I Kissed Dating Goodbye (15 page)

Julie, a nineteen-year old who worked as a receptionist in a doctor's office, found herself deeply attracted to her boss, a married man who was beginning to make advances toward her. She wanted to act on her attraction and play along with his flirting. Her heart told her to give in to her feelings. Should she have listened?

Fortunately, Julie's convictions resisted the whisperings of her heart. She quit her job and confessed her temptation to a Christian friend who prayed with her and promised to keep her accountable.

Julie wisely guarded her heart by thinking through the consequences of her actions. If she followed her feelings, she would sin against God, she would carry the memory of the affair into her future marriage, and she would possibly ruin the man's marriage and family. Thinking along these lines exposed the ugliness of her heart's desires. Getting away from the temptation and finding an accountability partner were further precautions to ensure that she didn't fall prey to her own sinful heart.

Do you face a potentially precarious situation that your heart wants you to pursue? Like Julie, do whatever it takes to guard your heart and keep it in submission to God.

rather guard your heart 139

maintaining a pure spring

Next, picture guarding your heart as if it were a fresh spring of water that you want to drink from daily. The Bible tells us the heart is "the wellspring of life" (proverbs 4:23), the source of our attitudes, words, and deeds. If we fail to keep our hearts clean, the rest of our lives will stagnate and become dirty.

Peter Marshall, the former chaplain of the United States Senate, loved to tell a story called "The Keeper of the Spring." This simple tale beautifully illustrates the importance of constantly maintaining the purity of our hearts.

I An elderly, quiet forest dweller once

Graceful swans floated along the crystal-clear spring, the mill wheels of various businesses located near the water turned day and night, farmlands were naturally irrigated, and the view from restaurants sparkled.

Years passed. One evening the town council met for its semiannual meeting. As the council members reviewed the budget, one man's eye caught the salary paid the obscure Keeper of the Spring. "Who is this old man?" he asked indignantly. "Why do we keep paying him year after year? No one ever sees him. For all we know, this man does us no good. He

140 joshua harris isn't necessary any longer!" By a unanimous vote, the council dispensed with the old man's services.

For several weeks nothing changed. But by early autumn, the trees began to shed their leaves. Small branches snapped off and fell into the pools, hindering the rushing flow of sparkling water. One afternoon, someone noticed a slight yellowish brown tint in the spring. A few days later, the water had darkened even more. Within a week, a slimy film covered sections of the water along the banks, and a foul odor emanated from the spring. The mill wheels moved slowly; some finally ground to a halt. Businesses located near the water closed. The swans migrated to fresher waters far away, and tourists no longer visited the town. Eventually, the clammy fingers of disease and sickness reached deeply into the village.

The shortsighted town council enjoyed the beauty of the spring but underestimated the importance of guarding its source. We can make the same mistake in our lives. Like the Keeper of the Spring who maintained the purity of the water, you and I are the Keepers of Our

What are some things God will ask us to remove from our hearts, especially concerning our dating mentality? "Do not love the world," John warns us, "or anything in the world.. .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" (1 John

2:15-16). In this guard your heart 141

passage, John gives us three categories of worldly things that pollute our hearts: sinful cravings, lust, and prideful comparison with others. Can we apply these items to romantic relationships? I think so. In fact, most of our struggles in relationships seem to involve desiring what we shouldn't desire, lusting after what God has forbidden, or complaining about what we don't have. These "pollutants" specifically manifest themselves in relationships as infatuation, lust, and self-pity. Let's examine all three more closely

1. Infatuation

You've probably experienced it--the constant thoughts about someone who has caught your eye, the heart palpitations whenever that person walks by, the hours spent dreaming of a future with that special someone. It's infatuation, and I know it well, having experienced it myself!

Many of us have a difficult time seeing infatuation as potentially harmful. But we need to examine it carefully, because when you really think about it, infatuation can be a sinful response to attraction. Any time we allow someone to displace God as the focus of our affection, we've moved from innocent appreciation of someone's beauty or personality to the dangerous realm of infatuation. Instead of making God the object of our longing, we wrongly direct these feelings toward another human. We become idolaters, bowing to someone other than God, hoping that this person will meet our needs and bring fulfillment.

