One of the most profound verses in all of Scripture comes from Proverbs 4:23, Watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flow the springs of life. Today we examine how to guide our heart passions into the channels that will help us win the battle with lust.
I. The first heart craving we need to steer is our hunger for intimacy and connection. As we saw two weeks ago, the Apostle Paul’s strategy for helping the Corinthian Christians in their battle with lust was to say, “Make sure your deeper level craving for intimacy is fully satisfied through intimacy with God Himself.” He wrote to them, You cannot say that our physical body was made for sexual promiscuity; it was made for God, and God is the answer to our deepest longings.
Just as Paul recognized the hunger for intimacy beneath sexual sin, Dr. Harry Schaumburg, in his book, False Intimacy, makes a compelling case that viewing pornography is a form of false intimacy. He explains, Fantasy seems to be much safer than risking emotions in unpredictable relationships and suffering the pain that real intimacy can cause…. Acceptance is unconditional. Rejection is not possible. Sex is a conquest, imaginary or real and abates the terrifying sense of not belonging.
I’m not saying that we men SEE this connection between sexual hunger and our deeper intimacy needs. When I am hungry for sex with my wife, I want... sex with my wife! Nevertheless, making sure our overall intimacy tank is full is a powerful strategy for minimizing our thirst for the muddy waters of false intimacy through sinful sexual pleasure. Here are three ways our intimacy tank needs to be refilled.
A. First by feasting on the pleasure of knowing God. In Psalm 37:4, the Psalmist urges us, Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. The word, “delight” is a synonym for enjoyment. This is a command to get joy out of your walk with God, to make a deliberate choice to enjoy Him. It is the command to fill our soul with the joy of knowing and loving the God of the universe. It is a command to imbibe deeply the pleasure of being unconditionally loved by God. Isaiah tells is that our God delights in us as a bridegroom delights in his bride (62:5) Scotty Smith knows that feasting on the pleasure of God’s love for us would change out lives. He asks,
What would it feel like in your heart to know that God not only accepts you, but that he richly enjoys you? To know that your company is his pleasure, your fellowship his joy, your face his delight? What effect would that have on how you think about God, yourself, others (Objects of His Affection)?
Since sexuality grows out of our overall hunger for intimacy, steering our heart to delight in the Lord is a vital part of winning the battle with lust.
B. But there is a second, valuable application of this biblical principle, especially for single men. Avoid social isolation and make sure you are surrounded by close friends, especially female ones. As God said after creating Adam, “It is not good for man to be alone.” Though the eventual way God wants to meet a man’s need for companionship is normally through marriage, until then, men still have companionship needs. Having good friendship and fellowship with Christian women is a vital part of filling our intimacy tanks, before marriage. It is when we are feeling alone, isolated, and into ourselves that the temptation to lust, fantasize and masturbate strike.
C. For a married man there is a third strategic way he is to direct his heart to make sure his intimacy needs are righteously met. That is to pursue a passionate romance with your wife. The best DEFENSE against sex going outside the marriage is a great OFFENSE, i.e. keeping romance hot inside the marriage. No couple who walks down the wedding aisle falls out of love on purpose. Nor do couples who maintain a strong romance throughout their marriage do it by accident. It happens through intentionality. Just in time for Valentine’s Day, here are four ideas that explain what romance is to a woman.
WHAT IS ROMANCE TO A WOMAN?
1. It begins with a man's willingness to pursue her, even though his very fragile self-esteem is at risk if she rejects his advances. Sometimes, even inside marriage, a wife's repeated busy signals can begin to shut down a husband and make it hard for him to pursue romance with her. Furthermore, as we saw in our last episode, our fallen nature tempts both unmarried and married men to retreat to our fantasy world or to pornographic images to find sexual pleasure without the risks and messiness of real emotional engagement with a real woman who can hurt us. But a real man (unless he has the gift of singleness) is one who pursues a real woman, whether it is pursuing a woman to marry him or pursuing the woman who has married him. Our job is to initiate; her job is to respond.
2. Romance means pursuing a woman for the purpose of delighting in her. She needs to know that you enjoy her--that you love being with her, getting to know her heart, discovering more and more of her, and feasting your eyes on her inner and outer beauty. Since she needs to know this, it must first be true. (If it is not true, you need to settle this issue with the God who brought her to you, asking him to make you appreciate, value, and cherish her more.) Second, you must tell her she is a delight to you. Words reach her heart. “I love the way you laugh." "I love your smile." "You look beautiful tonight." "I love being with you." "I love the way you explain things so well to the kids." "I love the feel of your smooth skin. "You still have what it takes to light my fire." Etc. etc.
3. Romance means making her feel special as your sweetheart. She IS special because you have chosen her from among all women on Planet Earth to be YOUR sweetheart. Romance is making her FEEL special, pampered, like the princess that she is! Sanna and Miller, in their book, How to Romance the Woman You Love, write, From our survey we learned that every woman needs to feel appreciated, wanted, and loved....As long as he shows me that I'm special--no matter where we are or what we're doing--that's romance. Cards, foot-rubs, affection, love notes, a relaxing bubble bath to candle light while you put the kids to bed--anything you do to pamper her and make her feel special is romance to her.
4. Romance means connecting with her. (This is the part I like most!!) We need to realize, however, that women are hard-wired to crave emotional connection before they want sexual connection. Barbara Rossberg writes, Men your sex drive is connected to your eyes. You become aroused visually. Your wife's sex drive is connected to her heart; she is aroused only after she feels emotional closeness and harmony (The Five Love Needs of Men and Women). Romance for her is being in love with her best friend--and best friends laugh, do fun things together, and have long, heart-to-heart talks. When it comes to understanding his wife's romantic desires, a wise husband follows the rule: Always touch her heart before touching her body.
