Charlie Crane Interview: Sexual Purity

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By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we�re called by the Divine Trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King. Here�s our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.

Introducing Charlie Crane and the Topic of Men’s Purity

Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth, and I have a good friend in the studio with me today, live, Charlie Crane. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. Thank you very much.

What�s your middle name? I forgot your middle name. Thomas. Thomas. Charles. Charles. Thomas. Thomas Crane. And I have known you for almost 24 years. Can you imagine that? That�s amazing. Yeah. That is amazing.

And of course, you go down in infamy because when there was a big vote here 24 years ago, you were one of the abstentions because you didn�t know me. You�re the only one that had a clue. I only know this guy for two days, how am I going to vote him as my pastor?

That�s right. And now you live close to the church, so I guess you're the official closer for the church?

Charles I'm trying not to be, but maybe I am.

Pete I remember once, Charlie, I, it was 24 years ago, I got a phone call at home. I lived in that little Sterling place and they said, well, pastor, you know, did you know the front doors open at the church?

I said, well, did you swing by and shut it? Oh no, we just thought we'd call and tell you.

Oh, oh man. I will close the door if it's found to be open.

Good. Now I think it has been nine years since I've had you on the radio show and we were talking about music because I think you're, you're fairly musical, musical family. Would that be safe to say? That is safe to say.

Did you buy the new house because it had some kind of barn thing? Was it like Hall Oates? You know, what's a Daryl Hall's got that, you know, Daryl's place? That's right.

Is it Charlie's place? I will say that the deal was closed when we, we walked out to the barn that's connected to the house and it's, it's heated. And I had visions of an old video. I used to love James Taylor's Squibnocket video where it's entirely filmed in the barn off the back of his house on Martha's Vineyard.

And I thought, oh, this is my Squibnocket. So that closed the deal right there. Yeah. I think it's Martha's Vineyard. Might be Nantucket. I'm not sure.

Okay. Well, it's been good to serve with you over these years and we've both seen the Lord's faithfulness in our lives in the church here. Days of rejoicing, days of weeping, but we've seen the Lord's good hand in our lives, have we not?

Absolutely. So Charlie, we have had some Sunday nights at the church, as you know, that talk about men's purity. It's one of those things that's a reoccurring theme with men, right? So besetting sin for many men, that is the lust of the eyes.

And I thought I would teach for, for one of the sessions and then you and I were talking and then I heard you with some questions that were so insightful. I said, Charlie, you ought to teach. And I wasn't being mean, by the way, you know, raise your hand so many times, I finally have to say you teach.

It wasn't that, although that would have been a good strategy. And so you taught on a Sunday night a couple months ago about men and their struggle with lust and those kinds of things. And then you gave us some positive ways to deal with that.

And I loved it so much. I said, I've got to have Charlie on the radio show. So now I've forgotten what you said two months ago. Was it good?

Well, yeah, basically the premise, my whole premise, and it was just looking at the problem from one very specific vantage point. And that was the association between winning a mate and the impetus for work and what the relationship between those two are.

And if you can understand how we're wired and what the purpose of the differing libidos between men and women you can kind of, I don't know, I think the more that we understand ourselves, the more we can control and, you know, work proactively to stop problems.

Testosterone, Work, and the Drive to Win a Wife

So, Charlie, for many years, I think I perceive testosterone as something negative. That is to say, I wouldn't say it out loud, but I would think, you know what, why did the Lord give men such a drive with testosterone and the way He's made us?

But of course, that would be wrong to think because it's not testosterone that's wrong. It's the sinful proclivities that come from a fall and united with Adam and then our own sinful nature. It's what sin does to testosterone and the drive to be with a woman.

And so, I think to myself regularly for believers and unbelievers, the drive to be I wrote a book on sexual fidelity, but I'm trying to be very careful on what I say. The sex drive, it's important.

So, in and of itself, it's a good thing, is it not?

12 Absolutely. I would go so far as to say it's more than important. It's in, you know, first of all, it's by God's design, like you said, but second of all, it is the impetus and the engine that causes man to be continually self-reforming, to woo intimacy with his wife or to win a wife.

And many, I don't know if the term is sociologist or behavioral scientists say that that desire is really what rose Western civilization out of the chaos of the dark ages and even probably before that.

But because I think it's all predicated on the fact that man's besetting sin is laziness and testosterone along with perhaps greed is not the right word, but the ability to have an income and the ability to win intimacy are the two primary motivators that get men to get out of.

The starting blocks and to start to act like men. Pete. It's interesting because when you said something about the difference between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, it's all in the same landmass. I thought that was insightful.

Do you remember what you said?

12 Well, yeah. I mean, Haiti, I think the last statistic I heard was that 80 plus percent of their GDP was charity. And I heard, it was some interview that I heard where they said that they have found in areas of the world where winning sex, you know, there's gratuitous satisfaction of the sex drive and the basic needs of people are met that the society just doesn't improve overall.

It remains stagnant. And this particular person, I forget who it was. I think it was, I don't even want to guess whether it was a TED talk or something like that, but they held up Haiti as an example where you can just go from one side of the island to the other side of the island and you basically go from third world to the first world.

And they said predominantly the difference is needs are met without work and the sex drive is gratified without commitment.

And the betterment of man. Pete. So fascinating. Did you not also say something about colder climates and what happens in colder climates and what happens.

Closer to the equator? Peter. Oh, yeah. So, I mean, just another thing is that when natural resources are plentiful and man doesn't have to work in order to meet his basic needs, society has, you know, anthropologists will say that societies don't develop quite as fast.

And that's why the temperate zones are where a lot of the scientific discovery and a lot of the, you know, a lot of art, music, ballet, you know, the finer the top of the pyramid, as it were, stems from those climates as opposed to the climates around the equator.

Pete. So interesting. Talking today to Charlie Crane on No Compromise Radio. By the way, Charlie, you've done a lot of work behind the scenes for NOCO over the years. Thank you for that. Charlie. Sure, yeah.

Pete. As you know, Charlie, I am what some theologians would call a cessationist, and I believe the sign gifts ceased because we have the canon now and I don't need to have any miracles or signs or wonders to authenticate the message or messenger.

But I did say once that I still am a continuationist in this degree. I think that testosterone still speaks. And it says to the unmarried man, get up off that couch and stop playing Call of Duty. Get a good job, you know, be godly, go win a godly wife so you can enjoy her, not just, you know, physically, but in every way.

And then for the husband, it says, you know what, same thing, right? We need to be motivated as husbands because you're exactly right. Adam is supposed to work, and Adam falls, and then what's the first response to this sinful condition now?

I don't want to work. I'm lazy. We need to be motivated.

Marriage, Gender Roles, and the God-Ordained Pattern

Charlie. That's right. That's right. And it's incumbent not only on men to make their, turn themselves into something that a spouse would want, but it's also incumbent upon our daughters and on society at large to teach that intimacy is only to be given away, obviously from a Christian standpoint, within the confines of marriage.

But that's not just random prudishness that God inflicts on His people to be a cosmic killjoy. The purpose is that if you reserve it for marriage, you then have to earn the right to propose to a woman.

You then have to convince her father that you're worthy to be a spouse. And that model of making the best version of you in order to win a life mate, that is the engine by which society operates, and God knew this.

And that's why we have the prohibitions of not giving ourselves away until we're in the confines of marriage. And that, even when Christians only make up a slight percentage of the population, that mindset pulls society to a better place, and it makes the world a better place.

And obviously, when you live by God's design, you have, I think, a better go of it, in my opinion.

Pete. That is so true. We have now, Charlie, all kinds of issues that come along with that, and that is when women don't have any reservation, or seldom have reservations as unbelievers. Romans 1 kind of thing, and they're almost acting like men.

That compounds the problem, does it not?

Charlie. That's right. That's right. The desire for financial income and the desire to win intimacy, if you rob the society of those two things, you're not going to improve society, and it will degrade over time.

And women really hold the keys to that. They need to hold the hoops up that men need to jump through in order to win intimacy with them. And in so doing, they actually preserve society, they preserve families, they make life better.

Longevity increases, right? We look at the stats for longevity, right? There are certain behaviors, gratuitous sexual behaviors. If you live in a certain way, you will live on average 21 years less than a married monogamous man.

I mean, smoking is only nine years less. So, it's just, it's so true, and the facts are borne out just by casual observation.

Steve, I sit here and talk to Steve all night. That was, I said a word and I was formulating a thought. That's what that is. Sorry, Charlie. See if I had a good editor behind the scenes, we could just edit that out, but this is like live radio.

I talked to Kim a while ago about this, and that message that you gave that night. And I said, you know, Kim, I bought a house before we were married. And before I proposed to you, I had that all settled.

And, you know, I had a job and a 401k and health insurance. And did buying a house play into that at all? When I said, will you marry me? And you said, yes. And she said, of course it did. Right? Because you're getting everything ready and you're prepared to be the husband and all that stuff.

And I thought, long gone, it seems like are the days where somebody doesn't have a job, but they want to win a woman. So they join the military because at least they say, you know what? I have income, I have health insurance.

I will do anything to win this woman. And that includes getting a good job.

So I can support her. That's right. And I remember when my wife and I were engaged, I think it was six months to the wedding and I was still doing the odd retail job. You know, I was a young kid, a college age.

