Will Marriage Cure My Lust?
00:00:00.000 | Will marriage cure my lust? That's today's question from an unmarried listener named
00:00:09.680 | Mark. "Dear Pastor John, I'm a 22 year old burdened with strong sexual desires.
00:00:13.760 | Sometimes I submit to the flesh and look at pornography. I hate this and I'm fighting
00:00:19.360 | against this sin with the help of my friends. In the meantime, I have some friends who seek to care
00:00:25.280 | for my soul by quoting the Apostle Paul, 'For it is better to marry than to burn with passion'
00:00:30.400 | 1 Corinthians 7, 9. And they say I should marry soon. But I also have married friends who assure
00:00:36.240 | me that marriage will not cure my lust and tell me it would be a battle I would carry into marriage.
00:00:41.920 | So I'm confused. If marriage cures lust, I should marry soon. If it doesn't cure lust,
00:00:48.480 | then I need to work on personal purity now without the urgency to marry. So which is it?"
00:00:55.040 | Mark, my sense is in listening to your question that you have a distorted, maybe all or nothing
00:01:05.440 | mindset. When you say, "If marriage cures lust, I should marry soon. If it doesn't cure lust,
00:01:15.680 | then I need to work on personal purity now without the urgency to marry." Now, when you say that,
00:01:23.440 | it sounds to me like you have in your mind either marriage cures lust or it doesn't. Total cure or
00:01:33.120 | total non-cure. You know, that's what I mean by the all or nothing mindset. But that's not the
00:01:39.840 | picture we see in the Bible. So let's get the text in front of us so that we can see what the real
00:01:45.280 | help is that the Scripture gives precisely at this point. Because you're right to focus
00:01:52.080 | right on this issue. First Corinthians 7, 8, 9 says, "To the unmarried and the widows, I say that
00:01:59.360 | it is good for them to remain single as I am, but if they cannot exercise self-control, they should
00:02:05.920 | marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion." So, Mark, you're right to see marriage
00:02:12.880 | as a God-designed help in dealing with the overpowering passions and sexual desires. That's
00:02:21.760 | what it says. But there's nothing here that I see about a total cure, but rather a definite offer
00:02:31.280 | of help. Same thing in 1 Corinthians 7 earlier, verses 2 to 5, it says, "But because of the
00:02:40.960 | temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband.
00:02:46.720 | The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights"—it's a fancy way of saying, "have sex
00:02:53.360 | with her when it's helpful for her, and likewise the wife to her husband." So sex with him when
00:03:00.000 | it's helpful for him. "For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does.
00:03:05.680 | Likewise, the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does." Each has a claim
00:03:12.880 | on the other for sexual relations. "Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a
00:03:21.200 | limited time." Here comes this interesting part. "That you may devote yourself to prayer, but then
00:03:26.560 | come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control." So
00:03:33.760 | clearly, Paul is teaching that God has designed sexual relations in marriage as a way to weaken
00:03:43.360 | sinful impulses towards adultery. Otherwise, he wouldn't have said, "Get back together quick!
00:03:50.800 | Satan's gonna tempt you!" Now, if we think—and some people do, and I have certainly struggled
00:03:59.120 | with this over the years—if we think this sounds like a merely pragmatic, kind of low vision of
00:04:07.200 | marriage—get married, have sex, you don't have to commit adultery or fornication—well, it's not.
00:04:13.920 | It's not. It's a pragmatic effect of marriage, which is a far greater reality than its merely
00:04:23.760 | sexual pragmatic effects. To see the vision of marriage, the big, glorious, God-centered
00:04:31.840 | vision of marriage, we would go to Ephesians 5, for example. But just like it would be wrong
00:04:39.360 | to think that sexual pragmatics is the totality of the meaning of marriage, it would also be wrong
00:04:47.840 | to think that the magnificent theological vision of marriage in Ephesians 5, with Christ and the
00:04:54.720 | Church modeling the roles of husband and wife, did not include these nitty-gritty practical sexual
00:05:02.560 | effects of marriage. So it's both/and, not either/or, both magnificent God-centered vision
00:05:10.400 | of marriage and nitty-gritty practical physical effects of marriage. Now I think, as I was
00:05:20.480 | thinking about this, it seemed to me that it might be helpful for Mark to consider that sexual
00:05:27.120 | relations in marriage are a physical help in the spiritual battle against lust and adultery the
00:05:36.800 | same way that other physical acts help other spiritual battles. Let me illustrate. For example,
00:05:46.000 | the physical act of getting enough sleep helps in our spiritual battle against the sin of impatience.
