Surrendering Your Sexuality| Understanding Attraction Without Crossing Boundaries

We start a new series on surrendering our sexuality to God by getting honest about attraction and the confusion it can create. We break down why attraction is not automatically romance, how the body can mislabel signals, and how discernment plus boundaries keeps our faith and relationships healthy. 

• the call to surrender every part of self to God including sexuality 
• why attraction is the foundation of many boundary crossings 
• a personal story of confusing dreams and misplaced guilt 
• how church culture and society bundle attraction into romance 
• Jesus and Mary of Bethany as a model of nonsexual intimacy 
• different types of attraction including spiritual soul and physical 
• why physical sensations can mimic excitement anxiety and desire 
• Amnon and Tamar as a warning about lust urgency and harm 
• a discernment yardstick body soul spirit then scripture 
• Moses and the idea that not every attraction deserves attention 
• practical safeguards for work church and mentorship dynamics 
• the difference between love that gives and lust that demands 

If you found this episode helpful, share it with someone who needs it, your family member, your friends, your loved ones. If you're listening to us on any podcasting platform, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Buzz Sprout, Good Pods, Amazon, anywhere that you are listening to us right now, do us a favor and follow so that our podcast also is recommended to many other people, and you will be doing the world a service. 

Transcript

Welcome And Series Vision

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello everybody. Welcome to the Light of Life podcast. My name is Rotendo. I'm your host. Thank you so much for joining us today. We are on episode 11. And as usual, I am so excited because we're starting something new. This podcast, if you're joining us for the first time, it exists to paint a realistic picture of what it looks like to walk in faith every single day and to gently dismantle some of the misconceptions that have come with religion and even spirituality over time. So before I introduce my topic today, let me start by asking you this question. Do you ever find yourself struggling to reconcile your humanity and also your spirituality? And when I say your humanity, I mean your impulses, your appetites, but more specifically, your sexuality. Where are the boundaries? I get this question or I see this question all the time. What is right? What do I do with what I feel? How do I handle it in a way that honors God? These are all questions that a lot of people have. And that's why we are starting this new series. Because the truth is, when you come to Christ, you are called to surrender every part of yourself to his lordship. Not just your mind or your habits or your desires, but even your sexuality. So this series is really about that, learning how to surrender every other part of yourself, but focusing on your sexuality and surrendering it to God in a way that is honest and healthy and aligned with his purpose and his design for you.

Why Attraction Matters In Faith

SPEAKER_01 2:26

So I mentioned it's a series, but for today, I want us to deal with the foundations where this surrender starts. We're going to be talking about attraction. And by the end of this episode, it is my desire and my earnest prayer that you walk away with clarity. I pray that you begin to recognize the different types of attraction that you experience in your human life and that you develop the discernment to respond in a way that protects your heart and also in a way that still honors your walk with God. I would hope you will be able to hold both truths confidently. And when I say both truths, I'm talking about the fact that you are a sexual being and the fact that you are definitely a child of God. Those two aspects of yourself, they're not mutually exclusive. They can coexist right next to each other, so snug, and you will still be a candidate for the kingdom. So today, I would like us to start with the foundation where everything starts, which is at the attraction level. We're going to be dealing with different types of attraction because no matter how spiritual you are, divinity will never dismiss or disregard your humanity.

