God’s Good Design for Sexuality Part 2

Sex can feel like the loudest desire in the room, but what if it’s actually a signpost pointing to something deeper? James Craig, our director of projects, shares a condensed version of a church talk that maps a Christian theology of sexuality from creation to fall to redemption, with an honest look at why so many people feel fractured inside their own wants, choices, and sense of self.

If you’ve ever wondered why sex carries so much weight, or how healing can reach deeper than shame and willpower, this conversation is for you. Subscribe, share this with a friend who’s wrestling, and leave a review with the line that hit you hardest.

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Free Resources to help you on your journey to Becoming Whole:

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Transcript

Why This Talk Exists

Speaker 2 0:03

My friends, today we're gonna be hearing a portion of a talk that I, James Craig, uh, director of projects, will be giving at a church, um, pretty soon. Uh, we, we give talks. Sometimes we're invited to churches as a staff to, to speak on different issues, and this, this talk is, uh, basically a macro picture, an overview of what is human sexual- sexuality all the, all about. What are some of the key dimensions of what it means to, um, to be a sexual human? What, what was God's design from the beginning? How did the fall impact that? How is Jesus's redeeming work changing that? And so I hope you guys enjoy this. And as always, if you ever wanna invite us to your church to speak, just reach out. There's a place in the description to, uh, to email us. Um, and there's a whole variety of offerings that we have for churches, and so this is just one of those. And hope you enjoy this today.

Speaker 4 1:15

All right, now we have to talk about... W- we- we've sketched out that first circle of creation. This is the design. Now, I want to say from the outset as we go into the fall, as we talk about that second circle, that the fall means we all have room

The Fall And Room To Grow

Speaker 4 1:34

to grow. We all have room to grow, all of us, 100%, to live out God's vision for sexual flourishing, because we are all marred by the impact of sin. All of us. We all are invited to reintegration. We don't actually have to go far in Genesis to see the great divorce happen that I alluded to at the beginning, the divorce between heaven and Earth, between God and human, and therefore, the divorce between man and woman, humans with other humans, and even humans with themselves, with ourselves. So let's look at three really important, what I'm gonna call divorces, as related to our sexuality. First divorce, eros and agape. This is kind of an interpersonal or horizontal. Everyone familiar with the, uh, four words for love in the Greek language? So I- I'm probably gonna pronounce these wrong, but storge is, like, affection, like a mother might feel for her daughter, for example.

Eros Cut Off From Agape

Speaker 4 2:32

Uh, philo or philos is friendship love. Eros is passionate love. And agape is self-giving love. And there's probably some difference, different ways of, you know, removing each of these. Or sorry, not removing. Uh, there's probably some nuance that I didn't just capture. But in essence, agape is self-giving love most associated with God's love, as far as I can tell in the New Testament. Eros, again, passionate love. And this is really important because the word eros is gonna trigger some thoughts in our minds. The original intent with eros is not limited to sexual or erotic desire, what we would say is erotic desire. It's, it's more broad. It's passionate love. So here's what I want to tell you. At the fall, passionate love was divorced from self-giving love. Think about that. Passionate love, eros, was divorced from self-giving love. Can you think of any issues that might come from such a thing? This means that instead of one flesh unions being about self-giving love, sex became a tool for selfishness. As Christopher West says, uh, this is a guy who teaches a lot on theology of the body, wonderful man, a Catholic, but what I would call an evangelical Catholic, someone who really loves the Word of God, um, and knows actually how to speak our language, which is really fun. But Christopher West says, "Imagine a rocket ship. The rocket has massive, powerful engines, strong enough to take it to the far reaches of space." Those engines are eros, right? We just sent a rocket around the moon. Um, however, because eros has been untethered from agape, being pointed up the right direction, the engines of the rocket, the engines of eros, passionate love, have been inverted, driving the rocket down into the Earth. That's gonna create a big mess. Eros and agape were divorced. Second divorce, desire, identity, and behavior. This is an internal divorce. I actually used to use the word vocation instead of behavior because what, what I was trying to get at is it's not just what we do, it's what we're called to do. So it's kind of this both and, but, but behavior's a little simpler. So

