If you’ve ever wrestled with how to reconcile your faith with your sexuality, or how God’s design seems outdated (or even unloving), this is an episode you can’t miss. Continuing in our theme of Surrendered Sexuality, Juli exposes the cultural narratives shaping how you think about sexuality — often without realizing it.
Prefer to listen? Listen to the full episode here.
Juli (00:00.11)
If you think like the world, what the Bible says about your sexual behavior will make no sense to you. At best, God will seem very outdated and at worst, he will seem very unloving.
(00:19.63)
Hey friend, welcome to another episode of Java with Juli. Now today we are headed back to our 2024 Reclaim Conference for a message that I gave there. And we are continuing on this theme of surrendering our sexuality. I hope you’ve been learning over these last few weeks, how important it is to understand that Jesus ultimately wants to change who we are as people, not just how we behave. And an important piece about that, that we’re going to cover today is how God wants to change the way we think.
The way we think about sexuality, the purpose of sex, the purpose of marriage. Now, let me ask you a question before we dive into that. Has this podcast been a blessing to you in any way? Maybe it’s helped you find truth or get set free from something that has pledged to you or it’s helped you in your relationships, your marriage. If the answer is yes, would you prayerfully consider becoming a monthly donor?
Authentic Intimacy is a nonprofit ministry and Java with Juli is funded by people like you. And so we are looking for 200 new monthly donors in the month of July to help keep this program going and the Ministry of Authentic Intimacy well-funded. And if you feel led to give, if you can contribute monthly, we want to say thank you by sending you a copy of my book, Surrendered Sexuality.
To become part of what we’re doing and contribute to the ministry of authentic intimacy, just go to our website, authenticintimacy.com/give. Now off to Reclaim 2024, where we’ll learn about surrendering our thinking.
All right, I want to tell you a quick story about a nephew that I have. I don’t know if he’s here. Jake, are you in the house? But my nephew Jake is brilliant. He is a computer expert with cyber security. And I knew this kid was brilliant when he was about three years old. I took him with my son Christian to go to the Cleveland Zoo. And at the Cleveland Zoo, they have this exhibit that’s this huge aquarium.
(02:21.432)
So we walk into the aquarium and all the kids are saying what kids would say. They’re looking, they’re like, fish, fishy, fish, look at the fish. And Jake walks in and he goes, water.
I’m like, wow, nobody notices the water. Here’s this three-year-old, he just sees the water. And I told my sister, I’m like, that kid’s brilliant. I don’t know what this means, but it means something. And that’s always stuck with me. And what we’re gonna talk about this morning is we’re gonna talk about the water. You see, so often when we talk about sexuality in the church and in our culture, we talk about the fish.
We talk about what we’re doing and our struggles and our behavior, but we don’t pay attention to the fact that there’s a problem with the water. John Stone Street, who is the president of the Colson Foundation, says that culture is the water that we’re swimming in. And the thing about culture, the thing about the water is that we as fish don’t even, we’re not even aware of it. It’s just our habitat. We’re not aware of. =how it’s impacting us. Last night, I shared about how this topic of sexuality for most of us, if not all of us, has come to represent some kind of barrier between us and God. A barrier of questioning His goodness and doubting Him. A barrier of shame because we don’t know what to do with our struggles or our sin or our past. A barrier of just feeling like you’re in bondage or a barrier of the wounds from the past and it keeps us from God.
And we looked at some of the strategies that we use to try to control or compartmentalize our sexuality. And we looked at this verse in Romans chapter 12, verse one that talks about what really God is calling us to do is to bring ourselves to Him, to offer ourselves to Him as a living sacrifice because of who He is and because of the relationship that He offers us. Now in the very next verse,
(04:29.486)
Paul starts to tell us how we offer ourselves as a living sacrifice. And the thing he says to us next is he says this, he says, do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. That by testing, you may discern what is the will of God, what is the good, perfect and acceptable will of God.
