Authors: Stephen Arterburn
• How long am I
going to stay sexually impure?
• How long will I rob my friends
in the youth group with my fake Christianity?
• How long will I
stunt the growth of intimacy and oneness with God, an intimacy I promised Him
years ago?
God’s view is simple here. You need to face those
questions and make a decision. Yet you’re hesitating. We know you are,
because we hesitated for years. You’re thinking,
Wait a minute;
I’m not ready.
Or,
It just isn’t that easy!
Fine. We’ll agree that choosing to stop sinning isn’t any
slam-dunk, easy decision. Once you’re ensnared, the obstacles loom huge.
But listen to the following words spoken by preacher Steve Hill, who was
addressing his escape from addiction to drugs and alcohol as well as from
sexual sin:
There’s no temptation that is uncommon to man. God
will send you a way of escape, but you’ve got to be willing to take that
way of escape, my friend.
I was an alcoholic to the max. I would
drink whiskey, straight whiskey, every day. And I was a junkie. Cocaine up my
nose, in my arm—I did it all, friend. But God never delivered me from the
desire and the love of drugs. He never did. What happened is that I
decided
to never touch the stuff or drink booze again.
Those of you who are into pornography may be asking God to take away
your lustful desires. You are a man with hormones. You feel things. You have
since puberty, and you will until the day you die! You are attracted to the
opposite sex.
I’m not saying that God cannot take the
desire from you. He can! He’s just never done it in my life or in the
tens of thousands of people I’ve worked with over the years. That
includes pornographers. Ninety-nine percent of them had to
make a
decision.
They had to make a decision to not walk by magazine racks of
adult magazines, and they had to make a decision to stay faithful to their
wives and their families.
We agree. It’s time to make a
decision.
Consider the
example of Eleazar, one of David’s “three mighty men,” whom
we learn about in this brief record of a tough battle against the
Philistines:
Then the men of Israel retreated, but he stood his
ground and struck down the Philistines till his hand grew tired and froze to
the sword. The L
ORD
brought about a great victory that day. (2
Samuel 23:9-10)
Eleazar refused to be ensnared anymore. Everyone else
was running from the enemy, but he put his foot down and said,
“I’ve had it with this running. I’m going to fight until I
drop dead or until I drop to the field in victorious exhaustion. This is my
moment to live or die.”
Have you had it with the running? In his
early twenties, author and pastor Jack Hayford once sat in his car after a
banking transaction with a lovely bank teller and said to himself,
“I’m either going to have to purify my mind and consecrate myself
unto God, or I’m going to have to masturbate right here.” That Jack
could say this in front of tens of thousands of men at a Promise Keepers
conference was inspirational.
How about you? How long will you allow
the Philistines to chase you? Are you motivated instead to fight?
Here’s a
story of someone who became very motivated to change. Several weeks prior to
his planned wedding, Barry heard me (Fred) give a talk on sexual purity. My
words weighed heavily on his heart because he’d been masturbating to
R-rated movies since his midteens. He’d been planning to marry Heather
with his secret safely tucked away, but now he decided to tell her the truth.
Heather recalls her reaction to Barry’s confession:
I was
shocked and numbed when we talked in the car that night. I just stared straight
ahead with no feelings at all. After dropping him off, I cried and cried,
refusing to talk to him for days. When I did agree to see him, he commented to
me that I looked pretty. I got so mad and repulsed by him that I threw the
engagement ring in his face and told him to get out of my sight. I felt sick
and dirty.
As you can see, this topic was an emotional one. Women take
it personally when they find out what their boyfriends have been doing in
secret.
Heather asked Brenda and me to meet with her, which we did.
After much prayer and counseling, Heather gave Barry a deadline of one week to
turn his life around.
Then I met with Barry. “Can you help
me?” he asked. “I’m absolutely hooked on sexy movies. I
expected Heather to understand, but she was horrified and called me a sex
addict. Fred, I’m desperate. The invitations have already been sent out,
but if I don’t get this stopped, I’ll have to somehow explain all
this to my motherin-law! You’ve got to help me!”
Do you
suppose Barry was motivated? He surely was. Rarely have I met with someone who
wanted to win a war more quickly. In short order, Barry defeated his problem.
He became a man of sexual integrity, and today he and Heather have a wonderful
marriage.
You can win the war as well—and start winning it now,
long before you get engaged.
As the basis for
your victory, God has provided you with everything you need for a life of
purity. God’s way is far better than a state-of-the-art GPS navigational
system.
At Calvary, He purchased for you the freedom and authority to
live in purity. That freedom and authority are His gifts to you through the
presence of His Spirit, who took up residence within you when you gave your
life to Christ. The freedom and authority are wrapped up in our new inner
connection to His divine nature, which is the link that gives us His power and
the fulfillment of His promises.
His divine power has given us
everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who
called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these he has given us his very
great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the
divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires. (2
Peter 1:3-4)
It’s like the situation that Joshua and the people
of Israel faced as they prepared to cross the Jordan River and possess the
Promised Land. What did God say to Joshua?
Have I not commanded you?
Be strong and courageous! Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the
L
ORD
your God will be with you wherever you go. (Joshua
1:9)
He’d given the Israelites all they needed. They merely had
to cross the river. Regarding sexual purity, God knows the provision He’s
made for us. We aren’t short on power or authority; what we lack is
urgency. We must choose to be strong and courageous in order to walk into
purity. In the millisecond it takes to make that choice, the Holy Spirit will
start guiding you and walking alongside you during your struggle.
