Satan loves to attack us by throwing accusations in our face. This tactic is powerful because whatever lie he may use feels like truth. Without realizing it, we begin living as if the lie really is true, and it creates a fog over our vision—a fog that can derail our progress toward freedom from lust, if we let it.
Lies are devastating because they feel real. They can come in various forms through various means, some of which may seem highly credible. It may even simply be a question we think we’re asking ourselves. In reality, however, it’s a doubtful seed Satan plants in our hearts to weaken our confidence in Christ and awaken our suspicion that God is not good.
Neil Anderson, founder of Freedom Life Ministries and author of the bestselling book The Bondage Breaker, says,
When your feelings of remorse pound you into the ground and drive you from God, you are being accused by Satan. Resist it. But when your sorrow draws you to confront Christ and confess your wrong, you are being convicted by the Spirit. Yield to it through repentance.
Anderson goes on to say, “Don’t believe anything Satan says about you; believe everything God says about you.”
Unless we clear out the fog of lies, we inevitably fall right back into the bondage we were just set free from.
After all, sin originated with a lie and with Adam and Eve believing it. They agreed with the serpent that they could define good and evil for themselves instead of agreeing with what God had already called good and evil.
Unlike they thought, however, eating the fruit made them bondage to the serpent’s corruption; it didn’t allow them to create a new good and evil. Like two people entering a contract together, agreeing on the terms and conditions, believing Satan’s lies are like entering a contract with him, agreeing to his terms and his conditions. It only leads to bondage.
But as we identify different lies we believe, we can break agreement with Satan’s terms and make agreement with God’s terms, instead. We can come out of the fog that causes us to stumble around in failure.
I have learned that even if I am living in greater victory than ever before, Satan will continue throwing accusations at me. Finding lasting freedom means dealing with those accusations so they don’t become the terms of life I agree to. Following is how I have personally dealt with three specific lies I have faced.
“God is disappointed in me after I sin.”
I often thought of the verse where Jesus said, “Be ye perfect, even as I am perfect.” God must be disappointed in me, I would think, because I am not yet being perfect.
It is true God calls us to a transformed way of life. That is why the answer is not to resign to struggling with moral failure over and over again. Christ offers so much more than continual ups and downs. He offers abundant life and freedom! (See Jn. 10:10, 8:36)
But the fact that we go down, that we may “fail to obtain the grace of God,” does not mean God is disappointed in us. He still loves us as a father loves his disobedient child. He is grieved, yes! But not disappointed.
So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us. –1 John 4:16-19
God is love. If what I am feeling makes me afraid, it is not of God. There is no fear in love.
In Isaiah 66:13, God says that as a mother comforts her child, so He comforts us. God does not push us away because of our sin. Otherwise, He would not have died for us while we were still sinning against Him (see Ro. 5:8).
God lowered Himself to the level of His creation, and then died for us, all while we were living in sin.
What is God doing when you are looking at that website or lying in bed masturbating? He is breaking through the Heavens and nailing Himself to the Cross. Why? So you can have a relationship with Him even though your sin has made you completely unworthy of being in His presence.
I realize, now, that God is not disappointed in me. Grieved, yes! But He wants me. And He is moving toward me despite my sin. The question is, will I respond to Him in repentance and obedience?
“I must be really messed up if I struggle so much to gain victory.”
Perhaps this lie is fostered primarily from silence in the church. I don’t think people intend to foster a lie, neither do I think everyone intentionally stays silent. But it is incredibly easy to quit sharing failures and struggles in the church.
We know we should be able to live better, and many people respond to one’s struggles by simply quoting verses or reciting platitudes we already knew to be true. Soon all we ever talk about are shallow testimonies, requests for prayer dealing with health issues, and other trivial stuff.
Whatever sin we are struggling with at the time feels as if it is unique to us because no one else ever shares about failing with it. We must be really messed up, right?
