Every Young Man's Battle: Stategies for Victory in the Real World of Sexual Temptation: The Every Man Series (17 page)

Now this isn’t the
only way to worship or find intimacy with God. However you seek Him, just make
sure you don’t wait to stop masturbating before you reach out to Christ
in worship and praise. You need that intimacy in your life. His heart of
passion longs for you. Worship Him. He’s the Creator of the universe, and
He’s
for
you.

One of the
key components to making it through your teen and young adult years is
teamwork. Everyone needs supportive friends or groups. Every young man needs an
intimate relationship with God.

Ultimately, men of all ages face the
same challenge—asking for help and being honest about emotions and
struggles. For most young men, it’s a major victory to come to the point
of asking for help. Have you done that yet?

If we’re to quit masturbating, the last of the four
requirements is to understand what cable TV, videos, the Internet, magazines,
and fantasy can do to our sex drive.

What are the effects? Simple.
They increase your sex drive, which makes it practically impossible to
eliminate masturbation. Some would say it’s simply impossible to live
life as a single male without having intercourse, and that we must choose
either genuine sexual intercourse with a girl or false intercourse with our
hand or go crazy. Are those really the only options? To answer that, we might
ask a better question: Do you require masturbation because of the sex drive God
gave you or because you’ve built it into an even
bigger
sex
drive?

Let us say it
clearly: Masturbation is primarily a symptom of uncontrolled eyes and
free-racing thoughts. When you create new habits of guarding your eyes and
taking fantasy captive, masturbation can cease. Until then, it probably
won’t. Masturbation is like the low oil warning light on the dash of your
car. If it goes on, the problem is not with the light; the real problem is
under the hood.

Brennan feels overmatched in the battle. “But my
eyes can’t be the only problem! What about my sex drive?” he asked.
“Look, I’m sixteen and probably have a stronger sex drive than some
rabbits. Since I’m lacking in the wife department, what am I going to do
about it? How will I get release?”

My reply was, “Is that
your natural sex drive, or have you done something to grow it?”

The size of our sex drive isn’t fixed. If we’re to eliminate
masturbation, we must see that our sex drive has two parts. One part is fixed
at birth, but the other part can billow up like a hot-air balloon as we
encourage it.

That we have a baseline sex drive, there’s no
question. Dr. James Dobson stated in
What Wives Wished Their Husbands Knew
About Women
that the human male, because of sperm production and other
factors, naturally desires a sexual release every seventy-two hours or so.
You’re probably wondering what can be done about that. Is there a way to
release that stuff?

Thankfully, yes. While our body has this natural
physical pressure for sexual release, God Himself has provided a built-in
“relief valve,” something with which you’re familiar.
Clinically it’s called a “nocturnal emission,” but long ago
in a dank, smelly football locker room, some kid decided to call it a
“wet dream,” and that name stuck. The good news for teens is that
nocturnal emissions
can
work for you in your quest for purity.

Having said that, you might wonder how such dreams can work toward purity
since some of these semiconscious flights of fancy can get pretty hot and
heavy! But don’t forget that those hot and heavy aspects arise from what
you’ve been feeding your mind each day. The same pure eyes and mind that
keep you from actively seeking release during the day will limit the impurity
that your mind can use in your dreams at night. These dreams will be
dramatically purer in scope and content than you now realize.

Nocturnal
emissions kick in naturally in response to your normal, natural sperm buildup.
This means that the fixed part of your sex drive will more or less be taken
care of by God’s natural relief valve.

So there’s at least
some help regarding the
natural
baseline part of your sex drive. This
means that you aren’t necessarily overmatched in this battle simply
because you have no wife. However, you can become overmatched if you’re
not careful to guard your eyes and mind. We bring most of the sexual pressure
onto ourselves through visual sensual stimulation and mental fantasy, which
puffs up the variable portion of our sex drives to the point where it’s
difficult to handle it through nocturnal emissions alone. We’ll call this
the false sex drive.

