Weaving Our Spirituality With Our Sexuality

Weaving Our Spirituality with Our Sexuality

Let there be no sexual immorality, impurity, or greed among you. Such sins have no place among God’s people.

Ephesians 5:3

What happens when we connect our spiritual self with our sexual self? We like what Philip Yancey says in Rumors of Another World: “When I experience desire, I need not flinch in guilt, as if something unnatural has happened. Rather, I should follow the desire to its source, to learn God’s original intent.” He’s saying that a sexual impulse can and should take us to God’s original purpose in creating us as sexual beings. He created us for relationship. And a relationship does not get more personal or more sacred than when it is consummated in making love.

We want to say it straight. Sex is more than physical. It’s more than treating another human being like a sexual plaything. It is spiritual. And that’s why it is designed to make us holy. You read that right! Sex is designed to make us holy.

Now, we can already hear your questions: “Are you saying that the more sex I have the more spiritual I am? Are you saying that I’m supposed to be thinking religious thoughts while making love?” Of course not. Don’t misread us here. We all know that sex is complex. It’s influenced by mood, levels of stress, constraints of time, sleep, and so on. Remembering that sex is spiritual as well as biological—that it’s about a deep and profound connection of two souls—does not guarantee that we will realize anything more than physical gratification in our sex lives.

Sex doesn’t promise a spiritual epiphany. After all, marriage is composed of two people who have bad moods, stressful schedules, and imperfect hygiene. As a spouse, you live with a person who needs patience, respect, understanding, kindness, nurturing, acceptance, devotion, forgiveness, and so many other honorable qualities. And you need the same from your spouse. Admit it. For when you do, you’ve recalibrated your sex life to honor the whole of your relationship, not merely the physical aspect. And within those deeper bounds is where the holiness of sex resides.^a

Sex may be redeemed in our secular age not by denying it and not by indulging it but integrating it into our quest for depth, loyalty, and permanence in interpersonal relationships.

—Edward Thornton

^a 148