are ill-equipped to enter. Fleeing physically, whenever possible, and certainly within the meditations of our hearts is the only effective strategy.
This may wrongly be considered a sign of weakness. Instead it is simple obedience. How better can we obey the charge our Savior gave us? Understanding the mechanics of lust and that it is not inevitable or forced upon us by the way God designed us keeps us keenly aware that sin cannot play out unless we allow it. If we obey in this regard—actually doing that which we have been told to do—it acts as a practical evidence of our relationship with Christ. Our faith is not self-generated or self-directed but rather comes from God and is placed in Him.
As we learn to fully trust in our Savior, and the instructions He laid out for us we will automatically recoil from the sin He warned us against. Jesus knew that learning to do this may be difficult and therefor provides abundant help. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.
Matthew So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies; he who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as the Lord does the church.
Ephesians When we sin we not only displease God and harm ourselves; we also harm others. In my case, I caused much pain for my dear wife of many years. She fully expected early on that I would live in a godly way and the fact that I gave in to lust was painful and damaging to her and our relationship. Although I do not concur with the overall approach promoted by Joe Dallas in his book The Game Plan , for reasons I will explain in Chapter 9, I fully agree with how he describes the damage lust brings into marriages.
Dallas does an excellent job of describing such damage and in suggesting appropriate actions by husbands in the reconciliation process. He explains that wives whose husbands succumb to the sin of lust could lose confidence in the assumptions on which they based their marriage, their own attractiveness, their own intelligence in picking a man who would be like this, and even their faith in a God who would allow them to join such a relationship.
Like most men, I prefer to move on and not look back. The sin of lust is an isolating, coarsening, and self-centering sin. Learning how to love sacrificially and doing all that can be done to reconcile and bring healing into a marriage relationship is evidence that Christ-like character is being forged in us. However, once the strongmen behind the driving force are identified, freedom can manifest. Recognize you are in a spiritual war and fighting a spiritual battle. The Bible says, "For our fight is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, and against spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places" Eph.
Separate the person, you, whom you love, from the evil force operating through you. Focus on loving you the person, removing shame, self-condemnation and the victim mentality. Your fight isn't against yourself and the sin that ensnares you.
It is against the evil force drawing you into that sin. Separating who and what you are fighting is your first step to freedom. You are fighting a spirit, but now you have to do your part in the natural to resist that spirit.
You also came into agreement with that spirit by turning on the internet and watching pornography, not seeking out your healing, allowing pride to rise up and participating in acts of masturbation.
You need to change your habits, behaviors and thoughts and do your part to resist temptation and not give these perverse spirits a legal right to occupy, attack and distract. In the process of deliverance, inner healing is also necessary. Perverse spirits usually manifest from a root cause in our life that needs to be discovered and brought forth into the light and love of God so we can receive healing.
We can't do inner healing without deliverance and vice versa. They need to manifest together for people to receive complete freedom.
Seek the Holy Spirit in your prayer time and ask Him to reveal what your entry point is and what you need to do to close that door. Ask Him to bring healing into your life and remove the trauma of the sexual experience from your mind. Ask Jesus to forgive you. Forgive yourself. I repent and renounce my participation and actions. I declare these spirits no longer have a stronghold over my life. I bind and restrict you from any future spiritual attacks. See my book, Discerning and Destroying the Works of Satan, for the model of biblical deliverance and Speak Out , for taking your authority and how Jesus spoke out audibly to the spiritual atmosphere to see natural manifestations.
Cast out the spirits that have been plaguing you. Here is a list of demons that could be associated. Either cast them all out or pray and ask the Holy Spirit to show you which ones are present. It is best not to group them but cast them out individually if this has been a strongman in your life.
Cast them out until you feel a release or have peace. Spirit Listing: lust, perversion, masturbation, pornography, mind-binding, torment, trauma, seducing, alluring, shame, pride, self-condemnation, witchcraft, satanic ritual abuse, Masonic, unworthiness, defeat, lying, addiction, unclean, woundedness. If you are being tormented in the nighttime hours while you sleep, cast out one of the following spirits:.
When you finish casting out spirits, make sure to ask the Holy Spirit to come and fill you. Enter the throne room and develop the habit of looking at Jesus. Enjoy the strength and the power of God. Believe the greatness of the beauty in the sanctuary of God Ps. You can satisfy yourself with the thrill and pleasure of the Holy Spirit flowing through you. The attraction there is in sexual sin and lust is also about possessing another person.
