How Can We Serve One Another in Battling Lust?
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00:00:05.000 | Pastor John, in a previous podcast you expressed how important deep and rich
00:00:08.680 | theology is in the fight against porn addiction and lust. That was the theme of
00:00:12.880 | podcast number 19, and I want to revisit this and look more closely at how
00:00:16.200 | Christian men can serve each other. What would you say to a man who has friends
00:00:20.200 | committed to helping him win the battle against lust and porn addiction?
00:00:25.000 | Yeah, I've been thinking a lot recently about Paul's text in 1 Corinthians 9
00:00:32.080 | where it says he pommels his own body. The word is literally, he gives his body a
00:00:37.280 | black eye. He says, "I don't box beating the air." In other words, "I know where to land
00:00:41.400 | my punches." And he's talking about the sins in his life that need to be
00:00:45.520 | punched out. They need to be put to death. And so he's talking about a kind of
00:00:51.160 | self-denial and a kind of self-opposition that stands up and pokes himself, and I
00:00:56.880 | think he's just extending Jesus' words where he says, "If your eye causes you to
00:01:02.480 | sin, tear it out." Well, that's a pretty good punch, you know, to the eye. I mean, it's
00:01:06.720 | taking your eye out. And if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. Now, we
00:01:11.880 | know that's not meant to be literal because he says, "If your right eye
00:01:17.440 | causes you to sin, tear it out." Well, you've got your left eye left over, and you need to
00:01:20.920 | see the naked woman just as well with your left eye as your right eye. So we
00:01:24.440 | know that the literal tearing out of the right eye wouldn't solve the problem. He
00:01:28.760 | means be as vigilant and as forceful in your opposition of sin as you need to be
00:01:35.120 | in order to kill it in your life. Now, here's my new wondering. Why? Why does
00:01:42.640 | lust, why does seeing—I'm thinking mainly men, but not just men—why does seeing
00:01:49.480 | have such a force to draw us to click on pornography or to linger over some
00:01:58.160 | bathing suit issue of Sports Illustrated or to linger over some ad for a movie?
00:02:05.480 | Just what is it about us? And as I've tried to analyze my own body over the
00:02:11.740 | years, I've got this phrase that I use called "psychoerotic euphoria." I made
00:02:19.360 | that up. "Psychoerotic euphoria." What I mean is, I don't know what it is or where it
00:02:26.760 | is. I'm very localized in the body. It can get localized, but it isn't localized
00:02:30.800 | usually, and it's just like power in your body that makes you so pleased by the
00:02:41.160 | erotic, by the visual, that you are moving toward it visually with such a
00:02:49.240 | force that it starts to nullify moral conviction and puts you out of touch
00:02:55.600 | with all the arguments you had before to be pure and moves you into behavior that
00:03:02.100 | you then later are going to disapprove of. What in the world is that like? And my
00:03:06.180 | answer is, it's like drunkenness. So if you go to a bar, suppose me, I'm just
00:03:11.440 | making this up, you go to a bar with a buddy and you're a witness for
00:03:15.720 | Jesus tonight at the bar, and you sit there, and this guy that you're with
00:03:20.840 | starts drinking, and he drinks too much, and he gets drunk, and you say, "Well, this
00:03:26.920 | is obviously not working. We're going to win anybody to Jesus. Now we've just
00:03:29.840 | disobeyed Jesus by getting drunk, and so we're going to go out of here." So you grab
00:03:34.200 | his arm and say, "We're leaving." And he's the one who drove tonight, and so he wants to
00:03:39.720 | drive and go down and watch a movie downtown while he's drunk. And you say, "You're not
00:03:44.320 | driving. I'm not going to let you drive. It's my driving. I'm going to drive this car." And you
00:03:47.960 | bend his arm back behind his back and throw him in the backseat and grab his
00:03:52.000 | key, and since he's your friend, he doesn't hit you. And you drive him home
00:03:55.560 | and throw him in bed. Now that's a lot of manhandling for a drunken guy.
00:04:00.120 | Is that right? Should we do that? And I think most people would say, "Yeah, yeah, you
00:04:03.520 | should do that. I mean, he was drunk. He's going to kill himself." And my question is,
00:04:08.400 | is there something like that that we should do for each other? If this
00:04:13.480 | psycho-erotic euphoria is as powerful as drunkenness, and I think it is, then do we
00:04:22.680 | need people in our lives who will break our arm? I mean, not just, you know, Paul says, "I palm
00:04:26.840 | on my own body." I'm saying, "You should palm on me." In other words, should I have...
