When coming to the issue of sex, there are only two choices: God’s voice or the world's. God’s voice set boundaries, and the world has no boundaries. This article shows how you can keep God’s boundaries.

Source: Australian Presbyterian, 2000. 3 pages.

A Divine Relationship Love isn’t Half-hearted, but Sex can be

Several years ago a group of 18 skydivers the United States jumped from 20,000 feet. It was a cloudy day in Ohio, so cloudy that when they jumped the divers couldn’t even see the ground from the plane. But they decided to jump anyway. They’d been looking forward to this jump for weeks. Anyway, according to the pilot’s calculations, they were flying over flat, open farmland. Perfect terrain.

So they trusted the pilot’s advice and jumped. When the skydivers eventually broke through the cloud, all they could see was water. They had actually jumped right over the middle of Lake Erie! Sixteen of the eighteen divers drowned. There can be seri­ous consequences when you go with the wrong advice.

When you’re so eager to chase the thrill that you listen to the wrong person, the results can be disastrous. Wrong advice can be especially tragic when it comes to our sexuality. That’s the thing about sex. It promises so much.

Our sexuality creates powerful desires. It tantalises us with the idea that physical intimacy will deliver us incredible joy. And it can. But it’s like anything else: if you fol­low the wrong advice, then what can deliver so much joy will actually deliver terrible heartache. That’s why, when it comes to thinking about sex, the thing we really have to get sorted out first is: whose directions are we going to trust? Whose word are we going to follow? When it comes to sex, we need to trust and obey what God has to say. It sounds so simple, but it really is the heart of everything.

In life we’ve basically got two options to choose with respect to sex. There’s what God says, and there’s what the world says. The world’s view of sex is all about doing whatever you want, with whoever you want, wherever you want, and doing it as many times as you want. The world’s view of sex is all about having no boundaries.

Let’s be honest, there’s a level of attrac­tion to no-boundary sex. As you move from person to person, hunting for the best love-making techniques, as you roam from one sex-shop to the next, as you search for the ultimate orgasm, you titillate your pas­sions and fantasies. No-boundary sex does have an appeal to it. But it’s an appeal born out of rebellion against God. As God reminds us in Romans 1:21,

Although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.

God, for his part, totally disagrees with the world’s view on sex. In his word, God stresses that there are important bound­aries. Our sexuality is such a precious part of who we are that it needs to be preserved for the security of a life-long, male-female relationship. Anything other than that and we’ll be short-changing ourselves on sex. We’ll be going for something other than the best. So will we trust the world or God?

Even a moment’s thinking will bear out that we ought to believe God. To start with, Genesis tells us that it’s God who created us. He knows what’s best for us. Indeed, God never stops being committed to our best interests. The message of the gospel is that God is so committed to us that he didn’t even withhold his Son from death on a cross. The apostle John puts it like this, “This is love: not that we loved God but that he loved us and he sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 Jn 4:10).

Further, God doesn’t lay down bound­aries for our sexuality because he’s a killjoy. God lays down boundaries because no-boundary sex is unbelievably destructive to us. The problem is that we keep falling for the lie that no-boundary sex will be fulfill­ing and liberating. We need to forget the Cleo survey and the advice from Ralph magazine. God is the one with the invalu­able combination of limitless wisdom and limitless love. God’s word is all about faith­fulness and confining our sexual intimacy to the one life-long relationship.

If we really believe that God gives us boundaries because he has our best inter­ests at heart, then we’ll be wanting to go to extremes to keep them. When he says “but among you there must not even be a hint of sexual immorality” (Eph 5:3), we’ll deliber­ately not watch movies that will lead us to daydream about immorality. We’ll refuse to flirt with others, no matter how supposedly harmless it is. We’ll resist touching mem­bers of the opposite sex! We’ll be striving not just to avoid sexual intercourse with someone else outside of marriage, we’ll be actively avoiding anything that might cause us to go even near the limits that God has laid down.

In other words we are to be so focused on keeping God’s boundaries that no one could even mistakenly get the wrong impression that we weren’t keeping them. If you’re going out with someone on a date, you’ll be thinking very carefully about what you’re going to wear and what you’ll be going to see and do. You’ll think through whether you’re going to be alone at your date’s home, and how long you’ll be alone. What exact situations will you be put in? What temptations might develop?

Ephesians 5:4 provides us with another powerful thought. “Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking which are out of place, but rather thanks­giving”. Obscenity is a way of life in this country. There is incredible peer pressure to join in swapping dirty jokes and to make suggestive comments about different peo­ple. We mustn’t do it. It’s inappropriate for a child of God to say things that could even be accidentally misconstrued as being vul­gar. It’s pushing God’s boundaries, and we don’t want to do that.

A few verses later, there’s another chal­lenge in Ephesians. In 5:8-14 Paul uses the images of light and darkness to illustrate the extent to which we should be going to keep God’s loving boundaries. A lifestyle of darkness is one which is shameful and needs to be hidden. But a lifestyle of light abounds in goodness and is happy to be seen by all. There ought to be no actions, no motives, no secret fantasies that we’d prefer others not to know about.

This is actually a good criterion for test­ing your actions in the whole area of Christian freedom and sex. Would you rent that video for yourself if you knew the whole Bible study group was going to watch it with you? Would you flick through that magazine if you knew that your wife or your girlfriend was looking over your shoulder? Living within God’s boundaries means living such a righteous life that you’re happy to be seen in the light. If you’re single and dating, you should be using your sexual freedom in such a way that if the entire night were videotaped you’d be happy for others in your church to watch the tape. You should be happy for your youth group to see how much you kissed and fondled each other on the tape.

This is something you may need to seri­ously think through in practical terms. Especially if you are already drifting into some trends that are putting you on a slip­pery slide. If you’re single, you may need to rethink the movies that you’ve been watch­ing lately, the magazines you’ve been read­ing, maybe even the sorts of people that you’ve been going out with. Certainly going out with a non-Christian is not a smart move if you’re serious about keeping within God’s boundaries.

Maybe you need to lift your game with your personal prayer and Bible-reading so that the way you’re thinking about things is a bit more like God and a little less like the world. Maybe you’re married and you need to rethink the amount of time that you’re spending with someone of the opposite sex who isn’t your marriage partner. Maybe it’s all still innocent. You might even be helping them through a difficult patch in their lives, but perhaps you need to wake up to the dangers. Maybe you need to find at least one friend who’s prepared to routinely ask you the hard things and help you recognise the thin edge of wedge when it appears.

Hudson Taylor founded the China Inland Mission. During one of his last ser­mons, he kept repeating the same line, over and over again. Some people thought that he’d gone crazy with old age. Other people thought he was simply saying the most important thing he had to say. Taylor kept repeating, “You can trust the Lord too little, but you cannot trust him too much.” That’s a good saying! And in this article on how we use our sexuality, it’s a great line to close on. “You can trust the Lord too little, but you cannot trust Him too much.” Our God is not a killjoy. He is whole-heartedly generous, whole-heartedly wise and whole­heartedly loving. That’s why we mustn’t be half-hearted at obeying him!

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