Link to Adventist Review article on sex by Marcos Paseggi about Mary Jo Vollmer’s material.
“Shame is not from God” Oh, yes it is. Three consequences enter a person’s life when they transgress God’s moral law: Guilt, Shame and Fear. The Lord allows these consequences into our life to wake us up and bring us to repentance after we have violated God’s Law. They are a red light flashing on the dashboard of our lives. “Return unto Me, and I will return unto you.” Humble yourself, acknowledge your sin through repentance and come back onto the road of life in peace.” Freedom will come, and He will take away the shame.
Develop your own sexual ethic with God. As our Creator, God is the one who sets the boundaries on morality. We will either accept or reject those boundaries. Adopting a sexual ethic is pleasing to the Lord only if it is within His revealed will in His Word. Your ‘ethics’ must conform to the Bible in order for you to walk in moral freedom.
If we make mistakes, we are not beyond His reach. True. Sin must be brought to Jesus for forgiveness and healing. He is willing and able to forgive us (1 John 1:9).
Traditional Christian teaching limits sexual intimacy to marriage between a man and a woman. True. The Bible is clear that this is the only proper outlet for sexual intimacy.
The idea is that “you will get married and then you will have blessings, and then you will have amazing sex for the rest of your life, many beautiful children, and you will live happily ever after. But it’s not always the reality,” she pointed out. “As Adventists we don’t endorse that, because we know that God gives the sun and rain on the good and the bad.” Huh. When a couple conforms their life to God’s principles, they will experience joy and fulfillment in marriage. Yes, there will be things to balance, forgive and resolve in the marriage, but if they commit themselves to God’s ways, they will also experience happiness. There are three kinds of intimacy available to couples: Spiritual, Emotional, and Physical (or sexual). When the first two are operating, the physical part is 10-100 times better.
The comment about God sending rain on the good and the bad is odd, in this context. He doesn’t bless marriage or sexual activity that is outside of His revealed will. That is called rebellion in the Scriptures, and the rebellious dwell in a dry land (Psalm 68:6).
Real-life challenges can lead to a lot of shame, Vollmer said. “What if you waited to have sex, and then in marriage it doesn’t go well?” Marriages struggle because people bring unresolved issues into their marriage. They don’t usually realize those issues are there, until the honeymoon wears off. The enemy exploits these issues and brings conflict and distance into the marriage. Unless a couple chooses to resolve these issues biblically, they will continue to struggle, eventually concluding they married the wrong person. But the real problem in their marriage is not their spouse, it is the unresolved issues that both partners brought into the relationship. These issues are often spiritual: Pride, bitterness, hypocrisy, rebellion, negative thoughts, enemy (occult) issues, evil for evil, and moral failure. Spiritual issues must be resolved through repentance.
There are often emotional issues that must be resolved in order to have peace and joy in marriage: Abandonment, Rejection, Abuse (there are four kinds), Pressure patterns, being Neglected, and Disowned. We don’t repent of these–these issues must be taken to Jesus for healing. Psalms 55:22 “Cast thy burden upon the LORD, and he shall sustain thee.” God wants us to bring our problems, our damage, the pressures of life – to Him.
Keeping yourself pure before marriage is a wonderful thing, it prevents regrets that the enemy can use to damage your relationship. Purity should never be devalued or trivialized, but rather held up as the ideal.
“Many people who were virgins get divorced or have very unhappy marriages.” Then they ask themselves, “What did I do wrong?” As stated, they brought other unresolved issues into the marriage.
Research has shown that “purity culture” can sometimes turn sexual purity into an idol. Instead of viewing sexual choices as one aspect of Christian discipleship, people may begin to see their sexual status as connected to their worth before God. Moral purity could be connected with pride, which should be replaced with humility. But, moral failure is dreadfully expensive, and our young people need to be educated what the cost is. I’ll explain later...
