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When someone asked a humble, godly, old Christian what it is like to be free from sexual temptation, his response was, “I don’t know. I will let you know when that time comes.” You don’t want to dismiss the old, godly man’s perspective on sexual temptation as an anomaly. I was there when he said it. He had an impeccable reputation and was a saintly stalwart in the Christian community for decades. He is with Jesus now, but at the end of his life, he still battled with sexual temptation. How do you think about those who are not free from sexual temptation? Of course, I’m making a distinction between ubiquitous temptation and succumbing to it. Living with temptation means you’re very much alive.
When some people think about sexually tempted people, they immediately relegate them to the perverted regions of human depravity. That kind of thinking is unsophisticated, unkind, and unhelpful. To cast every sexually tempted person under the bus of perversion is immature, ignorant, and arrogant (self-righteous). Sexual temptation is a universal temptation for men (and women) because it is supposed to be. The Lord built into the man a desire to like and enjoy the opposite sex. It would have been a major relational faux pas if the Lord created man without a desire for a woman. Placing naked Eve in front of naked Adam and for Adam to not like what he was looking at would have been weird. I suppose Adam could have thanked the Lord for giving him a helper and went out to play with the animals.
And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed (Genesis 2:22-25).
But Adam did not go out and play with the animals. He wanted to play with his new playmate. You hear it in his voice: “At last.” I have someone I can connect with, a person with whom I can relate. Eve was different from the rest of God’s creative work. She was different from Adam, which made them perfect for each other. They fit like a hand in a glove. You sense this in the instinctive attraction he had for her. She was different, and he desired her. Sometimes, when people talk about sexual temptation, they don’t go back far enough. If they do go back at all, they only go back to Genesis 3, where man’s view and practice of sex was distorted and depraved by sin.
If you’re going to talk about sex, the essential place to begin is how sex and sexual relationships were always supposed to be. Sex was good, and Adam and Eve enjoyed their sexual relationship. They were not ashamed. Naked and sharing the most intimate love relationship two humans can enjoy with each other. Do you think Adam or Eve stopped liking sex after sin took over their lives? Did the way the Lord made them regarding their sexual drive stop after the fall? They did not experience a diminished sex drive or sexual desires because of their fall. They continued to enjoy sex and felt drawn to each other. What they were and what they liked before the fall was still part of their desires after the fall.
The desire for sex is no different from any other good thing the Lord had made before hell broke loose on man’s soul. Genesis 3 did not eradicate the good things the Lord made, though the fall changed how man thought about and desired those things. Imagine if the Lord created food and made man dependent on food but put a distaste for food on man’s palate. That does not sound like a good God. He creates things perfectly, which means food is not just for utilitarian purposes. God made food tasty so that man could enjoy it while he was storing his survival energy in his belly. He did this by giving man taste buds. Follow the formula: Man desires food. Man eats food. Man enjoys food. Man benefits from food.
It was a perfect plan. How kind of God to construct things so well. Then sin entered the world. What changed? Nothing, in the sense that man still desires, eats, enjoys, and benefits from food. The fall did not create a different kind of man who had no connection to his pre-fallen condition. Sin did not remove man’s pre-fall enjoyment of and benefit from food, but it did distort how man thought about food. He could no longer have a perfect godly experience with food. No longer was he able to desire, eat, enjoy, and benefit from food exclusively.
His newly depraved mind took good food and twisted it into a means to feed his selfish desire to indulge himself. He no longer ate food for God’s glory and survival instincts (1 Corinthians 10:31). Adam and Eve’s God-centered worldview turned into a dark, human-centered one. If there is a way to distort the Lord’s kindness to us, we will find that way, even if we have to build a tower to Heaven to demonstrate our depravity (Genesis 11:1-9). We have the depraved ability to turn all God’s blessings into personal indulgence. Food is good and meant for all to enjoy, but we are tempted to make poor food choices, including eating more than we should.
