Week 21 Sunday
Week 21 Sunday
The Road of Undisciplined Sex
2 Peter 2:13-20
We now consider perhaps one of the broadest roads that lead to dead ends—the road of undisciplined sex. Note that we do not say that sex leads to a dead end, but undisciplined sex.
Sex in itself is neither moral nor immoral; it is amoral. Sex in itself is natural, as much a normal part of us as eating. It is what we do with it that determines whether it will be a blessing or a curse, whether it gives us heaven or hell. In no other area of life is it more true than in sex that some people get results, others get consequences.
Take, for instance, Solomon. If any man could have made sex work his way and do his bidding, it was he. He had everything: position, wisdom. youth, opportunity, and a philosophy about sex. He puts it startlingly clear in his opening verses, “The song of all songs, which is Solomon’s. Oh for a kiss from your lips!” (Song 1:1 Moffatt). The song of all songs, the chief emphasis in life is what? “Oh for a kiss from your lips!” Life is sex. Freud would agree.
Other philosophies of life could be stated thus, “The song of all songs. . . . Oh for recognition!” Life is self. “The song of all songs. . . . Oh for security within the group!” Life is the herd. But if life is identified with any one of these, it will run into a dead end. Each of these—self, sex, the herd—is right in its place; but if it gets out of its place, it ends in disillusionment. It did with Solomon.
He started out by saying that “the song of all songs,” the chief emphasis, is sex, “Oh for a kiss from your lips!” and ended up in cynicism and pessimism. Listen to his verdict in later years, “Nothing I coveted did I refuse myself; I denied my heart no joy. . . . Then it was all vain and futile. Nothing in this world is worthwhile. . . . So I hated life; for all that goes on under the sun seemed evil to me, all of it vain and futile. . . . What does he gain by all his futile toil, spending his days in gloominess, privations, deep anxieties, distress, and fits of anger? . . . Utterly vain—such is the Speaker’s verdict—everything is vain!” (Eccl. 2:10, 17; 5:17; 12:8 Moffatt). Why did life turn dead in his hands? He was seeking the wrong thing first.
O Christ, here I enter an area in which I shall need your special guidance, for my emotions get tangled up, and to think straight is difficult, yea impossible, if you do not give me the guidance I must have, the guidance I crave. For here I must not make a misstep lest it lead to disaster everywhere. For here the issues of life center. Help me. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Since sex is the creative part of me, I shall see to it that it is Creative, not chaotic.
Week 21 Monday
The Slough of Despond
Ecclesiastes 2:10-12, 17
We saw yesterday that Solomon, the wisest and the most foolish man that ever lived, was not upon the Way in regard to sex, for his philosophy ended in cynicism and pessimism about life. Depend upon it: any philosophy of life that leads you into a slough of despond is off the track. Life is not approving it. Examine the roots when the fruits begin to taste bitter.
Lupe Vélez, a film actress, had defied the moral laws and done as she pleased. Before she committed suicide, Vélez is reported to have told a friend, “I am getting to the place where the only thing I am afraid of is life itself.” She was expecting a baby, something that should have brought only joy had sex been used as the Way ordains. To her it brought only fear and dismay. Why? It was not-the-way.
Why is it that an age that has laid such supreme emphasis on sex seems to enjoy it least? Those who are freest in sex get most tied up. Hollywood is a symbol of sex freedom, and it is also a symbol of sex dissatisfaction, with its procession of divorces and remarriages. They are specialists in sex and also specialists in sex dissatisfaction. They spend the most time at it and get the least out of it.
A well-fed man said to a radiant friend of mine who lives abstemiously, “I couldn’t live the way you live; I enjoy my meals.” My friend replied with his characteristic twinkle, “I enjoy myself more between meals than you do.” It is the between acts that count. What happens to yon between acts determines the nature of the act. “You will know them by their fruit” (Matt. 7:16 CEB); the outcome is the criterion.
A prominent pastor deliberately walked out of his pulpit, deserted his family, and ran away with an intelligent and respectable schoolteacher, disregarding the advice of friends and the protests of conscience. “I have a right to enjoy myself,” he said. Years later, after the man had died in disillusionment and misery, the woman came back to her family with the simple but revealing comment, “I don’t see why I should have done it.” The between acts determine the nature of the act. To pay a lifelong regret for an hour’s pleasure is a fool’s bargain. It is an attempt to make life work other than the Way, and it simply will not work. And anyone who tries it is not only bad, but a fool.
O Christ, I see that your laws are written into our relationships with one another, that we cannot be free from them at any time, anywhere, except in one way—by obeying them. Then, and then only, are we free. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Sex is going to bring me heaven or hell. I choose that it bring heaven.
Week 21 Tuesday
The Road Away from God
Ecclesiastes 6:1-2; 7:1-3
When the emotions get entangled then the mind can’t think straight. You have to be straight in order to think straight.
