Killing Sexual Sin, Part 1: It’s A Big Deal
I anticipate this will not be the last post on this topic. This is simply what comes to my mind at 3am today, March 10th.
“REAL TALK” WARNING: WHAT FOLLOWS IS A BUNCH OF “REAL TALK” THAT IS NEITHER EASY NOR COMFORTABLE. BUT I THINK IT IS GOOD FOR THE SOUL. MAY THE LORD BLESS AND DIRECT ALL THOUGHTS TOWARD HIM IN THIS DISCUSSION.
Sexual sin is wreaking havoc on the world today. It has wreaked havoc in almost every single man’s life I have ever met.
Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. (1 Corinthians 6:18)
I’m 34 now, which means I have over 20 years worth of interacting with sexual sin in some form. At times, fighting it. At times, getting smoked by it. At times, by the power of the Holy Spirit, waging war, and winning. Having this kind of a storied career, I have experimented with many methods to quell the nearly unbridleable power of the male human sex drive. I don’t know about the female human sex drive because there are 2 sexes and I am the male sex, so again, I do not know about the femal sex drive. Here are a few that have worked and then not worked in my 20+ year career dealing with this area of life.
accountability groups
1-on-1 accountability phone calls and prayer
internet accountability software
purity books
purity commitments
earlier bedtimes
roommates, including bunkmates
serious conversation with a professor
screen time limits on my phone
cold showers when feeling excited
not eating much before bed
counseling
transparent conversations with pastors and mentors
workout regimens
running
increased workout regimens
more running
Some methods have helped address the acute sexual urge for a time, and then those selfsame methods that worked for awhile end up being completely useless. I’m at the point of my life where I am motivated to figure out what drives this, deeper than band-aid level fixes.
I have been lately searching the Scriptures for the answer to a few questions, and the questions have come to me in approximately this order:
Why do we experience sexual temptation?
“Be killing sin or sin will be killing you” - but can we actually kill sexual sin forever, or will it keep coming back?
Why does this sin in particular seem to have a compulsive effect?
Can “deny yourself and take up your cross” be obeyed only by the highly disciplined? To put the question another way, can some people “just say no” and others can’t?
Can growth in Christ help a person feel a sexual impulse and ignore it? If so, how in the world is that possible?
These are hard questions for me to wrestle with, because the answers are not chapter-and-verse in nature. However, there are chapters and verses that deal with these topics, that, I believe, can be addressed. It just takes a little digging.
In my journey, I have found that there are a few exacerbating factors that need to be addressed individually in order to gain a full perspective on the source and extent of the sexual sin issue in my personal life. These are the areas that are acute trigger points to me in order to allow myself to let a sexual thought take hold in my mind and begin the havoc wreaking process that those thoughts tend to wreak:
Too much access to sexual material
Wandering away from the Body of Christ
Addiction to dopamine and a noisy soul
Feeling lonely, unloved, unwanted, disrespected, or like life is out of control
Mind set on earthly things
Can we get to the root of what drives sexual sin, and root it out every day? Is that possible? Or will we all be relegated to living in a constant low-grade anxiety thinking that any period of success won’t last? I have some thoughts about this. I will write them as I work through these topics and perhaps other topics and side-tangents as well. At this time, I really want it to be true that we can have sustained, lasting victory for the rest of life. To some, it’s not a thought in their minds, and I am happy for those people. That is not how it has been for me.
So, I am going to take up the quill, and write.
AND ANOTHER THING… I have read a lot of the books that have been written on this topic. They problem is a lot of them “suck.” I didn’t just say that bad word. I know this guy who says that a lot so I just quoted him, so I actually am not the person who said it. Therefore, you can’t get mad at me about it. Why do these books “suck” (as he says) you might ask? Because they are either way too general to apply specifically to many people at all, or they are so specific that the author is clearly addressing his own personal journey that doesn’t apply specifically to many others. Anyway, I just wanted to say that.
