Any Advice For Someone Trying Not To Masturbate?
Question: I'm a 19 year old Apostolic Boy. Obviously that makes me have a very high sex drive as God intended. Has anyone in this forum been in my situation? And if so you have any advice for someone trying not to masturbate?
Answer: Greetings in Jesus wonderful name!
You see if God would want the people to overcome sexual offences without temptation, he could have made every human to start having sexual feelings after their marriage and therefore they would have avoided all the strong sexual urge and desires that go haywire when they are young that mislead them to unholy living which further leads them to live out of the will of God.
If that were the case, without free will humans like us would have become like robots, to do whatever we are programmed to do. But the very purpose God created us in His likeness and image (Gen 1:27-28), is to make us excercise the free will just like Him in dependence upon each other within Trinity so that we could live as a child of God in freedom and dignity unlike angels who are God's servants who do his word (Heb 1:14; Psa 103:20; Rev 22:9). In other words, angels had one choice to serve God or reject God to follow Satan, one third of the angels chose to follow Satan to become forever unholy, and the rest followed God until today and therefore stay holy (Rev 12:3-4; Matt 26:41, 46).
The Apostle Peter clearly said to young people like you who are saying, has anyone been in my situation, "5 You younger men, follow the leadership of those who are older. And all of you serve each other with humble spirits, for God gives special blessings to those who are humble, but sets himself against those who are proud. 6 If you will humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, in his good time he will lift you up. 7 Let him have all your worries and cares, for he is always thinking about you and watching everything that concerns you. 8 Be careful--watch out for attacks from Satan, your great enemy. He prowls around like a hungry, roaring lion, looking for some victim to tear apart. 9 Stand firm when he attacks. Trust the Lord; and remember that other Christians all around the world are going through these sufferings too. 10 After you have suffered a little while, our God, who is full of kindness through Christ, will give you his eternal glory. He personally will come and pick you up, and set you firmly in place, and make you stronger than ever. 11 To him be all power over all things, forever and ever. Amen." (1 Pet 5:5-11, LB).
The above verses confirms authentically from the Bible that "other Christians all around the world are going through these sufferings too" and that you are no exception at all. He also says that God is ready to solve all your problems that you are facing as a apostolic young man with testosterone kicking in, but remember to "Be careful--watch out for attacks from Satan, your great enemy. He prowls around like a hungry, roaring lion, looking for some victim to tear apart. Stand firm when he attacks." Satan will give impure thoughts out of your old nature of the flesh to use your mind to pervert it in ways that will cause the act of sexuality and its desire to become sinful and impure (Mark 7:20-23, LB). Sexuality in itself is a beautiful gift of God to be used within the boundary of marriage (Gen 2:24-25), anything practiced outside of this boundary of marriage whatever high or low drive we have will only drive us to habitual sin and more sin.
In other words, can you be able to solo masterbate before marriage without even thinking about any woman in your heart and mind or seeing pronographic images to add wood to fire more of your sexual desire until you get relieved through ejaculation? But the truth is, it is impossible to maintain our libido until ejaculation without adding fuel to the mind through thinking about some women in the fantasy world (Matt 5:27-30), which Jesus told is a spiritual adultery in our heart which has the potential to lead us to do the same sin physically when oppotune time arises if not for the grace of God, and end up in a divorce to sin against the spouse and children (Matt 5:31-32). The eyes and hands are the most powerful co-ordinating organs to work together in tandem to bring sexual desire and erection in male organs, and it also applies to women too to a lesser percentage than men, women are relational and therefore get sexually charged through relationship and friendly exchange of touch than through eyes in men. Individuals who become addicted to masturbation might carry it with them into adult married life. There, it can become a serious obstacle to healthy marital intimacy.
