I recently asked a room of young men, ages seventeen to twenty-one, to take an anonymous survey that contained the following question: what are the top three battles you face as a younger man?
One hundred percent of them—every guy in the room—wrote that sexual temptation, lust, masturbation, or porn topped his list. When I asked the guys to tell me why they lost battles with temptation, all of them took advantage of the survey’s anonymity to reveal why sexual temptation got the better of them:
• They failed to choose the way out that God gives them.
• Their personal time with God eroded over time.
• They felt disconnected from other Christian guys.
• They rationalized their behavior by saying, “God will forgive me.”
• They had no genuine accountability.
• They experienced loneliness and isolation.
• They had a lack of discipline, which made it easier to give in to temptation.
• They exercised no self-control, preferring instant gratification.
• They discovered that the visual pictures in their minds were strong.
• They remained apathetic toward the consequences.
I also asked these young men to describe ways that helped them win some battles against sexual temptation. Here’s what they said:
• They could talk about their struggles with someone else.
• They felt close in their walks with God.
• They were confident about the prospect of “better things” coming as a result of obedience.
• They recalled Scripture in their minds.
• They feared getting caught.
• They knew that God showed them an alternative—a way out.
• They talked to God in the midst of their temptation, asking for His help.
• They stayed “active” in better pursuits.
• They remembered God is with them.
• Their desire to honor God was stronger than their desire to sin.
• They wanted to grow in Christ.
• They underwent less stress without sin in their lives. Several expanded on their answers, including this young man:
When I am alone with my temptations, I choose pleasure. Feeling like I’m all alone in it makes the situation worse and causes me to be spiritually lazy. On the other hand, when I am with friends or can interrupt the temptation with a phone call, prayer, exercise, or something else, then that interruption keeps me out of the situation.
Sound familiar? In your head you may know what you should be doing, may know exactly what God desires, and may understand what situations spell disaster. What every one of these guys struggled with was consistency, because consistency required doing the hard thing over and over until they gained the character to defeat sin in their lives.
Here’s my point: you are not alone when you admit your battle with sexual temptation, and you are not alone if you fail.
Mark, for example, knew exactly what God’s plan for sex was, but he rationalized and debated with himself about the whole idea of remaining pure. Once the debate began in his mind, he worked through various scenarios regarding his girlfriend, Kelly. Like a kitchen faucet with a slow leak under the cabinet, Mark began allowing certain things to happen. For instance, their good-bye kiss went from a peck to a full-on session of deep kissing. He figured that was okay because everyone still had their clothes on. He hadn’t really stepped over the line physically, so he viewed this as acceptable behavior for an unmarried young man.
Then, at a beach party, people began leaving late that night, and Mark knew that this would be a wonderful opportunity to be alone with Kelly. This meant saying no thanks to an invitation to join friends at a nearby Denny’s for a late evening—or early morning—breakfast.
One hundred percent of them—every guy in the room—wrote that sexual temptation, lust, masturbation, or porn topped his list.
Kelly hesitated, however, saying something about feeling hungry, but Mark wasn’t interested in hearing that, because he had other things on his mind. Instead, he blurted out some lame excuse about how he didn’t have any money, sending the guys off with a quick, “See ya.”
Kelly never realized he had talked her into a compromising situation that offered both parties little or no chance to escape. Back in the beach parking lot, her boyfriend led her to the backseat of his car, and within an hour he had snatched Kelly’s virginity away unceremoniously. Kelly participated in the act, but there was nothing to celebrate. Regret and resentment now dominated her feelings toward Mark. The secrecy and manipulation on Mark’s part, combined with her own weakness, made her angry at herself and at him.
Consistency required doing the hard thing over and over until they gained the character to defeat sin in their lives.
