Love, Sex and Marriage

Welcome to the Awakening Church podcast.

We pray this message encourages you and provides the hope and light of Jesus Christ.

Thanks for tuning in.

How many of you seen the Netflix TV show Love is Blind?

Anybody?

Anybody?

A few of you.

Yeah, no, you.

Some of you are like, I'm not really sure if I'm should say that in church.

If you don't know what it is, it's a social relational experiment where singles try to find true love without ever seeing each other.

Love is blind.

They talk through a wall, connect emotionally, and if everything clicks, if everything goes right, they propose before they ever see each other.

I just want to let you know ahead of time, if you haven't seen it, it's wildly addictive.

And so beware if you dive into it, you may binge watch it.

But the show reveals something we all feel deep down.

There is this longing, this craving for real connection that goes below the surface, below skin.

We want to be known.

We want to be loved.

We want to be chosen.

We have so many apps today to help us find love.

Advice is everywhere.

TikTok speaks so eloquently in a short-form therapy on emotional chemistry and intelligence.

Common language around emotional unavailability, love bombing, attachment style, green flags.

These are all so prevalent in our day.

To give us relationship hacks, to somehow get that deep connection and intimacy.

And yet still, why does love feel so hard to find?

And even harder to hold on to.

I'm not sure, but I think Love is Mine may have a better success rate than The Bachelor.

I don't know, but it might.

But in a world of hookups and heartbreaks, does real intimacy still exist?

I mean, is marriage just fundamentally broken, or can it still once again be beautiful?

What if there's more to love sex and marriage than we've been led to believe?

Today the sermon title is Love, Sex and Marriage.

Go ahead and say that to your neighbor.

Yeah, that was weird, wasn't it?

You're like, Ryan, I mmm.

Okay.

We're in this series called Unalone.

God's design for human flourishing.

We're unpacking a chapter, the second chapter in the book of Genesis, the very first book in the Bible that lays out the framework for human flourishing, going back to God's original intent and design.

And before we dive in, I want to give just a little uh disclaimer, if you will, when it comes to flourishing and love, sex and marriage.

And it's simply this marriage and sex are not essential for human flourishing.

You're like, what?

Marriage and sex are not essential for human flourishing.

They are important.

God has designed them, and yet they're not essential to flourish.

And this attacks two idols or lies that we believe, one culturally and the other in the church.

The first culturally is simply this is in our culture, it's to be sexually inactive, is to be less than a whole person.

If you are not expressing your sexuality however you want in the most free way, you are less than a whole person, and that is fundamentally not true.

In the church, there's been a lie that's been in the church that says something along the lines to be single or unmarried is to be less than a whole person.

Like if you're single, like, yeah, it's nice, but until you find your person, you're incomplete, you're lacking.

Must I remind us, we worship and follow a single, celibate, Middle Eastern rabbi named Jesus, who was not incomplete or less than or lacking in any way.

Deborah Hirsch in her book Redeeming Sex writes this.

And so, in light of where that, what is God's original design for love, sex, and marriage?

If you've got your Bibles, would you open up to Genesis chapter 2, Genesis 2, verse 20?

Genesis 2 · chapter mention Genesis 2:20

And it's in your notes if you want to follow along.

It says, But for Adam, no suitable helper was found.

So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep, and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs or his side, and he closed um and then closed up the place with flesh.

Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib, he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.

So first uh Adam just means the word Adam means human, by the way.

Uh it became a uh it just throughout the Hebrew scriptures, Adam means human, Eve means life.

Uh and so it's also a proper name for him.

But the human took one human in the garden, Adam.

And the last week Carolyn talked all about the only not good in the garden would be alone.

So he took the one, divided the one, and made two.

Go ahead and just say two.

There we go.

And then you notice that after he made two, man sang a song.

It wasn't a particularly good or exciting song, but he sang a song.

This is now bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh.

She shall be called woman, for she was taken out of man.

I think it could have been more romantic, but that's okay.

So one became two because aloneness was the key issue.

And then you'll notice, verse 24, we get some insight.

That is why a man leaves his father and mother, is united to his wife, and the two become, help me out, one flesh.

So there's one that becomes two, and then through this sacred, mysterious act of marriage, somehow creates one new entity, one new reality, one flesh.

And then verse 25, and Adam and his wife were both naked and they felt no shame.

We're going to talk about that next week, naked and non-ashamed.

Uh, it's really the whole uh next week is all about how do you experience intimacy?

Not just in a uh a relationship, marriage relationships, just in life.

The deep longing and hunger and desire is to be fully loved and fully known.