So masterbation before marriage is not the perfect will of God, but rather has come in as permissible among us humans because of our fallen sin nature, and therefore even when we have been involved in these evil things of the heart before marriage, God wants us to repent of it and turn to our spiritual elders and bishops for guidance through confession of it so that it might not be able to enslave us after our marriage or before it which is a preparation time for a godly and a blessed marriage. After our initial deliverance from slavery of masterbation, God expects us to trust Him to help us overcome masterbation because we can be assured that when we give "all our worries and cares to Him through prayer, God who is always thinking about us and watching everything that concerns us" will at some point of time will "personally ... come and pick us up, and set us firmly in place, and make us stronger than ever before." God allows us with temptations and tests us with trials so that we could become more holy to the Lord and trust Him more and more. We are not created holy, but rather have been created inherently innocent in the beginning of time, so that by our positive choice to choose the right and reject the wrong, we could have been made holy for the Lord to cause His favor to come upon us in our lives and living forever and ever. But the wrong choice of choosing the wrong and rejecting the right in the Garden of Eden by our forefather Adam made the whole humanity to come to a state where we ought to choose the right always and at all times to keep ourselves from evil and stay on the right side. We were unable to live in the above way and keep our righteousness intact before God and men, that is why Jesus Christ as the last Adam appeared in human form to help us always choose the right even when it is inconvenient to stand for righteousness and thus become favored and blessed by God in Him.
So you who are trying to trying not to masturbate are in the right track, but intention stays that way, unless you put in your effort with the plan of God from the Bible to overcome it by faith in Jesus name. So we can discuss that plan as a advice for ourselves and others to help us overcome masturbation by the power of God through fellowshiping with one another regularly to strengthen our mind with the truth and the wear the armor of God to overcome it for the Glory of God.
1) Identify the trigger points and replace it with better habits. For example, say that when you go to bed and after that you lock your door and settle to sleep, you begin to see the cell phone or computer that enflames your desire to masturbate takes over, and you give in to the temptation. Then first, avoid locking the door and instead of turning to your cellphone or computer before going to sleep, you sit solidly and read the word of God and pray and thank God for the day and everything in it and praise Him for He dwells in it, and then go to sleep from thereon. Then the same applies to the morning time which can be a quiet time of meditation and prayer towards God which will energize you to overcome temptation and keep you as a overcomer for the rest of your day.
2) Keep your mind focussed on the right and not on the wrong. When you have fallen in to temptation, it is easy to focus on what we can't do rather than what we can do through Christ who strengthens us (Php 4:13). Even when you have fallen, you need to turn the focus from yourself to Christ, and thus confessing and forsaking the sins, and further choose forgetting what has happened to focusing on fulfilling of your calling in Christ Jesus which is to be holy and pleasing to God the Father in all things and everyday in the present and in the future (Php 3:13-14). To fall is one thing, but to raise oneself up and walk in faith to overcome is totally another thing that we must learn to practice more and more every day.
3) Cast your cares on the Lord and do not bother yourself too much. Tell all your failures and your inability to the Lord regularly, the Lord knows and understands even when you can't bear of your failure to understand yourself and your situations (1 John 1:7, 9). The Lord who is concerned about you more than you do, will intervene in your life at the right time to cause you to become blessed and be a blessing to many. Do not fail to give up your cares day after day to the Lord at a particular time of private prayer and worship, or else you will get drowned in sin and the ways of the world to become ineffective for the Kingdom of God. The only failure that leads you to fail in your spiritual life is the failure to pray to God and give your cares to Him regularly day by day. The cares that weigh us daily are like garbage in a house, if you fail to throw it away for long time, it will cause foul smell and great harm to the inhabitant of the human house of our body and spiritual life.
4) Share your temptation as a confession with a spiritual elder who care about you, so that you can be prayed over to live a spiritually effective life. When we let our secret to those who care, we can become free enough to work out our spiritual exercise in freedom and liberty to strengthen our muscle to overcome the mentality to masturbate and instead develop a life of devotion towards the Lord Jesus Christ (James 5:13-20; 1 Cor 7:35).
