I don’t frequently spend time alone. I love to be with people too much, BUT yesterday night I was really needing some Kaitlyn time. (Translation: half watching a movie on my computer and half watching my brother play video games.) So, I was feeling an old favorite–you know, a “classic,” so I started watching the movie “Grease.” You know, that great movie with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, with the great music, and the great ’50s stuff.
Since when is that movie all about sex?
It was one of the huge, double-take, what? moments. I’ve seen the film before, but I never remembered it being this bad. I had to skip so much of the movie, and it bothered me how this is hailed as a classic, yet its content is completely focused on the sexual encounters between a bunch of teenagers.
This is what the world celebrates, promotes, and encourages. As Christians, this is not what we are called to believe, and yet it would so easy to walk away from a film like that and subconsciously agree with its messages. Throughout the film, the male characters talk about how girls are only good for “one thing” (sex), and the heroine of the film isn’t “cool” or truly a part of the gang until she turns herself into a sex object and gives up everything she stands for in order to keep her guy. Sex is treated lightly, virginity is seen as gross and stupid. Sex is seen as an “everyone’s doing it” sort of thing. Unfortunately, “Grease” isn’t alone in this. The majority of media today are promoting, whether subtly or blatantly, that sex is the answer and the goal. Worse, sex is equated with love.
The Word of God points to purity with our bodies: sexually, emotionally, spiritually, and mentally. It’s not simply avoiding certain things; purity is to pursue righteousness, that is, to pursue living the way God calls us to live. “Flee from sexual immorality,” Paul writes to the Corinthians; he doesn’t say “Don’t have sex and that equals purity.” Purity is living according to the Word of God (Psalm 119:9). Purity is being washed from our sins by the blood of Christ and striving to live in step with the Spirit, who is working in us to make us more like Christ (Galatians 5:16). Purity is treating sex the way we are supposed to: between one man and one woman in marriage, reflecting the intimacy between the Trinity, between Christ and the church, and between God and the individual believer. We are “to control [our] bodies in holiness and honor” (1 Thess. 4:4).
Do you have a biblical view of sex? Have you been simply ingesting what the world has been telling you? What do you really believe about these things?
Our bodies were not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord. Therefore, let us glorify the Lord–with our bodies (what we do), with our minds (what we think), and with our lives (in everything). See clearly. See the truth: you were made for more than what the world is telling you to pursue.
