Love Handles – Sex & Intimacy

This podcast is presented to you by Pastor Jason Burns and Access Church in Lakeland, Florida.

For more information, visit Access.tv.

Alright, everybody.

We there's no good way to transition.

We're talking about sex today.

That's what we're gonna do.

So let me be honest, let me be up front.

I only have one goal today.

My goal is to get through this message without embarrassing my wife.

This is my goal.

Trying to get you some without costing me any.

That's the point, everybody.

And uh it's the third service, and I'm tired.

It might be a little looser up in here today.

So buckle in, it's gonna be fun.

Um, want to help you, I really do.

Hey, you ever um you ever walk into a conversation at the exact wrong moment?

You ever had this happen to you?

People are having a conversation, you walk in and someone says something really awkward and pathetic in that moment, you're like, what in the world?

A couple years ago, I was on my way into the Brandon Mall.

And if you've ever been there, the Brandon Mall is a great mall, but there's kind of like a dining area that you walk through to get into the main entrance of the mall.

And so I was walking in by myself and right past Cheesecake Factory, where there's those outdoor tables.

And as I was walking by, I don't know what was happening, I don't know what they were talking about, but two ladies at a table were talking, and one lady takes her fork and knife and slams it down on the table, and really loudly she says out loud, it's just bleeping sex.

I bleeped it for you, it's just bleeping sex.

And as soon as she said that, I looked and we caught eyes.

And it was one of the most awkward three seconds of my whole life.

She didn't know what to do.

But here's the question Is it is sex just sex?

Is it just physical?

Is it just two bodies trying to get joy and pleasure for a moment?

Is that all that it is, or is it possible that there is something way more profound, something deeper, something spiritual even that happens in the act of sexual intimacy?

Is it possible that there's more?

And I would like to submit to you that there absolutely is so much more going on.

Now, all of us know this is true because sexual hurt and sexual pain is it's different than other pain.

If you've ever been lied to about something, if you've ever had something small stolen from you, if you've ever been cheated on on a test of some kind, that hurts.

But when sex and sexuality gets mixed into it, doesn't it hurt a little bit more?

Like when he abused you, when he assaulted you, when when she left you, doesn't it carry different kinds of pain and weight?

It does, and we know this is true.

And yet, in spite of all of that, in spite of all the pain and all the remorse that can get attached to our sexuality, it's fascinating.

We are the most addicted to sex culture in the history of the world.

Well, we just are.

Everything is about sex.

Like in fact, I went on Amazon and I looked up some numbers.

If you go to Amazon and you search for books by these topics, the topic of marriage, there's 200,000 or so books.

The topic of attraction, there's 90,000.

But sex has more than marriage and attraction combined with over 300,000 books about the topic.

We're obsessed with it.

We'll do anything we can to get it.

It's like for some reason in our minds we bought into this idea that we all need sex.

Can I offer you this thought?

You don't need sex.

Sex is not a need.

Sex can be a desire, it can be a craving of your soul, but sex is not a need.

Air is a need.

Water is a need, food is a need, but sex is not a need.

Sex is not a need.

Sex is a desire of your heart and a craving of your soul.

But I would like to submit to you today that there's something else underneath all of that.

That is what God intended you to pursue.

And let me tell you something.

God, He hardwired you this way.

Now, when you think of sex, what do you think of?

What imagery comes to your mind?

Not the act of sex, but what sex is, what comes to your mind?

Well, I'd like to submit to you, it's usually one of three things.

Most of us think of sex as either gross, a God, or a gift.

It's either gross, a god, or a gift.

You can say, what does it mean?

We'll start with this first one.

For a lot of people, and I would even add, especially Christians who grew up going to church as a kid in religious families, sex is seen as gross.

You say, what does it mean?

Well, we're taught from an early age that sex is bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.

And then you stand on an altar, have a 15-minute ceremony, and all of a sudden it's good.

Have fun.

Can you see how psychologically damaging this would be?

Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.

Oh, now it's okay.

No, no.

That's never what scripture says.

In fact, what scripture teaches is sex is good and it's a gift from God reserved for the season that God has for it, which is marriage.

So, parents, if you're in the room and you have students, don't teach them that it's bad.

Teach them that it's a good gift from God, but it's reserved for marriage and there's a reason for it.

I'll never forget as a kid growing up in church, I had this really awkward experience.

