Full Exposure

I consider myself to be one of the most blessed women on the planet.

Not only am I redeemed by God’s grace, I’ve also got a husband who is head over heels, crazy nuts about me, even after 15 years of marriage. Others see it. Over the years I’ve had numerous people comment to me, “Your husband sure is crazy about you!”

And it’s true. John is passionate about me. Passionate, unashamed, and unrestrained.

Whew!!!

Of course this passion can’t help but be expressed in the marriage bed, but I’m not even primarily talking about sexual passion. I’m speaking of a passion that goes much deeper than sex, a passion that fully accepts, embraces, and pursues all of me.

It is not afraid of the dark corners.

It doesn’t just want what it can get.

It wants to consume me, swallow me up, and it invites me to reciprocate. It is an invitation to truly become one.

So what’s the problem? Isn’t this what every woman dreams of: To be desired, adored, and accepted like that?

Well, the problem is that this type of passion scares the daylights out of me, and that is what my sexual mirror revealed to me when I took an honest look at it. As I stood before my mirror, I saw a fear of losing control. A fear of surrender. A fear of full exposure.

James 1:23-25 “For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror.”

Okay, so I had taken a look in the mirror of my sexuality and I saw a deeper condition of my heart: the propensity to self protect.

The question was (and is), am I going to take a look and “go away and at once forget” what lies inside, as James goes on to say? Or was I going to look in a way that changed me from the inside out?

As I pondered this type of all consuming, all encompassing, all demanding passion (and my fear of it), I realized that this is how God loves me. Really. He loves you and I with an all consuming passion, the kind that demands you rise to meet it.

The problem was that I was afraid of it, whether it was coming from God or from my husband or from anyone else.

What if I let someone in and I turned out to be one big disappointment, a big zero? What if I surrendered and ended up being rejected? Or used and discarded as I had been in the past? The potential pain of soul intimacy was just too great.

I had taken a good look in the mirror and saw what I was like and it wasn’t pretty. The next step was to look into the perfect law, the law of liberty.

James 1:25 “But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing.”

Did you catch that very key phrase, “law of liberty?” Who thinks of the law as giving liberty? We think of rules and laws as necessary, even constructive and helpful perhaps, but to think of law as liberty? Probably not. Laws generally restrict freedoms.

However, God’s law = perfect liberty

Think about that. It applies to all of life. From money and finances, our role as wife and mom, to career to ministry to sex.

God’s law = perfect liberty

As I began to look intently at the word of God, I had to change my outlook. I had to look at it believing that it was liberty. The laws for intimate relationship, both sexual and non-sexual, are not to make me a second rate person; they are not to make me a piece of meat; they are not to use, abuse, and mistreat me; they are not to take from me in any way.

They are to give me perfect liberty.

Do you want to be free? I mean gloriously free and unhindered? Approach the Word as “the law of liberty.”

Some of you may be needing a concrete example of what that may look like relationally, so I will give you one from a friend who just a few weeks ago shared this with me. I will call her “P.”

P’s husband was addicted to pornography for many years. He destroyed her fragile trust and even though he had confessed his sin, she still felt that in the bedroom she just could not live up to the images he had in his head.

P told me that she was responsive whenever he initiated sexual contact, but there was no intimacy between them. After talking about the situation, she revealed to me that in fact, even making eye contact with him was too intimate for her. She wanted healing in her heart and marriage, so I challenged her to start with that one small goal: to look him in the eyes when she talked to him.

A couple weeks ago, I talked to P again and she said that she had done it! She had looked him in the eyes and it transformed him. Furthermore, it encouraged her to share with him her feelings of inadequacy. By her taking the step to initiate intimacy with her spouse, she spoke affirmation to him. She told me that since she did that, he has been a changed man and this has in turn changed her.

P went from viewing God’s plan for intimacy as frightening and scary to viewing it as life giving. I have done the same, and your comments indicate that there are many of you who have made the jump too.

Our natural tendency is to be like Adam and Eve after the fall and run from intimacy and full exposure. But God still pursues us and it is not to beat us down…He pursues us to redeem us. As we in turn pursue His plan for intimacy, we find redemption and freedom. Liberty.

I’ll share more next week! For now, I’m interested in hearing your feedback, so talk, girls, talk!
Are you afraid of God's "law" for intimacy (both sexual and non-sexual)?
Are you someone who has made the jump and can share tips on what helped you?
Do you generally view God's instructions for money, motherhood, etc as giving liberty?