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Juli (00:00)
So often when we talk about sexuality in the church, it’s a message that you have to get your sin under control. That is not the message of the Bible. The Bible has a very different offer for us and it’s an offer instead to just bring it to him.

(00:32)
Hey friend, welcome to Java with Juli. I am your host, Juli Slattery, and thanks so much for joining us today. Many of you are listening as a podcast, but let me also remind you, we are on YouTube now, so some of you might want to watch what we’re going to be talking about today. As we enter into our conversation, for today’s Java with Juli, let me remind you that we are only one week away from the launch of my new book called Surrendered Sexuality. And boy, I’m so excited for this book. You can actually join us for a live launch party on July 1st, which is launch day at 7:30 PM It’s a free event.

(01:09)
I’d love to have you celebrate with us, hear the heart behind why I wrote this book, some of the content in the book. I’ll be answering your questions and also we’ll be having some giveaways. So you don’t want to miss it. And if you’re interested in that, you can find out more information by going to our website, authenticintimacy.com, or you can just click on the link in the show notes. For today’s conversation, I’m not interviewing anyone. Actually, you’re going to get an opportunity to listen to a message that I gave at our Reclaim conference in 2024. The theme of that conference was the same as the theme of the book. What does it look like to surrender our sexuality to the Lordship of Jesus Christ? I look forward to it. Just really kicking off more of a conversation of what’s rendering our sexuality looks like.

So here is our first Reclaim session from 2024.

(01:59)
I want to start by just talking a little bit about what the landscape is like in our world today. I’m just looking at some statistics that help us understand this topic of sexuality and how it’s been evolving and changing even over the last 12 years since we started authentic intimacy. So take a look at some slides with me. First of all, let’s talk about singleness. Singleness is on the rise in the Western world. In our country, the latest research shows that 46% of American adults are single. And there’s a pretty high percentage of those 46% that maybe wish they weren’t single. But in all fairness, there’s probably a high percentage of the 54% who wish they weren’t married. We also see that cohabitation is a more popular choice in our day and age than marriage is. Among adults 18 to 44, 59% have lived with somebody or cohabited while only 50% have been married.

(02:58)
And so we’re choosing to kind of try out relationships instead of choosing to get married. The next slide is a sobering one talking about just what’s happening with sexual trauma and violence. According to the CDC, 53% of women and 29% of men report having experienced sexual violence in their lifetime, and the vast majority of them will have experienced sexual violence before the age of 18 and a quarter of women have experienced rape. And when we look at those statistics, each one of those statistics they represent lives and they represent deep pain around this topic of sexuality. And then finally, there’s been a lot of shifts around sexuality in the area of LGBTQ. Nearly 30% of Gen Z Americans identify as LGBTQ. And just to give you some perspective of this, if we were to go back about 20 years, that statistic for the younger generation would’ve been about maybe 5%.

(04:05)
So that’s a huge jump among adults who identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual, 62% identify as bisexual. And approximately 5% of the American population is in a consensual polyamorous relationship, which most experts believe is kind of this next wave that we’re going to be seeing in terms of normalizing that is not just two people, it’s three people, it’s five people, it’s 10 people who all agreed to have some sort of family kind of sexual relationships that are consensual. So wow, that’s a lot to take in, isn’t it? Okay, so what does all that mean? All that means that there is a huge amount of pain, questions, broken relationships, confusion all around this area of sexuality. And that pain is not just out there in the world somewhere, that pain is in this room. Every single one of those statistics that I’ve mentioned lives in this room here today.

(05:18)
And so when we talk about sexuality, we don’t just talk about, “oh, the Bible says do this or don’t do this.” What I’ve learned over the last 12 years is when we talk about sexuality, we are stepping into some of the deepest pain points that people have experienced and that they’re carrying along with them. And if I look back on the last 12 years, the things that I’ve learned from you as I’ve walked with many of you and been in groups with many of you and heard your stories is this: When sex becomes confusing, God becomes confusing. Which means that every sexual issue is also a spiritual issue. That when we talk about sexuality, when we have sexual pain, it’s not just about our sexuality, it impacts our relationship with God. And really that’s why I feel so called to do the work that I do, not because I want to talk about controversial topics or because I want to talk about sensitive areas, but because I’ve come to realize that when we’re silent on sexual issues, we really allow that pain to fester and we allow there to be so much confusion in this topic that people actually get discouraged in their relationship with God.

