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Women everywhere are turning to spicy romance novels to escape stress, overwhelm, and the monotony of everyday life. Today, Juli talks about why these trending titles feel so intoxicating, how they subtly shape our expectations of intimacy, and why they often leave us feeling disconnected from real relationships.
Instead of escaping into fictional worlds, hear how you can rediscover the adventure and connection God designed for real life.
Juli (00:00.588)
Hey friends, it’s Juli. One of the most awkward parts of my job is explaining it. When people ask, what do you do for work? I never quite know how to tell a stranger that I run a ministry that’s focused on sexuality. Well, a few years ago, a young woman helped me find the perfect answer. After we talked, she said, thank you for helping me make sense of God and sex. And that’s really what we do here on Java with Juli.
Because as we wrestle with questions about sexuality, we’re not just asking about behavior. We’re really asking about identity, about love, about God Himself. Questions like, is He good? Can I trust Him? Does He see me? We are living in a moment where many people are walking away from their faith in God, not because they don’t care about God, but because the answers they’re getting from questions about sex just feel shallow.
Juli
And I’ve learned that when sex becomes confusing, God becomes confusing. And that’s why this podcast exists, to help people encounter a God who’s designed for sex is good and whose word brings clarity and healing. As we close out this year, would you consider supporting this work? Between now and January 1st, your gift is going to be matched dollar for dollar up to $70,000. And that’s doubling your impact.
Friend, your generosity helps more people discover that God is not afraid or embarrassed by their questions. His heart is good towards them. You can give securely today at authenticintimacy.com/give. And thanks so much for being a part of this work.
Juli
Hey friends, welcome to another episode of Java with Juli. My name is Juli Slattery and with me today is the one and the only Hannah Nitz.
Hannah
Hey Juli, so good to be with you.
Juli (01:53.41)
Thanks so much for being with me.
Hannah
You know what, I come anytime that you text me.
Juli
You do? That is true.
Hannah
I have a very short list of people that I will always say yes to. You’re on the list.
Juli (02:03.79)
I’ll try not to abuse that.
Hannah
Oh you never would. You never could.
Juli
Yeah. Well, maybe today because I don’t know how you feel about the topic today.
Hannah
Honestly, great question… I know Juli, you always do this to me.
Juli
You want to introduce it?
Hannah
Yeah. Okay guys. So today we’re talking about smut.
Juli
There you go.
Hannah
Do you think everyone knows what this word is Juli?
Juli
No.
Hannah
What are some other words we could use? Other people call it spice, call it erotica, call it romance fiction stories. We’re talking about BookTok.
Juli
We used to call it mommy porn. I don’t know if they still call it that.
Hannah (02:39.222)
You know, I’ve never, I haven’t really heard people call it mommy porn. It is a good description of what it is.
Juli
That was back in the day, but that…
Hannah
It, they are just books with a lot of sex in them. That’s pretty much how we’re going to define it. Yeah. And the trending words around it are usually smut or spice, but this is something that has taken over, Juli, the culture. I mean, it is everywhere. is trending on social media platforms. It is taking over every book club in America, maybe the world. don’t know. just know America, except your book club, obviously. And it is a article that was sent to us by your producer was talking about that it has single-handedly saved Barnes & Nobles bookstore.
Juli
That’s it. That’s crazy.
Hannah
It’s not. Yeah. She said, so Book Tok is what it’s like on TikTok, which is one of the world’s most popular social media apps.
Hannah (03:36.63)
Whenever you’re in like a section of TikTok, it’ll have a little name. This category BookTok, where they’re talking a lot about books, it says, Book Talk saved Barnes and Nobles. From 2009 onwards, Barnes and Noble had a decade of troubles closing more than 150 stores and teetering on the brink of going out of business. But in the past few years, they recovered in no small part, thanks to the rising popularity of a book centered social media, the book obsessed side of TikTok thrives off of sharing the latest reads, videos, and color-coded bookshelves. Of course, towering stacks of book hauls from romance to fantasy. And the article essentially goes on to talk about how this category of like “sexy books” is so popular that it’s literally changing the bookstore…
Juli
Yeah
Hannah
…life. We thought Amazon was gonna kill them all.
