Dennis Tuuri

Amen to all of that. Praise God for the season of thanksgiving, the celebration of the fruitfulness of the Lord our God. May he make us more fruitful in our lives through the reading and preaching of his word. Today I’ll be reading from Genesis 2:18-25. I have an unusually simple alliterated outline dealing with sex in marriage—intimacy, marital intimacy—that it is good, it is glue, and it is a gift to be given.

Please stand for the reading of God’s word. Genesis 2:18-25. And then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him a helper fit for him.” Now out of the ground, the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field.

But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man. And while he slept, took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man, he made into a woman and brought her to the man. And then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man.

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife and they shall become one flesh.” And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for your word. We thank you for the blessing of life, abundant life, in our created order that you’ve given to us, Lord God, to walk in the context of. Thank you for the life in our families. Thank you for the wondrous gift that marriage is and sexuality within marriage.

We pray you would bless us, Lord God, with an understanding of your word as it relates to the topic at hand. As we continue our series on marriage, I pray, Lord God, that you would bless every marriage here. Bless the future marriages of our children and the children and the singles that are here today with an understanding of this text and bless the singles as well in their lives, whether they marry or not, with an understanding of human relationships.

Thank you, Father, for your word. Bless us now by your Holy Spirit. Transform us in Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen. Please be seated.

So it’s almost always a topical matter to talk about sexuality and certainly not two weeks after the election it’s in the pages of the paper. I’ll just get the bad joke out of the way at the beginning. You know, we had this controversy in Benghazi, Libya, and the question was, you know, would it continue on as a story or not? And the expression for that is whether a story has legs. And Benghazi has legs, and several pairs of them.

As it turns out, we are faced with a crisis in our country. We’re not two weeks after the election, and we have another sexual scandal, this time involving both the director of our CIA as well as the head general of our troops in Afghanistan. This follows, I think, they just wrapped up the investigation on the Secret Service sex scandal from about six months ago.

And not only that, of course, but you know, here we are and thousands and thousands of layoffs are being announced and the Middle East is once more—rockets being fired back and forth. You know, we have hearings now. We seem to have divided government, as always. Even Twinkies provide a provision to divide the country right down the line. Half the people are blaming the unions for the demise of the Twinkie and the other half are blaming the venture capitalists that took over Hostess.

So there you have it. We’re split down the middle and we’re talking about a topic today about uniting. And so it’s quite important. And it is, you know, particularly difficult in the context of where we’re at as a country right now, after the sexual revolution of the sixties, to get our heads and hearts straight about this topic of sexuality and marriage. It’s not rocket science, but it’s stuff that really can just elude us, and it is important to, I think, deal with it in a way that will be transforming to our lives.

I mean, you know, as a pastor for thirty-some years now—about thirty years—and having done a lot of marriage counseling, this is certainly one of the top issues that is a problem in marriages and creates tensions and conflicts and fights and disunity. And not only that, but it’s a lost opportunity because it’s intended to do the very opposite—to bring unity.

And so we want to talk about this as the eleventh sermon on marriage. I’ll probably have one more to address this. I wanted to address it now, after our sermon last week on embracing the other and the otherness of it. And this as well is rejected in our day and age or embracing of the other, but in human sexuality that’s what we’re called to do. All right.

So it’s quite simple. First of all, I want to say that sexual relations in marriage—it’s a good thing from God. So it’s good, and that’s really important because, you know, people don’t think it’s very good, and a lot of people feel very conflicted about it.

So it’s important to just simply affirm what our text says, and that is that it wasn’t good for man to be alone. It was good to have relationships and community. And so what God gives Adam in terms of a marriage and a wife is a good thing. Now, it’s not the standard for everybody. We talked about that a couple of weeks ago when we talked about singles. But it is certainly a good thing that God has given to man.

This is really kind of, you know, the picture of the Bible from beginning to end. I mean, the creation of man itself—you know, Adam himself, of course, is a man. He’s a sexual being. And that’s a good thing, right? God creates it good. And then he creates a wife to pass for Adam. And so that creation is also seen as a good thing. And the goodness of it is the summary statement at the end of our text: the two are naked and not ashamed. There’s goodness to it.

Now, the Bible is that way from beginning to end. Of course, along the way, we have an entire book of the Bible—the Song of Solomon. The Song of Songs. It’s the very best song ever written and ever could be written. It is the song of songs. And while certainly it represents wisdom literature—that a king must love his people—and certainly it points to the Lord Jesus Christ and the church, there’s simply no way to do away with the metaphor or the actions there of husband and wife and their creating relationship, and getting married in the middle of the Song of Songs, et cetera.

I mean, it’s just ridiculous not to acknowledge the fact that God gives us, as the best song ever written, a song about intimate marital relationships—about marriage—and in the context of that marital relationships and the exultation of physical beauty. And you know, it’s really quite astonishing literature from that period of time, particularly because, you know, the woman does a lot of initiating in that book. And this was very, you know, opposite to patriarchal, male-dominated cultures. And there’s a kind of an equality to the thing in terms of the essence of the two partners that will marry in the Song of Songs. And there’s an equality of physical description of beauty. You know, the husband describes the wife’s beauty, the wife describes the husband’s beauty. And they go, you know, one starts at the feet and works his way up, the other starts at the head and works her way down. From head to toe, human bodies are good things, and they’re good things, particularly in the context of marital relationships, which is what the whole book is about.

