“I wish I had heard this 60 years ago.”
She was in her 70s, wiping her eyes as she approached me after the worship service. I’d just preached on the holiness of sex out of 1 Corinthians 6.
“I came of age in the ’60s,” she said. “I was force-fed the ‘free love’ stuff. Sex was like shaking hands. It meant nothing. All that mattered was consent. And I bought it all. The church was backwards; Marilyn Monroe and Hugh Hefner were the future. They were the liberators. But it only gave me decades of suffering, waste. I know God gives grace—I’m not insecure about that. But I’m a bit angry. Why didn’t the church I grew up in teach me these things?”
If pastors want to love and disciple their people well, they must talk about sex. This isn’t just a matter of faithful presence in an ever-changing culture. It’s shepherding.
Here are five ways to describe sex if we want to be both faithful and helpful: compassionate, creational, covenantal, congruent, consecrated.
Compassionate
The people in your church have been harmed by the spirit of the age—some by the sexuality of others, some by their own, most by both. They carry wounds—self-inflicted and others-inflicted. There is shame. Secrecy. Years of suffering tucked behind church smiles.
One in four women and one in 26 men have lived through sexual assault. Spouses have watched pornography or committed adultery. Children are exposed to explicit material long before they even have a category for it—innocence shattered, no way to unsee those things or take it back.
It’s a gut punch.
When Jesus “saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matt. 9:36). That’s the posture we need when we look out at our congregations and consider the weight of their stories.
Without compassion, we betray the significance of the Incarnation. We strip Christ’s passion of its meaning. Our words ring robotic—truth without tenderness—because to love well requires knowing the people in front of you.
The lies of the sexual revolution have left deep wounds in the people of your church. We cannot overstate the damage. The topic of sex is charged with secrecy, shame, confusion, dehumanization, and dopamine doom loops, patterns of pleasure and pain that now run on autopilot.
And this where the compassion of Christ stretches further than our own, reaching both the one who was sinned against and the one who sinned—the one who was harmed and the one who harmed. Our preaching must do the same.
Creational
Sex was God’s idea. He could have designed humans to reproduce asexually like some corals or split through mitosis-like cells. Yet he chose to create a sexually dimorphic species—male and female. He stamped both men and women with his image, and he tethered the begetting of new life to an act of covenant love, reflecting the Trinity’s own overflow of love that called the cosmos into being. Sexual differentiation is on page one of the Bible: “Male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27). And then in almost the next breath comes the blessed command to reproduce: “Be fruitful and increase in number” (v. 28). What a lavish gift God gave our first parents.
Why does oxytocin flood the brain? Why the crescendo of orgasm? Why the magnetic pull of sexual attraction? Why does the Song of Songs revel in mutual delight without any direct reference to procreation? Because the blessed God loves to bless his creatures, and the whole of creation is a theater of his glory. The sexual revolution did not invent sexual pleasure (nor its abuse and perversion) in the 1960s; it merely rebranded what God had already called good and debased it, twisting it out of its intended shape.
Covenantal
“The two will become one flesh” (Eph. 5:31).
To truly know a person—intertwined not just physically but legally, publicly, emotionally, spiritually, financially, and geographically—is an incredible privilege. Hookup culture and “sex-positive” slogans peel sex away from a sense of self. In contrast, Scripture fundamentally welds sex to unity and service. Instead of sex being a product or service that we consume, it is a mutually edifying act that bonds a man and a woman at the height of their togetherness. They have “cleaved.” (The Greek proskollao in Ephesians 5:31 means “glued, bound”; the Hebrew counterpart, davaq, in Genesis 2:24 means “stick, cling, hold fast to.”) This is covenantal language. In other words, you pledge your whole self to your spouse, and sexuality is only one slice of that covenant pie.
Such mutual consent (as we see in 1 Cor. 7:4) would have been radically countercultural in the first century. The idea that a wife has the same sexual “rights” as her husband was unheard of. Even Scripture’s earliest divorce clause (Ex. 21:10–11) targets the husband who willfully deprives his wife of conjugal love, treating that neglect as grounds for dissolving the union.
Godly men do not ask women to act like wives without exchanging vows; godly women do not ask men to act like husbands without doing the same. People say good sex begins in the kitchen. It starts earlier—with having a playful, warm, connected, vowed, loving, and covenantal marriage where the wife is cherished and nourished (Eph. 5:29) and the husband is respected (v. 33).
Congruent
“Go and sin no more,” Jesus tells the woman caught in adultery—and tells every one of us who seeks to follow him. That summons is wildly different from the overly therapeutic style of preaching that simply asks, “How does that make you feel?” or says, “Let’s explore that,” and leaves behavior untouched. A nonjudgmental shrug may sound compassionate, yet it is fundamentally incongruent with the Jesus who grants pardon and commands repentance in the same breath.
Abomination. Shameful. Unclean. Defiled. Whoring. Fornication. Lust. These are biblical words, and as Bible people we should not be ashamed or afraid of properly using them. They are not hateful words; they are diagnostic. This is a matter of both faithfulness and helpfulness.
Helping people name their experience with Scripture’s own words is both good shepherding and good evangelism. If people never understand that they are unclean, the invitation to be “washed … in the name of the Lord Jesus” loses its meaning (1 Cor. 6:11). If they never learn to call a sin shameful or embarrassing, they won’t rejoice when they hear, “Anyone who believes in him will never be put to shame” (Rom. 10:11).
Downplaying the serious nature of sexual sin—or worse, gaslighting people about it—might feel pastorally helpful in the short term, but in the long run it undermines the weightiness and splendor of the grace God freely offers.
Consecrated
Words summoned the world into being, and the Word still upholds the universe. Language is a vital component of good shepherding and formation—sermons, counseling sessions, letters to the congregation—but syllables alone cannot rewire desire or heal shame. Without God’s involvement, this endeavor will ring hollow and not hallow. “For the kingdom of God is not a matter of talk but of power,” says the apostle Paul (1 Cor. 4:20). Good strategy has its place, but it won’t solve our built-in inadequacy unless the Spirit works mightily through preachers, parents, and parishioners alike.
The sexual discipleship of God’s people is ultimately God’s prerogative. Still, what an opportunity we have: to inoculate the saints against the spirit of the age, to tend to wounds before they fester, and to guide both sinners and sufferers into the abundant life found under Christ’s reign. May neither our silence nor our passivity become the hindrance that causes “one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble” (Matt. 18:6). Picture a day, decades from now, when someone who once sat under your preaching tells another pastor, “I wish I’d heard this 60 years ago.” Such words would reveal we failed to love the flocks Jesus left in our care. Let’s leave our congregants no cause to speak those words.
The next time you talk about sex, whether from the pulpit or the counselor’s chair, remember two things: The task is beyond you, and the Helper is with you. Lift your tired eyes to the Bridegroom, who laid down his body for his bride. Then speak with courage—clear and unashamed of the Father’s instruction to his people. Don’t sacrifice clarity for cute and clever turns of phrase. We need to show our people how the Words of Life that we carry shape real choices, comforts real wounds, and calls them into real freedom.
Seth Troutt is the teaching pastor at Ironwood Church in Arizona. His doctoral studies focused on Gen Z, digitization, and bodily self-concept. He writes about emotions, gender, parenting, and the intersection of theology and culture.
