A Prayer About Sex

When my eyes and thoughts stray

LOVING FATHER,

What a dirty mind I have! Forgive me, I pray, for my impure thoughts and my habit of dwelling on them. You created everything good, including sex—what an incredible gift. Yet Satan has twisted and cheapened this natural urge, leading many astray. Empower me to resist the pull of dirty jokes, pornography, and innuendoes, which focus my lustful thoughts on pleasing myself at the expense of another. You made this drive for procreation, expressing love, and enjoyment but only within marriage, where sex can be fully expressed and enjoyed. Society is littered with unwanted pregnancies, prostitution, scandals, dissolved marriages, and broken promises and lives because people believe the lies about your gift. Popular culture talks of love but makes sex the ultimate pleasure—it’s overrated. But it also presents sex as free and easy, with no consequences—undervalued. Free me from this trap, I pray. Show me the way to go in order to flee temptation and then the courage to take the better way. Purify me in mind and body for your sake.

God’s will is for you to be holy, so stay away from all sexual sin. Then each of you will control his own body and live in holiness and honor—not in lustful passion like the pagans who do not know God and his ways. 1 Thessalonians 4:3-5