No matter how or where we have been raised, it seems that we all bring sexual baggage into marriage. I grew up during the early years of the “sexual revolution.” For some reason, I believed all the stories that the older guys told in the locker room about their sexual exploits. I had no idea that the new prevailing philosophies about sex were far from God’s design. Nancy was raised with the goal of staying pure till marriage. It was an admirable goal, but she accomplished this by seeing sex as bad and dirty. By the time we got to our wedding night, we were a sexual nightmare.

Honestly, the church has not done a very good job of teaching God’s design either. The Puritans taught that sex was for procreation and procreation only. In other words, have sex but don’t dare enjoy it.

Sex is not just a physical act. It is a oneness and a mystery, and our culture - including the church - is missing that. It touches our soul in an incredible way. Those who have suffered the pain of rape, molestation, or incest will tell you that sex is not just a physical act. If it were, the healing process would not take so long and be so painful. Long after the physical healing is done damage remains. Those who have married one of these victims know the difficult process of emotional healing.

If we remove the relationship aspect, sex becomes just technique and you don’t have to look far to find books, magazines and manuals full of how to improve your love life - and relationship is never mentioned. No matter how good our technique is our culture is still lonely - very lonely. There is more sex in our culture today than ever before, and it is not working. We can all get caught up in this trap, and the consequences are devastating. Somewhere God’s beautiful plan for sex got hijacked, and most of us have just stood by and watched.

God has a plan for sex. You don’t have to read far in the Biblical book Song of Solomon to realize it is much more than procreation. Today we use one word for love. I love my i-phone, Taco Bell, and my wife. The Hebrews painted word pictures that told a story. I want to look at what I believe is God’s plan for sex. It consists of building blocks of intimacy and love, and we will look at the first of these next time.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 2:37 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.