How to Overcome Sexual Temptation Part 3: Hope Faith Love
In this installment, we will go back to the basic. How does Christianity 101 have to do with an advanced topic such as overcome sexual temptations?
The concepts behind familiar words such as faith, hope, and love have a lot to do with it.
We are to be careful so we don’t say these words so carelessly that we forget their real meaning, or by hearing them too much we became too numb to conduct any meaningful contemplation on these words.
The more we are filled with faith, hope, and love, the more we will find it easy to set ourselves apart for God.
A brief overviews of faith, hope, and love
Do you know that your level of faith is proportional to your level of accomplishments in life? If you try to do something without putting real faith into it, you will never reach your full potential. Similarly, you will never experience true freedom from sin if you don’t really believe that freedom is yours to have.
Your behavior and attitude will stand in your way if you mentally agree with something, but not really believe it with your whole heart. And you if you don’t even agree with it, you will never take the first step.
Hope. It can give you endurance that is comparable to steel. When politicians fail the people, they often talk about the future so the people will endure poverty and chaos of the present.
It’s like the network marketing industry. Most people in a NM company don’t make money, but rather, lose money to yet another conference, yet another training course, and yet another “business expense”, but the stars on top will keep pointing them at the beautiful future so the representatives will stay with the company.
Hope works!
The examples I used might sound negative, but without hope, we can do nothing.
24But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? Romans 8:24
Everything that takes more than the present to accomplish requires hope. A college student spend years and big money on school because he has a hope: to graduate and find a job with his degree.
Developers spend years to build a skyscraper because they hope to make money. Oil companies take risk and time to detect an oil mine, negotiate with the local government, and invest in major equipments in hope of making profit many years later.
Suppose you are a single Christian. What can keep you from satisfying your sexual need with premarital sex or casual dating? It’s hope. If you have a hope of marrying the best person ever, you will feel worth it to preserve your purity for that special someone. You will find strength to endure until the time come.
We will talk more about marriage and intimate relationship in the next installment.
And finally, love
Love has many facets. One of that is repulsiveness to lust. If you have god’s love in you, it will repel lust. If love and lust share the same room, they will fight until only one remains.
Let’s take a full look at the biblical love:
4Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 1 Corinthians 13: 4-7
Where there are impatience, unkindness, envy, boastfulness, pride… or any other antithesis of love, there are cracks for lust to creep in.
To excel in one thing requires excellence in everything. Virtues support each other. Purity requires other virtues to stay strong.
If you have read previous installments of this series, you should note that I mentioned a fateful night when I fell into lust, and experienced self-arousal for the first time at 24 years of age.
What happened before that night that lead to my downfall?
In the year that lead to THE night of downfall…
…I had kept record of wrongs of fellow Christians. I had involved in gossips that contaminated my spiritual well being. I was burned out in school because of self-imposed expectation and regrets. I had made many complains. I had been negative toward life. I had been careless with worldly things such as cable TV. I had harbored angers. I had intense fears.
Collectively, these were probably what set up the fall for me.
A Christian should always be joyful. I had lost my joy. My love was not pure and strong.
When a Christian loses his love and joy, addictions and sin will set in. Why? because the joy of the Lord is our strength (Neh 8:10), and that love unites all virtues (Col 3:14).
Without joy, you have a void. It’s hard to not find something to fill a void. The longer that void exist, the more likely you will find indulgences to fill it.
Without love, all other virtues will start to disintegrate, and every defenses against temptations will crumble.
Coming Next
I will further delve into the concepts of faith, hope, and love, and explain how we can apply them while we are yearning for intimate relationship. A healthy Christian relationship and sweet fellowship with brothers and sisters will complete our defenses against lust. Coming next: Romance, marriage, desire, and intimacy.
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