Keith, a single
youth pastor I recently met in North Carolina, said that when any of his guys
fall into masturbation, his standard reply is, “Why did you need release?
What were you doing during the day that made you fall that night?”

Added Keith, “Look, I’m single too. I understand what
they’re going through. But in my experience, if I’m faithful to
guard my eyes and keep the fantasies out of my life, that false drive, as you
call it, simply dries up. It just isn’t there anymore.”

Some of Keith’s guys claim they don’t lust while they
masturbate, and they’re only doing it to release tension. “So
what?” says Keith. “You were fantasizing and watching soft-core
shows on cable earlier in the day. That forced your hand, and you know it. If
you hadn’t been watching those shows, you would have had no sexual
tension in the first place.” They rarely argue.

When you boil it
down, sexual purity is simply a choice. Is holiness important to you or is it
not?

Thad is a twenty-three-year-old college student, currently
single—no wife, no girlfriend, no nothing. “I know God holds me to
a very high standard,” said Thad, “but I still have a desire for
some kind of sexual satisfaction, even if only mental fantasy. I suspect
it’s wrong to fulfill this desire at all, but what do I replace it with?
I can’t just ignore it, or probably more honestly, I don’t want to.
How do I get God to fill this desire in me?”

The honest answer is
that it isn’t God’s job to fill that desire. Thad created that
desire himself through fantasy, but now that the situation has become big and
frustrating, Thad wants God to bail him out. In God’s opinion, it’s
Thad’s job to take care of it. Thad admitted he doesn’t want to
train his mind to avoid mental fantasy. Our guess is he’d be even less
interested in training his eyes to bounce away. He wants God to do it for
him.

Well, in most cases, God isn’t going to do it. We’ll
say it once more. Sooner or later, we all have to fight for our purity. That
word
fight
leads us to a helpful word picture.

Have you ever
been channel surfing and seen two Japanese sumo wrestlers going at it inside a
small ring? In a sumo wrestling match, two bloated behemoths dressed in
loincloth diapers (gross!) grab each other’s arms and ram shoulders until
one gets knocked out of the ring. Well, picture your battle with masturbation
as being like a sumo match. You’re on one side of the ring, and your
overgrown, bloated opponent—known as Mr. Sex Drive—is on the other.
If you knock Mr. Sex Drive out of the ring, you don’t have to masturbate.
If Mr. Sex Drive knocks you out of the ring, you do have to masturbate.

You’re standing just inside the ring, wearing that silly white thong,
with your arms crossed and your gritted teeth bared. With piercing eyes, you
snarl at Mr. Sex Drive to leave you alone. Mr. Sex Drive, bloated by a billion
meals of lust and fantasy, yawns and looks at his watch. Then, appearing quite
bored, he waddles over your way. Without bothering to lock arms with you in
battle, he merely swings his huge thonged rear and sends you flying against the
wall, where you dutifully sit down and masturbate on the spot.

Time and
again, you enter the ring, and time and again you fly against the wall,
emptying jar after jar of Vaseline. For a while, you keep up your courage by
bravely facing up to Mr. Sex Drive again and again. But eventually your bruised
and battered spirit gets angry, and you blame it all on God, spitting under
your breath, “God put me in this ring with this massive sex drive. If He
hadn’t given it to me, I wouldn’t keep getting knocked out of the
ring and have to masturbate. It’s His problem, not mine.”

You wait and wait, but Mr. Sex Drive just keeps standing there bored as the
dickens, waiting for some more lust. Meanwhile, you climb back into the ring
for another flying lesson, and then another, and the ache gets deeper as the
despair brings tears to your eyes. You decide to leave the arena from time to
time to go to church. Your pastor claims it’s God’s will for you to
defeat Mr. Sex Drive. You pray for victory. When church is over, you rise up
encouraged, march back to the arena, and declare your victory once more.
Standing on your side of the circle, you command Mr. Sex Drive to “Go, in
the name of the Lord.” Nevertheless, he waddles over and knocks you on
your rear.