The Bible and Christianity is supposed to be a body-positive religion—a body-positive religion—and a religion that exalts the goodness of sexuality within, of course, the context for which it’s given, which is marriage between a man and a woman. That’s the simple biblical rule.

You know, beyond the Song of Songs, there’s all kinds of other verses in the Bible. We could talk about a lot of them. We could embarrass you by reading some of them. I won’t do it. But, you know, Proverbs specifically instructs the husband in that case to delight himself in the physical beauty of his wife and warns him against delighting in the physical beauty of a different woman, the wrong woman. Proverbs is all about embracing the right woman. And Proverbs 5 puts that directly in the context of the marriage relationship and embracing one another in terms of marital intimacy.

And so, you know, the Bible wisdom literature is filled with references to the goodness of sexuality. The creation account is filled with references to this. We’ll look at some texts in a couple of minutes from Corinthians, but Paul certainly says that marital relationships are good and proper and should be engaged in regularly, not infrequently.

And throughout these texts, you don’t see the reasons, first and foremost, being procreation. Now, that certainly happens, right? It’s the only way it happens, but that doesn’t seem to be at the top of the list in the Song of Songs or in Proverbs or in Paul’s instruction in Corinthians to have regular relationships within marriage. The idea isn’t procreation. That is an outflow of the rejoicing life together of man and woman.

In the same way that God, you know, is life and we celebrate, you know, the wonderful blessings of the season—his outflow, when he walks on the hills, they burst forth into life. And when man and woman come together as husband and wife in the image of God, he creates them community, right? Together. And in that relationship of oneness, what do we see? We see life abundantly coming out of it, with the creation of the next generations.

It’s the only way the world continues to flourish and grow—is through human sexuality. And then finally, we could say many things, but finally, of course, in Ephesians 5—this incredible, delightful thing that God has portrayed for us—talks about the relationship and specifically the verse we just read from Genesis—that the two will become like, well, the husband will cleave to his wife and they’ll become one flesh. Specifically, Ephesians says that’s a picture and a description of the relationship between Christ and his church, and the oneness of the body of Christ with its head.

I mean, so sexuality has all these wonderful benefits to it. It has particular purposes, which we’ll look at. But you know, it is such a highly exalted thing that it is used as the metaphor, as it were, the description of the great truth of the unity of the body of Jesus Christ and our relationship to him.

So that’s pretty heavy water—heavy stuff—to be considering. I mean, you couldn’t really put, you know, intimate human relationships at much a higher level than the way the scriptures seem to deal with them. And yet, you know, we don’t seem to feel that way about it.

If that’s true, why is it so difficult for us to see the truth of that? Or not so much to see it, but rather to experience it emotionally? So on your outlines: why does it seem so bad?

Why doesn’t it seem like it’s that great a thing? It seems like it’s filled with troubles, and it’s embarrassing. And why, you know, Mark Driscoll in his book with his wife on marriage—talks about he has a chapter called, I think it’s actually the name of the chapter, maybe it isn’t—but he says that when they got married, he thought of sex as God and she thought of sex as gross.

And that’s a big part of the tale, you know. One reason we feel so weird about it is because we either, you know, make it the number one thing instead of being a mediated gift from God to be used for his purposes, or it just, you know, there’s been so much misuse of it that people tend to think of it as gross. You know, the sexual story in our newspapers for the last week or so—you know, you see the typical things involved with male-female stereotypes, right?

You know, well, we got this general—well, it’s really sad about him and his family—and then we’ve got this woman, and man, what a lady of disrepute is that, you know? The double standard just sort of shouts at us in a lot of these press accounts of what’s been reported on. And this is part of why, you know, this difference is part of why it seems difficult for us.

Let me mention some specific reasons why I think sex seems so bad. And one of them comes directly from the text. It says they were naked and not ashamed. But we know that’s going to change. We know that as soon as sin enters the world, the immediate effect that’s described of that is an awareness of their nakedness and a shamefulness about it, right? So the very fall itself begins, in terms of its manifestation, to the men and women who had been naked and not ashamed. Right away, sin attacks that truth. It attacks the goodness of the sexual relationship.

And what happens then is that there’s a sense of shame. Now, Adam and Eve don’t deal with shame correctly. They try to cover themselves up. Their shame is a painful feeling. It points us to the fact that we’ve sinned. That’s the purpose of shame—is to get us to address our sin. But they didn’t address their sin. And people don’t tend to address their sin. They tend to address their shame. And so what they did is they took care of their shame by making, you know, their own clothing for themselves. They self-justified, right? They got rid of the shame without really dealing with the sin.

