May the mumbling commence!
God is love. On this, the Scriptures are clear. What is the opposite of love? The first answer that comes to my mind is hatred. But the devil knows the true opposite of love. The opposite of love is deceptive – as is anything that the devil promotes. The opposite of love in some small insignificant ways is akin to love.
The opposite of love is lust. That says it best. And it means that, as a country and a world, we are in trouble. Read from Second Peter chapter one:
He has by his own action given us everything that is necessary for living the truly good life, in allowing us to know the one who has called us to him, through his own glorious goodness. It is through him that God's greatest and most precious promises have become available to us men, making it possible for you to escape the inevitable disintegration that lust produces in the world and to share in God's essential nature.
For this very reason you must do your utmost from your side, and see that your faith carries with it real goodness of life. Your goodness must be accompanied by knowledge, your knowledge by self-control, your self-control by the ability to endure. Your endurance too must always be accompanied by devotion to God; that in turn must have in it the quality of brotherliness, and your brotherliness must lead on to Christian love.
If you have these qualities existing and growing in you then it means that knowing our Lord Jesus Christ has not made your lives either complacent or unproductive. The man whose life fails to exhibit these qualities is short-sighted – he can no longer see the reason why he was cleansed from his former sins. (Verses 3-9)
Through Jesus Christ, God has given us everything that we need to live a godly life. God has opened an escape route, a U-turn, in our lives. From what do we turn? We turn from lust that the world produces in great quantities. And that lust inevitably leads to our disintegration.
Indeed, lust can lead to hatred. Lust can lead to envy. Lust can lead to theft. Lust can lead to adultery (in all its meanings in the Bible). Lust can lead to lies. Can you see a pattern here? It seems that lust in some way underlies the commission of sin in the breaking of the Ten Commandments that God handed down to us.
How horrid! How do we start our turn from lust?
1) Have faith in God and in Jesus.
2) Allow that faith in Jesus to saturate your life through the gift of the Holy Spirit, who will lead you into real goodness in life. The Holy Spirit will show the counterfeits for what they truly are – deceptions. That, by definition, is full repentance from sins.
3) Study the goodness that the Holy Spirit of God puts before you.
4) Learn self-control.
5) Endure!
6) Devote yourself totally to God. (It seems we’ve in some ways returned to step number one.)
7) Treat everyone as next-of-kin in your life.
8) Watch Christian love bloom in your life.
9) Cleanse your life. And repeat the process.
Turning from lust is a life-long journey. Without this journey in our lives, we will become focused too much on the things that are at our feet – and miss the curves in the narrow path before us. Without this journey in our lives, we will forget the reason for our cleansing and fail to fully repent – return to God in fullness of relationship.
Leave behind the many lusts of this world and take up Christian love.
Amen. May it be so.
Enough mumbling for now…
Peace Out
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