Every Young Man's Battle: Stategies for Victory in the Real World of Sexual Temptation: The Every Man Series (27 page)

Whatever kind of
leadership that is, it smells bad from here—and it certainly isn’t
spiritual leadership! If you’re going to love your girlfriend as
yourself, you’re going to have to give her what she wants, and that
includes strong spiritual leadership. Sex doesn’t fit into the mix at
all.

What will strong spiritual leadership look like? For starters, we
might ask God, “Where are the boundaries? How far can a Christian
go?” Too often we avoid asking God this question, preferring to ask our
peers instead.

But remember this: It’s not the act of defining
sexual boundaries that makes you a spiritual leader. It’s the act of
defending them. It wasn’t that Kevin was ignorant of God’s ways. He
knew them well enough to help Cassie define proper sexual boundaries for their
relationship together. But whenever he neared them he simply kicked out the
markers a bit farther so he could stray over them at will.

For Kevin,
Bible studies, prayer, and fasting camouflaged his relentless raids across
Cassie’s sexual borders. In the confusion, she described Kevin as a great
spiritual leader on the one hand while pointing out that he has been a painful
stumbling block to her sexual purity on the other. How weird. How common.

If
there’s anywhere we need to be authentic, it’s in our relationships
with girls. You must leave her better than when you met her. So are you going
to do that?

A young lady named Maggie told us that she had a huge
problem with her boyfriend:

When we started dating fourteen months
ago, everything was perfect. I felt I’d finally met a great Christian guy
who loved my family and agreed with my morals. But six months ago, we slept
together. We were both virgins and, to tell you the truth, I didn’t want
to do it. I had struggled through many relationships before and had remained
pure. I was so wanting to wait for my wedding night, but I also wanted to make
him happy, so I let it go too far.

Since then, life has been
terrible. I knew that getting it on was a mistake and a sin before I even did
it, but the experience really hit him hard too. Now every other area of his
life has been impacted. He doesn’t think looking at pornography is wrong,
he doesn’t think cursing is wrong, he doesn’t think premarital sex
is wrong, and he doesn’t honor his parents or mine anymore. We were
thinking about getting married after college, but now I don’t know what
to do. He views everything I say as “nagging.” I just want the same
godly man back that I grew to love. I guess I don’t want to face the fact
that this man that I gave myself to is not the one who God has planned for me
to marry.

Maggie didn’t do anything to deserve this fate.
Sure, she yielded, but that’s what she did—she yielded. Her
boyfriend should have been a leader. He should have acted as if it was
his
responsibility not only to set the boundaries but also to keep
them. That’s what guys are called to do.

I (Fred) have a little
motto I live by: “Never, ever bring shame on the name of Christ.”
There’s no quicker way to bring shame on the name of Christ than to slip
your hand under her bra or kiss her until she can’t resist your advances
anymore.

Then how far
can
we go? The Bible defines the outer
boundaries quite well—all foreplay is out of bounds. What is foreplay? We
defined it earlier, but we’ll do it again here: Foreplay is anything that
has as its natural result either sexual intercourse or the false intercourse of
masturbation. For instance, oral sex, mutual masturbation, heavy petting, and
kissing around the neck are in foul territory.

We might loosely paint
this picture another way—anything you do with her that causes an erection
is out of bounds. An erection is your body’s way of preparing for sexual
intercourse. Anything she does that prepares your body for intercourse is
foreplay.

Author Josh Harris once asked his fiancée, Shannon, to
take a nap in the hammock with him. What could be more innocent than a nap in a
hammock? It’s a far cry from foreplay, right? Listen up:

As soon
as I suggested it, I knew it was a bad idea. My ulterior motive was to get as
close to Shannon’s body as possible. My conscience was incensed.
“Take a nap in a hammock?!” he screamed. “Are you nuts?
That’s not fleeing temptation—that’s inviting
it!”

