These words are the ingredients to a most intoxicating and joyful experience that we humans know as sexuality.  No matter what our culture, or perhaps our church, has made it to be, the Holy Bible presents it as quite wonderful.

It is possible that we really know very little about sex, no matter how much of a veteran we think we are in these things.  The evil American culture in which you and I live has twisted it into commerce.  Jon Foreman sings, “Sex is industry, the CEO of corporate policy.  Addictive, bittersweet; suburban youth, hail your so-called liberty.”  The statistics on pre-marital sex, pornography, and STDs are enough to sober and scare us.  Just walking through the mall, I feel I need a blindfold.

C.S. Lewis compares our culture’s obsession with sex to food.  Perhaps his words could wake us up to the low and polluted place we have assigned to sex.  He writes, “There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips.  For the past twenty years you and I have been fed all day long on good solid lies about sex.”

What has the church done to address this?  Sadly, for the most part, it has made it worse.  Preachers are often scared to address this topic.  Most Christians I have talked with have never heard a message on sex, unless it is with condemning tone.  I wonder if we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater.  Erotic love was there before the fall of mankind in the garden; the fall did not create eros; it only perverted it.  Karth Barth said the result of this for human sexuality has been a vacillation between evil eroticism, on one hand, and an evil absence of eroticism, on the other.

This brings me to the point of this article:  Sex was created by God and is good.  Very good in fact.  Heck, it’s amazing, I’m not ashamed to say.  And you shouldn’t be either.  Block out everything you’ve heard that tells you otherwise and think of this:  God invented sex.  He invented pleasure.  There are heights of ecstasy that are part of human reproduction, but are not necessary for the same.  Why?  Could it be that this is a wonder of God?  How could pleasure evolve?  Nay, I say, it is a gift, created by a benevolent Father.

These things are realized over a lifetime as we seek to find healing from the past and order our sexuality within the safe boundaries of God’s truth.  Consider this crazy idea:  a monogamous relationship between a man and woman without the worry of disease, abandonment, betrayal.  Wake up next to the same person every morning and grow together for a lifetime.  If this sounds good stuff, it is, and God came up with it. 

The Bible is stuffed with affirmation of the good of sexuality, portraying Divine approval of the gift of sex when submitted to God.  The Bible on marriage and sex?  Try this: “Bless your fresh-flowing fountain!  Enjoy the wife you married as a young man!  Lovely as an angel, beautiful as a rose—be always intoxicated with her love!  Nourish and cherish your wife.  Enjoy one another deeply!”

In the season of Valentine’s day, may we invite the truth of God into this most sacred part of our humanity.

http://www.familylife.com/site/c.dnJHKLNnFoG/b.6149579/k.EA2E/The_Art_of_Marriage.htm

Overeating leads to obesity which leads to heart disease which, aside from abortion, is the number one killer in America.  In this country, one person dies from heart disease every minute.  By the time you finish reading this article, three people will have died from a disease that is directly caused by the way they ate.  Nearly a fifth of all health care spending in our country is on obesity-related diseases or conditions. 

I do not think that this is God’s design for his creation.

“Why don’t you ever preach sermons on gluttony?”  I was asked this a few years ago by a young man in my church.  This began a meaningful conversation that has been going on in my head ever since.  It is very common for a Bible-thumping preacher like myself to rail against the sins of hate, lust, and greed, and then fill my plate with five desserts at the church potluck after the service. 

It seems that gluttony is a sin that Christians like to ignore.  We are quick to warn against the dangers of addiction to tobacco, alcohol, or media….but what about an addiction to overeating?  The sobering statistics above should make it obvious.  And for the person of faith, the Bible speaks directly to this issue.

Proverbs chapter 23 warns, “Do not join those who gorge themselves on meat.”  And again, “Put a knife to your throat if you are given to gluttony.”  And in the New Testament letter to the Philippians, we read the sobering account of those “whose god is their belly”. 

Gluttony has much to do with the way we approach food.  Is it our nourishment, enjoyed and eaten in gratitude to God who has provided?  Or is it our medication, our comfort, something that gives us good feelings to balance out the bad ones that we live with day to day?  Is our eating, as John Piper puts it, merely the “anesthesia of sadness”?  Is God the God of all comfort, or is food the god of my comfort?

For me, this is a real daily battle.  There is nothing wrong with eating and enjoying what God has provided.  But I am constantly asking myself a few questions.  How much should I eat?  How quickly do I eat?  What would happen to me if I gave up sweets, or perhaps caffeinated drinks, for a spell?  Who is really in control – who is really God –here?

Back to my point – this is a faith issue.  It is such for many reasons, most importantly this:  As a man who pursues God, I shall have no other god before God.  Any excess that becomes my god is a dangerous evil – be it money, sex, or hamburgers and Coke.  John Piper again: “The most deadly appetites are not for the poison of evil, but for the simple pleasures of earth.  For when these replace an appetite for God himself, the idolatry is scarcely recognizable, and almost incurable.”

Let us consider these things.  Who is in control…God, or my belly?  May we honor God not only during service on Sunday, but also at the lunch buffet afterward.