Love Restored - A 7-Day Plan from Dr. John KoesslerSample

In the middle of the last century, Dorothy Sayers observed, “The mournful and medical aspect of twentieth-century pornography and promiscuity strongly suggests that we have reached one of these periods of spiritual depression where people go to bed because they have nothing better to do.” According to her diagnosis, in some cases, sexual lust may be a symptom of another of the cardinal sins. It is the one that the ancients used to call acedia or sloth, a condition that sophisticates of another generation once called ennui. Indeed, all these sins are connected. It is a mistake to see them as distinct from one another. All the capital sins and the myriad of expressions of transgression that flow from them all flow from the same root.

But what is opposite of lust? What is the virtue that answers the sin of lust and is its antidote? If the essence of righteousness is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself, then the essence of sin must be the opposite (Matthew 22:37, 39). To sin is to love yourself at the expense of your neighbor. More than that, it is to love yourself at the expense of God. Sin-shaped love expresses itself primarily in the form of narcissism. It is self-absorbed love. This affection is a distortion of love that, once it has achieved its full effect, actually proves to be an exercise in self-loathing. It is hate masquerading as love, compelling us to engage in self-destructive behavior. Sin promises freedom and delivers slavery. It speaks the language of friendship while treating us like enemies. Sin is a cruel master who promises good wages only to reward our loyalty with hard service, disappointment, and death. For some reason, we return again and again to this false lover and expect a different result.

The answer to sinful lust is love—God’s love, which comes to us from the outside, like the righteousness of Christ. Adopting the language that Martin Luther used to speak of Christ’s righteousness, we might call it “alien love” because it does not originate with us. It is a love that begins with God and can come to us only as a gift. For the Christian, this greater love is the organizing force for all our other desires. In this regard, love is not so much an emotion as it is a disposition. We might call it a divinely empowered direction for our lives.

Our natural love is limited. The impediment of sin skews our interests in the direction of self. Jesus implies this in the second of the two great commandments, the command to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39; Mark 12:31, see also Leviticus 19:18, 34). We are by nature self-protective and self-interested. We are able, even in our natural state, to show some concern for others. We may inquire about the health of others when they are sick, or express sympathy when they are grieving. We might even sacrifice ourselves for someone else, offering what Abraham Lincoln called “the last full measure of devotion,” if we feel the cause is good enough (Romans 5:7). But the ability to love others to the same degree that we love ourselves is not natural. Our default orientation is skewed toward our desires. We will easily sacrifice the desires of others on the altar of our self-interest unless something more powerful moves those interests in a different direction.

What is true of lust is true of all the capital sins. Change may require discipline, but it does not begin with discipline. What is required is a miracle of grace. Redirection is necessary if we are to love others in the way that Jesus describes, but there is only one force powerful enough to turn the tide of our desire so that we are as interested in others as we are in ourselves. It is the power of God effected by His love for us. That is why the love that Jesus describes begins not with us but with God. We love others because we love God (1 John 4:21). We love God because God first loved us (1 John 4:10–11, 19).

Discussion Question:

From Matthew 5:27–32. How would you characterize the boundaries that Jesus sets for human sexuality in these verse? To what does He appeal as His authority for setting such boundaries?