The story continued…

“Stop looking
at her legs, Josh,” my conscience said. “Your half-open eyelids
don’t fool me.”

I’m just admiring them.

“You’re lusting.”

Well, she is going to
be my wife in four months.

“Well, she’s not your wife
today.”

God does not want to stifle my sexuality!

“Stifle, no. Control for the sake of righteousness,
yes.”

Josh, a true leader, soon excused himself and rolled out
of the hammock. While a nap may be well within God’s outer borders
technically, it wasn’t the right place for Josh to play. For instance,
Josh admits that during his engagement he often struggled with sexual thoughts
about Shannon in the morning, right after he woke up.

“If I
allowed myself to lie in bed for an extra five minutes and dream about how one
day I’d be waking up next to her,” he said, “lust often got
the better of me—if not at the moment, then later in how I treated her
when we were together.”

Seeking the boundaries of purity is
important, but it’s better to seek the center of purity. For instance,
kissing is not technically foreplay. I’ve kissed Mom, my sisters, and
even my Aunt Nadine with no sexual overtones at all. Kissing may be fine for
you and your girlfriend. We have no problem with that in general.

But
when I (Fred) look back, I’m not at all certain that kissing was best for
Brenda and me during our courtship. Kissing ignited sensual infernos in my mind
and made it only harder for us to remain pure together, while it did little to
strengthen our relationship or ensure the success of our pending marriage. All
pain, no gain.

Marking out general boundaries like “kissing the
lips is okay” but “kissing the neck is not okay” can be
useful, no question. But in my relationship with Brenda, splitting hairs on
this issue missed the point entirely. Kissing Brenda took my mind into dark,
lustful corners where it had no business going.

Maybe you can handle
the kissing—fine. But what if it lights her fires, leaving her struggling
to stay inbounds? Make a stand for her purity.

The point of this book
is not to hammer God’s rules into you. True, there are physical
characteristics built into our mind and eyes that easily draw sexual
gratification from those around us, and if we don’t follow God’s
rules, we’ll be ensnared. In light of this, the disciplines of
“bouncing the eyes” and “starving the sumo” demand our
focus.

But the ultimate point of this book is your intimacy with God.
Is what you’re doing with her resulting in a closer relationship with
Him? Does it glorify Him? Are you satisfied with Him alone, or must you have a
taste of her body as well? God is most glorified in us when we are most
satisfied in Him alone.

“Please tell your readers to be
leaders,” said Cassie. “Help them to set high standards and
encourage them to stick to them. Don’t make girls constantly have to be
the strong ones when temptation hits, because girls don’t want to be
pressured into doing something they don’t really want to do. We want a
man we can trust and deeply respect.”

You’re called to lead
spiritually, and if you do, you’ll go through life without regrets.
That’s a great place to start as you begin to live on your own, marry,
and have a family.

When I told our youth pastor I was
writing this book, I asked him whether there was anything he felt was
absolutely critical to include. He pleaded, “Fred, they know
they’re going to fail. They don’t have the spiritual strength to
say no, and they know it. Show them how to have that strength!”

Amber is a twenty-year-old single woman at a Bible college. When I told her
that I was writing this book and asked her the same question, she said,
“I wish I would have been told more specifically what ‘sexual
purity’ really meant when I was growing up in the church. I was always
taught that sexual purity meant ‘no sexual intercourse,’ but then I
loved the definition given in
Every Man’s Battle.
‘Sexual
purity is receiving no sexual gratification from anything or anyone outside of
your husband or wife.’ That’s a black-and-white definition that
young people need to be taught. If you don’t do anything else, please
stress this definition.”

We
have
stressed this
definition throughout
Every Young Man’s Battle,
and now that
you’ve been good students, we’d like to leave you with this
challenge: We challenge you to live without premarital sex. We challenge you to
live without masturbation. We challenge you to clean up what you’re
watching and the thoughts you’re thinking.