And so Paul says, if you want to surrender yourself to God, if you want to offer yourself to him in any area, including our sexuality, it begins by recognizing that we have a world that wants to conform us into its pattern. There’s water that is impacting us. And we’re called to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. What we’re gonna do this morning is we’re going to look at the water of our culture. You if we were to go to the Cleveland Aquarium, and there were to be a problem that the fish were getting sick and the fish were dying, they would probably bring in a marine biologist, maybe a chemist to take a sample of the water and look at what was wrong. And we’re gonna take a look at the water of our culture today and how it’s impacting us and how it’s causing us not just to act wrongly in our sexuality, but to think wrongly.
Because we can’t surrender our sexuality to God if we still think like the culture. We have to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. Now as we look at the ingredients of the water of our culture that we’re swimming in, we’re inundated with, we have to understand that we’ve been just bombarded by cultural influences. And I’ve come to learn over the last dozen years that while Christians might be discipled in some areas of their life, we have been sexually discipled by our culture. Every single one of us. We have been taught to think about our sexuality from culture. And so when we look at this sample of our culture of what they’re telling us about sexuality, I want to talk about three particular ingredients that is in the water that we’re swimming in that teaches us how to think about our sexuality. So the first ingredient is humanism.
(06:46.83)
Okay, we live in a culture that is a humanistic based culture. Now when I read the Old Testament and New Testament in the Bible, I see that the Word of God addresses idolatry quite a bit. And I don’t know about you, but have you ever read about the Israelites? And you’re like, come on guys, like, don’t you know the idols aren’t gonna save you? I don’t you see the power of God parting the Red Sea and now you’re worshiping a golden calf?
And we can be judgmental of the people in the Old Testament, the Israelites, without recognizing that our culture has idolatry as well. And we don’t worship a golden calf. We don’t usually worship animals or stars. We worship ourselves. We live in a culture that continually tells us that we are God, that the universe revolves around us. And just like when we read in the Bible the people of God being impacted by the idolatry of their culture, we’re impacted by this humanism. Sometimes, not even sometimes, often we are tempted to think about God as if he exists to serve us. Not that we were created to worship him. As part of my job, I get books sent to me all the time. I probably receive like eight or 10 books a week from different publishers because people want to be on the podcast. And it has saddened me to see that even with traditional Christian publishers, there’s a lot of authors and messages that are mixing humanism, the worship of self, with the worship of God. And this humanism, tells me that I should have whatever I want, that a loving God should give me what I deserve and what I want. That everything is about me deciding what’s good for me. And so we’re impacted by the humanism of our culture and it compels us to begin thinking about our sexuality, not in terms of how it affects the people around me or the people I love or God, but how it affects me. So that’s the first ingredient. The second ingredient is postmodernism.
(09:07.074)
Now you all probably have heard that we live in a postmodern culture. You may have some idea of what that means, but I love this definition by author Abigail Favali. She’s a professor at University of Notre Dame. And she writes, postmodernism, to put it simply, is a worldview that sees reality in terms of the narratives that are created by human beings rather than an objective order of truths that can be discovered by human beings.
In other words, postmodernism says that there’s really no objective truth about anything. And so feeding on our humanism, it’s up to us to create our own truth, to create our own reality. And this has impacted our view of sexuality in massive ways. I believe the most obvious outplay of postmodernism is what we see with gender confusion and fluidity.
Postmodernism would tell me that what my objective body says about my gender means nothing. What I feel in terms of who I am is more important. And so postmodernism teaches us to look inside and discover truth and create truth within myself and to honor each other’s truths rather than looking at what the Creator has made and what He has called to be true.
Carl Trueman, who’s a professor at Grove City College, he wrote a fantastic book that explains the impact of postmodernism and some of the other impacts of our culture on how we think about ourselves in terms of sexuality. His book is called Strange New World, and he writes, sexual desire has emerged in the last 100 years as a primary category for understanding our identity. In biblical times or in ancient Greece,
Sex was regarded as something human beings did, but today it’s considered to be something vital to who human beings are. And so it becomes very offensive for God to tell us not to be who we authentically feel like we are. And postmodernism has not just impacted us in terms of the LGBTQ movement, it’s impacted all of us in terms of what does my heart say? What do I want?
