The Lust Dare: Day #2

How to Use "The Lust Dare."

Day #2: What God Called Good

“Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father.”  –James 1:17

Before we really begin to challenge ourselves, I want to make sure that the difference between our God-given sexual nature and the lust of the flesh is clearly understood. I will be pulling sage words from others a little more in this challenge, as this is an area that I myself still really don’t quite grasp completely.

“At times, especially when I was single, I’ve been tempted to view my sex drive as more of a curse than a blessing. But how untrue that is! In fact, it’s the very lie Satan wants us to believe–that our sexuality itself is sinful. He knows that if he can confuse us about the difference between our God-given sexual nature and the corrupting influence of lust, our efforts to battle sin will be sabotaged before we even walk out the door.

Before we can fully grasp why God says there should be not even a hint of lust in our lives, we need to understand what lust is and what it is not. And before we can attack the lust in our lives with conviction, we need to reclaim sexual desire as God’s amazing and good gift to us.” –Joshua Harris

The evidence of why this is important to grasp has already become clear to me in certain circumstances in my life. See after talking to my parents, I spent about a year really battling the lust of the flesh, and learning to put it aside, and not letting myself go anywhere near those things that were supposed to be saved for later. But in doing so, I was careless and lost sight in some ways of the beauty of the sexual nature that God implanted in many of us.

This became more evident to me when in God’s great blessings a young man asked me to court him with the intention of marriage. In the weeks that followed, I would sometimes feel it was wrong to hold his hand or squeeze his shoulder as I walked by, or even have the desire to do such things as I had spent so much energy on saving such things for the future and not thinking on those types of things. In some ways, I had lost sight of the beauty of intimacy as God created it to be. And I don’t want you to make the same mistake.

• It is not lust to be attracted to someone or notice that he or she is good-looking.
• It is not lust to have a strong desire to have sex.
• It is not lust to anticipate and be excited about having sex within marriage.
• It is not lust to experience sexual temptation.

None of those above things are lust. They are not wrong, or evil, or just a result of the fall. They are part of how God created us.

“God made man and woman to be sexual creatures. God did not wince when Adam, in seeing Eve, was drawn to her sexually. God didn’t cringe when Adam and Eve enjoyed sexual relations in the Garden of Eden. In his wise plan, He gave sexual desire to both the man and the woman.”  -Carolyn Mahaney

You were created that way, and such desires are natural and right; when they are used in the way they were created to be. So lust is not in the desires, but rather what we do with them. It is not lust to find someone attractive, but undressing that person in your mind is lust. It is not lust to anticipate sex inside marriage, but if we let our mind dwell on what that might look like and imagine it, that quickly turns into lust. It is not lust to have a strong desire for sex, but any method outside of God-ordained sex inside marriage to satiate that desire is lust.

It is not our God-given desires that we need to saved from, but rather the highly corruptive lust that seeks to ruin the beauty of sex as God created it.

“The truth is that Jesus didn’t come to rescue us from our humanity; He entered into our humanity to rescue us from our sinfulness. He didn’t come to save us from being sexual creatures; He became one of us to save us from the reign of sin and lust, which ruins our sexuality.” –Joshua Harris

In letting myself forget that such desires were God-given, it made it harder for me to find the beauty when I actually had the right to act on a few of those desires in moderation. But God reminded me of this truth, and I am now much more able to communicate love to the man that God has given me within the proper confines of courtship. And I definitely eagerly look forward to marriage, and the day when God will fully honor my battle against the current lusts of the flesh. 

“Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.”  -Genesis 2:24-25

Today’s Dare

Read the creation story in Genesis 1-2. Pay special attention to the story of Adam and Eve, and the way that God created such beauty in their sexual frames, that they were not even ashamed in their nakedness. Pray today that God would help you to remember the reason for your desires, and that in your battle against the flesh that He would never let you forget and become uncomfortable at that which He created as right.

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