Sexual Problems in Marriage

Coming up today on Renewing Your Mind, Sexual Problems in Marriage and the Solutions We Find in Scripture. God understands the sanctity of that intimacy that takes place when people can be naked and unashamed within the context of marriage. And so God is not saying that sex is wrong.

He creates it, He ordains it, but He regulates it. Over the last 50 years or so, the definitions of marriage and sex have changed drastically, and it's caused confusion, even for those in the church. How should we view a healthy sexual relationship within the confines of marriage?

Today on Renewing Your Mind, Dr. R.C. Sproul continues his series, The Intimate Marriage, by helping us see the lies many people believe that lead to sexual problems in marriage. Welcome you once again to our study on the biblical view of marriage. And in this session, we're going to discuss the problem that the research indicates is the number one reason that people give for the breakdown and breakup of marriages. And as I'm sure you can guess, the number one problem listed in America for struggles and the dissolving of marriages is this, sex, lack of harmony, lack of communication, lack of intimacy, and adjustment in the sexual dimensions of marriage. That may seem to be somewhat of a surprise to us in light of the fact that in recent decades we've gone through an explosion, not only of interest, but in literature of sexual relationships and harmony.

You can go to any bookstore, to the self-help section of the bookstore, or even separate sections on sex in marriage, and find dozens of marriage manuals, how-to books, and counseling books on how to have a great sex dimension to your marriage. But somehow we're still experiencing severe problems of sexual harmony within marriage. One of the biggest problems, of course, that we face in adjusting to the sexual dimension of marriage, particularly as Christians, is making the transition from living in a life situation all the way up till marriage where God says no, and then all of a sudden we're expected to enter into a relationship where that which was once forbidden is now not only allowed, but in biblical categories is commanded. That is very difficult for many people to understand, that that which is forbidden in one context is absolutely commanded by God within the bond of marriage. Now, the church has struggled for centuries with that dimension.

Just last week, for example, I was reading an essay from the great theologian St. Augustine, who is one of my all-time favorite writers and theologians. And in this particular essay, he was making the case that the only moral justification for sex relationships within marriage is with a specific view towards conceiving and bearing children. That is, Augustine saw no room within marriage and the marriage relationship for the enjoyment of sex as a physical bond involving physical pleasure between a husband and a wife.

In other words, it was kind of a necessary evil that one had to go through in order to propagate the species. Now, I'm persuaded that that viewpoint that even the great St. Augustine advocated is one that is found not in Scripture, but has its roots in ancient Greek and Oriental views that depreciated the value of anything physical. We know what the sin of materialism is in this world, where people seek all of life and all of meaning through physical things, through money, through food, through wine, women, and song, through the gratification of the body. And we call that materialism, and we know that that is a distortion of the reality that God has made. And sometimes to counteract that, we go to the other extreme and fall into the error of what may be called spiritualism, where the only thing that is of value is the spiritual dimension, the soul. But we believe in a God who made a physical world, who made man not just as a disembodied spirit, but as a person who has both a soul and a body. And the New Testament, for example, in the teaching of Jesus shows a profound concern for man's material well-being, that we are called to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to give shelter to the homeless.

Those are physical concerns. And so even the apostle tells us that the man's body belongs to the woman in marriage, and the woman's body belongs to the man, and we are not to defraud each other. We don't find this negative view of the physical dimension of our humanity in Scripture. But God is very clear about the context in which sex may be enjoyed. I remember not too long ago doing a study of the New Testament view of sex, and just isolating those passages in the New Testament where Jesus and the apostles speak about sex.

And in my studies I went to what's called the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, which is produced by a group of German scholars who have no brief for evangelical Christianity and are by no means conservative in their approach to things. And the particular scholar who had done his analysis of the New Testament view of sex came to this conclusion. Even though he himself did not embrace the position, he said, we cannot deny that the New Testament clearly teaches that in God's sight premarital sex and extramarital sex are serious offenses against His holiness. So that the apostle, for example, tells us that there ought never once be named among you the occasion of fornication. But if we look at the New Testament, we hear that prohibition. So severe is it that it makes one of the Ten Commandments, thou shalt not commit adultery. Now that is not because God is against pleasure or God is against human fulfillment, but it is because God understands the sanctity of that intimacy that takes place when people can be naked and unashamed.

