One Flesh – Love, sexuality, and Our Existence
One Flesh – Love, sexuality, and Our Existence
Sexual love, passion, eroticism, and sensuality are obviously germane to our human existence. God created these emotions, feelings, thoughts, and desires within each of us. Hence, they are godly and good within the healthy confines of our humanity, our lives, and our human behavior. Our Creator not only wants us to enjoy these gifts, but He, as our Loving Creator-God, wants us to enjoy His gifts to fullest of our human ability. And as the case with all gifts, all actions, all behaviors, all things of this world, we must acknowledge and accept the godly limitations of this world. It is only within these boundaries, not man’s boundaries, but boundaries established by our Creator, that we find that greatest, most complete, most liberating enjoyment. In God’s world, boundaries are not designed to limit our joy, but rather to free us from and to keep us from the decrees, actions, and temptations that would rob us of godly joy. No greater joy can a husband and wife have on this earth than to become one flesh, spiritually, soulfully, and physically. Notice God’s order of our three beings. The spiritual and the soulful connections are more important than the physical connections. But yet the physical connection is a God commanded connection for a complete becoming of one flesh for husbands and wives.
As a young man and minister I often heard and was taught that sexual passion was something that believers had to fight and should abhor. However, I was never able to reconcile those words and teachings with the general revelation of God or the written word of God. Scripture only derides and says to put away sexual passion that has a genesis, is acted upon, or fulfilled outside God’s boundaries. Furthermore, if sexual passion has no benefit for humanity, and thus, ultimately, no benefit for Him, then why did God create sexual passion in man? However, any open and honest study of human sexuality in the Scripture shows that not only does God not disdain sexual passion within the confines of a godly, natural marriage but also that the Scripture encourages and promotes sexual passion.
As a pastor, counselor, missionary, and seminary professor and having lived among, traveled among, taught, and ministered to countless peoples and cultures around this world, I have had opportunity to see human sexuality from myriad angles and perspectives. As mentioned earlier, our spiritual and soulful beings are what connect us to God and to other believers. However, it is our physical beings that connect us to our spouses in the most intimate way. To deny the godly importance of human sexuality in our lives would be akin to denying the very creation of God. To eliminate sexual passion in our marriages is to eliminate the most intimate connection with our spouse that God has provided us.
Our sexuality can be the most wonderful, pleasurable and sacred gift of erotic (eros) love, or our personal sexuality can be another casualty of our fear and a wounding brought on by ignorance or suppression at our own hands or the hands of those whom we allow to influence us. Likewise, personal, unfettered selfishness can also destroy the beauty of erotic love as God intended it. Love and sexuality are so intertwined with our human spirituality and being, whether we consciously realize it or not, whether we embrace our sexuality or feel shame while attempting to repress our sexuality due to past religious, cultural, or social influences, it all boils down to the fact that our sexuality was created by God within us, as part of His image, and it is a great measure of how we came to be here, why we are here, what we do here, and who we are while here. Yes, love and sexuality can be found in our very existence and creation. And as God is able to accept us for what we are, through His divine work, so should we also accept ourselves.
As human beings, much of our mental imagery, our thoughts, our desires, and so, our urges and impulses come from what is communicated to us by others. What we read often fuels our passions. Words can and do influence not only what we want but also how we feel, how we “see” things and people. A husband should see his wife in the most desirous ways. The wife should see the husband likewise. Our spouse should see us as being able to provide for all of our needs: spiritual, soulful, and physical. We should do our best and also seek God’s grace in being able to be that provider. Yes, we will certainly fall short. However, falling short does not give us a godly reason to stop providing or to cease striving to be a better provider for all our spouse’s needs and desires.
God has provided us with much reason why sexual passion for our spouse is needed in our lives. He has even provided us with a godly picture of that sexual passion within the scriptures that He has left for us. Then why should we not embrace, encourage, teach, and communicate such sexual passion in our marriages?
Young Stag
Thank you so much for this post. This is exactly the kind of encouragement I have been needing to remind me of God’s plan for my marriage and what will keep it strong. I have always underestimated the importance of sex in my marriage, and it has caused rifts between me and my husband that I am determined to repair. I really appreciate the thought process and clear communication of your writing, it has given me great perspective and insight. Thanks so much!
Underestimating the value of erotic love and sex within our marriages is common for many of us. Males, husbands, have the robust physical desire for sex, whereas women, wives, have the stronger emotional connection between sex and love. It is interesting that often the first question a man asks a wife who is suspected of infidelity is, “Did you have sex with him?” But the common first question that a wife asks a suspected cheating husband, “Do you love her?” Men usually do not tie sex and love together as tightly as women. Husbands are often more forgiving of sexual infidelity than a wife. Perhaps this is because women see sex more as a product of emotional love but men usually develop emotional love for a wife after a physical attraction has been recognized.
It is just as important for men to be as intimate in loving the wife through the “right” kind of sex – that right kind being the sex that the wife finds most loving for her – as it is for wives to be just as responsive in doing sex the way the husband physically desires, so long as such physical sex does not create any sort of feelings of humiliation or being demeaned. Husbands need to spend just as much energy being romantic and loving in sex as the wife spends being sexy and erotic during sex.
And there are often times in a marriage when the wife might not have the physical desire for sexy sex and there are times in which the husband does not feel like having loving sex. That is when the marriage partners have to put aside personal selfishness and provide what the partner desires. And, truthfully, if sex in a marriage is undertaken with each partner having a desire to please the other at all times, bad sex rarely happens. Even “maintenance” sex can be enjoyable.
Loved your original post youngstag. It is sexually freeing to read the reminder that God fully endorses sex in marriage.
I think your follow up post here missed the mark. It has a lot of generalizations about what men and women feel that fall into stereotyping. These stereotypes reinforce the boxes that men and women feel trapped by. And these stereotypes help perpetuate the expectation for those behaviors rather than showing proof of them.
A lot of women love “sexy sex” as you put it, but a society and even worse church culture, that says in so many ways that raw, coarse passion is a man’s territory, sends a message to women to hide those feelings and act more like they are expected. And I would venture, though I try not to make guesses at what others are thinking, that many men like “loving sex” but fear that expressing that subtracts from what is stereotyped as masculine. There are more examples in your post of this, the questions about how men and women react to affairs and the level of desire for sex and love and they each fall into the same trap of thinking. I hope the church will talk more about sexual freedom within marriage for both men and women and leave the stereotypes out of it.
Thank you for your comments.
Please allow me apologize for any stereotyping that I may have caused to be perceived. Stereotyping is far from my intentions.
Based upon my personal experiences, I very much agree that there are just as many wives that enjoy those more bold, passionate sexual experiences as there are husbands that enjoy that flavor at times. I am also just as sure that there are as many husbands that enjoy those more tranquil, sexual moments as there are wives that enjoy that quiet bonding.
For a person to self-judge his or her masculinity or femininity by the surrounding culture’s standard denies the individual creativity of God as well as self-assigning oneself to fulfillment and unhappiness.
I am also saddened and ashamed at how eros love has been denied as a valid human gift and an innate desire that we were created with. Fortunately, within the marriage relationship of a committed husband and wife away from the prying eyes of outsiders, we can experience eros love and its boundlessness possibilities and pleasures. But first the individuals need to unshackle themselves to the limitations that man’s religions and cultures place upon us.
As for the different responses of husbands and wives that I have commonly seen, I was only attempting to offer a theory, again based upon observations. Perhaps I am wrong, but it seems to me that men and women approach sex and have sex with different thought-processes. I believe that those different thought-processes were created within male and female as part of a grand design that works for the good of humanity. Again, it is not my intention to create or support any stereotyping with those statements. I am only speaking to my observations. There are many times that stereotyping contributes to or causes behaviors. However, stereotypes usually, though not always, have a basis in either a historical or current commonly expressed behavior or the behavior was or is mandated by an authority. Could it be a combination of both causes that has created what we see as sexual stereotyping?
Amen to everything you said. The whole thing of marriage and sex is very spiritual.
Amen and Amen! Great post, Thank you Youngstag! God Bless.
This should be taught from every pulpit across the world. Thank you!