00:05:52.800 | Getting good physical exercise helps in our spiritual battle against melancholy.
00:06:01.040 | Taking a walk in the fresh air—Spurgeon said this beautifully—taking a walk in the fresh air
00:06:07.680 | helps in our battle against discouragement. Considering the lilies and the birds and the
00:06:15.360 | heavens helps in our battle against anxiety—Jesus said so, Matthew 6. Physically getting up,
00:06:23.680 | getting up, using your legs to get up, and leaving his coat behind and running out of the house
00:06:30.800 | helped Joseph defeat the sin of adultery with Potiphar's wife. That's why Paul says, "Flee
00:06:37.040 | fornication." That is, use your muscles and run, right? This is a physical fight as well as a
00:06:42.720 | spiritual fight. It's why he says in Romans 13, 14, "Make no provision for the flesh." There are
00:06:52.880 | practical physical steps we can take that help us in our spiritual battle against sin. In other
00:07:02.400 | words, God has appointed some physical patterns of behavior as a means of helping us fight
00:07:10.480 | spiritual battles like the battle against sin. And just like sleep and diet and taking walks
00:07:18.720 | and considering the sunrise and running out of a frat party at a certain point and taking certain
00:07:25.280 | apps off your phone are physical helps in spiritual battles, even though none of them is an absolute
00:07:33.360 | cure, in the same way, sexual relations in marriage is a great help in the spiritual battle against
00:07:42.000 | lust and adultery, but not an absolute cure. And the reason we know this from Scripture
00:07:49.600 | is that Jesus gives such strong warnings against committing adultery, like Luke 18, 20, "Don't
00:07:58.480 | commit adultery." There would be no desire for adultery, for goodness sakes, right? There would
00:08:03.600 | be no desire for adultery in marriage if sex in marriage were a cure-all for illicit sexual
00:08:10.000 | desire. Jesus wouldn't have ever had to say, "Don't commit adultery." So yes, yes, the gift
00:08:17.840 | of sexual pleasure in marriage is a great help in fighting the spiritual battle against lust,
00:08:24.160 | against adultery, but it's not a cure-all. Rather, all the fruits of the Spirit, one of which is
00:08:32.880 | self-control, Galatians 5:23, all the fruits of the Spirit are still needed in marriage,
00:08:39.680 | as well as outside marriage. So let me say one other thing that I think is so important,
00:08:45.680 | unless I create an artificial view of marriage. Marriage in the sexual relations, at their best,
00:08:56.560 | create a firewall between the couple and adultery and pornography in other ways besides
00:09:06.160 | merely physical. We shouldn't think of the protection from sin merely in terms of sexual
00:09:13.040 | relations as a physical release, kind of like a pressure valve that got to keep this guy from
00:09:18.720 | exploding in all the wrong places, so he's got to have this pressure valve released every now
00:09:24.320 | and then. That's a truth, but it's not the totality of what's going on when Paul says
00:09:31.280 | that sexual relations are a firewall. There's more to it than that, and I think in our culture,
00:09:37.840 | which has so prostituted sex into a hookup weekend sport, it's very hard for them to grasp what I'm
00:09:43.760 | about to say. God intends that in the intimacies of physical union in marriage, something amazing,
00:09:54.640 | glorious, beautiful, spiritual take place. Depths of affection, covenant intensification,
00:10:05.440 | spiritual union, unfathomable personal bonding take place, which as they grow,
00:10:18.000 | these depths of union make pornography and adultery more and more unthinkable. That's the
00:10:27.360 | real glory of sexual relations in marriage. So, Mark, as you go on fighting for sexual purity
00:10:36.640 | in your single life by the power of the Spirit, that's what you should dream of and pray toward
00:10:46.000 | in marriage. That's really great counsel on marriage and in principle, words that are
00:10:52.000 | applicable to a lot of life, talking about the physical helps and spiritual battles,
00:10:55.600 | even though none of those helps are absolute cures. That's really, really good on so many
00:11:01.520 | other fronts where our physical life and our spiritual life meet. Thank you, Pastor John.
00:11:06.560 | And Mark, thank you for the question. For everything you need to know about this podcast,
00:11:10.640 | go to DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. Well, it's better for us that Jesus is gone away from us.
00:11:21.040 | He said so. But how so? Why is his absence better for us than his physical presence?
00:11:28.160 | That's the question for us next time on Wednesday. I'm your host Tony Rehnke, and we'll see you then.
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