00:04:32.160 | You know, we often talk about accountability relationships, and a lot
00:04:36.240 | of people get all bent out of shape about legalism, and you're supposed to
00:04:39.360 | love Jesus from your heart and not have to be constrained. Look, if you're drunk
00:04:43.920 | and you're about to kill yourself, you better be glad somebody's in your life
00:04:47.120 | to throw you in the backseat of the car, and later on, when you wake up, you'll be
00:04:52.400 | glad they did, and then you can pray yourself back into some kind of
00:04:55.240 | appropriate stance where you obey freely from your heart. But this lust thing is
00:05:00.320 | much more like drunkenness than it is like anything else, and so we may need
00:05:04.880 | this kind of personal accountability where we have some kind of connection,
00:05:10.360 | some kind of special number on our cell phone, some way to push a button and say,
00:05:14.960 | "Knock me out if you have to in the next half hour because I'm about to lose it
00:05:19.900 | because of this psycho-erotic euphoria that's come over me like drunkenness." So
00:05:25.640 | I'm just throwing that out there to guys to say, compare it in your life. Analyze
00:05:31.120 | your own soul to see whether the sheer physical, erotic, psycho nature of this
00:05:40.160 | power is enough like drunkenness that you would put a thing in your
00:05:45.960 | life like, "Drive me home." Yeah, I can see how this point gets applied to a
00:05:51.480 | brother stumbling in sin in our presence. So much of pornography and lust, however,
00:05:55.960 | is a private struggle in the darkness of isolation. How does this principle work
00:06:00.080 | out there? Right, so I'm saying when Hebrews 3:13 says, "Exhort one another
00:06:05.800 | every day as long as it is called today, lest there be in you an evil heart of
00:06:10.560 | unbelief," you would extend that out and say, "Perhaps throw one another in a cold
00:06:17.000 | shower every now and then so that there won't be an
00:06:22.640 | acted-out heart of inebriated psycho-erotic drunkenness in a person's
00:06:30.360 | life." If a guy is fighting a losing battle and most of the guys know who
00:06:35.560 | they are, or gals know who they are, about, "Okay, I'm supposed to fight this. I'm
00:06:40.000 | supposed to win it. I'm regularly losing this battle." If they know that, they need
00:06:44.560 | to say that to their small group, and then one idea would be, "I'm going to put
00:06:50.400 | your number at the top of my favorites on my iPhone. It'll take one punch, and I
00:06:56.160 | want you to give my number a special ringer on your phone, okay?" So it goes, "Do,
00:07:01.280 | do, do, do, do," and you say, "Okay, the only time he ever hits that number is when he
00:07:06.480 | needs me to intervene." And so you get on the phone, and you get on the phone and
00:07:10.560 | say, "Stand up. Go outside in the snow," or "I'm coming over right now," or
00:07:18.520 | something. You just have it worked out just the way you would if you were an
00:07:22.280 | alcoholic, you know, and he were saying, "I'm just moving towards this bottle on
00:07:27.040 | my wall. I don't know what it is. I want you to come smash the bottle for me." I mean,
00:07:30.760 | it's that weird. I mean, why else would Jesus say things like, "Cut your eye out"?
00:07:37.000 | I mean, that's just wild. If somebody says, "Oh, that's wild to put a special
00:07:41.360 | number on your phone." Really? Like, take a screwdriver and poke it in your face?
00:07:44.760 | That's not wild? So I'm saying, when Hebrews 3:13 says, "Exhort one another
00:07:52.360 | every day as long as it is called today, lest there be in you an evil heart of
00:07:57.080 | unbelief," you would extend that out and say, "Perhaps throw one another in a cold
00:08:03.480 | shower every now and then so that there won't be an
00:08:09.120 | acted-out heart of inebriated, psycho-erotic drunkenness in a person's
00:08:16.800 | life." Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast. Please
00:08:20.880 | email your questions to us at AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org. At
00:08:25.000 | DesiringGod.org you will find thousands of other free resources from John Piper.
00:08:27.800 | I'm your host Tony Reinke, thanks for listening.
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