We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

Why did God create me with an uncontrollable sex drive?

Question: Why did God create us with far more of a sex drive than we need for reproduction and far more than we can handle to refrain from sex before and outside of marriage? It seems like a cruel joke!

Answer: Sex is a wonderful, beautiful, God-glorifying gift. It’s not just for reproduction–it’s also for married couples to enjoy and functions as the sign of their life-long covenant.

But it’s true that many find the call to refrain from sex before and outside of marriage to be very challenging. The problem here is not the sex drive itself, but our screwed up priorities. Sex is good, but it’s to be subservient to a far greater good – namely, obeying God. When God isn’t enthroned as the highest priority, sex moves up toward the top of the priority list for many and they experience it as an almost uncontrollable “lord” over their life.

The challenge is not to suppress your sex drive – which you’d probably have little success at doing anyway. The challenge, rather, is to make God the highest priority of your life. Seek first the Kingdom, Jesus said (Mt 6:33). You’ll find that the more you pour yourself into being a disciple of Jesus, the more power you’ll have over your sex drive.

Related Reading

The Point of the Book of Job

The point of the book of Job is to teach us that the mystery of evil is a mystery of a war-torn and unfathomably complex creation, not the mystery of God’s all-controlling will. Given how Christians are yet inclined to look for a divine reason behind catastrophes and personal tragedies, I think it’s a point…

What is the significance of Numbers 14:11?

In the light of the Israelites’ relentless complaining the Lord says to Moses, “How long will this people despise me? And how long will they refuse to believe in me, in spite of all the signs that I have done among them?” The fact that the Lord continued, for centuries, to try to get the…

Topics:

How do you respond to 1 Timothy 4:1–3?

“…in the later times some will renounce the faith by paying attention to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the hypocrisy of liars whose consciences are seared with a hot iron. They forbid marriage and demand abstinence from foods…” New Testament authors considered themselves to be living “in the later times” (e.g. Acts 2:17;…

How can we determine what is and is not “open” about the future?

Question: You believe that the future is partly open. You’re writing has pretty much convinced me this is true, but I’ve still got some serious questions about it. For example, how does anyone determine what part is open and what part is not? If we can’t determine what is and is not open, isn’t the…

Isn’t Faith Inherently Irrational?

Is Faith Inherently Irrational? Many people seem to assume that faith is giving credence to things that don’t make much sense and for which there is little or no evidence. Take the doctrine of the Incarnation, for example. This is the traditional Christian teaching that Jesus is “fully God and fully human.” Now, to many…

6 Things the Church Fathers Can Teach Us about Spiritual Warfare

Image by Christina Saint Marche via Flickr Unlike our thinking today about the source of good and evil in the world, the early church fathers, including Irenaus, Athenagorus, Origen, and others before Augustine, possessed a warfare worldview. Here are 6 ideas that are common in their writings: The Reality of the “World-in-Between” The church fathers assumed…