Tag Archives: sex

God The Great Withholder

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I want to revisit one of the beliefs that I think can really hurt us as singles and even as marrieds.  It’s the idea that God has one person for me that he is going to provide but just hasn’t done it yet.

This idea is everywhere.  It is in books on dating.  It’s said from the pulpit.  It’s encouraged in small groups.  “You just need to be patient – God will bring you the one”.  “God will in His perfect timing, bring you the perfect person for you.”  “Just live your life and don’t worry about it, because God will provide.”  “Rejection is God’s Protection – she just wasn’t right for you.”  The list goes on and on.

People try to use scripture to back this idea up.  They use situations like Isaac and Rebekah and say see God will provide.  Yeah I’ll just send my servant to a well. You have to make some major leaps to make this idea scriptural.

The heart of this usually comes in one of two places.  Most people are mainly trying to be comforting.  It’s a quick, painless way out of a the “why are you single” conversation. It’s what I call help you sleep at night theology.  While it might help you sleep, it probably won’t help you find a wife.

The other place it comes from is the good hearted place of wanting to recognize that God is our provider for all things.  Well He is, but the problem is that we don’t treat that the same way in any other place.

If I came to you and said, I’m broke and I need a job, would you tell me to sit tight – that God will provide the perfect job that is just for me at the right time?  I should wait for the perfect job, and for sure not settle right?  Obviously this would be a bad idea.  You’d tell me to go look for a job.  Or maybe you’d say I need to go back to school to train for a different job.  What you wouldn’t likely do is blame God for my joblessness.

I think this whole idea is dangerous to us personally on a lot of levels.

First of all it perpetuates the idea of the Christian Soulmate.  This idea that there is this one person that God has for you.  This to me is not scriptural and frankly more a mix of bad Calvinism, Oprah theology and romance novels.  Nowhere in Scripture are you promised a wife, let alone a soulmate.  You do not have a soulmate.  In fact Jesus specifically says that there won’t be marriage in heaven.  The other funny thing about the soulmate is that the focus is typically on how they will be perfect for me, not so much the other way around.

Second is that many end up in fear of choosing wrong.  What if I marry someone that is not the one perfect person that God has for me.  This can also become an excuse where every person I date just “isn’t the one“.  Not to mention it’s a great excuse after marriage for leaving the marriage.  I mean if I meet someone who seems more like the perfect one, well then I must not have been right the first time right?

It can keep us from working on the things that get in the way of us getting married.  Our (and other people’s) sin, insecurities and/or lack of ability to communicate with the opposite sex.  It’s not anything that I’m doing, or the choices that I or others around me make.  It’s God’s fault.

But perhaps the worst thing about it is that it turns God into the Great Withholder.  God loves you and has someone for you, He just isn’t bringing them to you.  Really?!  This always get’s explained as you’re not ready or they’re not ready or something to that affect. But people get married all the time.  God thought they were ready but you aren’t?  All this does is create unnecessary anger and frustration with God.

It would also mean, as I’ve mentioned before, that God has changed His mind about marriage.  Now I know logic is dead in our culture but hang with me here.  For thousands of years, people got married young.  As recently as 40 years ago if you were 18-29 there was a 60% chance you were married.  Now there is only a 20% chance that you are.  So God used to think it was good to “provide the one” in your early 20s or teens, but now He waits to do it until you are 30.  Really?!

Now here’s the thing.  God is the Great Provider.  But His provision looks a little different than this.  First of all we need to get in our heads that He is not as much our provider as He is literally our provision.  Read that again.  God has given us all we need regardless of our context because He has given us Himself.  We need to start here or all else is foolishness.  The beauty of living in this is that I can live life to the full in any context including single or married.  If I get this, then I am free to search for a wife, instead of The One. If I get married, I’m more free to actually love my wife.

If we walk with God, He will provide opportunities.  But we have a role to play in that and we live in a fallen world where we and everyone we interact with (including someone we could marry) make mistakes and bad decisions.  I believe that God indeed brought my wife and I together.  I fully believe that He was in that.  But I also believe that we both chose to do something about it.

Here’s what we really want.  We want a system where either we don’t have to do anything or where we control everything.  But neither of those are right.  Neither require actually walking with God.

Managing Attraction – I Can’t Help What I Feel

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Do you remember who you were attracted to back in your high school days.  Even maybe middle school?  I sure do remember.  I even had a list in middle school – a top ten list. Haha and all ten were so out of my league so to speak.  I didn’t understand how anything worked.  I just knew who I was attracted to and that I wished they were attracted to me.  I spent most of early to mid adolescence in that place.

But here’s an interesting thing.  When you are all “into” someone, they become even more attractive.  It’s as if our attraction scale slides based on how bad we want someone.  This leads to the feeling of “the one” or of “one that I can’t live without”.  I have a post coming soon to talk more about that idea, but for today I want to focus on a different side of attraction.

