There is a lot of darkness and dirt in our hearts that is not easily perceptible. All people are between light and darkness, and although there is still darkness in your heart, that yearning for light is actually the beginning of the light emerging in your life: He who works well in you will fulfill it on the day of Christ Jesus. But this requires a process, which is fraught with struggles.

The key is not speed, but the direction

Sexual crime is essentially intercourse with the wrong object of lust, which can occur on a practical level or in the imagination. The human heart is always using, abusing, and misusing God’s grace and other people, without caring about the purity of others, making otherwise good sex dirty and terrible. The victim feels guilty and ashamed of what others have done to her, and in the midst of all kinds of strange filth, there is unclean pain and unclean pleasure.

“is not an exclusively male issue. We must recognize that women are fully capable of committing the same sins as men. But sometimes men and women have different mentalities. The typical female mindset is usually to find love and relationships. I know many lesbians who have a strong desire for intimacy, and when they find that other women can satisfy them, they gradually erode the relationship. Porn sites may be a problem for many men, but romance novels may be women’s porn sites: only they appeal to romantic lust, not naked lust. The beautiful woman on the cover of the novel is wrapped around the strong arm of a man, loved and protected, which is one of the salvations given by the world.

Marriage does not solve sexual problems. Fear, guilt, and bad memories can all carry into marriage. Even though you no longer sin, guilt still haunts you, you feel like a damaged item with a discounted value. Christ’s redemption will work on all dark places, not just on lust, but on unholy suffering, on lack of intimacy, on anger that is vented through sex.

The darkness we face is wider and deeper than we think, and the battle is longer than we think. We often think of discipleship and counseling as quick-acting remedies for holiness, as if simply studying a verse, remembering justification by faith, and constantly gathering to hear the Word will solve the problem. When things are still the same, we are overwhelmed. Looking at history, you will see that God seems willing to work on His people over generations or even centuries. Because love is patience. When you put this truth personally, God is willing to spend decades working in your and my lives. A disciple is a lifelong learner. This is a battle that will last until the end, and there will be a glorious outcome in the end.

The process of sanctification is very diverse, and some people, like leaping antelopes, get rid of all kinds of filth at once. Maybe your life is more like walking smoothly, developing discipline, and learning step by step. There are also times when you struggle to move, and even sometimes you are crawling and moving forward with your fingernails. Do you know? That’s good too. What really matters is not distance or speed, but direction. Although sometimes you may not even be able to move, at least you are facing in the right direction—you face God and put your faith in God.

When Jesus says “repent,” He wants believers to spend their entire lives repenting. It’s amazing! We usually think of repentance as simple, as doing something wrong and turning back. Martin Luther’s statement is closer to the Bible, writing, “We are not yet what we should be, but we are growing toward it.” The process is not over but is ongoing. This is not the end, but the road. All this has not yet shone in glory, but it is being cleaned. ”  

2. Lust is just the exhaust valve that you drain from other pressures

The battle is wider than we think. Like a multiplex theater with a sign that says this week’s hit movie: a blockbuster of lust, with several plays inside, the battle is actually unfolding in multiple theaters at the same time. In my ministry to those struggling with sexual sin, I have found that they often breakthrough in other theaters, which in turn changes the outcome of their battle against sexual sin.

A 35-year-old single man who began a 20-year erotic struggle with his conversion at the age of 15. He is exposed to pornography and masturbation from time to time, sometimes up and down. I tried everything, including mutual accountability, memorization, prayer, fasting, and even strenuous exercise and cold showers, but I couldn’t get rid of it. He was discouraged, “Am I really a Christian? “Why work so hard?”

As his pastor, I didn’t want to tell him a bunch of things he tried but couldn’t, so I started with the simple question, “Can you make a note?” Write down when and under what circumstances you were tempted, try to find patterns, and if anything else is happening related to sexual crimes. ”

He laughed and said: “I already know the answer, I will only be weak on Friday or Saturday night. Because I had a tantrum with God. Surprised, he continued, “I come home from work every Friday and come back to my apartment alone, most of my single friends are out on dates, my married friends are spending the night with their wives, and I am the only one who is self-pitying.” At nine or ten o’clock in the evening, I would say to myself, ‘You can relax today, after all, God has deceived you.’ Then I fell.”

