The Bible's puzzle of sexual intimacy actually highlights not just rules, not just pleasure, those are part of it, but more importantly, the broader picture is that highlights covenant love. Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson.
And I'm Dave Wilson, and you can find us at familylifetoday.com or on our Family Life app. This is Family Life Today. So we get to hear a message today from the Family Life Love Like You Mean It virtual cruise. Didn't you wonder what it would be like when you heard it was virtual?
Like, what is that? I mean, it's actually ended up being a great idea. We couldn't get on a boat because of COVID. And so we decided, let's do a virtual cruise. And so couples all around the world zoomed in, you know, online and experienced talks, workshops, music. I mean, there were couples doing ballroom dancing in their family room.
I've heard couples had, you know, their beach towels out sitting at home. And so it was really fun. But let's admit the real cruise will be better.
Yeah. And the great news is in February next year, 2022, February 6th to the 13th, we are back on the water. And actually, if you want to get on that boat, you can sign up right now.
Before June 28th, you'll get a better deal. So I'd go to familylifetoday.com right now and sign up for the real cruise, not the virtual, real cruise next year. But we get to listen to a message that Julie Slattery gave on the virtual cruise on a pretty hot topic. Yeah, she called it God, Sex and Your Marriage. And we both know Dr. Julie Slattery. She is a great friend. She's a known clinical psychologist. She's an author, speaker, broadcast professional. But she's also the president and co-founder of Authentic Intimacy. And she has her own podcast called Java with Julie, and she just answers tough questions about sex. And so I love Julie because not only is she brilliant and she has a brilliant mind, but she also is an expert in this area. And she brings it down to earth and talks about the things we all struggle with and we need help with. And she always comes from a biblical perspective. And this this message was dynamite because she walks us through different perspectives that we have, especially we in the church have about sex. And it's honest and it's real. And I'm telling you, it's life changing. As often is the case, I've been asked to speak on sexual intimacy and marriage.
That's what I kind of do for a living now. So I will tell you in the course of the ministry that I run that I have literally been asked thousands of questions about sex. Like, if you can think about it, I've been asked it. I've been asked questions from thousands of Christian couples about things like, what's OK in the bedroom? Is it wrong for us to watch pornography together as a couple?
What do I do if sex is painful for me? Or even how often should we be having sex? And, you know, I think as I as I look at those questions, all of them kind of boil down to one central question that I think most of us don't know how to answer. And that question is, what should our sex life look like? Like, what's normal?
What's healthy? And most importantly, what is God honoring? Why did God give us this gift of sex in the first place? And as we navigate the challenges of a sexual relationship, what are we actually supposed to be working towards? I think a lot of Christians don't know how to answer that question. And it's even possible that you guys disagree as a couple on how to answer that question.
One person thinks it should look this way and the other person thinks it should look that way. And I think the best encouragement that I can give you in the time that we have together is to help answer that question. As you're working through challenges and asking yourselves questions about how do we overcome just issues we have in our marriage, as we overcome differences in our opinions, what should we actually be striving for? You know, one of the things that I've been doing during quarantine, and I'm going to ask you not to judge me because some of you will think this is really nerdy, is I like jigsaw puzzles. So at one point I got my husband to agree to do a jigsaw puzzle with me.
And the first day we did, he's like, this is awful. Like, how could you enjoy this? But I think it's relaxing. So on a snowy day like today, on a weekend, I might put on some headphones, go downstairs, listen to an audiobook and just work on a 2000 piece jigsaw puzzle. Now, the way I do my jigsaw puzzles, actually, if you go in my basement right now, you're going to see a jigsaw puzzle there. And I've got the box propped up so I can see it because when I do the puzzle, I'm looking at the context of what the front of the box is telling me that I should be creating. And I really can't imagine doing a puzzle without having that frame of reference to show me what I should be creating. I really can't imagine doing a jigsaw puzzle if I were looking at the wrong box, if I thought I was creating this picture when in reality I was supposed to be creating another.
None of the pieces would make sense. And that's an analogy I'd like you to think about as we consider the question, what are you supposed to be creating with sexual intimacy within your marriage? Because if you're working from the wrong picture, then you're going to be very confused about how to overcome some of the common challenges that we face when it comes to sexual intimacy in marriage. So before we get into the right picture, I want to talk about two pictures that a lot of couples will be working from that are actually the wrong pictures and can create confusion in your sex life. So let's take a look at those two first.
The first one I want to look at is a puzzle that is based on really the world's perspective. And you'll be looking at a slide here. The world's puzzle really highlights the idea that sex is about self fulfillment, about your pleasure. It highlights the fact that you guys have to experience great sex all the time. It's always going to be pleasurable.
