Every Young Man's Battle: Stategies for Victory in the Real World of Sexual Temptation: The Every Man Series (3 page)

As I mused over this development for several days, I
didn’t put two and two together and connect this “new me” to
the prayer in my office, but I should have. Looking back, I can see that it
clearly was a sign that my heart was changing. When you’re saved, God
gives you a new heart for Him. He lives in you and gives you the strength you
need to do everything and anything He calls you to do, including His call to
sexual purity. This new life flowed with no effort from me, and the new
inclinations to do God’s will came without any attention on my part.

As I recall, during the two weeks between my sunset prayer in San Francisco
and that moment when I stepped into the
Playboy
-decorated bathroom, I
hadn’t prayed again, attended church, or read my Bible. The Holy Spirit
simply took me at my prayerful word and began working with me right where I
was.

It took a
second event a number of weeks later to finally confirm to me that God had
indeed transformed me by giving me a new heart that beat with a desire to do
right and to live holy. After I settled into an apartment in Ankeny, Iowa, my
nights were monotonous and long. A man accustomed to entertaining four
girlfriends isn’t used to having his nights free!

In no time,
thoughts of Janet began to swirl in my imagination. She was an old friend from
high school, and I’d been enamored with her for years. Back then,
I’d been too busy with football to start a relationship with her, but
I’d often dreamed of sleeping with her.

I soon tracked her down
and—what luck! She was still single and living in Omaha. I called her
and, after some cheerful banter, she invited me to meet her at her favorite
dance bar. Need I say more? After closing time, we found ourselves alone in her
apartment. One thing led to another, and we slipped out of our clothes and
slipped into her bed. We began kissing, but a strange thing happened: I
couldn’t get an erection!
That
had never happened before. Deeply
humiliated, my head spinning, I slunk out to the parking lot and slumped into
my car.

Then I clearly heard the Spirit whisper into my heart,
“By the way, I did that to you. I know it hurt you, but this practice
can’t be tolerated anymore in your life. You are Christ’s now, and
He loves you.” He didn’t have to say it twice—on the spot I
recommitted myself to staying pure! (I was glad I did, because a few months
later I met Brenda, and we committed to saving intercourse until our wedding
night.)

Wide-awake now to my salvation, I wasted little time finding a
church home. A proper fear and respect for this new life in me had taken root,
and I immediately fell in love with the Spirit’s whisper in my life. I
wanted to grow in Christ and experience the abundant life of joy that He had
waiting for me.

Before I continue with my story (in chapter 5),
let’s take a time-out and explore some important principles of sexuality
that I think you’ll find interesting and immediately applicable to your
life. We’ll begin with a discussion of God’s view of our
sexuality.

As a young man, you probably have many questions about this
mysterious thing called sex, even though you’ve been exposed to a lot
about sex in today’s media and films.

In the old days, we
would say that most of us learned about sex “in the gutter.” The
phrase isn’t around today, but many of your fathers received their first
sex lessons on some street corner or in a locker room shower. That’s
where we listened to older and “wiser” guys unlock the mysteries of
what happens between a man and a woman—or what you can do to yourself. Of
course, that still happens today, and this story from Tyler is fairly
typical:

I was walking home with Billy one afternoon after school, and
he suggested picking up something to drink. I didn’t really like Billy,
but I felt sorry for him because he didn’t have many friends. I could
tell he was trying so hard to be nice. After we bought our drinks, he told me
about something called masturbation. I’d never heard that word, so he
explained what it was. He said all the guys in our class had been
experimenting. I couldn’t get what he told me out of my mind, so that
night I tried it. Having an orgasm was like nothing I’d ever felt before,
and I really liked it. But the thought of God looking on while I did it made me
feel kind of rotten.

Maybe you haven’t gone more than a week
without masturbating since you were a freshman in high school. With questions
about sex looming on every side, maybe you’ve begun experimenting with
your girlfriend, unsure of where God’s boundaries lie but determined not
to look for them too hard.

A few years ago, Brad told us, “I
know making love is wrong before marriage, but I guess anything short of that
is fine. I love to get up under a bra.” Brad’s “under the
bra” experiments eventually ended in regular intercourse with his
fiancée, and those sexual experiments took on a frustrating life of
their own and resulted in significant problems. “We’ve been having
sex for over a year, and I’m confused,” Brad said. “I think
we should break it off, but now I feel obligated to marry her since we’ve
been having sex for so long. I wish we hadn’t gone so far. Now I’m
worried she might not be the one for me.”

We live in a culture
where the sexual boundaries have been obliterated, disappearing like the chalk
lines marking the batter’s box after six innings of play. John, an
all-around sports star and leader at school and church, recently sat in on an
abstinence course taught by his youth pastor—but he wasn’t buying.
Afterward, he got into a heated argument with his youth pastor. John finally
said, “Okay, I’ll commit to this abstinence thing, but
there’s no way I’m giving up blow jobs. I’ve had dozens of
them, and I really like them.”

But maybe you’re not like
John at all. You’re a good kid. You play drums loudly in the youth
worship band, and you’re such a handsome, winsome guy that other parents
say they’d love to have you marry their daughter some day. On the
outside, you look great. Yet privately, in terms of your sexuality, your
conscience has dimmed to the point where you’re not quite sure
what’s right or wrong anymore.

Perhaps
intercourse once seemed wrong, but you recently got it on with that girl in
English class, and you didn’t feel guilty at all. Purity once seemed
right, but now whenever the youth speaker talks about keeping yourself pure
until marriage, the idea sounds quaint and archaic—so “twentieth
century.”

