Sex 180 - Part 1 of 3

This transcript has been adapted from the attached audio. It may not be in its final form and may be updated.

LAND: I would love to know why you felt led to write this particular book at this particular time.

INGRAM: Well, you know I’d like to say that I was just culturally sensitive, propped by the Holy Spirit, saw what was coming, and said this is what I need to write, but I can’t because it didn’t grow out of that. As a pastor, I just believe that you need to teach through books of the Bible and that as you teach through books of the Bible, you also need to realize that each New Testament book was written to answer a major issue. The Book of Ephesians was written to multiple churches to help them, “this is how, when you are in Christ,” the first three chapters, and chapters four, five and six, “this is how when you really are in Christ, you live it out,” so I was teaching through the Book of Ephesians and I did a series on the first three chapters, did one on chapter four, got to chapter five and in the context, it opens up and says, “therefore, be imitators of God.” “Mimics” is the word, be in mimic of God and walk and love just as Christ also loved you and then it says, well, how did He love you? He gave himself as a sacrifice, an offering as a fragrant aroma to God, and then notice in verse three, there is this juxta-position, “but let no immorality or impurity or greed,” it goes on to talk about course jesting and he uses six different words for various types, it covers every sexual perversion you can imagine, and the contrast where the opposite of walking in love is this pseudo-means of attempting to use, exploit, and abuse the opposite sex to what really boils down to self-worship, because he later on says, idolatry. So as I taught through Ephesians 5:1-14, that is the answer but I needed to package it, I believe, in a way that was the highest cultural need and what I saw was people, number one, don’t know how to have meaningful loving relationships, don’t know when they’re in love and when they are not; they don’t know what the Scripture says about sex, not just the negative side but the positive side, and they don’t know how to make them last, and so, literally this book grew out of teaching through Ephesians 5:1-14.

LAND: God lead you on a tremendous voyage that we all, I think, are going to benefit from. As you were preparing to write this book, I assume you had to start with where the average person gets their ideas about love and relationship in this culture.

INGRAM: That’s exactly right, and I think maybe when you hear that title, so that people know, this is not a book-like sex manual or improving your sex life, or it is not a psychological book about those kind of issues as much as it is looking at relationships, love, sex, and lasting relationships through the lens of “how do you think about it? What’s even your perception?” Over and over, Richard, I’m amazed, people say, you know everyone quotes the statistics, there are as many or more divorces in the church as outside the church, and we all shake our heads and say, “Wow, how could that be?” What I would say from this research, what I’ve learned is, you know what, if we believe how relationships work and we view them exactly the same way as the world, we are going to have exactly the same results, so I am actually not shocked by that at all. We’ve kind of followed what I call Hollywood’s formula. There is a way to think about relationships that it is the water, it is in the air, it is in the movies, in the books, it is in the magazines, and how many people really think this is how to go about finding the right person, having a great relationship, and this is when my family sat down with me and taught me how to do that. Now, most people learn by watching, depending on your era, either a Jimmy Stewart movie or a Gregory Peck movie, or if you move on up then it is a Tom Hanks or Brad Pitt or Julia Roberts, and you watch all those movies and you think, “hmm…” Well, you go out and find the right person, then you “fall in love,” have these ooey, gooey feelings, set your hopes and dreams on this person, and then if it doesn’t work out, well I guess you had the wrong person. I guess you go find and do it again, and that cycle is repeated over and over and over, and I just want to scream and say with some compassion of the Lord, “that doesn’t work, that is not God’s way of having meaningful love, a dynamic God-given sex or lasting relationship.”

LAND: And you know, we just have to help our people, beginning with Christian people, understand that God would not have given us this gift of gender, He would not have given us this powerful emotion, this powerful force known as sexuality, without giving us detailed instructions on the parameters that He sets around it, and why He created it, and how it is supposed to work according to God’s plan, would He?

