2 Sorry, but We’ve Gone Crazy
She’s thirteen, and the thing she can’t stop thinking and talking about is her impending breast development. For her, being a woman is all about the size of one’s breasts.
She’s fifteen and is quite the self-appointed expert when it comes to oral sex. She doesn’t see herself as just knowledgeable but as a bit experienced as well. What she likes about oral sex is that it’s a way of having sex that “isn’t really sex.”
I’ve told my wife that during the summer months it’s hard to walk down the street in Center City Philadelphia, where we live, and to know where to look, because there are so many women in various stages of undress.
Tim is seventeen, and in ways he doesn’t recognize, he’s already been trained to view women as objects whose value is attached to physical beauty and body shape.
George is married with three children; he seems to have a good marriage, but he masturbates at least once a day. His wife doesn’t know it, but he’s done it for years.
They came to me after a conference, carrying with them a combination of heartbreak and anger. They wanted to know what to do about their son who seemed hopelessly addicted to Internet pornography. I asked how old he was, thinking I would hear teens or early twenties. To my shock, and speaking through his shame, the father said to me, “Eight.” Eight! Let it sink in. Eight!
At a conference in South Africa they asked if they could have lunch with me. After the meal they told me their story. Their son, a newly married intern pastor, had been having sex with a college girl from the student ministry over which he was responsible.
In the big cities around the world, you are considered a hopelessly old-fashioned bigot if you don’t think same-sex marriage is not only a wonderful idea but also a civil right.
We’re now being told by powerful cultural influencers that gender is not a fixed biological reality but rather a cultural construct.
You can barely watch a video, look at a car ad, or hear a popular song without having your morals assaulted.
Sandra is twenty, and her definition of cool, fashionable clothes is those that are designed to reveal the body. Her clothes tend to be tight, short, and often low-cut. Sandra is a Christian who in many ways takes her faith seriously.
He asked to counsel with me because he knew he was in trouble. He was literally stalking women in the evenings after his seminary classes. He would hang around Starbucks and follow the most attractive women home, of course never letting them know what he was doing.
How many teachers, how many coaches, have been arrested for having sex with the students entrusted to their care?
There are websites that connect people who want to be unfaithful to others who are desirous of the same.
An inner-city high school opens up a day care next to the school building because so many of its female students have children.
So many people are texting sexually explicit pictures from their cell phones that the word sexting has become part of the modern vocabulary.
Internet pornography is the most powerful economic engine of the World Wide Web.
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Sex—you don’t have to look very far to see that we’re in big trouble. The news is littered daily with sex scandals. The content of the tabloids is enough to alert us to the fact that something has gone terribly wrong. It’s hard to listen to any cultural discussion of sex that isn’t infected with either self-deception or distortion of reality. Sex can’t deliver the promise that we think it makes, and it’s more dangerous than we tend to think. Sadly, today this beautiful creation of God functions in the surrounding culture like a spiritual solvent eating away at the very fabric of the human community. It has perverse power to master your heart and, in so doing, determine the direction of your life. It gives the buzz that you’re in control while, at the very same time, becoming the master that progressively chains you to its control. It offers you an inner sense of well-being while having no capacity whatsoever to satisfy your heart. It seduces you with the prospect of contentment-producing pleasure but leaves you empty and craving more. Sex holds out the possibility that you will finally be satisfied but instead causes you to envy whoever has more and better than you do. It sells you the lie that physical pleasure is the pathway to spiritual peace. Sex is the work of the Creator’s hands but tends to promise you what only the Creator can deliver. It is beautiful in itself but has become distorted and dangerous by means of the fall.
With all of this swirling around us and inside us, the church of Jesus Christ has been strangely silent and reticent. We seem to approach sex with a timidity, reserve, and embarrassment that does not make personal, cultural, or biblical sense. Pastors are often all too hesitant to teach and preach about the topic of sex. Meanwhile, the world around us seems to never stop talking about it.
