Understanding Sexual Sin: What Is It?Sample

DISHONORING GOD IN OUR SEX LIVES: DEVIATIONS FROM THE PLAN

We can dishonor God in our sex lives just as we can dishonor Him in any other area. When you get to the nuts and bolts of it, sexual sin distorts the image of the Trinity mirrored in our marital relationships.

This is why Christian teachings against certain sexual practices aren’t made up out of thin air, nor are they intended to keep us from having fun. Quite the opposite! They’re designed to help us flourish as God intended us and to enable us to reflect the image of God in our marriages.

If our sex lives are meant to function as reflections of the image of God, it stands to reason that they should be shaped by the qualities of the Trinity. Three primary principles apply here. If we keep them in mind, they will help us live a life that is pleasing to God and beneficial to our families and ourselves. Here they are:

1) We may never use another person as an object, sexual or otherwise. The members of the Trinity never relate to each other as objects or things to be used. Instead, they relate to one another in love, each seeking to serve and enhance the goodness and glory of the others. 

When we use others, we diminish their dignity as human beings as well as our own. Animals do this, but people shouldn’t. God created sex for a much higher purpose. This explains why sexual practices such as pornography, masturbation, and rape fall outside of God’s intentions for us.

2) We must keep sexual relations within the bounds of a loving and committed marriage. Sexual embrace, the most intimate and ultimate of all expressions of human giving and vulnerability, ought to take place only in the context of total union and permanent mutual surrender between two people. 

That’s what marriage is: both the public and personal dedication of a man and a woman to forsake all others and give themselves fully – body, mind, and spirit – to one another. This sexual embrace within the bond of marriage mirrors the nature of the relationship between the members of the Trinity as nothing else in creation can. Ideally, the marital bond is designed to be loving, permanent, exclusive, and self-giving. Premarital and extramarital sex are incapable of mirroring this same reality. It’s not surprising, then, that research indicates that faithfully married people enjoy the deepest levels of sexual satisfaction.

3) We must respect and honor the God-designed differences between male and female. Male and female are not simply cultural constructs. They are God-created characteristics of humanity. Together, they personify the Trinitarian nature of God in a fundamental way – as the Bible says, “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27). The differences between male and female provide the fullest picture of the image of God in creation.

This is a fundamental issue against homosexuality. It falsely states that the distinctions between male and female don’t really matter. Nothing could be further from the truth. Homosexuality violates the image of the Trinity expressed through human sexuality.

To sum up, at the most basic level all sexual sin is wrong because it fails to mirror the image of the Triune God. Our goal as Christian couples is to love and glorify God through our sex lives by living in the fullness of what He intends for us.

This has both positive and negative aspects. In positive terms, it implies that we are to live fully as the sexual beings God created us to be. In this way we mystically personify an important part of the nature of God.

But this doesn’t mean that “anything goes” or that God has given us an unqualified green light in the area of sexual behavior. There are stoplights and caution lights to which we need to pay careful attention. As we’ve already said, this does not mean that God is a killjoy. To the contrary, He knows what is best for us and wants our sexual relationships to mirror His image and likeness.