As I’ve stated, and fully believe, the feeling of attraction is not a choice.  You either feel attraction or you don’t.  It’s not a conscious in the moment decision.  It just is.  I believe we can do things to be more or less attractive in a moment to someone else (more coming here as well) but I don’t think I will myself to feeling attraction for someone.

However, we can manage what we do with attraction.  Attraction does not require a particular action.  And just because we don’t feel attraction (especially 100% attraction) doesn’t require inaction.

Today I want to talk about the first part, because honestly it’s maybe more important.  Just because you are attracted doesn’t mean you have to act on it.

I’ve had a lot of people (probably more women) tell me something to the affect of, “I can’t help what I feel.”  In other words, I’m attracted to this person and therefore I am going to be with them.  This is a very immature way of handling it.  An adolescent way really.  (No offense to our many fine adolescents 🙂 ).  It is not how you make a mature decision on who to marry – which as a Christian adult (read 18 and over) should be the goal of dating.

This is dangerous on so many levels.  First we should not be controlled by our feelings and desires.  That doesn’t mean that they don’t count.  They do.  But I put my feelings and desires up against the Truth of the scriptures and teachings of the Bible and Church.  I don’t just act because I feel.  This is a part of what it means to be mature.

Paul speaks to this when he says in 1 Corinthians 6 when he says that he will not be mastered by anything.  He is talking about sexual immorality but it’s true for all things. The idea is that while I might feel something or desire something, I don’t HAVE to act on that.

This is where the list of qualifiers I mentioned a couple of weeks ago comes into play. Attraction (whether its creating it or being attracted) opens the door.  It means it’s time to find some stuff out.  If I’m attracted that means I need to find out more.  That’s all it means.

If we don’t bring the feeling of attraction under our control and under the Lordship of God we are setting ourselves up to fail in all sorts of different ways.

  • We can end up dating/marrying someone we know we shouldn’t.  I lost count a long time ago of the people I’ve watched date people they said they never would, simply because they “can’t help what they feel.”
  • We can waist our time pursuing someone we know we wouldn’t marry.  Hard to find the right person while dating the wrong one knowingly.
  • We can set ourselves up to consumer date.  In other words, “I’m not as attracted today so I break up” or “I met someone more attractive so I moved on”.
  • If we do get married we set ourselves up for an affair.  If I “can’t help what I feel” then  what happens when after being married for a while I meet someone else that I’m attracted to?  That will happen you realize.  There are a lot of attractive people.

Attraction matters.  It matters for sure in our context that we live in.  I don’t think we can pretend that it doesn’t.  I think a bunch of verses about beauty fading probably aren’t going to change that.  We aren’t going back to arranged marriages. But while attraction is the starting point its not the ending point.  It’s probably going to be part of the process, but it’s not the end goal.

I want to say more about managing attraction.  Things like how much attraction do you have to have, how do we help ourselves be more attractive so to speak, more on how to flee when you are attracted but shouldn’t be, and some ways to quit comparing everyone to the mystical 15 that I talked about last time.  I’m even going to give a couple of new “qualifiers” that you should look for in someone’s character when considering marriage.

But for today, how driven by attraction are you?  Are you and adult about it, or an adolescent?  Do you control what you do with it, or are you controlled by it?

My Picker Is Broken

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One of the things I’ve heard from several people when it comes to dating is the words, “I think my picker is broken.”  In other words, “I keep picking the wrong people to be with.”

There can be a lot of reasons for this and a lot of different results.  We can can keep getting into relationships with people that we shouldn’t or keep chasing people that we can’t seem to “get”.  Some of it might be self sabotage for various reasons.  But a lot of it has to do with misunderstanding and/or mismanaging attraction.

As I’ve said a lot, attraction is not a conscious in the moment choice.  But it matters and in a big time way.  I believe its not so much that our picker is broken as it is that our attraction meter is broken.  I mean this in several ways.

For starters we need to understand that our attraction scale is skewed.  This is true for both how we see the opposite sex and typically in how we see ourselves.  Let me explain.

Let’s say there is an attraction scale from 1-10.  1 would be extremely unattractive.  10 would be extremely attractive.  This is maybe more straightforward for how guys see women because it’s more a physical thing, but the scale works for women as well, just in a different way.

I think there are very very few 1s and 2s and also very very few 9s and 10s.  Most people fall in between.  In fact it is my contention that most people fall between 4 and 7 but maybe I’m just an optimist.  There is a lot of good news in this.  For one, it can be subjective. While it might be true that a 10 is a 10 to just about anyone, one persons 5 could for sure be another persons 7.  Second we can do things to move up or down in that scale.  Maybe a six can’t be a 10, but presentation can sure make them a 7.  You get what I’m saying.

