God Designed Our Sexuality

1. God is God, the Creator

God designed and created our sexuality. What we think about sexuality begins with what we believe about God. Sexual issues are ultimately spiritual issues. What we believe about Jesus Christ impacts everything in our life. A.W. Tozer said, “The question before us, and the question that really matters, is simply, what do you think of Christ? And what are you going to do with Christ? Every question we might ever have can be boiled down to the subject of Jesus Christ.”

Following Jesus, living the kingdom life, begins with the believe and agreement of who is the authority, who is truth, who is lord. Is it God or I? God or we? God or the culture? God or the world? It’s not the world. It’s not the culture. It’s not the church. It’s not us. It’s not me. 

Yahweh, the Lord God Almighty, is the truth and the authority. He is the supreme and sovereign Lord. He calls us to surrender our hearts, our souls, and our strength in love, adoration and worship to Him. And that applies also to our sexual discipleship. Our beliefs about sexuality must be rooted in the truth that there is one, true living God and Lord of all, one source of authority and all wisdom. God is God, and his Word, his truth, his authority, his designs, his intentions and purposes are eternal and do not change. (Ps. 119:89-91)

2. God is the Creator Who Created Our Sexuality

We can look at sexuality from two viewpoints. One, we view sexuality as a personal expression of our identity and feelings. Therefore, we are free to define sexuality as we choose. Or, we view sexuality as God’s intentional design for humanity. Therefore, we defer to God in our understanding of male and female, sexual expression, sexual identity, and sexual morality. 

The choice between these two views ultimately boils down to whether we acknowledge that God created our sexuality or not. If God is the Lord God, if God is the Creator, he defines the purpose, principles and boundaries of our sexuality and our expressions thereof.

Genesis teaches us, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). Thus God designed and created everything, including our sexuality. Verse 27 tells us, “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” 

God creates humans uniquely male and female for a reason. Right after he blesses them, he commands them, “Be fruitful and and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.” (Gen. 1:28). This command is only possible because God created them male and female.

Genesis 2 explains in more detail God’s creation of our sexuality.  All of creation is good but one thing is not good. Man is alone. Verse 18—The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.” So after God had created all the wild animals and the birds, He brought them to Adam to be named. “But for Adam no suitable helper was found.” (Gen. 2:19-20)

So the Lord God “made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.  The man said, ‘This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.’ Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” (Genesis 2:21-24)

We see the beauty of God’s design. He created male and female to form one flesh, a physical bond and union in deep intimacy, a mingling of souls, that is to happen in the covenant of marriage. God’s design for our sexuality is written in our physical bodies and in his Word. This is how God created us, and it is good because God says it is good. We cannot chop and change that reality or truth just because the world, culture, society, philosophy or our friends tells us so. 

The beauty, wonder, and wisdom of God’s design for sexuality is that it works and it is the best for us. The majority of honest sociological, psychological, and brain (neuroscience) research show that getting married and keeping sex within marriage is good for us. This validates biblical sexual morality.

When we live within God’s design for sexuality it is a gift and a blessing. When we live outside God’s design for sexuality, we experience disastrous, destructive consequences.

Before we go on, we must clarify and affirm one more belief that is fundamental for our understanding of and living out a biblical, kingdom sexuality.

3. Jesus is Lord!  

Jesus is Lord of all … including our sexuality and marriages. We must be rooted in this belief that Jesus is truly Lord. This “means that we have given Him our very lives in response to the fact that He has given us His [life]. … We wake up each day with the attitude of surrender, ‘Not my will, but yours be done’ (Lk 22:42)” We cannot choose certain areas of our lives in which Jesus can be Lord, have and be the authority, but then exclude him from other aspects of our lives, like our sexuality, that. We cannot have Jesus as Lord alongside something else, or alongside ourselves. Either Jesus is our Lord, fully, completely, or he is not!