Mark got what he wanted, but as their relationship became more strained, he didn’t care for her vibe. Everything became so uncomfortable, so the only alternative in his mind was to eliminate the cause of the discomfort by throwing the relationship away. Within two weeks they mutually agreed to break up, which was fine with Kelly, because she felt their relationship had become shallow and dominated by sex. In her mind she had been used and manipulated by Mark, and the mystery about making love to her future spouse had been robbed from her.
What heartache on both sides! A great relationship and a potentially greater future imploded because Mark allowed a small compromise to fester in his heart. He knew, as the aggressor, that he took things too far when he and Kelly french-kissed for a long time, but he rationalized his behavior by thinking he could handle the ramp up in getting physical.
Mark’s rationales came in the form of little excuses—everything was okay because he liked her, she wanted it just as badly as he did—but at the end of the day (and night), they were excuses. Making excuses is what little boys engage in—not God’s men. Sure, it’s not easy to stay pure, which is why I feel that honoring a commitment to God and to your future wife to remain sexually clean is the stuff of men.
God’s men have a long-range plan. God’s men think through questions—tough questions. Have you ever asked yourself:
• Why can’t I grow past sexual temptations and thoughts?
• Why am I not getting closer to the standard I know is right?
• Why do I keep repeating the same mistakes over and over?
Making excuses is what little boys engage in—not God’s men.
If you are asking yourself these questions, then you are searching for the one thing that separates men from boys—character. Character is the stuff inside you that causes you to act one way or another when you face a moral dilemma. It’s what you do when nobody else is looking. Character is required:
• to delay gratification
• to prevent free falls into sin
• to overcome feelings in the moment
• to reject lies quickly
• to face sin head-on
• to trust good impulses more than bad ones
• to be honest with others about weaknesses
• to get consistent
• to rise again after a fall
• to apply wisdom
• to honor Christ
I believe that being a Christian and having character are not the same thing. When God entered your life, you instantly inherited many things. You were forgiven of all your sins, you became a child of God, and you were placed spiritually in heaven with Christ—to name a few of more than thirty different blessings that come to a believer the moment he believes in Jesus Christ. A fundamental change in your character traits (who you are and how you react under pressure) was not on the list. God has chosen to bring us character only when we decide to do hard things that require faith in His way. And doing hard things is like weeding a garden, or in the days before machines, plowing new ground.
Becoming a man involves doing some very uncomfortable spade work, which means turning the soil. This is one of the hardest parts of manhood for younger brothers to embrace. Why is that? For the most part, parents have shielded them from making spiritually and emotionally tough decisions themselves.
Kinda commitments, which require no character, are synonymous with compromise.
When you don’t have to face emotionally tough decisions, you get used to going through life making half commitments. Stuck between adopting values you learned growing up and establishing your own identity and convictions, the Enemy wants you to water down what should be strong commitments. He even wants you to feel it’s an expression of individuality to:
• kinda go to church
• kinda read God’s Word
• kinda stay away from sexy R-rated movies or Internet sites
• kinda not get wasted at parties
• kinda date girls with a commitment to sexual purity
• kinda share your faith
• kinda connect with other Christians
• kinda be accountable to other guys
Kinda commitments, which require no character, are synonymous with compromise. In that sense, they actually take you backward as a man. You may have made some of these half commitments yourself because it felt more comfortable that way or gave you an excuse to be irresponsible—there’s less guilt and less discomfort that way. Whatever your case, God never said His role in our lives was to make us comfortable. In fact, God says real manhood will cost you some sweat:
I said, “Plant the good seeds of righteousness, and you will harvest a crop of my love. Plow up the hard ground of your hearts, for now is the time to seek the LORD, that he may come and shower righteousness upon you.” (Hosea 10:12, NLT)
God’s man Hosea was speaking to a group of spiritually immature men in Israel. He used their knowledge of farming to explain God’s work in their lives and how they could be productive for him. The picture he painted was the all-too-familiar one about hard work and sweat paying off at harvest time. Any good Israelite knew that a fruitful yield started with the condition of the soil. Hard soil was bad, and soft soil was good. Hard soil offered little chance of taking the seed, while tilled land yielded a crop—perhaps a bountiful one. The farmer had to do the hard work (breaking up the unplowed ground) to get the results.
