Visual

I believe the awareness or attraction for the opposite sex is different from lusting after someone of the opposite sex (if it were the same sex, well, that is a different topic all together, and not covered in this post). Lust involves will, making a choice. Can I really fault my wife for noticing a good looking man? As humans, we are visual people. Observing a nice looking adult human-being is going to happen. However, the problem comes in when we don't handle the thoughts we [might] have after the observation. Do we observe for too long, or focus too much on a certain body part? The time we are taking to focus or linger, is causing us to go down a path we don't need to be going down. We get into trouble when we start thinking of things that involve us and the attractive person (lust). We have to choose whether we are going to dismiss those thoughts or entertain those thoughts. And there are times when we do less dismissing than we should. That is when we have to ask for help from the Lord.

And for men, we can recall an image of an attractive woman without even wanting to. However, we can determine whether we will keep that image in our mind and go somewhere that we shouldn't with that image. We have a choice to dismiss the image, as we don't want anything to taint what we have with our wive. There are enough issues that don't involve sex, that you won't have to worry about your marriage being boring. :-) We men are fighting that daily, unfortunately, because of the society we live in today. Every where you look, there are images that are not very appropriate for a man trying to live holy. We have to make a conscious decision to bring those thoughts into captivity. We can't be selfish and think about how we didn't "get some" last night and we are going to pay her back. We have to take ourselves out of the equation and obey God. We don't want to put asunder what God has brought together.

I heard a preacher say that where your mind goes, your heart will soon follow. And we have an example of that in Lot's wife (see Genesis 19).

Be encouraged, saints!

Blessings.