SERIES: Christ is the Answer When the Church is in Crisis
Sex is Good!
SCRIPTURE: 1 Corinthians 7:1-9
DATE: February 25, 2001
Introduction: This week we return to our regularly scheduled study of 1 Corinthians. We will be looking at chapter 7, verses 1 through 9. Last week Pastor Mike took us through a study of David’s life and mentioned that my sermon title was apparently a cheap attempt to cash in on the momentum of our recent study on sexual morality. Frankly, I just thought the research would be more interesting. Seriously, this passage really is about our sexuality and what to do with it.
Paul turns from the warnings against immorality in chapters 5 and 6 to give some positive instructions about morality, about honoring God with our bodies. 1 Corinthians 7, verse 1 through 9 reads:
Now for the matters you wrote about: It is good for a man not to marry. But since there is so much immorality, each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband. The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. The wife’s body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the husband’s body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife. Do not deprive each other except by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. I say this as a concession, not as a command. I wish that all men were as I am. But each man has his own gift from God; one has this gift, another has that.
Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion. (1 Corinthians 7:1-9)
“I got saved six months ago, but nobody told my glands!”
“I don’t feel any sense of wrong when we’re together…. It’s a fulfilling relationship for both of us.”
“Sure it’s a sin. I’ve tried … but I just can’t let her go.”
These statements come from an excellent book by Erwin Lutzer, Living with Your Passions. Lutzer talks powerfully, plainly and graciously about what to do with this sexual desire God has given us. Those passions and what to do with them are the thrust of this passage, as well. Paul is not focusing on celibacy, or singleness, or even marriage, but sex. This text is about how to honor God with our bodies in whatever circumstance he has put us. Because sex is so incredibly powerful, it is also potentially harmful and destructive. We need to be guided in the proper use of our sexual desires as a gift from God. There is no one-size-fits-all answer because everyone of us faces different temptations and lives in our own unique situations. What Paul gives us are principles to use in dealing with our sexuality in a way that is affirming, God-honoring, and other-centered.
The first observation we make about this passage is that Paul does not condemn sex, and he is not ashamed to speak openly and frankly about it.
Sex is Good – Amen?
As I started doing research for this sermon, I ran into some roadblocks. Nave’s Topical Dictionary and Easton’s Bible Dictionary have no entry headings for “Sex” at all. My NIV Study Bible only talks about sex in the negative sense of avoiding sexual immorality. God must have something to say about sex. Surely he’s not embarrassed about the whole thing. It seems we are. Friday’s radio broadcast of the program “For Faith and Family” was discussing the dangers of pornography and the victory that God can give us over sin and temptation. But the hosts noted that when they have a program on this or similar topics, their donations go down considerably!
If Christians talk about sex in more than a clinical manner, other Christians get upset. But sex is for more than just reproduction. Just as food is not solely about feeding our bodies, but also for our enjoyment, so God clearly intends sex for pleasure. Sex is a good gift. It is the highest expression of love, intimacy, and vulnerability – being naked before another person and becoming one flesh. That one-flesh union is even a picture of the relationship between Christ and his people:
“For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery— but I am talking about Christ and the church. (Eph 5:31-32)
You see, we are created for passion, delight, and intense joy. God is the ultimate object of our desire, but not the only one. Eugene Peterson writes: “Sex and religion are intricately interwoven because they dealing with the basic elements of intimacy and the stuff of ecstasy.” Scripture itself draws out the parallels between spiritual and physical passion:
How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord Almighty! My soul yearns, even faints, for the courts of the LORD; my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God. (Ps 84:1-2)
This is the language of intimate, passionate yearning that finds its parallel in the proper expression of our sexuality:
May your fountain be blessed, and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth. A loving doe, a graceful deer—may her breasts satisfy you always, may you ever be captivated by her love.(Proverbs 5:18-19)
Sexual response and impulse touches us more than physically, it also touches us emotionally and spiritually because God made us that way. We have to avoid two opposite evils – on the one hand, the Victorian prudishness that wants to deny sex, call it something dirty, and lock it away; and on the other hand, the more modern hedonism that tells us sex is an absolute good and that we ought to pursue our sexual impulses no matter what.
If we Christians ignore sex, we will surrender it to those very cultural perversions and give the impression that sex itself is bad because it’s so abused. But you can’t fix what is wrong by simply negating or ignoring it. Nobody lives in the world of “no”. We all have to know how to say “Yes” in the right way. It’s not enough to be people who hate evil; we must also be people who love good, and we must teach our children to love good. A pastor mentioned recently that he heard a non-Christian describe Christians as “people who say ‘No’ to everything and go to a lot of meetings.” Ouch. We’re much better at saying what not to do than what to do. Sexuality is deeply perverted in our culture. But we have to do more than negate the negative. We also have to articulate powerfully the joy of God’s way, to show the beauty of holiness.
