When You Lack Desire for Your Spouse

Josh  
Hey, good people. Hey, today I want to talk about when you find yourself lacking sexual desire for your spouse, not I mean for a night, or even necessarily a week or so, when there's kind of a repeated pattern of you feeling like you don't want to have sex with your spouse, a lot of times when people are recovering from a porn addiction, or compulsive porn use the evidence, or the kind of the most visible, or most obvious kind of culprit of why you might lack desires, because I mean, two that are often cited. One is you can find this kind of model images in porn, right? Like, if you find just your type, and just the body type, and, you know, whatever. And if you haven't found it, you just keep swiping right, swipe right, swipe right. And the other is that relationally it's just easier. You know, there's, there's no, there's no need to work through conflict, there's no arguing there's no relational intimacy required. It's just, you know, you just dive in and feel the sexual pleasure. But those are, those are both true, but those are really surfacey answers. So when you find yourself lacking desire for your, for your spouse, I would invite you to look somewhere else, I'm gonna invite you to look at how you feel about yourself. So instead of kind of thinking, Okay, the reason I lacked desire for my, my wife, for example, is because she's just not as sexually appealing. At age, whatever, after however many kids then image is important might be, and instead of going there with your brain, I would encourage you to look at like, well, how attracted do I feel like I am? How good do I feel about myself? That is usually more of the the underlying reason why you lack desire for your spouse, then your spouse's. It's really it has to do with you. So let me unpack that a little bit. Let me and I want to go back to Genesis two, like I often do, where Adam and Eve were together, they were naked, and they felt no shame, and they desired each other. And somebody said, Well, yeah, you know, because they were, they had perfect bodies. That was before the fall, there's before aging, there's before any of that stuff, right? Sure. But I suggest to you that that shame, being shamed free, has less to do with the the shape of your body, or perfect athleticism or youth than it does with something in the interior of you. So, case in point, we need to think back when you were younger. Think back when you maybe some of you listening are younger, and you can answer this for yourself, but like, are you free from shame? When you look in the mirror? Are you free from shame? When you get ready in the morning? Do you feel free from shame? When you stand in front of a group of people? Do you feel free from shame with your clothes on for example? Do you feel free from shame, when you buy that great new outfit, and you get that great new haircut, and you've been working out and you feel like you look great? Are you free from shame, you might experience less shame in those moments than you would if you roll out a bed and you had bed head and bad teeth. And all of a sudden, there's somebody you care about at the door. But you're not free from shame. I'd suggest even the fact that we spend so much time in front of the mirror, or that we spend some time thinking about we were where we spend so much time at the gym. Those are often indicators that we actually feel a great amount of shame. And we're trying to do things to cover up our shame, or trying to do things maybe to eradicate our shame but, but if we live long enough, you find you're not really eradicating shame by working on how you look on the outside. So when Adam and Eve looked at each other naked and unashamed, again, I think it had less to do with how they appeared to each other, and more to do with the the interiority of their of themselves, their own capacity in in on the inside, to feel good. And by good, I don't mean they felt well, healthy. Positive, if it was the follow six to lead specifically, what I mean is they felt interiorly interiorly as they looked each other, they felt within themselves, like they were bringing a good gift to the other like they were a good gift to the other. So when when Adam and when you say that Adams naked, he's and God has just put him to sleep. He wakes up. And he's created this woman for Adam. And Adam sees her and recognizes that God has made a help helper for him. And by the way, that word helper does not mean subservient. It really means somebody who's his his equal, helping him. And that's important because he looks at her knees like Wow, she's amazing. But there's no hint and Adam as as much as he sees her as other than he is as much as he sees her as having good that he does not have and he did right. He definitely felt that because she's a woman. He does not have everything she has. But nonetheless, as he looked at her, he he felt within himself that he was a good gift for her. Otherwise, he would feel shame. Likewise, When she looked at him, she saw that he brought things to the relationship, that there were things that were true about him that were not true of her. He was a man, she was willing that she could not be a