God Loves Sex: An Honest Conversation about Sexual Desire and Holiness
Overview
The church’s stance on sexual matters has been clear throughout history: all sexual activity outside the boundaries of Christian marriage is sin. So we hide our struggles and pretend to live above the erotic fray, or else we embrace the culture’s redefinition of what is acceptable. But in this book Allender and Longman explore what the Bible really says about sexual desire and sexual intimacy.
God Loves Sex offers a truly liberating, godly view of holy sensuality by recovering the clear meaning of the Song of Songs as God-sanctioned eroticism. Then it uses that lens to answer questions posed by a fictional new Christian struggling with expectations of sexual purity. It asks provocative questions, such as “What does it mean to be both holy and filled with rich sexual desire?” and “How can our sexual struggles take us deeper into the purposes of God?”
Pairing psychological insight with sound biblical scholarship, the authors bring desire and sex out into the open, allowing Christians of any age and any marital status to understand sex the way God meant it to be.
- Offers counsel on sexuality and the Christian life
- Provides practical advice from the Song of Songs
- Combines biblical truth with an awareness of modern psychology
Top Highlights
“Our central conviction, which we will explore throughout the book, is that sex is a window into the heart of God, pure and simple, even though our experience of sexuality is usually complex and tinged with the debris of the fall.” (Page 15)
“Sexual harm comes through relationships, and sexual healing equally comes through the process of reclaiming our sexuality in relationship with our spouse and others.” (Page 9)
“Sex is so wonderful that the danger is to engage in a sexual relationship impulsively and prematurely.” (Page 17)
“Sexual desire is the physical prompting to move toward a pleasure that aches to escape division, loneliness, or shame. Sexual desire is not so much the desire for orgasm as it is the desire to be caught up in the sensuality of beauty that transcends the here and now for a timeless, undivided, unsoiled innocence. All other dimensions of lesser or distorted desire that we call sexual are cheap counterfeits or, far worse, a conscious effort to evade the Creator’s design or transgress the Creator’s boundaries.” (Page 43)
“Desire is not meant to become a demand, nor is it intended to merely fade away like footprints in the sand. Desire is meant to awaken us to be alert and attentive to the other, honoring their desire, but in a way that also honors one’s own desires and sense of self.” (Page 42)
In a world that has gone sexually insane, where sex most often lives in confusion, perversion, compulsion, guilt, and shame, it is wonderful that Allender and Longman use the Bible’s sex song to restore sex to its original created beauty. Along the way, with refreshing and liberating honesty, they break the church’s code of sexual silence and offer us sex wisdom that only comes when we stop being afraid and start listening to the God who fashioned sex for his glory and our good and who meets us in our sexual struggles with remarkable grace.
—Paul David Tripp, author, Sex & Money: Pleasures That Leave You Empty and Grace That Satisfies
It’s rare to find a Christian book about sex that is real and helpful and honest. God Loves Sex is all of that and more. I’m grateful the authors tell the truth about a subject so complex and beautiful and ultimately give us hope and guidance to redeem the power of intimacy in our own lives.
—Donald Miller, author, Blue Like Jazz and A Million Miles in a Thousand Years
Wise. Playful. Sacred. Surprising. This is not your average Christian book on sex. This is something better—and it is going to bring clarity, healing, and hope to a lot of people. I loved it from the first chapter.
—John Eldredge, author, Wild at Heart
- Title: God Loves Sex: An Honest Conversation about Sexual Desire and Holiness
- Authors: Dan B. Allender, Tremper Longman III
- Publisher: Baker
- Print Publication Date: 2014
- Logos Release Date: 2014
- Pages: 172
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
- Subject: Sex › Religious aspects--Christianity
- ISBNs: 9781441226877, 9780801015663, 1441226877, 0801015669
- Resource ID: LLS:GODLOVESSEX
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2022-09-30T00:18:43Z
Dan B. Allender is professor of counseling psychology and is former president of Mars Hill Graduate School in Seattle, Washington. He travels and speaks extensively on sexual-abuse recovery, love and forgiveness, worship and other related topics. Allender is the author of nine books, including The Wounded Heart: Hope for Adult Victims of Childhood Sexual Abuse, which has sold over 400,000 copies.
Tremper Longman III is the Robert H. Gundry Professor of Biblical Studies at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. Before coming to Westmont, he taught at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia for 18 years. He has authored or coauthored numerous books, including An Introduction to the Old Testament, How to Read Proverbs, and commentaries on Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs, Jeremiah and Lamentations, and Daniel.
