Purity culture backfired on us who lived through it.

The intent was good, but that lurking variable was what blew up in our face.

Instead of healthy relationships, there grew a barrier between men and women. With good intentions, we became forbidden fruit to one another, whether the desire was there or not.

Books and information flowed freely about how not to relate to the opposite sex, but how to relate well received less in epic proportions.

Which left no healthy guidelines for relating at all, and there was only one way left.

The way of forbidden fruit glitters more brightly to those with scurvy.

Scurvy is a deficiency disease.

Sailors of old stories didn’t get scurvy because they ate food that was bad for them. Scurvy took hold of them because they lacked what kept them healthy. Instead, they were malnourished, which made fertile ground for the seed of scurvy to grow.

Many Christians weren’t formed with a healthy understanding of desire, affection, passion, attraction, and romance. We were taught how to avoid every pit and snare, but we were lacking on the pro side of wisdom. Instead of developing rightly ordered loves, many of us were left with fear, hunger, awkwardness, and obsession.

Have you heard the Billy Graham rule?

Men should avoid being alone with women they aren’t married to.

I don’t think this is a bad rule; however, I do think it’s incomplete.

The only dynamic the rule gives us is avoidance.

Avoidance alone cannot form healthy love, or show others what it looks like.

In only addressing avoidance, the unintentional dynamic is the creation of forbidden fruit and it reduces the other person to less than their whole.

John Piper had a teaching he called Christian Hedonism. Instead of only focusing on what was forbidden, he acknowledged it but turned his listener’s path to superior satisfaction in God’s design and will instead of sin’s pull. Basically, God’s will is the ultimate manifestation of the enjoyment we’re capable of.

Now we’re talking about rightly ordered loves. Yes we have been told over and over again what to put off, what we need to stop doing, but the value Piper brought to the conversation is what to put on, what to start doing instead.

Whenever you try to stop sinning against God in some area, if nothing gets put in its place, a vacuum is created. If there’s a lack of a good practice or behavior or mindset or worldview, the old thing you were trying to get rid of is going to be sucked right back in. Scurvy sets in.

Let me be blunt.

It is possible as a Christian to interact with a member of the opposite sex without wondering what’s hidden beneath their clothes or wanting to sleep with them. Not only is it possible, as Christians, we are called to live higher than that, and we must.

If all relationships, friendships, and abilities to unawkwardly speak to one another become sexualized, all forms of intimacy become suspect, eventually even normal friendship itself among guys and guys and girls and girls will become destabilized. Malformed desire spreads, and malnourished lust seeks an outlet. When every form of closeness brings with it the suspicion of forbidden romantic connection, trust breaks down and along with it deep friendships.

Is it possible for us to imagine affection, loyalty, and admiration existing without there being erotic undertones lurking in the shadows?

Hand in hand with the world, the prime way we’ve been influenced to think about one another is through sex. Perhaps a finer point would be to say there’s been active discipleship to think of one another through a sexual lens. At least, many of us received the message this way.

So, in good intentions, we say don’t look. Don’t touch. Definitely don’t taste. Don’t - Don’t - Don’t in our children’s most formative years. What have we given them to put on? Telling them to think of every girl like their sister is only a part of the message. If we teach our children avoidance and not friendship, how will the spark of their potential marriages ever ignite? I understand teenage hormones are raging and we have to be there to help our kids put a bridle on them, but part of that is guiding those hormones to properly ordered loves that see more than consumption. That’s hard, I agree, but to only make the other forbidden will have its unintended consequences.

As it turns out, forbidden fruit looks tasty.

Forbidding is much easier than leading.

As murky as the word leadership has become, it simply means showing the way.

The instruction we give our children as they’re developing is to steer clear, but that carries on into their marriages. They’re never really shown what good looks like. Only what to avoid.

Kids need to see that their parents love and like and have affection for each other. They need to see their parents are attracted to and want to hug and kiss each other. They should see them still playfully flirting after years of marriage. They should see forgiveness and the gospel at work in such a way that resentment doesn’t find fertile soil in between two people that claim to love God and love each other.

In other words, the remedy is to show that close affection, tenderness, attraction, and sex are all good, while also instructing that marriage is the only ship that fire of intimacy is not going to burn to a crisp and send to the ocean floor.

I remember the shock of seeing a guy who we used to go to church with post a meme to his wife’s Facebook that was supposed to be an affectionate joke. It completely lacked tenderness and affection, but it was dressed up in animalistic vulgarity. It was crude intimacy. His sentiment could have been communicated without sounding like it was overheard at port between a drunken sailor and the woman he was cavorting with.

