Inner Experience as the Ultimate Sexual Authority
And why it will always lead us astray
In a recent New York Times article, an conservative evangelical pastor recounts his personal experience changing his mind on homosexuality after his son came out to him as a teenager. This is a familiar story, especially for younger Christians: a conservative Christian raised to see LGBTQ lifestyles as sins but who has had no real exposure to people in those communities finally meets someone who identifies as gay or queer and all of a sudden is sympathetic. It doesn’t feel immoral, particularly if it’s practiced monogamously. It feels like love. Just a different love. And how can love be wrong? Don’t we serve a God who is love? Why would a God of love condemn anyone for “naturally” feeling attraction for someone they love? It’s a compelling argument. It’s not true or good, but it is compelling, especially when you care deeply about the person who experiences these feelings of love toward someone other than the biological opposite sex. It feels like a personal betrayal of your friendship or parenting to tell that person that their deeply held, intimate internal experience of desire could be disordered, mistaken, and even sinful. How could God do that and how could we do that?
It seems to me, that unless Christians are grounded in a robust understanding of biblical sexual ethics, of the narrative of the body, sex, procreation, and our design, then we will abandon traditional biblical teachings on sexuality. Because for most of us, in the world and in the church, our default setting is to accept that inner, personal experience is the ultimate authority on all sexual ethics.
I know I’ve beat this drum before, and I’ll continue to beat it, because when I grew up in the church I was given plenty of teaching about abstinence, and some teaching about the sin of homosexuality, and a lot of teaching about masculinity (just like the teaching mentioned in the NYT article), but I had no teaching about the purpose of the body, the purpose of sex, or the purpose of marriage, or the role of procreation in marriage (other than that it was a thing that happened because of unprotected sex). And I certainly wasn’t taught anything about my body or my life being designed a certain way.
What I was taught by the world was that my feelings were supreme. That love is over all. That love is an internal emotional that no one can challenge and is defined by the individual. That who you were attracted to and what you desired and who you loved were intimately tied to your identity which was and is profoundly sacred. I was taught all this by a thousand songs, a million movies, and a billion TV shows. Whatever my heart desired, my heart desired. End of story. The only limits on that desire was consent: children and animals. Beyond that, my heart was free to desire anyone and everyone it wanted. My heart was free to be and become anyone and everyone it wanted. My identity’s desire was plastic as my identity itself. That’s the radical freedom of modernity. From the world’s perspective, it felt immoral to deny my deep, internal desires, because they were mine.
But this is not the truth. It’s not the truth as we understand it from the Bible, nor is it the truth from creation. It’s the lie of modernity which I address at length in You Are Not Your Own.
Instead, we belong, both body and soul to Christ. And it’s that body aspect that I want to focus on today. In 1 Corinthians 6:19 when Paul tells us that we are not our own, the context of his admonition is a warning against sexual immorality. And his point is that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. The implication here is that in belonging to God we don’t get to do whatever we’d like with our bodies, including having sex with whomever we desire. We learn how to and who to rightly desire by knowing God and understanding his Word. We could look at the biblical teachings against same-sex activity, like we find in Romans chapter 1, but those were the kinds of warnings I heard growing up. I knew those. And those are good to hear. They are good but what I also needed to hear was how God’s design all fit together.
For example, I needed to understand that my body was designed as a male to join with a female. Which did not mean that I must get married, but that if I did choose marriage (which is a good thing), that is how sexuality was created by God to be expressed! I needed to understand that in marriage, the sexual act was designed for union of the couple and for procreation. Naturally, in his creational design, God made sex so that when it is done lovingly and self-givingly it brings the couple into an emotional, psychological, union. But it also leads to life, which is part of the purpose of marriage, an openness to life. Through all this, my body and my life is not my own, but is sacrificed for my wife and my children in act after act of self-giving. This goes beyond sex to the purpose of my body in general. My body is not first and foremost a tool for sexual pleasure, but a gift from God which I care for as a temple of the Holy Spirit and which I use to serve others, particularly my family. That, too, is part of the design.
My desires in this marriage may differ at times from the covenantal commitment to my wife. They may be disordered toward other women. And when this happens, my duty is to submit those desires to Christ, to mortify those desires, to repent of them, to not act on them, and to turn my gaze first to Christ and then to my wife. So all of us in this life must submit our desires to Christ. This is part of what it means to die to ourselves daily. Rather than see our inward selves as sacred and ultimate authorities, we die to ourselves in order to live with Christ, in order to live according to the design Christ created us for, as difficult as that may be. And it will be difficult at times. But paradoxically, Christ promises that his “yoke is easy and his burden is light” (Matthew 11:30). I think this means that while dying to ourselves and our desires, whatever our desires may be, is costly, what is infinitely more costly is living unto ourselves. Yes, Christ’s yoke is still a yoke, still a burden, but it is a burden you can carry with the help of the Holy Spirit and the community of the church! Whereas the burden of self-sovereignty is unbearable.
The grand design of God for human sexuality as part of marriage is embedded in Genesis and creation itself. Marriage itself is a living symbol for Christ’s relationship to his Church. There is a givenness to the nature of human sexuality that is a part of the beauty of God’s creation. When young people, in particular, are not taught that beauty, when they are only given a list of rules, and (even worse) when they mostly come to understand sexuality in terms of a larger culture war, then they lose the beauty of that creational story entirely. It’s no longer about how God designed us to flourish to his glory. It’s about how we are individually responsible for fulfilling our inward desires. And that will never satisfy.
Each of us faces sexual desires that are disordered. Some of us face them stronger than others. But all of us face them. The challenge before us is to submit ourselves before the mercy of Christ, the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit, and the love of God, and strive to turn from those desires to rightly ordered desires, desires we were created to pursue. In a sense, this is difficult work, but as Christ promises, his yoke is easy and light, thank God.