If you are a fan of Joshua Harris' books "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" -- "Boy Meets Girl" - Here's his another book! "Not Even a Hint" -- this book talks about LUST ~! the thing that not only men struggle, but we, women, do too!
"Oh, I keep my bed pure" -- or "Oh, I never have sex before marriage" -- we might say that~! But, we know what we have in our minds, when we try to be beautiful (in a wrong way) to get attention from guys -- or how we try so hard to have a bootylicious body like girls on magazine covers ('coz men like them!!) -- or how we fantasize after watching several movies or reading novels!! and we know God knows!
Bible says -- there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or any kind of impurity!
So, hey girls (and guys) -- let's not give ourselves a chance - and play with it - not even a hint!!
God be with us ~
the good news is "The temptation in our lives are no different from what other experience. And God is faithful. He will not allow the temptation to be more than we can stand. When we are tempted, He will show us a way out so that we can endure"
You are not alone, and there is a way out!!!!!!!!
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“Every day of our Christian experience should be a day relating to God on the basis of His grace alone. Your worst days are never so bad that you are beyond the reach of God’s grace. And your best days are never so good that you are beyond the need of God’s grace.” Jerry Bridges
Lust: craving sexually what God has forbidden.
In our losing battle against lust we’re often misguided in three key areas. We’ve had..
- • The wrong standard for holiness
- • The wrong source of power to change
- • And the wrong motive for fighting our sin
God’s standard when it comes to lust = not even a hint. God wants us to be freed from; He wants us to eliminate any kind of impurity in our thoughts and actions. He wants us to dig down into our hearts and uproot sexual greediness, which is always seeking a new sensual thrill.
God’s standard of not even a hint quickly brings me to the end of my own ability and effort. It reminds me that God’s standard is so much higher than the standards I place for myself that only the victory of Christ’s death and resurrection can provide the right power and the right motive needed to change me.
Lust is our enemy and has hijacked sexuality. We need to keep reminding ourselves that our goal is to rescue our sexuality from lust so we can experience it the way God intended.
It feels as though destroying our lust will destroy us. But it doesn’t. and when we destroy our lustful desire, we come not to the end of desire, but to the beginning of pure desire – God-centered desire, which was created to carry us into the everlasting morning of God’s purposes.
If you ever expect to find victory over lust, you must believe with your whole heart that God is against your lust not because He is opposed to pleasure, but because He is so committed to it.
It’s so critical to understand that our sexual drive isn’t the same as lust. For example:
- - it’s not lust to be attracted to someone or notice that he or she is good-looking.
- - It’s not lust to have a strong desire to have sex.
- - It’s not lust to anticipate and be excited about having sex within marriage.
- - It’s not lust when a man or woman becomes turned-on without any conscious decision to do so.
- - It’s not lust to experience sexual temptation.
The crucial issue in each of these examples is how we respond to the urges and desires of our sexual desire.
To rightly embrace our sexuality we must bring it under the dominion of the One who created it. When we do so, we’re not fighting for it. We’re rescuing our sexuality from being ruined by lust. We’re exalting our God-given identity as sexual creatures by refusing to be trapped in the never ending dissatisfaction of lust.
Each of us is unique in how we’re tempted to lust. This shouldn’t be a surprise – we all have different backgrounds, different weaknesses, and different sinful tendencies. All these combine to make us particularly vulnerable to lust in certain situations.
My bigger outbreaks of sin are usually triggered by smaller sins that I wasn’t diligent in guarding against. I’m talking about the daily, even hourly decisions of what to watch, read, listen to, and allow my mind to think about and my eyes to rest upon.
“Keep as far as you can from those temptations that feed and strengthen the sins which you would overcome. Lay siege to your sins and starve them out, by keeping away the food and fuel which is their maintenance and life.” Richard Baxter
1. List your own top three lust triggers. (time of day, tempting locations, television, newspapers and magazines, music, books, internet, the mailbox, in public). How can you avoid them?
2. What time of day or week are you most tempted by lust? What can you do to prepare for those times?
3. Which locations are the most tempting for you? How can you limit your time in those places?
4. What five little battles do you need to be fighting more faithfully? Describe in detail what it looks like for you to fight – and – to win - this battles.
It’s not enough to merely feel bad about or dislike the consequences of lust. True repentance is a change of direction. It involves turning away from sin and toward God – replacing sinful actions with righteous ones. Genuine repentance springs from heartfelt sorrow over sin because it is against God and then leads to real change in the way a person thinks and lives.
When it comes to lust, the greatest misconception about women is that they only deal with lust on an emotional level. But many women struggle with lust in what you might call traditionally male ways – the temptation to view pornography, to masturbate, to focus on intense physical desire for sex. These women are often hindered in their fight against lust because they’re consumed with shame over the particular ways they struggle.
Women, it doesn’t matter if your sex drive is as strong as a guy’s or how it compares to other girls you know. What matters is whether or not you’re looking to God for strength to control the desires you have. What matters is whether or not you’re fleeing temptation and pursuing holiness because you love Him.
