let's talk about sex baby!

On Friday I drove back to St. Louis from Birmingham, AL. On Friday night and Saturday I participated in a class titled "Gospel Centered Sexuality." I was really looking forward to this class because there is so much biblical material that deals positively with the fact that we as humans were made by God as sexual beings. However, many people assume that all Christianity has to say about sex is what "not" to do. The saddest thing here is that it's often been the church and Christians themselves who have perpetuated this misunderstanding of biblical teaching.

As we discussed in class the Bible actually teaches that we should simply distinguish between sexual need and sexual desire. A good analogy here is food. Our bodies have a legitimate and in-built need to eat. However, there is a real difference between hunger and appetite. True hunger is our body’s ability to make us aware of a real need, but our appetites can be severely distorted in many ways. Our appetite can lead us to eat too much or too little. It can lead us to eat things that can harm or kill us. In the same way, as human beings, we have a true and legitimate sexual hunger as creatures who are intrinsically sexual beings. This is a proper and God given aspect of our nature. However, our sexual “appetites” can be and are severely distorted and tend to work against us. Due to the effects of our rebellion against God our sexual appetite is out of line with our legitimate hunger. We now lean toward the misuse, disuse, and abuse of our sexual nature.

Here are a few helpful quotes from Ben Patterson's chapter on the goodness of sex and the glory of God from the book Sex and the Supremacy of Christ.

"Pleasure is God's idea, and God is the devil's Enemy. The devil actually hates pleasure, because he hates the God of pleasure."

"The pleasures and goodness of sex are heightened, not lessened by proper restraint, in the same way the Colorado River is made more powerful by the walls of the Grand Canyon. The very narrowness of the river's channel there makes for a greater river. Farther south, as the river flows through the deserts of California and Arizona, it is shallow, wide, and muddy, even stinky in spots. Wider boundaries diminish the river; sharper, stronger, and narrower boundaries strengthen it. Less is more. The boundaries and proscriptions of sex in the Bible are for the sake of sex."

"The reason we like sex so much is that it is a little bit like the God who created it. Therefore, the more sex is enjoyed in ways redolent of its Creator, the better sex is for all involved - to God's glory and our sanctification and joy."

As someone who used to try to live my life without limits on my sexuality these words ring true. I have experienced the wide, shallow, and muddy sex that Patterson describes. From experience I know that sex outside of proper, God-honoring boundaries, while still pleasurable, provides only diminishing returns. One of the biggest things Jesus had to re-form in my life when I became a Christian was my understanding of sexuality. Notice I said he reformed my sexuality, he didn't ditch it. According to the Bible, Christians should be having the best sex in the world. Yet sadly we hardly ever talk about it. May we do better in the future than we have in the past.