Pastor John, in a couple of places I've recently heard you talk about visualizing Christ

in the battle against lustful thoughts. Lust is so often a visible battle, so it makes

sense that this battle is fought in the imagination, and this point surfaced in your parable

on the power of sin in a sermon clip that I posted as episode number 291 of this podcast.

And all the way back in episode 18, you explained the inachronym anthem to fight lust,

and there you described H as quote, hold a beautiful vision of Jesus in your mind until it triumphs

over the other sensual vision. In quote, in the fight against lust, how important is it to have

this beautiful vision of Jesus? And how does this work for you in the moment of temptation? What's

happening in your imagination? Well, Tony, I, I've had history with really bad ways of using

visualization in prayer. So even though the question isn't exactly that, let me, let me start

there. Pictures can begin to displace the word of scripture as the center of God's saving

communication, and that's, that's really dangerous. We can edge right up to and transgress the

intention of the second commandment. Don't make any graven images for, for worship.

Um, that there's an approach that I've run into. It's pretty widespread. At least it was

to healing prayer where people are instructed to go back into their painful past and visualize

a scene of, say, abuse, sexual abuse. And, and for example, imagine Jesus, picture Jesus walking

into the room and picking you up and hugging you and caring for you. And, and there are problems

with that kind of counseling, it seems to me, because it's, it's foreign to scripture. You don't

find any pattern quite like that in scripture. And it's usually slanted away from some of the

aspects of the role that Jesus plays, namely in Providence, portraying Him only as a comforter and,

and, and not as a sovereign and not as a judge and not as one who's going to handle that perpetrator

with violence someday. Um, it's, it tend to be just soft and gentle and warm and therefore slanted.

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