God Cares About Who I Sleep With

We think it's bad news that God cares about who we sleep with because we think he's just going to come into our lives and restrict us and get in the way of our pleasure and, you know, make us miserable. That's what we tend to think. But God cares who we sleep with because he cares about us.

He made us. 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. The first time that I can remember, and I'm almost sure because I'm always right, that we heard or that I heard a message on sexual intimacy from the Bible, from God's perspective, was literally two weeks before we got married at the weekend to remember. I remember this because I grew up in a family that there was a lot of pornography in our house.

I had read a lot of pornography. We're just going to start right there, huh? Bam! We're going right deep dive darkness right away. Welcome to Dave and Ann. Exactly. This is where I go in our marriage, too.

I just dive deep really fast. Sorry, everybody, if that took you off guard. Are you shaken by that? Oh, just keep going, honey. You've never listened to me before. Why would you listen to me now?

Anyway, what had happened because of my past and there was sexual abuse, there's pornography, there was no, I had never seen affection in a healthy way in our family. And so I sit down as a 19-year-old, and for the first time in my life, I'm hearing a biblical perspective of married sexual intimacy. And it blew me away. Like, I have never heard this in my entire life. And I was thinking, how have I never heard this? Like, this is amazing.

Like, this is a good plan. And yet the only thing I had heard was the worldly plan and how it would satisfy me. And it had left me so lost and broken.

Yeah. And that's, you know, it's one of the things, obviously, as we were sitting there, you realize, man, if you do it the way the Creator intended, it can be glorious and beautiful and a covenant of marriage between a man and woman. If you miss it and you sort of follow the cultures, you don't hear about the damage and about the brokenness that's going to result. And yet we were sitting there and we both could feel both of that same time. And it was presented in such a way that we're like, we want that. We want God's way.

Can God repair what we've messed up and can he lead us to a new future? So, so many people didn't get to sit in that ballroom. They haven't been to a weekend to remember to hear this message. And I hope they will go to one. Yeah, you can go to one now. They're back on.

You can go to familylife.com and sign up for one right now. And by the way, that isn't the only thing we talk about all weekend. It isn't all about sex. But there is one message in the weekend because it's so critical that people understand God's perspective on this. And that's why there's books out there. And we have an author with us today, Sam Albury, who wrote a book about God's perspective on sex. Sam, welcome to Family Life Today. Good to be with you.

Thanks for having me. So, and by the way, you know, as we talk about your book, which has, what a great title, Why Does God Care Who I Sleep With? Because I think that's a question a lot of us have. But you've written other books. You're a pastor, an author, a speaker.

You speak around the world. I mean, I could go on and on about your bio. But the most important thing is you are connected to our middle son, Austin, in your literary publishing world, right? I am indeed. So if anything good comes out of my books, Austin gets the credit for that.

Yeah, that's pretty cool. But I mean, as you write this book, Why Does God Care Who I Sleep With? Help us understand. You obviously are tapping into this is an important question to help people understand God does care. And we've already talked about a little bit about why he cares. But tell us again, why does God care so much about this thing that we seem to be flipping about? And we don't think it's that big a deal. And the culture says it's really not that big a deal. But God says, no, it's a really big deal. Help us understand again, why is it a big deal? And how did a loving God create this and give it to us?

And really as a good, beautiful gift. Yeah, we think it's bad news that God cares about who we sleep with because we think he's just going to come into our lives and restrict us and get in the way of our pleasure and, you know, make us miserable. That's what we tend to think. But God cares who we sleep with because he cares about us.

He made us. I love what Jesus says in Matthew five in the Sermon on the Mount about not looking at someone with lustful intent. And you realize God even cares about the people we're thinking about sleeping with. He cares about them so much that it matters to them how they are thought about, even in the privacy of someone else's mind. All of us have that kind of sexual dignity in God's sight that he's protective of how others, even in their own hearts, are thinking about us. So it's good that he cares about these things because he would not be a good God if he didn't. It is such a profound, personal, sensitive, vulnerable part of our human experience.

He would be negligent not to care about this. It's a bit like this is off the top of my head and probably not a very good analogy, but it's a bit like I don't know what age people start learning to drive in America. What is it? Sixteen.

Sixteen or something. It'd be like a 16 year old saying, why does my parent care how I drive? And the answer is because used in the right way, a car is an amazing blessing and used in the wrong way.

It can do incredible damage to you and through you to others. So God cares about who we sleep with for the very same kind of reason a parent should care about, how their brand new learning to drive 16 year old is handling a vehicle. These things, it shows our sexuality is precious and valuable in God's sight. And in a sense, as you write in your book, God's perspective on the human sexuality and married sexuality really highlights the value.

Tell me if I'm right or wrong, of a person. You know, one of the analogies or illustrations you use is Rachel and Den Hollander, who was one of the first to sort of bring up the whole Larry Nassar thing at Michigan State. And we're from Michigan, so it's just an hour from us.

So it was pretty close to home. But one of her questions, you know, as she as victim after victim came forward, was how much is a girl worth? Yeah.

Right. I mean, what are we going to do about this? And as you've mentioned also in the book, you know, the whole Me Too movement sort of came out of this whole area of sexual abuse and women saying, I have experiences as well. Now, again, if sex isn't that big a deal, why are all these people saying Me Too, but they're speaking out to get at something very deep that was taken from them.

So talk about that a little bit. It obviously gets at the value of a person. But what was going on with that whole thing?

Yeah, there are lots of things that have been happening culturally that are very revealing and very significant. We've been telling ourselves in a kind of secular context for so many years, oh, it's just a physical act. It's just the exchange of bodily fluids.

Why are you so hung up about it as Christians? But if nothing else, the Me Too movement has shown us that the abuse of sex is far more than physical. There's an emotional, psychological component to it that can be lifelong in its harm. So actually, we're realizing it's not just physical.

Being sexually abused is not the same as breaking your leg. It's not just a physical wrong that's gone on there, but something much more profound. And again, it's because in the right context, sex is meant to involve your entire psychology and your emotional life and everything else.

It's meant to involve the whole of your personality, and therefore the abuse of it is similarly widespread in its effects. I'm glad the Me Too movement is making us more aware of not just the existence of sexual abuse, but of the extent of the harm that it causes. We're becoming a little more sensitive to these things, I think, culturally than we have been in the past. But at the same time, it gives us as Christians an opportunity to say, this just shows us we're not dealing with just bodily fluids here. It's not just physical. Something far more profound is at play when it comes to human sexuality, and it's that something profound that actually guides what the Bible says about these things.

It's interesting. It was just as you were talking, I was thinking about, yes, when there's sexual abuse, there's no choice, and you feel like something was stolen from you. But I would also say, and this isn't talked about very much, but for myself, I was reciprocal in the sexual relationships I had before I got married that were sin. And because I had a say in it, I felt like, well, that's on me. And so there is a new kind of shame. It's a different kind of shame that, yes, with abuse, it was stolen. With my promiscuity, I gave it away, and yet I still felt deep shame about it, but I couldn't really explain it when I was in it because I was making those choices for myself. I still felt a sense of emptiness and a shattering a little bit of my soul when I felt like it wasn't reciprocated in love by the other person. And I'm imagining how many shattered souls there are in our world, but we don't really speak about it very often because we feel like we've done that to ourselves. And yet Jesus walks into this, the great restorer and the redeemer, the forgiver, and I'm so glad that he does restore. When we watch those, the whole court case of these girls telling Larry Nassar, this is what you've done to me.

This was what you've stolen. I sat, I think many of us sat and just wept. Yeah. At the pain that these girls felt. I was angry, too.

There's a righteous anger in that moment. Now, thank you for being so honest about your experience there, and I hope some of these things are becoming easier for us to talk about. But I'm also aware that culturally we're still being fed this narrative all the time that multiple sexual partners is fun, that it doesn't matter, it doesn't mean anything such that promiscuity is in any way not in our best interests. So it's very hard, therefore, for people who've been promiscuous to put their finger on what now doesn't feel right.

Yeah. Because culture is saying this is a blast, you're having a great time, this is life to the full, and yet it can feel very empty and very hollow. And we need to make our churches places where it's kind of safe to talk about that, it's safe to articulate that without feeling kind of undue levels of embarrassment because we need the gospel at this very point.

When we hollow out ourselves, we need someone who can come into our lives as Jesus does to fill our lives afresh again, to restore to us what has been lost and to redeem what has been broken, which he does so wonderfully. Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit because I know when Anne and I got married, and obviously we've talked, especially her, very honestly. I kind of do that.

Can you see that, Sam? You haven't been on this date? Not quite as, well, I am, but I mean, it's, as couples would even ask us, like, what regrets do you have about your past? And, you know, what's interesting is I think about my life as a non-believer before my junior year in college, I was, I didn't realize the Bible even said the sins of your father, sort of visit through the generation. I was copying the sins of my dad and I didn't even know him. He was not a part of my life after I was six years old. And yet here I am on a college campus drinking like my dad did, womanizing like my dad did.

I was doing all the things that my dad did, even though I really never saw him do this. And here I am living out this life. Obviously there were consequences.

So we get married. And again, when people ask me, what do you regret? I don't regret. I mean, obviously I would wish I wouldn't have done any of that. But the one thing that comes to my mind is the sexual involvement before marriage because of the effects it had on our marriage. The first year, first couple of years of our marriage, we had to struggle through. It was all our baggage. It was baggage from that that nobody ever told us. There will be consequences.

Yeah, you can live it up, but there will be consequences that you bring in, not just your bedroom, but your whole marriage. Yet God met us. And I could talk about how God met us, but I'd love to hear you, Sam, talk about, OK, so how does God meet a person who has messed up in this area, who hasn't followed God's plan? And now they're listening and they're saying, can God restore my soul?

How does he do that? Well, let's be clear. God doesn't meet people who aren't broken in this area of life because those people don't exist.

Yeah. One of the kind of big moments of clarity for me, looking at the stone on the mountain when Jesus talks about lust, is what he's doing there is he's showing us that the Ten Commandments were never given so that we could prove how good we are. The Ten Commandments were given to show what is in our hearts, to show that we will only ever relate to God on the basis of his kindness and mercy to us, not on the basis of our worthiness and obedience and everything, you know, things like that. It's not that, you know, most people out there are basically sexually fine and sorted. And then there's the poor listener who's feeling like, well, they're a mess and they're the exception to the rule. Jesus is saying all of us have adulterous hearts. Some of us may have expressed that physically more than others, but we're all made of the same stuff on this. And therefore, we all need the grace of God.

And that's exactly who he is. Psalm 51 is David coming to terms with his own sexual sin. His sin was far more than sexual, but it was certainly driven by kind of improper sexual desires. And David knows that there is mercy even for his pretty horrific sexual sin, that God is able to restore the things that we mess up. He's able to give back to us the very things that we've had taken from us, the things that we have damaged ourselves.

God is able to give those things back to us better than they were before. It's just the kind of God he is. So, he is not limited by our sins. As if, well, I've now sinned myself into such a place that God really can't do much with me now, that the raw materials are just so messed up.

This is a God of resurrection, a God of creation out of nothing, and so he is able to bring back into our lives far, far more than we would have ever been able to accomplish, and far more certainly than we deserve. And so, no one is ever too far gone for God to be able to intervene in a beautiful way in their lives. There are going to be consequences of our sins that we still have to live with.

David still had to deal with some of the physical outworkings of his sin, I'm sure. But we know in our hearts that we can be forgiven and cleansed and made new. And however crazy and destructive our sexual history might have been, God can still bring sexual health to us.

