I’ve just moved from Ballina to Randwick, and it’s been a bit of a shock. In Ballina, from my study I could see the whales swimming by. Now I get up and look out the windows and I see the buses rushing towards the city. But watching the buses is very educational.

At the moment, plastered all over the sides of some buses are the latest ads for adult sex shops on the net. One of them says: “Moan, moan, moan, it’s all we ever hear from our customers, moans.” It’s not much fun being the father of an eight-year-old who’s a good reader. “What’s that mean, dad?”

It’s a good question. What does it mean? In order to think around that question for a while, I thought I might take you on an imaginary bus trip. We’ll catch the 380 from the City to Bondi.

We get on at Hyde Park. It’s not long before we hit Oxford Street. Oxford Street is the bottom-end of the sex market. The streets are lined with brothels, strip joints, and places that put on live sex shows. News vendors don’t just sell the Sydney Morning Herald, they also sell a wide array of porno magazines, including homosexual ones.

Our society tolerates what goes on at Oxford Street, but I think that most people feel a little uneasy about it.

As we make our way down Oxford Street we come to Paddington — rows upon rows of terraces, owned by upwardly mobile couples. If you quizzed them about their views on sex, you’d find that many of them believed in serial monogamy: one sex­ual partner at a time. If things start to go sour, you move on to the next person.

As we make our way down Oxford Street towards Bondi, we come to Centennial Park. There on the corner you can see St Matthias. On the notice board, there’s a sign for the next sermon series: “Pure sex — sex as God intended it”, what­ever that means.

Finally, we make it to Bondi Beach. It’s covered with young bodies drinking in the sun. A hundred years ago everyone would have been in their neck-to-knees, but you nearly need a magnifying glass to spot the swimming costumes they’re wearing today! Bondi is where the sex as leisure lifestyle is best seen.

What does it all mean? One thing that’s obvious is there are lots of different views about what’s OK in sex and marriage. At one end you have the conservative view, sex within marriage, but from there it’s an ever-broadening road, from serial monogamy, to sex as fun, to the perversions of Oxford Street. People aren’t all that interested in getting off at the church. They don’t want pure sex, but more sex.

About eighteen months ago Ally McBeal hit our TV screens. When the show started, it caused a real splash because they had a unisex toilet. That toilet is a symbol of the show in more ways than one. It’s all about doing away with the barriers. Ally has sex with her professor. She used to go out with her best friend’s husband. She still has a thing for him. She had sex with another friend’s fiancée in the car wash. She has kissed other women. All the barriers are down. And the last thing on anyone’s mind is marriage.

It’s easy for us to become rather smug as we see how people are crashing through the barriers, extending the boundaries. But we need to be careful to analyse our own boundaries as well. What boundaries have we set up? How do we deal with the issue of sexuality as Christian people?

Is it OK to kiss your girlfriend when you drop her off at home after a good night out? If so, what sort of kiss? One on the cheek, or one on the lips? If you hug, what sort of hug is OK? Is it OK to flirt with members of the opposite sex? If so, when is it too much? What boundaries do we have? More importantly, what are God’s?

In Genesis 2 God tells us clearly the boundaries he has established for sexual relationships.

The first two and a half chapters of Genesis are the account of creation. God keeps saying: “It’s good, it’s good, it’s very good.” But in Gen 2:18 God says for the first time “it’s not good”. “It’s not good for the man to be alone.” And so the Lord sets out to provide a suitable helper or compan­ion for him. The word ‘suitable’ there means corresponding to him, appropriate, right. God is going to find a companion who complements him.

First, the Lord brings all the animals before him in v19, and Adam names them. But we read in v20 that no suitable helper was found for him. So in v21 God causes a deep sleep to come over Adam. He takes out one of his ribs, and makes a woman from it. Then in v22 he brings the women to the man. Notice how he responds in v23,

This is now bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman for she was taken out of man.

It’s love at first sight. It works!

As we read on we see God’s pattern for the way our sexuality is to be expressed:

For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and cling to his wife and the two will become one flesh.

God’s pattern for sexual relationships is marriage. This verse highlights four steps involved in the marriage relationship.

First, it involves a man and woman. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and cling to his wife.” When Adam needed a suitable helper God didn’t make another man; he made a woman. God’s pattern is a man and a woman, not a man and a man, not a woman and a woman.

