Ep. 113 - The 3 Lies About Sex Every Christian Husband Was Taught in Church

Sexless marriage advice for men often tells Christian husbands to lower their expectations, accept fading attraction, and become content with companionship. But what if those assumptions are not biblical—and are helping keep your marriage passionless?

In this episode, Matt Hallock exposes three sexless marriage lies many Christian men were taught in church:

- Attraction inevitably fades as a marriage gets older.
- Sex matters to men, while wives mostly provide it as a duty.
- God cares more about building your character through deprivation than restoring passion, desire, and delight in your marriage.

We examine Proverbs 5, 1 Corinthians 7, Song of Solomon, and Psalm 20 to recover a biblical vision of marriage marked by mutual desire, enduring delight, sexual generosity, and hope. If you feel more like your wife's roommate than her lover—and you have started wondering whether living without being wanted is simply part of being a godly husband—this episode is for you.

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Chapters

0:00 When You Stop Feeling Wanted
2:57 Why Christian Marriages Lose Passion
6:50 Lie 1: Attraction Always Fades
8:47 Proverbs 5 on Lifelong Desire
12:19 Lie 2: Sex Is Only for Men
14:04 The Damage Done by Duty Sex
15:27 1 Corinthians 7: Desire Goes Both Ways
17:06 But My Wife Doesn't Want Sex
20:07 Lie 3: God Prefers Your Suffering
21:48 God's Goal for Your Marriage
23:19 Reject the Lies and Believe God
24:45 Resources to Rebuild Desire

Creators and Guests

Host

Matt Hallock

Founder of Man Warrior King and author of The DNA of a Man

What is The Man Warrior King Podcast - Confident Christian Men and Passionate Marriages?

Faith and masculinity meet kingdom living to help Christian husbands rebuild their confidence and masculine strength, so they can enjoy attraction-filled and passionate marriages.

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Matt (00:00)
You stopped bringing up sex because every conversation seems like it makes things worse. So you resort to praying about it, you serve her, but as time keeps going on, you just start feeling more and more like her roommate and not like the passionate lover that you used to dream you guys would be.

And you go about your duty taking care of the stuff of life, paying the bills.

And you're still committed You're still there, but somewhere

You can feel like you've kind of been drifting, you're disappearing, you're you're starting to be less present. And you hate it.

And you know it's wrong. You know that to be a good godly husband you need to be present and you need to give of yourself and sacrifice and love her in all things at all times and be able to deal.

But there's this pain inside of you that you if you're honest, it's really difficult to get to go away.

So you've tried to turn it off, to shut down your desire, to tell yourself you don't need it, you don't want it, it's okay without it and

You actually are wondering if that's what it means to be a good Christian husband. If being a good Christian Christian husband means living without being wanted.

So you go to church and you hear your the pastor teaching, you listen to the sermons online, you read the books.

And you begin to believe that this is kind of the norm.

that this is what God planned for my marriage. As actually this is what God planned for marriage in general.

And so

You have this battle going on on the inside between the desire you have for deeply fulfilling and passionate sex with your wife and the desire you have to be a good Christian husband. And it starts to feel like the two cannot coexist.

What if underneath this

Discouraging state of affairs.

is a three part lie that church never warned you about and in fact church actually authored it and it's keeping you from the marriage of your dreams. Let's get into it.

By far one of the most common and

Problems that I work with men on in their marriage is lack of sex, infrequent sex, sex that where where the his wife doesn't really seem to want him. The man doesn't feel desired and wanted. And I will tell you, I've worked with men of of all ages, married men of all ages, right? In their 20s up to their

eighties.

Every age bracket of these men wants and values sex.

Every age bracket.

And

This trend of passionless marriage seems to be quite common and maybe growing.

In our Christian culture.

And the this like sexless marriage

Epidemic.

Is

It's been thrust upon us by horrible, horrible teaching and thinking over the years.

Because you tell me if I'm wrong, but if you look around the pews on Sunday morning, do you find marriages that that you are envious of? You're like, geez, look at

How she's all over her husband.

Look at how they can hardly keep their hands off each other and they're sitting in church. Do you see that much? I don't. I see a lot of

You know, ho hum at best, and quite possibly some distance and coldness under the surface. I mean I've known I've known important people in church leadership.

