Broken By Sex: Let's Talk About Sexual Sin

Adult Conversations About An "Adults Only" Crisis

(This is the 2nd in a 3 part series about how sexual sin is crippling both our larger society and our Christian communities. I strongly recommend reading Part 1 before for you read this post. I’m going to talk frankly about sex - but nothing I think is NSFW - because we need to have MORE not less of these adult conversations. And I think you’re adult enough to do so.)

Let's talk about sex, baby

Let's talk about you and me

Let's talk about all the good things

And the bad things that may be

Let's talk abo—

No, no, no.

Wrong topic.

Let’s talk about sexual sin.

Talking about sexual sin isn’t very popular.

If you’re a secular person, you don’t want to be lectured about morality. And if you’re a Christian, its usually spoken as a cudgel against the “heathen” non-believers or to shame one of ours who has gone astray.

But discussing sexual sin to understand it and deliver people from it? That’s not in either camp’s wheelhouse.

But I’d like to take a crack at it.

With no lecture on morality. No pronouncing judgment. No shaming.

Let’s start with the concept of sin. What exactly is sin?

Thousands of pages have been written about the concept of sin and this isn’t the forum, nor do I have the theological chops to present a drawn-out explanation.

So, let’s keep it simple.

The Greek word for sin most typically used in the New Testament is “hamartia” and hamartia means “to miss the mark”; like a dart player missing the board or an archer missing the target.

Two things come to mind when I consider hamartia as sin.

First, there is no moralistic component built into the definition of hamartia. Missing the mark means you did something wrong, but it does not necessarily connote a value judgment on your intent or character.

You threw the dart into the door rather than the bullseye, but that doesn’t mean you hate the door or you’re a terrible person for doing so.

However, from my conversations with many Christians, I know this sterile definition of sin tends to rub some of you the wrong way.

I know this is thin ice I am walking on.

But I’m going to ask for your grace until I finish this series of posts. I’ll be going deep into this in my next post on Shame because the connotation of sin, the baggage that we attach to sin, threatens to crack the ice and swallow us whole.

As Richard Beck, a Christian writer and professor of psychology, writes, “the ‘hate the sin, love the sinner’ notion is just psychologically a nonstarter. Empathy and moral outrage tend to work at cross purposes.”

So, for my purposes, I’m going to destigmatize sin so we can bring it out into the light and discuss it like adults searching for a solution.

(Don’t worry though…that stigmatized concept of sin will be right there waiting for you if you need it when you’re done reading.)

The second thing I realized about hamartia as sin took me a while to see even though it was always right in front of me.

Missing the mark means we were engaged in an act that went wrong, NOT that we shouldn’t have been doing the act. To revisit my dart analogy, because you missed the board doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t be playing darts.

In fact, sin is a perversion or corruption of some attribute that God gave us as a necessity to live.

I love that my Catholic brothers & sisters are the cataloguers of all things God. If you can’t find it in the Catechism, you better check and see if you’re in the right classroom.

And the Seven Deadly Sins is a perfect list to demonstrate my point.

Let’s briefly go thru six of them (I’ll leave Lust as its own discussion) and see what necessity each corrupts.

Pride. Pride is having an exaggerated opinion of oneself or one’s actions. What is pride a corruption of? Wisdom. We need to sound thought and action, but when we start believing our press clippings, we get pride.

Greed. Greed is a selfish and excessive desire for more of something. And what necessity does greed corrupt? Well…necessity. We all have a baseline of primary survival needs. Food, water, shelter, etc. God gave us a drive to acquire those, but when we go into overdrive, we get greed.

Envy. Aristotle defined envy as the pain we feel when “those who have what we ought to have, or have got what we did have once”. Envy is a corruption of admiration. We need role models to admire and emulate, but when admiration gets corrupted, we get envy.

Gluttony. Here’s a sin we don’t talk about much. Gluttony is greed manifested in eating. As humans, we need to eat to survive, but when we overindulge our basic caloric needs, we have gluttony.

Wrath. Wrath is a corruption of righteous anger. In its proper application, anger is our early warning system that something is not right, that something is out of order in God’s plan. But when we don’t balance anger wisely, it evolves into wrath.

Sloth. We get labeled with sloth when we are lazy, but what virtue could sloth be a corruption of? Rest. Everyone needs rest; even God rested on the 7th day! But when we go too far with rest, we fall into sloth.

I think we need to think of sin in terms of a balancing act.

We need wisdom, drive, admiration, food, righteous anger, and rest, but we need to use them in the proper balance.

Theologian Cornelius Plantinga (oh boy, I’m quoting a Calvinist!) notes that “prophets kept dreaming of a time when God would put things right again”. This state of being in the Bible is “shalom”.

We tend to translate shalom simply as peace, but according to Mr. Plantinga it means “universal flourishing, wholeness, and delight” where every entity in the world would have its “own integrity or structured wholeness” but that we all would get along interdependently with “edifying relations to other entities”.

Shalom would be “the way things ought to be”.

To be in peace, to be in shalom, is to be in balance with ourselves, with others, and with God.

Perfect peace is a state of perfect love. In fact, if you replace “balance” with “love” in the aforementioned statement, you have a truncated version of the Great Commandment.

So with balance in mind, and the corruption that interrupts that state of shalom, lets look at lust, or more broadly, at sexual sin.