Um, when I was like 13 or 14, my youth pastor moved away to go to another job somewhere.

And so they didn't hire a new youth pastor right away.

So for several years, we were preached to by people that probably had no business preaching to us.

They were different youth leaders and volunteers.

And one night, this man got up with this sex talk.

We're gonna talk about sex, it'll be awesome.

So we were all excited about it.

And he hands every student in the youth ministry an Oreo.

Anybody love a good Oreo?

I love me some Oreos, right?

Miss me with the knockoff brands.

I don't do that.

Like it's Oreo, ride or die.

That's how I live.

And Oreo, like, there's only one way to eat it, right?

Double stuff.

Miss me with single stuff.

They shouldn't even call that a cookie, double stuff or nothing.

You ever just go to the grocery store and just for enjoyment?

You ever walk down the Oreo aisle just to see what the psychopath flavors they've come up with?

You ever do that?

It's like, who needs peanut butter and jelly Oreos, right?

Just give me the regular.

So the youth pastor gives everybody an Oreo.

He says, here's what I want you to do.

Everybody take your Oreo, hold it up and think about it for a moment.

How many of you love Oreo?

Yeah, we love Oreos, cool.

Smell it.

We smell it, cool.

He goes, here's what I want you to do.

Take your Oreo, twist it open, and I want you to lick it.

So we all lick the Oreo.

He goes, Okay, cool.

Now put it back together and hand it to the person on your right.

This was pre-COVID, everybody.

Everybody chill.

So we all do that.

And you know, you hand it, and the other person's like, okay, fine, and we took it.

And here's what I want you to do.

Take it and I want you to lick the outside of the Oreo.

Kind of gross, so we lick it.

Hand it to the person on the right, so we do that, and it's just gross.

Flip it over, lick the other side, and hand it to the person beside you.

By now, there's like Oreo juice in your hand, you know.

Oh what, Oreo juice is not okay, whatever.

Like this is disgusting.

Here's what I want you to do.

Pass it to another person, take it, twist it open.

I want you just to spit just a little bit into the Oreo and close it up and hand it to the person beside you.

So we all do this.

And then he comes out with this line that I'm sure he thought was brilliant.

He says, Now, how many of you would want to eat this disgusting, used up Oreo?

And everybody's like, yeah, and then there's that one weird kid in the back who's like, I'll still eat it, whatever, but you know.

Nobody wants it, right?

And he goes, when you have sex with someone that you're not married to, you become like the used up, lift up, spit-upon Oreo.

And as like a 14-year-old boy, I'm like, I gotta protect my Oreo.

Like, I don't want, I don't want anyone after this, right?

Okay, but think about the message this sends.

Think about it, right?

Think about the message this portrays.

That if you have sex, you're dirty, you're worthless, all of the sudden shame gets introduced into our stories.

For many of us, the idea of sex is gross and we're told it's bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.

And then we get married and somehow it's now okay and it's good.

You just need to understand that sex is a gift from God reserved for its season.

So for many of us, sex is gross.

There's a whole nother audience of us that think of sex not as gross, but it's a God.

And what I mean by that is we worship it.

It has our every thought, it gets all of our emotion.

We think about it all the time.

We we crave it, we desire it, and it's everywhere around us, isn't it?

You can't watch a TV show.

You can't watch a Sunday night football game on TV with your kids without seeing a commercial with the couple ripping their clothes off and falling into bed together.

It is literally pervasive.

It's everywhere around us.

You can't go to Publix and check out and you see the magazines, and it's like Cosmopolitan Magazine, 13 Ways to Blow His Mind.

Even men's magazines, it's like Auto Mechanics Weekly, Three Ways to Tune Her Engine or something.

It's just like everything's sexual.

It's all sexy.

And so we worship it, and it was never intended to take that place of God in our hearts.

But then, but then there is God's intention.

It's that we would see sex as a gift from God.

Okay, let me say this to you.

When we see sex as a gift, when we understand that it was God's idea, that God made it as a gift for us.

And when expressed in marriage under his rules and his way, sex is actually us worshiping God.

After the second service, I had this man come up to me and says, I'm gonna go home and try to worship right now.

And I'm like, Ain't nobody got time for that, bro.

It's like just get out of here.

It's actually worshiping God, it's it's a gift from God.

Let me explain it to you like this.

Genesis chapter 1.

