I came to my garden, my sister, my bride, I gathered my myrrh with my spice, I ate my honeycomb with my honey, I drank my wine with my milk. Eat, friends, drink, and be drunk with love!

Song of Solomon 5.1

Note: These are some collected thoughts from a handful of opportunities I’ve had to address the topic of sex with men in a few different settings over the last few months. Some of this is directly from my notes on those occasions, some is later reflections. There is much more to be said for both men and women with regards to these things but, as I said, I was addressing men. 

We are living in an age that is at war with sex. I believe this to be so even as the sexualization of everything proceeds unabated. But even that characterization isn’t quite right. Sex has at its core the mutual delight of difference. These differences carry with them eternal responsibilities, pain, difficulty, and selflessness. This is simply to say that sex is like all the other glories God intends to give his children: beauty, delight and joy tethered to work and responsibility and prudence. Our secular culture, ever attempting to untether delight and beauty from God and his words have reduced sex to some sort of disenchanted pleasure - to sever the fruit from the tree. 

Sex was always meant to be a weighty and glorious responsibility. For men, in particular, it was designed to be linked to virtue and character and hard work and fruitfulness and skill. Sexual desire was designed to be a remarkably powerful engine driving men to become better men - to be men worthy of a woman’s love, her body, and her trust. Here is the powerful and wonderful desire meant to turn a slob of a man who spends too many hours shooting aliens on a screen or smoking lots of weed, into someone with professional skills (able to make some money anyway), some measure of hygiene and responsibility, strength, and a modicum of honor. I was designed to see a particular woman, to desire that woman, and to become the sort of man who might be worthy of that woman (one who might be able to provide for, to protect, to even lead that woman). Too many Christian men have been taught to see their sexual desire as a bad, perhaps merely organic thing which exists to be kept at bay. But it is actually an engine meant to drive men towards goodness and virtue and strength. You were supposed to see someone strange and beautiful and gloriously different. She was supposed to be difficult to attain to, to be worthy of. There is supposed to be a father nearby making access to this different someone reasonably difficult. And that good, often groaning desire, was to drive you towards godliness and the delights and difficulties of marriage. Difference and Work and Fruitfulness lay at the heart of good human sexuality. 

But there is a deep war happening with all of this. That war is the motivating force beneath abortion, homosexuality, ambiguous sexuality (ambu-sexuality?), pornography and hook-up culture. These are all, ultimately a war against God himself, but they are the corrosive agents destroying the good desire of sex and replacing it with fruitlessness, futility and the death of glory and the delights of sex for men. 

The war on sex is aimed at cheapening sex, neutering sex, and destroying sex. Sex is cheapened by making erotic pleasure cheap. Hook-up culture, romanticized visions of relationships and the ever-lowering standards of what is required of men in marriage gut sex of its power to compel men towards becoming faithful, virtuous, and economically fruitful. When sex is easily accessible outside of marriage and one-night stands become the norm, Sex gets reduced to an individualized experience of short-term pleasure without any required investment or responsibility. When sex is reduced to the fulfillment of some feeling of romantic attachment, its value is reduced exponentially. Many Christians, holding to the biblical norm of marriage as a prerequisite for sex, cheapen the intended cost of sex when entering into the covenant of marriage is simply about a set of romantic feelings two people have for one another. Marriage is romantic, but it is also an economic arrangement. It is religious. It is about raising Godly children. All of these things matter, and a man should be the sort of man who can provide for a family as well as disciple children and lead a family to worship God in Jesus Christ. To reduce the standards a man must attain to simply “evoke romantic feelings” is to reduce the power and meaning of sexual desire. The cost of sex should be a lifetime of responsibility and provision and love, not a fleeting and conditional attraction. Cheap sex erodes the motivating power of sexual desire. 

Sex is neutered as the fruit of sex and their attendant responsibilities are cut away. Fruitless sexual pleasure does this. Pornography, in addition to its many attendant pathologies, offers a short-term satisfaction of the longing to see a woman without the difficult prospect of having an actual relationship with real conversations, real disagreements, real commitments and all the devastating vulnerabilities that come with marriage. It allows a man to find some measure of sexual satisfaction without the threat of rejection, failure or the need to become the kind of man who is desirable. When you consider the billions of dollars being spent by some of the most creative and smart people on the planet to make pornography ubiquitous, normal and free its hard not to see that a real war is being waged against the real fruit that can come when a man pursues a woman by his own growth as a man. Add to this the almost sacramental nature in which abortion is defended by Secularist politics as a fundamental human right, and it becomes clear that fruitlessness has become a strategic goal to both business interests and the political powers. When the atrocities of the abortion process can be hailed as a vital human good or even a necessary condition of equality and freedom, then the world has been flipped upside down, evil is celebrated and goodness is derided.

Sex is destroyed as the dance between two fundamentally different and yet perfectly fitted beings is reduced to an incidental and unnecessary condition for sex. Paul describes homosexuality in Romans 1 as sexual desire turned in on itself. A man was made to delight most in all the ways that a woman is not like him - both physically and otherwise. He was made to see and desire everything about a woman that indicates her fruitfulness. Homosexuality robs sexuality of its “sex-ness”, the beauty of difference coming together. As gender is reduced to internal “feelings”, the manifest physicalness of sex is destroyed. If a man is simply a being who wants the identity of a man, then there is no such thing as a man. If a woman is simply the result a person willing themself to be a woman, then sex is not substantively real. It is destroyed. 

But Jesus Christ came to destroy the works of the Evil One. He has done so by accomplishing the forgiveness of all our sins - all of them, even our sexual sins, our twisted sexual desires, our attempts to short-circuit the design and nature of sexual satisfaction. He died for your sins that you might be forgiven. But he was also raised, and sent his Spirit that we might - that our nature might be restored. He came to restore sexual desire and the fruits it was meant to produce - virtue, honor, courage, cutlure-making work, and the marvelous intimacy that unfolds over a lifetime of marriage.