Program: FamilyLife Today

Pastor: Marital moderation is most easily secured and maintained where married persons occupy separate beds. Often, the best arrangement is to occupy separate rooms, because then you can escape the sexual excitement, which comes daily, by the twice-repeated exposure of undressing and dressing in each other's presence.

Woman: To the sensitive young woman who has had the benefit of proper upbringing, the wedding day is ironically both the happiest and the most terrifying day of her life. One cardinal rule of marriage should never be forgotten ? give little, give seldom and, above all, give grudgingly.

Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Thursday, April 7th. Our host is the president of FamilyLife, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine. We'll see if today we can't provide you with a little more biblical counsel on romantic love in marriage.

And welcome to FamilyLife Today, thanks for joining us on the Thursday edition. You know how it is when you sit down with couples who are maybe just a step or two farther down the path than you are in your marriage, and you look at them, and they still have the twinkle, and they still have the grin, and you can tell this couple, they are still passionate about one another.

Dennis: Right, and there's not enough of those couples, Bob, frankly.

Bob: It's exciting when you meet them. You want to sit down with them and say, "Okay, tell me what you know and how you get there, because I want to be like you when I get to where you are."

Dennis: Right, and when we run across one of these couples who is a great communicator, we love to feature them here on FamilyLife Today, and today you're going to hear a couple of friends, Jody and Linda Dillow, who have served Christ internationally. Jody has been a seminary professor; Linda, an author and speaker all around the country. They are not only great friends, but they have a passion about passion.

Bob: They sure do.

Dennis: And at our Weekend to Remember, Bob, we talk about a lot of relevant issues that couples need a biblical perspective on, but I don't think there's any more relevant today at our Weekend to Remember than the hour or so we spend on sexual intimacy in marriage.

Bob: Well, it's one of those topics that doesn't get addressed very often in very many places from a biblical perspective.

Dennis: Well, Christians are afraid of it.

Bob: And I think a lot of people are struggling in this area in their marriage, and who do you talk to about that? Where do you go to get helpful biblical information?

Dennis: I know.

Bob: To the Weekend to Remember.

Dennis: to the Weekend to Remember and to today's broadcast. We're going to hear Jody and Linda Dillow talk about the first two of four flames about firing up your romance. Let's listen to Jody and Linda.

Jody: Four weeks ago, Linda and I celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary. It gets better every year.

[applause]

And we went to Aspen, Colorado. I don't know if any of you have been there, but there's a couple of different ways you can go, and one is over a place called "Independence Pass," and it's a series of switchbacks with no guardrails. And on the way over, I just about lost my wife emotionally and practically killed the weekend, but it was a fantastic time just to get away and reflect upon our years of marriage.

We were overseas for 18 years. We had three children in under three years, so we were physically exhausted, and then we had four teenagers at the same time, so we were emotional wrecks, and then we had four in college at the same time, so we were bankrupt. And last year we had ? or I had ? three trips to the emergency room. In fact, on the last one, as I recall, I was in the emergency room and my wife, that same day, had to put our beloved dog to death. Not a good day for Linda.

But in the midst of it all, God has given us a rich relationship, and probably one of the reasons they invited us to speak on sex is because we've been married longer than anyone else here; we've had more experience. This afternoon, we want to reflect with you a little bit on romance and the joy and excitement of an intimate relationship.

Linda: When we were in Aspen, I spent some time just reflecting on 40 years of intimacy, and one time came to my mind very vividly, and it was about three years ago when I was whisking Jody away to Breckenridge for five days, and I was talking to the Lord. I said, "Lord, I don't want our sexual relationship to get dull just because we're getting older, so give me an idea to be creative." And I'm walking around the house saying, "Holy Spirit, speak to me. I'm opening doors," and ? ah, I open a closet, and I spy an Easter basket with the colored Easter eggs that you fill for children, and I thought, "I can use that."