Each one of
us has been manipulated by our sexual culture; each of us has made choices to
sin. To varying degrees, each of us became ensnared by these choices, but we
can overcome this affliction. Far too often, however, we ignore our own
responsibility in this. We complain, “Well, of course I want to be free
from impurity! I’ve been to the altar 433 times about it, haven’t
I? It just doesn’t seem to be God’s will to free me.”
Not God’s will? That’s an offense to the character of God.
Don’t blame God. His will is for you to have sexual purity, and He has
made a provision for that purity. Listen to these Scriptures:
Count
yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let
sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires. Do not offer
the parts of your body to sin, as instruments of wickedness, but rather offer
yourselves to God, as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer
the parts of your body to him as instruments of righteousness. For sin shall
not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace. (Romans
6:11-14)
You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to
righteousness. (Romans 6:18)
God is waiting for you, but He
isn’t waiting by the altar, hoping you’ll drop by and talk for a
while. He’s waiting for you to rise up and engage in the battle. We have
power through the Lord to overcome every level of sexual immorality, but if we
don’t utilize that power, we’ll never break free from the
habit.
You see, sexual impurity isn’t like a tumor growing out of
control inside us. We treat it like a tumor when our prayers focus on
deliverance, as we plead for God to come remove it. Actually, sexual impurity
is a series of bad decisions on our part—and a by-product of our immature
characters—and deliverance won’t deliver us into instant maturity.
Character work needs to be done.
Holiness isn’t some nebulous
thing. It’s a series of right choices. You needn’t wait for some
holy cloud to form around you. You’ll be holy when you choose not to sin.
You’re already free from the
power
of sexual
immorality—it’s just that you aren’t yet free from the
habit
of sexual immorality. That is, until you choose to say,
“That’s enough! I’m choosing to live purely!”
Ready for authenticity? Good. Let’s get to it. We’ll recount
Steve’s story in the next chapter and use the rest of the book to offer
guidelines for living authentically as a real man.
PART IV
When I (Steve) was eleven years old, I was a fairly good
kid. I had accepted Jesus as my Savior when I was nine in an exhilarating walk
to the altar, and I was living like most Christian boys were supposed to live.
Sure, I forgot to take out the trash from time to time and even tossed out a
few cuss words on occasion, but that was about as bad as it got. I was one of
the happiest kids around. Life was fun, and I felt free in Jesus.
About a year or so after my salvation, I tagged along with my parents to a
youth outing about thirty miles away in Curtain, Texas, where we spent an
evening roller-skating in an old school gymnasium. That school district was a
bit poor, so it raised a little money by allowing groups to come in and destroy
the gym floor this way! I suppose by today’s standards it was a pretty
lame outing, but in a small Texas town back then, it was a lot of fun.
Mixing in with the older kids, I did my best to stay on my wheels and act
as grown up as possible. I did neither very well, but at least I was trying.
Soon, during an “all skate” moment, I found myself wobbling forward
and backward like an unearthed earthworm. Just as I was about to wobble back,
down, and out, two soft “angels” swept up beside me and kept my
wheels under my feet.
Gabriel and Michael? Nope. They were Nancy
Hewitt and Marcia Mallard, the two most gorgeous girls I’d ever seen in
my life.
While
they were eight years older than I was, something happened when I found myself
woven into the arms of these two roller-rink goddesses. I hadn’t felt
anything so intense, so magnificent since I walked down to the front of the
church to accept Christ.
Until then, I thought nothing could feel as
good as becoming a Christian, but rolling around the rink with those two
perfect “10”s was the discovery that there are some things in this
world that can make a person feel
really
good. After that night, I
decided I wanted to feel really good. And I decided that night to begin a
search of all things that felt good. I wanted to experience them all, but it
occurred to me that I might have to compromise a little bit to experience them.
Sadly, I sensed I was willing to move away from God if it led me to more of
these “heavenly” pleasures. Looking back, I guess I can say that
becoming a Christian didn’t produce instant character in me, and it was
the absence of character that paved the road of compromise.
Compromise
is a killer that seems so innocent in the beginning. Yet when you compromise
and do a small thing you know isn’t right, it rarely stays small or ends
there. It becomes easier and easier to choose the wrong path the next time
around.
Then it feels as if the wrong path begins to choose you.
Alcoholics explain it like this: First a man takes a drink, then the drink
takes the drink, and then the drink takes the man. What feels first like liquid
medicine eventually poisons. We saw the same process in Fred’s slide down
the slippery slope of premarital sex. He made a few small wrong choices, and
before he knew it, he couldn’t choose anything right.
Shoplifters
start by giving in to the urge that first time. A piece of
two-cent candy
becomes a candy bar, and sooner or later, stealing candy becomes a habit, all
because of the first compromise. There are guys sitting in prison right now who
likely told themselves, “Just this once.” But once led to twice,
which led to thrice, and now there are too many times to count. If they
didn’t get caught in the beginning, they continued to steal until they
lost the person they were created to be. We’re talking total compromise,
and the life of compromise is never the life God intends for us.
That
was the way it was for me when it came to cheating in school. I was a fairly
clever guy in fifth grade, but not clever enough to do right. Everyone in the
fifth grade was supposed to learn the fifty states and capitals before moving
on to the sixth grade. My problem? By the time I remembered to study, it was
too late. The right thing was to study the best I could, accept the grade I
received, and accept the responsibility for not starting in time.