Biblical Foundations: The Moral Core
When we come to faith in Christ, God calls us to adopt an entirely different mind-set from the two competing views in our world. Christian faith invites us into a world where God has given meaning to our humanness and our sexuality and has revealed the core of that meaning to us in the Scripture and in the person of Jesus Christ. The Christian worldview is one of beauty, purpose, meaning, complexity, and depth. It is compelling. It is the truth, and it leads us toward everything that is ultimately good for us.
Christians believe that the world and our sexuality are not the result of random chance but of divine design. We live in a world that bears the imprint of its Creator across its entire spectrum. The crown of that creation is humanity. No part of the creation is as deliberately and deeply marked with meaning as men and women. Sex and sexuality, rather than being meaningless, are a key aspect of what it means to be created in the image of God.
In being made men and women who inevitably feel the urge for union with another whom we love, we learn experientially that we are incomplete in ourselves and that we need union with another who is “an other” (male to female, female to male) to be truly ourselves. And praise God, because we are made in his image, we believe love is real and can endure. Yet no marriage, no matter how wonderful, ever fully satisfies our need for completion. Through our sexuality, we are directed beyond ourselves to God for that completion.
Christian marriages teach the world about God’s love for his people by serving as earthly models of this heavenly truth (Ephesians 5:25-33). Similarly, godly singleness models the way in which individual human beings reflect the image of God and serve the world by standing as a witness of the true meaning of faithfulness to Christ.
These truths together give us the following meaningful answers to the two critical components of the “Why is it wrong?” question:
“What does sex mean?” Sex is not meant for casual pleasure. Sex has intrinsic and powerful meaning: It creates a one-flesh union; it is a major ingredient of the glue that is intended and designed to bond one man and one woman together for life. Sexual union is meant as a unifying agent in a beautiful lifelong marriage. But love itself is deeper and more real than sex, and so we believe in marriages that are real, permanent, and profound unions in which two become one flesh!
“Why does the Bible say that sex outside of marriage is wrong?” Because it is a misuse of one of God’s most precious gifts, one that demeans and insults the intention of the gift (not to mention the Gift-Giver as well) and hurts more than helps us. What we all truly want in our hearts is not just good sex, but real love. Real love is rooted in faithfulness; sex outside of marriage betrays the real love we all really want.
Some content taken from HOW AND WHEN TO TELL YOUR KIDS ABOUT SEX, by Stan and Brenna Jones. Copyright © 1993, 2007, 2019. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. To purchase books in the GOD’S DESIGN FOR SEX book series, go to www.navpress.com.