A Redeemed Mindset

Leslie Basham: According to Linda Dillow, each woman approaches the subject of physical intimacy with a certain mind-set. Here's Linda:

Linda Dillow: It's the accumulation of everything she's ever seen, everything she's ever heard, everything she's ever done--every right choice, every wrong choice, or any evil that was done toward her.

Leslie Basham: Happy Labor Day. This is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss. Today's program isn't appropriate for young children, and you might want to protect the little ears in your home.

We'll discuss a topic that might make some people uncomfortable, yet it's important and it's biblical. Here's Nancy to get us started:

Nancy Leigh DeMoss: Our desire, through the ministry of Revive Our Hearts, is to minister to women in practical areas of their relationship with the Lord and others. In fact, our byline is that we're calling women to experience freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ. And we're talking about every area of our life in relationships.

I know that many of our listeners are married women, and one of the very important areas that God's Word addresses is a woman's physical relationship with her husband.

Now, I'll be the first to say, particularly as a single woman, that this is not necessarily an easy topic for us to address in this format. But the Lord has given us a gift this week of two guests, who are going to help us from a standpoint of biblical understanding and also from their experience as married women, to know what the Scripture has to say about the practical area of a woman's intimacy, physically, with her husband.

Linda Dillow is with us this week. She's been a guest on Revive Our Hearts in the past. And she's co-authored with Lorraine Pintus a book called Intimate Issues: 21 Questions that Christian Women Ask About Sex.

Linda, thank you for writing this book, which is so rooted in the Scripture. I appreciated that about it and it is discreet and yet very practical and helpful and specific for women in dealing with some of these issues. Thank you for being here on Revive Our Hearts to discuss those with us.

Linda Dillow: I'm so happy to be here, Nancy.

Nancy Leigh DeMoss: And joining us also is my friend, Holly Elliff. She's a wife, she's a mom, she's a dear friend. She ministers regularly to women in her church and in our community. I've asked Holly to join us because, particularly as I am a single woman, I felt it would be helpful for us to have two married women addressing this subject, which relates specifically to married women.

So as we jump into this subject, we want first to lay a foundation. And as with every other area of our lives, the way that we act, the choices that we make, the way that we live is really rooted in the way that we think. We have to go back to what do we believe because what we believe in our minds ultimately determines the way that we live.

And, Linda, as you've helped women talk through and work through some of these intimate issues, sexual issues, in their marriage, what part does the mind, the thinking, play in this whole issue?

Linda Dillow: Oh, it's huge, Nancy. It's huge. And the problem is that our minds are filled with the world's perspective because the world blares at us from every venue. We need to go back to God's Word and back to God's perspective.

I'm just so grateful that God spoke so freely and so specifically in the Scriptures about the sexual relationship in marriage. The picture we see portrayed, from Genesis to Revelation, is a picture of beauty, of freedom, of joy, of fun and of holiness because He says in Ephesians 5:31 and 32 that the intimacy in the physical relationship between a husband and wife is to picture the spiritual intimacy between the Lord Jesus and each believer.

But, Holly, do you think that's the picture most wives have in their minds?

Holly Elliff: Oh, I don't think at all, that most of the time when we think about our physical relationship with our husbands that we see that as a biblical issue, as something that brings joy to our Father, when we respond in the right way. I do think a lot of the problem is the way we think about that whole area.

It's sometimes on the very end of our list. It's not even on our to-do list, and so how do we change our thinking so that our mind-set is in accordance with Scripture.

Nancy Leigh DeMoss: And add to that the fact that so many women, from their past and based on perversion that they've been exposed to or that has been done to them in a sexual realm or wrong sinful choices that they have made sexually, so many of those women come into marriage...

Holly Elliff: With a lot of baggage from their past.

Nancy Leigh DeMoss: With a lot of baggage...in their thinking.

Linda Dillow: And I think the first thing that God would have each of us do is to really close our eyes and look at our minds and say, "God, reveal to me what I have in my mind concerning my sexual relationship with my husband. How do I think about sex? What is my sexual mind-set?" because every woman, married and single, has a sexual mind-set.

It's the accumulation of everything she's ever seen, everything she's ever heard, everything she's ever done--every right choice, every wrong choice or any evil that was done toward her.

We read in Romans 12[:2] that we're not to be conformed to this world, and so much of what is in our minds is junk from the world. Don't you see that, as you talk to women?

Holly Elliff: Exactly. You refer in your book to "pulling up weeds" and getting rid of wrong thinking in this area. What are some issues that you think women deal with in their mind-set toward the sexual area that need to be addressed?

Linda Dillow: Well, as a woman sees her mind-set, Holly, and as she sees, "Oh my goodness. It's just distorted," she needs to go before the Lord humbly in prayer and just say, "God, I want You to uproot these weeds.

"Like a gardener, dig out this wrong thinking that, even in marriage, my sexual relationship isn't right. It's not pure. God isn't really interested in this area of my life."

