the rambling missionary

by erika haveman

This is an excerpt from a paper I wrote entitled “Getting Along with Getting It On: The  Necessity for Adhering to the Biblical Standards for Sex & Sexuality ”  The full paper can be downloaded for FREE on my homepage.

In the recent years I’ve had countless conversations with Christian young people, some married and some unmarried, who have expressed that being obedient to sexual integrity has been hard because of what their Christian circles of influence have taught them. One thing they are being told is “sex is bad, unless you are married, then it is great.” I remember hearing this partial truth as early as the 7th grade.  Sex itself is not bad and it is, in fact, great. The gaping hole in this encouragement is the unspoken answer to “why” sex is bad outside of marriage and “why” it is great inside the perimeters of marriage, respectively. There is no call for obedience in this ambivalent statement, let alone a mention of who a person needs to be obedient to. In fact you may wonder what this has to do with obedience at all.  We’ll get to that.

One of several problems with this statement is that it doesn’t allow a person to have the liberty necessary to accept the sexual aspect of themselves in their unmarried state, not to mention the difficulty of transitioning to accepting a spouse’s sexual aspect. There is a silent assumption that marriage will heal all sexual wounds, bring clarity to all sexual lies, and make whole a person sexually. This leads to many couples floundering along feeling shame for something that is not sinful nor even disrespectful within the confines of their marriages simply because they were not educated on how to be people of sexual integrity before their marriage – whether they saved the act of sex for marriage or not. Dennis Hollinger in The Meaning of Sex writes, “[sex] is not the ultimate meaning in life, and it is not essential to our humanness, though it is a necessary part of married life.” Though even this truth could be misread if a person hasn’t been informed and given time to accept the truth that they are created in the image of God,  furthermore that sex was a part of God’s original, perfect creation. The deepest, most secret (and sometimes not so secret) longings of a person’s heart is to be known. We are hard wired for covenant relationships, not only with our Creator God but also with others who are a part of His creation. God designed marriage as a covenantal relationship between a man and a woman, and a sure benefit of that relationship is sex. Owen Strachan suggests that “sex is an appetite given to us by the creator God and, in fact, is specifically tied to one covenant community – that of marriage. It is an appetite like hunger and thirst, but it is not to be awakened until the right time (Song of Songs 8).” When a person chooses to satisfy that hunger using their own methods, they are choosing to write their own covenant rather than submit themselves to God’s design for marriage. Sexual integrity is compromised when a person does not understand the reason why they should keep safe the sexual aspect of their created beings until they are sheltered within a covenant marriage. This idea that sex is “bad” but “great” is a confusing statement with no tangible truth to help someone develop conviction on keeping their sexual integrity in tact before and through their married lives.  So where did this thinking come from?

That sex is “bad” is one idea that has been seemingly encouraged by Augustine through the ages, with his ideas and definitions pervasive in Christian circles, though it is unlikely Christians are aware from whom they have based this conviction. If they knew they would understand that Augustine had a conviction that sin was transferred from parent to child through conception – resulting in sex being bad because the act was literally encouraging sin to enter the world. His illicitly sexual background had brought him to a place of near opposition to sex because he had such a hard time reconciling his past lusts and the integrity that a person can have in consideration of their sexual desires. This is where, I think, there is a correlation between his thinking and the statement, “sex is bad, unless you are married, then it is great.” People take their ideals from his Confessions, the ones that back up their partial truth, and encourage that sexual desire is a sin filled behaviour synonymous with lust. However married people are good people, and they do not want to lie, so they add this idea of sex as “great” to try and make peace with why unmarried believers should wait to have sex. What Scripture says about sex, however, is clear and it is the place where Christians really need to begin when trying to understand how one can live a life of sexual integrity.

The only natural place to start reconciling this problem is the Garden of Eden. After God created man He offered them His blessing saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). The implications of this statement aren’t hard to figure out: have sex. In all of perfection God consecrated sex as a fundamental enough directive to be the first on the list. “Here we have a specific mandate to exercise human sexuality, accompanied by God’s blessing. The creation story tells us that we are both spiritual and sexual beings,” says Catharine Clark Kroeger. People are both sexual and spiritual and both aspects come with responsibility. The biggest responsibility that a person has to this truth comes at the end of the creation story in Genesis 2:24-25: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.” Becoming one flesh isn’t an idea to be taken lightly – so why is this often the case?

It is a misconception among believers and non-believers alike that one’s personal choices will not affect anybody else, especially if that choice is done in love of oneself or another person. If two people are mutually consenting to sex in their relationship there is no problem. This lie (with roots in philosophical thought suggested first by Darwin) permeates into the lives of believers, leading them to forget that Jesus not only saved from death the woman caught in adultery, but also commanded that she go and sin no more. If adultery is defined by a spouse having sex with someone who is not their spouse, then believers, accordingly, need to ask themselves this question: “Am I having sex with my spouse?” The question is not, “Am I having sex with the person who will one day be my spouse?” There is a vast difference between the two questions! One seeks to be obedient while the other seeks to justify selfishness – the absolute definition of what sin is! While the world would say love exists between two consenting partners, Paul would argue no true Christian love exists when selfishness is prevalently in the forefront. When a person knows God as holy they will walk in the holiness of sexual integrity resulting from obedience being worked out through one’s faith in Christ.

Holiness, being set apart, will always be the result of obedience, and sexual integrity is the definition of how a believer stays unmistakably set apart when it comes to any cultural sexual norm. Being set apart was the whole point of the Old Testament Law to Israel fulfilled in Christ and spoken to the first century believers when Peter writes, “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light” (1 Peter 2:9).  The nature of the redemption process for a believer is to become more and more like Christ, and one cannot submit to this while living disobediently. One cannot submit to this by choosing to fulfill their sexual desires selfishly, both outside and inside the covenantal marriage relationship.
We need to stop saying that sex is bad but it’s great, and we need to start encouraging one another to live truth out daily, to submit to God hourly, to choose obedience in that moment when our desires are telling us to compromise.  We need to live this way in order for the world to see the love and light of Christ in us as professing believers.