Most of my life I viewed my sex drive as something bad that had to be controlled. Whenever I felt a tingle or experienced an erection, I thought it meant I was lusting, and often that was the case. But what about the time I first took Teresa on a date?
I found myself insanely aroused. This new relationship with a beautiful young lady had me on cloud nine—I couldn’t help myself no matter how hard I tried.
We went out to eat at Merlino’s Belvedere, an elegant Italian restaurant in town. We stayed late until the restaurant closed then meandered our way up Skyline Drive which looked out over the city. We sat up there talking about life, dreams, and whatever else newly dating couples talk about to get to know each other better.
I felt ecstatic the whole time, like electricity was coursing through my veins. Something tremendous was happening inside of me and it felt really good!
When Is Sexual Desire Lust?
Was I lusting on that date? This was only our first time together as a couple. Was it wrong for me to have such strong sexual desire for her?
Experiences like that used to drive me crazy. In my heart, I felt totally at peace with God. I did not want to violate Teresa in any way. But I sure desired her sexually! And if simply being aroused and having strong desire for sex is lust, I wouldn’t have known what to do to overcome it.
This is part of why I am unconvinced common definitions of lust are altogether accurate.
The most popular one I hear is “wanting something that isn’t mine to have.” Lust, jealousy, envy—it’s kind of all one and the same. But is lust, jealousy, or envy best defined as the mere reality of desire within oneself?
According to that definition, wanting Teresa for sexual fulfillment was lust indeed. She was not yet mine to have. We didn’t even truly know if we liked each other, let alone whether or not we wanted to have sex together.
But my desire for her came from a place of deep affection and appreciation for who she was, not selfish infatuation.
Furthermore, she was single and we were dating. There was a strong possibility that she could be mine to enjoy sexually someday.
So, on that ridiculously romantic night in Cañon City, as hard as I tried, I couldn’t help but desire her. And while I suppose some might say my desire for her serves as an indicator of lust, it felt more like love than lust. I saw her as a beautiful lady worth protecting instead of an object worth using. I felt no guilt, especially because I didn’t do anything sexual with my desire. I just. . .desired her.
God Made Sex Drive…and He Made It Good
If God created man, then He created sexual drive. And if all of His creation was good, sexual drive and the desire for sexual fulfillment is also good.
After all, when Adam first saw Eve after God had made her, he said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Gen. 2:23). That sounds like strong physical attraction, if you ask me. Likely even sexual.
And God called it good.
Perhaps the attraction to someone we find beautiful and the desire to express oneself sexually to that person, and the exhilaration that comes with such expression, is not the result of lust at all. Maybe it is simply the way God designed our sexuality, albeit mysterious.
King Solomon touched on this when he said there are four things he didn’t understand. Even though he is called the wisest man who ever lived, one of the few things he could never quite figure out was the way of a man with a virgin (Prov. 30:18-19).
It seems God has built within people powerful attraction to our counterparts, a deep compulsion to make ourselves one with such beauty. Seeing this drive as bad, then, can only further complicate one’s journey toward sexual freedom.
Things happen biologically we cannot control. We are wired for intimacy, not the least of which includes sexual intimacy. In other words, the drive for sex is not what’s wrong.
God Gives Desire
Along with my sex drive, another thing I recoiled at for much of my life was desire. I didn’t know what to do with things I deeply wanted. Especially, when they weren’t necessarily mine to have, or when it felt as though my desire for them caused me to stumble in sin.
To me, distracting my desires seemed to offer the best solution for overcoming what I thought was lust. After all, wasn’t simply wanting something that wasn’t mine to have lust? So, I would focus on a “greater purpose,” take a jog, recite verses about “dying to myself” all in an attempt to distract my mind from what I felt.
But the more I tried stuffing or ignoring my desires, the greater they seemed to pull at me. In my understanding, my heart was deceitfully wicked and self-centered. Holiness seemed to have something to do with separating my actions and lifestyle from what I wanted deep inside—separating me from my heart.
The only problem was, no matter how hard I tried, I could not get rid of feelings that rose up inside me. Sure, I could distract myself from them, I could busy myself with other things so I didn’t notice my desires. But I could not completely free myself from what my heart felt.
When Desires Are Too Weak
What if God never intended for us to separate ourselves from what we feel in our hearts? What if He actually wants us to live from our hearts and not in spite of them?
C.S. Lewis once wrote,
If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased. (The Weights of Glory)
It seems to me that ignoring the desires in our hearts more closely resembles false religions than it does Jesus.
Buddhists believe attaining the state of nirvana happens when one completely frees himself of all desire. Hindus, stoics, and Taoists also believe perfect happiness comes when a person can detach himself from desire, because, with no desire there is also no suffering.
Somehow, along the way, even Christians have bought into a form of detachment. We get more focused on distracting ourselves from desire, from our hearts, than on what our hearts long for and allowing our desires to guide how we live.
Then I wonder what it is we are really after: being one with Christ, or avoiding pain?
But what if pain actually points more directly to the real problem at hand then desire does? What if the problem with immorality—porn addiction, obsessive sex, pedophilia, adultery, homosexuality, and every other kind of sexual immorality—is more a matter of not wanting to feel any pain than it is of having too much desire?
A Deep Desire for…God?
