Puritan Remedies for Lust
Jul 27, 2017 · 3 min read

The following is an edited compilation of the advice of 14 puritan writers on how to deal with lust and other similar sins. A summary of each individual writer’s advice can be found here:
Fighting Tactics
Avoid all temptations
- Study to avoid all temptations to sin and occasions which would stimulate this sin
- Avoid lascivious plays, dancings, songs, books, pictures, and whatever else is apt to provoke lust
- Avoid all light and lewd company and all improper and indecent conversation
Keep vigilant watch
- Watch constantly against all temptations
- Watch strictly over your heart, mind, spirit, and external senses
- Watch your eyes, to turn them away from such objects as may provoke lust
- Watch your ears, to shut them against all lascivious discourse
- Watch your mind, to suppress every lustful thought and to repel all wanton imaginations
- Watch your heart, to immediately shake off any unclean motions that may arise
- Watch your spirit, to oppose uncleanness in the first desires of it, to resist the very first motions of lust in the soul
Weapons of Warfare
Fear God
- Labour to get the fear of God into your heart, arming yourself with fear for God’s presence and omniscience
- Use serious reflection to gain a habitual sense and vivid conception of the divine presence, God’s all-seeing eye, his infinite holiness, and vindictive justice
Trust in Christ
- Give yourself away body and soul to Jesus Christ and learn to live by faith, sensible of your own weakness, relying on his promised strength
- Daily and earnestly apply the blood of Christ for the purifying of the heart, purging it from sin, filling it with true holiness, and for crucifying the lusts of the flesh
Walk in the Spirit
- Labour to get the Spirit of God within you, to sanctify and rule you
- Depend constantly on the help of the Spirit
Pray
- Pray frequently and fervently against this sin, to be preserved from it and all temptations to it
- Pray for the sanctifying influences of the Holy Spirit, to subdue every lustful thought
- Pray ‘Create in me a clean heart, O God’
- Pray ‘Turn away my heart and eyes from beholding vanity’
Meditate
- Study the Word of God daily, diligently, and with delight, filling your mind with godly meditations
- Believe and apply of the scriptural promises of the cleansing of the heart and the subduing of iniquity
Helps & Hindrances
Work
- Let not your flesh be idle but be diligent in your calling and busy in your employment, always doing some good thing
Moderation
- Take heed of excess in diet and lifestyle; be moderate in your eating, drinking, sleeping, and recreating
Fasting
- Keep control over the body, when there is need, with frequent fastings, especially if this sin frequently assaults you
Marriage
- When other means do not prevail in quenching burning desires, seek to marry in the Lord without undue delay
- Let every married man have a chaste, entire love to his own wife
Serious Considerations
Consider the sin
- It is a sin in itself truly vile, abominable, and exceedingly dishonourable to God
- It dishonours and debases the body and procures awful Judgments from God
- Falls into this sin are frequently the punishment of some other sin
Consider the danger
- If you nourish this Lust in your heart, it will easily get the victory over you, and when this sin takes hold it cannot very easily be driven out
- Few persons truly repent of this sin; and these with great difficulty
Consider the consequences
- It yields but a brief delight for the flesh and a long and bitter aftertaste for the soul
- It frequently leaves an indelible stain upon the character and creates chaos in families
- It is ruining to the soul in this world in so far as it sears the conscience, binds the affections, blinds the mind, and utterly unfits for communion with God, till the guilt be washed off by the application of Christ’s blood
- It is ruining to the soul in the world hereafter, awfully hazarding men’s eternal ruin
