You are not what you want. You are who you are. And that’s defined by the Word of God. It might be that God frees your appetite from whatever it’s drawn toward, but usually he instead enables you to fight it. This might go on for forty days, for forty years, for an entire lifetime. That’s all right. There must be room then in our churches for a genuine bearing of one another’s burdens when it comes to the appetites. Pretending the appetites are instantly nullified by conversion is a rejection of what God has told us–that we are still in the war zone.
–Russell Moore, Tempted and Tried