Juli
Mm-hmm.
Hannah
And then in came the smut.
Juli
There you go. Yeah, I guess people don’t want Amazon sending them these titles or something. I don’t know.
Hannah (04:37.334)
I don’t know, it’s like going in the store and seeing it all in person.
Juli
Yeah, we did a few months back, we did a show on these kinds of books for young teens, for young adults, how they’re really trying to get these themes into kid literature and teen literature. And we had such a response to that program. We’re like, hey, we need to talk about this further and how it’s impacting not just teens and young adults. Like, this is a thing for really all women today.
Hannah
I like the thought that you started with a slightly easier conversation of being like, isn’t this bad for our teens? And once people said yes, we’re gonna like take a step back and be like, this could also be bad for you.
Juli
Yeah, and this could also be something that’s trending with all age women.
Hannah
All age, Juli, it’s everywhere. I was telling you, I mean, if I’m on Instagram, if I’m on social media and I’m scrolling just like my For You page, just a general newsfeed, I feel like on any screen we’ll see something about smut. It’ll be someone rating a book, it’ll be someone talking about a book. They use the little red pepper emoji. Are you familiar with this emoji?
Juli
Yes.
Hannah
To rank…
Juli (05:49.57)
How spicy it is.
Hannah
…how spicy it is. So if you got five peppers in this book, like buckle up. yeah. Okay, so Juli, here’s why I’m excited why we’re talking about this. I have thought of you so many times when I see like the trending things on Smut because…
Juli
I don’t know how I feel about that.
Hannah
Because you wrote a book back when I think a lot of the smut world began and this like spicy sexual books because when 50 Shades of Grey came on the scene, what do think that was? 2014?
Juli
It was right about 2012, 13, 14, like in those years.
Hannah (06:34.798)
Yeah those books… took over. I mean, they were everywhere. And it felt like one of the first times where this erotica literature became not just this offset, but it was everywhere. was trying, I mean, you went to the dentist office, everyone in the waiting room was holding the 50 Shades of Grey book.
Juli
Yes.
Hannah
And you wrote a book called Pulling Back the Shades, really talking about why are we so drawn into this book? Why can’t people put this book down? So as I’ve seen this, rise of the smut and of the erotica, I have thought so many times, man, we need to take pulling back the shades and just rip off the cover. And instead of making it about 50 shades, just making it about this conversation because it’s everywhere.
Juli
You’re right.
Hannah
It’s everywhere, truly. It’s everywhere. Okay, so can you catch us up a little bit on why you wrote it for 50 Shades of Grey, why you felt like it was important and like why we’re bringing this back up now?
Juil (07:29.536)
Yeah, so at the time, 50 Shades of Grey, as you mentioned, it was all the rage. It was the fastest selling book in history.
Hannah
That is a crazy statistic.
Juli
It is. And there are all kinds of conversations, both in the general population as well as in the Christian world of women are flocking to this. They are figuring out that they are more sexual than they realized. They’re enjoying this. And so I stepped into that conversation with Dannah Gresh. She wrote that book, Pulling Back the Shades with Me, to really address, why are women drawn to this book? Why is it not a good thing?
And for those of you who might have been around Authentic Intimacy at the time or read Fifty Shades of Grey, you might remember I chose to read the trilogy, the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, so I know what was in it. Dannah did not read it.
Hannah
Which I did really appreciate that as you wrote it, because I think oftentimes you can hear conversations from Christians who can commentate on something just assuming.
Juli
Yes.
Hannah
You were like, no, I’m going to really see what’s going on.
Juli (08:32.266)
If you’re going to write a book on something, you have to know what it actually says. But I also remember Hannah that at the time in wake of Fifty Shades of Grey, I was reading articles about how this was transforming the publishing world and that authors and publishers and booksellers were like, wow, this stuff sells. And so you had a whole army of people who were saying, we can make money on this. Like I can write these kinds of stories.
