Roommates, Bad Dates And Great Mates: Sex Series

Let me give you a couple of examples from television. Do any of you remember the old, old, old Star Trek? If so, just do this. Yea, some of you do. Do you remember this guy, Mr. Spock? There were three main characters in Star Trek. Now, there were other minor characters, but there were three main characters. One was Mr. Spock. The other was Dr. McCoy. And then, of course, you had Captain Kirk. And that was sort of the trinity inside of Star Trek. What’s interesting about Gene Rodenberry, he built an entire series on this mind/body dualism and the battle back and forth. But Mr. Spock, who interestingly enough, was most us. He was our favorite character, Mr. Spock was totally driven by the mind and it was all about reason. It was all about depressing emotion and doing the logical. Dr. McCoy, who was a doctor, he lived his life according to the body. He lived his life with passion and he always represented the other side of things. Then you had Mr. Kirk in between. And Kirk had to always decide—is he going to go with bones, Dr. McCoy, or was he going to go with Spock. And this created for some rather interesting issues inside of the show Star Trek. Well, you say—that’s old. Fast forward to today. Have you seen the show Desperate Housewives? In Desperate Housewives, what you have is you have one person who represents the mind and they operate according to a prudish view of society. Another person represents the body and it’s all about Hedonism and pleasure and the main character is what, always going back and forth. Who are they going to believe? Which philosophy are they going to go into? And this mind/body dualism is so strong. But the problem with that is, whenever you live your life according to a false truth, you are going to suffer pain. You are going to suffer regret and you are going to miss out on the very life that God wants you to live. In the area of sex, all sexual problems can be traced back to a lack of understanding of the truth of how God created us as sexual beings and how He designed us so that when we live according to that design, that we can get His best for our life. So, this is a series about truth. As we begin tonight, I want to give you three basic truths about sex, not from the philosophical prospect, or from the world’s perspective, but I want us to look at sex from God’s perspective and hopefully that will change your perspective as well and you can walk out of here tonight experiencing God’s best for your sex life. Here’s truth number one.