But the bad news is that this scale is not only subjective, it’s also based on context to some extent.  Here’s what I mean by that.  100 years ago if you lived in say St. Joseph Missouri (a town of about 70,000 people) you would only meet people from there.  So your context of 1-10 was sort of dictated by that.  But then came ease of travel – specifically highways and airplanes.  Now I could view people from everywhere.  This skews the scale.  As a female friend of mine once said, “the great thing about it is, in California I’d be a 6 or 7 but in St. Joseph I’m a 10”.  I remember laughing about that – there was some truth to it.

But now we have a bigger problem.  We have hundreds of channels and of course the internet.  So now the context is the world – every picture, book, story, movie and perversion.  We even have what I call the off the scale 15.  The 15 is the touched up model or the movie star guy.  It’s not real, and yet we’ve spent our whole life viewing that as the 10, when really it’s the 15 – it’s not even actually on the scale.  So our scale is skewed and we need to begin to figure that out.

This leads us to the second problem.  We have this idea that in order to marry someone, we need to be “perfectly attracted”.  We need our “soulmate” so to speak.  Not only should I be 100% attracted, but I should always feel that way.

This makes us eliminate good people that we are actually pretty dang attracted to. Remember most of us are not a 9 or 10 and we are certainly not a 15.  And yet that has become the prerequisite for marriage.

This is seriously frustrating for many of us.  We meet people that have the qualities that we are looking for, but we rule them out because we aren’t attracted enough (read perfectly attracted).  Notice I didn’t say not attracted at all.  We are at least somewhat attracted to all sorts of people.  We need to own this!  While it might be fine to say I don’t want to marry someone I’m not attracted to, it’s not the same thing to say I don’t want to marry someone I’m not 100% attracted to 100% of the time.

This is where it comes back to the picker problem.  When we keep looking for the perfect attraction, when we do feel that way, all else flies out the window.  This is part of why so many women end up with the guy who has none of the qualities they are looking for.  They are attracted so it’s now time to rationalize everything else.  Or it leads to the guy chasing the girl who won’t ever say yes, but dang it, he’s 100% attracted to her, so he has to keep acting on it.  And for many Christians it means just picking no one.  I’m attracted to the wrong people so I just won’t be with anyone.  While better than being married to the wrong person, it’s not a good long term solution.

So what do we do?  How do we manage attraction?  I’ll say more about this soon.

By the way, this doesn’t even take into consideration that most men don’t even realize what women are attracted to at all (nor do a lot of women).  

But I really believe the first step is asking some hard questions.  What is your attraction scale? What type of decisions do you make out of that?  Where do you see yourself on your scale?  How do you know where you are? How attracted do you need to be to act on it? To stay with it?

Fulfilling Sexual Desire Keeps You Single

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I’ve talked here many times about the fact that less and less people are getting married. Right now 50% of adults in the U.S. are unmarried.  Only 20% of those 18-29 have ever been married.  People are waiting longer or just not getting married at all.

There are a whole host of reasons for this and I’ve talked about many of them here before. But one of the biggest reasons is that we as a culture (even in the Church) have separated sex from marriage.  And to go a step further we’ve actually made sex only about physical pleasure.  And because of it, we are really, really jacked up.

Now I get, and have pointed out before, that this is not “new” to the world.  I mean there have always been jacked up cultures and there has certainly always been sexual sin.  But never has the overall impact on marriage been felt the way it is now.

What we have now is a combination of a lot more ways to meet the physical desire for sex, and a culture that is ok with all of it.  It’s killing us – individually and as a culture.

Sex was not created to be just physical.  It is a part of it, but not all of it.  From the very beginning it was to bring two people together to become one flesh but only those two people.  It is an important part of the marriage covenant.  When we take it out of that context or when we make it just about physical desire, we are devaluing everything about it – both within and outside of marriages.

Here’s the reality.  One of the surest ways to stay single is to have your sexual desire met some other way.

This plays out all sorts of ways.  First off, all sorts of people are obviously having sex. Some of it is purely for the physical desire.  Some of it is in “relationships”.  But either way people are not having less sex today than before.  They just aren’t doing it within marriage. People sleep together, live together, and even have children together, without marriage.

But now there are even more ways to meet my physical desire.  I can just go on the internet.  When I was a kid, you at least had to risk hiding the magazine with pictures. Now you can watch it, heck even interact with it, and then just hit delete.  If it’s just physical, why work for it.

No matter how you look at it, it is easier than ever to get your physical desire met.  And everyone is telling us this is what it’s about.  All the media, our leaders, even some of our parents.  And at some level even the Church.  We spend so much time focussing on what not to do.  The basic message is don’t look, don’t touch, sex is bad until you are married then it’s good.  Bury your desire and then flip the switch when you get married.  But the problem is not only is the act of sex bigger than just physical, so are the questions that surround it.

Sure we are told that married sex is better – but what does better mean?  We automatically assume that means more physically pleasurable.  But sexuality isn’t just about that.  It’s about being bonded to the other person.