And we know that’s what happened because then when God comes and talks to them, we know they’re just really in radical rebellion and start blaming the other person. They haven’t dealt with the sin. They’ve tried to deal with the shame. So I think that one reason why sexuality seems difficult to us is that same thing. We don’t recognize, often enough—or maybe we do in our church, but you know, it’s very important to recognize—that sin really is behind the inability to see sexual relationships as good, and specifically an attempt of self-justification, and it twists and perverts our sexuality.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I think there’s a relationship between the sexual problems of the Roman Catholic Church and their essential rejection—just at the people in the know in the church—their denial of justification by faith. Justification by faith having atonement for our sins—that’s the kind of clothing that God puts on us. Animals had to die for their sins. Atonement for our sins. And a full recognition of that is necessary to get rid of the shame, because shame is driven by sin. And if you’ve got a relationship that isn’t gospel-centered, that isn’t justification-by-faith centered, then shame continues, and perversions of sexuality, I think, continue as well.

So the first reason why it’s bad is just because of sin. It’s you know what happens after the fall—the fall affects everything—but the immediate, first effect of the fall is this idea of shame over sexuality.

Secondly, as I said, the second reason why we feel bad about sexuality is an inability to appropriate the gospel and justification by faith.

The third reason, of course, is our culture’s misuse and twisting of it. So since the sexual revolution of the sixties, the culture—what we might say is the Greco-Roman roots of our culture—have sort of come back, you know, with a flourish. It’s hard not to look at the military sexual scandals as something different from what used to happen in the context of Rome. And so it seems like Roman sexual perversions and distinctions, and you know, females being dominated by males, and all this sort of stuff—this seems to be coming back to our culture as we’ve rejected our Christian roots.

And so we have more and more in the last forty years cultural displays of sexuality that are supposed to bring shame because they’re sinful. And so we feel shame about sexuality because it’s being portrayed to us, and we’re being encouraged to think about it in unbiblical ways. And so there’s this link that’s made—the more and more we do that, between sexuality and shame—and after a while it gets hard to distinguish, right? All you know is sex, shame, sex, shame, sex, shame, as you’re watching your TV or listening to your records or whatever it is. And so it’s difficult then to recover that area. So the culture is shouting at us that this isn’t a good thing. It’s twisted in various ways. Now it shouts that it is a good thing—it’s the only thing—and it’s completely selfish, which we’ll see is the absolute opposite of what the scriptures say about it. But it gives us a sinful perspective, which induces shame, and so we feel bad.

Finally, you know, pornography, of course, is one of the biggest reasons for this. So pornography twists more radically than just the cultural things that are being put in our face and in our ears every day. But pornography now actually continues that tremendous perversion. And so when, as is true, most young men, most teen boys are engaged in observing pornography and going after it on the internet, and a lot of increasingly teen girls as well—the tremendous gift with such great power now works opposite as a gift.

And what’s being portrayed are ways of going about sexuality that are radically perverse. And as I said, it induces then a sense of shame. We don’t think it’s good, and in fact it isn’t good because then what happens is you start to be conditioned by what you’re observing. And so a young man starts to think, oh, that’s what girls really want. They want to be dominated in this, that, and the other thing. And girls think that’s the way guys really are. Well, it isn’t true. That’s sexual sin. But the point is, that whether it’s true or not, it tends to set up those kind of associations.

And so when we enter into marriage after observing pornography, and even our culture, without intentionally working to have a biblical perspective on sexuality, we’re going to tend to imitate, you know, the things we’ve seen and thought about. And that twists the relationship that’s supposed to be this grand, glorious, life-giving relationship between husband and wife. It becomes twisted then.

You know, young people don’t think that you can do the pornography thing and then have a happy marriage afterwards. I mean, there is forgiveness and all that, but it sets up ways of thinking about sexuality, ways of thinking about what the opposite sex is actually like, that are completely false and erroneous, and will mess you up and bring you not to see the goodness of sexuality within marriage—at least not the full goodness of it that the text provides for us. Okay?

So sex is good if we appropriate it correctly. Confess sin. You know, try not to be affected by the cultural displays of it, and certainly avoid pornography at all possible. Then we’re going to break this relationship that sinful sexuality produces—between sexuality and then a response of shame.

Secondly, sex is glue. So in the text, you know what it says is that then a man will leave his mother and father and hold fast to his wife. That’s the way the ESV puts it. The King James version puts it, right? And then it says that the two shall become one flesh.

So the cleaving to one another is entering into this covenantal relationship. But the word means glue—to be glued to each other. So the covenant of marriage produces a strong attachment between the marriage spouses, and then that is as well described as them becoming one flesh.

Now, you know, flesh here is being used as a synecdoche. A synecdoche means an expression that describes the whole of something by using a part of it, right? So if we were to take a vote in the country two weeks ago, we counted noses on who they wanted for president. But nobody really voted with their noses. The nose is just a representation of all the person. So we counted the votes of all the people that were voting.

Well, when the Bible says here it uses this term flesh, it uses the term flesh as a synecdoche. We have flesh, right? We’ve got bodies. But that’s not all we are. God says, for instance, in Joel—and this is fulfilled in the book of Acts—that he’ll pour out his spirit on all flesh. It doesn’t mean he just pours it out on your physical body. It affects your heart, your mind, all of you.

