Originally published May 8, 2026 for our weekly Issue of Mindful Intelligence Advisor. Subscribe to get weekly issues.
FINAL THOUGHT – SEX AS CHRISTIAN SPIRITUAL FULFILMENT
By Bill Collier, Publisher
“Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely deer, a graceful doe. Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight; be intoxicated always in her love. Why should you be intoxicated, my son, with a forbidden woman and embrace the bosom of an adulteress?” – Proverbs 5:18-20
Sex is a spiritual communion between two souls meant to be together for life. Marriage is the place God pre-ordained for this union, because marriage, in its totality, is a shadow and representation of the love between Jesus Christ for the church, the Body of Christ, and between the church, who are the Bride of Christ, and their Lord.
This is so holy and sacrosanct; I can hardly find the words to convey how eternal and sacred this institution is. It does not end but changes from just between two people to the whole Body of Christ and Jesus Himself.
When I die, I will not be my late wife Dora’s husband nor will she be my wife; we are the bride of Christ forever, married to God in a perfect union.
People do not seem to understand marriage and sex from a pure Kingdom perspective. They miss the best God has to offer. We all miss it to some degree, but those who treat intimacy like a short round of sexual pleasure, while they treat marriage like dating with paperwork, are denying THEMSELVES God’s best for their lives.
I’m not here to judge any one person. I will discern and judge between what I see as right and wrong, from the absolute moral standards down to personal preferences, but not individuals.
If you are reading this and feel defensive, because this isn’t something you have lived, understand that I hadn’t lived it myself, I came to live it, but I spent a lot of my youth violating it and didn’t even understand what I was doing.
I invite you to consider God’s way.
You say, “who are you to say what God’s way is?”
Well, I have 66 sacred books and thousands of years of moral and doctrinal orthodoxy behind what I believe. In short, I didn’t just wake up one day and pretend I was hearing the voice of God or that my opinion about things was the utter sacred truth of God’s design.
Nonetheless, you may still think you understand what God wants better. You may reject the very notion of God’s existence. That’s between God and you.
I don’t judge you as a bad person or someone beneath me because you don’t agree that what I’m saying is God’s blueprint for marriage and sex. I just feel that you are missing God’s best, and my desire is for everyone to have God’s best for their lives with excellence.
I can have a viewpoint about God’s design for sex, marriage, and family, without judging you as a bad person or beneath me.
When it comes to God’s righteousness, I have fallen utterly short and throw myself at the foot of the Cross in total obedience and surrender. As St. Paul stated, “The good I would do I do not do and the bad I do not want to do, I do” (Romans 7:19). But thanks be to God for the sacrifice and resurrection of Jesus Christ that saves me from this body of sin.
So, I present not a judgement against you but an offer of a better way. I went down my own unrighteous sexual path.
It was 1986, or maybe early 1987, while I was still confusing sex for love and love for sex, when that confusion finally broke me, for the better.
At one moment, after an indulgence that left me empty, I chose to deny myself any sexual gratification until I met the woman I would marry until death did part us.
I was still in denial of Christ. Yet even without Christ, I came to understand the unfruitfulness of sex outside of marriage. I would still do other awful things after I was sexually broken before truly repenting and renewing my covenant with God by faith in Jesus Christ.
After I came back to Christ, the vow became even more meaningful, as my views of healthy sexuality aligned with God’s. It is because of this vow that my wife and I didn’t so much as kiss until after the Pastor declared us married.
We could never bring back our virginity, we could not give that gift to each other; but we had both made a choice years before we met to refrain from sexual gratification until marriage.
The perfection of love is found in marriage and the pinnacle of that love shared is sexual intimacy, which, while gratifying, is about the connection; the gratification being a side effect, not the main show.
Experiencing pleasure is a good thing in marriage and finding ways to bring this type of pleasure to each other is an adventure; at least it can be, and optimally will be.
What do you do now if you have pretty much trashed God’s righteous standards in love, sex, and marriage? You stop. You search God’s Word for His standards. Don’t just read a book that tells you what the Bible says. Use modern tools, like a concordance and a Bible Dictionary, to find every reference, and judge for yourself what it says.
If you are part of a congregation, you should seek council within the parameters of your congregation. Yet continue in the steps that follow, for no institution, no human is infallible.
Next, find authors who have addressed these things, from the ancient to the modern, and judge for yourself, knowing, however, that you should treat this as something vital, holy, and urgent. You want to get it right for your own happiness and completeness. You want to be circumspect.
While people, including me here, may teach on the subject and claim they are teaching the right way, in the end, you alone are responsible for what you choose to believe and do.
This is why I am double careful when I share things to express them as a fallible man, not the arbiter of the meaning of the Word of God, lest I become a stumbling block to others through my own arrogance, or mislead them from God’s path through my own “sincere” error.
I strongly urge against sex outside of marriage, not as a prude, but because sex outside of marriage is, at best, in my considered opinion based on my faith, spiritually vapid and invalidating to your soul in ways that are hard to see in the moment of pleasure.
Many sometimes feel its emptiness but this passes and is forgotten as they seek a new dose of pleasure.
I can testify that sex inside of marriage with Christ as the head of our marital union was something almost mystical and affirming in ways I cannot describe, so much that years after the last time I was intimate with Dora, the blessedness of those encounters still fills me with joy.
I have theorized that IF I end up never remarried and thus never have sex again, it will be because what I had filled me for the rest of my life.
On the other hand, IF I remarried it would be with someone who holds the same view on intimacy and sex within a holy marriage. They would treat sex as a gift to be freely shared, not a chore, nor just a way to get physical pleasure, although it’s a definite benefit to have between you.
I would likely also refrain from any physical intimacy or kissing until marriage, not that I think it is wrong for everyone (you can kiss your boyfriend or girlfriend!), because for me that feels right.
If you are single, and Christian, let God choose your spouse and follow His plans.
I have presented what I have concluded is the best representation of God’s blueprint for marriage and sex that I possibly can.
It is up to you to judge whether I am close or far from the truth. But if you see that I am right or already know the same thing I do yet haven’t lived by it, now is the chance to repent, to re-center yourself in the center of God’s will, and to proceed forward into a new pattern and practices that are truly Kingdom centered and lead to blessings and happiness for all.