Learn instead, to enjoy possessing God. Our desire to pursue other people is evidence of a strong drive to experience the presence of God. He is the one who designed your desire to be powerfully strong.
Set your heart to meet your need with God. If you humble yourself in that way, you can be confident God will give you the Holy Spirit freely. He can meet your need! It is a lie to delight in the power we feel when we take advantage of someone by lust.
Hate that kind of sin. Nurture a love and delight for God that makes you able to say honestly of Him, "My soul clings to You" Ps. We have to find all the thrill and pleasure that we need, in our receiving and possessing the Spirit of God. We have to delight ourselves in the abundance of the Spirit that God gives. We have to nurture believing the transcendent beauty and strength radiating from our Lord is better than anything we can experience here.
Purposely listen to your own thanks and praise for the truth about the presence of God being readily available to you. In this way you can stir up your obsessive and compulsive desires and direct them toward freely loving and enjoying God. His is the only power that is real. In doing so, you will find, just like I have, that standing before the Lord and thrilling yourself with His presence meets your need. What I say here is not an exaggeration. It is the truth. We want God. Set your heart to find great thrill and pleasure in each and every one of His attributes.
Nothing less will quench your thirsty soul. There is no thrill that is greater. It has to work. You can be confident that it will. The Bible says, "Put on the armor of light You will strengthen yourself against the lust of the flesh if you put on the Light God radiates upon you when you draw near. Hate sin in yourself. Delight in God. Love His power close to you. Love His beauty. Love His holding you. Reassure and soothe yourself with God.
Doing so is to apply a powerful principle for cooperating with God: "where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" Luke The battle inside our own heart is the most important battle for us to win.
Even as Christians, we are our own worst enemy. But there is another battle that cannot be ignored ; that battle is an enemy outside us; the devil and his hordes of demons. The churches I grew up in didn't talk much about the devil. If they did, it didn't sink into my brain enough to stay with me.
Up to that time I hadn't studied the scriptures for myself in that area. As a result I was ignorant about how much Christians can be affected by demons. The painful reality was that I was being destroyed by constant failure and had to find a way out.
My wife was hurt. The Christian life seemed impossible. I was caught between an inaccurate, unstudied theology, and nagging sin. I didn't believe, or didn't want to believe that my problem might be caused, or at least partly caused by demons.
It was a Saturday night and no one else was home. I hate lust; I renounce lust and masturbation" Loudly, I rejected and renounced specific sexual sins. As soon as I said that I physically felt something lift off the outside of me.
My eyes widened in amazement. I remember being surprised that it left and that there was so much power in that kind of prayer. After that, a lot changed, but not everything. Prior to that prayer I was having physical symptoms of arousal several times during the day and at night. I had come to believe that this was normal. I learned it wasn't because physical symptoms of being sexually excited stopped happening unless there was a known reason. I surprised about this change, but those symptoms have never returned.
Even though I had been "delivered" as Jesus talked about, I still had many of the same old struggles. But it was very different in that I wasn't nearly as driven. The guilt still hurt just as badly. My conclusion was that I wasn't done. Addressing the demonic issue wasn't the only thing involved. I had won a battle on the outside of me, but I still had to change the internal habits of how I had learned to reassure myself by sexual sin.
It is ineffective to go after demons and ignore our need to feed on God. In the same way, we can't go after God and totally ignore the our enemy in the process.
It is the truth that we do wrestle against demonic principalities and powers Eph. God has given us what we need to win. In time, the battle with our own heart gets much easier. When that happens the enemies attacks decrease also. That is when staying pure from sexual sin becomes more of a maintenance issue than something that is destroying you. The battle doesn't totally go away, but it becomes realistic to have many years of continued success with little or no failure. Nurture believing that Jesus has won the battle and that He has given you authority to tell them to leave.
Then do it! But if you are at a point where you aren't even sure if you want to tell them to leave then you have some other work to do first. You have to get your heart to hear, believe, and love that it is better for you to depend on the closeness of God than to feed yourself with sexual sin.
Of course you know that in your mind, it is just that our heart is often times a long way from our head. Start thanking the Lord now that "I don't have to believe their demonic lies.
