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1 " Although we should affirm the wonder and mystery of sexual intimacy and romantic attraction as God's good creations, we need to set these aesthetic enjoyments within the context of the Christian virtues of fidelity, self-sacrifice, and patience in suffering.Bringing this together, our pastoral approach should be double-edged, seeking to challenge our culture's worship of sexual desire and personal fulfillment while offering a different vision of human flourishing. Christian formative involves both RESISTANCE and REDIRECTION. But is is the redirection of our desires that enables our resistance of cultural idolatries. Failure to attend to the dynamics of our desires leads to inevitable self-deception regarding the 'freedom' of our actions. Especially within our sexual lives, our hearts must be truly captivated by the goodness of the Christian vision of life, so that our whole self is drawn toward it, or our commitment to live in tune with it will be brittle. "
― Jonathan Grant , Divine Sex: A Compelling Vision for Christian Relationships in a Hypersexualized Age
2 " Unfortunately, many modern Christians have been deeply formed within the surrounding culture, so that they have also come to see their relationships and marriages in purely individualistic terms. Their marriages are perceived as solely for their own benefit rather than existing also for the sake of the church and its witness in the world. It is no wonder, then, that Christian relationships are often not clearly distinguishable from those in the culture at large. "
3 " when we try to address discipleship through ideas and beliefs alone, “it’s as if the church is pouring water on our head to put out a fire in our heart. "
4 " Increasingly, too, children are being portrayed in “adultified” ways while adult women are “infantilised.” This leads to a blurring of the lines between sexual maturity and immaturity and, effectively, legitimises the notion that children can be related to as sexual objects. "
5 " Modern sex education has focused on the physical risks of sex, almost completely ignoring its influence on emotional and spiritual well-being. And research reveals that despite the bold promises of Sex and the City, young women experience most of the emotional fallout of our culture’s “relaxed” sexual ethic. Whereas young men’s emotional well-being seems almost unaffected by their sexual conquests, young women experience a close connection between sexual experience and poorer emotional health. "
6 " In an age where we expect our daughters to be treated with unprecedented dignity, respect, and equality by their male peers, we have handed the sexual formation of our young people to the sex industry with its dark vision of sex and relationships. "
7 " Whatever we set as our loftiest goal and make our highest priority—that is, our highest love—orders everything else that we want and do in our lives. This idea brings together two essential drivers of human identity: our nature as desiring beings and our nature as moral beings. Unlike animals, which act purely and reflexively from instinct, we have desires about our desires. This means that we are able to reflect on whether we want the desires we have and to choose other ones. "
8 " The key weakness of romanticism is that it seeks intimacy but refuses to encourage the habits that form people who are able to enter into and sustain genuinely intimate relationships. This is because real intimacy requires giving ourselves faithfully and permanently to another person in vulnerable trust. It is only in this context of safety that genuine intimacy, as opposed to just a powerful romantic or sexual attraction, can develop. "
9 " This is one of the core contradictions of today’s hypersexualized culture. In the quest for personal freedom, we have created small, dark prisons of our own choosing. "
10 " Besides this, our culture’s hypersexuality has made it more difficult to relate to each other as brothers and sisters within the household of God. When every male-female friendship is freighted with sexual overtones, it is harder to enter into the broad network of mutually nurturing relationships that we need to support our personal identity. "
11 " The loss of any coherent cosmic structure that gives sex its real purpose—namely, God’s blessing of sex within marriage for intimacy and childbearing—leads to sexual chaos. Our bodies become pleasure machines that are capable of endless different forms of sexual expression, while we have no fundamental reason for keeping this self-expression within certain boundaries. "
12 " Even though we may believe in God, this secular vision has become the air we breathe, affecting our way of seeing and being in the world. It leads to a sort of “practical atheism” whereby we believe in God but find it hard to live as if he exists. "
13 " The Christian who designs his or her own personalized blend of faith and morality is making choices from the options available rather than seeking to reflect and participate in God’s character and mission in the world. "
14 " The Christian vision of sexuality is the gracious provision of a loving God who invites us into a life of flourishing via participation in his own character, the relationships within the Trinity, and the reality of the kingdom of heaven as it takes shape on earth. "
15 " Christian marriages should be built on a fundamentally different vision of personal identity and relationships than their secular counterparts. Rather than representing a contract between two ultimately independent people, Christian marriage is a covenant entered into sacrificially, within and for the benefit of the church. It is only within a committed community of faith that our intimate relationships can be properly supported and find their ultimate purpose. "
16 " The gospel envisions the sort of life that ultimately leads to human flourishing. Sin is destructive because it undermines the good that God has for us, not because it’s forbidden candy that a cruel father keeps under lock and key. This is the age-old temptation that Adam and Eve swooned under in the garden—wondering whether God really does want what is best for us. Yet this truth sits at the heart of our faith: the Christian view of sexuality is an aesthetic vision of human flourishing just as truly as it is one of sacrificial self-denial. "
17 " In order to resist this overemphasis on the ticking biological clock, the church needs to articulate a strong and positive vision in relation to aging. Although peer-group ministry has some important advantages, we also need to reintegrate the different generations within the church. Mature and wise exemplars within the community train us to join confidently with Paul’s conviction that even as the body ages, the inner self is being renewed. "
18 " The main concern relating to online dating is that it encourages the dislocation of romantic relationships from our natural communities. It tempts us to travel through the world as private and independent consumers of people as much as things. Yet as holistic beings, whatever we do with things, we will inevitably do with people. "
19 " falling in love, gives us a momentarily restored vision of one other human being—a sort of insight into his or her eternal identity. For a brief time our romantic attraction transfigures this person, allowing us to see the very best in him or her, to ignore or forgive the person’s flaws, and to be endlessly fascinated by him or her. One day, we will see every resurrected person in this way, as God sees each of us now. "
20 " Teaching Scripture as a narrative decisively upends the distorted priorities of the “authentic” self. When we become followers of Christ, we step into a much bigger story. This gives genuine significance to our personal identities and lives because God calls us friends, but it also displaces us from the center of the story. We become followers of the Way rather than the heroes of our own tales. The gospel, rather than our own experience, becomes our primary text. We don’t read Scripture; Scripture reads us. "
