“God wants to have sex with you.” A startling phrase from a famous international Christian preacher, and although hearing it as an isolated apercu still rings like tinnitus, in a spiritual context there is absolutely no other way to describe the intimacy God wants to enter into with you, which explains why sex is so severely sullied down in the valley of voluptuous vagrants who sabotage its true purpose as a killing coda instead of an ecstatic continuance. But as is the pattern of every loving relationship, from love at first sight, to a couple of date nights, to an engagement, marriage and then the conjugal frisk, there is a period of wooing on route to this consummation, and we learn this courtship at the King’s court – the church – a place, where if we have a soul is titillated, stimulated and aroused enough to enter into, not a momentary, but an eternal bliss.

Pregnant words I know, but please allow me to spill.

Sex is of course an intimate intersection, an exchange enjoyed between two people that eventually in most cases, produces an offspring, a hybrid representing a man and a woman’s inseminating symbiosis. Here I make the natural leap to church life, for it is a remarkable community which teaches us a lot about how to have a healthy procreative and lengthy reproductive life inasmuch as our church, apart from having an exceptionally large organ, very often presents two diverse yet related concepts, before encourage its intercourse by way of discourse to produce, without being coarse, a whole new ‘third thing’.

If you are spiritually a sexually moist creature, then I invite you to sample these seven aphrodisiacs below, seven philtres to cure any philistine, swapping phylactery for prophetic prophylactic, from erratic to erotic to ecstasy seven penetrating intersections to procure the divine and of course, our heavenly bodies.

ONE – The Horizontal and the Vertical position.

Love at first sight. It is as if one was born with two half-hearts where one half, for no clear reason at half past one on a Saturday afternoon is suddenly ripped through the fleshy walls of one’s own chest to lodge into the bosom of another, as if like some impounded hound it returned to its rightful original owner at the mere curvature of a lip, or hip, and in this delightful confusion one is left with the most staggering clarity to submit, surrender and pursue its platonic terminus, towards some supernatural morph-knitting of one’s soul with another into a new alien-like organism.

The blood-drenched cross on Calvary might appear to be the most unlikeliest place to experience love at first sight, and yet why else would we simultaneously weep the same tears? More than a symbol for church the cross is a universal symbol for life, its vertical line depicting a God-relationship intersecting with the horizontal line representing a neighbourly one. Good relations with God and man is what we desire most in this life and Church fulfils this craving to practice good relationships upward and sideward, and where they are forged, sometimes under duress as people from various social structures converge with vigorous rigour summed up in “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and love your neighbour as yourself.” (Luke 10:27)

It is at this conjunction, both the converging and diverging pulsating cross that we encounter and experience the God-man Jesus Christ with all his diverse excellencies, who made all manner of healthy relationships possible, and by healthy I mean the kind of relationships that lasts forever, and by its extension when church copulates with the detumescent world we witness unequalled courage, untold bravery and fearlessness against every recoiling wicked scheme and evil executor until every citizen is undressed and their viagrous virility fired up in the face of every simulacrum.

TWO – The Listening and the Doing.

You are on your first date, and although interactions and conversations are awkward at first, exacerbated by the spaghetti kraken that’s sporadically whipping juiced tomato undignifyingly up your unsuspecting nostrils you are still at your most attentive, like you’ve woken up from a cryogenic sleep. You remember reading somewhere that the blind have acute hearing because of their mute sight, but because you have a sudden onset of clairvoyant clarity due to the kryptonite in your pockets, you over-compensate the small random acts of kindness for this creature who hovers constantly before you like the pillar of smoke by day and blazing fire at night.

We listen and respond to the things we love, and love generate ‘excess’ like nothing else.

We attend church not only to listen but to do, and therefore it’s a wise church that has set in place immediate mandated and rostered opportunities to volunteer and participate in God’s house, but it’s an even wiser church that encourages its membership to share their excesses. Whether counselling, hospitality, mentorship, time, musicianship, finance whatever our excesses are it is highly probable they are deliberately given to us by God to share among, and serve our fellowship. Determining and then spending excess at church allows the leveraging of our skills to enrich the community as we give our breast… er… best…, which in turn as all churches are meant to do, enrich the broader secular community. “Do not merely listen to the word and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.” (James 1:22) Listen and do, in other words, be fed and feed. Feeding without being fed is likely to make your participation a chore, and being fed without feeding others will make you fat and lazy.

