Lust

But 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.

— James 1:14-15

Lust is sinful desire: a craving for what God has forbidden, or for something good pursued outside the limits he has set for it, sharpened in Scripture to sexual desire outside marriage but reaching any forbidden craving (Ex. 20:17). Jesus locates the sin in the desire itself, not only the act it might lead to: looking at another with lustful intent is already adultery in the heart (Matt. 5:27-28). It is one name for concupiscence, sinful desire remaining in fallen human nature; even its first risings, before any consent, are properly sin, not merely an occasion of sin.¹

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession, in the same words as the Westminster Confession (1646) and the Irish Articles (1615) before it, states that the corruption remaining in believers after conversion is not a harmless residue:

The corruption of nature, during this life, doth remain in those that are regenerated; and although it be through Christ pardoned and mortified, yet both itself, and the first motions thereof, are truly and properly sin.¹

“The first motions thereof” names exactly what lust is: the initial risings of forbidden desire, prior to any consent or outward act. The confession folds this into its general chapter on sin rather than devoting lust a chapter of its own; the catechisms sharing its Reformed family fill in the specific application. The Westminster Shorter Catechism narrows this to one sentence: “the seventh commandment forbiddeth all unchaste thoughts, words, and actions.”² The Larger Catechism’s fuller list of what the same commandment forbids opens with “adultery, fornication, rape, incest, sodomy, and all unnatural lusts; all unclean imaginations, thoughts, purposes…”³ The tenth commandment reaches the same territory from another direction: its sins forbidden are “discontentment with our own estate; envying and grieving at the good of our neighbor, together with all inordinate motions and affections to anything that is his.”⁴

Biblical Basis

James traces sin to its root before any outward act: “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” (James 1:14-15). The Greek word James uses for “desire,” epithymias, names a forbidden craving in this context, not a desire for something good;⁵ the seventeenth-century commentator John Mayer read the verse as tracing four stages of the same movement, from “delight alluring” through “consent conceiving,” “work performing,” and “custom perfecting.”⁵

Jesus grounds the same point in his own teaching on the seventh commandment: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matt. 5:27-28). The sin is located in the heart’s desire, not only in whatever physical act might follow it. John draws the same boundary around desire itself rather than only its objects: “For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world” (1 John 2:16). Paul instructs the Thessalonians to pursue holiness “not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God” (1 Thess. 4:3-5) and tells the Colossians to “put to death” what belongs to their earthly nature, naming “evil desire” alongside sexual immorality and covetousness in the same list (Col. 3:5). The tenth commandment reaches further back still, forbidding the bare desire for what belongs to another before any act follows from it at all (Ex. 20:17).

Historical Development

Augustine against Julian of Eclanum

Augustine’s mature doctrine, developed across his long controversy with Pelagius and hardened in his final, unfinished work against Julian of Eclanum, held that concupiscence, sinful desire, was itself “doing evil,” culpable before God even apart from any consent to act on it.⁶ He described the concupiscence remaining in a Christian’s flesh, the same “lust of the flesh” Paul names, as an evil desire to be resisted rather than a neutral impulse: “concupiscence is not neutral, sinful desire is always sin; sinful desire is the lust of the flesh.”⁷

Trent and the Reformation

The Council of Trent’s 1546 Decree on Original Sin took the opposite position: concupiscence remaining after baptism, though the apostle sometimes calls it sin, is not itself sin in the regenerate but only an inclination toward it.

in the baptized there remains concupiscence, or an incentive [to sin]…. This concupiscence, which the Apostle sometimes calls sin, the holy Synod declares that the Catholic Church has never understood it to be called sin, as being truly and properly sin in those born again, but because it is of sin, and inclines to sin.⁸

The Reformed confessions answered in the words already quoted above: the Westminster Confession, the Irish Articles, and the 1689 all declare that remaining corruption, and its first motions, “are truly and properly sin,” directly against Trent’s denial of exactly that.¹ The broader dispute over concupiscence and original sin generally, including Rome’s doctrine of the donum superadditum and the Reformation’s rejection of it, belongs to Original sin; what is specific to lust is this narrower point of the same dispute: whether the desire itself, prior to any consent, already carries guilt.

Opposing Views

A live question among contemporary Reformed evangelicals is whether unchosen desire itself, apart from any consent or act, is culpable in the way Augustine and the Reformed confessions describe, or whether only yielding to a desire crosses into sin. The dispute is most often argued out over same-sex attraction specifically, since there the desire itself, not merely the acts it might lead to, is what is contested. Jared Moore’s 2019 dissertation surveys and evaluates two representative positions from within confessional Reformed circles. Wesley Hill, he reports, distinguishes “same-sex sexual attraction,” which Hill holds is morally culpable sin, from the broader, non-genital “homosexual orientation” or desire for same-sex companionship, which Hill holds is not.⁹ Robert Gagnon, on Moore’s reporting, argues that “God is more concerned with behavior than purity of heart in his people in this life,” so that an unwanted, unchosen same-sex attraction is “a guiltless desire to sin” rather than sin itself.¹⁰ Both positions grant that acting on same-sex desire is sin; both hold, against Moore’s own Augustinian reading of concupiscence, that the bare, unchosen inclination is not.

Objections and Responses

If desire itself is sin, wasn’t Jesus a sinner too, since he was genuinely tempted? Hebrews states plainly that Christ was “one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Heb. 4:15). James’s account of desire conceiving sin describes temptation rising from a person’s “own desire,” an already-corrupt inward source; Christ’s temptation came instead from outside, from hunger and from the devil’s direct proposals, since his human nature carried no indwelling corruption for a temptation to rise from within. Moore puts the distinction this way: “Jesus’ temptation is not the same as the self-engendered lusting described in James 1:14-15.”¹¹ Calling the first motions of fallen desire “sin” describes a corruption Christ’s human nature, conceived without that corruption, never had.

Isn’t it unjust to call someone guilty for an attraction they never chose and do not want? The same objection applies to inherited corruption generally, not only to lust: nobody chooses the sinful nature into which they are born, and the confession’s answer is the same one it gives there. Remaining corruption is “truly and properly sin,” and also, in the same sentence, something “through Christ pardoned and mortified” for the believer.¹ Calling an unchosen desire sin is not the same as calling it unforgiven or holding it against a Christian in a condemning way; it is a diagnosis calling for ongoing mortification, the pattern Scripture applies to every remnant of the old nature in a believer, rather than a verdict of final guilt.

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 6, “Of the Fall of Man, of Sin, and of the Punishment thereof,” para. 5. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
The Westminster Shorter Catechism (1647), Q. 72. ↩
The Westminster Larger Catechism (1647), Q. 139. ↩
The Westminster Larger Catechism (1647), Q. 148. ↩
Jared Heath Moore, A Biblical and Historical Appraisal of Concupiscence with Special Attention to Same-Sex Attraction (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 190-91. ↩ ↩²
Moore, chap. 2, “A Chronological Systematic Theology of Augustine’s Teaching That Concupiscence Is Always Morally Culpable Sin,” 20-76. ↩
Moore, 12. ↩
Council of Trent, “Decree Concerning Original Sin” (1546), quoted in Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 35, “Sanctification.” ↩
Moore, 151. ↩
Moore, 152. ↩
Moore, chap. 4. ↩