This post builds upon the content in our previous post, “Sexuality of Christian Manhood: God Calls You To Achieve” from a couple of months back. Content for our blog is based on gained knowledge and personal study which is an ongoing process that is occurring over the present time and so we take the opportunity to create new material as the concepts become known to us and we have time to explore their relevance and meanings. The starting point for this discussion is the understanding that masturbation is very important to the “3 Ds” for Christian men, and it is extremely important for masturbation to be a useful sexual outlet for Christian men, as they need a greater range of options to deal with an innately higher sex drive than most women experience, although a percentage of women do have a high libido that requires the same techniques to manage.
For Christian men, the key theme that we are engaging with in this post is the idea that your sense of sexual performance or achievement makes a key contribution to your personal self esteem. We already know that typical men are performance and achievement focused, and we expect that as a Christian man, your outlook on life will follow this trend, although your adoption of and commitment to a godly lifestyle means that the way you achieve this will differ from society in general. It follows therefore that whilst sexual performance is important to you, the ways in which you will address it are going to be different from the world, but you can willingly admit that it is something you think about. We are aware from associating with men’s groups in churches that it is something that Christian men talk about, just that you will try to address it in a godly way that is inherently respectful both to the commitment you have made in surrendering your life to Christ and in being accountable to those around you, in particular your wife if you are married, and to church leadership etc.
This post has been in part inspired by the suggestion which we have heard, that for those of you who are married, that your self esteem in marital relations is dependent to an extent on your ability to successfully initiate sexual intimacy with your wife, which is a measure of your ability in sexual performance. So we can go into the ways that you can have other productive and God-honouring sexual performance focused outlets in your life, whether you are married or single. Certainly if you are single, this is much more important because the sole focus of your sexuality is how to honour God. The desire to achieve sexual performance is probably a key aspect of the reason that so many men are turning to pornography as an outlet for their sexual fantasies, and this is quite relevant for Christian men because such a significant percentage of you are viewing or using pornographic materials, which is capable of significantly diverting your spiritual focus away from God and towards spiritual idols. In fact, anyone who uses pornography is committing sexual idolatry and this means God will not bring blessing into your life whilst you are engaging with the use of pornographic materials because this is a violation of the first and second commandments. It is therefore extremely important for you as a godly believer to have a means of fulfilling your need to achieve sexual performance in a way that is God honouring.
We are writing this because we believe that masturbation provides the means for you to have that sense of sexual performance as a single man of God, or a married man of God who needs to fill in some gaps between intimate sexual encounters with your wife in a productive way that she agrees enhance and support your marriage. The key issue for a marriage is that there are conflicting objectives that won’t be completely achievable when you have sex with your wife. You have to be able to evaluate key objectives for sexual performance in light of being able to serve her and God at the same time, and the achievement of these objectives will be different than when it is just God that you are serving, as is possible in a time of masturbation that is focused upon sexual devotion to God. Whatever the key objectives for sexual performance are for you, we believe they will be similar to those which we mentioned in the previous article listed above. The difference in this post is that we are emphasising that achievement of sexual performance can contribute something to your personal self esteem and therefore has to be considered important to your mental health.
The key question is exactly what objectives for sexual performance are relevant to a godly man. For a married man, your objectives have to be ones that you will probably determine with your wife, and are directly relevant to building an intimate relationship with her and strengthening your marriage and family, as well as your faith. If you are single, the key relationship you are seeking to build and strengthen is directly with God. Male sexuality is generally focused on physical aspects. Worshipping God with your sexuality is achieved by using it for the purpose that God designed it for. Therefore your key sexual performance indicator is that you fulfilled godly purposes, which in marriage have to include sexually fulfilling and satisfying both you and your wife. If you are single or undertaking a time of sexual devotion as a married person, a means of sexual fulfilment in a godly context is related to reaching sexual climax during masturbation and producing the semen that your body has manufactured for that purpose. Another aspect of sexual fulfilment and therefore performance, as we alluded to in our previous post, is that these outcomes were achieved in a godly way without any sinful practice.
There may be other contexts for sexual performance for a man of God but the key importance is that you can realistically achieve them in a godly manner and therefore fulfill your calling as a Christian in whatever stage of life you find yourself in.