5) Develop a love for the Word of God and for prayer. When these habits can increase more and more, it has the ability to consume the other self centered habits like masterbation and pornography which brings a person in to bondage to make you become ineffective spiritually (Psa 119:11, 15-16; 55:16-17). It is like the Moses rod that becomes a snake to eat all other snakes of the Egyptian magicians to bring Glory to God through it. Remember, God is always by your side as your take the help of the Holy Spirit to develop and inculcate these regular habits for your own spiritual growth.
6) To marry sooner and learning to love within marriage as the maturing process starts sooner than later within marriage is better for us to deny to be rooted in a independent life. So as soon as you have attained manhood in your late teenage years, you will be fit and young and energitic enough to marry, so by early twenties itelf marry and learn to love your spouse as Christ has loved the Church unconditionally, and women should learn to submit to their husband as the Church submits to Christ (Eph 5:25, 24). It is better to marry than to burn with lust of masturbation or pornography or other harmful evil desires (1 Cor 7:9). To love means it is to sacrifice oneself, what better time we have than in our young teenage years to sacrifice for our own family and for others around us to help them have a better relationship with God through sharing our own testimony through our victorious life in Christ Jesus. I would tell you that the earlier it is better to learn love early than to have burnt ourselves with lust and then think about marrying later which will have caused our self by then to become deeply rooted in ourselves which might cause the marriage more harm than good (1 Cor 13:1-13).
7) Renew your mind constantly with what Christ has done for you to live a holy life. To remain in the rest of what Christ has done for you and dwelling in it through understanding and meditating in His circumcision, His baptism and His death on the Cross can position you powerfully in Christ. In His circumcision you became the people of God, in His baptism He received your sins on Himself and fulfilled your righteouness from that moment onwards, and on the Cross He nailed the sins of yours and died shedding His blood so that you and I can be redeemed and forever raised in a new body with a new spirit and a redeemed soul (Matt 3:15; Col 2:11-15; 1 Thess 5:23-24). You may be fighting against temptation for a long time, but you never know when the Lord will establish you powerfully over those sinful tendencies to rule over it just like Joshua and Caleb were let loose by God's power in the land of Cannan to overcome the giants by faith and inherit the promised land of milk and honey to become rulers by winning wars through battles. Never give up, you can never be defeated unless you give up your faith to start to live in the evil of unbelief that God hates.
Much Blessings....
Answer: Greetings in Jesus wonderful name!
You see if God would want the people to overcome sexual offences without temptation, he could have made every human to start having sexual feelings after their marriage and therefore they would have avoided all the strong sexual urge and desires that go haywire when they are young that mislead them to unholy living which further leads them to live out of the will of God.
If that were the case, without free will humans like us would have become like robots, to do whatever we are programmed to do. But the very purpose God created us in His likeness and image (Gen 1:27-28), is to make us excercise the free will just like Him in dependence upon each other within Trinity so that we could live as a child of God in freedom and dignity unlike angels who are God's servants who do his word (Heb 1:14; Psa 103:20; Rev 22:9). In other words, angels had one choice to serve God or reject God to follow Satan, one third of the angels chose to follow Satan to become forever unholy, and the rest followed God until today and therefore stay holy (Rev 12:3-4; Matt 26:41, 46).
The Apostle Peter clearly said to young people like you who are saying, has anyone been in my situation, "5 You younger men, follow the leadership of those who are older. And all of you serve each other with humble spirits, for God gives special blessings to those who are humble, but sets himself against those who are proud. 6 If you will humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, in his good time he will lift you up. 7 Let him have all your worries and cares, for he is always thinking about you and watching everything that concerns you. 8 Be careful--watch out for attacks from Satan, your great enemy. He prowls around like a hungry, roaring lion, looking for some victim to tear apart. 9 Stand firm when he attacks. Trust the Lord; and remember that other Christians all around the world are going through these sufferings too. 10 After you have suffered a little while, our God, who is full of kindness through Christ, will give you his eternal glory. He personally will come and pick you up, and set you firmly in place, and make you stronger than ever. 11 To him be all power over all things, forever and ever. Amen." (1 Pet 5:5-11, LB).
