When Your Spouse Doesn't Want to Have Sex on this edition of Truth and Love.

I'm Heath Lambert and you're listening to Truth and Love, a podcast of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors where we seek to provide biblical solutions for the problems

that people face.

We love to answer your questions on the Truth in Love podcast, and we've received a number

of questions over the last weeks about the sexual relationship in marriage.

Specifically, some people have asked about what to do when sex has not been occurring in your marriage for a number of years.

Now, a number of years is a very long time to go in most marriages without the sexual relationship happening.

But it's common for many couples to experience a sort of drought in their sexual relationship that could

last a number of weeks or a number of months. And the issue is, what do we do when your spouse

doesn't want to have sex? Well, before we can really answer that question, we need to talk about

what the Bible commands in this regard. It is clear that the Bible

commands married couples to have sex in marriage. In 1 Corinthians chapter 7, starting in verse 1,

the Apostle Paul says, now concerning the things about which you wrote, it is good for a man not to

touch a woman. But because of immoralities, each man is to have his own wife,

and each woman is to have her own husband. The husband must fulfill his duty to his wife,

and likewise also the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body,

but the husband does, and likewise also the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife

does. The text grounds the command in the reality that in marriage a husband loses the exclusive right

to control his own body, and the wife loses the exclusive right to control her own body.

That is to say, in marriage, a husband's body

does not belong to himself alone, and a wife's body does not belong to herself alone, but these

bodies are shared one to the other in the context of marriage. And so we share our bodies with

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