What is Lust, Actually?

Church Words Revisited Series: Part 3

[Series Note: This piece is the third installment of an ongoing, semi-irregular series I’m doing called “Church Words Revisited.” The series is aimed to take a look at oft-used phrases or words in the Christian vocabulary and, when necessary, set the record strait. You can find the first two installments, one on “Spiritual and Physical” and the other on “Family” here.]

Lust: A Millennial History

If you came of age within a Pentecostal or evangelical youth group in the 90s and early 00s, you were deeply acquainted with the perils of lust. Wrapped up within what has been commonly called the “Purity Culture” movement, the sheer volume of sermons, discipleship lessons, accountability partner discussions, small group breakouts, and more aimed at addressing the topic of lust is usually perplexing to those who grew up in other Christian traditions or outside of the faith in their youth.

Typically, conversations around the subject of lust were male-centric—aimed at explaining to boys why they shouldn’t lust and to girls why they should be responsible for keeping their young, hormone-riddled brethren from lusting.

I myself grew up within the purity culture movement—a reactionary movement aimed at combatting the sexual liberation movements that had preceded it, giving rise to spikes in teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

We were deeply aware of the consequences of lust. The problem is this…no one seemed to know what lust was.

In our churches, in our writing, and in our conferences, we (evangelicals/Pentecostals) addressed at great length the causes of lust, whether that be natural heightened sexual impulses in contrast to women or even repressed masculinity.[1] You might note that the onus in both of these hypotheses (illogical and ahistorical as they may be) is on women. If we are to prevent lust, by these definitions, women must get back into their rightful place under the patriarchy so that men might flourish and women must 1) help unmarried men control their impulses before marriage by dressing modestly and 2) satisfy the sexual desires of their husbands after marriage so that they might remain faithful.

So while the prescriptions of how to avoid lust, who was responsible for it, and the consequences of giving into it abounded—the definitions of it were much thinner. Lust, for well-meaning millennial youth, was something of a Je ne sais quoi. The attempts at defining lust that were attempted, however, were something of an assembled hodgepodge of anecdotal logic and metaphor—attempts that, over time, have grown into prevailing and unchallenged definitions.

One definition of lust I heard as a youth, and have oft heard repeated in my years in pastoring is that lust is a matter of dwelling on a thought—described in the form of a metaphor: “You can’t control whether a bird lands on your head, but you can control whether it builds a nest.” Thus, lust was dwelling on an unholy thought for too long. That unholy thought can be assumed to be anything from noticing the physical beauty of another person to a more focused attention on particular attributes of that person (i.e., “checking out” a guy/girl).

Another definition was more specific and time-oriented. With many variations, well-meaning adults defined lust as the “second second” (meaning, the first second is natural impulse, the second second is a choice) or the “three second rule” (meaning, anything over three seconds of dwelling on a thought is lust).

Still others defined what is possibly the more commonly held definition: that lust is what occurs when thought gives way to desire or fantasy (though, for “desire” at least, the working definition as I have observed it still remains a sort of “sustained thought.”).

These definitions though, are purely conjecture. While the impulse to avoid lust may be biblically rooted (Jesus, himself addresses lust!), what we mean when we talk about lust is not. The prescriptions for avoidance were the topic du jour while the bedrock definition was left up to the guesswork of well-meaning, but ill-equipped youth pastors and leaders.

Fundamentally, the story of purity culture in the 90s and 00s was a story about avoiding lust without ever coming to a deep understanding of what lust was.

Why Does it Matter?

Because the definition of lust was malformed or broken, there was no singular, biblically rooted target to address. And, when we’re talking matters of sex and the Bible, when there is a poor understanding of the biblical roots of a concept, women are often disproportionately (and negatively) impacted.

This played out in full force in purity 90s/00s purity culture with young men being discipled to see the physical beauty of women as a potential threat to their purity. They need only keep women off of their mind and get to marriage mentally unscathed and then, as many were taught, their wife’s body was theirs to do with as they pleased.

Young girls were discipled to see their physical beauty as nothing more than, first, a stumbling block to their Christian brothers, and second, a gift to their husbands. At no point did we teach young men and women that the physical beauty of women ever belonged to women.