And one of our greatest fears is to be fully known and rejected.

And how do you begin to experience intimacy where you're fully known and fully loved?

That's next week.

This week, what is God's design for love, sex, and marriage?

Just the foundational and so important reality is simply this.

God invented love, sex, and marriage.

It was actually his idea from the very beginning.

Love, sex, and marriage isn't a cultural construct, it isn't just a fabrication so that we can somehow figure out, you know, an orderly society.

Uh, scripture tells us that that actually God designed it.

And so if he designed it, then it works best by his design.

And we see in that verse, verse 24, that he said, for this reason a man will leave his father and mother.

Then he'll be united.

Actually, I like the old King James version.

It says they'll cleave.

And then they'll be uh one in flesh.

We actually see through this leave, cleave, one fleshness, God's design and process for love, sex, and marriage.

Let's begin just with leave.

Uh leave is simply maturity.

That you're gonna leave your father and mother, that there's a time, and in fact, as parents, we're raising our kids to be adults, we're raising them to be uh to be able to succeed and move through life without us.

That we're sending them out.

There's a time where you grow up and you're no longer a part of your family, you've matured, and so you begin to step out.

Maturity has the idea of taking on responsibility and ownership for life.

See, maturity, immature people blame people, constantly blame people, constantly are a victim.

They did that.

Mature people take ownership for their emotions, responsibility for their decisions, ownership for their finances.

It's this maturity that we grow up in to.

Um I want to just take a moment, especially if you are uh maybe in dating, just a word when it comes to maturity, and it's simply this do not date a project.

Maybe you said something along the lines of he's got so much potential.

She's just misunderstood.

Other people just don't see what I see.

Yeah, they don't, and you probably shouldn't see it either.

If you're constantly making excuses for someone's instability, emotionally, spiritually, vocationally, that's a red flag, not a romantic story waiting to be written.

Look for patterns, not potential.

Are they already walking in maturity?

Are they already whole without you?

We are not looking for somebody to complete us or fulfill us.

That's the job that only Jesus can fulfill.

And by the way, marriage doesn't magically fix immaturity, it only magnifies it.

An important part of maturity is actually upgrading our understanding and definition of love.

When you're love when you're young, love is this emotion, this force, this feeling.

Uh, as you've gone through it maybe a couple times, you begin to realize and call it what?

Puppy love.

Infatuation.

It's wonderful, it's amazing, it's magical, uh, but it only lasts so long.

And we have to upgrade our definition of love.

Love from just being an emotion to devotion.

That it that it's not just a force or a feeling.

Love is actually a choice, it's a decision of the will.

Devotion is a steadfast commitment of the heart, mind, and will towards someone or something marked by loyalty, sacrifice, love, and action.

That's love.

It's when it has this devotion to one another, to another, this commitment of the heart, commitment of the mind, commitment of the will, marked by loyalty, sacrifice, love.

Here's the problem when we think about love in our modern context, because we buy into this, this modern love promise.

The modern love promise goes something like this when I fall in love, everything will fall into place.

Isn't that like the crux of most of our romantic comedies?

When I fall in love, everything will fall into place.

Oh, it's amazing.

And it goes something like this find the right person, fall in love, live happily ever after.

Find the right person.

And that's a whole nother thing we don't have time to talk about.

Is you never marry the right person.

You actually grow to become the right couple.

Uh find the right person, fall in love.

Isn't it interesting?

We talk about falling in love.

Oh fall.

We never use falling in a positive sense any other way, though.

He fell for it.

She fell off the wagon.

Fell in love.

I don't know.

I don't know what's that going on.

Then live happily ever after.

Now here's the thing: reverse engineer that.

If you're not happily ever after, if there's a problem, well then what do you do?

You fall out of love and you find a new right person.

Leave is this idea of maturity where you upgrade your definition of love from an emotion, a feeling of a force, to devotion.

And so maturity knows this.

Maturity knows that it's less about falling in love and far more about growing in love.

As we grow in love, um we um now here's we can't I came across this picture.

We're doing some cleaning in the house, and uh it was, I saw this picture, check it out.

This is Jenny and I.

We've been married um 22 years this last December.

And that's a picture of us, and at first I was trying to figure out when was this?

And we were talking through, and then I realized as a pastor, I know exactly when this was, because that little envelope, I've seen many of these, uh, that is a marriage certificate.

This was us down at the county clerk's office 22 plus years ago getting our marriage license.

Happy love, about to make the second greatest commitment of our life, the first being the Jesus second to each other.

I got news for you.