Second, it involves leaving — “a man will leave his father and mother” — that sounds self-evident. How can you get married if you don’t leave home? But when these words were written, most men didn’t phys­ically leave home when they were married. Often the man would take his bride to live in his father’s house. What this means is not so much physically leaving home as mentally leaving it. It’s talking about establishing a new primary relationship in life, a new commitment.

This thought is carried through to the third statement — “he will leave his father and mother and cling to his wife”. The word cling there literally means “glue”. And when you glue things together, they’re meant to stay together. I’m always telling my five-year-old daughter not to put stick­ers on the end of the bed because when you tear them off, they inevitably tear away the paint. Things that are glued together are meant to stay together.

That leads us to the final step. Once a couple have left and become glued together, they become one flesh. Then sex is OK. Let’s be clear, we’re not talking about sex as an animal attraction here. It’s not just lust. This is love. Two people delighting in one another, enjoying one another, and expressing their deep love and lasting commitment to one another. Sex is a physical way of saying “I love you, I am committed to you”. It’s only appropriate in a committed and lasting relationship. If you read through the Bible, then you’ll see that it says yes to sex in the context of marriage, and no in every other one! Marriage and sex are always tied together in the Bible.

It’s easy to see how much this cuts across the culture of our day. It cuts across just about everything we saw on our bus trip from the city to Bondi: the Oxford Street scene, the serial monogamy of Paddington, and the sex as leisure at Bondi.

The Bible’s view of sex within marriage is all but gone. One of the things that I get to do as a minister is marry people. I’ve been in the ministry for 10 years now, and I reckon that at least 80 per cent of the cou­ples who come to me asking to be married are living together. The couple believe that if they’re compatible, then they’ll commit. It’s the exact reverse of what it says in the Bible.

Why do we see all the sexual confusion we see in our society? Why don’t we see more people being married if God’s pattern is so good? Because we are in rebellion against God! We want to make our own rules. There’s only one problem: it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because it’s based upon lies. The devil says “There aren’t any boundaries, there aren’t any consequences. You can be like God.”

But God has set boundaries, boundaries that work. There are clearly consequences for going outside those boundaries, as we can see all around us. And we don’t make very good gods.

We know this in our hearts. We don’t always want to acknowledge it, but deep down we know it. Perhaps we’ve gone too far sexually in a relationship, but the thing that made it seem right was that we thought we were in love and we thought it was good. But it wasn’t. We were used. And now we feel exposed and guilty.

However, sex is one of God’s greatest gifts to us. But when we take it and use it outside of the boundaries he has set, then it becomes something that does untold dam­age in our lives. We are left feeling guilty, broken, exposed, ashamed.

If we want to get back to the quality of relationship that we see pictured at the end of Genesis 2 (“the man and his wife were both naked and they felt no shame”), there’s only one way. We need to confess our rebellion towards God and repent of it.

If you’re going out with a girl or a boy, then you’ll need to talk about how you’re going to relate to one another in a way that honours the Lord. And if you’ve already gone beyond the boundaries that God has set, then you’ll need to ask forgiveness from God and one another.

If you’re engaged, then you may need to do the same thing. Certainly, all of us, sin­gle, engaged or married need to repent of the wrong thoughts and intentions we’ve had. We need to ask God to strengthen our hearts to obey him.

Second, we need to determine that we are going to obey God in this area of our lives. I was challenged recently by a statement from one of the old Puritans, William Law. He said: “If you will stop and ask yourself why you are not as godly as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you that it’s neither through igno­rance nor inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it.”

That cuts to the heart, doesn’t it? We don’t obey God because we have never really intended to! Do you fully intend to obey God in the matter of your sexuality and how you use it?

In the back seat of the car with the win­dows steamed up is no time to begin to think about what you’re going to do with your sexuality. Give your sexuality to God.

Repent of using it your own way. Ask God to give you a new heart and a new mind. You don’t need to be overcome with guilt over your past failures. Jesus died on the cross to forgive your rebellion, including your sexual sins. Confess them and repent.

Determine with God‘s help to obey him and trust him in this matter. If you do, then you’ll be able to experience the quality of relationship pictured there at the end of Genesis 2, “the man and his wife were both naked and they felt no shame”.