Why Marriage, Sex, and Family Are Keys to Sanctification

To read the previous article from our Proclamation series: A Tale of Two Ecologies: What Environmentalism Overlooks by Jeff Bennion

While the fifth paragraph of The Family: A Proclamation to the World may be the shortest paragraph in the proclamation, its meaning is profound for marriage, sex, and family. It reads, “We declare the means by which mortal life is created to be divinely appointed. We affirm the sanctity of life and of its importance in God’s eternal plan.”

How the Proclamation references sex reflects a most sacred and special union, which is “the means by which mortal life is created.” Additionally, sex is appointed, which indicates that it was decided as a means beforehand.  In other words, sex is an act of sharing bodies within a covenant relationship which is divinely appointed or specified by God. This is important to His plan.

Within its intended use, sex is powerful, nourishing, and loving. As a sex researcher, I’m aware of the evidence on how sex can strengthen marriages and, at times, bring a child into the loving bonds of that family. However, when sex is misused, it also has a powerful negative effect which is likely more self-focused, does not nourish both man and woman, and can be used as a means of control, manipulation, and possibly violence. Additionally, when sex is misused, it can bring a child into an environment that does not benefit from a loving two-parent marriage.

God has appointed this powerful act to be used only in the most nurturing and safe environment—a loving, fully committed marriage. Ideally, this is a place where both man and woman have promised to use their time, energy, and resources to serve one another and direct their efforts toward serving God. This environment has been shown to produce greater life satisfaction and improve sexual well-being.

God originally counseled Adam and Eve to “be fruitful, multiply, and replenish the earth.” Being fruitful can mean bearing offspring, but it can also be a means to produce good or helpful results. Further, the command to replenish the Earth does mean to fill the earth, but replenishing also begins with our own souls and relationships. As Elder Patrick Kearon testified, God’s divinely inspired plan is to bring us peace and joy and to help us learn to be whole and complete.  It is no surprise, then, when research confirms that meaningful, other-focused sexual relationships add to an individual’s physical and mental well-being.  These carefully curated boundaries around sexual intimacy reflect God’s purpose in bringing us joy by walking the divine path to learn how to become holy through marriage, sex, and family.

The Tuition of Intuition for God’s Divinely Appointed Plan

However, God’s divine path of marriage naturally takes some learning, as with most things in life. We must gain some experience or education on how to be successful in marriage and the associated sexual relationship. Like all things, though, education comes at a cost.  While most people must labor to learn, sometimes we can intuitively know the answers to the questions that we have. Intuition may seem to come without a price, but research indicates that intuition comes from being focused or attentive to the nuances around us—absorbing information from less obvious sources.

The tuition of intuition can be paid as we obey God’s greatest commandment in learning to love Him.  More particularly, by loving God, we can learn about the divine nature of God’s children, including us and our spouses. When applied to sex specifically, we can learn to value our own and our partner’s experience, and that creates energy, acceptance, and vitality for the individual and the marriage and can create a child. President Jeffery Holland put it this way,

Such an act of love between a man and a woman is—or certainly was ordained to be—a symbol of total union: union of their hearts, their hopes, their lives, their love, their family, their future, their everything. It is a symbol that we try to suggest in the temple with a word like seal.

To love God, yourself, and your spouse requires frequent self-checks. Marriage is hard at times; the trials and annoyances of life that come daily give us the opportunity to attune to or turn away from Christ. 

When faced with difficulties, we can try to be aware of how we can change before placing blame on our spouse or God. When we place blame, we are often engaging in avoidant behaviors. To be fair, it can be difficult and uncomfortable to see which parts of yourself are out of alignment and need work. However, we can resist the urge and find ways to take personal accountability for our own behaviors and attitudes before we turn the blame on others. 

Sometimes, though, we can be anxious and take blame for problems that are not ours in trying to dodge a sense of abandonment or insecurity.  But God asks us to shun both these tendencies toward avoidance and anxiety. Instead, He asks us to anchor any spousal or self-evaluations in humble holiness. This will allow God to show you who you are—warts, flaws, pride, strengths, and potential glory. Additionally, by engaging in this type of self-reflection, spouses are invited to do the same. When this magic happens, and both parties are participating in the process, God helps us pay the tuition and gain intuition for how to be both holy and happy. 

In his book, Pastor Timothy Keller observed, 

To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us. 

This intimate relational and physical knowing of one another that occurs in marriage and sex expands our ability to be humbly holy.

To accomplish this unity, particularly sexual unity, is rarely simple. It will likely require some personal gut checks and intense growth. Finding harmony in our sexual relationship helps us to be holy because we are working to understand and gain a deeper emotional connection. Struggles to understand one another can be seen as opportunities to know our spouse more intimately. You can talk about the differences in desire, the meaning of sex, and the creativity you each desire, and listen to understand each other’s heart. This takes time, practice, and consistent sensitivity to one another’s emotions and thoughts.  