If we make sex only about pleasure and sexual desire, then I don’t have to get married to have it.  And, even if I get married, I could still be stuck in it only being about the physical. That can lead to less intimacy and ultimately less sex.  If you don’t need it that day, you don’t do it.  Or maybe the computer is still easier.

If we make sex about only the physical then why does it matter how you meet the need. You can meet it at the bar, at the computer, or even with the same sex.

I don’t say all of this to turn it into a lecture on how sex outside of marriage is sinful.  That’s a no brainer.  I say it because I think we as believers have to go way beyond that.  We have to understand that it isn’t just some sort of physical discipline.  There is way more on the line than that.

My pastor has often said that we need the single people in our church to have less sex and our married people to have more. I agree with that, but we need more than that.  We need sex to not be just sex – just physical pleasure.  “Not having sex” is a start, but it isn’t enough.  We need to understand that meeting the physical desire for sex outside of marriage hurts both our chances of getting married and experiencing sex the right way within our marriages.  We need a whole lot of repentance and relearning.

Do you view sex as primarily physical?  What is your view of sex based on?  Do you have your physical desire for sex met already?  What do you do with that desire?

Men And The C Word

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One of the things that people would sometimes “challenge” me in as I entered my mid thirties as an unmarried person was the idea of commitment.  In other words they would say things like, “Do you think you are afraid of commitment?” or “Marriage is about commitment, you know?”, or, “our friend Justin has some commitment issues when it comes to women”.  Ah the C word.

Now I get it and it’s probably fair to ask this question if you don’t know me.  But I always had a problem with it because in general it didn’t wash with me.  First off, I’m a pretty committed person in general.  I’ve always been committed to my work, friends, projects, the game I’m playing that day.  No one would look at my life and say, “Justin usually bails on stuff.”

It seems to get tossed out a lot in our culture (both secular and Christian) that men in general are fearful of or unable to commit to women and marriage. I kind of disagree, in general.

There a lot of factors at play here, so let’s take a look.

First of all, I would agree that we live in a world in which people are often less “committed” to things.  This is mainly because we have more choice than ever before. Most people don’t stay with the same company they started out with.  We have more freedom to move and travel.  We have a zillion channels and now the internet.  Heck, people change churches and friend groups at least every four or five years.  So yeah, people are less committed in general.

We also have more choices in dating.  As my father once said, “Back 100 years ago when a pretty girl came to town, you married that girl, because she might be the only one you ever met.”  In other words there wasn’t the comparison game that we all play now.  There weren’t pictures of models everywhere.  There weren’t thousands of romance novels and Lifetime specials.  Women had even less options. You can feel that this is good or bad, but it is for sure true.

The second factor is that we have separated sex from marriage.  So if you don’t need commitment in order to have your sexual desire met, then why have commitment. When you start separating sex (let alone living together, child rearing, etc) from the context of marriage, then you automatically take away from marriage – both for the single and the married (more on this soon).

Neither of those factors have to do with fear of commitment.  They have to do with the choice to not be committed.

Now fear of marriage and divorce are real factors that create fear of commitment.  That’s no doubt a big factor.

But to be honest, I think the whole fear of commitment thing is a bit overblown and frankly it gets used against single men way to often.  I don’t believe that men are any more or less likely to be committed than women.  A lot of this comes from the false notion that women are morally superior to men which is a whole other conversation.

But let’s back this whole thing up one more step.

First you have to actually have someone available that you want to commit to. For much of my single years I didn’t have that.  As I’ve admitted several different times here, much of that was my fault.  I went a long time not working on becoming the man I needed to be in this area.  I had no idea about how female attraction worked.  I did a lot wrong.  No doubt.  But along with that, when you are a Christian trying to follow Jesus you are working with a small target – that is women you are attracted to that also want to follow Jesus.

This is a gigantic factor.  It’s a bigger factor in singleness than fear of commitment.  Finding someone to be committed to can be a big problem.  Knowing how to go get that person is also a problem.  We should spend more time here and less time beating people over the head with commitment.

Which brings me to the final couple of points I want to make about commitment.

Assuming that I am committed to Jesus, and I’m not called to celibacy, I need to be committed to the idea, and pursuit of marriage.  That does NOT mean marry anyone.  It doesn’t even mean that you have to know if you can marry someone before you ask them out.  But it means having the end in mind.  It means not dating the person that I know I won’t marry just because it’s comfortable or easy, not doing things that will hurt your marriage opportunities, and learning how to interact well with the opposite sex so you have a chance if you do meet someone you might want to marry.

It also means that I need to move away from looking for someone that meets all my needs, start looking for someone that I am willing to be committed to and who I believe would be committed to me.  More on that soon.

Are you a committed person?  Are you stuck in consumer dating?  What are you committed to when it comes to dating and marriage?

