Sex Mystery

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. The greatest human quest is to be known and loved. If we are known but not loved, that is rejection. If we are loved but not known, that is sentimentality. So we want somebody to see us for all that we are.

We want to be exposed and we want somebody to love us anyway. The greatest way that we ever experience that is in the gospel. Welcome to Summit Life with pastor, author, and theologian J.D.

Greer. I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch. Today we'll look to scripture for clarity and direction on intimacy and healthy relationships. Many people get uneasy when the preacher starts talking about these personal issues. But the fact is, sex is one of the few topics that's addressed in almost every book of the Bible.

God has a lot to say about it. And if he's got a lot to say, then we've got a lot to learn. Now, if you missed any of the previous messages from Ephesians chapter five, you can listen online free of charge at J.D.

Greer dot com. But for today, pastor J.D. has titled his message Sex Mystery.

Let's get started. Ephesians chapter five, verse 21. We have been in this passage now for this is the sixth week. And every week I hope you have gained a little bit more from this passage.

I'm going to read it one more time in its entirety. So you listen as I read it to you, verse 21. Submitting to one another, the apostle Paul says, out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its savior. Now, as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word.

So that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes it and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. That has quotation marks around it, because it's a quote from Genesis 2. This mystery is profound, Paul says, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.

The main point that Paul makes in this passage is that marriage is a divine mystery that is pointing us beyond itself to something higher and more ultimate, and that is Christ and the church. Whenever you have a sign, you are not supposed to get fixated on the sign. You are supposed to look through the sign at what the sign is pointing to. If you are traveling to the Grand Canyon, and you packed up your family, and you drove all the way there, and right before you got to the Grand Canyon, there was a big sign that had a picture of the Grand Canyon on it, and it said, Grand Canyon, turn right, just ahead. You would not stop your car there and get out and unpack your equipment and say, look at it, there it is.

Picture the Grand Canyon, the name Grand Canyon, and set up your camping stop there. Of course not. The sign is simply there to point you to go beyond itself. What a lot of people do with marriage is they get fixated on the sign, and so they start to look at marriage as something that is there to give them ultimate happiness, there to give them meaning and identity and fulfillment. But marriage was never designed to give those things to us.

We end up putting a weight on marriage that it was simply not designed to hold. The mystery of marriage, Paul says, is that it and our families, our biological families, are merely echoes, signs of something greater, something ultimate, something more eternal, and that is Christ and his eternal family, the church. Marriage, Paul says, is simply gospel reenactment. You are reenacting the eternal gospel in ways that you relate to each other in marriage and that is giving you both a taste of the love of God and you are learning to love like God.

Whether or not you are in the sign is not important. The point is that you get to the ultimate thing, which is Christ and the church. That's Paul's main point in Ephesians 5. And so we have looked at it from five different angles so far, and today we're going to look at it from a sixth, and that is you're going to bring all these things together and think about what does intimacy and sex in the marriage relationship look like in light of this truth.

And if you're single, what we're going to do is we're going to talk about what it looks like in your life as you wait for that and what the implications are of that for you. Now the word sex is not found in Ephesians 5, but Paul talks in verse 31 about coming together in one flesh in marriage. The ultimate expression of that is, of course, sex.

That's becoming one flesh. Now what I'm going to try to do today is to debunk a deeply held cultural myth that a lot of people believe, and I would say that even a number of you, if you don't believe it outright, you're at least sympathetic with it and you're not quite sure how to answer it because it seems to be the theme of every sitcom that I have seen in the last 10 to 15 years, and that is the idea that sex is just physical. It's just physical.

It's just physical. Yeah, I didn't know him or her that well. It wasn't a big deal. We just had a little fun for a while. There were no strings attached. We were on spring break. My other girlfriends were doing it too, and it was nothing.

It was not a problem. Sex is kind of like food. You give it your body gets hungry, you eat.

It's not really that important what restaurants you ate at one night and if you ate it at a different restaurant the other night, or sex is like a sport. You play it. It doesn't matter. You're on one team one day and on another team the other day. It's like touch football.

It's like tackle football, except you stay on the ground for as long as you possibly can. That's what it's like. It's just physical. It's just biology. But most of us, when we think about that, I would just say even if you want to believe that, even if part of you has trouble explaining why you do or don't believe that, you know that's not true. You know it's not true. I heard one pastor expose that this way.

Think about these questions. Listen, why is it, if sex is just physical, why is it that when a child is sexually abused, when they're an adult and they finally connect the dots, why is that so difficult for them to shake off? It's not just an authority figure betrayed me, because that happens in a lot of different places and it's not nearly the lasting damage that that kind of sexual abuse has on a kid for the rest of his life. Or how about this, why is rape so much more harmful to a woman than simply being beat up? Why is rape so much more psychologically damaging to a woman than simply being beat up? Do you know statistically women report physical abuse much more often than they do rape? Statistically it's very high how often a woman will report being physically abused, but rape it's shockingly less. There's a reason for that, because there's something that goes with that that is different than physical abuse. Why is it that men with the deepest sexual issues usually had uninvolved or missing fathers?