Vollmer cites two cases of couples who brought virginity into their marriage and experienced conflict in the relationship, later. That proves nothing, except that the author is willing to abstract examples to illustrate her point. Implying that their moral purity may have played a role in their subsequent strife is a horrendous suggestion. Each of them brought unresolved spiritual issues into their relationship, including pride. How do I know this? Because the Bible says “Only by pride cometh contentions” (Proverbs 13:10). Resolve the pride, add humility to purity, and you have a nice combination.
“fornication can happen in a marital context . . . when, for instance, we are just having sex disconnected from everything else.” Fornication is both spiritually and typologically different from the marital act, and in fact a mockery of it. It happens outside of marriage, not within it.
“I believe that everything that is wrong with premarital sex can be also true in a marital context.” Sex outside of marriage brings 13 consequences into a person’s life. I will discuss some of these at the end of this article.
Within marriage, a person can experience other consequences, which the Lord wants us to avoid. For instance, if a spouse is pressuring the other spouse in a sexual way, that can damage the physical intimacy of that couple. If a spouse brings pornographic images into their marriage, that will violate the relationship and make the wife feel dirty. Pornography can also invite demonic activity into a person’s life.
These strongholds need to be broken by Christ in order for a person to have freedom. Then they can experience inner peace and freedom in the marriage.
Vollmer fails to make a distinction between fornication and marriage in this article, possibly misleading many young people and Review readers.
In this regard, it is essential for couples to ask themselves some questions. “Are we connected? Are we loving to each other? Do we respect each other?” Because God Himself planned for that connection to happen. Amen. Get spiritual and emotional intimacy in your marriage relationship and the physical intimacy will be fantastic (10-100 times better).
In the last part of her presentation, Vollmer called young people—single or married—to develop their own sexual ethics together with God. “You need to define what your picture of God is and then [find out] how it connects with your life.” One danger with this approach is that it suggests that sexual ethics can be auto-developed outside of God’s Word. Biblical morality is based upon the external objective Word of God, not on inner emotional experience or your (subjective picture of God). Our view of God can be distorted by lies from the enemy, which is why we need the Bible to present the truth about God.
A far better approach is to ask young people “What is the cost of moral (sexual) failure, and can you afford it?” Is your life in harmony with the Word of God in this sexual area? If not, would you like it to be?” The first eight verses of 1 Thessalonians 4 can help us get there.
“[Purity] is not an idol, is not defining me, and is not all who I am,” she illustrated. “And I don’t have to be perfect, because I will be probably making mistakes all my life.” Impurity is way more of an idol than purity. From the Temple of Diana, to the Orgy Dome at Burning Man to our modern hook-up culture, sex is the mysticism of the age and has replaced the cross as the emblem of ultimate longing and fulfillment (1 Kings 14:22–24; Deuteronomy 23:18; Hosea 4:14; Acts 19:24-35).
I don’t have to be perfect, because I will probably be making mistakes all my life. Talk about waving a white flag of surrender! Instead of surrendering to lust and your carnal nature, surrender to the Lord Jesus Christ Who will lead you in paths of righteousness for His name’s sake (Psalm 23:3). How can a young man keep his way pure? By living according to Your word” (Psalm 119:9).
Vollmer closes with these words “Create your own sexual ethics with the God who loves you, who lives today, and who understand your experience.” Three times, she missed the opportunity to direct readers and young people to the Word of God which lives and abides forever (1 Peter 1:23). You can’t develop a correct sexual ethic outside of the Bible, but you can easily develop an incorrect ethic, influenced by the culture and worldly wisdom.
Observations
Sex outside of marriage sex is a destructive act that brings expensive consequences into a person’s heart. The question is, can you afford it?
From grandparents to teenagers, moral failure brings some of the sharpest regrets known to man (and woman). As believers, we need to do the utmost to protect our young people from the consequences of moral failure and sexual abuse.
