Masturbation

Dear Victorious,

I know you've talked before about masturbation being a selfish sin. However, I am single and don't have any plans to marry soon. I think being a virgin when I eventually do marry is important, so masturbation looks like a very plausible compromise to tide me over. After all, a man has physical needs that must be taken care of. So how about giving us single people a break on this masturbation thing?

Andrew P. - Spokane, WA

Dear Andrew,

Not on your life. Bear with me here, because I have a lot to say about this subject. The Bible says that what makes two people one is not commitment or wedding vows, but sex – even the most casual sex (1 Corinthians 6:16). So if we treat marital commitment with extreme caution, we need to be even more cautious about anything related to sex.

If, as the Bible reveals, sex somehow creates a mysterious union between two people (Ephesians 5:31-32), sex is an exceptionally powerful bonding agent – so much so that the Bible declares that no other sin damages us like sexual sin (1 Corinthians 6:18).

So if sex bonds two people, then any sexual pleasure without a marriage partner will still powerfully bond a person to something, but the bonding will be to whatever sights and thoughts are present during that time of intense pleasure.

When you are single, at such bonding moments your thoughts are on an imaginary member of the opposite sex, and you are likely to find yourself bonded to features of the opposite sex that your future spouse does not have.

For some people, the bonding created by sexual self-stimulation will be to the sight of their own body. If so, it will be this – and possibly the sight of their own gender – that will begin to dominate their passions. Not everyone will slide down this particular hole but, one way or another, the context in which a person repeatedly experiences sexual pleasure will bend his or her sexual preference.

If your thoughts during sexual pleasure are not focused on a person but on neutral things, then attraction to the opposite sex will begin to lower and you are powerfully brainwashing yourself; training your mind and bodily reactions to cheapen sex: corrupting yourself to the point where, for you, sex is a shallow, mechanical puff of pleasure, rather than the height of meaningful,
interpersonal union.

Then there are those who try to convince themselves they are being godly by masturbating while focusing on spiritual things. If Jesus walked this planet today, would you try to have sex with him?

Sexual bonding should be reserved exclusively for a husband and wife. Anything else is a perversion. Masturbating cultivates yearnings for sensations that differ from those generated by intercourse. Just how destructive to heterosexual relations this becomes will vary from person to person. Even in the mildest case, however, it would seem inevitable that masturbating when single will at least slightly detract from one’s future enjoyment of, and appreciation of, the uniqueness of heterosexual relations.

Everything God does is an expression of love and everything he gives us is to be used to express love. In fact, his gift of sex is meant to be such an expression of love and giving that it binds you to a person for life.

Love is all about relationship. And sex is so much about love and relationship that it is losing yourself in another person so that two people become one. As Jesus taught, it is the person who loses himself who finds life and the one who fails to do this, loses big time.

Masturbation shatters the divinely ordained link between sex and love. God’s intention is for sex to be lovemaking in the highest conceivable sense of the word. In tragic contrast, masturbation degrades and perverts sex by programming its victims to associate sex with self-pleasuring, with getting rather than giving, with self-centeredness rather than other-centeredness.

When it becomes a habit, masturbation can degenerate from isolated acts to an addiction that corrupts our entire mentality, so that our sex drive becomes not something that powers us to nobility and selfless giving but drives us to gorge ourselves.

In masturbation, sex – which should be the height of interpersonal intimacy – turns impersonal. Powerful feelings that should be associated with the sealing and nurturing of the deepest human relationship – a lifelong interpersonal union – become locked into a solo act. By gutting sex of genuine love and interpersonal intimacy, masturbation not only depersonalizes sex, it depersonalizes the masturbator.

People’s sexual response can easily go haywire. There are people who are more sexually aroused by the sight of shoe leather (a shoe fetish) or a computer screen (a porn addict) than by the most sensual sight of their own wife. It was no accident that their sexuality ended up so perverted. In the early stages, their sexuality could have gone in any direction but little by little it became increasingly concreted in one direction through choosing to repeatedly cultivate strong sexual feelings – often by masturbation, but any form of sexual stimulation would do – while fantasizing about objects. This is why those who suppose masturbation is safe, provided you don’t fantasize about people, are tragically mistaken. It is impossible to think of nothing, but even if that were possible, wouldn’t it be a perversion to so gut sex of love as to end up programming yourself to associate sexual feelings with “nothing”?

We have seen that sex is such a powerful part of who we are that if it is abused, it damages the abuser like no other sin (1 Corinthians 6:18). Few of us have any conception of how profoundly attitudes to sex affect our entire personality. If you ruined your eyesight, so many aspects of your life would be affected. So it is with sex. By programming one’s sexuality, masturbation dehumanizes and perverts not just sex itself but the person ensnared by it. “Deny yourself,” taught Jesus. In contrast, masturbation enslaves us to a very different mentality.

Masturbating now, to tide you over until God gives you a sexual partner, is like taking drugs to dull the pain of loneliness. When you find someone, loneliness might vanish, but the craving for drugs will remain. Even if you heroically break the habit, you will most likely for the rest of your life find yourself haunted by the occasional longing for the unique sensations the drugs produced. Of course, the more you had allowed yourself to become addicted, the more it will hound you later in life. So it is with masturbation.

Make no mistake here. Masturbation has ramifications and consequences that reach far beyond what most of us would imagine. Be no deceived, my friend. Be not deceived. I have spent a great deal of time in ministry to men who struggle with sexual addiction. I have a great deal of front-line experience witnessing the devastating effects of masturbation and other forms of ungodly sexual expression.