Ahmed came to see me on a Thursday afternoon, alone. He was a quantity surveyor with a firm in Abuja, a deacon in our church, a quiet and careful man who had grown up in Kaduna and had come to faith in Christ as a teenager. He sat in the chair across from my desk, turned his car keys over in his hands for a long time, and then said, “Pastor, I need you to talk to my wife. She is sinning against me.”
The story came out slowly. Their third child had been born fourteen months earlier, after a long and difficult delivery. Since then Mary had seemed to withdraw from him. She was always tired. She went to bed early with the baby. When he reached for her, she turned away, or agreed reluctantly and then cried quietly afterwards. He felt rejected. He had started sleeping in the parlour some nights.
“I have been patient,” he said. “But the Bible is clear. First Corinthians seven. The wife hath not power of her own body. I showed her the verse. I read it to her last week. I told her that what she is doing is against the Word of God.”
“What did she say?” I asked.
He looked at the floor. “She took the baby and went to sleep in the children’s room.”
My wife and I met with them both the following week. Mary said very little at first. Then she said something I have never forgotten. “When he reads me that verse,” she said, “I feel like a piece of property. Like something he bought at the market. And I am in pain, Pastor. Every time. I have been in pain since the baby came. I didn’t know how to tell him. I thought maybe that is just how it is now.”
Ahmed turned and stared at her. He had not known. In fourteen months, he had never asked.
I tell their story, with details changed, because it touches something many Christian couples carry in silence. God’s design for closeness in marriage is beautiful. But it is easily misunderstood, misused, or simply never talked about. This article is an attempt to speak about it gently, honestly and biblically.
Naked and not ashamed
The story of marriage begins in the garden, with words that Jesus Himself would later quote:
Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.
“They shall be one flesh.” The phrase speaks of a union that is physical, but far more than physical. It is the joining of two whole lives: bodies, households, names, futures. The husband leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife. The word cleave suggests clinging, holding fast. Something new has been formed that did not exist before.
Then comes a sentence of extraordinary tenderness: “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.” This is a picture of complete openness without fear. Nothing was hidden. Nothing needed to be. They could be fully seen and fully known, and it was safe.
That is the heart of marital intimacy. It certainly includes the physical union of husband and wife. But it begins with something deeper: the freedom to be seen without being shamed. To be known as you really are, body and soul, and to be received with honour.
Look at what happened after the fall. “The eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons” (Genesis 3:7). When God came walking in the garden, Adam said, “I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself” (Genesis 3:10). Sin brought fear, shame and hiding into the most intimate human relationship. Openness became dangerous. People began to cover themselves, physically and emotionally.
Every marriage since then has lived with the effects of that hiding. We are tempted to cover our weaknesses, our desires, our fears and our pain. We are tempted to use another person’s openness against them. And so the closeness God designed becomes, for many couples, a place of anxiety rather than rest.
The gospel speaks to exactly this. In Christ, God has dealt with our shame. He has covered us with His own righteousness, a covering no fig leaf could ever provide. And a husband and wife who know they are accepted by God can begin, slowly, to become safe for each other again. That safety is where real intimacy grows.
PunchlineIntimacy in marriage begins with the freedom to be fully seen without being shamed. Where there is no safety, there can be no true closeness.
God is not embarrassed by marriage
Many of us grew up in homes and churches where these matters were never discussed. Parents did not talk about them. Pastors mentioned them only to warn against sin. Young couples went into marriage with little more than a few whispered comments from an aunt and whatever they had picked up from films or friends. Some carried a vague sense that physical closeness, even within marriage, was somehow less than spiritual.
Scripture does not share that embarrassment. “Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled” (Hebrews 13:4). The physical union of husband and wife is honourable. It was God’s idea. Proverbs tells a husband to “rejoice with the wife of thy youth” (Proverbs 5:18). And an entire book of the Bible, the Song of Solomon, celebrates the love between a bride and her beloved in poetic language that is delighted and unashamed: “My beloved is mine, and I am his” (Song of Solomon 2:16).
Near the end of that book come these words:
Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.
“Set me as a seal upon thine heart.” A seal in the ancient world was a mark of ownership and belonging, often worn on a cord around the neck or on the hand. The bride asks to be kept close, as something precious. “For love is strong as death.” The love the Song celebrates is faithful, fierce and exclusive. It cannot be bought: “if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.” Real love is not purchased, demanded or extracted. It is given freely.
That is worth remembering when we come to Paul. The Song of Solomon shows us intimacy as mutual delight, freely offered, between two people who long for each other. That is the atmosphere God intends. Anything that turns that delight into a duty extracted by force or guilt has already moved away from God’s design.
Paul’s surprising mutuality
Now we come to the passage Ahmed had been quoting:
Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband. The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband: and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife. Defraud ye not one the other, except it be with consent for a time, that ye may give yourselves to fasting and prayer; and come together again, that Satan tempt you not for your incontinency.
To read it well, we need its context. Paul is answering questions the Corinthians had written to him. The chapter opens, “Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me: It is good for a man not to touch a woman” (1 Corinthians 7:1). Many scholars believe that this second sentence was a slogan circulating in Corinth, a view held by some believers who thought that abstaining from physical union, even within marriage, was a mark of higher spirituality. Paul is responding to it.
