Suffering is a Gift

Have you ever pressed hard into a season of prayer with God, crying out for a breakthrough, for healing, for relief,

and when God answers, you get incredibly excited:

My help is coming!

Only to find that your answer from God is a blessed season of continued suffering?

This is what happened to the disciples in the gospel of Mark.

For centuries, Jews had been crying out to God for miraculous deliverance from foreign oppression. Throughout Mark’s gospel, Jesus has been proving to his disciples through miracles, exorcisms, and powerful teaching that He is, in fact, their awaited deliverance.

After feeding 4000 people with 7 loaves of bread and a few fish (another amazing miracle), Jesus asks his disciples,

“Who do you say that I am?”

Peter responds, “You are the Christ.”

Wow! Deliverance is here! God has come!

But Jesus tells the disciples to keep quiet and warns them that His next assignment is to be

rejected,

to suffer,

and die.

Jesus is about to radically redefine what the gift of redemption looks like.

Ironically when Peter disagrees with Jesus and discourages the path he’s chosen, Jesus rebukes Peter for completely missing the will of God,

Get behind Me, Satan;

for you are not setting your mind on

God’s purposes, but on man’s (ESV).

Peter’s desire for Jesus to avoid suffering put him in league with Satan and the religious elite—and in opposition with God.

Think about that for a second.

What would it look like if the driving factor in our choices was not to avoid suffering?

Living in squalor among the poor and destitute in order to reach them? That would be a blessing, not a burden.

Paying off someone else’s debts when you’ve been wise with your own money? That would be an honor, not unfair.

Being betrayed by the emotionally immature? That would be an opportunity to display grace and forgiveness, not an offense to recover from.

Turning the other cheek when someone slaps you in the face? That would be a chance to pronounce a blessing on them, not hit them back.

Why?

Because we’re delighted to suffer—if our suffering has even the slightest potential of drawing someone else into closer orbit with the ways of Jesus.

Each time Jesus predicts his death, his disciples fail to get it. They respond with pride and incomprehension. They cannot fathom an outcome where their government continues to oppress them and their popular rabbi dies in shame and embarrassment. How is this a good thing?!

Many people today embrace servanthood, but only until serving leads to suffering. That’s when most bail.

I’ll serve you until that serving starts to hurt, and then I’m out.

Jesus served us right into a bloody death, and if he had bailed too soon, we’d all be lost in darkness.

Who is God calling you to serve today in order to radically alter their impression of His love,

and what form of suffering has become the excuse you use to avoid serving them?

Every time they sin, do you find yourself longing to bear the weight of their suffering if it could draw them closer to the love of Jesus?

The messiah must pass through suffering and sacrifice on his way to glory.

For us.

Who can you suffer for, to help bring them and yourself, after the footsteps of Jesus, to glory?

On Sex and Marriage: Don’t Promise What the Bible Does Not.

I remember sitting inside the conference center screaming, surviving on adrenaline after getting 2 hours of sleep, and getting amped up alongside thousands of other teens as the worship team was about to kick things off. Everything is loud, flashing, and theatrical. It’s the perfect atmosphere for impacting young teenagers with a message that could last a lifetime. That message was,

“God wants you to have amazing sex!”

Literally, that’s how the guest speaker opened it up. I’ll admit, that’s a great way to grab the attention of thousands of teenagers and keep them engaged. It took me years to learn, however, that what the guest speaker called a promise from God is never promised in the Bible.

If you’ve heard the term, “purity culture,” there’s a good chance you’ve heard mixed reviews on what it was and whether or not it was good for the generation of people raised in it.