I love that woman far more deeply and greatly today than I did back then.

Twenty-two years ago, we stood before an altar and we declared our love, but honestly, I didn't fully know what love was.

I had ideas about it.

Twenty years we've had wonderful times, we've had hard times, we've seen the worst in each other.

She's seen the worst in me.

Isn't it interesting that the people we love the most often get to see the worst and we treat them the worst sometimes?

And through all of those moments and all of the highs and the lows and the wonder that like I'm amazed she's still with me.

I'm not the easiest human.

But love is less about falling in love, it's growing in love, and her love has grown and it has deepened and it's richer.

I know her now in ways I could never have known her 22 years ago.

And walking through every one of those seasons of life, and watching, you know, now three kids later, launching them out, and the richness that comes with that.

Friend, I just gotta tell you, if you keep chasing the emotion, you will never get the depth and the richness of love that God longs for you, and that is just incredible.

And so he says, leave.

It's this idea of maturity.

Then he says, cleave.

Unite.

It's a commitment.

That word cleave, it literally means to um to be glued together in the Hebrew.

It's this unbreakable, unshakable commitment.

What commentators and scholars would tell you is this is the first covenant in Scripture.

That marriage is actually a holy covenant, not a contract.

A holy covenant, I have these cardboard boxes, a covenant is a promise or a pledge to another person that's irrevocable.

It's not dependent on whether they're having a good day, whether they're meeting your needs.

It's I make this promise and I make this pledge to you.

We do it at the altar before God and others, and it's irrevocable.

It's binding, it's unbreakable.

It's the idea of taking two pieces of cardboard like this and putting crazy glue.

I tried it last service, I couldn't get any out.

I'm gonna try it and you bind it together.

Thank God someone else, sweet Bailey, put it together for me.

Where the two become one.

You can't even barely tell there's two here now.

I can't pull it apart.

That's a covenant, commitment.

And yet today we treat marriage more like a contract.

Instead of super glue, we treat it a lot more like velcro.

You know, we stick together, and while it's good, it's great.

But then, you know, we allow uh the weight and pressure of life as it pulls on us.

You know, maybe we have some disagreements in how to parent.

Maybe our jobs and uh our career trajectory or our dreams begin to pull us apart.

Maybe we just allowed each other just to drift.

It's been years and we don't even pay attention to one another, and as it drifts, it just keeps pulling apart.

See, a contract is a lot like my phone contract.

We make a commitment, we sign up, we um we pay the money, and we expect some things in return, some services, some goods for it to, you know, work.

And then you know what happens with the phone contract is there's hidden fees that they didn't tell us about.

All of a sudden those show up, right?

And and then after that, they keep raising the price on me, and then eventually you become dissatisfied with the amount that you're paying to the extent that you want to get out and find another contract.

And that's what we do with marriage, is we get into it, and we thought, like, well, I'm gonna do this for you as long as you do this for me, and as long as that works, then we're good.

And there's all these hidden fees in marriage that we didn't expect.

And it costs more than we ever thought it would cost.

When you believe and understand that your marriage is not velcro contract, that you know what, I'm just it it's it's binding, but you know what?

Enough time, enough force, I can get out of it.

It's super glue, it's unbreakable.

It gives you the foundation to weather every storm.

Come hell or high water through sickness, which this is, and health.

When you don't have a backup plan, when you don't have an eject button, when you realize there's no back door or exit, you just have to work through it.

You go, okay, let's figure it out.

Because you know what the option is not getting out.

Jesus would even say it this way in Matthew 19 for this reason, quoting Genesis, a man will leave his father and mother, be united to His wife and the two will become what something new happened, united, bonded.

So they're no longer two, but one flesh.

Therefore, what who who joined it?

Oh.

Uh-oh.

Who joined it?

What God joined together.

Oh, we've become too casual with marriage.

Allowed it to become some cultural thing and my thing.

And it's like, no, that wedding ceremony is sacred.

It's a holy moment.

God joined it together.

Let no one seek to separate.

There's a oneing that happened here.

Dr.

Preston Sprinkle outlines and defines the orthodox Christian understanding of marriage.

He says, marriage is a lifelong one flesh covenant union between two sexually different persons, male and female from different families, united with the purpose of telling God's story and faithfulness and creativity, and sexual relationships outside this covenant union are a sin.

We'll get to that in a second.

When I do weddings, often we have two sets of vows.

This is kind of the traditional wedding.

And the first set of vows is you have the couple and they're standing and they're facing the pastor facing me.

And they're declaring this before God and these witnesses.