We challenge you to
stop ridiculing your friends who are trying to walk closer to God. We challenge
you to let the girls in your life know that you care more about their hearts
than their bodies. As Amber says, “Guys, please don’t wait until
you’re twenty-two and ready to get married to grow up. Start appreciating
girls right now—girls who place value on the right things, like character
and loving God.”

These are
special days—a time when the idea of sexual purity seems radical. These
days are a lot like the days of Ezekiel:

Her priests do violence to
my law and profane my holy things; they do not distinguish between the holy and
the common; they teach that there is no difference between the unclean and the
clean. (Ezekiel 22:26)

Today, the sexual lines have been so blurred
that no one knows what’s right or wrong, holy or profane. To put it
bluntly, you’re living in the era of masturbation. There’s more
masturbation today and more things to masturbate over than ever before. There
are entire industries centered on the practice of masturbation. The porn
industry wants you to masturbate compulsively so it can sell you products.
Playboy
succeeds because guys want to look at pictures of naked women
and masturbate with them.
Playboy
has always been about masturbation,
though they’ll never say it out loud. The porn industry will rent out
seven hundred million videos a year. They’ll release eleven thousand
“adult” movies this year so that men can become aroused and
masturbate in the privacy of their own homes. These folks want you as a
customer.

Porn-related Web sites are also an amazing success. While the
dotcom industry is in a shambles with all sorts of Web sites going out of
business, seventy thousand adult pay-for-porn sites are flourishing. Clearly,
men want to masturbate, so businesses have sprung up to meet that need. For the
rest of your life, you’ll be bombarded with sensual television shows,
horny movies, bra-and-panty ads in newspapers and magazines, and neighborhood
strip joints. All of this is waiting out there for you
because men have
sought out intensity rather than intimacy in their sexuality.

The
good news is that God is looking for special people in these special times. His
eyes are looking throughout the whole earth for young men on whose behalf He
can show His power—just like He did in the days of wicked king Ahab, when
He needed someone with a steel spine to stand up to the evil man. God found
that man in Elijah, who was ready to stand up for God before the king.

How many of us are like Elijah? I don’t have an answer, but I do know
this: God wants to use you to change these days.

We’ll leave you
with an inspirational story of a unique young man named Aaron, a person whom
God is using in these special days. This is Aaron’s story:

I’m now twenty-seven years old, but you have to go back fourteen
years to the start of my story. I was introduced to pornography while
baby-sitting at a neighbor’s house when I was only thirteen years old.
Late at night, I’d just sit in the bathroom and look at the magazines. I
even broke into their house on several occasions when no one was home. I moved
into a whole new level of pornography when I turned fifteen and found I could
buy any type of pornography at a local 7-Eleven.

Whenever I had
the money, I’d buy magazines. Not just
Playboy
and
Penthouse,
but the really hard-core mags. When I was bored with a
magazine, I could sell it to a friend for a small profit. After several months
of doing this, I earned the title of “Porn King” around school. A
year later, as my high school years were coming to a close, my parents found
out about my “business.” They kicked me out of the house to protect
the rest of the family from the “pervert.”

This
rejection only fueled my passion for pornography. I looked at porn whenever I
was lonely or sad. I could be the stud, the king of my own little world, at
least for the moment. My parents moved me back home after a few months, but I
continued to look. I just found better hiding places. I had a new job at
McDonald’s, which provided me with the ready cash to buy magazines
whenever I wanted. It was at McDonald’s where I met a beautiful girl
named Tina.

Tina introduced me to Jesus Christ, and I became a
Christian. I gave up so much for Him! I quit swearing, stopped drinking, and
never smoked pot again. But the pornography stuck with me. I just
couldn’t shake it. I
begged
Jesus for help, but nothing worked.
I’d buy magazines, look at them, and then masturbate while driving home.
Then I’d take the magazine straight to the trash and promise myself that
I’d never do it again.