Maybe The Church Should Man Up

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My favorite TV show ever is Friday Night Lights.  Basically everything about it is good. Seriously.  I love the main character, Coach Taylor.

Taylor is the classic high school coach who wants to win and shape young men along the way.  What I love about it is that while he does give some nice pre-game speeches, he also personally invests into their lives.  Nowhere is this more true than in his relationship with a forced into action backup QB Matt Saracen.

Saracen’s father is mostly absent.  He is insecure.  He loves art more than football.  But Taylor is convinced that he can be QB1.  Taylor knows that isn’t going to “just happen” and so he invests in this kid.  Over the course of three seasons, Saracen grows into a grown up man.  He becomes a leader.  He doesn’t become a different guy, so much as he becomes the guy that he was meant to be.

What Taylor doesn’t do is say “man up” and then hope for the best.  He invests.  He takes Saracen to the field at night and works with him.  He has him over for dinner.  He goes to his house.  He speaks into his life in critical moments.  He fights with him and for him.  He shares his life not just his words.

As I mentioned last week one of the latest mantra’s being thrown at Christian guys is the idea that what we need to do is man up.  Now, full disclosure here, I’ve told people that they needed to man up.  I’ve said from up front that, “sometimes” you just need to man up. I’ve told people certain people that I’m invested in that it’s time for them to grow up.  What I’m saying here is that there are times where this is pretty good advice.  But what it isn’t is a good blanket answer for what is wrong in the world of marriage, dating/courting, and singleness.

When it starts getting put out as a generic answer it leads to all sorts of problems.  Here are a few, in no particular order.

1. We are terrible at linking it to singleness.  Do you have to get married to man up?  What if you’re called to celibacy?  Should you man up and be celibate?  Did Paul not man up? What does man up mean for my sexual desires?

2. When it comes to dating we are completely confusing to men.  Does man up mean ask everyone out?  Or do I man up and “wait for God” to bring me “the one“?  Do I man up and pursue the girl that said no or do I man up and walk away?  Do I man up and marry someone I don’t want to?

3. The man up people almost always assume its the guy that is the problem.  Women in the Church aren’t typically told to woman up so to speak.  What if the guy is doing everything right – or at least really trying to?  This is huge for both singles and marrieds.

4. Man up is kind of a charge into battle type of saying.  That can be good. But what if you are really broken?  Do you need to just man up?  Can you “heal up“?  Am I supposed to just try harder to get healing from my wounds caused by my sin and the sin of others?

5. It seems to me that if you’re not careful you could man up without actually walking with Jesus.  Just make it happen. Do, do, do.  What about grace?  Here’s the best part, most of the people using this line tell us all the time how sinful and bad we are and we can’t do anything good without Jesus.  Hmmm.  So I’m bad, can’t do anything good, but I should man up.  Gotcha.

Now hear me clearly.  I’m all for challenging guys to grow.  I’m all for having hard conversations.  I’m not saying we don’t have guys that need to basically man up.  But what I am saying is that as a talking point or slogan, without relationship, it gets into platitude territory in a hurry.  Or at the least, ineffective territory.

And this is the ironic part.  You know who needs to man up?  All the men who should be helping the guys in trouble by investing in their lives.  All the men who sit in the pews and applaud because they know that young single guy or the guy who is struggling in their marriage and think, “I sure hope that guy is hearing this – hope he mans up”.  All the seminarians and hipster Jesus dudes who sit around sipping premium brews of coffee or beer while sharing about how most men need to man up – and then not actually investing in any of those men.  How’s that for some tough man up talk?

When it comes to the single guys between the ages of 22-29 (soon to be 30 . . 31. . .) the main group that needs to man up is the Church.  You know why? Because those guys aren’t there to hear the speech.  And if they do come and hear it, and we don’t invest in them (read pour out our lives, spend time getting to know them) then they won’t keep coming.

If man up isn’t followed by, “and here’s how we want to help you do it” then we’ve failed. In other words, don’t tell someone to man up, unless you are willing to man up for them.

Should We Touch Each Other?

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In the movie Tommy Boy Chris Farley’s character says to Rob Lowe’s character as they are introduced as brothers, “brothers don’t shake hands.  Brothers gotta hug.”  This is of course followed by a very awkward moment as Farley’s youthful innocence meets Lowe’s disdain.

In the Church, as well as society as a whole, we have a touch problem.  It’s real, and we need to actually start addressing it.

A few month’s ago I wrote about The Snuggery.  This is literally a place where you can go and pay money to have someone snuggle with you.  No lie.  Look it up.

As crazy as that sounds, it makes perfect sense.  We live in a world more and more devoid of proper touch.  There is a lot of abusive and sexual touch.  There is very little good touch, if we can even figure out what that means.

But the value of touch in our lives can not be understated.  It is vital and we can’t hide in a corner as the Church and just tell people no.  We need a different answer.

