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Sex is More Than a Muscle Spasm

03/13/2009 05:40 AM Filed in: Theology | Pastoral Stuff
Smiling_Bob
Last week I got an email from a friend of mine. He’s a wonderful guy who I’ve seen grow a lot in his faith the last couple of years.

It just so happens that he finds himself in a new location trying to make new friends. No longer surrounded by any safety net, he’s having to work out his salvation with “fear and trembling” while overcoming the adversity around him.

Lately he’s been getting hung up on the “lust” topic.

His friends want to know why lust is a bad thing; it feels natural and it “doesn’t hurt anybody.” They say “God designed us to be attracted in this way to girls,” and though my friend tries to bring the subject around to marriage, he’s struggling a bit and wants to have some clarification.

Here we go...

I understand getting hung up on the lust topic. It feels so natural and it feels so good. Why would that be wrong?

Well, it feels natural for a reason. God gave men and women sexual urges and drives for one another because He intended for us to hook up, get married, and have crazy amounts of amazing sex. And it's awesome; completely and utterly awesome!

The thing is, just like alcohol and church and music and football: it can be abused. None of those things are bad in and of themselves, and they are all gifts from God. But if you begin drinking excessively and find yourself addicted, or if church becomes more of an excuse to judge others than a place to be changed by God, or if your music begins to glamorize killing and degrade women, or if your love of football becomes so all-consuming that it's all you can think or talk about...then you're abusing those things.

And so it is with sex and lust.

God created sex. And in doing so He created an amazing thing. But He also created parameters around it to protect us from abuse. He says that we are made in His image and THEREFORE we are made male and female. Now hang with me here, because this is about to get interesting:

The male/female relationship, the sexual differentiation, in some way models something about God’s own character. Both the masculine and feminine attributes show something of God’s own character, but even the internal relationally of God is manifested in our relationship between the man and the woman. The Bible goes so far to say in Song of Songs and Ephesians 5:31-33 that the relationship between a man and a woman in sexual intercourse is something like the ecstatic relationship and the interpenetrating relationship that God wants to have with His Church because it manifests something of the internal Triune relationship that God has within Himself.

Bottom line: sex feels awesome and great and wonderful, but there is also something holy about it. In some ways it symbolizes the kind of relationship God has within the Trinity and wants to have with the church. It's wrong for us to cheapen that with lusting after every pretty face or spending a lifetime doing nothing but trying to "hook up."

Satan is all about turning the beauty of sex into an ugly, cheap fix. He wants to take the majesty of the God-ordained sexual relationship and turn it into nothing but the muscle spasm we get when we have an orgasm.

But sex is so much more than this.

So remember that the same kingdom of darkness that's behind little 12 year old girls being turned into prostitutes in Asia is behind trying to distort sex through pornography and cheap sexual urges in the United States. The same kingdom of darkness that's behind the kidnappings of attractive young women in Europe in order to sell them into sexual slavery in an open market...that same kingdom is behind the urgings of your friends to “just relax” because it's "not hurting anyone."

As followers of Christ, we have a higher calling. And we have a much higher view of sex than a muscle spasm: it’s the deepest intimacy of a male-female relationship and it even symbolizes something of the God we serve.

We shouldn't take that for granted.

Thanks for the question.

"But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart." -Jesus, Matthew 5:28

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