I’m not going to tell you to pray more. I’m not going to tell you to worship more, or begin a program of positive confession. I have tried all of this myself, and it doesn’t work. It seems like the flesh always has the upper hand, no matter what. It seems like sin will always out, always win.
I know the way it is. You pray aloud in your prayer closet. You play some worship music and worship the father in spirit and in truth. You are feeling good, ready to transform the whole world through faith, by love and charity.
25 minutes later you are watching porn.
Or you are cursing someone out over the phone.
Or you are flipping someone the finger on the highway.
Or you are ripping open a pack of cigarettes with your trembling hands.
Whatever the answers are, I knew that nobody has ever shared them with me. I was just told the same tropes over and over, to pray more, read my bible aloud, ask God for help, and so on. I decided this advice needed an updating. I would go to the Bible for the answers and search and seek until I found the answer, the solution to putting down the lusts of the flesh.
I new I had the answer when I read Galatians, chapter 5.
Galatians 5:16
But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh.
We are told to “walk by the spirit.” That is all well and good, but how are we to do that?
Imagine, for a second, that God was with you, walking with you, accompanying you everywhere. You could not escape Him. He was with you when you woke up in the morning and He was with you when you arrived home from work.
In that kind of situation, it would be difficult to sin. It would be hard to find a way to open up your laptop and watch porn, for example. But this concept is the key to overcoming the lusts of the flesh. You have to realize that God is always with you, always watching, always inside of you.
When you are aware, at all times and at every moment, that God’s precious Holy Spirit is in you and with you, throwing yourself headlong into a mortal sin will not be easy. For one, if you have a relationship with the holy spirit, as you should, you will not want to do anything that might grieve him.
This is why we are commanded to “walk in the spirit.” What that means is to develop a relationship with the Holy Ghost, so much so that you are aware of his nearness and presence at all times. It means to walk in the spirit, as in a marathon walk, and not just a morning jog, as it were.
Once you understand that you are never alone, you begin to act differently. Certain sins are impossible, and completely off the table. It is not that you don’t want to be a partaker in that sin, it is that you will not want to make the Holy Spirit a witness to that sin. And the only way to realize that you are never alone is to walk in the spirit.
Talk to the spirit. Speak to the person of the Holy Spirit. And listen to the spirit, for his guidance, for his comfort, for his help. He will always advocate action on your behalf. So don’t be afraid to start a relationship with him. That relationship is the key to everything.
Walk in the spirit.
How are you to ‘walk by the spirit’ if you cannot hear the direction of the spirit, if you cannot hear his voice?
The Word of the Spirit is the Bible. We must read the bible and listen to the Bible. Once we know the bible, we know the mind of Christ.
Coming to know the bible means coming to know the will of God for your life. It means coming to know the will and voice of the spirit.
This is literally the key to everything. If you can overcome the lusts of the flesh, you can overcome addiction, to food, to sugar, to carbohydrates, to drugs, to masturbation, to sex, to anything. I look back on my christian walk and realize that my body, my flesh, my physical temple has always been the number one enemy of happiness and peace for me.
Basically, you need a closer relationship with God. You need to feel that God is with you at all times, because He is. You need to have a constant sense of communion with the Holy Spirit inside of you, at all times. This is the key element to overcoming lustful practices.
Get to know God’s presence. Get to feel His presence with you, become aware of it always. Become more God-conscious and less sin-conscious, less flesh conscious. And you will sin less, and cave less to the desires of the body. You will become more “spiritual,” as it were, which should be your ultimate goal, to “walk in the spirit.”
This is the key to overcoming the lusts of the flesh, as much as it can be overcome, because we won’t fully overcome those lusts while we are “in the body” as Saint Paul says. Many may have to marry, even young, in order not to burn with sinful desires. This is another overlooked solution, due to our modern cultural climate, which sees marriage as a thing that should be put off until your 30s.
Fact is, throughout all of human history, men and women were marrying young, for over 50,000 years. The truth is that we were built for our child-raring years to be in our late teens and early 20s, when out fertility levels are the highest, and our energy levels almost inexhaustible.
Better to marry than to burn, as Paul and Christ said. But better to be married to the Holy Spirit, first.