Within the context of marriage. And so God is not saying that sex is wrong. He creates it. He ordains it.

But He regulates it. He says, in this circumstance, it's not good. I don't allow it here. It's destructive. In this circumstance, it's beautiful. It's expressive.

It's part of what I have made for your enjoyment. And so we have that problem as Christians making the transition. Okay, but now the transition is made. Then what problems do we discover in terms of sexual fulfillment in marriage? The two biggest problems that we encounter in marriage with respect to sex are in the case of the male impotency and in the case of the female, we use terms like frigidity. Now those terms bother me because neither one of them are accurate terms of absolutes. Nobody's absolutely impotent and nobody's absolutely frigid.

These terms represent a continuum, degrees that deal with how free we are able to express ourselves sexually in the marriage estate. So that we have to think in terms of degrees of impotency or degrees of frigidity. Now impotency of course means simply a lack of strength or a lack of power. And the word frigidity is an interesting term because it suggests coldness.

It suggests someone who is frozen. And what both of these terms are describing is a certain level of paralysis in sexual activity. And so what we have eating away at healthy marriages is this problem of sexual paralysis. It's become so significant that now we see clinics springing up all over the United States medically directing their attention to a scientific investigation of what is called sexual dysfunction. In order to help people over problems that are destroying their marriages. It's too bad, I would have to say, that there are very few, if any, notable Christian clinics of research into sexual dysfunction.

Because if anybody should be aware of how severe this problem is in marriages, it should be the church because the clergy have to deal with it every day. And we have very few resources that we can direct people to who have serious problems that they can attend without compromising their own value systems and the Christian ethic. But we need help to deal with these forms of paralysis. Now any time I encounter a form of paralysis, I look right away for one of two things. There are two things in our emotional experiences that contribute again and again to all different kinds of paralysis. And they are, I'll write them on the board, fear and guilt.

And these two, incidentally, are often very closely related. We say that someone is frozen with fear, frozen with fear. He stops in his tracks. He can't move. He can't scream.

He hesitates. Fear paralyzes. So we discover in sexual problems that there is a tremendous amount of fear entering into the Christian bedroom. Well what are the fears about? What are we afraid of?

Well there are lots of things. I think both in the case of impotency and frigidity, one of the most significant elements of fear is fear of performance. That's one of the fallout problems of this explosion of sexual literature. Where now the myth abounds that for somebody to be healthy and normal, they have to be capable of super sex, both the woman and the man. We have all of these images which are mythological images that Hollywood plays of the super sexual athlete male and the woman who is everybody's Mata Hari. It just isn't true.

But you can't tell that to the person when they're entering into this relationship and they feel this pressure to perform. Last year I saw a list of the ten most common phobias of American people. Do you know what the number one phobia was in the United States? I don't know where death was. Fear of death came four or five somewhere down the list.

I was surprised. Do you know what the number one phobia was in the United States of America? Fear of standing up in front of a group and speaking. That's what scares more people than anything else.

And ladies and gentlemen, I can relate to that. And you all have experienced a situation where somebody gets up to speak and they open their mouth and nothing comes out. Because they have become paralyzed by their fear. Where I experience fear in speaking is not that I'm going to teach the wrong thing or I'm going to forget my words, but it is the pressure to perform. And you would think the more that you speak, the easier it is to speak?

In one sense, yes, but the more that you speak and get a reputation for speaking, the higher the expectation is from the audience and the higher the expectation is, the more the pressure that's on you, the more the pressure. In fact, I think I'll stop right now and get out of here because I can't stand it. You know, I'm ready to choke. We talk about choking. And choking is a paralysis of the neck brought about by fear. We see it with athletes under stress because they are afraid that they will not perform to the level of expectation that is set before them. Well, our sexual relationship is not for display.

