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Key Bible Verse: God blesses those whose hearts are pure, for they will see God Matthew 5:8.Bonus Reading:2 Peter 1:2-5a

In an unsigned Fall 1982 Leadership journal article, a pastor confessed to years of bondage to gross pornography. What finally released him was encountering What I Believe, a book by Catholic French novelist Francois Mauriac. In it, Mauriac admitted how the plague of guilt hadn't freed him from lust. But he concluded that there is one powerful reason to seek purity, the one Christ gave in the Beatitudes. The promise that the pure will see God empowers escape from lust.

"So far," the lust-bound pastor wrote, "none of the scary, negative arguments against lust had succeeded in keeping me from it. But here was a description of what I was missing by continuing to harbor lust: I was limiting my own intimacy with God. The love he offers is so transcendent and possessing that it requires our faculties to be purified and cleansed before we can possibly contain it. Could God, in fact, substitute another thirst for the one I had never filled? Would Living Water somehow quench lust? This was the gamble of faith."

It was no gamble. You can't lose when you turn to God. The way to fight lust is to feed faith with the "rich and wonderful" promise that the pure in heart will see, face to face, the all-satisfying God of glory.

—John Piper in Battling Unbelief

My Response: I'll cling to God's promises as I battle lust.

Thought to Apply: Many of us are not thirsty for God because we have quenched our thirst at other fountains.—Erwin Lutzer (Illinois pastor)

Adapted from Battling Unbelief (Multnomah, 2007) by permission.

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today International/Men of Integrity magazine.Click here for reprint information on Men of Integrity.

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Prayer for the Week

I've tried, Lord, to shut out sinful compulsions, but what I really need is an intense hunger for You that will crowd all that out.

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