I’m reviewing a book on chastity called “Purity 365” by Jason Evert, and as I began typing the review I found it became less a review and more an entire post on lust, chastity, and purity. So I instead decided to separate the latter part into its own post:
One of the oldest sins of man, dating all the way back to the nakedness of Adam and Eve in Eden, is the sin of “lust”. Lust–self-indulgent sexual desire–seems to have exploded into the forefront of our culture over the last 50 years or so through the conduit of mass media.
Modern American media serves us fresh plates of lust each day through every TV and computer screen in our nation. As a man, one of the most difficult battles I fight in life is against the culture that beckons me to objectify all women and lust after them. We men are taught—if only passively—that women are sex symbols, things to pant at.
This encouragement of lust, has done severe damage to our own hearts. It’s difficult to deny that. It has also led to a tremendous backlash effect for women. Many women now feel pressured into living up to these false, lusted-after caricatures on the screens of entertainment. They think this is what men truly want, and so many women feel deeply unsatisfied with their own appearance or worth. These effects are especially rampant on middle school, high school and college campuses.
Everywhere I go I see teenagers who naively give into this idea that their worth is directly tied into how sexually appealing they appear to others. Go to any mall and the majority of the girls dress in ways that surely don’t proclaim their true worth.
The hidden beast in this whole mess, pornography, is slowly destroying the very backbone of our culture, the family. Pornography is the ultimate embodiment of lust. It is the easiest, most private way to objectify and use another person’s body and because of this, has done the most damage to families. The statistics show that the majority of men—and a large percentage of Christian pastors—have looked at, or are addicted to pornography.
Many sociologists have gone into much greater depths, but the widespread acceptance of pornography is definitely one of the largest chunks of coal in our furnace of cultural lust.
More than at any other time in human history, it is easier and quicker to objectify others lustfully through all forms of media.
I’m sure none of this is terribly new to you. You know all of this. You see the TV shows and websites, you see the broken families, and you see the lustful eyes. I’m sure you’ve read some of the countless articles decrying the moral decline of our culture. The question is, how do you react?
Most people react to these claims either by ‘rolling with the times’ and being apathetic about the whole thing or by declaring war on culture and becoming Puritanical, thereby rejecting all things sexual.
However Christ does neither. Jesus spoke adamantly about the wrongness of even looking at a woman lustfully; He equated it with adultery. But at the same time His voice was behind the erotic Song of Songs. The Bible constantly paints the Christian life as a form of marriage, as a Wedding Feast. So what is Jesus’ true position? In the midst of all of the trouble explained above, why does Jesus step in and claim lust is wrong? And what does He offer instead?
In response to the question of lust’s wrongness, the replies I hear from many of my male friends include:
“We’re just men; we were made to enjoy looking at women” or “It doesn’t hurt to look. You’re not doing anything wrong unless it becomes physical.”
I would respond only with this answer, “Actually it does hurt. Lust is wrong. Its hurts your very humanity, your very soul; if you could only see the damage being done to your heart. Each glance of lust towards a woman affects you deeper than you know. It reverberates all the way back to the way you look at your own wife. Lust is vicious foremost because it objectifies other people. You ‘take’ from them and use their body for your own mental satisfaction, for your own enjoyment. And when you do this, it becomes impossible to have real, full relationships with anyone else. Everyone else becomes a means to your own desires. Likewise, it is impossible to fully love your own spouse if at the same time you are objectifying others.”
When Jesus rejects lust, He doesn’t reject it as a finger-shaking disciplinarian out to suck out all of life’s pleasure. He says it as a God who wants his sons and daughters to live fully whole lives. He’s like a father who sees his child playing with rocks in the Toy’s-R-Us parking lot. He tells him to put down the rocks not because they make him dirty or because they may scratch him—though both are surely true. He tells his child to stop messing with the rocks because something infinitely better is awaiting him.