Desire Identity And Behavior Split

Speaker 4 4:59

desire, identity, and behavior have been divorced. Now, instead of the full unity and integration within the human person of these three powerful elements, they're often now at odds with one another. Let me, let me try to explain how. Think about desire struggles, right? Specif- specifically, uh, sexual desire struggles. We all desire wrong things, including in the realm of sexuality. Some of us desire sex with the opposite sex outside of marriage. Some of us desire pornography. Some of us desire sex with the same sex. Some of us desire adultery Some of us desire, even outside of sex, some of us desire to eat a box of donuts every day. The point is that because of the great divorce, the fall, our desires are often not aligned with God's will, his best for us. Therefore, those desires are not rooted in our truest identity made in his image. And if we're in Christ, then sons and daughters of God. So we also end up with identity struggles. Our desires are at least partially shaped by our sense of self. You know, one of my biggest breakthroughs in my past pornography addiction was realizing that as a son of Father God, I am not the type of person who uses others for my own gratification. That's not most truly who I am. Likewise, whether it's identifying with our brokenness, the opposite sex, whatever, a certain attraction, a certain sin habit, our identity is not yet fully aligned with our deepest reality. All this leads to the third, behavior struggles. Regardless of my desires or my sense of identity, there are clear ways we're called to act in Scripture. In the realm of sexual actions, have we not heard and experienced the terror of this divorce, right? We've harmed ourselves with our sexual actions. We've harmed others. Even porn is not a harmless act. It impacts others. It continues the enslavement of men, women, children. It amplifies the sex trade around the world. Sexual slavery is a real thing. It's happening all around the world, including in our city. Not being a self-giving gift to the other, right? Being used by others. We've experienced the pain of this, right? And so my point here is that the fall created internal disorientation. Our desires, identity, and behaviors are no longer naturally in harmony with God's will. All right, one more divorce to look at. This is most crucial. It's our division or divorce from intimacy with God, our divorce from God. This is the foundation and the culmination of the great divorce. Our separation from life, God is life itself, right? From the life that is found in God alone sets the stage for the prior two divorces we

The Deeper Divorce From God

Speaker 4 8:06

just looked at. We're relationally divided. We're internally divided. Here's one way I like to think about it. Sin is the root. Death is the fruit because we're no longer united with God. We end up sowing seeds of sin that, you know, take root, sin roots. Death is just the natural outcome of sin. So here, so here's where we're meant to be s- so where we're meant to be satisfied in God and healthy relationships, right? It wasn't good for Adam to be alone. We now take all that massive need for intimacy, many of us do at least, we take it to sex instead of God. And I just wanna say this, this might sound a little shocking, but you actually don't need sex in any form, including sex with self, to be a healthy, functioning person. You know Pascal, the great Christian mathematician and thinker, uh, he says that we all, after the fall, have a God-sized hole in our hearts. Given that, think about the fact that the sexual orgasm releases powerful chemicals, not limited to dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin. Is it surprising then that we have a culture where we've looked to fill the God-sized hole in our culture, in our hearts with... God-sized hole for love with, with sex. God, the source of life, cannot be separated from without comprehensive disintegration. All right, so now we have time for Q&R. All right. If that wasn't heavy enough, we're not going heavier. We're going toward the good stuff, the good news. Restoration. The Gospel reintegrates and redeems. Specifically, w- first thing here, it's gonna sound a little funny,

Restoration Through Union With Jesus

Speaker 4 10:14

but we're talking about marrying Jesus. Jesus and his cross make a way for being reunited with God, and this comes to full... This will come to full consummation when Jesus returns. So we're gonna look real quick at Revelation 19:6-9. I'm gonna read this. "Then I heard what sounded like a great multitude, like the roar of rushing waters and loud peals of thunder, shouting, 'Hallelujah! For our Lord God Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory, for the wedding supper of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready. Fine linen, bright and clean, was given to her to wear. Fine linen stands for the righteous acts of God's holy people.' Then the angel said to me, 'Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb.' And he added, 'These are the true words of God.'" Friends, in the new heavens and new Earth, we will become both single and married. On one hand, we're no longer married to any earthly spouse according to what Jesus says in, uh, the Gospel of Matthew. But on the other hand, we're now in perfect union with God and perfect communion with other humans. Union with Jesus is the culmination we're all truly looking for. And even before heaven, even before the new heavens and the new earth, this is the good news of the kingdom. It starts now. What does that mean? What does that do? I- is the good news of the kingdom have any impact on my life, including my sexuality? Yes. The good news means that God wants to start now, start even today for some of you, reintegrating identity, desire, and behavior. He wants our identity to be rooted in Christ, what you might call orthodoxy, true belief. That's just w- uh, kind of one layer of it, if you will. What is the deepest reality of our identity as humans? Think back to the first section. I even said it again, I think, in the second. Yes, our deepest reality is Imago Dei. And since Christ came, if we put our faith in Jesus, 1 John 3:1 says that we are called children of God. One other theology of the body type consideration here, male and female. People are born as men, are called to be sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers. Think of this. Sons, sons of God spiritually and biologically were sons of our parents, right? Brothers, sometimes we have siblings

