Introduction
I want to take you on an adventure of our hearts. This great adventure is about discovering how we can as both physical and spiritual beings find the meaning in our lives. We will look at the origins of our sexuality driven by our strong desire to be know and become one with another person. We’ll see that love and serving each other is at the foundation to finding our meaning. This is not a “don’t do it” speech on sex, it is at its core, a rediscovery of the language and longings of our hearts. When we submit in service to each others heart, God's gift of intimacy appears. A gift God wants us to make to others and in particular our spouse. If we learn to make ourselves a gift of love, we may just find the true meaning to life in a very special way.
Open your hearts, free your mind of what culture has or is telling you. Let the Lord Jesus speak to you in this talk for where you are at today and for what you need. In this brief time with you I hope I can re-tell a story of God’s romance. The beauty of his original plan for us is truly his most special gift to us. It is up to you to discover what this looks like for your life. This romantic adventure will take trust, it will take solitude, and it will take much suffering of the heart. It will for sure ask you to die in some respects to things you thought you needed and understood about your physicality. I do promise you this for I have experienced it myself, there is no greater joy than loving someone with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength (paraphrased Luke 10:27). For this is the love God has for us. He wants us to know what 100% surrendered in love feels like, so we will love him in the same way. He gave us the gift of our body as a means to express his love.
You will find not all the answers, but a starting point to look at your own desires to be in relations with another. I give this as a gift from my own experiences and with a lot of help from Lord, who has put a fire in my heart to tell a different story. A radically different story, totally opposite from the story of the world around us which teaches us to be consumers/takers of that sex and intimacy for our own selfishness.
Much of what I contemplate comes out of reflections on marriage and my diligent search for meaning in my past marriages. It also comes out of the many wounds I gave woman with my selfishness pursuit of satisfying my own needs. But it is joy which I have felt that really drives me to show you the truth of God’s gift. I want you to know what true love is and how it works into our sexuality. This sexuality when combined with love is the closest thing we can know of what heaven will be like. It is one of the greatest forms of worship we can offer Jesus. In this talk I will totally depend upon God’s word in the Bible, along with a lot of help and direction from Pope John II sermons on the Theology of the Body. His sermons on this subject are a beautiful analysis of Genesis and Jesus’ Gospel about male and female relationships. I want to thank Christopher West for his summaries of John Paul’s work. It is revolutionary in its message. I encourage to read more of Mr. West's work. It will deepen and change your marriage.
The Fall – The Case for Sex Gone Wrong
The teachings of our culture and times tell us that sex is a selfish act made just for our own pleasure. It tells us we don’t need love to have great sex, we just need perfect bodies, the right perfume/cologne, a beer or the best clothes and you will get more sex. They also beat into us that sexual performance makes us who we are it defines our worth to society. Men are condition to be like race horses expected to give women unbelievable mountain top sexual experiences. For women it is being the perfect sex toy, with the perfect body, the best clothes to attract a man.
Men are ranked by other men on how many women they can conquer. Sex becomes a sport to use women for our own pleasures. Women are forced into pleasing men to be accepted or to keep a boyfriend by how well sexually they perform. Sex is everywhere because our culture instinctively knows its power. It has made sex into a selfish act far from the selfless act of giving our bodies as a gift to that special person we love. Evil twisted our inner most prized gift from God. God wants us to have it back not by controlling us to do so but out of loving us, giving us the freedom to reclaim his gift. For it is out of choice that love can be found. We must choose to be a gift to each other once again if we are ever to experience the original unity and deep connected love again.
When we have sex with another person before the establishment of love and commitments or any emotional depth, our heart senses the emptiness and lack of the all important foundation of love. We become confused about love because sex and nakedness of our souls and hearts came before love. Repeated like this sex becomes mechanical and purely a physical release and not the way God intended it to be. Our intuition tells us even when we are young for sex in this capacity never lives up to what culture or our friends tell us. So we search for better ways to experience sex like using sex toys, pornography, different sexual positions, and multiple partners to find that ecstasy that is so promised.
Making love (sex) is not about sex toys, positions, pornography, or whatever aberrations we can dream up. When we invite God into this place we have no need for all those tricks and gimmicks. Wrapped in each other’s arms, skin to skin, face to face, breath to breath, warm lips together, peering into each other’s eyes finding that complete intimacy and making a place for God and praising and loving him for this gift. Now that is making love. Sex any other way is letting satan use you for his pleasure which will lead to heart ache and dysfunction.
Researchers have known for a long time that teenage sexual activity and depression are linked. In a publication by (Smith and Denton pg21) Teenagers get depressed when they cannot understand the physical, emotional and spiritual loss that happens when the act of intimacy(sex) is not done out of love.
We use sex like a drug to make us feel good for a period of time but like alcohol we do experience not only physical hangovers but also spiritual and emotional ones to. Sex is a temporary escape from this world and like any other escape mechanism some become addicted to it just like drugs and alcohol. This is why we are seeing pornography become so destructive for it gives us sex without love and without another person. It requires nothing of us, it is an illusion and will lead to addiction.
“Addiction is the most powerful psychic enemy of humanity’s desire for God,” says Gerald May in Addiction and Grace, which is no doubt why it is one of our adversary’s favorite ways to imprison us. Once taken captive, trying to free ourselves through willpower is futile. Only God’s Spirit himself can free us or even bring us to our senses.
The "heart" has become a battlefield between love and lust, habitually threatening the meaning of the body. As John Paul says, because of man's disordered passions, "The human body in its masculinity and femininity has almost lost the capacity of expressing this love in which the person becomes a gift…" (General Audience 7/23/80).
How did sex get so twisted? Let us know look at what sin did to our original state of the male female union. How has evil and culture misdirected God’s original design. This starts back in the Garden of Eden in Chapter 3 of Genesis
2 The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.' "
4 "You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. 5 "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."
6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the LORD God called to the man, "Where are you?"
10 He answered, "I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid."
Here the evil serpent convinces us not to trust God that we too can know good and evil. We can know what God knows but this taught us to grasp after God’s likeness instead of receiving it as a gift. All of a sudden we now see our nakedness, our flaws or inadequacies. We hide from God, we hide from each other. God looks for us, we are ashamed and this begins our fall from our original creation. This falling away continues we now grasp on to our original unity and nakedness. Out of this grasping the roots of lust come forward. We try to control and posses the opposite sex for out of fear of losing him/her of being alone and in some respects being found out. We find it really difficult to be totally naked again with each other. This is meant by the fall. The falling away from who we really are. Let us now try to find our way back.
Original Man before the Fall (How we were meant to be)
We have to go way back when God created Adam and Eve to understand God’s original plan for us as man and woman. Here we will find some clues how we were originally created and what life was like for the first couple. We will also see what God asked of them and what gifts he gave them.
There are two accounts of our creation in Genesis. It is important to note the first two accounts describe man and woman before sin. This is very important to the story because we have fallen away from the pure goodness of God’s original plan which is perfect unity of man and woman. Also I want to point out that Jesus who is the only man both of Divine and Flesh whose words offer us a direct understanding on how God wants us to live. Lets us begin with Jesus pointing us back to “THE BEGINNING” in Matthew 19 where we hear Jesus being questioned by Pharisees when they asked him about divorce. He refers them back to man and woman’s perfect unity “that in the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female,' God’s intention for us was to be in pure relationship or to have a perfect union
26 Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."
27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
28 God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground."
Genesis 1:26-28 NIV
So we read here that God created us IN HIS IMAGE and in His Likeness. So we are physical but yet more than physical. We have a likeness to God who is spirit and who is love 1 John 4:18 8Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. NIV
He gave us rule over all the animals. He also created us male and female. He did not describe the animals in this manner. We know ourselves that we are much different than the animals, we posses His image therefore the image of Love. Also if we have his image our bodies must reflect Him in some way. So we must conclude that we can come to know God through our physical body. He also blessed us and not the animals. Again God differentiates us from the animals by blessing us. So this gave us a spiritual quality and creates a great mystery for we know we are more than just physical matter but like God in what way?
We can look further into how we are different than the animals by what God tells us next in Genesis 2:7
7 the LORD God formed the man [a] from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
Here God gives us the breath of life. The Hebrew word (nÿshamah, “breath”) is used for God and for the life imparted to humans, not animals. Its usage in the Bible conveys more than a breathing living organism. Whatever is given this breath of life becomes animated with the life from God, has spiritual understanding.(from the NETBible)
God’s breathes life into us. In some early traditions people did not speak name of God. To utter his name was too holy. God’s name in Hebrew was Y H V H which we would pronounce Yod, Heh, Vav, Hah which when we say it, it sounds like the rhythm of our own breathing. Is the name of God the sound of our breathing? (Rob Bell in Nooma: Breathe) So God is our breath without it we die without God we die.
Now that we have a foundation of being spiritual beings made in the image of God we can start to dive into the origins of our sexuality by further examining the next details that follow in this 2nd account of the creation.
18 The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him." 19 Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 20 So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field.
But for Adam no suitable helper was found.
So Adam named all the animals and realizes he was alone in the world as a person different from the animals. He knew he couldn’t love the animals so he felt alone in complete solitude. This alone feeling is something we all feel. We fear it, we hate this feeling, we cannot live without being in communion with others to find another to love and be loved back drives our inner most desires. To not be alone means to be in communion with another to be in love and be loved in return. This brings us back to what we identified early that God is Love. John Paul II concludes “Love is, therefore, man's origin, vocation, and end.”
So God says “it is not good for the man” to not have someone to Love and to have Love in, so God’s solution is create someone who he can love, so he creates someone that embodies His beauty and is the final touch on His creation this He called woman.
21 So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and closed up the place with flesh. 22 Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.
John Paul II points out in a footnote that the word "rib" in the original biblical language is a play on the word "life" (General Audience 11/7/79). Woman comes from the life of a man. The man now has a missing a piece that rib that God removed to make woman holds a very special role. So a man longs to replace his missing piece and a woman longs to find a man to give her piece back to; the man she came from. This desire to find each other to replace the piece is our deepest desire. It is so strong and at our core that it drives almost everything we do in life. Next we hear Adam cry out what we all would love to say when we find our missing piece.
"This is now bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called 'woman,'
for she was taken out of man." Genesis 2:23
As the Pope explains, "there is no doubt that man falls into that 'sleep' with the desire of finding a being like himself. In this way, the circle of the solitude of the man-person is broken, because the first 'man' awakens from his sleep as 'male and female'" (General Audience 11/7/79). Immediately the man declares: "At last this one is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh." That is to say, "Finally, a person with whom I can share the gift of life. Finally, a person I can love!"
So we see here that God has given us the Gift of Life and in that he provided everything we need to know Him and to love and be loved by another person. Now that we have another to love how are we to Love? How are we to find it? How are we to know what love really is? When are we ready to do this? Let us try to answer these by looking into this Gift of Love and this ultimate reunion.
24 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. (NIV)
For God tells us that we are to leave our parents. Are you ready to leave your parents? This is when God and most traditions tell us we are ready to be married to take a spouse in marriage to be reunited in one flesh. This God says signals our readiness for becoming one in flesh with our Adam or our Eve a reuniting of the flesh in holy sex and nakedness.
What does becoming one flesh mean? Is this not a better word for sex “one flesh”? As we unite our flesh in this holy reunion, God lets us go back to how he created us “in the beginning” pure in heart the world disappears around us for a brief amount of time bringing us to the place where we feel as one. This is total relief from our feeling of solitude and it must be the ultimate expression of love. For God made it so enjoyable nothing else in our physical life can match this experience for this is not sex as talked about by culture but it is the true act of making love. So special it is only here that God lets us co-create another human being with His help. In the act of making love we come face to face with each other naked bringing only our bodies to each other as a gift.
The Second Vatican Council teaches us, "man can only find himself by making a sincere gift of himself" (Gaudium et Spes n. 24). So with our bodies, in and through our sexuality, that we realize we are called to give ourselves to one another as a gift. Thus, John Paul can say, "we are convinced of the fact that the awareness of the body’s capacity to show love is the fundamental element of human existence in the world" (General Audience 1/16/80).
In this brief encounter of the flesh and spirit we replace the missing piece within us, thus completing what was once lost long ago. We get to relive part of God’s creation story in the intimate act of making love. Do you not see the power, the awesomeness of it? Is it no wonder that God makes our sex drive the most powerful thing in the universe? Can anyone name something we all think about more in common or more often than sex? The missing piece may be the root of our internal sexual drive not only to create new life but to replace this missing piece. How else do we describe where this urge or need comes from? We don’t know what drives us so passionately and strongly but this need/urge does not go away until we have been reunited with our own Adam or Eve, who holds our missing piece. Our hearts long for each other to dive deeply into the purely intimate act of rejoining and becoming one again with each other. For God wants this union to be a special one, one out of His love.