Nobody's keeping score. It is for the intimacy of the two people that are involved. And it is to be built upon a foundation of love. And that doesn't mean just an emotional feeling. That means a foundation where sex is not ripped out of the relationship to love, but sex becomes an expression of love. I hear people say that we had sex two times last week, as if sex were something that were different from love. Sex was just simply a physical activity. Well, it's easier, it seems, for men to separate sex and love. That's what the research indicates, that men can enjoy sex without love. That's why there are such things as prostitutes and why it's the oldest profession.

So that men can have physical pleasure without love. And every woman knows that. And every woman's leery when the man says, I love you. Because being translated, the woman is hearing, I want sex with you.

And in order to have sex with you, I have to say to you, I love you. And the woman then is expected to show her love for her husband, not by giving him love, but by giving him sex. And so that builds up resentments and miscommunication that strangles and paralyzes the relationship. But if the sex is an expression of love, and I understand that my wife is committed to me, and she understands that I love her, then the pressure to perform diminishes. The more I demonstrate love, the more free my wife is to be liberated sexually. The more she demonstrates love to me, the more I am able to live without fear. Because it's perfect love, the Bible says, that casts out fear.

What other things are involved in the fear of sex? One of the things that's becoming more and more apparent to us in our society, particularly for the woman, is the fear of being hurt physically. The battered woman is not just a rare incidence in our society. I can't tell you how many women I've dealt with in counseling who have been either battered as wives or battered as children. They have been sexually abused. They have been hurt. Men have used their strength to force women to submit to their advances, and they're physically afraid of being hurt.

And we also hear of the man who is tough but not tender. You get women together and say, what are the qualities you want in a husband? Yes, they want self-assurance. Yes, they want self-confidence.

But they also put very high on the list sensitivity. One of the biggest problems of sexual maturity in our nation is the lack of male sensitivity in lovemaking. He has to prove his manhood by living out the old caveman myth, which hurts the woman physically. And no wonder she doesn't want to be involved in sex more often when it's a painful experience for her.

Rather than one of tenderness and of love. So we have to remember that fear of pain can be a paralyzing force. Well, there are other fears. There's fear of discovery.

And that's a very real one. I've talked to countless couples where the woman says, for example, that she much more enjoys a sexual relationship with her husband when they're away from the home. When they go on vacation to a hotel or something like that than they are in the home. And you begin to explore that and you begin to see that she is afraid, or he may be, and maybe the man, is afraid that the children will walk in or will overhear them or whatever.

See, one of the best investments that you can make in a marriage is a lock for your bedroom door. Again, this is the place where you can be naked and unashamed. But you're not going to be naked and unashamed if any minute somebody comes walking in because your daughter is not your wife and the next door neighbor is not your husband. And if people are afraid that somebody is going to see them, then they're inhibited.

Then the partner takes that as a personal act of rejection. Fear of pregnancy is another major fear. And we could go on and list these fears that people have that inhibit them, but here is where we need communication, where the husband and the wife need to talk, where we need to express to each other, what is it that you're afraid of? Are you afraid of something?

And how can I help? I'm not going to help my wife by forcing her to do things that she is afraid of. Now the second one is the one that almost no one talks about, guilt. I'd like to express a pattern that I find familiar in marriage counseling. When I hear a man come into my office and say to me, I want to divorce my wife, our relationship is deteriorated and she doesn't respond to me sexually and all of that, I will ask this question straight up, straight from the shoulder. I'll say, tell me, here in the privacy of the office, did you have sexual relationships with your wife before you were married? Now, my experience in counseling cannot be a test of the sufficient universe to give you a percentage that covers the whole nation.

But I'll just tell you my experience. I don't know how many men I've asked that question to, a hundred? Every single man that I've ever counseled on this question and I asked, did you have sexual relationships with your wife before you were married?

Every single one of them said yes, every one. The virginal husband is almost nonexistent as well as the virginal wife. So after they tell me this, that yes, they did have sexual involvement with their wife before they got married, I asked them this question.

In your opinion, was your wife more responsive sexually or less responsive sexually before you were married? And their eyes light up and they say, she was more responsive before we were married. And he looks at me like I'm a voodoo witch doctor for knowing that. He says, how did you know that?

