Questions around sexuality and gender are always before us in our highly sexualized world. Author and pastor Sam Allberry helps us think deeply and clearly and communicate compassionately about these difficult topics.

Note: This episode may not be appropriate for children, due to the frank discussion about sexuality.

Show Notes: 

Learn more about Sam Allberry and visit his author page.

VIDEO: Sam Allberry explains how the message of Jesus on marriage is life-giving.

Transcript

Welcome to Questions That Matter, a podcast of the C.S. Lewis Institute. I'm your host, Randy Newman, and I'm so very grateful to have as my conversation partner today, Sam Allberry. Sam, welcome to Questions That Matter.

Thank you for having me. I'm glad to be with you.

Why does God care who I sleep with?

Let me tell our listeners: Sam Allberry is a preacher and a pastor and an author and a speaker and an apologist. He really speaks and has a ministry all around the world, and I'm so very grateful for your books, Sam. I used your book, Is God anti-gay? for a number of years as a textbook for a class I taught in undergraduate college. So I really am so grateful. This is such a crucial matter, the issues related to sexuality. And this is the ministry God has called you to, among also a wider ministry. But I'm particularly interested in the book that I've read most recently by you, Why does God care who I sleep with? Let me start with, Sam, why is this such a big deal? Why is this a question that matters?

Thank you. It matters for lots of reasons. It matters to our culture because, in our culture, sexual fulfillment is seen as such a high good that anyone who is potentially going to interfere with it needs to kind of explain themselves. So from a secular person's point of view, it's an urgent question. If there's climate change, injustice, pandemics, and everything else on God's plate, why is he concerned about what consenting adults do in their bedroom? But from a Christian's point of view, it also matters because—and it matters to God because He made us, God cares about us, so He cares about what we do, and He cares about the people that we do things with. And He is the one who came up with the idea of human sexuality. We didn't discover this behind His back. So he cares who we sleep with because He cares about the people doing the sleeping. So, although it doesn't seem like it to many people today, it's actually good news that God does care who we sleep with.

Say more about that. Why and how is it good news? Because I've heard you say that in a number of ways, and I really appreciate that.

Yeah, well, it sounds like bad news because it sounds like He’s going to restrict what we can do. But actually, when we understand what He’s restricting and why He’s restricting it in the way He does, we realize actually that it's for our good, it's for our protection, it's for our flourishing that there are certain boundaries in place. And it's worth bearing in mind that every single person has some boundaries when it comes to sexual behavior. So it's not that Christians have boundaries and other people don't. The question is: All of us do. Can we kind of coherently account for where those boundaries lie? And we begin to realize, as we understand God's design for human sexuality, that it's good that He’s given us the instructions He’s given us. He understands human sexuality better than we do. He understands the emotional, psychological things that are in play when it comes to human sexuality. And so it's good for us to have the particular prohibitions and permissions that He gives us in the Bible. And I was writing the book just in the wake of the #MeToo movement, and that's just one example of where we are beginning to realize that the whole line of, “Oh, it's just physical. Why do you have hangups about this?” We're beginning to realize, in Western society, that that actually rings pretty hollow. The abuse of it hurts so profoundly and for so many years because the right use of it is meant to be profound and life giving. So the #MeToo movement, among other things, I think, is an awareness on the part of our culture that sex really is something quite profound, which I would then say is why we need to properly understand God's design for it.

People who know me will not be surprised when I say, I really love the fact that all of the chapter titles in your book are questions. So I love the way you turn, I mean the title, Why does God care who I sleep with? You turn the question on its head, so to speak, and chapter one is titled, “Why do we care who we sleep with?” And it is a big deal. And if it wasn't a big deal, we wouldn't care. But we do, and it is so profound, and you're right, and the violation of it hurts so, so deeply. So you've given us words to say and routes to take, I think, to have conversations with people. That's my hope for this book. You just touched on something you wrote on page 25. “Christians do have a category of sexual behavior that they believe is wrong. Actually, all of us do.” And can you say just a little bit more about that?

Yeah. So it's easy for people to say, “Well, Christians have hangups on this. Christians are trying to restrict people's sexual freedom,” but any right-minded person believes in restricting other people's sexual freedom. We all have things that we believe would be just wrong for anyone to be doing. We all believe, at least we say we believe, that sex without consent is wrong, or sex with children is wrong, or sex between close relatives is wrong. So those boundaries need to be, not just spoken of and assumed, but actually they do need to be explained and accounted for. And again, we're realizing, with the #MeToo movement and other things, that our sort of insistence on consent isn't quite as… Well, we don't evidently believe in it as much as we think we do. And the other thing we need to bear in mind is we're saying there must be consent at the very same time as we're saying, culturally, “Unless you're sexually fulfilled, you cannot be complete. You cannot be full in your life.” Those two things don't go together, because someone might feel that their sexual fulfillment won't happen with consent. So we're sending mixed messages in the Western world, and I think there's a lot of sort of inconsistency there.

