During my years ages twelve through twenty-one sex was my god. Not that sex existed for me very much, mostly in my imagination and lustful heart.
I wasn’t the only one. The sphere formed by my friends and me was pretty much a culture where sex was lord and king. We’d do almost anything for it and we all said so often.
It was the ultimate – the most valued – the subject of most of our thoughts. It consumed us, devoured us; we were the subjects of this selfish carnal king.
Eros was the Greek god of love. The word eros was, through the ages and across the world, translated and transliterated to represent romantic love. But all this love ever was was a selfish sexual type of love. And I use the word love very loosely.
The Greeks also used another word for love: agape. Agape was in its etymological infancy in the first century. Who knew what it would come to mean? Who knows what it would mean today had Jesus not walked the earth teaching about God’s kingdom in the first one-third of that century, and had the apostles – especially Paul and John – not continued for the remainder of that century to use agape to describe the kind of love God has for us?
While early Christianity served to define the Greek agape, it made little to no use of eros. Eros was ungodly, carnal, selfish and evil, whereas agape was (and still is) the opposite.
At age twenty-one, I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior and had a radical, born-again shift in my life; virtually everything changed for me, not the least of which was my view of sex. Eros still presented itself to me, inviting me to serve it. And even after forty-two years of walking with God (21 + 42 = 63), eros is still probably my greatest foe.
Not that I have already obtained, as Paul wrote (Philippians 3:12), but this one thing I know (now me, not Paul), that eros is no good to anyone unless agape is applied to it.
My book, Interwoven Love, describes how to interweave agape with all the Greek loves to make them what God intended them to be. In the book I use the term (my own) holy eros to represent what a life of sex and romance should look like for a Godly couple.
To simplify it, it should include the following three threads:
- Marriage Covenant. God makes it clear in Scripture that sex is reserved for the husband and wife, and no other arrangement is a viable substitute.
- Husband & Wife Surrendered to Jesus. (This really should be number one.) A believer in Christ has received the Holy Spirit to abide in their heart. Which means they have dwelling within them the very one who produces agape-love.
- Not Self-seeking & Not Delighting in Evil but Rejoicing in the Truth. These are two of the defining traits of agape-love Paul listed in 1 Corinthians 13. These two traits serve to sanctify eros as much as any of the others. A selfish sex life is domineering and unpleasant for the other partner while putting the other’s needs first make sex better for both partners. An example of evil is what you might see in porn. But, contrary to the lustful eros message of this Christ-opposing world, of which porn is an accurate representative, the truth is that the best sex isn’t carnal, making human anatomy and physical pleasure a god, but is actually always both spouses serving each other in every part of their relationship, not just the bedroom.
So, there it is. Now take these words to heart and sanctify your sex life.