1. God created sex.

God created sex. That may or may not sound all that radical to you, but the reality is that God created us as sexual beings. Now, some people have a hard time embarrassing sex. Some people tend to think that God created us in such a way that He doesn’t want us to experience any pleasure or any fun. That God somehow set up all of these rules and regulations in the Bible so that He could take the fun out of living life. And many have viewed God this way for centuries. And Christians have been guilty of promoting this false view of God. As a matter of fact, when it comes to sex and the issues related to sex, we, as the Church, have been very guilty of knowing more about what we are against than what we are for. Somehow, we have allowed the world to think and the people out there to think that they created sex and somehow they come up with this idea that sex can be fun. The reality is that sex was God’s idea all along. I want to go back to Genesis 1, the creation story in the Scripture, and Genesis 1 is kind of a foundational chapter for this entire series that we are beginning. In Genesis 1, I want you to see how God created sex and I want you to see His purposes and plan for sex. As a matter of fact, let’s read these verses out loud together. Genesis 1:27-28. Are you ready? Here we go. “So God created people in His own image. God patterned them after Himself. Male and female He created them. God blessed them and told them to multiply and fill the earth.” It’s interesting, God says two things. God blesses them and then God tells them to multiply. And inside of that Scripture you find God’s two fold purpose for sex. Purposes number one is to multiply. What you and I might call procreation. God obviously created sex for procreation purposes and God says multiply and fill the earth. And throughout the Scripture, God commands His people to multiply and fill the earth. Most of you have probably heard that reason for sex. It is for procreation. The second purpose, though, is one we don’t talk about very much. That is that God also created sex for pleasure. God blessed the sex life. Now, think about the context of what is going on here in Genesis 1. God has just created male and female. The only two people in history never to go through infancy or teenage years, Adam and Eve. They are created as adults and He created Adam and He created Eve. And we learn their names in chapter 2. And He says to them, multiply, that is to have sex and procreate, but He also blessed that relationship. He creates them in a marital state and that leads us to an understanding of God’s simple plan for sex. God’s plan for sex is one man, one woman, inside of marriage, maximum sexual fulfillment. You see, God’s view of sex is very simple. Inside of marriage, sex is wonderful. But outside of marriage it can be offensive. It can be offensive to both the One that created sex as well as to the created beings who choose to follow a plan that is different from God’s. Sometimes we fall into this. Sometimes we misunderstand that God not only created sex for procreation inside of marriage, but He also created it for pleasure. As a matter of fact, when I was in college, I had just become a Christian and I had transferred to another college. I was pursuing a religion degree. I met a guy who was about to get married. He was engaged and I saw him several months later and I said—how’s the wedding coming? When’s the date? He said, “Well, it was originally scheduled for about two weeks from now, but the wedding’s off.” I said, “What do you mean, the wedding’s off?” He said that about a week or so ago, the girl in the wedding had announced that they were not going to have sex on their honeymoon. It created a problem for him as you might imagine. He said, “What do you mean we are not going to have sex on our honeymoon?” Well, the lady went on to explain to him that she intended to only have sex two times in their relationship because she only wanted to have two children. So the wedding was off. I don’t know about that. I thought—how out of balance can you get? I mean, not only did this girl not understand sex, but she also had a lot to learn about God’s view of sex. Did you realize that the Bible speaks a great deal about marital sex as great pleasure? As a matter of fact, I Corinthians 7, the Apostle Paul says to married couples—be careful that you don’t spend too much time away from each other. You need to be together and spend time with your partners, touch one another and enjoy one another. In Genesis 26:8, if you want to look it up, it is recorded that Isaac was sporting with his wife, Rebecca. The Hebrew word for sporting there, I assure you, does not mean playing checkers. Okay? There is a text in Deuteronomy that says, when a man is married, he should take a year off from work. Because once he gets married, he should spend that next year “cheering up his wife”. The text does not imply that the first year of marriage is going to be one long honeymoon, but it does indicate the tremendous importance of marriage in general and the sexual relationships between a husband and wife in particular. Interestingly enough, the Hebrew word that is translated “cheerful” really involves a profound sense of intimacy. A modern vernacular would mean that the husband is to discover what pleases his wife in every way. That’s just in the first couple of books in the Bible. There is a whole book in the Bible, that I mentioned earlier, the Song of Solomon, that for many years was considered rated “R” by societal standards. The Song of Solomon extols the joys of sexual pleasure within the bonds of marriage. In fact, it was so explicit that the ancient Jews forbade young men from reading the book until they turned 30 years old. You see, over and over, the Bible offers an underlying assumption about sex, if God created sex and if the Bible tells us that it is created for our pleasure, then God, more than anyone else, knows how you and I can get the maximum benefit from it. You see the God as a cosmic killjoy is wrong. Yes, there are things in the Bible where God says “no”, and God will occasionally say “no” to something for our own good, but for every “no” in the Bible, you should understand there is a parallel “yes”. God says simply—sex outside of marriage, yes that is considered painful, and ultimately sinful. But the yes is that within marriage it can be profoundly beautiful and utterly good. You see, our model for this from the very beginning was found in Genesis 1, with Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve were the model for maximum sexual fulfillment. One man, one woman, fully enjoying each other inside of marriage. Regretfully, we don’t know a lot about the marital relationship of Adam and Eve, except it was a long one. Adam lived over 900 years and the Scriptures say that he outlived his wife, Eve. He and Eve were life-long partners and they had many sons and many daughters. And Adam and Eve, interestingly, were the only couple that experienced life in the garden and outside of the garden. If you will remember from your reading in Genesis chapters 1, 2, and 3, when Adam and Eve were created, they were created and placed in this perfect place called the Garden of Eden. They lived their early years of marital life inside of that garden. And interesting aside, the only perfect marriage that has ever happened in history. And they lived a perfect marriage for a period of time inside the garden. But eventually because Eve and Adam sinned by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they were kicked out of the garden. Just as a note, around the room, you see some of the artists and they are drawing representations of what life in the garden might have been like. What relationships in the garden might have been like. We certainly don’t know enough about that, but here’s what we do know. We know that once Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden, human free will kicked in to such an extent that the rest of human history has been a devaluation of how God created Adam and Eve in the garden. In other words, as we have gotten further and further away from the garden, we have become more and more sinful in the area of sex. So much so, that it is a sin today run out of control, just like it did in the day of the Apostle Paul. That’s why when Paul was writing, many, many, many years after the garden, in the New Testament, it says this in Romans 1. It says, “Therefore, God gave them over in the sinful desires of their heart to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.” They exchanged the truth of God for a lie. And they worship and served created things rather than the Creator. Even way back then, they began to elevate the body over an above everything else. Even to this day, we live with that elevation. In our day, we tend to worship the body, the creature, the bodily creature, rather than the Creator of the body. And what we find is that historically from the Garden of Eden, until today, human beings have constantly lowered the value of God’s created sex. And that leads us to truth number 2.