“Then He said to them all, ‘If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me.'”
Luke 9:23
If you want to discover if masturbation is a sin, simply examine one of the costs of discipleship for following Jesus. Jesus teaches that if you want to be His disciple, you must deny yourself. Since masturbation is a selfish act that satisfies the flesh rather than deny it, anyone who masturbates fails this fundamental requirement of being a disciple of Jesus.
When Jesus commands you and me to deny ourselves, he uses a word that means to disavow, to reject, to abnegate. It is a word that means to refuse to affirm something, to refuse to confess something, or to refuse to identify with someone or something. It means to contradict, to repudiate, to disown. Get the idea? To be a disciple of Jesus, you and I must take our desires and refuse to affirm them. We must take the urge to look at pornography and repudiate it. We must take the temptation to masturbate and disown it, reject it and refuse to identify with it.
Discipleship is a life of self-denial. We deny ourselves in order to identify with and follow Jesus. And denying ourselves isn’t an abstract notion. To deny yourself means to deny your ambitions, to reject your plans, to repudiate your will in favor of doing what Jesus desires for your life. To deny yourself means to refuse to identify with your carnal lusts and sexually immoral desires, and to embrace the holy desires that Jesus wants you to have.
There is simply no way that you or I can masturbate and think that we are denying ourselves. We can’t reject our lustful thoughts by giving in to them. We can’t refuse sexual temptation by indulging it. We can’t practice self-denial by practicing self-pleasure. I realize that this is unwelcome news for many Christian men. But this is the price of discipleship, given to us by the Master himself. Following Jesus shouldn’t be easy. Being a disciple of Jesus costs you something—your right to yourself.
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