25 Questions You Are Afraid to Ask About Love, Sex and Intimacy (Part 3) - Juli Slattery

Dennis & Barbara's Top 25 All-Time Interviews

25 Questions You Are Afraid to Ask About Love, Sex and Intimacy (Part 1) - Juli Slattery
25 Questions You Are Afraid to Ask About Love, Sex and Intimacy (Part 2) - Juli Slattery
25 Questions You Are Afraid to Ask About Love, Sex and Intimacy (Part 3) - Juli Slattery

FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript

References to conferences, resources, or other special promotions may be obsolete.

The Spiritual Component of Sexuality

Guest: Juli Slattery

From the series: 25 Questions You Are Afraid to Ask (Day 3 of 3)

Bob: Dr. Juli Slattery had been married ten years before there was a breakthrough that occurred in her marriage in the area of marital intimacy.

Juli: We had many years of boredom. You know, one of the first steps I took was I dedicated three months: “Lord, I’m going to pray about this area of my life. I’m going to learn to enjoy it, and I’m going to learn to pursue it.” I got serious about saying: “God, You’re not okay with where we are. I’m not okay with where we are. I’m going to devote myself to helping change that.”

Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Wednesday, October 26th. Our host is the President of FamilyLife®, Dennis Rainey. I'm Bob Lepine. Could it be that a season of prayer and study could actually bring about a breakthrough in your marital intimacy? We’ll talk more about that with Dr. Juli Slattery today. Stay with us.

1:00

And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us. I hope our listeners have been hanging with us here this week as we’ve been talking about a sensitive subject. I have to tell you—just in the conversation, there is such rightness in talking in a healthy—

Dennis: Oh and it’s healthy!

Bob: —biblical way—

Dennis: Yes!

Bob: —about what God created.

Dennis: If there’s a radio program on—on all of radio—it ought to be a Christian radio program talking about sex from a biblical perspective. Dr. Juli Slattery has been with us this week. I just want to tell you: “You’re doing a great job. Your book is excellent—25 Questions You’re Afraid to Ask About Love, Sex and Intimacy.”

Juli—welcome back to the broadcast, first of all. I just want to ask you—you’ve been married since 1994 / you have three sons: “What is the most important lesson you personally have learned about love, sex, and intimacy?”

Juli: That this is spiritual terrain.

2:00

It’s not just a matter of good parenting or having a happy marriage—that sexuality represents a very intense spiritual battle. When I learned that, it was a total game changer in how I approached this in my marriage and parenting.

Dennis: So, in essence, you’re saying: “Who are you listening to?

Juli: Yes; yes.

Dennis: “Are you listening to the Bible and God’s perspective of sex?”—because that’s really the only place you’re going to find it is in the Bible—or “Are you listening, watching, and feeding from what the world is?”

Bob: Yes; when you’re standing at the supermarket checkout line and Cosmo is there—what they’re advertising on the front cover is not, “Here’s how to think biblically about sexuality”; right?

Juli: No; no.

Bob: They’re kind of compartmentalizing it to a purely biological activity that you can disassociate from every other aspect of your life. When people think that way, what happens to their sexuality?

Juli: Well, and I think a lot of Christians do think that way—they think that sexuality is compartmentalized.

3:00

What happens is that you never realize that Jesus needs to be Lord of that area of your life too. In 1 Corinthians 6, it talks about the sexual, and spiritual, and the relational all being intertwined—that you can’t make a sexual choice that isn’t also spiritual. When you start to understand that—that this is a major battle; and if I’m not careful with even the little choices I make, I can be contributing to evil I hate.

Boy, when you get that, it changes—for example, we all hate sex trafficking and sexual exploitation. We hate it / we wish it would go away. But we don’t realize that our choices—for example, to look at pornography feeds into sexual exploitation and trafficking—that we have a part to play in that. Even just a cavalier attitude about casual sex—and you can hook up with whomever you want—you’re contributing to the enemy’s design on tarnishing sexuality.

4:00

That’s really convicting. It changes the way we pray, and it changes the way we act.

Dennis: I want to take a step back and just address a couple, who are listening to our broadcast, where sex has become boring. The romance is kind of out the window—it’s a routine, it’s a duty, it has lost its zest, and—well, whether a man or a woman, it can just be something you just “have to do” or neglect to do.

Bob: Yes. Let’s say somebody comes to you and says, “Okay; here’s our deal…”—a couple in their 30s / they’ve got three kids. Both of them have full-time jobs. They would say: “You know, I guess for the last year, maybe once or twice a month we’ll have sex and it is okay; but it kind of feels more like a chore. I’m honestly—I’m really okay if we just kind of let it phase out of our marriage.” There are people thinking like that; aren’t there?

Juli: There are; absolutely!

5:00

I would say: “First of all, you’re normal. Those are normal seasons of marriage. Second of all, you might be okay with letting it fade away; but God’s not okay with letting it fade away. We know that because, in 1 Corinthians 7, one of the few very specific pieces of marriage advice that we get from the Bible is: “Don’t neglect sexual intimacy except for mutual consent for a time of prayer,”—that’s the only reason why you should be avoiding this.

Now, of course, there are health issues and things like that you may need to work through; but the spirit of it is: “This is very important for you to pursue,”—that would be the challenge of: “God would say ...