Sexual Immorality: Beyond Body Parts & Nerve Endings
Sexual Immorality: Beyond Body Parts & Nerve Endings
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ByJohn A. Huffman Jr. | Senior Pastor of St. Andrews Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, California. Heis a Contributing Editor to Preaching.
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Shun fornication! Every sin that a person commits is outside the body; but the fornicator sins against the body itself. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body (1 Cor. 6:18-20).
Is there anything in the world more fascinating and more powerful than the human sex drive?
Pornography is a multi-billion-dollar industry. I’m told that, in a world where there are so many things to think about and learn, there are more Internet sites devoted to sexual stimulation than any other subject matter on earth.
Sexual attractiveness is so desired and admired that we use it to sell every product you can imagine. I opened up the L.A. Times, and this multi-page, high-gloss insert fell out that pictured this knock-down gorgeous brunette in all kinds of attractive poses, the one word theme “GORGEOUS” running through this several-page spread. It was only when I got to the last page I realized that it was an advertisement for Jaguar automobiles.
C.S. Lewis, many years ago in his book Mere Christianity, described our contemporary struggle with human sexuality in the following words:
The Christian idea of marriage is based on Christ’s words that a man and wife are to be regarded as a single organism—for that is what the words “one flesh” would be in modern English. And the Christians believe that when He said this He was not expressing a sentiment but stating a fact-just as one is stating a fact when one says that a lock and its key are one mechanism, or that a violin and a bow are one musical instrument. The inventor of a human machine was telling us that its two halves, the male and the female, were made to be combined together in pairs, not simply on the sexual level, but totally combined. The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union. The Christian attitude does not mean that there is anything wrong about sexual pleasure, any more than about the pleasure of eating. It means that you must not isolate that pleasure and try to get it by itself, any more than you ought to try to get the pleasures of taste without swallowing and digesting, by chewing things and spitting them out again... Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body—which believes that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in Heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, our beauty, and our energy. Christianity has glorified marriage more than any other religion: and nearly all the greatest love poetry in the world has been produced by Christians. If anyone says that sex, in itself, is bad, Christianity contradicts him at once...
