Restoring Foundational Truths of Our Sexuality
Series: Restoring the Gift of Our Sexuality
Brad Bailey – March 22, 2009
Intro – This past week my wife was facilitating a group of mothers who have been discussing sexuality… and in this particular week… imparting healthy sexuality to children through developmental stages… very basic and foundational truths. Such things include affirming that our bodies are good… created by God. Our bodies are to be respected and some parts are more private. What was so striking is that so many healthy principles… foundational truths that we would never question as healthy… have become so distorted in our journey through life and into adulthood.
The truth of the matter is that we were created in the image of God… but now like a person with amnesia… and being shaped by world that is trying to write it’s own story apart from the true author. I believe we are a part of a very real story... a divine storyline. Life involves understanding that story. But human culture has been trying to write many other stories…scripts… that often prove tragic… or at least a confused mix of truth and lies.
Jesus invites us back into the very real storyline of the author. He confronts the false stories of culture… including religious culture… to proclaim the rule of the eternal story. The apostle Paul… when writing to those in Rome… one of the defining cultures of history… wrote of our need be renewed in the truth of the story.
Romans 12:2 (NLT) “Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.”
Romans 12:2 (MSG) “Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.”
To reach what is good, perfect, and pleasing…including what is good, perfect, and pleasing (fulfilling) as sexual beings… involves transforming our perceptions. In this case it may mean deciding that the movies and magazines really can’t tell us who we really are.
So we are going to conclude considering some of the myths that God wants us to transform into truth…some foundational truths.
This first myth is really one that comes out of religious culture…
Myth 1 – Followers of Jesus should focus on calling culture to line up with God’s design.
We’ve addressed many issues regarding the confusion that dominates sexuality within our culture. But I want to be clear that the primary purpose of this series isn’t to add another voice that is directed at the larger culture… wagging it’s finger. The tragedy is that organized religion… it often colluded in a false sense of power and control and takes on a role as the police… or
watchdog… of culture. The result is that while many do offer some inspiring distinction… we have so underestimated our own challenges. Often we really haven’t embodied God’s story… and so we become actors. That is what the root meaning of the word ‘hypocrite’ most literally means… an actor… and voice of hypocrites… offers little hope for any.
Jesus spoke very pointedly to the religious leaders that it’s vain to just wash the outside of the cup… we need to change the inside. All change is rooted in discovering and developing something new within. His could describe the what was wrong and said ‘but you be different…’ ‘let them see your good works.’ As some would phrase today… we need to become the change that we seek. We need to be those who are open to being real about our desires… our needs… and God’s design and desire…
Truth - Our primary witness lies in personally discovering and developing a healthy God-centered relationship with our own sexuality.
There is certainly a vital role to play in interpreting others people’s experiences and longings and choices… but it we can’t bypass our own integrity… our own process. Integrity shares the same root meaning as the word integration. It means mining the gap between what we believe and what we do. As Eric Sandras describes, ‘Our most important goal is to live a life consistent with what we profess to believe." The tension for any of us as humans occurs when we are professing one thing and living another.
Myth 2– Our bodies are enemies to our spiritual lives.
This may be experienced and embraced in varying degrees… for some… simply a battle between some desires… for some it leads to a very deep sense of shame…that our bodies themselves are dirty and to be disdained. We must stop and hear the Psalmist…
Psalms 139:13-15 (READ TOGETHER) “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place.”
What a wonderful affirmation of our bodies.
Truth - Our bodies are an intrinsic and good part of our being and of ‘embodying’ Divine love.
We are followers of God INCARNATE… goodness in bodily form. Yes your body embodies desires from within that are not good… but they are also the very means of embodying all that is loving… the ability to give… and comfort… and help.
We all know that we need to cultivate certain discipline to our bodily behavior… but it should not be in a spirit of developing a FIGHT… but a FIT. We want to embrace our bodies as a means of embodying what is good.
Myth 3 – Sexual desires are ‘natural’ and therefore must be fully expressed.
