[David Platt, in the Counter Culture Bible study, asked us to write a statement about how the gospel relates to the issue of sexual exploitation. Here is my statement.]

Our culture idolizes sensuality. That means it idolizes sexual desire.

It doesn’t idolize sexual climax, but sexual desire – lust. The goal isn’t merely to have sexual desire satisfied, it’s to have it stirred up as much as possible first. Pornography isn’t about making sexual satisfaction more likely, it’s about making sexual desire more intense beforehand.

Sensuality is a focus on the body. When we are sensually driven, we tend to objectify other people, but we also objectify ourselves. We see ourselves – and seek to see ourselves – as physical machines that cannot help but follow their programming. We hide from our essential rationality and freedom to choose what to value, and pretend we have no choice at all. Think of how many times sensual lyrics or prose focus on how someone is helpless to resist their urges. Why? Because it somehow increases the sexual thrill to think of ourselves as controlled by our desires. We want to be controlled by lust, and it helps us feel the thrill more intensely if we imagine that we are.

Satan uses our desires to tempt us. Most of the time, having a desire is not itself a bad thing. We only sin because we seek to meet our own desires in our own way instead of taking them to God. We legitimately wish we could have something, so we steal it. We want praise, so we brag or otherwise seek our own glory. Initially, sexual sin is similar. Someone has a normal, natural sexual desire and it leads them to act it out inappropriately – they get a little too physical in a relationship with someone, or they look at pornography, or something.

When we begin to pursue sexual desire itself, as an idol, we move into a completely different kind of desire, one which is in and of itself unhealthy. It is not something we can look to God to satisfy, because the desire itself (the lust for lust) is unhealthy. Proverbs 30:15, 16 describes that kind of desire this way:

The leech has two daughters,

“Give,” “Give.”

There are three things that will not be satisfied,

Four that will not say, “Enough”:

Sheol, and the barren womb,

Earth that is never satisfied with water,

And fire that never says, “Enough.”

The point is that this kind of desire is by nature insatiable. It cannot be satisfied, even by God, because it is in its very nature to deny any permanent satisfaction. All it does is say “Give, give”. It is like the grave, in that its recurrence is as inevitable as death (no one will ever say, “Well, he lived, because the grave was full.”) It is like the barren womb, in that no matter what is given to it, it will never have what it needs. It is like the desert earth, which is unable to absorb the water that lands on it, and even if it did, is so immense that there would never be enough. Especially, it is like fire, which only burns hotter the more you feed it.

Feeding sensual desire will lessen it, temporarily. Images and fantasies that stirred it up become commonplace, and fail to fan it. But the desire for desire just continues to burn hotter, and more frustratingly. Eventually, something taboo becomes fuel for the fire. Its forbidden nature gives it a little more intensity, a kind of kick, which makes the thrill return. This explains why a true pornography addiction tends to escalate to harder and harder forms. What was taboo is commonplace after a while, and the addict needs something still more forbidden to keep stoking the fire.

The thing about sensuality is that, paradoxically, it’s a spiritual thing. The thrill of the lust gives us a sense of meaning, of transcendence. It makes all of life glow with intensity and purpose.  It becomes a substitute for real spirituality, for a real connection with God. It is no coincidence that so much idol worship in the Old Testament involved lots of sex.

The difference between the spirituality of the sensual and the spirituality that comes from God is twofold. First, the spirituality of the sensual makes everything seem transcendent when it is bathed in lust, but when the lust dissipates, everything seems meaningless. The more a sensual addict finds his meaning in lust, the less he can find any satisfaction in regular life. So as the thrills get weirder and weirder, ordinary living becomes bleaker and bleaker. True spirituality is completely different. When God breaks through our lives with the supernatural, it doesn’t leave the ordinary days emptier afterwards; it enriches them a little.

The other difference is the one I mentioned at the beginning: that sensuality reduces us to merely physical creatures. We come to identify ourselves with our physical desires. We cannot imagine anything else being real. But true spirituality awakens our sense of ourselves as spiritual people, for whom the body is only one factor of being alive. We become aware of our ability to reason, to value, to empathize, to dream, and especially to responsibly choose. We are transcendent, not through our physical lusts, but by finding that they are irrelevant to who we are most deeply.

Because there is no way for God to righteously satisfy the desire for sexual desire, though, those Christians who are trying to seek God for deliverance from sensual addiction will find themselves feeling as though life is gray and bleak and as though they themselves have nothing inside that can ever respond to anything but the physical. They may accept that there are serious consequences to a sensual life, but they will have trouble believing that there is any joy to be had in living a non-sensual one. They need to be encouraged that the spiritual joy that comes from walking with God will eventually become evident, and that when it does, it will feel as much a part of them as sensuality ever did, but in a way that enriches the rest of their lives instead of impoverishing it.

Anyway, how does the gospel relate to all this? The same way as it relates to abortion. It shows us that we are created in the image of God, that we transcend the physical realm, that we are anything but ordinary, and that our lives are tinged with the supernatural. When we come to Christ, we are called to more than enslavement to our physical desires, and have a higher purpose than sensuality and lust.

Jesus loves and accepts us, but the exciting thing is that he doesn’t see us as we think of ourselves. He sees us as we can truly be, in him. The gospel is a message of transformation. It’s an invitation to be born again, to be born of spirit, to become the kind of person who is far more than we ever dreamed. It’s an invitation to step into a new, transcendent identity as a child of God.