And I think, in our conversations with people, we want to be able to bring some of that inconsistency up to the surface, so that they see it, and of course, the challenge is to do it graciously, kindly, lovingly. Because this issue is so charged emotionally, it's easy for anger and other strong feelings to invade, but I do think, if we can have lengthy, gracious conversations with people, it really can be helpful. Not just, “Oh, I'm trying to convince you.” No, we're really trying to help people. I don't know if you're familiar. I've benefited a bunch from writings of a woman named Donna Freitas. I don't know if you know her writings.

I don’t. No.

She's not a Christian, but she has done so much doctoral level and postdoctoral research about college students and sexuality, and almost everything she finds is that college students are profoundly unhappy. I mean, they're very active, and there's this whole… she wrote a whole entire book about the hookup culture and how it's leaving people devastated and unhappy. She tells a story in one of her books where she's speaking on a college campus, and during the Q&A time, someone asks the question, “Why is this such a big deal? Why can't it just be like choosing what food to eat or what's my favorite flavor of ice cream or something? Why is this such a big deal?” And she says, “I could tell that many people in the group wanted to somehow believe that, and yet they couldn't.” And so she doesn't, articulate, “Well, but why is this a big deal?” And that's where I think we have this great platform to say it's a big deal because it's God's invention. God is the one who says, this is a really big deal, and it's beautiful and it's profound, and it's not to be treated lightly. Anyway, I'm sorry for the mini sermon, but I couldn’t help myself.

No, that’s good. I would add to that that, you know, Paul makes it very clear in 1 Corinthians 6 and other places that sex is designed to involve the whole of our being, the whole personality. And therefore, if that's the case, it's not equivalent to eating a meal or whatever. It's something that is meant to affect the entirety of who you are. So little wonder, then, that it matters so much.

Well, you have a section in the book that was very, very helpful for me as I read it, for articulating this, about the whole topic about lust. Why does Jesus single out lust and say that it's bad, particularly in our culture that seems to celebrate that? And particularly, there's this assumption people have of, “Well, I'm not hurting anybody. This is all inside my mind. That person doesn't know I'm lusting after them.” And I do realize that this may be uncomfortable for some of our listeners, and maybe it's too late. I probably should have began this by saying this may not be the podcast for children to be listening to, so I'll try to put that in on the website. But can you share a little bit about that argument, about why does Jesus say that lust is so bad?

Yeah, it's a really significant question, and I think there are two main reasons that come to the forefront. One is that it matters to Jesus how we think about other people. It matters to Jesus how they are thought about by us. So they may not know how we're thinking about them, but they're created… Before they are a sex object to us, they are His creation. They bear His image. He's not a third party legislating how other people should behave. He made each one of us, and there's something beautifully dignifying in that teaching, because it means that actually Jesus believes we have a sexual dignity as people made in His image, such that if someone else is violating that dignity, even in the privacy of their own minds, it bothers Him. I think it's good to know that. I think the other thing is that we may say, “Well, me having this lustful thought isn't doing that person any harm.” But Jesus would say it is doing us harm. It's training us to see other people in a certain way, in a way that actually dehumanizes them, that commodifies them, that distorts our own understanding of what sexuality is for and therefore reduces our own capacity to be able to actually use human sexuality in the way that God intended. So we're doing ourselves no favors by indulging lustful thoughts in that way.

I think that that is so important, and yet I haven't heard it too many places. I think quite often people look at that part of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus said, “You’ve heard it said that adultery is wrong, but I say whoever looks at a woman lustfully has committed adultery.” They say, “See, that's the root of the issue of adultery.” Or it’s, “Jesus said that to show us just how very sinful we are and therefore we need a Savior.” Yes, to all of that, for sure. But then sometimes we leave off, “You still didn't address the issue of why lust is so bad,” and the point you make, that it harms us, the ones who are doing the looking. This reminds me there’s a line in Mere Christianity where Lewis says, “Every time we disobey or commit a sin, we're changing ourselves. We're making us more into the kind of person who goes that direction more easily.

Yes.

And so the opposite is: The more we obey, the more we're training and crafting our beings to move in a Godly direction.

It's interesting. I've not read much on this, but the little I've come across, what brain scientists are saying about the effect of pornography, it actually corroborates that you're creating neural pathways that make it more difficult to not do that in the future. So you are actually affecting the makeup, I guess, of your brain the more you go down that route.

