0

Why Men Struggle With Sexual Temptation

Why Men Struggle With Sexual Temptation

Photo: ©Atef Khaled from Pexels via Canva.com

Sex is a beautiful thing. A sinful sexual temptation is not, but giving in to sexual temptation is worse. As fallen creatures, though redeemed by God, these temptations will always be part of our human experience. After the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, every person has struggled with distorted views of sex and sexual temptation. These problems are some of the universal assumptions you can make about anyone. We assume such things because of fallenness but not out of condemnation. We have a mutual understanding of our human condition and need for transformative grace. In this chapter, I will be addressing every man’s battle with sex.

You may want to read:

Not Free, Indeed

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).

Enjoying Eve

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.

Rick's Books on Amazon

Enjoying Food

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.

Twisted Sex

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).

Leaders Over Coffee Web Banner

Post Genesis 3 Struggler

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.

Call to Action

  1. The Parent: Sexual temptation will be part of your child’s life. He may be cute, cuddly, and oblivious right now, but he will not always be that way. Be warned and discerning about how God made him with a desire to enjoy sex, and be proactive as you think about how his fallenness will try to distort sex. Your worst move is to bury your head in the sand by thinking your child is different. No child is different when it comes to distorted sex. There is no special group of un-tempted men, no matter how godly they are or how godly you want to think they are (including your pastor). “He raised up David to be their king, of whom he testified and said, ‘I have found in David the son of Jesse a man after my heart, who will do all my will.'” (Acts 13:22). “It happened, late one afternoon, when David arose from his couch and was walking on the roof of the king’s house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; and the woman was very beautiful” (2 Samuel 11:2).
  2. The Wife: Your husband is not different from the rest of us. It is wise and humble for husbands and wives to talk about these things. The gospel should have freed you by this time—assuming you are Christians (Hebrews 5:12-14). It should have you in such a place where there is nothing to hide and nothing to protect. Suppose you can’t talk about your sanctification journey, specifically about this crucial aspect of it. In that case, I recommend you find help because your marriage is not as stable as it should be.
  3. The Tempted: “But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death” (James 1:14-15). Friend, you are tempted toward bad sex, but do not be discouraged: temptation and yielding to temptation are two remarkably different things, though there is only a thin line that separates them. To tempt is an essential play from the evil ones. They know that every human has an attraction for the thing they are swinging in front of their craving hearts (James 4:1-2). If a man were not pre-wired to like the thing the evil ones were tempting him with, they would not try to tempt him with it. They only tempt you if you can succumb to the temptation.
  4. The Rest: Something tempts everyone. Though the consequences of some sins can be more grievous than others, do not think your sin puts smaller nails in the hands of Christ (James 2:10). Only the person struggling with gospel amnesia would slam the door on a sexual struggler as though that person has a plague. We all have the plague. Yours may put you in a more acceptable category within the Christian community, but not before God; we’re all filthy in His eyes (Isaiah 64:6) and stand in need of Christ’s righteousness. Can you admit that you struggle with temptation? Do you see yourself as better than other people? If so, what righteous merit makes you better? We must not treat strugglers the way the Lord would never treat us when we bring our struggles to Him.

And should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you (Matthew 18:33)?

Need More Help?

  1. If you want to learn more from us, you may search this site for thousands of resources—articles, podcasts, videos, graphics, and more. Please spend time studying the ones that interest you. They are free.
  2. If you want to talk to us, we have private forums for those who support this ministry financially. Please consider supporting us here if you would like to help us keep our resources free.

Mastermind Program Web Ready Banner