I said, I know it because I've heard it so many times. And that's why I'm asking the question. Now, why is it that so many men say that their wives were more responsive to them before they were married than after they got married? Is it because they have simply idealized the good old days? It might be. Is it because sex was just more exciting in its novelty than it has become over the years? That's another possibility. And there's a third possibility that the woman can only respond when she's in a taboo situation. And when she's allowed to perform sexually, she's bored with it and doesn't care. There are all kinds of reasons that would explain why men say that their wives were more responsive before.

But one factor that we need to consider here, it may be true. In fact, it may be that the woman was more responsive, and suddenly she's less responsive. And it may be because she carried into the marriage all this baggage of guilt and resentment because the husband manipulated her, persuaded her to do what she was trying not to do before she got married. And now she carries that resentment in, but worse, she carries unrelieved guilt.

What do you do in a case like that? Well, again, we can get all kinds of therapy offered to us from the medical world, from secular counselors, and from ministers. And the usual therapy goes like this in our day and age.

You have to understand that what you did before you got married was okay. Everybody does it. The Kinsey Report, the Chapman Report indicates that the overwhelming majority of people do that. And since the overwhelming majority of people do that, that indicates that it's normal.

And if it's normal, it's healthy. And this is just part of your maturing process in becoming responsible human beings. You've heard that line a million times. I had a woman come to me who was about to get married. She had been engaged for a year or so, and she came and she was very, very much distressed with guilt. And she said, oh, what am I going to do? She said, I feel so guilty. She said, I've been having sexual relationships with my fiancé. She said, and I went to see my minister, and my minister said to me, look, the way to get over this is to understand that the reason you feel guilty is that you've been a victim of this narrow, rigid, Victorian, Puritan culture with its taboos. And you have to mature and understand that you're not promiscuous.

You have just been a responsible adult. And she said, and I tried that, but I still feel guilty. And I said, well, the reason why you still feel guilty is because you are guilty. I said, the prohibition against premarital sexual intercourse was not invented by Jonathan Edwards or by Queen Victoria. It was God who said no, and you have offended God.

You have transgressed His law, never mind the fact that everybody else is doing it. The law does not come from the psychiatrists. It does not come from the ministers.

It does not come from the counselors. It comes from God, and God said no, and you did it anyway. So you're guilty. And the only thing that I know that can cure you of that is not rationalization. You have real guilt, and if you're going to get healthy, you have to have real forgiveness. And the only way I know to get that is for you to go home by yourself on your knees and tell God what you did and confess your sin. And God will forgive you of that. Do you understand that you can be a virgin again in God's sight? And so we need to clean up marriage by dealing with unresolved guilt, and God will make us free. Such important insight, a clean conscience allows us to have a healthy relationship with our spouse.

Dr. R.C. Sproul is teaching on the intimate marriage this week here on Renewing Your Mind, and we're glad you could be with us. The confusion about marriage, unfortunately, has crept into the church, and many Christians are buying into the lies. Throughout this series, Dr. Sproul looks at the deeper issues that lurk beneath the surface and provides biblical solutions to the problems.

This is a six-part series, and we'd be happy to send it to you on two DVDs when you contact us today with a gift of any amount. You can reach us by phone at 800-435-4343 or online at renewingyourmind.org. This might seem like an awkward topic to be discussing, but the Bible is not silent on issues related to sex and marriage, and we're grateful that R.C. was not afraid to bring a straightforward biblical perspective to this vital aspect of the Christian life. So again, request the intimate marriage when you call us at 800-435-4343.

You can also make your request online at renewingyourmind.org, and in advance, let me thank you for your gift of any amount to Liget Air Ministries. Well, communication is the key to a good marriage, but conflict is inevitable. What I say with my mouth is what communicates how much I cherish my wife. Of course, what I do speaks as well, but nothing can destroy her sense of being cherished faster than an unkind, thoughtless, cutting remark that comes out of my mouth. Get ready to be convicted tomorrow as you join us for a message titled Criticism and Compliments, here on Renewing Your Mind. Copyright © 2020, New Thinking Allowed Foundation