Clinton Chisholm | The Church and sexuality in the 21st Century

I BEGIN by strengthening the opening of my CD, Plain Talk on Sex, and declare that if you have never felt a strong pull to sexual immorality, you are abnormal – too old, too young or ‘too lie!’.

The pervasive reality of a feeling for sexual intercourse means that the Church cannot avoid teaching on sex because sexual desires affect everybody – Church members as well as those who need to be in the Church.

There are three things involved in the concept of sexuality: sexual identity, gender identity, and sexual orientation. Hence my equation: Sexuality = sexual identity + gender identity + sexual orientation.

Sexual identity relates to one’s genetic makeup, the combination of X and Y chromosomes. The genes of our being and hormones (the relative presence or absence of them) determine how masculine or feminine we appear physically and the intensity of our sexual desire.

Gender identity relates to the inner sense or picture we have of ourselves as male or female and is largely determined by social and psychological forces during infancy and childhood.

The identities can clash. The inner feel (gender identity) can be different from the outer appearance (sexual identity) and change of one of the identities may be deemed necessary.

So we have transvestites who alter their outer ‘vest’ or clothing to look like the opposite sex, consistent with their inner feel. Or you have transsexuals who desire medication and/or surgery to alter their physical appearance. [see DSM III – Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 1987].

Put differently, and less precisely, your sexuality relates to who you are sexually, who you feel like sexually, and who/what you feel for sexually.

Let’s look at the basic sexual orientations.

1. Heterosexuality – heteros is Greek for ‘another of a different kind’, so a heterosexual mates across the sexes.

2. Homosexuality – homo is derived from the Greek homoiōs, meaning ‘same’, not from the Latin for ‘man’. So a homosexual is either a male or a female who mates with another of the same kind.

3. Bisexuality – Bi in Latin is two, so a bisexual mates with both sexes.

4. Bestiality (pronounced, beashiality) – a human being mating with a lower animal.

5. Asexuality – lacking the normal desire for sexual intercourse

Due to propaganda from LGBTQIA advocates, I want to share a few summary points now from the 2016 edition of The New Atlantis, a peer-reviewed Journal of Technology and Society, as a special report on Sexuality and Gender: Findings from the Biological, Psychological, and Social Sciences.

1. There is virtually no evidence that anyone – gay or straight – is “born that way” if that means that their sexual orientation was genetically determined.

2. The idea that people are “born that way” is not supported by scientific evidence.

3. The transgender notion that a person might be “a man trapped in a woman’s body” or “a woman trapped in a man’s body” has no scientific support.

4. There is now considerable scientific evidence that sexual desires, attractions, behaviours, and even identities can, and sometimes do, change over time. Change is in fact a scientifically verified reality.

Let me say some more about sexual issues because some church folk are too conservative and spiritual to face the issues squarely.

We must be clear in our minds that God made us as sexual creatures. So in the perfection of Eden, Adam and Eve came from the hand of God with sex organs and with erogenous zones and with the capacity to desire and feel for sexual intercourse.

So sexual intercourse was not created after humankind sinned but was a God-given and delightful reality before the fall.

Adam, in his maleness, felt a desire to mate with Eve in her femaleness and vice versa. I like how the Bible portrays Adam when he first saw Eve. Look at Genesis 2:20. So, Adam, while naming the animals and while sharing a certain level of fellowship with them was looking for somebody of his kind with whom to share at a deeper level.

So he exclaims (in v. 23) with ecstasy [and possibly an erection] when he sees the woman, “At last, finally, flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone, someone like me. She will be called woman [Hebrew: isshah] because she was taken from man [Hebrew:ish].”

Understand then that if you are single, you will feel the desire for sexual intercourse occasionally and that that feeling is not evidence that you are either ‘old man’ or ‘new man’ but simply that you are normal human.

The rub is what you do with the feel!

What the Fall has done is to mess up our desires and even our physical structures.

So in a fallen world, we have not only males and females, but people who have both sex organs, neither properly developed, and these folks are called intersex individuals, formerly hermaphrodites.

Sin has also messed up God’s perfect plan for sexual intimacy, which, biblically, ought to be in the context of marriage and with another of the opposite sex.

Now, we have all kinds of things happening in terms of sexual orientation and practice.

Friends, what has been happening, especially since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, is the view that every sexual orientation and thus every sexual preference is okay because they are all simply different sexual options.

So we hear that the whole gamut of specific sexual acts is okay, even the act of paedophilia (molesting children sexually), necrophilia (having sex with a dead body), incest (having sex with a close relative), fornication, or adultery.