For some reason, sexual sin tends to be at the apex of sin in modern Christianity.

We’ve got a lot of prideful preachers, out of shape congregants, lazy disciples, and angry followers plus a liberal helping of envy and greed in our Christian communities, but those rarely are they the goats that we send out into the wilderness.

I have an idea, though, why sexual sin is at the top of the pyramid. And perhaps, rightfully so.

First, lets look at what lust is a perversion of.

Lust is a perversion of…lust.

Lust is a passionate desire, and we need passionate desire to prolong our species. If men and women stop being attracted to one another, this tribe of ours will go the way of the dinosaurs.

But much like fire can warm your house or burn it down, lust is a double-edged sword. As the HELPS Word-studies notes in the definition “epithumia”, the Greek noun for lust, lust “can be positive or negative, depending on whether the desire is inspired by faith (God's inbirthed persuasion).”

So God has a design for lust.

Obviously, we need to procreate so God made sex the most pleasurable activity we could engage in. Talk about a bribe! He even made it so pleasurable that we would do it again & again AND be willing to stick around & raise the fruit of our passion till adulthood.

I think, though, that He had an equally important second design for lust. One that isn’t as obvious but is the meaning of life.

Relationship.

Everything, both heavenly and human, is based on relationship.

The Trinity is the divine model of relationship.

(Sidebar: if you have a daughter, you know that 2 girls having a playdate is doable but that 3 girls is a disaster waiting to happen. I often wonder if God decided on the Trinity to say “hey, if the three of Us can get along then you humans should be able to figure it out”. I think, though, that God put too much faith in us, but I digress)

The Trinity is the ultimate relationship and amazingly, we are included in it!

We came into being thru Jesus (John 1:3), we know God thru Jesus (John 14:7), and we are called to love one another as we do God (Matthew 22:37-40, Mark 12:29-31, Luke 10:27-28)

RIGHT RELATIONSHIP IS THE MEANING OF LIFE!

Doubt me?

Go read the last part of each of the three versions of the Great Commandment I linked above. The answer is right there.

In Matthew, Jesus says, on this “depend all the Law and the Prophets” meaning all of Scripture, all of life. In Mark, Jesus says “there is no other commandment greater than these” meaning this is the prime instruction for life. And my favorite is in Luke where Jesus simply states, “do this, and you will live”.

You will live.

Relationship is the hinge life pivots on.

But there are some wild turns possible when lust is what greases our most intimate of human relationships, the joining of man and woman.*

Because while it’s the most intimate, it’s also the most fragile.

As high as passionate desire can take you, the fall from rejected desire is just as steep. We have shared our being with another, and they can say “thanks, but no thanks”.

And Satan knows this is the chink in our armor.

The weak point where life can be crippled.

He can’t attack the Godhead. Satan tried to tempt Jesus, but he failed. He tried to kill Him, but Jesus beat death.

Satan can attack humanity’s relationship with the Godhead, and while he’s won some battles, it is impossible to get God to give up on His children so that war will be ultimately lost.

But destroying the holy, yet fragile relationship of man and woman joined together? That’s a vulnerability with promise and Satan is hard at work exploiting it with the super-charged technology of the 21st Century.

Before I get to my closing, I want to acknowledge that I haven’t gone into the particulars of sexual sin. I’ve done this intentionally. As Christians, we tend to get bogged down in the details and argue with one another about what constitutes sexual sin.

Meanwhile, humanity is under attack.

So I’d like to posit that the inverse of my “live and let live” statement from my first post should be our focus.

That if what you are doing sexually is harming you or another, then that is where we should start.

That’s certainly a big enough task for me; focusing on how the technology of porn, sex work, and hook up apps is destroying us. If you need to see how daunting Satan’s array of weaponry is, then go back and read my first post.

But we don’t have time to dawdle.

We need to talk about sexual sin like adults.

We need to acknowledge that we have a sex problem not only in society but within our churches. We need to approach sexual sin as a therapeutic problem to be solved rather than a moral one to be prosecuted. We need to drag sexual sin out into the light because “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).

The time has come to stop sending our scapegoats into the wilderness with our sexual sin. Let’s address them, right here, right now.

So I hope you’ll join me in my next post when I discuss how we use shame to mistreat sexual sin and suggest some healthy & productive alternatives to a shame based approach.

We’ve made it this far folks. Let’s take back sex from the Enemy who has hijacked it.

God bless you and remember…

Jesus loves you.

(If you are a Christian man who struggles with addiction, I recommend that you look into the Samson Society. The Samson Society is a fellowship of Christian men who are serious about authenticity, community, humility & recovery.)

*I didn’t go into same sex relationships because that’s a branch of this conversation that needs its own post. Somewhere down the road, I will address same sex relationships, but if that is you, for the time being know that you aren’t forgotten and Jesus loves you just the same. And feel free to reach out to me if you want to start that discussion.

References

Kruger, CB (2013). God in the hands of angry sinners. https://tftorrance.org/journal/s3/participatio-2014-s3-12-Kruger-87-102.pdf

Plantinga, C. (1995). Not the way it’s supposed to be: a breviary of sin. Eerdmans.

Photo Credit:

7 Deadly Sins: https://www.britannica.com/topic/seven-deadly-sins