Overcoming Lust: What Romans 1 Says About Sexual Purity

From the sermon preached on May 31, 2026

Most people carrying a private struggle with lust aren't looking for a lecture. They want to know if it's actually possible to be free of something that keeps pulling them back. Romans 1 makes a case that overcoming lust isn't primarily about discipline or willpower; it's about what your heart is fundamentally craving, and whether that craving is being redirected toward the only source that can actually satisfy it. The difference between someone stuck in that cycle and someone walking out of it often comes down to one question: what is functionally ruling your heart?

Sexual purity isn't a performance standard. It's the fruit of a heart that has found something better to want.

There's a phrase worth sitting with: love can wait to give, but lust can't wait to get. It sounds simple, but it cuts right to the thing most people feel and can't quite name. Lust isn't only about sexual desire in the narrow sense. Lust, in the way the apostle Paul uses it in Romans 1, is any driving, obsessive craving for an object, an experience, or a person that has taken the place of God. It can attach itself to money, to approval, to food, to a screen at midnight, to a text conversation that shouldn't exist.

The distinction between love versus lust isn't a moral technicality. It's a diagnostic. Love, as the Bible describes it, is oriented toward the good of someone else. It costs something. It waits. Lust, by contrast, is extractive. It treats a person or a thing as a means to an end, as raw material for personal gratification. In Jesus' words in Matthew 5:28, to look at a person with lust is to have already committed adultery in your heart. The line isn't drawn at the physical act. It's drawn at the orientation of the craving itself.

One honest question worth carrying into the week: in the relationship, the habit, or the private thought pattern you keep returning to, are you trying to give something or get something?

Romans 1 begins with a foundational claim that can feel abstract until you sit with it: God has made himself plainly known through what he created. And when humanity (individually or collectively) turns away from that knowledge, the result isn't neutral. Paul describes a specific progression. The rejection of God leads to darkened thinking. Darkened thinking leads to disordered desires. And disordered desires lead to dishonoring the body, treating something sacred as if it were ordinary, using a person or yourself as currency for something else you want more.

Honoring God with body means something more than avoiding certain behaviors. In the ancient world Paul was writing into, honor and shame were the currency of daily life. To dishonor something meant to strip it of its actual value, to use it for a purpose it was never designed for. Paul is arguing that the human body is designed to reflect God's image and, for those who belong to him, to house his Spirit. Addiction, immodesty, sexual sin of any kind, and the subtler forms of using your appearance or sexuality as a bargaining chip for power or attention; all of it, Paul says, falls under the category of dishonoring what God made to be sacred.

Honoring God with body is not a list of rules to follow out of fear. It is a recalibration of what the body is actually for.

A practical step this week: name, out loud and privately, one area where you have been treating yourself or someone else as a means to get something you want. Not as condemnation. Just as honesty.

The most disarming moment in the sermon behind this post was not a theological argument. It was a pastor saying plainly: I am not immune to this. And then walking through, in specific detail, exactly what runs through his head when temptation shows up. The list is worth reading slowly, because it is not a list of rules. It is a list of anchors. He tells Jesus out loud that he is being tempted. He calls a friend. He puts on music that reorients him. He thinks about his children and what they need from him. He reminds himself that the person drawing the temptation toward him is made in God's image and needs God far more than they need him.

Resisting sexual temptation, the Bible suggests, is not primarily a willpower exercise. It is a theological exercise. Romans 13:14 puts it plainly: put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires. "Make no provision" means stop building pathways toward the thing you are trying to avoid. Stop telling yourself you can handle it. Stop keeping the app. Stop taking the meeting you know is not just a meeting.

Paul's instruction in Romans 13 is not about being afraid of yourself. It is about being honest about where the path leads. The person who keeps walking toward the edge of a cliff is not brave. They are just ignoring what they already know about gravity.

The action this sermon offers is three-fold: put on the armor (name the battle and engage it honestly), walk in the light (stop living a double life in the dark), and put on Christ (let his righteousness, not your own effort, be what covers you). These are not three stages. They are one posture, turned different ways.

A practical step this week: write down the one environment, habit, or relationship that consistently creates the opening for temptation, then tell one person you trust about it before the week is out.

Romans 1:24 puts it plainly: "Therefore God gave them up to the lusts of their hearts, to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves." The passive judgment Paul describes is not God throwing up his hands. It is God allowing a person, or a culture, to experience the full weight of what they chose. The absence of immediate consequence is not approval. It is patience, and it has a limit.

The good news in that same passage is that Christ's righteousness covers what lust has damaged. Sexual purity, according to the gospel, is not something you earn back through enough clean days. It is something Christ offers freely to anyone who turns.

Rural communities tend to carry things quietly. Across Watseka, Ashkum, Gilman, Milford, and Cissna Park in Iroquois County, and in communities like Goodland in Newton County, Indiana, the struggles that a sermon like this one names are real and they are rarely spoken out loud. Trinity Church exists, in part, to be a place where those conversations can happen without performance and without shame. Whether you have been carrying something private for years or you are hearing a message like this one for the first time, there is room here for honest people in real situations.

The central claim of Romans 1 isn't that lust destroys, though it does. It's that what we crave shapes where we end up, and we are not locked into craving the wrong things. The gospel, as the sermon closed, is that grace transforms. Past failures in sexual sin do not define a believer. Christ's righteousness does. That means it is never too late to turn around.

If you are ready to take a next step, we would love to welcome you at Trinity Church, at our Ashkum, Goodland, or Watseka Campus, you can plan your visit below.
If you are not quite ready for that, learn more at your own pace, just fill out a connection card and let us know how we can pray for you and take the next step here.