Even when desire finally found it’s rightful harbor in marriage, the earlier malformation still shaped how it was expressed. Many Christian men learned how to parry between suppressing and expressing desire in it’s base form, but not how to mature it.

That all starts with rightly thinking about the other.

Start talking to yourself like you believe God’s will and that He will be at work.

Repeat after me: “As a Christian, I don’t have to look at sisters in a consuming, hungry, lustful way.”

I don’t recommend becoming best friends with gals you aren’t married to, because that’s a recipe for emotional connection that’s going to light a forbidden flame. I’m not saying share your deepest vulnerabilities, either. I’m also not saying to be reckless and throw yourself in sensually driven situations. I’m not saying start hanging out with people you aren’t married to behind closed doors with the lights off and curtains drawn. Be wise, for even if you do reign in this fire for yourself, it does not mean all parties around you have. They may still thirst for what you cannot give them, and try to drink from that well anyway.

A quick side note on that situation of external pursuit you aren’t looking for and have guarded against. Ladies, the sirens who have consumption in their hearts don’t give two shakes of a lambs tail about your marriage and will absolutely leverage a chronic “not tonight” to feed their bellies. Guys, if the sirens do lick their lips at you, you must resist. To the husbands and wives, it will take you both fighting together to fight the sirens.

It’s easier said than done to just “stop lusting,” but if you don’t start trying, you’ll never start winning. You’ll also never win if you don’t start rightly ordering your loves and thinking about one another as the whole persons they are. Scurvy will have no place to set in for a life like that.

We are sons and daughters of the King. This is easy to determine His will. His gifts are good and are reserved for marriage. It’s His will for love to be expressed, to know and be known, within marriage. Those we are not married to yes, are brothers and sisters, but first and foremost they are sons and daughters. Should love be kindled, and it very well may, seek the marriage. Once married, you can 100% count on it being God’s will that any other person is not to be entangled intimately with, while still having the fear of God to think of them as His sons and daughters. Guard your mind and take your thoughts captive.

It’s not love and it’s outpourings that need to be avoided, but rather building all hedges around it without showing the good way to the generations that will come behind us.

The most intimate levels of a relationship can only be contained in the deep well of a marriage between a man and a woman, and we should encourage them to flourish in that well.

One for the men…

One for the women…

With a proper view shaped by the words of the wise King Solomon, we can show the way to those who watch us while also avoiding the snares the world may set for us.

Through different intentions, we’ve trained our minds to see the opposite sex almost exclusively through a sexual lens. That has starved those who are waiting for marriage of real relational capacity before our relationships even get off the ground.

For our young ones who would desire marriage, teach them that the gifts within marriage are good. Teach them to wait and anticipate the fire where it will not be destructive, but don’t instruct them in ways that will build distance creating patterns that will carry into their marriages.

For the married folks, it’s not wise to unveil the deepest recesses of your heart with someone you aren’t married to, especially if it’s about your spouse, but if every interaction is filtered through sexualization, we lose sight of the whole person. If you’ve allowed thoughts about your not-spouses to come on board without being taken captive, you have got to cast those thoughts out to see and quit entertaining them.

If you are a Christian, with the help of the Holy Spirit, you can discipline your mind to and take those thoughts captive. You’re not a slave to disordered desires, and there is hope for you. The deep ruts in your mind can be redrawn.

While writing this article, I had a live performance of the late Keith Green playing. His closing prayer hit hard. Pride will keep us from confessing to the Lord in prayer that we are merely vessels made of dust that are held together by the Holy Spirit. We move and have our being in God. There’s nothing we can do on our own and are helpless without God, but in Jesus we are more than conquerors. The name Christian means “little Christ,” and is that what name we bear to the world with our disordered loves?

Your malnourished affections can be rekindled, and your misplaced affections can be tamed. The hotbed that allowed your list scurvy to thrive can be reversed. To say otherwise would make a liar out of God. The question is, who do you believe more: God or yourself?

Stay Anchored and keep fighting the good fight,

~ J.P. Simons ⚓️

“Has no one ever told you about the law of undulation?”

As spirits we belong to the eternal, but as physical beings we also belong to time.

We are always ebbing and flowing, climbing and falling, moving forward and falling back. There will be wins and losses, times of richness and times of dryness.

In these times, do not forget that you are in the middle of a spiritual war.