(06:38)
And the research is actually beginning to show this 10% of Christians have recently within the last several years left the church because of unaddressed sex abuse scandals or leaders falling. The research also shows that 50% of Christians who have left the church recently have done so because of teaching and unfair treatment of LGBTQ people and issues. And so what we have to recognize is when we’re too afraid to step into conversations around sexual issues, we’re not just neglecting kind of a cultural issue, we’re neglecting a spiritual battleground. And that’s why we call this conference Reclaim. Because we really want to step into those conversations so that we can see God begin to reclaim territory in our lives that has been given over to the enemy. You see, because what happens is when we have these things occur in our past or in our present, when we have things like a pornography addiction that we can’t tell anybody about, we have things like past trauma or sexual violence or abuse in our past, when we have sexual problems in our marriage or betrayal, what happens is it’s not just a relational issue, it starts to become a barrier.

(08:02)
It starts to become a wall between us and God. And Satan loves the camp out in those walls. Over the last dozen years, I’ve seen a lot of walls be built because of God and sexuality. I’ve seen sexuality become a barrier between people and the love of Christ in a lot of different ways. And some of you are here today because you know what that feels like. You know what it is to have a wall between you and God. So what does that wall look like? Well, it can look like a lot of different things. First of all, it can look like doubt. Some of you have a very pressing question on your heart that goes like this. How could a loving God tell someone that they can’t sleep with who they want to sleep with?

(08:59)
How could a loving God tell two women that they shouldn’t be getting married? I just don’t understand how a good God could say that. Or, your wound might be the source of a wall. You have a really deep pressing question, a legitimate question of how could a loving God have let that happen to me? Why didn’t he step in before I married that person that hurt me so deeply? Or why didn’t he stop that person before they took my innocence? Or even now today, when we think about the fact that there are thousands, millions of girls and boys and women and men in sex trafficking, why doesn’t he stop it? And so our wounds make us question the goodness and the power of God. Some of you have a wall that looks like shame and that wall says, “Well, I know God loves and forgives people, but I don’t really believe I can ever receive the fullness of God’s love because of what I’ve done.

(10:15)
I don’t really ever know that he truly forgives me.” And some of you have a wall that looks a lot like bondage. When we look at those statistics about pornography, just think about that. In the younger generations, 98% of men and 72% of women, there are an awful lot of people who want to please God, but they can’t stop lusting. They can’t stop looking at pornography. They don’t feel like they can control their desires, and so they don’t know what to do with that. I’ve had people tell me, “I don’t even know if I’m saved because I can’t stop sinning.” That’s a barrier between them and the love of God. And so we’ve got this topic of sexuality that for so many of us doesn’t represent some good thing that God designed and gave us as a gift. It’s come to represent the one thing that makes us question the love of God for us and the goodness of God.

(11:18)
What do we do when we have this wall between us and God represented bi sexuality? I have seen that in my own life, and in other people’s lives, we tend to have one of three strategies and none of them really work long-term. The first strategy we have is that we compartmentalize. Okay, so we’ve got the spiritual me that loves God and reads my Bible and wants to go to church and worship, and then we’ve got this sexual me that I really don’t quite know what to do with. I certainly don’t bring that box to church. I kind of just keep it over here and visit it every now and then. And if you compartmentalize for too long, you start to feel like you’re really two separate people. People don’t know this part of you. You just wish you could get rid of this part of you and compartmentalization, it’s an effective coping tool.

(12:20)
For a while, I’m glad God gave us the ability to compartmentalize because I can’t think about all the hard things all at once, all the time. And it’s a gift to be able to say, “I don’t know how to deal with this. It’s overwhelming. I had to put this over here for a while.” But when it becomes your strategy of dealing with pain and shame and doubt, and you never integrate this box into who God is and who he created you to be, you begin feeling like a fake. And we hear almost every week stories of Christian leaders and pastors who are found out to have this secret struggle. Do you think that only happens to leaders? That happens to all of us. God calls us to integrate our lives into his love. And so this strategy of compartmentalizing our life in the end is not going to lead to health.

