Hot, Holy & Humorous

Using Your Body for Marital Intimacy: Heart and Soul

Today is the wrap-up of my short series on how to use your body parts during sexual intimacy. I previously covered the following:

First, Your Mind

What to Do with Your Hands

What to Do with Your Mouth

What to Do with Your Legs

What to Do with Your Hips

While I believe that marriages can benefit from specific coaching and tips, I don’t think that technique is as important as other factors. It’s quite possible for both participants to be technically fabulous lovers and not experience fulfilling sexual intimacy.

How do I know this? Okay, sadly, I know this because I’ve had both experiences. What is the biggest difference between my premarital sexual encounters and my marital sexual encounters? The former attempted to have meaning (and failed), but the latter has deep, deep meaning.

Why? Because my marital intimacy is born of an entirely different relationship: one that involves committed, covenant love; years of shared sorrows, joys, tears, and laughter; security and hope for our future; and the blessing of our Heavenly Father. For sexual intimacy to be the full gift that God intends it to be, it must involve the heart and soul of husband and wife.

The Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon) describes the beautiful sexual love between a husband and a wife. The passages are romantic, passionate, and — if you read ’em right — can be titillating. But in the last chapter, we get a clear picture of what makes their sexual love so meaningful. The wife declares:

Picture: Microsoft Word Clip Art
Picture: Microsoft Word Clip Art

“Place me like a seal over your heart,
like a seal on your arm;
for love is as strong as death,
its jealousy unyielding as the grave.
It burns like blazing fire,
like a mighty flame.
Many waters cannot quench love;
rivers cannot sweep it away.
If one were to give
all the wealth of one’s house for love,
it would be utterly scorned.”

Song of Songs 8:6-7

“Like a seal over your heart.” The best sexual love involves the heart. And not the momentary rush of emotions in the heart, but a deeper commitment of the heart — like a seal.

A seal in Bible times was used to “guarantee security or indicate ownership” (Baker’s Evangelical Dictionary of Biblical Theology) — the kind of I’m-yours-you’re-mine commitment that exists in a godly marriage. Indeed, the wife in Song of Songs says that very thing: “My beloved is mine and I am his” (2:16, also 6:3).

The way I think of it is the phrase “heart and soul.” Which means completely, wholly, totally. In a sense, your sexual encounters should remind you of your wedding vows when you said to your mate, “This is it. I am all in.”

Sometimes I fear we wives hold back on that emotional and spiritual connection with our husbands. Too many women feel that sex is merely a physical act — a pleasurable physiological experience or a release of body tension. But God intended it to mean so much more:

“Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” Matthew 19:4-6

Look for ways to engage your heart and soul in lovemaking with your husband. Be tender, be active, be intimate. Express your love both verbally and physically in the bedroom. Remind yourself that sexuality is a gift for marriage from our Lord and Father — that it came from His own heart to bless ours.

6 thoughts on “Using Your Body for Marital Intimacy: Heart and Soul”

  1. I always enjoy your wise and enlightening blog posts, J, but I also confess to a wry smile when people hold up Song of Songs as an example of beautiful and committed marital love. Solomon had 700 wives, and 300 concubines (low-status unmarried mistresses who lived in the household)! Not exactly a paragon of monogamy! I wonder which of Solomon’s 1,000 sexual partners he had in mind when he wrote Song of Songs… 🙂

    1. As a matter of fact, HopefulGirl, I don’t think King Solomon wrote it. I agree with scholars who suggest that the book was likely written by a happily married nobleman in his kingdom and sponsored (as works of arts were often done at that time) by the king. Some argue against that theory, but I think your point about his many wives and concubines, as well as the differences in writing style from this to other works by Solomon, should at least give us pause about its authorship.

      Thanks!

    1. You’re welcome! Indeed, the first verse says, “Solomon’s Song of Songs,” or “The Song of Songs, which are Solomon’s.” But that statement of ownership doesn’t necessarily mean authorship. It could be more like owning the copyright than writing the words themselves. I guess we’ll find out for sure in heaven!

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