Downsides to Masturbation You May Not Have Considered
Adapted from Sexual Healing: God’s Plan for the Sanctification of Broken Lives by David Kyle Foster. Please visit his website at http://masteringlife.gospelcom.net/.
1. Masturbation can be the vehicle whereby the inhibited person maintains their propensity to remain self-contained and in need of no one. It deepens the trenches of loneliness, self-pity and self-centeredness.
2. Masturbation is a turning in on one’s self - a narcissistic neurosis that feeds introspection and other dysfunctional directions. This kind of inwardly focused life robs people of the fullness of life that Christ came to give.
3. Masturbation can become a gateway for demonic strongholds to develop. This becomes more and more likely as one delves deeper and deeper into pornography and perverse sexual fantasies.
4. This behavior serves to program the mind to focus on fantasy as the source of pleasure rather than the biblical model of union with one’s spouse. People come to be seen as objects rather than real people. It is an elaborate scheme of the enemy to keep us from learning how to be intimate with our spouse and our God.
5. When someone takes up the practice of masturbation, they are programming themselves to turn to solutions that block or hide problems rather than solve them. This immature life-pattern for problem-solving is highly dysfunctional and is the foundation upon which is laid a lifetime of addictive behavior.
6. Masturbation has a physically addictive side to it that serves to block pain. The chemicals that are released into the brain serve to medicate pain much like any addictive drug. God wants us to bring our pain to Him. He wants us to grow through it and receive the blessing of sharing in the sufferings of Christ.
7. Masturbation is a task master that demands the continual plumbing of new and more perverse depths of lust. On that treadmill, the mind is programmed to more and more highly delineated sexual fantasies which the marriage bed can never match. Normal marital relations become a disappointment and the design for sex thwarted. The body also becomes programmed to achieve release quickly, which serves to frustrate the patterns of healthy sexual intercourse between spouses.
8. A clutching at the genitals by infants is often a manifestation of separation anxiety, but that same behavior in childhood is often a sign of sexual abuse or some other cause for significant internal anxiety in the child. If the child uses a mirror during the act, that is a scenario that can result in homosexual confusion, as the child programs their mind to associate sexual pleasure with the sight of their own body. (In such cases, other factors that lead to homosexual neurosis are probably also present, such as molestation or failure to bond on an emotional level with the same-sex parent). Adolescent experimentation at puberty is normal and not a cause for alarm unless it becomes habitual.
David Kyle Foster is the author of Sexual Healing: God’s Plan for the Sanctification of Broken Lives, as well as other books, and is the Director and Founder of Mastering Life Ministries: an interdenominational, non-profit Christian ministry. It exists in order to target areas of life where people are caught and deceived into unhealthy, dysfunctional life-styles that separate them from the power and blessing of God, and to equip the Church to redemptively minister to such people.
The primary focus of MLM is sexual sin, brokenness, and related issues such as intimacy with the Father, performance orientation, anger management, etc. The tools of this ministry include film, television, and radio as well as seminars and publications that communicate the truth of Jesus Christ. Please visit the Mastering Life Ministries at http://masteringlife.gospelcom.net/.
