Sexuality as a Mission Field

Dr. Juli Slattery: My test now is to talk to you all about two words that may feel very odd put together: sexual discipleship. When you hear those two words, I have found that people usually have one of two responses. Either they’re like, “Eww!” Or they’re like, “Huh?” You know, we are so used to separating God and sex that it almost feels sacreligious to put those two words together. But I want to share with you how I came to use those two words quite regularly.

As I’ve mentioned, over the last decade my work has been leading a ministry where we talk about sexual issues. All day every day, that’s what we do. We sexually disciple. So when I first began this work, I co-founded the ministry with Linda Dillow, who some of you know, and we would go all around the country to groups of women in churches, and we would talk about biblical sexuality. 

One of the things that I noticed as I went from city to city and church to church was, I would meet women like you who loved Jesus, who have walked with the Lord for many years, who have been discipled in many ways. You had Kay Arthur on one hand, and Priscilla Shirer on the other. You knew God’s Word. But when it came to relating God’s Word to your sexuality, you’re kind of like, “I’m not sure how to do this?” We have not been discipled in our sexuality from the Church. What I began to realize is that we have been sexually discipled by the culture. 

Discipleship is not what to think about sexuality, it’s how to think about sexuality. I would say that even in my own life, having been raised in a Christian home and going to Christian colleges and graduate school, I still was very stumped in dealing with sexual issues. What does the Bible actually say about issues like masturbation and oral sex? Some Of you are like, “Did she just say that?” That just shows you how uncomfortable we are having a Christian gathering where we acknowledge the reality of these things. 

As I began to press deeper into what it looks like for us to really integrate God’s Word into this very private, precious area of our humanity, this idea of sexual discipleship really kept coming to the forefront of my mind. 

Now, in order for you to really understand what sexual discipleship is, it's helpful to look at what it’s not. When we look at the ways the Church has traditionally approached sexuali—and I would say even the ways we approach it today—we are not discipling. When we look at the average Christian home, we are not discipling related to our sexuality. 

The approaches that we are taking or that we’ve learned to take are one of three. The first one is silence. How many of you would say that growing up in . . . maybe you grew up in the Church, maybe you grew up in a Christian home, but his was never talked about. Many of you would raise your hands. When I put on Facebook the question, “What did you learn about sex growing up in the church?” half of the responses were: nothing. Just nothing. Nothing. “We never talked about it. We just [heard] don’t have sex before marriage. That was all we heard.”

The silence was deafening! And because of the silence, the enemy has had room to step in and fill that void and to take up the conversation about sexuality in our own hearts. Because of the silence, we feel shame to even say outside some of the things that we’re wrestling with or struggling with. Silence is not the right approach.

A second approach that I see very often in the Church today is the problem-solving approach. I call this the whack-a-mole approach. Your average pastor is like, “We’ve got a problem with pornography. Let’s start a men’s group.” Thump. Whack-a-mole. “We’ve got a problem with women in pornography. Let’s start a women’s group.” Thump. “We’ve got a problem with survivors. Let’s start a group.” A prodigals group . . . all these groups rising up which, friends, those are good. I would say those are part of discipleship. But those are only a part. 

Sexuality is not a problem for us to solve. It’s a territory for us to reclaim. If we only approach the problems of sexuality, we’re never getting to the root of how we reclaim God’s design for sexuality. 

Now, the third approach, which I think we’re all very comfortable with, is sex education. You’ve heard of sex education, right? Christian families will do the kinds of things like Mike and I did with our boys. We take them away for the weekend. We send our youth group on a retreat to talk about sexual purity. We maybe have a class for engaged couples where we give them one last lesson for what to expect on their wedding night, as if one lesson will actually be helpful. But an educational approach is very limited. 

Let me give an example of this. In high school and college I took Spanish. I took Spanish for four years in high school and two years in college. My last Spanish class was conversational Spanish. My final exam was to have a fifteen-minute conversation with my professor in Spanish only. Somehow I made it through. That was quite a few years ago. That was education. My education ended. I stopped studying Spanish. And many years later, I’m not so good at Spanish. 

I asked a friend to come up, is she here? Is Betsy here? There she is. She’s getting a microphone because Betsy actually does speak Spanish. She is going to test me after many years. We’re going to have a conversation in Spanish to see what I actually remember.

Betsy: [speaking Spanish]

Juli: [responds hesitantly]

Betsy: [speaking Spanish]

Juli: You no say?! [laughter]

Betsy: [speaking Spanish]

Juli: Umm . . . [attempts Spanish]

Betsy: [speaking Spanish]

Juli: I have no idea what you said. [laughter] Alright, how did I do? Not too well, yeah?

Betsy: Ahh, you maybe got ten out of 100.

Juli: I would maybe fail! Thank you, Betsy. Okay, she is fluent in Spanish. She’s been discipled in Spanish. It’s a native language for her. I am not. I have been educated. Friends, this is so often how we feel when we’re engaging on topics of sexuality. We have learned certain verses that we can say. We can answer the right question. If you ask it the right way, we know how to respond because we heard somebody talk about it or we read a book. But we’re not fluent in biblical sexuality. 

So you’ve gotten caught off guard by your kids, by your grandkids, by your co-workers, by your culture. We do not know what to say. God is calling us to do better than the culture in discipleship around sexuality. It is our place not just to do a sermon series, or not just to read one book on sexuality, but to become fluent in reclaiming the territory of biblical sexuality. 

I will tell you that I still have great difficulty in describing to a stranger what my job is. (laughter) When they ask me, I don’t say, “Well, I sexually disciple Christians.” (laughter) I have to remember that answering that question is even more difficult for my three sons. “What does your mom do?” Yeah . . . Now that Mike works with me, they can’t even talk about what Dad does. So we’re both in the business, apparently, of sexual discipleship.

So what does sexual discipleship actually look like? I’m going to give you three things that I have learned through the ten years of ministry to sexual disciple. This is just an overview. The first thing is we have to be able to talk openly about sex—about all sexual issues. We have adopted through tradition this idea that Christians should not talk about sex. 

Let me just say, that may be a Christian tradition, but it’s not a biblical one. When we read God’s Word, He was not shy to talk about every sexual issue. As a matter of fact, we now know that modern translators translated the Song of Solomon in a way that kind of played down the actual language that was used. They were too embarrassed to put it in the Scripture. It’s not just Song of Solomon, it’s all throughout Scripture. We read graphic examples of sexual brokenness and trauma and hurt and redemption. So, we have to break the silence.

Ladies, I know that’s difficult for many of you. It has been difficult for me. I certainly didn’t tell my high school guidance counselor that I wanted to be God’s voice on sexuality. The first few times I talked publicly about sex, I literally had hives crawling up my neck. I didn’t think I could get through it. But we have to step into what God calls us into. It really begins to open the conversation about sexuality. It begins with our homes; it begins with our churches. Let me tell you, you don’t have to do this perfectly. We have to be willing to do something poorly before we learn to do it well. If you feel like you’re stumbling and you don’t know what to say, if you’re afraid that a woman will ask you a question that you don’t know how to answer, that’s okay. It’s okay to say, “I don’t know the answer, but can I just pray with you?” 

It is a shame that Christian women have to pay a counselor because that’s the only safe place she has to talk about what she’s dealing with in her sexuality. That is our work within the Body of Christ, and we need to grow comfortable talking about every issue related to sexuality so that we can reclaim that ground. 

The second aspect of sexual discipleship is that we have to reclaim the biblical narrative of sexuality. Now, what do I mean by the biblical narrative? A narrative is what explains the why. 

All of us growing up—and if you have had little children you know this—around the age of three we start asking the question “why?”. We ask why about everything. So little kids say, “Mommy, why do I have to eat broccoli? It’s yucky!” “Why do I have to go to bed before the sun goes down?” As our kids get older, their whys get bigger. “Mom, why can’t I drive the car?” “Mom, why can’t I go to the party?” And what do we do when we’re really tired and we don’t want to deal with the why questions? We all know. What do we say? “Because I said so!” That’s it. What happens when you’re raising your kids if you always just respond with, “Because I said so”? Your children never grow. They never mature. They never learn to think for themselves.

There are a lot of why questions about sexuality in the Christian faith. Why would God say it’s wrong for two women to get married if they love each other? Why would God say that sex is reserved for marriage? You know what? Unfortunately, what we’ve done over and over again in the Christian church is say, “Because God says so.” Does He say so? Yes, He does. But He also created us as people who want to know the why. 

