What does the Bible say about lust?

Question 6032.

The sin of lust is one of the areas where believers most often feel defeated, and part of the defeat is caused by a misunderstanding. A great many Christians are confessing as lust something that Scripture does not call lust at all.

So let me try to define it accurately first, because a battle fought on the wrong ground cannot be won.

What Jesus actually said

Everyone knows the sentence: everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart (Matthew 5:28). It is worth noticing the phrase lustful intent, which translates a purpose clause. The looking is done in order to.

Jesus is not describing the involuntary registering of another person’s appearance. He is describing a deliberate act of the will in which someone is used, in the imagination, for gratification. The eye is the instrument; the will is the offender.

That distinction has enormous pastoral consequence. A sensitive young Christian who believes every flicker of attraction is adultery will live in permanent condemnation and will eventually give up altogether, which is exactly the outcome the enemy wants.

Attraction is not the sin of lust

God made human beings attractive to each other, and He did it before the fall. Adam’s first recorded words are a poem about a woman. The Song of Songs is in the canon and it is not shy. Attraction is part of creation, not part of the curse.

What turns it into the sin of lust is the addition of possession. Desire becomes lust when it stops delighting and starts consuming, when a person becomes an object to be used rather than a person to be honoured.

Test it this way. Attraction can coexist with respect and can be turned into thanksgiving. Lust cannot, because lust requires the other person to be reduced. That reduction is the sin, and it is the reason the tenth commandment sits in the list.

The Greek behind the word

The New Testament word is epithumia, and it means strong desire of any kind. Jesus uses it of His own longing to eat the Passover with His disciples, and Paul uses it of his desire to depart and be with Christ. Context decides whether it is good or evil.

That should settle any suggestion that desire itself is dirty. The Bible has no interest in producing people who feel nothing. It is interested in desire aimed correctly.

When John lists the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes alongside pride of life (1 John 2:16), he is describing wanting that has slipped its moorings. The problem is not the engine but the steering.

Why the sin of lust is a matter of the heart

The Sermon on the Mount is not tightening the law arbitrarily. It is exposing what the law always meant. The Pharisees had reduced righteousness to external compliance, and Jesus is showing that God has been reading the heart from the beginning.

That should humble anyone who has felt superior for never having committed adultery. The sin of lust means the man who has never touched anyone can still stand guilty, and the levelling effect of that is deliberate.

It also means that a change of behaviour without a change of heart is not the goal. You can install every filter available and still be exactly the person you were, only frustrated.

Where the sin of lust bites hardest today

It would be dishonest to write on this subject and not mention pornography, which has changed the terrain entirely. What used to require effort and courage now requires neither, and it arrives unbidden on a device most of us carry to bed.

The result is that a great many believers, including many in ministry, are fighting something their grandfathers never faced at this intensity. Pretending otherwise from the pulpit helps nobody, and neither does a tone that assumes only the weak struggle.

It also does measurable harm. It trains the brain to associate arousal with novelty and with images rather than with a person, and it damages real marriages. That is not a moralistic claim; it is simply what happens.

Jesus prescribed drastic action

Immediately after the saying about the heart, Jesus tells His hearers that if the right eye causes them to sin they should tear it out, and if the right hand offends they should cut it off (Matthew 5:29-30). This is hyperbole, and hyperbole is used to make a real point forcefully.

The point is proportion. Whatever it costs to deal with this is worth paying, and the cost is usually a good deal less than an eye. It is a phone without a browser, an account closed, a route home changed, a friendship with an honest man who asks.

Most people who lose this battle lost it at the point of half measures. They wanted a solution that did not inconvenience them, and the sin of lust is not defeated by convenience.

The Spirit does what discipline cannot

Paul’s instruction is not white knuckled suppression. Walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh (Galatians 5:16). The verb is positive: the way to defeat a desire is to be occupied by a stronger one.

Thomas Chalmers called it the expulsive power of a new affection, and the phrase has lasted because it is accurate. Nothing empties a heart of the sin of lust like being genuinely full of something better, and nothing leaves it more vulnerable than being empty.

Practically that means the fight is won in the hours when nothing is happening. Boredom, exhaustion, loneliness and self pity are the conditions in which it thrives, and each of those has a practical remedy.

Confession and company

Secrecy is the oxygen. James tells believers to confess their sins to one another and pray for one another, that they may be healed (James 5:16), and in thirty years I have not seen anyone win this alone.

That requires a church culture where such a confession is survivable. If the only response to disclosure is horror, people will keep quiet and keep sinning, and the congregation will look holier than it is.

Choose the person carefully, be specific rather than vague, and give them permission to ask again next month. Vague confession changes nothing because it commits to nothing.

Grace for the repeatedly defeated

Some reading this have confessed the same thing so many times that they have stopped believing the confession means anything. Let me say plainly that the blood of Jesus has not become less effective through repeated use.

There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1), and that verdict is not suspended between falls. The believer who fails today is a forgiven person who has failed, not a stranger applying for readmission.

Despair is the enemy’s second weapon and it is more effective than the first. Nobody has ever repented their way out of the sin of lust while convinced that God has finished with them.

Marriage is not the cure

Paul does say it is better to marry than to burn with passion, and marriage is a genuine and good context for desire. What it is not is a solution to a heart problem, and a great many people have discovered that the wedding did not change what they wanted.

A married man with a lust problem has a lust problem. His wife cannot fix it, and treating her as the remedy places on her a burden that damages the marriage further.

The married and the single fight the same battle with different pressures. There is more on the distinction between desire and lust in the article on lust and attraction.

Purity is a direction, not a record

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Purity in Scripture is single mindedness rather than a spotless history, and it describes someone facing the right way rather than someone who has never stumbled.

That is why the question worth asking is not whether you have failed this month but which direction you are travelling. Are you fighting or negotiating? Are the doors closing or opening?

God is not in a hurry, and He is not surprised. The work of sanctification takes a lifetime by design. See also the article on sanctification.

So, now what?

Do the practical thing today rather than tomorrow. Remove the access, whatever it is. The sin of lust survives on availability, and availability is the one variable entirely within your control.

Then tell one person, specifically, and arrange for them to ask you again. Not a general prayer request but an actual sentence about an actual thing. The sin of lust cannot survive long in the open, and it thrives on nothing so much as being kept private.

And fill the space. Something has to occupy the hours where this happens, and a life with purpose in it is far less hospitable to this than a life with time to kill. What would you rather be full of?

Walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.

Galatians 5:16 (ESV)