When beauty is a threat, odd sorts of practices begin to take shape. The practice of “bouncing the eyes” (a practice of averting or only quickly looking directly at a women) and never being alone with a woman, even in a professional setting took shape as standard best practices.[2] A sort of functional Neo-platonism heresy arose within our churches that deeply embedded within an entire generation of now-adults that the female body was first a dangerous threat to be managed and then, after marriage, a gift for someone else to do with as they please.

As I’ve spoken to women over the years, talked to my own wife, and did the research for my book Your Daughters Shall Prophesy, I was awestruck to find how so many women who grew up with this utilitarian and vilified theology of the body still struggle with the traumatic remnants of it today, well into adulthood, marriage, and parenting. While purity culture’s teaching on lust were a well-intentioned effort to adhere to a biblical sexual ethic and ensure the enduring nature of marriages in adulthood, it does not seem to have accomplished its mission. While divorce rates among millennials is much lower than their Baby Boomer parents, this is a wider, cultural trend that is removed from the impact of purity culture—and it is also because Millennials have tended to marry much older than previous generations, a trend that at least anecdotally contradicts the young marriages of many Christian youth of the same generational cohort.

So a poor definition of lust matters because, simply put, it has left us with a broken and ineffective sexual ethic that has disproportionately disadvantaged young women—a disadvantage that continues to impact them into adulthood.[3]

Jesus Weighs In On Lust

Before we set off to a straight definition of lust (it’s coming, I promise), it’s important that we see Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:27-28 in their original cultural context (if you frequent this Substack long enough, you’ll find I almost always start with a cultural look at Scripture).

You have heard that it was said, Don’t commit adultery. But I say to you that every man who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery in his heart. (CEB)

While we too often cherry pick verses out of their original context, this is not a fortune cookie theological definition that one can pluck out of the original conversation.

First, we need to remember that Jesus was an ancient Jew. Ancient Jews were a collectivistic, honor-shame culture. Meaning, like many similar cultures today, ancient Jews thought of “sin” as primarily an external act that disrupted the shalom of a family/ community.

Second, ancient Jews also possessed a deep association between hearing and doing. One could not truly shema (the Hebrew word for “hear”) unless that hearing provoked demonstrated action (the Hebrew word for shuv, from which we get “repentance,” also conveys a change of direction).

Jesus, as an ancient Jew, is giving this point in his Sermon on the Mount to an audience of ancient Jews, who would have thought about “lust” as a primarily an outward action (The same Greek word, epithymeō, is what is used in the Septuagint translation of the Ten Commandments pertaining to coveting one’s neighbor’s wife). For them, lust wasn’t truly lust until acted upon—and possibly even not sinful until it was exposed.

Jesus is challenging this cultural assumption among his contemporaries by taking things a step further, forcing them to internalize Moses’ command in the Decalogue.[4] In other words, Jesus is telling them that lust isn’t simply about an actionable offense, but also about the internal motivation that precedes that actionable offense. On the concept of coveting, John Walton notes that coveting “is a crime that can be detected and punished only when the desire is translated into action.”[5] Jesus is effectively calling to mind that the sin in view in the Decalogue is not just when it can get you in legal trouble, but even before a plot to act is hatched, sin before God has already transpired.

This is a consistent pattern we see in the teaching of Jesus, not dispensing with the Mosaic covenant, but bringing clarity to its original intent—fulfilling it, as it were (after all, Jesus said exactly that ten verses before in Matt. 5:17).

So we see that lust, biblically speaking, is deeply associated with the concept of coveting. Throughout the New Testament the same Greek word, translated in Matt. 5 as “lust” refers to coveting and desire—not simply in a fantasy sort of way—but a desire to take hold of, to possess, or two have for one’s self. Sometimes that term has a positive connotation, but here in Matthew and elsewhere, the desire is negative.

So What is Lust? A Working Definition

In Your Daughters Shall Prophesy, I lean on the work of Richard Foster quite a bit in generating a working definition of lust. In chapter seven I say this:

For Foster, lust is not noticing a member of the opposite sex, or even noticing that they’re attractive. It is a “runaway, uncontrolled sexual passion” that objectifies the other. In this regard, the heavy yoke we have put around women by shaming them for their female form as they have improperly born the weight of responsibility for the thought lives of their male counterparts trespasses on the sort of objectification in view by Foster more than observing that a woman is beautiful. [6]

Quoting Lewis Smedes, Foster says that,

When the sense of excitement conceives a plan to use a person, when attraction turns into scheme, we have crossed beyond erotic excitement into spiritual adultery. Lust is an untamed inordinate sexual passion to possess, and this is a very different thing from the usual erotic awareness experienced in sexual fantasy.[7]

