BLESSED ARE THE PURE IN HEART
Around a year ago I married one of the most wonderful men in the world.
The very first thing that attracted me to my husband was the way he looked at and treated other people and the way he looked at and treated me. When he looked at people he saw the person. He never looked at me like I was an object that could give him pleasure, and he never looked past other people either. He simply saw and appreciated each person as a joy and a gift, regardless of if they could do anything for him or not. Even past the initial “making a good first impression” he continued acting this way, and always has.
Why was this so insanely attractive? Shouldn’t that be the norm? It should, but sadly it’s not. I was 30-years-old on my wedding day. In my eleven years of adulthood waiting to meet my husband, I saw a lot of the private lives of Christian young adults. It’s not pretty.
Some were young men interested in me, some were men my friends were seeing, and some were young women I knew. They came from multiple denominations. Some were home schooled, some private Christian schooled, and some public schooled. All were conservative Church-going Christians, all active in their church communities and the Pro-Life movement, all said they wanted to get married and have lots of children, and all had good reputations among the Christians around them. Yet at the bare minimum all of them were regularly watching pornography, and very often involved in other sexual perversions as well. Rarely was this how their parents had raised them! What happened?
As a teenager, I never read all of the popular purity books. I knew to wait and respect myself and others, so why did I need to? Throughout my twenties I was so discouraged about meeting a good man I started reading some. They were encouraging and very good as far as they went—but then there was a certain lack. And that same lack in formation I noticed was resulting in some serious misunderstandings in these young adults.
Namely that: Chastity is the same thing as abstinence. Purity is what you haven’t done. Experiencing any sexual desire is always bad if you’re not married so you need to repress them. In short, a very “list mentality.” This ignorance reached its peak in horror stories I heard from young men who went to their pastors seeking help and advice in overcoming the sin of pornography. These pastors (again from multiple denominations) told them once they were married the problem would go away. So they married and of course the problem did not. Instead, it got worse, hurting their wives, their children, and their marriages horribly. One of these young men was divorced within a year.
The common theme in these errors is that it’s focused on your behavior, not your heart. Now yes, behaving purely is highly important! But purity does not start with behavior. If you think it does, you won’t actually be pure or know how to correctly order your desires, and then behaving purely will feel next to impossible. Behavior is only a manifestation of what’s inside. Jesus did not say “Blessed are the pure in behavior,” He said “Blessed are the pure in heart.”- Matthew 5:8. We have to start with the heart.
If we don’t we’ll completely misunderstand what lust is. Lust is a disorder of the heart. Remember, satan cannot create. Only God is the Creator. The devil can only twist, pervert, and disorder what God has created. The goal is to reorder our hearts back to God’s original design. “Moses allowed you to divorce because of your hardness of heart, but in the beginning it was not so.”- Matthew 19:8. “I will take away your stony hearts and give you natural hearts.”- Ezekiel 11:19.
To co-operate with Christ’s grace in reordering our hearts back to God’s original design “in the beginning” we need to clearly understand the difference between God’s order and satan’s disorder. The world uses the words “lust” and “sexual desire” interchangeably, and now sadly even many Christians no longer know the difference either. I learned as a teenager that “lust is disordered sexual desire” but it was years before I had any idea how to explain what that meant, or how to quickly recognize the difference between that and pure desire. Even in most devout Christian homes and communities there are millions of teenagers and young adults who desperately need someone to clarify the matter.
In this scenario the person is the end and sex is merely the means to that end. A lover is not desiring “sex” in and of itself. A lover is desiring a person. The person has captivated his heart and soul.
Now because God created us as sexual beings, He gave us sexuality as our human way of giving ourselves to another and uniting to another. So when you love and desire a person, you have passionate sexual desires—because you desire to belong to each other, to be one with each other. Sex —including all of the “chemistry”— is the means to the end: coming closer and more united to your beloved, so much so that this love overflows and multiplies into the creation of another beautiful human being.
With this as your goal, how much pleasure you may be getting out of it is not all that important to you. You do desire and appreciate the experience of pleasure, you desire to share this delight with your beloved, and most of all, far more than gaining any pleasure for yourself, you desire to give delight to the one you love. So while the pleasure is there and it's great, sure, it's merely icing on the cake. The deep and intimate joy you have from union with your beloved is what matters and what lasts, long after the act and its accompanying pleasures are over.
And what is love's opposite?
