Transcript

Welcome back to Shameless Potpourri.

I'm Joe Heschmeyer, and today, I wanna talk about lust, and how it makes you stupid.

And I wanna do this specifically, because I think there's two competing messages that we receive right now, and one of them is just false.

So, one message is sex is no big deal, that we're told, you know, Just don't make a big deal of it.

This is your religious indoctrination, and this is just the culture you grew up with.

Sex is like a handshake, it's not a big deal.

And the other kind of direction, uh, we get information is just one after another sexual scandal, where you watch someone utterly destroy their life because they couldn't control their sexual passions.

I mean,, y- whenever you're watching this, I bet you could easily come up with examples of your own.

Because of when I'm recording it, the most recent one is a, a big to-do about the CEO of the tech company Astronomer, who was caught with his HR director at a Coldplay concert.

And it's embarrassing enough, uh, that he was at a Coldplay concert, but he also, uh, threw away his whole marriage and his job, a job at which he was making enormous sums of money.

He's worth between 50 and 70 million.

He was making, just in salary, about half a million a year, but was also getting giant end-of-the-year bonuses, and you just think, wow, he's gonna lose a huge chunk of that in a divorce.

He's also lost his job, a job that he presumably cared a lot about.

Think about all the work that goes into being the CEO of a company.

Think about everything a CEO sacrifices so that they can help the company to succeed, so they can make more money, so they can do all the things that they've built their life around, and then think about the fact that this guy threw all of that away because he couldn't control his sexual passions.

And he's by no means alone.

I actually am not using his name, even though his name is very m- uh, widely available.

I mean, 'cause it's, it's right there in the article, but because it, he is kind of an exemplar of a much broader phenomenon.

I mean, Jeff Bezos, the head of Amazon, cheated on his wife, and their divorce cost him $38 billion.

Imagine you have before you, all right, all you have to do is not commit adultery, and you can have $38 billion, and one of the most successful men in the world utterly failed at that challenge, couldn't do it.

Wrecked his marriage, wrecked his public image, cost himself 4% of his company's shares, and, you know, which was a quarter of what he owned, and $38 billion damage total.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

I mean, also recently in the news, we had the Jeffrey Epstein story, which, which Pam Bondi assured us this spring was on her desk with a client list of other successful, powerful men who were so driven by sexual exploitation and a desire to possess teenage girls that they were ready to risk their entire life, their public image, their success, maybe even their liberty.

That kind of insanity, uh, should give the lie to this claim that sex is no big deal.

Now, I'm picking on an article written by a random person more than 12 years ago, and I am gonna acknowledge that at the outset.

This is an article from 2013 that struck me as, again, emblematic.

Because you can find plenty of people, uh, saying these things.

Frankly, I remembered this article, I had it saved somewhere.

I didn't have to go Google, Sex is no big deal, like a weirdo, and, uh, so I wanted to kind of unpack the, the two voices.

'Cause one voice is, look, obviously, there is something in the sexual drive that leads otherwise very smart people to do insanely stupid and self-destructive things when they don't have a good handle on it, and on the other hand, we have people acting like s- sex is no big deal at all and saying that explicitly.

So in this article, the woman who wrote it undermines her entire point.

She says, Sex is certainly a worthy subject of inquiry, being arguably the most powerful socioeconomic force in America.

Okay, just quick fact check here.

Is it reasonable to call the most powerful socioeconomic force in America no big deal?

I would suggest no.

And she does a good job of pointing to things that are connected to sex we don't often talk about, like the fashion industry, $600 billion.

A lot of that is about amplifying sex appeal.

$50 billion on cosmetics, uh, you know, hundreds of million dollars on movies that are driven by sex, and then she also mentions all of the money that goes to psychologists and lawyers and artists and pharmaceutical companies and so on and so on and so on, and she mentions that it is the most often-cited cause of divorce.

Like, the guys I mentioned were not alone.

It's very easy for this to, uh, d- destroy your marriage, destroy your family, and cause generational harm, like, to your kids, because we know the stats on what divorce does to kids, and they're, they're bad.

They're really ugly stats.