Christian parents often fail to do a good job of discipling their children in what it means to be God-honoring sexual beings. How many parents do more than conduct one creepy, quasi-embarrassing talk about sex and have joy once it’s over and a determination never to talk about it again? How many young people from Christian homes are struggling with questions, confusion, and temptation but wouldn’t think of seeking the help and wisdom of their embarrassed and silent parents? How many parents provide a long-term, safe, gracious, and nonjudgmental place for their teens to talk about sex, knowing that the questions and temptations of a thirteen-year-old differ from those of a fifteen-year-old, which differ from those of an eighteen-year-old? Meanwhile, the obsessions and distortions of an addicted culture are powerfully brought to the eyes, ears, and hearts of even the most conservative Christians by pervasive and intrusive media that is almost impossible to escape.
Yet God in his great wisdom, for his glory and our good, has chosen to place us in a world where sex is a significant part of the human experience. The issue of sex is important and unavoidable because God, in wisdom and love, chose it to be. Because sex is the creation of God’s hand and exists under the control of his sovereignty, we should approach it with reverence and awe, not with embarrassment and timidity. Sex came from him, belongs to him, and continues to exist through him—to him be the glory.
God has also chosen us to live in a world where the lies, deceptions, distortions, and temptations of sex are many. Your address is not a divine mistake. Your exposure to the variegated difficulties of life in this fallen world, with all of its delusions and temptations, is not in the way of God’s plan; it is his plan. He—right here, right now—has you exactly where he wants you to be. He knows exactly what you’re facing. He isn’t trying to cope with or cover up a grand divine mistake. He isn’t wringing his hands in celestial anxiety. He has carefully and wisely chosen you to live right where you live, knowing full well what you will face. All this is done with divine knowledge and purpose.
So we can’t act with regard to sex as if we’re powerless, or it will be impossible to prepare for what we will all inevitably face. We can’t allow ourselves to think we’re alone in the struggle. We can’t allow ourselves to live as modern evangelical monastics, as if separation from the world is the key to true righteousness. And we can’t be lulled or intimidated into silence in a crucial area of the human existence where the Creator has powerfully and clearly spoken. And we mustn’t forget the lie-exposing, freedom-granting truths of the gospel of Jesus Christ. It’s vital that we remember that the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ addresses not just our need for past forgiveness or for future hope but also everything we face right here, right now. This gospel is what provides the only reliable diagnostic when it comes to sex, and because it does, the gospel also graces us with the only truly effective cure. The gospel has the power to make us sex-wise, to keep us sex-protected and sex-bold, no longer willing to be sidelined by timidity and fear. The gospel graces us with everything we need to celebrate and participate in human sexuality in a way that honors God and fully enjoys the good things he’s given us to enjoy.
Why This Book Now?
People ask me all the time what I am working on or what I intend to write next. They always follow the first question with a second: “Why that now?” And they’ve surely been intrigued when I’ve told them I am working on a book about sex. They’ve been interested in why I’ve chosen this topic from all the topics I could be addressing, and they ask what I see that motivates me to write about it now. As I’ve thought about this over the last several months, three words have come to mind again and again, and they are my best answer to the question. The words are insanity, addiction, and glory.
Insanity—no, not mine, but the culture’s. I’m deeply persuaded that when it comes to sex, we’ve gone culturally insane. The level of functional delusion, of self-deception and self-destruction, that accompanies the way we approach it is simply crazy. You don’t have to look very far to see that we’ve gone sex insane. We’ve put sex in a place it was never intended to be, but we seem to fail to see the danger. Our children are sexualized before they’re properly educated. I sat in a nice restaurant and was forced to listen to graphic descriptions of sexual “love” that was supposed to be mealtime background music. I had to tear up magazines and put the family computer in a public place in our home to protect my unsuspecting children who were being encouraged to lust before they knew that they were sexual beings. There are few female pop singers able to resist the powerful demands to disrobe and do dance routines that are little more than well-orchestrated simulations of sex. We surely do a better job teaching our girls how to be fashionable than we do teaching them how to be modest and pure. In fact, the words modest and pure seem strangely weird and antiquated in today’s culture. We do a better job of saying no to our children when it comes to what is objectionable than we do teaching them to be good stewards of the desires of their hearts and the functions of their bodies.
