Sex to die for

Preface
I get asked to speak to college students/young adults once in a while. Last week I was invited to a college group to do a talk on pre-marital sex. Not how to have it, how to respond to the inevitable urges we have as human beings and how manage those urges from a Christian worldview. Like I told them last week, if you take nothing else away from the talk/article you need to take away the “one big question.”

If you’re a parent, use the info below to talk about sex with your child. It’s too bad that it’s something most parents leave to self-discovery. In the words of Crosby, Stills, and Nash…”teach your children well.”

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Sex to die for

If you grew up in the Southern religious culture that I grew up in, sex as a subject was treated more as a sin than as a gift from God that a husband and wife share. The word “sex” was never even mentioned by any pastor that I ever heard preach. Okay, my Dad (a pastor) did talk to me about sex but it was pretty much “don’t you ever get a girl pregnant.”

So I grew up thinking abstinence was the best way to handle pre-marital sex. Mainly because I thought my Dad would kill me if I did anything otherwise.

Southern religious culture, and I’m guessing most other Protestant and Catholic religious cultures, talk about sex from a sexual immorality point of view as their default setting. We pound out the virtue of abstinence with a sledge hammer of “don’ts” and “thus saith the Lord.” Okay, fine. It’s a sin to have pre-marital sex. The problem is, when you mix humans and religion, one tends to get a legalistic view of things when the subject is charged with social tension.

When God says something is a sin, I usually think that there’s got to be a good reason that he’s giving us a warning. He’s infinitely smarter than we are, right? So why not look at his command that tells us not to go there, to not have pre-marital sex? Let’s do…

If you’re not religious or a Christ-follower and you’re reading this, humor me for a bit and keep reading.

Humans were created in the image of God. There’s a lot to unpack there. Suffice it to say that we were created to be spiritual beings with a physical existence. Then God says to have sex. When God told us to “be fruitful and multiply” he didn’t mean eat healthy and score high on the math section of the SAT. To make more humans, there had to be sex. So God created human beings to have sex. In the perfect setting of the Garden of Eden, God saw that everything was good. (You can read the whole story in Genesis 1.)

Humans damaged our relationship with God by being prideful. That, in turn, damaged our spiritual connection (Gen. 3:1,7,23) with God and our emotional (Gen. 3:15) and physical existence (Gen. 3:16-17).

When God introduced himself in human form, we were given the opportunity to be healed spiritually, to enjoy more emotional health, and to understand and live with our physical maladies. (This is a long post so to find out how Jesus Christ came to make your life better by reading this book and this book for starters.)

Since human beings were created to be with both God and other humans, we crave being connected. When we’re missing a healthy spiritual and/or emotional connection we try to connect the only other way we know how…a physical connection. We often try to fill the spiritual/emotional need by connecting physically, often with sex. The results end up being an epic failure. It’s a crappy part of life in a world damaged by pride and selfishness.

When pre-marital sex happens, affairs happen, babies happen, abortions happen, divorces happen, STDs happen, and lack of trust between humans happens. Small wonder that God says that sex before marriage is unhealthy and dehumanizing.

By the way, there’s a screwed up belief among Christian teenagers and young adults: That you’re not having sex (and therefore not committing sin) if you don’t have intercourse. They would rationalize that anything leading up to intercourse is perfectly fine. Don’t be stupid. Read Jesus’ human ethics discourse in Matthew 5. Saying it’s okay to go past “third base” as long as you don’t go “all the way” is just a different twist on the legalism most young adults hate…making the Bible say what you want so you can manipulate people and get away with something. Read the previous paragraph again. Then read the next one.

Sex isn’t just a sensual, physical thing. It’s tied to the emotional and spiritual parts of us as well. From a Christian worldview, there’s no way to extricate sex from being a spiritual occurence. The unity of spirit, soul, and body are clear (1 Thess. 5:23). To live as redeemed humans we should guard our lives and others by refraining from engaging in less than human behavior (1 Peter:13-25). If anyone wonders why they still feel empty after pre-marital sex, that’s why.

Sex, in all of it’s pleasure and goodness, was designed to take place between a man and a woman that are married (Gen. 1:27; Mark 10:8). That’s why sex was intended to be shared as a physical, emotional and spiritual union with one’s husband or wife. Since the Scripture teaches we have spiritual/emotional/physical unity and a husband and wife become “one” (Mark 10:8) when they’re married, the clarity of sex only inside of marriage emerges.

The “one big question”
When I was reading that a husband should love his wife like Christ loved the church (like, he should be willing to die for her), I came up with the one big question that I think people should ask before they start having sex…especially pre-marital sex.

Christians need to honestly ask themselves if the person that they’re going to have sex with is the person that they’re willing to become “one” with for the rest of their life. Before they start getting all hot and bothered and taking off too many clothes, maybe they need to ask the “one big question”:

“Am I willing to die for the person I’m getting ready to have sex with?”

Question: Anyone have a better question/technique they use?

Two great books to read:

Sex God by Rob Bell

From Eternity To Here by Frank Viola