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I had lunch with a pastor of another congregation who wanted to welcome me to the community. We were old friends and had a great time together, reminiscing and catching up. That night, when we were talking together as a family about the things we'd done during the day, Brenda asked me how I knew him. Where had we crossed paths before?

"Well," I said, "his sister was my first girlfriend."

Of course, that got the attention of a few ears! "Daddy," said one of our daughters, "did you think a lot about girls when you were a teenager?" I had to admit that I did.

There was no stopping this thing now! "Mommy," came the next question, "did you think a lot about boys when you were a teenager?" (I'm looking at Brenda, eager to hear the answer to this one too!) "Yes," said Brenda, "I did."

That's never the end of it, of course. They were on a roll now, so there was no quitting. "Mommy and Daddy, why do teenagers like each other so much?"

What do you say?

I remember what Chuck Swindoll said one time. He was speaking at a conference, and one morning a woman handed him a note. In the note she told him that she had gotten married at the age of 31. She said that she hadn't been worried too much about being single until then, although she did have a rather peculiar practice. Every night, before she went to sleep, she hung a pair of men's pants on the headboard of her bed. Then she knelt next to her bed, held onto the trousers with one hand and prayed this prayer:

Father in heaven, hear my prayer,

And grant it if you can;
I hung a pair of trousers here --

Please fill them with a man!


Now, that's a good story in itself! But something happened to Chuck Swindoll which made it even better. He thought that was such a good story that he shared it with his congregation the following Sunday morning. The crowd, of course, roared with delight, although Chuck did see one young man who didn't smile. In fact, he seemed a bit preoccupied.

The young man's mother wasn't in church with the family that morning, having stayed at home to take care of a sick daughter. But a couple of weeks later the mother slipped a note to Chuck after worship: "Dear Chuck, I am wondering if I should be worried about something. It has to do with our son. For the last two weeks I have noticed that before he turns out the light at night he hangs a woman's bikini over the foot of his bed ... Should I be concerned about this?"

"Why do boys and girls like each other so much?!" What shall we say? Certainly, when Paul reflects on marriage relations in his letter to the Corinthian Christians he has some things in mind about human sexual relations. What does the Bible have to say about human sexuality?

Human Sexuality Is the Best Thing That Ever Happened To Us

The first thing the Bible has to say is that our human sexuality is the best thing that ever happened to us! In the story of creation God fashions Adam to romp and roam in his beautiful new world. God brings all of the animals to him to play with, but they're not enough for him. He's alone in a crowd, so God creates Eve to be with Adam. Someone like him in every way, and yet so different.

In that act God declared that loneliness is a curse, a curse which doesn't belong in his wonderful world. The way to get around loneliness is to find a relationship that matters with a person who matters. God intended for that to happen in a special way across the gender lines.

Hugh Hefner is on to something, you know. Hefner is the guy who turned sex into a multi-billion dollar business with his Playboy magazine and his Playboy clubs. Not long ago he was interviewed, and the reporter asked him why he was so fixated on sex. He said: "Sex is a function of the body. A drive which man shares with animals. Like eating, drinking, and sleeping. It's a physical demand that must be satisfied. If you don't satisfy it you will have all sorts of neuroses and repression psychosis. Sex is here to stay. Let's forget the prudery that makes us hide from it. Throw away those inhibitions, find a girl who's like-minded and let yourself go!"

What do you think about that? In many respects I think he is absolutely right! God made us males and females, and he wanted us to enjoy one another in just that way.

Stan Wiersma, who taught at Calvin College until his death some years ago, wrote a series of poems called Purpaleanie. In them he remembers his own sex education on the farm. Purpaleanie is a collection of eighteen poems, one for each of his first eighteen years of life. In number "Seventeen" he writes:

Mother worried
that my sex education
was not complete, not knowing
you had undertaken it when I was one.

Mother called a family council
before I went to college.
Mother led off:

Mother worried
that my sex education
was not complete, not knowing
you had undertaken it when I was one.

Mother called a family council
before I went to college.
Mother led off:

"Love is never sin.
     Lust is always sin.
Love is giving.
     Lust is taking.
Love always lasts.
     Lust never lasts.
Love is expressing yourself.
     Lust is gratifying yourself."

And you, Dad,
suddenly agitated:
"This uncivilized English
language, with two words for the same thing,
only one is good and the other bad! In Dutch
lust means like wanting food when you're hungry!
Sure, it's getting,
     it never lasts,
          and it's self-gratifying,
but it's not sin to enjoy food when you're hungry!"

Then you fell silent.
When you spoke again
you were calmer.

"When you get married, Sietze,
I hope it's for love,
but I hope it's for lust too."

Don't imagine that Adam was a prude! Don't think that Eve was shy about being a woman! Don't pretend that Jesus didn't understand what it was like to be male! After all, he's one of the three persons of the Holy Trinity of God who said together, at the beginning of time, "Let's make humankind in our image ... male and female."