I’ve learned over the last decade of studying the Scripture that there is an answer to the why question related to biblical sexuality . . . and it’s a story. The Bible isn’t a list of rules, even though it has rules in it. The Bible is not the law. That’s not the whole thing. Mary Kassian began to talk about this in the beginning of our time together. She talked about how the Bible is really a story that reveals God, and all of creation reveals God. She mentioned that male and female actually have the gospel written in them. 

Can I go a step further and say that your sexuality tells a story of the gospel? Where do I get that from? First of all, we need to realize that everything God created He created for the purpose of revealing Himself. That is true of our human experiences. 

How many of you have ever felt hungry before? Some of you aren’t raising your hands. You need to try fasting. (laughter) How many of you have ever felt thirsty before? Because you have hunger and thirst, you now know what it means when Jesus says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness.” You also understand why it was so significant when Jesus said, “I am the bread of life.” Or when he said to the woman at the well, “I am the living water. If you drink of me you’ll never get thirsty again.” If you didn’t have the experience of hunger and thirst physically, you wouldn’t understand the spiritual. 

The same is true with our sexuality. God has created us as sexual people because through our sexuality He is revealing to us the nature of how He loves with covenant love. We see this all throughout the Bible. Most often, sexuality is not referenced just in terms of what to do and not to do. The Bible most often, in both the Old Testament and New Testament, references sexuality as a metaphor. 

Think about the nation of Israel with whom God had a covenant. God had a covenant with them. When they were unfaithful to their covenant, what did God call them through the prophets? An unfaithful wife. He said, “You are a prostitute. You’re acting like a whore.” The sexual communicated the spiritual reality of the importance of faithfulness in covenant. 

And in the New Testament the covenant is with Christ and the Church. There’s all this bridal language of Jesus being the Bridegroom and us being the Bride, and the wedding feast of the Lamb. Paul says it very clearly in Ephesians 5 when he’s talking about marriage and the one-flesh union between the husband and wife. He says, “This is a mystery, and it’s meant to reveal Christ and the Church” (see v. 32). 

Now ladies, I know if this is the first time you’ve really heard somebody say that the gospel is written in our sexuality, that is like, “Whoa, I’ve got to get my mind around that.” I have spent probably five years trying to get my mind around it. So it’s okay. Paul calls it a mystery too. But I would encourage you to go deeper with the story, the narrative, of biblical sexuality. The narrative explains the “why.” It gives purpose to even the spiritual battle around our sexuality.

The third thing we need to do in sexual discipleship is we need to invite people on a journey, a lifelong journey of sexual integrity. What do I mean by that? In a very common way, if you look at the language of the Church around sexuality, the phrase that we’ve often used is sexual purity. Sexual purity is not a bad phrase. There’s a lot of conversation in our day and age about purity culture, and I’m not going to get into that today. There’s a place to talk about purity, but it has become very confusing for people. Here’s why: most of us understand sexual purity only in terms of our actions. 

For many of us, we were told to save sex for marriage. A lot of our conversations around biblical sexuality in the Church today are about actions. When we look back at Romans 1 (I talked about that progression of sexual chao), the only thing we’re talking about today in our day and age in Christianity is to change that behavior. We’re not teaching people how to challenge the thinking of the world that we’ve just ingested. We’re not talking about how you can change your desires, or what discernment actually looks like. 

Integrity, this idea of sexual integrity, is more than just actions. Some of you can relate to this. You became a Christian and then you said, “There’s this long messy period of . . . I’m here, and I know I should be here, but I have no idea how to get there.” Sometimes you begin with actions. 

“Alright, I’m just going to fake it ’til I make it.”

“I know the church is telling me I shouldn’t dress like this . . .”

“I know the church is telling me I should break up with my boyfriend or my girlfriend . . .” 

“I know the church is telling me that I’m supposed to stop looking at porn . . .”

“I know the church is telling me that I’m supposed to enjoy sex with my husband . . .”

“But if you really want to know the truth, I don’t know how to do those things! How do I do them? Does all this just come naturally?!”

No, it doesn’t. It’s a journey. The journey of sexual integrity is lifelong surrendering of every aspect of who we are to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. So many of you, even as you’re listening to all of this content today, you have questions. You have questions like, “My husband left me because he decided he was gay,” or “He decided that he was a woman. What do I do?”

You have questions like, “I know I’m supposed to enjoy sex in my marriage, but can I be honest? I hate sex,” or “The only way I know how to be aroused sexually is to think about things I know I shouldn’t be thinking about. What do I do?”

Some of you single women are asking the question, “What is the purpose of my sexual desire as a single? Does God see me?” You may say, “I know I’m supposed to stop looking at pornography but I don’t know how to! I can go a month or two and I have victory, but then I fall back into it. I just wonder if I’m really saved? Does God love me? When is this going to stop?”

These are the questions of sexual discipleship. It’s not enough for us to bring you to the cross and salvation repentance and tell you what your life should look like without walking with you on the road of, “How does this work? How do we surrender? How do we actually become the people of God?” 

I told you that we weren’t going to stop with Romans 1. What I want to look at now is what I believe is the parallel passage to Romans 1 that Paul writes later in the book to the Romans. It’s found in Romans 11 and 12. What Paul is really calling us to is to leave the Romans 1 lifestyle and to be discipled into a whole different way, not just of behavior but of thinking and of desire and of discernment. 

I’m going to start reading at the end of Romans 11 and then go into Romans 12. In Romans 11 it’s almost like Paul is writing this letter and he just has to stop and worship God. 

Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his path is beyond tracing out! ‘Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor? Who has ever given to God that God should repay them?’ For from him and through him and for him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen. (vv. 33–36)

And so instead of denying God, Paul gives us an example of what it looks like to worship God. Then let’s see what happens next.

Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—which is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good and pleasing and perfect will. (Rom. 12:1–2)

So it begins with worship. In Romans 1 we saw that our thinking becomes foolish and depraved. Our hearts become darkened. Our desires become twisted. We lose our discernment. But see the reversal here? What happens when we truly worship God? Our thinking is transformed. Our desires are changed. Now we can discern God’s good and perfect will.

If we keep reading in Romans 12, we see this beautiful fruit of the kind of world that we all want to live in where we have unity, and we love each other, and we treat each other with kindness, and we cling to what is good and hate what is evil. This is discipleship and it must, my friends, be connected to the sexual journey. It must intentionally be integrated into the struggles and questions that we have related to sexuality. 

Now, as some of you honestly are saying, “I am so glad that God raised up people like Juli Slattery to do this kind of work. You go, girl! Amen! Where do I write the check? I’m with you!” But, I could never do that. Friend, this is not just my work. This is our work. 

Ephesians 4 says that the only way that the Body of Christ becomes mature is if everyone is using their gifts under the authority of Jesus Christ. 

Is the Christian Church mature in our understanding of sexuality? Or are we blown and tossed by every wind of culture? I think you would all agree with me in saying, we are not mature. So what is it going to take? It’s going to take God’s people being willing.

I remember way back in the days when I was little, I would go to church. Do you remember missionary Sunday, when you’d have a missionary come up from India or Africa? They might tell a story like, “I remember telling God I’d go anywhere but Africa, and lo and behold, God gives me a heart for Africa!” Some of you are saying, “I’ll do anything but talk about sex.” Be careful! I think I was probably there one day. 

You know, God doesn’t call the equipped, he equips the called. When we look at Jesus’s call to go into all the world and make disciples, there’s no doubt that He was talking about the geographical places that were forsaken in the world—into every corner of the world. But I also believe that He’s calling us to go to the forsaken areas of the human heart. Sexuality is certainly one of them. 

Rosaria Butterfield said that you may be called to be this missionary—we are all called to be this missionary. We are all called to disciple. If you want to see a harvest, a field that is ripe for the harvest, it’s the area of sexuality. 

People are dying for someone just to put their arm around them and to speak truth and to listen and to have compassion and to walk with them. They have so much grace if you do it because they’re like, “No one else is doing it!” It’s an amazing mission field. Just to see God bring forth fruit. Friend, it’s a mission field God is calling all of us to. Will you say “yes”? Will you be courageous enough to say, “God, send me”?

I love the fact that we have, not only teaching here today, but we have examples of what happens when Christians are bold enough to disciple and to walk amongst the hurting. 

All Scripture is taken from the NIV.