Sexual temptation attacks at the level of our heart. So, we’ve been looking at a vital strategy to make our hearts more resistant to those attacks by satisfying our heart hunger for intimacy with God, close friends (especially when single), and by the intentional pursuit of romance with our wives.
II. A second way that we need to direct our heart, is into a channel called hatred. We need to train our hearts to hate sexual sin. This command is given by Paul in Romans 12:9, Abhor what is evil. Abhor means to hate, to loathe, to detest. Webster says, “abhor implies a deep, often shuddering repugnance.” The reason to hate sin is because sin destroys. Steering our heart to hate sexual sin is to think from time to time about the price tag of sexual sin. Joe Dallas who led the Every Man’s Battle workshop reminds us, You should know by now that sexual sin ravages everyone connected with it. If you’re entertaining lust, you’re dancing on a cliff. Take concrete action now while you can. Lust, when it is conceived, brings forth sin, and sin brings forth death (James 1:15). Here is a short catalogue of the cost of sexual sin:
- It brings guilt, which drives me away from God who is the answer to our deepest longings.
- Sexual sin grieves the Holy Spirit and wounds the heart of our Lord who said, “If you love me, keep my commandments.”
- Sexual sin takes us down a path that often deeply hurts those we love most. I know a man who had a one-night stand with a work associate while away on business. It cost him having his children in his home, the rest of his life. When he confessed his affair, his wife filed for divorce leading to splitting custody of the children. What a price to pay for a few moments of illicit pleasure!
- Surrendering to lust enflames our sexual desires making it harder to resist next time. The more we sinfully indulge our sexual appetite the stronger the appetite becomes.
- Studies universally show that couples having regular sex before marriage are more likely to divorce than those who don’t.
- The use of porn trains us to separate sexual pleasure from heart connection with a real woman. It trains us to make sex with our wife or future wife UNFULFILLING for them.
- Repeated exposure to pornographic images deadens the heart. Like a computer virus that has the ability to hide its presence from the user while it systematically destroys the hard drive, sexual sin dulls the conscience, while it systematically ravages the heart. The blessing of the pure in heart, said Jesus is their ability to see God. Similarly, the curse of sexual impurity is losing our spiritual perception.
- Every return to sexual sin takes us closer to sexual addiction. Over time, illicit sex creates a craving that the body can’t do without; his brain is actually reprogrammed to crave sexual pleasure. Once stimulation occurs, the body DEMANDS sexual fulfillment. However, it takes ever more erotic images to get the same result. A bloated sexual appetite demands more and more to be satiated. The body is hooked. Slavery is in sight.
The price tag of sexual sin is so high; how can we NOT hate it because it destroys? Before moving on, it is important to note that hating our sin is NOT the same thing as letting Satan, The Accuser of the Brethren, heap shame on our shoulders over PAST sin. To the contrary hating sin is cooperating with the Holy Spirit to recognize the cost of yielding to FUTURE sin. So, BEATING LUST requires steering our hearts info valid intimacy connections and into a hatred of sexual sin.
III. Ther third pathway into which we need to direct our heart is the path of heart trust in God to be the one to make sure our sexual appetite is satisfied. Paul devoted the first eleven chapters in Romans to explaining God’s gracious, merciful plan of redemption. Then, chapter 12 begins by saying, “the only reasonable response to God’s astonishing grace is to put my body and its desires on the altar.” Romans 12:1 says, Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship.
Our God is worthy of our trust. We want to satisfy our sexual desires when and how WE want, regardless of the promptings of God’s Spirit in our conscience. But trusting OURSELVES, like worshipping any idol, is stupid. God wants our happiness and pleasure far more than we do. His path leads to life; ours leads to death. Psalm 34 urges us to trust God. Taste and see that the LORD is good; blessed is the man who takes refuge in him. Fear the LORD, you his saints, for those who fear him lack nothing. The lions may grow weak and hungry, but those who seek the LORD lack no good thing (vs 8-10).
We need to take our desire for sexual fulfillment to God. As we saw two weeks ago, Scripture seems to go out of its way to tell us how positively God, the creator of sex, views righteous sexual pleasure. In Proverbs 5, he commands married couples to get drunk with sexual pleasure! God is neither a prude, nor a cruel father who wants to torture men with sexual cravings they can’t righteously satisfy. Here is what it looks like to build a heart trust in God to be the one to satisfy the sexual desires he put in us.
- If married, add “an intoxicating love life” to your prayer list. Prov. 5:19, says this is God’s will for married men. Pray according to God’s will! If you are feeling “deprived” take that concern to God. Pray for wisdom to have a careful, honest discussion explaining your sexual needs to your wife (There is a booklet on our website, Intimacy—God’s Design for Marriage: Three Conversational Dates to Recover Intimacy in Your Marriage which will help you.)
- If you are single, you know that God’s will is not for you to burn with unfulfilled sexual passion because he says so in 1 Cor. 7:9. So take your desire to be married to God, and remind him of what he has said.
- If you are single and feeling sexual desire, ask God to help you direct it into righteous channels. The thought that sexual release is the only way to quench that thirst, when there is no righteous way to quench it is a lie. Remember that your craving for sexual pleasure is often tied to other cravings in your heart. God can meet the root desire in another, righteous way that satisfies the true hunger. Trust him to do that.
- In summary, whether married or single, ask God to be the one to see that your sexual/intimacy needs are met in his way. He is worthy of your trust
For Further Thought:
1. Is there anything you need to do to preemptively make sure your general intimacy tank is full?
2. If you were trying to explain to a brother why we should learn to hate sexual sin, what would you say?
3. What is the toughest part about entrusting your hunger for sexual pleasure to God?
