Every Young Man's Battle: Stategies for Victory in the Real World of Sexual Temptation: The Every Man Series (4 page)

When I got close to God, what He said about
interpersonal relationships started to make a whole lot of sense. I quickly
found that God’s rules weren’t just sets of arbitrary, kill-joy
regulations. Instead, His rules set me free to live fully and to avoid
dangerous traps.

For instance, after I moved back to Iowa, I continued
to maintain a phone relationship with one of my girlfriends back in California,
the one I was most serious about. My friends and family fully expected us to
marry someday since we’d been an item for three years. Then at church I
heard the pastor say that Christians shouldn’t be unequally yoked with
nonbelievers. Since I was a Christian, and she wasn’t, this news
presented a problem.

My reaction?
You got it, Father.
I called
her and explained the verse in the Bible about being unequally yoked. “I
really need you to explore this and to seek God,” I said, “or I
don’t know how we can keep our relationship going.”

“Okay, I’ll read my Bible for thirty days, and we’ll
see,” she promised. A month later, I heard from her, right on cue.
“I’ve done what I promised,” she said. “But I just
can’t buy this stuff at all.”

“I’m sorry to
hear that,” I responded. Then I quietly said that we should go separate
ways. God’s rule freed me to break off the relationship and allowed Him
to find someone better suited to be my wife. Less than a year later, God
introduced me to Brenda, and my life has never been the same.

At a single
moment, salvation gave us a new life and a new desire to be sexually pure for
the first time. But this new desire alone will not bring full intimacy with
Christ. We must say yes to this new desire and refuse to ignore it. We must
choose oneness and intimacy with Christ. We must choose sexual purity.

It is God’s will that you should be sanctified: that you should
avoid sexual immorality. (1 Thessalonians 4:3)

It’s not enough
to
seem
or to
feel
Christian. We must
be
Christians
in action. We can’t expect to practice with the youth band by day and
then slide nude under the sheets with the cute keyboardist by night. We
can’t expect to circle and hold hands in emotional prayer at church by
day then wallow in cybersex by night.

When we turn on the computer and
masturbate over naked, nameless lovers lying across our screen, we aren’t
like Christ. We aren’t moving toward Him. While His love for us never
changes, our intimacy with Him wanes. Distance grows. But when we choose sexual
purity and walk in the light, we’re one with God’s essence.
Intimacy grows. True relationship flourishes.

When we call ourselves
Christians but don’t act like it, He forcefully objects. Luke 6:46 says,
“Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I
say?”

God is aching for you to be one with Him. The whole plan of
salvation was designed that He might have a close relationship with you. Have
you met the terms? Do you love His standards? When God asks you to change your
behavior, do you say,
You got it, Fathe
r
? If so, that’s
a mark of growing intimacy.

Let’s go to the source and check out
what the Bible has to say on the subject of sexual impurity. Did you know that
in nearly every book of the New Testament we’re commanded to avoid sexual
impurity? Here’s a selection of passages that teach God’s concern
for our sexual purity. Highlighted in italics are key words indicating what
we’re to avoid in the sexual realm:

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

For from within,
out of men’s hearts, come evil thoughts,
sexual immorality,
theft, murder,
adultery,
greed, malice, deceit,
lewdness,
envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a
man “unclean.” (Mark 7:21-23)

You are to abstain
from…
sexual immorality.
(Acts 15:29)

So let us
put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us behave
decently, as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in
sexual
immorality
and
debauchery,
not in dissension and jealousy.
(Romans 13:12-13)

I am writing you that you must not associate
with anyone who calls himself a brother but is
sexually immoral
or
greedy, an idolater or a slanderer, a drunkard or a swindler. With such a man
do not even eat. (1 Corinthians 5:11)

The body is not meant for
sexual immorality,
but for the Lord. (1 Corinthians 6:13)

Flee from
sexual immorality.
(1 Corinthians 6:18)

I am afraid that when I come again…I will be grieved over many
who have sinned earlier and have not repented of the
impurity, sexual
sin
and
debauchery
in which they have indulged. (2 Corinthians
12:21)

So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the
desires of the sinful nature.… The acts of the sinful nature are
obvious:
sexual immorality, impurity
and
debauchery.
(Galatians 5:16,19)

But among you there must not be even a hint
of
sexual immorality,
or of any kind of
impurity,
or of
greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people. Nor should there
be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking, which are out of place. (Ephesians
5:3-4)

Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly
nature:
sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires
and greed,
which is idolatry. Because of these, the wrath of God is coming. (Colossians
3:5-6)

It is God’s will that you should be sanctified: that
you should avoid
sexual immorality;
that each of you should learn to
control his own body in a way that is holy and honorable, not in
passionate
lust
like the heathen, who do not know God.… For God did not call
us to be
impure,
but to live a holy life. (1 Thessalonians 4:3-5,
7)

See that no one is
sexually immoral.
(Hebrews
12:16)

Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed
kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the
sexually
immoral.
(Hebrews 13:4)

For you have spent enough time in
the past doing what pagans choose to do—living in
debauchery, lust,
drunkenness,
orgies,
carousing and detestable idolatry. (1 Peter
4:3)

In a similar way, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding
towns gave themselves up to
sexual immorality
and perversion. They
serve as an example of those who suffer the punishment of eternal fire. (Jude
7)

Nevertheless, I [Jesus] have a few things against you: You
have people there who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to
entice the Israelites to sin…by committing
sexual immorality.
(Revelation 2:14)

Nevertheless, I [Jesus] have this against you:
You tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess. By her
teaching she misleads my servants into
sexual immorality.
(Revelation
2:20)

But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers,
the
sexually immoral,
those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and
all liars—their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This
is the second death. (Revelation 21:8)

Isn’t that something?
Drawing from these passages, let’s summarize God’s standard for
sexual purity:

• Sexual immorality begins with the lustful
attitudes of our sinful nature. It’s rooted in the darkness within us.
Therefore, sexual immorality, like other sins that enslave unbelievers, will
incur God’s wrath.

