Lust and the Desire That Replaces Love

7 December 2025

*This article is part of “Dialogues,” where real questions from people are answered by AI and then reviewed by theologians for clarity, accuracy, and faithfulness to Christian teaching.

Question

“What is lust? The Bible sometimes connects it to sexuality, but is that all? How should we understand lust more broadly in the light of God’s love and the gospel?”

Answer

In the Bible, lust is not first a word about sexuality, but a word about the heart. Lust is what happens when a desire stops living under God’s love and begins to rule in God’s place. It is any craving—whether for pleasure, success, control, comfort, or recognition—that we quietly move to the center of our lives until it pushes out real love for God and neighbor. The problem is not that we have desires. The problem comes when a desire no longer submits to God, to His love revealed in Christ, and to His command to love. Then it stops being a gift and becomes a master.

Lust as Desire That Refuses to Be Ruled

The New Testament word often translated “lust” or “evil desire” is epithymia, a strong longing. James 1:14–15 describes the inner movement this way: “Each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.” Desire becomes lust when it stops bowing to God and starts leading us. Paul speaks of “evil desire and covetousness, which is idolatry” in Colossians 3:5. That is a crucial connection: lust in the broad, biblical sense is a form of idolatry. It is the inner decision to treat some created thing as if it were ultimate.

In Romans 1:24–25, people “worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator,” and as a result “God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts.” Lust is what desire looks like when the heart has exchanged God for something else. Likewise, Paul says that before Christ we “lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind” (Ephesians 2:3). Desire is still present, but it no longer listens to God’s love or His commands; it wants to rule.

When Desire Moves to the Center

Jesus teaches, Matthew 6:21: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Whatever becomes our treasure—what we quietly feel we cannot live without—draws the whole heart after it. Lust appears when a particular desire moves into that place of treasure and refuses to be corrected, limited, or redirected by God’s love.

This can be the craving for success, for recognition, for comfort, for control, or for some specific future we have imagined for ourselves. None of these is wrong in itself. They become lust when they no longer submit to the greatest commandment, to love God with all the heart and our neighbor as ourselves (Matthew 22:37–39). The Tenth Commandment exposes this inner movement: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house… or anything that is your neighbor’s” (Exodus 20:17). Coveting is the inner insistence that “I must have this,” even at the cost of obedience and love. As James 4:1–2 explains, our “passions are at war” within us; we “desire and do not have,” and so we harm one another. Lust is this war of craving that begins to push love aside.

John warns in 1 John 2:15–16: “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world.” The point is not that created things are evil, but that when they are loved as ultimate, they displace the Father’s love. Lust is desire that no longer lives under that love, but competes with it for the center.

Lust, the Gospel, and the Displacement of Love

The gospel proclaims that God has loved us first. Romans 5:8 declares: “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Through this, “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5:5). This love is meant to be the fixed center of the Christian life. We learn to see every desire, every plan, every longing in its light.

Lust begins where a desire stops accepting that center. Perhaps we still confess Christ with our lips, but in practice the heart says, “Yes, God loves me—but I must also have this, or I cannot be at peace.” That “must” can be success, comfort, approval, or anything else. Once it sits at the center, prayer easily becomes a way of asking God to secure our idol. People become helpers or obstacles to our craving. Love shrinks, because something else has taken its place. Instead of “Christ at the center, everything else as gift,” we live “my desire at the center, Christ as support.” That is the inner shape of lust, even when outwardly life looks religious and respectable.

God’s Love as the Only Safe Center

Scripture does not call us to become empty of all desire, but to have one supreme love that orders all others. “We love because he first loved us,” writes John in 1 John 4:19. The first movement is God’s movement toward us in Christ. Our desires are healed not by sheer willpower, but by being drawn into this prior, steady love. Jesus calls us to “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness” (Matthew 6:33), trusting that all other things will be added in their proper place.

Conclusion

Biblically, lust is any desire that ceases to live under God’s love and begins to occupy the center of the heart. It is not limited to sexuality; it can attach itself to success, comfort, control, recognition, or any other created good. When a desire no longer submits to the gospel, but starts to rewrite life around itself, it inevitably pushes out genuine love for God and neighbor.

God’s answer is not to strip us of all desire, but to give us a truer center: His own love in Jesus Christ, poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. As that love becomes the place from which we live, desires are no longer tyrants to obey. They become gifts that can be received, questioned, redirected, or laid down in the service of the greater command—to love God with all our heart, and our neighbor as ourselves.