It's always going to be fun. You're always going to agree on the fundamentals of sexuality. And if you are looking at this puzzle, at this picture, as you're trying to navigate the issues of sexuality in your marriage, here's what you're going to believe. First of all, you're going to believe that your sex life is broken if it's not always pleasurable.
If you go through a season where it's not fun or one of you is having trouble just with climax or orgasm, you're going to think something is seriously wrong with us. You also think that sexual compatibility is the most important thing in your marriage. You'll believe that, hey, if my spouse's desires are different from mine, we're forever broken.
That's just never going to work. And you'll probably believe that you are sexually healthy as long as the physical experience of sex is good. And I think all of these statements come from the wrong perspective because this is really not how the Bible teaches us to view sexual intimacy within marriage. Now, is there a place for self fulfillment and for pleasure? Sure there is, and a healthy sex life should include aspects of pleasure, and we'll talk about that a little bit later. But when your whole perspective says it always has to be pleasurable, we always have to be compatible sexually, you're going to get very frustrated when you run into situations and seasons in your marriage where that's not the case. And I think this is why some Christians think things like, porn is good in our marriage because porn helps the physical experience be good, and that therefore must be healthy, but the scripture would say, no, actually, that's not health. And that's not the way you want to navigate sexual challenges in your marriage. It might also be why someone might be thinking about leaving their marriage because sex in the marriage isn't pleasurable or good. And I've talked to both men and women, Christian men and women, who feel like, God would not want me to have to struggle this much in this area.
Maybe he wants me to leave my marriage. And again, that's the wrong perspective. And that's the reason why I hear from so many single Christians who say, why in the world wouldn't I have sex with somebody before I get married? Like, don't I want to know that we're sexually compatible? And again, that's the wrong perspective, because the most important aspect of the puzzle you're putting together is not compatibility. It's something else.
And again, we'll get to that in a minute. So that's the first picture that I think a lot of couples are trying to create. And again, it's a wrong perspective. It's the second picture that I think a lot of couples are trying to create.
And this might surprise you a little bit when I talk about it as the wrong picture. But I'm going to call this the traditional church's puzzle of sex. And it's kind of the teaching that a lot of us got growing up. It's the emphasis that sometimes we hear in a lot of Christian teaching about sex.
And it highlights the rules and the duty. And so when you go to church or you read your Bible, you read these lists of things that God says are wrong, that are defined as sexual immorality, and you hear that over and over and over again, and you learn that sexual immorality is wrong, but you may also have begun to believe that sex itself is wrong or sexual pleasure is wrong, and that the most important thing is following these rules. Or you may have heard that sex in marriage is all about an obligation or a duty. Now, I want to say that when I bring up that traditional church puzzle on sex, and I talk about obedience or rules or duty, there definitely is truth in this puzzle. There's definitely truth when we look at that picture of God's design for sex. God has really clearly said that sexual intimacy is supposed to be reserved for a man and woman within the covenant of marriage.
That's true. And there's also a truth in the fact that when we get married, there's a sense of this is part of our love for each other, and we shouldn't withhold it. But the problem with the traditional church's picture of what we're building in our sex life is it emphasizes those two aspects and neglects the broader picture of what sex is supposed to look like in your marriage. And so as I've worked with couples who really are rooted in trying to create this picture of sex all around rules and duty, here's some of the things they might believe. First of all, you might believe that your sex life is broken if you have any sexual sin in your past.
You carry around the sense of shame and unforgiveness. I remember talking to one lady who had been married probably close to 30 years, and she honestly told me that sex in her marriage had never been good. It had been okay for her husband, but she never really enjoyed it, and she couldn't figure out why. So she went through a Bible study through our ministry, and in that Bible study, she discovered that she had been believing a lie for 30 years of her marriage. And the lie said essentially because she and her husband had sex before they got married, she felt like God could never bless their sexual intimacy within marriage. She didn't realize that essentially she had kind of been punishing herself for the last 30 years of her marriage because she didn't really believe that God could give her forgiveness and freedom.
And when she learned that, it was like this light bulb just going off. You mean I don't have to live in that shame? And I think when we overemphasize the rules without also bringing in the redemption and freedom that Jesus offers, in the complete picture of what sexual intimacy is supposed to be, we can really feel like we can't move past something even as difficult as an infidelity, that God can't bring healing and redemption. And we start to believe that God doesn't even want us to be free, but the scripture tells us that Jesus died for our freedom.
He died to set us free, and that's in every area, including any kind of past sexual shame or guilt that we're carrying around. If you believe this puzzle, this is what you're creating, and it's all about obedience and duty, you might also think that your spouse owes you sex because you got married. Now, again, let me say that there is a passage in 1 Corinthians 7 that communicates that we have a sense of meeting each other's sexual needs within marriage.
