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Three times in the Song of Songs, the woman declares to her hearers, “Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires.” She recognises that love in all its fullness is an amazingly powerful thing, but used outside of the confines for which it was intended by God it can become damaging and destructive.

So far in our journey through the Song, we’ve looked at what love is, how guys experience and express love, how girls experience and express love, and how love changes over time in a couple’s relationship. In each case, we’ve mentioned that being a good lover is part of being a good disciple/follower of Jesus - but with the warning in mind, it has left us with one nagging question.

What does it mean for us if we already have aroused love in our lives before we should have? What if we have done things with our boyfriends or girlfriends or people other than our spouses that neither honour the other person or God?

Passages such as 1 Cor 6:12-20 give many warnings about living sexually immoral lives and it doesn’t take a genius to recognise the things in our world that are caused by low moral standards and a total disregard for the beauty and intimacy of a loving sexual relationship. The reality for us, however, is that we live in a sex-saturated world and to abstain from pleasure is to be seen as a freak.

If the statistics are anything to go by, the number of young people sleeping together before they are married is no different within the church as it is outside the church. Similarly, the number of affairs are very similar and by extension, the number of broken realtionships and people is ever increasing. Perhaps this is a result of love-education or sexual discipleship missing from our faith communities. Perhaps our parents have let us down. Perhaps our schools have. Or perhaps it is we simply have all given in to the culture of insant gratification in which we live and have become one with the world…

I don’t really know.

But I do know, that many, many of the people that I spend time with each week struggle with sexual sin in their lives. Often the thing that worries them the most is how it will impact any chance of having a healthy, loving relationship with anybody in the future.

A number of people have written books on recovering from sexual sin, suggesting a number of ’steps’ to go though and things to put in place. While they are helpful to some extent, I’m not that confident that they work that well. In the long term, I think you need more than a ‘formula’ and if it were that easy, I’m sure Jesus would have outlined how it was done as part of his teaching.

So rather than simply talk about how to deal with sexual sin in our past on Sunday night, I invited some friends of mine to come and share their stories. Deb and Al Hirsch are well known  for their work with gay, lesbian and trans-gender people as well as pioneering much of the emerging missional church stuff that is happening in Australia. But something we don’t often get to hear is their own story - that’s what I asked them to share with us, for I think it is an encouraging example of how sexual sin can be lived with and used to help others.

Deb shared her testimony first. In a nutshell, Deb was in a lesbian relationship, using drugs and living in a ‘party house’ in Melbourne when her drug dealer was put in prison. While there, the dealer was miraculously brought to faith and when released set about converting people in the house. In a short time, Deb and a number of her house mates had become Christians. Not knowing really what it all meant, the group of them took themselves off to the nearest church one Sunday morning. This strange bunch turned up to the local Church of Christ - one which Deb described as havng a youth group in its sixties. But they were embraced and discipled and many of that group are now in Christian ministry of some sort. Their brokeness now a source of life giving ministry to others.

Al then joined Deb on stage and I asked them a series of questions about how their pasts impacted their relationship now. Deb spoke about how healing happened with time, but never fully. There was still an aspect of becoming comfortable with who she is and the “skin she’s in”. Al described his own past as promiscuous and to this day still struggles with lust. For the both of them, it has meant being open and honest with each other from the beginning about who they were and what they’d done, but also recognising that God has called them to something greater. Also recognising that the strength required to resist temptation is often too much for an individual or a couple, they are very strong on accountability to the Christian community. Too often we think we’re the only ones struggling with sexual sin and feel isolated becasue we don’t talk about it. Accountability help breaks that cycle and allows the Spirit to speak through God’s people and bring relief.

Perhaps the biggest theme that came through the Hirsch’s sharing was the theme of God’s redemption. Sex is something beautiful, designed by God. But it has become broken and thus needs to be redeemed in our world. People who have been broken through sexual sin and immoral living  need to be redeemed, to experience love as God intends it to. The woman caught in adultery was not condemed by any of the ’stone throwers’, nor by Jesus, but was told to “Sin no more.” For her, life and love was to be redeemed (made new and whole) and I think its a safe to assume that it happened in the midst of the newly formed Christian community.

It’s hard to capture the atmosphere and power of what was shared on Sunday night here. Reading what I’ve typed doesn’t seem to do it justice, probably because it’s not a simple ten step process, but two lives that we were privileged to see into. My feeling at the end of it was that God can and does bring wholeness and healing when there is sexual sin in our past. That doesn’t mean our memories are wiped or our struggles are taken away for ever, but instead it gives us a road to travel on which others can help share the burden and where forgiveness is found.

My thanks again to Deb and Al for joining us and being so open, honest and frank about their lives.

We have one more installment of our Song of Songs series, much of which will be a follow up to this topic - there’s been a heap of questions, so we’ll see how many we can get through!

Links to the Song of Songs Series:

• What is Love?
• The Guy thing
• The Girl Thing
• The Together Thing
• Dealing With Sexual Sin in Our Past
• Answering the Questions