“What About My Sexual Feelings?”

When young people explore the question of relationships with the opposite sex, biblical wisdom sets a constraint on very strong desires. Amid a culture that says self-fulfillment is a moral duty, even when it comes to sexual urges, the question arises in the church: “What about my sexual feelings?”—with the implication that if the feelings are there, it is necessary to act on them. Once, when she was a guest on a BBC talk show, the historical romance novelist Barbara Cartland commented on the racy content that filled the romance novels of a younger writer: “Listen, that isn’t love. Love is something quite different from what we’ve had. We’ve had sex, sex, sex. … There is nothing about love in this at all.” She was striking on a common-sense truth about attraction between men and women: Of course there is a physical, sexual dimension—but that is only one dimension. It cannot replace or displace the emotional, the intellectual, the volitional. The whole issue of our sexuality has to be framed within the context that God, the Designer, has established. Love, in other words, is much more than a drive, much more than a set of involuntary urges to act upon or instincts to heed. Love is n...