As a guy touch is even more complicated because touch is also a strength thing.  Here’s what I mean.  A lot of times as a young boy or teenager, touch means getting pushed around.  Are you tough enough means can you take a hit.  Are you strong enough means can you dish one out.  We get all sorts of answers to these questions growing up and those answers stay with us, even if they aren’t true anymore.

I was never a wrestle around kid.  I didn’t really know how to get hit or hit back.  Looking back, I wasn’t really weak over all, but I thought I was.  That affected how I viewed touch as I got older.  How you interact with other men physically matters and affects your confidence.

Then there is the touch of the opposite sex.  This is also all jacked up.  And in the Christian circle we are basically told don’t touch each other.  That sounds good, and I get it, but at some level, with no physical interaction at all, we just end up pushing people into a weirder and more awkward place.  If we accidentally equate all touch with shame or sin, we are setting ourselves up for failure.

When you throw in how isolated we are in daily life as singles this can be a disaster that just continues to build.  It hurts.  Touch matters.  The reality is people are doing something with their need for touch.  Touching the wrong way, burying the desire in escapism or fantasy, or just falling into isolation and awkwardness.

Many of us basically work alone.  Then literally half of us go home alone, eat alone, go to bed alone, and then get up alone and do it all again.  That does not lead to healthy touch. That leads to isolation.  Is our advice to single people going to be don’t touch?

We need a different answer than that.  The Church, and we as single people, need to engage this issue.  We need to talk about a right thinking about touch and then we need to live it out.

Touch is all over the Bible.  Jesus is constantly touching people.  This is actually one of the amazing things about Him.  He became flesh.  He lived in a place and at a particular time, just like you and me.  He sweat and smelled, and got tired and sore and He touched people – literally.  The leper, the blind, heck, even the dead.  And he was touched. Women of ill refute, came and touched him  – with their hair and kisses.  Scandalous.

I’ll admit to not having all the perfect answers to this but I believe it starts with something Zack Eswine writes in his book Sensing Jesus.  He writes, “in the New Testament, two kinds of physical touch are set in brutal contrast”.  He points out that the misuse of touch used “to consume or preserve it’s own selfish wants, lusts, desires or agendas” and in contrast a different kind that “envisions a way for Christian community to recover in Jesus how humans were originally meant to touch each other.  Physical touch is meant as a holy act.”  He goes on, “Jesus touched people.  He touched bodies.  But his was not the sexualized touch of a pornographic mind, a controlling cling, or a predator heart.  The way of Jesus’s touch graciously intends to reform our own.”

Here’s my take.  As the Church (and especially if we are going to reach out to the half of the country that is unmarried) instead of running from touch, we need to reclaim it.  In other words we need to own the discussion and do it well.  We need to freaking lead instead of reacting in fear.

This will mean confronting wrong touch and helping both the wrongly touched and the toucher deal.  As men it means dealing with our insecurities and learning our strength and then offering it – physically.  With the opposite sex on a date it means reaching for her hand without thinking about reaching into her pants and realizing that they are not the same thing.

What we can’t do is say, don’t touch, don’t experience that or grow in it, and then if you get married don’t worry, it will just turn on.  That’s ridiculous and irresponsible.

What do you do with your need for touch?  What would holy touch look like?  What have you learned about touch in your life?

Christian Sexual Prowess

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Yesterday I wrote about the fact that every guy asks the question am I good in bed?  How we answer that question is critical to our core confidence as a man.  We can wish it wasn’t that way.  We can try to over spiritualize it.  We can blow it off with joking and hiding.  But it’s still going to be there.  We question our sexual prowess as a man and we in the Christian community MUST have an answer.

At first glance it seems that as a “Christian” that there is no way that I could answer that until I’m married because I’m not supposed to have sex.  Often because we are so worried about sex outside of marriage and the costs that come with it, we end up telling men that they should just table the question and then “presto” answer it on their wedding night.  But in my opinion that is not good enough.  That might have worked a couple of generations ago when people got married by 25 but it won’t work now.

It’s a good thing to direct people to wait until marriage to have sex but it is not ok to wait until then to help them answer their question about sexual prowess.  They are going to answer it somehow.

We need to stop answering the sexual prowess question with a sexual ethics answer.  We need a different conversation.  Sexual prowess and sexual experience are not the same thing.  Thinking they are the same leads to men that are either having sex to answer the question or men that are living with lack of intimacy, touch and confidence in their ability to deliver.  Neither of those are acceptable.  The ironic thing is that our Christian theology actually does answer the sexual prowess question.

The first thing we have to do is realize that God has ultimately created us as sexual beings. It only takes one chapter in the bible for God to bring up sex.  We all have the tools, and I don’t just mean that we have the right “equipment”.