(11:29.9)
And so we’re teaching children at the youngest ages to look inside for truth instead of looking up at their creator for truth. And we’ve all been impacted by postmodernism. The third ingredient that we find in the water that we swim in is hedonism. And hedonism is not a new philosophy, but it’s certainly one that we live by in our day and age. A hedonism shows up in the Bible when people would say, eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow you die. In other words, you’re only going around once. Live the best life you can. Get the most pleasure that you can. And the pornography phenomenon feeds on this because pornography teaches you that your sex drive and your desires are all about getting the most possible pleasure that you can get. And so we begin making sexual choices and marriage choices and relationship choices based on what serves me, what makes me happy, what do I think is best? We ask each other, what is your heart want? These are not the questions that Christians should be asking each other. Because God tells us to do something very different. He says, deny yourself and follow me, which is a very different message.
And so when we’re swimming in this water of culture, here’s the thing, a lot of Christians hear the biblical rules about sexuality, but they still think like the world. One of our biggest gaps in talking about Christian sexuality is we don’t challenge the assumptions of our culture. And if you just believe, hey, know, like whatever you want is good, you should have what you want, find what the relationship that makes you feel good, and then you read the Bible and the Bible seems to exclude that for certain people, you’re gonna see God is very unloving. If you think like the world, what the Bible says about your sexual behavior will make no sense to you. At best, God will seem very outdated, and at worst, he will seem very unloving.
(13:48.654)
So this would be like, you know, the average kid, I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid, you know, I wanted junk food. All right, kids, we like junk food, right? We like pizza and burgers and french fries and donuts and milkshakes and cokes. Okay, well, I had parents who didn’t let me have a lot of that stuff. And instead of milkshakes,
They gave me milk with no Nesquik or anything good in it, you know? And instead of donuts, they gave me pineapple. And instead of pizza and greasy cheeseburgers, they gave me grilled salmon. Okay, so, and I’m like eight years old or 10 years old, and I’m going to school and my kids are eating like, or my friends are eating like peanut butter and jelly and they got chips and my.
My mom gives me like some healthy thing. Like I literally used to trade my lunch. The lunch ladies were jealous of my lunch. You know, I got a spanking once because I traded my lunch, just so you know. But I thought that my parents were not the cool parents and they weren’t the loving parents. Now let’s say I grew up and I still believed that the junk food was the same as the healthy food. I never learned about nutrition. I would be like, man, my parents really didn’t love me. They kept me from all this good stuff. But we grow and we mature and we learn that they’re not the same, that health food and junk food are not the same. But friends, when we think about our sexuality, because we’ve been so discipled by this culture, we believe that every sexual choice is pretty much the same.
We believe at some level that maybe God is withholding something good from us. And so we begin to see him as if he’s an unloving father, as if he’s outdated, as if he’s not with the times, as if he doesn’t understand human flourishing. But you know what? The message of the culture is not working.
(16:14.19)
Friends, the fish are dying because there’s poison in the water. And let me just show you a few statistics that kind of bear this out. When we look at what’s happening in our culture, 50 % of Americans are lonely almost all the time.
We look at the young people, 61 % of teenagers and young adults report being frequently or all the time lonely, and it’s dramatic rise from previous generations. Nearly 20 % of adults experience anxiety disorder. Depression is on the rise. We see suicide rates in the US increasing by over 30 % over the last two decades. Now you might say, well Juli, there’s a lot of reasons for that. like we’re disconnected, we’ve got our devices, we’ve got COVID, the impact of all that. And I’d say, yeah, you’re right. There are a lot of causes for that. But I would suggest to you that one of the leading causes is what we’re telling ourselves about sexuality and what leads to human flourishing. Because we live in a culture that sabotages connection and intimacy at every level and offers sexual expression and a sexual high as a cheap substitute. And it just makes us sick. Let’s look at a few other statistics that kind of bear this out, specifically related to our sexuality. LGBTQ plus individuals experience significantly higher rates of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and other mental health conditions. And you might say, that’s because we’re not accepting.
