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A Crisis in Christian Sexuality

For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.

The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.

Genesis 2:24–25

“Honestly, sometimes I wish God never made sex in the first place!”

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Kim buried her head in her hands and wept. Sam sat on the couch beside her with a pained look on his face, obviously concerned but not knowing what to say or do. I sat grieving with the two of them as I had with many other couples over the previous fifteen years, aching over how painful God’s gift of sexuality had become.

This beautiful couple in their mid-twenties was sitting in my office because they didn’t know where else to go. They had expressed skepticism that counseling would help but realized they had to do something to keep their marriage from falling apart. Though married for almost three years, they had yet to consummate their relationship through intercourse. Kim was unable to allow Sam to enter her.

They had tried to be patient and not force the issue, but increasingly it had become a source of tension between them. It wasn’t just Sam who was frustrated; they both felt they had been robbed of something they had saved until marriage. Now they wanted to start a family but knew it was impossible because of Kim’s problem.

Through their own research, they had learned that Kim’s reaction was indicative of vaginismus, an involuntary spasmodic contraction of the vaginal muscles that does not allow penetration. They had tried everything the books and their OB/GYN had suggested, but the problem only seemed to worsen. By this point they both acknowledged feeling pretty hopeless.

The good news is that we were able to solve Kim and Sam’s problem; there were answers, just as there are answers for so many other sexual struggles that couples face. The bad news is that there are so many other struggling couples.

Sometimes the problem is pain during intercourse. Sometimes it is an inability to achieve orgasm or the triggering of trauma from past sexual abuse. It may be a pornography addiction, an affair, or conflict over a specific sex act, the frequency of relations, or differing desires. It may be infertility or repeat miscarriages. Sometimes it is as simple as premature ejaculation or a general feeling that sex is wrong or dirty; other times it is as complex as homosexuality or coping with sexually transmitted diseases. The point is that these are the all-too-common struggles of countless Christian couples.

Rachel and I have long contended that Christians ought to be the most sexually fulfilled people on the planet. That doesn’t necessarily mean the most sexually active or the most sexually varied in their practices, but simply the most sexually fulfilled. Our God is the creator of sex and, like all things he created, he pronounced it good. He affirms its enjoyment within marriage, instructing Adam and Eve to consummate their relationship before the fall.[1] He celebrates it in the Song of Songs, instructs us to come together frequently,[2] and pronounces the marriage bed pure and undefiled.[3] Clearly God affirms sexuality within marriage! Fostering a healthy sex life is like pouring superglue all over your relationship.

Scripture is also filled with admonitions to avoid sexual sin. These passages are very specific, often listing numerous acts that are detestable and an abomination to the Lord. We are clearly told that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom.[4] We are told to flee from sexual immorality[5] and to make no provision for it.[6] We are instructed to drink the water of sexual fulfillment from the well of our own marriage[7] and not to adulterate it by looking at another person with lust in our heart.[8]

So God is either glorified or blasphemed by our sexuality. It can cement a relationship together or blow it apart. Very few things have so much potential for tremendous good or unspeakable evil. Studies consistently cite sex as one of the top reasons for marital conflict and divorce. Wisdom demands that we carefully examine anything with that kind of power.

An Easy Slide into Sexual Sin

There is no denying that our sexuality is one of the strongest drives we have, and throughout history it has been one of the main areas in which God’s people have struggled and failed. However, in addition to the struggles that are common to all generations, we in the twenty-first century contend with sexual temptations that no previous culture has ever had to face. Media and the sexual revolution have wreaked havoc on the church and on her call to preserve God’s gift of sexual fulfillment within Christian marriage.

Certainly there have always been impassioned invitations to enjoy the forbidden fruit of sex outside of marriage. Prostitution is called the world’s oldest profession, and many cultures throughout history have had deplorable sexual values and practices. However, until the invention of photography and then of films, television, VCRs/DVDs, cable channels, and the Internet, no culture was ever daily bombarded with the graphic presentations of sexuality the way we are. Sexual images, complete with perfect lighting, background music, and models’ bodies, are constantly available to us. In past generations we couldn’t have seen anything close to what we see now even if we were voyeurs peeping in people’s windows.

Think about it. Through archeological digs and history museums, we know that sexuality has always been portrayed in art. We find nudity and depictions of sex acts on pottery, in decorative carvings on walls, in paintings, wood and clay sculptures, tapestries, and statuary. We find it in ancient writings, songs, and theatrical plays. We read of infidelity, rape, and homosexuality even throughout the Bible. But in those cultures, for a person with godly values to stray from viewing inanimate portrayals of sex in art forms to actually engaging in sinful behaviors was a fairly big fall.

