Men, we need more frank conversation about sexual temptation.

 

The effects of lust and the idolatry of sex destroys lives and opportunity to serve the Lord. Too many of us know that addiction to pornography and masturbation combined with worldly notions about love are a recipe for disaster. Great engines of sin have been built in our generation to pump the filth of pornography and lust at high pressure through the cracks in the defenses of our Christian homes and minds.  Worst of all we must face the fact like men that if we have sinned then we have personally chosen the fleeting pleasure over God’s will with no one else to blame but ourselves. Men, we need grace. We need grace to be true men. Though Satan has redefined manhood to mean uncontrolled passion and sexual conquest, we need the grace through Jesus Christ to be godly men who control our bodies and protect our women. Consider Uriah.

 

 

Though David was a believer he sinned greatly by taking his brother Uriah’s wife Bathsheba and she became pregnant. The story reminds us that true Christians can fall terribly. But worse David attempted to cover the deed by tricking Uriah into having sex with his wife Bathsheba so he would think the baby was his. The choice of Uriah to abstain from relations with his wife would be considered insane by the sex-crazed people of our age. Why not have relations with your own wife? Yet his resolve does not even compute in their best of reasonings because his first choice was faithfulness to ALL God’s people. Read the whole story in 2 Samuel 11.

 

Our nation has made a joke out of sex and thus a joke out of ourselves. I get 100 spam emails a day advertising Viagra, Cialas, Levitra, and more. We have become a nation of fast food and fast sex junkies who swing by McDonalds for a super sized value meal and swing by the pharmaceutical company for a super sized sex life.

 

I grew up in the day when Huey Lewis and the News sang, “I Want a New Drug.” He sang the song of a drug that would make him feel like he felt when he was with his lover. Friends, we don’t have one new drug, we have ten!  How long before we are selling drugs that take us the whole way from foreplay through intercourse to climax, and that without a partner? Perhaps erectile dysfunction drugs have a place and a man humbly takes them in order to serve his partner, but the Huey Lewis Drug Company would not be making billions on that. Instead our email boxes are stuffed full of hard-core calories to feed the lust of our super charged sexual idolatry.

 

Friends, I am no stranger to the passions of wanting to please my wife, but at what cost? We shame ourselves! Has anyone ever thought that the family men of the third-world must think that American men are simply idiots? While they work their tail off facing poverty, uncertainty, and danger to feed their family struggling to keep it down because they cannot afford another kid, we work 9 to 5, pad our 401ks, masturbate to pornography, and if we ever do have sex with a woman we need a pill to get it up! It’s moronic.

 

Yet if I preach to fools, I also know myself to be a fool. Christian men, brothers, let’s pray for each other in these times of great temptation. Let’s pray for our sons. Let’s pray that God would give us the grace to share in the character and faithfulness of Uriah so that our lives can be of service to Jesus Christ. And if it is our desire to serve our spouse in the bedroom why not sanctify our relations through the power of prayer leaving the result to Christ?