Christian Marriage VI: What is sex?

Notes from Sunday sermon by Pastor Mark Driscoll


VI: What is sex?
http://marshill.com/media/real-marriage/sex-god-gross-or-gift


Bottom line: The world has mixed views about sex. Some think it's the only thing worth living for, while some think it's that disgusting thing people should only do if they want to procreate. Well, everything we have, we have because of God. So, what does God say about sex? As I elaborate below, sex is a gift from God, a gift to be enjoyed between a man and a woman in a Godly marriage, to the glory of God.


Our bodies are a temple of the Holy Spirit


1 Corinthians 6:18-20
"Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sexually sins against his own body. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are onot your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.


Pastor Mark Driscoll recounts his and his wife's repentance of sexual immorality:


I was in a collegiate Bible study, and the pastor was talking about fornication, a completely new “f” word to me. I’d never heard of that word. And he read—I think it was Corinthians, probably, where it says that fornicators will not inherit the kingdom of God.


And I thought, "Wow, that’s a big deal. Boy, I really feel bad for those fornicators. I wonder what a fornicator is."


So, I called the pastor, and I said, "I’ve got a friend of mine. I fear he may be a fornicator. So, I would like to get from you the definition of a fornicator.”


He said, “Well, is your buddy sleeping with his girlfriend?”


I said, “Yeah.”


He said, “They’re fornicating.”


I was like, “Whoa! Are you sure?”


“Yes, I am sure.”


“They love each other.”


“It’s still fornicating.”


“Oh, okay.” I’m looking for the fine print. “Well, they’re going to get married.”


“Still fornicating.”


“Oh, okay. Well, they’ve already slept together, so, you know, it’s too late now. So, why should they stop?”


He said, “Yes, because they’re fornicating.”


I was like, “Oh, okay. Well, I will let my friend know that. This is very serious.”


So, I called Grace, my friend. I said, “We are fornicating.” 


She said, “Yeah, I know.” She said, “We’re not supposed to, and you now belong to Jesus, and I’ve returned to a vibrant relationship with him, and we need to stop fornicating.”


So, we stopped fornicating, by the grace of God.




God speaks a lot about sexual immorality in the Scripture. This is one of the reasons some people think sex is gross. However, God also told us to be fruitful and multiply (Genesis 1:28), so sex itself is not a sin.


The Bible presents sex as a gift. It’s not god, and it’s not gross. It can be a false god. It can be done in a way that is gross because it dishonors God. But ultimately, sex is a gift from God.




SEX BEFORE SIN


Genesis 2:18-25
The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him... The LORD God made a woman from the rib He had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man... For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame."


A man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife
This is the covenant of marriage: man leave his paretns and hold fast to his wife


They will become one flesh
This is the consummation of the covenant.


The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame
This is sex BEFORE sin. The man and his wife were naked and felt no shame. Godly covenant between a man and a woman glorifies God.




Sex is grounded in Biblical concepts


1. God made us male and female with equal dignity but different roles


2. Marriage is for one man and one woman by God’s design


3. God created our bodies for sexual pleasure and called it very good


4. All sex outside of heterosexual marriage is a sin. Sex is a gift, and it’s to be contained and restrained by marriage


5. Sex is to be without shame. It says that the man and the woman were naked without shame, no shame. They didn’t feel dirty about it. It wasn’t sinful. It wasn’t horrible. It was a gift that God gave them to enjoy as a married couple.


6. Our standard of beauty is our spouse (Exodus 20:17). Jesus calls “adultery of the heart” as having a standard of beauty other than our spouse, comparing our spouse to others, becoming dissatisfied, and then ultimately becoming an adulterer; if not just in our heart, also with our hands.




There are 3 primary views of sex
1. Sex as god
2. Sex as gross
3. Sex as gift.




SEX AS GOD
This is where sex is our identity: “I’m gay/straight/bi.” Our life is consumed by it. It dominates our being.


Romans 12:1
Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God--this is your spiritual act of worship.


Worship is what we do with our body. What we do with our body is not just physical; it’s deeply spiritual, and we're offering our body as a sacrifice, either to the glory of God or to worship a false god.


The problem isn't sex. The problem is us worshiping sex. When we fail to honor marriage as a Godly covenant between a man and a woman, we are blind to sex as a gift from God. When we place sex above the Holy covenant between a man and a woman, we turn away from God to pursue our own selfish will. Worshiping sex as god is not to the glory of God.


As Driscoll puts it, "That means that your bed is a pagan altar, and your boyfriend is a pagan priest, and your body is a living sacrifice. It’s idolatry, which is the worship of someone or something other than the God of the Bible." 


1 Corinthians 10:7
Do not be idolaters, as some of them were; as it is written: "The people sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in pagan revelry." We should not commit sexual immorality, as some of them did--and in one day twenty-three thousand of them died.


Those who don’t worship the God of the Bible are idolaters.


We don't realize this, but if we take the time to think about it, we are always worshiping something.


