Welcome back to James Popery. I'm Joe Heschmire, and the season of Lent starts tomorrow.

For many Christians, it's a time to give up chocolate and such, and that's fine, but it kind of misses the point. I don't want to have a forgettable Lent, and I don't want your Lent to be forgettable either. Because the fact is, Lent and Penance has the power to completely transform our lives. But for it to do that,

we need to know what the Bible highlights is the three sources of temptation and sin, and then the

three tools that Jesus gives us to combat these sins. So let's talk about our problems first

and then look at the solutions. When we talk about types of sins, there's various formulations.

For instance, in terms of the seven deadly sins, pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth.

Or you can group the sins by which of the Ten Commandments they violate. For instance, sins of theft, covetousness, and so on.

But there's another way of grouping the sins, one which even many Christians are

unfamiliar with, even though it's a grouping we find within the Bible itself. St. John warns us in

1 John, Chapter 2, that there are three types of sin that are incompatible to love of God. These are

sometimes called the triple concupiscence, meaning they're the three types of temptation. And these

temptations are lust of the flesh, lust of the

eyes, and pride of life. Understanding each of these three types of sin is critical to see where in your

life you might be drawn away from the love of God. Now the first of these three is pretty straightforward,

lust of the flesh. You have a natural desire for food, for drink,

for sex, and the like. Those things are good in themselves. Without food and drink, you don't survive,

without sexual reproduction, the species doesn't survive. But these desires, like all earthly

desires, can become disordered. That's going to include the sin that we normally call lust,

disordered sexual desires, but it's also going to include sins like gluttony and drunkenness.

But there are other kinds of disordered desires as well, other kinds of lusts that we might have.

And John calls this second category lust of the eyes. So think about this as the desire to have

more and more stuff, the most money,

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