Those thoughts just have to be uprooted. "I can't be forgiven for my past." Pull that out.

There are so many admonitions in Scripture. We're to have no crude remarks, or the King James says "course jesting" as part of our lives. If we have thoughts like that, they need to be uprooted.

We need to look at our mind-set and say, "God, take it out." And then, the next part of that verse in Romans 12[:2] says that "We're to be transformed by the renewing of our mind."

Holly Elliff: So after we uproot the wrong ways of thinking, get those cleared out, then new seeds, new thoughts need to be planted in their place.

Linda Dillow: Absolutely, because we don't just want a barren field with nothing, or the world's going to throw stuff at it.

I often ask women, "How many scriptures do you have memorized about your sexual relationship with your husband?" I hear lots of gulps.

So I encourage women, as they're thinking of planting the seeds of God's Word, to plant Song of Solomon 5:16, "His mouth is full of sweetness, and he is wholly desirable. This is my beloved, and this is my friend."

What a combination. This is what God wants. He wants our husbands to be our best friend but also to be our lover. A woman needs to have this perspective.

Song of Solomon 7:10 says, "I am my beloved's, and his desire is for me." If we have this perspective that "I am my beloved's, and his desire is for me," and if I not only memorize that, but I meditate on it and pray it back to God and just say, "God, thank You that I am my husband's beloved. Thank You that that's Your desire for me. Lord, I just praise You that he is my beloved as well as my best friend. Teach me how to live that out today."

As we bring it back to God in prayer, it becomes part of us and what's in our minds comes down to our hearts and goes out into our actions and we are transformed.

Holly Elliff: It allows us to respond to our husbands, even sometimes when we don't have a natural, emotion-driven desire to respond to our husbands.

Linda Dillow: I think it does that, absolutely. But do you know, Holly, I've even seen God use the planting of scripture to erase horror in a woman's mind?

A woman came up to me at a conference and she said, "Eight months ago, when my husband had left for work, a man broke into our house and brutally raped me."

And I just said, "Oh, I weep with you."

I prayed for the woman. But she said, "I can't make love with my husband. There are all of these video tapes. There are these sounds that come back to me. It's a horror I relive. And so we haven't made love for seven months."

I said, "First, we just need to lay this at the feet of the Lord and ask Him to, in a mighty way, come in and renew your mind and your heart." But as she left, I said, "There's one thing I want to ask you to do: Will you for the next four weeks, every week, take a scripture," and I gave her examples, like Song of Solomon 5:16, "and will you put this in your mind? Will you memorize it and meditate on it and pray it back to God and ask God to make this real?"

I got an e-mail from her and I opened up my e-mail. And I just fell to my knees because she said, "Linda, I did what you said and last night, for the first time in all those months, we made love and there were no flashbacks."

You know, this is positive proof that God's Word transforms minds. Isn't that exciting?

Holly Elliff: It brings healing and restoration.

Linda Dillow: It brings healing. But it also just heals crummy attitudes. A lot of the wives out there, Holly, that are listening, they've been blessed not to have some horrible thing happen to them, like this woman, but they've just allowed the wrong attitudes to come into their minds.

Nancy Leigh DeMoss: So whether a woman is married or single, she needs the renewing of her mind, which takes place through the Word of God. Ephesians 5 [:26] talks about us being "washed," "cleansed" with the Word of God. Psalms [107:20] says, "He sent His Word and healed them."

So whether it's healing for damaged emotions or wrong thoughts that have been planted there in the past, through our own choices or others' sins against us, whether it's just coming to reject the world's way of thinking about sexual issues and to know what God's way of thinking is, the Word of God is so crucial.

So we want to say to married women, obviously, but also to single women: make sure you're getting your input, your viewpoint, your perspective, from the Word of God, that you're reading the Word, studying it, memorizing it, meditating on it, personalizing it, obeying it, internalizing it, getting it in-grafted into your spirit. You need to get the wrong ways of thinking rooted out and see your thinking transformed by the pure Word of God.

Married or single, young or old--sexual issues and every other issue of our lives--we need to go back to the Scripture and say, "Lord, shape my thinking. Shape my perspective. Help me to think Your thoughts, to know Your ways." And we do that as we fill our minds and our hearts with the Word of God.

Leslie Basham: Nancy, whenever we air a program like this, we get flooded with letters and e-mails from people in tough situations. It's obviously a topic that we need to address from a biblical perspective. We do welcome your thoughts.

You can send a letter to Revive Our Hearts, or you can go on-line to ReviveOurHearts.com and send us an e-mail from our Web site.

You can also get some wise and practical advice from our guest, Linda Dillow. She and Lorraine Pintus have written a book called Intimate Issues. It will help you apply God's Word more fully to your own marriage and, as a result, it will help you glorify God.

Again, our Web address is ReviveOurHearts.com. Tomorrow, we'll get some practical escape routes to use when we're facing temptation. Please join us for Revive Our Hearts.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss is a ministry partnership of Life Action Ministries.

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