Hosea’s metaphor works today as well. If you want to be God’s man on the outside, you’ve got to pull out the jackhammer and get to work on the inside. For you, the decision spiritually might look like:
• making a commitment not to masturbate as a habit
• telling a buddy about your desire to be sexually pure
• making a contract with your girlfriend not to tempt each other sexually (being specific and honest)
• having accountability partners
• not spending fruitless hours playing video games
• finding and committing to a weekly Bible study with other guys
• serving others in ministry
• not drinking alcohol
• sharing your faith in Christ instead of hiding it
• rededicating yourself to God’s purposes
• waiting on God to answer your prayers versus manipulating circumstances to get the results you want
• seeking out an Internet accountability partner so that porn is not an option for you
• telling the truth to someone close to you
• looking at girls as His—not yours to play mental games with
• listening to and respecting your parents’ wishes
• telling your youth pastor something about you that no one knows about—then asking for his help and counsel
Plowing up the hard ground means doing something uncomfortable that will stretch your faith. It means deciding to do what real God’s men (versus posers) do—facing their fears. It involves tension and risk and will cost you something, usually your pride.
To Jesus Christ our lives are like fields He has purchased that need to be worked. He will point out one field to you at a time. Once you have worked that field of change into productive acreage, He will move you to the next weed-infested plot. The thing about weeds—which I view as attitudes and actions that choke His plan to produce fruit in us—is that these weeds can easily grow back if you are not careful. Tilling weed-infested soil means going after the roots, digging deep, and exercising persistence. The key is not to give up and trust God when it’s taking longer than expected to change a behavior pattern.
Plowing up the hard ground means doing what real God’s men (versus posers) do—facing their fears.
Take my struggle with masturbation. Before I was a Christian, I became very comfortable with this practice as a way of feeling good, especially when I felt lonely. After I became a Christian, this practice didn’t magically disappear overnight, even though I knew that it wasn’t God’s best.
I would have to say that this “weed” was one of the toughest to eliminate completely from the fields of my sexual life. Every time I stepped into a shower, I felt like an alcoholic stepping inside a rollicking happy hour, where I could see the bartender mixing a margarita and setting out a bowl of warm tortilla chips. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. This temptation chased me every day over the next fifteen years of my Christian life, despite my attempts to cultivate self-control.
One of the most difficult things I have ever done was to talk about this habit with the men in my Bible study. It was also one of the best things I ever did. When I confessed my situation to my brothers, God gave me the strength to say no to the flesh and say yes to His Spirit in the moments of testing. He knew it took guts for me to give up my “dirty little secret.” He knew it required faith and humility because I risked rejection for a stronger walk with God.
Confronting weaknesses in your character early on will set the stage for a strong walk later. If I had allowed my habit to persist—as well as all the mental gymnastics that went along with justifying my sexual behavior—my adult life would look radically different today. For me, masturbation was a compromise of God’s best, and I knew I was lying to myself when I thought, Everyone does this or It’s okay because I’m not married yet.
That type of thinking, when allowed to remain in your character as an older man, will be deadly to your future marriage and family because what you’re really doing is becoming good at selling out your faith for an intense, pleasant feeling. This is all about self-control, and if you can exercise self-control now, then that character trait will greatly strengthen your ability to be God’s man for your future wife and family. Trust me when I say that cutting out masturbation before I got married has helped me to stay married.
When you resist change, however, God has other ways to get our character in order, and those usually involve His calling a time-out on your plans. God can forge character by allowing difficulties, delays, or even the consequences of your choices to act as His agents of change. The Bible is filled with examples of His making men uncomfortable so He could teach them something about character. Just ask these guys:
• Joseph was stuck in an Egyptian jail for thirteen years before he became the number two man in Egypt.
• Moses lived in the desert for many years before God asked him to deliver the Israelites.