man. And yet she felt within herself that what she was bringing into the earth, bringing to Him was good, it was a good gift. That interior sense of goodness in ourselves, is where freedom from shame comes. And when we experience shame in ourselves, it makes sex with our spouse more difficult. Now, interestingly, that union that closeness relationally, sexually, emotionally with our spouse can also be healing thing, when it comes to shame, can be a place where we experience healing, but only if as we open that interior part of ourselves to experience the other experiencing us as a good gift. So when a husband is drawn to porn, most often it's because of his own sense of shame inside those women won't reject Him, there's not the risk of rejection there. It's not because they look better than his wife. It's because he doesn't believe himself to be a good gift for her. And so he goes searching. Now we can say something about the attractiveness of the people, he searches for sure. Because their attractiveness is a it's an invitation, it's a, it provides the illusion of goodness in them. And if somebody who appears good out there seems to desire me or, or there's even that, that illusion of that that false intimacy that's there because they're, they're unclosing themselves, they're giving me giving themselves to me sexually, even though they're really not. But on camera, it seems like that my brain might my heart kind of feel some sense of that. If somebody who appears good. And that's kind of that's what the illusion of attraction, that attraction is the illusion of goodness. Because it doesn't necessarily mean there's goodness there, in the way that we that we ultimately mean. But when I experienced that person to be attractive, something in me says they're good. And if their goodness, if that person who's good wants me, and it seems to somehow feed my sense of that I must be good to them, I'll make sense I hope makes sense. We don't really ultimately want to be attractive, what we want is to be good, we want to be good. And that in a sense of, of I am a good offering into the world. What I bring to the world, however I look, whatever I do for a living, however much I make. However many kids I have, whether they're married or single, I want to know, deep in the interior part of the deepest parts of me that I am a good gift in the world, that it is good that I'm here, that others are blessed because of my presence, that the creation is blessed because of my presence, that God is happy that I'm here. It's good that you're here. That's what we're longing for. And in the marriage bed, when we when we fear that we're not a good gift, we carry shame and feel like I'm not a good gift, that can actually be a deterrent to wanting to have sex. Because it's hard to it's hard to expose yourself to someone, it's hard to open yourself up to someone when you when you're concerned, they're going to experience you to not be a good gift. That is shame. So let's come back to what we're doing here today. If you find yourself lacking, if you find yourself pursuing sexual integrity, and you're lacking sexual desire for your spouse, stop focusing on them, criticizing them thinking If only they would look better. If only they would, whatever familiar, they're younger, if only they would get back in shape. If only they would treat me better. If only they would dot dot, dot, dot dot. Take your focus off of that. And start focusing on having Jesus restore your own sense of dignity, your own sense of goodness, that your your shame would be born on the body of Jesus, so that he could restore to you your sense of of worth, as one who is made in the image of God, and who is in fact, designed by God to be and becoming more and more a good gift for your spouse. And as you embody that and carry that in the interior of who you are. More and more and more you will find actually that your desire for your spouse grows.

Josh  
And it won't necessarily be like the desire that you felt for porn. Because for porn, you weren't really bringing yourself as a good gift to those to the others. But in your marriage, you bring yourself as a good gift. So part of the desire that you will experience for your spouse is not a selfish, greedy, lustful desire. But it's the desire that is love. It's the desire to bring the good gift of yourself as an offering as a good valuable treasure that you're giving to your spouse. And in other words, you will have that that same interior capacity like Jesus did to say this is my body given for you And he will say that with full confidence that that's actually a very good gift. How can that happen? Through Christ through Christ, He gave Himself to you. For you, this is my body given for you, because he saw your worth saw your value and because he was fully confident, and rightfully so that he was a good gift, the ultimate gift in whose image your made to Jesus, would you grant us to know ourselves as you do? Restored us our true goodness, Lord, redeem us to be truly good, that we know ourselves to be a good gift that we can bring to our husbands to our wives. I pray this now in the name of Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Amen.