The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Sexual Love (8 page)

In Summary

God obviously had many purposes in mind when He deliberately created our sexual capabilities, from reproduction to pleasure to unique union. Like all things He created, it is all very good. As with many of his wonderful gifts to humankind, it is only when we distort it and misuse it that it becomes twisted and ugly. Sex in marriage is beautiful, enriching, and fulfilling when practiced as He directed—
but only in marriage.
Adultery, fornication, homosexuality, promiscuity, and other forms of sexual abuse become ugly, harmful, and life-shortening. All people have the same choice about the use of their sex drive. They can obey God and confine its expression to marriage, which He calls sacred, or they can adopt the standards of the world and have an affair or become promiscuous.

The results are already determined by God. As He, through Moses, told the children of Israel,

I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses.

Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.

Deuteronomy 30:19

Five

Sex Education

God has never put a premium on ignorance, and that includes the matter of sex education. His statement “My people are destroyed from lack of knowledge” (Hos. 4:6) is as true in this area of life as in the spiritual. Millions of married couples accept a second-rate experience because they don’t know much about the reproductive organs and sexual functions and are unwilling to learn.

Many who have come for counseling because of sexual dysfunction have never read a book on the subject or had proper counseling. Such persistent ignorance has given self-styled sexologists the opportunity to swing to the other extreme and inundate children from kindergarten through twelfth grade with adult doses of sex education. Both extremes lead to unhappiness and frustration.

The public school has rendered itself incompetent in the field of sex education by making two fallacious assumptions:

1. They insist on teaching sex education without moral safeguards, excusing their omission by asserting that the separation of church and state requires that they exclude moral guidelines. That is not only ridiculous, but dangerous! Teaching sex education without moral principles is like pouring gasoline on a fire. Research shows that the male experiences his strongest sex drive between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one. The last thing he needs at that age is exposure to sexually igniting information that he will not use for several years. Moreover, he requires a moral rationale for controlling those drives until he is old enough to accept responsibility for them.

2. These “sexperts” erroneously assume that education will naturally produce sexual happiness. Such an assumption emanates from the humanistic concept that humans are animals and as such should live like them. This philosophy has promoted promiscuity before and after marriage, which in turn has made venereal disease one of the nation’s greatest health problems for persons under twenty-four years of age and has heightened the incidence of guilt neurosis after marriage. We predict unparalleled anguish and heartache for the next generation because of this wanton mental destruction of our youth.

Reading that last sentence again reminds me that two years after this book was first published, our local community was in turmoil as the Board of Education insisted on bringing in an even more explicit form of sex education, and it was made compulsory that all students take it whether parents approved of it or not. Along with other ministers, I appeared before the board and warned that if they brought in this new curriculum, totally void of moral values, they would create a wave of unprecedented promiscuity and teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and a decline in learning. They mocked my warning, yet today those are the very social problems facing our nation’s youth across the country.

Personally, I lay the drastic decline in the SAT test scores and the increase in school dropouts to the overemphasis on sex in the life of our youth. True, the entertainment industry is also to blame, but these young people received their sex education and moral mistraining in those same valueless explicit classes on sex. Consequently, they have created an obsession with sex during an age when young people really need an obsession on learning. As an educator, I do not believe the average student can maintain an obsession on two subjects at the same time, particularly when one is sex. Girls maybe, but hot-blooded, undisciplined teenage boys? Never!

Educators get what they emphasize. If they emphasize reading, they will get good readers, or if they emphasize math, they will produce good mathematicians. Instead, they have emphasized explicit sex education and have produced the most sexually permissive generation in the history of America. Recent reports indicate that 57 percent of girls and 67 percent of boys have had sex before graduating from high school. According to surveys, this form of public education is not producing responsible sex but is disillusioning many.

It is no wonder that learning has suffered drastically and millions of our youth are not really being prepared for life. And like so many promises of the antimoral humanists, who control most of our nation’s public schools, their educational programs have not produced safe sex or even better sex. Instead, they have produced untold suffering by exacerbating the spread of STDs.

Sexual ignorance, however, is not the alternative. Young people need to be instructed that sex is sacred, an experience God has reserved for marriage. Certainly they need to be taught the high cost of promiscuity and the dangers of venereal diseases, and when dating, they must be very conscious of the fact that the bodies of both persons are the temples of the Holy Spirit. Most Bible-believing churches, of course, teach such values unequivocally at youth camps and many youth meetings.

Fortunately for today’s Christian young people, the church has responded to their needs by producing many morally based programs that confront them with the need to maintain God’s standards of virtue and that teach them how to make sexual love beautiful by saving it for marriage. Josh MacDowell’s
True Love Waits
program has been a rich blessing to Christian teens, parents, and church leaders. The Southern Baptists pioneered a program of challenging over a hundred thousand teens to make a written commitment to virtue before marriage. This was picked up by Lutherans, Catholics, and others; now millions of young people have gone on record that they are going to save their first sexual experience for marriage. They will not regret it.

