Marriage and Sex: What No One Is Talking About

So I always love talks that start this way, what no one's telling you about, dot, dot, dot.

Me too. Don't you? Yeah, because it hooks you in. It's like you're going to get backstage. You're going to get inside the truth when everybody's talking about, but no one's telling you this. So today, we get to do that about a very sensitive topic. What no one's telling you about married sex. Are you excited?

Um... 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. I don't ever remember hearing God's perspective, or even what God's Word says about sex. Oh, me neither. Growing up.

No. You know, my mom, basically, I went to church almost every Sunday with my mom. I remember one sermon when I was a kid growing up from the pastor on Sunday morning about sex. And here's all I remember. He said it was wrong, it was dirty, it was bad, and if you do it, you're going to die. But you'll go bald. He did not say that. He didn't say the bald part. But I remember the other part.

And by the way, I'm pretty bald. So what's that telling you? Anyway. You think that's so funny. Yeah, I think that's a funny joke. And I tell you, when you talk about this topic, sometimes you got to just bring a little humor, because it's not always the easiest thing to talk about.

Right. Especially as I'm sitting here looking across at my wife, who we've been married 41 years. And this has not been an easy topic to talk about, even in our own home. Why do you think that is?

For most couples, I think that's true. I think it's scary. There's a fear that I'm not enough for you.

You're disappointed in me. Again, it's not an easy topic to talk about. I mean, it's hard for us as parents to talk about with our kids, and yet it's critical.

I've never heard that before. So I think this is a great thing to talk about. Yeah. And so we're going to talk about it for two days. Today, what no one's telling you about sex. And then tomorrow, you get to take an online assessment that Family Life has put together for an online sex course. That's very helpful that we've done.

And we're going to walk you through what that looks like. But today, let's talk about what no one's telling you about sex, which is really, what are the lies? What are the truths about sex? And here's one interesting statistic.

We are having less sex today than ever in the last three decades. We've seen that because we've been speaking at the Weekend Remember Marriage Getaway for 30 years. And I think that's very true. So why? Yeah. What do you think? I'm asking you.

You're going to throw every question about this topic back to me. I think there's a lot going on in our culture today. And I think porn has a lot to do with that, that there's some struggles in marriages where men and women are looking at porn outside the bedroom. So there's self-gratification. I think that. And I think it's just something that's very difficult to talk about.

And that's why we're talking about it. It's like, okay, what is God's heart? So let's just give a couple thoughts in the time that we have to sort of debunk some myths.

And here's one that I think would shock most people. If you want to have great sex, go to church. Like what?

People just say, what? No, I don't mean go to church. And have great sex. I mean, if you want to have great sex, you need to bring God's perspective, God's word, God's heart into the bedroom, into this area of your relationship.

When I say go to church, I mean, get God's heart around this. It's really interesting. There's been several studies done over the decades that asked basically American couples, how's your sex life? And here's what's really interesting. Almost every one of those studies have found that the best sex and again, this is a couple saying we enjoy our sex life. They're both a husband and wife are saying they both enjoy it. The best sex being had in America is by Christians.

That's shocking. How would you define Christians? Fathers of Christ.

People go to church. They say, I believe in God. I believe in the Bible. I believe what the Bible says about sex. They're in a covenant of marriage. They're saying they're the most happiest in their marriages in the bedroom than other couples. Now, let me just say some of your listening thinking, OK, I was really hurt by the church and what they said about sex because we had a recent conversation with Julie Slattery and Ron Deal about the whole purity culture time where some people felt hurt. And maybe they were told, if you stay pure until you're married, it will result in the perfect sex life.

And that's not always the case. It's the happiest, wonderful, miraculous sex once you get married, which was some of the belief of that whole movement, which in a lot of ways, there's a lot of good in that. And we talked about that when we talked about the purity culture.

But there was sort of this. If I do this, I get this, which means sex will be easy and wonderful marriage. That's not what we're saying. But we are saying when you bring God into the bedroom and do sex His way. Couples are saying they are happiest in their marriage, which is a beautiful thing.

And it's really interesting. One of the passages that you look at when you think about, OK, what is God's perspective on sex is found in First Corinthians, where Paul is writing a letter to this church in Corinth, which, by the way, was having all kinds of issues with sex outside of marriage. And he's trying to say, OK, let me help you understand God's perspective of this. And he says sex is reserved for the covenant of marriage between one man and one woman. So he puts boundaries around it and says you can do whatever you want. But I'm telling you, the best sex is going to be done the way God wants it. One man, one woman, covenant of marriage for life.