• David lived like a fugitive and was hunted like an animal before he became the greatest king of Israel.
• Jonah had an “Aha, I got it God” experience inside the stomach of a huge fish.
• Job endured catastrophes and testings.
• Paul was physically blinded by his encounter with Christ.
The point of all these male biographies is that God uses hard times and uncomfortable situations to mold and shape our characters in ways that no other circumstance would. Just as the repeated heating, pounding, and cooling of metal forges the strongest steel, God wants your character strong so you can fulfill His purposes on earth. He loves you too much to allow you to remain immature, untested, and weak as a man. Most important, He knows that you cannot produce in greatness for Him what you do not possess in character.
Maturity is recognizing that sometimes you need to do the very thing you don’t want to do to become the man you need to be.
He also knows that younger men have a hard time trusting Him with certain things—especially with sex. He’s watched a few billion lusty stallions get creative in this area, observed how they create wiggle room with His will, and have tried to paint His clear instructions gray. He knows exactly how you think. He knows all the mind games that testosterone produces in men. He knows all your dreams. He knows you want intimacy with another person. But He also knows that hooking up with a girl and physically gratifying yourself at this time will not make you a man, prove anything, or make you happy.
Life, as you’ll see, is so much more than a thirty-second blast of sexual energy. That’s why the first stop in getting sexual character for all young men is to pick up the “brother” book in this series called Every Young Man’s Battle. If you really want to make an impact, get a bunch of guys you hang with to start a group and go through it. Now that takes guts!
You can’t necessarily expect immediate results when you choose to do the right thing. In fact, my experience over the years has shown me that God takes His time, even though I think I already have learned my lesson or am sure that I’m ready to be responsible.
That’s why way too many of my younger brothers miss God’s ultimate blessing—they are simply too impatient. They give up too early, too easily in the name of fun, because they are demonstrating the emotional and spiritual development of a twelve-year-old. Maturity is recognizing that sometimes you need to do the very thing you don’t want to do to become the man you need to be. God’s men have this perspective:
But God is doing what is best for us, training us to live God’s holy best. At the time, discipline isn’t much fun. It always feels like it’s going against the grain. Later, of course, it pays off handsomely, for it’s the well-trained who find themselves mature in their relationship with God. (Hebrews 12:10-11, MSG)
When I was a college sophomore and a new Christian, I was slow in understanding that I would be better off avoiding girls rather than embracing them. Since I didn’t have the self-control to manage a serious relationship without muddying the waters sexually, I had no business having a girlfriend. Fortunately, my fraternity Bible study, classroom studies, and intramural sports kept me plenty busy and out of trouble at UCLA. That’s why meeting Heather right before the end of the spring quarter caught me by surprise. She was cool and Christian. This, I thought, will be different.
We dated a month before the school year ended, and then I was off to Europe on a missions trip. Throughout my travels in Spain, France, Germany, and Switzerland, I kept a journal and entered the lovesick infatuated musings of a guy who I would probably slap silly today. I guess all sorts of romantic feelings bubbled inside me while I was serving the Lord in Europe. I really looked forward to coming home and exploring this new frontier of dating a Christian. No matter who you are, it’s nice to think there is someone on the other side of the world waiting just for you.
For the first time in my life, I was not on the hunt for a relationship.
While I was romanticizing this on the cobblestone streets of Europe, Heather was wisely concluding in Los Angeles that I was not the relationship for her. Not long after I touched down at LAX, she ended it. Talk about shock and awe. “But … but … but …” was all I could come up with. Discovering that our relationship was over before it began was something I didn’t take too well. I kept wondering, What are You up to, God?
I chewed on that one for a while until I arrived at the conclusion that if God wanted this relationship to happen, nothing could have stopped it. He clearly said no. Deep down, this made me feel a little better, and I decided that relationships were not His purpose for me at that time. I concluded that God wanted me to invest my energies in:
• my walk with Him (versus a girl)
• school (what a concept!)