Hannah
Juli, and here we are 12 years later and we’re standing in it. We are. Like we’re like, it’s everywhere. If you look at bestselling lists, I mean, if you look at just even the numbers, I mean, the stat about Barnes & Nobles, it’s like, that happened.
Juli
Yes it did. Yeah. It was a recipe that at least from a commercial perspective worked.
Hannah
Yeah. Okay. So here we stand, and it’s trending. It’s everywhere. And Juli, the women love it.
Juli
Yeah.
Hannah
The women love it. So we want to just have a conversation about this today. And I just love the way that you help us see not just why we stay away, but why are we so drawn to this? Like what is it in women that is so drawn in? And I just want to read a few things from an article that interviewed women who are very much enjoying their time reading smut, reading these spicy books. This woman says, so much of our lives as mothers is spent doing for others. We give until we’re gone. Daily stresses can dampen our creativity, our spontaneity and our passion. We’re tired and tapped out. Life’s a bit much. We make lists even during intercourse. So a piece of literature that can suck us in, make us feel and turn us back on is a treasure.
Hannah (10:21.922)
And I mean, quotes after quotes of women who are just asked why you’re reading this. Another one says, I read Smut for one quick and dirty reason, escape. So much as I love my married life with my kids and my husband and my day-to-day responsibilities of caring for them, I need to escape the reality. Reading about romance and sex and unreality is an easy way of stepping away from that responsibility. Luckily, my husband is more than willing to leave my nightstand light on while I read an extra chapter, because he knows when the light finally goes off, I’m happily back to the reality of being with him.
And then, you know, we have other quotes from people who have talked about this is even something that has been better for their education on sex than anything else. A senior editor at Glamour Magazine said, reading romance and anything smutty has taught me way more about myself and my sexuality than any textbook or sex ed class ever did.
Juli
Yeah.
Hannah
What do we do with this Juli? What do we do with something that so many people are loving?
Juli (11:22.476)
I mean, I think Hannah that really covers some of the main reasons that women are so drawn to this. First of all, they do want an escape. And we have a phrase like, that’s my dirty pleasure or guilty pleasure or something like that where it’s like, I earned this, I worked hard, I took care of people all day, I wanna do something for me. But I would say, let’s switch it around a little bit and let’s say it’s pornography. A lot of people, men and women would say that with pornography, like, I’m exhausted at the end of the day. I don’t wanna work at sex. I don’t wanna work at romance. Like I just want that quick hit of dopamine, that feeling of excitement, that sense of fantasy. And so they escape into that. But as soon as I use that word pornography, a lot of our listeners are like, well, that’s obviously wrong. Like I don’t want my husband doing that or my kids doing that. So why is this any different?
Juli
And I think… That’s the first main reason is just that a fantasy or escape, the boredom of life, the disappointment of not having the romance or the sexual passion that you want to have in relationships. And then the second reason that you really hit on there with one of those quotes is, I’m gonna use this word very lightly, but a form of sex education. Like it’s a terrible form of sex education, but when we look at what was happening in 50 Shades of Grey, one of the big themes in that book was BDSM, bondage, dominism, sadism, masochism. And it was pushing the limits of sexual excitement by bringing this theme in.
Now, when we look at what a lot of this erotic literature is like today, it is anything goes. It’s throuples, it’s, which means threesomes, if you don’t know what that means; it’s queer relationships, it’s women falling in love with their girlfriend instead of a guy. It’s everything, it’s experimentation. And that is really reflective of what we see in our day and age related to sexuality, that it’s all about exploration, pushing the boundaries, anything goes, whatever you feel you should try.
Juli (13:45.824)
And so people are reading these kinds of books and discovering, well, hey, maybe I would like a threesome, or maybe I am more aroused by a story where it’s two women instead of a man and a woman. And so it’s not just even your traditional love story that has spice mixed in. It’s a form of exploring all the boundaries of what can be done sexually.
Hannah
And some of it too, Juli, is it’s a little bit more subtle than that at times too. I mean, I think of one of the biggest, I think I should look at the statistic, but like one of the most bestselling authors right now is Colleen Hoover, who’s writing a ton of these books. But the premise of these stories is not sex. It’s a good story.
