Sexual Sin within Christian Marriage

1Thes 4: 3-6 God wants you to be holy,
so don’t be immoral in matters of sex.
Respect and honor your wife.
Don’t be a slave of your desires

or live like people who don’t know God.
You must not cheat any of the Lord’s followers in matters of sex. (CEV)

From Why do I feel so down When my faith should lift me up? by Dr Grant Mullen

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Sex is primarily a spiritual act of oneness symbolized with a physical act. For it to be a blessing im marriage, there needs to be emotional and spiritual wholeness, free of domination, manipulation and control from either spouse. Emotional wounding or bondage in either person will damage and distort sexual intimacy. To have a healthy sexuality, you need complete trust, mutual respect and appreciation of each other which leads to oneness of body, soul and spirit. This creates a godly sexual soul tie.An ungodly sexual soul tie occurs when sexuality becomes a tool of control. Yes, there can be an ungodly sexual soul tie even in Christian marriage. There can even be sexual abuse in Christian marriage which gets covered up by insisting on the scriptural submission of women to the will of the male. It is a sin to dominate, manipulate or control a spouse in any way, including sexuality. It shows disrespect and treats the person as an object to meet the emotional needs of the other. Sexuality can be used as a tool of punishment or reward to control the other spouse. When it is used as a way of reassuring yourself of worth or acceptance, it can easily become an addiction that drives you for more. A very simple test of sexuality is to ask yourself this question, during sex are you lovingly giving yourself to your spouse or taking what you believe to be rightfully yours? If you are taking then you are on dangerous ground!In my observation, most sexual problems are emotional and spiritual, not physical. The solution is the healing of our wounds.

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Heb 13:4 Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled; for God will judge the immoral and adulterous.
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What “defiles the marriage bed”?

Apparently, normal women tend to shut down sexually when they are treated badly:

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quoted from Sacred Marriage by Gary Thomas
I remember talking frankly to two Christian men once about the ideals of Christian marriage. I cracked them up when I freely confessed, “You bet I’ve swallow arguments because I wanted something from my wife later that night.” They both admitted, somewhat sheepishly, that they too had done the same thing. I’m not proud of the fact that I’m less willing to stand up for my beliefs when I feel “the urge”- and I particularly don’t like the fact that what feels like a physical need directly my spiritual attitudes- but I can learn to use that physical need for spiritual benefit.Let me put this succinctly: We can learn to use the sex drive to groom our character. Out of a need to be intimate with their wives, husbands may learn to show tenderness and empathy.

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From 1Thes 4:3-8, it seems there exist choices in how one possesses “his vessel” (some translations render “vessel” as “wife”; some render “vessel” as his own body. I think GOD deliberately used a word which can mean wife or body- and the teaching of the passage applies to BOTH. John Piper thinks the RSV rendering “wife” is more accurate- link ).
Does he possess his wife/his body in “sanctification and honour”?
Or does he do so “in the lust of concupiscence”/”passion of lust”?
Engaging in the “passion of lust” is to “go beyond and defraud his brother”. I think “brother” can be his WIFE (or her husband). His transgression/ his lusting transgresses boundaries and DEFRAUDS HER. Here is the passage in 3 Bible versions:

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1Thes 4:3 For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from unchastity;
1Thes 4:4 That every one of you should know how to possess his vessel in sanctification and honour; 5 Not in the lust of concupiscence, even as the Gentiles which know not God: 6 That no man go beyond and defraud his brother in any matter: (AV)

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4 that each one of you know how to take a wife for himself in holiness and honor,
5 not in the passion of lust like heathen who do not know God;
6 that no man transgress, and wrong his brother in this matter, because the Lord is an avenger in all these things, as we solemnly forewarned you.
7 For God has not called us for uncleanness, but in holiness.
8 Therefore whoever disregards this, disregards not man but God, who gives his Holy Spirit to you. (RSV)

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1Thes 4: 3 God wants you to be holy, so don’t be immoral in matters of sex. 4Respect and honor your wife. [a] 5Don’t be a slave of your desires or live like people who don’t know God. 6You must not cheat any of the Lord’s followers in matters of sex. Remember, we warned you that he punishes everyone who does such things. 7God didn’t choose you to be filthy, but to be pure. 8So if you don’t obey these rules, you are not really disobeying us. You are disobeying God, who gives you his Holy Spirit. (CEV)

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Because this post is filed under “abuse” categories, I will include some links which were helpful to me:

• Retrouvaille Marriage Help
• The Silent Killer of Christian Marriages
• The Wounds of Spouse Abuse
• Cloud and Townsend Articles

 

 

"Taking it to Eve" by John Eldredge

Here is part of a chapter from Wild At Heart by John Eldredge.

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Taking It To Eve

Remember the story of my first kiss, that little darling I fell in love with in the seventh grade and how she made my bicycle fly? I fell in love with Debbie the very same year my father checked out of my story, the year I took my deepest wound. The timing was no coincidence. In a young boy’s development, there comes a crucial time when the father must intervene. It arrives early in adolescence, somewhere between the ages of eleven and fifteen, depending on the boy. If that intervention does not happen, the boy is set up for disaster; the next window that opens in his soul is sexuality. Debbie made me feel like a million bucks. I couldn’t have put words to it at the time; I had no idea what was really going on. But in my heart I felt I had found the answer to my question. A pretty girl thinks I am the greatest. What more can a guy ask for? If I’ve found Juliet, then I must be Romeo.

When she broke up with me, it began what has been a long and sad story of searching for “the woman that will make me feel like a man.” I went from girlfriend to girlfriend trying to get an answer. To be the hero to the beauty – that has been my longing, my image of what it means to really, finally be a man. Bly calls it the search fot the Golden-haired Woman.

He sees a woman across the room, knows immediately that it is “She.” He drops the relationship he has, pursues her, feels wild excitement, passion, beating heart, obsession. After a few months, everything collapses; she becomes an ordinary woman. He is confused and puzzled. Then he sees once more a radiant face across the room, and the old certainty comes again. (Iron John)

Why is pornography the most addictive thing in the universe for men? Certainly there’s the fact that a man is visually wired, that pictures and images arouse men much more that they do women. But the deeper reason is because that seductive beauty reaches down inside and touches your desperate hunger for validation as a man you didn’t even know you had, touches it like nothing else most men have ever experienced. You must understand – this is deeper than legs and breasts and good sex. It is mythological. Look at the lengths men will go to find the golden-haired woman. They have fought duals over her beauty; they have fought wars. You see, every man remembers Eve. We are haunted by her. And somehow we believe that if we could find her, get her back, then we’d also recover with our own lost masculinity.

You’ll recall the little boy Phillip, from the movie A Perfect World? Remember what his fear was? That his penis was puny. That’s how many men articulate a sense of emasculation. Later in life a man’s worst fear is impotence. If he can’t get an erection, then he hasn’t got what it takes. But the opposite is also at work. If a man can feel an erection, well then, he feels powerful. He feels strong. I’m telling you, for many men The Question feels hardwired to his penis. If he can feel like the hero sexually, well, then mister, he’s the hero. Pornography is so seductive because what is a wounded, famished man to think when there a literally hundreds of beauties willing to give themselves to him? Of course, it’s not just to him, but when’s he’s alone with the photos, it feels like it’s just him.)

It’s unbelievable – how many movies center around this lie? Get the beauty, win her, bed her, and you are the man. You’re James Bond. You’re a stud. Look carefully at the lyrics to Bruce Springsteen’s song, Secret Garden (from his Greatest Hits recording, 1995):
She’ll let you in her house
If you come knockin’ late at night
She’ll let you in her mouth
If the words you say are right
If you pay the price
She’ll let you deep inside
But there’s a secret garden she hides.
She’ll lead you down a path
There’ll be tenderness in the air
She’ll let you come just far enough
So you know she’s really there
She’ll look at you and smile
And her eyes will say
She’s got a secret garden
Where everything you wantWhere everything you need
Will always stay
A million miles away.

It’s a deep lie wedded to a deep truth. Eve is a garden of delight. (Song 4:16) But she’s not everything you want, everything you need – not even close. Ofcourse it will stay a million miles away. You can’t get there from here because it’s not there. It’s not there. The answer to your question can never, ever be found there. Don’t get me wrong. A woman is a captivating thing. More captivating that anything else in all creation. “The naked woman’s body is a portion of eternity too great for the eye of man.” Femininity can arouse masculinity. Boy oh boy can it. My wife flashes me a little breast, a little thigh, and I’m ready for action. All systems alert. She tells me in a soft voice that I’m a man and I’ll leap tall buildings for her. But femininity can never bestow masculinity. It’s like asking a pearl to give you a buffalo. It’s like asking for a field of wildflowers to give you a ‘57 chevy. They are different substances entirely.

Dave, whose father blew a hole in his chest when he called him “mamma’s boy”, took his question to the woman. Recently he confessed to me that younger women are his obsession. You can see why – they’re less of a threat. A younger woman isn’t half the challenge. He can feel more like a man there. Dave’s embarrassed by his obsession, but it deosn’t stop him. A younger woman feels like the answer to his question and he’s got to get an answer. But he knows his search is impossible. He admitted to me just the other day, “Even if I marry a beautiful woman, I will always know there is an even more beautiful woman out there somewhere. So I’ll wonder – could I have won her?”

It’s a lie. As Bly says. it’s a search without an end. “We are looking at the source of a lot of desperation in certain men here, and a lot of suffering in certain women.” How often I have seen this. A friend’s brother hit rock bottom a few years back when his girlfriend broke up with him. He was a really successful guy, a high star athelete who became a promising young attorney. But he was carrying a wound from an alcoholic, workaholic father who never gave him what every boy craves. Like so many of us, he took his heart with it’s question to the woman. When she dumped him, my friend said, “it blew him out of the water. He went into a major nosedive, started drinking heavily, smoking. He even left the country. His life was shattered.”

This is why so many men secretly fear their wives. She sees him as noone else does, sleeps with him, know’s what he is made of. If he has given her the power to validate him as a man, then he has also given her the power to invalidate him too. That’s the deadly catch. A pastor told me that for years he’s been trying to please his wife and she keeps giving him an “F”. “What is she is not the report card on you?” I suggested. “She sure feels like it…and I am failing.”

Another man, Richard, became verbally abusive toward his wife in the early years of their marriage. His vision for his life was that he was meant to be Romeo and therefore, she must be Juliet. When she turned out not to be the Golden-haired Woman, he was furious. Because that meant, you see, that he was not the heroic man. I remember seeing a picture of Julia Roberts without costume and makeup; Oh, I realised, she’s just an ordinary woman.

“He was coming to me for his validation,” a young woman told me about the man she was dating. Or, had been dating. She was drawn to him at first, and certainly drawn to the way he was taken with her. “That’s why I broke up with him.” I was amazed at her perceptiveness and her courage. It’s very rare to find, especially in younger women. How wonderful it feels at first to be his obsession. To be thought of as a goddess is pretty heady stuff. But eventually, it all turns from romance to immense pressure on her part. “He kept saying, ‘I don’t know if I have what it takes and you’re telling me I don’t.’ He’ll thanks me for it one day.”
What’s fascinating to note is that homosexuals are actually more clear on this point. They know what is missing in their hearts is masculine love. The problem is that they’ve sexualised it. Joseph Nicolosi says that homosexuality is an attempt to repair the wound by filling it with masculinity, either the masculine love that was missin or the masculine strength many men feel they do not possess. It, too, is a vain search and that is why so many of them suffer depression and a host of other addictions. What they need can’t be found there.

