My friend and mentor Chuck Colson used to say over and over that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is “the great proposal.” Not only is it, as he wrote in his book The Faith, an invitation for “one and all — black, white, rich, poor,” to the great wedding feast; it’s also an invitation to human flourishing, to a better way of life, here and now.
That’s because the Christian faith understands human beings for what we truly are: Made in the very image of God, possessors of a weighty and eternal dignity, but nonetheless fallen. And, left to our own devices, we are prone to, well, mess things up.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the area of human sexuality. Just take a look around. I’ll spare you all the statistics, but you know the carnage the sexual revolution and sexual “liberation” have left in their wake: soaring divorce rates, the breakup of families, abortion, teen pregnancy, AIDS and a host of sexually transmitted diseases, and on and on.
And of course our culture has become astoundingly vulgar when it comes to sexuality.
You’d almost think a group of particularly bad eighth-grade boys were making most of the decisions about what TV, movies, and songs were being made.
Part of the reason for the mess, of course, is that modern culture denies that we humans — our bodies included — are anything more than a mere product of random chance, a potpourri of atoms, molecules, and stuff. With nothing beyond this life, pleasure becomes the main goal; use your body however you want.
This is so beneath the dignity of human beings made in the image of God. Human beings whose very bodies — like Jesus’s body — will be resurrected at the last day.
But maybe the worse part about all of this is sex is actually one of the truly precious and great gifts that God has given to us. It is part and parcel of His road map to human flourishing and human happiness. Yet we humans decided to blaze our own trail.
And, because we’ve strayed from the map, we’ve messed things up.
This is a hugely important topic these days, which is why my BreakPoint colleague John Stonestreet has spent four weeks on the "Two-Minute Warning" discussing sexual brokenness. And today, he talks about the road map back to sexual wholeness — for us as individuals, as a Church, and as a society. I urge you, go to ColsonCenter.org to hear and see what John has to say about God’s plan for human sex and about cultivating virtue and accountability within the church.
If you’ve missed John’s other three installments, not to worry. We’ve gathered his “Two-Minute Warning” videos onto a flash drive. And we’ve included a brilliant series and small group study written by Colson Center theologian T.M. Moore. T.M. lays out the biblical understanding of the goodness, the richness, and the beauty of human sexuality as God intended it — and how it ultimately points to God’s love for us.
We’ve called the series “Sexual Brokenness,” and you can get it at ColsonCenter.org.
The goodness, the richness, and the beauty of conjugal love between a husband and wife, within the context of God’s loving plan for families, for society and for the church — these are the things we Christians simply must model for a sexually broken world. And for the sexually broken within our own ranks.
That, of course, is only a part of the great proposal of Christianity that Chuck talked about. But now more than ever, it’s an extraordinarily important part.
Eric Metaxas is a co-host of BreakPoint Radio and a best-selling author whose biographies, children's books, and popular apologetics have been translated into more than a dozen languages.
BreakPoint commentary airs each weekday on more than one thousand outlets with an estimated listening audience of one million people. BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today's news and trends via radio, interactive media, and print.
Publication date: August 2, 2012