“For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies. These are the things which defile a man, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile a man.” Matthew 15:19-20
You can’t be tempted by something you don’t desire. Or, to state the case in the positive, you are tempted only by what you desire. I, for example, have no desire to see anyone dead, so I am not tempted to murder. I don’t long for wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, so I am never tempted to buy Powerball lottery tickets. But I do on occasion desire sexual satisfaction from sinful sources, and so I am tempted to look at porn and to masturbate. I wish this wasn’t so, but it is what it is, as they say. I have a heart problem.
In the Bible, the heart refers to the seat of the affections, desires and passions, as well as of wisdom and understanding. Jesus says the heart, my heart, your heart, is where adultery and sexual immorality (fornication) start. When you and I are tempted by something wicked on the outside, it’s because we have a corresponding wicked desire on the inside. That desire might be small, and we might not want to acknowledge it or to tell anyone about it, but it is there in our heart all the same.
This truth from Jesus has practical implications for our walk with the Lord today. For example, I can cruise through the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, see the dealers and the addicts, the deals going down, but I’m not tempted to crack down my window and score a pound of Acapulco Gold. I don’t desire to get high, so the drug that takes me there has no appeal to me. But there are places in every city where women dress immodestly in the summer. There are sites online where nudity, adultery, sexual immorality and all manner of sexual deviancy are on display, easily found, and free for me to enjoy all on my lonesome. I am tempted to visit these sites because I desire illicit sexual satisfaction. I don’t desire it as much as I used to, but somewhere in my heart there lingers a desire for porn and masturbation. I wish it didn’t, but wishing it away doesn’t make it vanish.
Knowing that porn and masturbation are heart problems helps me stay sexually pure today. I guard my eyes with porn-blocking software on all my devices, so that my eyes won’t see what my heart desires. I take every wicked thought captive. When I see something pornographic or inappropriate, I bounce my eyes away. I am encouraged to have discovered that this process gets easier with practice. Just this morning, before I started writing this post to you, I received an unsolicited email from a stranger, with this message: “Hi, this is Anna. I am sending you my intimate photos as I promised.” Anna kindly included a link for me to click on. Was I tempted? Yes. For one quarter of one sixteenth of one second. But did I click? No. My desire to please my Lord outweighed my desire to pleasure myself. The Lord is transforming my heart. He will transform yours, too, when you ask.
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