And then the second set of vows is to one another.

The first set of vows, I just read the man's portion, goes like this.

Do you solemnly agree before God and these witnesses to take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife, to love and respect her, to honor and cherish her in health and in sickness, in prosperity and adversity, and leaving all others to keep yourself only unto her so long as you both shall live.

They often say, I do or I will.

See the process.

For one flesh, intimacy is leave.

Cleave, this commitment, worth in it.

And then one flesh.

But in our culture, we've reversed the order.

This is why we're struggling so much relationally, by the way.

Because if it works best by God's design, but we want to do it our own way, we just keep hitting up against it.

Hurting ourselves.

Culturally.

This is where we're at culturally.

It's just hook up.

First date, second date, third date.

I don't know when, but we just hook up.

And eventually, after a season of hooking up, well, we should shack up.

We should live together.

And then after you shack up, eventually what happens statistically at least is you break up.

Hook up.

Shack up.

Break up.

What's interesting is while current generations are delaying marriage for men 30 years of age, for women 28 years of age, they're not delaying the age of first residential union or sexual coupling.

Young people today are living together as couples at the same age as older generations.

They're just doing it outside the setting of marriage.

Cohabitation, by the way, has great uh higher, higher rates of divorce.

You know, something that Jenny and I did when we were first married.

We just made a commitment.

We would never use the D word in our marriage.

We not even joke about it.

Divorce.

Now there's biblical grounds for divorce, whether it's abuse, infidelity, or abandonment.

I've had friends that have walked that painful journey.

Much of the times many people get divorced today is not for any of those reasons.

We just drifted apart.

We just disagree.

We have these financial pressures.

I just let, I don't love him anymore, I don't love her anymore.

I found someone new.

And I deserve to be happy.

And we just said, we'll never ever use the D word in our marriage.

We've invested, and I'm grateful for this in our marriage.

And one of the pictures that I had, I was at another wedding, and I love learning from other pastors.

And this pastor talked about the five stages of relationship.

It was so helpful.

Because for some, you're in a relationship and you're in some of these stages and you're wondering, will it ever get better?

Five stages of relationship go like this.

The honeymoon stage.

In the honeymoon stage, it's that puppy love, it's the infatuation euphoric.

Scientifically, it lasts anywhere between six months to two years.

Um you say they're perfect, never change.

Never change.

That's funny.

Never change.

Because then you move from that to the disillusionment stage.

And in the disillusionment stage, you begin to say this if only they would change.

Like if they would just change this habit, this response, if they would do this, our marriage, our relationship, everything would be better.

I know I'm messed up and I may bring a little bit to the party, but if they would change this, it would fix it all.

And the disillusionment stage then moves to the misery stage where you just finally realize I can't change them.

I can't change them.

And you do, couples do all sorts of things.

Maybe you add kids to the mix to try to figure some things out, and that doesn't always help or ever help.

So maybe you figure out, well, let's just move.

We need to venture, we need to spice stuff up.

And the problem is you bring the old you to your new place, and you have all the old patterns that come into that.

And but at the misery stage, you go like, I just can't, I can't change them.

And then you have the awakening stage.

This is powerful.

You stop trying to change them and you begin to ask, what can I do to change?

I like the old adage, it doesn't matter how flat a pancake, there's always two sides.

And and the thing is, is no matter where you're at in the relationship, you can look at the other and like, man, they have 90% of the problem.

I only have 10%.

Well, deal with your 10%.

Because if you finally realize I can't change anyone, and as long as I keep trying to change you, I'm only making things worse.

But if I begin to ask, what can I do to change?

How can I respond differently?

Maybe there's some maturity issues in me that I've brought in from that I need to grow and develop in emotionally, spiritually, relationally.

And you ask, what can I do to change?

As you begin to ask that, it is a process, it is hard work, then you move into the intimacy stage where your differences don't divide you, they begin to be an opportunity to unite you, where you're better together.

Now, you don't just move so easily through all five of these stages, you kind of revisit them through different seasons of life.

One of the best things that I'm so grateful for that Jenny and I did, it was a little over ten years ago, is we were in kind of that misery stage, or you know, like I can't change them, we're struggling.

And a mentor of ours gave us uh a therapist to reach out to, and her name's Sue.

We love Sue.

We talk about Sue almost like she's part of our family.

In the early years, we saw Sue like every other week, and it was just hard work trying to figure things out.

Then eventually it was once a month.

Now it's like, you know, these check-ins that we do with her.

It was so helpful to have someone on the outside because we were stuck in no amount of one person explaining or the other person explaining.

