Healing Disordered Sexuality

Without the sound counsel of the Word of God, sexuality breaks out of its enclosure like a wild stallion that suddenly rebels, kicks down the fence containing it, and runs off, destroying everything around it. When human beings step outside the protective boundaries of the Word of God, they inevitably leave a pile of rubble behind them. One of the first things the devil tries to damage and corrupt is the sexuality of men and women, their masculine and feminine identity, as we see in our time.

Satan knows that sexuality plays a central role in the life of a man or woman. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, declared that human sexuality is the driving force of society. It possesses incredible power. It causes wars, and it also inspires poems; it is an incredibly creative force, and also a destructive one. It is a divine energy, but it can also become demonic.

The devil knows the power of that force, and that is why, when he wants to deal a death blow to a society, he first goes after its sexuality and begins pulling out pieces and tugging at wires, inspiring human beings to start tinkering and experimenting with that delicate mechanism. It is a sublime but extremely fragile mechanism. Once it is destabilized, how can it be restored to its original balance? Only God, who designed it, knows how to do so.

The more modern man experiments with human sexuality, the more he distorts and destabilizes it. The harder he strives to free himself from the sexual boundaries established by God, the more disoriented he becomes and the more he bleeds. When a society bleeds through its sexuality, everything else is destabilized—the family, parenthood, government, and moral, ethical, and religious values. Chaos is sown in society.

In the modern world, for example, we observe a society in which femininity has gained an unbalanced degree of preeminence. We can see periods in history when masculinity becomes demonic and oppressive. We see countries in the Middle East, for example, where men pervert and oppress women by literally putting them inside a sack, turning them into sad objects with no lives of their own.

But society can also go to the opposite extreme, where femininity becomes an equally oppressive and suffocating force. There is a feminine sensibility that can subtly permeate society, establish its influence everywhere, and color everything. In countries such as the United States, this phenomenon manifests itself through growing homosexuality, emasculated fathers, insecure men, and a ridiculous and inept masculinity, as we see it portrayed on television and in Hollywood. We see it in religion as well.

God made women and men for certain specific and complementary roles. When a man does not take his place and a woman occupies the space he leaves vacant, destructive patterns begin to emerge, and society loses its course and sense of direction. That is why, in our time, the Church must be a place where men embody a healed masculinity and women reflect a femininity consistent with God’s design.

We must ask the Lord to make our churches places where issues involving sexuality or gender—sexual identity—can be properly addressed. What does it mean to be a man or a woman? What is God’s balanced design for a husband or a wife? Then, as we work through these issues in accordance with the values of the gospel, setting our homes right, setting our masculinity right, and setting our femininity right, we will be able to serve as a reasonable and illuminating voice for our society out there.

When society sees our homes functioning according to God’s model; when it sees men who are masculine and tender; when it sees women who are feminine, strong, and self-confident; when it sees a man and a woman living together and each giving the other their proper place in a beautiful dance of complementarity, society will say, ‘I want that too.’ Then the values of the Kingdom of God will be able to offer a valid, attractive, and credible alternative to that world out there, which desperately needs those values.