(13:18)
The second thing we tend to do is we compromise. I mentioned that two of my sons are here today, and I remember one of them, Michael, when he was about four years old, he sat down on our couch and he took my Bible and he opened my Bible and he said, “Mom, the Bible says Michael gets candy. The Bible says Michael gets cookies.” And he closed it and he says, “That’s what the Bible says.” Yeah, I don’t know where he learned that version of the Bible, but there are lots of authors and speakers that you could find nowadays in the Christian space who will tell you, “The Bible says you get whatever you want sexually.” “The Bible says a loving God doesn’t have holy standards for our sexuality.” And it’s tempting to want to create an image of God that makes us feel good about our struggles, that gives us permission to do whatever we want. But in the long run, what we end up doing is doing what Paul wrote about: Embracing a form of godliness but denying the power of God. And it doesn’t lead to life.

(14:35)
The final thing we try to do is we try to control. Any of you ever done this? When you have something you can’t quite make sense of or you have a sin struggle that you can’t get rid of, we just white knuckle it. We try to have so much willpower and promising and putting filters on our devices and memorizing verses and telling an accountability partner to ask us something. We try to control our children. We try to control our spouse so that sin doesn’t get in. And sometimes that works for a while, but it doesn’t work long-term because our sin and our shame and our desires that we don’t know what to do with, it’s like a beach ball. You can push it down for a while, but it’s going to require all your energy, and in time it’s going to come back up. God does not call us to compartmentalize.

(15:32)
He says, “I want you to love me with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength. I want you to be a person with integrity.” He doesn’t call us to compromise. When Moses said, who do I tell them that you are? What did God say? He said, you tell them that “I am the I am,” and we are called the worship of God as he is, not to create some version of him that we want to believe in. And he doesn’t call us to control. So often when we talk about sexuality in the church, it’s a message that you have to get your sin under control. That is not the message of the Bible. God knows that we have desires that wage against our soul, and the temptations we face and the shame that we carry. It’s too much for us. And the Bible has a very different offer for us, and it’s an offer instead to just bring it to him, just bring it to him.

(16:43)
The theme verse of this conference is probably one that is really familiar to most of you and is found in Romans chapter 12, starting with verse one. And again, some of you, most of you have probably heard this verse before, Paul writes, “Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters in view of God’s mercy to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice wholly and pleasing to God. This is your true and proper worship.” And what Paul is telling us to do, he’s urging us to do, is he’s urging us to bring ourselves, to bring our bodies and to surrender them to the Lord. Now, when you hear that term “surrender,” even as you looked at maybe this conference, the title Surrendered Sexuality, how many of you like the word “surrender”? A few of you, most of us are like, that’s a pretty awful word in our day and age.

(17:41)
I mean, when do you surrender? You surrender when you’re beat, when you are an army that’s been defeated and you have no choice. You surrender when you’ve got no other options. I mean the human nature does not like to surrender. If you don’t believe me, just try to put a five-year-old to bed. They will do everything they can to not surrender, to sleep from I’m hungry, I’m thirsty. There’s a monster in the closet. We hate that concept of surrender. But God’s offer for us to surrender our lives, to surrender our bodies, including our sexuality, is not this sense of, “Oh, I give up. God, you win.” It’s a very different offer, not what we give up, but what he wants to give us. So let’s dive into what this verse is actually saying and asking us to do. First of all, did you notice that that verse starts with brothers and sisters? Who’s Paul talking to?

(18:49)
Who? Christians. Christians. He’s talking to people that have an experience of being saved by God. And so if you go up to the average person on the street and you tell them their surrender, their sexuality to God, that means nothing. Paul is talking to his brothers and sisters in Christ, those in the church who love God. And then I want you to notice what is the first word in this verse, in Romans chapter 12? One. What is it? Therefore, what does therefore mean? Huh? You’re like mumbling. What does it mean? Yeah, it’s something before that. So to understand this verse, we got to know what Paul is saying before this. Now, Paul is referring first of all to everything he’s written in the letter of Romans, which if you’re familiar with the letter of Romans, there’s so much in there about how our sin brings the wrath of God, but how God has delivered us from his wrath. That he has given us mercy. That he has overwhelmed us with his kindness.

(19:55)
If you read in Romans chapter eight, you hear that “nothing can separate us from the love of God” and that “God works everything together for the good of those who love him.” And so there’s all these encouragement in the book of Romans that sets up what Paul is about to write. But right before Romans chapter 12, verse one, here is the end of Romans chapter 11. After everything Paul has written, he kind of breaks out in the toxicology of just being overwhelmed even as he’s writing about the greatness and the sovereignty of God. Here’s what he writes. “Oh, the depths of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God. How unsearchable his judgments and his paths beyond tracing out. Who has known the mind of the Lord or who has been his counselor? Who has ever given to God that God should repay them? For from him and through him and for him are all things to him be the glory forever.”

