A desire for purity in the face of passive prayer.
When you’re sexually tempted, do you find it hard in your mind to say no to the image and try to think vigorously about images with another connotation that destroys the seductive image?
- For if you live according to the flesh.
- You will die; But if by the Spirit you kill the acts of the body.
- You will certainly live (Romans 8.
- 13).
Many believers think they are fighting temptation when they pray for deliverance and expect desire to disappear. It is very passive, yes, God works in us both wanting and performing, according to His goodwill!But the result is, “Have I developed your salvation with fear and trembling?”(Fil 2: 12-13). Taking your eyes out may be a metaphor, but it expresses a violent attitude. The brain is a “muscle” that we must exercise in search of purity, and the brain of the believer is strengthened by the power of the Spirit of Christ.
This means that we must not yield more than five seconds to an image or sexual impulse, before throwing a violent counterattack into our minds It is true!Five seconds. In the first two seconds we say, “No, get out of my head!”In the next two seconds we shouted, “O God, in the name of Jesus, help me. Release me now. I’m yours.
That is a good start. But the real battle is just beginning, it is a battle of the mind. The real need is to throw the image and the impulse out of the mind, in what way? Bring to mind a counter-image that exalts Christ and captivates the soul. You will have to fight. Push, attack, don’t reduce effort. It must be such a powerful image that others will not survive it. There are thoughts and images that destroy lust.
For example, in the first five seconds of the temptation, did you ever demand that your spirit stand firm in the form of Jesus Christ crucified? Imagine this: you just saw a girl in a see-through top that motivated you to fantasize. You have five seconds. Get out of my head. Oh God help me !? Now, do you demand that your mind fix its contemplation on the cross of Christ? the Holy Spirit can do it. Use all your imaginative power to see the wounded side of our Lord. Thirty-nine lashes left little meat intact. The body of the Lord rises and falls, because of his breath, on the vertical beam of the cross. Each breath introduces fragments into the lacerated flesh. The Lord gasps. Sometimes he moaned, in excruciating pain. He tries to move on the wood, but the nails stop him, jamming his wrists and striking the nerve endings. He groans in great agony and tries to move his feet to ease his wrists a bit. Yet the bones and nerves of his pierced feet clench in agony, so he moans again. There is no relief. His throat is dry with groans and thirst. You are losing your breath and you think you have choked. And suddenly your body sighs for air and all wounds hurt. In intense anguish, he forgets the six-centimeter crown of thorns and, in despair, leans his head back, striking one of the perpendicular spines against the crossbar, causing it to penetrate his head. Her voice echoes a high-pitched tone of pain, and sobs pour out of her body, pierced and aching as each moan brings more and more pain.
I don’t think about that T-shirt now. I’m on Calvary, these two images are incompatible. If you use the vigour of your brain to search for and fix yourself – with all the power of your reflection – images of the crucified Christ, with the same creative energy that you use in sexual fantasies, you will annihilate these fantasies. But you have to start, in the first five seconds and don’t give up.
So my question is: are you struggling, instead of just praying and waiting and trying to avoid it? It is image versus image. It is a mental conflict, relentless and continuous, it is not enough to pray and wait. Join me in this bloody conflict to keep your body and mind pure for the Lord, for my wife and for the church. Has Jesus suffered more than one can imagine, to purify, for him, a people exclusively his? Titus 2. 14). Was every cry and sigh of Jesus meant to kill my lust? “To bear our sins on his body, so that we, dead to sins, can live by righteousness?” (1 P 2, 24).
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