Sex And The Christian

Adultery recently made the news. Iran has sentenced a 43-year-old widow and mother of two for “illicit relationships” with two men After receiving 99 lashes, she was sentenced for stoning. After much pleading from the United States and Great Briton, Iranian courts have relented and are considering other possible punishments.

If you watch TV, go to the movies, or read magazines today, you get the impression that the only people having good sex are the people who aren’t married. Sex within the boundaries of marriage is portrayed as bland and routine in popular media. While Bernie Madoff was making off with millions from defrauding his investors, officials at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) were surfing the Internet for pornography. According to the Atlantic Monthly, a senior attorney at the SEC's Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office. An accountant was blocked more than 16,000 times in a month from visiting websites classified as "Sex" or “Pornography.” Yet, he still managed to amass a collection of “very graphic” material on his hard drive by bypassing the SEC's internal filter. Seventeen of the employees were "at a senior level," earning salaries of up to $222,418. The number of cases jumped from two in 2007 to 16 in 2008. All the while cracks in the financial system emerged in mid-2007 and spread into full-blown panic by the fall of 2008.

“Porn is the wallpaper of our lives,” says David Amsden.

If the Bible says that a person who says in his heart “there is no God” (Psalm 14:1) is a fool… Then in realm of contemporary human sexuality might be rightly viewed as a “ship of fools” as we are tossed about in the sea of life’s disordered passions.

“It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans, for a man has his father's wife. 2 And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you. 3 For though absent in body, I am present in spirit; and as if present, I have already pronounced judgment on the one who did such a thing. 4 When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus and my spirit is present, with the power of our Lord Jesus, 5 you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord. 6 Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? 7 Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. 8 Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. 9 I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people— 10 not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. 11 But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler—not even to eat with such a one. 12 For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? 13 God judges those outside. “Purge the evil person from among you” (1 Corinthians 5:1-13).

When it comes to issue of sex, we have to consider what voices we listen to. Many around think that listening to the sexual instructions from a book that is at least 2,000 years old is the equivalent of learning about the progress of technology from a 1980’s instruction manual about the Commodore 64. Instead of listening to the moral voice of the Bible, they wish to listen to the inner voice within.

1. God Made Sex Good

Scripture has a lot to say about sex. Most of the time when we think about the two subjects of sex and the Bible, we think of sin. We think that sex is sinful. Or that sex is simply a necessary evil to give birth to children. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you were to look up what the Bible has to say about sex, you might search the Bible for the word “sex.” Yet, a productive strategy would be to search the Bible for the term all things, since sex is obviously a subset of all things. Here is a sampling of what this kind of search would reveal in God’s authoritative Word: