Sexual Duties in Marriage

Our text this morning is from 1 Corinthians chapter 7 verses 1 through 9. Now in response to the matters you wrote about, it is good for a man not to use a woman for sex, but because sexual immorality is so common, each man should have sexual relations with his own wife, and each woman should have sexual relations with her own husband.

A husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise a wife to her husband. A wife does not have the right over her own body, but her husband does. In the same way, a husband does not have the right over his own body, but his wife does.

Do not deprive one another, except when you agree for a time to devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again, otherwise Satan may tempt you because of your lack of self-control. I say this as a concession, not as a command.

I wish that all people were as I am, but each has his own gift from God. One person has this gift, another has that. I say to the unmarried and to widows, it is good for them if they remain as I am, but if they do not have self-control, they should marry, since it is better to marry than to burn with desire.

Marriage, Sexual Immorality, and the Corinthian Context

Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your church and Lord, another Lord's Day where we can come into the house of praise and fellowship and worship with your people. Lord, I just pray for Pastor Josh this morning as he unfolds this text, that your spirit would be at work in our hearts and our minds to listen, to be exhorted, to be encouraged, and Lord, to be changed by the power of your spirit in conformity to the image of your son Jesus.

Lord, we pray your blessings on the marriages in this church, that they would be strong and healthy and focused towards you, Lord, that we would raise up households that love your statutes and your commands and love your creation, Lord, that includes your people.

So God, we pray your blessings. Lord, we pray your conviction. And God, we just, we pray that your name would be glorified in this place. Amen.

You may be seated. Well, we get to the point in Corinthians here that the church at Corinth really wanted to know the answers to. This is the reason that they had sent the apostle a letter, was they wanted to understand how they were supposed to save their marriages.

There was trouble.

We saw last week that sexual immorality had gained a foothold in the church and that it was tearing people apart. It would tear the church apart. It would make them look like the world. It would take away their witness.

It would disgrace the gospel of Jesus Christ. But we also see here that there is trouble in the family, trouble in the family unit. And it's something that we have to know this morning. This lesson, you've probably not heard, you may have never heard a sermon on this text before.

It's pretty rare. This is often used in counseling situations and marital counseling. But I would call this text, this is really the blocking and tackling of the church. If we do not have strong marriages in the church, then the church will be weak.

It will fall apart. It gives the enemy rampant opportunities to pick people off, to destroy them. His first line is he wants to strike down the shepherd so the sheep will scatter. The enemy will take me out.

He will take Corey out. He will take the deacons out if he can possibly do it because it causes unrest. But failing in that endeavor, he will attack marriages. And that has been my experience as a pastor, is that a huge amount of time dealing with trouble inside the church is dealing with marriage.

It's dealing with this issue. Now, we also cannot make the mistake of just going where I want to go in 1 Corinthians 7 this morning because there is a context and the context is very interesting. See, at this time, we know archaeologically that there were famines and there were earthquakes that had rocked Corinth.

There was trouble. And so you might hear things like, how could we raise kids in this messed up world? They thought that the end was near because Jesus had said that there would be earthquakes. And he had also said that you should hope that you're not pregnant when the end comes.

We know that from all that discourse. See, many had come to believe in Corinth in a culture that was decadent, in a culture that was soaked with sexual immorality, where the way you would worship your God and to be in the confidence and the goodness of the Roman Empire would be to go have sex with temple prostitutes.

This was the culture they are in. And so there can be a pendulum swing and a rebound. And this had made its way into the church at Corinth. Many had come to believe that it was holy to abstain from sexuality in marriage.

It gets uncomfortable for us. Many of our Reformed fathers in the faith had very similar beliefs about marriage. That marriage is solely for procreation and that it was basically a dirty deed, no matter what the context, and that you should stay away from it.

And that is going through the church at Corinth. And so you can almost imagine the letter gets sent to Paul, and he's like, look, things are going badly here. What do we do with this? What are we supposed to do in marriage, Paul?

And Paul takes seven chapters. He takes a long time to get to this point. This is a church that you can understand. We like to throw stones, but you can understand the confusion because in Corinth, the spiritual gifts are overflowing.