And so I think what the text is telling us here—I’m sure what the text is telling us here—is that sexual relationships within marriage produce a unity. There’s a glue to it that brings people together and binds them together as one person, okay? And so the idea here is that sexual relationships in marriage, marital intimacy, produces this union of two people into one person.

And of course, our Western law courts, built on Christian roots, acknowledge this. You know, a spouse can’t be forced to testify against the spouse because it’s forcing a man to testify against himself or a woman to testify against herself. You’re one person in the eyes of the law for a wide variety of things. So what’s being talked about in terms of the sexual union that’s being certainly alluded to is as well a unity of two people into one person. They become one person. They become one person financially. They become one person, you know, legally in the eyes of the law. They become one person, more and more psychologically, emotionally, as well as physically.

So sexual relationships are intended to bring two people together. It’s glue, and it’s specifically glue that produces a unity of persons, and that is its purpose. The purpose of marital intimacy is to produce this unity of two people, and that’s a real good thing, of course. It brings two people together, and so they lose it.

It’s the opposite of the worldly view today, which is that sexuality represents independence and expression of who I am and a desire to fulfill what I want to do. It’s exactly the opposite. It actually binds you to the other person. You become one person. You give up in marriage—and you know, through this physical union—you give up your independence. Not all of your independence, I mean, we—but you give up your autonomy, certainly. You give up most of what we would think of as radical independence. You become linked to another person, and your lives are now intertwined.

And the older you get, and the more you continue to have romantic relationships with each other and you live your lives together, you get closer and closer and closer and closer as one person. Until, you know, when you get around to old people, they start looking like each other, even. You know, again, that’s a synecdoche—part for the whole. You can finish each other’s sentences. You know, you can think, what would my spouse do? As I talked about last week. And that’s a good thing—cross-gender enrichment. We talked about that last week.

But the point here is that that’s accomplished at the beginning of the relation of the marriage by this covenant associated with, or linked in, the text to the physical union of man and wife. And so this is what God intends marital sexuality to do—to bring two people together.

And not just at the beginning, you know, as I said, there are other verses in the scriptures that talk about the importance of sexuality from Corinthians. And the Corinthians text, Paul, you know, tells both partners that they’re to engage in regular sexual relationships. In Corinthians, he makes the, you know, radical statement in 1 Corinthians 6, I believe it is—or maybe 7. He makes this radical statement that, you know, your body doesn’t belong to you alone. It now belongs to your wife, and your wife’s body doesn’t belong to her alone. It belongs to her husband.

Now, if you think of the context—the Roman context—and increasingly our context, but look at the Roman context where marriage was this legal relationship. But sexuality for the man was usually attained somewhere else. Women were supposed to be chaste, dedicated to their husbands, but not the guy. And that’s just what we have going on with the retelling of the Petraeus affair. And it’s very typical now in American reportage of these things.

But if you think about that, the idea that—and so in a lot of human history and male-dominated cultures, women were seen as what used to be called cattle, property. They were the property of the man, right? And as I’ve said before, the problem with that is not that statement. The problem is not also affirming the opposite—that the man is property of the woman, not cattle property. But that’s what Paul says in Corinthians. We actually are property of one another. I don’t belong just to myself anymore. I belong to Christine, and her to me.

So it makes this radical statement of, you know, sexual equality of male and female. But it’s making it in the context Paul. The specific point is because of that, you know, you should want to engage in relationships if your spouse wants to, and so you don’t hold back from marital relationships because that gives temptation to both parties. So Paul encourages regular sexual activity in the context of marriage, and seeing yourself as belonging to your spouse.

Now, why does he do that? Because not only are sexual relationships at the beginning this coming together to make one person, but it is sort of like sexuality is kind of like covenant renewal for the marriage, right? So what’s covenant renewal? Well, you know, you have a covenant, and every so often you renew the terms of the covenant, and that’s renewing it. And we have this—we believe in covenant renewal worship ceremony or worship liturgical performances or services. And so the Lord’s Supper is a meal of covenant renewal where God affirms our covenant and assures us that we’re in relationship with him. And he assures us that, you know, he’s paid the price for our sins, and he assures us that we’re part of the body of Jesus Christ. And by participating in this covenant renewal ceremony, you know, it’s not just a message to the ego or to the head or the rationality—it’s a liturgy that reaffirms our relationship to God. And he says that regular engagement in that liturgy will increase efficiency—or not efficiency—but increase our commitment to Christ, knowing his commitment to us, will love him the more, and we’ll grow in grace. It’s a sacrament. It’s a means of grace.

Now, sexual relations within marriage are not a sacrament, but they have that same kind of power in the context of husband and wife. I mean, when you engage in sexual relationships within marriage, you are prone to give statements of love to one another. Young people, that’s what will happen when you get married. But married people, you know what I’m talking about. You know, there’s a love for each other that, if you’re going about intimacy in marriage, you know, in a good way—you know, not a sexually perverse way or a sinful way—but if you’re going there, there’s a love for each other, there’s a tenderness toward each other that is the result of the activity.

