Two words we need to reclaim: Intimacy and Chastity

I think it’s a travesty that the word intimate has been adopted by our culture mainly to mean sexual.

We all need intimate relationships.

For Jesus, the central question is loving each other and there is no way to love someone without letting them into your heart. Coming and bouncing off people on a Sunday morning is not what Jesus has in mind. He is talking about the kind of relationships where people actually know the best of you and they know the worst of you.

Consider these words:

My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command.

John 15:12-14NIV

I don’t think our culture shapes us to do this. I don’t think we believe the church is a place where we love each other deeply from the heart. For Jesus the idea isn’t that we come to church on a Sunday morning and have a nice time together, it is that we are a family, the family of God.

Peter who towards the end of his life is trying to help the churches hold it together says this:

Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for each other, love one another deeply, from the heart.

1 Peter 1:22NIV

One of the great problems for us is we have a faulty idea of what community is and what relationships are. We’ve even produced an individualistic approach to church that says the church is here to meet my needs rather than a family I belong to and so when the church is no longer meeting my needs I go and find somewhere else and I become a consumer of church.

If you’re looking for a community to meet your needs you’re actually dangerous. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote:

 Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Life Together Kindle Edition.

If you have in your mind the kind of community you need to feel better you’re actually dangerous in that community because you’re dealing with an idea in your head rather than the messy real people in front of you.

Community doesn’t exist for you.

A healthy community exists for its weakest members, and the paradox is that the more you give up your needs for their sake, the more you will find the community meets your needs. The less you make intimacy your goal, the more you will experience it.

Which brings us to the second word we need to reclaim: Chastity.

The Collins Dictionary says:

Chastity is the state of not having sex with anyone, or of only having sex with your husband or wife. [old-fashioned] 

Do you notice the brackets? Chastity is clearly not something we talk about anymore. Chastity is an intentional choice to limit your own freedom to pursue your sex drive. Chastity is actually an essential ingredient in community because it is an intentional choice to put others ahead of yourself, but it gets a bad rap because we live in a culture that says that is impossible. Bonhoeffer again:

The essential thing about chastity is not a renunciation of pleasure but an all-encompassing orientation of life toward a goal. Where there is no such orientation, chastity inevitably deteriorates into the ridiculous. Chaste living is the prerequisite for clear and superior thoughts.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison: DBW 8 (Kindle Locations 14151-14153)

This is the point at which true Christianity most clearly diverges from popular culture. One of Jesus’ clearest teachings was that we were to give up our own agenda for his sake:

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.

Matthew 16:24-25 NIV

What Jesus is saying here is that if you want to follow what feels good, if you want to trust your own internal world and let the messiness of your internal world set your agenda, feel free to do it.

But you will lose your life.

If you’re ready to give up your life for Jesus sake you will actually find your life. Bonhoeffer says you need an all-encompassing goal beyond yourself. The secret to managing our sexuality isn’t to focus on sexuality, but rather, because of our love for Jesus, have other people and other goals in our lives that are more important to us than our sex drives.

One of the things that really doesn’t work is trying to do it for the sake of guilt. One of the things that doesn’t work is saying “I won’t focus on sex, I won’t focus on sex, I won’t focus on sex.” You need an external focus beyond yourself.

In the same way the Apostle Paul did in his time, we need to challenge the assumption that sex is a need like hunger or sleep. Paul put it this way:

You say, “Food for the stomach and the stomach for food, and God will destroy them both.” The body, however, is not meant for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.

1 Corinthians 6:13 NIV

Let’s be honest, though, this is simply weird in our world.

John Mark Comer names well the assumptions that underlie most human interactions in our world:

The secular world’s dominant idea (read, working theory of reality) is that human beings are animals, simply aided by time and chance to evolve into the dominant species on our planet; monogamy is “not natural,” as we rarely see it in “other animals.” In fact, men evolved to spread their seed over as many women as possible for the survival of our species— evolutionary biology’s way of saying, “Boys will be boys.” In such an idea matrix, the prevailing consensus is “Sex is just play for grown-ups. What’s the big deal? It’s just an animal pleasure, no different from hunger or thirst. If you do pursue marriage, that’s fine; be true to yourself. But you should at least live with your partner for a while to make sure you’re a good fit. And if it doesn’t work out, the important thing is to be happy.” (After all, there’s no meaning to life; it’s just a glorious accident.) And of course marriage, sexual norms, and even gender itself are all social constructs, often created by elites to maintain power.

John Mark Comer. Live No Lies (pp. 31-32)

The Christian church has not really had a clear enough answer to the sexualisation of culture. Too often the idealisation of marriage, as the answer to all of the complexity of self-centered sexuality has resulted in a culture of shame as Christian kids, are not given tools to manage their sex-drives and unsurprisingly end up making choices they wish they hadn’t.

This watered down version of Chastity is still an idealisation of sex and the underlying assumption that it is a need that needs to be fulfilled.

The idea that it is possible to live a full life without sex is as poorly promoted within the church as without the church, it’s just that within the church we give the impression that marriage is the answer, and that somehow single people are second-class citizens. This culture is and anti-biblical and anti-Christ.

Paul actually encourages people to be single:

 I would like you to be free from concern. An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord’s affairs—how he can please the Lord. But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world—how he can please his wife— and his interests are divided. An unmarried woman or virgin is concerned about the Lord’s affairs: Her aim is to be devoted to the Lord in both body and spirit. But a married woman is concerned about the affairs of this world—how she can please her husband. I am saying this for your own good, not to restrict you, but that you may live in a right way in undivided devotion to the Lord.

1 Corinthians 7:32-35NIV

Whenever the Church has been at its best, it’s often been led by single people right the way through Church history because single people have the space that married people, particularly married people with young kids just don’t have.

Single people have the space to care in ways that married people don’t.

One of my heroes is my Aunty Anne. She has not ever married, but she became the glue that held an international mission movement together because she loved its people. She didn’t have any biological children of her own, but she has children all over the world who she was, and is ready to die for. She was the glue that held Fusion together.

I think we’ve got to find a way to honour and create space for the single people amongst us. And as we’ve already said, the Church is a place where you’re meant to be able to have intimate relationships.

Single people need the church to be a deeply connected family because they, like all people, need intimacy and connection with people who are different from them. The lie of the enemy is that you can only have intimacy and connection through sex.

Not being married should not be a reason not to have intimacy.

It’s not only single people though, who need to rediscover chastity and intimacy in the context of the church. Married people need the church to be a deeply connected family because no marriage can produce all that the other person needs and no parents can give all that their kids need. The lie of the enemy is that the nuclear family (husband, wife and kids) is all the intimacy and connection you need.

Chastity and Intimacy may be words that are not commonly used anymore, but they are words we need to rediscover if we are to live the kind of healthy and whole lives we were created for.

This reflection builds on what I was speaking about on Sunday. You can see the full message here or listen to the podcast here.