But nevertheless, she quotes an anthropologist who says, Oh, sex isn't some strange, ethereal construct.

It's as normal and necessary as eating and sleeping.

Well, look, I wanna suggest a couple things.

Number one, something being normal and necessary, that doesn't mean it can't also be strange and ethereal.

Like, thinking, there's something strange and ethereal about the fact that you've got a few pound, uh, mound of mass in your skull, and either the mind is a real thing and it works with the brain, or the brain somehow is able to come up with ideas inside, that can create a mental image of whatever you want.

That's very strange.

That's very ethere- whatever your view of mind-brain dualism is, it's very strange .

that you can do that.

Even though thinking is, is very normal, it's very necessary, it's also strange.

It's also ethereal.

So, this is a, a bad juxtaposition.

But she suggests that we should regard sex as mundane.

And whatever sex is, it is clearly not mundane.

You don't see people throwing away billions of dollars for something utterly mundane.

What it is instead is something powerful that we have to reckon with.

Yes, sex is ubiquitous.

Yes, sex is how the species continues, but it's also this incredibly powerful force that can be used for good or used for evil.

And when it's used for evil, when it's used in an exploitative way, as we saw with Epstein, or when it's just used in an unchecked, undisciplined way, as we see with lust, it can do a tremendous amount of damage.

So, I wanna look at the work of three figures.

The first two, Pope Gregory the Great, who lays out what he calls the eight daughters of lust.

He argues in his Moralia and Job that each of the major sins has these offspring sins, so that you don't end up struggling with just one sin, you struggle with a bunch of different sins.

These are the offspring or daughters of, of that sin.

So, we'll look at the eight daughters of lust that he gives us, and then those are then expounded by St. Thomas Aquinas, who kind of explains what they are.

Because Gregory just gives us a list.

He says that it leads to blindness of mind, inconsiderateness, this is sometimes also called thoughtlessness, inconstancy, precipitation, that's a bad translation, rashness is a better translation, self-love, hatred of God, affection or love of this present world, and then dread or despair of the world to come.

So, those are the eight daughters of lust, and as I say, St. Thomas Aquinas is going to expound what each of those eight daughters are.

But he starts with a pretty basic point, that when your reason is working properly, your intellect and your will are in the driver's seat.

Your intellect first and then the will.

So, your intellect perceives that something is good.

Okay, this is true, this is good, this is beautiful.

The will says, Okay, I'm gonna do that, and then the passions delight in it.

But when your passions, the lower powers, as he calls them, are overly excited, that can distort your thinking.

And so if you've ever, you know, gotten hangry, for example, or you buy way more food in the supermarket because you're hungry, it happens with any of the lower powers.

If they start to get out of control, they can become, uh, too much in the driver's seat, where the intellect and the will start serving the passions, rather than the other way around.

But it's not just, I did the right thing.

I, you know, I perceived that the right thing was, I did it, and I'm delighting in that.

Now it's the passions, these kind of animalistic part of myself is in the driver's seat, and then the will and the intellect start thinking, How can I appease the beast within?

How can I appease the animalistic part of myself?

And that's a total inversion of the relationship that your mind should have with your body.

And so, he warns that, uh, the higher powers, namely the reason and the will, can become grievously disordered by lust.

Now, let's unpack how the first four of these f- eight daughters of lust work by looking at the four, what's, kind of the four steps or four acts of reason, and this is gonna sound abstract for a second, but I think it'll make sense once you kinda hear it illustrated.

So, step one.

You see that X is good.

Step two, you then take counsel about, okay, what steps would I need to achieve X? What are the pros, what are the cons?

Is X as good as it looks?

Step three, you then have a sound judgment.

Okay, this is worth the cost, or this is not worth the cost.

I'm, you know, I, I see what the right answer is.

And then step four, you decide to do it.

So, you perceive, take counsel, you judge, and then you command into action.

So, let's say you think, Okay, I wanna go to law school.

I wanna go to Yale for law school.

It's a very hard law school to get into.

I got rejected.

I'm not bitter, but it's an example of a, a very well-respected law school.

So, step one, you see that X is good.

Yale would be a great school for me to go to.

And then you say, All right, well, how do I What do I do?

Like, obviously I can't just walk in there and sit down and they'll just count me as a student.

It doesn't work like that.

So, then you start taking counsel.

You say, Well, what does it take to get into Yale?

What are the pros?

What are the cons?

How much does it cost?

What are the opportunity costs?

What do people who've gone there think of it?

You know, all of those kind of questions factor in.

And what are things that will make it more likely that I can get in?

What are things that might hinder me?

All of that stuff.

And then once you've kind of gathered the evidence, you've taken the appropriate counsel, you then decide, Okay, I can, I can do this.

Like, This is worth the sacrifices it would take to really pursue this goal, or it's not.

So, let's say you decide that it is.

I can do the things I would need to do to have a realistic shot of getting, getting into Yale.

Then you command that the thing be done.

You then start acting in accordance with, with those judgments.

So you say, Okay, I'm gonna work on my grades.

I'm going to practice for the LSAT. I'm going to do these extracurriculars.

I'm going to do whatever it takes.

That's a well-ordered four-step act of, set of acts of reason, where your reason is engaged at each of those four steps.

And even just thinking about that list, you can probably come up with times where you haven't made a good decision because you've failed to do one of those things.

You prejudged a matter, meaning you jumped right to the judgment step, step three, rather than taking the appropriate counsel.

Or you just sat in the taking counsel part and never moved on to making a judgment.

Or you made a judgment and then didn't act on it.

You, you didn't have any real resolution.

You weren't, you, you had inconstancy.So, when you're thinking about these kind of four steps in action, and this, again, this is kind of true across the board.

Your whole life, if you're living well, probably looks like you're doing those four things, consciously or unconsciously, quite a bit.

How does lust screw up each of those four steps?

Well, let's start with the- the first step.

You see X as good.

And the daughter of lust that's relevant here is this thing called blindness of mind, that you start seeing things with a corrupted lens.

The things you want, maybe it's no longer Yale, maybe it's some girl on OnlyFans, and so you have a turning away from some authentic good to some deceptive good.

And Daniel, in Daniel 13, uh, rebukes the There's two, I think you can call them pervy, elders who, uh, rape a-a young woman, but they've become completely slaves to their lust, and he calls them out for it.

He calls them offerings of Canaan and not Judah, and he says, Beauty has deceived you, and lust has perverted your heart.

But it's that notion of beauty deceiving you in particular that's blindness of mind.

And so I think it's probably, uh, pretty easy to understand.

When- when it's at that step of you see X as good, then you might see XXX as good.

You might start, uh, planning in accordance with a whole series of bad ideas.

So okay, that's the first danger.

The second one, or the second daughter of lust, is when it comes to taking counsel about how to achieve your goal, and this is rashness, that your world sort of closes in, and you start acting a lot more impulsively when you're in the thralls of lust.

You don't think about the consequences of your actions.

You don't stop and say, like, Hey, what would my wife think about this?

Or, What would my future wife think about this?

Or, What would my pastor think about this?

What do I think of myself if I give into this sin?

You don't do any of that taking counsel.

You just kinda jump past all of that.

Now, you can jump past all of that for any number of reasons, and it's usually a bad idea to impulsively and rationally make decisions, but lust has a particular way of getting you to not think coldly and deliberately, or coolly and deliberately, I should say, about the thing in question.

And Saint Thomas Aquinas, uh, quotes the ancient Greek poet, uh, Terence, who, uh, talks about lecherous love and says, This thing admits of neither counsel nor moderation.

Thou canst not control it by counseling, that, you know, somebody who is in the throes of, say, a porn addiction, they're not gonna just be like, Oh, yeah.

No, I-I deliberated and thought this was the best way to spend, you know, hours of my time.

No, they are acting in a kind of impulsive and even compulsive way.

That's rashness.

But the third step is that, after you've taken counsel, you then have sound judgment to achieve your goal, and the problem here is simply thoughtlessness, that you Maybe you have Like, let's say in your calmer moments, you've said, Okay, this is what I want for my life.

You know, I wanna be a saint.

Here's how I'm gonna get there.

I've- I've done all the counsel, I've made judgments, and I'm- I'm trying to command all that into action.

And then you find yourself facing temptation, and one of the dangers is you simply forget the good judgments that you've made.

You simply forget.

Like, I actually have better goals for my life, whether it's better goals for my day, This isn't what I wanna do all day, whether it's better goals for the person you wanna be.

Like, you can lose sight of all of those things, and so Daniel warns the elders of that.

And well, actually, well, Daniel in the- in the text talks about this.

So, the two elders see this young woman every day, going in and walking about.

They began to desire her, and they've perverted their minds and turned away their eyes from looking to heaven.

We're gonna get to that later of, uh, uh, the rejection of God that can come about with lust, but they also turned away from remembering righteous judgments.

That's this third step of thoughtlessness.

They knew better.

They'd built their entire life around being religious leaders, and they were gonna throw all of that away because, it says, they were both overwhelmed with passion, and they're also isolating themselves.

They didn't tell each other for distress, for they were ashamed to disclose their lustful desire to possess her.

So, already they- we see there one of the things that can amplify lust, which is you become isolated, or worse, you form a new community of people who are also driven by lust.

So, that's gonna be another You know, eventually, the children come together with an evil congress.

Like, they- they work together in a- an evil way.

So, you don't wanna be isolated, but you also don't wanna form, like, a- an unhealthy, spiritually toxic kind of community either.

You need some group of people guiding you towards holiness, but because of shame in those things, it can be hard for people to break out of that.

And Daniel 13 is showing you the danger of what can happen if you don't break out of that.

And so one of the dangers is they forgot righteous judgments.

They had all of the right principles somewhere in their mind, and they blocked all of them out.

So, that third step of sound judgment, they just closed it off.

And then the final thing is inconstancy, and inconstancy just means like, okay, so you've- you've got good decisions.

You've- you've decided well, and you've made a decision about what to do, and the danger is when you're overwhelmed by lust.

When you give into lust, you simply throw away your good resolutions.

In Aquinas' words, The fourth act is reason's command about the thing to be done, and this also is impeded by lust insofar as through being carried away by concupiscence a man is hindered from doing what his reason ordered to be done.

So obviously, these four steps can be related, these first four daughters of lust, the blindness of mind, the rashness where you're- you're not taking good counsel, the thoughtlessness where you're not remembering the good judgments you may have made, or the inconstancy where you don't stay true to your earlier resolutions.All of those point to a kind of weakness in the will and a weakness in the intellect.

There was a particularly horrible case, and I'm not gonna share the, the article, and, you know, I- I imagine this person feels absolutely awful.

A father who left his toddler in the car and got caught up looking at pornography, and the toddler died in the car.

I don't think the dad was trying to murder his kid.

I think what he was dealing with was a blindness of mind and a thoughtlessness, that his world had closed in, and the good things, like being a father, had become blin- like, he'd become blind to them because he'd become so enthralled by his passions.

That is a really real and kind of horrific way.

Now, God willing, that would never happen to anyone watching this, but there might be some other good that you're called to, that in the throes of lust, you, you simply seem blind to.

And so those are the first four, but now I want to look at the next four: self-love, hatred of God, love of the present world, and dread of the world to come or despair of the world to come.

So now we've got to step back.

Think about the Yale example again, because we looked at the, you know, what are the four steps to figure out, like, how am I going to get into Yale Law School?

But you'd even want to step back and, and zoom out, look at the bigger picture and say, Well, why do I want to do that in the first place?

And those are going to be some really big questions about what kind of person do I want to be?

Am I living for this world?

Am I living for the next world?

Am I living to glorify God?

Am I living for myself?

Like, all of those kind of things, those are the, the biggest sort of issues that you'll ever grapple with in your life.

And lust can interfere with even those really big kind of questions, abou- those foundational questions about the kind of person you are and the kind of person you desire to be.

In Aquinas's words, On part of the will, you can have two inordinate acts, like two things that are just, t- they're broken, they're, they're out of proportion.

One is the desire for the end, to which we refer self-love, with which regards the pleasure which a man desires inordinately.

Let's unpack that.

It is perfectly good to enjoy, in the appropriate context, food, drink, sex, sleep, whatever.

Like, the goods of the world are good, they're pleasurable, this is not a mistake.

God wants you to enjoy them.

But if you're just living for sleep or just living for food or for drink or for sex, that is actually beneath your dignity as a human being.

That's what an animal might do, and you're made for so much more than that.

And so the inordinate desire, the problem isn't the desire, it is the inordinate desire, when it becomes, like, too big of your life, where the decisions you're making, the person you're trying to become is too focused on, on bodily pleasures.

In particular here, sexual desires, but, you know, this is true in general of, of any time.

Like, if you just built your entire life around, How can I get Wendy's for life?

People would say, That's a really weird life goal.

Like, something is wrong with that being on your, uh, list of things you're trying to accomplish in life, because it, it just seems disproportionate, 'cause it is.

So that's one way lust can get in the way, that s- self-love becomes too big of an issue.

And self-love particularly in the sense of just desiring more and more pleasures for myself.

The second way is where you get mad at God, because God tells me I can't just get more and more sex, I can't have more and more porn, I can't have, whatever it is.

Like, you've got some bodily desire that you've become a slave to, and rather than viewing your slavery to sin as a problem, you start viewing God as the problem for telling you not to be a slave to your sin.

And so then you act like God is this horrible slave master for telling me not to be a slave to sin.

That's where hatred of God can set in, and you see this a lot.

Like, look at the sheer number of people who become atheists or anti-theists right at the moment they first start to struggle with lust in a real big way, or when they've gotten to a point where lust is, is completely wrecking their life, that they've tried for a while to live an upright life, and then they despair of it, and so then they get mad at God.

This, it's hard to tell how frequent it is, but it certainly seems frequent enough, and I've heard enough people share it in their own kind of testimony, that they have these intellectual-sounding reasons, and maybe there is some of that, but a lot of it was that they were mad at God because the spiritual life seemed too hard because they were dealing with these temptations with lust.

But that then leaves us with the ultimate question of what are we aiming for?

You know, what Aquinas calls, or Thomas Aquinas calls the desire for the things directed to the end.

With regard to this, you've got love of this world or a despair of a future world, and that's really simple.

Like, is your life centered around just your biological life here on Earth, or are you living for eternity?

Because if you're living for eternity, everything else is gonna fall in order in a certain way.

And if you're not, if you're saying, Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we'll die, like, that is a love of the present world coupled with an implicit kind of despair, a rejection of an afterlife or a despair of the afterlife.

So those are the eight daughters of lust.

Your mind can become blind.

You start acting rashly.

You become thoughtless, where you, you forget the good judgments you've made.

You become inconstant, where you don't live out the resolutions you've made.

You start focusing more on the pleasures you can achieve for yourself.

You start resenting God for impeding you by telling you not to live this way.

You start loving this world in an inordinate way.

Again, it's not bad to like the good things of the world.

You can enjoy a sunset without sin, but if you, you start living as if this is all your life is for and you start dreading or despairing of the world to come, I might add, or ignoring or rejecting the idea of the world to come, those are all these daughters of lust.So, the second thing I wanted to do is to give you some of Gregory's wisdom in combating this, because he made some really fascinating connections, uh, some of which I'd heard before, but I liked the way he kind of tied things together.

So, there's three things I wanna share that, that he offers in Moralia and Job.

The first one is on the connection between lust and gluttony.

And hopefully, even having just listened to all of the daughters of lust, you can see, like, oh yeah, like, people who have a drinking problem or a prescription drug problem or a food problem are dealing with a lot of the same kind of things.

Like, the way an addict's mind works looks a lot like everything you just saw with the eight daughters of lust.

And l- I'm not getting here into the whole question of moral culpability when someone is legitimately, like, addicted.

I'm just saying here's how these sins can corrupt you, and they can corrupt you by eroding your mind and eroding your will.

And you can see that when some- someone is in the throes of addiction, but Gregory puts it like this in connection to food.

He says, It is plain to all that lust springs from gluttony, when in the very distribution of the members, meaning, like, the shape of the body, the genitals are placed beneath the belly.

And hence, when the one is inordinately pampered, the other is doubtless excited to wantonness.

So, if you just live and you're just constantly appeasing your body with food and drink, then the rest of your body's gonna want a piece of the action.

And that's going to be a temptation to lust.

This is Again, like, one of the reasons that you have things like fasting and sh- like, cold showers and the like recommended is that it's about learning to discipline the body, that either you or your bodily urges are gonna be in the driver's seat, but it can't be both.

The second connection that Gregory makes is between lust and spiritual combat.

That yes, this is very much a battle between you and your body, but it's also a spiritual battle, and it's a spiritual battle in this sense, that if you can't win this, you're not ready to take on external threats.

Like, you're not ready to go be a martyr if you can't, like, fight against bodily temptation.

In Gregory's words, To go forth to meet the armed enemies after the earth has been dug up is, after the wickedness of the flesh has been overcome, to engage in contests of spiritual vices.

For he who as yet contends but feebly with himself vainly rouses against himself contests from without.

In other words, if you are not regularly winning the kind of interior contest against, you know, bodily lust and the rest, uh, you're not ready for the external persecutions and everything that might come.

For how does he who subjugates himself to sins of the flesh Like, you enslave yourself to sins of the flesh.

contend against those of the spirit?

Or how does he seek to triumph from the labor of an outward contest if still gives way in himself to the inward battle with lust?

So, if you're watching this, there's a really good chance you wanna go be a saint, and you might have a great vision in your mind of, you know, surviving persecution and everything else.

And Gregory's point is you're not ready for that unless and until you're ready to win these interior battles against lust.

And so, he gives the recommendation that St. Paul gives in Colossians 3:5, To put to death, therefore, what is earthly in you, immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.

Like, stop listening to those earthly desires so that you can be prepared for the spiritual battle that you're meant for.

All right, and the third and final connection, and I think this is maybe where it's hopefully a little more hopeful, though it's gonna get worse before it gets better, is the connection between lust and pride.

Because the worst spiritual battle that we have, or the worst enemy of human nature, the biggest sin isn't actually lust, it's pride, which Gregory calls the queen of sins.

And he warns that when pride has conquered a- a heart completely, she surrenders it immediately to seven principle sins, the seven deadly sins.

And so, if you give into pride, then don't be surprised if you start finding yourself struggling with the other sins.

Because if you really buy into the kind of puffed up, exaggerated, prideful version of yourself, then you're not really spiritually ready for what other temptations might come your way.

And so, don't be surprised if you become more of a jerk, you become more wrathful, you become more envious, you feel like you deserve things you don't actually deserve, you become more lustful.

A- all of that stuff can easily flow upon, uh, losing the battle with pride.

So, this is actually the- the biggest, this is the worst battle we face is not with lust, but with pride.

Lust is obviously worth talking about 'cause we've seen the kinda damage it can do, but we don't wanna talk about lust to the exclusion of pride.

Partly because the devil often has a kind of one-two punch, and Gregory has a beautiful kind of military image for this.

He says, The heavenly soldier is often opposed by the enemy in both ways at one and the same time in order that he may be destroyed by some one blow.

That you're being attacked by two different weapons.

For the crafty adversary endeavors to strike at the same time, both raging openly and lurking in ambush, in order that while the arrow is dreaded from a secret spot, the spear may be less feared before his face, or that while he withstands a spear before his face, the arrow may not be observed when coming from a secret place.

So, imagine you're in combat.

You have to worry about the guys who are charging at you with spears.

Okay, that's the It's right there.

It's in your face.

It's an obvious threat.

That's the overt threat, but you also have archers who are mounted in places you're not gonna immediately see who are aiming arrows to shoot at you.

That's the covert threat.

That you need to go into spiritual combat aware you've got this overt threat of lust, you know what that threat looks like, and a covert threat, the arrows of pride.

And the devil is trying to figure out, Which of these can I use to get to you?So, in Gregory's words, For he often puts forward the temptation of lust and su- and then suddenly desisting, more craftily suggests pride, chastity having been preserved.