Dreams That Sparked The Question

SPEAKER_01 4:01

Now, let me tell you briefly how I came to this topic. So I got born again when I was probably around nine, ten years old, maybe 10 years old. And at that time, my brother would really school me and get me into the word and understanding scripture, and he was so big on that. And then later on, when I was now an adult and I was trying to get mentorship and growing in faith, I began to explore different men and women of God. And at that time, because of the internet and you know, YouTube and the spread of various media, a lot of televangelists that you would have only seen maybe on TV, they were now easily accessible. You could get their materials so easily that I really felt like a kid in a candy store. I was accessing just various messages. Oh, what is so-and-so saying? What is this person saying? And something very strange. I would call it strange, but it was it was disturbing to me. Whenever I would discover a man of God, I would go to sleep, and then I would have a dream of this particular man of God that I would have watched, or men of God that I would have watched, approaching me, making advances towards me. These dreams were not explicitly sexual, but they were definitely, they had a romantic tone to them. And I would always wake up very disturbed. Like, what is wrong with me? Like, am I filled with lust? And I would be an endless confession. Or sometimes I wouldn't confess, I would just think maybe it just means I'm not cut out for this Christian life. Maybe I'm of the world because why am I thinking this? And after some years of blaming myself, I really got to explore those feelings and trying to understand what is causing this. And I realized that some of the men that I was having dreams about, when I was watching them, I didn't even find them to be particularly attractive to me. But for some reason, when it came to my dreams, I was having these very strange and weird dreams. Anyway, fast forward, of course, as I got more mentored and more rooted in the word and got to understand human behavior. Because back then I would tend to spiritualize everything, which is a weakness that we have as believers, that we ignore the psychological, the psyche aspects of our existence.

How Culture Mislabels Attraction

SPEAKER_01 7:03

We only focus on either the flesh or the spirit. So when I did get into understanding the psychology of a human, a believer, I then realized that we have not been trained to read and interpret male-female dynamics. We've not been trained to understand attraction. Sometimes it's taboo. One of my lecturers, when I was first starting out in theology, he said to me, when I was growing up, if you were caught walking even a few feet apart from a girl, immediately they would assume that you are romantically involved. If it's just the two of you, you're not holding hands, you're not in each other's personal space, you were just walking, not even side by side. If you're just walking and the the girl is a few meters away from you, that would be a cause for concern. And I thought this is the background where we're coming from. We have been taught, either directly or indirectly, that if there's any form of attraction between a man and a woman, it must be either romantic or sexual. There's no room in our understanding for anything that's in between or beyond that. And because of that, many people end up misinterpreting what they're feeling. You feel something, but because it's a man, you think it must be romantic. And that's where you rush to. You condemn yourself or you even pursue it. And then you end up responding to attraction in ways that cross boundaries that you were never meant to cross ever in life. We have been taught more so how to react to attraction, but not to discern it. I remember some time back hearing an interview with this woman. I think she used to work in show business, and she was explaining how you know fast the life is, and a lot of people live that promiscuous life, and she used to be in that life. But there's one encounter that she described that I thought, okay, that this she could be onto something here, or it just caught my attention that it's something that I really need to think about. She said she had an encounter, an intimate experience with someone famous. I won't, you know, mention the person that she said, but she said when they decided to explore a romantic relationship, not even a relationship, they decided to explore a sexual encounter together. And immediately after, she said they both regretted it because she said, I realized after we had done the deed and it was already done that this was never a sexual attraction. There was some tension there, but it was not a sexual tension. I don't know what it was, but we because he's a man, I'm a woman, we just assumed, and we're in this lifestyle where people are already promiscuous. I just assumed that the only way we can explore it and harvest whatever that attraction had to offer, the only way we could do that was to do so sexually. People are really, really going through this. And we see this all across, whether it's in churches, whether it's in the corporate world, whether it's in families, whether it's just in schools, in just daily social circles, people are crossing boundaries that they're not supposed to cross.

Jesus And Mary Of Bethany

SPEAKER_01 10:55

If we look into scripture, the relationship that Jesus had with his Marys. I say his Marys because there were so many Marys in Jesus' life, from his mother to Mary of Bethany to Mary Magdalene. I'm so fascinated by his relationship with this particular Mary of Bethany. So if you look at the nature of their relationship, it was deeply intimate. In the sense of closeness, though, in the sense of devotion, and Mary genuinely just enjoyed the presence of Jesus. She was always trying to be around him. She was drawn to him, always wanting to sit at his feet. And yet there was nothing sexual about that relationship. I know there are some historians that would want to pervert that relationship because to them, they cannot fathom the idea of a man and a woman who have an attraction that is not romantic. Some proof of their deep emotional connection. If you go to John chapter 11, verse 32 to 35, this is when Lazarus, her brother, died, who is also a dear friend of Jesus. It says when they finally met, she fell at Jesus' feet in tears. And Jesus was even deeply moved by her sorrow. And that just shows the emotional bond that was already between them. Mary is viewed as the epitome of a contemplative life. It represented a focus on being in Jesus' presence, not working for him. Because sometimes you can get carried away with doing his work and not actually being in his presence. Jesus himself, he understood the nature of Mary's attraction. Now, I'm not saying be like Jesus if you're a man of God, if you're a woman of God, and say, assume that I'm like Jesus, so I'm going to be around the company of women or the opposite sex without any safeguards in place. I'm trying to say the attraction between men and women is deeper than only romantic. There are many classifications of attractions. That's why Jesus, he didn't re-reject her. When she would see him and she would want to be around him and she would want to sit at his feet, he did not shame her and say, go be with the women. But he received her because he knew that what this lady is feeling and what she's expressing is not a romantic desire, but it's a spiritual connection that she's

Types Of Attraction Explained

SPEAKER_01 13:58

after. Even in the world, if we move from spirituality and religion, they do have different classifications of attractions. Sometimes it can be an aesthetic attraction. Maybe you just like the way that someone's dressed, but it doesn't mean that immediately you want to enter into a romantic relationship with that person. You just like maybe how they dress, you like how they carry themselves, you like the way they're so organized. I remember when I was as a young youth, I would meet a lot of guys either at youth camps, I would meet a lot of guys maybe at church, at group music practices and things like that. And there were genuinely some guys that I was not romantically attracted to, but I just was attracted to them. I was attracted to them because maybe they were funny. And I was, I felt like I was one of the guys. So I would run and I would say, hey, you know, and I would, you know, want to be around them because we would just be laughing and having a good old time. But then because a lot of these guys were also unskilled in understanding the male-female dynamic, immediately they would rush to think that I'm romantically interested. And then the relationship would end up fizzling out because that's not where I'm going with it. But they assume this girl must be filling me. Look at the way she's laughing at my jokes. Look at the way she's looking for me. But I genuinely would just seeking friendship with no strings, just so we can coexist while we're at youth camp, while we're at youth practice. But let me tell you why we often get it wrong, or why people often get these attractions mixed

When The Body Sends Mixed Signals

SPEAKER_01 15:51

up. The first thing, the first reason is I think I mentioned this before, we have already been conditioned. Society tends to bundle all forms of attraction together, if you notice. So if you feel something strongly, it has to be romantic. It must be. And if it's romantic, then it has to lead to sexual encounters. And on top of that, it doesn't help that the body itself, like I mentioned to you, that we're not only spiritual beings here, we're not only you are a spirit, you have a body, but there's also the soul aspect of you, you have the psyche, and the body responds, the mind and the body responds in similar ways across different types of attractions. And this has been scientifically proven as well. Do you know that your heart can race and you can feel nervous and excited and drawn, and your mind can quickly label that as a sexual desire? But it might not even be that. That's why they have even what they call hero worship, which is maybe what I was feeling with these some of these men of God. I would feel like maybe they delivered me from a form of spiritual bondage, and then it would show up in my subconscious, in my dreams as a romantic connection. Because the moment I really, really dug into those feelings, I haven't had that happen to me for a long, long time. It happened a long time ago. So the body can trick you if you're not aware of yourself into thinking that because I'm excited and my heart is racing, and it means I must have a romantic attraction for this person. Another point, I remember I did suffer from anxiety when I had surgery some time ago. And when I was trying to overcome it, there was a book that I read. I'm not sure, I don't remember the author, but the author said one technique you can use to overcome panic attacks is to trick yourself. You can Jedi mind trick yourself into thinking, because the same feeling of anxiety, you know, that heart racing and anticipation and it actually mimics or they mimic each other, the feeling of excitement is the same if you look at it. The same way your heart races races when you're excited is the same way that your heart races when you're panicking. So if you try to change your mindset, instead of saying I'm panicking, there is some impending doom, you can actually trick yourself and say, No, it means something good is coming. I'm excited, I'm not panicking. So it is possible for you to mix these similar physical responses.

Amnon And Tamar As A Warning

SPEAKER_01 19:03

If you go to 2 Samuel chapter 13, this is the story of David's children. This is between Amnon and Tamar. So Amnon, the son of David, the scripture says, he fell in love with Tamar, who was his beautiful half-sister. He became very obsessed with her, and the scripture actually says he made himself fall ill. That's how much he was so consumed and enamored with this girl. He was just infatuated. And it explicitly said she was a virgin. That detail was put in there, and it seemed impossible for him to do anything with her. So that already tells you something. He was thinking of doing something with her, something sexual. That's those are the thoughts, the nature of the thoughts that consumed him. So this Amnon fellow had an advisor who I don't really think was a very good advisor. If you are to find an advisor, you need to find yourself someone who is very practical in their solutions, not someone who's going to help you play into your human or animalistic tendencies. So this guy, the advisor, asked him, Hey, you haven't been yourself. You're the king's son, for God's sakes. What's going on with you? You should be happy, enjoying life. And then he opened up to his advisor and he said, Oh, I'm in love. I'm in love with my half-sister Tamar. And then he said, Oh, okay. He didn't ask anything else. The immediate thing he did was to give him a plan. And he said, Go to bed and pretend to be ill. When your father comes to see you, you just say to him, I would like my sister Tamar to come and give me something to eat and let her prepare the food in my sight. Then I can eat directly from her hand. So Annon did as he was told, and he was like, that's a great plan. Pretended to be ill. And of course, Tamar was sent there by the king. She cooked, needed the bread. And what he did was he sent everyone out. He said, Send everyone out of here. And they were left alone in the room. And he said, Bring me the food, my sister. When she brought him the food, he then said, Come to bed with me. Of course, propositioning her to have sex with her. Then she said, No, you know, she refused. She didn't want to do it for her reasons, maybe. Because they were family, I guess that's the number one reason, but she wasn't interested in it, she wasn't interested in it, in his idea. And the moment he saw that, he forced himself on her. And this is the part that always got me, and I always used to question when I was a child. If you read on verse 15, it says, This is after he had already forced himself on her. Verse 15 says, Then Amnon hated her with an intense hatred. In fact, he hated her more than he had ever loved her. Amnon said to her, get up and get out. And this is immediately after he had forced himself on her. He had gotten what he wanted, right? He was sick for for for I don't know how long. Just a few verses before, he was so in love and infatuated with this girl, and he was even sick. But can you imagine that in the twinkling of an eye, just one crossing of the boundary that he was not supposed to cross, those feelings changed almost immediately. It shows you something very clearly that what he felt was really never love. It was a misinterpreted attraction that he explored in the wrong way, and it led to destruction. The same way, the same pattern, it plays out almost daily in our lives today. If you look around you, you're going to find an example of this type of situation right here. A woman may feel maybe drawn to a successful, you know, nowadays on those online dating shows and the language in the dating pool is you need a high-value man, a high value woman. That's what I want. But you're attracted to the person's value, not them. If you're attracted to a woman or a man who is successful, intelligent, or influential, you're interpreting your admiration for them as a romantic attraction. That's why a lot of times when those things are taken away, the relationship fizzes and the relationship breaks down. And that's why we see a lot of women, they they end up sleeping with their bosses, sleeping with their pastors. A lot of men end up finding maybe the most beautiful woman that they see because they are so attracted to the attention that this woman commands. So they don't care about the woman's personality. Do they love God? How do they treat their family? They're attracted to the wow factor of if I marry this beautiful woman, they're not so much attracted to the beauty, but the what comes with it, that every man wants this woman. So let me get her and she will be my trophy. And if anything happens, either the woman gets older, you will find that relationship breaks down. Again, you need to understand that sometimes you're not even attracted to the person, but you're attracted to what they carry. I told you my own experiences where I would watch someone who was so explosive spiritually, and I wouldn't be attracted to them physically, but somehow in my subconscious, it will show up in my dreams.

A Simple Discernment Yardstick

SPEAKER_01 25:38

And my own three three classifications, classifications of attraction, I would say there's a spiritual attraction, then the level of the soul, and then the physical attraction. Sometimes you can enjoy someone as a kindred spirit. It could be a spirit-to-spirit attraction that is happening, similar to that of Mary and Jesus. But then you, because you are untrained in interpreting and understanding and discerning relationships, you rush to cross a boundary that was already there. Sometimes it's because they make you happy, they make you laugh. Remember, I told you about some guy friends that I would have growing up, and I would really enjoy being around them. There would be someone I would want to talk to every day, but I had never, the thought of romantic feelings never crossed my mind. I was drawn to their gifting and maybe their anointing, their, their, their depth, their way of thinking, just how they made me feel. Maybe they complimented me a lot and they gave me self-esteem, like, oh, you can do this, you can. So I want to surround myself with people like that, but it has nothing to do with romance. So let me give you maybe something that can help you to discern. Because I don't want to keep on saying you need to discern, you need to discern. But every time you feel attraction, let me focus on members of the opposite sex. If you're a man, you feel attracted to a woman. If you're a woman, you feel a high affinity for a certain man who is not your husband if you're married, or before you even get married. Don't rush to act on it or to label it or to condemn yourself that, oh my God, why am I even feeling this way? Ask yourself, what is my body saying right now? What is my soul feeling? And what is my spirit witnessing? This is the yardstick that I would even recommend. The final thing that is going to help you, ask yourself, what does scripture say? And how should I respond according to scripture? Look at different examples of male-female relations. Look at negative examples, look at positive examples, give yourself permission to explore. Think in your thoughts, like, how do I, what am I feeling? Not in a lustful way. I'm not saying start picturing people naked and allowing your mind to go down the gutter. I'm saying give yourself permission to explore what you're feeling, but in an honest analytical way that actually helps you to understand yourself better.

Moses And Choosing What To Pursue

SPEAKER_01 28:37

Let me give you this example of Moses. If you go to Exodus 3, verse 2, when he got his calling, the scripture says that Moses was tending to the flock of his father-in-law. And as he was, you know, taking the sheep back to the desert, he came to Horeb, the mountain of God. Then he saw the angel of the Lord, you know, the burning bush that he saw, but it was not consumed. On verse 3, it says that Moses said, Now I will turn aside and see this great sight, this wonder. He saw it and he was like, and I'm sure because he was in the mountain going back to the desert, there are a lot of wonders in natural, in nature that he could have stopped to observe. I'm sure that wasn't the only one. But he had enough discernment to say, of all the wonders, the attractions that I have seen while I'm tending to the sheep, this one is it actually warrants me to stop what I'm doing and actually observe and actually get closer to it. There were so many other attractions that he could have stopped for, but he had to use his discernment. Not every wonder, not every attraction made him stop. But this one did. And in the same way, not every attraction that you feel deserves your attention. And not every attraction should be explored in the same way. Once you understand what you're feeling, this is what I want you to do.

