Guidance for Married Life

Many years ago, the Senior Pastor of the National Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC, Craig Barnes, offered a sermon entitled, Finding Good Sex. After putting the sermon title on the sign in front of the church he had more comments about it than any other sermon he had ever preached. 

 

As we have discovered already in our study of 1 Corinthians, sex was a hot topic in Corinth. And Paul continues that hot topic in chapter 7. Listen for God’s word to you…

 

Now for the matters you wrote about: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” But since sexual immorality is occurring, each man should have sexual relations with his own wife, and each woman with her own husband. The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife. Do not deprive each other except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. I say this as a concession, not as a command. I wish that all of you were as I am. But each of you has your own gift from God; one has this gift, another has that. Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.

 

Last week we looked at what Paul had to say to single people in 1 Corinthians 7. This week we are looking at what Paul says to those who are married. First, he says it is better to marry than to give into sexual immorality. 

 

Paul says that singleness is good. But he invites the Corinthians to think practically about the world they live in. 

 

As we have seen already, Corinth was the Vanity Fair of the ancient world. Aphrodite was worshiped there as πόρνῃ (prostitute). Aphrodite’s temple on the Acropolis of Corinth, at one time had one thousand temple prostitutes. The name of the town was identified with sexual license. The city was sex mad.

 

Given that context, where temptation to sexual immorality was all around, Paul was saying that it was better to marry than to be faced with temptation, to burn with unsatisfied passion, day after day. Our situation today is not much better. There is a plethora of voices in our culture talking about sex nonstop. Temptation to sexual immorality lies all around. But giving into the temptation is not the way to settled happiness.

 

Author Susan Howatch made a fortune writing blockbuster novels like Penmarric. She had houses in several countries, drove a Porche, and after divorcing, had a number of “transient liaisons”. But at age thirty, she said, “God seized me by the scruff of the neck and shook me until my teeth rattled.”

 

After becoming a Christian, Howatch reflected: 

 

I was promiscuous, but finally one morning I woke up and said, ‘What am I trying to prove and to whom?’ I knew exactly what—that even though my marriage broke up, I could still attract men. The fact that I could control men boosted my fractured ego.

 

Her conclusion was: “Promiscuity is a sign that you’re not aligned right with God or yourself.”

 

Way back in 1989, Erica Jong wrote in Ms. magazine,

Our society has had a decade and a half of experimentation with random sexual freedom. We have discovered that it is neither so very sexy nor so very free. My generation is disillusioned with sex as a social panacea. We look longingly at the marriages of our parents and grandparents and wonder how on earth they managed to stay best friends for so long—or even worst friends for so long! But at least they had someone to read the newspaper with.

 

Perhaps all the experimentation that has been going on since the 1960s is not in all cases the best way to deal with sexual need. Paul suggests that marriage is the best solution.

 

This is certainly not the only reason for marriage presented by the Bible. Companionship is the main purpose of marriage. And of course, the begetting of children and raising them to know the Lord is another purpose fulfilled by a Christian marriage. Paul is not exhaustive in what he says here about marriage. He is simply addressing some of the practical issues the Corinthians were facing.

 

A second thing that Paul tells the Corinthians is that sex is a two-way street. Paul’s statement would have been a startling one in the ancient world of patriarchy. Who ever thought of a woman’s needs or desires back then? And yet Paul says, “The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband.” 

 

Not only does Paul talk about the husband meeting his wife’s needs, but he leads with that statement. Paul states that there should be a mutuality in sexual relations within marriage. And the focus should not be selfish. We should focus on giving not on getting.

 

If there is going to be mutuality in this area of sexual relations, then that means we need to learn about one another, what pleases the other person. After all, men and women are very different when it comes to what pleases them.

Ann Landers once asked all the women in her reading audience to send a postcard or letter with a reply to the question: would you be content to be held close and treated tenderly and forget about “the act”? More than 90,000 women responded to Landers’ query. 72% said “yes” they would be content to be held close and treated tenderly and forget about the act. Of those 72% who said yes, 40% were under 40 years old.

 

Psychologist and author Kevin Leman once said that, from the perspective of some women, the greatest of all aphrodisiacs is for a man to take out the garbage for his wife. By contrast, some wag once said that the only aphrodisiac most men need is for their wives to show up naked … with beer.

 

Bottom line: men and women are very different. Sex is a two-way street. So, we need to get to know our mate and learn what pleases them.

 

A third point that Paul makes about sex is that your body belongs to your mate. The fact that Paul says “the husband does not have authority over his own body” is truly amazing. In the ancient world the man had absolute authority in his home. Craig Blomberg writes, “Against the highly patriarchal societies of antiquity, this mutuality stands out in sharp relief. Most non-Christian husbands would have been horrified at the notion that their bodies belonged to their wives.”

