Wise Up About Sex Series

So here we find the alternative for living outside of God’s sexual boundaries. WISE LIVING INVOLVES ENJOYING OUR SEXUALITY WITHIN THE COVENANT OF MARRIAGE.

God created our sexuality for us to enjoy. This is one area where there’s a big difference between what we as an evangelical Christian church believe and what the Roman Catholic church teaches. The Catholic church believes that the only purpose of human sexuality is reproduction, to have children. This is why all forms of birth control are considered a serious sin in the Roman Catholic church. However, the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century questioned that idea, and based on texts like this one in Proverbs, the Reformers concluded that God’s purpose for sex was also enjoyment and intimacy between a husband and a wife. You see, God didn’t make sexual activity pleasurable in order to coax us into having kids, but he designed also it to cultivate pleasure and intimacy in marriage. Reproduction is a big part of our sexuality, but it’s not the whole story.

But God also created a boundary for the enjoyment of sexuality, and that boundary is the covenant of marriage. You see, when you’re intimate with another person, you become especially vulnerable to that person. So God created a the safest possible relationship in order to protect us from being hurt deeply. God created a covenant relationship, a relationship of mutual trust and mutual commitment, a relationship that’s entered into with vows. God knows that sexual wounds are among the deepest and most profound wounds that can be inflicted on a person. Just ask someone who was molested as a child or exploited by another person. So God created a special kind of relationship to provide a safe context for sexual expression. Not that we won’t get hurt in marriage because we surely will. Since we live in a fallen and sinful creation, all of us are sexually broken to some extent or another, but marriage provides the safest context for us to enjoy our sexuality.

This means that if we express our sexuality outside of this covenant relationship we’ve gone outside the boundaries. The Bible teaches that premarital sexual expression is wrong and destructive in our lives. The Bible uses the word "fornication" to describe premarital sex. It teaches that all extramarital sexual expression is wrong and destructive in our lives. The Bible uses the word adultery to describe extramarital sex. The Bible also teaches that all same sex sexual expression is wrong and destructive. The Bible uses the word homosexuality to describe same sex activity.

(Note: On the issue of homosexuality, the focus of the Bible is on the behavior, not on the orientation or the temptation. Moreover, the Bible doesn’t condemn homosexual activity because it’s gross or because its worse than other sins, but it condemns it because it short circuits God’s creation intention in marriage. But it’s important for Christians to realize that it’s not the temptation that’s wrong, but it’s the behavior itself that the Bible condemns).