Young girls today surely worry more about the beauty of their face and the shape of their body than they do about the quality of their character. Our heroes tend to be people who are young, rich, and sexy rather than heroes in the classic sense of what that word connotes. Young women attach their identity to how thin their nose is, to how full their lips are, and to the size of their breasts. We evaluate one another with terms such as hot and hunk (they sound more like descriptions of chocolate). Graphic sexual language has become acceptable—and common—in the vocabulary of primetime TV. Pornography is not restricted to the bad neighbors and the dark hallways of rundown buildings. No, it exists on mainstream Internet sites that are a Google click away from anyone with a computer and the most basic computer literacy.
Look around. Listen carefully. Take time to evaluate and consider. Examine the true desires of your own heart. We’re in trouble because, in this important place in life, what the human community tends to look at as normal isn’t normal at all. It’s a web of descending degrees of madness. And in the midst of the madness there’s only one window through which we can look at the world of sex and see with candor, clarity, and wisdom. This window is the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. And there is only one thing that can free us from the insanity that somehow, someway seems at some point to grip us all. It’s the grace of that very same gospel. You see, the humbling truth is that when it comes to sex, we don’t have a thing problem; the thing (sex) is not evil in itself. We don’t have an environment problem, as if our surroundings cause the difficulty. No, we are the problem. The counterintuitive reality is that it’s only ever the evil inside us that magnetizes us toward and connects us to the evil that’s outside us. Since we are the problem, we really have a problem. We can run from a thing, we can change a relationship, we can move to a different location, but we can’t escape ourselves. No, we need rescue, and because we need rescue, we need a rescuer who is wise, powerful, willing, and faithful. That rescuer is the Lord Jesus Christ. He is willing, he is wise, he is able, and he will not forsake us in our time of need.
Addiction
There’s a second word that motivated the writing of this book: addiction. The dynamic of addiction is that if you look to something that God created to give you what it wasn’t intended to give, either you get discouraged quickly and wisely abandon those hopes, or you go back again and again, and in so doing, you begin to travel down addiction’s road. That created thing will give you a short-term buzz of euphoria, it will offer you temporary pleasure, it will provide a momentary sense of well-being, it will briefly make you feel that you’re something, and it may even make your problems seem not so bad for a bit. It’s all very intoxicating. It all feels great. The problem is that the created thing you’re looking to has no capacity to satisfy your heart. It wasn’t designed to do that. It cannot give you inner peace. It cannot give you the heart rest of contentment. It cannot quiet your cravings. In a word, it cannot be your savior. And if you look outside of the Savior for something to be your savior, that thing will end up being not your savior but your master.
You’ll love the short-term buzz, but you’ll hate how short it is. So you’ll have to go back again quickly to get another shot, and before long you’ve spent way too much time, energy, and money on something that can’t satisfy; but because of what it has briefly done for you each time, you’re convinced that you can’t live without it. You’re hooked, and you may not know it. The thing you once desired, you’re now persuaded you need, and once you’ve named it as a need, it has you.
Sex is powerfully pleasurable, but it cannot satisfy your heart. The touch of another person stimulates your body and your heart, but it never leaves you fulfilled. Sex connects you in powerful and dramatic ways to another person, but it has no ability whatsoever to make you a better person.
Whether we know it or not, every human being lives in search of a savior. We are all propelled by a quest for identity, inner peace, and some kind of meaning and purpose. And we all look for it somewhere. Here’s the bottom line: looking to creation to get what only the Creator can give you always results in addiction of some kind. The thing you hoped would serve you pulls you into its service. What seemed like freedom ends up being bondage. The thing is not the problem; what you’ve asked of it is.
This leads to a third word that lies at the foundation of this book. That word is glory. As I have written before, human beings are hardwired for glory. That’s why we’re so attracted to glorious things. We love the glory of a great painting or a beautiful piece of music. We love the excitement of an athletic contest or a feat of daring. We love the sleight of hand of a great magician or the sizzle of a well-seared steak. We love the glory of a moment of success or the recognition of the people around us. We’re attracted to the glory of wealth or the beauty of the human body. We’re powerfully oriented to glory, and because we are, we live in pursuit of it.