Ultimately the concomitant of listening with doing will increase our awareness, one of the prerequisites to wisdom, and doing because we’re listening will make us both agile and effective in both our work and our spiritual journey. Jesus once said that he had ‘food to eat no one knew about’ but him, while the Hebrew poet more than groped this epiphany when he wrote: “Whoever refreshes others, will be refreshed.” (Psalm 11:25) When we ‘listen’ we emote, when we ‘do’ we experience, and the symbiosis means we experience the full force of an emotion instead of just feeling it from a distance. Why? Empathy, the mark of a better priest.

THREE – The Holy and the Common.

Second date, a continuation of what is undeniably a series of interviews where you’ve gotten a little wiser with putting your best foot forward by avoiding embarrassingly messy cuisines, carefully monitoring the topics of conversations by skirting around any ‘holy’ deal-breakers in favour of all the things you have in ‘common’, which appear to be so numerous and wonderful you wonder if any couple in the history of the world has ever been more compatible.

“…teach my people the difference between the holy and the common…” (Ezekiel 44:23)

God expects church leadership to teach the distinction between what’s holy and what’s common, not only to separate good behaviour from bad, but to point out who are His people and who are not, which are His endeavours and which aren’t. Common and holy, as God’s Son so succinctly articulated when he said: “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s” means that the Holy goes to God and the common goes to the King.

But as life becomes more ‘church’d’, and church becomes more ‘lifed’, there is a new creation from the symbiosis between the holy and common. Certainly when we confess our sin we bring our ‘common’ before His ‘holy’ and in the process become ourselves ‘graced’, that is to say transformed and refreshed, but also vice versa, when we as a result share more of our holy, or grace into our common, especially conversations at church, then not only will we escape this hamster-wheel of shallow small-talk, but we’ll be set on a path as new creations, where our common becomes holy and our holy becomes more common, Jesus confirming this communion at his death when the curtain separating the holy of holies, and the holy and common area of the temple in Jerusalem was significantly and supernaturally ripped apart to endorse this ‘thirdness’ in a ménage a trois of free-flowing access.

FOUR – The Milk and the Meat.

It’s been date after date, activity after activity, and as conversation melds into conversation like the liquid in each other’s eyes and the saliva around each other’s tongues, you both survey the distance you’ve already travelled – a gradual sanguine gradation from shallow crush to deepening tugs, frothy laughter to vermilion hugs, having long enough languished in milk baths to now stand at the carnivorous threshold of desire.

I once sat through a lecture of one of Australia’s foremost story consultants stressing and expounding on the importance of knowing your audience when crafting stories. I’ve sat through church services where the audience were predominantly milk drinkers being given meat to eat, and conversely Bible study groups where meat cravers were being given milk to drink at the insistence of a few. I also once sat through part of a lecture where a young minister was warning about sexual fantasy-scapes with some of the audience not even having hit puberty yet, my young saucer-eyed son included. Knowing your audience, seems so obvious, and perhaps it isn’t, hence the reason to write it here, making all the difference between piercing the air or piercing a heart. The goal is to work towards craving the meat, as even this ancient author indicted his audience; “…by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food!” (Hebrews 5:12)

Most churches have separate services and opportunities to cater for providing milk for the young and separately meat for the old, and that’s perfectly fine, for Jesus rebuked his disciples for not allowing the young to come to him on their own terms. But if there aren’t opportunities made available for cross-pollinated intersections, where old and young can come together for introspection, the young are likely to get wise in their own eyes and the old set in their ways, and as thusness goes both become equally unteachable. It takes a skilled, Christ-led preacher to provide intersections to bridge that gap between milk and meat.

FIVE – The Internal and the External.

The interviews are over as you and your half-heart announce your engagement, and as if a veil is suddenly lifted you find yourselves like a pair of wild romping brumbies in unmarked land. It’s reconciliation day and the sluices are open as you share your most intimate plans and joint-ventures for the future with unbridled obsession and unguarded passion, pulling what you think are the last treasures from the very bottom of your soul-encased flesh, and flash it out in the sun. In and then out – the seed to a pleasant repetitive pattern to life.

