Will marriage cure my lust? That's today's question from an unmarried listener named Mark. "Dear Pastor John, I'm a 22 year old burdened with strong sexual desires. Sometimes I submit to the flesh and look at pornography. I hate this and I'm fighting against this sin with the help of my friends.

In the meantime, I have some friends who seek to care for my soul by quoting the Apostle Paul, 'For it is better to marry than to burn with passion' 1 Corinthians 7, 9. And they say I should marry soon. But I also have married friends who assure me that marriage will not cure my lust and tell me it would be a battle I would carry into marriage.

So I'm confused. If marriage cures lust, I should marry soon. If it doesn't cure lust, then I need to work on personal purity now without the urgency to marry. So which is it?" Mark, my sense is in listening to your question that you have a distorted, maybe all or nothing mindset.

When you say, "If marriage cures lust, I should marry soon. If it doesn't cure lust, then I need to work on personal purity now without the urgency to marry." Now, when you say that, it sounds to me like you have in your mind either marriage cures lust or it doesn't.

Total cure or total non-cure. You know, that's what I mean by the all or nothing mindset. But that's not the picture we see in the Bible. So let's get the text in front of us so that we can see what the real help is that the Scripture gives precisely at this point.

Because you're right to focus right on this issue. First Corinthians 7, 8, 9 says, "To the unmarried and the widows, I say that it is good for them to remain single as I am, but if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion." So, Mark, you're right to see marriage as a God-designed help in dealing with the overpowering passions and sexual desires.

That's what it says. But there's nothing here that I see about a total cure, but rather a definite offer of help. Same thing in 1 Corinthians 7 earlier, verses 2 to 5, it says, "But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband.

The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights"—it's a fancy way of saying, "have sex with her when it's helpful for her, and likewise the wife to her husband." So sex with him when it's helpful for him. "For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does.

Likewise, the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does." Each has a claim on the other for sexual relations. "Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time." Here comes this interesting part. "That you may devote yourself to prayer, but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control." So clearly, Paul is teaching that God has designed sexual relations in marriage as a way to weaken sinful impulses towards adultery.

Otherwise, he wouldn't have said, "Get back together quick! Satan's gonna tempt you!" Now, if we think—and some people do, and I have certainly struggled with this over the years—if we think this sounds like a merely pragmatic, kind of low vision of marriage—get married, have sex, you don't have to commit adultery or fornication—well, it's not.

It's not. It's a pragmatic effect of marriage, which is a far greater reality than its merely sexual pragmatic effects. To see the vision of marriage, the big, glorious, God-centered vision of marriage, we would go to Ephesians 5, for example. But just like it would be wrong to think that sexual pragmatics is the totality of the meaning of marriage, it would also be wrong to think that the magnificent theological vision of marriage in Ephesians 5, with Christ and the Church modeling the roles of husband and wife, did not include these nitty-gritty practical sexual effects of marriage.

So it's both/and, not either/or, both magnificent God-centered vision of marriage and nitty-gritty practical physical effects of marriage. Now I think, as I was thinking about this, it seemed to me that it might be helpful for Mark to consider that sexual relations in marriage are a physical help in the spiritual battle against lust and adultery the same way that other physical acts help other spiritual battles.

Let me illustrate. For example, the physical act of getting enough sleep helps in our spiritual battle against the sin of impatience. Getting good physical exercise helps in our spiritual battle against melancholy. Taking a walk in the fresh air—Spurgeon said this beautifully—taking a walk in the fresh air helps in our battle against discouragement.

Considering the lilies and the birds and the heavens helps in our battle against anxiety—Jesus said so, Matthew 6. Physically getting up, getting up, using your legs to get up, and leaving his coat behind and running out of the house helped Joseph defeat the sin of adultery with Potiphar's wife.

That's why Paul says, "Flee fornication." That is, use your muscles and run, right? This is a physical fight as well as a spiritual fight. It's why he says in Romans 13, 14, "Make no provision for the flesh." There are practical physical steps we can take that help us in our spiritual battle against sin.

In other words, God has appointed some physical patterns of behavior as a means of helping us fight spiritual battles like the battle against sin. And just like sleep and diet and taking walks and considering the sunrise and running out of a frat party at a certain point and taking certain apps off your phone are physical helps in spiritual battles, even though none of them is an absolute cure, in the same way, sexual relations in marriage is a great help in the spiritual battle against lust and adultery, but not an absolute cure.

And the reason we know this from Scripture is that Jesus gives such strong warnings against committing adultery, like Luke 18, 20, "Don't commit adultery." There would be no desire for adultery, for goodness sakes, right? There would be no desire for adultery in marriage if sex in marriage were a cure-all for illicit sexual desire.

Jesus wouldn't have ever had to say, "Don't commit adultery." So yes, yes, the gift of sexual pleasure in marriage is a great help in fighting the spiritual battle against lust, against adultery, but it's not a cure-all. Rather, all the fruits of the Spirit, one of which is self-control, Galatians 5:23, all the fruits of the Spirit are still needed in marriage, as well as outside marriage.

So let me say one other thing that I think is so important, unless I create an artificial view of marriage. Marriage in the sexual relations, at their best, create a firewall between the couple and adultery and pornography in other ways besides merely physical. We shouldn't think of the protection from sin merely in terms of sexual relations as a physical release, kind of like a pressure valve that got to keep this guy from exploding in all the wrong places, so he's got to have this pressure valve released every now and then.

That's a truth, but it's not the totality of what's going on when Paul says that sexual relations are a firewall. There's more to it than that, and I think in our culture, which has so prostituted sex into a hookup weekend sport, it's very hard for them to grasp what I'm about to say.

God intends that in the intimacies of physical union in marriage, something amazing, glorious, beautiful, spiritual take place. Depths of affection, covenant intensification, spiritual union, unfathomable personal bonding take place, which as they grow, these depths of union make pornography and adultery more and more unthinkable. That's the real glory of sexual relations in marriage.

So, Mark, as you go on fighting for sexual purity in your single life by the power of the Spirit, that's what you should dream of and pray toward in marriage. That's really great counsel on marriage and in principle, words that are applicable to a lot of life, talking about the physical helps and spiritual battles, even though none of those helps are absolute cures.

That's really, really good on so many other fronts where our physical life and our spiritual life meet. Thank you, Pastor John. And Mark, thank you for the question. For everything you need to know about this podcast, go to DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. Well, it's better for us that Jesus is gone away from us.

He said so. But how so? Why is his absence better for us than his physical presence? That's the question for us next time on Wednesday. I'm your host Tony Rehnke, and we'll see you then.