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I want to talk about something I think deserves our attention, particularly for those of us who are parents, grandparents, or simply people who care about the next generation. Our children and grandchildren are growing up in a world where some very influential voices are telling them some pretty troubling things about what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman, and what relationships between men and women are supposed to look like. And many of those voices are speaking in the name of Christianity.
They're telling young men that being a strong man means always being in charge, making the decisions, and expecting women to accommodate every sexual desire. They're telling young women that being good means becoming a wife, submitting completely to their husbands, deferring to their decisions, and even making themselves sexually available whether they want to or not.
And these aren't just ideas floating around in some obscure corner of the internet. They're being promoted by popular personalities, podcasts, social media influencers, and megachurch pastors with enormous audiences. They're reaching young people who are looking for identity, belonging, purpose, and guidance about how to navigate relationships.
One prominent megachurch pastor recently told the women in his congregation that on their wedding night they should “stand where he tells you to stand, wear what he tells you to wear, and do what he tells you to do.” Another prominent pastor described women as “the kind of people that people come out of.” And some of these Christian teachers are even advocating for repealing the 19th Amendment, which secured women's right to vote.
I don't bring this up to point fingers at you or suggest that any of us have somehow failed the next generation. Most of us are doing our best to love them, encourage them, and teach them the way of Jesus. But we have a responsibility to pay attention to the messages they're hearing, especially when those messages come wrapped in biblical language and create environments of real harm. We also have a responsibility to lovingly warn them from messages of real harm.
And that's precisely why Paul's words matter. In this passage, he’s writing the church at Corinth to warn some within the church who are making derogatory statements about women and sex in order to show them the gospel way.
He writes, “For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise, the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does.”
Now, notice what Paul does here. He doesn't tell wives that their bodies belong to their husbands and leave it there. He immediately turns the whole thing around. The husband's body belongs to his wife, too. And when it comes to sexual intimacy, Paul insists that the decision must be made by mutual consent. Neither person gets to claim a special entitlement to the other's body. Neither person's desires automatically take precedence.
Paul isn't describing a marriage in which one person gets to call the shots and the other learns to comply. He's describing a relationship in which both people recognize that the other partner’s body, freedom, and life matter just as much as their own.
In our Better Together series, we've been exploring God's vision for human relationships: not domination, but partnership; not hierarchy, but shared dignity. And here, in a few remarkably provocative sentences, Paul gives us a glimpse of what that partnership looks like in practice. And let me put this plainly: Paul is not a conservative defending traditional family values. Paul is the revolutionary feminist challenging traditional norms.
To appreciate just how remarkable Paul’s position is, we need to understand something about the Roman world he lives in. In Roman society, men possessed far greater sexual, legal, and social power than women. The idea that a husband could make claims on his wife's body was culturally undisputed. The idea that a wife possessed an equivalent claim over her husband's body was something truly unheard of. Male privilege was so dominant that male created real, legal double standards for men and women, particularly when it came to sexual behavior.
For example, a wife's adultery brought severe consequences, while a husband's sexual behavior was judged by an entirely different ethical standard. Gellius, a Roman lawyer writing in the second century, recounts a legal precedent: “If you should catch your wife in adultery, you can kill her with impunity ... but if you commit adultery ... she has no right [to do so].” That's the world Paul is speaking into.
So listen to what Paul's doing. In the face of this asymmetrical world, he addresses husbands and wives with radically symmetrical language. Each has the same obligations to the other. Each has the same authority in relation to the other's body. And each has an equal voice in deciding whether to abstain from sex.
And in verse 5, Paul says married couples should abstain from sexual intimacy only “by mutual agreement.” Listen to that. This is the only place in Scripture where Paul addresses a specific decision a husband and wife must make together—and he insists that it be mutual. I've often heard conservative Christians argue that Paul's declaration in Ephesians 5 that the “husband is the head of the wife” means that men ultimately get to make the decisions. But here, when Paul actually mentions a concrete marital decision, he doesn't give the husband the final say. He doesn't give the wife the final say. He doesn't say the more spiritual person gets to decide. He says both must agree. Not one person's authority over the other. Not one person's will prevailing over the other. Mutuality. That's Paul's instruction.
