Sexual Self-Knowledge

How We are Formed by Christ in Being Aware of our own Sexual Desires

As a professor of theology at a Christian university, I’ve grown accustomed to students dropping by my office hours intent on sharing with me some aspect of the terrain of their inner sexual desire. This is due, in part, to the fact that I teach a class called “Bible, Sexuality, and Gender.” I’ve even written a book that tackles aspects of the subject entitled The Gift of Thorns. Still, it’s also partly due (I suspect) to my clear insistence at the beginning of every semester that my students are always permitted to come to me in the raw, unedited state they are in. Over the last five years, I’ve had somewhere in the realm of 90-100 young people share with me their struggles with ungodly sexual desire, sexual addiction, attractions to people of the same sex, or questions about their gender.

I’ll be honest—as someone receiving this sort of disclosure, I’ve been given little to no training on how to respond appropriately. No seminary course prepared me for this moment. Responding to someone’s sexual self-disclosure can be especially tricky for those of us who hold unswervingly to an orthodox, historically Christian understanding of human sexuality, as I do. Do I correct my student’s desire? Do I affirm their newfound self-understanding? Do I respond with silence? The way I respond in these situations can make or break the potential for future conversations and transformation.

I don’t have space in this article to fully iron out everything that could be said on this subject. Nonetheless, I’ve learned some things about these conversations. I’ve noticed that a revelation like this usually assumes some degree of trust between the one sharing and the one listening. It takes, in other words, a tremendous amount of trust to be willing to talk about our very private experiences of sexual desire. Whenever someone shares these desires with me, then, I need to be aware that it often comes alongside much fear and trembling.

I’ve also discovered that a person naming their sexual desires doesn’t immediately mean that they want to obey these desires. Often, they do not. Time and again, I’ve heard someone name their experience with same-sex attraction not to gain some permission slip to obey it—rather, so that they do not obey it. Naming a hidden desire doesn’t imply their will to pursue it.

Finally, I’ve discovered that for a student to name what is going on in their heart is both frightening territory and a step in the direction of deep formation in Christ.

Naming is part of healing. In the early church, Gregory of Nazianzus famously penned the sentence, “What is not assumed, cannot be healed.”¹ Gregory was writing about the incarnation—that only in becoming a full human could God heal humanity. But this same principle, I believe, powerfully reframes the importance of knowing and naming our sexual desires in a trusted, honest, Christ-centered relationship. Only that which is revealed, named, and known can, in the end, be healed and transformed. Without this, some part of our hearts remains unrevealed, unnamed, and unknown. For many of us—either because of fear, ignorance, or sheer willfulness—we fail to come to terms with the power of our own sexual desires and their impact on our lives. When we choose to live in ignorance, we greatly heighten the possibility that we will do harm to ourselves. Or, worse yet, that we will do harm to others.

On knowing our sexual desires

I have been learning firsthand the importance of this truth in the last few years. Part of my own maturity process as a theologian and pastor has come alongside an increasing honesty about my own sexual desires—and where they have come from—with those closest to me. As part of this journey, I hired a Christian therapist in December 2022 to help me begin to make sense of the wreckage of my sexual history, trauma, and story. As a child, I was forced into several traumatic unchosen sexual experiences that have had lingering impacts on me as a young (and now middle-aged) adult. For too long, thinking all would turn out well given some time, I willfully hid from my story and my desires. In the end, I was only postponing my formation journey. By going on a four-day virtual retreat with my new therapist, I hoped to begin to see healing in a new way.

What happened transformed my life. And that transformation shaped this article. I want to contend here that it is not only good, but also Christian, to begin to be honest with our sexual desires and bring them into a community of trusted people who can help us walk through them. I suggest five reasons why we should know our sexual desires—and bring them to others who can steward them with us.

1. To be a Christian is to confess.

Healing entails truthfulness. In the Christian tradition, this truthfulness is often called “confession.” In 1 John 1:9, the apostle writes that when we confess our sins before God, we are assured forgiveness and cleansing. Interestingly, the word John uses for confess is the Greek word homologeō. This compound word brings together the words “same” (homo) and “say” (logeō). Together, the word literally means “to say the same” or “to say with one voice.”

The confession John is describing is not the kind that seeks to tell God something he was previously unaware of. Quite the opposite. Confession is acknowledging something before God that God already knows. This is the spirit of the author of Psalm 38, who cries out, “All my longings lie open before you, Lord; my sighing is not hidden from you” (v. 9). Confession is not informing God. Confession is agreeing with God.

Confession, I like to say, is what is happening when a sinner chooses to tell on themselves. It is through this kind of confession that true healing happens. For Christians in an increasingly sexualized world, we must begin to utilize our own truthfulness about sexual desire as a means of showcasing how God can handle it. When we confess our sexual desires to God, we take a step of faith in the process of allowing God to help us with them.

