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In this series I’ve deconstructed our cultures low view of marriage and love and today I will pick at its diminished view of sex. I’ve been weaving the biblical meta-narrative of sacrificial love and the gift of marriage as the means for personal healing and growth. The Bible does have much to say about ways couples could “structure” their marriage, but I’m convinced these cannot be primary frameworks for our relationships. The primary driver in all things is love as first experienced and understood as the love of God for each of us, then applied as best we can, as the very same love going out to our world.

“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22:36-40)

The best I can offer anyone is to know and submit to the law of love. My content will only be confusing until a person understands this premise. If we get love right, we get everything in every religion right, if we get love wrong, no amount of religion or structure can help us correct our course.

In the name of sexual freedom, our culture has diminished sexuality on both sides of the discussion. Liberalism seeks freedom by widening sexuality to remove any stigma or shame associated with almost all sexual expression. Of course, there is no scenario where all expression is allowed. Total freedom is still curtailed to protect the innocent or unwilling, thus making the trajectory of liberalism ultimately unobtainable.

Fundamentalism narrowed sexuality appropriately to the bounds of committed marital relationships, but diminished sexuality and stigmatized it in order to convince people to subscribe to a singular expression. Not surprising, many who stifle their sexuality discover later that freeing it isn’t so easy.

Both sides got sex wrong by devaluing it.

The wisdom I’m offering can heal us by first realizing that both camps require restraint, and such restraint is required to rightly value sexual intimacy so that it is not so high as to become an idol, nor too low as to become a sin.

Healing our sexuality requires that we understand it. I believe we misunderstand it because we assume we know what sexuality is based on our cultural and personal experience. I don’t speak as someone having complete and perfect knowledge, but I’d like to share 10 perspectives which I’ve discovered and applied in my life.

