Many of us learned about sex at church mostly through what went unsaid. A rule was announced, the subject changed, and the silence taught the rest: that the body is embarrassing, that some questions are too dirty for God, and that the people who get judged are the ones who get caught. Scripture says something different. It keeps a clear standard: sexual intimacy belongs within the marriage of a husband and wife. It also refuses to use shame as the way to hold that standard. Jude 3 teaches this historic ethic and holds that it should be taught plainly, leading with grace and never with fear or humiliation.
This study helps you separate those two things in your own life: the standard Scripture actually gives, and the shame and quick judgments you may have absorbed along the way. You will read a handful of passages closely, in context, before applying any of them to yourself. You can work through it alone with a notebook or with a small group over one or two sessions. The questions are open on purpose. Nobody has to share anything they would rather keep private.
Start with what the silence said
On the Jude 3 Project podcast, Lisa Fields asked Pastor John Faison, who pastors Watson Grove Baptist Church in Nashville, why so many churches avoid the subject. He listed what the avoidance has produced: unhappy marriages, unhealthy sexual activity, teenage pregnancy, and high rates of HIV and other infections. Then he named the cause: “Because we forced people to get their information elsewhere.”
That sentence assumes something worth noticing. Silence does not leave a person with no beliefs about sex. It leaves them with beliefs picked up elsewhere, and with a lesson about God underneath: that he has nothing to say here. Faison put the contradiction this way: “we say God has an answer for our eternal salvation, but God has nothing to say about issues that we deal with every day.”
Before opening a Bible, take ten minutes with these prompts. Write short answers. You are taking an inventory, not passing a test.
- Where did you actually learn what you believe about sex? List every source you can name, whether or not it was a good one.
- Write down three beliefs about sex or the body that you hold but never remember choosing.
- Next to each one, mark whether it is about God’s design, about shame, or about other people.
Keep this list. Every passage below is a chance to test one line on it.
Genesis 2-3: where the hiding begins
Read Genesis 2:18-25 and then Genesis 3:1-13 in one sitting. These chapters are narrative. They describe what happened. They do not hand down a rule for church programs. So the first question is not what to do, but what the story shows.
The first section ends with this line: “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed” (Genesis 2:25). The verse pairs nakedness with the absence of shame. It also places that freedom inside a union: “the man and his wife.” The verse just before it describes a man leaving his parents and cleaving to his wife (Genesis 2:24).
Now look at what changes. After the disobedience, the couple sew fig leaves together and cover themselves (Genesis 3:7). When God calls, the man answers, “I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself” (Genesis 3:10). Fear and hiding come in after sin. The text does not present them as part of the original design, and it does not present hiding as a form of holiness.
Be careful not to make the story say more than it does. Genesis 3 does not teach that every feeling of shame is false, and it does not erase the boundary that Genesis 2 sets up. What it does show is the movement of the first couple: away from God, toward cover. Look at your inventory. Does any belief on it push you toward hiding from God, rather than toward honesty before him?
Hebrews 13:4: one sentence, two claims
“Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge” (Hebrews 13:4). The verse sits in a closing list of practical instructions to a community of believers: love one another, show hospitality, remember prisoners, stay free from the love of money.
Notice that it makes two claims, and it makes them together. The marriage bed is honorable. The word “undefiled” means unstained or pure, the opposite of dirty. Sexual immorality and adultery are under God’s judgment. Neither half cancels the other.
Many people received only one half of this sentence. Some heard only the warning, so sex itself came to feel like a stain they would have to overcome even after marriage. Others heard only the honor, as if the boundary were an old custom. Read your inventory again. Which half did you get? Which half is missing from how you think?
1 Corinthians 6: the body matters to God
Read 1 Corinthians 6:12-20. Paul is writing to a church in Corinth where some believers apparently thought what they did with their bodies did not touch their life with God. Paul argues the opposite. The body belongs to the Lord. It is joined to Christ. It is the dwelling of the Holy Spirit. His conclusion: “For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s” (1 Corinthians 6:20).
Look closely at what grounds Paul’s reasoning. He does not argue that sex is disgusting. He argues that the body is valuable enough to belong to God. The boundary follows from that dignity. This is the reverse of the script many people absorbed, where the boundary rests on embarrassment.
Faison’s complaint about silence fits here. A church that speaks about salvation but never about the body implies the body is outside God’s concern. Paul will not allow that separation. Ask yourself: when you think about your own sexual history or desires, do you think of your body as God’s, or as something he would rather not look at?
Romans 2 and Galatians 6: the one who judges is examined too
This angle often gets skipped. Inherited shame tends to come with inherited judgment, and usually the judgment falls unevenly.
Lisa Fields described a pattern she sees often. When a same-sex couple visits, some church members feel they have to confront them right away. Yet, she said, “there are some people that are shacking in your church that you ain’t saying nothing to.” Her point was not that the standard should be dropped. It was that applying it so selectively treats some people as projects and others as invisible. She argued that someone who holds a conviction should talk with the actual person, possibly in private, instead of preaching in their direction: “I think that’s the difference between being somebody that’s a coward and somebody that’s courageous.”
