Well hi there. It's been a little while. I've missed the keyboard. I've missed the blog. I've missed writing. I miss thinking. Hopefully my brief hiatus hasn't put a halter on the cognitive juices too severely.
Anyway, to kick off my first post of the school year, I wanted to re-post something that I wrote at the beginning of last summer for a blog on which my friends and I were collaborating. The blog topic was general meditations on our fight for sexual purity: physical and mental. I wrote this at the end of May, and was encouraged as I re-read it to see the Spirit moving in my heart to lead me to communicate thoughts that I had forgotten about. I hope it ministers to you, and as always, leave a comment and let me know what you think!
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I wanted to write a little bit tonight, so I thought I would just share a few personal thoughts I've had recently in my battle against lust.
The short of what I want to say is that looking at the summer seems incredibly difficult and insurmountable in terms of conquering sin. As we all know, it is probably not the most helpful way to approach the idea of the battle by thinking in terms of how much we have to accomplish. First, we can't accomplish anything at all anyways (John 15:5). Second, when trying to fight sin in the power of the Spirit, waging war against the whole world is never helpful because God is not making us face the whole world at once. Similarly, we ought not try to conquer the summer's worth of temptations every day, because we only have each day and each task immediately put in front of us! It is very good to care and to be sobered by the deceitfulness of sin and the power of the slippery slope of one more indulgence, but only thing that we should understand as the overarching reality is the Jesus defeated it ALL on the cross so that we wouldn't have to. This is why we can have confidence that if we take the necessary steps of gouging out our eyes and cutting off our hands in this regard, we can truth that the Spirit will empower us to see God as supreme and totally worth abstaining from a hit of porn or replayed nude images that enter and take residence in our minds.
We gotta just take our time and really dig in deep to our relationship with our heavenly Father and trust that He is the refuge of the One who diligently seeks Him!
DSN
I am seeing the Lord work in me a quieter spirit of trust. Put anything in the place of your specific topic, like anger or greed or any other form of self-worship, and your conclusion is the same. "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof."
ReplyDeleteLove,
Mom
Thanks, David. I'm particularly tempted to anxiety over finances right now, and your observations are helpful with that. I don't have to meet a year's worth of financial obligations every day--I just need to trust God as I plan for the next payment due date in my stack of bills.
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