A Story About Masturbation and Sexual Feelings

When I became a teenager I started to have lots of sexual feelings that I hadn’t had before. I suppose I wasn’t all that different from lots of other boys in their early teens, and was preoccupied with sex. I often fantasised about what it would be like to have sex with the girl I had a crush on, while I masturbated.

The summer I turned fifteen I joined a Christian youth camp. I had actually always believed in God, but I suddenly understood that life was about so much more. I started to read the Bible and listened to Christian preaching. The main difference from before was that I now wanted to be in the presence of Jesus every day, and that I felt like I met Him when I read the Bible and prayed.

I don’t remember hearing any preaching about sex or masturbation, however I noticed that the combination of sexual fantasies and masturbation diverted my focus away from God. I understood that I didn’t actually need to masturbate and that sexual fantasies just hindered me from focussing on the things I really wanted to spend time on. I could still have a crush on someone and sense sexual feelings, but I realised that it was not right to fantasise about sex. I read a book called What’s on Your Mind?, where the author wrote that whatever we don’t fantasise about, we will not do in reality. This book helped me to clean up my thoughts first, and then it was much easier to make the right choices.

A few years later I led a youth club. There were lots of nice girls there who were a little younger than I was. I remember one day a verse almost jumped out of the Bible when I read it, it said that I ought to treat girls as ‘sisters, in all purity’ (1 Timothy 5:2). I thought that I would meet someone I’d marry, but until that day I could look at all the girls as if they were my sisters. If they were sisters then it wasn’t acceptable to fantasise about sex with any of them.

Not all of the sexual feelings disappeared, but I myself could decide what I thought about and what I fantasised about. This helped me when I met the girl I was later to marry. I was really in love, and thought she was truly fantastic, but we could be in each other’s company without me fantasising about having sex with her. We talked about sex and planned a future together, but we waited till we were married before we had sex. We’ve never regretted that choice.

I am so thankful that God showed me that we don’t need to be controlled by sexual feelings, we can choose what we allow ourselves to fantasise about. That way it’s easier to live in a way that we don’t do things that we regret later on. My teenage years were great without sex, and I’m sure that my sex life with my wife is really good because we waited till we were married before having sex.

Written by a man in his forties who is still happily married.