Juli
Sure, yeah.
Hannah
It’s a story that people want to read and love with this like sexual, very like explicit sexual encounters spread throughout it. Then that comes out as the number one bestselling movie with Blake Lively in it. So then it’s trending, it’s on everything. You see these beautiful pictures of her on the red carpet. like, what book is she in? Let me go see this movie. It’s not just this thing that feels as straight up as I’m gonna sit and watch porn. It’s telling a story, it’s cultural, it’s this movie and book that are trending.
I mean, I remember having dinner with a group of girlfriends just last month. And one of them was like, man, there’s this book that everyone’s talking about, and I picked it up because all my colleagues are talking about it. She’s like, I’m halfway through and I cannot even believe the sex in this thing. She’s like, I’m embarrassed to tell anyone I read it. And then we find out by the end of the story, she’s like, but I finished the whole book. She’s like, she’s like feeling these mixed feelings about it, but she’s like, I couldn’t stop.
Juli (15:29.462)
Yeah, and that’s so key, Hannah, because one of the reasons that this is more attractive to women than men, and of course there are men who might be attracted to this kind of book, but women are more drawn to it because in general, our sexuality is more integrated with feelings of attachment, with feelings of safety, with exciting romantic stories being chosen, being loved, you know, the tension of foreplay.
And so even traditional pornography that is geared towards women will tend to have more of that kind of storyline. But with a book, you can really develop that sense of character, you know, development or relationship development and those feelings that women want to have when there’s a new relationship or they’re being pursued or that tension of are they ever gonna get together? And so absolutely, there’s good story mixed in.
Juli
And again, the good story can be a traditional relationship between a guy and a girl. It can be I’m married and then this guy comes into my life who pays attention to me and is so attractive and so much better than my husband. But it can also be these other themes which are really geared more towards I think a lot of the younger generation where they’re queer relationships or it’s exploring or it’s you know, again, breaking the boundaries of what we would have even thought people would be writing about 20 years ago.
Hannah
So as we’re hearing this, so many of our listeners who are listening to this who are like, yeah, I’ve read some of these. Or maybe this is something that’s been a big part. Like I’m always reading one, I’m loving this. Or maybe it’s something like my friend who’s like, everyone talked about this and I picked it up and I understand. What would you say to that person who’s just starting to listen to this and is feeling, I don’t know, a little overwhelmed with like, I don’t know. Is this that bad? Like, what do I do here? Yeah, what’s the deal?
Juli (17:26.074)
What’s the, what’s the issue with it? Yeah, I think a lot of times, Hannah, we think about from a Christian perspective, like it’s wrong to have sex with somebody you’re not married to. But what could possibly be wrong about fictional characters?
Hanah (17:41.526)
Yeah, if I’m reading about Jane and John.
Juli
Like, even pornography, you can make really a valid argument that you’re exploiting real human beings by looking at them. But when it becomes something fictional, like who gets hurt?
Hannah
You know, and the tough part is Juli, we all just like love to feel smart. And sometimes it feels nice to think I’m reading in my free time. I know even for that, it’s like, not only am I not harming someone, not only is this not a real person, I’m sitting here with my light and instead of scrolling social media and instead of doing this, I’m reading. You know?
Juli
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So what’s the problem with it? And, you know, I think part of it is we have to break this thinking that it’s all about consent. You know, it’s all about like, hey, if I’m doing this and I’m not hurting anyone, what’s the problem? And I’ve talked about this before on Java with Juli, that we have to recognize, particularly as followers of Christ, that we don’t belong to ourselves. We belong to God. And the scripture says that our bodies literally are a temple where the Holy Spirit lives. And so we are to glorify God with our bodies. We’re to offer our bodies to God for his service. And that includes our eyes, it includes our mind. And so when you start to look at it through that framework, like Jesus is right there with you, reading the book with you, how do you feel about that?
