How to stop feeding your lust
An old Cherokee Indian was speaking to his grandson:
“A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy. “It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil–he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is good — he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. This same fight is going on inside you, and inside every other person, too.”The grandson thought about it for a long minute, and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”
The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”
Our lust is like the story above; we must stop feeding the lust and start feeding the parts of our lives that is starved for spiritual truth. It’s really that simple: stop feeding lust and start feeding your soul with spiritual nourishment. But like the advice my karate instructor once gave me: “Hit them and don’t let them hit you,” simple things can be very hard to practice.
Stop feeding the lust.
Stopping the lust in our lives is a three part process that is based on the overall concept of radical amputation. Radical amputation means that we intentionally do anything we must do to rid ourselves of the outside and inner sources that fee our lust. We must be willing to intentionally take radical steps to rid ourselves of the pain. Jesus said that we should be willing to pluck out our eye or cut off our hand, if it were necessary to be rid of lust (Matthew 18:9). Jesus is saying that we must be willing to make radical choices.
External Choices
We must be willing to get rid of any and everything that causes us to stumble. Here are some examples. Perhaps some will seem radical!
- Removed cable TV from home or cut the cable
- Moved the computer from the “dungeon of privacy” to the open living room
- Removed TV from home and/or hotel room
- Refused to take cash or credit cards with them when driving in the neighborhood of a strip club or movie house
- Spent all night in prayer, begging God for grace to overcome
- Locked up the VCR and gave the key to a family member
- Drove a different route to work to avoid areas of temptation
- Refused to go out of town except with spouse
- Cut off all Internet access
- Changed jobs
- Started going to church
- Started working with an accountability partner
- Began counseling with pastor
- Burned all pornographic magazines
- Reformatted hard drives
- Installed net filtering and accountability software.
- Slept with curtains open in bunkroom to avoid privacy
- Stopped counseling with counselors who wouldn’t confront pornography
- Refused to go where temptation has been strong
- Cut off relationships that promoted lust, immorality, pornography
- Confessed to spouse, asked for assistance
- Changed stores to shop only where pornography was not available
- Moved out of current residence where pornography was in use
- Moved to a different city
- Cut up video store rental cards
- Slept with clothes on to avoid self-gratification
- Called spouse from hotel to ensure avoidance of pornography
- Threw pornographic disks in lake
Internal Choices
Not only must we be willing to rid ourselves of the external things that cause us to stumble, we must also be willing to work internally as well. There is a simple truth that those of us who suffer from problems with lust, must face: we are only one thought away from acting out once again. I cannot stress this enough–our bondage to sexual immorality happens on a thought-by-thought basis and we are only a thought away from acting out on our addictions. Our goal is to come to realize the importance of taking every thought captive (II Corinthians 10:5).
- Learn to watch our thoughts objectively and be willing to turn our attention elsewhere,
- When you notice you have a lustful thought, turn your attention to prayer for a friend or loved one,
- Pray for the person you were thinking about,
- Confess your thought to God and ask for help,
- Call your accountability partner if you find it hard to stop your thinking,
- Begin a new activity that requires you to think of other things.
Start Feeding the Soul
If we are honest with ourselves, we must come to recognize that we’ve enjoyed having lustful thoughts about in our heads and we’ve shown little or no restraint in our thinking. But if we are to overcome lust, we must stop the thoughts before they give rise to other thoughts and still other thoughts. The truth of our thinking isn’t all that complicated. If we allow ourselves to entertain lustful thoughts, our bodies will excite and we will seek whatever we can find to gratify our addictive desires. How do we begin to stop these thought processes?
The Bible is full of wonderful spiritual truths and perhaps the most important one we need to face is the one taught in Matthew 12: 43
“Now when the unclean spirit goes out of a man, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, and does not find it. “Then it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came’; and when it comes, it finds it unoccupied, swept, and put in order. “Then it goes and takes along with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first.
Nature abhors a vacuum. Once you get rid of the external influences you must replace them with something else or you’ll relapse into something worse. This means you must fill your mind with spiritual food. Daily Bible study, recovery literature, journaling and all kinds of material are available for you to grow. While you can fill your mind with material that isn’t spiritual, God’s power will be there to help you if you choose Him instead. If you choose to fill your mind with Christ oriented material, you’ll find that God’s power will help you do the rest.
Recap
You must stop feeding your addiction and start feeding your spiritual hunger with Christ centered material. If you do this, God is faithful and will give you the power you need to move to the next step of freedom from the slavery of lust and pornography.