That's one of the things we're called to do. But we're never to use the scripture to have the kind of attitude where I'm demanding something from my spouse, where you have to give this to me. That's a very unloving attitude, and it's not at all representative of the heart that God calls us to have within marriage towards one another. So that would be an attitude that, again, if you're creating this puzzle and you're looking at that picture, you might get that a little bit skewed there. Or you might feel like, hey, I'm just resentful towards my spouse or even resentful towards God because I'm not enjoying this part of our marriage.
Another thing you might believe is you might believe that we are sexually healthy as long as we avoid sin. I think of a young couple, a Christian couple, going off to their honeymoon. And essentially the advice we give this young couple often, we might not say it out loud, but we pretty much say, all right, you're free now, go have fun, just don't break the rules. But we don't give them any context for the kinds of things that they're going to encounter, not just on their honeymoon, but that they're going to encounter early in marriage.
And I want you to think back to your honeymoon, to your first year of marriage. Did you run into challenges in your sexual relationship? Were you prepared for those?
Did anyone tell you that you would encounter those? My husband and I ran into very serious disappointments on our honeymoon, and it actually led to conflict because we didn't know what to expect that. We followed the rules, but we still experienced pain. We still experienced some disagreement.
Things weren't working right for us. And so we were really confused, like, hey, if we follow the rules, why is this so difficult? And you know what I've learned now over 26 years of marriage is that God not only calls us to be sexually moral, but he also calls us to become sexually mature, to grow in our understanding of this gift within marriage, to grow within our love for one another.
And so this picture of your puzzle, again, if you're just looking at the rules, doesn't give you a glimpse of what that maturity even looks like. And that's why it's so important that I think that you understand that God presents this beautiful picture that we're supposed to be creating of sexual intimacy from the Scriptures that is so far beyond just following rules. And the Bible's puzzle of sexual intimacy actually highlights not just rules, not just pleasure, those are a part of it, but more importantly, the broader picture is that it highlights covenant love. Now, what do I mean by that? Why does the Bible highlight covenant love as an aspect, as the key aspect of our sexuality?
Well, let me put it this way. The Bible begins with a wedding. If you go to the book of Genesis, the first book in the Bible, and you read just two chapters in, chapter 2, before sin enters the world, God has created a man and a woman, and they are stark naked in the garden, and it says they're not ashamed, that they enjoyed each other sexually. And so sex begins with this intimacy, with this wedding. And then if you read through the Scripture all the way to the end, the last book of the Bible, Revelation, we see there's another wedding, but this wedding is between Christ, who comes for his bride, for his bridegroom, and there's a wedding ceremony, and we're united, and we're taken to his new home. So the Bible begins with this wedding, and the Bible ends with this wedding. And this very common verse that we often talk about when we talk about marriage, but sometimes don't unpack, is in Ephesians chapter 5, where Paul essentially combines these two weddings.
He makes the connection between them. And he says the purpose for marriage, and the purpose for sexual oneness, he actually is referring to one flesh union there, is a mystery that helps us understand God's love for his people. So what Paul is saying here, essentially, is that the whole Bible is the story of a wedding, and that wedding of Adam and Eve in Genesis, and every wedding since, your wedding, my wedding, our marriages, they foreshadow the ultimate wedding of Christ and his bride.
I really love how author and teacher Christopher West explains it. He says the Bible can be summed up in five words. God wants to marry us. And at the very beginning of Genesis, to the very end of creation, we see that God has created male and female, the covenant of marriage, and the sexual union of a husband and wife, not only to be something that's sacred, but it's symbolic of the wedding that's to come. Now, I know that that kind of blows your mind. It's like, all right, that sounds very theological, Julie, but how is that going to help me? Here's what I want you to think about.
That is the front of the puzzle box. That's what you use to make sense of all the different pieces of sex within your marriage. It's what you use to get perspective when you're going through things like conflict around your needs versus your spouse's needs.
It's what you use to work through disappointment when your bodies aren't working the way you wish they would or where you're just exhausted all the time. And what I want to do in the rest of our time together is I want to help break that down into four practical things. When we look at the puzzle box of God's love for us, of His covenant for us, how does that inform, how does that help me make sense of how I should be stewarding sexual intimacy within my marriage? So we've been listening to Dr. Julie Slattery as she gave a message on the Love Like You Mean It virtual cruise this past February. And boy, oh boy, not only is she talking about a hot topic, but she is given a perspective that is so helpful and life-changing. Well, and I think that we've all been there.