Why are those things connected? Why is adultery so hard to shake? Other forms of betrayal, you tend to get over. Why is that form of betrayal so hard to shake? Why is it that most people's greatest regrets are usually sexual?

When somebody comes to me with a deep dark secret, it's almost always sexual. Whenever I hear the phrase, I've never told anybody this before, I know what's about to follow that statement. I can't remember ever hearing that statement and then hearing somebody say, I cheated on a test in the 11th grade.

Or I went 110 miles an hour through a 35 mile per hour zone. That's bad, but I've never heard anybody say that. It's always sexual when they bring that up. We assumed it was no big deal.

I just met him on spring break. I was at a bad time in our marriage and it was just physical, but we know that sex is not just physical. Otherwise none of those things that I just gave you would be the way they are. So what I want to show you is from Ephesians 5, a different way to look at sex than what our culture is trying to get us to believe.

And if every teenager in college student would listen to this, I'm telling you this goes 110, a thousand miles the other direction from what you have been programmed to believe. I'll give you three things that Ephesians 5 teaches you about sex. I was in a particularly Southern Baptist mood this week, so all three of them start with S. They are alliterated. Number one, sex is symbolic. According to Ephesians 5, sex is symbolic. The relationship between the husband and wife, Paul explains, is like the relationship between Christ and the church. And maybe that's nowhere seen quite as clearly as in the sexual relationship. I'll give you a couple different ways that's true. One, when a man and woman are married, they are naked and they are not ashamed.

That's what Genesis 2 said. There's a certain sense of shame that goes with being naked in public. At least if you're normal, there's a certain sense of shame.

But when a man and woman are married, that shame is gone. You see, I've told you this before, but the greatest human quest is to be known and loved. Known and loved. Because if we are known but not loved, that is rejection. If we are loved but not known, that is sentimentality. So we want somebody to see us for all that we are. We want to be exposed and we want somebody to love us anyway. The greatest way that we ever experience that is in the Gospel.

When the all-seeing, all-knowing God sees everything about us, sees our every flaw, sees our every fault, and loves us intensely and has taken upon himself our shame and our sin and put it away. The Gospel is where that ultimately happens, but the mirror of where that happens is in marriage. Because that's where someone else sees the real you. It sees a part of you.

It sees you exposed and they love you anyway. Here's another way that that relationship is like Christ in the church. The way that you bear fruit physically is you get caught up in intimacy with somebody else. It's kind of a mystery when you step back and think about it. When you actually come together to make a child, you're not thinking about the mechanics of making a child. There's a lot of mechanics and there's a lot of science involved in it, right? But you're not thinking scientifically when that happens.

It's not like making a recipe. You get caught up in a moment of intimacy. A woman is in the arms of a man and the fruit of that is a child. The way that spiritually we bear fruit is how? We get swept up in the arms of our Savior and the fruit of that in our soul is love, joy, peace, and all the spiritual fruits that God wants to bring about.

These things are signs of a much fuller relationship. Sex is symbolic. It is a mystery that points us beyond itself to the ultimate thing that we really crave, which is the love of God.

That's why, by the way, we put so much weight on it. That's why it's so mysterious to us because it points to something deeper and more ultimate that goes down to the core of who we are and how we're made. It asks eternal questions.

It asks ultimate questions. Remember Josh McDowell saying years ago, he says, many people today feel like good sex is the answer for their problems. Good sex is the answer for their problems.

He said, if anything, sex is not the answer, it's the question. It is a soul that is reaching out saying, I know that there's something more that I'm created for. I know that I'm missing something and I'm reaching out.

That's also the reason that sex has probably the greatest potential of anything to go so dysfunctional and become so perverse. We'll return to our teaching here on Summit Life in just a moment, but I wanted to quickly share a little bit more about our current resource this month. Don't let the distractions of today destroy the peace and satisfaction that come from sitting and learning and resting at the feet of Jesus. To get started, we've created a book of devotionals for anyone who feels distracted and even disconnected at times on the topics of relationships, faith, and rest. And in addition, we'll include a set of 20 conversation cards to help kickstart faith-based conversations in your home. Make these lessons on relationships truly personal by reaching out today in support of this ministry.

Give us a call at 866-335-5220 or go online to jdgrier.com and reserve your copy today. Now, let's get back to today's message with Pastor J.D. Greer here on Summit Life. C.S. Lewis, back in the 1940s, he did a series of radio talks on BBC, believe it or not.