2. Sexual desire as made by God is good and not to be ignored.

Scripture often speaks about sexual desires. Sexual desires, of course, were created by God. From the earliest chapters of our creation story, we discover that sex between a man and a woman in covenant faithfulness is “good”—just as was everything else God had created. The very body parts God made can reflect this goodness, having the capacity to bring us great pleasure and joy in the right context. The wisdom tradition brings us the story of the Song of Songs, which narrates (metaphorically) a man and a woman during their first week of marriage. There are body parts, sights, sounds, tastes, and even smells. This graphic sexual text seeks to give language to God’s longing for his people Israel. But it also speaks of the blessedness of sexual longing that humans were endowed with from creation. Not only does the text bless sexual longing; it also frames it in a context of restraint. When Song of Songs 8:4 says, “Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires,” it interrupts the building tension of the poem by demonstrating that these two lovers must be patient and learn to restrain their desire.

Too often, the only way Christians speak about sexual desire is when we discuss aberrant or distorted sexual desires. That is, we discuss sexual desires only in the context of what is wrong with them. When we do this, we fail to recognize the goodness of sexual desire in the way that God designed it. Because we can tend to see sexual sin above all other sins—what Samuel Perry calls “sexual exceptionalism”—we cut short the possibility of discussing sexual desire in any good or redemptive terms.² Rather than teaching people how to eat good food, we only teach people about the never-ending dangers of food poisoning.

3. Sinful sexual desires need to be confronted.

While sexual longing and desire as created by God are blessed, Scripture also speaks to their counterpart—lust. If longing is sexual desire over which we rule, then lust is sexual desire that rules us. And the sad tale in Scripture reminds us of its painful results. Paul’s command is as clear as crystal: “Flee from sexual immorality.” It is instructive to notice that Paul commands Christian communities only twice to “flee” anything. He tells followers of Jesus to “flee sexual immorality” (1 Cor 6:18) and “flee idolatry.” (1 Cor 10:14) That’s it. The gravity of this command is as important today as it was two millennia ago. Paul knew that our sexuality and our worship were intimately tied. Little, for Paul, revealed more about what we love and the ordering of desire than how we embody our sexual selves.

Our love for God is reflected in our relationship to our sexual desire. Hence Paul’s constant affirmation to “Put to death every…evil desire” (Col 3:5). And that “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Phil 4:8). Paul presents a clear continuation of the teaching of Jesus, who spoke candidly about how “looking lustfully upon a woman” is an act of adultery (Matt 5:28). Indeed, sexual behavior is dangerous. But beneath any act of rebellious sexual expression are unsanctified sexual desires that lay in the human heart.

What we find in a post-Eden world is that the good sexual desires God created us with don’t go away. Rather, they transform—becoming distorted and twisted—outside the realm of the sustaining presence of God. We need an environment where we can confess these desires so that they are not obeyed.

4. Hidden sexual desires eventually impact others.

Unsanctified sexual desires have the power to be profoundly dangerous. We see this in the David and Bathsheba saga in 2 Sam. 11: “One evening David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of the palace. From the roof he saw a woman bathing. The woman was very beautiful, and David sent someone to find out about her.” We know what comes next. This was no affair. This was sexual violence. The downfall of David’s kingship begins with a look, a desire, and a want for someone who was out of bounds for him.

The reader who is familiar with Genesis 3 will discern an unmistakable linguistic connection between “seeing” and “taking.” Just as the woman in the garden “saw” and “took” from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, David is “seeing” and “taking” Bathsheba. Similarly, the prophet Samson “sees” a Canaanite descendant and “takes” her. (Jud 14). Achan does the same thing as he observes the glories of the Babylonian cape—“seeing” and “taking” it for himself (Josh 7:20-21). Time and again, humans “see” and “take” what’s not ours. Perhaps Ariana Grande was reading her Bible when she wrote her famous song:

I see it, I like it, I want it, I got it.

When it goes unchecked, sexual desire can be used as a means of manipulation—even in a marriage. There is, in any sexual relationship, a dynamic of power. David Schnarch is a therapist who has written extensively on sexual desires. In his book Intimacy and Desire, Schnarch argues that in any given marriage, there tends to be one partner who is “high desire” and one who is “low desire” in their sexual relationship. Schnarch (after years as a sex therapist) observes that the partner with lower sexual desire can often have the greatest power in a marriage relationship. Why? Because when someone is desperate for physical touch, they will be more willing to give up something of themselves to get it.³

Sadly, this dynamic can lead to disastrous power plays in some marriages. In this situation, one person realizes that they have the key that could get them what they want. Perhaps this is one of the reasons Paul so explicitly states that marriage should not be marked by sexual neglect. As he writes in 1 Cor 7:

Do not deprive each other except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. (v. 5)

Paul’s words reveal how Scripture affirms a mutually edifying, consensual, and honoring relationship where both people are sexually cared for in the spirit of grace, love, and commitment. What these things teach us is that unsanctified sexual desire can be used by those in power to harm others. But sexual desire can also be withheld as a means of gaining power. To have a trusted person—a pastor, a Christian therapist, a friend—be able to discuss what is going on in marriage can help identify the use or misuse of sexual union even in a covenantal relationship.