Genesis 1 · chapter mention

It says, In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and with his words, he spoke the universe into existence.

He created stars and galaxies farther than we'll ever be able to reach with modern science.

Scientists believe that God placed more stars out in space than there are grains of sand on the whole earth.

And God did all of that with his words.

And he hung the sun, the moon, the stars, and he littered the the planet with all kinds of amazing animals and trees and fruits and vegetables, and he created beetles and those weird little fish at the bottom of the ocean and everything in between.

And all of it screams of his power, and all of it screams of his majesty.

And then at the end of his creation, he creates this man, Adam.

Adam literally means from the ground, from the dirt, and he breathes into him the breath of life.

The word breath in Hebrew is the same word that we would use for spirit, like the spirit of God.

So what's interesting is God breathes his spirit into Adam, and that's what makes him come alive.

So if you've ever doubted the existence of God, just go because you're living on borrowed breath.

That is the spirit of God, which fun side note, when you worship and you use your voice and you use your breath to worship God, it is returning to God what belonged to him in the first place.

Really cool way to view worship.

So he creates this man, breathes into him the breath of life.

And then he puts Adam in this place, this interesting place.

It's a place called the Garden of Eden.

Eden literally means pleasure and delight.

He places Adam in this place called the Garden of Eden, pleasure and delight.

And he's living the bachelor's dream, isn't he?

The whole world is his bathroom, he's naked, he gets to hang out with animals, he gets to name all the animals, and yet there was something missing.

There was something missing from him, and it wasn't sex.

What was missing from Adam was something so much more profound.

He was missing intimacy.

Intimacy is an inner closeness and a depth of relationship.

He could have friendship with animals, he could hang out with animals, but there was an inner closeness, a depth of relationship.

There was a certain amount of being known that was missing from Adam in this moment.

And so God realizes it and God forms from him woman.

Now I want you to notice a couple very important things.

Before God even creates Adam, he set in motion some rules for what this was going to look like.

Genesis 1, I believe it's verse 28, he says this.

Essentially, what God was saying is, I want you to have sex, but the reason for the sex is procreation.

Make more life, fill the earth with life.

That's what I want.

But if sex was only for procreation, then we'd be missing so much.

In fact, there are whole churches and denominations and networks of churches that teach that literally this verse means that the only point of having sex was literally just to make to make babies.

That's the whole point of it.

But that that's not God's intention.

God made Adam and Eve and He put them in a place called the Garden of Pleasure and the Garden of Dight.

Sex was always God's idea.

And in marriage, I said earlier, in marriage, sex is actually a form of worshiping God.

Here's what's so funny: Sex is such a vulnerable act.

It just is.

Like even when you're married, even if you have no kids, even if you have no pets at the house at all, very often you'll go to the bedroom and you'll shut and lock the door because there is this part of us that wants to keep it hidden.

There's this part that we just feel we feel vulnerable.

We feel naked, not just physically naked, but we just feel like you're gonna see all of me.

But I just want to offer you this thought.

It was God's idea.

And having sex in your marriage is actually honoring God.

I said this in one of the services earlier.

It's not like what happened is God created Adam and Eve, placed them in this garden of pleasure and delight, turned his back for two minutes and looked back, and they were having sex, and he's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, get off of her.

It wasn't like that.

It's not how it was, it was always his idea.

So Adam's alone in this place of pleasure and delight.

He's told to fill the earth and subdue it, but he has no one to do that with.

So Genesis chapter 2, verse 20 says this.

Genesis 2:20

So the man gave names to all the livestock, all the birds in the sky, and the wild animals, but for Adam no suitable helper was found.

That there was no one, there was no companion to do this thing called life with.

So it says, the Lord God, next verse, caused the man to fall into a deep sleep.

And while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and closed up the place with flesh.

Let's pause here for just a moment.

This is how God creates Eve.

He literally takes one of Adam's ribs, he closes the place up, and from it he creates Eve.

But before it, I want to do a very, very loose, very, very loose exegesis of this text.

He uses this word, and the word is flesh.

What's interesting is in the epistles, which are some of the letters written by Paul, he also uses the word flesh, but when he talks about flesh, it means our sinful human nature.

It's the sinful part of who we are.

I just want to say this to you.

If you're single in this room today and you're waiting on God to bring you the man or the woman of your dreams, he's not gonna do it until you close up that sinful place of flesh in your own life.

