The Weekly Perspective
by Burke Shade, Associate Pastor
How shocking! “Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely deer, a graceful doe. Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight; be intoxicated always in her love” (Proverbs 5:18–19).
Can you believe Pastor Thacker read that verse, publicly, at a wedding? What boldness!
Christians and Christian pastors too often dance around the subject of sexuality, particularly in wedding sermons. What are they afraid of ? We are created sexual beings and we are commanded to be sexual in marriage: be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth… to do so you have to have sexual relations to have kids in order to multiply and fill the earth! We all know that; so let’s talk about it. The scriptures certainly do.
God not only made our bodies, but gave sexual desires for those of the opposite sex. He did so to facilitate sexual relations and the enjoyment of those relations. As Doug Wilson once wrote, “Men are hard and women are soft. Men like that about women and women like that about men.”
So a good wedding sermon should address the elephant in the room and demonstrably show what a blessing that elephant is, and that the enjoyment of sexual relations in marriage is wonderful! Of course, the world gets this wrong and abuses women’s bodies in pornography all over the place. But we don’t take our cue from the world, but from the Lord: “Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vaporous life that he has given you under the sun, because that is your reward in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 9:9).
How shocking! But how wonderful!