Now, that is straight-up demonic.

That the devil might tempt you weekly on purpose with lust so that you'll win the battle, and then he'll tempt you to be like, Aren't you such a great guy?

Look at you winning that battle.

You should feel even better about yourself.

And so, he purposely has kind of a, a feint attack, like F-E-I-N-T, attack, uh, with the Spirits, it's happy for you to beat those, while you're taking the arrows of pride and losing to those.

It's an ambush.

It's a trick.

You've, you've been trapped in that if you give into that.

And so, Gregory says that there are some who, when they observe that many have fallen from the stronghold of chastity into the pit of pride, neglecting as to watch over their life, are plunged into the filthiness of lust.

That avoiding pride, you can fall into lust, or the other way around, while you avoid the uncleanliness of lust, you can plunge through the height of chastity into the gulf of pride.

Right.

That you might not struggle with lust at all, but have become so proud of yourself for not struggling with lust, you're like, Thank you, Lord, I'm not like those people who have to hear about the eight daughters of lust.

I'm great.

That is the gulf of pride.

That's one of the proposed renamings for the Gulf of America/Mexico.

Just throwing it out there.

That you, you fall into that, and you've won the battle and lost the war.

That's a real problem.

Gregory says, A- a fault, therefore, which springs from vice is, as it were, a spear striking openly, and a fault which springs from a virtue is, as it were, an arrow from the quiver wounding in secret.

Like, if you're struggling with lust, you know you're struggling with lust.

If you're struggling with pride, you can think that, Oh, no, I'm just, I'm really great because God's given me all these gifts and talents, and I'm, I'm virtuous, and it's really wonderful, and you don't notice that there's a spiritual battle going on to draw you subtly away from glorifying God to glorifying yourself.

But there's good news.

Gregory says, But the horse of God I like that expression.

The horse of God both overcomes the spear before his face when he tramples down lust and looks around at the arrow on the side when in the cleanliness of chastity he keeps himself from pride.

Like, be a good soldier for God.

Be a horse of God, be a knight for God, by fending off both of these attacks.

So, that reminded me of something CS Lewis said in Mere Christianity, because it is there, I believe, where Lewis talks about how God may permit some people to fall into sins like lust to actually help them to realize this, this greater battle with pride.

And so, if that's something you're struggling with right now, I wanted to give this as kind of a hopeful encouragement.

That, yeah, this is a real problem, this is something you have to work on.

This can destroy your life, as I think we've seen, but there are actually bigger problems, and God may have given you this battle to help spare you from an even worse one.

In Lewis's terms, virtue, even attempted virtue, brings light.

Indulgence brings fog.

And we saw that fog, right?

The blindness and all that.

And then he says, Although I've had to speak at some length about sex I'm skipping all that part, but you get the idea.

I want to make it clear as I possibly can that the center of Christian morality is not here.

If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as a supreme vice, he's quite wrong.

The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins.

All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual.

The pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronizing and spoiling sports and backbiting, the pleasures of power, of hatred.

Like, there may be people right now whose perverse delight in the downfall of the CEOs I mentioned earlier is a greater sin than what those CEOs committed.

That they are dealing with envy and hatred and backbiting and all of that stuff, and are delighting in sharing gossip and the rest for no reason other than just to delight in the downfall of another human being.

That attitude is coming from the devil.

And without exaggeration, that attitude is coming from the devil.

And as, as Lewis puts it, he says it quite well: For there are two things inside me competing with the human self, which I must try to become.

So, there's three things.

There's the, the saint God means you to be, that's your human self.

He wants you to be fully alive.

Th- the glory of God is man fully alive.

He wants you to be fully the person He made you to be.

And against that, you have on the one hand the, what he calls the animal self, and on the other hand, the diabolical self, or demonic.

The diabolical self is the worse of the two.

That's why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute.

But, of course, it is better to be neither.

So, there you go.

I hope hearing this has helped you.

I don't want you to go from being a prostitute to a prig, but hopefully it gives you the courage and the strength to really engage in the battle to be a good horse of God and to be neither.

For Shameless Papery, I'm Joe Heschmair.

God bless you.