So what’s our healthy response to be to a world that’s gone wacky when it comes to sex?  Every week there’s a new headline about important people behaving badly.  I’ll spare you the list; you know it all too well.  Add to that the flood of sensual images that scroll across the electronic billboards that sit on our desk and decorate the walls of our home.  Then consider the hook up culture that no longer considers dinner and a movie a necessary prelude to the most intense intimacy available to humans.

Now If sexual desire is the problem then God should have made it clear in the scripture, “thou shalt have low to no desire!”   Scripture doesn’t exactly tell everyone to take a cold shower or think about something else.  God didn’t recommend unhealthy sexual repression as a response to unhealthy sexual obsession.  Satan borrows God’s tools and doesn’t bring them back.  We have to go get them back.

Here’s what the ancient book of divine wisdom had to say …

“Since there is so much sexual immorality … do not deprive each other except by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.” 1 Corinthians 7: 1,5 (NIV)

“If a man who has married a slave wife takes another wife for himself, he must not neglect the rights of the first wife to food, clothing, and sexual intimacy. 11 If he fails in any of these three obligations, she may leave as a free woman … Exodus 21:10-11 (NLT)

The younger widows should not be on the list, because their physical desires will overpower their devotion to Christ and they will want to remarry. 1 Timothy 5:11 (NLT)

C.S. Lewis in mere Christianity said, “Starving men may think much about food, but so do gluttons.” — C. S. Lewis is pointing out that desire is not in itself the criteria for sin or the measure of one’s holiness.

Now a blog is a place to bring stuff up, not work stuff out.  To be sure there’s a ton of stuff to work out.  There are marriages with deep wounds.  There are partners with low desire. There are circumstances that call for celibacy.  In theses cases a cold shower might be necessary. On second thought, forget a cold shower, some of us need a tub of ice.  The answer is not to give up and go with society in sexual sin, or go home and settle for the romantic North Pole. The answers have to do with the good of humans and the glory of God. That’s all I have space to tell you right now.

But I will leave you with this; the church needs to cheer on those deeply committed couples that combat the craziness of the sexually obsessed culture with the sanity of a loving and sexually passionate marriage.  These people deserve to lead the church right alongside those devoted men and women who forgo marriage to serve God with a single focus.