There are so many things worth talking about when it comes to sex and sexuality, and I certainly can't cover them all in a blog post. Maybe I'll pick up some different subtopics in the future. This time I want to reflect on sex within marriage. I've been a Christian as long as I can remember. When I was growing up in the church, older Christians, such as my parents, explained that God has designed sex for marriage and so rightly taught me to wait for marriage to have sex. When I was twenty-two, I got married and stepped into uncharted territory. Suddenly sex was no longer something forbidden or something off in some possible future. But I really didn't have much of a framework of how to think about sex in marriage. Almost everything my fellow Christians had taught me had been about abstinence, and that didn't really apply to me anymore. Pretty much anything I knew or thought about what sex was supposed to look like in marriage I had unintentionally picked up from TV shows and movies, from my culture rather than the church. Finally I was in a place where I could appropriately express my sexual desires, but I had very little idea what that should mean for my marriage or my relationship with Christ Jesus.
Now I don't want to be too hard on my fellow Christians. I certainly didn't want to hear anything about sex from my parents. (I still don't, for that matter.) When I was a teenager in youth group, I don't think I was probably ready to really hear about how to approach sex as a married person. I'm sure it came up a little bit in premarital counseling, but we mostly focused on other things. As a pastor, I think working on communication is the most important thing to cover in that brief time. And again, most people probably don't want to hear too much about sex from their pastor or their future spouse's pastor, or the pastor they don't really know who happens to be officiating their wedding as the case may be. And I did hear some good things. The Christians around me did affirm that sex is good in its proper place, a gift from God. I did have some very basic understanding that sex brings two people together as one—and not just in a physical sense.
But I definitely could have used more instruction from a Christian perspective. I think we as Christians tend to drop the ball in thinking and talking about sex within marriage. We're generally not doing all the work we should do in preparing and helping each other to live faithfully as followers of Jesus. Probably what I needed was one or two Christians who had a little marriage experience and whom I trusted to pull me aside after I was engaged and talk with me about how to honor God when it comes to sex. And then after Tess and I got married we should've had some fellow Christians to talk with now and again. But I didn't have that, and—let's not let me off the hook here—I didn't seek that out either. We Christians are often not nearly as interested in accountability as we should be, and we're especially uncomfortable when it comes to sex. So we all end up trying to fend for ourselves and figure things out on our own, which makes us weaker than we could or should be.
To state the obvious, sex is everywhere in our culture. And the vast majority of what we pick up on TV or online is radically different from what God wants for His people. Certainly God teaches us through the Bible and guides us through the Holy Spirit, but sometimes applying what God wants to our specific situation isn't easy. We shouldn't just expect to figure it all out on our own or leave others to fend for themselves. We Christians can't just be silent. We need to support each other, even if that means learning to talk about a topic that makes us uncomfortable.
I've got a few other thoughts, but this is getting long, so let's leave it here for now. I'll plan to share some general things I've learned from others (and maybe a bit from experience) in a future post.
Grace and peace,
BMH
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