This may sound rather healthy. As I noted previously in our series… there is plenty of unhealthy repression that proves dangerous. But also as noted… being authentic… is not about acting on all desires… but acknowledging them. We have every reason to stop and question our desires. Unless humankind is living out perfect health and fairness and love… then we have every good reason to question whether our nature is perfect.
The truth is that it is a mixture of what is good and what is not good. We have generosity… and greed in all of us. We need to value boundaries. Our culture has become so good at tearing down fence after fence, never pausing once to ask why that fence was there in the first place.
Truth - Our true nature has become lost in autonomy from God out of which our self indulgence will prove a destructive end… and from which redemption lies in ‘loving God and others as ourselves.’
> Regarding the role of sexual desire – for too long we have simply swung between being repressed by inhibition… or resigned to indulgence… when what we need is to be infused by love.
Myth 4 – What is done in the bedroom (how we behave sexually) has no effect on anyone else.
At some level we can appreciate what this idea is trying to protect us from… we want to protect individual freedom. We are a country who recognized that it is best not to have a government who controls every choice. There are certain rights… freedom of speech.. to bear arms… of religion.
But interesting that those wise framers of our nation did NOT include freedom of sexual behavior. It’s just not that simple.
It’s certainly very personal… perhaps more personal than any other aspect of our lives… but ‘none of anyone’s business’ is a little different. It caries forward the idea that how we engage in this one particular way bears no larger meaning that can effect others…that it can’t hurt anyone… especially if kept private… even secret.
Consider the latest version…
Finish this sentence, “What happens in Vegas… (stays in Vegas). It’s the slogan for the Only Vegas campaign. Their big marketing idea is this: You can hop on a plane, travel way out to the desert, enthusiastically indulge in all the hedonistic pleasures that sin city has to offer, when your Vegas trip is over you hop on your return flight and by the time your plane touches down… there are no consequences… nothing will have been affected. As long as it’s not known… there is no connection between what you do as an individual… and anyone else.
Truth - While sex is personal, it is never fully private… as our sexuality is best understood in the context of shared life (community.)
We are morally connected.
I really appreciate what Lauren Winner has explained… and while this quote is long… I think worth hearing…
‘This myth of individualism and the idea that my body and what I do with it is my own business really underlies almost everything else that we think and do about sex. Put simply, this is a lie. And it is a fairly new lie. For most of human history, people of many different cultures have agreed that societies must order certain forms of exchange in order to survive. As essayist, poet, and novelist Wendell Berry has put it, "Sex, like any other necessary, precious, and volatile power that is commonly held, is everybody’s business."
What we do with our bodies, what we do sexually, shapes our persons. If we believe that sex forms us, then it goes without saying that it is public business, because how we build the persons we are—persons who are social and communal and political and economic beings—is itself a matter of social concern.
Even in America, which sometimes seems to value individualism above all else, we never hesitate to insist that formative institutions are public business. We readily agree, for example, that education is a matter of concern for all members of our community, even those citizens who don’t have school-age kids—because we understand that education forms the children who grow up to be the adult citizens that constitute our community. We have heated debates about controversial exhibits at art museums, because we recognize that the art we spend time with shapes the persons we are, and who we are is a public problem. As with art and education, so with sex. Because sex forms us, sex is a community matter.
…when we realize that sexual love is a primary force in constructing a household, and that households are primary components of constructing community, it begins to appear, indeed, that sexuality is something that should have a public, communal face.
In the Christian universe, the individual is not the vital unit of ethical meaning. For Christians, the most basic images, metaphors, and signs are corporate, and the basic unit of ethical meaning is the Body, the community. Israel experiences covenantal fidelity as a people, and the People of God is a collective—not merely an aggregate of individual persons, each doing his or her own thing, but a body.
…the community is not so much cop as storyteller, telling and retelling the foundational stories of the community itself, sustaining the stories that make sense of the community’s norms. This storytelling is part of the working out of God’s grace in the church. We, the church, retell our own story—we do this every time we read scripture, every time we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, and (hopefully) every time we minister to one another. And that retelling is part of what enables us to live into the story. It is the community that ensures that ethics is not about the dispensing of cut-and-dried answers to moral questions, but that ethics is a story with meaning and power. It is to ask the church to serve as narrator, reminding ourselves who we are, and why we do what we do.