They are having prophecies. They are speaking in tongues. They are understanding things in a dark culture. They are growing in the faith and in their doctrine in the midst of one of the darkest places you can imagine.

And so the confusion comes in, Lord, you're pouring out all of these gifts on the church. We're seeing manifestly your blessing on us in this church, and yet we have sexual immorality, and yet we're suing one another.

We have consciences that are burdened by the eating of meats offered to idols. There's all kinds of trouble, and yet there's all kinds of good going on. And that is typical of the church in the fallen world is there's a lot of good things going on, and then there is the corruption of this world that infects us.

So we've seen in chapter six, the warning of the danger of sexual immorality. And I purposefully did not talk very much about the main tool in the war against sexual immorality. And that is what Paul turns to in chapter seven.

Marriage as an Escape from Sin

You have to understand this, people. This goes for the younger people among us, the single people, even the kids, but especially the married couples. Marriage is destroyed when we are wrongheaded in these issues.

This is critical, absolutely crucial. And I hope that if there are errors in your household today, that you would repent on your knees before God, and that marriages would be strengthened from turning away from the foolishness that we get into.

Because what happened was, I've heard this throughout my whole life, Jesus is coming back imminently. What's the point of all this? We don't need to build anything. He's coming tomorrow. See the world out there.

You see the wars and the rumor of wars. And whatever you believe eschatologically, that is not how we are supposed to live. We are supposed to build. We are supposed to have faith in our God. We are supposed to be given to marriage.

And if you need to be married, you know who you are. We'll get there at the end today. So we see that the first thing, the first issue, is that marriage provides an escape from sin. And we should know from last week that this sin is a very deadly one.

It destroys the church. It destroys young men. It destroys young women. We see it around us all the time. We are very much like Corinth in a sexually depraved culture today. You can't turn on the television for much more than 20 minutes before you see something that's utterly depraved, and that you wouldn't have seen even in the golden days of the 90s.

When we were so sexually depraved in the 90s, that our forefathers would have been amazed at the things that Christian watched. And it's so much worse now. You watch the Super Bowl, you're going to see it.

You watch the news, you're going to see it. You click onto YouTube, you best believe you're going to see it. You go on social media, you're going to see it. And the question can be asked, like no one's ever lived in this environment before.

What do we do about it? And the answer is, you get married. Now, I know many of you will say, many of you young people especially will say, well, that's all fine and well, Josh. It's harder than that.

Easier said than done. And I would say, I agree, but there is things that we have to do to get the house in order. And first is understanding what we're trying to do. What is marriage? What is it all about?

We read in the call to worship that it is a mystery, that is a shadow, not in a weird way, but in a completely holy way that marriage is a shadow of Christ's intimacy.

With the church.

We are the shadow as married people. Christ is the reality and the substance. The intimacy that you have in a perfect marriage is a shadow of the holiness of Christ and his relationship with the church, where he to the utmost has given his life for his bride.

To the utmost, he has washed her in the word. To the utmost, he has served her and mastered her and lorded over her. He is the head of the church. He is perfectly holy and his care for the church cannot be matched.

But men and women, we are to point at that in our marriages. Even though it will be a dim light, it is a light before our neighbors. And many of the reasons that we see the fall of the church in America is because of the fall of marriage among Christians.

And I'm not talking about divorce. I'm talking about the shambles of our marriages, where we talk badly about our spouses at work, where we secretly hide animus and bitterness towards our spouse, where we withhold things that we ought not withhold.

And this week, as I dug into this, I saw just how bad it really is. But more on that later. Now, concerning the things about which you wrote, this is what they really want to know. It is good for a man not to touch a woman, but because of sexual immoralities, each man is to have his own wife and each woman is to have her own husband.

Things are going crazy in Corinth and they want to know answers. And it is interesting that we go right back to basics. What they had asked about is how do we get this thing in order? And Paul's first real instruction about how to get things back in order is to solve the marriages.

You need to start acting like who you are. You are Christians, but you are also husbands and wives. And a slogan is likely being passed around that it is good for a man not to, quotation marks, touch a woman.

He's not talking about opening the door for them and putting a hand on their shoulder when they walk in. He is talking about sexual intimacy here. And so the idea here is that there is partial truth to this slogan and this is making its way through the church at Corinth.