Being Gentle 

You may feel that you have not met the mark or that it is too late. However, we believe in a Christ who helps us develop amidst conflict, even within a sexual relationship. With Christ, nothing is too late, and your sexual relationship does matter.  More than likely, God would begin by asking us to be gentler and more compassionate toward our spouse and allow His love to fill us up. While grit is essential in our striving to follow Heavenly Father’s plan, He did factor in our ‘humanness’ despite the high expectations we may feel are there. The Atonement of Jesus Christ allows us to be gentle and work toward humble holiness bit by bit.

The divinely appointed plan works in our lives to squeeze out the nonsense and pride of the human experience. Elder Neal Maxwell said, “Trials and tribulations tend to squeeze the artificiality out of us, leaving the essence of what we really are and clarifying what we really yearn for.”

So if you are struggling with intimacy in your relationship, how can we reflect on what we are truly yearning for in having a healthier sex life? Are you yearning for a celestial marriage? If your sexual relationship is struggling, slow down and ask each other to authentically talk about expectations and realities. There may be unresolved hurts or fears. Invite the Spirit to tutor you both in communicating with more love and acceptance. If you feel like this challenge is beyond your natural capacity to work through, then ask for God to help you learn about what you lack—ask Him to help increase your grit and compassion. Ask for His gentleness with your shortcomings, and ask for gentleness with your spouse’s shortcomings. 

Marriage, Sex, and Family Help Us Look Where We Least Want to Look

In marriage, we may face differing sexual desires, differing levels of sexual comfort, and even differing meanings of sex, but this process helps us to better know and understand each other with humble holiness. In sterquiliniis invenitur is a Latin phrase meaning in filth it can be found. Loving Heavenly Parents knew we may not willingly dig into our own fallibility—our self-deceit or weakness—and in Their wisdom, they created the holy order of marriage and included sex as a method to draw a couple together and to illuminate the need to change. 

Often, individuals want to keep parts of themselves hidden, but marriage can make hiding such flaws almost impossible. If we take the opportunity and work to be humbly holy in marriage and our sexual relationship, life-altering change can come. Psychologist Carl Jung explained that often what we want most in our life will be found in the places we least want to look. Heavenly Parents also knew these unexamined corners are best faced with a loving spouse. Additionally, they encourage us in cultivating courage to look at the unexamined corners of who we are and gently face those unpleasant realities. 

Because sex is an area where unhealthy attitudes and behaviors can emerge, it is often fraught with anxiety and judgment. We tell ourselves to “hurry up”—get aroused, perform, look, or act a certain way. Women tend to condemn their bodies, their performance, or their desirability, and men have similar challenges and can feel stress about performance. These difficulties can provide the opportunity to be kinder and more compassionate to yourself and your partner. Furthermore, research indicates that couples who have sex about once a week are reporting the most satisfaction. These results indicate that focus on the quality of the interaction is more important than the quantity. High-quality sexual relationships are cultivated with time and commitment to truly know one another.

Happy sexual relationships can look like refocusing intimacy on the quality of the feelings of love, connection, and tenderness felt with one another rather than focusing solely on orgasms or frequency. Creating a more holistic sexual relationship can also look like observing how sharing your body with your partner can be transformative both emotionally, spiritually, and relationally. Additionally, it can be found in recognizing the divine purpose in blessing marriages with the powerful gift of sex. Together, be curious about how attuned you are with one another. It is a gentle approach that Heavenly Parents have admonished us to use to find solutions and connect emotionally, spiritually, and physically.

Engaging in Sex to Create Children

While sex is intended to bond and replenish a couple, it is also intended to bring a child into a loving, committed family. When a child is created in this divine environment, the love of two individuals combines with a host of biological systems to create a body in which one of our Heavenly Parents’ spirits can be housed and developed. Some of the same hormones that bond the couple now protect a pregnancy and allow an embryo to develop into a viable infant. One of the beauties of this divine process, when used correctly, is that couple unity contributes to better co-parenting. Heavenly Parents are the source of love and teach us through our own parenting the depths and breadth of pure love. Our efforts to be more humbly holy are critical as we iteratively learn to parent an infant, a toddler, an adolescent, a teenager, and finally, an adult.

Our Heavenly Parents’ divinely appointed plan for marriage, sex, and family is simple but will challenge us to look at the unpleasant realities in life. But these challenges provide us with an opportunity to practice being gentle with ourselves and curious about needed changes. These holy changes bring us closer to Christ and are the essence of God’s divinely appointed purpose in marriage, sex, and family. 

Developing a meaningful sexual relationship in marriage can be a challenge, but it helps us rely on the gentle promptings of the Spirit—here is where the Atonement of Jesus Christ heals, informs, and changes us. In marriage, we acknowledge chaos, flaws, or weaknesses but employ humble holiness to authentic intimacy that leads to unity.