“If we claim Jesus as Lord, we must accept all that He commands and trust all that He says as truth. … Jesus never sugarcoated the cost of His lordship in our lives.” He said that it would require of us to deny ourselves and take up our crosses (Mt 16:24). Next week we will talk more about this when we talk about radical purity for kingdom sexuality.

4. Our Sexuality Tells God’s Love Story

God’s design for our sexuality involves far more than the capacity to reproduce. It is far more than the physical expression of love. God created sexuality and marriage to point to a greater reality.

Have you thought about why God so many times compares and describes his covenant relationship with Israel in the Old Testament, and with the church in the New Testament, in terms of marriage and sexuality?

God knows that as physical, sinful creatures, we have a difficult time to understand spiritual truths,. Thus, when he created the world in such ways that even creation will display his character and intentions.

The gospel is the good news of God’s passionate and sacrificial love for His people. God loves the world so much that He sent His only Son to redeem His covenant people. Because of His love, God saves us and He also calls us to be own people. He calls us into this intimate, covenant relationship with Him. He is our Father. We are his children. God has called each one of us to love and serve Him here and now. He has prepared a place for us where we can be with him, love, serve, and worship him forever. 

What could God create to help us understand this great truth? He created the covenant of marriage. Sexuality and marriage are holy expressions, illustrations of God’s love for us. It tells the story of God’s love. Our sexuality and its place within marriage is a profound physical picture of this great spiritual truth. God intentionally created our sexuality to tell the story of His covenant love.

Paul linked sexuality and marriage with the gospel in Ephesians 5:21-33. He is not just talking about the respective roles of husbands and wives. He is also pointing us to the bigger picture. The covenant of marriage and its consummation of sexual one-flesh union mysteriously point to Christ’s love for His bride, the church. “‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church.” (Eph. 5:31-32)

Marriage, according to Ephesians 5, pictures Christ and the church. It is a living portrait drawn by God to show the world that he loves his people so much that he has sent his Son to die for their sins. In the picture of marriage, God portrays Christ’s love for the church and the church’s love for Christ.

God designs husbands to be a reflection of Christ’s love for the church in the way they relate to their wives. “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.” (Eph. 5:25-28)

God designs wives to be a reflection of the church’s love for Christ in the way they relate to their husbands. “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.” (Eph. 5:22-24)

David Platt — “When God made man, then woman, and then brought them together in a relationship called marriage, he wasn’t simply rolling the dice, drawing straws, or flipping a coin. He was painting a picture. His intent from the start was to illustrate his love for his people … For God created the marriage relationship to point to a greater reality. From the moment marriage was instituted, God aimed to give the world an illustration of the Gospel.” (Quoted by Slattery, 50) 

That is why our sexuality is spiritual, something holy, something intimate, something intended not for our own pleasure or satisfaction, but intended to be enjoyed only in the covenant relationship of marriage. (Slattery)

That’s why we must defend and display a biblical, kingdom sexuality and marriage to the world. For God established marriage at the beginning of creation to be one of the primary means by which he illustrates the gospel before a watching world. We will talk more about this in our sermon on marriage.

So human sexuality is a holy masterpiece infused with spiritual significance … But someone wants to destroy our holy sexuality. “What God has created as a sacred expression of covenant love has been cheapened, warped, abused, and twisted.” The evidence of this devastation is all around us. Sexuality is the bull’s-eye of Satan’s battle — if he can destroy our sexuality, he destroys marriage, he destroys families, he destroys lives and society. 

Let me close with these words from Slattery:

“… sexuality is mysteriously linked, by God’s design, to the message of God’s unfailing love for His people. Our bodies tell the story of God’s covenant love—the longing for it, the celebration of it, and the devastation of a broken covenant. Here is the great promise of the gospel. While we have broken our covenant with God, He will never break His with us. … Your sexuality is a living metaphor of God’s covenant love. This means that your sexual decisions are not simply a matter of what is right or wrong. Stewarding your sexuality is about being true to the metaphor [story, teaching] of covenant.”