What does that mean?

Like, quit the porn habits.

It does nothing but objectify people, it strips them of their humanity, it robs sex of its beauty and its joy.

Stop your lustful thinking.

If you find yourself with a person and you're only pursuing them for what you get out of it sexually, cut it out altogether, close up the place of flesh, so to speak.

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

Now remember to this point, Adam's the only man in the whole world.

Bunch of animals, naked guy, the whole world's his bathroom.

He's in this place, bachelor's paradise.

But all of a sudden, when he sees this woman, remember, she's naked.

She comes walking at him.

All of a sudden, my man turns into a poet.

He says, This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh, for she shall be called woman, for she was taken out of a man.

The word woman in Hebrew literally means out of me.

It's like he sees her, and all of a sudden he notices there's something distinct and beautiful and yet different about her.

That there's similarities, but there's differences, that they're made in different ways, they're shaped in different ways.

Where he is strong, she is delicate.

Where the lines on him tend to be sharper, they tend to be softer on her.

Where he tends to be rugged, she tends to be beautiful.

Even the way their bodies are constructed are similar, but they're different.

They're similar, but they're not exactly the same.

And he's taken by her and he gives her the name woman because it literally means, out of me came you.

And then the next two verses, there are four elements, I believe, that really God desires for us to experience.

These are the four elements of intimacy.

Says this.

That is why, number one, a man leaves his father and mother.

Number two, is united with his wife.

And they, number three, become one flesh.

Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt, here's number four, no shame.

These are the four elements of what I really believe are the elements of a healthy, God-honoring, intimate kind of sex life, and I'd like to spend our last few minutes together in these.

Well, how do we do it?

Well, got a simple acronym.

It's the acronym VEST, V-E-S-T.

And literally what it means is to be vested in someone.

If you want to have an intimate, passionate sex life, you have to be vested in your spouse.

Well, how do we do this?

Well, the first thing is this we have to, number one, value them.

We value them.

Scripture says that for this reason, he leaves his father and mother.

Listen, I've counseled hundreds of people over the years and hundreds of marriage problems.

And one of the greatest reasons I see problems in marriage is marriages don't know how to properly assign value to their spouse.

It's like they get married and they don't know how to leave mother and father.

They don't know how to change the dynamics of that relationship.

Or what happens is someone else in their life or something else takes a higher priority than their spouse.

So what is it?

What does it look like?

Well, well, our words have the power of life and death in them.

And so what I what I think is this I think that number one, we have to tell our spouse.

We use your words to say you're you're number one.

No one else is above you.

Some of you are like, well, that doesn't sound right because God is number one.

Well, scripturally, God is preeminent.

That means he's above.

Like he's above all of it.

So, God, you are before number one.

And then here on earth, I need my wife to know that she is number one.

Nothing else, not our kids.

I love my kids to death.

I adore my kids, but they are not number one.

My wife is number one.

I value her.

And then we use our words to actually build up.

Let me ask you this question.

Do your words validate and add value?

Do your words validate and add value?

Some years ago, had this really awkward counseling session.

I've I've counseled for everything you can even imagine and some really weird jacked-up stuff in between.

And this couple comes in and they told me before they came that they they were having some sexual issues they wanted to talk through.

Now, I've been around the block enough to know that it was one of two things.

Usually, when people say that in advance, it's that there's been some sort of unfaithfulness, or it's that there's been some sort of incompatibility with their sex drives.

Like what it usually means is one person desires to have sex more than the other spouse.

Nine times out of ten, anecdotally, nine times out of ten, it's the man who wants to do it more than the wife.

And so that causes some friction in the relationship as they don't know how to navigate her.

Talk about that.

So, dealt with that a hundred times.

They come in, I'm excited to talk to them, and I say, All right, guys, what's going on?

Tell me.

And so the wife starts up by talking.

She's talking to me, and she's got this little maybe two-month-old baby sitting on her lap, just kind of bouncing on her leg.

And she goes, We're just at the end of a rope.

I've just tried everything.

My husband goes off to work.

He works hard all day.

I appreciate him working.

And he comes home and I just want affection.

I just want him to hug me.

I just want him to be physical with me.

I just want him to kiss me.

I just want to make love to my husband.

I just, and all he wants is to have something to drink and to go play video games until the wee hours of the night.

I invite him to the bedroom.

I invite him to intimate moments, and he always rejects me.