And C.S. Lewis talked about sexuality. He said, imagine—again, keep in mind this is the 1940s—imagine that you were visiting a country that you had never been to. And when you got there, you saw that the young men, when they finally got out of their houses and went off to college, when they got to college and they were away from their parents, out of their bags, they would slowly pull out—nobody was looking—these posters. And they would unroll these posters and put them on the wall, and there they were big color pictures of food. Bacon and cheeseburgers and ice cream sundaes and cupcakes just there on the wall. And they would all sneak around to each other's room and be like, oh, you got a picture of a cheeseburger.

I got a picture of bacon back in my room. And then late at night, they would all go out to this club with the low lights and the bumping and the grinding music. And there on stage would be somebody that was slowly uncovering something on the stage. And when they finally pulled it back, all the guys would start yelling and hooping and hollering, and they'd lose their minds.

And it was a plate of cheese fries. And all the guys would start throwing dollar bills at it. And then at night, they would go back in their rooms, and they would get on their computers, and they'd start looking at pictures of food. And then somebody would walk in.

They'd turn off the screen real quick so that nobody could see. He said, what would you conclude about that country? They're starving, right? He said, they're starving. He said, but then you find out that they're not starving. They've been glutted with food for the last 40 years.

They're all obese. He said, what would you then have to conclude? You would have to conclude that there's something deeply disordered in this particular culture about its relationship to food. He said, the same thing is true, has to be true with us with sex. He said, in a culture that is glutted with sex, to have the dysfunctions that we have about it has to point to something deeper. And that is because, he said, it goes down not just to our physical desires, it goes down to the core of who we are. Because we are separated from the love of God, and there's something our soul is yearning for in sex that we think we'll find in sex, but it's not there.

There's a dysfunction that goes much deeper. It goes down to the core of how we are made and who we are, which leads me to number two. Sex is sacred. Sex is sacred. Now, don't hear that word sacred as an exclusively religious word. The word sacred simply means set apart. So think here sacred to you, sacred to your innermost being.

Here is why. Paul in Ephesians 5 31 says that marriage and the sexual act that epitomizes it is a fusion of two souls into one being, into one being. They become one body.

I mean, sex, I mean, think about it. The bodies interlock. There is a literal conjoining of bodies. That physical oneness is to be matched in every other way. Emotional oneness, a lifelong commitment in marriage. When you separate physical oneness from the oneness in every other way, it becomes harmful. You see, God had multiple purposes for sex.

This is probably not how it went down, but this is how I think about it. When God's creating the world, he's got the angels and he's like making the planets and the stars and the continents and the plants and then he's like, oh, I got an idea. And the angels are like, what is it?

He's like, well, you can't understand it right now. But he creates sex so that the animals can procreate. But then when he gets to human beings, it's more than just procreation because he makes them the only species that will have sex face to face. Because there's something more than just procreation. There is something that is about their souls that are going to unify them.

So it's procreative. It's unifying. And then just because God is God, because God does things like this, he makes it a lot of fun.

He makes it a lot of fun. In fact, there's nothing wrong with that, by the way. And maybe some of you need to hear that. That's not an accident.

That wasn't an after effect. Proverbs 5 18, a man should be ravished with his wife's breasts. I think that's the first verse I memorized in high school of my own free will.

Some of you guys are like, what was that? Proverbs 5 18. Make sure you underline the word wife in there, though. God made it to be a lot of fun. So when somebody says, well, the only purpose of sex is procreation, they're wrong. God did not make it for that purpose. He made it for all three of those purposes. And he made it to be something that would conjoin the souls. He made it to give us a delight, a taste of the delight of the intimacy that we would have with God for eternity. I'm not quite sure how sex is going to correspond in heaven. I know that you would love to hear a sermon about that, but God did not tell us. But I know that it just gives us a taste of something that we experience eternally, something much more glorious, something that if it could be comprehended by us, God would have told us. But he didn't. You take that mystery, and that's why Paul says, hold your finger in Ephesians 5, flip over to 1 Corinthians 6.

It should be backwards to the left just a little bit. 1 Corinthians 6, verse 18. Keep your finger in Ephesians 5, but we're going to be in 1 Corinthians 6 and 7 for just a few minutes here. So Paul says this, using the same concept, he says, verse 18, flee, run from sexual immorality.

Run from it. Because every other sin a person commits is outside his body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. When you sin against somebody else, you do damage to them. If I walk in the room and I punch you in the face, then your eye is black, but I'm not really hurt.

My hand might hurt a little bit, but you're more hurt than I am. I've sinned against you. If you're in there and you've got your wallet sitting there on the table, when you're not looking, I take it, then I gain, you lose. But he says, sexual immorality is different because you are actually taking a razor to your own soul when you commit sexual immorality. And I know that you may have a hard time believing that, so let me just spend a few minutes trying to flesh it out a little bit.

