Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Sex and Wisdom | The Writings | Proverbs 5

Episode Date: September 24, 2024

Are your ideas of sex influenced by culture? What does God's wisdom have to do with my sex life? Is God's design for sex good for me? In today's episode, Tanya shares how Proverbs 5 warns us against using God's gift of sex outside of His design. Read the Bible with us in 2024! This year, we’re tackling a group of Old Testament books traditionally known as “The Writings”— Psalms, Chronicles, Proverbs, Daniel, Ruth and more! Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Proverbs 5

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Tanya Wilmeth. We all have certain actions or behaviors we believe are fundamentally wrong and would never do. Murder, grand theft, auto. These are things I assume most of us can agree on. But what about texting while driving? Ten years ago, I probably would have put it in the same category.

Definitely not. Ten years ago, the idea of giving my adolescent advice where they could talk to, and exchange photos with strangers. Definitely not. Yet, I pick up my phone while driving far more than I care to admit. People expect me to respond, and often I need the text coming in so I know where to go and what to do, right? And my kids have phones, and similar to smoking in the 70s, I assume this is something we're all going to regret if we don't already. Psychologists say there are about 10% of people who are going to do things that are fundamentally wrong no matter what. There are about 80% of us that think we won't do it, except when the consequences are removed almost entirely. In other words,

if everyone is doing it and nothing markedly bad is happening to them, then 80% of people will do something they believed was fundamentally wrong. That only leaves about 10% who are not going to do it no matter how many people are doing it or how low the stakes are. When it comes to sex, marriage, beauty, pornography, how much are our fundamental values influenced by the masses? Do we have a similar attitude about these things that I have about texting while driving? Sometimes it's necessary. It doesn't hurt anyone. I can be careful.

I have control over this. Everyone else is doing it. Everyone else expects it. It has become a way of life. It both was and was not so different in the time Solomon wrote the first proverbs. Marriage was more about securing a financial future and extending the family line. It was not common to marry for love. It certainly wasn't common to marry for friendship, companionship, and to

lifetime monogamy. Yet, when Solomon prayed and asked God for wisdom, the wisdom God gave him about sex, marriage, beauty, and lust broke through the cultural norms in an outrageous way. God's wisdom gave extreme value, in very erotic terms, to the way sex could absolutely make or break married life, how it could overvalue or undervalue single life, and humanize or dehumanize men and women in our societies. A few years ago, Eric and I were having lunch with our small group leaders, a husband and wife on our pastoral team. We'd known them since college and our families became close friends and we both moved back to the same town. The difference was that in that 10 years that separated us after college, they moved abroad and Eric and I lived in a very conservative town

in the Midwest. Perhaps that's why we were so surprised when during our lunch they looked at us and asked, how's your sex life? We still joke about this. It hasn't become less uncomfortable. Are we really supposed to talk about that with our small group leaders? If we take our key from the Bible, probably so, at least with people who value marriage and people who have wisdom. Proverbs 5 verses 15 through 20 make a lot about how awesome sex can be in really erotic terms. I'll read the verses. I'll let you fill in the gaps with your own understanding of how metaphors and similes work. It says, drink water from your own cistern, flowing water from your own well. Should your springs be scattered abroad, streams of water in streets?

Let them be for yourself alone, and not strangers with you. Let your fountain be blessed and rejoice in the wife of your youth. A lovely dear, a graceful dough, let her breasts fill you at all times with delight. Be intoxicated always in her love. Why should you be intoxicated, my son, with a forbidden woman, and embrace the bosom of an adulteress? For a man's ways are before the eyes of the Lord, and he ponderes all his past. Now, according to verses 18 and 19, the fountain that is blessed, the one filled with sexual delight to the point of being drunk with abundance of desire and satisfaction, is the one who