I went to the grocery store and bought Jody's favorite candy, Milk Duds, and I filled each of the colored Easter eggs with Milk Duds, and that was his sweet treat. And then I took little pieces of paper, and I wrote a sexual treat on each one and put it in the colored Easter eggs with his sweet treat. And every now and then while we were at Breckinridge, I would just toss him a colored egg. And one morning I tossed him a bright pink egg, and he opened it up, and he read the little piece of paper, and he smiled, and he started eating the Milk Duds, and I went over and sat on the couch with him, and he's eating the Milk Duds, and we're just talking and, all of a sudden, he says, "Oh, no." And with the Milk Duds came a bridge with four crowns.

So we called a dentist, and Jody is standing at the door with his teeth in his hands, and I looked at him, and I said, "Grandpa, I'll be waiting for you after you get your teeth glued in." People often to say to us, "Doesn't sex change when you get older?" And I say, "Yes, it gets very expensive." This creative sexual encounter cost $6,000. No more Milk Duds for my man.

Jody: We'd like to share with you four flames, which we believe are biblical and are crucial to igniting sexual intimacy in your marriage. The first flame is to embrace God's perspective. There's a number of Scriptures that I think would be appropriate to highlight here. First of all, in Ephesians 5, Paul says, "For this cause a man shall leave his father and mother and shall cleave to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh." The mystery is great, but I'm speaking with reference to Christ in the church. Have you ever reflected on the fact that what Paul is saying here is that the intimate relationship between you and your spouse is in some way to reflect an intimacy between Christ and His church. In other words, the physical dimension of marriage is elevated to a very high degree in this passage.

In Proverbs, Solomon says, "Let your fountain be blessed and rejoice in the wife of your youth. As a loving hind and a graceful doe, let her breasts satisfy you at all times. Be exhilarated always with her love." That Hebrew word translated "exhilarated" here, literally means "intoxicated" with her love. In Hebrew, a way of paraphrasing this might be something like this ? "Let your love and your sexual embrace with your wife intoxicate you continually with delight. Always enjoy the ecstasy of her love." So God says revel in the delight of sexual intimacy at all times. But, sadly, this has not always been the message through the centuries that the church has communicated.

Linda: In preparation for the book we just finished, "Intimacy Ignited," we did a lot of research back in the years about what godly people gave as advice to brides and grooms. Now, this advice was written by a pastor's wife in 1897 to young brides ? "To the sensitive young woman who has had the benefit of proper upbringing, the wedding day is, ironically, both the happiest and the most terrifying day of her life. On the positive side there is the wedding itself, but on the negative side there is the wedding night, during which the bride must pay the piper, so to speak, by facing, for the first time, the terrible experience of sex. At this point let me concede on shocking truth ? some young women actually anticipate the wedding night ordeal with curiosity and pleasure. Beware such an attitude. One cardinal rule of marriage should never be forgotten ? give little, give seldom and, above all, give grudgingly."

Jody: In another manual written in 1907 by a very well-known pastor, he was giving advice to the bridegrooms, and one of the warnings he had is that too much sexual involvement with your wife could lead to a decline in your IQ and would certainly exhaust you and diminish you physically. So what was the solution? Well, here it is ? "Marital moderation is most easily secured and maintained where married persons occupy separate beds. Sleeping in the same bed is the most ingenious of all possible devices to stimulate and inflame carnal passion. Often, the best arrangement is to occupy separate rooms, because then you can escape the sexual excitement, which comes daily, by the twice-repeated exposure of undressing and dressing in each other's presence."

Linda: The first flame is that we need to not listen to the world, even advice from the church that was not God's advice. Martin Luther said intercourse is never without sin, but God excuses it by His grace. That's not a biblical concept. We need to push all of that out, and we need to embrace God's perspective. So we want to ask you a question. Will you embrace God's perspective?

Jody: A second flame is related, and we've called it to receive God's blessing on your intimacy. For a number of years, Linda and I taught marriage seminars, and we used the Song of Solomon. I remember, I was assigned the task to research this, read it in Hebrew, and I was quite surprised and stunned at what I discovered. You start drilling down into all that poetry. In the context of poetry, God is able to say some very specific and intimate things without raising the censor of rejection or embarrassment or embarrassment about what's being said. So it's a very beautiful way of presenting some things, and it's done in the context of a story.