So, for Foster, for Smedes, and—I believe—for Jesus and the first Christians, lust is not:

• Noticing or appreciating someone’s beauty

• Thinking about someone who is beautiful

• Experiencing sexual desire or even fantasy about another person (much to the relief of teenage boys feeling shame about their sexual dreams)

Lust is, instead, a runaway, objectified desire to possess. It is, as Smedes says, “when attraction turns into scheme.” Thus, the problem was David’s lust toward Bathsheba was not that he noticed or even appreciated her beauty. It was the point in his heart where that appreciation turned toward objectification and possession. It is the scheming, plotting—the coveting—of the heart that, if left untreated, gives birth to outward action.

If we are to return to a true, biblical understanding of lust, it is going to feel like rampant sexual liberalism to some and an urgent point of conviction to others. To that, I will turn for my conclusion.

Implications of Getting Lust “Right”

There are four serious implications that we should consider about returning to a biblical definition of lust.

1. Understanding biblical lust brings freedom to those walking under the heavy yoke of purity culture. A biblical understanding of lust actually serves to free people from the legalistic weight that has been placed upon them to feel guilt and shame over feeling attraction and appreciating beauty in other people. It actually serves to liberate us from overly-sexualizing physical beauty and can bring us to a place where recognizing beauty in the other is a part of appreciating God’s good creation. The body is thereby no longer a threat, but what it actually is—an integral part of a person’s vocation to bear the image of God. When we reframe the body of another person in that way and let that bury deeply within our souls, it can actually serve to permit us to approach things like physical attraction with a sense of holiness of the other rather than the realm of carnal appetites.

2. Understanding biblical lust causes us to face the issue of marital lust. Yes, friends, lust is not simply a matter outside of the marriage while within marriage you enjoy unfettered access to your spouse whenever you please. If lust is about runaway desire to objectify and possess, and if we recognize that our spouse’s body is not ours to possess as an object—we must consider that there is still a need for each of us who are married to resist the temptation to lust after our spouse—that is, to treat them with an unholy objectification that robs them of their dignity as a child of God. You absolutely can lust after your spouse in an unholy way when we define lust biblically, and we should resist that impulse out of a desire to honor their image bearing status.

3. Understanding biblical lust forces us to face how some purity culture practices are actually practices in lust. Once again, if lust is the runaway scheming to objectify another, there is a sense in which practices like “bouncing the eyes” and others that rob (usually) women of dignity and honor, treating their bodies as an objectified threat to avoid are simply the other side of the lust coin that treats women's bodies as an objectified possession to use. Resisting biblical lust in this regard really looks like treating women with the dignity and humanity they desire as daughters of God.

4. Understanding biblical lust exposes our need for a more well-formed theology of desire. Sarah Coakley touches on this need extensively in her book The New Asceticism. Her basic argument is that the current issues plaguing Christianity on the subject of sex are as a result of a poorly formed theology of desire, more broadly speaking. Our capacity to disciple ourselves and others into seeing our desires become cruciform—to be submitted, reformed, and reshaped in light of the cross, is the fundamental task. But that has just as much to do with one’s eating habits as one’s sexual habits. Coakley notes that the ancients saw these seemingly-disconnected concepts as intertwined. We would do well to have conversations among ourselves, in our churches, families, and more, of what it looks like to develop a more robust evangelical theology of desire that is more holistic and holy than what purity culture gave us.

[1] Rachel Joy Welcher, Talking Back to Purity Culture. (IVP, 2020), 59.

[2] Welcher, 61.

[3] It’s worth noting at this juncture that, while I’ve made a lot of references to these teachings in the 90s and 00s, this is because this era is both the one with which I’m personally acquainted and is generally the time period associated with the “height” of purity culture. Many older Gen Xer and Baby Boomer men and women were discipled in similar ways, and many young Gen Zers continue to be raised in this thinking because, in large part, no proper theology of desire has replaced what their millennial youth pastors grew up with.

[4] Craig Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament. (IVP, 1993), 59.

[5] John Walton, Victor Matthews, and Mark Chavalas, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament. (IVP, 2000), 97.

[6] Todd Korpi, Your Daughters Shall Prophesy (Wipf & Stock, 2023), 93.

[7] Korpi, 93.