Fifty-shades-of-grey-feature-788x394This is a blog post I promised myself I wouldn’t write.

I didn’t want to be that guy cashing in on a trendy headline to get views.

I didn’t want to join the thousands of other blog writers who have written about Fifty Shades Of Grey.

But I feel I have to.

Because we, as Christians, have missed one huge piece of the Fifty Shades puzzle:

God wants us to have great sex.

In our attempt to warn people that Fifty Shades Of Grey shouldn’t be read or watched, we’ve taken things too far:

We’ve started attacking the idea of an adventurous sex life.

Even within marriage.

Before we go any further, let’s add a qualifier to this post so we’re all on the same page:

Sex was created to be used inside a monogamous marriage between a man and a woman. Any other use is dangerous and harmful.

With that said, God never intended for us to have boring sex lives in our marriages. In fact, Jesus himself said he came to give us life and life abundantly.

Part of life is sex.

The issue we run into is that adventurous, fun sex scares us.

We’ve been conditioned to “just say no” to sex before marriage. We’re taught to avoid pornography and erotica literature. For most of us, we battle our hormones throughout our teenage years and early 20’s.

Now, after years of “finding the way of escape” whenever we’re tempted, we are terrified to explore our sex life with our spouse.

We think we’re doing something dirty.

Something unclean.

Something wrong.

The truth is when we explore our sexual desires inside of marriage, we’re doing something holy.

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God designed marriage to be a relationship of serving your spouse. Because of that, no Christian marriage should ever have a boring sex life. We should be seeking out ways we can serve our spouse.

Even in the bedroom.

Especially in the bedroom.

Because believe it or not, your spouse may have desires and needs that are more than boring, Baptist church sex.

He or she may want something “dirty.”

Something “unclean.”

Something “wrong.”

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There are plenty of things wrong with Fifty Shades Of Grey, but we have to realize that there are, in fact, shades of gray in our sex lives.

We aren’t only animals who can go around and do whatever we want with whomever we want.

We aren’t only angels who have sex solely for reproductive purposes.

We are humans living in the tension of animals and angels.

In his book Sex God (which I highly recommend even though the author went crazy in his theology years later), Rob Bell writes:

When we deny the spiritual dimension to our existence, we end up living like animals. And when we deny the physical, sexual dimension to our existence, we end up living like angels. And both ways are destructive, because God made us human.

When we talk about how to build a healthy marriage, we focus a lot on listening and communicating. We talk about budgets and financial planning.

We don’t talk about sex nearly enough.

I wonder how much lower the divorce rate amongst Christians would be if lively, adventurous sex lives were the norm.

Would men turn to pornography as much if their wives were risky and daring?

Would women turn to romance novels as much if their husbands were bold and giving?

So while Fifty Shades Of Grey is destructive on many levels, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

There is a middle ground between Fifty Shades and Old Fashioned.

That middle ground is where the fun is.

Say your prayers and take your vitamins.

Have a nice day.

-Jonathan

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