If any of this sounds like you, then you’re
sinking in a sexual quicksand. You still bang the drums in the worship band,
but you really don’t
feel
the worship anymore. Instead, you feel
distant from God.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Regardless of where you stand right now, let me use my (Fred’s) story as
a starting point to lay a foundation for the rest of this book. It’s an
underpinning of six basic truths upon which we all need to agree:

1. Attraction to Girls Is Natural

Attraction to the female body is a natural, God-given desire. Just as it
was natural for me to want to hang around girls in college, so it’s
natural for you to find a girl’s beauty tugging at your eyes for
attention.

The temptation, however, is to fulfill these desires and
attractions in a wrong way and to go beyond a natural and normal outlook. That
means viewing a girl more as an extremely interesting collection of body parts
rather than as a precious child of God. We refuse to believe you don’t
know the difference. You know when you’re thinking about her mostly as a
pair of breasts walking by, and little else.

We’ll be tempted in
many wrong ways to play with these natural desires and attractions to girls.
Obviously, stripping off her clothes in the basement at the after-game party is
a wrong way, but it’s just as wrong to stare lustfully at her and
fantasize in your mind. Neither practice is any more pure than the other.

2. Sex Is Exhilarating

This one’s
not too hard to accept, is it? There’s nothing in the world like an
orgasm. No feeling hits you harder or draws you back faster, whether through
masturbation or sex with a partner. When I was fourteen, my sister’s
boyfriend, Brock, said to me with a wicked little grin, “Once you taste
the candy, you’ll never say no again. So you better not taste
it!”

Brock was right. Once you travel down the freeway of
premarital sex, you can’t back up. If you want your purity back, then
you’ll have to exit that freeway entirely.

3. Sex Is
a Slippery Slope

If you don’t ram a stake into the
ground and declare, “This is as far as I go, and I won’t go any
further,” then you’ll lose your footing on the slippery slope of
sex. Remember how I let myself go in college? Because of the pleasure, sexual
escalation was natural. Besides, why should I
not
have sex? I
wasn’t committed to Christ, and I saw no reason (until God later
intervened) to stop having sex. Looking back, it was amazing how I made such
sweeping rationalizations for my behavior:

• “It’s
okay because I really love her. I
know
I’m going to marry her
anyway.”

• “Why wait until marriage? We’re
already married in our hearts.”

• “Sex isn’t
wrong for everyone. God is really concerned only about adultery.”

Maybe you’ve said the same things to yourself…the same things
that non-Christians say to themselves! That alone should make you feel a bit
uncomfortable. It’s amazing how we can justify our actions to ourselves
and to God. These rationalizations allow our consciences to gradually become
accustomed to the sexual freeway we’re traveling.

4.
God Has Standards of Sexual Behavior for His Children

God takes sexual standards seriously, and He wants to be heard on the
matter. When I tried to continue in my sexual ways after committing my life to
Christ, God humbled me in Janet’s bedroom. God sure got my attention that
night. We’re talking Joe Stud not being able to perform when it counted
the most! If He’s this interested in our purity, then we need to get just
as interested.

Clearly, premarital intercourse is outside His
standards. But what about oral sex? Mutual masturbation? Petting?
French-kissing? Where are the boundaries? We’ll get to the details later,
but first we want to tell you that God has already rammed His
own
stake into the ground:

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)

That, my friend, is quite a stake. Not even a
hint?
Hmm. Do your Christian friends act in this manner? Probably not. Today’s
teens and young men are often indistinguishable from their non-Christian peers,
sharing their tastes in popular music, dirty jokes, and attitudes about
premarital sex. Kristin, a teenager, told us,

Our youth group is
filled with kids faking their Christian walk. They’re actually taking
drugs, drinking, partying, and having sex. If you want to walk purely,
it’s easier to hang around with the non-Christians at school than to hang
around with the Christians at church. I say that because school friends know
where I stand, and they say, “That’s cool—I can accept
that.” The Christian kids mock me. They laugh and ask, “Why be so
straight? Get a life!” They pressure my values at every turn.

We’re not pointing a special finger at teenagers. Young adults in
their late twenties are no different from Christian teens. Linda, a single
career woman, says her adult singles group at church has
“players”—men and women who send signals that they’re
ready to play in the bedroom.

Married couples have also fallen short.
There isn’t a day in which I (Steve) don’t take a call on my daily
radio talk show from a husband or wife asking how he or she can recover from an
adulterous affair or a partner’s sexual addiction.

5.
God’
s Love Is Not Based upon Your Ability to
Meet His Standards

God’s love for you is
unconditional; it never changes. Before you were formed in the womb, He loved
you. You’re the apple of His eye. His love for you has no limits, and His
love for you never wanes. If you masturbate, that fact doesn’t lessen
your value to Him. If you get up under a girl’s bra, God doesn’t
regret having sent His Son to die for you.

This is true for all of us.
When I (Fred) couldn’t put my porn magazines down, He still loved me.
When I lay in the arms of another Saturday-night date, He still loved me. When
I continued to ignore Him, He chased me desperately, aching to reach me before
it was too late and my heart was too hardened.

6. Rules Are
Part of a Vibrant Relationship with Christ

I recall how
the Holy Spirit whispered to me, “This practice can’t be tolerated
anymore in your life. You are Christ’s now, and He loves you.” The
implication was that continued sexual activity would hurt my intimacy with
Christ.

When you break His standards, the Lord doesn’t reject
you, but you can’t be as close to Him. Soon after I prayed that prayer in
my office, God told me
No more
in regard to my sexual exploits. Did I
feel as though I’d taken an elbow to the chops? Yes. But by the grace of
God, I didn’t say,
Hey, what’s the deal? You’re taking my
freedom away! You’re killing me!
Instead, I said,
You got it,
Father.
This new life in me was moving me His way. I had a desire to be
closer to Him. And in order to get closer to Him, I had to be not so close to
those women in my life.