Instincts Can Be Physical and Spiritual

“But these people sneer at anything they can’t understand, and by doing whatever they feel like doing—living by animal instinct only—they participate in their own destruction.” Jude 1:10

Some things we instinctively understand can be very dangerous if misused. It is easy to write-off something that is instinctual because it seems so natural, so simple, so expected. But, in order to live well and honor God, we have to learn to contain those instinctual impulses and let them guide us accordingly.

Consider food; eating is instinctual isn’t it? We all know the dangers of overeating or eating really poorly though; diabetes, stroke, heart attack, etc.

Let’s take sex; seems pretty instinctual too, right? If we’re honest, some of us have misused our sexuality too. We’ve engaged in acts we swore we would never commit, with people we never imagined, at times and places we would otherwise never visit.

Too often I hear men express their “high sex drive” as the reason they act out sexually with pornography, masturbation and even affairs. “It’s natural for me to want to have sex” they say. Then, when coached or guided on containing those instinctual impulses and delaying sexual gratification, they get defensive, argumentative and angry. In other words, they sneer at the advice.  What if sexual temptation and lustful thoughts are actually a cue to connect with God rather than just an opportunity to sin?  Each of us gets to decide what it will be for us.

Perhaps Jude was speaking to us when this scripture was written, encouraging us to look deeper than our animal instincts.  Might our lives be different, and our relationship with God be different, if we tried to acknowledge our natural instinctual impulses as both physical and spiritual?

If we’ll allow it, our natural instincts can lead us in two ways: 1) to act in a physical way and 2) to act in a spiritual way.

The urge to eat can prompt us to find food for nourishment of our bodies. It can also be a prompt for us to seek spiritual nourishment too. That’s partly why we see fasting can be such a spiritual experience. The same can be true of sex. Sexual desire can be a prompt to engage intimately with another human, and by the same token, perhaps it can signal our need to engage intimately with our Creator.