A man who had lived a morally straight life allowed self-pity to justify his taking up with another woman because sex relations with his wife were unsatisfactory. “I did what nine out of tea men would have done under the circumstances,” he replied to my urging to keep true to his marriage bonds. He justified himself by saying that other men would have done the same. But that justification didn’t make his face light up or relieve the inner conflict. He was a civil war, and his face showed it.
The words of theologian Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) are to the point, “Yes, life will work only one way, and that is Christ’s way. There is a precipice at the end of every other road. Broken, bruised, disillusioned, despairing, we know then that of ourselves and in ourselves there is no hope of finding anything but the hell of a great despair. Outside of God there is only death. I wish I could persuade the reader of that before he finds it out for himself.”*
And yet we go far afield to find justification for wrong courses. A woman, writing to a married man, suggested that he see another woman since his own married relationships were not happy. She said that Jesus must have approved such extramarital relationships since he said to the woman taken in adultery, “Neither do I condemn you.” She stopped short of the last portion, “Go, and do not sin again” (John 8:11). She was prepared to blaspheme the holy to justify the unholy. A doctor says to his patients, “Your brain is your chauffeur. If the brain gets drunk with a wrong idea, you’ll land in the ditch.” The wrong idea is that you can enjoy sex against the will of God.
“There is death in that pot, man of God!” said the guild of prophets to Elisha as he was about to eat poisonous herbs. Elisha threw some flour into the pot, and “there was nothing bad left in the pot” (2 Kings 4:40-41 CEB). There is death in every pot—self, sex, herd—until the flour of the will of God is mixed into it. Then there is nothing wrong with it; it can be eaten safely.
O Christ, you cleansed everything, especially sex. So I bring to you my sex life—so clamorous, so ready to go astray. Where I have failed alone, with you I can succeed and succeed gloriously. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires” (Rom. 13:14).
*No published source was found for this quotation.
Week 21 Wednesday
The Steps to Sex Victory
1 Corinthians 9:25-27
We come now to the steps we must take in regard to sex:
(1) Remember that sex is God-given, and hence can be God-blessed and God-used. God has put sex within you as an integral part of your being. It cannot be escaped, cannot be side-stepped or disregarded. It is there. It cannot be eliminated as Hindu ascetics vainly try. I have seen them try to get rid of it in strange ways, but the attempts to get rid of it call attention to it all the more and aggravate it.
(2) There is a Way written in sex; that Way is God’s Way. Don’t fight against that Way; you’ll lose the war. You will win all the skirmishes, even some battles, but you’ll lose the war. In the end, the Way will have the last word. A friend of mine, about to walk across the street against a red light, had a hand laid on his shoulder with this word, “My friend, if you want to live long, walk with the lights.” Say to yourself. “My friend, if you want to live long and happily and usefully, walk with the Way.”
(3) That Way is not the way of taboos and suppressions. We are not advocating unnatural attitudes toward sex. Someone wrote to me, “I have read your book, Victorian Living.” We are advocating “Victorious Living,” not “Victorian Living”; they are not the same. Unnatural ways tie you up; the Way frees you. The most unnatural use of sex is to suppress it and drive it down into the subconscious mind and put the lid on it and sit on it. That is self-defeating, for sex, then frustrated, works as subconscious conflict. There is a disturbed uneasiness, and one scarcely knows why. It is frustrated, suppressed sex working at hidden levels. The lid must be lifted and sex brought up and faced.
(4) Remember the clarifying words of Paul, “I know, I am certain in the Lord Jesus, that nothing is in itself unclean” (Rom. 14:14 Moffatt). He was “certain in the Lord Jesus.” You do not have to turn to pagan ethics to find natural attitudes toward sex. When you discover and obey the Way in regard to sex, then you discover the way of harmony, of peace, of rhythm, of creative power. Romans 1:28 (Moffatt) speaks of “a reprobate instinct”—an instinct naturally right, but turned reprobate. That is the genesis of sin, the good twisted.
O Christ, I know that your stamp is upon my body, your laws are written in me. I would know them, would obey them and live by them. For they are life. Everything else is death. I would live. Help me, then, to be as natural as you were—and as victorious and radiant. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I am afraid of nothing you have made, except that I unmake them, and myself in the process.
Week 21 Thursday
Further Steps to Victory
1 Corinthians 10:12-13
We continue our steps to victory over sex. We saw yesterday that in the Lord Jesus “nothing is in itself unclean.” Jesus did not hesitate to call husband and wife “one flesh,” not merely “one spirit,” as the overspiritual would have done.
(5) The God who made sex provides the power to use sex aright. It seems, as someone has said, that sex has been overloaded, that to get the species to propagate itself the sex impulses are greater than the inherent necessities. But this is because we have misused sex and have turned its energies into destructive channels and have aggravated the impulses. If the wrongly used impulses are strong, then the rightly used impulses can be strong in the direction of construction. They can be harnessed and made to pull life into creative channels.
(6) Shun like poison the advice of psychiatrists and others who advise extramarital relationships as a cure for sex problems. The advice to “find a man,” or “a woman,” as the case may be, has resulted only in further frustration. It introduces into the personality a mental and spiritual conflict worse than the sex problem itself. And it cures nothing. Honest psychiatrists are agreed on that. An eminent psychiatrist says, “From the point of view of cures, the advice to go out and express your instincts is foolish. In actual experience, I have never known a true neurosis cured by sex libertinism.”