Identity Rooted In Imago Dei

Speaker 4 13:05

biologically, but we're also always called to be the body of Christ, to be brothers and, and sisters in Christ. Husbands, sometimes there... We, we have, uh, spouses, so physically with a wife, but also spiritually. We're supposed to be like Christ in this way. We're supposed to be husbands, husbands of Jesus, all of us. Yeah, husbands of Jesus. That's the actually the main thing here. We're meant to be husbands of Jesus. And if you're a man, you're called to be a father, and that could again be biological, but it's definitely we're called to be spiritual fathers. I love that emphasis that Pastor John brings, um, seeking to be a spiritual father of us at, uh, at Epicenter. Women, likewise, of course, called to be daughters, sisters, wives, mothers. This means that regardless of how much we feel like it, we're invited by Jesus to grow in these respective four-fold identities as men and women. We all have room to grow. Remember that from earlier? We all have room to grow. He also wants to redeem desire, what's sometimes been called orthopathy, feeling or desiring like God desires. I'm gonna show you guys this. This is a little upside down pyramid I made called the pyramid of desire. So often we can spend so much of our lives focusing on surface level desires, right? They're influenced by how to meet our core level desires. In other words, I might think that to meet

The Pyramid Of Desire

Speaker 4 14:40

my basic needs, I need to steal. I might think that to meet my connection intimacy needs, I need to go to porn. I might think that to meet my ultimate needs, I, I, I don't have anything, so I go to something besides God. So we can respond in carnal, fleshly, sinful ways. Um, we can just respond in somewhat natural, you know, you know, kinda neutral ways actually, or we can respond in healthy, holy ways. But the point here is we often don't know how to actually meet our surface level desires, uh, meet our deepest desires, uh, in how we process our surface level desires. So let me throw the middle of this pyramid in here. It's got a lot of words there. But negatively speaking, these middle, uh, our, our, our deepest desires are mediated by our experiences psychologically and spiritually. Here's what I mean. Part of what makes it hard for me to know how to meet my basic needs is I might have had core-shaping experiences where I wasn't taught how to meet my own needs as a little kid. Or part of why I avoid God and, and I go to something besides God to, to meet my God-sized hole might be because I've had pastors who have mediated. They've, they've taught me that God is wicked toward me. That's part of my story. I might even have some unprocessed grief, and it just makes connection so difficult, so I don't actually know how to meet my desires for connection. I've got so much pain that people have caused me, I don't know how to deal with it, and so I go to, you know, pseudo-connection like porn, fake... you know, false intimacy. But we also can't forget that the enemy... that there are spiritual inputs, right? The enemy, the world, the flesh, devils, there's spiritual inf- inputs, the Holy Spirit, angels, the gospel. These are all vying for our core. They're vying to... The, the, the, the good things of God, the Holy Spirit, angels, and the gospel are, are trying to help us see how to truly meet our needs. Jesus wants to bring redemption, right? He wants to heal our unprocessed grief and, uh, heal our, our core-shaping experiences, and all this kind of stuff. But there's also the enemy who's constantly sowing more of this discord. But yes, as we work through some of these psychological, spiritual things, our desires do change over time in a whole variety of ways. In fact, so many of us think... This is actually from Aristotle, so again, I'm- demonstrating that I, I, there's probably, oh, there's definitely some things I disagree with on Aristotle. His stuff on women is pure evil. But this is actually a great, wise, uh, insight of his.