In this scenario the person is the means to an end, and sexual pleasure is the goal. If the person doesn't stimulate enough physical pleasure in your body you are disappointed and disgusted—this object failed in it's job! If this person refuses an action which may give you pleasure you become angry and highly indigent that this person dared to deny you your lustful due! When the initial rush of physical excitement tapers off and calms down, you are now bored and need to move on to someone or something else. If this person expects non-physical time and attention, or sacrifices from you—like you actually do care about this person!—you become impatient and feel imposed upon. The selfishness and callousness trained into someone through lustful habits always spills over into how they treat other people in every other area of life as well.
Sadly, how many relationships and even marriages match this description? Can we wonder that so many marriages fail? Often a person may not be completely lost to lust. They do have genuine love for a person, it's just muddied with a lot of lust too. So when life is great you're a good lover. But when the normal stress and trials of life wear you down until you’re weak and tired, then the lust in your heart gains the upper hand and hits the person you love between the eyes.
Look at the first scenario “Love.” In this diagram, sex and abstinence are completely interchangeable because sex is not the goal—loving your beloved is.
What if you're not married? Or suppose you are married, but one person has health issues flaring up at the moment? What if someone just had surgery? What if someone is simply exhausted? What if he's sick and needs his sleep? What if it's a hard time of the month for her and she just needs space? Or suppose there are complications during a pregnancy or right after, and for the baby's safety, maybe even the mother's safety, you have to temporarily abstain? What is really love then?
If you really love, sex and abstinence can be swapped in and out with ease. If loving this person is the goal, what is best for them always comes first. Sometimes sex is best for your marriage, and at specific times abstinence is best for your marriage (and always best for the person when you're not married). When the person is the goal, the good of the person is never interchangeable with anything—only how best to love them in that moment can be changed.
Now look at “Lust.” In this diagram, what's interchangeable? Yep. The person. If that person doesn't satisfy you, or comfort you, or thrill you enough at the moment, and your goal is pleasure, you will reach for something else—porn, masturbation, fantasy, sex toys, another person…
And guess what? As long as sexual pleasure, comfort, or satisfaction is your goal, no person will ever be enough for you. Lust is never satisfied. It can't be. The reason lust can never be satisfied is because you were not made for pleasure, you were created to love. Sexual pleasure is a beautiful gift God has given us, but it can never bear the brunt of being your goal. That's not what it was made for, which is why lust is disordered. The person and the pleasure are in the wrong places; they are out of order. As long as you're chasing an idol—sex—instead of your vocation—to love another person the way God does—you can never be happy, never satisfied, and never be fulfilled. You will always need “something more." "The best way to ruin pleasure is to make it your goal.” - J. Budziszewski
This is where the education of many Christian youth has tragically failed them. If you don’t understand the difference between the two you won’t know how to order your desires correctly, and then well-meaning but unprepared young Christians are shocked to find themselves so seriously tempted. So they just try to white-knuckle their way through temptations, and either live in miserably repressive depression, or keep falling into sin and hate themselves. Likewise, people who have only ever heard the “list mentality” of purity don’t understand how lust can run rampant inside of marriage. When Jesus said “whoever looks at a woman lustfully has committed adultery with her in his heart”- Matthew 5:28, he did not add “if the woman is not his wife.” No, that goes for all women, including the woman he married.
Since lust is never satisfied, it is incredibly naive to think, as sadly many people do, that marriage can cure a masturbation, fantasy, or porn addiction. That is impossible, because your heart is still disordered. Far from marriage miraculously curing your lust, you will use your spouse and hurt the person you want to love more than you can possibly imagine. Because not only will the sin continue, but you will treat your spouse with that same lust instead of love.
Marriage was NOT created as a remedy for lust. Marriage prefigures the Fall when lust did not exist. Marriage and the marital act were made to unify and strengthen the bond of the spouses to help them learn to love and serve each other more and more, and then to create new life they love and serve together. Using your spouse as an alternative to sin is not love! That trains you in the opposite of love!
Young women are often told her boyfriend’s/fiance’s/husband’s sexual sin “has nothing to do with you.” Yes, she’s not responsible for it, it is not because she is “not enough” for lust is never satisfied with anyone—not even God and God is always there for everyone and more than enough. A lustful person is primarily saying “God, I need more than You.” However, while his problem is never “on her” it has everything to do with her. It’s dangerous to compartmentalize your life and say “my sexual sin is over here, and you're over here, and I have this problem but I really love you.” Yes, you may want to love someone very much, but are you capable of it?
