God is committed to transforming us to be more like Christ, and he often provides many refining elements throughout our story to accomplish this. This includes the crucible of relationships, and a sexual crucible as well.
Our sexuality runs deep and it’s an essential part of who God has created us to be. We cannot deny it or cut it off from the rest of our life in Christ and still remain faithful to God’s design and purpose for our lives.
But it doesn’t take long to realize just how intense, complex, and messy this part of our life is to navigate. On the one hand, we fear losing control and so we try to keep it restrained. Or it seems impossible to tame and so it seems best to simply indulge every desire that emerges.
The sexual crucible holds us in this tension of neither playing it safe in fear nor simply doing whatever we want. Instead, we’re forced to wrestle and discern how to mature our sexuality toward its potential as a divine reflection.
And this is the difficult work as there are no shortcuts or simplistic answers. In each season of life, we must discover how to use our embodied sexuality as a vehicle of love. This requires discipline, humility, and a willingness to stay engaged as we learn how to handle this intense power God has entrusted to us.
Of course, we’re bound to make mistakes along the way. But, as we remain faithful to pursuing God’s best, we can be confident this is all part of his training ground for our maturity.
We remain immature and impotent when we don’t submit to the refining fires of the sexual crucible.
In the end, God wants to grow you up and form you into the image of Christ. And wrestling through the messy waters of our sexual nature and learning how to reflect God through it all is a meaningful crucible for this work of transformation.
Photo by Oziel Gómez on Unsplash
