Sex and Prayer

Sexual spirituality and spiritual sexuality appear to be oxymorons, but not to those who have been converted to a full biblical perspective on sexuality. There is a deep reason for this. The desire for sexual union and the desire for God are intimately related. God is a God of love. God dwells in the covenant community of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, interpenetrating, mutually indwelling, living for and in one another, finding life in self-giving to the other—all ways of describing what the Orthodox fathers of the church in the fifth century described as perichoresis: the intercommunion of the Godhead in a non-hierarchical community of loving, mutual abiding. Made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26), humankind was built male and female for communion, created to long for mutual abiding, destined to find fulfillment in self-giving. Commenting on how the sexual appetite is so closely related to worship and prayer.

The primitive impulse to deify sexual love was not wholly misguided; it has all the features of great mystical experience, abandon, ecstasy, polarity, dying, rebirth and perfect union. . . . It prompts between human beings those features characteristic of prayer; a noticing, a paying attention, a form of address, a yearning to communicate at ever deeper levels of being, an attempt to reach certain communion with the other.
But there is an important corrective in Scripture: our sexuality arises from our godlikeness; our godlikeness does not arise from our sexuality. So this profound clue to our true dignity as God-imaging creatures, a clue written into our genetic code, our psychological structure and our spiritual nature, is an invitation to seek and worship God in spirit (truly in Spirit) and truth (John 4:23).

So prayer and sexuality are intimately related for both men and women, though differently so. Not surprisingly, many people find themselves sexually aroused when they pray, whether or not they are in the presence of someone of the opposite sex.

Sex and Singleness
Three biblical goals for our personal sexuality are (1) sexual freedom, (2) sexual purity and (3) sexual contentment. Sexual freedom does not mean freedom from constraint but freedom to express our sexuality fully and exclusively within the marriage covenant. When one is not yet married, or is called to the single life (see Singleness), sexual freedom allows us to appreciate the other sex and to welcome our sexual appetites but to refrain from full physical expression outside of the marriage covenant. What is seldom noted about self-control is that it is a by-product of a prayerful life, the result of walking in the Spirit, and not something gained by steeling one’s will or “trying.”

Sexual purity is certainly not dull (read the Song of Songs). To live freely and with sexual purity, we must reduce the amount of stimulation we allow ourselves to receive from magazines, movies, videos and mass media. Job could say that he had made a covenant with his eyes not to look at a woman lustfully (Job 31:1), not an easy thing to do in a sexually saturated culture. Positively, we must increase our attention to God. In a shocking exposé in Leadership magazine, a onetime spiritual director anonymously confided his battle with pornography and perverted sexual behavior. While he found that his attempts at trying to become pure through self-determination and passionate prayers of repentance failed, he was delivered at last by the simple recognition that his addiction to sex was short-changing his intimacy with God. Love of God, that expulsive power of a new affection, purged lesser loves and even lust.

Sexual contentment, rather than sexual fulfilment, is a worthy Christian goal. The secret of contentment for Paul and ourselves is the practice of thanksgiving and continuing dependence on God (Phil. 4:6, 13). Thanksgiving is essential for single people who will be tempted to seek fulfilment mainly in themselves (see Masturbation) or in dating relationships that are impure. Single people will find their sexual repose by directing their love with all of its passion to the loving community of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, through which literally we experience God as our spouse (Isaiah 54:5).

In conclusion, sex is contemplative. This most down-to-earth daily stirring within us invites us heavenward. It does this by insisting through the very fibres of our being that we were built for love and built for the God who is love. It causes us daily to wonder at the mystery of complementarity, inviting us into a social experience in which there is more unity because of the diversity of male and female, just as God is more one because God is three. It demands of us more than raw, unaided human nature can deliver, a life of self-sacrifice and abiding contentment, qualities that can come only by practicing the presence of God. Finally, it invites us to live for God and his kingdom. As C. S. Lewis once said, if we find that nothing in this world and life fully satisfies us, it is a powerful indication that we were made for another life and another world. In some way beyond our imagination, human marriage will be transcended (Matthew 22:30) and fulfilled. Indeed, we will not give or receive in marriage because we will all be married in the completely humanized new heaven and new earth, where God’s people daily delight in being the bride of God (Rev. 19:7; Rev. 21:2).