Sexual Idolatry

 

The other day I tuned in to the pop radio station and I heard Katy Perry crooning about the dangers of falling in love, one of the lines said, "Make me your Aphrodite, make me your one and only, But don't make me your enemy, your enemy."  Aphrodite was the Greek goddess of love and beauty and was one of the many false gods people long ago worshiped in place of the one true God.

I am amazed at the diversity of gods and goddesses people once worshiped.  There were gods for the sun and moon, gods for lightning and rain, gods of fortune and fertility, and gods for death.  Whatever you might want or need, there was a god for you.

We moderns are more sophisticated in many ways than those ancient Greeks, we do not worship gods and goddesses after all.  But idolatry is still alive and well.  While Ms. Perry may not be looking for anyone to make a statue of her and worship her, the message in the song is that we often take romantic love, the people we love, and even sex itself and make them into idols.  Our boyfriends and girlfriends, husbands and wives become a refuge and comfort for us, and we look to them to meet our needs and to satisfy us when we should be looking to Jehovah God.  We chase after love and sex all in hopes of filling the God-shaped hole in our hearts.

When I entered adolescence I was not particularly troubled, but I had my fair share of burdens.  One summer during that volatile time my family moved from Phoenix to Southern California.  I was dropped into a new school and had trouble making new friends and faced some bullying.  It wasn't too long prior to this that I had learned about masturbation, and it had become a comforting and consoling habit for me.  When I was faced with the stress of moving and bullying, I ran to masturbation for refuge.  It gave me an escape from the pain that afflicted me.  I might be miserable at school, but I could come home, close the door and make myself feel good.  At least for a few minutes.

"Masturbation is the one great habit that is a primary addiction."  Sigmund Freud observed, "The other addictions, for alcohol, morphine, tobacco, etc., only enter in to a life as a substitute and replacement for it."  I am by no means a fan of Freud, but I think he has a useful insight here.  John Bradshaw in his tremendous work on shame, Healing the Shame that Binds You, gives a good definition for addiction, "Compulsive addictive behavior is 'a pathological relationship to any mood-altering experience that has life-damaging consequences.'"

Taking these two quotes together we see that fundamentally, addictions are used to regulate our moods, and one of the earliest ways we learn to regulate our moods is through masturbation.  Masturbation becomes our coping mechanism of choice.  In this way masturbation (and anything that we use to regulate our mood outside of Christ) becomes an idol, a false god.  We look to it to meet our emotional and spiritual needs when we should be looking to Christ alone.

Jesus said, "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." (Matthew 11:28)  But instead of turning to him when we are stressed and exhausted, we turn to masturbation.

Jesus said that he came to give us fullness of joy(John 15:11), but instead of taking our sadness to him, we look to masturbation.

We could feast on the Bread of Life, but instead, we masturbate in order to try to satisfy our spiritual hunger (which it never does).

We feel spiritually thirsty and instead of drinking the water of life that Jesus offers, we turn to the broken cistern of masturbation.

Jesus said, "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly." (John 10:10)  If we are living that abundant life in Christ, there would be no need for us to find comfort in masturbation. 

On a certain day Jesus was travelling from Judea to Galilee and passed through the town of Samaria.  He met a woman there who was drawing water from a well. (See John 4)  He asked her for a drink of water and struck up a conversation with her.  In the course of their talk he revealed that she had had five husbands and man she was with now was not her husband.  Like so many of us, she had been looking to sex and relationships to meet her emotional and spiritual needs.  She was drinking from a broken cistern and Jesus was there to offer her living water.  She took him up on the offer, and traded in her idol of broken sexuality for the true and living God, and she went her way filled with joy and proclaiming the glory of Christ.

God's wants nothing more than to give us fullness of joy, but he cannot do that if we are turning to masturbation to fill up our deficit of joy.

I was just talking with a Catholic friend who said that for Lent he was planning to fast every Friday until Easter.  Fasting and other forms of self-denial have been a part of Christianity from the beginning, and have been a common spiritual discipline that has enriched the spirituality of many saints across the ages.  You may not be convinced that masturbation is a sin, and we can masturbate if we want to without any guilt.  What I challenge you to consider is a masturbation fast.  Give it up for a few weeks or months and see what happens(90 days is always popular mark).  When you feel the urge, turn to God in prayer and meditate on Scripture and see if God doesn't reveal himself to you in a powerful way.

God is a jealous God.  This means he is protective of us and he does not tolerate rivals in our lives.  If we are looking to masturbation to bring us peace and joy, then that is a space in our hearts where God will not go.  We cannot know the desperate joy that he wants to give us when we are committing idolatry.