And the husband looks at me and I'm like, huh?

And and then um, and then I say to him, I was like, What is what's going on?

He goes, that's true.

He goes, I just I don't know.

And he he said several things.

He goes, I just I just don't desire her anymore.

And when he said those words, I could literally see her physical countenance change.

She just said, Yeah, she's just not attractive to me.

She's gained a lot of weight.

And I'm like, she's holding your two-month-old baby.

You did that to her.

What is wrong with you?

I didn't say that, I thought it, right?

Because I'm I'm reserved.

I'm I'm I'm you know, I'm not controlled by my sinful flesh nature, right?

But I thought that.

And then the husband goes, So what do you think?

I was like, Oh, you you don't want to know what I think.

And he goes, Yeah, what what do you think?

And then um, I'm gonna be honest, my sinful flesh nature came out and I called him a name.

What do you mean?

I said, I said, you're a, and then um probably shouldn't say it.

I'll tell you what, it rhymes with bass hole.

That's what I called him.

And uh so if you're like, is that okay?

If you have problems with that, email Ryan at access.tv.

Yeah, he I told him that joke and he said it was fine, so that's on him.

Um so I called him this name.

And I was like, How dare you?

How dare you treat this woman who loves you, who wants to be intimate with you like that?

How dare you use your words to tear her down?

What is wrong with you?

After they left, it was funny because in that season our office walls were very thin, and several of the staff walked in with their eyes as big as the state of Texas.

They're like, is everything okay?

I'm like, I'm fine actually.

I feel really good now.

That's how I feel.

Solomon, the wisest man to ever live, says it like this He said, The tongue has the power of life and death.

This applies to every relationship, but let's talk about your spouse.

You have the power with your words to build up or tear down, to encourage or discourage, to add life or to bring death to them.

So we value.

Number two is this the second element of intimacy is we bring our energy.

It says that a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his spouse.

This word united in the original language of Hebrew carries with it an enormous amount of energy, the same amount of energy required to climb a mountain.

What that means is in your marriage, you will always have to bring your energy to the table.

A lot of people think that I'll just pursue them as long as I can, as long as we're dating, but the moment we get married, it's like I get to coast and be happy.

It takes enormous amounts of energy to constantly serve each other.

It just does.

A lot of people miss it.

A lot of people buy into the lie that, like, well, she's not meeting my expectation, so I'll leave.

No, no, no.

You serve them.

The author of Ephesians, Paul, says it like this: He says, submit to one another, not because you have to, but submit to one another out of your reverence for Christ.

It's because of what your love for Jesus is.

It should be reflected in your relationship here on earth with your spouse.

That literally means I'm going to do whatever I can to show you love in every practical way I possibly can.

I will constantly bring my energy.

If you're exhausted from something that happened, I'll serve you.

I'll meet your needs.

I'll do all of this.

And check this out with no expectation in return.

No expectation in return.

I don't do this to score points to get some from you.

I do this because I love you, and part of loving you is serving you.

I bring my energy.

I bring my best.

The S in this list of things that are that are the foundational elements of intimacy is sacrifice.

And it says, and the two become one flesh.

Now, this is an important thing for you to understand.

Sex, and let me talk to the young people for a moment.

The reason God intended sex for the context of marriage is not because he doesn't want you to have fun.

It's not at all.

The reason God that God assigned the value of sex to the season of marriage is sex is a physical representation of a spiritual moment.

When you get married, you're two individuals, and your lives become one.

When you have sex, you are two individual bodies.

But temporarily, you become one.

It is the reminder of the covenant that happened in your soul.

Literally, what it means is when we've been joined together in this way, we can never undo, we can never take back every cell that was exchanged.

We can never undo what has happened in this moment.

It is a physical reminder of what's happened in your souls.

This is why there's so much brokenness when you have sex with someone you're not married to.

Because you're reminding your soul of something that hasn't happened.

It's the reason there's so much pain.

Now, part of sacrifice means that because we're becoming one, we're going to put the needs of that person ahead of our own.

A study was done by a ministry some years ago called Marriage Today.

They surveyed several thousand men and women and they asked, What are your greatest desires in life and in your marriage?

Here was the results.

It's so interesting.

For men, their number one desire was respect, want to be respected.

Their number two after respect was sexual intimacy.

They wanted to have physical touch and sexual intimacy.