My wife, Beverly, and I were so concerned about this problem that we collaborated on a book for parents so they could be the principal teachers of their own children about sex. We titled it
Against the Tide: How to Raise Sexually Pure Kids in an “Anything Goes” World.
¹
The book instructs parents to teach their own moral values along with the facts of sexuality to their teens. We included a suggestion to parents to take their emerging teenagers out for a special dinner-date and challenge them to a commitment to virtue until marriage. Then we propose that parents be prepared to present their teen with a “virtue ring,” which they may wear proudly until their wedding night, at which time they may give it to their new spouse as a token of this important commitment.

I cannot tell you how many parents and even teens have contacted us to thank us for this suggestion. Everywhere I go to speak, some teenager comes up to proudly show me his or her virtue ring. This practice has been promoted on Dr. James Dobson’s radio program and also by other agencies. One youth counselor called to tell me he was setting up a whole ministry dedicated to this cause. It won’t be long until our dream really comes true—many Christian newlyweds exchanging virtue rings on their wedding night. In anticipation of that, a beautiful senior student at a Christian high school where I spoke showed me her ring with pride and volunteered a new dimension: “I plan to pass this virtue ring on to my daughter someday!”

Learning by Doing

An in-depth study of sex is best pursued just prior to marriage. Let’s face it—the material is simply not that complicated. God didn’t give Adam and Eve a manual on sexual behavior; they learned by doing. We are convinced that modern Adams and Eves can do the same, provided they are unselfish enough to consider their partner’s satisfaction more than their own. A few good books on the subject studied carefully two or three weeks before marriage, a frank discussion with their family doctor, and pastoral counseling usually are adequate preparation.

Another source of help is an honest discussion with the parent of the same sex. As parents, we enjoyed sharing our insights with two of our offspring. With both this discussion and the suggested reading, they seem to have made a beautiful adjustment. The following material includes some of the things we discussed with them about themselves and their partners. When studied by married couples or those about to be married, it proves exceedingly fascinating. When this information is considered in the light of the intended purposes of marriage—conception, pleasure, and marital communication—the reader can hardly escape the fact that God has ingeniously created human beings. No wonder the psalmist declared that we are “fearfully [awesomely] and wonderfully made” (Ps. 139:14). You would do well to study these next few pages carefully. Each organ is listed in the order of its reproductive function, as labeled on the following diagram.

Fig. 1.
The male reproductive organs

It is important to know the basic parts of your reproductive system and your partner’s. You should also understand their basic purpose and function.

Scrotum or scrotal sac
—the small sac, containing the testicles, that hangs between a man’s legs.

Testicles
—the sensitive, egg-shaped, sperm-producing organs that hang in the scrotal sac. They are the size and shape of a large nut, approximately 1-1/2 inches long; contain a long tube approximately one one-thousandth of an inch in diameter and about one thousand feet long; and are able to produce 500 million sperm every day. Usually the left testicle hangs lower than the right, but this should cause no alarm—it is quite natural. Sometimes only one testicle drops even after puberty. This is no cause for concern sexually, since a healthy male can be virile with only one functioning testicle. Surgery or treatment with certain hormones can correct the problem. A higher rate of tumors appears in undescended testicles, however, and it is advisable that a boy having this condition be checked by a doctor before age ten for early detection of any difficulty.

Sperm or spermatozoa
—the male seed, manufactured in the testicles, that fertilizes the female egg. This seed contains the genetic information that ultimately determines a baby’s sex. In sexual intercourse it is ejected through the penis into the female’s vagina. The cells measure about one six-hundredth of an inch from head to tail.

Epididymis
—the little channel in the scrotal sac where sperm manufactured in the testicles undergo a maturing process.

Spermatic duct
(vas deferens)—the duct from the epididymis that carries the sperm into the ampulla chamber. In a vasectomy for sterilization of the husband, a one-inch section of each vas deferens is removed. This surgery can usually be performed under a local anesthetic in a doctor’s office and incapacitates a man for perhaps one or two days. The operation will in no way affect his sex life—it merely stops the sperm from entering the penis.

Ampulla chamber
—the storage chamber for sperm that have left the epididymis and traveled through the spermatic duct.

Seminal vesicle
—the organ producing the seminal fluid that carries the sperm to the prostate gland.

Ejaculatory duct
—the organ that expels the sperm and seminal fluid through the penis into the female.

Prostate gland
—an important gland, shaped like a large walnut, which contracts and aids in the ejaculation. It produces additional seminal fluid and contains the nerves that control the erection of the penis. It is located between the urinary bladder and the base of the penis surrounding the passage from the bladder. The prostate may become enlarged and block the flow of urine in an older man; this may necessitate a prostatectomy—that is, removal of the prostate—or a simpler operation to enlarge the channel. After either of these operations, the semen in ejaculation enters the bladder and does not leave the body at the time of ejaculation. This does not change the physical sensation of orgasm, but special instructions may need to be followed if the wife wishes to become pregnant. Currently many have resorted to nutritional means to avoid surgery.