Purity Is How You Learn to Love

Let me say the honest thing first: sexual purity — what the church fathers called chastity — is something all of us struggle with. I struggle with it. You struggle with it. We all do. So this is not a lecture from someone standing above you. It is one person talking to another across a table.

We are sexual beings because God made us to need love and to give it — He made us to love and be loved in order to exist and survive. Sex is also how we bring new life into the world. So at certain hours of the day, in certain seasons of the month, you will feel desire simply because you are human. None of that, by itself, is the problem.

Why God asks this of us

God calls us to purity because He wants to teach us how to love. And love, at its root, is about giving. Sit with the difference for a second: you can give without loving — people give for all sorts of cold reasons — but you cannot love without giving. Giving is the one thing love cannot skip. So the moment we make sex only about taking, having, and getting, we quietly drain the love out of it and are left with the shell.

The old writers had a word for romantic desire — eros — and they warned that eros has to be wrapped in agape, self-giving love, or it turns destructive. This is why chastity matters even inside marriage. If you never learn restraint, sex becomes selfish there too; all you end up caring about is being satisfied rather than satisfying the one you love. The discipline is not the enemy of desire; it is what keeps desire from curving in on itself.

So hear this, wherever you are today: you can be more sexually pure today than you were yesterday, and more sexually pure tomorrow than you are today. This is a direction to walk in, not a bar you either clear or crash into. And there are a few things that help us actually walk it.

Some desires you were meant to push against

The first thing to accept is that some desires must simply be resisted. Our culture insists that every strong feeling is healthy and deserves to be acted on. It is not true. There are people you cannot love in that way — a sibling, someone else’s husband or wife, someone you are not able or prepared to commit to fully in marriage. When you find yourself drawn there, you cannot yield to it. God calls you, with His help, to restrain yourself.

“But it feels so good — why should I not do it when it feels this good?” Cocaine feels good, and we still tell people to stay far from it. The intensity of a feeling tells you nothing about whether you should obey it. As C.S. Lewis put it in Mere Christianity, the sheer strength of a desire is no evidence at all that acting on it is wise:

For any happiness, even in this world, quite a lot of restraint is going to be necessary; so the claim made by every desire, when it is strong, to be healthy and reasonable, counts for nothing. Every sane and civilized man must have some set of principles by which he chooses to reject some of his desires and to permit others.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Read that plainly: even ordinary human happiness requires saying no to some desires. Purity is not a strange religious burden laid on top of a normal life. It is the same principle every sane person already lives by, aimed at one more area.

“I’m only human” is not the last word

The second thing is to refuse the excuse, “I can’t help it — I’m only human.” That surrender is a lie we tell ourselves before we have really tried. Lewis compared it to sitting an examination. Faced with an optional question, you weigh whether you can manage it. But faced with a compulsory one, you simply do your best — because a poor answer may still earn something, while leaving the question alone earns nothing at all.

And we attempt “impossible” things all the time, he noticed — in war, in mountain climbing, in learning to skate or swim or ride a bicycle, even in fastening a stiff collar with cold fingers. People constantly do what looked impossible right up until the moment they did it. It is always impossible, as the saying goes, until someone does it.

But purity is not finally a matter of gritted willpower, and Lewis is honest about this. Perfect chastity, like perfect charity, will never be reached by merely human effort. You have to ask for God’s help — and even then it may seem, for a long time, that little or no help is coming. Here he is worth quoting directly:

Never mind. After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again. For however important chastity may be, this process of trying and trying again trains us in the habits of the soul which are more important still.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Read that last part slowly. What God is building in you, through all the falling and rising, may not be the finished virtue yet — it may be the deeper habit of never giving up. And that habit is training your soul in something even more important than the single struggle in front of you.

Watch the company you keep

Third, we have to cultivate some friendships and avoid others. Think of Amnon in the story of Tamar. Imagine if he had a friend who said, “Why torture yourself? Let me help you have her.” Well — that is exactly the friend he had, a cousin who coached him straight into forbidden desire. The people around you will either help you resist or help you rationalize; there is rarely a neutral voice.

And that is precisely what our screens do. Hollywood, television, pornography — they all whisper the same line: it’s just sex, it’s just natural desire, and repressing it will only make you sick and abnormal. But the truth runs the other way. The person seriously pursuing purity is not repressing anything and is in no danger of it; he is becoming more awake, not less. Lewis said it memorably:

Those who are seriously attempting chastity are more conscious, and soon know a great deal more about their own sexuality than anyone else. They come to know their desires as Wellington knew Napoleon, or as Sherlock Holmes knew Moriarty; as a rat-catcher knows rats or a plumber knows about leaky pipes. Virtue — even attempted virtue — brings light; indulgence brings fog.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Sin really is the great challenge of anyone who wants to be holy. But notice the trade Lewis names: indulgence blurs your vision until you can barely see yourself, while even the honest attempt at virtue clears the air. The pure person is not the naive one. He is the one who finally sees his own heart in daylight.

This is not the center

And now the thing we most need to hear, because it keeps us from becoming monsters about all of this. For all the time we have spent on sex, the center of Christian morality is not here. If anyone imagines that Christians treat unchastity as the supreme vice, Lewis says, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad — but they are the least bad of all sins.

The worst pleasures, he pointed out, are entirely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronizing and spoiling other people’s fun, of back-biting, the pleasures of power, of hatred. There are two rivals inside me, competing with the human self I am meant to become — what Lewis called the Animal self and the Diabolical self. Sexual sin belongs mostly to the animal self; it has to do with restraining the body.

The diabolical self is far worse, because it lives in the soul — your eternal, unseen part. When you die, you lose this body, and sins like lust and gluttony fall away with it. But hatred, and bitterness, and a judging spirit travel on with your soul. That, Lewis wrote, is why “a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither.” Hold both halves of that. Do not excuse the sin of the body; but do not imagine that keeping your body clean while your soul fills with contempt has made you safe.

Where to begin

So do not leave here crushed, and do not leave here proud. Leave here pointed in a direction. Wherever you stand today, you can be more pure tomorrow. You do not have to fix it all tonight.

All you really have to do is two things: ask God to help you, and commit yourself to the ordinary disciplines that make restraint possible. Then, after every stumble, ask forgiveness, get up, and try again. That trying, it turns out, is exactly where He is already at work in you.