Our sex problems, like food or any kind gift from the Lord, are one of our most complicated distorted blessings from God. To scold a person for desiring sex does not help him untangle sin’s distortions. To call a person evil because they make poor food choices or eat too much is just as wrongheaded. The culture will cancel you for fat shaming. Regardless of what you think about our culture’s perspectives about obesity, we know that corrupting speech does not motivate a person to change; it might manipulate them for a season, but it won’t motivate them for the long haul (Ephesians 4:29). To condemn a person each time he experiences temptation is like asking him to stop being human.
Rather than condemn him, it would be better to understand how his twisted heart became that way. We know it happened, in part, due to fallenness, but there is more to the story. Your temptation may be different, but the truth is that we all experience temptation, and we have not fully conquered all our temptations. I am not condoning sinful sexual temptation or anyone who succumbs to it. I’m appealing for a more intelligent discussion about God’s design for sex and our twisted desires that the fall did not eradicate. There are two extremes with some people regarding improper biblical discourse: The sexually tempted person will go to great lengths to justify their favorite kind of sinful practice. The un-tempted will uncharitably jump on any person who struggles with any sinful temptation.
No one can condone sinful sex of any kind because God does not condone it. There is no stamp to approve sinful sex, and the only acceptable kind of sex is the kind that happens between a man and a woman after they are married. The Hebrew writer could not say it more clearly:
Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous (Hebrews 13:4).
Any other kind of sex places the participants under the judgment of God. Unbiblical sex is the practice of darkened and futile minds, those who live according to the spirit of this age, not under the management and empowerment of the Holy Spirit.
They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity (Ephesians 4:18-19).
There is a difference between a person who is making excuses for their gluttony and a person who is honest about their temptation to overeat. The humble admission is what I appreciated about the comment from my old, godly friend. If a person comes to you and says they are tempted to overeat, I recommend you do not condemn them but thank them. If they have the humility and trust to let you know they are a Genesis 2 person who has been twisted by Genesis 3, encourage them to continue in dialogue as you keep watch on your heart since you’re a fellow struggler too (Galatians 6:1-2; Matthew 18:33). Don’t brand them like a pervert or a lesser person in the human race because they are honest about how God made them and how sin has twisted them.
Their struggle may be because impure thoughts control them. Maybe they have a specific weakness that is different from yours. It could be because something happened to them in their childhood that twisted their understanding of sex and its purposes. I do not know why they have a twisted perspective and practice of sex, but I do want to make sure they know these two things: They are experiencing something normal, which is why I want to sympathize with them (Hebrews 4:15), and I want to applaud their desire for the opposite sex. A desire for the opposite gender is God’s design. To not struggle (Romans 3:10-12) or not desire the opposite sex denies the truth of God’s Word.
Those who succumb to sexual temptation are not unlike the rest of us. We all have our dark battles with sin’s temptations. The sexually sinful mind does not understand a gospel orientation for sex. Rather than seeing sex as for the other person, they have turned sex onto themselves. The gospel orientation for sex has the receiver in view because the gospel is always subject-to-object-focused (John 3:16). The Lord gives His gifts so others benefit from them. Sadly, we live in a post-Genesis three world, which means our temptation is to take God’s blessings and turn them onto ourselves to feed and satisfy our selfish pleasures. It is the inwardly curved soul. Rather than seeing sex as a gift to give to a spouse, the sexually twisted person sees themselves as the receiver of sexual pleasure.
And should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you (Matthew 18:33)?
Rick launched the Life Over Coffee global training network in 2008 to bring hope and help for you and others by creating resources that spark conversations for transformation. His primary responsibilities are resource creation and leadership development, which he does through speaking, writing, podcasting, and educating.
In 1990 he earned a BA in Theology and, in 1991, a BS in Education. In 1993, he received his ordination into Christian ministry, and in 2000 he graduated with an MA in Counseling from The Master’s University. In 2006 he was recognized as a Fellow of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors (ACBC).