Why have I said all this about our search for validation and the answer to our question? Because we cannot hear the real answer until we see we’ve got a false one. So long as we chase the illusion, how can we face reality? The hunger is there; it lives in our souls like a famished craving, no matter what we’ve tried to fill it with. If you take your question to Eve, it will break your heart. I know this now, after many, many hard years. You can’t get your answer there. In fact, you can’t get your answer from any of the things men chase after to find their sense of self. There is only one source for the answer to your question. And so no matter where you’ve taken your question, you’ve got to take it back. You have to walk away. This is the beginning of your journey.
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"Sex God" by Rob Bell

Clips from Sex God by Rob Bell

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And when we begin to sort through all of the issues surrounding our sexuality, we quickly end up in the spiritual,

because this

is always about that…

Sex. God. They’re connected. And they can’t be separated. Where the one is, you will always find the other. This is a book about how sexuality is the “this” and spirituality is the “that”. To make sense of the one, we have to explore the other.

And that is what this book is about.

[italics in original]

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Sex, God.

“We reflect what God is like and who God is.
A divine spark resides in every single human being.
Everybody.
Everywhere.
Bearers of the divine image…

…deciding who’s hot and who’s not.
It’s an industry, a form of entertainment, a culture…
The problem is that “that” is actually a “she”.
A person.
A woman.
With a name, a history, with feelings.
It seems harmless until you’re that girl- and then it hurts.
It’s degrading.
It’s violating.
It does something to a person’s soul.

Jesus had much to say about what happens when a woman, an image bearer, a carrier of the divine spark, becomes a “that” [Matt 5:27-30]
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Scholars believe that the word sex is related to the Latin word secare, which means “to sever, to amputate, or disconnect from the whole.” This is where we get words like sect, section, dissect, bisect.

Our sexuality, then, has two dimensions. First, out sexuality is our awareness of how profoundly we’re severed and cut off and disconnected. Second, our sexuality is all of the ways we go about trying to reconnect….

For many, sexuality is simply what happens between two people involving physical pleasure. But that’s only a small percentage of what sexuality is. Our sexuality is all the ways we strive to reconnect with out world , with each other, and with God….

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…the Red Light District in Amsterdam is so sexually repressed…
There are lots of people “having sex” night and day, but that’s all it is. There’s no connection…

And so in the Red Light District there’s lots of physical interaction and no connection. There are lots of people having lots of physical sex- for some its their job- and yet it’s not a very sexual place at all…

When its just sex, then that’s all it is. It leaves the person deeply unconnected.

You can be having sex with many, and yet you’re alone. And the more sex you have, the more alone you are.

And it’s possible to be sleeping alone, and celibate, and to be very sexual. Connected with many.

It’s also possible to be married to somebody and sharing the same bed and be very disconnected. It’s possible to be married to somebody and sharing the same bed and even having sex regularly and still be profoundly disconnected….

And so they’re sleeping together, but they’re really sleeping alone.
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If marriage is meant to show people what the oneness of God is like, what happens when everybody is one in the presence of God?

If marriage is a picture of something else, what would happen to marriage if we found ourselves living in the midst of that something else?

Is sex in its greatest, purest, most joyful and honest expression a glimpse of forever?

Are these brief moments of abandon and oneness and ecstasy just a couple of seconds or minutes of how things will be forever?

Is sex a picture of heaven?…

Maybe Jesus knew what was coming and knew that whatever we experience here will pale compared with what awaits everyone.

Do you long for that?

Because that’s the center of Jesus’ message.

An invitation.