Women are just wired differently.

Women responded this way.

Their number one desire was to receive love.

Men want respect, women want love.

Their number two was communication.

Literally, which let's talk to each other and let's talk through whatever we're going through.

Tell me your feelings.

Number three was touch, but it was non-sexual, physical touch.

Like hold hands, rub feet, hug with no expectation of return, all the way down the list at number 12 was the first time she says sexual touch.

Narrowly edging out number 13, gardening together.

What does this mean practically?

Well, this means that if I'm married and I'm sacrificially in love with my wife, it means that I have to pay attention to what she wants and what she cares about.

Now I have this stupid thing I do, I think every guy does it.

I have this stupid thing that I do, where I try to turn anything my wife says or does into an invitation to make love.

That's what I try to do.

Liz will come home and be like, hey, I I picked up chicken on the way home.

I'm like, I see where you're trying to take this right now, girl.

I see where this is going.

She's like, I I just got chicken.

I don't know what you're talking about, right?

So here, what does it mean?

It means that I need to know how my wife wants to receive love and I need to offer it to her in that way.

That might mean holding hands with no expectation that it's gonna go farther.

That might mean taking a walk, that might mean listening with no expectation that it's gonna lead to something romantic.

That might be the most romantic thing I can do for her.

Okay, let me speak to the women in the room for just a moment and say this.

If you are wired the way that we just said, that may not apply to everybody, but if you are wired in that way, it might mean sacrificially sometimes that you think to yourself, I'm not necessarily in the mood, but I know it will bless my spouse, it'll bless my husband, so I'm gonna bring my best to him.

Does this make sense, everybody?

These are the elements of intimacy.

I'm gonna value, I'm gonna bring my energy, I'm gonna sacrifice.

And then here's the fourth one.

I'm going to trust and I'm gonna build trust and I'm gonna establish trust and I'm gonna keep building trust.

And you know how trust works, it takes a lifetime to build and a moment to come crumbling down.

It says about Adam and Eve that they were naked and not ashamed.

Bobby Brown, who was famously married to Whitney Houston back in the 90s, he famously said, cocaine is a hell of a drug.

Cocaine is a hell of a drug.

Let me submit something to you.

I believe that shame is a hell of a drug.

And if you're like, what's this guy talking about?

So crass and cursing, I don't mean it in a cursing kind of way.

I mean that it literally comes from the pits of hell to destroy you.

And shame comes in all different kinds of forms sexually.

It could be as innocent as you were 11 years old and you looked under a bed and you found a magazine and you looked and all of a sudden you were like awakened sexually.

It could be that you walked into a video store and saw something you shouldn't see.

It could be that you stumbled upon a website, it could, it could be something so innocent and you meant nothing by it, but all these years later you feel shame.

It could be that something that happened to you, an uncle that molested you, a parent that betrayed you, someone who assaulted you.

It could be anything.

We're just people that carry shame everywhere we go, and it is a hellish from hell kind of a drug that Satan uses to destroy you.

Well, there's no room for that in a God-honoring marriage.

So, what does it mean?

It means that I need to work to establish trust with my spouse.

There's a lot of ways this happens.

Number one, is she needs to know everything about me because you can only be loved to the extent that you are known.

So some of you might need to have some awkward conversations.

Some of you might need to confess to some stuff you've done, some places you've been, some things you've watched, to an affair.

Some of you might just need to have some awkward conversations, and if you're on the receiving end of that, I'm challenging you to listen with grace because it's hard.

But you need to be honest, because intimacy won't thrive where there's secrets.

Second thing that I think all of us need to do is we need to foster trust.

Well, what is what does that mean?

Well, it means practically in my marriage that I never want my wife wondering what I've been doing with my time.

Say, what does that look like?

I never want my wife coming to the bedroom wondering, well, I wonder who Jason was with today.

What secrets is he keeping from me?

So, because of that, I've got some really clear boundaries for my marriage.

This may not work for you, but in my marriage, I'm never, ever alone ever with a woman who's not my wife.

Ever.

I'm just not.

Why?

Because I'm not gonna have sex with someone I'm not alone with.

I'm not gonna do or put myself in a position where I could mess up sexually by being alone with someone I'm not married to.

Some people are like, well, that's sexist, maybe to you, but it's sexy at home to my wife.

Like, that's the point for me.

Are you getting this?

Like, you've got to establish some boundaries.