People who say, "I worship nothing." Well, they are probably the most prideful people around, because they worship themselves. Some may argue, "Really, I find they are the most pleasant people around. Very nice folks. Can't be any nicer."


I don't want to side-track from the main subject of this post, but I'd like to briefly point out 2 counterpoints:


1) Our mission in life is not to be nice.
Jesus didn't die for our sins so that we can be nice to people. Jesus died for our sins because we were dying in sin, and we could not save ourselves. Jesus died for us because He loved us and knew that His death was the only way to restore our broken relationship with God. Simply put, we're alive today because of Jesus. And upon ascending into Heaven, Jesus told us what our mission is as His disciples: Go and preach of repentance and the forgiveness of sins. Jesus saved us and told us to go tell the world that everyone can be saved through Jesus. That's our mission in life.


2) Prideful people can be super nice.
When we believe all we need is to be nice and loving people, and that we are perfectly fine without God, that is inherently pride. We tend to think prideful people are bullies and jerks, but these characteristics are merely the output of pride. What I mean by this is, pride, at its core, is a mentality. It is the idea that, "I am fine on my own. I don't need any outside help." How that idea gets lived out--whether in harmony with others or antagonizing to others--doesn't make that pride any more perfect in God's eyes. And the problem with pride is, well, we all needed Jesus to die for us. To think that we can get to Heaven without Jesus, that is prideful. To think that we don't need God to save us, that we would be just fine in Hell or wherever we end up, that is prideful as well. This rebellion frightens me, because once people end up in Hell, there is no repentance, only regret (Luke 16:19-31). And to people who think they deserve whatever is coming and do not need some innocent person dying on the cross for them, I encourage them to look beyond their pride and be not so flippant about their sins and Hell. Hell is not a 5-star hotel, I'll put it that way.


Back to the subject at hand, the question isn't "Do we worship?" The question is “Who or what do we worship?”


The people sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in pagan revelry
And the idea is, they had a few drinks, they had a nice meal, and it’s getting sexually flirtatious.


We should not commit sexual immorality, as some of them did--and in one day twenty-three thousand of them died
God just killed twenty-three thousand people because of sexual immorality. This is a big deal!


Romans 1:25-27
They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way, the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.


The idea is simple, but the idea is so important: We worship. Period. We are creatures of worship. And we can either worship the Creator and enjoy and steward created things, like the human body, and pleasure, and sex. Or, we can worship the created and fall away from God.


Read the Old Testament. Read the New Testament. History tells us idolatry is the main reason that brings about God's wrath. Why? There is only one true God, and our heart can serve only one master. When our heart pains for anything but God, we worship, in reality a false god, and that is idolatry. Idolatry is the core of our sins.


What is porn? Idolatry. What is fornication? Idolatry. What is adultery? Idolatry. All of these examples exalt sex above God. 


Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones
This is the only Scripture that clearly expresses forbidding of lesbianism in the whole Bible.


In the same way, the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.
This passage clearly states homosexuality is an act of sexual immorality.


When God created the world, he said that everything was good. When he made the man and woman in his image and likeness, he said it was very good. We are made in the image of God. Our bodies are a temple of the Holy Spirit. We are not our own, because we are bought with a price--the blood of Jesus Christ. Our bodies are sacred and should be treated in ways that glorify God, not defile God.


So, what happens when we worship sex as god? We end up being consumed by it. We sacrifice our body to homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexuality, fornication, adultery, pornography... anything that gives us sexual pleasure, nothing that glorifies God in any way.


We can’t simultaneously worship the Creator while worshiping the created. Our heart cannot serve two masters. Therefore, the answer for sex as god is Jesus as God.


I hear this a lot from my homosexual friends and colleagues. "I can't help what I feel. If God is truly loving, how could He judge me for loving?"


Well.


Jesus, about to face His crucifixion, sweated blood while He prayed to God in the Garden of Gethsemane, "Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done" (Luke 22:42).


Jesus sweated blood! One has to be under a tremendous amount of physical and emotional stress to sweat blood. I've been so stressed out, I feel like my head would explode, and even then, I have never come close to sweating blood. Jesus sweated blood. He was under a lot of stress. And why wouldn't He be? He carried the world's sin on His shoulders, and He was about to be judged for it, IN OUR PLACE. He was about to drink from the cup of God's wrath, the wrath that each one of us would have had to endure because of our sin. He therefore prayed that if there were any other way, please take that way. And guess what? There wasn't any other way. The sacrificial death of the perfect man, Jesus Christ, was the ONLY way Jesus could cleanse us forever of our sin and restore us to God. And so, even though Jesus prayed for any other way, He knew also that as man, He was here to fulfill the will of God. Thus, He didn't pray to take away the suffering. He prayed to have God's will be done.


I simply do not see how, after knowing the above, anyone can judge God for His "lack" of understanding of love. Those who so readily judges God obviously have yet to comprehend the love God has for us.