That's what when you do research, you find out what couples are finding out. Yep, that's the way God wants it to be done. And you look at First Corinthians 7.

Now listen to this. I want you to respond to this. He says, the husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife and likewise the wife to her husband. The wife's body does not belong to her alone, but also to her husband. In the same way, the husband's body does not belong to him alone, but also to his wife. Do not deprive each other except by mutual consent and for a time so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. So if you're trying to take that prescription from God into your married life and your sexual relationship, how do you apply that? I mean, I'm looking at that thinking this is important to God. And personally, I think between the two of us, when this is a regular rhythm in our lives, I mean, just lovemaking sex. And everybody's saying, what's regular? How many times a week?

We're not going to give you a number. Right. But when it's a rhythm in our lives, there's a closeness. Like there's an intimacy that's beautiful. It's a spiritual intimacy. It's a physical intimacy. And it's beautiful when there's neglect in this area.

I feel distant from you. And I think that's what God is saying. Like, this is important. It's part of the covenant of marriage. It will bring you together.

God never gives us instruction that will cause us harm. It's like, oh, this will be for your good and it will be for the good of your marriage. And I really believe it's bringing Jesus into every area of our lives and our marriage.

Yeah. And I think one of the things that I don't think we always understand when you bring God into your bedroom or you bring God's heart and perspective into your sexual relationship, it changes everything because it puts a covenant around your marriage. It puts selflessness, hopefully God transforming your heart into the bedroom, which leads to better sex. If it's not about me, it's about you. And it's about mutual pleasure, not just my pleasure. It changes everything.

So I think that's why couples would say as Christ followers, they're having a better sex life. You're going to be really mad at me for asking this. Oh, no. Don't do this. You're supposed to tell me when you're going to do this stuff.

You don't just do it on air live. I'm not even going to. I'm turning my head to you. I'm not listening right now.

Don't even ask me. What if one of you is like, yes, yes, I want to do this. I want to bring Jesus into this. And the other one's like, no, I don't care about that. Like, this isn't important. And I'm not really about bringing God into the bedroom.

Go ahead. Answer your own question. I know you know what the answer is. I want to know what you'd say. I mean, my first thought is you cannot control your spouse.

You can only control yourself. And so I'll get on my knees and pray that God would change my heart and pray that God would change her heart or his heart. I mean, that's what I would do too. And if there's any kind of abuse going on, you know, then that's a different story. But we're talking about good willed people. But I would definitely be on my knees praying, talking about this, saying I desire this area to be great. And so, yeah, I'd say the same thing. And this would be one of those areas in your marriage that we often don't pray about.

Why not? Pray about your sex life. And if your spouse will pray with you about this, pray about that together. I mean, that's a very intimate thing. So the first thought was if you want to have great sex, go to church. In other words, bring God into your bedroom. The second thought that I don't think anybody's telling anybody about sex is your marriage bed is crowded. And again, that's just our way of saying what we have to understand, and Galatians 6 says this, what a man sows, he will therefore reap, which also means what a woman sows, they will reap. In other words, what you've done in the past, what you've been taught in the past. What your parents taught you.

Yeah. In other words, all that stuff in the area of the sexual relationship ends up in the marriage bed. It's like a crowded bed. I know it's a strange way to say it, but if you've had past sexual experiences, you think they're just in the past. Here's what our culture say.

Have sex with anybody. It's just a hookup. Hookup culture. It's no big deal. It's not going to affect you in any way. It's just a hookup. Oh, yes, it will affect you.

Am I right? Oh, yeah. I mean, this is the point I want to cry about because we experienced it in our marriage. I mean, I'm thinking about my exposure to porn from four years old through high school. Past sexual abuse, I brought that into our bed. People, like people that I had sex with before I was married at age 16. And so then I become a believer and I'm following Jesus and I'm thinking, oh, Lord, like I give you this area, not realizing that all those things affected the way I view sex, the way I respond, the way I see you, the way I see our marriage. And there is a beauty to it.

Like, it sounds awful. And I think one of the other things is like I didn't know that you had a problem looking at women and there was a very brief time at the beginning of our marriage that you struggled with porn. Talk about making our bed crowded, like all of that's so hard. And yet as we talked about it, we dealt with it. I mean, I had some counseling classes. We read books about abuse, of how that affects your marriage. That made us better when we talked about it, prayed about it, asked God to heal it. And it certainly didn't happen overnight. But, man, it created an intimacy more than just physically. It was emotionally and spiritually.

Yeah. And I think what the culture is not telling you is that. They're telling you a lie which says it's like separate. What you did in the past, if you looked at porn, it's like a separate part of your life. It's like it's over there, but it's not really going to affect your marriage bed. Now you're married, you're in a covenant. The truth is what no one's telling you is, no, all that is connected because sex is more than physical. It's soul.

You're bringing your soul. And so all of that is connected in your bedroom. It's interesting. Again, back to the book of Corinthians, what Paul wrote about this area.

Very interesting. He said in 1 Corinthians 6, 12, everything is permissible for me, but not everything is beneficial. In other words, we have freedom.

God gives us freedom to live, but that doesn't mean everything you can do is going to be beneficial. And then he talks about the sexual relationship in verse 18. He says, flee from sexual immorality. The actual word there is porneia. That means any kind of sexual activity outside of marriage.

Flee, run from it. He says, all other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body. Which I think is a way that Paul and God is saying to us, you don't understand, sexual sin is uniquely different because it's soul. And so there's a heaviness to it that you got to understand, man, when you make bad decisions in this area, it comes into your marriage bed. But with all that being said, God redeems. God forgives.

God takes the mess that we've made in our lives and miraculously makes something beautiful. And you said it earlier, we've experienced that because we brought bad decisions into our bedroom, not realizing, even in year one, we experienced it in year one of our marriage, decisions we had made in the past with other people were affecting our marriage and our marriage bed. Well, talk about what your seminary thesis was. Well, I mean, I decided to study the effects of premarital sex on married happiness. Because? Because I had seen it in our marriage. And not too many seminary theses are written on this.

And it didn't even get finished. But the study I did highlighted what we were seeing. The reason I wanted to do it is we were experiencing this, is this common?

And yes, I found out it was very, very common. But what I didn't know and now I know then and 40 years later is God meets you right there. He redeems our lives from the pit.

He can bring beauty to your marriage and even to your sexual relationship in your marriage. I mean, you went through sexual abuse and God, I mean, it came up in our marriage. Oh, yeah. And it was something you had to deal with. And I had as your partner to come through and say, okay, I'm going to walk through this with you as well. And now we look back and say, God is a healer. God is a forgiver.

God meets us. It's actually something that was very hard but beautiful in our marriage. Right? Yeah. I think it's so important to talk about these things. And if you decide to do the sex assessment, it gets into some of this, into the past. And I think it just can create some good conversations to have.

Okay. We got time for one more. But just to review the things that no one's telling you about sex. The first one is if you want to have great sex, go to church. Bring God's heart and perspective into your bedroom. Secondly, was so important.

Your marriage bed is crowded. In other words, what you've done in the past is going to show up in the present. But I just want to highlight just so nobody forgets this. God redeems. God heals. God forgives. Don't you ever forget that.

That is the beauty of God turning ashes to beauty. And now the third one, great sex is really hard work. I would say great sex is really, really, really hard, hard, hard work. And I'm kidding, but I'm not kidding. It's like it's this liar, this myth. And we believed it.

At least I did. It's like, oh, you get married. Sex is going to be awesome. It's going to be wonderful. It's going to be easy, especially if you do it God's way.

You know, you save it for the covenant marriage and you get married. And it's like, it's going to be awesome. And it isn't always that awesome and that easy.

It's really, really hard work. Well, it's so funny. One of our sons, it was our first son that got married. And he was in the bathroom getting ready. And his younger brother came in, who is still in high school, into the bathroom.

I think he was maybe a junior, sophomore. And he said to his brother, man, do you realize what's going to happen tonight? You're going to start getting to have sex like every single day, several times, every single day of your life. And I just was walking past them and I heard that conversation and I was like, oh, no, I need to have a conversation with him. And I remember later saying, so when you get married, do you think that, you know, you think that that's going to be happening every day?

He goes, well, several times a day. And I said, oh, you know, it'd probably be good for all of us to have a discussion about the reality of what that looks like, because that can happen and it'd be great. But man, it's not always easy.

Yeah. And also when you have kids and life goes on, remember the picture they sent us? That same son sent us a picture of their bedroom years later and they have four little kids now. There was a slide, a little tyke slide on their bed into these bunch of pillows at the foot of their bed. I'm like, yeah, how much sex do they have right now? I mean, we were there.

You got little kids and they're waking up at night. I mean, it's hard work at different stages, but it's also one of the reasons that I found out it was such hard work is I really didn't understand how you viewed this. And we talked about this at the Weekend to Remember marriage getaway. We do a whole session on God's perspective on sex. And one of the things we talk about is how men and women are different, not just physically, but even in our thinking about this.

Well, I don't know. And we've shared this before, so some people have heard this, but I don't know if all women are like this. I feel like a lot of us can be wired like this, where for you, sex can be in a compartment.

Men can be more compartmentalized than some women. And so if you think this is happening tonight, that's the only thing on your mind where I know this is happening tonight. But I am thinking about a million other things like, do we have milk in the refrigerator for the morning? And by the way, we're not saying that we walk around the house looking at each other like this is happening tonight.

I mean, there are just times, you know, and sometimes you do give each other the look. And so but I'm like, do we have milk? Do I have enough to pack a lunch? My mom's sick.

I need to get a birthday present for my friend. I haven't worked out in five weeks and I feel terrible about myself. And so women were a lot of times were carrying the load of so much on our mind.

I don't like my job and I feel like I'm not getting along with a friend. And so here you are with one thing on your mind. I'm carrying a million different things. I mean, I'm in the bedroom waiting. Oh, yeah.

Because I've got one thing on my mind. Right. You come walking in with all these. And when you do this on stage and some of you have seen it in our vertical marriage small group study, you show this with luggage. Literally, you pick up bag after bag after bag, you know, and show what women feel like as they walk in the room. They have all this on their mind. Yeah. And you're thinking, does the dog have water?

I'm thinking that like as I'm crawling into bed, did I give the dog water tonight? And so here you are, like you're already in third gear and I'm like cold. I'm like, I've got nothing going on except all of my thoughts. And that's so frustrating. I remember sharing this with you the first time and you're like, that's the most depressing thing.

It was. But the thing is, when you share this on stage at our we can remember or the vertical marriage weekends we do, women start cheering as you're doing this. I had a man come up to me and said, honestly, I thought my wife was the only one.

I thought I should divorce her. Like, this is horrible. And they're cheering because? They relate. Like a lot of women feel that very same thing. And so what I'll say, even to the men who could be feeling like, oh, that's so depressing. This is where God comes in and we become selfless and we serve one another. Because I say to the men, if you just said to your wife, what's the heaviest thing you're carrying right now? And what can I take off of your plate and put it on my plate to help you?

That could be the most romantic thing you could do today. Yeah, and the truth is why we say really great sex is hard work is if you're willing to do that work. In other words, when I started to understand that's how your mind is, it's carrying all this at first, I was like, come on. And some men do that. Let's just drop it off. Yeah, it could be men.

Yeah, they're carrying a lot, too. But what I had to learn to do, and this is where the selflessness comes in when Christ transformed you from the inside out. It's not about me. It's about how do I love you?

The hard work was like, help me understand that. Yeah, I remember saying to you, I'm just going to be here on my stomach. Can you just rub my back? Like, just give me a little massage. Just stay on the back. Don't don't let your hand drift down.

Just stay on the back for like two minutes. And you're like, what? And that was like a gift to me that I could just unwind and release all the things I was carrying in my mind. Two minutes in the bedroom feels like watching the Lord of the Rings.

It's like, two minutes? That's forever. And we're joking, but doing the hard work of understanding one another, of understanding how our marriage bed is crowded, of understanding God's heart on this, all the things we just talked about, that hard work is worth the payoff. And I'm not talking just great sex. I'm talking a great marriage relationship. It's a union of the soul. Which is God wants more than the bedroom.

He wants you to be connected in a covenant of marriage, which will overflow into something beautiful, even in your bedroom. I know for so many couples, the issue of marital intimacy and how we come together as husband and wife is an area that is fraught with challenges, with issues, and it feels like there's no place to go to get the help you need. This is very personal.

And so it's not something you just talk with your friends about. This is one of the reasons why, here at Family Life, we've put together a private online course that husbands and wives can go through together. It's called The Nearly Complete Guide to Better Married Sex, and it features Ron Deal and Julie Slattery offering counsel and advice on how husbands and wives can experience what God intends for us to experience in the area of marital oneness and marital intimacy.

There are five sessions in this online course. There's an assessment you take as a couple at the beginning of the course, and then each session includes a video from Ron Deal and Julie Slattery offering counsel and insight on the subject of marital intimacy. There are activities for you to do as a couple, additional audio resources. There are devotions for couples to go through and read and pray together. All of this is available for you to use privately as a couple, and you can get more information about it when you go online to familylifetoday.com.

Look for The Nearly Complete Guide to Better Married Sex. Again, go to familylifetoday.com, and the information is available there. If you have any questions, give us a call at 1-800-FL-TODAY. 1-800-358-6329.

That's 1-800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word TODAY. Now, tomorrow, have you ever asked yourself the question, does it really matter to God whether we are experiencing oneness in every dimension of our marriage, including marital intimacy, our married sex? Dave and Ann Wilson will talk about that tomorrow. I hope you can tune in for that. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapeen. 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.