Boundaries And Practical Safeguards

SPEAKER_01 30:11

The next step should be to establish some boundaries. If this is a professional relationship, what safeguards do you need to put in place to make sure that you can still harvest everything that you need to harvest from that attraction that you feel? If it's your boss and you're attracted to him, how can you still be mentored? How can you still get whatever it is that you admire from him without breaching certain uh boundaries? What are the safeguards? Maybe you can say, I'll only meet with him in public, or we'll never discuss anything personal, I'll stick to what I need to ask. There are certain safeguards that you can put to make sure that whatever it is that you're feeling is kept in check. And your body is supposed to be kept in check by you. Your feelings are supposed to be kept in check by you. If you are drawn to someone or what they carry, you need to have a plan of how, a plan of extraction. Just like you would a mineral, just like you do when you're making orange juice. You don't eat the rind and and the peels of the orange. You know, like, okay, I want the orange. The peel is very bitter, but I want that juice that's inside the orange. So you find a juicer and you extract what you need, and you leave the things that can be potentially harmful or undesirable to you. So discernment without boundaries is incomplete. You need both. You need to discern and you need to put up the necessary boundaries. Because the truth is, when attraction is misunderstood and mismanaged, it can have very serious consequences. Just go back to the story of Amnon that I shared with you earlier. It didn't just end with a moment of regret. If you actually read the whole story, it led to family division. Because remember, this was his half-sister, but it was a full, she had a full brother who was very protective of her. It led to division, it led to violence, it led to destruction, not only within their family, but even within the kingdom. David, the king, actually had to go into exile for some time. And it all originated from the way that this situation was handled. And in our own lives, when we cross boundaries without understanding, what you don't understand is you're creating wounds, you're creating confusion and risking broken relationships that could have been avoided. Imagine this: if you sleep with your pastor, who was supposed to be looking after you, or if you sleep with your congregant, whom you are supposed to be shepherding, you have broken a relationship. Maybe you have wounded a soul that was supposed to contribute to the kingdom. Even if you go, if you don't go as far as sleeping with someone, if you date someone that you were never meant to date, you were simply attracted to them, maybe for business, and then you decide to date that person, and maybe you break each other's hearts. Now you lose maybe million-dollar opportunities over maybe a two-week link that could have been avoided.

Love Gives Lust Demands

SPEAKER_01 33:34

I want to leave you with something simple but powerful. You need to know that love gives, but lust almost always demands. In the case of Amnon, he said, I have to have her, I have to have her. He didn't say, I want to marry her, I want her to have my children, I want to treat her nice. He just thought, how can I get satisfaction out of this girl? Love is patient, but lust is urgent. Love is willing to wait and to honor, but lust insists on having something now, regardless of the cost. So, in closing, I want you to know that my conversation with you today, even the series that we have begun, is not to shame you. It's actually about freeing you. Because the shame is already what you have experienced in religion. You are allowed to feel, you are allowed to experience attraction. That's how you were made. Whether you like it or not, you're never going to pray it away. But you need to understand it. So start paying attention to what you feel and how you respond to it. So this is just the beginning of the series, as I mentioned, and in the next episode, we're going to talk about something else that's very important. But for now, I just want to pray for you and ask the Lord to lead you as you understand yourself.

Prayer And Next Steps

SPEAKER_01 34:59

Lord Jesus, we love you. We thank you for such an opportunity. We thank you for the lesson that you were brought today because of this podcast talking about attraction. Thank you for leading a life that was so exemplary and giving us a blueprint to understand even our own human attraction. I pray, Lord, use me. I need you to help me to articulate exactly what you want me to say from today, even going on as we finish the series. I pray that you help each and everyone listening throughout their struggles with attraction, that you give them the wisdom and the ability to discern and not only to discern, but to put up the necessary boundaries and safeguards so they're not let astray in any way. In Jesus' name.

Share Follow And Closing Blessing

SPEAKER_01 35:50

Now, thank you so much for listening. If you found this episode helpful, share it with someone who needs it, your family member, your friends, your loved ones. If you're listening to us on any podcasting platform, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Buzz Sprout, Good Pods, Amazon, anywhere that you are listening to us right now, do us a favor and follow so that our podcast also is recommended to many other people, and you will be doing the world a service. Now, this has been the Light of Life Podcast, and as usual, stay in the light.