And yes, if we were to go back and look at the history of our culture, particularly church culture, we did not handle sexual minorities and struggles well. And certainly that contributed to feelings of alienation and depression, anxiety. But can we say the more accepting we’ve become as a culture, the worse these numbers have gotten. We’re not getting better. By embracing and encouraging this, we’re not making people healthier.
(18:22.444)
Studies have also shown that heavy use of pornography are linked to increased symptoms of anxiety, depression, social alienation, or relationship problems. And research tells us that individuals who engage in promiscuous sexual behavior experience higher rates of depression and anxiety, and are also more at risk for substance abuse. The water is making us sick. So when God calls us to offer ourselves to him,
It’s not just about our behavior, he calls us to also submit, surrender our thinking. And in order to surrender our lives to God, here’s the thing, we gotta swim upstream. We gotta get out of the fish tank like Nemo did. We gotta swim upstream. We gotta push against culture.
Because God offers us a very different way of thinking about our sexuality and what creates human flourishing. And if you’re new to this message that we teach at Authentic Intimacy, this is gonna feel kind of like a huge paradigm shift for you because we’ve been so inundated to think about our sexuality the way the world does. But I wanna look at three different ways that God challenges us to think differently about our sexuality.
First of all, God gives us a different purpose for our sexuality. The culture tells you that sexuality is all about expressing you. You have to be true to yourself. You have to express who you love and what you feel and what your desires are. Here’s the thing, and this is a radical statement. The Bible says that your sexuality is ultimately about revealing God. And you might say, how in the world does my sexuality reveal God?
Well, when we read the Bible, we see that God gives us some pretty predominant views of creation to help us understand who He is. He gives us these pictures. And when we see in scripture, we see some pretty common pictures or metaphors that come up in creation all the time that God says, if you want to know how I love you, look at this picture. So one of them is a shepherd. I have never been a shepherd. Is anybody in here a shepherd?
(20:38.926)
Do we have any shepherds in the house? No shepherds in the house. Now I want you to raise your hand if you have been impacted by Psalm 23.
Look at that. How? We’re not shepherds. But you know, even though you’re not a shepherd, you know enough about the creation of sheep. And you’ve probably heard from sermon illustrations how dumb they are and how helpless they are. And you’ve seen the pictures of Jesus carrying the lost lamb. It speaks to you. It speaks to you that the Lord is my guide. He leads me to places of peace. His rod and his staff, they comfort me. He’s with me. And so God gives us this picture that would have been very powerful in the times that the Bible was written because many of them were shepherds. A physical picture to understand his caring love. Now all of us know this second picture, which is the picture of a parent and child. God says, I am your father.
Every single one of us has had a father. Some of us have had a good father who through our experience with that father has taught us what it is to be protected and loved, cared for. We received the blessing and affirmation of a father provided for maybe even an inheritance from a father. And so when we read this in scripture, we know, wow, that’s my relationship with God, my father.
But even those of you who have not had a good father, maybe you never met your father. Maybe your father was abusive or absent or harmful. Even then, you long for a good father. You feel that absence. As a psychologist, I know that some people will spend their whole lives searching for the love and affirmation of a father that they never received.
(22:51.148)
Why? Because God created you, He created me with a need for a good Father. So that every one of us would ultimately know that God is my Father and when He says He loves me, now I have a picture of understanding that love. Now the third primary picture we see in Scripture that helps us understand the love of God is the picture of marriage. And not just marriage, but the very intimate picture of even sexuality within marriage. Now it’s getting real. When we read the Bible in Genesis chapter two, before sin ever entered the world, we see that Adam and Eve were naked, they were unashamed, and they were doing stuff. At the end of Genesis chapter two, Moses writes, for this reason, a man will leave his father and his mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. They’ll become one flesh sexually and form a new family.