That doesn't mean that the persons of the Holy Trinity of God are male and female; rather, it reminds us that the persons of the Holy Trinity of God had such a wonderful relationship together that they wanted others to share whatever was good about it. When they blasted the stars and the planets from the Big Bang, and when they condensed the moisture of the earth into seas and clouds, and when they planned together the human form, they said to one another: "We've got to give these humans the delightful relationship we share with each other!" The best way they could figure to make that happen was to fix some of us up as females and to fix others of us up as males.

God himself declares, at the beginning of time, that the best thing that's ever happened to us is our human sexuality.

The Purpose Of Our Human Sexuality Is To Find Deeper Identity

But Paul doesn't just talk about human sexuality in these verses. He talks about adultery and prostitution, several things that are major threats to marriage. In what Paul says, he affirms the sanctity of marriage. He shouts in a large voice that marriage is a holy thing. Paul declares that there is something very special about marriage that no one ought to tamper with.

Why is marriage such a sacred thing? It has to do, in part, with our search for self. Notice that when Paul speaks of someone committing adultery he gives the impression that that person doesn't really know himself. If he did know himself he wouldn't have committed adultery! How could a person who really knew what he was doing actually sin in this way against himself, let alone against the person to whom he has declared ultimate trust and love?

You see, we come into this world as unfinished creatures. Little babies are fully human, but no one would say that they are fully developed. They have a lifetime of potential growth and development ahead of them. Intellectually they will need teachers to pour waters of learning into the sponges of their minds. Volitionally they will need parental discipline to shape and mold and give contour to the persons they are becoming. Socially they will respond to friends and communities, until they find a way to be themselves in relation with others.

Still, the chances are that they won't truly find themselves in a very personal way without the help of someone from the opposite gender. The poet Alfred Housman says:

When I was in love with you

Then I was clean and brave!
And miles around the wonder grew

How well I did behave!


He's saying that something of myself came alive only when I found myself in relationship with you!

I remember how it was to fall in love for the first time. No one understood me like she did! Definitely not any of my other friends! Certainly not my parents! But do you know what?! I didn't even understand myself as much as she understood me! One of the most fascinating parts of our courtship was our conversations together! We could talk about everything! She helped me to understand who I was just because she was there for me!

Renowned psychiatrist Rollo May says that loving a person of the opposite gender and finding intimacy with that person has five deepening dimensions to it. First, he says, there's a tenderness that happens to us which softens our hard walls of self, and which penetrates the mighty defenses we use to protect our individuality. Remember the song that they used to sing about love?

Six-food-six he stood on the ground,
Weighed two hundred and thirty-five pounds!
Yet I saw that giant of a man brought down to his knees by love!


And so it is with us! Our individuality makes us scramble for a personal identity. At the same time our sinfulness makes us fight for our distinction from everyone else. But something about love burrows past our rocks and walls and pride, and opens us to the wonder that there might be in intimacy with that special person! A. D. Hope says about someone loving someone intimately:

Here I come home: in this expected country
They know my name and speak it with delight.
I am the dream and you my gates of entry.
The means by which I waken into the light.


I was asleep, unaware of who I was, until you spoke my name, until you called me awake, until you brought me home to myself for the first time! This is the tenderness of love that works its magic on our crusty selves.

Second, says Rollo May, there's the affirmation of myself in a relationship of love. Social scientists talk to us about the culture of space. Do you know that you draw a circle around you wherever you go, whatever you do? In North America that circle is about three to four feet wide. It extends from the center of your body approximately a foot-and-a-half to two feet in every direction. It's the space you claim for yourself, the space you "own" as you move along in this physical realm. In different societies the size of the circle changes. In Nigeria, the circle is much smaller -- only about two feet wide.

The circle is our personal space, and we won't easily let someone enter it. Just watch yourselves and one another as you have coffee after worship today -- most of us will keep others about a foot-and-a-half to two feet from the centers of ourselves. And, if someone should be so bold as to invade our space, what do we do? Most of us, if we are "nice," will gently lean slightly away from the other person. Or we'll take a step back from the other person. Or, if we are children or rude adults, we'll give the other person a good push and send him reeling back into his own space!

We do it because we're afraid someone else will dominate our identity. We're afraid the other person will take over and overpower who we are. We're afraid that we'll lose our sense of self if the other person comes too near.

But what happens to us when we "fall in love"? Suddenly we can't get close enough to the other person! Someone has said that the scientific name for holding hands is "pre-marital interdigitation"! It's part of that closeness we allow only to someone special! "Here! You can come into my space! That's right! Come on in! Here, let me hold the door for you! Sure, come right on in!"

