Dear Lust, We’re Breaking Up With You | Part 1
The other day, I woke up swallowed by guilt because the hands of lust had once again motioned for me to come and play.
I obliged.
I pause here to say that this blog post isn’t for the people who “have it all together.” This isn’t for the down-lookers or the high and mighty. This isn’t for the judgmental or the proud, because baby I can tell you right now, you’re about to get uncomfortable real quick. We’re talking about pornography, masturbation, vibrators, orgasms, and everything of the sort today.
This is for the people who struggle and are OK with admitting it, even if it’s only to themselves right now. This is for the people who have sex drives and want to talk about them. This is for the humble, who know they can’t fight lust on their own. This is for the people who want to finally stop hiding in the shadows and walk in freedom. This is for the broken people Jesus died for.
Shame is absolutely not welcome here. And honestly, that’s a note-to-self.
Now that we’ve gotten those pleasantries out the way, we can dive in real deep, because y’all as a single woman, it’s been so hard. I haven’t been in a relationship for the last 5 years, and it feels like my natural desire for touch by a man has increased by 1000%.
Man or woman, can anyone else relate? And if you’re a man, sorry (not sorry) about the female-specific content, but hopefully you can learn from this blog too.
I’ve been struggling in this area–more than I’d like to admit, but God’s grace whispered in my ear and reminded me that the only way to get free is to get honest about the ugly stuff…the “taboo” stuff—the secret stuff.
So let’s chat about the stuff that might be keeping you (and me) from being honest:
Sexual desire: It’s OK to have it
Did I just say that? Yes, I did.
If you’re anything like me, you grew up in “purity culture” and the only thing you ever learned about sex was that it was bad. But allow me to let you in on a little secret—God has never created ANYTHING bad, in all the history of being God. He can’t, it’s not in His character. Your sexual desire is a gift straight from His heart, designed meticulously by His holy hands, and if that freaks you out, get curious about why.
God is the creator of sex, so He must think it’s good.
I recently heard a woman say that whenever you’re feeling turned on, pause and thank God for this feeling. This blew me away, y’all. Because never have I EVER thanked God for being horny. But then I asked myself, why? Why do I immediately shame myself instead of thanking God for creating my body to feel? We thank Him for breath, we thank Him for health, why not thank Him for creating a body that alerts us when it desires something?
When I started to think about sexual desire this way, feeling turned on became a little less taboo and scary.
Orgasms: It’s OK to want them
Oh, the highly anticipated but much less talked about big “O,” especially in Christian circles. Take a moment, unclench your jaw, relax your shoulders and breathe out every single bit of shame surrounding this word. Again, the Lord created us not only as physical, emotional, and mental beings but sexual beings as well.
He wired our sex organs this way and called it good. Therefore, the desire to have an orgasm or to experience sexual release is NOT bad.
Lust: Satan’s perversion of what God calls good
Satan loves nothing more than to pervert God’s truth. He gets you to doubt what God says, tells you half a story, and then watches you take the bait.
Just ask Eve (Genesis 3:1-7).
Satan advertises a knock-off version of what God has created and sells it to us dirt cheap. Who doesn’t love a good sale, right?
But think about it–how easily accessible is sexual pleasure? If you want it, you can find it anywhere. Walk right into a sex store, turn on the TV, press power on your vibrator, open up your music app, swipe right on Tinder, pull up a porn site—heck, call up an old flame. You can get sex whenever, however, no questions asked. You don’t have to work for it at all, and oh, how amazing that sounds in our culture of instant gratification.
Satan tells you why keep yourself from feeling good? Watch porn to get a quick “release” but he fails to tell you about the countless stories of broken marriages because porn-addicted spouses can’t stop lusting after or even sleeping with other people.
Surprise–lust doesn’t just go away once you get married.
Satan also fails to tell you about the underaged, human-trafficked teenagers you’re watching in those porn videos.
A lie Satan told me was, I could handle “just one more time” with a vibrator and then the next thing I know, I’m attached to the touch of an inanimate object. Yikes. If I had heard that part of the story, I personally would’ve steered clear.
Lust is what drove King Herod to command John the Baptist’s head be chopped off at the request of a girl who turned him on with her dancing (Mark 6: 21-28).
Lust is what made David have sex with Uriah’s wife Bathsheba and then he had Uriah killed (2 Samuel 11).
David then passed that same lust down to his son, Solomon who had 700 wives and 300 concubines. He ended up worshiping other gods (1 Kings 11:1-6). I guess satan also forgot to tell us about passing down generational sin when he served us lust on a silver platter.
So you see, lust doesn’t just stop at lust. It drives full—speed down a road to destruction: affairs, murder, and manipulation. And you may be thinking your experience isn’t “that extreme” and maybe not, but please be honest. Because drunken text messages, dishonesty, casual sex with strangers, sex with long-time significant others, late-night pornography binges, and undressing peers with your eyes are equally displeasing to God. Satan just tricks us into believing that they aren’t as bad.
Cheap thrills
Please understand this–it’s not that God doesn’t want you to have sex or feel pleasure. He absolutely does, or else He wouldn’t have created us that way. But just like any good parent, He sets boundaries and parameters around it because it’s much more powerful than we could ever imagine.
As a parent, you wouldn’t dare let your child get behind the steering wheel and drive at 12 years old (I hope) because you know they’re not ready for it, can’t handle it, and have no legal license for it. In the same way, God doesn’t desire for us to engage in sexual activity outside of His perfect design for it, because He knows we cannot handle it outside of marriage.
This means sex with yourself, too (probably ruffled some feathers with this one—yes, masturbation is sex with yourself). The hormones released during sex, bond you to a person on a spiritual level that’s meant for a husband and wife who have made a covenant commitment to each other. 1 Corinthians 6:18 says, “Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body.”
God didn’t say “be strong“ or “fight it“… He said RUN! FLEE! ABORT MISSION!
Satan has tried to diminish sex down to an 85% off sales tag.
But listen friend—you’re worth much more than a cheap thrill.
We can reclaim sex and sexuality from the grips of satan’s rotten teeth if we want to. We can also put our sexual pleasure back on the high-end rack if we choose to. I don’t know about you, but I feel like taking back what the enemy has tried to steal from me.
I feel like calling satan the liar that he is and looking at Jesus as my example. I feel like detaching from everything and everyone who tried to ring me up at a discounted price. This includes the Bible-thumping people who told me my body, sex, and sexuality were bad things. They were absolutely wrong.
If you’ve messed up in this area, I more than understand, friend—me too. Sometimes I feel so defeated. But one thing I’m sure of is that if you’ve chosen Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, you’re on the winning team and lust can go right to hell with its master.