Juli (19:11.714)
You know, even when we use words like smut to describe what we’re reading, certainly that isn’t something that is glorifying to God. And now you’d say, why? Why is it not glorifying to God? Well, for a few reasons. First of all, almost without exception, these books are taking the act of sex, sexual desire, and fueling it outside of how God designed it, which is the covenant of marriage. The lifelong covenant commitment between a man and a woman who are married; that is the only appropriate place where we are to nurture sexual thoughts and actions and really awaken that. And again, almost without exception, unless it’s like a Christian book, like a Francine Rivers book, you know, that is really trying to glorify what sex should be in marriage, it’s saying sex is really more about how you feel and about expressing your desires and that you’re hot for someone or you wanna try something new. And so it’s training your imagination and your brain to channel your sexuality in a way that God says, that’s not what I designed that for. And so that’s the first problem with it. Another problem with it is it really breeds discontentment. So we talk about this related to pornography. Like if you’re looking at airbrushed performance pornography, and you think that is normal sex, when you get into a real sexual relationship, you’re gonna be not only disappointed…
Hannah
Things don’t look as good as you thought.
Juli
…but I mean the reality is a lot of young kids can’t perform in marriage sexually because their brains have been wired to respond to something that’s unnatural with pornography.
Juli (21:08.588)
And so we even see impotence among young men, and we see couples withdrawing from each other because this is nothing. like my brain learned sex was. And the same is true with this kind of literature. And it’s even worse than pornography because not only are you presenting an unrealistic view of sex, you’re also presenting an unrealistic view of what human attachment and relationship look like. And it breeds dissatisfaction with real life. It breeds discontentment instead of investing in what you have right in front of you.
Hannah
So, you know, that one quote I read earlier was saying, you know, my husband happily is going to keep my bedroom light on to let me finish reading my sexual book. You know, we’ve read from others who say like, yeah, but then Juli, I read these books and then get excited sexually. And then that’s helping me with my sexual relationship with my husband. Like how, what is the connection there of how that could be?
Juli
Mm-hmm. We heard this a lot with 50 Shades of Grey. And I would say, Hannah, we even hear this related to pornography with couples that they’re like, we don’t know how to get aroused, and so we watch pornography together. And then that helps. So I think what we have to understand is the goal of sex isn’t just arousal, it’s intimacy.
And the goal of a long-term great sex life is that you learn with just the two of you to become aroused by each other. And so what these books do and what any form of pornography does is it helps you to get aroused by dissociating. It’s not, I’m aroused by my spouse, I’m aroused by being in the moment. We’re learning to be aroused by imagining that we’re somewhere other than we are. We’re learning to be aroused by thinking about somebody other than who we’re with. And while that might, in the short-term, be a payoff, in the long-term, what that does is it, it actually makes it even more difficult to enjoy sex together. But here’s the thing, Hannah, women in particular need to learn to think sexually in marriage. And nobody teaches us how to do this. And so these erotic books seem to fill that gap of, I don’t know how to think in a way that actually makes me look forward to sex.
Hannah (23:29.198)
Yeah, so it makes you realize why one of the many reasons people are so excited about these books.
Juli
Yes
Hannah
They’re experiencing something in their mind and body that they’ve wanted to. They’re want to have this piece of me.
Juli (23:43.778)
but I don’t want it. And so, you know, like I know in marriage I’m supposed to want this and pursue it and enjoy it, but I can’t. And now finally I’m finding that I actually do like sex and I do like thinking about it. But these books are training you to think about it in a way that again, short-term might pay off, but in the long-term, it’s not going to lead to lasting intimacy.
Hannah
So what do we do? I mean, yeah, what do we do for these women who are saying, okay, but this is meeting this need? What do I do different? If I remove this, it feels like it’s going to kill any of the sexuality that’s been growing.
Juli (24:23.18)
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, think whenever we look at sin, we got to say it’s a shortcut. Okay. You may have heard me say this before, but sin is always an illegitimate way to get legitimate need met.
Hannah
Man, that is so good.
Juli
And so we have to say, all right, there’s legitimate longings and needs that drive women to smut.
Hannah (24:47.054)
And those aren’t bad. Like the longing itself in you, it’s good. And there’s a reason why that’s there.
