Talking about sex

“This is not a talk about how important it is to hang on to your virginity or how far is too far, or watch out for herpes,” students were told at this morning’s chapel.

But Woodrow Dixon, a seminarian at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, told Smithville Christian High School students that it’s important for Christians to talk about sex because the rest of the world is.

Teenagers are being bombarded with messages about sex by the media, movies, TV, pornography or “that girl or that guy,” Dixon said. But those are often “warped messages” that distort “God’s gift of sexuality.”

“Our God knows how to be human,” Dixon said, “and God is in no way glorified when we don’t talk about sex. If we don’t talk about it as a community of faith, we end up believing what we hear from the media, or what feels good at the time.”

Dixon based his message on Proverbs 7, which is a father teaching his son about lust – something that Christians are often silent about or outraged about.

“There is nothing we so elegantly explain away or so zealously hide as our lust,” he told students.

But God has clear instructions for our sexuality, he said.

“God’s message is simple,” he said. “Have sex with your spouse. Period.”

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy, he said. It’s normal for teenagers to ask “Why?”
“Why is it so hard to wait until I am married?
“Why is it so hard to be satisfied with one person?
“Why is God not sending me someone?”

Dixon said it can seem like God is asking too much, or that God doesn’t care. In contrast, sex has “crazy power to consume culture, or consume people, to destroy human lives or destroy careers. You see it in the papers all the time.”

“The law of God is like a fence in a dangerous land,” he said. If you venture outside of that fence “you will end up destroyed.”

Sex outside of God’s plan is about power, he told students. It’s about our need to matter to someone or to have control over someone. “It’s powerful and debilitating and thrilling and always destructive. It’s one of the ways the human heart apart from God has gone insane.”

Sex has a powerful grasp of us because humans are driven by their need to matter to someone, he said. But when you have sex outside of marriage “you are using someone else, or you are being used by someone else, and part of you gets hurt. It’s the part of you that needs to be protected in order for sex to be good,” he said. “Sex needs a commitment like marriage in order to be good.”

Dixon offered hope and encouragement to the students.

“If you struggle with God and with sex more than you like to talk about, you are not alone,” he told them. “And God is not far away from you.

“If our God is big enough to hold the weight of the world on his shoulders, if our God is big enough to suffer all the weight of a broken world, then our God is big enough for me,” he said.

“And the good news is our God is enough for this day, this hour, this moment. God knows exactly how you need to be loved and his spirit is sweet and real and good, and it is enough.”