[image error]We use “love” to refer to a multitude of desires and affections, some high and some low. An unmarried couple on a date might declare undying love for one another during dinner and then in the next breath say that they “love” the food that is on their plates. Neither of them thinks this is strange.  Afterward, they might decide to “make love,” using the same term in a third sense that is really more in line with what the Bible calls lust. Not every affection we feel necessarily qualifies as love. Sometimes it is just a passing fancy. At others, it is something even more basic, merely a bodily response to stimuli. 

Most people associate lust with sexual sin. The Bible does speak this way but the Scriptures also employ the term more broadly. In the New Testament, the Greek term that is sometimes translated lust refers to desire. It can speak of both legitimate and illegitimate desires. In its sinful form, our desire can be fixed on many things. It is just as likely to be focused on someone else’s possessions or on their success as it is to be an illicit desire for sex. John hints at the full scope of this cardinal sin in 1 John 2:16: “For everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father but from the world.” As far as John is concerned, when it comes to lust everything in the world is a potential target.

I do not mean to minimize our problems with sexual lust. Lust is so much a feature of our culture that it is hard to find a dimension of our experience which is not somehow shaped by it. Sexual lust is the point of appeal for most of the products that are marketed to us. If lust is not the direct focus of most of the entertainment we consume, it is at least the garnish that its creators use to hold our attention. But this biblical sin has become so commonplace in our culture that it is almost a cliché. Lust’s commonplace status does not make it less dangerous to us. If anything, overfamiliarity increases our vulnerability. We have become desensitized and are therefore too tolerant of it, both in our environment and in our own experience. But the biblical sin of lust has many faces and sometimes its sexual form is only a symptom of something else. In the middle of the last century Dorothy Sayers observed, “The mournful and medical aspect of twentieth-century pornography and promiscuity strongly suggests that we have reached one of these periods of spiritual depression where people go to bed because they have nothing better to do.” According to her diagnosis, in some cases, sexual lust may actually be a symptom of another of the cardinal sins. It is the one that the ancients used to call acedia or sloth, a condition which sophisticates of another generation once called ennui. 

You might think that sin and love would be incompatible. After all, if the heart of righteousness is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind and to love your neighbor as yourself, then the essence of sin must be the opposite (Matt. 22:37, 39). But sin has its own version of love. To sin is to love yourself at the expense of your neighbor. More than that, it is to love yourself at the expense of God. Sin shaped love expresses itself primarily in the form of narcissism. It is self-absorbed love. This affection is actually a distortion of love which, once it has achieved its full effect, actually proves to be an exercise in self-loathing. It is hate masquerading as love, compelling us to engage in self-destructive behavior. Sin promises freedom and delivers slavery. It speaks the language of friendship while treating us like enemies. Sin is a cruel master who promises good wages only to reward our loyalty with hard service, disappointment, and death. Yet for some reason, we return repeatedly to this false lover and expect a different result.

The antidote to lust is love–God’s love. This is a love which comes to us from the outside, like the righteousness of Christ. Adopting the language that Martin Luther coined to speak of Christ’s righteousness, we might call it “alien love” because it does not originate with us. It is a love that begins with God and can only come to us as a gift. For the Christian, this greater love is the organizing force for all our other desires. In this regard, it is not so much an emotion as it is disposition. As C. S. Lewis observed, “It is a state not of feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.” It is the Love which orders all our other loves. It is also the only love powerful enough to wean us away from our infatuation with ourselves.