If we believe in a God that created us good, then we must start with the premise that God’s answer to do I have what it takes sexually is yes.  Let that sink in for a minute.  God says, “I have given you what you need here.  You can do this.  You have what it takes because I gave it to you.”

This is core.  Yes we are messed up because of sin. Yes we may have been wounded in this area in even horrible ways.  But at the core of who we are as a man, at the very center of it, we are created with sexual prowess.  It’s there, somewhere, no matter what our experience tells us.

The problem is we take sex out of context and turn it into it’s own question.  It becomes about performance which just kills us as men.  We fear failure.  We fear that we won’t be able to come through and when we make the act of sex the scorecard we are in trouble – even if we are “good” at it.

The act of sex was never intended to be that.  God did not create sex in it’s own context.  Sex is a part of a larger question.

Sex is not intended to be about performance.  It’s about loving another person.  It’s about trust, strength, intimacy and passion. It’s about giving and receiving. It’s about being a good lover, not about being a good performer.  This is why married sex (even in secular research) is described as the best sex.

If I try to answer the sexual prowess question without answering the intimacy question then I’m in trouble – even if I’m married.  Sex is not the goal.  In a sense it’s one of the means to the goal within the context of marriage.  As a stand alone thing, sex will not satisfy.  It will never answer the question.

If you are a good lover, you will be “good in bed”, or at least you’ll figure out how to be.  If you love well, the sex part will be there because there will be the context of trust, intimacy and passion to work on it.

The question we need to be asking is, “am I a good lover?”  It’s actually a lot harder question. If we need the woman’s approval we can’t be a good lover.  If we can’t be strong enough to be vulnerable, then we can’t be a good lover.  This is why women at their core are attracted to strength.

It’s a huge issue for us as men.  Becoming a lover is actually a stage of development just like learning to be a warrior.  Hence the wise saying, “Never give a man a sword who can’t dance.”

The good news is that we can work on all of this without having sex.  We can become lovers.  We can work on how to have intimacy and good physical touch (I’ll say more about how to do this soon).

Here’s the bottom line.  As a man growing in Christ, my sexual prowess should be growing because my identity and confidence in Him grows along with my capacity to give and receive love.   If I’m truly confident in Christ then I’ll have the freedom and strength to be a good lover – and as a part of that to be “good in bed.”

Are You Good In Bed?

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Earlier this week I shared about three questions that all men wrestle with in some way.  “Are you good looking or not?” “What is the worst thing you’ve ever done?” and “Do you have a small or big penis?” All of us have answered these questions in our head, but almost no one has answered them out loud – at least not in any meaningful way.

And yet how we answer them affects many aspects of our lives, none more so than how we interact with women.  This is because all of these answers affect the core confidence we need that in order to pursue, attract, and eventually love a woman.

These questions have to do with three areas of our life – our self image, our shame, and our sexual prowess.  I’ve written a lot about our self image, and I wrote this week about our shame.  Today I want to talk about the third question.  So buckle up men.

The issue of having confidence sexually is gigantic in how we feel about ourselves as men and therefore how we interact with women.

First, let’s just admit that this is true.  Men are about performance.  This is why everywhere you turn you see sexual enhancement drugs, workouts, and techniques.  A man’s greatest fear is failure.  As Eldrege says, every man is asking, “Do I have what it takes?”  No where is this more true, or more scary and vulnerable, than sex.  Nowhere!

Every guy is asking the question do I have what it takes to be good sexually with a woman. In simple terms – “Am I Good In Bed?”  Every Guy.  Our answers are all jacked up.

Most of us began to have the question answered when we were very young.  There are so many factors.  Do you have a father that even broaches the subject?  What happens in the boys restroom in elementary school?  What are you comparing yourself to?  The guy next to you?  The guy who developed before you?  The guy in the porn video? (Average age a male sees internet porn for the first time is now 11).  It can also be affected by our view of sex, abuse, being emasculated by peers or parents or both.

Sometimes the answer is that we are “small” and that we don’t have what it takes.  Often we get no answer at all.  Almost never do we get a positive answer in the right way.

So we of course go and try to answer it.  We might dominate women or become extremely sexual to prove our prowess.  This is the guy who lives for sex and is always out to, “get some”.  We might seek to control the answer by fantasizing or looking at porn.  But this usually just brings about shame, and can undermine the question once again.

And in the Christian culture, for the most part, we are told to bury it, kill it, or starve it.  In fact, we are told basically, “Don’t look, don’t touch, don’t explore, but don’t worry you’ll magically know what to do when you get married.”  It’s like there is supposed to be a Christian switch when it comes to sexual prowess.  Don’t have any, and then man up and have it.  Really?!

It seems to me that most Christian guys end up in one of two camps.  Be a Christian but have sex anyway which leads to the obvious problems.  Or, we go without touch, without intimacy and therefore end up freaking out when we get to it. Sex becomes this taboo thing. We end up having fear and passivity around women, especially a woman we are really attracted to.  We don’t know what to do, partly because we aren’t sure we could do it – as in literally “do it”.