has sex with a person they are holy and fully committed to in marriage. Now, you may say, but I am committed to my person, and I love them very much. I do think I will marry them someday. Yet, you're willing to give them all of your sexual self and receive all of their sexual self while wearing a parachute, pun not intended. You have an escape plan. You have not received all their financial burdens, family history, and tied your life together. And you have not given them all of yourself, a commitment to honor and protect them all of your life. So you have given and taken something from them, but not them as a whole person. You are a consumer, not a spouse. Now we know from psychology that

consumers are never satisfied. They always need or want more than they have. The question, rather what they have is good enough. They compare what they have to others. Consumerism is driven by lust, not love. Yet, the person that has given all of their devotion and commitment in marriage and received all the other person brings into marriage has a sexual relationship that flourishes under this kind of security and stability. Verses 18 and 19 also show the inverse that sex can break married life.

If it doesn't happen, the delight and intoxication described is missing. If one of you goes outside of the marriage, as it says, to scatter your springs abroad in the city streets, be it emotional or physical or in technology, as in pornography, the fountain doesn't function the same. The wisdom is that sex is a powerful force, able to give much pleasure and strengthen the cords of intimacy, or it can bring a whole pile of mess into our lives when we take on the burden of whatever or whoever we are engaging with. It can make us feel lonely, shameful, disgraced, and unsatisfied. The way we view sex can also undervalue or overvalue single life. I heard a new song on country radio last week about a girl in a bar who wants to sleep with a cute cowboy because she's been on the road so long. And the chorus has the girl saying to the cowboy over and over,

You look like you love me. We undervalue singleness and overvalue lack of commitment when we normalize casual sex. This proverb doesn't normalize sex without commitment at all. It likens when night stands or casual sex to a spring that was meant to provide clean water for someone to drink, but has been disrupted in spurts and sputters down the streets of the city. In 2024, Bumble launched a marketing campaign that nearly ended their business in Korea and Australia. The Bumble ads scattered around major cities were meant to shock, but it didn't work out the way Bumble intended. One ad featuring a Korean woman said,

Thou shalt not give up on dating and become a nun. and another said, celibacy is not the answer. Now, the problem was the way the ads stereotyped, not only the woman from Korea, but what single people want, particularly single women. See, in Korea, the Forby movement in particular, which started in 2019, was meant to address harm done to women. And this movement was particularly outspoken about Bumble's poor choices in this marketing campaign. The ad, they said, didn't tell the truth, because being single doesn't mean you're less valuable to society. The Bible couldn't agree more. Psalm 139 speaks to who we are, and we are no more or more less valuable if we are single, married, divorced, or widowed. It says, for you formed my inward

parts. You knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you for I'm fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works. My soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you. when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance. In your book were written every one of them. The days that were formed for me when as yet there was none of them. Each day of your life is known and precious to God. Each day of that other person's life is known and precious to God.

You are the most valuable part of His creation. You may get married or you may not. you may become widowed or you may have one that you leave behind. God cares and provides for us in every single stage and every circumstance. None is wasted with him. But when we focus more on outward physical beauty and attractiveness and satisfying our desires, we are prone to dehumanize the people we actually care about. Women who look at social media to define beauty will never measure up and will be in a lifelong quest to be something on the outside that masks the way their feelings. feeling on the inside. Men who look at pornography are dissatisfied with real women because intimacy

is more complicated in person. Women don't all look and act like porn stars. When we consumerize beauty and sex and tell ourselves and each other that lust and chasing lust is okay, we dehumanize God's most important creation. Thankfully, we have a rescuer, a savior that left his beauty and glory behind to become sin for us. And you know why? Because he thinks we are beautiful. We are beloved. To him, he sees what we will be. Unlike the sex talks of the 90s and I was there for those, the Bible doesn't tell you that you're damaged goods or that you're unlovable. It also doesn't tell you that you should resolve to try harder. No, the Bible tells you that you need to be rescued, that you need to receive God's mercy and live in his grace, that you need to depend on someone much

stronger than yourself for everything you need, especially your sexuality.