God has given each of us sexuality, a powerful force in our being. Along with sexuality, He gave us the ability to feel strong desires—perhaps the greatest, of which, is to love and be loved.
Adam longed for a partner like all the animals had. When he got Eve, he exclaimed “At last! Bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” He, in an unbroken, perfectly connected with God sort of way, had strong physical (if not sexual) desire for Eve.
In the deepest part of our being we long for intimacy. We long for a place where we can be fully known, while also fully loved. We want to feel we have worth, that we belong to people, and that they want us to belong to them.
In life, these desires are met most profoundly in the intimacy of marriage. But these desires are not for the purpose of marriage alone. Marriage is a picture of God’s relationship with humanity. In other words, beyond the intimacy a couple experiences in marriage, we are designed to experience intimacy with God.
Our souls feel most satisfied when we experience oneness with Christ. And when we don’t, when desires for intimacy go unmet, at any level—when we have gaping holes deep in our hearts—we try filling them ourselves.
Instead of turning to God, we use our sexuality as a way of trying to fulfill our desires. Not necessarily because we don’t want God, but because something inside most naturally tries taking care of things our own way.
We look for something within ourselves to fix ourselves; all the while, most likely, completely unaware of what we’re really looking for.
We Settle for Less Than the Best
We may think the problem is with our sexuality—that we get aroused or want sex. We may think the problem is desire—specifically, the desire for pleasure or being fully accepted and loved.
But sexuality is not the problem. Desire for pleasure is not what is wrong.
The problem is we settle for something less than the best kind of pleasure. We settle for something less than the best kind of love. Something causes us to settle for less, and the way we settle is by using our sexuality to try fulfilling what someone else is meant to give.
Why God Wants Us to Have Strong Desires
Throughout the Gospels, Jesus invites us to pleasure. Take, for instance, the woman at the well in John four. He caught her attention by offering her water that would satisfy so much she would never thirst again.
We talked earlier about how she was trying to satisfy something with all her husbands that wasn’t getting satisfied. Jesus knew this, so He went directly to her heart and offered her what she really needed—what she was really looking for, only didn’t realize.
This forever satisfying “water” was (and is) eternal life. And He went on to say in chapter seventeen that eternal life is knowing the only true God and Jesus Christ whom He sent. Not just knowing about, but having an intimate relationship where one experiences uninhibited fellowship with Him.
Our desires for fulfilling relationships are not just “fleshly” desires, but ones God has given us because He wants to be the fulfiller of relationships for us. That doesn’t mean we should not have other relationships, but rather, that even in those relationships, if He is not present, there is no meaningful fulfillment.
He wants us to have as strong a desire for intimacy as necessary to cause us to not only develop meaningful relationships with others, but desperately seek to know Him in the process. After all, it is His image we bear. And as we are to “give Caesar what is Caesar’s,” we are to give God what is God’s.
In other words, since we bear His image, we belong to God. The right response, then, is to give our whole lives to God. Nothing should stand in the way of our relationship with God. That is His design.
He desperately longs for us. And if He is perfect love—if His design is best and if in His presence there is fullness of joy and no shame—having him fulfill our desire for relationships is the most pleasurable thing we could ever experience.
Why We Choose Ourselves Over God
The truth is, I face a deep desire for sexual fulfillment every day. And each time I long for sex, I am faced with the option of waiting to get it the way God designed me to get it, or getting it my own way.
God designed me to share sexual fulfillment with my wife in the context of our marriage. So, when I look at pornography, masturbate, fantasize about sex, or make out with someone other than my wife, I am finding sexual fulfillment my way instead of God’s.
But if I am honest with myself, my way of getting sexually fulfilled doesn’t actually fulfill. It leaves me desperately wanting.
So, why would I choose my way instead of God’s? Why would I settle for something less than the most fulfilling, most exhilarating and satisfying form of intimacy and pleasure? Why would any of us keep splashing away in the mud when we are offered a holiday at the beach?
Because at the core of our being, in the deepest parts of our hearts, we don’t trust God.
We may say we do. We may go through all the right motions, believe all the right things—even do all the right disciplines. But when it comes to matters of soul fulfillment and intimacy, we hold God at arm’s length.
We don’t take Him up on His offer for the best because we are still convinced, whether because of painful events in our past or simply because we’re Adam’s sons, that He doesn’t have our best in mind. He’s holding out on us. We must captain our own ships. And though our own way of finding fulfillment doesn’t truly fulfill, we’ve become okay with it. We’ve become more okay with our brokenness than risking our lives with a design said to be very good because we doubt it actually will be good.
Broken Sexuality
Masturbation, homosexuality, adultery is wrong not because of our desire for it, but because they are not how God designed for us to express sexuality or receive intimacy.
The way we use sex and the way we go about satisfying desires is broken. Left to ourselves, we will only slide further and further into chaos, isolation, emptiness, worthlessness, guilt, bondage, because we settle for lesser, more harmful ways of finding fulfillment.
We may try disciplining ourselves. We may develop good habits at curbing our indulgences. But we cannot overcome brokenness on our own. We need someone else, someone perfect, to do it for us.
We need a savior. A sexual Messiah, of sorts.
At the core of our being, in the deepest part of our sexuality, the place where desires begin and find fulfillment, we need Jesus.
How does it feel to hear you struggle with lust because your desires are too weak? Does this make sense? Is there any confusion? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