The person and the addiction can not be compartmentalized because THE PERSON IS THE COMMON FACTOR. The lustful heart engaging in these sins is the exact same heart trying to love their spouse. How your spouse behaves away from you is how he or she will behave with you. If a man lusts after women on the computer, he will lust after his wife. If he treats his own body as a sex toy, he will treat her body as a sex toy. If lust is in his heart when he's with his addiction, it will still be there when he gets in bed with you. To treat, or even view, a person as a means to an end does violence to the very essence of the other. It’s saying in the harshest way possible “it’s all about me, so I have the right to use you. You’re an object to be used for my pleasure. You’re not a person made only to be loved.” When it comes from someone who claims to love you, worst of all your own spouse, the pain and betrayal is unimaginable.
So if two “well-behaved” (at least publicly) lustful-hearted people get married (or one such person marries a pure-hearted person) they think everything’s fine because they’re married now. But all of the lust comes pouring out and makes your marriage a living hell. Because before they got married, the person living in lust was already living in hell.
That is the exact opposite of what we want for our children! This is not how future generations will reclaim their marriages and families from the devil!
What should we do? Here is some of the best advice I have ever heard from parents who have successfully raised their children to love purely, and also from others who successfully helped young people and young marriages reject and recover from lust.
First, if you find out your child is falling into any sexual sin, or you think they are and need to gain their confidence, the first words your child needs to hear are “I love you.” All sexual sin, and especially the porn industry so tragically prevalent today, has told your child that people are garbage. Literally – lust says a person is to be used as an object for whatever you can get out of them and then thrown away. Your child feels like garbage, and now hates him or her self, both because they know they messed up, and because of the lies sexual degradation has pounded into their wounded hearts.
Please do not yell at your child trying to get through to them and impress on them the gravity of the situation. You can not scare your child away from sin. Sin is far scarier than you could ever be, so if sin hasn’t scared them away nothing you can do ever will. All you will do is re-enforce the lie satan has sold them that they are worthless. That will only encourage them more into sin, one for the momentary comfort, and two, because why should they fight to get themselves out of this sinful life if they are just worthless garbage anyway?
For the sake of your child’s soul, stay calm. Fall apart in front of a trusted mentor instead. If your child can see you are angry, make sure you make it very clear that “I am angry with satan and the world for lying to you, for exposing you to this, for convincing you to do something that hurt you. I am angry because I love you and you deserve so much better than this.” The first and by far most important thing you need to impress on your child is that they are unconditionally, immensely sacred and valuable, and that they are unconditionally loved. Every word, tone, and gesture from you needs to radiate this truth back into their broken and aching souls.
You need your child to trust your unconditional love for them in order for them to give you their confidence so that you can be their accountability. For any kind of addictive sin, once it’s out in the open and you have accountability, overcoming that sin just got a million times easier. Help your child discern when they are most likely to fall, such as late at night when they’re alone and tired, and set up restrictions and structures to help them avoid temptation, especially when they’re at their weakest. Teach them that the humility to run from compromising or tempting situations is one of the most courageous things they can do. Self-knowledge with the humility to admit I am weak is incredibly powerful, and satan loses power over a truly humble person.
This level of humility before God also means completely clearing out all compromises with impurity. You can not win the battle for purity if you hang out with impure friends, parade badly dressed women across the TV, “overlook” movies, books, or music which condone and normalize bad behavior, use bad language, and otherwise constantly desensitize yourself to the dignity of the human person. The constant reference to the impure constantly puts the temptation and lustful thoughts back in your mind. Adults should have the sense to reject this so-called entertainment, and no child should ever have to deal with this constant onslaught of “overlooked” impurity. Don’t ever fall for the trap that “they’re too young to understand; they’re not paying attention.” That’s true of a two-month-old, not a two-year-old. Little children pay dearly every day for this carelessness.
The goal, of course, of every good parent is to protect their child from too much internet access or compromising situations before they are exposed to pornography or fall into sinful behavior with their peers. That’s the first step. And then we have to teach them how to avoid the near occasion of sin for themselves and instead fill their hearts with genuine love and the habit of true virtue. Then they will be properly prepared for the day when they are no longer minors and have to take full responsibility for every area of their lives.