You will be much more holy if you don't touch any woman. Now, do you see the lie? Do you see the problem? Because this slogan is partially true because the Bible from its very beginning has two concepts of sexuality in human beings.

It has righteous sex within marriage and it has everything else. Everything else. This is not hard to understand. We do not have to go into rabbinical tradition to suss out, thou shall not commit adultery.

We have always known what that means. The Hebrew people of old knew what it meant. We all know what it means. That if you gain sexual gratification from anyone that is not your spouse, you are in sin.

It's sexual immorality. And so therefore, when sexual immorality has made its way through the church, there can be a rebound to say, well, it's better to do none of that whatsoever. It's good not to even touch a woman.

But that's a problem because what that's going to do is it's going to counterintuitively open the floodgates wide open for all kinds of sexual immorality. And so like many of the lies of the devil, it is true that he likes to cloak lies in kind of a shell of the truth.

Things that are reasonable. Are you not holy? Have many in the Christian tradition not fallen into this snare and said, you know what? The holiest man is a man who never even touches a woman. And what happens?

You have sexual assault, pedophilia, homosexuality that rages through these types of setups where we have monastery men. Because most men are not made for that, right? And to give you a little bit of spoiler, most women are not made for that either.

There is a normative reality of being a human being. And that is that we want to have children. And it takes a lot of pressure and a lot of indoctrination to start to go against nature and to make people believe that children are a bad thing.

But we are on the late stages of that in America. And so these lies, they make their way through. See, there was basically zero concept. And so what Paul is going to do is he's going to flesh out how bad pornea is, which he did in chapter six, which is the everything else.

But how good the marriage bed is. And this is really important because this is a distinctly Christian idea. Understand that in the ancient world, there was basically zero idea of men restricting their passions to their wife.

That was not a thing that was thought of. In fact, it was thought in the ancient world that you were not being disrespectful to your wife if you had a mistress or if you went down to the brothel and engaged a prostitute because the idea was that's boys being boys.

But Christianity ends all of that. That is not true. It's not a thing. So what happens is on the one hand, we have to get both right. On the one hand, you are restricted. You are sinning against God. You are in danger of hell fire if you engage in sexual immorality.

But on the flip side, if you are not engaging in keeping the marriage bed righteous, you are in danger of all the same stuff. You see, they're not dichotomies. To fail in the marriage bed is to open the door and to walk down the path of sexual immorality, which will destroy you.

So there's a right way to do this and a wrong way to do it. And that's what Paul is going to flesh out. And what he does is he gives us a series of commands. You would have thought there would be a lot of commands in last week.

There was one command in last week's text. Remember it? I made a big deal of it. Nobody remembers. Flee sexual immorality, right? The one imperative in that section last week, flee sexual immorality. There is a series of commands in today's text.

He just keeps giving commands. So let's read it. Verses three and four. The husband must fulfill his duty to his wife, and likewise also the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does.

And likewise also, the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. We're going to flesh that out. I think first we have to talk practically in a counseling situation. Understand this.

I've done a lot of marriage counseling. I've talked to a lot of couples that struggle. And I will tell you with 100 accuracy that marriages that are struggling are having tremendous struggles with the marriage bed.

In fact, it's not happening. They are sexless marriages. You'll hear shocking things where it's been years since there's been sex inside of the marriage. And what happens is these failures, the failures of intimacy between the husband and wife build over time.

And so the expression of intimacy through sexual relationships becomes a lagging indicator, not a leading indicator. Leading indicator is telling you, hey, there's problems that are about to happen. The lagging indicator says there are problems that did happen.

And that's how sexuality in marriage works. When you find yourself being disinterested, when you find yourself not fulfilling your duty to your spouse, what has happened is there has been a big problem and you are reaping the fruits of your lack of attention and your lack of maintaining the marriage.

It's a very interesting thing. I talked to Corey a couple of weeks ago that we believe firmly that repentance is a gift of the Holy Spirit. And what happens is when you're not given this gift in the Holy Spirit, you will continue to double down in your sin.

You will be blind, hard-hearted, and you will continue going that way until God grants the gift of repentance. Here's the point. Repentance is a very powerful thing among God's people. We love to forgive and we love to see repentance.

And so it seems like repentance could be used as a great manipulative tool to get people to believe certain things about you. I've had this thought in my psychotic neuroticism where I think about, you know, I could really sway a lot of people by just saying I repent of certain things and they'll be like, oh, what a humble guy.

But I think the Lord bars us from that. I really do as we see men continually caught in terrible behavior behind pulpits, even in the church, and they don't repent. And it seems so crazy. Why don't you just repent of it?

I think God prevents them from doing it. I think he hardens their heart and repentance is not near them. I do believe that the sex inside marriage is the same thing. You can't fake it. You're not going to be able to hide the problems that you have with your spouse.

The sex will stop and there's no way around it. You can't fake it. You can't manipulate with it. When you have problems with intimacy, it will dry up. It will go to a stop and then you'll start to have discontent and then things start falling off the truck as it's going down the road.

Every time, every time. So friends, let me give you a simple diagnostic that even a caveman can understand. If in your marriage you are having frequent sex, your marriage is probably healthy. If you are not, it is definitionally not.

It's really that simple. Diagnose yourself. I can't give you a number. I can tell you going months without is probably a really bad sign that there's something terrible going on. Figure it out. Talk to them.

We have prescription to this. I want to tell you in another way, it's one of my favorite tropes. We are all feminists. I want you to notice something about this text. Does he not talk to men and women the same way?

Does he?

Is there anything different? It's like, men, men do your duty. Wives, you have to do what he said. This is how we do it in our culture, is it not? Because when you read this text, what you're going to think is that I'm going to come in here and I'm going to browbeat a bunch of wives because you're not doing it because the man wants it and the woman is gatekeeping.

Listen, this is a product of our feminism. It really is. Paul understands the way things really are. And the way things really are is in a marriage blessed by God, the desires are going to be equal, but somewhat different in how they manifest.

Men, don't go around thinking that your wife doesn't want you. That is a death trap.

She does.

There's a way to unlock it. We have been inculturated for as long as I've been alive. And much longer than that, the husbands are bozos. They're stupid. They're sitting around and the only power that their wife has over their stupidity is guarding the bed.

That's exactly how it is, right? When you watch any sitcom, when you watch any drama, what's going on? The husband just wants to have intimacy, but the wife denies it because he's such an idiot. That's how it goes every time.

It's a trope. Do you think the enemy's behind that? He loves to destroy marriage. There is not an innate thing that says men are obsessed with sex and women couldn't care less. It's not true. It's never been true.

And Paul doesn't treat it that way. Notice how he doesn't give more emphasis on one and less on the other. In a right marriage, in a holy marriage, the husband and the wife are both going to have to sacrifice at times to relinquish duty and control over their own body to give to their spouse what their spouse deserves.

I know that's an interesting way to talk about sex, and I probably would not dare do it on my own. But the way Paul talks about it is that you have a debt to one another. That there is something you owe your husband and there is something you owe your wife and you have made promises that you will fulfill your obligations.

So when you don't feel like it, you can absolutely converse, but there is an underlying command. Understand that to say it one time in Scripture is enough. If God commands it one single time in Scripture, it's enough.

And Paul commands it many times in this text. Your body is not your own. Husbands, your body is not your own. I don't care if you'd rather watch TV. I don't care if you're not feeling it today. If you're tired from work, you pray to God that he would help you and that you would do your duty.

Wives, similarly,.

Mutual Duty, Authority, and the War Against Passivity

When we go off of this trail, it starts to break things. Men, if you're walking around thinking that your wife is not as into you as you are into her, you are falling into a death trap and you will suffer for it.

That is feminism. Do you understand it? That is feminism because what feminism does is a lie of the enemy is it boils women down to the way the only way they can be on top of the world is to be men. It's a lie.

And what feminism says is, women, you go girl, you assert your power, you will control the marriage bed because that's the ultimate trump card that you have in this marriage because he's a brain dead ogre that's just walking around wanting physical release and you're so spiritual.

Do you not see how it plays into the same idea? It's pro-gnosticism given a different coat of paint. Feminism is destructive. It's a destructor of homes. It's a destructor of churches and we are awash with it.

