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The Velvet Lined Trap
by Jack Hayford
from The Anatomy of Seduction – Defending Your Heart for God
Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. (1 Peter 5:8)
While seduction is romanticized by our worldly culture, it is a powerful bait of the Adversary in his insatiable quest to steal the glorious fulfillment that God has designed and intended for us as His children.
Identifying the Destroyer
Hellish intrusion is always at hand. It is the relentless and calculated objective of a very real Being and of the host of cohorts at his command, as our common Adversary makes his approach. He is ever and always merciless—his victims being targeted irrespective of age and without consideration for the rich and wonderful purposes of God for each human being.
Our Lord Jesus identifies our enemy, Satan, as a thief who comes to steal, kill and destroy (see John 10:10). Satan brutally seeks this objective at every point of human experience, existence and enterprise. He seeks to destroy domestically (ruining homes and marriages); economically (draining resources and bankrupting business pursuits); professionally (removing the prospects of fruitfulness and effectiveness in one’s labors); physically (encumbering with affliction, sickness and death); and on and on.
Behind this Destroyer lies a trail of destruction as he works his wiles, brutalizing minds and emotions along the way and especially manipulating our vulnerability at that fundamental point of our identity—our sexuality. Once we have been seduced and snared at any point—and especially when we are caught in the velvet-lined trap of sexual bondage—the Enemy of our souls floods people with shame and guilt in order to steal their confidence and peace;
deceives people into adopting habits that kill effective discipleship; and
neutralizes believers’ testimonies in order to destroy the life-transmitting power of their witness, their "ministry."
As I have elaborated with completeness and clarity in this book’s companion, Fatal Attractions – Why Sex Sins Are Worse Than Others, the power of sexual sin and bondage is too profound for sexual sin to be considered "simply another kind of failure" or to be trivialized as "risky entertainment" or "just playing around."
Held Captive by the Culture
I want to underline these realities for you, especially if you are a vibrant young person just coming into adulthood. You may be wondering why it’s so important to defend yourself against the seducing influences of the world, when that means going against the rip-roaring tide of everything that is presented as desirable by the icons of popular culture. More than a generation ago, our society absorbed into its rhetoric the slogan, "If it feels good, do it," elevating the sensual over the spiritual, and enshrining covetousness and lust over wisdom and morality. Today, it barely takes watching network television, viewing a supposed-to-be family film, glancing at a magazine or tuning in to a three-minute MTV clip to be bombarded by the glamorization of immoral lifestyle choices and sexual images.
Learn it early, dear one: The agenda here is not hidden. The intended objective has become clear and unapologetic: to excite to sexual arousal (in the name of "informing" or "educating") and to entice to sexual indulgence (by suggesting that to be sexually disciplined is to be "inactive" and to be sexually indulgent is to be "active"). The result is the formation of a matrix of thought that reduces true humanity to something other than "persons" and that binds soul and body onward and downward toward the pit at the end of seduction’s dead-end path.
This seduction may not involve a believer’s consideration of an outright or blatant expression of sexual immorality. Rather, it may be the subtle deception that a select portion of the Enemy’s tempting bait can be accessed without getting caught in his trap: lingering on the adult cable station while channel surfing, failing to be discriminating in the kinds of reading material permitted in the home, engaging in chatty flirtation over the Internet or entertaining one’s sexual fantasies and imagination. It may be the temptation to compromise in subtle ways, having been deceived by the Adversary into valuating some sin as "not so bad" or not even as sin at all.
Or the seduction may be the blatantly inappropriate indulgences of fondling or French kissing a person who is not your spouse—practices that have gone from the restricted to the recreational. Today, we are witnessing at pervasive and disturbing dimensions (especially as it relates to teens and even preteens) the absorption of homosexuality, masturbation and oral sex into our culture, stamped with society’s seal of approval. Tragically, this view has, at times, been validated by some in Christian circles.
Called to Be Holy
Yet if these seductions and deceptions were not detrimental to what Father God, our Creator, intended for our lives, He would not have provided in His Word warning after warning about sexual immorality, as well as the admonition that believers in Jesus Christ are to be holy—a way of living that is both possible and rewarding.
Therefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and rest your hope fully upon the grace that is to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ; as obedient children, not conforming yourselves to the former lusts, as in your ignorance; but as He who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, because it is written, "Be holy, for I am holy" (1 Peter 1:13-16).
Holy living is not beyond our ability, because it is Christ in us who enables that holy living. Our ability to live holy lives is dependent only on the degree of our submission to Christ in us. Holy living is desirable because of the abundant harvest of spiritual fruit that such discipleship produces. Purity and self-control are among the foundational characteristics of believers in Jesus Christ who have genuinely given their lives to the Lord and who now live enabled and empowered by His Holy Spirit and not by their own inclinations (see Galatians 5:22-23).
For a number of believers, even those who walk in moral purity and those who enter purely into the covenant relationship of marriage, there come situations in which everything that’s in us seems to be tested in the face of temptation. The Bible does not teach that we will never be tempted, but it does teach that we are fully equipped by the Word of God and the power of God to resist the temptation: "Therefore submit to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you" (Jas. 4:7).
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