This Is Your Brain On Lust

"This Is Your Brain On Lust"
Matthew 5:27-28


You know the commandment pretty well, too: “Don’t go to bed with another’s spouse.”  But don’t think you’ve preserved your virtue simply by staying out of bed.  Your heart can be corrupted by lust even quicker than your body.  Those leering looks you think nobody notices--they also corrupt.


President Jimmy Carter made this statement of Jesus fairly famous.  The press was constantly trying to get some dirt on Jimmy--this apparently squeaky clean, Southern Baptist President from Plains, Georgia.  Finally someone from the press corp asked about lust.  Why, I don’t know.  But President Carter made his now famous reply, “Yes, I have lusted after women in my heart.”  Finally, they got him.

As Jimmy Carter divulged, lust is one of those secret sins.  Like envy, no one ever knows that you are “lusting in your heart.”  It’s something you can savor, and smack your lips over with yourself.  “Undress a person with your eyes,” is another, longer way of saying “lust.”  Lust also, like envy is something we can disguise even from ourselves.  We can construct fantasy stories, with elaborate scenes in our hearts and never be discovered.  Until you admit it in a presidential news conference.

But lust isn’t a matter just of the heart.  Lust is also a matter of the brain.  The largest sex organ on the body is the brain.  That’s the center where it all happens.  What’s amazing is that several studies, using MRI scans, have shown that the brain in lust is much like a brain on drugs.  The area of the brain, where lust is activated, that “lights up” on the MRI, is the same exact area of the brain that “lights up” when an addict has just used cocaine.  Lust is a drug; the more you do it, the more you use it, the more of it you have to have, until it becomes an obsession and addiction.  What’s weird is that lust is the anticipation of something that may never happen.  Under lust’s addiction, huge amounts of mental and emotional energy are burned uselessly.  But just imagining that “something” is enough for the brain.

When a person’s sexual hormones are flowing full force in lust, the pleasure center of the brain is blown wide open.  This blown pleasure center, goes into hyperdrive, and fuels idealization and projection.  That is, you see what you hope someone will be, or you think you need them to be, rather than seeing the real person, flaws and all.  At lust’s baser level, it is simply the desire for desire.  The brain on lust, in other words, sees things that aren’t there; distorts reality just like cocaine; and keeps a person obsessed with constantly needing more, so they can feel what they’re feeling--even though lust is all a hormonally induced fantasy.

Commercials like those from Victoria’s Secret, or Axe deodorant, try to show us how we can become lustworthy.  Just by wearing a certain scent under your arms, or a certain style of underwear, you can have people either secretly or overtly desiring you.  That’s what those commercials are about.  It isn’t about underwear or deodorant.  It’s about selling lust.  And notice the fantasy nature of both those recent commercials: feathered wings or crazy sexual anarchy.  Isn’t it interesting that there are no commercials that show us how we can make ourselves repulsive or unlustworthy.


Let’s use another analogy.  Let’s say lust is like a major river running through your life.  All rivers are fed by smaller tributaries.  The tributaries contribute to the power and flow of the main river they are feeding.  They aren’t the river, but they are having an impact on the course of that river.

In the same way, lust, as a major river, is fed by certain tributary issues.  If you are, like Jimmy Carter, dealing with lust in your heart (and brain), then you also, at the same time, have to deal with the smaller streams that feed that lust.  These tributaries not only enhance lust, they also make us susceptible to lust and it’s power.  So let’s look at a few of these smaller streams of the human condition that create lust.

The first is vulnerability.  Being vulnerable is about being highly susceptible.  It means you are more open, or fully out in the open and unprotected.  Your normal defenses are down.  Life is more apt to get at you.

This kind of vulnerability is usually as a result from when we’ve been wounded or weary.  Life has battered itself against us too long and too fiercely.  Or there’s been a frontal attack.  It’s like those times you see the two football teams crash into each other on the line of scrimmage, and one of the player’s helmet pops up in the air.  I always suck in a gulp of air when I see that happen because I know someone is in that pile up of 300 pound bodies without protection for their head.  They are vulnerable.

If you have been wounded by life in some way, and you are vulnerable, one of the things that happens is your perspective about things gets clouded.  The reason that happens is, vulnerability caused by being wounded and weary is a kind of pain.  When we are in pain our judgement and decision making abilities diminish.  The only thing we can think about is how to get rid of the pain, to manage the pain of being wounded and weary.

Unfortunately, there’s no pill you can take for the pain that results in vulnerability. There are medications for everything, but not vulnerability.  But that doesn’t mean we stop looking for ways to take care of our pain.  Lust seems to be one of those ways people seek out pain relief from vulnerability.  Someone’s sweet words, leads to a gentle touch, which leads to thoughts of the distorted reality I mentioned a few moments ago.  The “medicine” of lust, fully swallowed resulting in some sexual tryst to remedy the pain, turns into a mocker and a fraud.  Which leaves you not less vulnerable, but more.  And more in pain than before.

The second tributary that feeds the river lust is denial.  Jeremiah the prophet, in writing about some of the problems in Israel in his day said,
My dear people broken and shattered,
and yet they put on band-aids,
Saying, “It’s not so bad.  You’ll be just fine.”
But things are not “just fine”!
Do you suppose they are embarrassed
over this outrage?
Not really.  They have no shame.
They don’t even know how to blush.  (8:10-12)

One of the ways denial works in our sexual relationships is thinking that lust is a solution to our unaddressed problems or unmet need.  That’s basically what denial is:  applying the wrong solution or interpretation to a problem or crisis.  It’s evading the truth with a lie we tell ourselves in order to get by.

That’s part of what was going on in Israel during Jeremiah’s time.  People were broken and shattered.  They coped with their political and religious problems through acting on their lusts.  Their religious leaders said everything was fine.  But it wasn’t.  And people weren’t even embarrassed at the way they were acting upon their various lusts.  As Jeremiah said,  the people had forgotten how to blush, their lusting lifestyle had become so commonplace.

Jeremiah tried to lead the people away from lust and the fantasy world their lusts created, and see the truth.  That’s one of the only ways to break the power of lust.  Hold it up to the mirror of truth for what it is.  Make it look at itself in that mirror.  Accept the pain of what is seen in that mirror.

Jeremiah held up God’s perspective of what life in truth, rather than lust looked like.  Once the people began to discern God’s perspective, Jeremiah replaced people’s denial and lust with that perspective of God.

A third tributary flowing into the river Lust is unfulfilled expectations.  Expectations are powerful things.  When we hear ourselves using words like “should” or “ought” we are finding out what our expectations are about a certain part of life.  Any expectation we are holding on to makes that expectation probable.  If it wasn’t probable we would be expecting it.

Or sometimes expectations are things we think are owed to us.  Maybe it’s owed to us because we have a personal sense of entitlement.  Or we expect something because we’ve gone through some hard times, and just because of our bad experiences, we are owed different expectations.

In 2 Kings 5, Naaman has come down with leprosy.  He went to Elisha the prophet to be healed.  He rides for many days.  He finally gets to Elisha’s house, “with his horses and chariots arriving in style” says the story.  Elisha sent out a servant to give Naaman his message and instructions.  This is Naaman’s reaction:

Naaman lost his temper.  He turned on his heel saying, “I thought he’d personally come out and meet me, call on the name of God, wave his hand over the diseased spot, and get rid of the disease.” … He stomped off, mad as a hornet. (2 Kings 5:9-12)
Notice, it wasn’t what Elisha did that really made Naaman angry.  It was Naaman’s own expectations about what he thought should have happened.  It was his sense of entitlement and his expectations about what he thought he was owed that got him angry.

Another, more current example is from writer & speaker Joni Erickson Tada.  She was paralyzed from the neck down in a diving accident. In her book Secret Strength, Joni wrote about facing temptation.
I was in my late 20’s, single, and with every prospect of remaining so. Sometimes lust or a bit of fantasizing would seem so inviting and so easy to justify. After all, hadn’t I already given up more than most Christians just by being disabled? Didn’t my wheelchair entitle me to a little slack now and then?

(But then, coming face-to-face with her expectations she had to ask other questions.)  When God allows you to suffer, do you have tendency to use your trials as an excuse for sinning? Or do you feel that since you’ve given God a little extra lately by taking abuse, that He owes you a "day off?"

Hard times can often lead to temptation... In our suffering the evil one is quick to come to our aid and offer one of his solutions; pursuing pleasure to numb the pain…

When a person feels cheated or let down by life, it is an easy step to expect something different, especially something better, something comforting, something healing.  We do that by searching out, in subtle forms of lust, to find someone who agrees with us and our needs.  Lust is a way that searches out partners who feed on each other’s sense of unmet expectations, and what they think life owes them.

The remedy for this situation is to always check your expectations not with others, but with God’s.  What are God’s expectations for people in general?  What are God’s expectations for you in particular?

The other remedy for this situation is to develop a long-term view of life.  Lust is a short term solution to an unmet expectations.  True perspective, God’s perspective is developed over time.  Take your time.  Take your time with God.


Lust is a huge problem.  It’s an internal, invisible kind of problem that you know is going on in your heart and mind, that you think you can keep hidden from those you may be leering at.

But the main thing to remember about lust is that it’s not the main problem.  Lust is the way you are choosing to cope with other issues:  vulnerability, denial, unfulfilled expectations, emotional pain, ungrateful and selfish attitudes, boredom, and especially a weak commitment to Christ.  Lust is a coping method that leads to self-destruction.

The question then becomes, What are more healthy, more Christlike ways of coping with your sense of vulnerability, your unfulfilled expectations, your emotional pain?  As a coping method, lust is a quick fix to these other issues that are impacting your life.  Lust is never a long-term solution.

More long-term solutions always rest with the Lord:  patience in and with what God is doing in your life; taking the time to evaluate what God’s expectations are for you; developing God’s long term view of life, and how God makes things unfold in the best way, in the best timing; gaining the perspective that can only come through patient praying.