Juli
Yeah. We were created for excitement and for passion and for adventure. And so if you’re in a stage, maybe like you are Hannah, where your daily life is getting up and taking care of kids and it’s exhausting and there’s not a lot of excitement, there’s something in you that’s like, I just need life to be more than it is right now. I wanna live on the edge a little bit. I’m bored. And that’s a legitimate longing.
And then as we’ve been talking about, like the longing to enjoy sex and marriage, that’s a legitimate longing. But sin will tell you to take shortcuts to this. And so when we’re talking about sexual longing, I think when you step right past this, why in the world did God inspire the book Song of Solomon to be in the Bible? Like 4,000 years ago. It’s unlike any other book that is in the Bible.
Juli
You know, like why? And I think there’s a lot of reasons why, but primarily one of them is because he knows that we need instruction on how to enjoy sex within marriage, on how to awaken passion and how to awaken our senses and the beauty of the sexual pursuit between husband and wife. And we just kind of skip over that book because we don’t know what to do with it.
But Song of Solomon gives a woman permission and gives instruction and pathways in terms of how do I actually enter into nurturing sexuality within my marriage? What does that look like?
Hannah (26:35.15)
Juli, as you’re saying this about Song of Solomon and our body being the temple, you know, I think a lot of people can say, yeah, I know, I know, but I can’t experience this actually the same way with my husband. What I experienced is I’m reading these books, going through something that feels very smutty or maybe just a romance book with this sex kind of sprinkled in. That experience, I just don’t know how to translate into my marriage.
Maybe someone’s thinking I can’t even orgasm in this kind of way with my husband. Like, I don’t know practically what that looks like.
Juli
Yeah. Okay. So first of all, I would say we’ve got to shift the goal. so if we use an example that everyone can relate to, let’s talk about food for a minute.
Hannah
Great, I’m with you.
Juli
So there are artificially manufactured foods that we eat that have way too much sugar and salt and fake stuff and chemicals that we know are bad for us. But I mean, does anything taste better than like a Krispy Kreme donut.
Hannah
No, actually, I had one of these recently and they’re just as good as you remember.
Juli
So good, you know, or I don’t know what you like. Like everybody likes a different thing. You know, there are these artificial foods. for a long time, I loved Doritos or I loved Oreos. And if you give me an apple and say, that’s better for you than an Oreo, I’d be like, I’d chuck the apple. You know, it’s like they don’t compare. But in the long run, the apple is really good food and nutritious and you can train your taste buds to actually have an apple be sweet. It takes work, but what God has given us is good and nutritious, but it doesn’t compete with the fake stuff. And in the end, the fake stuff kills you. In the end, we know if I keep eating this way, my body doesn’t process it the same way as my body processes the real thing. In a similar way, you have to retrain your thinking and your taste buds. And the same is true with sexuality.
This requires discipleship. And it’s why we don’t just have a podcast, we don’t just have a book. Authentic Intimacy is a ministry to help people on that discipleship journey. And there are other ministries as well that would tackle pornography, like the ministry Be Broken or Pure Desire or others. But you’re not just gonna one day say, oh, I want to invest in my marriage, so I’m never gonna read one of these books again.
Juli (29:19.308)
You have to say, I want the long-term outcome more than I want the quick hit. I don’t wanna struggle with shame. I don’t wanna struggle with feeling like there’s nothing good in my marriage. I don’t wanna live this way. And so then you say, okay, I need to do things differently. And it really does require Hannah, retraining what the goal of sex is and learning how to awaken your body in a way that is holy and honoring and wonderful and connects you to your husband and doesn’t leave you feeling empty. Like you gotta read another book or you’re not gonna make it through the day. And again, that’s why we have a whole ministry this way to help women do this. There are some amazing books, particularly ones by Cliff and Joyce Penner that help a woman understand her biology and her emotions around sex and really awaken that desire, to learn to climax, but to do this in a way that is focused on her husband and focused on physical sensations instead of dissociating into fantasy.
Hannah
And I kind of like, even how you’re describing this as this two-step thing, it’s not just, hey guys, let’s put the books down and then we’ll figure it out. Once we’re putting the book down, you’re saying there’s so much more to dive in and learn and explore to continue this area.
