Every Young Man's Battle: Stategies for Victory in the Real World of Sexual Temptation: The Every Man Series (11 page)

“Sorry, but we all saw a great video over the weekend at
Brent’s house,” said one of the high school juniors. “It was
the most hilarious movie, wasn’t it Brent?”

“It sure
was,” he said, grabbing his stomach as he giggled.

“What
was the movie?” asked the youth pastor innocently.

“
American Pie.”

“What was so
funny in the movie?” asked the youth pastor. “I haven’t seen
it.”

All four guys started smirking. Said one,
“There’s a part where the guy masturbates into an apple pie. It was
hilarious!”

“Masturbating into an apple pie? I’m not
sure that type of humor is appropriate for Christians,” said the youth
pastor.

A dark scowl came over Brent’s face. “Oh,
you’re just like our parents,” he sneered. “Get
real.”

Those teens would rather watch the girls in the stands
than get into God’s game. What about you? Are you like those guys whose
favorite video is
American Pi
e
?

You may be
playing in God’s game, but when the final out is made, you forget whose
team you’re on. One summer Jeremy went on a missions trip to Costa Rica,
and he was genuinely touched by the poverty and squalor he witnessed in that
Third World country. He dug trenches to build new school classrooms for eight
hours a day, and by night, he was gripped by the prayer times with the
missionaries. He thought he was a changed person.

When Jeremy returned
home, it wasn’t more than two evenings before he was back into his old
routine with the guys. Watching raunchy R-rated videos like
American
Pie.
Fantasizing about Lindsay as he lay awake at night. Sure, he had a
great experience in Costa Rica, but that was there and now he was here.

Three weeks later, he found himself in the backseat of his car, half drunk,
with a girl unzipping his pants. In an alcohol-induced fog, he couldn’t
remember being touched by God’s presence among those poor people in Costa
Rica. That seemed so long ago. Nor could Jeremy remember what he’d read
in his Bible that week:

The
acts of the sinful nature
are
obvious: sexual immorality, impurity.… But the
fruit of the
Spirit
is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,
gentleness and
self-control.
Against such things there is no law.
Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its
passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the
Spirit. (Galatians 5:19,22-25)

Jeremy is expressing sexual immorality,
not self-control. He’s not concerned with being intimate with God. If
interviewed at that moment, he would say things like these:

•
“I can’t commit to keeping my pants on. There are just too many
unforeseen circumstances that might make me want to go to bed with a girl, so I
won’t make that promise.”

• “God cannot
possibly have meant ‘not a hint.’”

•
“It’s impossible for me not to look at one of my classmates in a
string bikini.”

• “Just because she won’t let
me order doesn’t mean I can’t look at the menu.”

If
you think like this, you’re not coming to God on His terms. God is aching
for you to be one with Him, that He might use you. He wants to give you a voice
in His kingdom. He wants to show you His power.

So when He defines His
terms of sexual purity, don’t say, “God can’t possibly mean
that!” because He does. Christ is looking to see whether you can be
trustworthy—capable of handling more for His kingdom. Luke 16:11 says,
“So if you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will
trust you with true riches?”

If you aren’t trustworthy in
handling fleshly passions, how can you be trusted to handle things of greater
value? Jesus said that if you were faithful in the little things, He would
entrust you with bigger things. In this, God isn’t primarily referring to
what He’s called you to
do
in His kingdom. He’s primarily
concerned with what He’s called you to
be
in your
character.

Maybe you’ve asked God to reveal His will for your
life, but how are you doing with that “little” part of His will
that He has already revealed to you?

It is
God’s will
that you should be sanctified;
that you should avoid sexual
immorality
; that each of you should learn to control his own body in a way
that is holy and honorable, not in passionate lust like the heathen, who do not
know God; and that in this matter no one should wrong his brother or take
advantage of him.… For God did not call us to be impure, but to live a
holy life. Therefore, he who rejects this instruction does not reject man but
God, who gives you his Holy Spirit. (1 Thessalonians 4:3-8)

God has
already laid down His life as an example to us:

Therefore, since
Christ suffered in his body, arm yourselves also with the same attitude,
because he who has suffered in his body is done with sin. As a result, he does
not live the rest of his earthly life for evil human desires, but rather for
the will of God.
For you have spent enough time in the past doing what
pagans choose to do—living in…lust. (1 Peter 4:1-3)

It’s time to fulfill God’s will for your life. Focus on the
“little” things He has entrusted to you. He wants to reward you as
you earnestly seek Him.

Sure,
authenticity and earnestness have a price. A few years back, Cyndi was known
throughout her church as a girl who lived purely and radically for God, a
high-school student with high standards. I’ll never forget a conversation
I (Fred) had with her. “Is it hard to hold such high standards like you
do?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t mind being mocked,”
she replied. “Christ was mocked plenty. That’s just part of
it.”

Wow,
I said to myself. We sat silently for a while
as I pondered her statement. Then I glanced up at her and found her staring
wistfully into the distance. Suddenly, her face crumpled slightly, and a large
tear rolled out of the corner of her eye.

“I so ache to find a
friend, anyone, who’s like me,” she whispered.

How can
this be?
I thought.
How can we all be so mushy in our standards that
those walking straight are lonely?

I asked her youth pastor,
Larry, “Why aren’t the other youth drawn to Cyndi? I would
be.”

“Oh, they respect her to no end,” said Larry.
“Of course, some will always mock, but her peers rarely choose radically
committed Christians as role models. That represents too much sacrifice and too
much risk of not being accepted. They prefer to hang out with guys who play
sports and have a lot of girlfriends. You know, one who’s both Christian
and worldly simultaneously.”