(7) As with everything else, sex must be surrendered to God. It must come under God’s guidance and purposes. It must not be first; God must be first. If sex climbs into the saddle and tries to guide your life, you are in for a fall. God, and not sex, is God. You must deliberately decide to turn over to God your sex life and therefore plan to use it only under God’s guidance. That surrender breaks its tyranny and its power. Since God controls it, you have no longer the responsibility of controlling it. If sex is not surrendered, it is on your hands, you have to control it; but if it is surrendered, the center is changed from you to God. And the tensions are let down. That means that you are no longer tense and fighting; you are surrendered, relaxed, trusting.
O Christ, of the pure heart and mind and act, I would know your secret. I think I see it: everything was aligned to the will of God. Help me to align everything to the will of God. Then the victory of God will work in me. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: “God led them not through the way of the land of the Philistines, although that was near” (Exod. 13:17 KJV). I shall take no near ways that are not God’s Way.
Week 21 Friday
Don’t Fight; Surrender
Galatians 5:16, 18-25
We come now to the next step:
(8) Don’t fight your sex passions; that aggravates and intensifies them. To fight them puts your attention upon them. And it is a well-known law of the mind that whatever gets your attention gets you. Therefore a great many people fall into sex temptation and act at the very moment of fighting it. The strategy is wrong. When you no longer fight sex but surrender it to God, then your attention is drawn away from sex to God. You are looking at God, not at it.
(9) Since, in any battle between the imagination and the will, the imagination always wins, let God be the center of your imagination. That is not as difficult as it may sound, for “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Luke 12:34). Your treasure is in God, not in sex; therefore your heart or imagination is there too. Peg that down. Sex is to be used only as God approves and directs.
(10) If you are to have a God-directed sex life, then watch the place of your thinking. Whatever you hold within the mind tends to pass straight into act. Ideas are not passive; they are active. Keep them long enough within the mind, and they will inevitably pass into act, no matter what the will may say. They will brush past the will into act. Ideas held within the mind are destiny. So if you allow sex imagination to stay within the mind, you must not then expect God to save you from the sex act. But you cannot walk up to the precipice by undisciplined sex thinking and then expect God to keep you from a fall. The place to kill a cobra is in the egg. The place to kill wrong sex action is in its very incipient presentation—at the threshold.
“Shut your mind,” says Paul, with wrong sex thoughts on the outside. “Never think how to gratify the cravings of the flesh” (Rom. 13:14 Moffatt). “Never think how,” for if you think how you will soon plan how. The answer is in the first portion of the verse, “Put on the character of the Lord Jesus Christ”; put him in at the place of your incipient thinking, and he will be in at the place of the resultant act. “Temptation knocked at my door; I asked Christ to answer, and no one was there!”
O Christ, I know that you are my only hope and my only redemption from evil thought. When the evil thought presents itself, be my first refuge and my last. For in you I am strong and free. And in you I am pure. I would be pure in thought. Help me, for I’ll cooperate. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: “Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight” (Ps. 19:14).
Week 21 Saturday
Make Sex Serve
Romans 13:14; I Corinthians 6:18-20
We come to our next step in sex victory:
(11) Take a course before or after marriage on how to make marriage happy and useful. Among those who take such a course, only one in seventy go to divorce courts. Every church should have such a course to teach its youth regarding courtship and marriage. To those who believe in love at first sight, the advice will be: take a second look. For you’ll have to look a long, long time. These courses will help you to take a second look. They will help you to see which dispositions get along with each other. The sins of omission and commission are bad, but the worst sins are those of disposition.
(12) Make sex serve you and your life ends. Sex in the saddle will ride your life into ruin and regret. But sex harnessed to great life ends can contribute to victorious living. Its powers can be sublimated into creativity. They need not be suppressed; they can be expressed on other levels. The creative urge in sex can be made creative in mothering the weak, the orphaned, the dispossessed. It can become the father of movements, of hope, of art, of poetry, of creative activity in every department of life. It can give birth to newborn souls. In yourself, it can be sublimated into quickness of decision, into a sparkling personality. Some of the people who do the greatest work in the world are strongly sexed people who subordinate sex to the ends for which they live. The creativeness of sex pours through all their activities and makes them creative activities.
This possibility fits in with this verse, “Dedicating your members [context: sex members] to God for the service of righteousness” (Rom. 6:13 Moffatt). When sex is dedicated to God, then it becomes an asset for the service of righteousness. Sex, then, should not be looked on as an enemy to be fought but as a friend who is an ally in the service of righteousness. The strongly sexed can be strongly used.
O Christ, pure-hearted Christ, give me your purity, for I want your power; for they are linked. I would link them in my life. Help me, then, to have the strength of ten because my heart is pure. In your name. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: My creative powers are in the hands of the creative God. We go forward together.