The above verses confirms authentically from the Bible that "other Christians all around the world are going through these sufferings too" and that you are no exception at all. He also says that God is ready to solve all your problems that you are facing as a apostolic young man with testosterone kicking in, but remember to "Be careful--watch out for attacks from Satan, your great enemy. He prowls around like a hungry, roaring lion, looking for some victim to tear apart. Stand firm when he attacks." Satan will give impure thoughts out of your old nature of the flesh to use your mind to pervert it in ways that will cause the act of sexuality and its desire to become sinful and impure (Mark 7:20-23, LB). Sexuality in itself is a beautiful gift of God to be used within the boundary of marriage (Gen 2:24-25), anything practiced outside of this boundary of marriage whatever high or low drive we have will only drive us to habitual sin and more sin.
In other words, can you be able to solo masterbate before marriage without even thinking about any woman in your heart and mind or seeing pronographic images to add wood to fire more of your sexual desire until you get relieved through ejaculation? But the truth is, it is impossible to maintain our libido until ejaculation without adding fuel to the mind through thinking about some women in the fantasy world (Matt 5:27-30), which Jesus told is a spiritual adultery in our heart which has the potential to lead us to do the same sin physically when oppotune time arises if not for the grace of God, and end up in a divorce to sin against the spouse and children (Matt 5:31-32). The eyes and hands are the most powerful co-ordinating organs to work together in tandem to bring sexual desire and erection in male organs, and it also applies to women too to a lesser percentage than men, women are relational and therefore get sexually charged through relationship and friendly exchange of touch than through eyes in men. Individuals who become addicted to masturbation might carry it with them into adult married life. There, it can become a serious obstacle to healthy marital intimacy.
So masterbation before marriage is not the perfect will of God, but rather has come in as permissible among us humans because of our fallen sin nature, and therefore even when we have been involved in these evil things of the heart before marriage, God wants us to repent of it and turn to our spiritual elders and bishops for guidance through confession of it so that it might not be able to enslave us after our marriage or before it which is a preparation time for a godly and a blessed marriage. After our initial deliverance from slavery of masterbation, God expects us to trust Him to help us overcome masterbation because we can be assured that when we give "all our worries and cares to Him through prayer, God who is always thinking about us and watching everything that concerns us" will at some point of time will "personally ... come and pick us up, and set us firmly in place, and make us stronger than ever before." God allows us with temptations and tests us with trials so that we could become more holy to the Lord and trust Him more and more. We are not created holy, but rather have been created inherently innocent in the beginning of time, so that by our positive choice to choose the right and reject the wrong, we could have been made holy for the Lord to cause His favor to come upon us in our lives and living forever and ever. But the wrong choice of choosing the wrong and rejecting the right in the Garden of Eden by our forefather Adam made the whole humanity to come to a state where we ought to choose the right always and at all times to keep ourselves from evil and stay on the right side. We were unable to live in the above way and keep our righteousness intact before God and men, that is why Jesus Christ as the last Adam appeared in human form to help us always choose the right even when it is inconvenient to stand for righteousness and thus become favored and blessed by God in Him.
So you who are trying to trying not to masturbate are in the right track, but intention stays that way, unless you put in your effort with the plan of God from the Bible to overcome it by faith in Jesus name. So we can discuss that plan as a advice for ourselves and others to help us overcome masturbation by the power of God through fellowshiping with one another regularly to strengthen our mind with the truth and the wear the armor of God to overcome it for the Glory of God.
1) Identify the trigger points and replace it with better habits. For example, say that when you go to bed and after that you lock your door and settle to sleep, you begin to see the cell phone or computer that enflames your desire to masturbate takes over, and you give in to the temptation. Then first, avoid locking the door and instead of turning to your cellphone or computer before going to sleep, you sit solidly and read the word of God and pray and thank God for the day and everything in it and praise Him for He dwells in it, and then go to sleep from thereon. Then the same applies to the morning time which can be a quiet time of meditation and prayer towards God which will energize you to overcome temptation and keep you as a overcomer for the rest of your day.