The only reason we can do that is because in love we know the other person seeks to affirm us, rather than to annihilate us! That's the second thing love means to us: it affirms who we are.

The third dimension of love, says Rollo May, is the creative element. There's something about love that convinces us that together we're more than the combination of our individual selves. I give to you. You give to me. And somehow in the giving a greater identity is formed. God, of course, confirms it in a beautiful way with children. Children are the selves we are together combined to form even greater selves!

The fourth dimension of love is closely tied to the third. It's the "giving" dimension. Love teaches us the truth of Jesus' statement: "It is more blessed to give than to receive!" Giving is the beginning of receiving where love is concerned. Why do lovers give each other gifts?! Is it to buy back something in return? You know it's not! Lovers give because it is the meaning of love itself!

Read C. S. Lewis on love sometime. In The Four Loves he explores the four Greek words meaning love which were available in Jesus' day. There's storge, which means kind thoughts and affection. It's the type of love children have for pets. Second, there's philia, which is the tenderness of friendship. Third comes eros, which always has that physical sexual dimension to it.

But then, says Lewis, there is also a little-used term: agape. Nobody was using it much anymore, but somebody forgot to take it out of the dictionary. Along came Jesus and the church, and suddenly it is shouted everywhere.

Agape means a love that reaches beyond the warm fuzzies of itself and seeks to bring life and joy and delight and meaning to another person. Agape is the Bible's word of love. "We love," says John, "because God first loved us!" The word he uses is agape. The "giving" love. The love that reaches beyond itself to touch another life with beauty.

When the other dimensions of love are there, according to Rollo May, the final dimension happens. It's the dimension of shared consciousness. Poet John Betjeman remembers a sacred moment in a tiny tea shop in Bath, England. He sat at his table and watched an elderly couple enter. They took a booth nearby and ordered a pot of tea and some crumpets. Then he recorded their conversation in his own words:

"Let us not speak, for the love we bear one another --

Let us hold hands and look."
She, such a very ordinary little woman;

He, such a thumping crook;
But both, for a moment, little lower than the angels

In the tea shop's ingle-nook.1


This is a picture of the intimacy of love where our identities begin to fuse. It's what Paul meant, in another place, when he said: "Have this mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus ..." (Philippians 2:5). For this is the deepest dimension of love: to share beyond the physical realities the consciousness of the other.

God made us males and females because we would only be able to plumb the depths of ourselves more fully when we found ourselves in relation with someone of the other gender. It's like learning a different language. The other language is really the same kind of thing as English is: it has its forms and its nouns and its verbs and its modifiers. But somehow that other language reflects a slightly different outlook on life. We call it culture. Only when you start learning that other culture, and the language that expresses it, do you begin to understand better your own language.

So it is with our human sexuality. The language of males is one kind. The language of females another. The differences in speech between different males or different females are like dialects within the same language. Males can never really understand their own language until they learn something of a female tongue, and females can never really understand their own language until they learn something of a male tongue. The more each of us has the ability to learn of the other language, the more we begin to understand our own native speech. We find our deeper identity through our cross-gender relationships.

Our Greatest Need In Finding That Identity Is Love And Safety

This is why Paul has some very pointed things to say about adultery in this passage and divorce in the next chapter. No one in this world knows me better than my wife, and no one in this world has helped me to know myself better than she. The reason we have gained access to each other has to do with safety. I can share bits and pieces of myself with many people. I can share moments and thoughts with close friends. But with my wife I'm learning to share everything that I am in all five dimensions of love.

Why does that happen? How can we develop that intimacy? Only in this: she has created a safe place for me. Our marriage is a sanctuary of safety where we can express and explore those dimensions of love. If I am to enter her space, if I am to gain access to a place that allows me to find my truest self, if I am to learn the female language in order to understand my own native tongue, then I have to know that she will not violate me, she will not ridicule or demean me, she will not destroy me, she will not use me and toss me aside, she will not play with my secret things like toys.

If I am to find myself I need to know that she wants me to find myself, and that she wants to find me as well. Not to abuse but to cherish.

This is where we find our greatest sexual need: that society confirm, with us, the sanctity of marriage. Dr. Nancy Moore Clatworthy, a renowned sociologist, spent ten years researching people who "lived together" without being married. When she began her research, she says, she was convinced that "living together" was a good thing, perhaps even a better thing than the stuffiness of marriage.

Yet she wanted to prove it in a scientific way. For that reason she interviewed hundreds of couples who were living together, observing the development of people as their lives unfolded.

Amazingly, in spite of her own wishes, she found that "living together" without marriage is one of the worst things for the human person because the context of "safety" is gone! People who move in together view the relationship as that of non-committed sharing, so they can never fully give themselves to the other person in the relationship. Why should I give myself to you if tomorrow you can walk right out of here? Why should I trust you with my intimate self if I don't know whether you'll protect me when you find me?