Our existence is not to glorify ourselves. We all have our own personal sins that we have to battle through. Some of us may be addicted to drugs. Some, to gambling. Some, to power. Some, to sex. Some of us may be addicted to glorifying ourselves. When we turn our back against God, when we ignore His will to pursue our own, how do we in turn have the audacity to question His authority, His love?


Jesus sweated blood. Jesus drank from the cup of wrath for us. Our eternal life was restored because of Jesus, and all we can think about is, "What about me?" "What about pleasure for me?"


We are to one day reign with Christ as kings and priests. Clearly, God did not place us here to worship sex as god. Jesus did not die on the cross so that we can continue to bathe in our sins.


Sex is not God. Jesus is God.




SEX AS GROSS


On the opposite end of "sex as god" is "sex as gross." In the culture, it tends to be sex as god. In the church, it tends to be sex as gross. Due to influences of Platonic thinking (exemplified by Aristotle, Socrates, Plato), early church fathers condemned sex as gross because they viewed the body as not good, that passion and pleasure is not good, and sex within marriage is only for procreation. It's not for enjoyment. It's not for pleasure. It's a method to procreate.


This thinking is not biblical. For one, if the body is not good, Jesus would not have came in flesh and still be deemed perfect, not flawed, and without sin.


The Song of Solomon is a great love song between a husband and wife. Love is not gross. Marriage is not gross. Sex is not gross.


There are some people who see sex as gross because they have been sinned against. When our body has been defiled against, it's hard to feel clean again. But, Jesus cleansed us. Through Jesus, everything is made clean, including all the sins that have been committed against us.


Driscoll states:


I can still remember talking to a really sweet gal, who was an abuse victim as a child, and she said, “Growing up, I just felt that everything below my neck was gross.”


Those were her words.


I said, “Okay, well then we’ve got to help you to receive cleansing from sin that was committed against you and see yourself as God sees you, not as your abuse defines you.” 


The sin committed against us in a sexual manner is gross. Sex itself, however, is not gross, because when God gifted sex to a covenantal marriage, He declared it good.




SEX AS GIFT


Sex isn’t god. Sex isn’t gross. Sex is a gift.


According to the Scriptures, there are 6 ways in which sex is a gift.


1. It’s for pleasure.
In the Song of Solomon, the whole book is about the pleasure, enjoying it, having fun. There are plenty of examples throughout the Bible that clearly states that pleasure is not a sin. Now, when we start worshiping pleasure, that's a whole different story.


2. It's for procreation.
Sometimes, intimacy results in children. This doesn't mean sex is only for procreation. This doesn’t mean birth control is a sin. (Abortion is a different story. Abortion is murder, and the Bible clearly states murder is sin. It doesn't matter how science or society defines what a "human being" is, just like it doesn't matter how we think gay/lesbian marriages are perfectly peachy, or what we think constitutes "sin," for that matter. God is the judge, God makes the rules. Hey, He made the world and everything in it. He gets to make the rules. True, the Bible does not go through lengthy details to define "when" a fertilized egg becomes a human. But you know, that doesn't mean it's okay to play in murky water. I mean, come on, what would we say when we stand in front of God? "Uh, sorry, God, You should have been more clear?" I'd argue it's best to err on the side of life.)


3. It’s knowledge.
Genesis 4:1 says that Adam lay with his wife Eve, and he knew her. There’s a knowledge. There’s an intimacy. There’s a trust that’s built between a husband and wife that is sacred.


4. It’s for protection.
1 Corinthians 7:2-5
But since there is so much immorality, each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband. The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. The wife's body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the husband's body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife. Do not deprive each other except by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.


The context here is that Paul is tell the Corinthians that if they have troubles controlling their sexual urges, then it is best for them to commit to one person to avoid sexual immorality. They should love and enjoy sex under the context of Godly covenant but never lose their first love, which is God. If we give ourselves over to temptations and lose self-control, we open ourselves up to Satan's attacks. Therefore, protect ourselves against Satan by maintaining self-control in a Godly manner.


5. It’s for comfort.
2 Samuel 12:24
Then David comforted his wife Bathsheba, and he went to her and lay with her.


Their child has died, and there is nothing they could do about it. At such times, a husband and wife can grieve and comfort each other through intimacy. (This passage is actually very inspiration in terms of how we should view death as Christians.)


6. It’s for oneness.
Genesis 2:24 says that the husband and wife were one, and they were naked without shame.


Driscoll summarizes:


When God tells you to be faithful to your spouse, to practice chastity before marriage, to enjoy fidelity within marriage, what he’s saying is, “I want the best for you. I want you to be one with your spouse. I want you to be connected theologically. I want you to be connected emotionally. I want you to be connected mentally. I want you to be connected biologically. I want you to increasingly grow to be one.” Now, let me ask you this. Sex is god—is that your leaning? Repent of that as a sin. Sex is gross—is that your leaning? Repent of that as a sin.




Further Reading:
http://aletheia-seekers.blogspot.com/2012/01/biblical-sexuality.html