What does it mean to lust? When I feel the physical urge to masturbate, is that lust?
Is lust something I feel or is it an ambiguous force that simply dilutes my thinking? Can it be possible to lust for my wife, or is lust only ever something I will do for a woman who is not my wife?
Is lust a desire? If I desired to kiss Teresa on our first date, was that considered lust?
If I desire sex, is that lust? Is my sexual desire what causes me to lust?
As Rupp and Wallen point out, many things go into making someone feel sexually aroused. Their studies brought to light how impactful one’s cognitive state is in determining whether subjective stimuli (such as visual stimuli) is arousing. However, their studies also suggest sexual motivation, perceived gender role expectations, and sexual attitudes are possible influences as well.
In other words, why you want sex plays a significant role in how intense your sex desires will be.
What is it I am really looking for when I feel sexually aroused? What is it I truly want when my sex drives feel most passionate?
There can be many more motivations for sex than simply desiring oneness with the love of our lives. There can be more motivations than wanting children. After all, sexual arousal releases adrenaline and dopamine into our systems and gives us a bit of a “high.” This makes us feel “complete” and “on top of our worlds.” Sex may be a way of escaping from pain or disappointment. It may be a way of releasing stress or anxiety. Or sex may also be the only time throughout our days we feel any sense of purpose or worth.
Sex is powerful and there is so much more motivating me for sex than I may realize at first. This is why I must explore the underlying motivations of my desire for sex.
But sex in itself is an experience God has designed for humanity to enjoy. We may want sex because of a deep desire to show love to someone–is that a wrong motivation?
Is it even wrong to enjoy the pleasure of sex? Is it wrong to enjoy any kind of pleasure?
I met one young man who didn’t think it was right to use sex for anything other than having kids. Is he right? Should sex merely be an act of procreation?
And what about those who feel strong desires for sex—maybe even feel sexually aroused at times—but have no meaningful way of fulfilling it? What are they supposed to do with their drive?
This conversation is really about the role of desire in one’s life. Is all desire wrong? If not, when does desire become lust and when is it good, God-given desire? And what should a person do when he cannot fulfill a legitimate, good, God-given desire?
I am discovering that many of us tend to view all desire as lust. Even though we may verbalize a difference, in our hearts we don’t see it, or we don’t comprehend the significance of the difference.
We have this belief that to desire our own pleasure is wrong.
But God initiated the establishment of marriage and sexual intimacy by piquing Adam’s desire for the pleasure of a personal partner.
Consider how God positioned Adam to feel his desire for pleasure by assigning him to name the animals and causing him to realize he has no one who is of his kind as they did. Scripture kind of jumps over this scene, but take a look at the words Adam uses when he wakes up from his sleep and sees Eve:
This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. . . (Genesis 2:23 ESV)
He must have been wanting it with great desire if “at last” are the words he used when he discovered his partner. There no doubt was an internal, emotional longing for oneness and completion, but if we continue following the language of scripture used for this scene, we realize it was quite physical and quite sexual as well:
Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and not ashamed. (Genesis 2:24-25 ESV)
God says of this creation that it was very good (Gen. 1:31). This leads us to assume, then, that the desire Adam felt for a partner of his own kind is something God thought was good for man to have. We could conclude all desires are good for man to have.
But just as God designed us to desire, He also designed that he would be the fulfiller of our desires. Psalms 145:19 says that God “fulfills the desires of those who fear hm.”
Because of sin nature, however, (brought on by Adam and Eve’s choice to try and be God themselves) we are tempted to fulfill our desires through something other than what God designed.
The problem isn’t that we desire, but on whom by which we seek to have our desires fulfilled.
In other words, what causes us to sin, isn’t that we have desires, but that we are seeking to fulfill those desires in a way that God did not intend for them to be fulfilled.
God offers us incredible pleasures and He uses our emotions to awaken desire for those pleasures. Satan knows that when we are motivated by God-given desire we are absolutely catastrophic to his measly schemes, so his plan to freeze and cripple us is to get us sidetracked with another way of fulfilling our God-given desires: lust.
Where desire is a catalyst for protection and beauty, lust is selfish and destructive. Unfortunately, we have lumped these two together and tried hard to eliminate it all. But as we’ll see in a minute, this doesn’t make sense in light of Scripture (or personal experience).
Just as Psalms 145 says that God fulfills the desires of those who fear Him, Proverbs 10:24 confirms it by saying that “What the wicked dreads will come upon him, but the desire of the righteous will be granted.”
What type of desire is this? Is it the difference between desiring things of the Spirit and things of the flesh?
What is “flesh”? If I have a desire for sexual intimacy, is that a fleshly desire? Paul tells us that we are to walk by the Spirit and not by the flesh (Gal. 5:16), so if it’s true that a desire for sexual intimacy is a fleshly desire, I should not desire sexual intimacy with my wife, right?
Yet, Paul also exhorts us to give to our spouses their “conjugal” rights (1 Co. 7:3).
In other words, have sex!
He says that because of the temptation for immorality, every man should have one wife and every wife should have a husband.
This doesn’t make sense, if walking by the Spirit means not desiring sex. Why does he go on to say we should have sex?
Is It Wrong for a Christian to Masturbate?
Masturbation is one of those topics where there isn’t one easy answer for everyone. I want to be careful in writing about masturbation that I don’t cause unnecessary struggle for people, but I believe part of finding sexual freedom and healing is understanding our bodies and how they work and what causes us to do certain things. If we never talk about masturbation, it can actually cause people to forever wrestle with lust.