Fornication — It’s a good word with a lot of Biblical authority. And it is nearly buried under the rubble of our modern sensibilities. Let me be blunt, we updated our vocabulary long ago with the more politically correct term “pre-marital sex.” In doing so, I believe that we ceded Biblical truth to the pop-culture sexual revolutionaries. Strongly implied in the term “pre-marital sex” is that the only problem is timing. This gives the false impression that the main difference between marital sex and pre-marital sex is simply when one chooses to engage in it. And as soon as they “get married”—problem solved, right? Nope.
I have worked with hundreds of young people, and helped many of them resolve moral and abuse issues according to the Bible. It is refreshing to go to a wedding and know that this young couple have confessed every moral violation to each other and invited Jesus to come in and purify their hearts. This allows them to emotionally give themselves to each other, and experience the oneness that God designed for their marriage. If they choose not to resolve hidden moral issues they will experience a number of consequences in marriage and end up in a sexually-tolerant form of empty gratification that longs for emotional intimacy. Just getting married doesn’t erase the accumulated consequences of moral failure. Rather, it will bring them to the surface.
How often do we urge teenagers to maintain purity to be consistent with their "values" and to avoid bad consequences to their health, their future marriages, or their walk with God? These consequences are definitely real, but why would it seem so awkward to say what the Scripture says quite straightforwardly—that fornicators will not inherit the kingdom of God? (1 Cor. 6:9–10). You don’t have to be a ‘hell-fire’ revival preacher to admit that sexual immorality brings upon itself the wrath of God (Rev. 21:8). Yet because of political-correctness, we often retreat to the safety of terms like “pre-marital” and “struggling” or “addiction.”
Fornication pictures a different reality than that of the mystery of Christ. It presents instead a Jesus who uses the Church without joining her in sacred covenant to Himself. It is not just “naughtiness.” To use another word that laissez-faire Christians find awkward and antiquated, it is blasphemy — moral blasphemy with several unique consequences. Here are just a few of these consequences; and some of them may surprise you.
Role Reversal
If a dating couple gets involved sexually with each other, something strange happens in the relationship. From that point on, the girl becomes more aggressive and the guy becomes more passive. Guilt, shame and fear fill the relationship, and the girl becomes angry from pain and feels unprotected. The guy gives up his leadership as a man. From that point on, he stops caring about the girl emotionally and is only interested in how he can be alone with the girl. She feels unloved and begins trying to ‘protect” herself by becoming more aggressive—more manly. This sets up a wrong pattern that can only be resolved by the wonderful power of God through repentance and cleansing.
Conflict
Within two weeks after a dating couple commits fornication (there’s that word again) they will start fighting. Every time. Unless they Biblically resolve and forsake fornication—guilt, shame and fear causes them to begin blaming one another subconsciously. This leads them to push each other away emotionally, which leads to a loss of communication, which leads to a lack of respect for each other, which leads to… you guessed it—conflict. They will be fighting within two weeks and won’t understand why.
High Stakes
Dating couples who commit fornication are teaching each other how to commit adultery. Really, Mr. Wagoner? Yes. Fornication and adultery are the same sin—in that they both exist outside of marriage. Sex prior to marriage becomes a mixture of sex & guilt, and after marriage, the only source for that is...adultery. Couples who get sexually involved prior to marriage are training each other how to commit adultery.
In closing. Let us not be afraid to talk about sex to young people, to explain why it is worth waiting for and the consequences of not waiting. I’ve already discussed a few of the consequences; let me throw a positive motivator out there. If you do wait, your sex life will be in the top 2%.
In order to recover the beauty and the exultation of marital intimacy, we need to speak honestly and bluntly of the ugliness of its counterfeits. In the process we learn not to be ashamed of the Biblical language of "fornication," but instead to be ashamed of fornication itself. Let’s all align our lives with the Word of God, instead of creating a subjective sexual ethic that seems right to us.
I don’t want to give people the impression that if they have fallen morally, it will follow them around like a big black balloon forever tied to their unpardonable midsection.
There is hope. Through repentance there is freedom, and through Jesus there is cleansing!
God can restore unto you the years that the locusts have eaten (Joel 2:24).
****
