Topic : Lust

C. S. Lewis spins a remarkable story in The Great Divorce about a little red lizard that a certain ghost carries on his shoulder. The lizard twitches its tail and whispers continually to the ghost, who urges him all the while to be quiet. When a bright and shining presence appears and offers to rid the ghost of his troublesome “baggage,” the ghost refuses. He understands that to quiet the beast it is necessary to kill it.

Then a series of rationalizations begins. Perhaps the lizard need not die but can instead be trained, suppressed, put to sleep, or gotten rid of gradually. The presence responds that the gradual approach is useless in dealing with such beasts—it must be all or nothing. Finally, with the ghost’s permission, the presence twists the lizard away from him breaking its back as he flings it to the ground. Then an amazing thing happens. The ghost becomes a perfect man, and at the same moment the lizard becomes an incredibly beautiful silver and gold stallion, full of beauty and power. Then the man leaps astride the great horse, and they ride into the morning as one.

Lewis ends his story with these words: “What is a lizard compared with a stallion? Lust is a poor, weak, whimpering, whispering thing compared with that richness and energy of desire which will arise when lust has been killed.”

From Bad Beginnings to Happy Endings, by Ed Young (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publ., 1994), p.107.

While my wife and I were shopping at a mall kiosk, a shapely young woman in a short, form-fitting dress strolled by. My eyes followed her.

Without looking up from the item she was examining, my wife asked, “Was it worth the trouble you’re in?”

Drew Anderson, (Tucson, AZ), Reader’s Digest

Mr. Spurgeon once made a parable. He said,

There was once a tyrant who summoned one of his subjects into his presence, and ordered him to make a chain. The poor blacksmith—that was his occupation—had to go to work and forge the chain. When it was done, he brought it into the presence of the tyrant, and was ordered to take it away and make it twice the length. He brought it again to the tyrant, and again he was ordered to double it. Back he came when he had obeyed the order, and the tyrant looked at it, and then commanded the servants to bind the man hand and foot with the chain he had made and cast him into prison.

“That is what the devil does with men,” Mr. Spurgeon said. “He makes them forge their own chain, and then binds them hand and foot with it, and casts them into outer darkness.” My friends, that is just what drunkards, gamblers, blasphemers—that is just what every sinner is doing. But thank God, we can tell them of a deliverer. The Son of God has power to break every one of their fetters if they will only come to Him.

Moody’s Anecdotes, pp. 48-49

My wife told me one day that she had just come from a friend’s house where one of the children, a little boy, had been cutting something with a knife, and it had slipped upward and put out his eye, and his mother was afraid of his losing the other. Of course, after that my wife was careful that our little boy, two years old, shouldn’t get the scissors, or anything by which he could harm himself. But prohibit a child from having any particular thing, and he’s sure to have it; so one day our little fellow got hold of the scissors. His sister seeing what he had, and knowing the rule, tried to take the scissors from him, but the more she tried the more he clung to them. All at once she remembered that he liked oranges, and that there was one in the next room. Away she went and back she came: “Willie, would you like an orange?”

The scissors were dropped, and he clutched the orange. God sometimes takes away the scissors, but He gives us an orange. Get both your feet into the narrow way; it leads to life and joy; its ways are ways of pleasantness, and all its paths are peace. It is the way of victory, of peace; no gloom there; all light.

Moody’s Anecdotes, p. 30

I’ve learned that if you give a pig and a boy everything they want, you’ll get a good pig and a bad boy.

From Live and Learn and Pass it On, Jackson Brown, Jr.

• Sanctity of Life, C. Swindoll, Word, 1990, pp. 57ff

Thomas Costain’s history, The Three Edwards, described the life of Raynald Ill, a fourteenth-century duke in what is now Belgium.

Grossly overweight, Raynald was commonly called by his Latin nickname, Crassus, which means “fat.” After a violent quarrel, Raynald’s younger brother Edward led a successful revolt against him. Edward captured Raynald but did not kill him. Instead, he built a room around Raynald in the Nieuwkerk castle and promised him he could regain his title and property as soon as he was able to leave the room.

This would not have been difficult for most people since the room had several windows and a door of near-normal size, and none was locked or barred. The problem was Raynald’s size. To regain his freedom, he needed to lose weight. But Edward knew his older brother, and each day he sent a variety of delicious foods. Instead of dieting his way out of prison, Raynald grew fatter. When Duke Edward was accused of cruelty, he had a ready answer: “My brother is not a prisoner. He may leave when he so wills.” Raynald stayed in that room for ten years and wasn’t released until after Edward died in battle. By then his health was so ruined he died within a year…a prisoner of his own appetite.

- Dave Wilkenson

Thomas Costain, The Three Edwards.

Lust is not the result of an overactive sex drive; it is not a biological phenomenon or the by-product of our glands. If it were, then it could be satisfied with a sexual experience, like a glass of water quenches thirst or a good meal satisfies appetite. But the more we attempt to appease our lust, the more demanding it becomes. There is simply not enough erotica in the world to satisfy lust’s insatiable appetite. When we deny our lustful obsessions, we are not repressing a legitimate drive. We are putting to death an aberration. Lust is to the gift of sex what cancer is to a normal cell. Therefore, we deny it, not in order to become sexless saints, but in order to be fully alive to God, which includes the full and uninhibited expression of our sexual being within the God-given context of marriage.

Richard Exley, quoted in Homemade, Vol. 13, No. 9, September, 1989

Radio personality Paul Harvey tells the story of how an Eskimo kills a wolf. The account is grisly, yet it offers fresh insight into the consuming, self-destructive nature of sin.

First, the Eskimo coats his knife blade with animal blood and allows it to freeze. Then he adds another layer of blood, and another, until the blade is completely concealed by frozen blood. Next, the hunter fixes his knife in the ground with the blade up. When a wolf follows his sensitive nose to the source of the scent and discovers the bait, he licks it, tasting the fresh frozen blood. He begins to lick faster, more and more vigorously, lapping the blade until the keen edge is bare. Feverishly now, harder and harder the wolf licks the blade in the arctic night. So great becomes his craving for blood that the wolf does not notice the razor-sharp sting of the naked blade on his own tongue, nor does he recognize the instant at which his insatiable thirst is being satisfied by his OWN warm blood. His carnivorous appetite just craves more—until the dawn finds him dead in the snow!

It is a fearful thing that people can be “consumed by their own lusts.” Only God’s grace keeps us from the wolf’s fate.

Chris T. Zwingelberg