In this blog post, I do not want to be unfair to purity culture entirely because I share many beliefs at the core of what it's supposed to stand for. Purity culture (a term that was not coined until much later) developed at the end of the 20th century as a way to promote sexual abstinence outside of marriage. There were books, small group curriculums, and mass events dedicated to the subject. As teen pregnancy and transmission of STDs increased significantly in the 80s and 90s, purity culture did what North American churches have been doing for decades—responding to a cultural crisis by creating a cultural response dressed in churchy language. Purity culture attempted to promote a positive view of monogamous sex that is exclusively saved for lifelong marriage partners to counter the idea that multiple partners and a myriad of sexual experiences do not equate to sexual liberation and fulfillment (which I agree with). The problem? It promoted dozens of other unbiblical, toxically cultural, and at times abusive practices and expectations in sex and marriage. Talks on purity slowly moved away from biblical ideas of glorifying God with the body and covenant union (1 Cor. 6:12-20) to ideas of personal gratification via amazing sex, happy partners, and a household full of healthy children. Purity culture took sex and marriage and made it the “gospel-about-my-sex-life” rather than a gospel centered on Christ and his love for the Church.

The Bible strongly affirms marriage as a spiritual covenant between two people that signifies God’s love for humanity (Eph. 5:22-30), and that covenant is monogamous (Gen. 2:22-24; Eph. 5:31; Deut. 14:2; Isa. 54:5-8). Science now supports the notion that the human brain bonds powerfully to sex, and there is recognizable harm when sexual partners are removed from one another in various contexts and emotional intimacy is downgraded to irrelevancy. Purity Culture in some sense wanted to highlight an already firm belief among some practicing Christians that sex between two monogamous partners saved for marriage would benefit the married couple. I completely agree with this position still today.

But Purity culture completely over-promised, and under-delivered.

Purity Culture messages often proclaimed to young men and women that their sex life was guaranteed to be spectacular so long as they saved their sexual activity for their future spouse. “God wants you to have amazing sex!” was not only a theme at a youth conference; it was the banner of a kingdom for young men in the late 90s early 2000s. There are several problems with this, of course. On one hand, many young people, Christian or not, were already aware of culturally secular expectations for sexual gratification. Many young men assumed that a specular sex life meant the kind of sexual gratification they saw in movies and tv shows, or heard boasted about in pop songs and from insecure high school D-bags. They get it whenever they want, however they want, and there is no rejection involved. If a man has the urge to have sex, it is perfectly natural, and therefore, allowing him to have what he naturally wants is healthy for him (the world is only now waking up to the fact that it is unhealthy and unnatural for young men to indulge in every sexual desire whenever and however they want). Thus if a man saves himself sexually for his future wife, he is securing the fulfillment of these sexual needs in a perfect sexual partner. This same type of hyperbolic promise was pushed on young women too. The secular expectation that the perfect man will cherish and value you, instinctively know your needs, and readjust all of his needs accordingly will happen naturally if both partners saved themselves for marriage with each other. He’ll just “get it.”

Imagine the shock and disbelief when two people found out that they still had to work incredibly hard in their marriage, especially in the context of sex, despite doing exactly what purity culture told them to do.

It overpromised and underdelivered.

Purity Culture youth pastors often bragged about their “hot wives” that God gave them because they saved themselves for marriage (as if this is any sort of biblical promise at all—it's not). The idea promoted was that other young men would get the hot wife of their dreams if they abstain from sex until marriage as well. In contrast, some purity culture preachers described sex in such a negative light that women who obeyed and followed suit were so terrified of sex that they couldn’t bring themselves to trust their partner even after getting married and having biblically consensual sex. It felt so dirty that it almost couldn’t be redeemed for them, and it took years of therapy and redeeming theology to remove those barriers. Many women were told that if their husband wants sex, they were being sinful if they deny him, or at least they are harming their marriage and encouraging their husbands to look for sex elsewhere (porn, affairs, masturbation, etc). Without meaning to, purity culture messages were at times absolving men of sexual sin while lumping shame on women. Imagine the toxic weight a woman will carry by believing that her husband’s sexual sin is her fault because she didn’t sexually satisfy her partner as he wanted. Purity culture inadvertently stole the very thing it was promising—healthy sex between two faithful partners.

