Sex and Sexuality with Rachel Gilson
Today we’re tackling the topic of sex and sexuality with Rachel Gilson. We know the nature of today’s topic is heavy. If you have questions or you need to process after listening, please take time to send a text to a friend in your local church. We are praying the Lord will use this conversation to cause you to move towards his Word, to cry out to him in prayer, and to walk in confession with women in your local church body.
INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
Can you tell us a little about your own story? How has God rescued you?
Are warring desires—the pull toward sin and the pull towards Christ—common for Christians?
What is God’s purpose and design for sexuality?
What’s a positive vision for sexuality? How can we train our eyes to see that?
What is the design and purpose for marriage?
Does marriage solve our sex problems? If not, what does?
What does singleness communicate?
How does desire play into the conversation about sexuality?
What encouragement do you have for the woman who just can’t seem to overcome sinful sexual desires? What about the Christians who pray and pray and just don’t feel like they’re experiencing any victory in these areas? What hope does the gospel offer?
How is Jesus better than the power of sex and romance?
One thing I’ve witnessed you do so well is to be honest about your sin struggles. Can you tell me a little about what it’s been like to do that within the church? How has it been helpful? How has it been hard? How would you encourage your Christian sisters to communicate about their struggle with sin when it comes to sex and sexuality?
What has helped you fight for faithfulness? How can we practice Spirit dependence, not self-dependence?
How can we come alongside one another and offer strong, truth-filled encouragement in the war against sexual sin?
NOTEWORTHY QUOTES
“The Jesus I was reading about was really intelligent and really tender—really interesting. But I felt a barrier with my sexuality.”
“I was suddenly overwhelmed with the reality that God does exist—and not like Zeus or something, but the God who made everything, who made me, who was perfect—and the only thing I felt was fear. Because I knew me. I was mean, I was arrogant, I was sexually immoral, I lied, I cheated… But really quickly with that I also understood (I think the Spirit made it known to me) part of the reason that Jesus had come was to place himself as a barrier between God’s wrath and me, and that the only way to be safe was to run towards God, not away from God—specifically towards Jesus.”
“I couldn’t pretend this wasn’t true just because it was inconvenient for my life.”
“A big part of my Christian life has been trying to figure out, ‘What does it mean to thrive in Jesus in the midst of these attractions?’”
“For the first time in my life I was able to see that Jesus is good.”
“But everything in my life—the tv shows I watched, the songs I listened to, the conversations I had with my friends—had also trained me to think ‘I am only my real and full and authentic self if I am doing what my desires tell me.’”
“I really struggled. I had a hard time, but what I desperately needed was all these three things: God’s Spirit, God’s Word, and God’s people. I needed to constantly be confronted with what is actually true. Is following your desires going to actualize your real freedom and your real joy, or is it going to lie to you constantly?”
“I had given into all of my desires multiple times and had only really found pain.”
“So much of what was important in warring between these desires was coming back again and again to the Word and being with people who loved Jesus and who loved me, and who said ‘Let’s do this together.’”
“God confronted me and said, ‘Hey, if you are only willing to obey when you both understand and agree with me, you are not following me as God anymore, you are following yourself as god.”
“Sometimes obedience means choosing to obey before you understand.”
“When it comes to the God who made us and who loves us, there are times we’re not going to understand.”
“I was pressed again and again into the person of Christ.”
“I thought a lot during that time about the garden of Eden, because God had put Adam and Eve in this beautiful wonderful place and given them this vision to fill the earth and rule it together, and the one prohibition they had was ‘Don’t eat this fruit in the middle of the garden; if you eat it you will die’… The fruit thing demonstrates that you can only obey that if you trust that the one who says it is for you. Because otherwise it's a little arbitrary. And that’s where the serpent got Eve…”
“I had to ground myself in Christ. He is profoundly for me.”
“At the foundation of Christianity is the revelation of Jesus Christ and that he is for us. And so even when we don’t understand, he’s promised that it’s for our good that he’s said certain things… that is ultimately what kept me after I first gave my life to Christ.”
“In many Eastern traditions, the answer to desire is to stop desiring—to fight desire. You cut off the desire and that is freedom. But that is not the answer of Christianity. The profound difference of that answer is a more hopeful avenue forward. Because God himself is one who desires. He didn’t create the world because he needed the world, he doesn’t save us because he needs us. He created and he saves out of an overflow of his love, and he desires to be with us. So the fact that we desire at all is a reflection of the one whose image we bear.”
“But the thing is we desire stuff we shouldn’t because we’re fallen image bearers. We break everything we touch. The tragedy and the irony of being a fallen image bearer is that so many parts of us reflect the goodness of God, but we have in our rebellion turned distorted. This happens a lot with sexuality, because the closer something is to revealing the gospel, the more dangerous it is when it gets warped.”
“The goal of marriage is to display the gospel, and sex is a big part of that.”
“God’s relationship with his people is perfectly faithful; and our relationship with him is supposed to be perfectly faithful.”
“We are all going to express our sexuality in ways that fall short of God. We just do. We all need the grace and forgiveness of Christ.”
“God desires to be with his people; and we should desire to be with him!”
