Randy Alcorn has some excellent suggestions for pursuing sexual purity in marriage. Here are a few of the highlights:
1. Regularly evaluate your relationship with your spouse. Beware of poor communication, inadequate conflict resolution, poor sexual relationship, discontent, and other red flags. Keep your fingers on the pulse of your marriage!
2. Spend regular uninterrupted time together to communicate on all levels: spiritually, intellectually, emotionally, and physically. (Date your spouse. If it’s not happening, put it in your schedule!)
3. Share openly with each other—don’t harbor secrets or withhold personal struggles. (Every adultery begins with a secret.)
7. Be fiercely loyal to your spouse; speak highly of her/him and never downgrade her to anyone.
12. Anticipate, and then act to prevent, avoid and resist sexual temptation.
17. Take care of your physical health; be as attractive to your mate as you can.
18. Be modest with others in public, and sexy with your spouse in private—not the opposite!
20. Rehearse in advance the devastating consequences of immorality and a broken marriage. Count the cost of neglect and unfaithfulness!
National Review Online has a great article on the serious affects of Pornography. Here’s an excerpt:
Perhaps the greatest hardship for women who fear they have lost (or are losing) a husband to Internet porn is the absence of a public consensus about the harmful effects of pornography on marriage. Consider what we know. In a study published inSexual Addiction and Compulsivity, Schneider found that among the 68 percent of couples in which one person was addicted to Internet porn, one or both had lost interest in sex. Results of the same study, published in 2000, indicated that porn use was a major contributing factor to increased risk of separation and divorce. This finding is substantiated by results of a 2002 meeting of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, during which surveyed lawyers claimed that “an obsessive interest in Internet pornography” was a significant factor in 56 percent of their divorce cases the prior year.
Porn use creates the impression that aberrant sexual practices are more common than they really are, and that promiscuous behavior is normal. For example, in a 2000 meta-analysis of 46 published studies put out by the National Foundation for Family Research and Education at the University of Calgary, regular exposure to pornography increased risk of sexual deviancy (including lower age of first intercourse and excessive masturbation), increased belief in the “rape myth” (that women cause rape and rapists are normal), and was associated with negative attitudes regarding intimate relationships (e.g., rejecting the need for courtship and viewing persons as sexual objects). Indeed, neurological imaging confirms the latter finding. Susan Fiske, professor of psychology at Princeton University, used MRI scans to analyze the brain activity of men viewing pornography. She found that after viewing porn, men looked at women more as objects than as human beings.
There have been a lot of great resources on the web lately for young people struggling with issues of sexuality. Here are a couple that I’m sure I’ll be passing on to some of the teenagers and young marrieds that I work with.
1) Sexual Detox – This is a series of posts from Tim Challies for young men living in our pornified culture. Tim does an excellent job of addressing a very common and yet mostly ignored issue that young men struggle with.
2) Breaking the Pornography Addiction – This two part series from David Powlinson is an example of biblical counseling at its best. Powlinson does a masterful job of dealing with an extremely difficult topic.
3) False Messages – Men aren’t the only ones who struggle with sexual issues. These 3 posts from Aileen Challies speak to one of the most common and most difficult issues for any young married couple from a woman’s point of view.
I never thought that the day would come when I would have a picture of Hannah Montana on my blog, but apparently that day is today.
Gina Dalfonzo has an excellent post on modern rites of passage for teenager girls that is a must read for every parent of teenage girls. Dalfonzo writes:
And that’s what I mean by a “rite of passage.” Every young girl growing up becomes a sexually mature being, and we used to have ways to help her handle that fact: primarily, a culturally sanctioned (if sometimes nebulous) belief system that portrayed sex as one important part of marriage and life, not the be-all and end-all of existence. Good parents still teach their daughters this, but the culture all around them is teaching them something else: that the natural result of growing up — not just an option, but the very definition of growing up — is becoming a “girl gone wild.” (No wonder we use the term mature themes to mean one thing and one thing only. I use it myself, because it’s a useful shorthand, but I cringe whenever I do.) And even the stars who profess faith generally compartmentalize it out of their way, because apparently faith means one thing before you reach adolescence and another thing after. It can’t be allowed to interfere with real life, and especially with real “growing up.”
2 Samuel 12 records the familiar story of the prophet Nathan confronting David over his sin with Bathsheba. After telling David the story of the rich man stealing the poor man’s lamb and arousing David’s wrath against this injustice Nathan declares (2 Samuel 12:7-9):
Nathan said to David, “You are the man! Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, ‘I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you out of the hand of Saul. 8 And I gave you your master’s house and your master’s wives into your arms and gave you the house of Israel and of Judah. And if this were too little, I would add to you as much more. 9 Why have you despised the word of the LORD, to do what is evil in his sight? You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and have taken his wife to be your wife and have killed him with the sword of the Ammonites.
There’s certainly a lot that could be said about this passage, but what has recently caught my attention is the end of the verse. Nathan holds David guilty of the murder of Uriah, even though David was hundreds of miles away when Uriah was killed in a legitimate battle. What is implied is that even though David was not the immediate cause of Uriah’s death (Uriah was killed by the hand of the Ammonites), he was nonetheless the cause of his death (he gave the order) which makes him just as guilty.
This may seem like a terribly obvious observation, but stay with me for a minute here. What if we were to take this observation about immediate causes and remote causes and apply it to life today (no, I’m not talking about buying Starbucks coffee and worrying about where the proceeds from your triple grande mocha frapacino are going, let’s keep it a little more manageable for now). What about gossip? Words spoken in secret have a way of making their way from one set of ears to the next (Ecclesiastes 10:20) until a person’s reputation is tarnished or even destroyed. The person who spoke those words is more than a gossip (even though all he did was speak a few words into someone’s ear), he is a violent aggressor as he assaults his friend’s reputation.
One of the great tragedies of living in modern times is the free availability of pornography to the masses. It used to be that pornography took a small amount of effort to obtain, but today all it takes is a computer and an internet connection (or a nearby library). Working with teenage boys, I am well aware that this is a tremendous temptation for them. While most Christians would agree that pornography is a great evil, they would do so mainly because of the great harm that it does to the person viewing the pornography. But what about the women who are enslaved to this lifestyle? This principle of immediate and remote causes seems to apply here as well. You see, pornography doesn’t just destroy a man’s life it makes him a rapist by supporting the rape of these women, it makes him a pimp by promoting the sale of these women through his web browsing, it makes him a violent man as he supports violence against women and it makes him an adulterer (Matthew 5:28).
There are a lot of other applications of immediate and remote causes. The big question is where is the hand of the Ammonites in our lives and what do we need to do to repent of it? “This is the way of an adulteress: she eats and wipes her mouth and says, ‘I have done no wrong’” (Proverbs 30:20).
Don’t worry this isn’t a topic that I’m going to touch with a 10 foot pole, but it is one that needs to be addressed and that’s why I’m so thankful for John Piper’s ministry.