As hard as we may try, until we die or Christ returns, we cannot get out of this body. In fact, we’re told we still have bodies in Heaven, only they are new, redeemed bodies (2 Co. 5:1). I don’t think the physiological impulses we feel in our physical bodies are “the flesh” that Paul is talking about. I have yet to meet anyone who after believing in Jesus no longer had the urge to use the restroom. Sanctified disciples of Christ still ask for water when they feel thirsty, even though they now experience the Living Water Jesus gives. We still desire rest, provision, relationships, affirmation, massages, and so much more!
Perhaps the best barometer for measuring whether a desire is of the flesh or of the Spirit is whether or not I want to fulfill it in the way God designed it to be fulfilled.
Whenever I feel the desire for sex and masturbate, I am probably walking by the flesh because God did not design sex desire to be fulfilled outside of the marriage relationship with my wife. But if instead my desire for sex motivates me to pursue living out my sexuality in another form so I can keep myself pure for when my wife and I can experience sexual intimacy, then I am probably walking by the Spirit. The desire is the same, but how I seek to fulfill it is completely different.
But what do I mean by “living out my sexuality in another form”?
Are single people stuck from experiencing pleasure? Are they trapped in an irresolvable temptation when their sex drives rushes on them? What are singles to do?
We could say they need to abstain, and that’s good advice. But it doesn’t help anything. Many people, in the name of “abstinence,” have fought secret battles of masturbation and lust because they didn’t know what else to do with the sensational urge they felt inside.
Could there be a more complete answer than simply “resist the urge”?
Nepoleon Hill was an early twentieth century author who explored the concept of sexual transmutation in his book Think and Grow Rich. Hill defines sexual transmutation as changing sexual passion into another form of passion or energy other than raw sexual expression. He says:
Sex desire is the most powerful of human desires. When driven by this desire, men develop keenness of imagination, courage, will-power, persistence, and creative ability unknown to them at other times. So strong and impelling is the desire for sexual contact that men freely run the risk of life and reputation to indulge in it. [But] when harnessed and redirected along other lines, this motivating force maintains all of its attributes of keenness of imagination, courage, etc. which may be used as powerful creative forces in literature, art, or in another profession. . . The desire cannot and should not be submerged or eliminated. But it should be given an outlet through forms of expression which enrich the body, mind, and spirit of a man. If not given this form of outlet . . . it will seek outlets through purely physical channels.[1]
In other words, Hill suggests that when someone feels strong desire for sex, he can channel that energy into creative initiatives, and by doing so he is in fact expressing and releasing the same sexual energy he otherwise would express through sex.
Behind the force of our sexuality lies a power to be active in our world instead of passive.
This is why guys will face more sexual temptations when sitting around playing video games then they will when actively pursuing a dream. It’s why women will struggle with strong desires more when huddled up reading romance novels then they will when actively pursuing their dreams.
Understanding the power of sexual transmutation can help all of us (not only singles) channel sexual energies in meaningful ways without stumbling into sin. But sexual transmutation alone is not the answer to desires we cannot legitimately fulfill.
You see, an innate drive to solve our problems immediately undergirds our physiology. Furthermore, America has idolized sexual fulfillment. Therefore, when we find ourselves feeling intense desire for sex, the only answer seems to be to fulfill it. Or express it in some other way. Yet, God has clearly defined boundaries in which we can legitimately express our sexual desires. This means that sometimes we simply do have to resist.
Sometimes, abstinence is in fact the answer.
Where we fall short, however, is in realizing that our drive to solve our problems is the sin. The sin is not the desire. We tend to want to play God in our own lives, and that’s what is wrong with humanity.
It’s not wrong to feel desires we can’t fulfill. The problem is that we have made personal fulfillment essential to happiness—we have made sexual fulfillment the ultimate human experience.
There will be lots of desires we face in life that are good, God-given desires that we won’t be able to fulfill. To feel them is not lust.
The question, then, is do we trust that a relationship with Jesus is enough?
I’m not suggesting that a relationship with Jesus will give us the physical pleasure of sexual climax—although it may. Rather, I am asking if we trust that Jesus can fill us with the life, purpose, and peace enough to carry us through the longings of our hearts and bodies that go unmet in this life?
It’s easy for me to ask this when talking about sexual fulfillment since I am a married man. But this questions goes far beyond sexual fulfillment.
This question extends into relational desires, financial desires, career desires—any kind of desire we can think of. And when we consider all the temporal, earthly things we turn to for a sense of meaning and fulfillment, we realize how far we are missing the fullest enjoyment of the Gospel.
In fact, a single person who experiences strong desires for sex but is constantly bringing those desires to Christ and submitting his body to God’s ways may have a fuller experience with God than a married person who has failed to realize that he’s been leaning on his weekly nights of lovemaking for the place he finds his greatest joy.
Sexual pleasure is not bad. It’s not wrong to feel sexually aroused. But looking to anything other than Christ for our fulfillment in life is lust, and will surely leave us feeling empty and wanting more.
As we bring our desire to Christ and as we channel the God-given energies within us for purposes that advance his beauty and goodness in this world, we find deep, soul-satisfying joy.
And until the church can grasp a fuller perspective of the role of desire and sexual energies in people’s lives—without making sexual fulfillment the ultimate human experience—we won’t know what to do with singles, we won’t know how to handle people attracted to the same sex, and we won’t have a compelling answer for couples who have gotten divorced.
Simply telling them to remain abstinent might be the surest way to usher them out the door.
How does this perspective clarify things about sexual desire or lust? Have any questions surfaced because what anything I’ve said? Share in the comments below.
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[1] Nepoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich (Grand Haven: Grand Harbor Press, 1960), 201-202.
