Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, Ecclesiastes 3:11, Luke 15:11-32, Proverbs 20:29, Psalm 90:10-12
Someone once quipped that we spend the first half of our lives struggling with the sixth commandment ( Thou shalt not commit adultery ) and the second half of our lives struggling with the fifth comma...
In ancient Judaism, discipleship was taken very seriously. It was taken so seriously that eager disciples would ty to follow their rabbi (teacher) everywhere they went. Why? Because they wanted to see...
When human beings give their heartfelt allegiance to and worship that which is not God, they progressively cease to reflect the image of God. One of the primary laws of human life is that you become l...
In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the ...
Genesis 2:24-25, Song of Solomon 7:6-9 , Proverbs 5:18-19, 1 Corinthians 7:3-5, Ephesians 5:31-32, Psalm 63:1-5
Despite what now appears to me to be the overwhelmingly obvious connections between spirituality and sexuality, when I first came to faith and went to church, I had the sneaking suspicion that God had...
The great danger is to always single out some aspect of God’s good creation and identify it, rather than the alien intrusion of sin, as the villain. Such an error conceives of the good-evil dichotomy ...
Augustine of Hippo's (63AD-114) Confessions is widely considered to be one of the most important books ever written, some consider it the world’s first biography. Augustine's early life was ch...
Desire—eros, or erotic desire, to be more specific—kicked in pretty early in my life. I was often overwhelmed by a gnawing hunger and thirst I didn’t know how to handle. God bless my parents and my Ca...
Think of your own experiences as a human being: your body is not just a “shell” in which you dwell. Your body is not just a body. Your body is not just any body. Your body is somebody—you! Through the...
I never met my father-in-law; he died when my wife was a young girl. But I admire him tremendously because of the intuition he had as a new husband. At church the day after his wedding, having consumm...
The early church was strikingly different from the culture around it in this way - the pagan society was stingy with its money and promiscuous with its body. A pagan gave nobody their money and practi...
1 Corinthians 7:1-9, Matthew 19:3-12 , Psalm 139:13-16 , Genesis 2:18-25, Song of Solomon 4:1-16, Proverbs 5:15-19, Genesis 2:18
James Nelson describes sexuality as the central clue to what God is up to in the world. While this might seem a little over the top, when you think about it, sexuality factors integrally in our relati...
It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignora...
Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you’re going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth, and you should save it for som...
God made every one of us a sexual being, and that is good. Attraction and arousal are the natural, spontaneous, God-given responses to physical beauty, while lust is a deliberate act of the will.
Genesis 1:27-28, Genesis 29:20, Song of Solomon 2:16-17 , 1 Corinthians 7:3-5 , Ephesians 5:25-32 , Psalm 63:1-5
The late psychiatrist M. Scott Peck was convinced that buried in our explicit pursuit of sex is an implicit pursuit of God. He noted that sex is likely to be the closest that most people ever come to ...
The Hebrew word yada (“to know”) is, in fact, used for both sexual intercourse as well as our relationship with God. Every relational event is a stage that affords one a glimpse into the consumm...
In the Hebrew lexicon, there are multiple words for love, but one of my favorites is the word dod. Although it is often rendered “love,” dod refers specifically to sexual love and is better translated...
Think how intertwined sex is with the very reality of human existence. You simply would not exist without the sexual union of your parents . . . and their parents . . . and their parents . . . and the...
The appreciation of life in the body includes embracing our maleness or our femaleness, and thus our sexuality, as a gift from God that helps to reveal his true nature. None of us exists in this world...
Proverbs 16:9, Jeremiah 29:11, John 15:1-27, Proverbs 3:5-6, Galatians 2:20, Matthew 6:25-34
In their excellent book Invitation to a Journey , M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton describe the foundation of life as being spiritual in nature. This means we are constantly be “formed” s...
A source of the intensest pleasure earthlings can experience, sex has also been a source of vexatious trouble for the human family since the beginning of history.
Former cultures, whatever their faults, understood the imperialistic nature of energy, especially of spiritual, erotic energy. For the most part, they feared energy, particularly sexual and religious ...
…the body is not only biological. Since we’re made in the image of God as male and female, the body…is also theological. It tells an astounding divine story. And it does so precisely through the myste...