But Paul says in Corinthians we are not tempted in any way that others are not also tempted. Furthermore, he says God will not let us be tempted beyond our ability to flee the sin (1Co. 10:13).
I realize, now, I am no more messed up than the man sitting next to me. Yes! We are a “messed-up” creation. We have turned away from God and His fabulous design. But I don’t have to let Satan accuse me of being uniquely messed up, because I’m not. What I am struggling with is common to everyone.
“The fact that I feel aroused must mean I am alive to my flesh.”
The attraction to women and the desire to express oneself sexually to a lady, and the ecstasy that comes with such expression, is not the result of pornography. It is the result of how God designed men, albeit mysterious.
King Solomon touched on it when he said there are four things he does not understand. Even though he is called the wisest man who ever lived, one of the few things he could never quite figure out was the way of a man with a virgin (Prov. 30:18-19). God has built within us men a powerful attraction to our female counterparts, a deep compulsion to go and make ourselves one with such beauty.
When we look at pornography and then masturbate, we are merely responding to natural instincts. That doesn’t justify anything! But understanding how we are wired does help us clarify what we are dealing with when we struggle with sexual sin.
Many things play into sexual arousal. Smell, touch, emotion, sound all play a part of exciting our senses and injecting a sense of pleasure deep inside our bodies. Most men, however, are sexually aroused primarily by sight.
Women aren’t necessarily aroused this way. One in three are. And sometimes, because of the brokenness of our sexuality, a person may feel more aroused by the same sex; not the opposite. For most women, however, arousal takes place in a combination of emotional security and physical affection; not sight.
Sometimes people can make one feel like a pervert just for being visually aroused.
“Control your dirty mind,” is often what they say. Women don’t always struggle with imagining images of men, so it can be difficult for them to understand why men would imagine such of them. Furthermore, there are lots of dirty minds out there.
But dirty minds aside, we as men still find ourselves sexually aroused when we see an unclothed woman. God made us as men to be aroused by sight. That is why many of us first discovered pornography as young boys—a suggestive magazine cover piques our curiosity and we impulsively reach for more without realizing what’s happening.
I realize, now, it possible to be at a place where I can walk down a beach and not want to look at the nakedness around me. In other words, even when I am assaulted by arousing images, it’s possible to flee without getting entangled in sexual sin.
But I don’t think it will ever be possible to do that without feeling at least some sense of sexual arousal in the process. Arousal is not the sin. God designed us to be aroused by sight, which is why we probably shouldn’t make a habit of hanging out at beaches, in the first place.
Finding Freedom Is a Process, Not a One-Time Act
Deception is one of the enemy’s most powerful ways of keeping you and me in bondage to his perverted alternatives of God’s design for our sexuality. His lies feel incredibly real.
I am learning to evaluate the source of my thoughts by seeing where they are going to lead me. Then I can disagree with Satan’s lies and agree with God’s Truth about myself, about life, and about God. I will face consequences for the terms I agree with. Agreeing with Satan’s terms reap bondage. Agreeing with God’s terms reap freedom.
One of my greatest struggles was understanding that renouncing lies doesn’t necessarily free me completely right away. This isn’t a once-and-done act. Sometimes we approach habitual sins as if some “magic” prayer or conference will finally take care of all our struggle. But it doesn’t always work that way, and that’s okay.
We struggle with this sin because of wrong habits we have developed, as well as wrong terms we have agreed to. Maybe our agreements were caused by emotional wounds; maybe we simply believed thoughts the enemy put in our minds. Either way, just as this sin has become a habit in our life, believing truth will also need to become a habit in our life as we journey toward freedom.
Don’t go another day strangled in the net of lust. I’ve found that if life feels confusing and the path to victory clouded over, I am probably being bombarded by lies. Taking time to identify them and replacing them with Truth takes me to a deeper level of freedom.
Have you faced these lies in your journey to freedom from lust? Are there other thoughts you deal with that, after reading this article, you feel might actually be lies? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
