An Interview on “Winning the War Against Lust” with John Piper; Founder & Teacher, .desiringgod.org
~~ Audio Transcript ~~
Winning the war against lust is by far the most common theme of all the emails we get in our inbox. Today’s question comes from an anonymous listener. “Hello, Pastor John. Thank you for taking my question! I am a female college student in Maryland, and I love listening to your podcast. Thank you for the encouragement and truth that you put out each week. My question is this: How exactly does one transform the way they think? The Bible talks about letting your mind be transformed, but I feel it’s not so cut and dry as it is laid out in Scripture. Lately, I’ve been struggling with lustful thoughts that make me feel very insecure and guilty. So how do I deal with this, especially in a sex-crazed culture? I want to fight the temptations. Every time a lustful thought occurs, I feel like I’ve let God down. How do I let my mind get transformed, as the Bible says, so that I can win this overwhelming and exhausting battle?”
“How exactly does one transform the way they think?” That’s where she starts. Let me pick up there. There are so many pieces to her words that I’m probably not going to touch on every one of them, but let me give our college-student friend in Maryland a simple two-part paradigm for transforming the way we think. Then I will try to fill it out with a few details.
Stay Fit
Let me use the analogy of becoming physically fit or physically transformed into fitness to illustrate how we may become spiritually or mentally transformed in fitness. Almost everybody would see the common sense of saying that if you want to be physically fit, there are two aspects of the process of transformation. I think these same two are going to apply spiritually. Let’s call them resistance and reception.
By resistance I mean the kinds of exercises that put your muscle under a great deal of unnatural strain. For example, you want your biceps to be stronger so you can lift heavier packages or lift light ones more easily. You curl a weight up and down — say ten, fifteen, or twenty pounds — and you do it enough times that on the last one, you can barely do it because the resistance is so strong against your bicep.
In that process of resistance, the bicep, ironically, becomes stronger. It’s strange that you make yourself look like an idiot, trembling and pulling and unable to pull it up for the tenth or twentieth time. But out of that weakness, a few weeks later — lo and behold — your bicep is stronger.
By reception I mean you receive healthy foods and sufficient sleep and a kind of activity that is not so much pushing against something, but rather welcoming right and good things into your body.
So there’s the analogy, and you can work with it and see if I’ve got it right physically, because I don’t know much about that. But it seems to work for me.