What does the Bible say about lust?
Question 06032
When Jesus addressed lust in the Sermon on the Mount, He was not introducing a new standard. He was revealing the standard that had always been there, the one that an outward-focused reading of the law had managed to obscure. By reaching behind the act to the intention of the heart, He made clear that God’s concern has never been merely with behaviour but with the person who produces it.
What Lust Actually Is
The word translated “lust” or “lustful intent” in Matthew 5:28 is the Greek epithumia, which means a strong desire or longing. In itself, epithumia is not always negative. Jesus used the same root when He said He had earnestly desired to eat the Passover with His disciples (Luke 22:15). The problem is not desire as such; it is desire that has fastened upon something that is not yours to have, that treats a person as an object for your own gratification rather than as a human being made in God’s image.
This is why lust cannot simply be equated with sexual attraction. Noticing that someone is attractive is not lust. What Jesus describes in Matthew 5:28 is the deliberate act of looking at someone with the purpose of entertaining desire for them. “Looks at a woman with lustful intent” is not an involuntary glance; it is a sustained, purposeful directing of the imagination toward a person one has no right to. The difference between attraction and lust lies in what the mind and will then do with what the eye has seen.
The Heart Before the Act
Jesus’s point is that the heart which would commit adultery given opportunity has already committed adultery in the imagination. The act and the intention belong to the same moral reality. This does not flatten every distinction between a thought and an action; a man who commits adultery in his heart has not done the same damage to his wife, his family, or the other person that he would have done by the physical act. But he has revealed what is in him, and it is corrupted.
Job understood this before Jesus articulated it. In Job 31:1 he speaks of making “a covenant with my eyes” not to look with desire at a young woman. This was not a neurotic attempt to eliminate all visual experience; it was the deliberate decision of a man who understood that the eye is the gate through which the heart is either fed or starved. The covenant was with the direction of the gaze, the question of what he would allow himself to dwell on and what he would refuse to entertain.
Lust Is Not Only Sexual
The category of lust extends further than its most common application. Colossians 3:5 places epithumia alongside sexual immorality, impurity, and covetousness, and describes it as a form of idolatry. Greed is lust directed at money and possessions. Covetousness is lust directed at what belongs to a neighbour. The same mechanism operates in all of them: a desire that exceeds its proper bounds, that reaches for what God has not given, and that treats its object as existing for the self’s gratification rather than on its own terms.
The Process James Describes
James 1:14-15 traces the anatomy of how lust becomes sin: “each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.” The desire does not immediately produce the sinful act; it is entertained, nurtured, and given room to grow until action follows naturally. The critical moment is not the initial temptation but the decision about what to do with it. That is the point at which the will is genuinely engaged.
Mortification
The New Testament does not simply diagnose lust; it calls for its death. Colossians 3:5 says “put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness.” Romans 8:13 connects the same language to the Spirit’s empowering work: “if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.” Mortification is the ongoing discipline of refusing to feed what must be starved. It is not achieved once; it is practised over time, in the small decisions about what the eyes rest on, what the imagination is permitted to dwell on, and what the will chooses to entertain.
So, now what?
The honest place to begin is with the recognition that lust is not primarily a problem of opportunity but of the heart. Every believer carries the same disposition toward it, and the pattern James describes, from temptation through desire to sin, is one that requires active, ongoing resistance rather than passive hope that circumstances will protect you. The practical disciplines that matter are the ones that break the chain at its earliest point: what you allow yourself to see, to read, to watch, to dwell on. Those are the choices that determine whether desire is kept in its proper place or allowed to grow into something that will damage you and those around you.
“I have made a covenant with my eyes; how then could I gaze at a virgin?” Job 31:1