Is Pornography a Problem? All of the principles you read on this page apply to solving problems with pornography. The important thing is that you learn to look at sin -- and ask yourself, "What am I trying to get out of this and how can I get it from God? When asking those questions about pornography it becomes clear of our need to face toward God and look by faith at the greater beauty of His shining beauty and extreme majesty.
Focus all your lust into enjoying the beauty of God. God is using the pain from sin in order to corner you into giving up on empty sexual pursuits and getting what you need from God. It is time for you to cooperate. Being in "Awe" of People. The awe we feel should be toward God because it is worship. Be careful of what I call the "Awe of Man. Think about when you are strongly impressed, or feel respect with awe toward another person.
You might not say it with words but it feels like "Wow, they are impressive! The "Awe of man" can be a person of the opposite sex or the same. When you let yourself feel awe toward people like this, you open up toward them in a way that allows you to be attacked with the demonic baggage that they are carrying around with them. When this happens you can be attacked with temptation and fall very quickly.
I have learned to be very careful to guard my heart so that my awe toward God is greater than any awe I let myself feel toward people. It is very effective and not very hard to keep doing - especially after you realize how dangerous the "awe of man" really is. Lust and sexual sin are very poor substitutes for the reassurance that comes from wearing the presence of Almighty God. I still have to be careful in this area, but in general I will say that my greatest weakness has become an area of strength.
I have a truly wonderful relationship with my wife. I am only saying that even the best human relationship is a poor substitute for God.
Quenching my thirst with God has made me much stronger in my ability to resist temptation. The same can be true for you. Whenever I find myself looking at a woman with even a possibility of desire, I remember my need for God—without self-condemnation. In so doing, I have already agreed with God about sin, turned, and am trusting the blood of Christ to be cleansing me. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
Either I can be vulnerable to lust and sexual sin, or I can turn my very soul toward the Lord, open myself up to Him, and let Him come near. Either I drink the Holy Spirit in a way that reassures me deeply, or I will be left weak and wanting. For me, it comes down to a choice to keep nurturing my ability to believe and have freedom to keep enjoying God. The thrill and pleasure of allowing the Holy Spirit to continually flow is a wonderful thing.
In my desire to remain strong in this area, I soothe myself with God by thinking about the closeness of His beauty, power, and love. It is right to depend on God in this way. It feels good too. I think doing so is what it means to depend on Him as your one and only God.
The response of your heart will be to love God more if you note your fears and reassure yourself with the truth about your access to God and His glory, goodness, strength, and love. The more effectively you rest into believing, the more you will love Him and be free to enjoy receiving His presence. By nurturing your faith in this way, you will learn experientially that "The Lord gives grace and glory; no good thing does He withhold from those who walk uprightly" Ps.
In time, you will find that, like David, your very soul will cling to the Lord: "My soul clings to You; Your right hand upholds me" Ps. The way I see it, God loves us because He loves us. God is love. God loves us because love is who He is. God is loving and He takes pleasure in His people. We only need to cultivate the soil of our heart until we hear and believe this wonderful truth.
Soften the soil of your heart by thanking God for the truth of the verses below. When you pray these scriptures make sure you are listening to what you are saying. When God is loving us, He comes close. In spiritual realms, He is pouring His Spirit onto us Rom.
We need to learn to say and believe with the psalmist, "Great is your love toward me" Ps. Doing so requires that we recognize our need for love. We also have to recognize what we do with love when we find it. In the natural realm we hold it close.
When somebody loves us, we hold their love so close that we wear it around us. We make it our identity, our reason for feeling secure and confident. In a very real way, we are trying to "abide" in their love. We try to put their love around us and stay inside of it. God has a better way. Rather than trying to "abide" in love from earthly relationships, Jesus told us to "abide in My love" John People can never love us enough.
That we are commanded to abide in His love is the guarantee that He will give us enough of His love to be able to stay inside it. Train your heart to trust His grace. Delight in the love that radiates from the fountain of God. When you do, you will be abiding inside God Himself. I believe abiding in God involves trusting that we are before Him. We put on His love, just like when we come to Him in order to receive grace.
When we stand open before the Lord receiving the Spirit, the substance of His love shines at us from His face. Putting on His love this way means we are abiding inside His love.
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