Yeah. As I was reading that part in your book, I was thinking, trying to push it in the positive direction for me, of, “I want to become the kind of person who's more compassionate and more loving and more kind, and treating more and more and more and more people with the love of God, and lust will make that more and more difficult or unlikely.” And what a beautiful message for us to proclaim, that God wants us to become more and more like Him. And He has this process of sanctification, and we want to be part of that, so that we can become a more loving and more gracious and more kind person. And it is a process, and it's a lifelong process, but I find that to be helpful.

Yeah. I can't remember which C.S. Lewis letter this comes from, but I made a note of it where he's asked on one occasion what he thinks about masturbation. And he talks about how it, “This practice,” he says, “sends the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides. And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman.” And he talks about how, in his own mind, with these shadowy brides, he says he's always adored, always the perfect lover. No demand is made on his unselfishness. No mortification ever imposed on his vanity. And so, he says, the faculty of love is thus sterilized.

What are we to do as Christians in a culture that keeps changing so constantly and becoming more and more hostile to our faith and our values? Well, the first step would be to get a better handle on how we got to this point in the first place, and someone who knows about that and articulates it so very, very well is Dr. Carl Trueman, and he's going to be with us for a special event and talking about ideas on gender, sexuality, history, cancel culture. These things are really not new, but they've been percolating for quite a long time. And so we really hope you can make it to that event. It's an online event. There’s no charge for it, but you must register. So please go to www.cslewisinstitute.org/self-identity, and that's with a hyphen in between self and identity, self-identity. It's on Thursday, October 28, at 8:00 p.m. Eastern time. We sure hope you can join us for that. Just for your background information, Carl Trueman is now a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College. He's written several books, and this presentation, this conversation with him, flows out of his very recent, excellent, and challenging book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.

I think this is an uncomfortable topic, and so we don't want to think too deeply about it. We just want to have kind of like quick sound-bite answers. But Lewis and you and others have helped us. “No, no, no. Wait a minute! This is a big deal.” It's worthy of deep reflection and thought. So yeah, thank you for that reminder from Lewis.

I thought I should probably quote him at some point during this interview, right?

Well, it is required. That's right. This is a C.S. Lewis podcast, and I quoted him, and so that was the cue. You picked it up very, very well. So now it was time for you to quote him. And so we can check that box.

Actually, yesterday I was in Belfast, and I was at C.S. Lewis Square, so that sort of got me in the right mind frame for this today.

C.S. Lewis Square in Belfast

All right. Well, let's do a short little commercial. C.S. Lewis Square, which, by the way, I find kind of funny because it's kind of in a circle, but never mind. But I hope, Lord willing, we, the C.S. Lewis Institute, will be able to do that Belfast/Oxford Study Tour that we've done a couple of times again. We’ve had to kind of put it on the back burner, so to speak. But just say a word about C.S. Lewis Square in Belfast, please.

Yeah. So I didn't know it existed until I went there, but a friend of mine showed it to me. It's relatively new, and it's a sort of little route, which is a little greenway, I guess, around a little block of the city. And it's got…. The main section of it is a square, and it's got, I think it's Digory going through the wardrobe, a lovely kind of statue-type thing of that. And then as you walk through the rest of the route, you meet various characters from particularly The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The Queen is there. Aslan is there. The beavers are there. I forget the name of… Mr. Tumnus is there. And you kind of follow them around and glance at the things, and I think they've even chosen…. The plantings along the way are all meant to be sort of evocative of Lewis's imagination as well. So, it's really lovely. Beautifully done. There's a little cafe as well at the end of it, which I think is named something that ties in with it all. I didn't see if they served Turkish delight.

I think it’s called Jack’s.

Oh, I think it might be. Yeah. Yeah, Jack’s. I was expecting them to have a special on Turkish delight, but I didn't see it on the menu.

Oh, my. I do hope I can get there again. Thanks for that little side trip there. So, one of the things, actually I'll just confess this on the podcast. I’m jealous of your ability to communicate so clearly and so concisely. So there. You could pray that God sets me free from covetousness, but you have a sentence in your book that clearly states the doctrine of total depravity, which people get misunderstand, or they don't quite get it, but you say, and you don't call it total depravity, and that phrase isn't used in your book, which is kind of a key to keep people from being afraid of it. But you're talking about how sin has harmed us so pervasively. And you write, “It’s not to say that every part of life is as bad as it could be, just that no part is as good as it should be.” That's just brilliant. And that's so helpful. And there is a kind of liberation of, “Well, no wonder this is messed up, because sin has harmed all of me. I'm not as bad as I could be, but, boy, I'm nowhere near as good as I should be.”

