God's grace and divine mercy will often hinder us from pursuing our lusts. Here Jeremy Taylor explains all the little subtle ways He may do that. 

  "When a man's desires are winged with sails and a lusty wind of passion, and pass on into a smooth channel of opportunity, God oftentimes hinders the lust and the impatient desire from passing on to its port and entering into action, by a sudden thought, or by a little remembrance of a word, or by a fancy, or by a sudden disability, by unreasonable and unlikely fears, by the sudden intervention of company, or by the very weariness of the passion, or by curiosity, by lack of health, by the too great violence of the desire, bursting itself with its fullness into dissolution and a remiss or easiness, or by a sentence of scripture, by the reverence of a good man, or else by the proper interventions of the Spirit of grace, chastising the crime, and representing its appendant mischiefs and its constituent disorder and irregularity; and after all this the very anguish and trouble of being defeated in the purpose hath rolled itself into so much uneasiness and unquiet reflections that the man is grown ashamed, and vexed into more sober counsels." 

  In the preceding verses he explained this by way of an illustration using the flame on a coal reaching out for tinder, but hindered by many things ---

 "For so I have seen a busy flame sitting upon a sullen coal, turn its point to all the angles and portions of its neighborhood, and reach at a heap of prepared straw, which like a bold temptation called it to a restless motion and activity; but either it was at too big a distance, or a gentle breath from haven diverted the sphere and the ray of the fire to the other side, and so prevented the violence of the burning; till the flame expired in a weak consumption, and died, turning into smoke and the coolness of death, and the harmlessness of a cinder."