If we just caught in this cycle that we couldn't get out of, and then to have someone outside be able to speak into and see it, it was like, whoa, this is amazing.

And it's so helpful.

And something that we talk about, especially when we're meeting with young couples that are getting married, is just simply this little bit of advice.

If you invest in your marriage the same amount of time that you invest in your wedding day, you're gonna be set up like to have a flourishing marriage.

Think about it.

This is amazing.

Think about the time, the money, the energy intentionality that goes into a single day.

Let's just talk about the money.

Um, so like the cheapest amount of that you can do a wedding today.

I mean, you so you can really scrap it and people do it, but but like 30 grand.

I said the first service, and people just laughed.

Like, no, you can't do a wedding for 30 grand.

100 grand.

I got a daughter, I gotta start saving up for that.

Think about the massive amount of money.

Spend an entire year planning.

You have a bridal book, they don't have that anymore.

You have a bridal website, you have an app that you see, it organizes everything, and then we get married and we go into autopilot.

No wonder we're struggling.

No wonder.

If you just begin to invest in your marriage, it will pay incredible dividends.

Cleave.

Maturity, cleave, commitments.

And it says, and the two became one flesh, intimacy.

This language here for one flesh is speaking specifically sexually.

It's speaking that actually that oneness that happens, the the is happening through sexual intimacy.

It's the glue that bonds us.

Scientifically, we see this and know that when we have sex, that there is actually chemicals and hormones that are released that are called bonding chemicals, that it bonds you to the other person, that there is a uniting that happens that's more than just physical.

And we must understand this that sex is more than just physical, it's spiritual, it's sacred, it's holy.

Tim Keller in The Meaning of Marriage said this about sexuality.

He says, sex is a God-invented way to say to another person, I belong completely and exclusively and permanently to you.

The picture often when we talk about sex is this idea of a fire.

The fire in a fireplace is in that construct, it provides warmth and life.

In the wild, we've experienced the devastations here in California.

It brings destruction.

You see, God is actually not down on sex, he wants you to have the best sex ever.

And so he's created the space where you have maturity, a commitment that brings safety and intimacy.

Where you can experience full freedom.

And so the test drive before you buy, that's stupid.

Making sure you're sexually compatible, that's a myth.

It's interesting, 52% of singles have had a one-night stand, 41% of singles have friends with benefits, and yet 84% say sex is better when you're in love.

The Journal for Sex Research, yes, there is a journal for this, found that emotional connection, long-term commitment, and trust are the top predictors of great sex, not casual encounters or sexual variety.

Who has the best sex?

You're just not gonna believe this.

I know I'm a pastor.

So you're like, he he like is making some of this stuff up.

He's just this is research.

I am not lying.

This is like, this isn't, I this is not Christian research.

This is out of the University of Virginia.

Who has the best sex?

Listen, married, I'm not religious couples, especially those who attend church regularly, report the highest level of sexual satisfaction and frequency.

Why?

Because God designed love, sex, and marriage, and it works best by his design, it just does.

And when we go outside of that, it's not like God's down on us in any way.

It just means we keep breaking ourselves against his design, and so we hurt ourselves.

And so as we close, just a couple thoughts.

Some of us are here today and feeling the sting of a past relationship.

Maybe you've been burned by a love that was blind.

You gave your heart or your body your trust, and it just didn't last.

Now you're wondering, especially going for like I can I ever experience God's design?

Have I gone too far?

Am I too broken?

Other of us are carrying a weight of a struggling marriage.

You're trying to make it work, you're gonna get tired.

You're in what feels like the misery stage with no end in sight.

And you're asking, is it ever gonna get better?

And then those who are single, maybe you feel like something's missing or somehow incomplete.

And the truth is, no matter where you find yourself today, you are not alone.

You are not alone.

There's a God who sees you, not the curated version, but the real you.

And if you'll let him into your story, he won't just fix up what's broken, he'll begin to write a brand new story.

Story of healing, story of hope, story of wholeness.

And so where are you?

What are the aches and the pains and the heartaches?

Would you invite him into your story?

Just right now.

Invite him into your story, invite him into the longings, invite him into the disappointments, invite him into the abuse that has so been a shadow in your life.

The places you've kept closed off, hoping just won't go away.

Would you invite him in right now?

Heavenly Father, invite you into my story.

Would you write and begin to write a new story?

Would you breathe healing right now?

Would you breathe wholeness?

Would you breathe fresh forgiveness?

Would you lift the burden and the shame and the pain right now?

We hope you are blessed by this message.

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