Fleeing temptations includes keeping very busy. For all young people and young women especially, they need lots of strong healthy emotional connections and relationships to keep them from desperately “looking for love in all the wrong places.” Young men especially need healthy physical outlets, since sexuality has a physical urge. Some of the best fathers I’ve ever known in raising strong and holy sons, all say the same thing – when their sons temptations get hard, they take them to go work out. Hard, exhausting workouts. Apparently that works well. If a young man needs help very fast and doesn’t have time for a long work out, he takes a freezing cold shower. According to these young men this ancient practice of mortification completely quells the temptations in seconds.
This is all practical advice. In the spiritual realm, obviously pray for your children, but don’t limit your arsenal in spiritual warfare to words alone. All good Christian parents know to pray for their children and to teach their children to pray. But one of the most powerful forms of prayer does not get talked about in the Christian world very much anymore. Fasting. Jesus Himself said that some kinds of demons cannot be defeated “except by prayer and fasting.”- Matthew 17:21. Jesus fasted, and clearly expected us to follow His example, for He did not say “if” you fast, but “when you fast.”- Matthew 6:16.
Christian homes need to bring back fasting as a regular weekly practice. Obviously in proper moderation to the health and age of each person, and most of all for the right reasons. The only difference between fasting and dieting is why you do it. Teach your children to fast as a prayer of love to God. Jesus sacrificed everything for us, so now we respond with our small act of love saying “I will offer this little sacrifice to You because You love me so much and are so good now I love You too.”
This teaches children many things. First, that love requires sacrifice. Where there is no sacrifice there is no love. But true love makes us happy and willing to sacrifice anything for the good of the beloved – just like Christ did for His bride. It also teaches that when you love, you give up the “good” or pleasure you feel like you want at the moment for the sake of the true and lasting good which you want most of all. It prepares children to understand that chastity is not so much saying no as it is saying yes to real love. Most importantly, fasting trains them to actually do it. If you want your children to be capable of self-discipline in sexuality, they have to be in the habit of disciplining their physical senses for years. As a famous chastity speaker once said “How can you say no to pornography if you can’t say no to a doughnut?”
Explain very clearly to your children the difference between lust and desire (use my illustration if it helps). Help them realize that their desires are good, their bodies are good, and they are good. The only reason disordering sexual desires and misusing sexuality is so bad is because it destroys something so very good. Teach them that all behaviors have consequences – that there is no such thing as “no one’s getting hurt.” Above all, they are the ones getting hurt, because sin is not just the behavior. It rewires your brain and your heart until you are no longer capable of giving love or receiving love.
Raise your children to view each person with love as a precious, undeserved gift to the world – regardless of what that person can do for them, and also no matter how that person is living. Don’t bash or look down on people living immorally. Yes, explain to your children (at the right age) why this behavior is so dangerous and wrong, but view and speak about the person with love and compassion that this poor person does not understand and is not respecting their own greatness, the sacredness of their body, their beauty, and their objective unconditional worth and glory as the image of God.
Always, always, talk about people in the opposite of lust. Lust sees sexual gratification as a right, so you take whatever you want. Purity sees the person; a unique, unrepeatable, beautiful child of God who exists for his or her own sake, not yours, and therefore can never be anything but an amazing undeserved gift, not a right. Only an object can be a right, never a person, and therefore never the gift of a person’s sexuality. Even after thirty years of marriage, intimacy with your spouse, even the very presence of your spouse, is still an amazing undeserved gift from your spouse and God, that should be received with an overwhelming sense of gratitude, reverence, and awe.
Jesus said “blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.”- Matthew 5:8. Purity of heart gives you the ability to see God, to fully see God’s image in another human being, and then honor and love them accordingly. I now know what it’s like to have a spouse who looks at and treats you this way. If every young adult and teenager knew what kind of a marriage is possible and why sin destroys that, they would be running after purity and making all of the greatest sacrifices in the world to obtain this. As parents, the best we can do is help them to see this, and give them the protection, the practices, and the understanding to run after God, virtue, and true love for themselves.
SARAH BECNEL
Denham Springs, Louisiana, USA
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In September of 2024 Sarah was incredibly blessed to marry Kurt, and they are further blessed to be expecting their first little one in November of 2025.
Sarah is also the author of four amazing historical novels on the revolutionary war, the
JIM WINFIELD series.
UNDER SEIGE
WITH THE ENEMY
A HIGHER ALLEGIANCE
WEST OF THE EMPIRE
I have read a number of classics on the revolutionary war, but I enjoyed these more than them all. These historical novels will hold you spellbound but also teach you valuable history regarding the freedom of our nation. I highly recommend them.
You can order them from Amazon and here is the link: