Sexual Ethics and the Gospel

We all know the feeling of something being out of joint. A love that will not settle. A desire that promises life and delivers restlessness. Most people carry this quietly into the week. We learn to manage it, rename it, or baptize it with softer language. Scripture does not rush past that ache. It pauses over it. It names it. Then it tells us a deeper story.

Romans 1.18–27 begins far upstream from any single behavior. Paul is not scanning the world for the worst examples of human failure. He is tracing a fracture. The problem, he says, is not first what we do with our bodies but what we do with God. Humanity knew God and yet did not honor him as God or give thanks. We exchanged glory. We traded the Creator for created things. Psalm 106 tells the same story: “They exchanged the glory of God for the image of an ox that eats grass” (Psalm 106.20). That word exchange matters. Paul uses it again and again. It is the engine of the passage.

When worship bends, everything else follows.

Paul then says something unsettling. God gives people over. Three times. Not as an act of cruelty, but as an act of judgment that lets disordered loves run their course. Desire becomes its own teacher. What feels freeing slowly reveals its cost. This is where Paul speaks of same-sex relations in Romans 1.26–27, calling them “contrary to nature.” The phrase does not refer to private psychology or individual self-perception. Paul is not asking what feels natural to you. He is asking what accords with creation as God ordered it.

Genesis 1–2 sits behind his words. Humanity is made male and female. Bodies are given meaning before desire ever speaks. Sexual union is framed as a one-flesh reality that images God’s life-giving design (Genesis 2.24). Paul’s appeal to nature, physis, reaches back to that creational grammar. It is not about singling out one sin. It is about showing what happens when the world turns away from its Maker. As Thomas Schreiner observes, Paul introduces homosexuality here not because it is uniquely interesting, but because it visibly displays a deeper inversion of worship and order (Paul, Apostle of God’s Glory in Christ, 317–320).

Paul does not say these desires appear because some people are worse than others. He says they arise in a world where all of us have participated in exchange. We all live east of Eden. Sexual disorder is one expression of a universal problem. It belongs in the same sentence as envy, pride, gossip, and violence later in the chapter. The ground is level.

That is why Romans 1 must be read with Romans 8 open nearby. Creation itself is groaning, Paul says, subjected to futility, waiting for redemption (Romans 8.20–23). The ache we feel in our bodies, our longings that do not resolve cleanly, are not proof that God has abandoned us. They are signs that the world is not yet healed.

And Paul does not leave us in Romans 1. First Corinthians 6.9–11 echoes the same moral clarity, but it ends with a sentence soaked in mercy: “And such were some of you.” Past tense. Not because every desire vanished, but because identity shifted. “You were washed. You were sanctified. You were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.” The deepest change is not orientation but allegiance. Not the erasing of struggle but the re-centering of the self.

This is where Christ stands at the center of the story. Jesus does not promise that following him will reorder every desire on our timetable. He promises something better. A new Lord. A truer name. A future secured by resurrection. He calls people with many kinds of disordered loves to die and rise with him. Some will marry. Some will remain single. All are invited into a family deeper than biology and a hope stronger than appetite.

Romans 1 tells the truth without flinching. Romans 8 tells us why we do not despair. The gospel does not deny the ache. It gives it a horizon.

Trust Christ with your body this week. Trust him with the longing you cannot fix. He is gentle with the broken and faithful to finish what he begins.

~PW 🌮🛶

For further reading:

• Carson, D. A. (Ed.). (2022). How should we think about homosexuality? Lexham Press.
• Fee, G. D. (1987). The first epistle to the Corinthians (New International Commentary on the New Testament). Eerdmans.
• Plantinga, C., Jr. (1995). Not the way it’s supposed to be: A breviary of sin. Eerdmans.
• Schreiner, T. R. (1998). Romans (Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament). Baker Academic.
• Schreiner, T. R. (2006). Paul, apostle of God’s glory in Christ: A Pauline theology. IVP Academic.
• Smedes, L. B. (1994). Sex for Christians: The limits and liberties of sexual living (2nd ed.). Eerdmans.
• Volf, M. (1996). Exclusion and embrace: A theological exploration of identity, otherness, and reconciliation. Abingdon Press.
• Yarhouse, M. A. (2010). Homosexuality and the Christian: A guide for parents, pastors, and friends. Bethany House.