The truth is that men’s lust is more obvious, but not necessarily more sinful. Guys are typically more visually oriented, and as a result their lust is more visible. And because God made me to initiate and pursue women, their expressions of lust are often more aggressive and blatant.
- - A man’s sexual desire is often more physical, while a woman’s desire is more often rooted in emotional longings.
- - A man is generally wired to be the sexual initiator and is stimulated visually; a woman is generally wired to be the sexual responder and is stimulated by touch.
- - A man is created to pursue and finds even the pursuit stimulating; a woman is made to want to be pursued and finds even being pursued stimulating.
Lust blurs and bends true masculinity and femininity in harmful ways. It makes a man’s good desire to pursue all about “capturing” and “using” and a woman’s good desire to be beautiful all about “seduction” and “manipulation”. In general it seems that men and women are tempted by lust in two unique ways; men are tempted by the pleasure lust offers, while women are tempted by the power lust promises.
A man’s lust leads him to detach a woman’s body from her soul, mind, and person and use her for the sake of his selfish pleasure. Isn’t this why most pornography is directed toward men and depicts women presenting themselves solely for a man’s pleasure? Pornography reinforces the lie that women are sexual playthings for men’s enjoyment – that women want to be used, not loved and cherished. Some men prefer to masturbate to pornography over engaging in a real relationship with a woman because it allows to them to live in the fantasy that their own physical pleasure is all that matters.
When a woman sees a seductive ad featuring a man, she might be tempted to fantasize about sex with him, but the odds are that this temptation will be rotted in fantasy about a relationship with him, with physical pleasure being a subset of her craving for passionate attention and emotional intimacy.
Lust offers men the pleasure of sex devoid of the hard work of intimacy. Lust offers women the power to get what they want relationally if they use their sexuality to seduce.
Recognize that lust is the greatest enemy of a healthy, godly relationship. If you love God and each other, determine to hate lust. Don’t feed lust in your relationship. It won’t stop wanting till your relationship is ruined.
Lust seeks to use what we know about the weaknesses of the opposite sex to manipulate them. Our membership in God’s family must transform our view of the opposite sex. We’re not trying to get something from each other: we’re called to give, to love, and to care for one another.
The reason this very private act (masturbation) matters to God is not because it involves our genitals, but because it involves our heart. And God is passionately committed to our hearts belonging completely to Him (see Deut. 6:5). Masturbation isn’t a filthy habit that makes people dirty. It only reveals the dirt that’s already in our hearts. It’s an indicator that we’re feeding the wrong desires. That’s why problems with lustful actions are symptoms of deeper heart problems.
Masturbation is built on a self-centered view of sex. This wrong attitude says that sex is solely about you and your pleasure. Your body. Your genitals. Your orgasm. This is the natural tendency of sin. It isolates us from others and makes pleasure self-focused. When our lustful desires are given free rein, sex is pushed into a corner and made completely self-centered, isolated experience that reinforces a self-centered view of life.
Marriage and sex are inseparable in God’s design. You can’t have one without the other.
God is telling us that before we can view sex accurately, we have to take marriage seriously. We have to understand that in God’s sight, when a man and woman marry and join their bodies together sexually, something spiritual occurs – they really do become “one”.
CS Lewis compares having sex outside of marriage to a person who enjoys he sensation of chewing and tasting food, but doesn’t want so swallow the food and digest it.
If you cultivate a habit of masturbation, don’t assume it will end once you’re married. I know my married people who continue to be tempted. Sometimes “solo sex” seems easier, even more pleasurable, than the work involved with maintaining intimacy with your spouse and unselfishly seeking to give him or her pleasure. But a husband or a wife who turns to masturbation in marriage becomes a rival to his or her own spouse. The act of masturbation draws them away from each other.
The world has abandoned marriage and commitment for a lifestyle for empty “hookups”. Don’t follow the world’s pattern. Pursue God’s gifts of marriage. God has given marriage to us for our good. The world is increasingly delaying and avoiding marriage – we should do the opposite. No one should be ashamed to want to marry young and enjoy the wife (or husband) of their youth. Marriage is great. Sex in marriage is terrific! We’re not just called to guard the marriage bed; I think more Christian singles should be running toward it.
When it comes to our entertainment choices – a lot of Christians are more concerned with what others might think that with what God thinks.
God has begun to show me just how much my unhealthy media diet has fed my lust and negatively affected my spiritual life. When I’ve come to see us that no matter how much I study the Bible, pray, and ask God to help me conquer lust, I’ll never move forward in holiness if I’m filling my mind with lustful images and ungodly themes through entertainment.
Television and film stir up feelings and emotions that bypass our minds and go straight for our affections. The incredible power of media is that it can make something evil look good or exciting without appearing to make any argument at all.
If we’re to honor God with our entertainment choices, we must be willing to carefully evaluate how what we watch affects our love for God. We must be willing to wrestle with our standards and often refuse to watch what other think is permissible.