2) Keep your mind focussed on the right and not on the wrong. When you have fallen in to temptation, it is easy to focus on what we can't do rather than what we can do through Christ who strengthens us (Php 4:13). Even when you have fallen, you need to turn the focus from yourself to Christ, and thus confessing and forsaking the sins, and further choose forgetting what has happened to focusing on fulfilling of your calling in Christ Jesus which is to be holy and pleasing to God the Father in all things and everyday in the present and in the future (Php 3:13-14). To fall is one thing, but to raise oneself up and walk in faith to overcome is totally another thing that we must learn to practice more and more every day.
3) Cast your cares on the Lord and do not bother yourself too much. Tell all your failures and your inability to the Lord regularly, the Lord knows and understands even when you can't bear of your failure to understand yourself and your situations (1 John 1:7, 9). The Lord who is concerned about you more than you do, will intervene in your life at the right time to cause you to become blessed and be a blessing to many. Do not fail to give up your cares day after day to the Lord at a particular time of private prayer and worship, or else you will get drowned in sin and the ways of the world to become ineffective for the Kingdom of God. The only failure that leads you to fail in your spiritual life is the failure to pray to God and give your cares to Him regularly day by day. The cares that weigh us daily are like garbage in a house, if you fail to throw it away for long time, it will cause foul smell and great harm to the inhabitant of the human house of our body and spiritual life.
4) Share your temptation as a confession with a spiritual elder who care about you, so that you can be prayed over to live a spiritually effective life. When we let our secret to those who care, we can become free enough to work out our spiritual exercise in freedom and liberty to strengthen our muscle to overcome the mentality to masturbate and instead develop a life of devotion towards the Lord Jesus Christ (James 5:13-20; 1 Cor 7:35).
5) Develop a love for the Word of God and for prayer. When these habits can increase more and more, it has the ability to consume the other self centered habits like masterbation and pornography which brings a person in to bondage to make you become ineffective spiritually (Psa 119:11, 15-16; 55:16-17). It is like the Moses rod that becomes a snake to eat all other snakes of the Egyptian magicians to bring Glory to God through it. Remember, God is always by your side as your take the help of the Holy Spirit to develop and inculcate these regular habits for your own spiritual growth.
6) To marry sooner and learning to love within marriage as the maturing process starts sooner than later within marriage is better for us to deny to be rooted in a independent life. So as soon as you have attained manhood in your late teenage years, you will be fit and young and energitic enough to marry, so by early twenties itelf marry and learn to love your spouse as Christ has loved the Church unconditionally, and women should learn to submit to their husband as the Church submits to Christ (Eph 5:25, 24). It is better to marry than to burn with lust of masturbation or pornography or other harmful evil desires (1 Cor 7:9). To love means it is to sacrifice oneself, what better time we have than in our young teenage years to sacrifice for our own family and for others around us to help them have a better relationship with God through sharing our own testimony through our victorious life in Christ Jesus. I would tell you that the earlier it is better to learn love early than to have burnt ourselves with lust and then think about marrying later which will have caused our self by then to become deeply rooted in ourselves which might cause the marriage more harm than good (1 Cor 13:1-13).
7) Renew your mind constantly with what Christ has done for you to live a holy life. To remain in the rest of what Christ has done for you and dwelling in it through understanding and meditating in His circumcision, His baptism and His death on the Cross can position you powerfully in Christ. In His circumcision you became the people of God, in His baptism He received your sins on Himself and fulfilled your righteouness from that moment onwards, and on the Cross He nailed the sins of yours and died shedding His blood so that you and I can be redeemed and forever raised in a new body with a new spirit and a redeemed soul (Matt 3:15; Col 2:11-15; 1 Thess 5:23-24). You may be fighting against temptation for a long time, but you never know when the Lord will establish you powerfully over those sinful tendencies to rule over it just like Joshua and Caleb were let loose by God's power in the land of Cannan to overcome the giants by faith and inherit the promised land of milk and honey to become rulers by winning wars through battles. Never give up, you can never be defeated unless you give up your faith to start to live in the evil of unbelief that God hates.
Much Blessings....
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