Love Restored - A 7-Day Plan from Dr. John KoesslerSample

Sexual desire is pleasurable by nature, but it is also dangerous because it is pleasurable and therefore easily misdirected. Sex is dangerous because its effects always stretch beyond the individual. Sex is a public as well as a private concern. Sexual practice affects the community as a whole. “Sex, like any other necessary, precious, and volatile power that is commonly held, is everybody’s business,” Wendell Berry observes. However, although sex is “everybody’s business,” it does not automatically follow from this that sex is public property. According to Scripture, our sexual desires are to be gratified within a landscape whose limits have been established by God. This is His right as our Creator. Many treat sex as if it were only a human concern, with limits that can be changed at will or eliminated by majority vote. The Bible paints a very different picture. Sexual desire is a sacred pleasure, one that can be enjoyed safely only within the clear boundaries God has established for it.

In a culture whose notions of sex have been shaped by the sexual revolution, talk of boundaries is unpopular. We are more interested in freedom. The changed values of the sexual revolution were enacted under the flag of personal freedom. This is even truer today in the post-sexual revolution era when sexual desire is more than a matter of pleasure. It is now an identity marker. However, when it comes to the Bible’s view of human sexuality, there can be no question that real boundaries exist. In these verses, Jesus teaches that sex is legitimate only within the marriage context, and marriage is defined by God as the union of male and female. Jesus also warned that the act of adultery has its root in the heart. According to Jesus, those whose sexual desire falls outside the boundaries of God’s permission have already committed adultery in their hearts. Our culture has radically redrawn its moral boundaries so that what once was considered lust is now called love, and sexual preference is regarded by many to be malleable. This is more than a minor difference over sexual preference. It amounts to a complete inversion of Christ’s intent for sexuality and marriage. What culture used to regard as vice is now virtue. But such a shift involves far more than change in cultural tastes. It is ultimately an inversion of God’s idea of what is good. Those things that the Bible defines as vices have become today’s dangerous virtues. Not just dangerous but deadly. Jesus says that our sexual desires are limited by boundaries that God has established. This is equally true for anything upon which we might set our heart. As sinners, it is not only possible for our desires to move outside those boundaries, but inevitable. When they do, we must deny those desires, no matter what their focus may be. Lust is more than sexual desire, and there is more to love than lust. We are promiscuous in the way we speak of what we love using the term to describe our desires without discriminating between them. Sometimes what we say we love is only a passing fancy. At others, we use the same word to describe something even more basic, merely a bodily response to stimuli. An unmarried couple on a date might declare undying love for one another during dinner and then in the next breath say that they “love” the food that is on their plates. Neither of them thinks this is strange. Afterward, they might decide to “make love,” using the same term in a third sense that is more in line with what the Bible calls lust.

Not every affection we feel necessarily qualifies as love, and not all desires are lust in the sinful sense of the word. However, the general tenor of the Bible’s teaching about desire is cautionary. Human desire is easily seduced. This note of warning is reflected in the Ten Commandments, which forbids both adultery and coveting in general (Ex. 20:14, 17). The prohibition against adultery implies sexual sin, but in Moses’s day, where wives were also categorized as property, it had an economic dimension, too. We can lust for things as well as people and lust may cause us to treat people as things.

The commandment forbidding coveting is broad in its scope. Our neighbor’s house, wife, manservant, maidservant, ox, donkey, “or anything that belongs to your neighbor” are all off-limits to our desire. The Hebrew word that is translated “house” in this verse didn’t refer to the dwelling so much as those who inhabited it. It might be better translated “household.” All of the things mentioned in this verse were marks of personal wealth in the ancient world. It was not wrong to desire or even obtain them, but it is all too easy for our ordinary desires to become illicit.

Discussion Question:

How has the “new” sexual revolution of the 21st century further pushed the boundaries beyond those of the sexual revolution of the 20th century?