Getting Ready for MarriageShembull

“Creating a Foundation of Healthy Sexuality”

No matter what your experience is with your sexuality, we’re convinced those who handle their physical oneness best in marriage are the couples who have developed a healthy view of sexuality. Since sex was God’s idea and creation, let’s move past the Hollywood stereotype of it and go to the original source. God intended sex to be beautiful, pleasurable, and to create oneness within marriage. God not only created sex, but also sees it as great within marriage.

Because sex is God’s creation, He has established boundaries not to limit enjoyment but to enhance His designed and desired oneness. God’s sexual limitations—basically warnings to refrain from (1) adultery and (2) sexual immorality—are not established to condemn sex but rather to keep marriage pure and honorable. Why go to the hassle of providing guidelines? Because He wants the best for you. God’s words on sexuality are beautiful and sacred, and when experienced His way sex can provide the physical, emotional, and spiritual connection for which we long. Sex will be a seal and a celebration of your marriage.

Without this theological framework, sex simply becomes reduced to nothing more than a recreational pleasure act that can produce children. Culture has embraced and promoted a much lower view of sex where anything goes. As a result, we are seeing marriages crushed by adultery and pornography. Sex has been turned into a cheap thrill, or even worse, a way to manipulate and enslave one another. That’s not God’s design for the sacred act of sex.

When Jesus said “becoming one flesh” (Eph. 5:31), he meant that as more than just having sex; the sexual act is clearly an experience of literally joining your bodies as one. Your sexual relationship is a uniting experience. Your sexual relationship becomes a sacred seal of the lifelong commitment you make toward oneness. You really can’t understand your sexuality and the important role it plays in your relationship if you don’t view it as a gift from God. It’s a gift that keeps on giving and connecting the two of you into one.

* Is your view of sexuality based on God’s view, or the worlds view? What expectations about sex are you bringing into this marriage and have you discussed them in pre-marital counseling?

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