We've called the bride "Tierza [ph]," because in one place in the Song Solomon calls her that ? says she's as beautiful as Tierza, and what I'd like to drill down on is Song of Solomon, chapter 4, and introduce a few things about God's perspective.

This is the wedding night, and Solomon begins his lovemaking to his new bride, Tierza, with these words. "How beautiful you are, my darling, how beautiful you are. Your eyes are like doves behind your veil" ? so far, so good. "Your hair is like a flock of goats that have descended from Mount Gilead." Now, if I said that to Linda on our wedding night, that would have been the end of the night. These are metaphors of poetic response, subjective response, and he's describing here a common scene in that area, of these beautiful, black-haired goats with long, silky, shiny hair that would wind their way on a switchback down the side of the mountain at sunset, and the setting sun would glisten off their hair.

"Your teeth are like a flock of newly shorn ewes, which have come up from their washing, all of which bear twins," that means, unlike me, she hasn't lost any of her teeth. "Not one among them has lost her young. I will go my way," he says, "until the cool of the day when the mountains flee away, I will go my way to the mountain of myrrh and the hill of frankincense." Notice he's working his way down her body from the hair to the eyes to the neck, so things are heating up, and he says, "Your lips, my bride, drip honey, honey and milk are under your tongue and the fragrance of your garments is like the fragrance of Lebanon."

It doesn't take a whole lot of imagination here to understand what's going on ? the north and the south wind, by the way, blew across the literal garden to raise the passion of it. The north wind brought moisture, the south wind brought heat, and the combination promoted the growth of the garden. So here she is inviting him to stimulate her and to raise her sexual passion.

Then he concludes and says, "I have come into my garden, my sister, my bride. I have gathered my myrrh along with my balsam, I have eaten my honeycomb and my honey, I have drunk my wine and my milk."

Linda: If you open to Song of Solomon and read chapter 4, you would go, "This is steamy. This is erotic. It is very passionate, and we are invited into the privacy of this couple to view the consummation of their marriage and to see the passion and they are naked and unashamed, wrapped in one another's arms and, all of a sudden, it's like the scene is suspended, and another person walks into the bridal chamber, and we want to say, "No, no, this is private. No one else can be here." But that presence is God Almighty, and God the Creator says this to the couple as a benediction and a blessing ? "Eat, friends, drink and imbibe deeply, O lovers." And the word in the Hebrew is to "feast," feast on your lovemaking, enjoy it to the fullest ? "This is my gift to you, and I bless you." And I see the Holy God walking over to the bridal bed and putting His hand, a benediction out, and blessing this young couple and saying to them, "Eat, imbibe deeply, feast on your lovemaking, receive the blessing of my benediction."

God blesses the intimacy in our marriages, but as we travel around the country talking to thousands of couples, we find that very few couples receive God's blessing. Why not? I think, first, because Christian couples are confused. Some of what we read to you from 100 years ago has filtered down into the church, and many of the mothers and father represented by us gave this advice about sex ? "This is a subject you don't talk about." We look at the world, and we are disgusted. The world has exploited the female body, the world has exploited sex, and I find that many Christian wives look at the world, and they are repulsed, and they think, "Well, if the world overemphasizes this subject, I better de-emphasize it in my marriage." And so she determines that she will have marital relations under the covers after the 10:00 news with the lights off, and that is just as much against what God wants, because God said "Eat, my friends, drink and imbibe deeply. Enjoy this area of your marriage, it's my gift to you."

God blesses your intimacy. Have you received His blessing on your intimacy? How do you do this? Jody and I would just like to encourage you that the next time you make love, and you're wrapped together in each other's arms, just close your eyes and imagine the Holy God walking over to your bed and extending His hand of blessing over you and saying, "Eat, friends, drink and imbibe deeply, O lovers."

Bob: Well, that's Linda Dillow, along with her husband, Jody, and I say we just say, "Amen," close the service, and all go home.

