God’s rules on sex: Limiting or liberating?
By Lee Strobel

In the 1950s, America was rocked by scandal when actress Ingrid Bergman conceived a child out of wedlock. So hot was the firestorm of indignation that she was chased out of Hollywood.

Fast forward 40 years.

Actress Connie Seleca and John Tesh, then host of Entertainment Tonight, announced their engagement – and casually mentioned that they weren’t going to engage in sex before their wedding day.

The reaction: Hollywood was aghast. People magazine slapped the story on its cover, with the headline, “TV Star Weds ET Host After a Year of Romance – But No Sex.” When Tesh appeared on Maury Povich’s talk show, Povich was unable to conceal his incredulity.

“John!” he declared. “In this day and age, you didn’t consummate your marriage beforehand?”

Tesh shook his head. “Isn’t that a comment on our society,” he replied, “that not having sex before marriage would be seen as being such a big deal?”

Who knows best?
Attitudes toward sex have been flipped upside down in recent decades. But the reason is not that people have lost clarity on what the Bible teaches, but that people increasingly believe that when it comes to sex, we really know better than God does. Few people would actually come right out and say that, but they behave as if this were their belief.

We think to ourselves, “The Bible’s certainly outdated and outmoded when it comes to sex, isn’t it? It’s sure narrow and repressive and, worse yet, politically incorrect. Those kinds of strict rules may have worked a few thousand years ago when people were primitive, but today – well, we’re more educated and enlightened. And I think I’m smart enough to figure out what’s best for me.”

We can see this unstated opinion played out in a number of arenas – especially in Hollywood.

When the movie Endless Love caused a stir because of the way it portrayed the sexual awakening – and subsequent obsession – of two teenagers, the director strongly defended his work. “I’m not encouraging 15-year-olds to make love,” he insisted. “They do that anyway. I’m just telling them it’s quite normal.”

From soap operas to motion pictures, from cable TV to MTV, the entertainment industry fuels a popular culture in which the attitude is that sex outside of marriage is positive, not negative. For the most part, Hollywood portrays casual sex as nothing more than a natural – and expected – progression in a relationship.

Studies have shown that more than 90 percent of all sexual encounters on television and in the movies are between unmarried people. But rarely do we see the consequences of the choice. When an unwed Murphy Brown got pregnant, her life barely skipped a beat. Somehow Brown’s baby got cared for by her housepainter or friends. Somehow the infant rarely kept her up at night or complicated her life. Somehow the child grew from infancy to toddler with blinding speed and a minimum of hassles.

No consequences
In Hollywood’s fantasyland, consequences from extramarital sex are few and far between.

• Did you know that each day 41,000 Americans contract a sexually transmitted disease? One often-deadly disease – cervical cancer – is five to 11 times more likely to strike a woman if her spouse has had multiple sexual partners. And in 1996 alone, more babies were born with birth defects from sexually transmitted diseases than all of the children afflicted with polio during that entire 10-year epidemic.
  
  
• Television and movies seldom show the inadvertent pregnancies that occur in premarital sex. Nationwide, a teenager gets pregnant every 30 seconds – a total of 1 million per year. The price tag for society: an estimated $100 billion in medical, welfare, and other costs over the next two decades. Around the country, 1.2 million babies are born without fathers each year, and these children face terrible disadvantages in virtually every area of life – socially, financially, emotionally, behaviorally, academically, and even physically.
  
  
• We also aren’t shown the trauma suffered by the 1.2 million American women – including 400,000 teenagers – who end their pregnancies with abortions each year. One study showed they are more likely to attempt suicide than other women. Many live with an aching regret they cannot seem to resolve.
  
  
• Television also rarely shows the shame, guilt, and crushed self-esteem that occurs when non-marital intimacy is followed by abandonment. Ask any counselor on a suicide hotline, and he or she will tell you that the most common calls concern shattered relationships, especially those in which sex was involved. One study showed that 85 percent of unmarried women under psychiatric care were sexually active.
  
  
• Our society tells us that before we marry we should test out a relationship by having premarital sex. But Ray Short, in his book Sex, Love, or Infatuation, points out that people who live together are twice as likely to get divorced after they do marry. Other research has established that a woman is far more likely to be physically abused by a live-in lover than by a husband and that those most likely to be pushed into sex against their will are women who are living with a man prior to marriage.

Some of the most startling research on this subject was published in 1994 by researchers at the University of Chicago. They discovered that the lowest rates of satisfaction were among single men and women – the very ones presumed to be having the hottest sex – and that married couples not only reported being the most physically pleased and emotionally satisfied but also were the group having the most sex! Their data revealed that the most consistently sexually satisfied women in the country were conservative Protestants, followed closely by Catholics and mainline Protestants – all of whom had a significantly higher frequency of orgasm than those with no religious affiliation.

