18/08/2022
Kristen Clark .jpg)
is married to her best friend, Zack. She is the co-founder of GirlDefined Ministries and author of Girl Defined, Love Defined, and Sex, Purity, and the Longings of a Girl’s Heart. She is passionate about promoting the message of God-defined womanhood through blogging, speaking, mentoring young women, and hosting Bible studies in her living room. In the end, she’s just a fun-lovin’ Texas girl who adores all things outdoors and drinks coffee whenever possible.
With tears streaming down my face, I sat alone in my room. As a 22-year-old Christian single woman, I was battling against my flesh and the sexual temptations in my mind…again. I wanted to be pure. I wanted to fight against the lust in my life. I wanted to honor God. But it felt too hard. It felt almost impossible.
I’ve been married now for six years, but I was single for 24 years prior to that. I remember all too well the unfulfilled sexual desires that I had during that season of life. Moments of tears and struggle like the one above were normal for me. There were many times when I viewed my sex drive as a curse. I wished my desires would just go away all together and then reappear when I got married.
As much as I wanted to throw in the towel and ditch God’s plan for sex, I decided to search God’s Word for hope and answers. Over time, God’s Word helped me understand that my sexual desires weren’t a curse, but a blessing. His word also reminded me that He would give me the grace to handle my desires until marriage happened-if it happened (2 Corinthians 12:9).
If you’re single right now, your sex drive might feel like a curse to you as well. I want to share with you some of the things that helped me handle my sexual desires as a single woman, and I hope they’re encouraging to you as well.
1. Understand God’s Design for Sex
God created sex and it’s a beautiful thing within the covenant of marriage. God also created us to be sexual beings with desires and longings for sexual intimacy. We are sexual beings from the moment we’re born. We don’t become sexual beings once we get marriage. However, God’s design for sex is good and beautiful only when enjoyed in the right context.
Healthy sexual desires are not wrong or sinful. They’re actually 100% normal. It’s normal for you, as a single person, to look forward to and be excited about enjoying God’s gifts of sexual intimacy within marriage. However, these good desires can quickly become sinful if we turn them into lust, or use them with the wrong person at the wrong time.
God created sex to be a binding force between a husband and wife to unite them as one in marriage (Mark 10:8).
This covenantal seal also comes with intentional blessings such as physical pleasure and the opportunity to bring new life into the world.
As Christians, we must have a strong understanding of God’s holy design for sex if we’re going to handle our own sexual desires in the right way. I encourage you to another post I wrote called “Why I Chose to Save Sex for Marriage” to help you build a strong biblical foundation.
2. Prepare for Battle
As a single person, your sexual desires may be a normal part of God’s design, but they can also be the largest area for temptation. The battle for purity is real, and it’s an intense one. We live in a culture that has totally perverted God’s design for sex and pressures us to “join in on the fun.”