To trust that it’s true,

to trust that it’s real,

to trust that God is actually going to make all things new.
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from "The Wounded Heart" by Dan Allender

Quote From The Wounded Heart: Hope for Adult Victims of Childhood Sexual Abuse by Dan Allender

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The abuser-surrogate is usually the person who offers the abuse victim the most intimate relationship in principle or actuality. It will be the relationship where all the past damage and self-protection is intensely played out. It seems that a spouse is most often the abuser-surrogate. In the marriage relationship intimacy, trust, and sexuality are set against the issues of powerlessness, betrayal, and ambivalence. As stated before, the abuse victim usually will have chosen a relationship with a man who is dead to intimacy, untrustworthy, divorced from passion or a user of passion. The marriage of an abuse victim is usually dull and stable or painful and chaotic. It is not unusual for a marriage to swing between the two ends like a ride on a roller coaster… Some women are married to hard, angry, cold, but somewhat open men. Others are enmeshed with extremely closed and self-centered men, or worse with men who are evil, cold-hearted, and potentially violent…. If a husband will not pursue counseling with his wife, the woman can still benefit from a counselor who will help her explore what it means to love a man who will not involve himself in the process of change.

What are the basics of loving the abuser-surrogate? The process includes building consistent boundaries, deepening intimacy, leaning to sorrow and rejoice, and persevering in faith toward God’s redemption of one’s spouse as a person clothed in dignity and strength…

If the relationship deepens through honesty, travail, and repentance, it is unlikely the spouse will be used as a surrogate. However, when new boundaries and pursuit of depth in relationship result in irreconciled division, the victim will find it even more of a battle to boldly love her spouse who, in turning against her has become a capital-A abuser.

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Profile of an abuser

Profile of an abuser.

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His instability manifests in some or all of the following ways:… When criticisms, or even suggestions or help are offered, he can perceive these only as personal attacks or threats to his private citadel. Because of all this, typically he has been released from a number of jobs over the years, but has never been able to accept responsibility of his fault in the matter.

He is angry at root level because it seems to him that his father always criticized, rather than complimenting and affirming him, he will feel rage at his boss’s corrections, but self-defensively stifle his stormy response until at home he can “thunder and lightning” all over his family. If confronted about this behavior, he projects guilt onto everyone else and withdraws…

He NEEDED to set her [his wife] up to attack him in order to maintian his right to hide in the fortress he had built from childhood to insure protection from the destructive onslaught of “mother”….And then he would relate, sometimes with tears, his poor-abused-husband tale of woe…

He fears intimacy because to him it means a loss of control, and vulnerability to the destructive imperfections of others. He chooses the the familiar agony of loneliness rather than risking the unpredictable kinds and measures of pain he is certain lurk “poised to get him” from the world beyond his defenses

He avoids efforts necessary for real growth, and thus remains immature… He may be keenly aware of his own inadequacies, but cannot seek any kind of counsel, for fear of discovery… He doesn’t know that he is loved just as he is, that sins are forgivable, and that most people learn more by their mistakes than by successes…

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from link

…a man raped her

From Prayers that Heal the Heart . By Mark and Patti Virkler

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Let us say a woman has a negative picture of men in her mind because a man raped her. She may know that she is supposed to forgive everything against everyone (Mark 11:25) and that she is not supposed to let the sun go down on her wrath (Eph 4:26). So she may say a thousand times, “I forgive him.” But if she still maintains a picture in her mind of the man raping her, then that picture will create more energy within than her confession of forgiveness, and she will find that in her heart she still hates the man (if not all men).

… in this scenario the woman not only has a negative picture she must get rid of, but she most likely also has a negative expectation and inner vow which must be renounced and removed. The negative expectation is probably something like, “All men are pigs.” The inner vow may be, “I will never trust a man again.” So now we have three things producing sin energies within the woman. In addition, she is determining her future fate because her spirit is sending out a strong message of expectation to every man who can hear, saying, “I expect you to treat me badly, and I don’t trust you.” The man’s spirit hears the two messages which are saying to him, “I am supposed to act like an unfeeling animal around her. I am not to be trusted when in her presence.” Therefore, she will be drawing more molestation and abuse toward herself.

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