Dr. Clatworthy now opposes cohabitation outside of marriage vehemently. She says that our human sexuality demands the safety of marriage in order for us to become the persons we can be, the persons we are supposed to be!

Other studies confirm Dr. Clatworthy's research. The results of a scientific survey were published recently in Canada under this title: "A Hazard Model Analysis of the Covariates of Marriage Dissolution in Canada." It said that those who chose to live with someone of the opposite gender before marriage were twice as likely to have the relationship end in divorce as those who didn't cohabit first were! Why? Because if this is a "trial" relationship, I will never be able to believe that you won't walk out on me. The possibility of finding the safety to be my truest self is gone!

Studies in Sweden and here in the U. S. say the same thing. If you want your marriage to fail, the best thing you can do is live with that person or another person of the opposite gender before getting married. You'll never be able fully to trust anyone again. More than that, you'll have denied yourself one of the best opportunities for finding yourself!

So it is with adultery. The safety is gone. You slash away the curtain that hides our special room, and you leave me standing naked in someone else's bedroom!

Similarly, divorce rips me apart. If the highest of the five dimensions of love is joining my identity with yours, how can I find myself again after you hack with your knife between us? Divorce rips something irreplaceable out of me. Divorce tears a gaping hole in our sacred and safe space, and I'm left so exposed! I'm left so incomplete! I'm left with less than I had before I met you, because you take part of me away with yourself!

This is why Paul wrote such strong words about adultery! This is why Paul also had such strong words about divorce, because they are worse than death! They kill the spirit without ending the life of the body!

Listen to Oliver Stone, the creative genius behind some of the greatest movies of the recent years. A few years ago he was interviewed in USA Today (August 2, 1994, p. 2D), just after O. J. Simpson had been arrested for the deaths of his former wife and her lover. Oliver Stone had been divorced recently. O. J. Simpson had been divorced. Oliver Stone saw O. J. Simpson and Nicole shortly before her death. Stone says this: "I saw O. J. and Nicole a few weeks ago in the car outside the school. I was in a fairly sad mood -- because of my own divorce problems, and I was thinking, 'Look at O. J.! He's got his life together! He's made it! Something's wrong with me!' "

But then came Nicole's grim death and O. J.'s arrest for murder. Then this is what Oliver Stone said: "O. J. was too nice all the time. So one night he blows. Anybody who's been through divorce will tell you that at one point they've thought of murder. The line between thinking murder and doing murder isn't that major!"

Neither is the line between divorce and murder.

That's Why Sexual Perversions And Adultery Are Such Great Crimes

That's why all sexual perversions are such great crimes. Domestic violence and incest and rape -- each of them cuts at the heart of our human identity. Each of them violates the safe space we need in order to find ourselves. Each of them robs us of something essential to our characters.

The first question we ask when a child is born is this: "Is it a boy or a girl?" Our sexuality is as basic as our human existence, and when someone steals away from us something of that sexual identity, our very lives are demeaned!

That's why, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus used such strong language for anyone who presses that edge: "Cut your eye out! Saw off your hand!" (Matthew 5:29-30). If you take someone's car, you can pay him or her back. But if you violate someone's sexuality, you destroy something of his or her very soul! You can never undo the damage!

I hope the message is clear enough! The best that can happen to you happens to you as a sexual person! And the worst that can happen to you happens to you as a sexual person! God meant for you to enjoy your sexuality to the fullest. In fact, only in exploring your sexual relations with others will you begin to find your truest self. That's why Jesus cautions us to deal wisely with each other in sexual relations, because the greatest violence that can happen to someone happens when we violate her or him sexually. Don't let it happen!

But there's one more thing we should say. Paul isn't done preaching to the Corinthians at this point. He's still got a great deal of his letter left to finish, and he still has a wonderful finish to put on the grace of God's love for us. So the closing notes of this message are these:

• Where we as males and females have grown embattled against one another in our society, Christ alone can break down the barriers between us.

• Where we are presently engaged in activities that would harm others or ourselves sexually, Christ can help us overcome the worst evil in our souls.

• Where we have been horribly wronged by others, and where we have horribly wronged others, Christ alone can lead us through the hurting and healing steps of forgiveness.

• Where our marriages have ended in divorce, Christ can give us a second chance to find sexual meaning and intimacy and identity.

• Where marriage is not a possibility for us, Christ can make our lives full and complete in ways that transcend even our sexuality.

These are notes from other sermons, yet to be preached from this pulpit. But you must know these things this morning as well. For the human race is like a radio. It can make a lot of noise, and it can produce a lot of music. Still, the best sounds come in stereo -- female and male. And the best music happens when the system is tuned to the frequency God designed for it.

____________

1. "In A Bath Teashop" by John Betjeman, from The Best of Betjeman © John Guest, Penguin Books, 1978. Used by permission.