“The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. And likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does.” 1 Corinthians 7:4 NKJV
I know a Christian man who thought that getting married would end his compulsive masturbating. It didn’t. He looked at pornography and masturbated to pornography for the first 20 years of his marriage. Finally, he got so sick of his sin, and of hiding it from his wife, that he confessed all.
He was surprised at his wife’s reaction. “I thought you had lost interest in me, that you no longer found me attractive, and so that was the reason we didn’t make love as often as we used to,” she said. The husband was ashamed, learning that he had not been meeting his wife’s sexual needs. He had thought that his masturbating was a private sin that didn’t hurt his wife. He was wrong.
What this brother failed to appreciate is that, once he got married, his body wasn’t his to make decisions about anymore. He didn’t grasp the truth of what Paul meant. He didn’t understand that he no longer had authority over his own body. His wife now had that authority. He didn’t have the authority to use his body for adultery, sodomy or any other acts of uncleanness. And he didn’t have the authority to use his body for masturbation.
When you married your wife, you gave her authority over your body. That means you gave her decision-making power over when you have sex, and you lost any authority to have sex with anyone else, including yourself. Only your wife has claim to your body for sex. She alone has power over it, to claim the use of it whenever she pleases (with your consent and cooperation, of course).
When you masturbate, you defraud your wife. You take something that she alone has authority over and use it for your own selfish pleasure. You exclude her from your marriage bed. This is theft, pure and simple, as the brother I know learned to his shame. For 20 years, he robbed his wife of her sexual fulfilment by pleasuring himself. He had sex regularly, just not with her. His selfishness hurt his wife deeply. She thought their lack of sex was her fault, when all the time the blame lay in the hands of the man she chose above all others to be faithful to for life.
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