I remember a message preached by an old and respected pastor. In his message, he shared an illustration that changed how I process one aspect of my life—lust. He described what happened on one of his many flights back and forth to his speaking engagements. This was when flight attendants were all women and wore short skirts. 

He described one moment on one flight that changed his thinking. It happened when a stewardess was standing in the aisle next to him and had to reach up into the overhead bin to assist another passenger with their bag. Her skirt rose up as she positioned the bag in the overhead compartment. He couldn’t help from seeing what was happening.  What he did next would strengthen his spiritual integrity.

The Lord told him to see the beautiful young stewardess as his daughter. He realized he would want someone else to look away from his daughter if a similar situation arose and not continue to look at her with lust and allow a fantasy to fill his mind. He chose to look away then and in each similar situation in the future.

Early in our marriage, Jan and I discovered a similar truth. Whenever either of us was offered a chance to fantasize about someone or something in a moment of intimacy, the Lord said if we followed that fantasy, we would be making love with a demon. 

That is a very stark and uncomfortable reality to consider, but it is true. Any replacement for true, God-ordained love between a husband and wife is the work of demons. We now treat such invitations as an act of spiritual warfare. That understanding has guided our love life for many decades now and has made our love more pure and deeply intimate. Any thought that robs us of that purity comes from the pit of hell and must be challenged. 

We cannot unsee or unimagine some things. What we can do is capture the image or thought and refuse to accept hell’s invitation to enter its dark fantasy. We can only do this because we know who and what is extending the invitation.

“You cannot drink from the cup of the Lord and from the cup of demons, too” (I Corinthians 10:21).