Well, I love what you say. You say, this is why God cares who I sleep with. Our sexuality is meant to tell a story. Yeah.

What do you mean by that? It's one of the great things that we see in the Bible. The Bible begins with Adam and Eve getting together. And the reason it begins with that rather than something else is because Adam and Eve getting together is going to become a picture of how heaven and earth are going to come together through Jesus Christ, through the whole rest of the Bible. And the end of the Bible is the New Jerusalem coming down from heaven to earth, you know, the heaven and earth meeting in this new community of God's people.

And human sexuality is designed to point to that great reality. Human marriage is meant to point beyond itself to the ultimate marriage. Jesus comes announcing himself to be the bridegroom because he's saying, I am the divine husband the Old Testament always spoke of. And Jesus coming into this world is God wanting to put rings on fingers and to say, let's make you mine now.

Come to me. I've heard evangelists like Michael Green over the years talk about when Jesus is hanging on a cross, it's as if the Father is saying, Savior, will you take this sinner to be yours? You know, to love them, to honor them, to cherish them now and forevermore. And by hanging on a cross and stretching at his arms, Jesus is saying, I will.

I will. And so the question then to us is, well, sinner, will you take this savior to be your husband? So our human sexuality is meant to be about that. And we don't have to be married for our sexuality to be about that.

I'm single. And so what that means is when I feel sexual yearnings and sexual desires that have to go for now unfulfilled, I can let those yearnings and those desires remind me that there is a deeper yearning and a deeper desire in the human soul that is fully met by Jesus. And these unmet sexual desires are but a temporal picture of that eternal satisfaction that all of us can find in Jesus. He is the one for whom we have been made. Eve was made out of Adam's side and Jesus was wounded in his side at his death.

And out of that wounding comes his bride, the church, that we can know him and know that full union with him. I mean, Sam, what a beautiful picture that I've never really considered the way you said it, of thinking the next time any person has sexual urges instead of, you know, sort of the culture saying, go with it. You know, those are those are from your body and there's none. You're saying those urges can point you to the gospel.

They can point you to a savior who chose you. And so you don't have to fulfill those fleshly desires, which in our mind, we know this. This is going to have negative consequences. And most of the time we say, but that's OK. I'm going to deal with it.

No, no. This can push us the other way. It pushes us to the cross. It pushes us to forgiveness. It pushes us to a savior rather than a way to be embraced. That's a beautiful picture of what God wants. And the great thing is it means I don't have to satisfy my sexual desires in order to fulfill the purpose of my sexuality. I can actually fulfill the purpose of my sexuality by letting my sexuality point to that relationship with Jesus. What does that look like, Sam, practically speaking?

Because I'm thinking unless you're really connected to the father, that you're in an ongoing dynamic relationship, it would be really easy just to get sucked back into the cultural view of you should satisfy your own fleshly yearnings. So what does that look like? How have you done that when you have that urge? How do you go to Christ? There's a number of things, really. Truth internalized makes a big difference. And realizing that Jesus was never married, he was never sexually active, he never dated. And yet he was the most fully human and complete person who ever lived. So that tells me that when culture says, hey, if you miss out on this, you're really missing out on authentic, full life, I know that's not true because otherwise Jesus wasn't fully human and that can't be the case. So it helps to think, well, okay, no, this is not, however deep these feelings go and however painful some of those yearnings may be at times, I'm not missing out on something ultimate. The thing that is ultimate, I actually have in Jesus. I could have no sex in this world and have far more of that ultimate fulfillment than someone who has tons and tons of sex in this life but doesn't know Jesus. Because the real consummation is going to be experienced and enjoyed at the marriage supper of the Lamb, as Revelation shows us. So just trying to keep myself oriented to that perspective really helps and makes a big difference. And therefore to see behind those sexual yearnings, disordered though they inevitably are, to see them as breadcrumbs pointing back up to that ultimate union of heaven and earth in Jesus Christ.

