We feel this is a very important issue that we want to address in this series. It is one of the most controversial aspects of sex and masturbation in general because of the wider debate over the purposes of sex in the overall context of human sexuality. There have been widely differing schools of theological thought for this matter over the centuries and some of the more conservative ideas, as in general with sexuality as a whole, persist to the present day. Digging into our basic human physiology, we are physically wired with a sense of touch, and certain areas of our bodies respond to touch in a way that causes us to become sexually aroused, and which produce sexual pleasure. This pleasure in itself is not innately different from the pleasure we experience from our other senses, such as from smell and taste when we consume food. However, it is obvious that throughout this blog, we have sought to counter the conservative teachings on sexuality which hold that sexual pleasure is different from other forms of pleasure in that a Christian shouldn’t have an enjoyment of sexual pleasure from touching their own body.
Whilst we affirm that without a doubt, sexual activities carry with them a spiritual burden that is distinct and different from other things we do in everyday life, and that therefore a specific approach is needed to sexual beliefs and practices, to ensure that these matters are spiritually healthy and bring blessing to our lives as believers in Jesus Christ, we also affirm that we believe masturbation can be a healthy practice that Christians can partake of in full surrender and submission to God and that it can be incorporated into the daily lives of believers, both male and female, from the start of adolescence for life, for 3-D purposes which we have defined elsewhere.
It therefore follows from that, that the pleasure we experience when masturbating, is intended to have some benefit for us, and that it is in the same league as other physical pleasures we experience in life when we engage our physical senses. It is meant to be enjoyed in moderation, and it is appropriate to seek it out at specific intervals during the day in much the same way as we seek to satisfy our desires for food, for example. Sexual pleasure engages the sense of touch in particular, and we already engage personally with touch in our bodies in so many other ways that are pleasure seeking in our day to day lives. For example, we choose clothing and footwear that feels good on our skin, or soft sheets in our beds.
Our main goal in this post is to encourage those Christians who masturbate to give themselves permission to enjoy the physical pleasure of self touch. Your body is designed to produce this pleasure in order to reward you for seeking out this activity. If you can appropriate touching your sexual parts as valid for the purposes we have discussed extensively in other parts of this site, you can regard the pleasure produced as valid and meaningful in the whole context of what masturbation and your sexuality are about. What you must strive to avoid at all costs is an excessive level of behaviour that is solely focused on pleasure seeking; this type of focus can quickly lead to addiction in order to justify ever increasing levels of pleasure, with the usual problems of an overload situation in your brain causing the pleasure to diminish, which means you need more of it to achieve the same effect, and that is where addiction comes in to play. Pornography is one of the key drivers of sexual addiction that people use, and it causes many problems for them, when in essence the answer is to deal with the issues in their life that are causing them to seek out excessive volumes of pleasure. When we are dealing with the pleasures in our bodies, we need to remember that these are intended to be used in moderation, and for sexual pleasure, like other pleasures in our bodies, we have to apply a degree of restraint or personal discipline in order to ensure we are appropriately managing the use of these activities to be good for our bodies and spirits.