There’s a progression here. The loss of sensitivity and enjoyment often leads to what the scriptures call being given over to sensuality.12 The Greek word for sensuality is aselgeia. It’s the absence of restraint, an insatiable desire for pleasure. When our lusts get the best of us, they trap us. Whether it’s food, sex, shopping, whatever, what was supposed to fill the hole within us didn’t. It betrayed us. It owns us. And it always leaves us wanting more.
And so we’re
emptier lonelier hungrier more depressed.
“He hated her more than he had loved her.”
And so we go to the refrigerator and eat the whole box.
We go to the website and watch every clip. We buy one in every color. We take another.
And then we’re right back where we started. We’re momentarily satisfied, and then we experience letdown because it didn’t deliver what it promised.
Which of course leaves us wanting more. The passage in Ephesians calls it “greed”—the word pleion in Greek, which means “more,” combined with the word echo, which means “to have.”
We have to have more.
But when we get more, it leads to . . . more.
Lust does not operate on a flat line, as if we can give in and stay at the same level of consumption indefinitely. People who are not aware of what they’re dealing with will keep insisting that they’re fine and that they can stop at any time. But they’re “darkened in their understanding.” They’re operating under the assumption that lust can plateau at a certain level and simply stay there. But lust always wants more.
Which is why lust, over time, will always lead to despair. Which will always lead to anger.
Lust always leads to anger.
Sometimes it isn’t expressed on the outside because it turns inward. That’s depression. When it goes outward, it will often affect what a person indulges in—darker and darker expressions of unfulfilled desire mixed with contempt. Is that how someone ends up at leather and whips?13
Food or clothes or position or approval or power or sex—it grabbed us and said, “You are missing out until you have me.” And it was a lie. It promised us something. It claimed to be the answer.
But it wasn’t.
Lust says to us, “If you just had this, everything would be fine.”
But it’s not true. We wouldn’t be okay, and we have closets full of clothes to prove this. We thought that shirt and those pants would change the way we feel about our bodies, about how others perceive us, about how comfortable we are in our own skin. And then we got them and nothing changed, except the size of our bills.
Lust promises what it can’t deliver.14
Dark to Light
To be free from lust, we have to move from being darkened in our understanding to being enlightened in our understanding. And to be enlightened, we have to ask lots of questions about the things we crave:
What is this craving promising?
Can it deliver? Is this lust about something else? What is the lie here? Where is the good in this person or thing? Where is the good that has been distorted? What good thing has God made here that has been hijacked? Have I been tempted like this before? Have I given in before? What was it like? Did it work? Was I more satisfied or more empty? What will the moment, the morning, or the week after be like?
Is there a pattern here?
Maybe the most powerful thing we can do is simply to pray, “God, give me eyes to see the lie here.”
Perhaps you can relate to this progression and the lie and the ways we get hooked. Maybe you know exactly what I’m talking about because you’re in the middle of it right now. Something has got its tentacles wrapped around you, and you are having an impossible time getting free.
Happens all the time.
And so it feels like it’s you versus the craving. You against the addiction. Your brain and heart against your flesh.
I often meet people who say, “My battle against . . .” and then they name something that has them in its grip.
To be honest, if it’s us against the craving, we will often lose. It’s too hard. And what happens most of the time is we see ourselves fighting all alone against some temptation that is so strong it wins. Maybe we will win here or there, but those become the exceptions. And when we give in, it can start to feel pointless. Why resist today if tomorrow we won’t be able to?
There’s Something Else Going on Here
There’s a passage in the book of Ephesians where it’s written, “Those who have been stealing must steal no longer.”15
Which is quite straightforward—don’t steal. But the passage doesn’t end there. It continues: “but must work, doing something useful with their own hands.”
But it doesn’t there. It ends with: “that they may have something to share with those in need.”
On first read, the instructions seem as basic as it gets. But there is much going on here just below the surface.
First, the command doesn’t stop with the “don’t” part. The writer understands that that kind of instruction rarely helps. When we’re told not to do something, how often are we truly compelled not to do it, especially if we enjoy it? If it’s just me against the lust, the odds are already against me.
But there’s something else going on here.
Stealing involves large amounts of adrenaline. The rush of planning, pulling it off, not getting caught, getting something for nothing. And then there’s the expectation of next time. If we got something this significant for free, could we steal something even more valuable? What if we raised the stakes, hit a store with a better security system, tested ourselves? Stealing involves the senses, the intellect, a person’s fear threshold. It even has a powerful social dynamic. Stealing with someone creates powerful bonds between people. When our adrenaline is pumping, that’s a physiological phenomenon. It feels good because things are happening with the chemicals in our bodies, with our nerves and brain and bloodstream. If we do that enough, our bodies get used to it.
We could use the word addicted. A person gets addicted to it.
If you tell the person who’s stealing not to, and you leave it at that, you’ve taken something away, but you haven’t replaced it with anything. That’s why the instructions in Ephesians are so brilliant. The urging to stop stealing is followed by the command to have the person do “something useful with their own hands.” The word useful is the Greek word agathos, which is also translated “good” and “benevolent.”
Why does the writer mention the hands?
Because you steal with your hands. Stealing is a sensory experience, an adrenaline rush involving the hands. The command is to replace one adrenaline rush with another, a better one, one that’s good. But it doesn’t stop there. The command ends with the person who was stealing learning to do something good with their hands so that they can take care of the needs of someone else. Stealing is about taking from someone. This passage is about giving to someone who has less because you have more.
Stealing is the ultimate in being selfish.
Making something and giving it away is the ultimate in being generous.
This passage is about something central to what it means to be human: it’s about desire. It’s