1. Sex is knowing. The bible says: “Adam knew his Eve, his wife, and she conceived.” Knowing is intimate knowledge. It’s to know a person in a way that is shared with no others. When sex is divorced from the knowledge of the whole person, or when that knowledge is shared by many others, intimate knowledge is diminished and potentially lost. In a world where growing ones “body count” is praised, the cost is our ability to know and be known intimately. Today, some don’t consider sex the “intimate part” of the relationship. The soul who is lost in these transactions will struggle to find anything real or lasting. Despite the foolish advice of our world, this is not how we come to know ourselves, but how we’ve chosen to forget.
2. Sex is sacred. In the same way that love shares an X and a Y axis, so too sex in our horizontal expression is first grasped in the vertical plane. Sexual union is the ultimate physical expression of human intimacy. Tim Keller once explained how the eucharist is likened to intercourse in its intimacy of divine union. In the emblems, we are taking God into us and both parties are transformed by the event. I’m not suggesting God wants to have sex with us, nor vice versa, such a conclusion would prove that my point is missed. Intimate knowing, is a bodily experience of God within. Receiving of God in totality and giving to God of ourselves in totality is in essence spiritual loving or love making. This shows us how to elevate sex in our consecrated human relationships, where and when we have laid down our life for our beloved.
3. Sex is giving and receiving. The giving and receiving of the beloved can only be done as a whole. Anything less is a “taking” of a part of the other. To only give a part of oneself, is a withholding. Taking and withholding diminish sexuality and dismembers the other, objectifying what should be known subjectively. A biological definition of sex has misled people into believing that sex is a biological process, like digestion. A person need not exist as any inanimate object can then be sexualized in the act of taking. The biblical revelation is that our bodies, belong sexually to our beloved, not to ourselves. Let this sink in and retrain our behaviors.
4. Sex is conflated with deeper realities. Sexual intimacy is intended to be the complete giving and receiving of the other, and is safe and healing in a relationship where it is an acceptance of the whole person. When we hide instead of heal, we hold back our insecurities and weakness and then sex loses intimacy, and then intimacy scares us. Non-intimate Sex then masks over those unredeemed parts of the other and superimpose sexual satisfaction in place of healing. This drives the wounds deeper, and establishes a wedge in the relationship creating more dysfunction. Even in marriage, this violates the law of love through mutual usury. Sex early in relationships causes couples to believe the relationship is closer than it actually is. First see if the other will receive your unredeemed parts, if not, do not give your body away.
5. Sex must be restrained. There is no scenario where unfettered sexual expression is permissible. Instead, life is full of seasons where sex must be restrained. The world is not a sex buffet. Sex will violate the law of love if we engage in it when both parties will not lay their entire lives down for the other. In marriages, there are also seasons and times for restraint. In sickness, or where there are physical changes, during struggle or times of prayer, all may curtail sexual engagement. There is always a life circumstance which causes sexual expression to take a back seat. This doesn’t necessarily mean the marriage is broken or deficient, it’s just not the season for sex. Seasons don’t last, the coming back together is vital, so explore why if one or the other resists sex for prolonged periods.
6. Sex is important play not duty. Sex is a shared responsibility as each gives themselves to the relationship. It’s vital to have open conversations about what is needed, expected, or desired. As a self giving gesture, one must make themselves available to the other and take responsibility for their satisfaction. This includes a lifestyle of “trying“, staying fit, hygiene, health, and every other level of human connection. Sex is not isolated apart from the whole self, nor the whole marriage, it is the icing on the cake, not the cake. The avoidance of play is a mirror that reflects deeper pain which needs healing.
7. Pornography is not harmless. The world’s cavalier attitude toward sex coincides with the rise of access to sexual content online. The generations who have grown up with access to sexual content are dating less, and are finding intimacy challenges as porn re-wires brain chemistry and the sexual response cycle. This violates the law of love when the person gives themselves to an image of the part, rather than to the whole, real person in their life. Pornography is not an issue of nudity, nor is it matter of showing “too much”. The issue is that porn doesn’t show enough, by only showing the body as a thing to consume. Second, pornography is not sexual content of any kind. Jesus reveals this in Mark 7:14 by showing “porneia” is not something on the outside trying to get in, but within the heart, seeking a place to get out. I’ve proven this many times in my ministry to men and in my book. Like worry (which is typically a concern for women), pornography is not eradicated by removing sexual content. Worry is not eradicated by telling people not to worry. Worry and lust are areas within the inner self where we are confused and wounded and idolatrous. Both are healed in the context of love, where we experience validation, approval, and acceptance..which are the deeper issues behind our confusion.
8. Sex is a waveform. Each person has highs and lows with regard to their desire for sexual intimacy. This is more than libido. It’s important to understand the beloved’s wave form and work toward syncing them. The issue of frequency must be shared and respected or the issue gets blown out of proportion very fast. This leads too…
9. Sex is only a big deal when it’s broken. Sex functions like a check engine light. Like my friend says, “It’s 10% of a good marriage and 90% of a bad one.” The natural warp and weft of life when shared with someone to whom you are sacrificially giving yourself, will naturally bring sexual intimacy to the forefront as part of the joy and play and desire to please the other, and our desire to be with and know the other. When sex falls to the backdrop, is avoided, or not desired, there is usually an area of pain or confusion which needs to be healed before that flow is established again. Sex grows into a big deal when we blame it for all the other big deals we won’t deal with. Sometimes the best way through it is for the marriage to do it. Then it can become a deal, not a big deal.
10. Sex is sinful when it violates the law of love. I’ve steered clear of the religious rules and condemnation over sex as best I can. While sex is sacred and beautiful and amazing, it can also be a life disrupting sin. Yes, being in a loving, self sacrificing marriage is where sex is clearly its most healthy expression, but being married doesn’t necessarily make sex sinless, nor does not being married necessarily make it sinful. If we seek to avoid sin, then we must seek the highest and most sacred expression of sex, and that is in marriage. To uphold the law of love, how would marriage not be the ultimate goal? How would learning to self donate entirely not be a prerequisite before the sexual experience? You don’t need me to tell you if your sexual expression is wrong. We know if we live from a low view of love, sex and marriage, and if we do, whether we are married or not, we are violating the law of love, and are living in sin. In such a case, we must return to both the X and Y axis or we forsake ourselves and one another.

So was that what you expected? I hope you can perceive the nuances of wisdom here. There is no single standard between two people. Each couple is only as free as their understanding and commitment to the law of love. The less we know of love, remembering that God is love, the more corrupt our sexuality becomes. If we truly want the freest expression of sexuality, it doesn’t come by either repressing nor unrest raining our sexual desire, but tempering it through love. Rather than imprisoning people into regressive, puritanical notions that bore us, the law of love allows for a couple to continually go deeper and find richer and more satisfying connections through and ultimately beyond our sexuality. 

When love is our greatest desire, sex sorts itself out.