The Necessities for God-Glorifying Sex
In a sex-saturated world, broken by sin, the Bible’s ideal is difficult to attain. There is no room for self-righteousness here. We are all sinners. Each one of us is sexually broken to one extent or another. We all need Christ to sanctify our hearts, minds, bodies, sexual behaviors and inclinations so that our sexuality increasingly conforms to God’s intent for it.
Though we may never fully attain it, though we fail (aren’t you glad for grace?), though some may painfully struggle with questions of sexual identity for their entire lives, and though some have not experienced the marital union to be the blessing it was intended to be, it is nonetheless important that believers understand, faithfully communicate, and aim for God’s ideal for sex as outlined in Scripture.
The Lord wants Christians to experience great sex. He doesn’t want us to settle for impure—dirty, common, ordinary—sex. He wants our sexual conduct to become more and more pure, that is: clean, uncommon, and extraordinary, set apart (1 Thess. 4:1-8). Scripture tells us that we do with our bodies is important. Sex exists for the purpose of glorifying God. “So glorify God in your body.” (1 Cor. 6:13-20).
The big picture about sex informs us that there are five things that are necessary for sex to tell the story in the way that Scripture upholds as the ideal: 1) a marriage covenant, 2) complementarity, 3) mutuality, 4) congruence, and 5) Godwardness.