Though I run the risk of being misquoted here, let me still say that biblically, fornication is broader than we generally understand the term, and adultery is narrower than we understand these words today.

The Greek word translated as ‘fornication’ is a very broad term for all sex acts contrary to heterosexual marital sex. The Greek word is porneia = sexual immorality.

Now I beg you, hear me very clearly re adultery. The Greek word is moicheia and as the Jewish Rabbis and our brethren in the New Testament would have understood it, it is, strictly speaking, sexual intercourse with another man’s wife. It is the woman’s marital status that determines the classification of the sex act.

The man’s marital status is unimportant. So anyone who has sexual intercourse with a man’s wife (whether a boy, grown man or another female) commits adultery along with her.

If a married man has sexual intercourse with a single woman, the act is sexual immorality but is not adultery.

Christians who regard the Bible as the yardstick for faith and practice cannot agree with the sexual liberals because the Word of God pronounces against sexual immorality of all kinds.

1 Thess. 4:3 is quite clear. Christians should abstain from ‘fornication’, says the KJV, but do remember that the word translated as fornication is a broad word that covers all sexual sins, not just that happening between two unmarried persons, but all sex acts between or among any persons other than a man and his wife.

This is the general witness of the New Testament. Romans 1:26-27 pronounces against male and female homosexuality. Galatians 5:22 taboos unbridled sexual sins, covering the whole spectrum again.

So it would be difficult to advance a case from the New Testament justifying any sexual practice other than marital, heterosexual intercourse.

The Bible is so concerned about sexual purity that our Lord in Mat. 5:27-28 indicates that it is not only the physical act of unlawful sex that is sinful, but lusting as well. That is rough for a vast number of men and some women, too, who do not know, theoretically or practically, the difference between admiration and lust.

I will just say in passing that when you are admiring, God gets the glory for creating that person, fearfully and wonderfully and as an end. In lusting, you are tampering with God’s creation in your mind, and that person becomes a means to your sexual ends.

God created sex and the sex organs, and He is behind the capacity that we have to desire sexual intercourse. Our sexuality is our sex/gendered reality, plus our orientation.

So the issue that the Church has begun to face in this century, and beyond, I believe is the challenge from the world concerning the belief that sexual intercourse is only proper in marriage and with heterosexuals.

But more than that, because some of the critics of the Church’s stance on things sexual are from the Church itself, I believe that the Church will have to counsel, teach, and train its members to practise what the Church preaches concerning sexual purity. Our belief must constrain our behaviour because God has called us unto holiness, including sexual holiness.

So let me share some issues now with those in the Church generally, but especially the younger ones, who struggle with the challenge of sexual purity. Understand this, if we profess Christ and lose the battle repeatedly with sexual temptations, then onlookers will think we believe what is not possible.

Now then, if we are concerned about sexual purity I think we have to be careful with certain acts of intimacy.

POINTERS FOR SEXUAL PURITY

1. Avoid petting, which is never ever safe because it is not taming the body but teasing the body.

2. Watch kissing and prolonged hugging. Many persons have experienced orgasm by prolonged kissing, hugging, and rubbing.

Hear me well! Based on what Jesus said about lusting, you should realise that if you kiss, hug, rub, or pet to an orgasm, you have committed a sex act.

We need to realise that spiritually, sex does not require a penis entering a vagina or any other orifice whatever!

Purity demands avoiding that which will or could lead you to sin. So I borrow from my Plain Talk on Sex CD and say to you, if you must kiss, keep it short and shallow. When you hug, keep it light and not long. The average male, ladies, is emotionally quite fickle and cannot easily, if at all, deal with a prolonged kiss or hug. The longer you kiss, the more you desire what you can’t have lawfully. The longer you hug, the more you want to rub, then, worries!

NOTE THE FOLLOWING!

1. Condoms don’t provide ‘safe sex’ or ‘safer sex’. They simply allow for less risky sex.

2. Pre-ejaculatory fluid can infect or impregnate!

3. Anal sex with a man or woman is clinically unwise!

Take pride in yourself. No one deserves you sexually who is not yours maritally.

Dismiss me as prudish, ultra-conservative, or Victorian as I suggest to you an acid test for all romantic exchanges from my Love, Dating & Whatever CD.

ACID TEST

Whatever you plan or wish to do with your girlfriend/boyfriend or with whomever, can you pray and ask God to bless it before you do it and pray and give Him thanks after you have done it? Really? Try asking God to be with you while you pet ...

I open now for your feedback, questions and comments.

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