Juli
Yeah, yeah, 100%. And now I’ve been married for 31 years.
Hannah (30:52.29)
Yeah, Juli. It’s a lot of years.
Juli
It is a lot of years. But you reach age where you become so thankful that you did the hard work and you continue to do the hard work of building real intimacy. Because it’s long lasting. What you build is not just about an immediate pleasure. It’s about a real relationship. And I would say the same thing is true for the women who are reading these books as an escape, okay, what does it look like to have excitement and adventure that’s real? know, like getting involved in what’s happening in the world, going on a missions trip, know, reaching out to your neighbors and their messy lives and helping, like, those are the kinds of adventures that we were created for, and not escaping through a story. And again, there’s nothing wrong with stories, but when they become the thing that we’re addicted to, and the thing that helps us cope with life, we’re withdrawing from something that God made us to experience in the real world.
Hannah
Wow. I’m like, my mind is spinning with that point. That is amazing. It’s such a good point. Yeah. And you’re right. Even if you’re taking some of the sexuality piece out of the conversation, why are we so longing for this adventure? It’s like, yeah, that’s in us for a reason. To live life well in this adventure.
Juli
Yeah, and I don’t know about you, but I feel like my life is very adventurous. And I think you feel that same way about what God has called you to. From the outside looking in, it doesn’t look exciting, but when you have relationships with people and you’re sharing about Jesus and you’re in the middle of the hard stuff with them and you’re fighting the spiritual battle and you and your spouse, if you’re married, learn to do this together in terms of fight for the kingdom of God and love people well.
Like you’re exhausted by the end of the day.
Hannah (32:47.022)
It’s a great adventure.
Juli
It is, like you never know what’s around the corner. And so I think a lot of this is we’ve settled into an American life where it is boring because we’re not entering into the adventure that’s right in front of us of what’s happening.
Hannah (33:04.174)
Juli, in that passage you were talking about earlier from 1 Corinthians, when I’m trying to remember if it’s in 1 Corinthians 2 or 6.
Juli
Six.
Hannah
Okay, six. When you were talking about, can you remind me of that?
Juli
Yeah, our bodies are the temple of Holy Spirit.
Hannah
The very next verse there is saying, but those who are joined with the Lord are one spirit with him. And I just love pairing that part of the verse to what you’re talking about of like, of, we are the temple of the spirit of God, because I think that’s such an encouragement. It’s like, we have the spirit of God with us. You, sweet listener have the spirit of the same spirit that’s in the depths of God that searches him that is in you.
And I think even with this conversation, being bold enough to sit with that for a minute with God and asking these questions and saying this of like, I am longing for this. I’m drawn to these books for some reason. God, what do I do?
Juli (34:06.766)
And I think part of that Hannah is recognizing that when God tells us to say no to sin, he’s not just telling us to say no, he’s calling us to a greater yes. And I’ve been convicted about this every form of entertainment, even entertainment that is wholesome or clean. Another word for it is amusement, which means stop thinking.
And so, you I think we have to be aware of how much are we trying to escape and forget about life instead of uniting with God and stepping into it.
Hannah
Man, that’s a great question for all of us, Juli.
Juli (34:50.254)
Well, friend, this podcast is not about shaming you or anyone else for the choices that you’re making. It’s really calling us to know Christ in such a way that it reframes everything the world is doing and saying, okay, if I belong to God, how do I pursue these longings that I have in a different way than the world represents? Now that’s the response I hope you walk away with today.
If you’d like to dig a little bit deeper into this topic, we’ve linked to some blogs that might be helpful. The first two are, What Do I Do With My Sexual Desire? and Masturbation, Is It Wrong? Those are both written by me. And the third is a guest blog called, Confessions of a Former Erotica Author, written by novelist Francine Rivers. And please don’t forget to make your secure donation to help us continue to help others make sense of God and sexuality through this podcast.
Just go to authenticintimacy.com/give to make your secure year-end donation. We’ll link to that and to the blogs that I mentioned in our show notes. Thanks for listening and I look forward to having coffee with you next time for more Java with Juli.