Everyone with beliefs gets mocked,
not just Christians. Don’t be so afraid of it! That’s just a part
of life. When I was playing football, I was radical in my commitment to be the
best quarterback in the state. In the winter before my senior year, I decided
that I needed to improve my balance on the football field.

I devised a
plan. I noticed that the snowplows at school piled up the snow into a huge
twenty-foot-high berm that ran for the length of the parking lot. On the top of
this mountain was a ten-foot-wide plateau that jutted with boulders and jags of
snow and ice. Strapping my cleats on and tucking a ball under an arm, I’d
take off running from one end to the other. At full speed I cut in and out
between the jags and boulders, pretending they were linebackers and defensive
backs.

Early on, I paid a heavy price. The ice cuts and bruises really
hurt, and I took more than a beating. Still, as the weeks went by, I clipped
the jutting ice less often. My ability to cut and change directions became
sharper and faster with each passing day.

My teammates sometimes
dropped by to watch. They laughed and mocked me, all right. But I had faith
that I would be rewarded for my efforts, and I
was
rewarded. The next
fall, when it was third-and-two or fourth-and-one, who wanted me to run the
option play and keep the ball? Answer: The very same teammates who watched me
run for those tough yards on the snow berm. They knew I’d never go down
easily.

I did all that for football, a “god” that existed
only in my mind. Our own God is real, and He’ll truly reward those who
earnestly seek Him—or practice for Him! If you would step out for God
with even a fraction of the commitment I had on that ice plateau, you would be
an all-star in God’s kingdom.

And remember one more thing: While
authenticity has its price, inauthenticity for the sake of acceptance has a
high price as well—as we’ve seen in the many stories told earlier
in the book. The effects of your sin will follow you into adulthood. Since both
have their price, why not pay the price for something great? Why not fight? God
will
reward you.

We came
across a newspaper story about a World War II vet named B. J.
“Bernie” Baker who was told he was dying of bone cancer. Given only
two years to live, he told the doctors to fight the disease with everything
possible. “Give me the treatments,” he said. “I’ll keep
living my life.” Meanwhile he and his wife found time for a motor-home
drive to Alaska, a fishing excursion to Costa Rica, and several trips to
Florida.

Nine years after the diagnosis, he was struggling with
shortness of breath and loss of strength, but he said, “I’m going
to keep fighting. Might as well.”

Those words weren’t
uttered in resignation. They were the words of a fighter, a real man, a soldier
who faced bombs and machine-gun fire in the South Pacific before returning to
America and eventually starting Baker Mechanical Company with two pipe wrenches
and a $125 pickup truck. (It would become one of the largest companies of its
kind in America.) The cancer hit him hard, but he had no plans for
surrender.

Might as well keep fighting. What was Bernie’s
alternative?

To quit and die.

What about you and your battle
with your impure eyes and mind? What’s your alternative to fighting?

To become ensnared and die spiritually.

When you talk to courageous
men from Bernie’s generation, World War II veterans who embody the title
of Tom Brokaw’s book
The Greatest Generation,
they say they
don’t feel like heroes. They simply had a job to do. When the
landing-craft ramps fell open, they swallowed hard and said, “It’s
time.” Time to fight.

In your struggle with sexual impurity,
isn’t it time? Sure, fighting back will be hard. It was for us. When we
began our fight, we fully expected to take a beating at first, and we did. Our
sins had humbled us. But we wanted victory over those sins and the respect of
our God.

Your life is under a withering barrage of machine-gun
sexuality that rakes the landscape mercilessly. God has trained you for battle
and given you the weapons, along with the promise that courageous young men of
God can stop the fire.

But right now you’re in a landing craft,
bobbing and inching closer to shore and a showdown. You can enter the fray now,
or you can dawdle until this withering barrage leaves your spiritual landscape
devastated, which means you’ll have to fight later among deeper ruins and
more desperate conditions. But the showdown will come. You can’t stay in
the landing craft forever. Sooner or later, the ramp will drop, and then it
will be your time to run bravely into the teeth of the enemy. God will run with
you, but He won’t run for you.

It’s time to plunge ahead
and go like a man.

Several years ago
I counseled a high-school sophomore named Ben who said he wanted sexual
integrity. But his words were just words. “I’m still buying the
Playbo
y
s,” he said recently. “I guess I just
don’t hate them enough.”

Similarly, I’m reminded of
seventeen-year-old Ronnie, who was masturbating several times a day. His pastor
told me, “Ronnie says he wants to be free, but he doesn’t feel any
compunction to put in any effort on his own. He’ll give up his sin, but
only if God does it.”

Later, Ronnie rushed into his
pastor’s office in terror, saying, “Pastor, you’ve got to
help me! You know the fantasies I have while masturbating? Two weeks ago, they
suddenly turned homosexual, and I can’t make them stop!” That was
the moment when Ronnie needed to stand up and fight.

We’ve known
those who have failed in their battle for sexual purity, and we know some who
have won. The difference?
Those who won hated their impurity.
They
were going to war and going to win—or die trying. Every resource was
leveled upon the foe.

There will be no victory in this area of your
life until you choose manhood with all your might. In the arena of sexual
purity, you’re at your own point of decision.

Look in the mirror.
Are you authentic? Are you proud of your sexual fantasizing? Or do you feel
degraded after viewing cyber porn or sex scenes in films?

Is a
low-grade sexual fever burning? Like any low-grade fever, it doesn’t
disable you, but you aren’t healthy, either. Spiritually, you can sort of
function normally, but you can’t push hard. You just get by. And if this
fever doesn’t break, you’ll never fully function as a Christian.
Like the prodigal son, you need to come to your senses and make a decision.
Here are some more questions to ask yourself: