Chris and Jessica on Sex, Soul Ties and God's Redeeming Love
This month we hear from Chris and Jessica Duncan…and Zakai, their 4 month old who chimes in too!
Chris and Jessica share insight into the importance of purity, how and why God designed sex for marriage, the power of soul ties while highlighting how God's redemption reaches our most broken, messy parts and pasts and the beautiful way He uses marriage to bind up these delicate parts of our pasts.
6:00- 11:50 — They talk about the first year of marriage and taking down the expectations they first had.
11:50-14:20 How they met. The actual greatest story! Jessica spotted Chris on a reality TV show and 4 years later, they connected.
14:20 - 17:40 Prior to committing their lives to Jesus, Chris and Jess dated for 3 years. They open up about what the basis of their relationship was — sex. But did they really know each other?
“Looking back I can’t figure out how or why we started having sex. Did we feel love for each other? Fast forward, to when we stopped having sex we found out new ways to love each other, to communicate beyond just the act of having sex.
It’s not even a connection or intimacy, it’s really just empty pleasure. We didn’t even have a relationship with each other. It was just that. We didn’t know who the other was.” — Jessica
“Before Jesus, we see sex as for yourself. You get your self gratification, you get your sex, and that’s it.
That’s what we know now, this wasn’t what we knew back then.” -Chris
17:40 Jessica let Chris go after 3 years of dating because of what she realized as she began seeking a relationship with Jesus.
Finding Jesus became more important than any intimate relationship Jessica had with Chris when they were just dating and that’s what really spoke to him…he thought, “You’re willing to choose someone in some old book over me? I’m standing right here in front of you.”- Chris
“It was a battle and it took time. Because there was a person in front of me. Jesus became real the more I looked…the more I sought Him. For a long time, I thought, ‘Okay, if something happens between us then I can fully dive into my relationship with God. Sex was what was stopping me from walking truly with God and the purpose he had for me.
I knew that’s what I should be doing, but I kept falling into the same old, ‘But this is my boyfriend…’ and twisting the words in the Bible. And thought, ‘Well one day I want to marry him, so that means he’s my husband.’ But there was a point God said, “He’s not your husband, he hasn’t committed that. And I realized, my husband could have been somewhere else.” - Jessica.
“There came a point where I just said, Lord, take him. Take him away, this is my chance to just walk with You and not be distracted. If he’s not my husband, just let him be that guy that leaves it that way.” -Jessica
”When he came back around, if I was going to allow him back in my life I had to be honest with him. I had to tell him I wasn’t going to pursue a relationship with a man that isn’t a man of God — and that means more than just putting it in your bio. It’s walking in his purpose, being convicted by what the Word of God says, leading me to Christ, not drawing me to you.” - Jessica
“It’s not just about saying “God first”, it’s actually putting God first and letting Him transform you.” - Chris
22:00 God’s definition of a relationship.
”It wasn’t until we talked about this, that the true purpose of our relationship finally started revealing itself.” - Jessica
“So we put Him first and tried to understand what His definition of a relationship was or is instead of our own understanding of what a relationship is” — Chris
“We’re fallen, we’re always going to try to define things. It’s so important to go back to the Bible, and what the Bible defines what marriage is, what a relationship is, how it should be. We can try to define it so many ways but it’s always going to be imperfect because we’re imperfect people. The Bible is what we need to be rooted in because it tells us the answers.
The verse I was trying to think of Proverbs 21:22 “All man’s ways seem right to him, but the LORD weighs the heart”. We all think we’re right, we all think we have the right idea, but the LORD Is going to reveal what’s right and wrong.” — Jessica
24:10 Soul ties and the breaking of them.
“Soul ties are real. You remember things. You have dreams, there are consequences to those things, to having sex before marriage, to being with other people, bringing them into marriage.
What I brought into marriage, not only the expectations I had but everything else was stripped — that I didn’t feel worthy, clean, that I carried a past and that I carried that shame from that. That’s something that we had to go through, we had to talk about it, Chris had to understand that part in order to know why or what was wrong…
There’s these really beautiful, hard, but beautiful conversations that we had.
I realized I needed to forgive myself, because I knew the Lord forgave me, He cleansed me. God loves me so much that He gave me Chris. He gave me that gift, this tangible human in front of me that showed me that grace, showed me that tenderness, that I was worthy of it. That’s a relationship. That’s what marriage is, that Christ loves His church. I’m the church and Chris loved me that same way” - Jessica
25:00 The source of where their love is found — it’s not sex!
Chris seeing Jess as one of God’s daughters and realizing that He gave her to him. The Lord allowed him to see her how He saw her and how he should love her. That’s where he gets his source of love.
I constantly remember, ‘This is your daughter, Lord and You’ve called me to love her.’” — Chris
28:00 Resource #1 — Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers (linked below).
The main character who didn’t find worth or healing until she found her relationship with God.
30:40 “Get knowledge, read books, it was so helpful to get to the biology of what sex is, how does it bind you together.” —Jessica
34:00 Navigating sex in marriage after baby and the honest truth about it, that it’s currently non existent.
“That’s why it’s really important in finding God as your love, because if sex is your love then these last few months we would have been completely unattached because that source of where we found our love would have been gone.” — Chris
39:35 Chris and Jess are honest with one area in marriage they’d like to work on for each other’s sake.
“If you’re mad or in an argument, be a servant” — Chris
RESOURCES recommended from this month’s couple (linking to Audible in honor of Jess, who loves listening to her books!)
The Bible, always!
Loveology by John Mark Comer to find out what sex is and what it was truly designed for
Swipe Right by Levi Lusko to read about sex and purity
Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers
Anger: Handling a Powerful Emotion in A Healthy Way by Gary Chapman
You & Me Forever Marriage in Light of Eternity by Frances Chan
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