Animals are not like this. Rhinos don’t celebrate the size of their horns. Deer don’t gather for the biannual long-jump contest. Birds don’t envy one another’s feathers. Animals don’t have this glory orientation, because they weren’t made for God in the way that we are. Human beings are hardwired for glory because they are hardwired for God. The glory orientation that’s inside every person is meant to drive us to God.
When God created the world, he dyed it with his glory. The created world really is glorious because God made it that way. But the created world is not in possession of ultimate glory, the kind of glory that can satisfy your heart. The glory of the created world is sign glory. All the glory of the created world is meant to be a sign that points us to the only glory that will ever give rest and peace to our hearts, the glory of God. We were designed to live for that glory. But here’s the problem: we lose sight of the fact that the sign isn’t the thing. It is there to point us to the thing, and in forgetting this, we ask the sign to do for us what it cannot do.
In this way, life this side of eternity really is one big, unceasing glory battle. There could be no bigger issue than this, than what glory will rule your heart, and in ruling your heart, control your thoughts, desires, choices, words, and behavior. Sinful human beings, in functionally denying the existence of God, will stop at the sign, won’t care about what the sign points them to, and will ask of the sign what it will never be able to give. And that created thing with all its glory will not be their savior; no, it will prove to be a cruel and inglorious master that takes much but gives very little of what they were really seeking. Sex is glorious, but it was created to be a finger that points you to the one glory you were designed to live for—the glory of God.
If you’ve paid attention to our discussion so far, what I’m going to say next shouldn’t surprise you. The words insanity, addiction, and glory point us to the fact that our problems with sex will never be solved horizontally. Sex madness is not first a problem of situation, location, or relationship. Sex problems are not first biology or physiology problems. Societal sex addiction doesn’t exist because the body is a problem. The fact that we are sexual beings is not the problem. Sex problems are not first the problem of modern media. Sex problems are a matter of the heart. Our problems are deeply spiritual.
The apostle Paul says something striking in 2 Corinthians 5:20. He says that God has called us to be ambassadors of one message—24/7 we mustn’t forsake the diagnosis and cure of this solitary message. This message echoes God’s unceasing appeal. Here it is: “Be reconciled to God.” You see, it’s all vertical. The madness that we’ve briefly considered and that this book will unpack isn’t first horizontal, so it won’t be fixed horizontally. This insanity is vertical. Only when God is in his rightful place as the unchallenged Master of our hearts will everything else in our lives be in its appropriate place. When something else replaces him, insanity and chaos of some kind always result.
In ways that are formative and practical, we begin to serve the creation as we were designed to serve the Creator, no matter what we say we believe. But it never works; it only leaves us empty, driven, and dissatisfied, the victims of our own bad choices. What we hoped would help us has in fact hooked us. And we cannot run from our problem, because the problem is us. Only when we live practically inside what it means to be reconciled to God will we hold the powerful glories of the created world in the way they were designed to be held.
So continue this journey with me. Either you have sex problems yourself, or you are near to someone who does. You’ve bought into the insanity, or someone near to you is mad. Look with me at this place of cultural madness through the perfect window of the gospel of Jesus Christ and experience with me the wisdom and freedom that can be found only there.
Review and Reflect
1. Explain why “sex can’t deliver the promise that we think it makes, and it’s more dangerous than we tend to think” (p. 29).
2. How should we, as Christians, approach discussions about sex? Why do we tend to avoid the topic?
3. Where in your own life have you witnessed the sexual insanity Paul Tripp describes (pp. 32–34)?
4. How do addictions get ahold of the human heart? What does Romans 6:12–23 add to your understanding of addiction?
5. Paul Tripp notes that human beings are “hardwired for glory” (pp. 35–36). What does he mean, and how does it impact our sexuality?
Heart Reset
2 Corinthians 5:20