Purity Thursday: Harnessing Unrestrained Lust in the Battle for Purity

Installment #1:

Today (7/22/14) in Starbucks a guy comes in and is unashamedly looking at every girl/woman he can feast his eyes on. He moves around to check out the young girls at the table. He stares at the woman in line, stepping back a pace or two to get a better view. And on it goes. It’s obvious, repeated, unrestrained. I want to punch him in the mouth.

And it helps me. Seeing unrestrained lust in all its despicable ugliness – and thinking of my wife and daughters (I’m glad they weren’t at Starbucks today!) – made me want all the more to fight against lust in my own heart. This man seems to allow no sense of civility or respect for women to hinder his lust. I want to allow no sense of selfishness or lust to hinder my pursuit of purity and love.

I’m reminded of a powerful account in Richard Wurmbrand’s book, Tortured For Christ (35-36, emphasis added):

I often asked the torturers, ‘Don’t you have pity in your hearts?’ They usually answered with quotations from Lenin: ‘You cannot make omelets without breaking the shells of eggs,’ and ‘You cannot cut wood without making chips fly.’ I said again, ‘I know these quotations from Lenin. But there is a difference. When you cut a piece of wood it feels nothing. But here you are dealing with human beings. Every beating produces pain and there are mothers who weep.’ It was in vain. They are materialists. For them nothing besides matter exists and to them a man is like wood, like an eggshell. With this belief they sink to unthinkable depths of cruelty. 

The cruelty of atheism is hard to believe. When a man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil, there is no reason to be human. There is no restraint from the depths of evil that is in man. The Communists torturers often said, ‘There is no God, no hereafter, no punishment for evil. We can do what we wish.’ I heard one torturer say, ‘I thank God, in whom I do not believe, that I have lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart.’ He expressed it in unbelievable brutality and torture inflicted on prisoners. … 

I learned from them. As they allowed no place for Jesus in their hearts, I decided I would leave not the smallest place for Satan in mine.

This man in Starbucks has no hint of love or respect toward women in his heart. I want to have no hint of sexual immorality (Eph 5:3 NIV) in mine. “But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires” (Rom 13:14).