We live in a culture in which the average guy gets married at  28-29 years old.  What that means is that in the Church we are asking a guy to go about 15 years of his life (during the most crucial time when he is answering all of his life’s questions – including this one – for the first time) to not have sex.  My contention is this:  We can ask him to not have sex, but we CAN NOT ask him to not have an answer to this question.  Because he WILL answer it.

While this affects how we interact with women, its much bigger than that.  This answer affects how I do other things in my life.  It affects how I relate to other men, how I relate to my own body and self image and even how I interact at work and play.  This question matters.  I would submit that even if I’m called to celibacy in the kingdom, I’d still better have an answer to this question. It’s crucial no matter what.

In my next post I’m going to take a stab at what I think the Christian community can do to help guys answer it.  But before we can get help, we need to check what our answer is to the question right now.

Do you have what it takes to be good sexually with a woman?  Where does that answer come from? How have you tried to answer it?

Shame Crushes Confidence

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I know of a wise older gentleman who asks men that visit him three questions: “Are you good looking or not?” “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” and “Do you have a big or small penis?”

It’s kind of funny. It’s sort of offensive.  It’s for sure brilliant.

How a guy answers those questions is everything.  Does he answer honestly – even with himself?  Where does the answer to each question come from? They are all relative questions – what is it that guy comparing his answer to?  When was the first time he answered each of those questions?  What answer has the world, his dad, his God given him?  Every guy has answered those questions in his head – just not out loud.

Most men spend their life affected by their deep seeded answers.  They either run from it, avoid it, cover it up, or rail against it with anger.  The kicker is most of us have the wrong answer, or at least the wrong idea of what the answer means.  Very few of us own our answers.

They are the type of questions that haunt our confidence in who we are as men.  We often look for the answers from women.  It’s why single men don’t act  and why married men are afraid of their wives.

The kicker is this, most women don’t really care that much about any of those questions. But how you answer them will affect everything you do with women – whether you are married or single.

These three questions (or similar ones) get at the heart of three areas of our life that we are insecure about.  Our self image, our shame, and our sexual prowess.

I’ve written a lot about our self image, including when it comes to how we view our looks. Later this week I’ll write about the sexual prowess question.  But today, I want to focus on the second question.  What is the worst thing you’ve ever done?

This question has to do with shame which flies in the face of the gospel.  For some there is fear of being found out, for others the fear of being disqualified.  Many have been carrying it as a secret for a long time.

The funny thing about the worst thing you’ve done question is there’s a good chance it’s not actually the worst thing you’ve done.  It is however, what you are most of ashamed of.  But most of us have never actually said this out loud, to anyone.  Many have not even said it to God. Shame is a powerful tool of the enemy.  Shame means we are unreconciled with God. Think about that.

Shame causes us to look away when we shouldn’t.  It causes us to withdraw, back down or act out when we think it might be exposed.  What we hide in the dark, makes us afraid of the light – and freedom (as well as confidence) is in the light.  Worst of all, it holds us back with Jesus because He brings light to everything.  As a secondary problem it holds us back with people – including the opposite sex.

Shame crushes confidence.

The only way to crush shame is to bring it out into the light and deal with it.  It’s the only way to know which parts of it are our fault (so we can repent) and which parts aren’t (so we can heal).

We have to start with the truth that Jesus is serious about both forgiveness and healing.  If we don’t believe that then we will spend our whole lives in the dark.

You see the follow up question to what is the worst thing you’ve ever done is this, “Do you know that you are forgiven for that?”

Either the cross took care of every sin or took care of none of it.  There really can’t be any in between.  So if I think that Jesus, who knew no sin, became sin for us, then I have to figure out how to believe that I’m forgiven for the worst thing I’ve ever done.  We know it intellectually and biblically. But most of us don’t live out of it at all.

Here’s the truth.  Because of the cross, you are forgiven for everything you’ve ever done, everything you’re doing, and everything you ever will do.  That’s either true or we are screwed.

There are also some of us who are carrying shame because of something that happened to us that we have falsely interpreted as our fault.  Again, the only way to get at this is to bring it into the light.  Once it’s in the light, we need to know that Jesus, through the power of the resurrection makes all things new.  There is nothing that can’t be made new – nothing.

What does it mean to bring something into the light and deal with it?  I think it means bringing it before God and someone else.  I think to own it means to share it with someone. This can obviously be dangerous.  But we have to take the risk. If we don’t have community, pay a few bucks and see a Christian counselor – hey married people do it.

If we don’t then we will continue to shrink back.  Shame will keep us dating no one (or the wrong people), fearing commitment, or if we do somehow get married, insidiously impact our marriage.

What is the worst thing you’ve ever done?  Who have you told?  Do you know you are forgiven? Really forgiven?