And so, not only do sexual relationships, you know, build that one-person relationship as the marriage begins—it reinforces it. It reinforces it because you’re both being vulnerable to each other. You’re both caring about each other. You’re both engaging in a liturgy, we could say, that is a restatement of commitment to each other.

If marriage is intended to be glue, then marital intimacy, then when it’s engaged in, we’re reasserting that we’re glued to you. We’re attached to you. We’re one person with you. You’re the person for me. See, that’s being asserted over and over again with regular intimate relationships within marriage. And so, not only does it initiate that one-person thing—it actually continues to build and cause that to mature and progress.

Now, you know, the Bible is filled with one other thing before we go to the downside of this. There is a downside, and that is that in terms of this cross-gender enrichment—and I know maybe that’s not a good term these days—but in terms of, you know, the development of an understanding of the opposite sex of course it’s about that too, right? It’s after the fall. Adam knows Eve, and she bears a child. So “knowing” someone—that word in the Bible is talking about infrequent sexual relationships. What does that tell us?

Well, it tells us that in that most intimate of human relationships, there’s a knowledge of one another that is attained and built and built upon. Men and women are different. And if you don’t know this, you’re going to be in big trouble. And most people don’t know it because they’re too observant of what’s going on the television, or they’ve been involved in pornography, and they got no idea that the wife isn’t like those women, or that the husband isn’t like those men. But they’re completely different.

You know, most men aren’t all that concerned about context, but most women are. One of the most important things that I learned from going to a conference was that women, for the most part, desire safety and security in the context of relationships. You know, that pornography and stuff—they’ll tell you the opposite. But what they, you know, women want, and because why? They have these—well, I don’t know, but I think it’s because woman was betrayed by her husband. He sat there and watched her do something that would kill her. He betrayed her, and then he betrayed her secondly by blaming her for his sin.

So women, they, you know, they want a degree of security and safety from their husband because they don’t want him acting like Adam did in the fall. So the point is just that marital intimacy increases an understanding of the opposite sex. It just does—and not automatically, but if you intentionally approach sexuality the right way, it does that.

Now, there’s a downside to this as well. And Paul talks about this downside in 1 Corinthians 6. He says this: “Do you not know that a person who is united in intimacy with a prostitute is one body with her? For as it is said, ‘the two shall become one flesh.’ Keep away from sexual immorality. You do not belong to yourselves. You were bought with a price. Show forth God’s glory, then, in how you live your bodily life.”

So Paul says in Corinthians that there’s a downside to this unity thing—this glue thing. And the downside is if you decide to have sex with somebody other than your spouse, you’re joined to them. You become one person with them. You know, you don’t—that what happens when you go about engaging in sexual intimacy is a unity that you weren’t planning on, and you become more attached to that person.

So first of all, it’s a danger because, you know, if you don’t want to become one with that person financially, legally, emotionally, then don’t become one sexually, because it tends to have that effect. I used to think every man ought to have to watch Fatal Attraction as training for marriage, because that’s what happens. Or you can think of Cameron Diaz in Vanilla Sky. But sexual relationships—you know, people, and usually women in the portrayals of it in our pictures—but not just women, but there’s a desire then to be one with that person and keep going, you know, keep going in one-person life together, not just sexually. And so Paul warns us about that.

Well, you know, you think you’re just doing this one thing. But don’t you understand that one thing is intended by God to be glue, and it will have that effect on you? So don’t be a chowderhead. You know, if you’re looking at pornography, do you want to be united with that person you’re looking at? Or if you’re looking at, you know, these kinds of things, if you’re fantasizing in your mind about somebody, is that who you want to be in union with? Because that’s what you’re causing to happen—is that kind of unity. Paul says.

So what he’s saying is he’s taking this very point that sexual intimacy is glue, and he says that outside of marriage, it’s still glue. But you’re going to be glued to somebody you don’t want to be glued to, you know, emotionally and psychologically. And you can say, “Well, Dennis, I know people that, you know, have sex all the time at my place of work or the school I go to, and they don’t seem to be glued to anybody.” That’s right. The one way to take care of that problem—which is a God-given problem, God is warning you—he wants that to happen. But you can harden yourself against that, as our culture has now done.

And in the last ten or fifteen years, the attempt now is to say it’s a totally individualized deal. I have no connection to anybody. And so you numb yourself off against the unity that’s produced. Okay? You cauterize that part of your brain or your soul so that you can engage in serial sexual relationships of a fantasy or reality. And Jesus says if it’s fantasy, it’s just like reality. If you’re looking at a woman to lust upon her and you’re married, you’ve committed adultery, right?

So when you do that, the way to do that and try to, you know, the self-justification that will get rid of the shame of not really being united to that person and not helping that person the way you know you should, the fig leaves you’ll put on that action is to cauterize the wound and to get rid totally. You’ll turn the glue into water if you possibly can. The glue will become water.

