Monday, December 13, 2010

Sex - A Candid Convo Part 4 (Sunday, December 5, 2010)

Sex - A Candid Convo Part 4 (Sky94 Service) [Listen Here]

As you can see, I'm a little behind in these sermons. This is from two Sundays ago and is the final part of the Sex sermon series. The set up for this sermon was rather unique, as it was a not so much a sermon as an interview. At the beginning of this sermon series, we - as the congregation - wrote down/texted questions about the topic of sex. The purpose of this sermon was to answer those questions from a Biblical perspective. Because of how this sermon was set up, it will be very difficult for me to summarize.

That said, I strongly recommend you just listen to the sermon online. I so strongly recommend it, that I'm even going to link it on this blog. To listen, Click Here. Pastor Garlow and Dr. Welsh answer some interesting questions, but the constant topic changes and bridging between topics makes this a sermon that really can't come across well in text.

However, I still have things to say about it myself. If you're extremely interested in my opinion of the sermon or just want the quick bullet points on it that I plan to give you, you can continue reading. Otherwise, just click the link and don't worry about the rest of this post.

The first question of the night pertained to whether or not hand jobs were considered sex. Dr. Welsh's response was that hands jobs are a form of sex. Instead of referring directly to his Bible, Dr. Welsh looked first to the biology behind this answer. Physiologically speaking, this act has the same effects on the body and the brain as sex does. The same hormones and neurons are triggered; therefore, as far as your brain is concerned, you're having sex.

Pulling in another topic of the night, pornography was also discussed. Is porn bad? The answer is yes. Looking deeper into the rational, it covers more than porn. This applies to molestation, rape, incest, and many other such topics. When the brain sees or experiences something, a process takes place called imprinting. Essentially, when the brain finds itself experiencing a similar situation to something in the past, it will dredge up what it felt or saw in the past. Dr. Welsh said that many women who discover their husbands are addicted to porn say that it feels to them as though he was cheating on her. Men who consistently use porn, or have in the past, find that those images come into their head during sex. This goes back to imprinting. No wonder those women feel as though their husbands are cheating on them. Now there are many other reasons porn is bad, but the imprinting is really what I want to touch on here.

This imprinting concept also works with dating. The way Dr. Welsh put it was that for every person you date, you leave a little bit of yourself with them even after you breakup. Now this sounds cliche, but biologically speaking its an accurate statement. You have a little bit of everyone you dated before imprinted in your Hypothalamus and you're imprinted in theirs. As far as sex goes, because of imprinting, your brain will compare every sexual experience with ones you've had previously. With every partner, your chances of being satisfied for life drop as the competition rises with each time. In addition, bad experiences with sex - this is where molestation, rape, incest, a bad relationship, etc come in - affect your ability to be fulfilled, because the brain reacts to the current situation, even if it is a good one - as it did the previous one.

As a Biology major, I found this all extremely interesting and quite compelling. In an earlier post, I mentioned something about how God made you, so he knows how what will make you most sexually fulfilled. For me, this proved that point. These Biblical truths about dating and sex aren't just arbitrary rules on how things should be; they're based in the very biological makeup of the human species.

On a completely unrelated note, there was one more thing from the sermon that I would like to bring up. It stemmed from the question: if the average marriage age is in your late twenties nowadays, why is the sex drive so strong before that, when you can't even "use it"? The quick answer to that is it's a cultural issue. The marriage age has historically been much earlier in life. Regardless, the point that I wanted to make with this was that Pastor Garlow mentioned something that I very much agree with. In general, people don't get married not because the girl doesn't want to, but because the guy doesn't want to. [Note from the author of this blog: The phrase, "why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free" comes to mind.] Therefore, ladies, if women started saying no to sex and made the man marry her first, that marriage age will drop pretty quickly.

There was much more to this sermon, so I hope you listen to it. Yesterday's sermon will be coming as soon as possible.

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