Why Self-Gratification is not good. Another View point (Adults only)

I had this idea while eating some Phu (Vietnamese oup http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pho) with my wife the other day.  We were talking about our intimacy together (we do that often) and as the conversation went, She made a comment concerning that I would be the only one that would touch her, and that included herself!  At the moment I didn’t think much of it.  But later in that day, as I was reading the Chapter on Lust in “The Exemplary Husband” by Stuart Scott (A book I’ve read many times), something hit me in the face.

I read the quoted passage from Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount about lusting after a women being adultery, and that’s when I had the Epiphany!  My wife should be on the only one to arouse my body!  And that includes me too!!!  Wow, isn’t that what self-gratification is, my self arousing myself!

Why is that so bad?

Love!

Love does not seek it’s own, at the expense of another.  And this is why it is wrong.  If I use my own hand to arouse myself then I will find that my wife’s hand will not suffice!  And man that speaks to me.  My wife is to have me, and the Apostle Paul spoke of this in 1st Corinthians chapter 7 saying, “Men, your bodies are not your own, but your wife’s.”  She is the one who has entered into a all exclusive covenant with me.  And that means that not even I am to replace her right over my body.  So there is a cost to self gratifying.  The cost is to my wife.  As I self gratify (or visa versa) I am  finding satisfaction in another, though it be me.

The consequences to this are horrible.  You don’t want to have sex with your wife anymore, because you can do it better!  In a sense, you become married to yourself!  Sex with your wife will not be about togetherness but simply about getting off.  This leads to making your wife (or visa versa) do things, “your way” as to reach that satisfaction you get with yourself.  I wrote in my book, Porn and A Pastor, that those of us into pornography would rather watch porn than be with our spouses anyway.  It’s one of the saddest sentences in the book for sure.  Countless actresses in the pornography industry can understand what I’m talking about.  How many have dated men that continue to self gratify though there dating a “porn star?”

Having my wife be the one who touches me means no more adultery with myself.  The Apostle of Christ, Paul, said, “Your body is not your own, you were bought with a price, therefore glorify God with your body.”  Jesus is pictured as our husband who has paid the bridal price for us.  The Church is not to be aroused on it’s own, by itself, by it’s members, but we are to excited by our bride, we are His.  And Jesus does not touch himself but is aroused by the love of his bride for Him!   He hears the cry’s of his bride in a world that has rejected them.  Jesus sympathizes with His bride.  He cry’s with us and moves through us.  Simply put, Jesus is moved by us.  Before Paul was a Christian, we was a hater of the Church.  And during his conversion, Jesus said, “why do you persecute me?”  Was Paul really persecuting Jesus…well, in a sense no!  But in another sense, he was persecuting the Church, who is the bride of Jesus.  And Jesus is in His bride. He is one with his bride. He feels what his wife feels.  All this said, it makes the point that the relationship between husband and wife in covenant with one another means there are affections that each other are to exclusively have with themselves.  Nothing is to get in the way or take the place of the other.  I am not to commit adultery with another.  And that means committing adultery with me!

We are not to be dead ends of energy expelled, but to be a conduit which love is to flow through to one another!  Masturbation is the dead end with all my own energy focused on me.  Love is giving of my energy to my beloved.  Self-gratification is like the Dead sea, it has an input source but no outflow, where as love is receiving and giving.

Bottom line;  It’s time for me to stop touching myself!  That is something I can steel away from my wife.  This is one way we can usurp the authority of our wife having over our bodies.

She alone is the one who should touch my body in an affectionate way.  For some of us men it might mean that you need to stay away from other women, but for some others it means that we need to stay away from ourselves!

It is certainly time for us to stop hearing the rhetoric that masturbation will help you in your sex life because you will know how to tell your partner how you like to be pleased.  In getting something at CVS I saw 3 magazines with this idea in them.  But what happens if your “partner” can no longer please you the way you want to be pleased?  Then what?  Is the relationship over?  Is the answer to just go back to pleasing yourself?

These magazines are the Newspeak of Ingsoc in today’s world.  (See Orwell’s 1984, Newspeak is the institutionalization of falsehood on a systematic basis)

What a shallow view of love we have been taught.  I want a better way.  Do you?