(20:55)
And so what Paul is doing here in Romans chapter 11 is he’s giving us God’s credentials. We will not surrender to somebody that we don’t trust, right? So let’s say that you had a heart issue and you need to go in for open heart surgery. Would you care who did that surgery? I mean, you’re going to surrender on the operating table. You’re going to be put under and somebody’s going to have a very sharp knife and cut into your heart. Do you want somebody doing that who just maybe took an online course, or would you go to the Cleveland Clinic and find the best expert? And so when Paul is asking us to offer our bodies as a living sacrifice, when he’s telling us that this is our proper worship, he’s not just telling us this out of the blue. He’s saying because of who God is.

(21:55)
He’s saying because of what God has done. Because of we do not know God. There’s no way we can bring him any aspect of our life including something as sensitive and painful and controversial as our sexuality. So I want you to consider three things about knowing God. First of all, do you know God’s greatness? Mike and I used to live in Colorado Springs and before I got the pickleball bug, when I lived in Colorado Springs, my favorite thing was to hike. And I would love going into the mountains and hiking these fourteeners and just getting lost in the beauty of the mountains in Colorado. And I don’t know if any of you have had that experience where you just feel so small and you start to worship because you’re like, I am tiny. I remember this one time we were hiking a fourteener, which is a really tall mountain if you don’t know what that is. But, you have to get above the tree line and back down by a certain time because the lightning storms roll in and it’s dangerous.

(23:06)
And Mike and I didn’t do that. We got caught in a lightning storm and it was hailing above the tree line. I’ve never been so scared in my life and I’ve never felt so helpless and small. But sometimes I think we forget the greatness of God. Who are we to say that we understand love better than he does? And we need to be reminded of his greatness. So I ask you the question, do you know his greatness? But the second question is equally important. Do you know his mercy? Paul said in light of God’s mercy, not just greatness but his mercy. That same God who spoke those galaxies, I mean, this is so hard to believe. We hear it. We become so familiar with it, we lose the power of what it is that that God who spoke the galaxies came and took on human flesh.

(24:12)
Jesus came. He came to understand and to identify with every infirmity and weakness and pain point that a human being can ever experience. He came, he submitted and surrendered to the Father, and he understands every pain point that you could have walked through. All the statistics that I’ve mentioned, Jesus came to embody that, to live it and to die for it. When we read about the history of Jesus, him coming to earth, it is the most important thing that has ever happened in the history of man. It is how we do our calendars. The years started when he came. But think about what Jesus did when he came to earth. Jesus was born in sexual controversy as his mother was impregnated by the Holy Spirit. He knows what it is from the beginning to be gossiped about. Jesus at the age of maybe two or three became a political exile as his family had to leave because of persecution.

(25:34)
He knows what it is to be a foreigner, to be an immigrant, to be rejected. At some point, Jesus’ earthly father Joseph died. We don’t know when, but then he had a single mother. As an adult, he was falsely accused, suffering repeatedly for doing the right thing. He experienced the greatest form of church abuse as the church leaders framed him and accused him and ended up killing him. He was betrayed by a close friend and he was denied by a best friend. And then we’re told that Jesus suffered the most painful and humiliating death that is possible. And I think sometimes we want to clean up the crucifixion and we have pictures of kind of with a halo Jesus on the cross. But the reality of what Jesus suffered for us, he was beaten. He was pierced. He hung on a cross, not even with a loin cloth that we put on him in our paintings. He hung on the cross bare naked likely with filth running down his legs. He suffered the most humiliating abuse and death that’s imaginable. But even worse than that, his heavenly Father, who he was one with, turned his face away from him.

(27:14)
Jesus did all of that to show us his mercy. And so when he says, offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, let’s remember that he offers his first, so that we would know his mercy, so that we would be united to intimacy with the Father. And so I ask you, do you know his mercy? But the third question I’m going to ask you is: Do you know him personally? You see, there are people here like me who are blessed to grow up in the church growing up here in Akron, Ohio, and getting to go to Christian schools and having people pour into my life. And you’ve heard these things before. You’ve heard of the greatness of God. And like me, you may have given your life to him, and you may have received him as your savior, and you may read your Bible. But that doesn’t mean that we know him personally in such a way that we want to surrender ourselves to him.

