📖 Pastoral & Christian Ethics — Unit 8: Sexual Ethics, Purity & Gender

Section 8.1 — The Biblical Design for Sex and Marriage

We must begin where Scripture begins, with a good gift and not a prohibition, because the church has too often let the world cast it as the enemy of sex when in fact the church is its truest friend. God made human beings male and female, and He made sexual union, and He pronounced His creation very good before sin ever entered. Sex is not a regrettable necessity or a shameful thing the Bible reluctantly tolerates. It is the deliberate design of a wise and generous God, who gave it to husband and wife as a gift of union, delight, and the bringing forth of life. "Marriage is honorable among all, and the bed undefiled" (Hebrews 13:4). Honorable. Undefiled. Let no preacher leave his people thinking God is embarrassed by what God Himself created.

But the goodness of the gift is inseparable from the design of the Giver, and here the world and the Word part ways. From the beginning, sexual union was ordered to one place and one place only: the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman. "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh" (Genesis 2:24). The one-flesh union is covenantal, not casual; it is the bodily seal of a lifelong promise, not a recreation to be enjoyed wherever desire leads. This is why Scripture calls for chastity outside of marriage and fidelity within it — not because it thinks little of sex, but because it thinks so much of it. You honor a fire by keeping it in the hearth, where it warms the house; loosed from the hearth, the same fire burns the house down. The Christian sexual ethic is not the suppression of a good thing but the protection of it.

This vision of the male-and-female, one-flesh covenant rests on the design we studied in Unit 4, and it is the standard against which every question in this unit will be measured. Teach it positively. A people who have seen the beauty of God's design will be far better armed against its counterfeits than a people who have only ever heard what is forbidden.

Section 8.2 — Pornography: Its Destructiveness and the Path to Freedom

Of all the sexual sins now besieging the church, none is more widespread or more quietly devastating than pornography, and the pastor who imagines his congregation untouched by it is dreaming. It reaches into Christian homes, into the lives of officeholders, and, let us be honest, into the studies of pastors themselves. We must speak of it plainly and without panic, as physicians speak of a disease they intend to treat.

Understand first why it is so destructive. Pornography takes human beings made in the image of God and trains the heart to consume them as objects for one's own use — the very opposite of love, which gives itself for the good of another. It is, by our Lord's own definition, a form of adultery committed in the heart: "whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (Matthew 5:28). And it does not stay still. It follows the pattern of every enslaving sin, demanding more to deliver less, isolating its captive, corroding his capacity for real intimacy, and feeding always on secrecy — for as we learned in earlier units, sin grows strong in the dark and withers in the light.

Which points directly to the path of freedom, and there is a real path; no one need despair. The first step is confession that drags the thing into the light: "Confess your trespasses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed" (James 5:16). The secret sin thrives in darkness and isolation; once spoken aloud to a trusted brother, its power to control through shame and secrecy is broken, even though the underlying struggle itself is not instantly resolved. Then comes honest accountability — not a one-time confession but an ongoing openness to men permitted to ask the hard questions. And undergirding it all must be the gospel, for here above all a man must remember the lesson of Unit 2: holiness is the fruit of the Spirit, not the achievement of gritted teeth. Willpower alone has never broken an enslaving sin and never will; what breaks it is the grace of God working in a soul that has stopped fighting alone. The pastor's task is to address this sin in his flock without ever winking at it as harmless or crushing the struggler as hopeless — to call men to repentance and to walk patiently beside them in it, knowing that freedom in Christ is real and that many who now stand free once thought they never could.

Section 8.3 — Pastoral Wisdom in Contested Cultural Questions

Some of the questions raised in this unit have become denominational and cultural flashpoints. This course does not require students to adopt a CTS position on those disputed questions. Pastors should study the relevant biblical texts carefully, understand how faithful Christians and their church traditions interpret them, and teach within their ministry setting with theological integrity, humility, and pastoral care.

Whatever conclusion a pastor or church reaches, every person must be treated as one who bears the image of God. Controversy never gives Christians permission for contempt, cruelty, caricature, or careless speech. Pastoral ministry deals with people rather than abstractions, and difficult questions should therefore be approached with patience, careful listening, truthfulness, and compassion.