From White Knuckle To Virtue

Speaker 4 17:38

We so often think, and, and, and I'm applying this as a Christian, we often think that what God wants is to live, for us to live a life of continence, right? We know what's right and we do it, but we don't desire to do it. And by the way, that is way better than continuing to live a life of incontinence or vice. Vice being, especially, you know, bad, uh, not knowing what's right at all, and just therefore just desiring and doing what's wrong. Incontinence, knowing what is right and, and str- you know, failing to act. I, I know in my own journey, especially my first year of recovery from sexual addiction, I was back between continence and incontinence a lot. But here's the thing. God wants us to be people of virtue. He wants us to know what is right and desire to do it, culminating in correct actions. In other words, we're not just called to do the right thing forever and not believe it or feel like it. We're called instead to grow in our feelings in truth. We all have areas of viciousness in us. Uh, by the way, vicious is just the, uh, similar to how virtuous is the modified, I don't know grammar, but virtue, virtuous, vice, vicious. It's a, it's kind of funny to say the word vicious. Most of us don't realize it just means full of vice. We st- probably all of us still have some areas of this, but as we're being sanctified and transformed, God is convicting us of sin. He's showing us the truth, and there's a journey, there's a path here of actually growing to desire what Jesus desires. Dallas Willard would say things like, "For Jesus to sin would've been really hard." And that's a little bit of a tongue in cheek thing, because you might say, "Okay, Jesus could never sin. He's God." But, but the point is, Dallas, or, or Jesus was so set on the will of God, his desires were so aligned with the Father, that it wouldn't even cross someone like Jesus's mind to do something contrary to that. Again, we'll have some time later to reflect and, and talk more about this. But I want us to recognize, this is such an important thing as Christians. We're not called to a life of continence, what Aristotle calls continence, white-knuckling it through the rest of our lives. We're called to a life of true virtue in Jesus. Finally, uh, he's seeking to change our, our behaviors, yeah, our, our vocation, our, our calling, doing what is right, aligned with our identity, aligned even with our desires, which are becoming more aligned with Jesus. And notice here, I actually switched the order of the three from what I showed during the fall. Because on some level, our identity in Christ is foundational to the redemption of our desires, which then properly over time is meant to lead to right actions. Again, if I desire to do the right thing- Sometimes I still do the very thing I hate, like Paul talks about in Romans 7. But as I continue to desire what God desires, right behavior just falls in line. You don't have to, like, fight for it all the time. That's the vision. All right, final way Jesus comes to reunite, he reunites eros and agape and philos and brotherly love. You know, passionate love, self-giving love, and, and even brotherly, and I'm sure storge fits in there as well. Uh, it's been a while since I've read C.S. Lewis's Four Loves. But speak- speaking of Lewis,

Passion Healed And Reordered

Speaker 4 20:55

in, in second book of Chronicles of Narnia, at least second book written, uh, for many sets it looks like the third book, Prince Caspian, all right? Some of you guys have seen the Disney movie Prince Caspian. Um, it's actually in the third book, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Prince Caspian's grown old, and now he dies. Sorry, spoiler alert. Prince Caspian dies. He arrives in heaven, and Aslan, who's a lion who represents Jesus, he asks Aslan for something he really wants, but he's concerned, he, he's in heaven now, but he's concerned that it's wrong for him to want it. Here's what Aslan says, "You cannot want wrong things anymore now that you have died, my son." Ooh. The healing that is offered in Christ Jesus is so thorough in the final reckoning that we will be full of passionate love in the new creation, and that'll be perfectly aligned with true self-giving love. Rightly ordered relationships, including passion and friendships, are now built on the agape love of God, and this is possible beginning now. This means that the marriage bed, sex, is founded on self-giving agape love, no longer lust, because even in the marriage bed there can be lust. I don't know if that's a newsflash to anyone. But self-taking love or self, self-taking desire not informed by love is what you might define as lust. That's what most marriage beds are full of, actually. But by God's grace, we're called to become people of self-giving love. So the key is not the suppression of passion. This is part of what I'm trying to get through in this section. But the subsummation of all our passions into the passion of Christ. One way we say it at Regen, if it, if it confuses you, just drop it, but, but Josh, our leader, will often say, "Press your wounds into the wounds of Christ. Let your passion come underneath or be subsumed, be brought into the life and the passion of Christ." That's what we're after, and that's what Jesus cro- Jesus' cross did. It did all of that. It, it makes room for all of this. He took out the root of sin that gave the powers of darkness full dominion over our sexuality, and he intends now to bring our entire sexuality in line with his kingdom. So now we will pause for, um, se- Reflection, key takeaways, what are you challenged by? What is God calling you to? All of that's gonna be in your handout

Reflection Prompts And Farewell

Speaker 3 24:11

Friends, that was a, a lot of content. It's a little bit of a fire hose. Um, normally, a- as you could tell from the talk, there's time for questions and, and engagement. Um, but I just wanna invite you to reflect on w- what, what was new for you? How, how is God inviting you deeper into His story that we're all still a part of?