Devotional #4: Why Talk About Sexuality? Because It’s One Of The Most Powerful Forces Within Us
True or false: The more power something possesses, the more boundaries there ought to be around it.
Hopefully, you didn’t need to scratch your head too long on that one. Any loving parent gets it. Electricity that sends you warmth and light can also send you to the hospital. Get your hands away from there! Swimming pools are a blast, but they can kill you, so we’re taking swim lessons. And get those floaties on! My father spent more time teaching me how to drive a car than he did teaching me how to ride a bike. And so help me, if you come home with a speeding ticket!
Why the dedicated instruction? Why the many rules? Why the warnings? Because those powerful things that can make our lives so fun and fulfilling can also turn right around and ruin our lives or take our lives if we use that power wrongly.
You know where I’m going with this. Sex – and all that goes with it – is one of the most powerful forces on earth. I can scarcely think of anything more fundamentally primal to our humanity than this.
These desires and the act it leads to have the power to create life. Something has to be powerful to take life – a bullet, a virus, a storm. But to create life – my goodness, what power must be wielded by such a thing! And sex wields that power.
These desires and the actions it leads to also have the power to bond life. Sex exists throughout the animal kingdom, but with humans this connection goes far beyond simple biology. It catches up in its wake the deepest emotions felt by humans, and if the Bible is telling us the truth, it transcends physicality entirely and takes us into the realm of the spirit, where our deepest identity is forged. It’s not just bodies linking, but heart, mind and soul as well.
Two Hollywood actors can play out a fistfight in a movie scene, and go have a couple beers afterwards. However two actors playing out a nude love scene are tampering with forces that they cannot possibly comprehend or control, no matter how much they protest that it’s just art.
If a loving parent will speak the most about those things with the greatest power in life to heal or to harm, then we in the Church must not be loving our people all that much to remain silent or vague about sex.
God wouldn’t create within us this incredible force, and then leave us to figure out for ourselves how to use it, any more than a father would drop a loaded handgun into his children’s toy chest and walk away saying, “Have fun with this.”
Bear Clifton is a pastor, writer and screenwriter. In addition to this website, his blogs and devotionals can be enjoyed at his writing website: blclifton.com. Bear is the author of “Train Yourself To Be Godly: A 40 Day Journey Toward Sexual Wholeness”, “Ben-Hur: The Odyssey”, and “A Sparrow Could Fall”.