Many problems are breeding grounds for sexual crimes. This man didn’t just face lust, he had two thoughts, one thought, “I did all the right things, but God didn’t reward my wife, so I blamed Him.” On the other hand, he directed his guilt and accusations at himself: “I still haven’t overcome, if I win, I can get a wife!” God made him see that his life was built on fragility—a completely corrupt mentality that needed to be cleansed of trying to earn God’s reward for his performance.

We spend a lot of time dealing with his self-righteousness and longing for his wife than we do with pornography. Whether at the level of fantasy or behavior, lust is like the exhaust valve of a steam furnace to man. When a person encounters too much stress, failure, and frustration, he wants to find a false refuge and use sex to relieve it. This battle must expand, and “sex” is embedded in your whole life and is related to many other levels of problems. Normal stress in life should be dealt with by faith, not sin.
03. The dirtiest sins are actually the easiest to solve
The battle went deeper than we thought. Facing sexual sin is like playing a video game, you start with the lowest level, the enemy moves slowly, and you fly away in a few strokes. In level 2, enemies will get a little faster. When you reach level 42, enemies are elusive and fast, and you will lose many times. In sexual crimes, the primary enemies are the simplest, like adultery, and fornication, because they are obvious, in order to commit these crimes, you have to tell a lot of lies to hide your eyes, so to some extent they are relatively easy to get rid of.
The intermediate sin may be pornography. Pornography is more difficult to deal with than adultery because it is less detectable, and easy to obtain but harder to detect. Just go online and click the mouse a few times and delete the history. The more advanced ones may be lustful, more imperceptible, you don’t have to do anything, everything happens in the head, leaving no trace. Although you are not messing with others, you are also full of sin. As the battle progresses, there will be more and more imperceptible enemies.

This is true not only for active criminals but also for passive victims. Being in a masochistic relationship is difficult but relatively easy to escape and break. But it’s harder to really deal with the fear the other person throws at you, and it’s even harder to deal with fantasies of despair, hurt, and compensatory lust.

Above lust, there is also a situation: you are not looking for sin, but sin is looking for you. The woman in the advertisement who has almost no clothes comes to you, not you actively looking for her, you are tempted to see more. No one will be punished by the church for this, but this may be a difficult battlefield to solve.

To go up one level is to judge people’s subconscious account of their appearance, just as someOne Likes to Measurers by Wealth or Position. But what you have not about your nature. It is possible to cultivate a pure subconscious, but it takes a lot of prayer, reflection, struggle, repentance, and much wrestling with oneself before one can see the opposite sex as someone who needs to be cared for, cared for, and loved, and others as sisters, brothers, and friends, regardless of their appearance. Our view of sanctification must go deeper, and we must not stop adultery and pornography because we have stopped thinking that the problem is solved. The dirtiest sin that seems to be actually the easiest part to solve.

One of the profound truths about holiness is that, on the one hand, you are moving toward the light, with more love, joy, and faith than before; On the other hand, you are also aware of how deeply you are corrupted. In Calvin’s words, “We have the embers of evil in our hearts that will burn again at any moment.” “The deeper you go into sin, the more you realize that from the deepest sin we are basically the same, whether it is external behavior or imagination in our heads, whether it is lust or a second glance at something you shouldn’t see, or unknowingly judging human character. The deepest sin is not what you did, but why you did it.

04. We are all fighting, but the enemies are different

In the case of the 35-year-old man just mentioned, sexual desire was his true motive for committing the crime, but it was linked to other motives, including “I want to have a wife” and “God owes me a wife.” All idolatry is the replacement of God with something from creation. Man seeks refuge outside God. This is multi-layered idolatry. We may be very different from that man, but we also have the same idolatry.

Idol worship is about something you want and where you flee when life gets hard. Sexual crimes have many particular motives, and in addition to sexual desire, people sometimes commit this crime because they desire intimacy and to be loved. Many girls with a very messy sex life, the appearance is not outstanding, when the boys say to her “You are so beautiful, I love you so much”, although she knows that it is a lie, she is willing to be deceived, in order to experience the feeling of being loved.

Some people commit sexual crimes because they want to manipulate each other’s reactions sexually, and their deeper pleasure comes from being able to experience the feeling of manipulating each other sexually, and they are eager to seduce and play with others. There is also a desire for depraved obedience to authority, making it impossible to escape abuse. In addition, money is also one of the motives for sexual crimes, of course, not only the motives of prostitution, pornographers, and other direct targets of money but also more difficult to detect patterns. My church once had a single mom with financial constraints whose landlords allowed her to trade sex to offset rent. She didn’t like the landlord and thought he was dirty, but she was tempted financially.