And the problem with that is if you’re married, that action is going to become watered there too. Or if you get married after watching a lot of pornography or engaging in with multiple prostitutes, whatever it is—multiple serial relationships of a sexual kind—you’ve had to make it water to avoid getting stuck to the people you want to have sex with. And as a result of that, when you get married, the glue that’s supposed to be there, you’ve transformed into water in your head and in your spirit and your soul.

So don’t do that. The very fact that it is glue—attached to God—brings curses upon us if we misuse the glue with somebody other than our spouse. Or then it’s further becomes cursed to us. God removes the glue-making capability through our own obstinacy—try to make water out of it. And then we’ve fallen into real problems. Real problems that will take probably a lot of therapy, a lot of trips to my office or a counselor’s office, you know, to work your way through.

Now, there is forgiveness, right? They tried to self-atone. They tied the fig leaves on. They did whatever they could to deal with the shame and not the sin. But then God comes, and they then understand their need for blood sacrifice, and God provides atonement for them, and he blesses them, and you know, so there’s forgiveness along the way. But you know, don’t think you can, you know, keep chopping off little pieces of your arm and then, you know, one day—or maybe the right arm—and then one day think you’re going to be able to be a pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers or whatever it is, right? I mean, what we do has an effect. Maybe give you a brand new arm. His arm is not too short. Maybe your arm won’t be either. But not necessarily.

There are effects of our sin even if God forgives us of them. Okay.

So sex is glue. It is about whole-life self-giving. That’s what it is in the context of what the scriptures teach about it. And as much as the sinful heart rejects that, the sinful heart ends up with all kinds of other trouble, all kinds of judgments from God to drive you back to proper sexuality. Okay.

So sex is glue. It produces unity, and therefore we should engage in it regularly in marriages. And young people shouldn’t engage in it at all until they become married, and you should, you know, make a commitment to avoid it because it is unity. It’s a unity-producing mechanism.

Now some people say: shouldn’t it be the expression and culmination, not the means of our unity? You know, one of the worst things about books I used to recommend for marriage counseling was this very point. They’d say this all the time. A lot of Christian books used to say, “Well, you know, you really shouldn’t have sex until you have a good relationship. You’re talking good together. You’re getting along well together.” And then, you know, when everything is great, sex is the culmination of your unity. Isn’t that what the Bible teaches, Dennis?

No, it doesn’t.

If you wait until you’re worthy to partake of this supper, you wouldn’t be coming here. And I know people like that. By it’s interesting to me that I knew a guy who used to hold himself back from the table. He’s excommunicated now. He had the wrong attitude then, and he has the wrong attitude now.

And so if you think that somehow you can achieve what God says here’s a secondary means to be used to achieve it without that secondary means—if you think you can earn it—that’s the wrong way of thinking. Now, I’m not saying personal relationships are irrelevant to intimacy and marriage. I’m not saying that at all. They do work together, of course.

And there is a need for, you know, a context. One of the contexts that women particularly desire in marriage is that it’s, you know, talk, it’s discussion, it’s relationship. And so there’s nothing wrong with that. But I’m just saying that the idea that somehow we work on our marriage until we then can engage in sexual relationships as the culmination, you know, the cherry on top or whatever it is—that’s just not right thinking. That’s not what Paul said. Paul said, “Hey, you belong to each other. Don’t not engage in sexual relationships for extended periods unless for a period of prayer and fasting, then come back together.” Paul encouraged regular sexual activity because its purpose is this.

So, no, it isn’t the culmination. You don’t wait for sexuality until you get all your problems worked out. Some of the best ways to work out problems, you know, is to embrace each other and accept your unity in Christ, both physically and non-physically, and say, “Hey, you know, it’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay.”

So the third thing I want to say is that sex is gift. And this is kind of obvious, I suppose, but you know, so what God is doing here is he’s given Adam, you know, this wonderful song of praise that he offers up as soon as God brings his wife to him, right? I mean, he does bring her—the wife, an excellent wife who can obtain one. Well, you only get it if God brings it. So ultimately that’s what’s happening.

But Adam, you know, begins to sing this beautiful poem. I think it’s really the kind of the first poem, spoken poem certainly, in the Bible—a love song. And so it’s a response to the gift that marriage is. So marriage and sexual intimacy within marriage is, of course, a good gift from God.

And I think that’s why Paul says that we should enter into it at regular times. I’ve been talking about this. Let me quote from 1 Corinthians 7. “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, a brief season, of prayer.”

So what Paul is saying here is that the good gift that God has given to man and woman in terms of marital intimacy is to also be seen then as a gift that we give to someone else—that we give to our marriage partner. You know, so the idea here is that you’re not—it’s the exact opposite of what the world wants to do. That sexuality is something that I’ve got a drive. I got a desire. I’m going to fulfill my desire by engaging you. That’s what the modern world does. It turns—whether they’re images on the computer, characters in the movie, or an actual body in bed next to you—it turns them into objects to satisfy your personal desires. It becomes totally selfish.