God is righteously jealous for our hearts; after all, he has created us and redeemed us. He wants us to focus our thoughts, longings, and desires on him. He lovingly blesses us with human

In addition to diverting our attention from God, infatuation can cause problems for us because it is most often founded on illusion. When infatuated with someone, we tend to build up that person in our imaginations as the perfect guy or girl. We think we'd be happy forever if that person would return our affections. Of course, we can only sustain our silly crush because we've substituted fantasy for all the information we lack about the person. As soon as we get to know that person's true identity and discover that our "perfect" man or woman is human like everyone else, our dreams fade and we move on to a new crush.

To break out of this pattern of infatuation, we must reject the notion that a human relationship can ever completely fulfill us. When we find our hearts slipping into the fantasy world of infatuation, we should pray, "Lord, help me to appreciate this person without elevating him (or her) above You in my heart. Help me to remember that no human can ever take Your place in my life. You are my strength, my hope, my joy, and my ultimate reward. Bring me back to reality, God; "give me an undivided heart"" (psalm 86:11).

My dad likes to say that when you let God be God you can let humans be human. When we place God in His rightful place in our lives, we don't struggle so much when human relationships let us down. In direct contrast, when we make another human our idol, God can't be our God.

After placing God first in our lives, we need to continue to avoid infatuation by resolving to not feed attraction. "Don't nurse a crush!" a girl from Brooklyn, New York, told me when I asked her how she beats infatuation. And she's right. Attraction only grows into infatuation when we pamper it.

Each time we find ourselves attracted to someone, we have a choice to either leave it at attraction or allow our imaginations

guard your heart 143 to carry us away. I was once a guest on a radio talk show, and afterward I talked to the producer, a single woman in her thirties. She told me teenagers aren't the only ones who deal with crushes. This beautiful, intelligent woman still had to resist infatuation as an adult. She made a

2. Lust

The second poison that often threatens the purity of our hearts is lust. To lust is to crave something sexually that God has forbidden. For example, when I as a single man look on a woman who is not my wife (which right now means every woman) and immorally fantasize about her, I am lusting; I am setting my heart on something God has placed off limits. Sexual desire within marriage is a natural and appropriate expression of sexuality; after all, God gave us our sex drives. But God also gives us specific commands forbidding us to indulge in those desires before we marry.

To fight lust in our lives, we have to detest it with the same

144 joshua harris intensity God does. Unfortunately, we often do not. An experience I had while visiting Denver, Colorado, opened my eyes to my own laxity toward lust. One afternoon I was walking from my hotel to the convention center downtown. A group of three guys walked past me in the opposite direction. They smiled in a way that seemed odd. They whispered and laughed as they passed me, and for some reason, those actions made me uncomfortable. What was bothering me? I pushed my discomfort out of my mind and went on. But a few moments later a car pulled up alongside me. The same three guys were inside. This time, I could in no way mistake their intent nor the reason I'd felt strange--these guys were homosexuals and were checking me out. They whistled, winked, and laughed at my bafflement.

I remember turning to God in self-righteous anger and hissing through my clenched teeth, "Those people are so sick!"

The gentle rebuke God whispered to my heart caught me off guard.

"Joshua, your smug heterosexual lust is just as misplaced, just as disgusting in My sight."

This realization floored me. My contempt at the lust of those three men was nothing in comparison to the disgust God feels at the lust in niy heart, even though society condones and expects it. God states that when I look at a woman lustfully, whether she is on the street, on a billboard, or in a movie, I'm actually committing adultery with her in my heart (matthew 5:28). That's serious!

How many times have I felt lust for a passing girl as those homosexual men felt for me? How many times have my eyes

guard your heart 145 slid across a woman's body like a "slug on a rose" as Cyrano de Bergerac so aptly described it? Am I as repulsed by lust in my life as I am by lust in others'? Beilby Porteus writes, "What we are afraid to do before men, we should be afraid to think before God."

We should seek to completely remove lust from our minds. We should pray, "'Create in me a pure heart, O God' (psalm 51:10). Help me to be like Job, who made a covenant with his eyes not to look lustfully at others Qob 31:1). Forgive me for pampering lust in my life; help me to guard against it faithfully. May the "meditations of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O LORD"" (psalm 19:14).

Finally, we need to avoid those things that encourage wrong desire. For one girl I know, guarding her heart against lust meant throwing away all her secular romance novels. She felt convicted that the constant sensuality those books featured was totally inappropriate for her to read, making her heart rich soil for seeds of lust. Another friend attending college stopped spending his afternoons at the beach because the bikini-clad girls there were too great a temptation for his eyes. Another male friend decided to abstain from all movies for six months. All three of these