Napier Baptist

I've been a Christian for 10 years, 4 1/2 of them were spent at a Bible College, and not once in those 10 years have I heard a sermon on sex or sexuality. In those ten years I've gone from drinking so much alcohol in one sitting that I'd black out and not remember entire evenings - memories that I've never regained (I did this about 3 times a week), smoking drugs, staring at porn and pre-marital sex to becoming a Christian, having a relationship, getting engaged and married, having children, learning to be a father and a husband. These weren't any 10 years they were the incredibly formative years between 20 and 30, and in all that time I haven't heard anything from the churches I was part of to help me understand what it means to be Christian and to be sexual. When you've come from a background like mine, some input about what it means to be Christian and created as a sexual being by God (and that God saw how God created us this way and said that it was 'very good') is crucial because I have a lot of poor images of what good sex and sexuality is. But, the only thing I've heard (other than the silence) was 3 words before I was married - "don't do it" and 2 words when I was married - "do it"! Is this the beginning and the end of a Christian sexual ethic - 2 or 3 words?

We're working our way as a community through 1 Corinthians and we're up to chapter 7 (the sex stuff). We've decided to pause and consider seriously what it means that God created us as sexual beings and said that he's chuffed with it (God saw what he'd created humans to be and said that it is very good). We're doing a series on "God, Us and Sex". I've taken it as an assumption that the biblical view for sex is within the confines of marriage. Some may disagree that this is the direction the biblical witness points (let's be honest, you can mount a pretty good case for polygamy from the Bible), but it is an assumption of mine that this is the assumption of Jesus and the earliest church.

So, I thought as I was doing a lot of reading on this topic, I'd share some of my favourite sources and quotes.

By far the best material I've come across so far is the work of Lauren Winner If you only get your hands on one book on sex, get her book Real Sex, it's a gem. You can also listen to a couple of her lectures here and a sermon series she did at Jacob's Well here (the dates of her sermon series were June 30th to July 2nd).

A couple of favourite quotes:
"If we learn to talk about sex better, we might be able to talk about it less." - Lauren Winner.

"The fact that sex is public does not mean it is mature and healthy. The fact that there are thousands of ``how to do it'' books on the subject does not mean that we know how; in fact, it means the opposite. It is when everybody's pipes are leaking that people buy books on plumbing!" - Peter Kreeft here.