Think about how radical that is. In a culture where a man's wishes carried so much more weight than a woman's, Paul insists that this decision belongs to both of them. And let's be clear: mutual authority is not permission to coerce. Paul isn't giving either spouse a license to demand sex. Mutuality means neither person gets to override the other's will.
The gospel changes not only what we believe about God. It changes what we believe we're entitled to do with one another. Paul's vision isn't that one person controls the other. It's that neither person gets to live as though the other doesn't matter. And what might happen if we took that principle beyond the bedroom?
What if we brought this mutuality into decisions about careers, finances, household responsibilities, whose exhaustion gets noticed, whose dreams get room to grow, and whose voice carries weight? What if the question wasn't, “Who gets the final say?” but, “How do we make a life in which both of us can flourish?” Because in God's kingdom, love isn't demonstrated by how successfully we get our way. It's revealed in how seriously we take the life of another person.
And there's another important part of this passage. Paul doesn't treat marriage as the destination everyone must reach to become a complete human being. In verses 7–9, he speaks positively about singleness, acknowledges that people have different gifts, and offers practical guidance to those navigating their desires. Marriage isn't everyone's calling. Singleness isn't a lesser calling. Neither should become a measure of someone's worth.
Some people are happily married. Some are single by choice; others long for a partner. Some of us are divorced or widowed. Some are trying to make sense of relationships that haven't turned out as expected. And some have been told by the church that their relationships or desires make them less acceptable to God.
We shouldn't flatten all these experiences into one answer. Paul's words invite us to take people's actual lives seriously, honor their gifts, and resist treating one particular arrangement as the universal pattern of faithfulness.
This matters because sometimes we take a handful of biblical verses about sexuality and turn them into boundaries determining who belongs and who’s acceptable. But Scripture is a much larger story—a story of a God whose mercy repeatedly reaches beyond the boundaries people thought God had established.
Biblical scholar Walter Wink once provocatively argued: “There is no biblical sex ethic. The Bible knows only a love ethic.” Now, that doesn't mean anything goes. Love asks more of us, not less. Are we honest with one another? Are we faithful? Do we respect one another's freedom? Do our choices contribute to another person's flourishing, or are we treating that person as a body to possess?
Those questions bring us right back to Paul. In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul takes people's bodies, desires, responsibilities, and gifts seriously. He refuses to make marriage the only faithful life, and he refuses to let a husband claim a one-sided right over his wife.
And that conversation belongs to married and single people, straight and LGBTQ+ people, those who have found companionship and those whose lives have taken a different shape. This conversation belongs to the church, too. Are we creating a community where people can flourish? Or are we using our convictions and conversations to make some people feel less, or lower, than others?
Perhaps the deeper invitation of this passage is to become people who no longer confuse decision making with entitlement, desire with ownership, or marital status with human worth. And I think that's why Paul's words are so important right now.
Because there are powerful voices trying to convince an entire generation that the way to restore relationships is to restore something Paul sought to dismantle. That the answer to uncertainty about gender and sexuality is to return to a hierarchy in which men command and women comply. That somehow we become more faithful to Jesus by reclaiming the privileges some men once enjoyed. But Paul points us in precisely the opposite direction.
He takes the patriarchal assumptions of his culture—the assumptions that only men decide, only men’s bodies matters, only men’s desires count—and turns them upside down. He refuses to let the gospel become a religious justification for someone else's control. And that's something we need to hear and share again.
We need to keep asking whether our relationships look like the self-giving, liberating, mutually honoring love of Jesus. Because the good news is not that some people get to have power over others. The good news is that in Christ, we are learning to make room for one another. To honor one another. To seek one another's flourishing. That's the kind of partnership creation was meant to hold. That's the kind of love God is teaching us to practice. Together. Amen.