For whom sex has become almost non existent for years.

These aren't fringe church attendeer attenders, attendees, attenders, I don't know, fringe churchgoers. They're integral people.

In churches. This has been at many churches I've gone to.

And it shouldn't be this way.

And part of the reason why it is, is because you have been sold a mentality about sex that is a lie from hell, and it has been dressed up in holy and righteous and good looking verbiage.

But the reality is, is it's sucking the life out of you, sucking the life out of your wife, and draining your marriage of any kind of passion and fulfillment.

And as you've been sold these lies, you start to believe some things. Like maybe this is just what marriage becomes.

Or maybe wanting passion and wanting a thriving sex life that's you know more than PG thirteen is selfish of me.

Maybe I should just be satisfied with commitment and faithfulness in the fact that we love each other.

So you start to question these desires that you have and it and that's when you start to put a damper on because also typically in in this type of a marriage things aren't going that great and you're tired of being rejected. You're tired of feeling like you're not desirable. You're tired of the like distance and the pain that comes when you even when sex becomes a possibility. And so you just try to turn it off and all these lies

encourage you to do so.

So what are these lies? Well, lie number one that you will be taught by many leaders in church is that

A godly marriage matures to the point where passion is no longer required. It's no longer central. attraction to each other fades over time, and you might envision a graph where one line is the attraction fading and the other line is friendship or companionship going up.

I've heard this taught many times that this is God's design, that the attraction fades because of let's face it, you get old and you get wrinkly and things break down and blah blah blah, but friendship is there. Sex drives drop, but friendship is there.

Man, you can no longer perform, but friendship is there. That was God's plan all along. In my opinion, if this was God's plan, it's pretty much a bait and switch. He's like, hey, I love marriage. Marriage is my design. I want you to build families. It is such a high calling. And and you know, I'll sweeten the deal by making it so that you get to do this wonderful thing with your wife.

And yeah, that's gonna be so cool to be able to have sex with her for the rest of your life, right? Then you get into it and it's like, you know what? When you signed that marriage license, what you didn't read in the fine print was that you have to actually accept the fact that sex is gonna be really difficult your entire marriage and eventually it's just gonna start to go away. And that'll be better.

that's gonna be good and it's actually replaced by something more beautiful, which is the friendship that you get to have.

That's a giant bait and switch.

This idea that it that attraction fades is completely unbiblical. How do I know? Because I'm holding a Bible right here. And in Proverbs chapter five.

Verse eighteen and nineteen. Let your fountain be blessed and rejoice in the wife of your youth. We don't have to dig into the euphemisms there and get in trouble for that, but a lovely dear, a graceful doe, let her breast satisfy you at all times with delight, and be intoxicated always in her love.

So clearly there's explicit imagery here. Let your wife's body satisfy you at all times. Not a period, but an extended little sentence right there with the words with delight. So we're not talking about, I'm just satisfied. No, we're talking about wow, this is delightful. And it says always. It doesn't say at first, it doesn't say for the first several years.

It doesn't say temporarily, it says always.

And then the next verse is be intoxicated always.

By her love. Other translations say forever be intoxicated.

So that is clearly what God designed in for your marriage. That's what His Word says. And if you are going to learn how to be a fully integrated, conquering man, not just out there, but also in here and in here in your home and in your marriage, you have to start getting used to believing God's word and his.

Promises even when it doesn't look like they're coming true. And even when it goes against the dominant church culture because dominant church culture has been teaching you lies.

But that's why you have such a hard time with this battle between the man that you know you need to be to provide for your family and to conquer and to build

And the man that you feel like you're supposed to be in order to follow God and love Jesus and be a good Christian.

There should not be a battle there, but there is because you've been sold a version of Christianity that has made you weak and powerless, and that it tries to keep you impotent.

Literally and metaphorically.

So

You probably were driven by desire to go make something of yourself, to go provide for your family, to go create something awesome. There was desire there.

you and it r it was good. And you might have even bucked against some of the pastors you've taught been taught by. You might have adopted some practices or mindsets that people are like, Well that's not very Christian of you. What if God, you know, how do you know you're in God's will? You're not being humble. You're not supposed to build wealth.