See, husbands, you have a command. The command is that you have a sexual debt and a duty to fulfill to your wife. The war that you're going to have is the war against passivity. All of the pressures of this culture that we live in are going to push you to be passive.

They're going to push you to do something like this. Hey dear, how are you feeling tonight? Are you looking forward to it? Is it going to be good? She says, oh, I don't really know. And you go, oh, okay, fine.

And you back off and you stop pursuing. All the pressure is going to be for you to do that. It's going to be for you to back off, be a gentleman. We know this as far back as 1939 in the movie Gone with the Wind, right?

Ashley was such a gentleman because he wasn't going to force himself on his wife. What a bunch of crap. It absolutely is. And you can see that we have been going this way for a long, long time. This has been a concerted effort, a long war, because our enemy is immortal.

Our enemy has time. He doesn't die in 70 years. He's lived for thousands of years and he makes war on the church and he can wait for his schemes to take fruit in your life. Many times he waits centuries for the lies that he unhatches.

We have to understand what's going on. Do you think I'm invoking Satan wrongly? No, Paul invokes him in this text, does he not? The enemy has a vested interest in destroying your marriage. Don't think that he doesn't.

You have a war, man, against passivity. You cannot give up. You cannot give up. You cannot pout. And you cannot follow. If you start following her, it makes the situation far worse. Women don't want somebody that they can dominate.

As much as they lie to themselves and think that they do,.

They don't.

Even today, even in the messed up world we have, the cream still rises to the top and you get some sign of masculinity with people beating on their chest and acting like men and that's who women want to follow.

Even in the twisted world we have, you can't suppress the truth for that long. So men, you have to fight against passivity. It's making it so much worse. When you start pouting,.

Oh, I guess I won't even ask.

And you'll play them. Listen, look, it comes from experience, right? I'm telling you stuff that I know. You'll play mental games. I'll make her wait it out. It's not going to work. You're an idiot.

Stop.

Stop being passive. Men, our job is that we have to take the risk. We always have to take the risk. The risk of being denied that crushes our ego, does it not? We hate failing. We hate it. And yet we fail often.

But you know what? Failure makes us stronger, men. And what you got to do is get better. It's not about trying the same stupid thing over and over. She's not going to be attracted to you when you're pouting around, kicking the ground, head down.

Oh, I guess I just don't get to today.

No, it's ridiculous. We have a war, men, against immorality. And this is the number one way that we fight that war. The enemy is at your door. Don't be foolish. His desire is for you. And he will attack the marriage bed with all that he's got.

So you have to have an understanding of how this all works, men. Here's how it works. If you stop pursuing, she will assume control of the family. If you pout and step out and act passive, she will put the pants on and she will run the home.

And then it will make it 10 times worse. Because what you are is a weakling to her then. Women, are you sexually attracted to weaklings? Guys that pout, that stick out their bottom lip,.

Guys that are like,.

Well, I guess she just really doesn't like me that much, is the most unattractive thing ever, besides desperation. Men, don't be saying, I'm so lucky, I don't know how I ever got you. That is unattractive to females.

Don't act that way. Why do you have her? Because God anointed her for you. You didn't get lucky. You didn't hit a grand slam in the bottom of the ninth. God appointed your wife because that decision is an extremely important decision in your life and God does not leave it to chance.

He is working in your life. He is working in your family and he has appointed you a helpmate just like he did with Adam. So have confidence in that. Understand that. Understand the way she works, right?

She warms up with love and attention and constancy. That's how you win your wife is that you lead and you act manly, but you love her and you give her attention and you understand that it takes time to warm her up.

She's not a microwave, it doesn't happen in 30 seconds. You might have to start first thing in the morning. I would encourage it. I highly encourage it. Look, we gotta get practical, right?

Send her text messages.

Goose her on the rear end when she's walking up the steps. Bet you never thought you'd hear that, right? Every man understands what I'm talking about. This is what we have to do. You have to understand that you're working towards something and that thing that you are working towards is what the author of Hebrews says is to prevent from defiling the marriage bed.

It's incredibly important. It's where war is done. Men, take care of yourself. Physical training is of some benefit. If you're eating too much, you don't exercise and you're trying to goose her going up the stairs, but you can't make it all the way up the stairs because you're gasping for air, you might want to do something about that, okay?

Nobody likes you weighing 300 pounds. It's not very attractive when you're eating a seven-dip sundae every time you get a chance. Discipline yourself. It's of some benefit. It's not of no benefit, okay?

There you go, men. You feel good about that? Let's go to the wives. Wives, you have a sexual debt to your husband and you have a duty to fulfill it to your husband. So there's a war that wages. For men, it's the war against passivity.

For women, it's the war against discontentment. Be careful. The enemy likes to make you discontent. He likes to make you think that you settled somehow. That's how all the force in our culture goes, right?

You didn't get to backpack across Europe because you got married and you lost all that fun. Let me just rephrase. That's a bunch of crap. It's nonsense. Nobody's fulfilled by that. Do you know what you're fulfilled by?

Obeying God. That's the end of all wisdom. It is the way that human beings are fulfilled is that we image and we follow our creator. That's the only way it works. See, women, you think that you want to lead and that goes all the way back to our mother, right?

Your desire will be for him, but he will rule over you. That meant your desire, Eve, will be for his position, but he will rule over you inevitably. If you think that you're going to want to lead women, wives, if you want to lead your husband around by the nose,.

Guess what?

You're going to start coveting other men and you're going to be sad. Do I need to point at the crazy feminist leftism we got in the country now? They're very sad people. Very sad, angry, raging, deranged, maniacal.

They would be much happier if they fulfilled their God-given obligation to marry, to have children, and to be happy. You have to understand, women, that you are in a war against feminism. You cannot assume authority.

You must not. Sometimes that's going to leave a vacuum in the home. If your husband refuses to lead, if your husband refuses to do his job, we have scripture for that, do we not? Be prayerful, be gentle.

You will win him over without a word by your holy conduct. That's what Peter says. You cannot assume authority. You do not own your own body. You do not have the right of refusal. Now, look, I'm talking normatively, right?

All the force in our culture, women, wives, is going to make you believe that you are the gatekeeper of sex. This is how perverted and twisted we are. This is the way we think, right? Men, they're the ones that want it.

Wives control their husbands by denying it. This is a complete perversion of the truth. This is not the way it's supposed to go. What's going to happen is there's ebb and flow between both, and then there's a command that undergirds and backs us up.

Look, you don't want to be having sexual relationships in your marriage because of duty all the time. It should be fun, right? We all know this. It should be a joy. It should be fun. It should not be, ah, I gotta go to work today.

Here we go, gonna honor the marriage bed.

It's gonna be brutal.

No, that's not the way it works, okay? But when you get down to brass tacks and you don't feel like it, we do have a spine here. We do have a steel girder that protects the marriage by saying you don't get to refuse, and if you do, there will be consequences.

Understand how this works. If you deny and you bargain against your husband, guess what he's gonna do? He's gonna rage, and then in our society, what he's gonna do is rage quit.

That's what he'll do.

See, your husband craves your admiration and your respect. He wants you to reciprocate his attentions,.

And you must.

Girls, I imagine this is fun too. I've never been a girl, so I don't know for sure, but I will tell you, I think that the act is designed to be fun for both people. It's designed to be holy in marriage.

It's designed to procreate. It's designed to bring together into one flesh things that should not be separated. So why would you separate them? Understand what Paul had said. He said grave sin on the church at Corinth because they had divisions and were trying to separate each other, right?

And then he said, you are the sanctuary. Anyone who destroys the sanctuary will be destroyed. Your marriage is a one flesh union. The two became one person. Now, look, you still have your individual identities, but I will tell you the truth, and this is not guile, and this is not manipulative.

I truly, after 15 years now, I really have a hard time determining where I end and where Kelsey begins. And this is the way it works. And men, I ask you to look. I ask you to look at godly men and godly women, look at their marriage, hang around them, be in your house, see what happens, see what it's like.

Younger people who are not married yet, watch people who are married. Look at them, see what they're doing. See how they talk to each other. See how men behave and act in those situations. It's important.

We learn by watching. We learn by imitating. That's the way this whole thing is supposed to go. Women also, likewise to men, take care of yourself. Physical training is of some benefit. You don't get to get married and then act like a slob.