As a teenager I struggled with history class. I found it boring to memorize dates and try to remember who conquered whom -- who cared? But now, history is one of my favorite topics. Not only do I find it fascinating, I also find my unconscious mind has stored up a great number of facts; and as I read about one situation, another one from the annals of time comes to mind and knits together a large timeline and global interactions. What compulsion by the school board's curriculum could not accomplish, my love of reading later achieved quite naturally.
It is the same with Bible study. You couldn't have paid me to do it until I was earning my own living. Faced with adult challenges, I started to look there from time to time for answers. As the years accumulated, so did my love of learning the Bible, as well as my grasp of the larger patterns of meaning in the scriptures. The call to integrity and purity occurs throughout the Bible in hundreds of passages, all of which interweave with, and support, specific proscriptions on behaviors.
A single commandment, "Thou shalt not commit adultery", can be worthy of many hours of contemplation. I like to translate it into modern language this way: "Do not adulterate the essence of what God has created." I believe he created the natural male/female reproductive scheme for the ultimate good of all of human society, not just the pleasure of the individual. When we live as Christians with integrity, with purity of heart and in surrender to God, we offer up our personal desires as a sacrifice, so that the Holy Spirit can move through us and use us to suit God's desires, not our own. These desires may be as simple as whether to wear revealing clothing or as complex as whether to engage in high-risk sex for pleasure's sake. The goal, however, is not to please the self, but to please God.
Our lives here are just a tiny speck of time, compared with the infinite afterlife. Why throw away an eternity in paradise for a few years here of sexual obsession? Only by believing in the promises of God can we have the strength to resist temptations, to live for the greater good and to "die to self" so that we gain eternal life.
*John 18:37
Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.
"Only by believing in the promises of God can we have the strength to resist temptations..."
When a person experiences the higher taste of even a drop of love for the Supreme, all mundane so-called pleasures become pale and dim, if not downright repulsive.