We got married quite young. And I remember my father said to me, hey, you're getting married this summer. You think you might want to get a real job? And fortunately, whether, you know, I like to think, fortunately, my wife perhaps saw the diamond in the rough and still granted me the, you know, agreed to become engaged, even though I wasn't, you know, pulling in the big bucks sort of thing.

But yeah, I mean, if you're about to ask this woman to trust in you and you're going to be to a large degree what defines her security as she moves through life and you're going to provide a home and you're also going to provide a, you're going to set the tenor for someone whom, you know, if we boil it down to its essence, you're part of the relationship is the winning of intimacy, right?

That's the motivation. Well, a woman theoretically, ideally is not going to be vulnerable to someone who is a screw off that doesn't do anything that is not reliable, that doesn't provide an income. And we need to instill that thought in our daughters because it's slowly being expunged out in the name of, I don't know what you could pin it on, but, you know, when both sides think like men, you break this all important engine that pulls the best out of people in society and provides welfare to our children,.

To our towns, everywhere, you know. So, Charlie, this lends itself then to the next part of the discussion and that is how devastating pornography is for both the man who would like to win a woman and get married and the man who is married, right?

Pornography as Laziness and the Destruction of Marriage

So, when I think of scripture, I just was thinking about verses on purity and Colossians 3 talks about being raised with Christ and set your mind on things above. And then it says right after that, put to death therefore what is earthly in you.

And it starts off with sexual immorality and impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. He uses this language, put it to death, you know, assassinate it, kill it. Tell our listeners a little bit about why it's so awful when the default is pornography and it bypasses this testosterone or placates it or something like that.

What are you thinking about that? Because I like what you said when we met here on a Sunday.

Night. Well, pornography and the turning to it to satisfy what the man feels like are unrequited needs and drives and things like that, it really is a, it's the hallmark of laziness because that need and those drives are the things, they're supposed to be the impetus to make you improve your relationship with your wife.

They perhaps are the impetus to maybe find more work to do, right, so that you're expressing yourself physically and getting tired out and doing things that are proactive. They, right, if the sex drive is the thing that constantly reforms the man, if you gratify it away from the God-ordained method of gratifying it, you are short-circuiting so much of what God has for you in terms of the way that you improve, right?

Just think about the process of sanctification, two sinners living together, right? Well, if one of your continual goals is to convince the other sinner in the relationship to be close to you and to be vulnerable to you, and you just say, nah, I can't be bothered, and you resort to pornography, you break that work-slash-intimacy relationship, the earning and the wooing, the constant wooing of your wife, and it's just, it does all sorts of harm.

And also, I think that it constitutes an addictive behavior as well because it's so, um, it provides a release that is so illegitimate, but it's so instant, and, boy, men just get ensnared by it, and then you have a world of trouble.

There's all sorts of unintended.

Consequences that fall out of that. Charlie, you wisely say, you want to make sure you, and you say it better than I do, but making choices in life that don't have tragic consequences, right? Try to minimize those, right?

There are a lot of things that could happen in life. Don't make choices that basically ruin your life. Talk a little bit about how serial pornography, and of course, we know sexual sins can be forgiven and you can be restored in Christ, but just on the warning side, what are some other bad consequences that happen when you just get enslaved to, you know what, I'll take the lazy way out, and I'll watch pornography either as an unmarried guy or a married guy?

Oh, boy. Well, let's see. Just off the top of my mind, you demote the marital relationship to be simply transactional, right? If you're viewing your relationship with your wife, you're defining it by one transaction instead of the breadth of what a marriage should be, and if you're checking out of what, at least from the man's perspective, if you're checking out on one of the most important aspects of it, you're going to start to check out on more and more things, and your wife is going to be viewed as perhaps a nagging sexless roommate, you know, and what happens is the marriage continually gets demoted because you are breaking that God-ordained process of how men and women are meant to relate, and I am convinced as I age and look back over my life, that is the reason why I think God gave men and women different libidos.

He intentionally set up this friction to pull the best out of men, and pornography just derails that. I think to a large degree, it's also a symptom of just colossal laziness, and you will see other symptoms of laziness that spring up in your life if you're starting to succumb and get tied into pornography.

So, yeah, it has a domino effect, I believe. Well, and then you expect your wife to do what those ladies do, and those ladies on the pornography screen, they would never do those things unless they needed the heroin, right?

And you don't know how they're coerced to do it, and the pimps and all the other kind of issues that go along with it, and I think it was maybe Heath Lambert that talked about, we as men should look at ladies as people to be protected, right?

And to, we would want to lay down our life for a woman who was getting abused or something, and then when it comes to pornography, instead of protecting, then we end up using. Women are not to be used.

Women are to be protected, and therefore, when I look at the pornography thing, I almost would hate to know how many people at Bethlehem Bible Church watch pornography, right? If we had the hands raised for people that struggle with it or watch it, and of course, there are things you can do to not do it, but I think it's going to be a full-orbed, Christ-centered sanctification.