INGRAM: Not at all, and you know, I contrasted there just the first couple of three chapters of helping people see the formula from all the music and I don’t mean people got in the back room and had a clandestine plan and said, “Let’s just fool everybody about relationships.” I mean, I think someone is behind this, but you know I think this is just normal. This is the world. Theirs is “find the right person,” so everyone is out on the hunt. So we’ve got to look a certain way, dress a certain way, drive a certain car, play a certain game. By contrast, God would say, “It is not finding the right person, it is becoming the right person.” When you become a godly, caring, unselfish, loving person, like bees to honey, you are going to attract those kind of people, and the world or Hollywood would say, “Fall in love, make it all emotional, it’s all about your feelings.” God would say, “No, walk in love, learn progressively to put other people first.” Love is giving another person what they need the most when they deserve it the least. That is what Christ did for us. Relationships work when you walk in love. And then the world says, set your hopes and dreams on this person. You know, they are going to complete your life. When you finally get married, when you find the right him or the right her, it will be great. No one can come through for us 100% of the time. The Scripture would say, “No, set your hope on God and realize that other person cannot come through for you, but together, as you walk with the Lord, by His power and grace, then you care for one another.”

LAND: Well, you know, Chip, you have touched on a very vital, vital issue; one that I think is totally underappreciated in this culture. As people have turned away from God as the source of purpose and happiness and meaning and fulfillment in life, both Christian and non-Christian, what they’ve turned to is a happy, fulfilling, nurturing, meaningful relationship with a person of the opposite sex, either in marriage or outside of marriage, and, you know, as one psychiatrist said, I think quite superbly, that is an insurmountable burden to put on any merely human relationship. No human relationship can replace the God-shaped vacuum that God put in our heart.

INGRAM: Absolutely, in fact, there’s a great couple that have written some great books on relationships, Les and Leslie Parrot, out in the Seattle area, and they teach a class for every incoming freshman, and they make the statement to every incoming freshman, “If you want to have great relationships, until you come to the point where you are emotionally healthy and whole and adding kind of the idea of spiritually strong, you are in no position in any way to enter into a relationship that will not always end dysfunctionally.” And their point was, no one can fulfill your life, you have to first get to the point where you get from God in your relationship with him that vacuum filled in you, so you can be a giver in the relationship. And I think you hit it Richard, I think we are asking people to do something that is totally impossible for them to do and then when they don’t come through, we think the problem is them, so we will go find either a younger or a newer model and go try it again.

LAND: When the answer all along is to follow God’s formula, which is “get right with God, become the person that God wants you to be,” and when happens, then we will be ready to attract and to meet and to interact with the person that God has for us.

INGRAM: And this has been shot through. I don’t want to sound critical or negative, but the Christian community is so shot through with this other person has to come through for me and I have to be fulfilled. I’ve done a number of kind of live talk call-in radio programs as this book has gone out and I mean on great stations, Christians line up and basically want to say to me, “You don’t understand,” here’s the line, “God wants me to be happy, I’m not happy with this person, I know divorce is wrong, but I am sure God will understand because I’m leaving my mate because he couldn’t want me this unhappy.” I just want to say, “Wait a second!” What they don’t know is the first five years of marriage, normal struggles will be in this area and that area. From years about seven to fifteen, the normal struggles will be here, empty nest, they are all normal things that make you, if there was a way out, feel like, man, this is crazy. That’s called normal. You work through them, you trust God, you learn to communicate, you get counseling if you need it, you realize what needs to change in me, instead of what needs to change in my mate, and then you break through those barriers and that is where the intimacy occurs. And what happens is when we hit these barriers now and it feels terrible and I don’t fill fulfilled, we’ve got Christians jumping out of their marriages saying, “Well, I know God wants me to be happy, and I’m not happy, so this can’t be the right person.” And then they find out what it feels like to have two families, and child support, and disgrace the testimony of Christ. And we’ve got a huge problem on our hands because we’re buying a lie.