To put it another way, Frederick Buechner says lust is “the craving for salt of a man who is dying of thirst”. God is not telling us to stay away from salt because He’s mean. He’s telling us to stay away from salt because not only will it not satisfy, it will make us more parched than we already are. And beyond that, He tells us this as He’s offering us a cold glass of water instead!
Instead of lust, Jesus offers to make our eyes and hearts pure. That is, if we will let him. He offers to form us into the humans He created us to be.
It’s very hard to embrace this offer blindly. Lusting after a women or looking at pornography seems so delightful and satisfying. Yet somewhere deep we know it is ultimately empty. Lust always craves more. It is never truly satisfied.
I yearn to ask many of my friends: “Have you ever wondered what it is like to live without lusting after other women? Have you ever tasted the glory of that type of life? Do you know what that’s like; have you ever seriously dreamed of what life would be like beyond lust? Think about it.”
Most young men have been cultured to see a girl and immediately think, “sex.” What would happen if instead they thought, “Sister! Woman of worth! Beautiful one!”? The world would change. If all of us men saw the inherent value and worth of every woman, we would then see the value and worth of each homeless person, each person suffering with AIDS, or each person struggling with homosexual tendencies. We would see the value and worth of each child in the womb of its mother.
This is the point that Pope Benedict XVI made in his last encyclical, “Caritatis In Veritate (Charity In Truth)“: Most of the world’s problems boil down to the simple fact that the dignity and worth of the human person is not fully recognized.
The Catholic Church has been proclaiming this for quite some time.
I would guess that the majority of those brothers and sisters saturated in lust would agree with this statement as well, at least on the surface. The problem is that their heart disagrees with them. They claim that each person has worth, yet their heart sucks that worth away from people each time they undress that person in their mind.
The previous Pope, John Paul II, devoted years towards these things I’m talking about above–purity of heart, chastity, and battling lust. He considered disordered love to be one of the greatest problems of mankind. He gave hundreds of talks on these subjects, which were collected into a series that are now known as the “Theology of the Body”. In this series he teaches that lust, sexual love, our bodies, and marriage all ultimately point to the fundamental question of our humanity–who are we as men and women? He answers that authentic manhood, womanhood, and love can only be fully understood in the context of Jesus and the love He offers.
For the world to change, hearts must change. And for hearts to change, lust must die. This process is called “chastening”. It leads to chastity, to purity. And it is often very, very difficult. Yet I believe it is the noblest, most honorable, most masculine thing that any person–especially young men–can do in today’s world.
I speak as a man who gave in for a long while towards all of the lust that the world offers. It’s very easy and satisfying. And even now, I’ll catch my eyes or my mind drifting towards things my heart has vowed to dismiss. But I have tasted it. I have tasted looking at someone with authentic eyes of love. And that taste is stronger than the daily temptation to “check-out” or lust after groups of women. For they are more than women to me now; each is a daughter of the King. Each is a “possible goddess” in the words of C.S. Lewis.
I strongly, strongly encourage anyone and everyone—especially young men who are on the frontlines of these battles—to intentionally pursue this purity of heart. Two of the best writers on this stuff are Christopher West—who has popularized Pope John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body” through many fantastic books—and the Protestant writer John Eldredge who, along with his wife Stasi, has spoken worth and authentic sexuality into many men and women.
I believe that God created us to be pure. And I believe that when we pray for His Kingdom to come to Earth in the Lord’s Prayer, part of that is us praying for His purity to saturate all of our hearts. May us men never glance at a woman with lust; may we rather die than do so. And may the women of the world—our sisters—comprehend their true worth and magnificent value.
Pope John Paul II said, “As goes the family, so goes the world.” I would take that one step further and say “As goes authentic love and the dismissal of lust, so goes the family, and so goes the world.” I’m out to change the world, as we all should be, and this is one of the largest hurdles to authentic change. But with large hurdles comes great hope, and I believe in the powerful, explosive energy of the God of the Universe. What greater hope than He?
He can do this in each of us if we let Him. Invite Him to mold your heart. Honor all people for the wonders that they are.