As the University of Chicago researchers said, “Our results could be read to mean that an orthodox view of romance, courtship, and sexuality – your mom’s view, perhaps – is the only route to happiness and sexual satisfaction.”

Real liberation, true intimacy
As ironic as it may sound, the truth is that God’s boundaries don’t bind us, but they liberate us to experience intimacy in its most fulfilling form. Our sexuality isn’t the result of an evolutionary accident but was intentionally and lovingly created by God himself. As outlandish as it may sound, real sexual liberation and true intimacy are found within the moral boundaries that God has compassionately designed for us.

Christians have acquired the reputation of being sexually repressed and prudish – a reputation somewhat justified by misguided attempts in centuries past to declare sex a necessary evil. But if we use the Bible as our source, we find that God intended sex to be a wonderful and important part of the bonding process between husbands and wives. He designed it not just for procreation but for pleasure as well.

In his Bible paraphrase, Eugene Peterson renders 1 Corinthians 6:16, a passage echoing that concept, this way: “There’s more to sex than mere skin on skin. Sex is as much spiritual mystery as physical fact. As written in Scripture, ‘The two become one.’ Since we want to become spiritually one with the Master, we must not pursue the kind of sex that avoids commitment and intimacy, leaving us more lonely than ever – the kind of sex that can never ‘become one.’”

God’s design is for husbands and wives to enjoy a vital, regular, and mutually satisfying physical relationship. Knowing the allure of sex and its potential for abuse, however, God also drew appropriate boundaries as a way of protecting us from pain. When we cross those boundaries, the consequences aren’t just physical, emotional, and psychological. The most painful consequence of sex outside of marriage is the spiritual cost.

The Bible says that our wrongdoing causes a separation between us and our holy God. Isaiah 59:2 says, “There's nothing wrong with God; the wrong is in you. Your wrongheaded lives caused the split between you and God. Your sins got between you so that he doesn't hear.” (MSG)

When people are engaging in sex outside God’s boundaries, they naturally tend to shy away from talking with him in prayer, to shrink back from worshiping him and coming to the Communion table, to stop reading the Bible, and to stop interacting with Christian friends whose moral lifestyle only accentuates their own sin. As a result, their heart turns numb and indifferent toward God and their spiritual life shrivels.

There’s no way to sugarcoat this: People cannot be tightly related to God at the same time they are intentionally violating God’s boundaries concerning sexuality. You can’t be boldly rebelling against him in any ongoing way and expect to experience an unhindered relationship with him.

What should we do?
One thing’s for certain – we can’t hide from the all-pervasive media, but we can be discerning. When a television show, movie, or music video tries to convince you that everybody’s enjoying sex outside of marriage, call it the lie that it is. Train your children to second-guess the values that the media are peddling, so they don’t unwittingly buy into distorted images. And when your hormones are pumping, pause for a moment to count the costs – the physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual consequences. Compare that awful downside with the fleeting and hollow upside of giving in. Let that help you make the choice to stay within the moral framework that God has created for us – because although it sounds outrageous, it’s within those restrictions that authentic sexual freedom lies.

The good news is that God can empower us to live the kind of life he wants us to lead. Though temptations abound, we can trust God to help us keep from falling into self-destructive behavior. Victims of sexual assault can trust that he will gently bind their emotional wounds. And we also can trust that God’s forgiveness is readily available to all who ask for it. He can scrub us clean when we humbly turn to him and admit our wrongdoing, rather than try to rationalize it.

I know. He’s done it for me. In my days as an atheist, when my highest goal in life was to experience pleasure, I lived a promiscuous lifestyle and left disillusioned victims in my wake. I would use whatever tactic it took, from false flattery to manipulative lies, to achieve a conquest. Afterward, I would callously walk away, never giving a second thought to the other person. But instead of happiness and fulfillment, I found nothing but emptiness. Now I am amazed that someone like me – and, yes, even a person like you – could be lovingly adopted into the family of God forever.

As incredible as it sounds, regardless of how far you have strayed sexually, there is hope, there is cleansing, there is forgiveness, there is new life available through Jesus, and there is freedom to experience the kind of meaningful, satisfying sex God created us to enjoy. (Video: What does it mean to follow Jesus? HI SPEED | DIAL UP)

Recommended:

• Celebrate Recovery: Offering Hope for Sexual Addiction 
• Healing Wounds of Sexual Addiction
• Teaching Youth about Sex and HIV
• Sermon download: Clear Thinking About Sex