• Our bodies weren’t meant for
sexual immorality, but for the Lord, who has both created us and called us to
live in sexual purity. His will is that every Christian be sexually
pure—in thoughts and words as well as in actions.

•
Therefore it’s holy and honorable to completely avoid sexual
immorality—to repent of it and flee from it, as we live by the
Spirit.

• We shouldn’t be in close association with other
Christians who persist in sexual immorality.

• If we entice
others to sexual immorality (maybe in the car’s backseat or in her
bedroom when her parents aren’t home), Jesus Himself has something
against you!

Clearly, God expects us to live according to His
standard.

four

Not too many decades ago, guys were married off at about the same age
you were when you took your driver’s test.

Taking a wife at
age sixteen had to help the ol’ hormones! But that was a different time
and a different era, and getting married at sixteen today is no more realistic
than beating Shaquille O’Neal in a game of one-on-one. It’s just
not going to happen.

So you’ve been dealt some lousy cards. Not
only do teens go through puberty sooner, but they’re caught in a system
of education that keeps them in school through high school and often four years
of college. Even when you finally graduate after sixteen years of schooling,
you’re expected to postpone marriage even further while you take a few
years “getting settled” into your career. And during all that time,
you’re expected to remain as celibate as a castaway until the day you say
“I do.”

“It’s definitely weird,” says
Danny. “I feel like God made me a sexual being, but He’s asking me
to live as though I’m not.” We feel for you, Danny, and for the
countless young men who share your frustration. Some even claim that in these
changed times God no longer expects them to live by His old standards of
purity, because He never intended this postponement of marriage in the first
place.

We hate to pile on here, but the postponement of marriage
isn’t the main cause, or even the worst result, of this change. The most
dangerous assault on our sexual purity from this cultural change is our new
view of ourselves and our teen years. A couple of hundred years ago, teenagers
who married continued to work on the family farms or in the family trade.
People in those days saw no distinction between the teen years and the adult
years. Young people grew up quickly in those days because they had to! You
weren’t given a year to go backpacking through Europe, and you knew that
the decisions you made today would affect your tomorrows.

Likewise,
the Bible doesn’t refer to the teen or adolescent years as we think of
them. Once you reached thirteen years or so, God considered you a man. You were
treated in that manner by parents and by your elders.

We’ve lost
this mind-set, and it’s killing our purity. These days, teens are often
treated like kids. Even if you’re in graduate school, you can still hear
others saying that you’re “not ready” to get married.
They’re usually thinking financially or maybe emotionally, and maybe
they’re right. But you’re certainly ready to have sex!

The
truth is, as young men we often treat ourselves as kids. If we viewed ourselves
as men like God does, we’d always view our sexual decisions today as
having an impact on our tomorrows. But we usually don’t do that. There
remains this huge gap between the
physical
ability to do sexual things
(which happens during puberty) and the
legal
ability to do sexual
things (at least in God’s eyes), which is ours only at marriage. Facing
this enormous chasm, it’s easy to view the physical and the legal as two
thoroughly separate realms. In other words, you think that what you do during
the teens is completely different from—or has no effect on—what
happens during your adult years.

Nothing could be further from the
truth.

Bifurcation.
Do you know what that word means? Well, neither did
I (Steve) until I learned it from a dentist. Here’s what happened. One
day I sat down across the table from my friend Shane at a cafeteria on the
Baylor University campus. As we talked, I bit down hard on a chicken-fried
steak, one of my favorite meals. Shane instantly heard what I felt, and he
groaned. I did as well. One of my molars apparently chomped into a piece of
metal lodged in that steak. Pain and embarrassment flushed over me as I spit
out a sharp, shiny chunk of steel.

“That must have hurt,”
said my friend.

“Oh, you got that right!” I moaned.
“I really did a number on my tooth.”

“Do you think
you need to see a dentist?”

“I hate dentists, but I’m
hurting so bad…”

A short while later my dentist pried open
my mouth and noticed I was missing a portion of one of my molars. He went to
work, and within an hour I had a temporary crown capping my chicken-fried steak
saga…or so I thought.

Over the years that tooth continued to
bother me. When I finally said something to Dr. Farthing, he peered at the
tooth for a long time. Then I heard him utter the word
“bifurcation” to his assistant. Then he explained it to me.
“Bifurcation means that something has completely split into two separate
parts. A cracked tooth is one thing. A bifurcated tooth is another. Cracks can
be fixed, but bifurcated teeth must be pulled because they’re either dead
or dying.”

I nearly needed a diaper when I heard him say the word
“pulled.” Not only did he yank the offending tooth; he also had to
perform a bone graft and set an implant. In the midst of all this oral
construction work—and the accompanying agony of our new
“painless” dentistry—I had plenty of time to meditate on
bifurcation. I began to realize that this word described the way I once thought
about life in general. I’d always assumed that the school years and the
adult years were completely bifurcated—split apart and completely
separate.