Follow along each week with the message. You can find Relevant in the Events tab of the Bible app each week or use the button below to view the notes directly.
NOTES
We’ve Got Issues
“Sex Issues (Part 2): Pursue Your Two”
Carl Nichols
Great marriages aren’t built on feelings, they’re built on patterns, pursuit, and priority.
Romans 12:1–2
Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
Three Decisions to Transform Your Sex Life:
1. Patterns must be replaced.
Ephesians 5:21-31
Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church—for we are members of his body. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.”
You can’t bring cultural patterns into a covenant relationship and expect kingdom results.
If your thinking doesn’t change, your intimacy won’t either.
Your marriage doesn’t need new feelings, it needs new patterns.
Three Decisions to Transform Your Sex Life:
2. Pursuit cannot be optional.
1 Corinthians 7:1-5
Now for the matters you wrote about: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” But since sexual immorality is occurring, each man should have sexual relations with his own wife, and each woman with her own husband. The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife. Do not deprive each other except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.
What you don’t pursue, you will eventually lose.
Intimacy is not sustained by love, it’s sustained by pursuit.
Three Decisions to Transform Your Sex Life:
3. Prioritize what is important.
Proverbs 5:15-19
Drink water from your own cistern, running water from your own well. Should your springs overflow in the streets, your streams of water in the public squares? Let them be yours alone, never to be shared with strangers. May your fountain be blessed, and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth. A loving doe, a graceful deer—may her breasts satisfy you always, may you ever be intoxicated with her love.
Pursuit is not a feeling. It’s a decision you make over and over again.
Neglecting regular intimacy isn’t just unwise, it’s unbiblical.
1 Corinthians 10:31
So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.
Transformation doesn’t happen when you try harder. It happens when you think differently and act intentionally.