Every Young Man's Battle: Stategies for Victory in the Real World of Sexual Temptation: The Every Man Series (6 page)

Third, your wife may not care to help
you in your battle. After a recent speaking engagement regarding
Every
Man’s Battle,
I noticed a man remaining behind in his seat. When
everyone else had milled out, he came up to me and said, “My wife
approached me this week and said, ‘Jim, I have something to tell you, but
I don’t really know how to bring it up. I’ll just say it straight
out. I just don’t like sex, and I really wish I didn’t have to do
it anymore.’

“I was stunned. I didn’t quite know what
to say, so I replied, ‘Honey, is it something I’m doing wrong, or
is there something I can do better?’

“She said, ‘No,
it’s not what you’re doing. All my friends feel this way. Every one
of them.’”

You’re probably saying to yourself,
Yeah, right, but that’ll never happen to me.
Really? Marveling
at Jim’s story, I passed it on to one of my pastors as we chatted in his
office. “See that chair over there?” he asked. “That’s
my counseling chair. Do you know what complaint I hear most often from married
men?”

“No, what is it?”

“‘I’m just not getting any sex anymore.’ It’s
overwhelming!”

Marriage won’t free you from the coal mine.
If you’ve been impure before your wedding day, you can expect it to crop
up after the honeymoon. If you’re single and watching sensual R-rated
movies, wedded bliss won’t change this habit. If your eyes lock on
passing babes, they’ll still roam after you say “I do.” If
you’re masturbating like gangbusters now, you’ll find that putting
that ring on your finger won’t keep your hands off yourself.

You
see,
before
your marriage, Satan does everything he can to
get
you to have sex with your girlfriend;
after
marriage, he
does everything he can to
keep
you from having sex with your
wife.

Do we need to repeat this point? If so, please read the above
paragraph again.

And so, in spite of marriage, don’t be surprised
when your sexual sins keep spilling over everywhere just like they did when you
were single. Joe told us he loves women’s beach volleyball:

At
night, I’ve had shockingly vivid dreams with these women. Some have been
so exhilarating and so real that I wake up the next morning certain that
I’ve been in bed with them. Heavy with guilt, I wonder where my wife is,
sure she has left me over this affair and wondering how I could have done such
a thing. Finally, as the cobwebs clear, it slowly dawns on me that it was just
a dream. But even then I feel uneasy. You want to know why? Because while I
know it was just a dream, I’m not at all certain it wasn’t some
form of adultery.

John wakes up early to watch those morning exercise
shows, though he doesn’t care much about fitness:

The truth is,
I feel absolutely compelled to watch, to catch the closeups of the buttocks,
breasts, especially the inner thighs. And I drool. I sometimes wonder if the
producers doing those closeups are just trying to hook men into watching their
shows. Every day I tell myself that this will be the last time. But by next
morning, I’m right there at the TV again.

Gary is a church music
director. He’s married and has a three-year-old girl, and he and his wife
are expecting another child. He teaches marriage classes and leads the youth
choir. “I have a great job,” he says, “and a great life at my
church. My wife says everyone puts me on a pedestal because of my dedication to
the choirs and my hard work.” All is well, right? He’s escaped,
right? Listen to what Gary had to say:

All this, and you would think
I’d be at least spiritually happy, but I’m not. I feel so unworthy,
undeserving, and ashamed. I know in my heart that something is not right. I,
too, look at those bra and lingerie ads in the newspaper as if they were placed
there solely for my pleasure. I surf channels on the TV and stop and linger on
the sexy shows. I pray and pray that God could take this from me, but yet I
struggle to say no.
Baywatch,
swimsuit issues, secretaries wearing
tight sweaters…it doesn’t matter.

I know what
you’re thinking.
These guys are perverts and weirdos!
But these
men are not weirdos; they’re your next-door neighbors, your
friend’s father—maybe even your father. They’re Sunday school
teachers, ushers, and deacons. Even pastors.

They are today what you
will become tomorrow. Today, you’re making the same decisions they once
made as teens. They’re saying, “Don’t do what we
did!”

Your sexual decisions now
will
carry over into
adulthood. The biggest blunder you can make as a young man is to believe that
you’re different from other guys and somehow stronger. You may think,
I’ll never do what these guys are doing.
All we know is that
there are countless married men with lovely wives sleeping in sexy negligees in
their bedrooms while they masturbate at the computer.

What makes you so
certain you won’t do the same?

Growing older won’t free you
from sexual impurity, and marriage won’t free you either. Sooner or
later, you’ll have to commit to purity if you want a true relationship
with Christ and with the women in your life. Why not now?

Before we get
into an action plan, we need to talk further about the roots of sexual bondage,
which we’ll do in the next two chapters as we take up Fred’s story
once again.

PART II

Let’s return to the rest of Fred’s story.

A couple of years into my wonderful new life in Christ, I began
experiencing something every Sunday morning during our church worship service.
I’d look around and see other men with their eyes closed, freely and
intensely worshiping the God of the universe. Myself? I sensed only a wall of
separation between the Lord and me.

I just wasn’t right with God.
As a newer Christian, I couldn’t imagine what was happening. Everything
had been going well, and I had changed so much.
Maybe it’s a
temporary slump,
I reasoned.
After all, relationships ebb and
flow.
But time passed, and nothing changed.

The true reason for
that distance slowly dawned on me: In spite of all that had changed, there was
still a hint of sexual immorality in my life that surfaced each Sunday morning
when I settled into my comfy La-Z-Boy and opened the Sunday morning newspaper.
I would quickly find the department store inserts and begin paging through the
colored newsprint filled with models posing in bras and panties.

The
models were always smiling. Always available.