And I liked that she just kind of broke it down into the world's puzzle, traditional church puzzle, and then the Bible's puzzle. And I don't think most of us really have an idea of what God's blueprint looks like for sexual intimacy in a marriage. I know that we didn't. No, we didn't. No, we didn't. We knew the world's plan.
It's all that we had really heard. We went to a conference two weeks before our wedding, the Family Life Weekend to Remember. And that was the first time in all my years, and yours too, right, that we had ever even considered God's perspective. And to think that we're just going to snap right into that as we got married a couple weeks later is what Julie's talking about. It was a real struggle. I mean, this was the biggest struggle of our first year of our marriage, is understanding God's heart in this.
I'd say the first 10 years, because not only did we... Was it 10 years? No, because not only did we struggle in the beginning, because we, in our relationship, when we dated, we really tried to do it God's way. And so that was good, but then we carried so much shame from our past. And then I would say the thing that really was hard, too, was having kids, because now we're like, oh, this is really hard. And I felt like it became a duty, which was so depressing for you. That's nice to hear. My wife thought sex was a duty. I just said it on the radio.
Yeah, that's good for everybody to listen. But, I mean, talk about that. Why did you say that? Well, it felt like I was a mom. I was raising kids. We didn't have much romance in our relationship. And I felt like the only time you were affectionate with me was when you wanted to have any kind of physical intimacy. And so we stopped holding hands. We stopped really kissing. And I felt like, oh, great, that's all you want from me.
Let's just tell the world. Our struggle, I mean, we could laugh now, but yeah. And I obviously had no concept of what real intimacy was, that it's much more than physical, especially for you. It's affection and conversation and sharing our hearts together.
And it is non-sexual touch, holding hands and just a hug. I had no idea. And I think at that point we knew God's word. We were studying it.
We were teaching it. But I'm telling you, to really apply it for all of us, it can be difficult. Yeah, and not only is it difficult in the bedroom, it's difficult in your marriage.
And in life. Yeah, and so you need someone to come alongside and say, let me help you. And that's what Julie did.
And it's interesting because a lot of us think, we don't need help. Do you remember when we first got married and my dad came to visit us? Oh, yeah. And, you know, Dave and I have all these books on the bookshelf and on marriage, on sex, on intimacy. And he's kind of going through all of our books and he pulls out, I can't even remember the book, maybe intended for pleasure. And he pulls it out.
And my dad, he wasn't walking with Jesus at that time. And he looks at the title and he goes, is this book about sex? And we're like, yeah. And he goes, wow, you guys must be bad if you have to actually read about it to know how to do it.
And you are so offended. Yeah, and I think I made some quirk comment like, well, your wife would like you to read a book or two about it. I totally said that. I mean, and the truth is, I'm so glad we did. And we all need that help. Oh, I mean, that's why we have Dr. Julie Slattery helping us.
I mean, it's like, this is not something you just figure out on your own. You need God's perspective, God's word, God's truth. And that's what she's given us today. Yeah, and she's also helping us to be super practical.
Here's what God's word says, and this is how we can live it out. And that's what we all need. As it is with everything in life, when we can align our thinking with God's thinking on any subject, when we renew our minds about what is true, it changes everything. We've been hearing today from Julie Slattery about how this applies in the area of intimacy and romance in a marriage. And honestly, this is a subject that regularly I hear from couples who say, we're challenged in this area. And that's why I'm so glad we're able to address this appropriately on Family Life Today. She presented this message on the Love Like You Mean It virtual cruise in 2021. We weren't able to be onboard a big cruise ship because of COVID this year. But the good news is next year, we're going to be all together again, back on the boat, sailing the seas in the Caribbean. And the cruise is starting to fill up. All of our Love Like You Mean It marriage cruises have sold out in past years.
We expect that to be the case again this year. This week, we're making special pricing available to Family Life Today listeners. It's our Back to Cruising event. You can get all the information on our website at familylifetoday.com, or this is even simpler. Just call 1-800-FL-TODAY.
We can answer any questions you have. We can reserve your cabin over the phone. Again, the number is 1-800-358-6329. That's 1-800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word TODAY.
And I know the last year plus has been tough for a lot of marriages. Make the Love Like You Mean It cruise in 2022 your opportunity to get away, to reconnect, to realign with God and with each other. Again, call us to reserve your cabin. The number is 1-800-FL-TODAY. Now tomorrow, we're going to hear more from Dr. Julie Slattery about how thinking biblically when it comes to romance, passion, and intimacy in marriage, how that can be a game changer for our relationship. I hope you can join us for that. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Anne Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We will see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life, a crew ministry helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-09-27 03:54:01 / 2023-09-27 04:04:39 / 11