Not so today. We have become the proverbial frog in the pot, so used to daily portrayals of live-action sexuality that we fail to appreciate how desensitized we have become. We have been raised on a slippery slope of magazine covers at the checkout counter, movie ads on television, daytime soap operas, romance novels, explicit music lyrics, news stories about our president’s sexual practices, bikinis and fashions that leave little to the imagination, teen flicks with lots of skin, values-free sex education, and sexual humor during the family hour on TV. When we combine these with the more explicit material available in R- and NC-17–rated movies, soft-core and hard-core porn, and illicit sites on the Internet, it is easy to see why many Christians simply slide, rather than suddenly fall, into sexual sin. They have been moving in that direction for much of their lives without even realizing it.

This relatively new phenomenon of being exposed to hundreds of thousands of portrayals of sexuality has had another devastating effect besides the enticement to sin: It has caused us to develop a host of unrealistic expectations of what sex should be like and these faulty expectations are destroying countless marriages. We have unwittingly programmed ourselves to expect sex to be like what we’ve seen in the movies, and, when it doesn’t measure up, it becomes one of the primary sources of conflict for couples. Just as the ultrathin models in magazines and movies have caused millions of women to struggle with their body image, graphic portrayals of sexuality have left millions of couples dissatisfied with their sex life because of unrealistic expectations and false information.

Our heart is never to criticize the church, for she is the bride of Christ, and we must never tear her down. Instead, our desire is to build her up and challenge her to pursue an ever-greater degree of holiness and righteousness as she awaits the return of her Groom. We want to encourage the church with a clearer vision of God’s plan for sexual union and help her respond more effectively to the state of sexuality in Christian marriage.

The Church’s Role

There is no question that Christians have struggled to address the rapidly changing sexual values in our culture. To a large degree we have remained silent because sex is such a private matter and so awkward to address publicly. It is certainly not the easiest subject to preach on from the pulpit. When we have addressed it, we have often focused only on what not to do, thus appearing prudish, old-fashioned, and judgmental and causing the world to portray us as simply not wanting anyone to have fun. Overall we have had an extremely difficult time clarifying what we are supposed to do with this incredible gift.

Our awkwardness and relative silence are reasons the sexual revolution was able to establish such a foothold so rapidly. When Alfred Kinsey launched the revolution in 1948 with the publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, it hit like an atomic bomb, partly because no one else was talking openly about sex. The church, and even the scientific community, didn’t know how to respond. It was not until 1981 that many of Kinsey’s research methods were shown to have been fraudulent and that his claims about childhood sexuality were based on the criminal sexual abuse of more than three hundred infants and children.[9] By that point we had experienced more than thirty years of Kinsey’s influence, and it had forever changed our world.

As the sexual revolution preached its gospel of free love and sex without consequences, the church of the twentieth century evangelized the masses and brought the lost into the body. This is her primary calling and is greatly to her credit. Unfortunately, since she didn’t openly talk to these new converts about sex, in spite of their questions and struggles, they took their cues from the culture instead. We began to see a number of sexual practices and beliefs crop up in the church for which we had no theological underpinnings. We didn’t know why we believed what we were beginning to believe, and that is always dangerous for the church.

As we ushered the lost, with all of their sexual brokenness—their trauma, perversions, beliefs, and practices—into the church, we admonished them to put away their evil ways but struggled to give them a vision of God’s original plan for sexual intimacy. We have somehow failed to redeem and sanctify sex. It has seemed too worldly, too fleshly; we haven’t been sure what to do with it. Most seminary degrees do not require even a single course in it. Many of our premarital counseling programs barely touch on the subject. Intellectually we know it is part of God’s design and is therefore good, but practically speaking we have largely left couples to fumble around with it, trying to figure out how it works and God’s original plan for it. As a result, couples have looked back to the culture for the instruction the church has failed to give.