This may sound progressive to some but despite everything society, Christian or secular, proclaims, sex is not about us, and marriage is not about our fulfillment.

The increasingly liberal message in the 80s and 90s was that men and women are freer and fulfilled by having numerous, diverse sexual encounters. Instead of correcting this false assumption and dismantling it, purity culture tried to offer the same fulfillment using sex but giving a different formula: “You will be freer and fulfilled by sex if you abstain until marriage.” This never works in any context with any cultural or moral issue. You cannot try to promise the same things secular culture promises but offer a different formula, because the truth of Christianity is that everything the secular world promises is often meaningless and finite. Christianity reveals a greater, fulfilling, and eternal promise that in relationship with our Creator, God, we have everything we want and need. Secular culture will never understand this, so it will never offer it. That’s why people who don’t understand what it means to have a relationship with Jesus are always trying to find fulfillment in something else. Disguising secular fulfillment by clothing it in Christian moral terms and boundaries does not help: If anything, it damages the idea of true Christian faith in the long run.

This is why so many Generation Xers and Millennials are setting aside their previous Christian beliefs and walking away from the faith in the first place:

“If my pastor was wrong about what the bible says on sex and marriage, what else is he wrong on?”

The Bible never promises that sex will be awesome and fulfilling in our lives, ever. There is incredibly little written anywhere in the bible about sex in terms of fulfillment and satisfaction. Outside of procreation, sex serves little purpose in the narrative of existence. It is one of the least important aspects of your life in the grand scheme of biblical truth, and marriage is so much more than sex in scripture. The one exception to this is in the book Song of Songs, which depicts a beautiful portrait of two people romantically and physically devoted to each other. Song of Songs certainly does imply that two people can enjoy romantic love and sex, and that anticipation in waiting for sex to “awaken” at the right time is important (Song 2:7; 3:5; 8:4). But the much larger, more important truth communicated in Song of Songs is that love is beautiful, captivating, and created by God for the greatest levels of intimacy. Anyone who has been in a long-term relationship/marriage can attest to the reality that life gets busy, arduous challenges take precedence over spousal time, and things can fall into stagnant patterns. God is love, and an intimate, meaningful relationship is so much more than just getting by in life. Love is meant to be beautiful, and at times that can certainly manifest in the form of beautiful sex. God is certainly for healthy sex within a monogamous, loving relationship and Song of Songs informs us of this. It does not aggrandize sex for the sake of sexual fulfillment but aggrandizes love for the sake of revealing how deep and powerful godly love can be in every context, including sex.

In the end, every biblical teaching is designed to point us back to fulfillment, intimacy, and eternal rest in God. He alone is our source for all things (John 6:35; Psalm 16:11; 22:26; Isaiah 58:11; Jeremiah 31:25), and the Bible promises us with absolute assuredness that, regardless of how our marriage, sex life, job, or monetary status turns out, we will always be satisfied and fulfilled by our relationship with Him.

Is there wisdom in following the Bible’s command to save sex for a monogamous commitment with your spouse? Absolutely. Is there a formula that guarantees anything concerning your sex life and intimacy in marriage? No.

Sexual Immorality, the Human Body, and Community Holiness.

Paul’s first address to the church in Corinth articulates a unique theology of the human body and its purposes in God’s inaugurated kingdom on earth. In examining 1st Corinthians 6:12-20,  Paul addresses boundaries and abuses of freedom in the Christian life (6:12-13), God’s purpose for the human body in Christ (VS 14-20), the sinful practice of sexual immorality against both the body and the Lord (VS 14-18), and communal holiness for the collective church as Christ’s body (15-20). This paper will endeavor to explain and support the position that Paul’s theology of the human body, explicitly expressed and supported in this passage, was unique in Paul’s day and is coherent and consistent within greater Pauline literature. It will begin by addressing the wider issue at stake in Paul’s entire letter to the Corinthians.