Well, here we are now exposing another layer of those lies, which is you're not supposed to want sex for the rest of your life. You're supposed to learn to be happy once it fades.

The next lie is that sex is for men, but not really for women. Can't you picture all those sermons that you know YouTube clips and stuff where pastors are like making jokes and saying, Okay, ladies, let's be honest. He just wants one thing.

And everybody's like, ha ha ha funny, funny, funny. Let's make fun of that fact.

Or let's treat it with the importance it deserves. He might just mostly want that one thing. And if he gets that one thing in the marriage, man he's a happy camper.

That doesn't mean that he only does the one thing. It doesn't mean that he only cares about you in the area of sex and that's it. But it means that for him to have his, you know, bank account filled up, getting deposits, that's the main thing that does it.

Why do we joke about this instead of just treat it like reality? And why do we kind of joke about it in a demeaning way as though it's pretty a bad thing and he's immature and he's kind of a pig for it? Instead of being like, yeah, no, that's that's that's real, and that's the way God made me, and yes, I'm not ashamed of it, and I love my wife dearly, and she loves me dearly, and we both show that to each other all day and all night.

But no, we have this this notion that sex is mostly for the man. Women don't really want it so much. And so he's got this need that gets coupled with her duty. Sex is his need, but sex is her duty because she has no desire or need for it.

And so then we get into this problem where the two build a habit of sex being duty sex. And over the years, I have worked with marriages where the wife has been damaged because she was trying to do her wifely role without really wanting any of it for herself and without being able to be honest about where she was at.

She was just trying to fulfill her duty, and after years of doing that.

It created massive pain and wounding in her that then created problems in the sex life that had to be worked through after years.

Not to mention the husband who's getting sex but it's only duty sex since his wife doesn't truly want him or it. He's not satisfied with that. We don't just want the one thing of the physical act. We want to feel wanted, right?

You can resonate with that, I'm sure. I know that that's what you want. You want to feel wanted, you want to feel like she's hungry for you. You would love to feel like she can barely keep her hands up.

That is a good desire.

And Proverbs backs it up.

What about this lie that sex is only for the men?

And that women don't need it or want it. I mean scripture s again, holding the Bible right here would would have something to say against that.

It says, Because of the temptation of sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. This is both ways. It doesn't present this as just like wife give to your husband his conjugal rights and husbands, you know, go do the dishes for her. Or whatever, go buy her stuff. It doesn't say that. It says, hey,

Husbands, give your wife the sex that she's ha has a right to.

That's a paradigm breaker, isn't it?

What if we said, Hey, husband, give your wife the sex that she needs?

Or that she deeply desires. And it goes on. For the wife doesn't have authority over her own body, but the husband does. And I know that's like sketchy territory right there. I'm not talking about dominating and coercion and things like that. Because look, it also says likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does.

Do not deprive one another except if you agree for a short limited time so that you can just devote yourselves to prayer for a little while, but then make sure you get back to it is what it says.

Wow, so

This is an equal playing field, according to God.

But I hear you. You're probably thinking, yeah, but my wife doesn't really want it. It she seems fine without it. I don't feel like that's a lie. I feel like it's actually quite true. I'm the one who wants this. She doesn't. She she can go forever without it. In fact she's told me she doesn't need it. In fact she's told me it would be a lot easier if I wouldn't need it because then she'd be happier not feeling like she there's always this pressure.

I get it. I get it. I'm not saying that that's not happening in all kinds of marriages. It is. I've worked I'm working with them.

But what I am saying is that that is a dysfunction. And it's not the way God designed it. It's not what he wants. Your wife in her healthy state was wired for sex. She was wired to want it. She was wired to possibly kind of need it. She's a very sexual being. And life has come along. It's beaten all of us down at different times. It's wounded her.

Maybe there's been health challenges, there's physical things going on that now create even more difficulty. The marriage has been difficult. There's been emotional distance and lack of security, lack of safety, and all these factors go into squashing her sexual nature, but it doesn't mean it's not still there, and it doesn't mean that God's desire is not for it to come back out.

So you add on to all of those factors now, faithful church attendance and getting programmed with lies year after year about how, yeah, women just don't need it or want it, and it's for the men and the wives are supposed to do your duty. I mean, some people have gone so far as to say, even back in the day, focus on the family, would say, like, it's it's actually physically harmful and maybe even dangerous to men to go longer than seventy two hours.

