Pursuing biblically-driven sexual sanctification becomes integral to the work of the church because most people today are impacted by these struggles, personally or in their families, and because everyone is a work in process.

Pastors and other church leadership play a crucial role in their flock’s growth and sanctification, especially regarding their sexual sanctification. By that, we mean helping their church members align their inner lives to correspond with their profession of faith and the lordship of Christ in matters of sexual sin and sanctification.

What are some of the crucial steps that pastors can take to better care for their flock when it comes to sexual sin in the church?

1. Realize and admit that there are many people in the church who struggle with sexual sin of some sort.

Few people grow up in today’s culture, or that of the past twenty years, who escape having their souls scarred by their own struggles with sexual sin or others’ sins against them. We live in a highly sexualized culture where sex sells everything. Entertainment, movies, and music reinforce this. For most people, it’s difficult to escape the enticements we see all around us.

A pastor recently confided in me, “John, I believe pornography use is at an epidemic level among men and women in my church. But I don’t know how—and, frankly, I’m afraid—to take the lid off it all.”

We can’t deny that sexuality and gender issues increasingly impact our churched youth.  Today’s world gives the message that, while you may not know what you want to be when you grow up in terms of work or career, you’d better know where you fall on the LGBTQ+ spectrum by the time you’re ten years old. Our church kids feel that pressure, too. In fact, Gender-Wiki now lists over 800 different sexuality and gender identity labels that encompass that “+” in LGBTQ+. One of the teens in my church recently told me that he thought this list of gender identities was where you go to find out who you want to be.

The fact that our people are impacted by and wrestling with these issues shouldn’t surprise pastors. Nothing is new under the sun. Most of the Bible’s pastoral epistles address temptations and sexual sins that believers can fall into. These were real issues in the first churches that began in the middle of the first century, and sexual sin in the church is still an issue today.

Over thirty years ago, in an article from the Fall, 1992 issue of The Harvest News (our old newsletter), Tim Keller wrote,

Every effective and growing church will have sexual strugglers in it. To go further, every church already has liars, gossips, adulterers, homosexuals and cross-dressers . . . those who have been abused, and many others who have long-standing patterns of life-dominating sins or have been impacted by others’ sins against them.

Read More