Every Young Man's Battle: Stategies for Victory in the Real World of Sexual Temptation: The Every Man Series Read Online Free PDF

time
    and a different era, and getting married at sixteen today is no more realistic
    than beating Shaquille O’Neal in a game of one-on-one. It’s just
    not going to happen.
    So you’ve been dealt some lousy cards. Not
    only do teens go through puberty sooner, but they’re caught in a system
    of education that keeps them in school through high school and often four years
    of college. Even when you finally graduate after sixteen years of schooling,
    you’re expected to postpone marriage even further while you take a few
    years “getting settled” into your career. And during all that time,
    you’re expected to remain as celibate as a castaway until the day you say
    “I do.”
    “It’s definitely weird,” says
    Danny. “I feel like God made me a sexual being, but He’s asking me
    to live as though I’m not.” We feel for you, Danny, and for the
    countless young men who share your frustration. Some even claim that in these
    changed times God no longer expects them to live by His old standards of
    purity, because He never intended this postponement of marriage in the first
    place.
    We hate to pile on here, but the postponement of marriage
    isn’t the main cause, or even the worst result, of this change. The most
    dangerous assault on our sexual purity from this cultural change is our new
    view of ourselves and our teen years. A couple of hundred years ago, teenagers
    who married continued to work on the family farms or in the family trade.
    People in those days saw no distinction between the teen years and the adult
    years. Young people grew up quickly in those days because they had to! You
    weren’t given a year to go backpacking through Europe, and you knew that
    the decisions you made today would affect your tomorrows.
    Likewise,
    the Bible doesn’t refer to the teen or adolescent years as we think of
    them. Once you reached thirteen years or so, God considered you a man. You were
    treated in that manner by parents and by your elders.
    We’ve lost
    this mind-set, and it’s killing our purity. These days, teens are often
    treated like kids. Even if you’re in graduate school, you can still hear
    others saying that you’re “not ready” to get married.
    They’re usually thinking financially or maybe emotionally, and maybe
    they’re right. But you’re certainly ready to have sex!
    The
    truth is, as young men we often treat ourselves as kids. If we viewed ourselves
    as men like God does, we’d always view our sexual decisions today as
    having an impact on our tomorrows. But we usually don’t do that. There
    remains this huge gap between the
physical
ability to do sexual things
    (which happens during puberty) and the
legal
ability to do sexual
    things (at least in God’s eyes), which is ours only at marriage. Facing
    this enormous chasm, it’s easy to view the physical and the legal as two
    thoroughly separate realms. In other words, you think that what you do during
    the teens is completely different from—or has no effect on—what
    happens during your adult years.
    Nothing could be further from the
    truth.
S TILL H OOKED ON
    THE B IFURCATION M YTH ?
    Bifurcation.
Do you know what that word means? Well, neither did
    I (Steve) until I learned it from a dentist. Here’s what happened. One
    day I sat down across the table from my friend Shane at a cafeteria on the
    Baylor University campus. As we talked, I bit down hard on a chicken-fried
    steak, one of my favorite meals. Shane instantly heard what I felt, and he
    groaned. I did as well. One of my molars apparently chomped into a piece of
    metal lodged in that steak. Pain and embarrassment flushed over me as I spit
    out a sharp, shiny chunk of steel.
    “That must have hurt,”
    said my friend.
    “Oh, you got that right!” I moaned.
    “I really did a number on my tooth.”
    “Do you think
    you need to see a dentist?”
    “I hate dentists, but I’m
    hurting so bad…”
    A short while later my dentist pried open
    my mouth and noticed I was