God, Sex and the Song of Songs!

How delightful is your love, my sister, my bride!
    How much more pleasing is your love than wine,
and the fragrance of your perfume
    more than any spice!
¹¹ Your lips drop sweetness as the honeycomb, my bride;
    milk and honey are under your tongue.

Your lips are like a scarlet ribbon;
    your mouth is lovely.
Your temples behind your veil
    are like the halves of a pomegranate.

Your graceful legs are like jewels,
    the work of an artist’s hands.
² Your navel is a rounded goblet
    that never lacks blended wine.
Your waist is a mound of wheat
    encircled by lilies.
³ Your breasts are like two fawns,
    like twin fawns of a gazelle.

God created sex and it is most completely understood and expressed within the context of marriage.  Marriage creates the security, the boundaries and most importantly, sexual fulfillment is the bond that is completely fulfilled within that God given covenant.  A Christian marriage has three people in the bedroom and as John Piper has said, “God is most glorified when we are most satisfied in Him”. 

Sexual purity is pleasing to Him.

Sexual intimacy is meant to be shameless!

We only have to go back to Genesis to see the way that God designed us – Genesis 2:24,25 24 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.  25 The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.

I know that many of the people we encounter in our post Christian culture think the Bible is hopelessly naïve on the subject of sex.  However, the message was given in a time when women were treated as possessions, where there was all forms of illicit sex taking place, where there was sexual slavery.

 The challenge for our generation is that we live where the opportunity to see the lowest forms of sexuality are one click away. Our children are being confronted with these issues earlier and earlier in life.

As followers of Jesus, we need to talk about sex and I just have to give a shout out to our pastors Jim and Carrie Gordon who present it in the most positive light at http://www.theintimatecouple.com/

We read in Hebrews 13: 4,5

Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral. 5 Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said,

“Never will I leave you;  never will I forsake you.

There’s the challenge…be content with what you have.  In a throw-away culture unfortunately marriages and relationships are quickly given up on much like an appliance that needs to be replaced. 

Proverbs 5:18 Let your wife be a fountain of blessing for you. Rejoice in the wife of your youth. 19 She is a loving deer, a graceful doe. Let her breasts satisfy you always. May you always be captivated by her love.

Song of Songs as seen in the following video breaks down the outline of the book into the three major themes of courtship, the wedding and the marriage and does an excellent job of giving the overall theme.

Check it out.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEEXqGg5RME&t=17s

More than anything God wants us to fully experience His intimate love and desire for us as His children.

1 Corinthians 6  For it is said, “The two will become one flesh.” 17 But whoever is united with the Lord is one with him in spirit.18 Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body. 19 Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; 20 you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.

I have talked with people who have decided to fast from sugar and the kind of withdrawl their bodies go through with headaches, but eventually they talk about the incredible energy and stamina that they feel and how they don’t feel as tired as they used to.  So, what happens to our spirit once we do this?  I believe it will come alive and have greater sensitivity to the Lord’s leading as well!

Sanctified – positionally it is being set apart for God and practically it is a progressive act of becoming more and more driven by our appetite for the Lord and His righteousness than our own selfish desires.  ‘they that hunger and thirst after righteousness shall be filled’

 I believe the greatest person who is able to control the body is not us but the Holy Spirit as we see later in the paragraph.

Immorality is like that. It always cheats someone else—usually someone you love very much. Just ask any wife whose husband left. Just ask any parent of a child who has had an affair. Just anyone who has been to a church where their pastor fell into sexual sin.

Perhaps the saddest thing about lust is that it never satisfies. Someone has said that lust is “the craving for salt by a man dying of thirst.” It promises everything and delivers nothing. No great release. No lasting satisfaction. Not even any swift punishment.

“The Lord will punish men for all such sins, as we have already told you and warned you.” Sometimes he punishes the body, sometimes the mind, sometimes our speech, our eyes, often our health, and almost always our memories. Lust produces that inward deadening that is both unexpected and inevitable.

Pornography is like cocaine…you can be addicted the first time.  Pornography is just like that, you can be addicted to it the first time you open the door to it.  That is why 1 Corinthians 6:18 tells us to flee …RUN

 The most likely judgment is that God will simply leave you alone to suffer the natural consequences of your sin.

It is often the fallout and consequences to families that unfortunately more are affected and punished by the decisions of a few.

Don’t take advantage of your brother in this way.  He is putting this challenge out in the context of a brother to brother relationship.  The decisions that are made don’t just affect those caught in sexual sin, they ripple out and affect families, children, churches.

 “Every man is our ‘brother’ and to be politically correct every woman is our sister and when we engage in sexual immorality we are hurting our brothers or sisters.”

Remember if you are tempted to watch that movie or look at that image, that is somebody’s daughter, that is someone’s sister and they are precious in God’s eyes.

I have personally been crushed by the devastating effects of immorality and have seen the consequences of sin in the loss of trust and respect and fractured relationships that are still affected many years later.  I have seen it in a previous church ministry where I served when a pastor and our worship leader had an affair.  I saw a vibrant and growing church become a place that would go through disillusionment and take a number of years to recover.  

It’s not worth it.

Finally I need to share that if this is an area of regret, failure, pain, remember that our God and Father heals, He redeems, He can restore the years that have been ripped away from us, He can heal our past, our memories and give us a new, fresh and living hope. There is forgiveness, there is always forgiveness when we confess and He is the Father always waiting with open arms for us to return home.

And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten  Joel 2:25

Be encouraged, God wants you to experience His incredible love for you and display it through you no matter what you have gone through.