Another reason we avoid talking about sex is that we want to keep some things private – not out of a proper sense of propriety, but out of a desire to keep some part of our lives separate from God. We want to be able to lock God out of the bedroom and tell him that what we do there is none of his business. But Christianity is a very earthy faith – it deals with the most intimate issues of our everyday lives: home, family, work, neighbors, food, sex, money, children. God cares about all of these things and claims his authority, his rights over every square inch of creation. Sex is a good gift, but it belongs to God.
That leads us to our second principle in understanding our sexuality: it must be God-honoring. God has a plan for our sexuality that actually will provide true fulfillment, but only if we follow the instructions and trust Him. We need to understand …
The Big Picture
God has a mission to redeem and restore what we have corrupted by sin. God is first and foremost interested in glorifying himself and making us like his Son, not in pleasing us or even making us happy. Look back up to the last verses of chapter 6:
You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.(1Corinthians 6:19-20)
As Christians, we find our identity, our acceptance, love, value and worth in God, not in sexual fulfillment or marital status. I am not identified by what I do, by my marital status, or by anything we commonly use to categorize people. I find my identity, worth and my meaning in God – in his love for me, his plans for my life, his transformation of my priorities, his mission to redeem the world and to preach the gospel to every creature. Paul reminds us in Romans:
Do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires … offer yourselves to God, as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer the parts of your body to him as instruments of righteousness…. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness. (Romans 6:12-18)
Every good thing that God gives us – sex, money, family – we turn into idols. Even our religion becomes an idol to give us what we demand. And if this idol won’t give us what we want, we’ll go find another idol that will. Yet, we are reminded in verses 3 and 4 of our passage that we have a duty to give love to others because our bodies do not belong to us. I don’t belong to me. I have never belonged to me. I was a slave to sin; now I am a slave to righteousness. It’s not about me. We need to get over ourselves.
If we belong to God and if sex belongs to God, then we must seek God’s wisdom to honor him and enjoy him in our sexuality. Sex is good, but it’s only a relative good. There’s a great scene in the musical 1776 where John Adams tries to draft someone into writing the Declaration of Independence. Finally, Adams corners Jefferson, who tries to beg off because he hasn’t seen his wife in a long time: “But I burn, Mr. A!” Adams reminds Jefferson that he too misses his wife, as he sings:
“Mr. Jefferson, dear Mr. Jefferson,
I’m only 41, I still have my virility;
And I can romp through Cupid’s grove with great agility,
But life is more than sexual combustibility!”
“Life is more than sexual combustibility.” Our sexuality must find its place in the larger issues of marriage, service to God and to others, my spiritual growth, and God’s purposes for my life.
In Lewis Carroll’s famous book, Through the Looking Glass, Alice steps through the mirror in the living room to find a world on the opposite side where everything is backwards: Alice wants to go forward, but every time she moves, she ends up where she started; she tries to go left and ends up right; up is down and slow is fast.
Christianity is a kind of looking glass world, where everything works on principles opposite to those of the world around us. Down is up, up is down. The way to be great is go lower. Jesus tells us:
The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. (John 12:25)
Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave –– just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. (Matthew 20:26-28)
The path to fulfilled desires is not to focus on the desire, but to love and serve others. To receive love, you must give love. To be blessed, be a blessing to others. If you want to live, you must die to yourself.
And yet, I know it doesn’t always work out this way. You give and serve and love, but you don’t always receive love in return. Your passion for your mate is sometimes unwanted and unfulfilled. Those are tragic and too-common realities, but they do not disprove these truths. Rather, they prove the truth of our sinfulness towards one another – that we are capable of taking and not giving, of using others. This is the reality for some of you, and I mourn with you in the coldness and emptiness of your unreturned love. But because we and our spouses are sinful, God never promises that we will have even legitimate sexual needs met. Walter Trobisch writes, “The task we have to face is the same, whether we are married or single: to live a fulfilled life in spite of many unfulfilled desires” (Love Is a Feeling to Be Learned, InterVarsity Press).
What God does not allow is for us to demand our rights, assert our wills, or ignore or intimidate our spouses. Much less may we ever seek fulfillment in illegitimate ways. The only way we will find the joy we seek is to stop searching for it so hard and to focus on loving and serving others first.
The joy we want is like a star in the night sky – the more we focus on it, the harder it is to see. Only by taking our focus directly off the star can we see it brightly and clearly. So it is with our desires. We don’t make someone love us by saying “Love me!” but by being a loving person. Only by focusing on those next to us – our spouses, our brothers and sisters in Christ, the lost and dying world around us – will we then find peace, joy, and fulfillment.
Our sexuality is good gift from God, but our sexual desires must be controlled by a heart that is centered on honoring God and loving others.
So What?
So, what do we do with all this? If our attitudes and our hearts and our priorities are right, we still need instruction in how to apply these truths.
Singles. To the single, God says first that singleness is good and even desirable. There is nothing wrong with being single, and a lot right with it. We married people need not only to say that, but to believe it and demonstrate it our attitudes and our relationships with singles.
God tells us that sexual desire is normal and right. However, the only legitimate format for the expression of sexual desire is marriage. This is why Paul offers marriage as the proper response to gross immorality in the church and culture. Yet the goal of singleness is not to stop being single. If it is, then you are missing what God wants you to be and do right now. Paul affirms that “It is good for a man (or woman) not to marry.” Being single is not a disease to be cured, but a format for living a particular kind of life.
The desire for a spouse is normal and good. But what do you with that desire? Does it control and direct your life? Does it lead you to immorality? Do you lack peace because you are unmarried? God says if you cannot stay single without falling into sin, then get married. But it is not right to get married because all your friends are, or because you are lonely, depressed or frustrated. Marriage is a serious commitment that not only doesn’t solve all your problems, it also creates some new ones. Everything that we do is corrupted by our sin, including marriage, so even as it brings joy and fulfillment, it also brings pain and trouble.
God recognizes not only our needs and weaknesses, but also our different gifts and callings. Look in verses 6 and 7. Not everyone is called to be single. It is good to be single, because the single person can be more fully devoted to the Lord, but not everyone has the gift of singleness that Paul apparently had. Virginity is a gift that some of you wish you could return or exchange, but if it is from God, then it is the gift he has given you. And we are challenged to accept by faith that God gives good gifts, even if they are not of our choosing.
He will not tempt you beyond what you are able to bear. He will give you grace to not only endure but to live joyfully. Dr. Debbye Turner powerfully demonstrated this at the recent Women of Honor dinner. She is a beautiful, talented, intelligent young woman who is entirely satisfied as a single. You can honor God in your body as single person. You can resist temptation, lust, and immorality.
The Married. Now, to those who are married, Paul has some more explicit instructions. As verse 3 points out, the normal life of married people includes and even commands sexual intercourse. Yet we do not demand our rights, but rather give ourselves freely to each other. Neither spouse has any right to either deny or demand. What we do have the right to do is give, serve and love. We may not deprive one another, as Paul says in verse 5.
There is one exception. Only by mutual consent are couples to stop regular sexual relations, and only for a short time, and only to devote themselves more fully to prayer. Some versions read prayer and fasting, based on differing Greek manuscripts – the difference is not significant. The mutual agreement to self-denial is a form of fasting – giving up something that is normal, good, and even necessary in order to devote ourselves more fully to God.
Continued denial of sexual relations, of normal intercourse, is sin. I know that there is a lot of frustration and disappointment in marriages, and not only for men. There are many men and women whose spouses selfishly ignore their needs. Denying one another interrupts the intimacy that God intends to develop by our self-giving. Worse yet, as Paul points out in verse 5, it also opens us up to increased temptation and the possibility of being led astray by the devil.
Notice in verses 2 and 4 that this union is exclusive – we have one single spouse to whom we belong. We may not ever invite other people into this most intimate relationship. “Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral,” reads Hebrews 13:4. There is no permission for pornography, for lustful thoughts about other men or women. We may not give our bodies or our minds over to desiring another person. This is adultery: dissatisfaction with what we have that leads us to seek someone or something else to fulfill me.
Having said all that, God also entrusts us with a lot of freedom. He gives us guidelines and principles, but not a lot of rules or standards. Difficulty can arise from differing expectations. There’s a scene in the movie Annie Hall where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton are both talking to their therapists about each other. Woody Allen says, “We hardly ever have sex – maybe 2 or 3 times a week.” And Diane Keaton is saying, “We have sex all the time – 2 or 3 times a week!”
There is no “right” amount or kind of intercourse – how we work this out in our marriages is a matter of prayer, discussion, sensitivity, and consideration. We must not try to get our needs met in a way that humiliates, scares, disgusts, alienates, or frustrates our spouses. We must not focus on pleasing ourselves only. But within those guidelines, God allows and even encourages us to explore and enjoy our spouse’s body.