Paul makes the same move at the structural level. Romans 1 describes humanity turning from God, and many readers stop there. Paul does not. The next chapter turns on the reader who has been nodding along: “Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest doest the same things” (Romans 2:1). The argument arrives at level ground: “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Read as a whole argument, the passage does not shrink sin. It removes the judge’s platform.
Galatians 6:1 gives the posture for correcting someone: “Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted.” The aim is restoration. The tone is meekness. And the corrector examines himself first.
Faison did that in the conversation. He said, “We preach abstinence, but the Saints ain’t listening,” and then counted himself among them, explaining that he married at eighteen when his wife was already pregnant. His conclusion was a demand on church leaders, himself included: “You gotta stop lying and stop acting like these things are not occurring.” Being honest about your own story does not lower the standard. It takes away the pretense that you are standing above it.
John 4: truth spoken without humiliation
Read John 4:1-30 and 4:39-42. Jesus talks with a Samaritan woman at a well, and at one point names her situation: “For thou hast had five husbands; and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband: in that saidst thou truly” (John 4:18).
Read slowly, and resist filling in what the text leaves out. John does not say why she had five husbands. In that world, widowhood and men’s power to divorce could both explain it, and interpreters disagree about how much moral blame the story puts on her. What the text does show is that Jesus says the true thing without contempt, keeps talking with her, and reveals himself to her. Then she goes back into town and says, “Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ?” (John 4:29). Being known fully did not send her into hiding. It sent her out with news.
Compare that to Genesis 3. Where do you see a person moving toward cover, and where do you see a person moving into the open? What made the difference?
Test the arguments, including the comfortable ones
Reading against your script also means testing claims you might like. In the same conversation, Faison raised the argument that Jesus never mentions homosexuality. Lisa Fields pushed back, saying that if we build theology from what Jesus did not say, “we’ll have a very skewed theology, because I don’t think he mentioned rape either.” Faison agreed with her, and moved to a different principle: where Scripture gives no direct word, he turns to the example of Christ, because, as he put it, “the Christian ethic always starts and ends with love.”
There is a parallel here. Church silence about sex lets an absence teach. An argument from Jesus’ silence does the same thing. In both cases, something the text does not say is made to carry weight it cannot hold. Careful reading looks at what the passage actually asserts.
Lisa and Faison also noted that Christians differ on how the laws in Leviticus carry over into Christian life. Faithful Christians hold different views on that question. Try this: write a two-sentence summary of each of their concerns that both of them would accept as fair. Only after that, write down where you land and why.
A practice for this week: read one belief against its whole passage
Choose one belief from your inventory, ideally one that carries shame or a judgment about someone else.
- Name the verse or saying that was used to support it. If none was ever given, write that down. It tells you something.
- If there is a verse, read the whole chapter around it. Write who is speaking, who is being addressed, and what kind of writing it is.
- Draw two columns: what the passage says, and what you assumed it said. Be strict about the first column.
- Ask whether the belief survived. Some will, perhaps held more gently. Some will not. Some will need to be rebuilt.
- Take one concrete step that fits what you found. It could be an honest conversation you have avoided, a talk with a pastor or counselor, or scheduling a medical appointment or STI test you have been putting off out of fear. Faison described the purpose of public testing at his church, where “my wife and I get tested before the congregation,” as going first so the stigma breaks.
Questions for discussion
- When Genesis 2-3 is read as a story, what does it suggest about where shame belongs and where it doesn’t? What would be overreading the text?
- Hebrews 13:4 holds honor and boundary in one sentence. Which half did your church emphasize, and what did that emphasis cost?
- Paul bases sexual ethics on the body’s value to God. How would that change the way you talk about sex with someone younger?
- Where have you seen the standard applied to some people and quietly excused for others? What would consistent and gentle application look like?
- In John 4, what in Jesus’ manner allowed the woman to be fully known without being crushed?
- Lisa Fields objects to reasoning from Jesus’ silence. What other conclusions have you seen drawn from what a passage does not say?
For anyone leading this study
Assume that some people in the room carry sexual shame they have never spoken about, and that some first learned about sex through abuse. Do not ask for confessions. Let people answer in writing and keep it to themselves. Thank people who share without probing further.
Keep one distinction clear. Being sinned against is not the same as sinning. A person who was abused carries no guilt for what was done to them, and the shame passages in this study must never be turned against them. If someone discloses abuse, listen, believe them, and help connect them with a pastor they trust and a trained counselor. Seeking therapy is not a failure of faith. If someone is in danger at home now, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233.
Finally, don’t wrap the session up too quickly. A good place to stop is with a question each person can carry home: which belief on my list did Scripture actually teach me, and which did I learn from the silence?