We're honored to be joined again by author and speaker Paul Tripp on the Ask Pastor John podcast. He is the author of several books, including the book Sex and Money. I have a bigger question for Christian leaders later, but first, Paul, we frequently receive heartbreaking emails from listeners of this podcast, specifically from wives who are feeling increasingly uncomfortable about the sexual expectations that their husbands bring into the bedroom.

Not all, but many of these women recognize this as the influence of pornography on the men, pushing husbands to expect increasingly lurid acts from their wives. So what would you say to women in this situation and what would you say to the men as well? Well, it should never be the situation where a woman, after having sex with her husband, feels put upon, feels demeaned, feels dirty, feels guilty, thinks that maybe she's done something that's not pleasing to God, walks away with shame.

Shame in marital sex is a screaming, flashing alarm because shame should not be part of marital sex. It's the one place where sex isn't to be shameful. Now if I have those shame feelings, it means that I have been forced to do things that I don't understand that my conscience is pushing against because the person who I'm having sex with is demanding rather than serving.

I mean, how could it be anything else? So I'm pushed to places that I'm not comfortable in and that is clearly what's going on there. Now to the men, I would say this, I think that one of the lies of the cultural view of sex is that sex is all about titillation, that it's got to have that almost dark titillation to it or it's not exciting.

I'm going to say this and any honest married couple will say, I'm glad this man said this, marital sex is not titillating. It quits being titillating. It becomes normal and regular and it's a regular expression of the love and the pleasure that God has given us in our relationship with one another.

The titillating thing is I've got to have more, I've got to do more, I've got to do more wild and weird things, I've got to do it in secret. All that stuff I don't think is fundamentally what God meant sex to be. It's this regular expression of exciting physical love and pleasure between people who know themselves well and who are doing this together, who are seeking to please and to serve one another and they in the act feeling loved by God, loved by one another, satisfied and thankful, not guilty and shamed or mad because you wouldn't do what I want you to do.

This porn becomes pervasive, is this going to become a greater problem? Here's what I would say about that, absolutely, but it's not first a pornography problem. It's an ownership of my pleasure problem that makes pornography a problem. If I own my pleasure, then I'm going to keep looking for things that give me more pleasure regardless of what it means to the other person.

So, if I get pleasure wrong, again, I weaken my defenses against pornography and the demandingness that I carry into the marital bed. Okay, a follow-up question for leaders who want to be proactive in this. Looking at this from a bigger context, I mean, the church seems to have a very strategic role in demythologizing sex, that is dethroning the cultural idol of sex, and then remythologizing sex, that is, you know, showing God's full intent for it.

How would you encourage pastors to do both of these things well? Absolutely. Well, I think that here's the state of things. While the world, the culture around us never stops talking about sex, the church has been strangely quiet, strangely embarrassed, strangely reticent. Sex is a pure gift that God has given us.

It's a beautiful thing. It points to God's holiness, his glory, his love, his faithfulness, his grace. You could argue that the gift of sex preaches the gospel of who God is and what he does for his creatures. So we don't have to be embarrassed about sex. I would say this.

Sex belongs to the church. It belongs to people who honor God, because it's only those people who are ever going to understand it properly and participate in it properly. So we should not be silent. We should celebrate human sexuality, because that celebrates the glory and the wisdom and the goodness of God.

And then what we need to do is teach people how to think in distinctively biblical ways about sex. And I think that's actually fairly simple. It's the distinction I make in the Sex and Money book between big picture sex and little picture sex. What the culture does is isolate sex as a thing unto itself.

Sex is sex, end of story. It's not necessarily connected to anything but my pleasure. That's heinously unbiblical view of sex. Sex is connected to everything. It's connected to the doctrine of creation. God created sex. He owns sex. It's connected to the authority of God. God has the right to tell us what to do in sex.

It's connected to the nature of the fallen world and the surprise that this area gets distorted and bent and twisted. It's connected to my relationship with people. I'm called to love my neighbor as myself. Sex is never an unrelational thing. It's always about relationship. So there's all these cords that connect sex to bigger, larger things.

And when it's pulled by all those cords, it lives in the middle where it's supposed to live. And what we need to do is we need to connect all those cords for God's people in good preaching and good teaching. Because once you understand that, it's impossible for you to think of sex in isolation anymore.

Thank you, Paul. That's Paul Tripp, the author of the book Sex and Money. You should check it out. It's a very helpful book. And you can get everything you want to know about this podcast at our landing page. Go to DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. We'll be back tomorrow with guest Paul Tripp.

Bye.