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Lust is a fact of human life, mine and yours.

It’s inside us, at times controls us. In it, is the power of life, and the power to destroy lives.

[Photo courtesy of msr via Flickr]

One author of the Proverbs, wanting to illustrate our insatiable and destructive lust for sex, wealth and power, put it this way:

Death and Destruction are never satisfied,
and neither are human eyes. — Proverbs 27:20 NIV

Here are fourteen things that scare me about lust…

1. Lust will lie quiet for a time to put me off my guard, and then suddenly inspire thoughts that, if acted on, I would regret for the rest of my life.
2. Lust is so insidious, that the Apostle Paul’s advice to his protégé, Timothy, was simply, “RUN!”
3. Lust drives people (especially men) to commit all kinds of sexual sins like: flirting with someone who isn’t your spouse, viewing porn, adultery, fornication, rape, paying for sexual services (prostitution), or entertainments (strip clubs), or even sex slavery (child exploitation).
4. Sexual sins like those above are often permanently destructive to marriages and families.
5. I’m always only one opportunity and one decision away from any of these sins.
6. No one plans to commit adultery, yet an estimated 30-60% of married people are unfaithful at some time during their marriage.
7. Most adulterers are men.
8. Adultery is almost commonplace in our cultural heroes, which tempts more husbands to rationalize and excuse it in themselves.
9. Women in our culture increasingly want to be perceived as sexy or hot, i.e. to appear sexually attractive to men.
10. Our culture’s obsession with sex seems to increase daily.
11. While loving one woman truly and faithfully, it’s possible to find many women personally interesting, that is, the type of person you’d want to date and get to know better if you weren’t, you know, married already.
12. While loving one woman truly and faithfully, it’s possible to find hundreds of women physically, i.e. sexually, attractive.
13. The sin of adultery would destroy my wife, Dawn, more than if I dropped dead today.
14. I’d probably never get over the guilt of that.

I’m sure I’ll want to say many things on my deathbed. But I already know the two that I most want to say:

“Hello Jesus, my savior, I belong to you.”

“Goodbye Dawn, my love, I never cheated on you.”

How do you guard against lust?

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