[Adapted from this past Sunday’s message at The District Church, “Being Single.”]
Statistically, most single adults have had sex. Some of you are in relationships where you’re having sex now; others of you have had sex before—maybe it was good, maybe it was terrible; and some of you really wish you could have sex. My hope today is that, regardless of what has already happened, we can have a biblical understanding of and approach to sex, because what happens next is also pretty important—actually, more important.
It’s an interesting thing being a single 30-year-old pastor in a church full of young, smart, good-looking people, in a city full of young, smart, good-looking people, in a culture that tells you that you need to be young, smart, and good-looking in order to find someone else who’s young, smart, and good-looking so that you can “find God’s match for you” (anyone seen that tagline recently?) and/or just have a little good old harmless fun between the sheets.
Accepting singleness as a gift—living into who God created you to be—doesn’t mean being free from sexual desires and urges; it doesn’t mean you’ll be miraculously free from hormones and chemical reactions in your brain and your body; it doesn’t mean you’ll be rescued from the cultural bombardment that we’re all faced with: on billboards, in ads, on the internet. I know how difficult it is to be hit by wave after wave of messages that say you need to have sex in order to fully enjoy life; that you’re somehow incomplete if you haven’t had sex; or that it’s just another appetite like being hungry or being thirsty—it’s a physical urge that just needs to be satisfied.
I realize this may be a very sensitive topic for some of you, but the perspective that says, What happens in the bedroom is nobody else’s business! doesn’t really work for a people who say, as Christ-followers, “All to Jesus I surrender; I surrender all.”
So here’s what I think the Bible says about sex—and if you disagree, talk to me, email me, dialog with me; let’s keep encouraging each other to find better and fuller and more holistic ways of following Jesus.
First, if Jesus was single and celibate his entire life, for 15-20 years after his hormones started kicking in, for 10-15 years after he was ‘supposed’ to be married and at least have some sort of outlet for his sexual urges, and if Jesus is the most complete, most fulfilled, most content human being that ever lived, then you are not incomplete if you haven’t had sex and you can live life to the full even without having sex.
And before you say, “Well, he was God,” the author of Hebrews reminds us: “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin” (4:15).
And before you say, “Well, he didn’t have the internet or magazines on which every single cover has the word ‘Sex’ on it, or he didn’t date anyone so of course he wasn’t tempted to have sex,” you don’t need those things to be tempted. As far as I’m aware, you have a mind, you are a sinner, and there is a devil: ergo, you will be tempted. It is not a sin to be tempted; Jesus was tempted! It is a sin to give in to temptation, to entertain those thoughts and play them out and act upon them. Martin Luther is reported to have said that you cannot stop birds from flying over your head, but you can keep them from building a nest in your hair.
Second, sex is not just an appetite like any other. This is clear from the way Scripture talks about it: Paul writes, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body” (1 Cor. 6:19-20). In fact, it is for these very reasons that Paul writes, one verse earlier, “Shun sexual immorality! Every other sin which a person commits is outside the body; but the one who commits sexual immorality sins against his or her own body.”
I think God intended sex to be not only a way to procreate and have babies, but more importantly, as one of the most intimate and vulnerable and enjoyable expressions of commitment and trust and love. In the beginning, it says in Genesis, “The man and the woman were naked and unashamed” (2:25). That doesn’t mean they were brazen about it, as is the common attitude today, which says, It’s just sex! What’s the big deal? Rather, it means that they had no fear in revealing all of who they were to one another. And the physical act of sex is symbolic of this closeness, allowing someone to get about as close as a person can get, “becoming one flesh.”
Scientifically speaking, when two people have sex, not only is the chemical dopamine released, which makes you feel good, but also oxytocin, which is the bonding chemical, increasing commitment. That’s why, relationally and emotionally, if you have sex with someone, you’re more likely (and of course there are exceptions) to feel a connection with that person. Relationships in which sex is a part are going to be a lot harder to end if they need to and they’re going to hurt a lot more when they do, and relationships in which sex is the main thing tend to be self-serving rather than self-giving; and we see in the person of Jesus Christ that love is about putting the other’s needs before our own. “We know love by this, that he [Jesus] laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another” (1 John 3:16).
As Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, “Love is an act of the will, where you act lovingly even if you do not always feel loving. We tend to think love is a feeling, but it is not. Love is an action; love is something we do for others” (God Has A Dream, 78).
So sex is not the same as love. Sex is intended to be the most intimate and vulnerable expression of love, meant to be enjoyed in tandem with serving the other person and sacrificing for the other person and putting the other person’s needs before your own. It’s not that sex is bad as a single person and then good for married people. Sex was always intended to be a very good thing; so precious, in fact, that God wanted to protect it within the confines of a covenant relationship, where two people have committed to each other that, no matter what, they will see it through. When things are valuable, we take care of them: most of you treat your iPhones as valuable, even if that shows itself by putting it in a protective case so that it can take some punishment. Similarly with sex, if it is a good thing, if it is one of the best things in life—and I believe that it is—then it should be cared for, it should be protected, it should be enjoyed in the safest environment, that is, a committed covenant relationship.
Jamie the Very Worst Missionary wrote a couple of great blogs on sex (here and here). Here she’s talking about waiting:
… when you wait to have sex, you are creating an important connection between the very powerful urges to do things that feel really good and the ability to control those urges. Otherwise known as self-control. This practice of self-denial and delayed gratification makes you a healthier, more poised, and better moderated person. Ultimately, self-control is a character trait—or *ahem*, fruit of the spirit, for the Christian folk—that will help you be a better long-term partner in your ’til-death-do-we-part relationship.
… we’ve done a really bad job of teaching about sex in the Church. Our approach has been to shame girls for having it, and shame boys for wanting it. And when the smart kids ask, “Why wait?”, we shrug our shoulders like a hillbilly and say, “Because the Bible says.” Then we give the girls a purity ring and we give the boys nothing and we cross our fingers and hope they’ll cross their legs. So dumb.
We’ve made virginity the goal, when it is purity that we should be aiming for; they’re not the same thing. Sexual purity is a lifelong spiritual practice that doesn’t begin or end with a single sex act, just as it doesn’t begin or end on a wedding night. So when we are asked, “Why wait?”, we should have an answer that empowers and prepares people to choose wisely for a lifetime.
So her advice for her kids is to wait and, by waiting, to cultivate self-control and to grow as a healthy, mature human being who’s capable of rising above the animal instincts that tell you that you can’t do anything other than what you feel. She says:
the person you’re with right now … is not the last person you will have those feelings toward, and you need to know what it feels like to not act on those feelings, because a day will come when you will have to exercise self-control for the sake of the relationship you’ve given your life to—and, trust me, you will want to know how to do that. Do not relinquish that power without a fight.
Now, please don’t hear me saying that what married people do in the bedroom doesn’t matter. It’s entirely possible to be selfish with sex as a married person, just as it’s entirely possible to live a life of integrity and wholeness and joy as a single person without sex. And as C.S. Lewis puts it in Mere Christianity:
There is no getting away from it; the Christian rule is, ‘Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence.’