- Real Sex – the naked truth about chastity by Lauren F. Winner, pp43, 46-55, 58-60 and couple statements from interview ‘A Church That’s Too Embarrassed to Talk About Sex’ By Craig Dunham
A foundational truth is that our sexuality is best understood in the context of shared life … of community.
Myth 5 – Unmarried and married lives have little to offer to one another’s development of healthy sexuality.
Have mentioned the very subtle danger of losing perspective on what marriage and family represent. The over emphasis on family can become a source of not only pain… but idolatry…. And also a division that loses sight of a meaningfully connected life.
The Bible recognizes the single/married distinction, for instance, but it shows little sign of the rigidity given to this distinction by the modern church, almost parallel to the male/female, Jew/Greek, slave/free distinction which were such stumbling blocks back then. It certainly does not make the value judgments on these two states that are present in today’s church.
Colossians 2:10 tells me- and I believe it - that I have been given fulness (fulfillment or completion) in Christ - not in marriage.
Jesus said, "Whoever has my commands and obeys them, that is the one who loves me." (John 14:21.) We cannot biblically separate our relationship with Jesus and our service to him and place one above and the other below the family in our scale of priorities.
Truth - The most complete grasp of God-given sexuality requires the symbolic representation and mutual support of both unmarried and married lives.
Let me unpack how we each provide a vital representation of something sacred.
Each position is a symbolic state that represents and teaches us something…
• Marriage – a symbolic representation of covenant, faithfulness, and intimacy
• Singleness – a symbolic representation of fundamental dependence on God that all truly live in… and a longing for ultimate union with God… which one day as ‘His bride’ will transcend temporal marriage
Lauren Winner
“…singleness prepares us for the other piece of the end of time, the age when singleness trumps marriage. Singleness tutors us in our primary, heavenly relationship with one another: sibling in Christ.”
- Real Sex – the naked truth about chastity by Lauren F. Winner, pp43, 46-55, 58-60, 143-147
Also need mutual support in our sexual faithfulness.
To those who are single… those married in your life… need your support. We still struggle with lust and really all the same stuff you do. (’Let marriage be honored by all’ - Heb.13:4).
To those married… those unmarried need your support. When was the last time you had single friends who you shared your life with….had over for a meal?
Myth 6 – My sexuality is already compromised and corrupted so I can never experience something better.
While the degree of such a feeling may vary… everyone can feel like damaged goods.
Often a further problem comes when we read that ‘we are new creatures in Christ’ and then face old desires.. It really means that something new has come into play that we should operate out of… a new position but one that will include a process.
Transformation is a process… we are ‘being transformed.’
o We are ‘truly new but not totally new.’
o Perhaps the best grasp we can find of our lives and process… lies in the grand story of the Exodus. The people are called out by God.. but along the way make choices that leaves them enslaved in Egypt. God delivers them. They flee and begin a journey towards a promised land… but begin to look back and idealize the past.. almost ignoring the enslavement. Old patterns arise. What becomes clear… is that ‘you can take the Israelites out of Egypt but it’s a deeper process to take Egypt out of the Israelites.’
Truth - Christ bears the ultimate authority to reclaim and restore our true identity… out of which a new way of experiencing life can develop.
Closing Time of Prayer…
• Time to present your past to God…
• Time for those married to pray for those they know who are unmarried… and for those unmarried to pray for those married.
• Time to reaffirm that our sexuality is ultimately a good.
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Some further resources available in the bookstore:
o Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections between Sexuality and Spirituality by Rob Bell
o Sexual Character: Beyond Technique to Intimacy by Marva J. Dawn
o The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes On by Dawn Eden
o Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity by Lauren F. Winner
o For Men Only: A Straightforward Guide to the Inner Lives of Women by Shaunti Feldhahn
o For Women Only: What You Need to Know about the Inner Lives of Men by Shaunti Feldhahn
o A Celebration of Sex: A Guide to Enjoying God’s Gift of Sexual Intimacy by Douglas Rosenau
o Pursuing Sexual Wholeness by Andrew Comiskey
