The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Sexual Love (29 page)

1. Pray about it, preferably with your wife. The Bible says, “In all your ways acknowledge him, and he
will
make your paths straight.” God has led man in amazing ways to find help for this problem. Let Him aid you.

2. See your doctor and follow his advice.

3. Talk it over honestly with your wife.

4. Read everything good that you can find on the subject. Nothing magnifies fear like ignorance, but nothing reduces fear to life-size as does knowledge. As Christians we frequently disagree with the theories and conclusions of humanistically oriented authorities, but we can uncover many helpful recommendations in their writings. Remember that all truth is God’s truth. Regardless of its source, truth is truth. Einstein’s theory of relativity should not be negated because the author was a humanist. In the same manner, a liberal medical treatise read with spiritual discernment may furnish prompt solutions. Unfortunately most Christian writers on human sexuality have not dealt clearly with the problem of impotence.

5. Begin a physical fitness program in accord with the advice of your doctor. Several of my friends claim that jogging increases their virility. Tests indicate that it heightens all vital energies, so their observations may well be accurate.

6. Pursue a weight-reduction program if necessary.

7. Avoid making love when you are tired. Most people fall into one of two categories: they are either “nocturnalists” (people who work best at night, but come to life around 10
A.M.
) or “early birds” (those who wake up with the birds but conk out about 8 or 9
P.M.
). Whichever you are, attempt lovemaking when you are wide awake, for you get the most out of your glands at that time.

8. Don’t rush lovemaking. The longer you anticipate it before entrance, the easier it will be to ejaculate.

Several therapists suggest that men tend to have less difficulty maintaining an erection while lying on their back during intercourse. Somehow it aids in the blood flow to their pelvic area. Consequently, if a husband and wife use the wife-above position, his erections will remain more rigid and last longer, which, of course, is the main key to mutual satisfaction. One position a couple may enjoy during much of their marriage is that of the husband on top and rising up on his knees. (This can be most pleasurable to them both). However, it may become necessary to discontinue this position and let the wife take the top position if the husband develops difficulty maintaining an erection. This is particularly true after age sixty or seventy.

9. Don’t give up! Expect success. A medical doctor, David Reuben, has spent many years in the field of sexual relations and has written several best-selling books on this and related subjects. In one he sums up the problem of impotence by saying,

Almost
any man can overcome his impotence. There is a minority whose problems are basically physical and there is a small group who wear impotence like a badge—and wouldn’t give it up for anything. But for the majority, restoration to vigorous satisfying sexual performance only depends on their personal decision. With determination, hard work, and the love of a devoted woman virtually any man can become
and remain
dramatically potent to the age of seventy, eighty, and beyond. Most men, if they had the choice, would want it that way. The good news is: most men
have
that choice—all they have to do is exercise it.
⁴

Is There Sex After Sixty?

It is obvious from the above quote by Dr. Reuben that millions of married men do indeed enjoy a normal sex life right on into their later years. Some men have fathered children in their nineties. Admittedly, not many. But good and satisfying sex is possible in the later years of life; however, as we pointed out earlier, it will not be as frequent.

Actually, satisfying sex in marriage is as frequent as the two lovers desire it. God has given us a natural sexual clock that races in our twenties and thirties, slows gradually in the forties and fifties, then slows even more in the seventies and eighties. My opportunities to interview eighty-year-olds on this subject has been somewhat limited, but the one universal comment is that, though the frequency level slows to one to four times a month, the satisfaction level tends to increase. Perhaps it is the anticipation or scarcity that makes it more enduring and valuable. Seniors tend to put higher meaning on quality whereas their juniors tend to evaluate the experience more on the basis of quantity. The important thing is that healthy married seniors, like healthy juniors, tend to get all the sex they want.

If couples have a problem in later life, usually the husband has the difficulty. One doctor friend of mine is a nutritional enthusiast who believes that because our farming soil is so depleted of its natural life-giving nutrition men over fifty should take zinc supplements regularly. He also recommends Yohimbe bark or extract for those who enjoy low blood pressure. One thing is clear, any man who has experienced difficulty maintaining an erection should go to his local health-food store and make a personal study of what nutritional helps are available to mature men whose testosterone production has slowly declined through the years. It is a subject he should discuss openly with his wife and his nutritionally informed doctor. Otherwise he may bypass years of pleasure for both his wife and himself unnecessarily. As with almost every other subject, lack of sexual pleasure is a high price to pay when a little self education, proper diet, regular exercise, and nutritional support can provide great improvement. It won’t turn you into a thirty-year-old again, but it could well give you hundreds of satisfying lovemaking experiences during your golden years.

Notes

1
. Genell J. Subak-Sharpe, “Is Your Sex Life Going Up in Smoke?”
Reader’s Digest
106 (January 1975), 106–7.

2
. Ibid., 107.

3
. Tim LaHaye (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1974).

4
. David Reuben,
How to Get More Out of Sex
(New York: David McKay, 1974), 176.

Twelve

Sane Family Planning

A striking young couple spoke with me following a Family Life Seminar in a southern city. After introducing themselves as the full-time directors of a local youth ministry, they asked, “Is it wrong for us to avoid having children? We are so involved in the Lord’s work that we don’t have time for children.” I responded, “Do you expect this to be a permanent or temporary condition?” They indicated that it was permanent.