Dennis: I was thinking that same thing. But, you know, there is something wholesome and very helpful about hearing such an intimate area of marital love talked about from a biblical perspective. And, Bob, that's what folks can count on at the Weekend to Remember. You come, you're going to get great instruction, the weekend can be a romantic weekend, a great time to communicate, to talk but also to discuss this area. And, you know, most couples, I think, Bob, can live an entire lifetime and never hear a message like Jody and Linda have just shared and never be confronted with what the Bible teaches about such an important area of marriage.

Bob: And that's one of the challenges we're facing in the culture today. All of us have been influenced by a godless culture promoting a godless view of human sexuality.

Dennis: A selfish view.

Bob: And to hear what the Scriptures have to say, to hear it explained clearly and relevantly in a weekend where the two of you are thinking together about how your marriage can be stronger; how it can be better; a weekend that's full of hope and encouragement and purpose for marriage. That's what happens at a Weekend to Remember conference.

Dennis: Bob, I have talked to far too many listeners who have listened to us on a regular basis for years, who have never taken us up on our offer to come to a Weekend to Remember. Well, I'm laying it on the line today. You all need to sign up and get to a Weekend to Remember. Your marriage needs it, your romance needs it and, believe it or not, your kids need a break from you.

Bob: That's right.

Dennis: So get to the Weekend to Remember, come and have a great time and invest in your marriage.

Bob: We still have a bunch of these events taking place this spring in cities all across the country this month, next month, and into the summer. In fact, I'm going to be speaking at the Weekend to Remember conference in Dallas, Texas, coming up in May.

Dennis: Oh, that's at the big Texan ...

Bob: Gaylord Texan Hotel, yes.

Dennis: I'm telling you, everything is bigger in Texas.

Bob: If you'd like more information about any of the upcoming Weekend to Remember conferences, how you can have a weekend together filled with hope, encouragement, and purpose, go to our website at FamilyLife.com. That's FamilyLife.com or give us a call at 1-800-FLTODAY, mark out a weekend, spend it together at one of the Weekend to Remember conferences, and contact us, as well, to get a copy of the book that Jody and Linda Dillow have written called "Intimacy Ignited." The message we've been listening to today touches on themes from that book, and it's available in our FamilyLife Resource Center along with the book you and Barbara have written called "Rekindling the Romance." In fact, any of our listeners who order both books together, we'll send the CD of Jody and Linda's message to you at no additional cost.

Get all of the details on our website, FamilyLife.com or call 1-800-358-6429. That's 1-800-F-as-in-family, L-as-in-life, and then the word TODAY, and someone on our team can let you know how you can have any of these resources sent to you and, of course, can get you signed up for an upcoming Weekend to Remember conference.

Speaking of CDs, your wife gave a message not long ago to a group of women that got a great response. It's a message on what a woman can do to help her husband step up to manhood; how she can help him be the man that God wants him to be. And this month we are making a copy of that message available to any of our listeners who contact us here at FamilyLife Today to make a donation of any amount.

We are a listener-supported ministry. We depend on those donations from listeners in order for our program to continue on this station and on stations all across the country, and we thought that this month a nice way to say thank you to those of you who can help us with a donation of any amount is to send out a copy of this CD from Barbara Rainey. In fact, this is a message we've never featured on FamilyLife Today. We ought to do that sometime.

If you'd like a copy of the CD of Barbara's message, "Helping Your Husband Step up to Manhood," call 1-800-FLTODAY, make a donation of any amount and just request the CD when you call, or go online at FamilyLife.com and you can make a donation online. There will be a little keycode box there. When you get to that keycode box, just type in "CD," and that will let us know that you want a copy of Barbara's message sent to you as a thank you gift for your donation this month.

Once again, the toll-free number is 1-800-FLTODAY. Our address online is FamilyLife.com, and we want to say thanks in advance for your ongoing financial support of this ministry.

Well, tomorrow we'll hear part 2 of Jody and Linda Dillow's message on igniting intimacy in marriage. I hope you can be back with us for that.

Thanks today to our engineer, Keith Lynch, and our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine. We'll see you back tomorrow for another edition of FamilyLife Today.

FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas, a ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ.