By Rick Carrol

The Bible seems to be a little outdated when it comes to relationships, gender and sexual expression. Our world has learned to give freedom and embrace people as they identify, rather than forcing them to fit the box that they are told to. It’s given people who have walked for years with shame or guilt about how they feel the freedom to express who they feel they really are.

 We can never discount culture’s impact on us. Positive and negative experiences shape our identity all the time. Cultural expectations for what it means to be “male” or “female” make it so that many of us don’t feel we fit, or that we have to adjust our true self to be part of the group. Through movies, music, advertisements, books and more, we are being sold an expectation of what sex and sexuality is supposed to be. Hollywood has monetized it, Hallmark has idealized it, but the Bible optimized a lifestyle of sexual fulfillment.

Genesis 1:27 tells us that, “God created human beings[d] in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

We are culturally informed, but Biblically illiterate. God actually designed a pathway for us to have wholeness, and fulfillment in our relationships. However it begins with trusting that He holds more truth about our identity and who we are, than we do. It starts by trusting that God made me, intentionally on purpose, to be who I am.

 While the world encourages us to seek truth within ourselves, God invites us to find truth in Him.

At the end of life, who walks through more hurt: Sexually permissive individuals, who can use sex for work, for entertainment, change partners and orientations based on seasons of life and feeling? Or two people who have been untied as one forever? Trusting in His plan for sexuality is the first step on a path to true fulfillment.