In this video, Grace@Work leader Cortney Alexander addresses misconceptions about Christians and their views on sex.
Sometimes people get the idea that Christians are opposed to sex. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. Christians recognize sexuality as one of God’s gifts to mankind. God created sexuality and blesses it—within the contours for which he created it.
One reason our culture often thinks that Christians are opposed to sex is because our culture promotes sexual expressions that go beyond God’s design. Since Christians want to be faithful to God, we cannot endorse behavior that conflicts with his ways.
Our culture knows that its views on sexuality are contrary to Biblical teaching, and that frequently makes our culture uncomfortable. So our culture pressures Christians to change. As Christians, however, our ultimate authority is not the culture around us but God’s word.
Christians also recognize that God’s view of sexuality is superior to the view promoted by Western culture. Western culture’s view of sexuality leads to brokenness, guilt, and shame. In contrast, God’s ways promote human flourishing, both in the lives of individuals and society as a whole. So what sexual relationships does God bless? He blesses the sexual relationship that he created for mankind in the beginning—the sexual relationship between a man and his wife, a relationship intended to last for life.
This was the view of Jesus. When some religious leaders came up to Jesus, asking him whether it was ok for a man to divorce his wife for whatever reason he liked, Jesus responded this way:
“Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, 5 and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?6 So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate” (Matthew 19:4-6).
Even Jesus’ disciples found this teaching difficult. They said to Jesus that if easy divorce isn’t an option, a man would be better off avoiding marriage.
Jesus responded by saying that if a man doesn’t want to make a lifelong commitment to a woman, then the only alternative is to live as a eunuch—as someone without the physical capability to engage in sexual activity. For Jesus, marriage between one man and one woman was the only sexual expression created by God.
That strikes many in our culture today as a hard teaching—just as it struck the men of Jesus’ day as a hard teaching. But Christianity is always countercultural in one way or another. That’s because the ways of mankind have been opposed to God’s ways ever since Adam and Eve chose to disobey God in the garden of Eden. As Jesus said, every one who sins is a slave to sin. But Jesus came that we might be set from sin. He who the Son sets free is free indeed.
If you’ve tried to live out our culture’s view of sexuality and found that it doesn’t live up to the propaganda, Jesus offers healing, redemption, and freedom. He doesn’t expect you to change yourself or to fix yourself before you come to him. He’ll do the fixing. The closing verses of the Bible offer this invitation: “Let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price” (Rev. 22:17).
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