A pastor must guard against treating any single sin as though it sat in a class by itself, more disqualifying than the sins a congregation tolerates comfortably in itself. The very word Scripture most often uses for sin, hamartia, means simply to miss the mark — and Scripture's own lists of sin are strikingly plural, never built around one offense alone. Our Lord Himself gave such a list: "For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lewdness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within and defile a man" (Mark 7:21-23, NKJV). Thirteen things named in one breath, with no ranking among them — pride and foolishness standing beside murder and adultery. A pastor who has read that list carefully will be slow to build his preaching, or his congregation's sense of shame, around any single item drawn out and elevated above the rest.

History offers a case in point, and Scripture is not silent on it. God's own verdict on divorce is plain: "For the LORD God of Israel says That He hates divorce, for it covers one's garment with violence," says the LORD of hosts (Malachi 2:16, NKJV). And Christ Himself named the sin directly: "whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery" (Matthew 19:9, NKJV). This is not a minor matter softened by time; it is a sin God says He hates, and one Christ calls by its full name. Yet a generation or two ago, many congregations treated divorce as very nearly the unpardonable sin, and a divorced believer often carried a weight of shame the rest of the church never had to carry for its own besetting faults. Today, with a large share of any congregation having experienced divorce and remarriage, that same sin — real, named, and taken seriously by God Himself — is rarely singled out that way at all, and divorced and remarried believers sit in the pew forgiven, restored, and serving alongside everyone else. If a sin God hates and Christ names adultery can be received into the ordinary, forgiven life of the church without being held over anyone forever, no pastor has grounds to treat some other struggle as though it stood outside that same grace.

Scripture also distinguishes, as it does with every temptation, between an attraction and an act. To be tempted is not the same as to sin; every believer, whatever the particular shape of his own temptations, wages the same war against desires he did not choose and does not fully control (James 1:14-15). Whatever chastity or repentance a pastor calls a congregant to, he is calling him to nothing stranger or harder than what he asks of every believer in the church — the same call to hold every desire under Christ that every saint, whatever his own struggle, is asked to carry.

No person's past, and no person's present struggle, places him beyond grace. The gospel that changed the church's comfortable sins can change any sin, and a pastor who has watched an entire congregation's attitude toward one sin soften over a generation should be slow to declare any other sin the permanent exception.

CTS distinguishes between doctrines central to the gospel and secondary or disputed questions on which evangelical churches may draw their boundaries differently. Students should learn to explain their own convictions from Scripture without pretending that every Christian who interprets a difficult passage differently has abandoned biblical authority. The church is called to hold the truth it believes with the posture of a hospital, not a battlefield — treating every person who walks through its doors, whatever he is carrying, as someone Christ died to heal, not an enemy to be defeated. The goal here is not to settle a denominational controversy for the student, but to form pastors who can handle controversial questions biblically, accurately, and graciously.

Section 8.4 — Truth-Telling with Compassion in the Local Church

All of this comes to rest, finally, not in a position paper but in a pastoral practice carried out in the local church, for that is where sexual discipleship actually happens or fails to happen. And make no mistake: every person in your congregation is being discipled in his sexuality by something. If the church is silent, the culture will not be; it catechizes relentlessly, through every screen and song, and a people left untaught by their pastor will simply be taught by the world instead. Silence is not neutrality. The pastor who will not speak of these things has not avoided forming his people's sexual ethic; he has merely surrendered the forming of it to other hands.

So teach — and teach positively, not only prohibitively. A congregation that hears only the list of forbidden things will conclude that Christianity is against sex, and will be defenseless when the world offers what looks like a more generous vision. But a congregation that has been shown the beauty and meaning of God's design — sex as covenant, the body as the Lord's, marriage as a picture of Christ and the church, singleness as an honorable and fruitful calling — has been given something worth living for, and the prohibitions then make sense as the fence around a garden rather than the bars of a cage.

Through all of it, hold the posture this course has pressed again and again: never truth without love, and never a love that abandons truth. The two are not in tension; they meet perfectly in Christ, who was full of grace and truth, and who neither lowered the standard for the woman caught in sin nor crushed her beneath it. Let your church be a community where strugglers of every kind — and that is all of us — find at once the clear call to holiness and the abundant means of grace and honest friendship to pursue it. No one who walks through your doors is beyond the reach of the gospel, and there is no sexual sin the blood of Christ cannot cleanse and no sexual brokenness His grace cannot, in time, redeem. Preach that, and live as though you believe it, and you will be the kind of shepherd these wounded and confused generations most desperately need.