Every Young Man's Battle: Stategies for Victory in the Real World of Sexual Temptation: The Every Man Series (14 page)

She really seemed like an incredible person to me, until she got pregnant.
When she announced the fateful news, I couldn’t believe it at first. It
was just too horrible. But nothing I could do would change the truth. Then I
remembered that there
was
something I could do to change it. I could
buy an abortion, the great eraser of our sexual miscues. I could then go on
with my life and be rid of the whole thing. After many discussions and a few
simple arrangements, I bought her an abortion and went on with my life. Sort
of.

The relationship broke up, as is usually the case, but the abortion
didn’t buy me peace. A simple thought continued to haunt me mercilessly.
I hadn’t simply purchased an abortion—I had killed my own child!
That so-called glob of tissue was bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. I had
it snuffed out.

But that wasn’t the worst thing. I hadn’t
simply paid for the abortion. I had manipulated and pressured my girlfriend
into going to the abortion clinic because I made it very clear that I would not
be there for her or her baby, even though she wanted us to marry. When I shot
down that idea, she said that she wanted to carry the baby to term and put it
up for adoption.

I brought every argument to bear in order to stop her.
Having a child out of wedlock would have been too humiliating to me. I
wasn’t going to think of anyone but myself. All I wanted was to get this
“situation” behind me.

The result? I never did put it
behind me. In fact, the grief and shame of pressuring her to have an abortion
literally almost killed me. Eighty ulcers grew in my stomach and intestines,
and I’d have bled to death if things had continued the way they were. Not
long after that, I hit a car at an intersection and dropped out of school.
There was just too much pain to even think of studying.

I had killed
more than my baby. I had killed
my
life, and nothing would ever be the
same again. In the future, whenever I held someone else’s baby, it was
awful. Every cry, every squeal of the word “Daddy” brought sorrow
and suffering welling up, and the emotional and spiritual scars remain to this
day. Sure, I’m forgiven. But I hope these are scars you’ll never
have to bear. If you make authenticity your priority, you never will.

If you connect the dots of my life—the cheating, the compromise, the
masturbation, the early exposure to pornography, the objectification of women,
and the promiscuity—you end up with an abortion. Each dot was
significant, and masturbation was one large, devastating dot along the
way.

Examine the dots in your life. What picture forms behind you as
you connect these dots on your walk to your future? What kind of man do you
want to become? Are the things you’re doing today leading you there? If
your dots look anything like mine, please make changes today. Please, for your
sake and God’s sake, create a very different history from mine.

In
Fred’s story, we saw how moving toward sexual purity strengthens your
spiritual life. In my story, we see the opposite is also true. No matter how
spiritually strong you start out, a life of pornography, masturbation,
premarital foreplay, and intercourse will weaken you and leave you distant from
God.

So where do we go from here? Before we talk about the direction
we’re going to take, let me share a story about Fred. Believe it or not,
when Fred was in high school, he never attended a rock concert. But he made up
for lost time in college when he took a job with Wu Wei Associates, a concert
security company that hired Stanford football players and Stanford karate club
members to work security at Bay Area concerts.

Fred saw a zillion
concerts for free during those four years, including many hot chart-topping
acts of the day. But the best concert he ever saw was not free, and the band he
saw that night had only two real hits, as he recalls. While Fred bought tickets
for the Sanford Townsend Band, the group did something that night that blew the
roof off the place.

Almost every concert starts slowly, with the band
playing its lesser-known songs from their newest album. The concert then builds
to a crescendo as the group plays their best-known songs at the end, leading
into a rip-roaring encore. Not on this night. The Sanford Townsend Band stepped
out of the shadows, strapped on their instruments, and blasted straight into
the hit song that everyone expected to come during the encore! The house went
delirious, and the emotional fever didn’t break all night long.

So, we’re going to take a cue from the Sanford Townsend Band and
blast straight into the chapter you’ve been waiting for—you got
it—the one on masturbation.

We’ll address the questions
that you most want answered:

Is masturbation a sin?

If it is,
why can’t I stop it?

If it isn’t, why do I feel so
guilty?

And the biggest question of all: If God didn’t want me to
masturbate, why did He put my genitals within easy reach of my hands? (On
second thought, let’s save that one for heaven!)

Let’s get right to it, first things first. Masturbation
isn’t addressed in the Bible, so there’s no direct, definitive
scripture that says the practice is right or wrong. In other words, the issue
of masturbation won’t be as cut and dried as say, adultery. But the fact
that adultery is a sin helps us out a great deal in defining almost all
marital
masturbation as sin. Jesus said:

I tell you that
anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her
in his heart. (Matthew 5:28)

If Jesus defines simply
looking
lustfully
at a woman as adultery for the married man, certainly
looking lustfully at a woman
and
masturbating is adultery. This is
indisputable. But what about you single guys? While the Bible is unclear about
masturbation, this same scripture makes a similarly strong case against lustful
looks in single men. If looking lustfully at a woman is the same as going to
bed with her for married guys, looking lustfully at a woman is the same as
going to bed with her for single guys. We don’t see much difference.

Neither does Ed Cole, a pastor with a national speaking platform:

Not only does pornography encourage its viewers to create an image in
their minds. It also entices them to fantasize about it. Usually these
fantasies involve an erotic act that can only be satisfied with someone else or
by masturbation. Once an image develops in the mind, that picture creates a
stronghold in the mind and becomes a trap. Some people think I’m
old-fashioned for preaching this, but I continually encounter men who have lost
all sense of balance because of habitual masturbation. One man asked,
“How many times a day would you consider habitual?” That’s
reason enough to teach it!

Some make a case that isolated instances of
masturbation to relieve sexual tension are okay, if you’re married and
focusing on your wife—not some supermodel—during periods of
separation or illness. Even if that’s true, where does that leave you
single guys? Nowhere. You really have no woman you can legitimately lust
after.

So unless a guy can figure out how to masturbate without any
lustful fantasy, masturbation is technically a sin. But that begs other
questions. Let’s suppose a man
can
figure out how to masturbate
without any fantasy, and he simply does it to relieve sexual tension. Where
does that sexual tension come from in the first place? If all of this sexual
tension were natural and rooted in his hormonal makeup, that would be one
thing. He’d have little direct control over it.

But what if it
isn’t all natural? That would be another thing entirely. For instance,
what if he brought all this frustrating sexual tension upon himself by looking
at Internet porn during the last few evenings after work? What about the
cumulative effects of renting
Titanic
on Friday night, watching nubile
sweat-soaked girls in tight nylon shorts at the track meet on Saturday
afternoon, and lightly rubbing your genitals against a girl during the slow
dance at the Saturday night social?

Even if this guy
can
masturbate with a clean mind, wasn’t the sexual tension caused by his own
sin in the first place? If we bring the sexual tension upon ourselves through
sin, wouldn’t releasing that sexual tension through masturbation also be
a sin? Looking at it from another direction, is masturbation the only way to
release sexual tension? There may be purer ways. We need to discuss all these
questions.

As you can see,
since God didn’t address masturbation directly in Scripture, the
questions can seem endless. Theologians will argue over this until Christ
returns, and maybe that’s how it should be whenever Scripture is silent.
Even we coauthors have found it difficult to decide together what to label
masturbation and where to draw the lines of sin.

I (Fred) feel most
comfortable simply calling masturbation a “sin” because its effects
are exactly like the effects of any other sin in a man’s life. If it
looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it likely
is
a duck:

• Habitual masturbation consistently creates
distance from God.

• Jesus said that lusting after women in your
heart is the same as doing it. Since most masturbation involves a lustful
fantasy or pornography, we’re certain that nearly all instances violate
Scripture.

• The pornography and fantasy that surround
masturbation change the way we view women, as you saw in Steve’s story.
How can that be right?

• Habitual masturbation is hard to stop.
If you don’t believe it, wait till you get married and try to quit
masturbating.

• Masturbation is progressive. You’re more
likely to masturbate the day after you masturbate than you’re likely to
do it the day after you didn’t. In other words, the pleasurable chemical
reactions draw you to repeat the practice more and more. This is bondage, and
God hates bondage in His sons.

Another point is that at least 98
percent of all masturbation involves lustful mental fantasies or pornography.
Most all of it, then, is a sin. I say, “Why quibble over
whether
to call masturbation a ‘sin’ when most of it clearly
is
a
sin?”

Steve agrees with this in principle. How could he not? Look
at what compromising with pornography and fantasy did to his life! He treated
women in a demeaning way. He was spiritually weakened. He caused an abortion.
Still, Steve says, “Like anything, it’s what is in the heart that
can produce the sin. Even consensual sex between two married people can involve
sin depending on what a person might be thinking at the time. Because of the
unwarranted, crushing shame that revolves around masturbation, we need to be
careful how we communicate about it. When you masturbate for the first time,
you don’t commit the unpardonable sin or engage in something that grows
hair on your palms or causes you to go blind.”

While Steve
believes masturbation nearly always involves sin, because of the deep levels of
shame often associated with it, he prefers not to focus on the word
sin,
but on the heart. He has seen young men react negatively to harsh
preaching about sexual sin, whereas hearing a hopeful message about change and
freedom, and honoring God and women, can result in positive change. The shaming
approach often makes the problem worse.

In a recent radio broadcast,
Steve said,

When masturbation
is
a sin, it’s not an
end-of-the-world kind of sin that should drive a guy into deeper isolation. I
know of young men and women who aren’t involved with church because they
are involved with masturbation. They were told this is the worst and most
horrible thing they could do, so when it happens, they feel like total outcasts
from God. It is never good to drive young people from the church. If
masturbation
is
done in a sinful way, it’s not something that
should elicit deep shame. Masturbation is not rare, and most have tried it at
some point. They just don’t admit it or talk about it.

In the
same conversation, Steve said,

What’s so great with men
I’ve worked with, who have been masturbating with pornography since they
were teens, is that when they stop, they find there’s a different world
out there. They find that they can handle stress differently. When they go
without masturbating for a month, they feel so clean and good about
themselves.

We both want to remove deep shame from the equation.
We’ve seen masturbation used by young men to salve deep insecurity or
psychological pain. Derrick said, “I’ve been a Christian all my
life, and I had no problem with sexual sin until my parents divorced two years
ago when I was seventeen. I was so upset. For some reason, I started up with
some mild porn and masturbation. It felt good, but now it’s gotten
steadily worse. I don’t know what to do.” Pound the sin and shame
aspect too hard, and his insecurity problems get only stronger.

Many
other “issues” besides family problems can prompt a young male to
pleasure himself in order to mask the pain felt elsewhere in his life. Maybe a
guy has acne problems or big ears or a lisp. Whatever. The point is, it
doesn’t do any good to pile a bucket-load of “You ain’t no
good” on top of him. Self-condemnation only sets the cycle of
masturbation into a downward spiral, causing deeper embarrassment and
humiliation.