Love or Lust?
Dating advice: if lust is driving your relationship,
it will never work. Here's why.
by Duncan Moore
I was brought up in an atheistic family and it wasn't until I
arrived at university that I met lots of Christians. They seemed
nice people and there was a quality to their friendships that I
envied. However, they seemed to me to be painfully naive and their
innocence, particularly in the area of sexual morality, evoked my
patronizing sympathy. Since then my thinking has radically changed.
In this article I want to ask whether there are good reasons for
taking the Bible's teaching on sex seriously.
Contrary to popular belief, Christians don't view sex as a bad
thing, tolerated as a concession. God invented sex and he meant it
to be good, very good. Sex is not just a means to pregnancy, but is
meant to be an intense, joyful, passionate expression of love. God
also designed a context for sex -- lifelong marriage between one
man and one woman. Contemporary English culture has now mostly
abandoned this idea. Should Christians abandon it as irrelevant or
does it point to timeless principles?
Pragmatic Reasons
From a practical viewpoint there are plenty of advantages to
following the Bible's blueprint for sex. It protects against
sexually transmitted diseases -- no small thing for us and a huge
issue in parts of the world where AIDS is wiping out whole
communities and destroying the economy. It also protects against
unwanted pregnancies outside of marriage.
Keeping sex exclusively for marriage avoids the pain and
destructiveness of comparing different sexual partners. It also
guards against the very painful situation where one partner is very
in love and the other is purely interested in having an
orgasm.
A final thought is that our sexual drives and desires are
addictive. Someone once pointed out that our sexual desires have
the engine of a Ferrari and the brakes of a bicycle. If we stir up
and feed our sexual desires in unhealthy ways it becomes harder and
harder to remain faithful in marriage, with all the emotional agony
unfaithfulness brings. The divorce statistics reflect the
consequences of our sexual values.
Ideological Reasons
The practical reasons alone are strong enough in themselves to
support the case for the Bible's teaching on sex. However, there
are more fundamental reasons for setting sexual relationships aside
for marriage. God didn't design sex simply to give us orgasms, he
designed sex as an expression of love and physical intimacy.
To have sex with someone is a profoundly meaningful thing and if
misused the effects can be devastating. There's a wonderful story
of a court case where a man sued the manufacturers of his
lawnmower. The man had injured himself while using his mower to
trim a hedge and claimed that the instructions didn't say that the
mower couldn't be used for that purpose. Similarly, sex has a
purpose but because its such a powerful thing, it can do a lot of
damage if not used as per the maker's instructions.
To understand the Bible's view of sex we must understand the
difference between love and lust. Love honors, values and seeks the
best for the beloved. It focuses on the other person. It's
selfless, sacrificial and inseparable from commitment. Lust, on the
other hand, seeks to use things or people to meet its needs and
gratify its desires. It focuses inward on itself, is inherently
selfish, and rejects commitment.
Love and lust are opposites. They are in direct conflict with each
other. The question to be asked is whether our sexual relationships
are an expression of love or lust: "I want to honor and value you,
giving myself to you," or "I want to use you as a tool to satisfy
my urge for an orgasm, using you and taking from you." If God
really has designed sex as an expression of love, to use it for
lust is an extremely destructive lie.
The role of Marriage
Marriage is a profound mystery, the joining of two people to become
one. It doesn't guarantee or enforce love, but if taken seriously
as an unconditional lifelong commitment of faithfulness and
fidelity, it certainly helps to distinguish between love and lust.
Just as litmus paper tests for the presence of acid, marriage tests
for the presence of commitment. How do we know if we truly love
someone enough to have sex with them? Marriage asks are we willing
to commit ourselves to them for life?
Marriage is also a safety net. We're all fragile and fallible. How
can we be confident and secure in the love of our partner in light
of our shortcomings and failings? The answer again is commitment.
If commitment is absent, then love isn't genuine and sex is reduced
to a physical orgasm which technically you don't need two people
for.
Conclusion
Lust is powerful and seductive, but it's inherently selfish and
opposed to love. As we foster and feed lust in our lives we're
dragged inexorably towards isolation, loneliness, insecurity and
emptiness. What do we have left when orgasm becomes boring and
unsatisfying, left alone to face the pain of guilt and
loneliness?
Love with commitment is clearly very expensive and hard work. It
requires honor, respect, forgiveness and sacrifice. However it's
the road out of the loneliness, suspicion and despair that plagues
our culture. If we substitute lust for love we end up with a
meaningless sensation which eventually loses its novelty and can
never satisfy beyond the physical.
God's intention for us is that we should be set free from the power
and slavery of lust and become men and women of genuine love.
Everyone falls short of a God who views sleeping around and
entertaining lustful thoughts alike. However, he offers us all the
forgiveness we need to bring us into a deep personal relationship
with him. The love we experience in our relationship with God
begins to be worked out in our relationships with each other. Our
choice is either to respond to God's offer and pursue a life of
love empowered by his love or to reject him and set off on our
own.
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