The Church’s Role in Sexual Mythology
00:00:00.000 | We're honored to be joined again by author and speaker Paul Tripp on the Ask Pastor John
00:00:09.280 | podcast.
00:00:10.280 | He is the author of several books, including the book Sex and Money.
00:00:14.400 | I have a bigger question for Christian leaders later, but first, Paul, we frequently receive
00:00:19.040 | heartbreaking emails from listeners of this podcast, specifically from wives who are feeling
00:00:24.600 | increasingly uncomfortable about the sexual expectations that their husbands bring into
00:00:29.760 | the bedroom.
00:00:31.200 | Not all, but many of these women recognize this as the influence of pornography on the
00:00:35.880 | men, pushing husbands to expect increasingly lurid acts from their wives.
00:00:41.240 | So what would you say to women in this situation and what would you say to the men as well?
00:00:45.640 | Well, it should never be the situation where a woman, after having sex with her husband,
00:00:55.440 | feels put upon, feels demeaned, feels dirty, feels guilty, thinks that maybe she's done
00:01:02.960 | something that's not pleasing to God, walks away with shame.
00:01:08.240 | Shame in marital sex is a screaming, flashing alarm because shame should not be part of
00:01:17.440 | marital sex.
00:01:19.040 | It's the one place where sex isn't to be shameful.
00:01:22.840 | Now if I have those shame feelings, it means that I have been forced to do things that
00:01:32.680 | I don't understand that my conscience is pushing against because the person who I'm having
00:01:39.280 | sex with is demanding rather than serving.
00:01:44.240 | I mean, how could it be anything else?
00:01:46.720 | So I'm pushed to places that I'm not comfortable in and that is clearly what's going on there.
00:01:57.520 | Now to the men, I would say this, I think that one of the lies of the cultural view
00:02:05.640 | of sex is that sex is all about titillation, that it's got to have that almost dark titillation
00:02:13.480 | to it or it's not exciting.
00:02:15.560 | I'm going to say this and any honest married couple will say, I'm glad this man said this,
00:02:22.240 | marital sex is not titillating.
00:02:24.160 | It quits being titillating.
00:02:26.000 | It becomes normal and regular and it's a regular expression of the love and the pleasure that
00:02:37.560 | God has given us in our relationship with one another.
00:02:42.400 | The titillating thing is I've got to have more, I've got to do more, I've got to do
00:02:48.920 | more wild and weird things, I've got to do it in secret.
00:02:54.200 | All that stuff I don't think is fundamentally what God meant sex to be.
00:03:01.720 | It's this regular expression of exciting physical love and pleasure between people who know
00:03:09.720 | themselves well and who are doing this together, who are seeking to please and to serve one
00:03:17.560 | another and they in the act feeling loved by God, loved by one another, satisfied and
00:03:27.200 | thankful, not guilty and shamed or mad because you wouldn't do what I want you to do.
00:03:35.320 | This porn becomes pervasive, is this going to become a greater problem?
00:03:40.200 | Here's what I would say about that, absolutely, but it's not first a pornography problem.
00:03:44.800 | It's an ownership of my pleasure problem that makes pornography a problem.
00:03:50.000 | If I own my pleasure, then I'm going to keep looking for things that give me more pleasure
00:03:56.320 | regardless of what it means to the other person.
00:03:58.760 | So, if I get pleasure wrong, again, I weaken my defenses against pornography and the demandingness
00:04:06.640 | that I carry into the marital bed.
00:04:08.720 | Okay, a follow-up question for leaders who want to be proactive in this.
00:04:13.760 | Looking at this from a bigger context, I mean, the church seems to have a very strategic
00:04:18.960 | role in demythologizing sex, that is dethroning the cultural idol of sex, and then remythologizing
00:04:27.280 | sex, that is, you know, showing God's full intent for it.
00:04:31.740 | How would you encourage pastors to do both of these things well?
00:04:35.240 | Absolutely.
00:04:36.240 | Well, I think that here's the state of things.
00:04:41.960 | While the world, the culture around us never stops talking about sex, the church has been
00:04:49.280 | strangely quiet, strangely embarrassed, strangely reticent.
00:04:56.440 | Sex is a pure gift that God has given us.
00:05:01.760 | It's a beautiful thing.
00:05:03.400 | It points to God's holiness, his glory, his love, his faithfulness, his grace.
00:05:10.380 | You could argue that the gift of sex preaches the gospel of who God is and what he does
00:05:15.240 | for his creatures.
00:05:16.680 | So we don't have to be embarrassed about sex.
00:05:20.000 | I would say this.
00:05:22.520 | Sex belongs to the church.
00:05:24.580 | It belongs to people who honor God, because it's only those people who are ever going
00:05:29.280 | to understand it properly and participate in it properly.
00:05:33.080 | So we should not be silent.
00:05:35.680 | We should celebrate human sexuality, because that celebrates the glory and the wisdom and
00:05:42.560 | the goodness of God.
00:05:44.360 | And then what we need to do is teach people how to think in distinctively biblical ways
00:05:53.960 | about sex.
00:05:54.960 | And I think that's actually fairly simple.
00:05:58.240 | It's the distinction I make in the Sex and Money book between big picture sex and little
00:06:04.440 | picture sex.
00:06:06.480 | What the culture does is isolate sex as a thing unto itself.
00:06:11.600 | Sex is sex, end of story.
00:06:14.000 | It's not necessarily connected to anything but my pleasure.
00:06:18.200 | That's heinously unbiblical view of sex.
00:06:22.480 | Sex is connected to everything.
00:06:26.240 | It's connected to the doctrine of creation.
00:06:28.440 | God created sex.
00:06:30.000 | He owns sex.
00:06:31.240 | It's connected to the authority of God.
00:06:33.800 | God has the right to tell us what to do in sex.
00:06:37.600 | It's connected to the nature of the fallen world and the surprise that this area gets
00:06:43.140 | distorted and bent and twisted.
00:06:45.540 | It's connected to my relationship with people.
00:06:48.240 | I'm called to love my neighbor as myself.
00:06:50.240 | Sex is never an unrelational thing.
00:06:53.040 | It's always about relationship.
00:06:54.800 | So there's all these cords that connect sex to bigger, larger things.
00:07:01.800 | And when it's pulled by all those cords, it lives in the middle where it's supposed to
00:07:06.760 | live.
00:07:07.760 | And what we need to do is we need to connect all those cords for God's people in good preaching
00:07:14.920 | and good teaching.
00:07:17.080 | Because once you understand that, it's impossible for you to think of sex in isolation anymore.
00:07:22.400 | Thank you, Paul.
00:07:24.080 | That's Paul Tripp, the author of the book Sex and Money.
00:07:26.440 | You should check it out.
00:07:27.440 | It's a very helpful book.
00:07:28.440 | And you can get everything you want to know about this podcast at our landing page.
00:07:32.280 | Go to DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:07:33.680 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:07:38.120 | We'll be back tomorrow with guest Paul Tripp.
00:07:40.000 | Bye.
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