Now, if we fast forward all the way to the end of the Bible, the book of Revelation, we see there’s another wedding. But this wedding is not between a man and a woman. And then Paul in Ephesians chapter five, he links these two weddings together. He quotes Genesis, he says, for this reason, a man will leave his father and his mother and be united to his wife and the two will become one flesh. And he says, but I’m speaking of a mystery. This is pointing to the wedding and revelation, to Christ and the church. Now I know this is a deep concept for us to understand. Actually the first time I heard it I was like, what? And it took me several years to really understand how profound this is. But here’s what I found reading the Bible cover to cover. Sexuality, marriage, faithfulness is most often used in the scripture to give us a picture, a metaphor of how God loves his chosen people, how he loves us with faithfulness and invites us into intimacy, the passion, the beauty, the love that God calls us to share as his people. And so there’s this direct revelation in marriage, it’s a picture that helps us understand God’s covenant love. Now here’s the thing, you don’t have to be married to understand the power of this.
(25:14.274)
Just like you don’t have to be a shepherd to get what Psalm 23 is saying. But you have to understand the significance of marriage to be able to understand God’s purpose in our sexuality. That through our experience as sexual people, whether we’re single or married, God is revealing to us that we were made for a covenant love and intimacy with Him that’s enduring.
And so God gives us a very different purpose for our sexuality. The second thing that we find in scripture is that God also gives us a different practice of how we steward our sexuality. And it’s really based on that idea of covenant love. So when we look at what the world is telling us, the world says that a sexual practice, that we practice our sexuality or we are sexual because we want to express romantic and erotic love. I want to show you how I feel. And the Bible says something very different. The Bible says that sex is a celebration and a symbol of covenant. Now I have a lot of people who will come up to me, Christians, and they’ll say, I just don’t get it. You know, like two people who love each other, they’re consenting adults, they want to have sex, they’re not hurting anyone.
Why would God not want us to do that? And in our day and age, we base sexual morality on consent, right? Like it’s my body. I should be able to do with my body whatever I want as long as I’m honoring other people’s consent. And God would say, I’m with y’all all the way. But here’s what he would also say. Your body belongs to me.
In 1 Corinthians chapter six, he says very clearly, your body was not meant for sexual immorality, it was meant for the Lord. And Paul reminds us, you were bought with a price. Honor God in your body. And so when I make decisions and choices about my sexuality, it’s not just what does Juli want, what does Juli consent to.
(27:34.912)
It’s my body belongs to God. He has purchased me with his blood. My life belongs to him. And so God, how do I honor you in how I practice my sexuality? And so God gives us a very different way to think about how we practice our sexuality. I made that statement that sex, according to God’s design, is a symbol or a celebration of the covenant promise.
You see, God’s relationship with his people, and the Old Testament was with the nation of Israel, and the New Testament is with us, the church, he made a covenant promise to us. We became his people. And with our covenant promise, God has also given us symbols that become sacred because they represent that covenant. A good example for us in the New Testament church is we take communion as a sacred symbol of our covenant to God.
In a very similar way, God has designed in our bodies a way for a husband and wife to symbol, to celebrate the covenant promise that we’ve made with each other. You some people sometimes notice, you know, the Bible never says not to have sex outside of marriage. You’re like, what did she just say? Okay, it says don’t commit adultery. It says don’t commit sexual immorality, but it never says.
Two unmarried people shouldn’t have sex. Do you know why? Because in that day and age, if you had sex, you were married. That was the sign of marriage. And so once you had sex, you were married. And God designed our bodies in such a way that we give each other our bodies as a symbol, as a way of cementing and celebrating that we belong to one another.
While the world would tell us that we get married because we’re so in love and we have sex because we’re so in love, we love each other because we’ve chosen to be married. My husband and I have been married for 30 years. We’ve been in and out of good seasons and bad seasons. We’re not still married just because we love each other. We work on loving each other because we’re married, because we’re covenanted with one another. And so we have a different practice of our sexuality.
(29:51.136)
I’m not looking at who can I feel chemistry with. I’m looking at who have I covenanted and pledged my life to in good seasons and bad seasons. And sex is a way of celebrating that. In our culture, we like to separate the celebration from the covenant. We’re like, well, I want to have the celebration without the covenant. That’s not how God designed it and it lacks integrity.