If you’re counseling and disciplining such people, you’d better not assume that all temptations to commit sexual sin comes purely from sexual desire and that there is one last motive for sexual sin: revenge. I’ve seen a lot of sex crimes out of anger. For example, “You were unfaithful to me, so I went to sleep with your best friend”; A couple had bitterness toward each other after an argument, so the husband ran to watch, and the wife flirted with people online.

We have to deepen this battle, and then you will find that we are all fighting the same way. Some people fight with pride, some people fight with lust, some people fight with control, some people fight with the sense of chaos that is controlled, some people fight with anger, and some people fight with money worship.

05. Our goal is not just to stop crime

It is also important that we remember the goals of our battles. There are two common mistakes, one is to only set the goal as “stop crime” and “I haven’t been on sites for half a year”, and they think that this is what victory looks like. Another wrong goal is to target the conduit of grace and ignore the purpose of grace. It is as if the goal is simply to have accountability mechanisms, to memorize Scripture, or to go to a church that preaches the truth, not as a means to achieve the Lord’s goals.
The Lord’s goal is to renew our relationship with God so that we can love others. Yes, God wants you to stop sinning, but he wants you to have a real relationship with Him, need Him completely, and cry out to Him from the bottom of your heart. Blessed are the poor in heart, God has no interest in creating people who can be good citizens by self-control, but He wants people who need Him, love Him, seek Him, and take pleasure in Him. Then He calls us to love, “Please keep me from sinning, and help me to be a conduit of grace so that my faith may be expressed through love.”

Through this wonderful transformation, you will begin to be zealous in protecting the purity and happiness of others, you will no longer regard others as objects to satisfy the lusts of your eyes, you do not want to see them polluted by lust, and you certainly do not want to pollute them. You will long for your loved one to be holy.

This positive vision only uses three classifications of “family, spouse, threat” to look at each member of the opposite sex. In the case of men, for every woman I meet, only one is a spouse, and my sex life belongs only to her. My mother and daughter are my family, and in this corrupt culture, we will protect them from sexual sin. There is also a category called “threats” that may tempt me sexually. I should stay away from them, not be drawn to them. This helps people love each other and be safe with each other.
Now you have to think, what exactly is your struggle at the moment? Your current struggle is that you need Christ today to satisfy your content. He has put the gospel in you: “I will never leave you, I will never forsake you. “Let’s say the darkness in my life has been hurt by someone, so sex is scary for me. If He really never forsaken me, then there will really be light in my life. Or you are facing guilt because you have sinned a lot in your sexual life, and He is not surprised by your filth,

Now you have to think, what exactly is your struggle at the moment? Your current struggle is that you need Christ today to satisfy your content. He has put the gospel in you: “I will never leave you, I will never forsake you. “Let’s say the darkness in my life has been hurt by someone, so sex is scary for me. If He really never forsaken me, then there will really be light in my life. Or you are facing guilt because you have sinned a lot in your sexual life, and He is not surprised by your filth, He was born and died to wash away your filth, and “I will never forsake you” is what he says about your guilt.

If your problem is a temptation to flirt with others, if you are a predator, what does the phrase “I will never forsake you” mean to you? One of the meanings is to make you fear God. He can see all your work, and you can’t hide it. But there is another meaning: He is always there for you, and He will help you. If you look for Him, you will find Him. With a cry, He came.

Pray that God will show us the true face of this battle and help us understand all enemies, both obvious and hidden. Broadening our horizons allows us to deal with the ups and downs of the entire process of sanctification, helps us understand the breadth and depth of this battle, and helps us see our destination. We don’t want to just stop doing evil in our actions, we want good things. Most of all, Lord, let us meet you where we need to meet you.

and “I will never forsake you” is what he says about your guilt.

If your problem is a temptation to flirt with others, if you are a predator, what does the phrase “I will never forsake you” mean to you? One of the meanings is to make you fear God. He can see all your work, and you can’t hide it. But there is another meaning: He is always there for you, and He will help you. If you look for Him, you will find Him. With a cry, He came.

Pray that God will show us the true face of this battle and help us understand all enemies, both obvious and hidden. Broadening our horizons allows us to deal with the ups and downs of the entire process of sanctification, helps us understand the breadth and depth of this battle, and helps us see our destination. We don’t want to just stop doing evil in our actions, we want good things. Most of all, Lord, let us meet you where we need to meet you.