When this rejoining is wrapped in Love, it brings with it a filling up of our hearts. We feel gratitude, amazement, and joy or better put ecstasy that something so wonderful could feel this good. Webster’s dictionary defines ecstasy as “rapture from the contemplation of divine things”. Don’t you think our divine creator God wants us to have a divine contemplation of the eternal life with Him? Maybe it’s through this uniting of our hearts in the act of sex that God whispers into our hearts this secret that so many of us fail to hear. Once you have really listened to Him and have heard the secret you so would love to tell everyone, but you just cannot find the human words to express it. It is such a big secret God wants us to keep it safe within the context of marriage and not to share it with just a random person. It is so deep and profound, to share it with an acquaintance or friend would be reducing sex to a physical act of pleasure much like drinking a glass of water when you’re thirsty or eating your favorite food. Is not sex so much more than just satisfying a bodily function or controlling a selfish need?
We see that in our original sexuality that at the end of Genesis 2 25 The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.
When we find that true love, that piece, and become the truest gift to each other we feel no shame being completely naked knowing each other so intimately that we have nothing to hide from each other. Trust each other with each other’s Gift of Life.
Let’s look at how Moses describes sex in Genesis 4:25 using a few different translation of the Bible.
NKJV - And Adam knew his wife again, and she bore
NIV – And Adam lay with his wife again, and she gave birth
NLT - Adam had sexual relations with his wife again, and she gave birth
NET- And Adam had marital relations with his wife again, and she gave
In the Hebrew language the word for sexual relations was the word YADA defined as TO KNOW. Is this the first man and woman knew each other thus not feeling any shame. Can you imagine having a friend someone so close to you that you are ashamed of anything to tell them or show them? I find this at the core of why I don’t just have sex and intimacy with just any woman. For me and for most of my life even in my teens and twenties when I was single I knew I did not want to share my gift with just anyone. Does anyone feel that too? You don’t have t answer that out loud but answer that in your heart sometime.
Conclusion and Benediction
If we are to live according to the original capacity of our body’s ability to express love and thus "fulfill the very meaning of his being and existence," we must win the battle in our hearts over lust. We must come to see the body, once again, as the revelation of the eternal mystery of God (cf. General Audience 3/18/81).
I hope this truth of the Bible sets your hearts free from what culture and evil are trying to tell you about sex. You have been duped no longer. God created our bodies so we could show our spouses the sacrificial gift of Love through the union our bodies becoming “one flesh.” We must look at our body as a temple to God for we were made in His image. Our sexuality is so strong and powerful that God made it this way so we wouldn’t miss the purpose of it. The Bible is a guide to a great romance that God invites us to. It’s for sure not a legal document. The Bible uses marital love as analogy more than any other example to help us understand God’s eternal plan for us.
If we live in accordance to what God is telling us and has revealed through our bodies we will fulfill the very meaning of our lives and that is to Love. Jesus primary commandment was and is “Love one another as I have loved you” John 15:12. Jesus gave his physical body up for us for the forgiveness of Sin from our falling away from real union. On the cross he died a physical death as the ultimate gift to us. He showed us the power of giving ourselves as a gift, for his gift was to all of us. In his Resurrection he defeated evil and showed us a way back to “THE BEGINNING”. His way of life will restore our sexuality to the way it was meant to be before the Fall. It is why He came.
I challenge you to find your Adam or Eve when you are ready to embrace God’s will for marriage and sexuality as a gift. Be careful it is not much of a gift to the one you want to spend eternity with if you have given it to 10 others prior. Go out from here knowing that God wants you to have His gift all you have to do is open your hearts and wait. I leave you with this promise from God in 1 Corinthians 2:9-10
No one's ever seen or heard anything like this,
Never so much as imagined anything quite like it—
What God has arranged for those who love him.
References:
Man and Women He Created Theology of the Body by John Paul II (translated by Michael Waldstein)
The Pope’s Theology of the Body by Christopher West 2001
Nooma – Breathe by Rob Bell
Biblical verses from the New Internal Version
