Many of us Gen Xers, Boomers, and Silents are staggered by the rapid descent of our society into sexual insanity. Sexual perversions have been present in all our generations. Quite frankly, older generations bear a great deal of responsibility for the present lunacy, but the rapidity of the Romans 1 sexual death spiral is bewildering. Identifying LGBTQ+ has become almost fashionable. According to a recent Gallup survey, LGBTQ+ identification in the U.S. is now at 7.6% of the population. One out of every five Gen Z (1997-2012) adults say they identify as LGBTQ+. In the past twelve years, the percentage of people identifying this way has doubled, with women outpacing men by two-to-one.
The problem is only in the sexual alphabet soup. Heterosexual sin remains a problem. One pornography site dwarfs visits to Amazon by seven hundred million more visits. When you throw in the sexually explicit content on social media, the numbers are staggering.
The church isn’t helping much. Half of professing Christians in the U.S. say that casual sex between consenting adults is sometimes or always acceptable.
Our rapid descent into sexual debauchery has been shocking to many of us, but our situation is not unusual in history. Christians have lived in these cultures since we have been called Christians. Our culture is not unlike the Colossians’ culture from which many Colossian Christians were delivered. With Paul telling the church that the old Mosaic laws concerning the calendar and cleanness have been fulfilled in Christ, some might start concluding (like those in Corinth) that the new creation is a sexual free-for-all. But the Law didn’t create sexual sin; it only exposed what was already there. The Law was put in place to create a place (Israel) and particularly a person (the son of David) to fully and finally deliver us from the enemy that overpowered us: sin. God’s grace in Christ frees us from what fought against and destroyed God’s design for us and enables us to live fully human lives as the image of God (cf. Col 3:10).
In Colossians 3:5-7, Paul homes in on sexual sins, instructing the Colossians to “put to death your members upon earth: sexual immorality, uncleanness, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.” These five categories run the gamut of sexual sins, from the acts of sexual sin down to the disordered desires that remain in our hearts. All of them are to be put to death.
Paul’s command “put to death” is a medical term that speaks of atrophy. Atrophy is the slow death of muscles and organs when our bodies aren’t nourished and exercised. The way we fight sexual sin is to refuse to feed it and give it a good exercise program to build its strength.
Why is Paul (and ultimately God himself) so concerned about sexual sin? What’s the big deal? Is God a prude? God created sex, and sexual drive is God-given to fulfill the mission to be fruitful and multiply, filling the earth (Gen 1:28). God made us for sexual relations. He’s for them. He designed them.
But our bodies were not made for sexual immorality, Paul tells the Corinthians (1 Cor 6:13). Your body was designed for sexual relations only within the covenant of marriage between one man and one woman. Any deviation from this destroys your body. Your body will tell you this just as a car will tell you something is wrong when you treat it like a boat. Your body can’t lie. You can repress the truth in your mind, but your body will be affected. Sexual relations produce chemicals in both men and women (vasopressin and oxytocin, respectively) that create bonds. When you create bonds outside of covenant relationships, you are killing your “commitment nerves,” making it more difficult to commit to someone in the future, a truth borne out in the divorce rates, especially among women who have had multiple sexual partners before marriage. This is like destroying the nerves in your hand so that you won’t feel anything. You may succeed in destroying the nerves, but you lose the ability to feel when something is wrong and threatens your hand.
Your Designer didn’t make your body to function well in sexual immorality. So, for us to fulfill our created purpose and to be truly human, sexual immorality must be fought.
But how? There are two basic disciplines for which there are no hacks: flee sexual immorality and pursue righteousness.
When you are tired, bored, lonely, or angry, be careful to keep your wits, and don’t go to those websites or social media outlets where you will nourish and strengthen your sinful muscles. Don’t flirt with someone of the opposite sex when the only possibility is a forbidden relationship. Avoid deep emotional attachments to people of the opposite sex if there is no prospect of marriage.
Avoidance methods are needed, but they aren’t sufficient. You must have positive, productive pursuits. Engage in activities that will make you better. If you are single, pursue marriage. If you are married, pursue your spouse. Each spouse ought to make it his/her business to serve the sexual needs of the other. That is why you are given authority according to Paul in 1 Corinthians 7:1-4. You are not given authority for the other person to always submit to your feelings or moods. You are to use your authority for your spouse.
What you do in this area is not merely a matter of either living an okay life or a good one. Those who live in sexual sin are sons of disobedience, not the sons of God. The sons of disobedience are the recipients of God’s wrath, not his accepting understanding.
If you want to live, you must put sexual sin to death.
