Your body, your family and your home are one assignment, and God already gave you everything you need for all three. We walk it out here every week, straight from Scripture.
Hey y’all, and welcome to Monday Manna!
Last month, we posted a two-liner about salt.
Jesus called you salt, not honey.
Nearly 6 million people have seen it on Instagram and Facebook since. We wrote the full teaching behind it this week, and if you have not read that one yet, start there, because everything else we published came out of it.
Here is what we did not expect.
Being salt is not a theory you get to hold at a safe distance. The moment you say out loud that truth is supposed to touch the places that are already wounded, God hands you one of those places and asks what you are going to do about it.
He handed us sex.
The Bible Is Not Embarrassed. We Are.
Five frames from 2015, early in our ministry. We were three babies in, brand-new to this work, and convinced that health challenges began with the inputs. The belief layer underneath the inputs was something we did not learn to teach for another decade. That is the layer this article is about.
We had a completely different week planned.
Then we put something up here, the response came back, and within a day it was obvious the need was not where we thought it was. So we scrapped the plan. Mama Z wrote what she wished she had known in her 30s as a Christian wife. We wrote the wedding night guide we wish somebody had handed us. Then a prayer for intimacy, because a lot of what we were reading was never a marriage problem in the first place.
And the reaction took the same shape the salt post did.
Almost nobody argued with what we said. They were uncomfortable that we said it at all.
So let us put Scripture on the table.
God gave an entire book of the Bible to a bride and a groom describing each other’s bodies. Paul spends most of a chapter telling husbands and wives not to withhold from one another. Solomon tells a young man to be intoxicated with his wife’s love. Moses wrote a law excusing a newly married man from the army for a full year for one stated reason, so that he could bring joy to his wife.
The Bible talks about this constantly, in plain language, without apology.
So when a Christian couple teaching straight from Scripture makes a room go quiet, the discomfort is not coming from the Bible.
It is coming from somewhere else, and it is almost always one of three places.
Some of it is trauma. Somebody took something that was never theirs to take, and now the subject cannot come up without your whole body bracing. That is not a theology problem. That is a wound, and it deserves real help from real people who know your name.
Some of it is upbringing. You were raised in a house or a church where the message was not wait. The message was dirty. And nobody ever came back after the wedding to tell you the rule had changed. So you did the honorable thing for years, walked down the aisle, and found out that shame does not come with an off switch.
And some of it is plain silence. No malice in it at all. Nobody said anything, ever, so you built your entire framework for the most vulnerable thing two people can do out of a purity talk, a locker room, and whatever the internet handed you at thirteen.
So here is our concern, plainly…
The church handed this subject to two teachers, and neither one of them loves you.
The culture teaches that it means nothing.
The silence teaches that it means something shameful.
Both are lies, and a marriage can quietly bleed out between them without anybody ever naming what went wrong.
We are not going to give you details. Nobody needs our bedroom.
What people need is a framework.
What it is actually for.
What God said about it.
What honor looks like on a Tuesday when you are exhausted, the kids finally went down, and the two of you have not had a real conversation in a month.
What to do with shame you carried into a marriage that never deserved to carry it.
That framework saves marriages, and it cannot be handed down by anybody too embarrassed to say the word.
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YOUR DAILY MANNA
“Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous.” — Hebrews 13:4
Read that first half again slowly, because most of us were only ever taught the second half.
Held in honor. The word behind it is the one you would use for something costly. A precious stone. Something valuable enough that you would notice the moment it went missing. That is not a warning label. That is a price tag.
Undefiled. Not dirty. Not tolerated. Not a concession God makes for weak people. Clean.
Then notice who the verse is addressed to. Among all. Not among the newlyweds. Not among the men. All of us. The whole congregation has a stake in whether marriage is treated as something valuable, which means silence on this subject is not neutral. Silence is a vote.
The writer does put a fence around the marriage bed in the back half of the verse, and that fence matters. But you only fence in what you already consider worth protecting.
So here is your one thing this week, and it depends on which side of it you are standing on.
If the subject makes you uncomfortable, ask God one honest question. Who taught me this was dirty? Not to assign blame to anybody. To find out whether the voice in your head belongs to Scripture or to somebody else. There is a good chance you have spent years obeying a rule God never gave you.
If it does not make you uncomfortable, then you are the one who has to speak. Somebody close to you got married with no framework at all and has been quietly failing at it ever since, and they are never going to bring it up first.
God was not embarrassed to write it down. We should not be embarrassed to talk about it.
Know someone who needs to read this?
What We Are Loving
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Featured Posts
Everything we’ve published since Manna #18, all four pieces, right here.
We did not set out to spend a week on this. Four pieces went out, and one of them is the reason we were willing to write the other three.
Salt, not honey.
From Natural Living Family
Bible Health is where we teach the why. Over on Natural Living Family this week we taught the how, and apparently we could not get away from salt on either Substack, because two of these are about the kind you actually put on your food. Four favorites worth your five minutes.
DIY Lipstick + Roman Chamomile Oil + Leaky Gut + Butter Toffee
Spotlight: Still using table salt or Himalayan salt? Read this first.DIY Facial Cleanser + Detox Oils + Air Fresheners + Labor Day Cookout Roundup
Spotlight: The salt problem most families never think about.DIY Face Mask + Cinnamon Oil + Immune Resilience + Tapioca Pudding
Spotlight: We got a private tour of the non-toxic side of Amazon.Healing Cavities + Tea Tree First Aid + DIY Beard Oil Pineapple Cake
Spotlight: Your eyes are working overtime.
Want more from our Natural Living Family Substack?
Your Voice Matters
One question this week, and you can answer it anonymously if you need to.
Who taught you what sex is actually for? Not what to avoid. Not what will get you in trouble. What it is for.
And if the honest answer is nobody, say that too. That is not a failure. That is the whole reason we spent the week here.
Truth that stings is not the same as truth that harms, and a subject that makes us uncomfortable is not the same as a subject that is inappropriate.
If you are just joining us, start here. A lot of what we believe about our bodies came from sayings that are nowhere in the Bible…
As always, our hope and prayer is that you experience the abundant life.
~ Dr. Z & Mama Z
P.S. If Bible Health is speaking to you, we would love to have you go deeper with us. Your subscription is what makes this ministry possible, and what lets us keep putting Scripture-first tools into more homes. We would be honored to have you.
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Even though it was the "wild 1960s," my husband and I learned about love and sex together. Such sweet memories.