 

What Paul is advocating is that charity, agape love, should determine the character of one’s sexual relationship. Elizabeth Elliot once wrote that charity “is always self-giving. Charity says ‘I grant you your rights. I do not insist on mine. I give myself to you; I do not insist that you give yourself to me.”

 

As Walter Wangerin, Jr. once wrote, “Sexual satisfaction is not a right, but a blessing.”

 

A fourth thing that Paul says about sex is that married couples should not abstain from sex except by mutual agreement. A less puritanical view of sex could hardly be imagined. And again, mutuality is the keynote for Paul. Whatever a couple does or does not do should be by mutual agreement.

 

It seems to me that Paul here recognizes that every sexual relationship goes through seasons. There may be times when sexual partners do not share the gift of sex with each other and their focus is on other things, like prayer.

 

But again, we need to remember that Paul’s counsel to couples here is not exhaustive. Paul is acting as a good pastor. He is responding to the questions of the Corinthian Christians and his advice is based upon the situations he was seeing among them. Paul does not tell us here everything that could or should be said about sex from a Christian perspective. He is not addressing every possible situation there is between two people in marriage.

 

For example, Paul does not address how to handle the situation where an active sexual relationship in marriage becomes untenable. Let me give you an example…

 

I am the youngest of six children. Shortly after my birth, my father was diagnosed as having diabetes and the disease rendered him impotent. At that point in time my parents were not even halfway through their fifty years together. Even in a marriage deprived of sexual relations by medical impossibility, my parents each found many other ways to express their love to one another over the course of their many years together. As every couple who has been married for a long time knows, sex is only part of the equation. 

 

My mother had a good, old Pennsylvania Dutch saying that hung in her kitchen for many years. I never realized its significance until I was grown up. But it said this: “Kissin don’t last. Cookin do.” Cooking many fabulous gourmet meals over the course of fifty years was just one of many ways my mother expressed her love for my father.

A final point that Paul makes in this passage is one I touched on last week. Paul states that both marriage and singleness are gifts from God. He says, “But each of you has your own gift from God; one has this gift, another has that.”

 

The word Paul uses here for gift is the same word, χάρισμα, that he uses in 1 Corinthians 12-14 to talk about spiritual gifts. In other words, the capacities for singleness or marriage are abilities that God graciously gives us for the building up of his church, just as much as the gifts of teaching, serving, administrating, showing hospitality, and all the other spiritual gifts. Married people and single people both have unique ways that they can serve Christ and his church.

 

This last point also affirms what the Bible teaches elsewhere, namely that sex is good. Hebrews 13:4 says, “Marriage is honorable in all, and the bed undefiled.” Bed in the King James Version is a euphemism for sexual intercourse. Sex, as God created it to function, is something pure and good.

 

Now, it may be hard for some of us to accept or view sex as a gift, as something pure, if someone has planted the idea in our minds that it is dirty. But as Dr. Ed Wheat writes,

 

The Scriptures tell us clearly that the joyous sexual expression of love between a husband and wife is God’s plan. It is, as the writer of the Hebrews emphasizes,undefiled, not sinful, not soiled. It is a place of great honor in marriage—the holy of holies where husband and wife meet privately to celebrate their love for each other. It is a time meant to be both holy and intensely enjoyable. Uninformed people have actually considered the Victorian view to be biblical because they think the Bible forbids all earthly pleasures. Certainly not! In fact, the Bible is far more ‘liberated’ concerning sex than untaught people realize.

 

It may be hard for some of us to see sex as God’s gift if we have been hurt or sexually abused by someone else. This is one area where good counseling can be of great help to bring healing and wholeness to one’s life. 

 

I think it is also important to recognize what Bill Brown writes. He says…

 

Every marriage seems to have its periods of ‘death’ as well as ‘resurrection.’ C. S. Lewis felt this way and attributed so much divorce among Christians to their not waiting out that deadly period—the winter months of marriage—until the spring, or resurrection arrives.

 

A friend of mine likens marriage to the lilac bush in her garden. When it is bare and brittle during winter, she doesn’t pull it out, only to plant a new bush each spring. Instead, she lives through that dormant period, and in the spring her lilac bush has not only grown, but it is more beautiful than ever. 

 

I also love this quote from one of the greatest sources of wisdom ever—the Peanuts comic strip by Charles Schultz. In one episode Charlie Brown says to his friend, “My Grandpa and Grandma have been married for fifty years!” 

 

The friend replies, “They’re lucky, aren’t they?” 

 

Charlie Brown answers, “Grandma says it isn’t luck—it’s skill!”

 

That is so true. I believe that Jesus Christ is the one who can best give us the grace and the skill to handle the gift of sexuality appropriately, to either live a life of loving marriage or loving singleness for a lifetime. Let’s ask him now for fresh measures of his grace and skill…