To be clear, Paul and many other biblical authors, including Christ himself, discuss sexual ethics and the dangers of lust plenty.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if we dealt with our self-centeredness and bitterness, for instance, things would be going much better with our sexual temptations and our marriages, even without the help of hundreds and thousands of books on these topics.
Then compare that number to the number of books about marriage, sex, and dating. Walk into any Christian bookstore and count the number of books written to help people put their greed to death, or their hard-heartedness, or their out-of-control mouths. She said to me one day, “You American Christians are obsessed with sex, but your real problem is gluttony.” There are lots of sins that Paul recommends avoiding, like falsehood, revenge, greed, hard-heartedness, stealing, unwholesome talk, rage, bitterness, brawling (!), slander, and malice, and that’s just in Ephesians 4! In this particular chapter he mentions only one thing that could be related to sex-deceitful desire-but that could be applied to a lot of other things as well. A Turkish friend of mine converted to Christianity. It’s important to note that Americans in general, and therefore American Christians in their own reactive way, tend to be overly focused on sex. I’ve included a screenshot here with the response from Beth Moore, evangelist and Bible teacher and no stranger to online controversy herself, because the ire it provoked focused my attention on this issue of fixation in an interesting way.įirst, my own thoughts on modesty. To his credit, he’s at least continuing the conversation. Recently, a controversial pastor decided to publish a tweet that broke through mere “Christian Twitter” and ended up trending nationwide.īrian Sauvé’s tweet has garnered some 20 million impressions and lots of engagement from non-Christians. Once the world became aware that he was visiting prostitutes, psychologists noticed that the timing of his acting-out behavior coincided with some particularly fiery sermons warning against a wide variety of activities that might lead to sexual temptation, even going into graphic detail about which sexual activities were appropriate within marriage. Everyone remembers the Jimmy Swaggart saga. For those of us who have dealt with compulsive behavior or addiction in our families or our own lives, there are clues-perhaps too seemingly unrelated for some to notice-that tip us off that someone might be engaged in an internal battle.
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