But what Paul is saying here is that marital intimacy is completely the opposite of being selfish. It’s about you acknowledging that your body belongs to your wife, and you, you know, you should want to gift her with your body, and she should want to gift you with her body. Okay?

So the gift that God gives is a gift that he expects us and calls upon us to regularly give to the other person. You don’t engage in sexual relationships because you want something. Ultimately, you should engage in them because you want to give something. It should be more, you know, your aim to make the other person happy than to make yourself happy. And that’s completely opposite of what the world teaches you. But that’s what the Bible says.

Sexual intimacy in marriage is a gift from God from him to the couple. And he expects you to gift each other. I mean, what is the life of the Trinity? It is that self-giving—desire not that self, but to please the other person. The Father, the Son, the Son, the Father, the Son, the Spirit, the Spirit, the Father, et cetera. That’s what the life of the Trinity is. In the image of God, he has created us male and female, so that within marriage, in sexual intimacy, there is this relationship to the image of God that’s engaged in self-giving acts of intimacy one toward the other.

See, so sexual intimacy in marriage is a gift from God, and it’s a gift that’s supposed to be gifting. We’re supposed to be gifting each to the other in the context of our marriage. So the—I always love this when I write these words and I can’t read them the next day. Oh, takers are makers. Yeah.

So, you know, we look at the culture around us and maybe what happened with the election? It’s hard to say, right? Who knows? We know that God ordained it. It’s enough for us, I guess. But, you know, some people think that maybe there’s this tipping point the country is going toward. De Tocqueville said that, you know, well, that’s a great country and all, but as the way they got their government set up, as soon as the people realize they can vote themselves benefits, it’s over. The decline will start happening. You can’t stop it.

And so the question is, maybe we’ve reached this tipping point of takers and makers. So maybe now there’s more takers of benefits than makers of those benefits, right? There’s two different kinds of cultures. That’s been there’s been historical books about looking at the history, and you can have cultures that take from other people or cultures that make things, right? The Muslim Islam has tended to be a taker culture. Their cultural advances really came from taking them from other countries. So taking and making is kind of a real big deal.

And in the context of marriage, this is what I’m talking about with gifting. Are you a taker or a maker? Are you taking sexual intimacy from your spouse—you know, being selfishly oriented—or are you instead making pleasure and intimacy for your mate? Are you a giver or are you a getter?

See, now what we find, of course, is that our truest fulfillment, our greatest joy, as we reflect the image of God rather than our sinful tendencies, is giving. And we actually get when we give, right? It makes us feel the most fulfilled and blessed.

Oh, gee, I should have said something. And so there’s this benevolence opportunity again this year. The deacons want to distribute some gifts to people in the congregation to make their holidays more joyful. And I think today’s the first Sunday of that. And so this fits right in. You’re to be a giver, right?

And you know what it’s like. You know, if you have money to give, don’t go in debt to do this. But if you have some money to give to others in the congregation—as the deacons know what needs are—they’ll distribute the gifts. That’s their job. And as you have that kind of gift and you give it right, you know how good that feels, right? You know how good that feels.

Well, you know, the same thing’s true in intimacy and marriage. It is the best kind of enjoyment for a Christian to really put the spouse first in the relationship generally, but then particularly in current terms of the physicality of the relationship. So marriage is good. Marriage binds people together. That’s a great thing. And marriage is supposed to be a gift to the other person.

Now, why isn’t the gift received sometimes, right? Well, there’s lots of reasons for that. One reason is because you put it in a really crummy box. Now, I’ve always said, if you’re going to give me a gift, don’t tie the float around a rock and throw it at my head, which is the way I get some gifts. I’m sure you’ve gotten some that way, too.

You know, we could get into the Song of Songs and all the wonderful things that are said there about human sexuality, but I always think about the comments on the whiteness of the spouse’s teeth, right? And how the breath of the spouse smelled like—what is it? Apples or something? Smelled good. So you’re going to give a gift, but you didn’t brush your teeth. It’s a bad box to put the gift in. Okay, so one of the reasons—and now that’s silly, of course. I mean, hopefully we’re not doing that. But take that same analogy as not really knowing your spouse very well. You haven’t intentionally worked at discerning—and forget male-female roles. You could factor them in, but just forget them for now. You haven’t really gotten to know your spouse that well, and what would make it a really nice gift for them?

To give a gift so it be received, you know, requires some degree of knowledge of the sort of gifts the other person likes, right? A wide variety of ways to express physical intimacy. And so, you know, making the right context and setting, all that sort of stuff, knowing, you know, what’s useful and not what the best package is to put on the gift.

That’s one of the reasons why the gift isn’t received. Now, a lot of times, of course, the gift isn’t received because it’s just not given. Both parties are engaged in a selfish act, and the only gift being given is, well, I’ll put up with it. But that’s not really a gift.

And so to one reason why the gift isn’t accepted is because our sinful selfishness gets in the way. Another reason is because we don’t put it in the correct context. We don’t put it in the right package as we give it. And that’s another reason. And you know, another reason is because a lack of appropriation of the gospel.

