Overcoming Lust as an Unmarried Christian Man

This is the unmarried version of Day 7. Read the married version →

If you're young and unmarried, there's a question you may not have said out loud, but you've definitely felt: Why did God give me this desire so strong, so early, when I have no lawful place to put it yet? It feels almost cruel.

Here's a picture that's helped a lot of young men I've talked to.

Your desire is rocket fuel

About eighty percent of a rocket's fuel gets burned in the first five minutes of flight, not because the rest of the trip is short (it might take days), but because breaking free of gravity is brutally expensive. Earth doesn't let go easily. It takes an enormous, violent amount of thrust just to get off the ground. Once the rocket clears gravity's pull, though, it barely needs fuel anymore. From there it's just steering (small adjustments), because the hard part is already done.

That's exactly what your sexual desire is for.

God didn't give you this drive so you'd have an itch to scratch before marriage. He gave it to you as rocket fuel, because breaking free of the gravity of your own self, your own laziness, your own comfort takes an enormous amount of force. Left to yourself, gravity wins. The couch wins. The infinite scroll wins. The video game wins. Staying in bed wins. That gravity is real, strong, and it will hold you down your entire life if nothing breaks you free of it.

But God put something in you strong enough to counter that pull. That drive is what gets you to set an alarm and actually get up. What gets you to work. What pushes you to save your money instead of spending it. What gets you working your nine-to-five, and then still working on your life in the five-to-nine after that: growing, building, becoming a man worth marrying. You need serious fuel to do all of that instead of collapsing into your own comfort. God gave you serious fuel.

Your desire is also a nuclear reaction

Sexual desire works like a nuclear reaction: unbelievably powerful, so powerful the exact same reaction can power an entire city or level one. It can supply electricity for a hundred thousand homes, or wipe out a hundred thousand lives. The reaction itself doesn't change. What changes everything is the container it's held in.

That's why God didn't just hand you raw power and walk away. He designed a container for it: marriage. Inside that container, this same overwhelming force becomes light and heat that can power an entire lifetime: sexual faithfulness to one woman, the raising of children, the patience to work through a thousand small arguments and hard seasons, because your desire for her keeps drawing you back toward her instead of away.

It's even bigger than that. Married sexuality, faithful and covenantal, is meant to be a living picture of Christ and His church. His desire for His people isn't distant or clinical. It's passionate. It's why He made an everlasting covenant with her, why He's faithful to her, why He gave Himself up for her. That's the kind of desire, contained in that kind of covenant, your marriage is meant to reflect one day.

Why casual masturbation is such a waste

Not because your body is bad, or your desire is shameful, but because you're spending fuel that was built for something enormous. You're venting rocket fuel on the launch pad instead of using it to break free of gravity. You're letting a nuclear reaction leak out in small, meaningless bursts instead of building the container that will let it power a lifetime.

So cherish this desire. Don't kill it, and don't waste it. Let it do exactly what God built it to do right now: pull you up out of laziness, out of self, out of comfort, and into the hard work of becoming a man. And save the rest. Because one day, God willing, you'll have a container built for it (a wife) and what's raging in you right now will become the very thing that welds the two of you together for the rest of your life.

This is Day 7 of Victory Over Pornography (unmarried version). Continue to Day 8 →