Business generally centers around mission statements, or commercial goals. Research shows that companies that share their mission regularly and which can be articulated from CEO down to the mailroom person, set a faster pace than businesses who don’t. Goals needs to be both internal and external in nature, goals for the employee to stimulate personal growth, and goals for servicing the customer. Personal growth concentrates inward while mission focuses outward. Fortunately for the church we have our mandates given to us for both. For our mission Jesus commanded us to “go out and make disciples”, whilst his apprentice Peter admonished us to continue to “grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ”.

Scripture reveals some practical examples to how we can achieve those two big ticket items as per this example, “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this; to look after orphans and widows in their distress (external mission) and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world (internal growth)” (James 1:27), but it also encourages any contemporary church to carve their own steps with sensitivity to their own character, culture and context. The fusion of this activity is truly remarkable, because while the world promotes ‘knowing thyself’ first in order to fulfil social justice, the order of the verse suggests that we can only grow inwardly as a result of performing mission to the marginalised.

SIX – The Jew and the Christian.

From the sapphire throne the zircon sky wraps around the nucleus of wedding guests who’ve come to bear witness and hold you accountable on this the day of your vows. With more textures in this afternoon you have fingers to scrub you turn to her with a sudden sickness of inadequacy, yet steadied in the longing to purvey her kindness, protect her innocence and preserve her beautiful heart.

“…turn the hearts of fathers to their children, and the hearts of their children to their parents…” (Malachi 4:6)

There are two Christianity’s in the world today, one with its root in Babylon and the other with a Jewish heritage. The latter is the one to pay close attention to as Messianic Jewish communities around the world have already reached out to acknowledge their Christian brothers and sisters, fulfilling the fathers-and-children prophecy, and the reciprocal revival by many Christian churches celebrating their Judeo heritage by not only getting knowledgeable on the festivals recorded in Bible as ‘lasting ordinances’, but infuse and institute its practices in regular Christian services as a year long celebration of God’s salvation story, and yet, while this is just the beginning there still remains more Christian churches to be taught and more Jewish communities needed to teach.

This intersection of Messianic-Jew and Judeo-Christian coming together – both groups being intersections in themselves – is one of the most beautiful forgings which will ultimately be celebrated in heaven in the ‘marriage supper of the Lamb’, both represented as one, and upon entering the new Jerusalem in another and final symbiosis, emerge as the Bride of Christ. The Holy Bible is itself a document celebrating this amalgam, with the Old Testament representing the Jewish journey while the New Testament the Christian journey, welded together by the groomsman, our Cosmic Lover right at its centre.

SEVEN – The Duty and the Delight.

From Jerusalem’s wine-soaked sheets golden limestone columns thrust deliriously up towards the white speckled sea and into the fragrant fallopian expanse, until every scriven clutching body like bread breaks, crumbling back into new formations in endlessly fruitful and blissful assaults – the dutiful delight of the requite beauty.

From my many diverse church visits I have observed that the emphasis on duty alone is a form of impotency, a piracy of passion stinging the sufferer with a form of self righteousness in ticking that religious box as if it were a chore, and yet on the opposite faulty scale I have found the emphasis on delight without any accountability and responsibility to make some alluring alterations along the Christian journey promotes inconsistency, and as statistics go hardly stay the course or finish the race. In both cases I’ve witnessed the unavoidable and rather abhorrent default position of ‘lukewarm christian’.

“So because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” (Revelation 3:16)

I love God for His binary-ness. It’s either right, or it’s wrong. It’s either good or it’s wicked. You are either hot for Him, or cold, but you can’t be the hypocrite in the middle. As Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son outlines, and as centuries of stoics and epicureans, Apollonians and Dionysians have remonstrated, duty and delight are the two ‘good’ extremes badly in need of a room, and as is the case with the intercourse which God introduced, duty always preceeds pleasure.

Some of the world’s most beautiful art, music and poetry attests to the results of this ecstasy, the climax and glory of the morning star is that you remain perpetually hot for God, and once you have reached Him, nothing in this world will shake the continual pleasures you find in Him… and He finds in you… as you hear His tender voice whisper your name… “Come away lover… on spice-laden mountains.”