August 26
Overcoming Immorality, Pornography, and Lust – Part XVIII – Critical Transformations – Hating evil as God sees it
“Hate evil, you who love the LORD, Who preserves the souls of His godly ones; He delivers them from the hand of the wicked.” (Psalm 97:10)
| FROM Conformed to the World | TO Transformed in Christ |
| 2. Loving and pursuing immoral thoughts, lusts, and behaviors | 2. Hating and detesting immoral thoughts, lusts, and behaviors |
The last few days we have been discussing the critical transformation that we need to make related to seeing evil the way God sees it, agreeing with Him and what His word says about evil and immorality rather than agreeing with the world and what it says about certain sexual behaviors. Today we will pick up the next critical transformation that must be made in order to gain the victory over immorality, pornography, and lust, and that is the transformation of going from loving immoral thoughts and behaviors to hating immoral lusts and behaviors.
This critical transformation of hating immorality is similar to the previous critical transformation of seeing immorality as God sees it, but whereas the latter is mainly cognitive and focused on the mind, recognizing and speaking truth about the immoral behaviors, this transformation of hating immorality is focused more on the heart, addressing what we love and crave. This is an important distinction, I believe, because some of us caught in pornography, for example, might know in our minds that the thing is wrong, that it is prostitution or adultery or homosexuality or whatever the perversion is, but we cling to it and are attracted to it and enjoy participating in it and fantasizing about it because we love it. And while we are participating in the evil deed, feeding our lusts, we are proving that we love sin more than we love Christ and His righteousness. So it is critical that we not only understand in our minds what is evil in God’s sight, but we need to hate the evil as God hates it.
How do we develop a hatred of evil? How do we change from craving evil things to hating evil things? How can this multi-tentacled, persistent, and elusive evil be extracted from our hearts? How can those of us with contaminated consciences and poisoned hearts be made pure? How can I hope to gain victory over these sins when I have failed time and again? Let me ever encourage you to keep up your pursuit of God and His righteousness; there is always hope in Christ and His eternal fountain of cleansing power that comes from the power of His blood and faith in Him. Never lose hope. But also realize that these sins may not go away simply or easily. If they do, praise God! and be careful to never go back to them. If not, praise God! for He has won the battle for us.
There are many things that you can do to help in your quest for a heart that hates all immorality. You can go back and diligently practice the 24 Overcoming Temptation principles, for example. You can study the eternal fate of the immoral and always keep in mind that they will suffer eternal torment for their iniquity; that should sober us and quench a love for evil to some degree! If you want to overcome immorality and your love for immorality and develop a heart that hates this evil, there are three things in particular that I recommend that you do to see your heart transformed: earnest prayer, diligent study, cessation of immoral input.
Tomorrow we will give an assignment for those who want to see their hearts transformed in this way.