“All kinds of desire—but especially sexual desire—can be this image of the longing for connection. Which is why even if you are unmarried, or widowed, or whatever, if you’re in a position where you’re not able to express your sexuality with a spouse, any sexual desire you experience is not a nasty trick God’s playing on you. It’s actually still a picture of how we should long for him. It’s a theological lens into the beauty of the gospel.”
“It’s okay for us to acknowledge in front of God the ways we feel—even when it’s broken. Because he knows—he knows we’re born into a broken world. My same sex attraction is a result of the fall—it is not something I will carry into the new creation. At the same time, the fact that I am a sexual being is not a threat to God. He understands that this is part of the way he designed us to be. And he is a God who loves to do new things and to redeem. And so there’s safety in him.”
“So much of parental love is specifically not letting a child do the things she wants to do because they’re outrageous, dangerous things that she thinks are alright. So the Lord’s going to keep me from doing certain things because they’re dangerous for me. My desires are a broken compass, but he has promised in his Word to give me the exact compass that I need.”
“I need God’s Word and God’s Spirit and God’s people together to move forward in healthy ways.”
“What I needed was safe people who loved Jesus and who loved me, who I could go to [with my questions] and my need to repent.”
“We often struggle with one or the other between grace and truth.”
“We need multiple [Christian] siblings who know us well. One Christian friend can be beautiful and amazing and a gift, but we’re designed for a bigger community. We’re designed as a big family, and we all bring different things to the table.”
“No one can live off of the fumes of my conviction. If you’re listening and for whatever reason you have either not come to Jesus or you’ve just kept him at arms length for a long, long time, there’s no amount of hearing from other people that can replace you drawing near to him yourself. He is better, but just hearing about it intellectually is not quite enough; it’s not the same thing as experiencing it. So I would just plea to anyone, maybe you’ve kept him at a distance for a long time, whatever, you will only really know it when you actually draw near to him and give him access into your heart. Because we can do all kinds of things where we go to church and go to Bible study but we shut our hearts off to him. He’s only actually better if we let him into every space, because he is good.”
“My desires want to say that I won’t be fully alive unless I follow him. But in following Jesus is actually where I find the power for forgiving myself and others, for blessing other people.”
“Jesus is the only one who will never leave me alone.”
“My desires want to lie to me and say that if I pursue them, I will always be happy. The truth is no matter what happens in this fallen world, there will be tears, and my desires won’t be the ones that wipe away the tears from my face in the new creation. Christ is going to be the one who looks in my face and like a good older brother wipes the tears away for me.”
“My desires will always tell me, ‘Well you’ll be more desirable in the future when you have this amount of sexual partners or that body or whatever it is,’ right? Jesus doesn’t love a future version of me, he loves me right now. If you are in Christ, God’s face towards you is not checking his watch and tapping his foot, he’s not rolling his eyes at you, even if you failed today. His face towards you is affection and love.”
“You have to put yourself in the midst of the means of grace. If you feel like you fail at praying, go grab somebody and say “Pray with me and for me.” If you feel like you fail at Bible reading, go grab someone and say “Read this Bible with me.” We are not designed to do this alone. Go get people, be shameless, be like the widow who won’t stop asking. Get people to help you.”
“The possession of the Spirit of God means that when I am faced with a temptation, he promises to help me.”
“We want to help our children see more of what we’re for than what we’re against. Because God is a God of ‘yes.’ That doesn’t mean he doesn’t say ‘no’ to some things, but his first foot is ‘yes’. When he took on human flesh, he was saying ‘yes’ to humanity. And he died on the cross because he’s also saying ‘no’ to the ways we’re pursuing idolatry and death. But he’s a big ‘yes.’”
“Marriage is a picture of the gospel. Sex is a gift for bonding and for creating new life.”
“Every single person is made in the image of God. And they might not follow Jesus, but our desire is to see them reconciled with the one who made them.”
“Our enemies are not image bearers. Human beings have received a stamp of God upon them, and what they need is to meet the One who made them and who redeemed them.”
“We want to help our kids see that even if people disagree with us about sexuality, we are in the same boat, we need redemption.”
“If we actually hold to what the Bible teaches, it’s going to look beautiful, and people will be drawn to it, because it’s good.”
“We’ve got to hold close to Jesus and the Scriptures.”
RESOURCES MENTIONED
Born Again This Way: Coming Out, Coming to Faith, and What Comes Next, by Rachel Gilson
Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
21 Days to Childlike Prayers: Changing Your World One Specific Prayer at a Time by Jed Coppenger
The Secular Creed: Engaging Five Contemporary Claims by Rebecca McLaughlin
Embodied: Transgender Identities, the Church, and What the Bible Has to Say by Preston Sprinkle
SCRIPTURE REFERENCES
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
What is God’s purpose and design for sexuality?
In the midst of your sin and your failings, how does it encourage you to remember what God’s heart and posture is toward you?
Do you struggle to believe that Jesus is better than the sin you are drawn toward? What verses might help you to remember Christ’s worth and goodness? Consider memorizing these.
Is there an area that Rachel mentioned—prayer, gentleness, truth, grace, Bible study—that you want to grow in? Who could you reach out to to help you with this?
What might you do or implement based on what you learned in this week’s episode?
IMPORTANT NOTE
Journeywomen interviews are intended to serve as a springboard for continued study in the context of your local church. While we carefully select guests each week, interviews do not imply Journeywomen's endorsement of all writings and positions of the interviewee or any other resources mentioned.
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