You know, it's interesting, you say in your book, sex is God's appointed way for two people in marriage to reciprocally say to one another, I belong completely, permanently and exclusively to you. Yeah, I think I'm quoting Timothy Keller with that particular line. Yeah, that sounds too good to be me. Yeah, that's a killer.

Everything that's really good is usually killer, you know. And Sam Albury. Yeah, Sam or Keller, but I mean, that quote is such a beautiful picture of the sexual union in marriage, but it's also a beautiful picture of what Jesus says to us. I am completely and permanently exclusively yours. That's why the sexual union in marriage is a picture of the gospel in a really beautiful way. And you've helped us with your book and with this interview to just say, man, that is the image we need to center our minds on around sex. And I also think you said it earlier, Sam. You said these conversations with our kids have to begin when they're younger, that they have an idea of this is a God who loves us.

There is a God who wants the best for you. And then we have those conversations about sexuality. The world and our culture is having those conversations, but what would it look like to have these conversations around our dinner tables and at bedtime with our teens, our little kids, that they grow up having a biblical mindset. Dave, so that one day they don't sit at a conference thinking, oh, is that God's plan for married sexuality?

We should be telling our kids this plan from the time that they're little in appropriate ways till the time they're adults and that they can look forward not only to what God has for them, whether they get married or not, but this journey that God the father has for them in relationship with him. Absolutely. Amen to that. Thanks, Sam. It's been great.

Thank you. We have good news and a good message to share with people when it comes to human sexuality. I know people see the Christian view of sex as outdated or restrictive or judgmental.

They see cohabitation as normal. For many people, this is a barrier to considering the Christian faith. But Sam Albury has written a wonderful book called Why Does God Care Who I Sleep With? It's what we've been talking about this week, and we'd love to send you a copy of Sam's book. You can request your copy online at familylifetoday.com or call to order at 1-800-FL-TODAY.

Again, the title of Sam Albury's book is Why Does God Care Who I Sleep With? Order online at familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-358-6329, that's 1-800, F as in family, L as in life, and then the word TODAY to request your copy of Sam's book. Dave and Ann Wilson mentioned the Family Life Weekend to Remember Marriage Getaway as a place where we teach God's design for marriage and for our sexuality. We're excited. We've had four of these getaways already this fall in Chattanooga and Augusta, Cedar Rapids and Tampa. Next weekend, we're in Raleigh and in San Diego, actually La Jolla.

We've got conferences continuing through the fall. David Robbins, the president of Family Life, is here with me. And David, it's exciting for us to have these Weekend to Remember Getaways happening again. Man, we are so glad to be back in person to see firsthand God meeting people where they're at. We all have gone through so much over this past year or so, and Meg and I were just recently at a Weekend to Remember, and we had some people email us and tell us how it impacted them.

One of them said, we came here in pieces and we are leaving as one. Another one said, we don't need to panic in our pain. Our issues are common and expected in marriage.

There's always hope. And that's what we see time and time again at these Weekend to Remembers. People come bringing in wherever they're at in their marriage. Some are doing great and are strong, and it's a great weekend away. Others are really needing God to meet them in some deep places of where they are at.

And we see God show up time and time again. And I just want to invite you and ask you to make this a priority in your marriage. And if you need more information about where and when a Weekend to Remember is coming to a city near you, go to our website, familylifetoday.com.

There's a link there. It'll give you all the information you need so you can join us at an upcoming getaway. We hope to see you at one of these. David, thank you. And we hope you have a great weekend this weekend.

Hope you and your family are able to worship together in your local church. And we hope you can join us back on Monday when Dave and Ann Wilson are going to talk about how powerful and how important our words are in marriage. The way we communicate to one another. What we say.

The tone we use. All of this makes a huge difference in our relationship. We'll hear more about that Monday. Hope you can tune in for that. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. Have a great weekend. We'll see you Monday 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.