Summer Lovin’ (Part 2 of 3)- Sexuality: Five Ways We’re Getting It All Wrong
Before we jump into part two of our three-part series on sexuality, we feel it’s important to share that Flourish Kenya exists to end the teen pregnancy epidemic in rural Kenya, but we can’t do that without first addressing the root of the problem, which is a lack of access to holistic, Bible-based, scientifically accurate Sexual and Reproductive Health Education.
We aren’t just talking about the issues— our dedicated local staff is actively changing the way a generation looks at and understands God’s design for sex and sexuality, informed by Gospel Truth and Grace and all the science we can get our hands on! We’re pulling up the bitter roots of purity culture, shame, and silence and planting seeds that will produce health, freedom, and FLOURISHING in Christ!
Please take time to learn more about our work and if you’re able, please donate today and keep our education program moving forward to grow and shape the youth of rural Kenya! Thank you!
We’d also like to suggest that if you haven’t read Part 1, consider taking a few minutes to go ahead and do so to add the proper context before reading Part 2.
Sexuality: Five Ways We’re Getting It All Wrong
Welcome back to Summer Lovin' Part 2! In Part 1, we learned about God's perfect design for sex. Not only did we see that He created sex for His purposes, but He also made it for our pleasure and our good.
If we go back to Grease, a film we’re referencing because it not only exposes but reinforces gender roles and behaviors, we see a great example in Sandra D. She’s the image of purity that all the high school boys are set on conquering, filled with lust and seeing her as more of a prize than a person.
Of course, Hollywood only portrays what the culture normalized within humanity’s mistaken understanding of sexuality long before the late 70s when Grease was filmed. But where did all of these ideas come from, and why do we continue to get sex and sexuality so wrong? (By the way, I still haven’t bought any leather pants, but I will perform a song and dance if that’s what it takes to bring healing to the broken places around our understanding of our sexuality!!)
So, here we go! Let’s explore five common ways we go wrong with God's design for sexuality, whether it started with what we learned through entertainment and media, what we were taught at home, or harmful teachings passed down by the Church.
1. The way we teach the concepts of sexual desire and lust
Unfortunately, we’ve taken what Hollywood uses to tell and sell a good story and used it to teach life lessons and instill fear in young people. If we want this to stop, the first step is to clear up the meaning of two important words:
Sexual desire is an interest in sexual activities.
Lust is an unrestrained, jealous sexual desire that usually results in pain or harm.
Sexual desire is not lust.
And lust is not, nor is it caused by seeing, looking at, or being attracted to someone. You can have sexual desire for someone and not lust for them.
Lust is a sin because it lacks self-control. It always causes harm to the person who is choosing to lust and/or another person, often the object of lust.
Note: There are many verses in Scripture for us to reference with regard to sexual desire and lust, and we have referenced the topical bible notes1 for you below. However, we have to be careful about the use of the word lust as we interpreted scripture. In Hebrew and Greek terms, and depending on the verse and translation, lust can be translated as desire (the original meaning of longing) or a coveted desire, AKA: sinful lust.
God's design and purposes for our sexuality are to give freedom and health, not shame and condemnation.
Sexual desire is part of God's creation fueled by our hormones to attract us to each other. (Don’t worry, there’s more on hormones next!) We stray from God's plan for our sexual desire, a natural and beautiful function in our bodies, when we believe and teach the false narrative that all sexual desire is wrong and leads to lust and sexual impurity or that lust is something it's not— particularly that it is innate and that others are responsible for its management in us.
More to that point, for ages, the Church has taught and counseled couples that husbands are inherently lustful, and it is a wife's duty to submit to his unrestrained sexual demands in order to keep him from sinning.
Y’all! We have been literally making stuff up to fit our thinking into a broken theology! Worse still, we've been teaching our flawed beliefs to generations of Christians using the ineffective and harmful tool of fear.
Studies show that there are hundreds of thousands of hurting marriages everywhere because of these wrong beliefs that are outside of God's purposes for sex.
2. The way we understand and misuse hormones
One of my favorite topics is hormones! There are over 50 hormones in the body that control many functions, from being hungry to experiencing emotions and moods like happiness or sadness and sexual desire. For our purposes, let’s hit on the seven “love hormones.”
Love hormones are adrenaline, dopamine, serotonin, vasopressin, oxytocin, testosterone, and estrogen. When in proper use, these hormones:
Attract us to one another
Give us feelings of love
Bond spouses together
Give us the ability to experience lasting love
Give husbands the instinct to protect their wives
Bond mothers to their children
Give us feelings of satisfaction
Transition us through puberty
Hormones are a magical part of the biology God gave each one of us!
However, love hormones are involved in every sexual act and do not have selective functions. They get released through watching pornography, multiple sex partners, and sex before marriage.
Despite our misconceptions, what we’ve been told, or what we have learned through watching T.V. and movies, we can NOT turn off our emotions during sexual acts because our hormones fuel them. We can't control when, how, or where these chemical reactions happen.
When hormones are misused and repeatedly released in ways counter to their design, they eventually lose the ability to function correctly. The outcomes are devastating:
Addiction2
Isolation and self-harm
Distorted beliefs about relationships and sexuality
Low self-esteem
Depression and anxiety
Inability to bond with a spouse
Regardless of where you land with faith and God, you simply can't escape the scientific facts about how hormones function or misfunction.
The good news is that when functioning within God’s perfect design, hormones bring health and vitality to the body and soul.
3. The way we let our feelings reign supreme
No, we can't control the release of hormones or their effects on us, but the well-known saying “knowledge is power” couldn’t be truer with regard to hormones, sexual desire, and feelings in general. When we know what we’re dealing with and tap into God's power in us, we can overcome what seems impossible in a broken world.
We might not be able to control hormone releases, but we can learn to identify the feelings that hormones cause and manage them with wisdom. Our feelings lose power when we know they are normal, that we're not abnormal for having them, and that we can control our responses to them!
“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things, there is no law.”
The truth is, boys, girls, men, and women CAN control sexual desire, even though it doesn't make for good T.V. When we teach where sexual desire comes from and that our feelings aren't our identity, we take back the Power in us to operate the way God created us!
In a knee-jerk reaction to cultural missteps, the Church has perpetuated a harmful message to young boys and girls that boys are uncontrollable lust monsters, and not only are girls the gatekeepers of their own “purity”, but they’re also responsible for the boys’ ability to remain “pure” as well!
The Gospel message of self-control and its application to our sexuality is entirely miscommunicated in the Church. Not to mention the other fruits of the Spirit and what loving one another, male and female, looks like outside an assumption of lust and lust-causing. Sadly, and to the detriment of generations of Christian men and women, this thinking reduces girls (and often boys) into objects of desire that should be feared from a young age.
4. The way we ignore sexual discipleship
Based on the little we know about most of you reading this article, you had one of three types of sex ed:
None. You were left to glean what you happened to catch in movies and on T.V.— oh, and the school bus.
(This was where mine came from. Hey, latch key kids— you’re not alone!)
From the Purity Movement3 in the Christian Church, whether you were a learner or a teacher.
(If this is the case, you’re likely the MOST misinformed about God’s design for our sexuality!)
A mix of P.E. class and awkward talks with a parent, guardian, sibling, or other relatives about where babies come from and abstinence, AKA “You better now come home pregnant or get a girl pregnant!
(But, let’s be honest, you already knew way more from #1.)
“Do the best you can with what you know, and when you know better, do better.”
Today, our kids have far more access to a whole world of information and sexual content. The average age of exposure to pornography is now 8 years old— before the onset of puberty for most! Young people, and people of all ages for that matter, need way more information before we can combat the world's harmful messaging about our sexuality. The Bible says to "train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it." (Proverbs 22:6)
Parents: This includes God's design for sex! But there is no condemnation. We are all working with what we were given. Truth and Grace-filled sex education aren't just lacking in our homes but also in our churches.
In fact, check out these porn stats from 2014:
64% of self-identified Christian men and 15% of self-identified Christian women view pornography at least once a month
Compared to 65% of non-Christian men and 30% of non-Christian women.
37% of Christian men and 7% of Christian women view pornography at least several times a week
Compared to 42% of non-Christian men and 11% of non-Christian women.4
And that was pre-2020; imagine what the numbers look like today! Breaking the silence about sexuality in the Church and getting serious about sexual discipleship is the only way we’re going to see a change in those devastating statistics.
We dream of churches and Christian communities that are places of refuge and safe spaces to find answers for sexual brokenness and confusion. Yet, only 7% of churches have ministries on the topics*, leaving us to look to and like the rest of the World.
The stone-cold truth is that God created sex, the World stole it, and the Church silenced it.
5. The way we refuse to call a golden statue an idol
Sex outside God's design is idol worship. The difficult reality is that, ultimately, this is the root of the issue.
The Ten Commandants can be taken as God’s guide for living a life that is pleasing to him because it honors Him and is loving toward others. The first two are about our devotion to God and not worshipping other idols or gods before Him.
You shall have no other gods before me.
You shall not make idols. (Exodus 20:4-5)
The word fornication means sexual intercourse between people not married to each other. That includes sex outside of marriage, adultery, or sexual acts for personal gain like pornography, rape, or prostitution.
BUT WAIT! The word porneia (Um… PORN! Anyone else see the enormous, glaring red flag?!) in Greek means fornication and refers to all forms of idol worship, not just sexual idolatry!
Putting it all together, when we engage in fornication— consume porn and masturbate, commit adultery, have sex outside of marriage, force someone to have sex, harm someone by sexual acts, force someone into or engage in prostitution— we are going against God's design for sex, marriage, and sexuality.
THE BOTTOM LINE: When we choose sexual idolatry (fornication), our hormones and personal desires cause us to elevate these things above our relationship with God. This, simply put, is idol worship.
We cannot worship God and idols at the same time.
We cannot serve two masters.
And God will not bless our idols.
Any sexual act that is not entered into with mutuality and reciprocity, fueled by the fruit of the Spirit by BOTH man and woman in marriage, is self-serving, idolatrous, and acts outside God's design. This may feel like a hard-line statement, but please stay tuned for the last post in this series.
It is critical to state that the above applies to those who choose to engage in sexual acts or those who force others to do so outside of God's design. For those forced into sex and don't have a choice, inside or out of marriage, there is ALWAYS grace, healing, and redemption with Jesus. Please, seek help. Start here.
References:
Bible Hub. (2004). Topical Bible- Lust. Biblehub.Com. Retrieved July 21, 2022, from https://biblehub.com/topical/l/lust.htm
Covenant Eyes. 2018. Porn Stats. Retrieved from https://www.covenanteyes.com/e-books/
Recommended Reading: The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You've Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended (2021) by Sheila Wray Gregoire, Rebecca Gregoire Lindenbach, and Joanna Sawatsky
Learn more about the dangers and harmful effects of porn: https://fightthenewdrug.org/
Written by Krista Blalock
President and Co-Founder
krista@flourishkenya.org
Don’t miss Part 3 of Summer Lovin’, where we’ll conclude with how we can navigate sexuality in the world we’re living in today.
Until then, please consider supporting the important work Flourish Kenya is doing with a financial contribution. We’d love to have you join the Flourish Kenya First Responders. It’s a monthly giving club that allows people just like you to come alongside the front-line workers in the fight to end the teen pregnancy epidemic in rural Kenya.