I've met friends and I who have discussions over the various merits or otherwise of different parts of Calvinism. And anytime I meet someone who says they don't like total depravity, what they don't like tends not to be the actual doctrine of total depravity, but a misunderstanding of it. Because if I say to them, “What area of life don't you need Jesus in?” they don't have an answer, because they'll say, “Oh, I need Jesus in every area of life!” And I’ll say, “Well, that’s what total depravity is.” The totality is the range, the scope of sin in your life. It's not the depth of it in any one particular part of your life.

What God Has to Say about Our Bodies

And it's why we can see the image of God in lost people, because, “Well, no, they're not the most horrible creature they could possibly be. They are harmed in every area of their life by sin and the fall, but there still are those displays of God's image and His common grace, and we can appreciate that in people.” And I find that those are great starting points for good gospel conversations. “You love art. I love art. Why is it that we both find this so moving and beautiful?” and then use that as a pointer of, “Maybe it's because there is such a thing as beauty, and we long for it because it's tainted so many places.”

Yeah.

Well, so you have a brand-new book and I haven't seen it. I'm looking forward to it. Can you tell us about that, the title, and what prompted you to go in that direction to write that?

Yeah. It's called What God Has to Say about Our Bodies, and I've not seen it yet either, so I know it's out there somewhere, but I've yet to see it in the flesh. And it's really a book about how the gospel is good news for our bodies. So it's trying to think through the biblical teaching about what it means to be physical human beings, the significance of that. Lewis gets a mention a few times, as you would imagine, because he rightly points out that Christianity is unique in its high view of physicality, of embodiedness, and the very facts of Jesus becoming incarnate. You can't write off human physicality if God Himself has taken on human flesh. So I'm trying to think through various aspects of creation, fall, redemption, and what each gives us in terms of insights about our own bodies and life in this fallen world.

Great! I look forward to reading it.

I should probably add, by the way, part of the impetus for writing it was I was aware that many of the issues I was coming across in local church life pastorally, that what you think about the body is upstream of so many of them. The obvious things of gender identity, but then body image, shame, issues to do with abuse and image. All of these sorts of things flow out of our understanding of what it means to be physical human beings.

I was going to say, a little while ago, we had Nancy Pearcey on our podcast, and I think her book is really very, very helpful along those lines. And you just said questions about the body are upstream from so many other discussions. And I do think that's a really crucial image for people to grasp. We have to look upstream, at the larger theological categories, the larger pictures. Otherwise, if we're only dealing with the very precise things of, “Why are you Christians against gay marriage?” “What's so bad about people being transgender?” And if we're focusing just on that presenting question, so to speak, it's very, very difficult to help people see. But if we go upstream, like you say, and look at the larger ideas that flow into those questions… so I think that book is going to be really helpful for us, your book, when it comes out. Anything else you wanted to say about the upstream idea? Because I think that that's an important perspective.

Yeah, I mean, it informs so many things in the Christian life and I hope is a good springboard for many areas of discussion with our non-Christian friends as well. But I think the part that most touched me was thinking about what it means for our bodies now to belong to Jesus, which I'd already known at a conceptual level for many years. But then I was counseling someone just recently, who confessed how much he hates his own body. And we're coming into summertime, and this is the time where people are at the beach or swimming, and you’re more likely to be taking your top off and all that kind of stuff. And he said he's dreading it. And one of the things that I really kind of was really moved by, as I was thinking about this, was how, if our bodies belong to Jesus, then the only Person our bodies need to please is Jesus. And a body that is pleasing to Jesus is the body that is consecrated to Him, whatever it looks like. Where the parts of the body are offered to Him in worship and in service. With such a body, Jesus can't be displeased. And it just struck me that Jesus is a far kinder master of our bodies than our culture is. So I've enjoyed thinking about that, as these sorts of issues have come up a lot.

Are you a fisher of men? Do you want to be a fisher of men? Do you struggle with this call that Jesus places on us to be fishers of men? Discipling others is also a significant part of that whole enterprise, and it's a way to abide in Christ. It's a way for us to know Christ more fully, become more like Him, and participate in His work of building His kingdom. So as we disciple, we become coworkers with Jesus. As He helps us mature, He allows us to help Him mature others and nurture them towards reproduction and expanding of His kingdom. And so we have many free small group resources on our website, many different things to help you in this discipleship process, both to grow as a disciple and to disciple others. So please check out cslewisinstitute.org/products.

