(upbeat music) - Well, winning the war against lust is by far the most common theme of all the emails we get in our inbox. And today's question comes from an anonymous listener. Hello, Pastor John, thank you for taking my question. I am a female college student in Maryland and I love listening to your podcast.

Thank you for the encouragement and the truth that you put out each week. My question is this, how exactly does one transform the way they think? The Bible talks about letting your mind be transformed, but I feel like it's not so cut and dry as it is laid out in scripture.

Lately, I've been struggling with lustful thoughts that make me feel very insecure and guilty. So how do I deal with this, especially in a sex crazed culture? I wanna fight the temptations and every time a lustful thought occurs, I feel like I've let God down. How do I let my mind get transformed as the Bible says, so that I can win this overwhelming and exhausting battle?

How exactly does one transform the way they think? That's where she starts. So let me pick up there. There's so many pieces to her words that I'm probably not gonna touch on every one of them, but let me give our college student friend in Maryland a simple two-part paradigm for transforming the way she, we think, and then try to fill it out with a few details.

Let me use the analogy of becoming physically fit or physically transformed into fitness to illustrate how we may become spiritually or mentally transformed in fitness. Almost everybody would see the common sense in saying that if you want to be physically fit, there would be two aspects to the process of transformation.

Let's call them resistance and reception. By resistance, I mean the kinds of exercises that put your muscle under great deal of unnatural strain, right? For example, you want your biceps to be stronger so you can lift heavier packages or lift light ones more easily. You curl a weight up and down, say 10, 15, 20 pounds, and you do it enough times that the last one, you can barely do it.

The resistance is so strong against your bicep. And in that process of resistance, the bicep ironically becomes stronger. It's strange that you make yourself look like an idiot, trembling and pulling and unable to pull it up for the 10th or 20th time, and out of that weakness, a few weeks later, lo and behold, your bicep is stronger.

And what I mean by reception, so that was resistance. What I mean by reception is that you take into your body, you receive healthy foods and sufficient sleep, the kind of activity that is not so much pushing against something, but rather welcoming right and good things into your body.

So there's the analogy, and you can work with it and see if I've got it right physically, 'cause I don't know much about that, but it seems to work for me. And now let's apply it to the spiritual mental fitness of the way the Bible says it happens. And of course, these resistance and reception are not sequential.

They're not sequential, like some days you do resistance and some days you eat. No, it's simultaneous at the same time, in the same days. First, there's the biblical principle of resistance. So James says in James 4, 7, "Resist the devil and he will flee from you." And Paul says in Romans 8, 13, "Put to death, kill the deeds of the body by the spirit." So we kill specific sins by targeting them with lethal resistance.

James 1, verse 3, "The testing of your faith produces steadfastness." So the testing of faith corresponds to the lifting of the barbell by your bicep. Some temptation or some suffering comes into your life and threatens to conquer you and ruin your faith and your holiness. And you have to lay hold on a promise of God and push hard against the rising doubt and unbelief with all your might as you rely upon the promise of God.

And so push back the encroaching darkness, just like you push on the floor when you do pushups. Why? Because this produces steadfastness or endurance. This means that those tests, those pressures of unbelief and temptation, those tests that have to be resisted by faith result in two things. They enable us to resist greater tests, greater temptations, greater suffering in the future.

And they enable us to meet the old test that used to make us stumble with relative ease so that we're not thrown into crisis every time we meet some sexual temptation, say. Now, all of this applies to lust and sexual temptation because those are thoughts and tests that we have to resist.

We have to take hold of a promise of Christ, believe it, and then use it to push, actively push the thought out of our minds. We say, "No, no, no." I mean, I do this. I'm not kidding here. I mean, a thought, some lustful thought or some image comes into your mind, and you've got about five seconds to decide whether you're gonna let it take over or whether you're gonna push on it with, "No, you're out of here.