Last year, I reviewed a book called Hooked. It is not a Christian book, but it is a scientific study written by a couple of neurologists who are trying to show scientifically what having multiple sexual partners, especially when you're young, does to your brain. What they show in this book is that multiple sexual partners actually rewires your brain in a way, they say, that makes genuine, lasting, selfless relationships much more difficult. They say, and I quote, the individual who goes from sex partner to sex partner is causing his or her brain to mold in such a way that eventually accepts that sexual pattern as normal.

The pattern of changing sex partners therefore seems to damage their ability to bond in a committed relationship. The kind of attachment damage that occurs after repeated sexual encounters is, in many respects, more pernicious, more damaging than pregnancy or STDs because it typically goes unperceived by affected individuals while causing ongoing difficulties in establishing a lifelong and satisfying relationship. The authors use the metaphor of tape, which you have probably heard, that the idea that if you take a piece of duct tape and you put it around my arm, when you rip the piece of duct tape off, you would take with it pieces of hair and pieces of my arm. But then if you take the same piece of tape and wrap it around somebody else's arm when you do it, it would still hurt them, but not quite as badly as it hurt me. You do that 10, 20, 30 times.

By the time you get to the 30th time, that tape has lost every bit of its cohesive power. They said that's similar to what's happening when you have repeated sexual encounters is that it's losing your ability to actually bond with your soul in a committed selfless relationship with somebody else. The same is true, they say, for pornography or autoeroticism. Let's just call it that. What you are doing is you are separating that part of you from the rest of you, and what's happening is it's actually damaging the ability of your soul to commit and have a normal, healthy sexual relationship. Now, that's just pure science.

Let me give it to you from a different perspective, from the perspective of a pastor, Tim Keller, meaning of marriage, which I would highly recommend that you get and read. I tried to reword this in my own words, and I just couldn't do it. I was like, there's just no way I could say it nearly as well. Then I thought about just straight plagiarizing it and not telling you where, but then I felt guilty about that. Let me read this to you. I don't do this often. It's only about six chapters. No, I'm kidding.

It's just a few lines here, but listen. If sex is a method that God invented to do whole life entrustment, it should not surprise us that sex makes us feel deeply connected to the other person, even when it's used wrongly. Unless you deliberately disable it, or through repeated practice you numb the original impulses of sex, sex will make you feel personally interwoven and joined to another human being as you are literally physically joined.

In the midst of sexual passion, you naturally want to say extravagant things like, I will always love you. But even if you're not legally married, you may find yourself quickly feeling marriage-like ties, feeling the other person has obligations to you. But of course, that person has no legal, social, or moral responsibility, even to call you back in the morning. This incongruity leads to jealousy and hurt feelings and obsessiveness if two people are having sex but are not married. It makes breaking up vastly harder than it should be. It leads many people to stay trapped in relationships that are not good because the feeling of having somehow connected themselves.

By the way, in the margin of my book, I wrote, this is the plotline of every episode of Friends I have ever seen in my life. Therefore, if you have sex outside of marriage, you will have to steel yourself against sex's power to soften your heart toward another person to make you more trusting. The problem is that eventually, sex will lose its covenant-making power for you, even if one day you do get married. Ironically, then, sex outside of marriage eventually works backwards, making you less able to commit to and trust another person. Now, what he's essentially done is said the exact same thing that scientific study just showed you, that what sex does outside of the context of all the things that God intended it for, instead of being a blessing, it becomes a curse to you. God gave us this blessing in marriage, yet many of us possess baggage in this area, and it's time to break free. You're listening to Summit Life, the Bible teaching ministry of pastor, author, and theologian J.D.

Greer. Pastor J.D., we only have one more day left in this study. Can you remind our listeners what First Love has been all about?

In First Love, actually, I love this series. If there's one thing that I'm confident in saying we need help with, it's forming and building healthy, life-giving, life-restoring relationships. In many ways, these relationships become windows to our relationship with God. So we've got a new resource we want to make available along with this series that will help you and those that you're in various types of relationships with help in talking to one another. We've made this set of conversation cards, simple cards that just have a question or a prompt on them that can kickstart dialogue around important topics. To go along with that, we've got a book of 15 different devotions that are all around the topics of faith and rest and relationships, even a couple thrown in specifically for parents. I would love to reserve a copy for you, both of the devotion and the conversations card, and we can do that.

If you'll just go to jdgreer.com, we would love to start this dialogue with you. This set comes with our thanks when you donate today to support this ministry so that more people can dive into the Gospel with us on a daily basis. Give and request devotions for the distracted family in your set of conversation cards when you call 866-335-5220. One more time, that's 866-335-5220.

Or you can request them both when you donate online at jdgreer.com. I'm Molly Vitevich, and I'm so glad that you joined us. Be sure to listen tomorrow as Pastor JD wraps up our study in Ephesians. That's Wednesday on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.