Eternal significance and purpose of love-making

Sex isn’t evil and bearing children is one method of gaining God’s glory, but, what about making love to your legally and lawfully wedded spouse?  Let’s not even discuss any other of type of illicit sex!  Making love is good, but why?

Isn’t it a passion, or an illicit?  I think that is the point.  Let me explain…  It’s just like becoming more mature and wise and having integrity with keeping the commandments.  We are given this power—the closest we can come to being a God in this life—creating, with relatively few governing rules or laws and we are to learn to control our feelings/wants/desires while being commanded to multiply and replenish the Earth.  God isn’t giving two contradictory commandments, as we all can learn to control ourselves, while we are expected to experience the joy of love making

Not a good enough explanation?  Let me try again…  On Sunday, it’s not (or shouldn’t be) a matter of keeping yourself from doing all of the list of things that one would do if not keeping the Sabbath day holy, but should be filled with all of the different things that one does to glorify God and reverently serve each other.

Think of this: Alma teaches us that desire comes before faith.  You must desire or have a desire in you to gain faith.  Faith, I think we will all agree, is one of the ultimate things you can achieve in this life.  The more you get, the better off you are!  Desire, then, is not an evil thing.  I guess we can agree that it's neutral.  Some desires lead to sin and other desires lead to godliness.  Good.  I'm glad we got that settled...  But, we're still not where we want to go!  But, we have the concept of desire as our first axiom, which leads to faith which is the first principle of godliness and of God's church.

So, just like you achieve "closeness" to your eternal companion by following God's commandments, gaining faith--not only in the principle of obedience to your righteous acts together or with each other, but in each other and our faith becomes "knowledge in that thing" (Alma 32) that we did.  We are both becoming more and more like our Father in Heaven and in His Son, Jesus Christ.  Don't forget that we are also becoming closer to each other.  As we both become closer to God, we will simultaneously become closer to each other.  As we righteously become closer to one (you can't become closer to God in an unrighteous way, but someone may think that they are getting closer to their spouse by some perverse reasoning...  sex-aholics or other good things twisted to perversion, etc.  Just stop it!  STOP IT!) of the two (God or our spouse), we will reciprocally become closer to the other.  Thus, as we become closer to God, we become closer to our spouse and vice versa….

Now, let's get back to the doing-good-on-Sunday point--one of the ways that we become closer to God is by faithfully fulfilling one of His commandments, which is keeping the Sabbath day holy.  His very first commandment, remember, was given to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, which was to "multiply and replenish the Earth."  Does that mean, then, that you only righteously make love to your wife if you are trying to "multiply and replenish the Earth"?  No.  For an explanation there from someone with more authority than me, you'll need to do a little research yourself, but since you asked, one of the reasons we make love is to become closer spiritually, emotionally, mentally, and physically.

You can become closer with any one or more of those ways and have a lop-sided relationship.  Just think about becoming closer spiritually to the exclusion of all other fashions and in all other respects.  Take any to the extreme, and you are left with nothing-but-that-practice.  Becoming more like God, though, means not becoming lop-sided.  His life, He sees, His focus is one-eternal-round.

Since we came here to talk about the eternal significance and purpose of love-making, though, let's stick with that.  Actually, I think we have and I believe we've done well.  If you can't see the significance or purpose, re-read.  If you still can't see them after re-reading, go and do something else and maybe come back in a year or two or after some major changes in your life.

And in the maybe-not-so-famous but very funny words of Mr. Green from CLUE, "I'm going to go home to sleep with my wife."

JPS