I mean, back to where we started, the first manifestation of shame has to do with sexuality after the fall. So, you know, why was there the sexual revolution? Why is there so much pornography? Why is there so much sexuality improperly demonstrated? Because the opposition knows the power of this tool. The opposition knows that this creates caring, loving, gifting of one another. It creates a knowledge of each other. It creates a unity that provides the basis for the Christian family, which is, you know, a tremendous tool in the advancement of the kingdom.

The opposition knows about that better than we do, I think, because he works at it harder than we do. Typically, we don’t work at it. It’s something that, well, we might end up thinking about a couple of times a week or whatever it is. But to work at it, to work at the kind of intimacy—see, we don’t necessarily prioritize it.

And so one way that the enemy works is to make us ashamed, right? And if we have it—if we’re trying to put on fig leaves, you know, of not doing it very often, or, you know, whatever it is—that’s not going to work. We need to deal with the sin, accept the atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ, and realize, yeah, you don’t deserve the gloriousness of human sexuality, but it’s God’s gift to you. It’s a result of the gospel of Christ.

You know, most of us, we’re walking around waiting for the other shoe to fall. We know we don’t deserve any of this. And we’re waiting for bad things to happen because we don’t preach the gospel to ourselves. The gospel says that God has forgiven you your sin. He’s covered your shame with his glory, not your glory. His clothing, not your clothing. The imputed righteousness of Christ. And because of that, you have freedom to enter into both gift-giving and receiving of gifts.

Human sexuality is this grand, glorious thing, and it is probably the most significant point of attack in our lifetime that the opposition has made on the Christian church. And of course now the attack is intensifying. The attack began, you know, with the sexual revolution. Well, actually, the attack began with a lack of knowledge about what the Bible says about sexual intimacy and kind of a rejection of that for a long time in this country. You know, it’s something we don’t talk about. Well, the Bible talks a lot about it.

But then the sexual revolution, and now the attack is really ramping up because now with the spread of homosexual marriage, it’s an attempt to try to affirm the truths that we’ve talked about today in terms of male-female relationships. This is in opposition to the world, and the attack will grow even stronger.

So you know, sexuality is this grand, glorious thing. You know, it probably is the reason why people sin in terms of it is because they know that it has such tremendous potential for bringing such praise and adoration to God for the joys that are experienced in marital intimacy. It’s a grand, glorious thing, and it is Satan’s attempt to turn that into a dirty thing and to remove it from your conversations.

I know that there are couples in this church who are struggling, maybe fairly large ways, in terms of sexuality. And if you just take the basic points I made today—the goodness of human sexuality, not attempting to cover up shame with your own self-justification, but the atonement of Christ for our sins—the goodness of sexuality, the fact that it is required. It’s the way God establishes and builds unity between husband and wife that produces then the sort of sanctification, the purpose of marriage, that we might sanctify one another and grow in holiness. And it is accomplished through this giving of gifts to each other, receiving the gift from God, ministering that gift to each other, and becoming then delighted in the gloriousness of the grand thing that human sexuality is.

You know, that’s why there’s so many rules, right? People say, “Well, you Christians, all you ever think about is sex, and all you want to do is pass bills against sex.” Well, you know, the reason why there are rules in the Bible that says only within marriage and only marriage between a husband and a wife, right? The reason is because it’s such an important thing. It’s not because sex is bad. It’s exactly the opposite. The rules are there because sex is so good. And if you’ve got the most powerful weapon in the world, right, for good and for the destruction of evil, you’re going to have some rules about how to take care of that thing. You’re not going to treat that casually, right? You’re going to make sure you treat that thing correctly. You’re going to understand the need to only use it under the right conditions, at the right times, in the right places, because it’s power from God, and that’s what God says human sexuality is.

And I guess that my last thing I want to say then is intentionality. We should be intentional about understanding and engaging in correct thinking and practices of sexuality—not assuming it’s just something that people do and it’ll work out. All will work out. No, it won’t. It won’t just work out typically because Satan has such an attack upon it, and he’s already affected most everybody in this pew with some really aberrant ways of thinking about the whole thing. It won’t just work out.

You have to apply yourselves intentionally to purity in the context and enjoyment in the context and gift-giving and unity in the context of Christian marriage. And then this gift from God is indeed grand and glorious for the establishment of Christian families and, as a result, the establishment of Christian churches, Christian cultures, and the destruction of the enemies to God as well.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we pray today that as we bring our gifts, our tithes and offerings to you, we would offer as well our sexuality. We thank you for it. If we’re single, Lord God, may the singles commit afresh to avoid sexual sins, knowing that they’re turning glue into water or they’re getting hooked up with the wrong people, that’ll just be so devastating for their lives, and they’re really sinning against their future mates. Help them, Lord God, to live lives of chastity in the context of our marriages. Help us, Father, to engage in this most excellent gift of yours in ways that are consistent with your scriptures.

We pray, Father, that you would transform our families. We want so badly to enter into thanksgiving this week with thanksgiving for this great gift. May we act, talk, and think for the next four days so that we can enter into thanksgiving on Thursday for this gift as well. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.