Thirdly, Paul now takes these overall principles to the case of those who have been married but are not now – to the divorced or widowed.
The Divorced or widowed. Paul does not state specifically “divorced” here, but “unmarried,” which could mean singles. But the flow and structure of his writing, as well as his grouping these two categories of people together leads me to believe he is talking to those who were, but are not now, married.
Again, Paul affirms that even this situation is not somehow sub-Christian. “It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am.” There is nothing wrong or deficient about being alone. Interestingly, it is very likely that Paul was in fact married at one time. Almost all Jews married. The Pharisees looked on singleness and childlessness as sins, and membership in the Jewish ruling council, the Sanhedrin, required being married. Paul in all probability was either a widower or had been abandoned by his wife after his conversion. “Follow my example,” Paul says. It is good to stay unmarried. And you can learn even to rejoice in your circumstances, as Paul says he has learned.
But God also recognizes the special nature of those who have been married: they have become used to sex. Those who have enjoyed sexual fulfillment in marriage will find it especially difficult to live without that fulfillment. And again, God addresses our weakness and need with grace and understanding: “If they cannot control themselves, they should marry.” This, of course, is always held under other Scriptural commands about who may remarry and under what circumstances.
But in 1 Timothy 5, Paul makes this same point again, and tells Timothy to encourage the younger widows to remarry, so that they don’t fall into temptation and give the enemy room to bring slander on them. Older widows are encouraged to stay single and devote themselves to the Lord and his work. Younger widows are more likely to feel the sudden lack of sexual fulfillment.
Yet, as Calvin says in his commentary on this passage, burning is not the same as feeling heat. God does not wish us to burn – that is, to be carried away or destroyed by our passions – but to feel heat is to recognize our weakness and our need of him. We cannot live rightly in a state of burning passion, but we can resist heat by God’s grace and for his glory. God will not tempt us to sin, nor will he ever make it so that I have to sin. Being married does not eliminate sexual temptation. Singleness can be a very good gift from God.
Now where do we go from here?
Now What?
I’ll be the first to tell you that this won’t solve all your problems. In fact, it may make your problems worse. One partner’s desire may increase more than the other’s. One partner may be totally committed to honoring God while the other is selfish or sinful. You may not have a spouse, but you earnestly desire one. This message about the beauty of God’s plan for our sexuality may in fact make you more unhappy than when you came here. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. God uses our weakness and frustration to cause us to lean on him.
There are many good resources available to help us deal with temptation. I would again recommend the book by Erwin Lutzer, Living with Your Passions. It is out of print, but I have found one supplier through the Internet who has copies available. Please contact me if you would like to get this very helpful book. Beyond the help of books and, of course, God’s Word, we all need to be connected to others in Christian community – through small church, community groups, or some relationship that will provide support and accountability. There are pastors and Christian counselors who can help also. The Christian life is not meant to be lived alone in our own power.
And still all these principles and commands can sound legalistic and impossible, because we know we can’t really live this way in our own strength. But that’s why Jesus came – not only to take away our sins, but to take away our hard hearts of stone and give us new hearts that are tender; to make us not people who obey, but people who want to obey, who live to serve, who love to give; people who literally hate sin and the idea of sinning. This is the work of Christ in you.
You can have this life by the Spirit of God in you as you walk with Christ, put to death the works and desires of the flesh, and sincerely ask him to transform your heart and life. Jesus bids us lay down our burdens and take up his yoke because it is easy and his burden is light. God wants to transform us into people through whom his life flows naturally and easily into every part of our lives.
The gospel is wholistic; it is a whole-life faith. It speaks to every corner of my life because Jesus claims ownership over it all. God cares about what happens in the kitchen, the bedroom, the boardroom, the schoolroom, the workplace, the neighborhood, and the church. He wants to direct us to true life, abundant life that is also glorifying to Him. We thank God for the gift of our sexuality, but we must also thank him for the gift of our every circumstance – single, married, widowed, or divorced.
I read an interesting email discussion recently that helps bring all this together. Listen as I read:
“Lust is the desire to possess someone in order to steal enough passion to be lifted out of our current struggles into a world that feels (for an instant) like the Garden of Eden…. Lust involves the heart of a thief whose passion is to be satisfied, not the heart of a lover whose desire is to give.”
In whatever situation we find ourselves, God wants to turn us from lustful thieves into giving lovers. As we do this, we find the fulfillment of our best and deepest desires. Let’s begin today. Decide right now that you want to honor God in your body.
DATE: February 25, 2001
Tags:
Sex
Singleness
Marriage