• ministry to unsaved UCLA students (there ya go)
For the first time in my life, I was not on the hunt for a relationship. It was during this down time, this period when I focused on what God wanted me to do, that I caught the eye (and later the heart) of a girl who saw me saying yes to God. Yep, I got the girl in the end—a UCLA cheerleader no less—but it was after I accepted God’s no by faith, figuring He had His timing and a special person waiting out there for me.
God wants your respect, obedience, and trust when He says no to certain activities or relationships.
As a young father, I have to admit that I say no every now and then just to see how my kids react. Will they respect me? Obey? Sometimes I ask to see if they will go with my plan just because it’s me who’s asking. Deep, deep down, I hope and pray that I get the right response to my direction—especially when I know it’s hard for them to swallow a no in the short term. Cara, Ryan, and Jenna know that listening and following Dad’s direction is almost always the best way to go. The reason why is that they know what I love more than obedience is rewarding obedience with over-the-top blessings. Obeying and respecting my verbal commands will come back to them in a much bigger blessing later that day, the next day, or when they really have a need.
So how do you react when you hear God saying no to you?
God wants your respect, obedience, and trust when He says no to certain activities or relationships. To think and act this way, however, requires a step of faith, a belief in Him, and a peace-filled hope that His plans and timing are the absolute best. What God is doing is asking for your trust and obedience now:
Trust GOD from the bottom of your heart; don’t try to figure out everything on your own.
Listen for GOD’S voice in everything you do, everywhere you go;
he’s the one who will keep you on track.
Don’t assume that you know it all. Run to GOD! Run from evil!
Your body will glow with health, your very bones will vibrate with life! (Proverbs 3:5-8, MSG)
God’s young man replaces running from good with running from evil. God’s young man replaces trusting in his feelings with trusting in his Father. God’s young man replaces lip service with active listening and obedience. God’s young man replaces limiting God’s influence to certain parts of his life with giving God everything happening in his life. God’s young man risks letting God be in control and manage him freely. What this means is:
• saying no to oral sex when your friends are saying yes
• saying no to double standards when your “Christian” friends are tempting you to join in the fun
• saying no to looking at sexually explicit Web sites when your whole dorm floor is doing it
• saying no to lying to your parents when it’s the only way you can go where everybody else is going
You get the point. God’s young man says no to temptation so that he can say yes to God. If there’s a no from God, then there should be a no from you, too.
Part of being able to forsake comfort for godly character has to do with knowing who your heavenly Father is and how He loves to reward you. Maybe you feel God has got you pinned down on something. Maybe He’s got you wondering what His will is for you. Or maybe you just don’t feel like towing the line on a particular temptation. That’s normal! You are not a robot, and God doesn’t expect you to swallow everything He throws your way with a smile. Sometimes God’s will feels like a cruel joke—even sucks, if you’re honest. But in that moment of struggle between choosing God’s plan or your plan, God’s young man pauses to consider who is doing the asking.
God’s young man says no to temptation so that he can say yes to God.
One of the most important things Jesus wanted men to know about God the Father is that He is a loving dad. I didn’t know what that meant while I was growing up, so when it came time to trust God when I first became a believer, I trusted myself and my instincts rather than God, because that’s what I was used to. But over time—and a lot of painful consequences later—I began to get it. God was not a fun-killer, a puritan, or a policeman. He was just a dad—a wise one, a trustworthy one, a maker of men, and a rewarder of sons who choose His way instead of the way their feelings might dictate.
These are the moments God wants to make a man out of you. This inner transformation happens when you choose the way that will test your character more. When you pass the test, you will change, your relationship with God will deepen, and you will discover what it means to be like Christ. The promise will become a reality:
When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. (the apostle Paul, 1 Corinthians 13:11)
Manhood is about making new decisions—mature ones that rely more on our faith and less on our feelings. As we’ll see in the next chapter, this decision process must be guided and shaped by embracing and acting upon the truth.