As you set up your defense perimeter with your eyes, a further strategic approach is to think of starving the eyes. Remember again our definition for sexual purity: You are sexually pure when no sexual gratification comes from anyone or anything but your wife. Our battle centers on our
sexual gratification.

Let’s picture that gratification in another way. As a man, you need a certain amount of food and water to live. The amounts differ for each of us, based upon genetics, metabolism, and activity. It’s even possible to suspend these needs for a while, as when fasting or limiting your food intake to lose weight. Similarly, you require a certain amount of sexual
gratification. Your sex drive may be suspended by God with a gift of abstinence. And you can adjust the required volume of sexual gratification to some extent. By
controlling the sexual images entering your eyes and mind, your system may become used to living on less, but in the end, you still have a certain volume of sexual gratification you need to fill.

Unfortunately, there’s no unit of measure for sexual gratification, like liters or inches. So let’s make
one up, and we’ll call them “bowls.” Imagine that your current level of sexual hunger requires ten bowls of sexual gratification per week. These bowls of gratification should be filled from your single legitimate vessel, the wife whom God provided for you. But because males soak up sexual gratification through the eyes, we can effortlessly fill our bowls from other sources. Our sensualized culture pours sexual imagery freely with
the potential to fill our bowls continually and forever. Our eyes can feast away! If your sexual need is ten bowls a week, you can easily draw five bowls from the culture, while drawing only five from your wife. (That’s not the same as having intercourse five times a week, because we can draw sexual gratification from our wives in many
ways.) While this “bowls” imagery oversimplifies the details, it clarifies the process involved in our sexual gratification.

To attain sexual purity as we deɹned it, we must starve our eyes of the bowls of sexual gratification that come from outside our marriage. When you starve your eyes and
eliminate “junk sex” from your life, you’ll deeply crave “real food”—your wife. And no wonder. She’s the only
thing in the cupboard, and you’re hungry! This newfound hunger will shock her. She has been accustomed to providing you five bowls a week, primarily through physical foreplay and sexual intercourse. Things were at equilibrium. Suddenly you need an extra five bowls from her. For no apparent reason, you come calling for intercourse twice as often. If this were all there was to it, it wouldn’t seem so
mysterious. To women, men always want more sex than they’re getting! But there’s more to it. Since your visual gratification now pours only from her, she’s looking very good to you. Perhaps you haven’t looked at her quite like this since you were newlyweds. While this sensation is
vaguely pleasant to her, it can also be a tad jarring. She doesn’t quite know what to do, except to send you outside to play with the kids while she undresses in the master bathroom.
And it’s not just the looking. Once you’re winning the battle, you’ll be saying things you haven’t uttered for years like, “I can’t wait for tonight, baby.” All your imaginative creativity now blossoms upon your marriage bed, not in some fantasy world. You’ll be fully enamored with her! Again, this is vaguely pleasant to her, but she’s also troubled. Where are these new ideas coming from? she may
wonder. Has he been having an affair? What’s going on? She’ll probably ask you what’s going on, and once she learns what’s cooking, you’ll both need to find a new asexual a equilibrium. The extra five bowls from outside the marriage must now be provided from inside the marriage.

The magazines at the supermarket checkout might say,
“Fantasize to a Better Sex Life.” The talk shows may say, “Let variety improve your sex life—adultery can be good!” But in God’s kingdom, obedience always ends in joy, peace, and in this case, thrills. You can count on a sexual payoff from obedience.
Whether your wife is wide or narrow or lumpy or smooth, when you focus your full attention on “your fountain,”
she’ll become ever more beautiful to you. Her weak points will become sexy because they’re yours and yours alone. They’re all you have, and you can cherish them and let them fulfill you. Maybe this shouldn’t surprise us so much. After all, standards of beauty are not fixed. In centuries past, the
great master painters depicted heavy, rounded women as the ultimate beauty. In the 1920s, thin, flat-chested women reigned. In the 1960s, the full-breasted, voluptuous girls
were queen. In the 1980s and 1990s, muscled, glistening athletic women ignited us. Men adapt to each time period, their tastes formed by what they view, and the same will happen in this new millennium. If you limit your eyes to your wife only, your own tastes will adapt to what you’re viewing. Your wife’s strengths and weaknesses will become your tastes. Eventually, she’ll be beyond comparison in your eyes.

For the singles, we must abstain till God gets us to marriage. We will always get tempted to satisfy our sexual desires through porn, masturbation, lustful thoughts and other forms of sexual sin (that keep on evolving) but we must resist.

We must pursue purity!