Sexuality and Spiritual Life I
Dallas Willard on chastity, the training of desire, and the joy that protects
At Fuller Seminary in June of 2012, Dallas Willard told a room of pastors that they had to accept something about desire before they could teach anyone about it.
“You cannot deal with desire by trying to satisfy it. You cannot deal with it that way because it will always cry for more.”
That is the opening claim of Willard’s twentieth lecture in his Spirituality and Ministry series, the lecture where he begins teaching chastity as a spiritual discipline. It is not a lecture on sexual rules. It is a lecture on what desire does inside a person, and what the alternative to being ruled by it looks like.
Our people have spent their lives operating on the opposite premise. Hunger is the signal. The signal points to satisfaction. Satisfaction quiets the hunger. So they satisfy it. And the hunger comes back, only louder, and they satisfy it again, and the loop tightens. Willard says the loop is not a loop. It is a slope. Every satisfaction makes the next desire larger, not smaller. Desire, he insists, has no ceiling.
What follows is Willard’s account of how to step off the slope. Not by killing the desire, but by forming a joy large enough that the desire stops running the person.
You can watch the full lecture or read the transcript here: Sexuality and Spiritual Life I
Desire Cannot Be Satisfied. It Can Be Trained.
Willard’s definition of chastity is narrower than what most people assume. Chastity, in Willard’s teaching, is the practice of abstaining from sexual acts, thoughts, and desires for a significant period in order to develop the strength necessary to be free from the domination of sexual appetites. The aim is not the avoidance of sex. The aim is freedom from being ruled by sexual appetite.
Chastity is therefore a training discipline. It is the work of submitting the will to God in an area where the will has likely never submitted before. As that submission becomes practiced, desire stops dictating. The person becomes free to choose.
Willard is precise about what freedom means here. The trained believer lives in shalom, the peace of God. Shalom is the aliveness of a person whose desires have stopped running the show, who can love and serve and rest without the next appetite dictating the next move. The undisciplined life dominated by sexual gratification is the deadened life. The disciplined life, the life of shalom, is the alive one.
Pastors may at times have it backwards. We assume discipline costs the person their joy, and that the gospel offer is the willingness to pay that cost. Willard says the gospel offer is the reverse. Discipline is how a person becomes free for a joy that does not depend on gratification.
If we preach chastity as a renunciation, we have left our people thinking that the holy life is the half-alive life. If we preach chastity as a training that frees them, we have told them the truth Willard is teaching here.
Chastity Is Not Sex-Negative
Willard is careful with this one because the church has often gotten it wrong. Chastity, in his framing, is not a verdict on sexuality as such. It is not the position that sex is bad, that the body is a problem, that the appetites are dirty. Willard rejects all of that. The discipline of chastity does not exist because sex is unclean. It exists because sexual appetite, left unchecked, “will always cry for more,” and that is a kingdom problem.
When sexual desire is left unchecked, it does not stay sexual. It becomes idolatrous. It begins to function as the organizing center of the person’s life. It decides what they pursue, what they fear, what they buy, what they look at, who they imagine themselves to be. The desire stops being one appetite among many and becomes the appetite that runs the others.
An appetite that runs the person is a god the person serves. The First Commandment is not silent on this. If sexual desire occupies the throne of the heart, then whatever religious language the person uses, the throne has been given to something other than the God of Israel.
The pastoral move here is significant. When we treat sexual sin only as moral failure, we leave the deeper issue untouched. A person can repent of the act and still serve the desire. They can stop the behavior and continue to be ruled by it. Willard’s frame goes underneath the behavior to the throne and asks who rules. The path forward is not white-knuckled suppression. It is reordering. The desire that runs the person can be unseated, but only because something and someone better can take its place.
Joy Is the Protector
Willard turns next to what protects a person from being dominated by sexual desire. The protection is not vigilance. It is not policing the eyes. It is not, in the end, even accountability software. (Though all of these serve a purpose and have their place.) The protection is the active pursuit of joy and love for what is good.
Willard points us to Paul instead. Philippians 4:8 is the text. Whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent, worthy of praise, think about these things. Paul writes that command in the context of teaching the Philippians how to live with peace amid temptation and pressure. Willard reads it as the protector text on the formation of desire. The mind focused on what is good is not weighed down by foolish desires.
This reframes the work of chastity in a way that matters for pastoral instruction. Chastity is not the absence of something. It is the presence of something larger. When we teach our people only the no, we have handed them suppression. When we teach the yes, the active formation of joy in what is good, we have handed them the actual discipline.
That joy comes from the disciplines that aim the person at the kingdom: worship, Scripture, prayer, fellowship, solitude, service, generosity. These practices do not exist to make us religious. They exist to give the heart something to love that is larger than the appetite. When the heart loves what is true, honorable, and praiseworthy, sexual appetite does not stop being present. It stops being king.
That is the trained life. The desire is not dead. The desire has been put in its place under a larger joy that is being formed by the kingdom’s disciplines.
A note for pastors:
Our task as pastors is to proclaim, teach, and manifest the kingdom. Beyond the sermon series, beyond the counseling-office moment when a man confesses pornography or a young person confesses a hidden relationship, the formation work is to teach our whole congregation what chastity is and how to practice it. That includes the married in our churches whose covenant already places sexual intimacy within God’s gift.
Paul gives the married in the church a teaching text in 1 Corinthians 7. He writes that husband and wife should not deprive one another sexually, except by agreement for a limited time, in order to devote themselves to prayer. That is married chastity. It is the practice of mutually agreed seasons where sexual intimacy is set aside so the couple can be filled by a truer intimacy. Paul does not treat this as a heroic move for the spiritually advanced. He treats it as a practice the married in the church are meant to know.
When we teach this, we open our people to something the culture cannot give them. The temporal joy of sexual intimacy is real. Christians do not have to deny it or apologize for it. It is one of God’s good gifts. But it is not the deepest joy available to the human person. The deepest joy is the with-God life made available in Christ, the eternal joy that does not begin at death and does not depend on bodily appetite. Chastity is one of the practices that gives the disciple, married or single, access to that joy now.
For the disciple who wonders whether they will always be at war with their own appetites: train the joy. Make a habit of what is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent, and worthy of praise. Let the disciplines of the kingdom take up the room in your day that the compulsion has been taking. Chastity is the practice that lets that joy take hold.
For Reflection
Willard says the central thing a pastor must accept about desire is that it cannot be dealt with by trying to satisfy it. What desire in your own life have you treated as something to manage by feeding it, only to watch it grow larger? What would it look like to treat that desire as something to train, not satisfy?
Willard makes joy the protector against the domination of sexual desire. In your preaching and teaching, do you spend more time describing what your people should refuse, or more time describing what they should pursue? What joy are you actively forming in them that is large enough to crowd out the compulsion?
Sexual sin in your congregation is rarely an isolated behavior issue. It usually points to a throne. When you sit with someone in that struggle, are you helping them stop a behavior, or helping them unseat the appetite that has been running their life? What changes if you do the second?