I loved lingering over
each ad insert.
It’s wrong,
I admitted to myself,
but
it’s such a small thing, a far cry from porn.
So I
continued peering through the pages, fantasizing. Occasionally, a model
reminded me of a girl I once knew, and my mind rekindled the memories of our
times together. I rather enjoyed my Sunday mornings with the newspaper.

As I examined myself more closely, I found I had more than a hint of sexual
immorality hiding out in my life. Even my sense of humor reflected it.
Sometimes a person’s innocent phrase—even from our
pastor—struck me with a double sexual meaning. I would chuckle, but I
felt uneasy.
Why do these double meanings come to my mind so
easily?

I remembered that the Bible said such things
shouldn’t even be mentioned among the saints. I was worse…I would
even laugh at them! And my eyes? They were ravenous heat-seekers searching the
horizon, locking on any target with sensual heat.

Young mothers in
shorts, leaning over to pull children out of car seats…

Foxy
babes wearing tank tops that revealed skimpy bras…

Joggers in
spandex, jiggling merrily down the sidewalks…

Smiling
secretaries with big busts and low-cut blouses…

I was left
wondering, because I knew I’d started out so well. You see, I’d
found a church home and began attending a wonderful marriage class taught by
Joel Budd. Except for that embarrassing no-performance night with Janet that I
mentioned in chapter 3, I didn’t date during that year under Joel’s
teaching. I might have been the only man in history to attend a married
couples’ class for a whole year without even having so much as a single
date! But just before the twelve-month mark, I prayed this simple prayer:
Lord, I’ve been in this class for a year and have learned a lot about
women, but I don’t know any Christian girls. Please show me a woman who
embodies these godly characteristics.

I wasn’t asking for a
date, girlfriend, or spouse. I just wanted to meet someone with these godly
characteristics so I might understand them better.

God did far more
than that. One week later, He introduced me to my future wife, Brenda, and we
fell in love. Shortly after we began dating seriously, Brenda and I decided to
stay pure before marriage, out of our commitment to Christ. She was a
virgin—and I wished I were. As God continued to work in my life, Brenda
and I married, honeymooned in Colorado, then settled into a new apartment
building on the edge of a cornfield in a Des Moines suburb. Was this a little
slice of heaven or what? I surely thought so.

Time passed and, at
first, I was feeling good. While I was once engaged to two women
simultaneously, I was now happily married to one woman. While I once drowned in
pornography, since my wedding day I hadn’t purchased a pornographic
magazine. Given my track record, this was remarkable.

I threw myself
into my leadership roles at church, and my Christian image shined brighter and
brighter. By worldly standards, I was doing great. With just one little
problem. By God’s standard of sexual purity, I wasn’t even close to
living His vision for marriage. Clearly I’d taken steps toward purity,
but I was learning that God’s standards were higher than I’d ever
imagined and that my Father had higher hopes for me than I had dreamed.

It soon became clear that I’d stopped far short of holiness. There
were the ad inserts, the double meanings, and the heat-seeking eyes. My mind
continued to daydream and fantasize over old girlfriends. These were more than
a hint of sexual immorality.

When I confided in a close friend, he
replied, “Oh, come on! Nobody can control his eyes and mind, for
heaven’s sakes! God loves you! It must be something else.” But I
knew differently.

I finally made the connection between my sexual
immorality and my distance from God. Having eliminated the visible adulteries
and pornography, and having avoided physical adultery, I looked pure on the
outside to everyone else. But to God, I had stopped short, and I’d
ignored His voice repeatedly as He prodded me in these areas. I’d merely
found a comfortable middle ground somewhere between paganism and obedience to
God’s standard.

God desired more
for me. He’d freed me from the pit, but I’d stopped moving toward
Him. I had stopped short. Having seen my distance from God, I decided it was
time to begin moving closer again.

I expected the journey to be easy.
After all, I had decided once before to eliminate pornography and affairs, and
those things were gone. I figured I could stop the rest of this sexual junk
just as easily.

But like the other men we spoke of earlier, I
couldn’t do it. Every week I said I wouldn’t look at those ad
inserts, but every Sunday morning the striking photos compelled me once again.
Every week I’d vow to avoid watching R-rated “sexy” movies
when I traveled, but every week I’d fail, sweating out tough battles and
always losing. Every time I gazed at some glistening jogger, I’d promise
never to do it again. But I always did.

What I’d done was simply
trade the naked photos of
Playboy
and
Gallery
for the
sensuous ad inserts and other magazine ads. The sin remained because I’d
never really changed, never fully rejected sexual sin, never escaped sexual
slavery.

A couple of months slipped by, then a couple of years. The
distance from God grew wider, and my impurity still ruled me. My faith waned
further with each failure. Each desperate loss caused more desperation. While I
could always
say
no, I could never
mean
no.

Something
was gripping me, something relentless, something I couldn’t shake. And my
friendship with Christ? Our relationship had changed. He hadn’t changed,
but I had. I had stopped short of His standard, and I had stopped moving closer
into intimacy. I’d said no in my spirit too often, and that stopped the
flow of His inner power. I was in bondage.

God’s standard is that
we avoid every hint of sexual immorality in our lives. If we followed this
standard, we would never experience sexual bondage. So we should be amazed that
so many Christian guys are under that bondage.

Our heavenly Father is
amazed. Here’s our paraphrase of some questions God asked (in Hosea
8:5-6), revealing His amazement:

What is going on here? Why are my
children choosing to be impure? They are Christians, for heaven’s sakes!
When are they going to start acting like it?

God knows we can choose
to be pure. So why don’t we? We aren’t victims of some vast
conspiracy to ensnare us sexually; we’ve simply chosen to mix in our own
standards of sexual conduct with God’s standard. Since we found
God’s standard too difficult, we created a mixture—something new,
something comfortable, something mediocre.