(28:21)
And there have been seasons in my life where I’ve done different kind of ways of surrendering my life to him and knowing God. But there came a point when I was about 40 years old that I really began to know what it was to know God in such a way that he changed everything. And some of you have heard me tell this story before, but it began with an exercise program called P90X. Does anybody know what P90X is? There you go. Anybody done it? Yeah. Yeah. All right, cool. Yeah, here we go. So Mike, probably about 13 or 14 years ago, he brought home P90X and he’s like, “Hey, let’s do this exercise program, help us get into shape.” And I’m like, I don’t want to do that. And he said, “No, you just work out for an hour a day.”

(29:07)
And I am like, when are we going to do that? We’re both working. We have three little kids. He’s like, we can get up at four in the morning and do it. I’m like, this is not sounding good. And so he is like, “No, it’s really good. It’s based on muscle confusion.” I was like, why do I want my muscles to be confused? That does not sound good. So he convinced me to start trying this P90X program, and we did it for about a week together. The first few days, I literally felt like I was going to throw up after I did P90X. And then Mike got a little bored with it. He went back to swimming, working out with some other things. But I kind of stuck with the P90X. And so most mornings I would get up really early, which at that time I really wasn’t a morning person, but I’m sort of a compulsive individual.

(29:52)
So I got hooked on this and I started getting up early and I’d go down in my basement and do whatever Tony Horton told me to do. Yeah. So about six weeks into P90X, I start to notice that my body’s changing. You would hope. So I’m like, wow, I’ve got some definition that I didn’t have before. I’m getting stronger. And I started coming up in the morning just feeling good about my body, and it was like the Holy Spirit began to speak to me and say, “Juli, you’re spending an hour a day on your body and you’re seeing the results. Imagine what would happen if you spend that time seeking me.” And it became so persistent every day. The Holy Spirit was just speaking to me that eventually I was like, okay, God, I’ll do the P90X. I don’t know what that looks like.

(30:45)
So I started getting up at 4:30 in the morning and instead of exercising, I’m like, alright, Lord, I’m here. What do I do? This really in the morning, if I start praying, I’m just going to fall asleep. What do you want me to do? And the Lord just led me those first few days to just get on my knees and just be like, alright, I’m seeking you. And I remember one of those first mornings, the first verse that went through my mind was one that was really familiar. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” And the next thought that went through my mind terrified me because I began to say to the Lord, I don’t really know that I love you.

(31:38)
I was in Christian ministry. I’ve been a Christian all my life, but God, I don’t really know why I do what I do and that I love you. And then the second thought was even more terrifying. God, I don’t really know that you love me. From the time I was a child, I learned Jesus loves me and God, I know you love me. You love the whole world, but do you know my pain? Do you say my name? And friends, that started me on a desperate search to know this God that I’ve been reading about my whole life that I’d even been serving?

(32:31)
And so I ask you, do you know God as if he speaks to you personally? Do you know believe that He knows that secret you’re holding? He knows your shame. He knows the pain and he invites you to himself. Because when we know God in such a way where we know his greatness, we know his mercy, but you know it’s for you. What else would you want to do but offer yourself to him? We will not surrender to someone we don’t trust and we will not trust someone we don’t know. And the problem with sexuality in the church is not that we don’t know the rules. We know them well. But we don’t know a God who’s powerful enough to save us. And so I invite you this weekend not to learn about sexuality, but to begin to take steps of what it is to invite God into that most precious and terrifying space of your life that you might experience his power.

(33:48)
Hey, friend, as we’re wrapping up today’s episode, if there’s one thing I want you to take away, it’s the fact that Christian sexuality isn’t about following a list of rules. It’s not even about knowing a bunch of stuff. I know a lot of stuff because of my training as a psychologist. And knowledge is a tool, but it’s not transformational. The only thing that really brings freedom and healing is knowing Jesus at an intimate level. And I hope that was loud and clear for you today. As we continue on this journey of what it looks like to surrender our sexuality, I want you to know that there is no sin you’ve committed that keeps you out of the freedom and redemption that Jesus wants to give you. There’s no struggle to great. There’s no question too profound that Jesus can’t meet you in. Surrender is all about inviting Jesus’s presence into the difficult, intimate parts of our lives. And that’s why I’m so passionate about this topic, Surrendered Sexuality. We are going to continue to have this conversation over the next few weeks, and so I hope you join us on this journey of what it looks like to surrender our sexuality to the lordship of Jesus. I’ll see you next time.