You hope that a hormone drop will shrink him down to size,
but that never materializes. You hope you’ll grow in spiritual strength,
but that doesn’t seem to happen. You feel shame before God, especially
after viewing all the empty jars of Vaseline lying around. Finally you say,
“I guess it’s not God’s will that I win this
battle.”

Not God’s will? That’s an offense to the
character of God.

God turns to you and says, “Get into the
ring.” So you obey, but Mr. Sex Drive knocks you clean into the wall
again.

Turning to God with pleading eyes, you cry, “See God? Save
me from this monster! Don’t You love me?”

“Of course,
I love you,” says the Creator of the universe. “Don’t you
love Me?”

“Lord, you know that I do!”

“Then starve the sumo!”

You see, lying beneath the size
and girth of that monstrous Mr. Sex Drive is a genetic makeup of what your sex
drive is
supposed
to look like. Really, Mr. Sex Drive is built like a
five-foot, three-inch, 110-pound shrimp, but he’s just grown huge because
you’ve been feeding him very well over the years. You served him six to
ten lusty meals a day until he became big and fat as a barn door.

Once
you decide to starve Mr. Sex Drive, however, his weight and heft will shrink.
He’ll shed pounds overnight. All you have to do is stop feeding him the
cable TV, videos, Internet, magazines, and fantasy we mentioned earlier!

Sure, he won’t lose two hundred pounds overnight, but Mr. Sex Drive
will shed weight rather quickly if you choose not to heap huge helpings of
“sexy” food in front of his fat face. Then you’ll cut Mr. Sex
Drive down in size, and once that happens, you’ll start winning some of
those battles inside the ring.

You can do it, but you must act with
urgency and choose to be strong and courageous before your peers in your quest
for purity. In the millisecond it takes to make that choice, the Holy Spirit
will start to guide you through the struggle.

Let’s talk
specifics by considering the movie
Titanic.
How did this movie ever
pull down a PG-13 rating? The raw sexuality of the “sketching
scene” alone should have qualified this film for an R rating. Frankly,
that nude scene was reminiscent of some of the 1970s-era X-rated flicks that I
(Fred) watched in the dorms back when I didn’t give a fig about
Christ’s laws. We aren’t to have a hint of sexual immorality in our
lives; how can the soft-core porn in
Titanic
rest easily with this
truth?

How many young men have popped
Titanic
into the VCR and
masturbated over this sketching scene? How many Christian parents have
unwittingly purchased this video, not knowing their sons can have sex with
actress Kate Winslett anytime they choose, day or night?

And what of
the days that follow? The alarm goes off, and you lay groggily in the warm
softness of your bed as you struggle to consciousness. Soon, the softness of
her image seeps into your mind, and in the quiet morning light your mind again
fondles her curvaceous fullness. A gentle, come-on smile plays across her lips
as your engines churn higher and higher. Helpless before her charms,
you’re masturbating again.

And it doesn’t stop with R and
PG-13 movies. The PG-rated
Dead Poet’s
Society
sports a
long closeup of a
Playboy
-style foldout. The PG-rated
Runaway
Bride
has no nudity, but the film has plenty of sensual joking that is out
of place for Christians in light of Ephesians 5:4. How many sexual fires has
Julia Roberts kindled by playfully teasing that she’d already
“charmed the one-eyed snake” long before marriage?

Such
sensuous food can sumo-size a sex drive faster than you can say,
“I’ll make mine supersize.” If you can’t control your
sex drive, whose fault is it? Is it God’s, for giving you the sex drive?
Or is it yours, because you’ve jumped on the gas pedal and sped past the
red line far too often?

You’ve got a decision to make. You
can’t visually feed on the same films as your school chums and expect to
stay sexually pure. Does this mean I have to give up going to the movies? Of
course not. Still, you do have to discern what is right to see. Do you want
sexual purity and the deeper intimacy with God that follows, or do you want to
be one of the gang, squeezing in purity only when it’s convenient?