Video coming soon. The video teaching for Day 37 is still in production. Read the full lesson below, it will be added here as soon as it is ready.
There's a scene from C.S. Lewis I think about whenever I start mulling over desire and lust. It's from a short book called The Great Divorce: a dream about a busload of ghosts who take a trip from a gray, drizzly town to the very edge of Heaven. Every one of them is invited to stay. But most of them don't.
The lizard
One ghost rides that bus with a small red lizard perched on his shoulder. The lizard never stops moving. Its tail flicks like a whip, and its mouth works constantly, whispering into his ear, feeding him something, the whole way there. When this ghost finally reaches the edge of Heaven, he turns to leave. He's ready to go home, back to the gray, back to the drizzle, back to nothing, because deep down he knows this lizard cannot survive here. The light is too strong for it. The place is too real.
An angel stops him: bright, almost too bright to look at, radiating heat as well as light. And the angel makes him an offer: would you like to make it be quiet? Some of you know that wish, don't you? Could we get lust to just shut up for twenty-four hours?
"Of course I would," said the Ghost.
"Then I will kill him," said the Angel, taking a step forward.
"Oh, you're burning me. Keep away," said the Ghost, retreating.
"Don't you want him killed?"
"You didn't say anything about killing him at first. I hardly meant to bother you with anything so drastic as that."
"It's the only way," said the Angel, whose burning hands were now very close to the Lizard. "Shall I kill it?"
"Well... I'm quite open to consider it... I mean, for the moment I was only thinking about silencing it because up here, well, it's so embarrassing."
"May I kill it?"
"Well, there's time to discuss that later."
"There is no time. May I kill it?"
"Please, I never meant to be such a nuisance. Please, really, don't bother. Look! It's gone to sleep of its own accord. I'm sure it'll be all right now. Thanks ever so much."
Can I stop and say: if all this program does is make lust lay down, be quiet, and go to sleep, are you sure that's all God can do? The angel keeps asking the question.
"May I kill it?"
"Honestly, I don't think there's the slightest necessity for that. I'm sure I shall be able to keep it in order now. I think the gradual process would be far better than killing it."
"The gradual process is of no use at all."
"Some other day, perhaps."
"There is no other day."
"Get back! You're burning me. How can I tell you to kill it? You'd kill me if you did."
Whoa.
Sit with that. Why would a man believe that killing his own vice would kill him? Why would you or I ever believe that? But we do. We build entire identities around the very things that are destroying us. We tell ourselves "this is just who I am," as if the addiction and the man are one and the same, so that losing one means losing both.
Surrender isn't something you do alone.
Confession and accountability turn "may I kill it" from a question you dodge into one you can finally answer.
"This will not kill you," the Angel replied.
"Why, you're hurting me now."
"I never said it wouldn't hurt you. I said it wouldn't kill you."
"Oh, I know. You think I'm a coward. But it isn't that. Really it isn't... If you wanted to help me, why didn't you kill the thing without asking me, before I knew?"
"I cannot kill it against your will. It is impossible. Have I your permission?"
And in the story, the lizard knows this trick too. It starts whispering warnings of its own: that if the man lets the angel finish him, he'll be without it forever, that it isn't natural, that he won't know how to live. That is the exact lie every besetting sin tells us the moment we get close to freedom. It tells us we need it. That we won't survive without it. That we need to keep our options open. That's a threat from something that knows it's about to lose its grip.
"Have I your permission to kill it?" said the Angel to the Ghost.
"Yes, go on, get it over. Do what you like," bellowed the Ghost. But he ended, whimpering, "God help me. God help me."
Next moment the Ghost gave a scream of agony such as I never heard on Earth. The Burning One closed his crimson grip on the reptile, twisted it while it bit and writhed, and then flung it, broken-backed, on the ground.
What finally happens
Here's the part that undoes me every time. The lizard doesn't just die. It transforms, grows, changes shape, until what's lying there is no longer a twitching, whispering parasite, but a magnificent stallion: silver-white, with a mane and tail of gold, powerful, alive, stamping the ground so hard the trees shake. And in that same instant, the man is transformed too, from a thin, translucent ghost into what Lewis calls an "immense man": solid, golden, radiant, more real than any ghost.
And then, I love this, the very thing that used to ride him, whisper in his ear, dictate his every step, is now beneath him. He climbs on its back. He rides it. The passion that was his master has become his servant. Lust, tamed and transfigured, becomes strength. What could have destroyed him becomes what carries him forward.
What this means for you
That's the promise hidden inside this story. Whatever lizard of lust has made a home on your shoulder, it did not come to make you strong. It came to make you smaller, grayer, less real, one compromise at a time. And it will tell you, right up to the very last second, that you cannot live without it.
It's lying to you.
Because on the other side of real surrender (not managed, not negotiated, not "someday") is not a diminished man. It's a stronger one. The very thing you feared losing yourself to becomes, in God's hands, the very thing that carries you.
"For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live."
So I want you to hear God ask you exactly what that angel asked the ghost.
May I kill it?
This is Day 37 of Victory Over Pornography. Continue to Day 38 →