So one way I like to think about this, you know, we’re all a little bit sad, those of us who live here in Cleveland today, because our guardians did not win last night. We’re down to our last chance of moving on, but we’re even more sad because we have another professional sports team in the city of Cleveland that is just really bad, the Browns. Okay, so.
The Browns are one of the oldest NFL franchises and we have never won a Super Bowl. And so Browns fans have PTSD like every time even we’re ahead, we’re like, I know they’ll find a way to lose it, you know? But I want you to think about if the city of Cleveland got so sick of the Browns losing, they’re like the worst team in the league this year, that we just decided in February, we’re going to throw a big parade downtown and celebrate a Super Bowl victory. And it’ll look like this. Like, how pathetic would that be? Like, we’d be more pathetic than we already are. Why? Because we’re celebrating something that’s not real. And that’s what we do when we have sex outside of covenant. We’re celebrating with our bodies something that’s not real. And it lacks integrity. It brings shame. It brings disconnect. It brings alienation.
And so God says, I have a different practice for you with your sexuality. And the third thing the Bible tells us that’s different, the third way that we’re going to swim upstream, and this one will really get you, is scripture gives us a different priority for sex and marriage. The culture tells you that sex is essential, but not sacred. The scripture tells us that sex is sacred, but not essential.
(32:14.36)
Do you know that you don’t need to have sex to be a fulfilled human being? Is that news for anybody? Like Jesus lived the fulfilled perfect life and didn’t have sex. We read in scripture so many of the prophets and perhaps some of the disciples, like they weren’t married. And it wasn’t like Jesus was like, hmm, let me hook you up with a good Jewish girl.
You know, like it wasn’t an issue. God has created marriage and sexuality to be the sacred symbol of His love relationship with us. And He created us for intimacy, but not for sex. Sex and marriage is a very unique form of intimacy, but is not the most essential form of intimacy. You know what the scripture tells us we cannot live without? The brother-sister relationship, being part of the family of God, having people in your life who know you and love you and bear your burdens with you, who are near to you. And we live in an American culture, and I would say an American church culture, that instead of challenging the cultural narrative, just sprinkle some Christian juice on it. It says, you know, save it for marriage. When you get married, your life will be great.
That’s not what the scripture says. The scripture says that we were created for God. We were created for one another. And marriage is a gift and it comes with blessings and it comes with hardship. And singleness is a gift and it comes with blessings and it comes with hardship. But we were not meant to chase the pleasures of this world. We’re just here for a breath.
God created marriage and sex to be an earthbound, temporary picture for us to understand what we’re headed for.
(34:17.164)
He created us not to long for Disney World and the picture perfect wedding and the happily ever after, but to long for what it points to, to the eternal kingdom, to fix our eyes on that. And if we still believe that we need marriage or sex to be happy, we will not honor it as sacred.
We need to be able to say, God, I’m content wherever I am because I believe that you can reach my deepest needs for intimacy and companionship and belonging, not through just having a sexual experience and not even just because I got married, but because I belong. I’m your child. I have brothers and sisters around me. I have purpose and you created me for an intimacy that will not die, that will not end. Friends, this is a radical way to think about our sexuality. And like we said, we are bombarded by culture, by media, hours and hours and hours a day.
Which is why we’re trying to create new forms of media. That’s why we’ve done over 500 episodes of Java with Juli. Like we need to come back to this again and again and again and ask God transform our thinking, renew our minds. Don’t just think about the behavior God wants you to change. Let him show you how you’ve been poisoned by the culture, by the water and the fish tank, and ask him to lead you into new places, into fresher water.
(36:03.384)
Well, friend, how about you? As you’re just processing what you just watched or heard, how is it hitting you? In what ways does God want you to surrender your thinking to him? If this message is impacting you, I would encourage you to dive deeper by picking up a copy of my new book, Surrender to Sexuality, which you can get anywhere you buy books, or you can find some free resources at our website, authenticintimacy.com.
Hey, thanks again for joining us today and I look forward to having more conversations next week with you on Java with Juli.