And I want when my wife and I come together physically to express the intimacy we have.

I want there to be nothing between us, nothing between us.

This isn't about clothes and nakedness, this is about internal vulnerability.

I want to be fully known and fully loved by her, and I want her to be fully known and fully loved by me so that when we come together passionately in those moments of intimacy, there is trust so that sex becomes the fulfillment of the intimacy that we feel.

And so many people think, and they make this mistake when they're single, I'll just have sex until I feel intimacy.

It never goes that direction, it goes the direction of intimacy, which leads to beautiful, close, trust-driven sex.

So, how do you end a message like this?

This is my third time, and I really have no idea.

Okay, here's how we're gonna try to end today.

Okay, I want to challenge two different audiences of people today.

The first one is if you're in the room or if you're listening online and you are single, here's my challenge to you.

I want to start some healthy habits.

I'm gonna challenge you for seven days, seven days to step so far back from the line sexually that you're not even tempted to mess up.

So, what does that mean?

Well, if you can do seven days, you you can stack another seven days, and then you can stack another seven days, and pretty soon you've developed a lifetime of purity.

Purity is what paves the way to intimacy.

Purity is not a pursuit that ends when you get married.

Purity is just something you keep pursuing.

So for seven days, let me talk to the single people.

I challenge you to be as non-sexual as you possibly can.

That means if you're looking at porn, if you're addicted to porn, cut it out.

Get an accountability partner, do whatever it takes, like get rid of the device, get rid of the thing that you stumble upon, like get rid of it altogether.

Seven days, no porn.

For seven days, I challenge you if you're in a relationship with someone and you've crossed some sort of physical boundaries.

If you've done with the book of Ecclesiastes, I believe it says, where our Song of Solomon chapter 4, verse 8, where it says, do not awaken love before it's time.

Song of Solomon 4:8

If you're awakening love, if you're doing anything sexual with another person, for seven days, step so far back from the line that you remove all obstacles, all options of sex altogether.

For seven days, if you find yourself constantly struggling with lustful thoughts, I challenge you for seven days to do what Paul says and take every thought captive.

What does that mean?

It means when you find yourself starting to drift towards something sexual.

When you walk past an attractive person and you find yourself wondering or thinking or undressing them with your eyes, it means you take the thought captive, and the rest of the verse says, and make it subjected to the authority of Christ.

You can do that.

Seven days.

Then for all the married people, for the next seven days, I want you to pursue intimacy intentionally with your spouse.

What does that mean?

Here's what it means for the next seven days.

I want you to do intimate things with each other.

Now that might mean, men, that you do the footrub.

That might mean that you do the hand holding, that might be that you do the listening, that might mean that you just do things that bring her joy and pleasure that make her feel closer to you.

It also means to every married person in the room that you need to pursue sexual intimacy with each other.

Well, we have kids.

Wake up early.

Stay late, stay up late.

Like find you, there's time for the stuff in your life that matters, but do whatever it takes to pursue sexual intimacy.

And here's my hope.

My hope is in a world where increasing numbers of people are divorcing, in a world where over 50% of marriage is in a divorce, in a world where people are getting married later and later and later because they're scared of what marriage even looks like.

The church should have the most beautiful, flourishing, life-giving marriages.

The church should have the most beautiful sex lives.

Like that sounds weird to say, but God wants that for you.

God's desire is that your sexuality would flourish and other people would look at you and be like, what makes them so close?

It's because there's a profound intimacy that sex just celebrates the intimacy of.

So how would it look if for seven days the single people stepped away from everything sexual and all the married people took a step towards sexual intimacy and delight?

What if our homes and our bedrooms became the Garden of Eden, of pleasure and delight?

And as a result, God gets the glory and our marriage gets even stronger and more intimate.

Let me pray a blessing over you today.

So, God, give us the courage to do this.

For all the single people in the room, give us the courage to pursue stepping so far back from the line.

For all the married people in the room, God, give us the courage to pursue our spouse, to be vested in them, to value and add value to them, to bring our energy to serve them and then to the S, to serve them with everything that we have, however they want to be served.

And then, God, my hope is that trust flourishes.

And that as a result, it's not just sex that gets better, but it's our intimacy that improves.

God, we love you and we thank you for it.

And God, may our marriages be a testimony to the world around us.

We thank you for it in Jesus' name.

Amen.