That's so very helpful. And again, what we're doing is we're trying to take, “All right, this is how our world thinks about our bodies,” and let's replace our thinking there with, “This is how Jesus thinks about our bodies.” And at the risk of sounding kind of… I don't know where this will go, but for me, I'm at the stage where, when I look in the mirror, I see a body that's much older than the one I saw before, and every so often, I'm tempted to despair of, “Wow, that looks like an old guy.” Well, from God's perspective, “It’s, yes, you're growing in age, yes, but look at how I have blessed you over these many decades.” And so instead of looking at, “Wow, that looks like an old guy,” it’s, “There’s decades of God's grace and blessing, and how wonderful it is that He has been with me all of these years, through these difficulties and trials and health struggles. And so instead of it being, “Oh, man, I don't look like those young models on TV and in magazines.” No, I'm a guy this age. Anyway, I'm sorry. I'm taking things in another direction, but-

No, no. That's part of it as well. It is. It's very, very much related. And, you know, you're exactly right to think in terms of, “No, gray hairs are a sign of God's faithfulness. They're a sign of His grace to us over these years. And, you know, the gospel shows us that our best physical days are ahead of us, not behind us, because we will be raised with renewed bodies. And so, as we get older, we don't need to constantly live back in the glory days of the past, because the real glory days are yet to come.

Oh, very good! Thank you for saying that. That's so important. Yeah, I will remind myself of that every time I feel an ache or a pain, which occasionally happens. All right, let's do just a quick commercial for another book that I just finished reading, and I was so grateful for it, and you wrote the forward to, Rachel Gilson's book, Born Again This Way. I do hope maybe we can get Rachel on the podcast. I thought her book was just great. And it's written specifically, if I understand it correctly, to a Christian who is struggling with gender identity or who identifies themselves as gay. And I just I thought it was beautifully written, theologically rich, but really very, very helpful. Can you just say a little bit about… Again, you wrote the forward, so you must be a fan.

Yeah, absolutely. No, they'd asked me to do an endorsement and possibly a forward. And I kind of feel like an endorsement is: You think it's a good book. You like it. A forward is, you know, you are really… you're really commending it. So I read it, thinking I'd probably like it, because I know Rachel, and I've always liked her and what she said and all the rest of it. I've never read her before.

So two things struck me. One was, A, she can write! I mean, she's a very good writer. And then secondly, the content of it was so, so good. One of the chapters is giving sort of a description of the new way you think about marriage and sexuality when you come to Christ. It's one of the best apologetics I've seen anywhere for heterosexual marriage, for why that blending of male and female is so unique and fundamental in human marriage. So it's a wonderful book. I would, without hesitation, put it in the hands of someone who's not a Christian. It's not sort of written with in-house terminology. It actually would be very accessible for unbelievers, too, but I think it would be…. Her story is wonderfully encouraging, and obviously, C.S. Lewis helped her along the way, because she stole a friend's copy of Mere Christianity, literally stole it. So it's a wonderful story, but just the clarity of thoughts-

That’s one of the most delightful-

Yeah.

Yes. I laughed out loud when I read that. She was not a Christian. She was talking to a friend who was a Christian. She was standing at the door of that friend's dorm room. She looked in the corner, and she saw this book, Mere Christianity, and she thought, oh, that would be really helpful. “So I stole it.”

Lewis would not mind, I suspect.

Well, Sam Allberry, this has been great, and you and I could talk some more, but for the sake of this podcast, I think I'll try to draw this door closed. Is there any other last comment you would want our listeners to chew on as they think about this very, very important question that matters.

Yeah. I think the most important thing for me, and that we so easily lose sight of in these discussions, is the goodness of God. I'm struck increasingly, particularly when I speak to people who aren't Christians, that they don't care if what we say is true if they don't believe it's good. And sometimes the thing holding us back as Christians is, “Do we really believe that Jesus’ way is going to be the best way for us?” And what keeps me going in my own desire to follow Jesus and be obedient to Him isn't duty, it's a sense of, “Actually, no, I will be tasting the goodness of Jesus the more I walk in His ways.”

Well said, and thank you for bringing it to that point in our discussion. I really appreciate that. Well, to our listeners, I really do hope you'll check out Sam Allberry’s writings. I'm always delighted to introduce people to his books, and I certainly hope you'll check them out and follow his ministry, see where the Lord opens up doors for Him and for us to converse with people about this very, very good news. Like all of our resources at the C.S. Lewis Institute, we hope this podcast helps you pursue discipleship of the heart and mind and love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind.

Brought to you by the C.S. Lewis Institute and the Questions That Matter Podcast with Randy Newman