The Fear Beneath Our Sexual Secrets
Every man hides somewhere. And this is especially true in the realm of sexuality.
This is not necessarily because we believe we’re the worst man in the room, but because we fear we no longer have what it takes to stand among a true company of men. This is not simply the guilt of doing something we later regret. It runs deeper. It’s about threatened status—our fear that we’ve lost our standing, that we no longer belong, that we’ve somehow ceased to be man enough.
How could we ever show our face again if others found out about the secrets we hide?
Sometimes those secrets involve our own sin. Other times, we carry shame because of what others have done to us, how we feel about our bodies and how they perform, or simply because our desires and fantasies embarrass us. Whatever the source, we hide because we’ve accepted a false verdict about who we are.
The False Verdict We Believe
It’s a false verdict because we’ve become both the prosecutor and the judge. Every failure, temptation, insecurity, or wound becomes evidence that we’re unworthy of love and belonging—without ever stopping to ask what verdict God Himself has spoken over us.
When Adam and Eve sinned, their first instinct wasn’t to argue or defend themselves. It was to hide. Their bodies hadn’t changed, but the way they experienced themselves had. Their standing before God and one another suddenly felt threatened. Their sin certainly needed to be addressed, but something else had entered the garden as well: shame.
Laying Down the Fig Leaves
And in many ways, we’re still hiding today.
We hide behind bravado, knowledge, humor, or even ministry. Our silence, our jokes, and even our moral certainty can become elaborate fig leaves—carefully stitched together to keep others from seeing the parts of ourselves we’re convinced would never be accepted.
We avoid sex with our wife because we don’t want to expose what we perceive to be our inadequacies. We quietly defer to her sexual preferences because we’re afraid she’ll think we’re perverted if she ever knew what we actually desired. And we joke about penis size because, somewhere beneath our laugher, we’re still wondering whether we measure up as men.
Different experiences, but the same verdict: I’m not enough. I don’t belong. I’m not really a man.
Like our first parents, we continue to hide.
Healing doesn’t begin when we finally feel worthy of being seen. It begins when we recognize the false verdict we’ve been living under.
Before we can step out from behind the fig leaves, we must first recognize why we reached for them in the first place.