"In Jesus' name, you're out of here." Directing your attention to some superior promise. Jesus is better. Jesus is enough. He said this. You're out of here, and you keep pushing until it's gone. So that's what I mean by resistance. The resistance half of transformation. And I want to encourage you that even though it may feel or sound exhausting at first, it really does yield a peaceful fruit of righteousness.

Read Hebrews 12, and you'll see what I mean. Now, here's the second half. That's only the first half. And so many Christians try to solve the problems of their temptations and their defeats only by the resistance half of sanctification. It won't work. It just won't work in the long run.

So let me give what I mean by the reception part. Second Corinthians 3:18, "We all, with unveiled face, "beholding the glory of the Lord, "are being transformed into the same image "from one degree of glory to another. "This comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit." Notice, this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.

We are receivers. We are receivers. This is the reception side. We are fixing our gaze on the glory of the Lord. And we do that mainly in the Word. We linger over the sweet and beautiful descriptions of the person and the work of Jesus Christ. We marinate our minds receptively by faith in the crock pot of God's Word.

And we fix our eyes, the eyes of our hearts on Jesus. And the more we receive and receive into our hearts the beauty of Christ through the eyes of the heart as we read and meditate, the more we will have his desires. His preferences, his convictions. We will be receptively transformed.

Oh, how sweet to have that receptive transformation so that the hooks of the devil don't even lodge themselves anymore. Here's another passage to stir in. Colossians 3.10, that reminds us that in Jesus we are new creatures. We have new selves, but we must put on the new self. That is, receive the new self.

Put it on like a coat, consciously receive it. But there's a phrase in Colossians 3.10 that tips us off how it happens. It says, "Put on the new self," and here it comes, "which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator." So the transformation of the mind and the desires and the thoughts of the new self happens in knowledge.

This is just like saying, "Look to Jesus more and more and your thoughts and your feelings will be changed. You will experience your newness." Here's the last passage I'll mention that relates to newness through beholding Christ, newness through knowledge, and it relates specifically to sexual temptation. 1 Thessalonians 4, verses three through five.

Here's what Paul says. "This is the will of God, your sanctification, that you abstain from sexual immorality, that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor," and here comes the key, "not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God." So notice where Paul lays the fault of sexual passion, taking control and ruining our lives.

He says that passion, that sinful passion, rules in people who do not know, just like Colossians 3.10, don't know, just like 2 Corinthians 3.18, don't see, don't meditate on, don't know, don't absorb, don't receive the knowledge of God. In other words, they haven't been renewed in knowledge. They haven't set their minds to behold the glory of Jesus day and night so that they become like what they admire and so they are at the mercy of their sinful passions because they haven't been transformed by putting on the new self, renewed in knowledge.

So that's the biblical pattern of transforming our minds and our hearts so that we are less vulnerable to sexual temptation. It's both resistance against unbelief and temptation and doubt and Satan, and it is the sweet, enjoyable reception through God's word of the preciousness and the beauty and the greatness of Jesus.

Both resistance and reception over time transforms our hearts and our minds. - So critical. Thank you, Pastor John, for joining in the fight against lust over the years and for taking so many questions in the podcast about this ongoing struggle. And thanks for the question. Many questions are anonymous.

We always respect your privacy when you send those in to us and just say in the email, I would prefer not to have my name mentioned. We'll always respect that. And many of our questions come from college students who are seeking to honor Christ on campus, and it's not easy.

In fact, it's a huge challenge for students who are in state colleges, in private colleges, Christian colleges, all of them come with real-life temptations that resonate with many other listeners. And we would love to hear the questions that you face because every time we get a question, it's articulating questions and challenges that many other listeners face.

That's really what this podcast is about. It's about hearing from you to address a group of people who are facing the same thing because we are really in this together, helping one another. And you can send us your questions through our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. I am not sure what's next on the docket, but Lord willing, we will return on Friday with another one of your excellent and thoughtful and specific questions.

I'm your host Tony Reik. Thanks for listening to the podcast, and we will see you next time. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)