Sex as Spiritual Warfare: Texas Pastor Says God's Purposes for Marriage Attacked by Satan
Pastor Blake Wilson is known for his Bible-based curriculum on sex, having shared his message on godly intimacy for years with NBA teams and churches across the country. The Houston, Texas, pastor of Crossover Bible Fellowship recently spoke with The Christian Post about his upcoming "Sex and the Gospel" conference and why he believes Satan is just as interested in the bedroom as God.
According to Wilson, whose nondenominational church is home to 700-800 members and has a strong youth presence, most people are unaware that sexuality is really an issue of warfare. As he explained, the devil knows that God's primary purpose for marriage is procreation, to "raise up godly offspring." He believes Satan is shown to have been attacking the purpose of marriage since the biblical account in Genesis 3 that tells of a serpent successfully tempting Adam and Eve to disobey God. As a result, said Wilson, man has been living by his own sexual agenda instead of by God's biblical blueprint, with disastrous results.
Below is a transcript of CP's phone interview with Wilson. It has been edited for brevity.
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CP: Please provide some background on the Sex and the Gospel conference.
Wilson: The curriculum didn't start out as a curriculum. Actually, my wife and I were asked to speak at a retreat with teenagers and the teenagers chose the topics ... and one of the topics that they chose was sex, they wanted to talk about it and learn about it from a biblical perspective.
As my wife and I began to speak on sex, the kids really responded ... and so from there we started getting more and more invitations to speak on sex. The next thing you know, it kind of developed into a series. I became a youth pastor and we started putting more and more teachings together on it because kids were basically saying, "Here's what we're facing and dealing with everyday. These are the realities we're dealing with in middle school and high school, and we never knew God had anything to say about these issues."
According to Psalm 119:9-11, the Bible talks about how a young person can keep their way pure, and it says by living according to the Word. Well if a person doesn't have a word to live by, they're not taught a word to live by, then they're going to fail.
I kind of looked back on my personal experience growing up in church, [about] not having a specific biblical teaching or word or instruction on that area to show me why wait to preserve myself for a wife versus just the old school adage of "If you have sex, you're going to die and burn in hell." So that's kind of what we really wanted to do, to renew people's minds in that area and of life that's so real and teach them so that they can make wise decisions.
CP: Over time, have you found that you've had to adapt the message to make it more relevant to the culture?
Wilson: No, we really have not had to adapt the message. Actually, in teaching the message, you're talking about ancient stories from the Bible that are very relevant, whether it's just scenarios of date rape in 2 Sam. 13 or Gen. 34 that are very relevant to people. I think that God's Word is timeless, and as a result it's not a matter of it being made relevant to the culture but the culture, including the church, has never been exposed to the Word of God in the first place so they don't even know that God is addressing these types of issues in the Word of God.
CP: Who are you trying to reach and what kind of change are you hoping to inspire with the Sex and the Gospel conference?
Wilson: Number one, we believe that the message concerning sex is larger than the Church. It's a universal message, so in terms of reach, there are definitely churches we are reaching but also we have people in this social media world that have friends, the Facebooks, the Twitters, and they're saying, "Come and hear about sex from the manufacturer's manual." God is the one who manufactured sex, the one who thought of it. … So people are inviting their friends, they're inviting their coworkers, we're experiencing all those things. And people are saying, "I didn't even know that the church talked about sex." So we're getting people who aren't churchgoers on a regular basis as well as church people.
CP: You shared this message at the 2013 Advance the Church conference. How was it received?
Wilson: I think that a lot of the people were amazed how biblically-based the message was as it relates to the culture. One of the big premises in the teaching is in Acts 15:29-30 it says "seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these essentials." Here are some essential things the church has to know, and it said avoid idolatry and avoid immorality. It was because the culture that those people were coming out of were so idolatrous and so immoral that they said, "Okay, let's teach them in these areas and if they observe these things, they will do well." In other words, life will change for them. Which goes back to that revolution – you're no longer just engaging in an activity that's going to lead [to] pain and hurt. It was never God's design for people to have sexually transmitted diseases. It was not God's design for people to raise children with no fathers. That's not His design, that was once man entered into the equation and started running his sex life by his own agenda, versus God's biblical blueprint. So a lot of the things that are hurting us in the culture today, you know [a girl] losing her virginity to a so-called boyfriend who loves them only for him to start dating the next girl, and now she's hurt – that wasn't God's design, that was our plan. As a result, when people get informed they start learning things that they would have never learned in their entire life.
One major fact is a girl's virginity. A lot of women know the price of getting their hair done, their nails done, their feet done, but don't know the price of their virginity in the Bible. In Exodus 22:16 and 17 and in Deuteronomy 22:29, it talks about a girl's virginity being worth five years of salary. So a bride price would be paid in which the guy interested in marrying the young lady would pay the father five years of stored up salary for the value of his daughter who was a virgin. So virginity at the time was the expectation not the exception. So you know, Mary and Esther, they're not being used in the Bible the way they're getting used on accident because they're virgins. They were getting used the way they are used in the Bible because there was the expectation and they were living according to God's Word.
I think that one of the things that came out of the conference the most is people being amazed at what God said. We've just never really been taught well concerning sex.