And so wives, you better do it. Or put the burden of of a man's sin of lust on the wife. Like, do this to keep him from sinning.

And so a wife whose sexual nature is already getting attacked in different ways now is starting to hear these things, and first of all that makes sex not even desirable at all. It makes it a job that I have to do, so bad things don't happen. And I'm supposed to do it 'cause it's my job, my role. It's so that I'm a godly wife. I'm kinda I'm kinda tired of the terminology godly husband and godly wife, if I'm honest.

'Cause to me what I hear there is like everybody doing what they're told.

Instead of living from passion, living from desire, living on fire, living in the full unleashed masculinity of a man and the full unleashed femininity of a woman.

And the third lie that you've been sold is that God cares more about growing your character through the suffering of your marriage, through you having to endure not having your desires met, through going without. He cares more about building your character through lack in your marriage than he does about happiness, than he does about your passion.

that he does about you being fulfilled and living abundantly, both in your marriage and out of it, in all the ways of life. This is a rampant lie that God does not care so much about your happiness he cares about your holiness.

And that is tragic.

It's tragic. It's created a version of Christianity where suffering and lack and being discouraged and disappointed should be the norm and are signs that you're actually on the right path and getting closer to God. Am I saying that suffering doesn't happen? No. Am I saying that you'll be free of hardship in your life? No. What I'm saying is that we've made it out so that God is obsessed with suffering and that

He cares mostly about getting all that yucky fleshly sin off of you that you keep on doing even though you're saved, and so he's gonna withhold all kinds of blessing from you so he can grow your character. That's that's what we've made God out to be.

But what if instead of

The end goal of marriage in God's mind is not to get your character grown at all costs. And I'll hold sex back from you just so you can grow.

What if in God's mind it's like no, the end goal of marriage is passion and fulfillment? It's like to add to your life an incredible quality that you'd never have alone. What if his goal for your marriage is delight? Like it said in Proverbs, that you would delight in her, that you would be always intoxicated by her love. That seems to be God's goal for your marriage.

And what if the way he's designed it is that okay, son? If you want to get there.

Then it's gonna take some character growth.

So character growth becomes the journey to get to the goal rather than suffering being the journey to get to the goal of character.

Is there suffering on the journey? Yeah, there is. It's hard. But the end is good. The end is not just like, well, I learned how to go without sex and I'm happy now. No, the end, God's desired end is like, holy crap, I didn't know how good it could get between me and my wife. I didn't know how good the sex could be. I didn't know how passionate it could be. That's his goal.

So your job from this episode.

Is to let go of those stupid lies.

And to allow yourself to think according to what God actually says, not according to what a pulpit says.

Let yourself think about your marriage, about sex, about your own desire for sex. Let yourself think about it according to his promises, which is that he wants to fulfill all of your requests.

Bring to pass all of your plans. He wants to grant you all your desires. Psalm twenty. I'm paraphrasing, I always forget the exact wording, but it's Psalm twenty.

If you need a picture of what his heart is for your marriage, then stop listening to those lies on Sunday morning, if they preach at your church, and listen to Song of Solomon. Look at what happens there. Look at the dr the desire that the woman has.

That is not a book of the man just getting what he needs from the woman who couldn't care less. The woman almost wants it more.

I know that it can feel like an impossible thing to go from where you are to a marriage like that. I know it can feel like

It can feel like it'll never happen.

If you feel that way, I've got a few resources for you. One, purchase my book. It's in the link in the show notes, The DNA of a man. There's a workbook that goes with it. Two, I've got a free marriage training on how to go from frustrated to desired.

Gives you five keys to stop re like repelling your wife and to start attracting her. And the third resource is my masculine husband program. And that is for men who are ready to jump in all in and make the change to do deep intensive work, six months with me.

We it's group program or we can do one on one version. There's there's a lot in there. There's a lot of breakthrough that you'll see when you do that. So whatever the level of your need is, of your readiness is, do one of those.

Let your mind get changed.

And let God be the one who says where sex is heading in your marriage.

And even if it's not there, let yourself have faith for it.

I love you. Peace out.