Teaching Sons and Daughters to Pursue Purity

Charlie, we've only got a few minutes left. Anything else that comes to your mind when it comes to thinking about purity for men, advice that you could give? Maybe we'll go this direction. Advice you could give dads when they're talking to their sons about this?

What'd you tell your young men, your sons?

Pete. Well, we kind of had a joke saying, in the Crane household, and it was more often inflicted upon the daughters when they would start talking about a boy that they were interested in, and we would say, 40 hours in benefits?

We'd always just say, 40 hours in benefits? And then, what do you mean, dad? It's like, well, don't even think about bringing a boy around here unless he's working 40 hours and has benefits, right? Because we tried to instill upon them that they set the standards of the relationship, and with the boys, it was, you need to be someone that a girl ideally would be attracted to.

And sadly, the world is changing, and this whole model is starting to erode, and that's why it's so incumbent upon Christians to understand why these prohibitions and these taboos and mores, or whatever you want to call them, why they exist.

So, yeah, it's definitely something that we talked about with our sons and with our daughters. And it's important too, and I know we're wrapping up, but when you're young, I call it the Disneyfication of marriage, right?

Everyone thinks about Disney, and they think that they lived happily ever after, and the boy thinks that once they're married, the agenda is going to, his expectations are going to be met, and he's oftentimes very shocked to learn that his wife isn't ready to fall into bed at a moment's notice and all this sort of stuff.

It's understanding and teaching our sons that it's a continual act of wooing, and that begins, you know, when the family with the cute daughters come in to visit, and for a family visit, and the boy rushes up and cleans up his horrendous bedroom, right?

Boys Jared Shaves, combs his hair. Pete Right, empties the 60 McDonald's bags out of the back of his car. Boys, they inherently Jared. It's built in. Pete. They spring into action and produce work when they're interested in getting to know a girl better, and we need to formalize that concept in our children's mind.

Girls, our daughters as the standard bearers, what must be true in order for me to let you into my life? And boys, the standard meters, we need to tell them, listen, you don't even, you don't need to think about a wife.

You don't even have a job yet, you know. Let's talk and plan. Let's make a five-year plan. So, yeah, it's very important, and it should be expressly and explicitly discussed, I should say. Jared.

Charlie, when you were talking about that, it made me think, all right, if you are interested in a girl, you're 18 years old, and you're at the basketball court, you try to put on your best moves to show her, look, look at me, look what I could do, right?

For you, you'd have a guitar, and if you're 18 years old, and Elaine walks in, you'd try to play the best riff you could for Mississippi Queen from Mountain or something, right? And you try to say, look, I have something to offer you.

And so, how much more with a job and everything else? And so, I remember when people would ask me for one of my daughters, you know, could I date your daughter, this, that, and the other, and I would be nice.

We'd have a coffee, and I'd say, well, tell me about your job and your benefits, and I don't have any. So, you want to date, and then that leads to marriage, which leads to kids, you know, sex and kids, and then you can't even have like a copay for pharmacy.

Stuff. The answer is no. That's right. And I'd be remiss if I didn't say there is a process as we age through life. When we enter marriage, we're overcome by testosterone, and that's when the most reform happens.

That's when deference to women is learned. That's when we become protectors of our wives and our daughters. We adopt all these great attitudes, because we're blazing through life with an agenda. As we age, and testosterone diminishes, and the sexual component of marriage perhaps diminishes in importance as we move into our elderly years, those early years set up the pattern of behavior that carry a loving husband and a wife into their elderly years.

So, instead of it being filled with bitterness and resentment, when you are that, when the wife is that standard bearer and the man is the standard meter, you're really setting yourself up for a wonderful life as you move through the years together.

So, the consequences, the good and bad consequences are innumerable, and you really can set yourself up well.

Charlie, so true, and it makes me think about the dad's role with the daughters as well in such a licentious age, helping protect the virginity and purity of our daughters to make sure they honor the Lord Jesus, of course, first and foremost, but then practically, so they get the right kind of guy, right?

And so, they're the ones, as you called them, the gatekeepers, and of course, when the ladies fall into sexual sin first in culture, then you know the culture's completely gone. So, anyway, today on No Compromise Radio, Charlie Crane, I'm glad to have you here, glad to have you close with that barn.

Could I hear the barn music when I drive by? I'm wondering, sometimes I just want to honk and….

Thursdays at 730, if you roll down your windows…. Seriously! You will hear the barn.

Good, well, thanks for your ministry here at the church, and thanks for being on NOCO. Thanks. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible-teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life-transforming power of God's Word through verse-by-verse exposition of the sacred text. Please come and join us.

Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbcchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.