The Sex Series: Adult Entertainment, Old Flames & Intimacy – Part III

This is the third in a four-part series we are calling “The Sex Series,” where God’s men receive the best from God’s gift of sexual intimacy. Sex is physical, mental and spiritual and God wants us to use this gift in the way He intended it to be enjoyed. This series will help you understand sex through the lens of Scripture. It will teach you to understand what God expects from his sons when it comes to sex and sexual intimacy.

Because I speak everywhere to men, it’s so funny whenever a guy starts off a conversation with me by saying: “What if a person, what if a friend of mine contacted his old girlfriend on Facebook?” “You contacted your old girlfriend on Facebook, I reply, and you are all conflicted because you have a gold ring around your finger”. They look at me like I’m Yoda. It is truly an epidemic.

As I have talked about many times with many men’s groups, when you don’t have the character to meet the reality of your current relationship, and you are not connecting physically in that relationship, then you are wide open to the danger of connecting with someone who doesn’t demand any character from you in order to connect with them mentally, emotionally, spiritually and physically.

Why?

Because it feels better, it’s that simple. When you feel bad, you want to feel better. Anyone who gives a man strokes when he’s struggling to work something out, that’s tough. That’s why when guys travel, they turn on LodgeNet.

Have you guys ever been in a hotel room? It’s “after hours” entertainment, but you are there to attend a Christian men’s conference, but now it’s after hours. If you hear me speak at a Christian men’s conference and things aren’t going well at home, are you more or less open to that? Are you open to that?

Then there’s this whole issue of old girlfriends, old flames. Old flames will help you go down in flames.  Even with new girls who are friends, there are opportunities for issues. Here we have these surveys saying that sexual satisfaction comes most often from one person and monogamy. And yet the caricature is that there is something so much more exciting and so much better outside of that.

Consider this. 73% of men said that if ale birth control was available, they would take it. One last statistic says that 100% of all men throughout history have masturbated at least one time. So, can we just get that on the table: whether your single, married, or married a long time, you don’t have to feel weird.

Let’s talk about me for a second. If I’m going to talk about sex, the truth has to come out. I’m from a Navy brat family of seven, and the son of a third generation alcoholic. My good friend down the block at age 10 had a tree fort in the creek, with a stack of Playboys. That was my first experience with anything sexual.

I have to tell you, and a lot of you guys know exactly what I’m talking about, that first experience of seeing the female form without clothes on was explosive. It’s like crack. At ten years old, it was a magnet pulling me to the “wow, look at this!”  What is that? How do I relate to that? What do I do with that? What’s going on down there? I had never felt that before in my life.

There’s this thing called family formation, especially in a boy’s relationship with his father.  It’s the male relationship in the family that is formative for sons and daughters. The love and approval expressed in the time, talk, and touch that goes from father to son and father to daughter forms their sexual identity.

It’s that sexual identity and the understanding of themselves as male or female, socialized by gender, family relationships, anatomy and modeling, that if it is tenuous then those children are very vulnerable to sexual exploitation and sexual experimentation at a very early age.

Now let’s turn the microscope back on me. Last of seven kids, son of a third generation alcoholic, my Dad was a ghost, there’s the tree fort, Calabasas Creek, Playboys. No wonder that seeing that stuff for the very first time was so explosive for me.

Offers from peers at a very early age to experience sexuality, I’m talking about elementary school here, that’s heavy stuff. But for the vulnerable child who has low time and touch with the father to then have someone offering them a form of intimacy, it’s very attractive. It’s compelling.

Why?  God made us to give and receive love, to experience it. When we are not experiencing love and affirmation, then we are open to experiencing it in an unhealthy way, and that’s my story.

I was out in the neighborhood and very vulnerable. I got a job at age 14 at a liquor store after being exposed to pornography at a very early age. I was very vulnerable. I got a job at Oak Tree Liquors.

Why?  My Dad was the number one customer at Oak Tree Liquors, and that’s why I got the job. How many parents would let their kid work at a liquor store at the age of 14 being an eighth grader? In my family, there wasn’t a healthy family formation.  I’m bagging ice at Oak Tree Liquor.

I’m a Navy brat and I know how to work. I’m feather dusting the beer and wine shelves before Sunday football games. I know how to tally the register, but unfortunately on Sundays the liquor store is only busy prior to football game and at halftime.

It gets really slow in the afternoon. That’s when you have your choice of magazines to “read” in the liquor store, at 14 years of age. Here I am developing sexually. No role model. No mentor. No messaging. I never had the sex talk. I’m very vulnerable. I’m out there. I’m working. I’m being mentored by my peers instead of my parents. I’m having encounters with my peers as a young man.

Culture is chasing me, even in that time. It’s there with pornography and other distortions of sexual expressions.

This leads to sexual experimentation. In the ways that young boys growing into men do it, whether that is masturbating or dating relationships, you have to understand that below the waterline there is a man forming, a man who God has designed and given a gift to express himself sexually, who needs to understand it spiritually and emotionally.

He puts me in a family to help form me, and to see how it’s worked out, but because of sin and brokenness, the family is AWOL and broken. I’m like an orphan out there swimming in an ocean of desires, wants, acceptance and approval.

I get to junior high and high school. It might as well be college in junior high school. Why?  God made me to give and receive love. He has made me a sexual creature. I’m developing anatomically and biologically with a lot of testosterone.

But I’m being mentored by my peers and by culture instead of by Christ and my father. And so, that leads to other encounters. Not because I wanted the sex, I just wanted the intimacy.

That’s something fundamental that you have to understand as we approach this whole topic of sex. It’s the difference between intimacy and sex. I just want to know that somebody cares about me.

The fact that I had to do it in a certain way or had to experience it externally and internally in a certain way is not as consequential as the fact that God has built you to give and receive love. He wants you to experience healthy expressions of that until your last heartbeat.

Click here if you would like to read more from Kenny Luck’s Series Fantasy Island

Kenny Luck is the founder of Every Man Ministries and the men’s pastor at Saddleback Church.  His 20th book – SLEEPING GIANT: No Movement of God without Men of God – is the proven blueprint for men’s ministries, and was recently released through Broadman & Holman Books.

Watch and read more of Kenny’s teaching here at EveryManMinistries.com.