Perhaps this is nowhere more evident than in the issue of birth control. Few Christians realize that until at least the 1930s the Catholic church and the Protestant church were absolutely united in their stand against artificial means of contraception.[10] In spite of numerous forms being in use since the time of the ancient Egyptians, there is not a single church father, including the leaders of the Reformation and the Great Awakening, who supported contraception in any form.[11] When the issue began to be debated in America, there were outcries from all denominations and even from major newspapers, including the Washington Post and the New York Times.[12] The president of the United States denounced it publicly,[13] as did many prominent thinkers and writers of the day (including Sigmund Freud! [14]). Every state in the United States had laws prohibiting it. Not until 1965 did the Supreme Court rule that contraception is a constitutional right (while clarifying that it is a right extended only to married couples).[15]

Of course today most Protestants teach that many forms of contraception are acceptable and are even to be encouraged. It is rarely even considered much of a debate. But for the most part, we have not done the hard work of developing a sound theology for why we believe that—we simply believe it. It makes sense to us, just as it did to the culture. We didn’t arrive at that conclusion by looking to the church’s teaching; we gained it from the culture.

Our purpose in pointing this out is not to debate the merits of artificial contraception—that would be another book. We are simply using contraception to illustrate how dramatically our sexual practices have evolved over the period of a few decades and to emphasize that this evolution has largely been a by-product of our relative lack of a well-developed theology of sex.

In the case of contraception, after Planned Parenthood succeeded in having it legalized, people entered the church who had been practicing contraception before their conversion, and they simply continued to do so. Then apparently other converts learned that these members, who seemed like good upstanding Christians, practiced birth control and began to feel comfortable doing so as well. The culture was heavily promoting it, it has obvious benefits for couples, and since the church was not talking openly about sex and making a clear argument against it, contraception became common practice.

This pattern of beliefs and practices evolving over the past few decades with little theological debate can also be seen in our views on controversial issues such as masturbation and oral sex. Every time I speak on sexuality, I get questions about these two issues—and people usually have strongly held opinions on both—but they’re often not sure why they believe whatever they believe. Their positions are argued more out of feeling than from belief.

This same pattern might even have continued with larger issues such as homosexuality and abortion—two other agendas heavily promoted by Planned Parenthood and others—but many within the church have mounted a counteroffensive on these issues and are studying and debating them more openly. We are at least beginning to clarify the theological underpinnings for why we believe whatever we believe about sex. We cannot simply allow whatever we feel is right or wrong to substitute for what we believe, based on sound theology. Our feelings are too easily influenced by the culture. If we fail to wrestle through a sound theology, we get beliefs and practices by default rather than from conviction, creating a terribly weak foundation on which to stand.

Reclaiming God’s Gift

If Satan had his way, he would take everything God created for good and make it his. In ancient Egypt he claimed many of the things in God’s creation and persuaded the people to worship him through them—the sun, the Nile River, cows, frogs, even the crops of the field. Through Moses, God reclaimed his creation. The plague of darkness took back the sun and showed that it did not belong to the sun god Ra. Changing the Nile to blood showed that it belonged to our God and not the Nile god Hopi. The plague of frogs took them back from the goddess Heqt. The plague of locusts conquered Osiris, god of vegetation.

In the twentieth century, Satan claimed sex as his. Through his “prophets” Margaret Sanger, Alfred Kinsey, Hugh Hefner, Larry Flynt, and others, he has persuaded our culture to worship sex. In The Pivot of Civilization, Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood) wrote, “Through sex, mankind may attain the great spiritual illumination which will transform the world, which will light up the only path to an earthly paradise.”[16]

The church must take back sex and claim the truth that it belongs to God and it is good—but only when practiced within his guidelines. This is accomplished in many ways, but most powerfully in the marital bedroom when, under the blessing of the Holy Spirit, husband and wife join themselves and the two become one flesh. Our union as husband and wife bears testimony in the heavenlies to the promised consummation of Jesus Christ and his bride, the church.

We strongly believe there is a need for visionaries, missionaries, and warriors in this culture who can address sexuality and say, “This is our God’s turf! This is not the enemy’s turf. We will no longer be silent while the culture seeps into the church. We will no longer watch passively as our couples struggle in ignorance and brokenness. We are reclaiming sex!”

God has answers. He has a plan for this gift, and it is incredibly good. We as a church must redeem and sanctify our view of sex. If we do, it can be the cornerstone of a new evangelization—the world is crying out for real answers. If we fail, it will likely be our undoing. The homosexual issue alone is already unraveling entire denominations. We simply must do a better job of discerning God’s plan for sex.

Questions for Couples

In what ways has the media and Western culture impacted your view of sexuality?

In what areas are you most easily tempted by the culture’s presentation of sexuality?

What faulty expectations have you unknowingly brought into the marital bedroom?

In what ways has sex become a point of contention between you and your spouse?