(upbeat music) - Pastor John, in a couple of places, I've recently heard you talk about visualizing Christ in the battle against lustful thoughts. Lust is so often a visible battle, so it makes sense that this battle is fought in the imagination. And this point surfaced in your parable on the power of sin in a sermon clip that I posted as episode number 291 of this podcast.

And all the way back in episode 18, you explained the anacronym ANTHEM to fight lust. And there you described H as quote, "Hold a beautiful vision of Jesus in your mind "until it triumphs over the other sensual vision," end quote. In the fight against lust, how important is it to have this beautiful vision of Jesus?

And how does this work for you in the moment of temptation? What's happening in your imagination? - Well, Tony, I've had history with really bad ways of using visualization in prayer. So even though the question isn't exactly that, let me start there. Pictures can begin to displace the word of Scripture as the center of God's saving communication.

And that's really dangerous. We can edge right up to and transgress the intention of the second commandment. Don't make any graven images for worship. There's an approach that I've run into, it's pretty widespread, at least it was, to healing prayer, where people are instructed to go back into their painful past and visualize a scene of, say, abuse, sexual abuse.

And for example, imagine Jesus, picture Jesus walking into the room and picking you up and hugging you and caring for you. And there are problems with that kind of counseling, it seems to me, because it's foreign to Scripture. You don't find any pattern quite like that in Scripture. And it's usually slanted away from some of the aspects of the role that Jesus plays, namely in Providence, portraying Him only as a comforter and not as a sovereign and not as a judge and not as the one who's gonna handle that perpetrator with violence someday.

It tends to be just soft and gentle and warm and therefore slanted. It tends to oversimplify and over-psychologize what's really needed. The healing of the soul involves a profound spiritual perception, not only of a tender affectionate Jesus, but of the full meaning of the cross and the reality of the Holy Spirit and God's ways in justice and judgment.

So there are real dangers that I've encountered in this whole area of visualization in prayer. But let me get back to the positive side. Jesus is the eternal Word and He became flesh, John 1:14. So we know He had a body. People looked at Him. They could see Him with their physical eyes, unlike God the Father, who can't be visualized in that way.

I don't think we should picture God the Father as a grandfather with a white beard. I think that's a big mistake. But Jesus had flesh and bones. And here's another point. Some words do not invoke visual realities like love, hate, right, wrong, kind. Those are general, principal kinds of words.

But other words do evoke necessarily images in our minds, cross, blood, nails, spear, side of body, hands, feet, thorns, beard, spit, rod, sun darkened, hill. You can't say those words without seeing something because those words are names of sites. They're names of sites. You see a hand, you put a word on a hand, you expect people to process that word and have a kind of hand visualized in their mind.

No specific hand, but the idea of hand is being visualized in their mind. So when you read about the ninth hour, Jesus cried out with a loud voice. Now you've got sounds as well. There are words that designate sounds like loud voice. That word is supposed to conjure something in your mind concerning Eli, Eli, Lama, Sebaothenoi.

And it was loud. The word loud is used to make you feel and think loud. And then Jesus calls out with a loud voice, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." The point of those very words is to get our minds hearing something and the words like beard and spit are supposed to get our minds seeing something.

And then here's one pointer from the apostle that inclines me to go ahead and form this image in my mind. Galatians 3,1, "Oh foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you? It was before your very eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified." Now, what does that mean? I don't think it means Paul got out a piece of chalk and drew Jesus.

But it means evidently that he portrayed with words the gospel, the cross so vividly. He says, "It was like I was doing it before your very eyes." He used the words eyes here. It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed. So maybe he means I'm embodying this with my sufferings.

I'm speaking it in such a way that you can see it. And so one of my strategies, Tony, back to Anthem and the whole battle with lust. One of my strategies in trying to obey Jesus, tearing out my eyes and putting sin to death and counting myself dead is to fight nudity.

Let's just take that as a concrete example. Fight nudity in my mind with Christ's misery on the cross. So nudity is a picture in my mind. Now I've argued that Christ's misery on the cross is a picture in my mind. Christ died to make me pure. This lustful thought is not pure.

Therefore, if I willingly hold this image in my mind, I'm taking a spear and thrusting it into the side of Jesus. I picture myself about to do that. I picture him saying, "I love you. "I love you. "I am dying to free you from that bondage to lust." And I picture a battered body.

And maybe I should qualify. It's not a photographic. I don't have a particular face in view. I don't know what Jesus looked like. I don't pick a movie star from the Passion of the Christ or whatever. I don't have a particular face before me. He doesn't look like any actor.

I don't get that specific. It's a word-created picture, not a photo-created picture. So it's what I think Paul did when he said in Galatians 2:20, "The life I now live in the flesh, "I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me." Now, he could have stopped right there, couldn't he?

"Who loved me," and he added, "And gave himself for me." In Paul's mind, the faith to kill sin every day in his life was strengthened by remembering the love of Christ for him and the love of Christ is emblazoned in Paul's mind as he thought of him as crucified.

He gave himself for me. And Paul saw crucified people. They were on the hills. It was horrible. And when he said, "Christ gave himself for me," I can't believe that he didn't have some picture, if not photographic, in his mind of Christ suffering profoundly for his purity and thus his faith was empowered to defeat lust.

- That's interesting. Thank you, Pastor John. And for more on the anacronym ANTHEM, see Pastor John's article titled "ANTHEM, Strategies for Fighting Lust," which was published online in 2001. It's available online at desiringgod.org right now. Go to the website and search for the title "ANTHEM, Strategies for Fighting Lust." Tomorrow, we'll address a tricky pastoral question with big ramifications.

For those in our churches with severe cognitive impairment, what's the threshold that Credo Baptist Church would hold to in deciding whether or not to baptize such an individual? I'm your host Tony Reinke. We'll see you tomorrow. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)