The attitude of these two young people is not rare, and their kind are increasing in number today for a very simple reason. Modern science has put into the hands of humankind for the first time in history an almost foolproof method of family exclusion. In city after city, after my lectures I am set upon by the younger generation because I advocate having a family of four or five children.

In Chicago a couple attending the University of Chicago’s graduate school made it very clear that I was “Neanderthal” in my approach to family planning because I reaffirmed God’s first commandment to humans, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen. 1:28). They had been so brainwashed by the humanistic family planners of our educational system that they considered avoidance of a family a patriotic service. However, I was suspicious (as I told them personally) that the real reason largely reflected selfishness. At that point the wife’s anger erupted, and she revealed the extent of her humanistic brainwashing by parroting the women’s libbers’ line, “What do you think I am, a baby factory? I want to pursue a career.”

A young minister, educated for the most part in secular schools, insisted, “Genesis 1:28 is no longer in force; the world is already over-populated. You should be urging people to cut down on the size of their families.” To this I replied, “Who says Genesis 1:28 is obsolete? God is the only one who can nullify His commands, and I know of no verse in the New Testament that negates Genesis 1:28.”

Still others offer the excuse that “the day in which we live is so immoral and the world situation is so grim that we have no right to bring children into the mess we have created.” That is the cry of unbelief. People who use that argument do not realize that the moral conditions of the first century under the tyranny of Rome and the Corinthian culture of the Greeks were worse than ours. Those first-century Christian children made it, and so will ours, but we must live before them the precepts by which we train them: to be obedient to the principles in God’s Word and to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

Personally we do not accept responsibility for the mess this world is in. The principles of God to which we have given our lives have not created the problem; our nation’s leaders’ rejection of them is at fault. Not an acceptance of our Lord and Savior, but our rejection of Him has left humankind in despair. Humanistic man has repudiated God’s plan for his life and for the destiny of nations; therefore he must accept full responsibility for the ensuing degradation.

Reasons for Raising Children

Before considering the rationale and methods for limiting a family, we would like to present four reasons why Christian couples should, if at all possible, have children.

1.
Children are a unique gift of eternal creativity.
God has granted to a husband and wife a unique ability, unshared by any other creature in the universe: to create another human being with a free will, an eternal soul, and the capability of passing on that unique gift to their children. Reduced to the barest of terms, a husband and wife have the ability to create an eternal person. Where that person decides to spend eternity is entirely up to him or her. In a practical way, when a Christian couple decide not to have children, they exclude a potential child from the potential blessing of eternal life as God planned for him or her. Fulfilling God’s command in Genesis 1:28 solves that problem.

2.
Children provide a lifetime blessing.
The psalmist says, “Sons are a heritage from the L
ord,
children a reward from him. … Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them” (Ps. 127:3, 5). People sometimes look on children as a “responsibility,” an “expense,” or an “accident,” but the Bible calls them a “blessing.” We would be the last to overlook the problems and sorrows involved in raising a family: we have raised four and lost one. In the process we confronted sickness, failure, financial pressure, and almost every dilemma children and young people can create. But after forty years of marriage, we can honestly say that the joys and blessings of our children
far
outweigh any sacrifices we may have made. In fact, my wife and I agree that we encounter no greater joy than to know that our children are walking in the truth (see 3 John 4). They and our grandchildren are without question our greatest human blessings.

Someone has suggested that according to Jewish tradition, a “quiver” of arrows (Ps. 127:5) numbered five. If that is true, could it suggest that the blessing God is speaking of here included at least five children? When I performed a wedding recently, the bride told me she wanted six children: “I come from a family of six, and it was such fun growing up, I’d like six of my own.”

3.
Children are a tangible expression of your love.
Far more is involved in begetting children than biology. When married partners become “one flesh,” they combine their genes in a God-given way and produce a one-flesh person that merges both of them. It was God’s plan, then, that children be an expression of their parents’ love. Fortunate indeed are children who are regarded so by their parents; they are a “heritage” that provides a “blessing.” Only parenthood enables us to see certain traits of the one we love mixed with our own in another human being.

4.
Children fulfill the psychic design of your mind.
God never commands people to do anything that does not cooperate with the function of their mind. The best way to deduce the human psychic mental mechanism is to study the commands of God in the Bible. For He put the human mind into its psychic pattern, so that it would function best when one obeys His commands. We call that “natural.” It is “natural” to marry, beget children, and become grandparents. A person’s mind has to be severely warped to feel “unnatural” about fatherhood or motherhood. God has given certain instincts to the mind that function in accord with His commands—and these produce that “natural” feeling essential to a happy life. Parenthood is such an instinct. “God’s grace is sufficient” for those couples who find it impossible to procreate; but the natural desire of humankind for family loving will result in a lifetime void and a lack of fulfillment for those who selfishly refuse to have children.

The chief enemy of personal happiness is self-interest. Nothing forces people to mature beyond the limitations of selfishness like being entrusted with an infant of their own. The fact that some adults never mature and even brutalize their babies does not alter the fact that, for most people, children are a blessing needed to fulfill, not only their destiny, but their lives.

One of the healthy signs of humanity in our present decaying culture is the fact that so many childless couples are actively seeking to adopt one or more children. It is a beautiful sight when a parentless, unwanted, or fatherless child, born to a teenager much too young for parenthood, is adopted by a Christian couple who have been praying for a child. We have assisted many such couples, and in every case it has resulted in the child’s becoming a Christian. The right adoption experience is a life-changing experience for both the parents and the child. We enthusiastically recommend it.

Planning Your Parenthood