What these dynamics illustrate—and are important for us to acknowledge—is that the hiddenness of the sexual desire in our heart has a great impact on our relationships. That which is in the dark can be the most controlling power in our life. Thus knowing and naming our desires with vulnerability in safe relationships can help undo the misuse of sexual touch.

5. Sexual desire needs limits.

One telltale sign of a world rebelling against its Creator is that its God-given limitations and boundaries are thrown aside. As Dallas Willard would say, it is a world that demands “that I will have what I desire.”⁴ Bathsheba pays a heavy price for David’s unchecked sexual desire. Scripture illuminates the way in which sexual desire and power can have a dangerously interconnected relationship. Many men are taught very early on that their sexual desires are the most important or powerful in a marriage relationship. Therapist Tina Sellers writes:

In American culture, men are taught through secular and religious channels that sex is about intercourse (the penis) and that they are entitled to this after marriage. How much and how often are based on their wants. They are the drivers, they are in charge. They are the winners. This reinforces the tendency for men to lead from the pelvis and reduces their sense of their need to learn about the skills of the heart and the skills of how to love a woman — how to be her great lover.⁵

Too often this assumption goes unconfronted in Christian theology. We see it in comments like, “God commands that men, husbands, be leaders. Men are to take the leading role while women are to follow. God intends that men take leadership even in sex, and, therefore, he gives men a greater desire for sex. This way, a man can lead his wife, taking the initiative.”⁶ The result of language like this can be destructive in two ways. It entrenches the use of sex as a form of masculine power. Meanwhile, it can come across as shaming toward women for having sexual desires, as though they are being “manlike” when they do.

Some Christian teachings give the impression that men are crazed for sex and women are crazed for love. This is not fair. Both men and women are sexual beings. And both have sexual desires—desires that need healing. The gift of bringing our sexual desires into discussion with a trusted community is that they are given shape. I have one friend with whom I share conversations about all the things our hearts desire. In those conversations, we remind each other that we are loved for who we are. We also remind each other of the consequences of following all our desires. My friend brings me back down to earth by reminding me who (namely my son and wife) would be devastated if I just “followed my heart.”

Retroactive healing

I long resisted the journey of exploring my childhood. Nietzsche once said, “When we are alone and quiet, we fear that something will be whispered in our ear. So, we hate the silence and drug ourselves with social life.”⁷ This is why we often don’t like being quiet, listening, or getting in touch with our stories—we don’t like what we will find. And it explains why I resisted curiously exploring what happened to me as a developing child. To be willing to be honest with ourselves assumes that we have the courage to do so.

The four days I spent with that therapist changed my life. So much of the experience of that four-day retreat opened my eyes to a healthy understanding of sexuality for a Christian. It also reminded me that, while those childhood experiences did impact me and shaped the template of my sexuality, God can heal me.

The healing of my desire has begun by listening carefully to Jesus in Matthew 19:

Then people brought little children to Jesus for him to place his hands on them and pray for them. But the disciples rebuked them. Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” When he had placed his hands on them, he went on from there. (v. 13-15)

Jesus welcomes the children. Jesus wants all the children to come—even the inner ones. It’s the adults who try to keep them away. I’m walking in healing by whispering to Jesus all those hidden desires I never knew or named as a child. That I desperately need non-sexual touch that I was afforded little of as a child. That I want a friend. That I want a dad to play with. That someone wanted to be with me. Jesus listens. And Jesus responds. Jesus always welcomes that child. He touches him. He listens to him. He heals him. I’ve learned that the healing of my desire comes as I allow my inner child, battered and ashamed in all his brokenness, to come to Jesus. All the while learning to lovingly ignore the voice of my inner adult who thinks the whole thing is a waste of time. That child and his desires deserve to be listened to—even if the listening comes later than it should have.

“We must be transformed,” writes Stanley Hauerwas, “we must be freed from our ill-formed desires, if we are to see that this is God’s Son.”⁸ Thank God, Jesus can heal even retroactively.

1
In his “epistle 101” to Cledonius the Priest Against Apollinarius.
2
Throughout his book Addicted to Lust: Pornography in the Lives of Conservative Protestants (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019).
3
David Schnarch, Intimacy & Desire: Awaken the Passion in Your Relationship (New York, NY: Beaufort Books, 2011).
4
Dallas Willard, “Beyond Pornography: Spiritual Formation Studied in a Particular Case,” Journal of Spiritual Formation & Soul Care 9, no. 1 (2006): 8.
5
Read her article called “Sacred Sex” at https://tinaschermersellers.wordpress.com/2011/05/24/sacred-sex-highlights-hebrew-style//
6
I appreciate Tim’s work and have followed him for years. But comments like this inaccurately represent female sexuality and double down on false views of male sexual desire. Tim Challies, Sexual Detox: A Guide for Guys Who Are Sick of Porn (Minneapolis, MN: Cruciform Press, 2010), 53.
7
As quoted in Mark Thibodeaux, Armchair Mystic: Easing Into Contemplative Prayer (Cincinnati, OH: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2001), 42.
8
Stanley Hauerwas, A Cross-Shattered Church: Reclaiming the Theological Heart of Preaching (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2009), 30.