NuggetHis response is to insist that married couples should not withhold themselves from each other in the name of piety. Marriage includes physical closeness, and that closeness is good.
But look carefully at how he says it. Every instruction is mutual. “Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband.” Due benevolence means the kindness and goodwill that is owed. Paul speaks to the husband first. Then he says exactly the same to the wife.
Then comes the verse Ahmed had read to Mary. “The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband.” In the Roman world, that sentence would not have surprised anyone. Husbands were widely assumed to have rights over their wives. But Paul does not stop there. “And likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife.” That sentence would have astonished his first readers. Paul is saying that the wife has the same claim on her husband’s body that he has on hers. Neither one belongs only to himself or herself. Each belongs to the other.
This is not a charter for one spouse to make demands. It is a picture of two people who have each given themselves away. Each is called to care for the other’s needs. Each surrenders the right to treat their body as purely private within the marriage. But the whole movement of the passage is toward self-giving, not taking.
Ahmed had been reading verse 4 as though it gave him a right to claim. He had skipped verse 3, which tells him first what he owes. And he had read only half of verse 4, leaving out the half that applied to him.
Never an entitlement, never a weapon
Verse 5 continues: “Defraud ye not one the other, except it be with consent for a time.” The word defraud means to deprive or rob someone of what belongs to them. Paul warns against one spouse withholding closeness from the other as a general pattern. And the exception he gives depends entirely on agreement: “with consent.” The Greek phrase means “by mutual agreement,” literally “with one voice,” from which we get the word symphony. Even the decision to abstain for a season of prayer is to be made together.
So this passage forbids two opposite errors.
The first is using intimacy as a weapon by withholding it. Some spouses punish each other this way. After an argument, closeness is refused for weeks. The reason is not pain or exhaustion or grief. The refusal is a way of making the other suffer. That is a form of manipulation, and Paul calls it defrauding. If something is wrong in the marriage, it needs to be spoken about, not enforced through coldness.
The second error is treating a spouse’s body as an entitlement. Paul’s word “consent” governs the whole passage. Nowhere does Scripture give a husband or wife permission to force, pressure or coerce the other. Forcing a spouse into physical intimacy against their will is a serious wrong. It is not a marital right. Using guilt, threats, Bible verses or anger to extract compliance is also wrong. Where coercion of this kind is happening, the person being harmed should seek help from a trusted pastor or counsellor, and if necessary from the authorities. No one is required to endure abuse in the name of submission or covenant.
There is a difference between a spouse who is hurt and withdraws, and a spouse who withholds in order to punish. There is also a difference between a spouse who longs for closeness and expresses that longing honestly, and a spouse who demands it. The first in each pair can be met with understanding and conversation. The second in each pair needs repentance.
Mary was not defrauding Ahmed. She was in pain, exhausted and afraid, and she did not know how to say so. Ahmed was not wrong to long for his wife. But he was wrong to treat that longing as a debt she owed him, and to use Scripture as a lever to collect it. What he needed was not a better argument. He needed to ask her what was wrong.
Nourishing and cherishing
Paul gives husbands a picture of love in Ephesians 5 that bears directly on this:
So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church.
“No man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it.” The word cherisheth is a word for warming, for tender care. Paul uses the same word elsewhere for a nursing mother: “even as a nurse cherisheth her children” (1 Thessalonians 2:7). It is the care a mother gives a newborn, gentle and attentive and patient. That is how a husband is to treat his wife’s body: as he would his own, with nourishment and tender care.
A man who is in pain does not force himself to keep walking on an injured leg. He attends to it. He rests it. He goes to see a doctor. Paul says a husband should treat his wife’s body with exactly the same attention. If she is in pain, he does not demand. He cares. If she is exhausted, he helps. If she is afraid, he slows down.
This sits within the larger passage in Ephesians, which begins with mutual submission, “Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God” (Ephesians 5:21), and calls the husband to love his wife “as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it” (Ephesians 5:25). The model for marital love is Christ’s self-giving. Christ never used His authority to take from His bride. He used it to give.
Peter says something similar:
Likewise, ye husbands, dwell with them according to knowledge, giving honour unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life; that your prayers be not hindered.
“Dwell with them according to knowledge.” Husbands are to live with their wives with understanding, paying attention to who they actually are. That includes knowing her body, her seasons, her fears, her pain. It means learning what she needs rather than assuming. “Giving honour unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel.” The phrase weaker vessel has sometimes been misused, but Peter’s point is about care, not inferiority. In the same breath he calls husband and wife “heirs together of the grace of life.” They stand equal before God. Where one is more physically vulnerable, the other is to protect, not exploit.
And notice the warning: “that your prayers be not hindered.” A husband who treats his wife without understanding or honour is damaging his own walk with God. How we treat each other in the most private parts of marriage matters to the Lord.
Love that seeketh not her own
Paul’s great chapter on love gives us a test for every part of married life, and it applies very directly here:
Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
Read those words with marital intimacy in mind. Love “suffereth long, and is kind.” It is patient. It is not in a hurry. It “seeketh not her own.” It is concerned with the good of the other, not simply with its own satisfaction. It “is not easily provoked.” It does not respond to a spouse’s reluctance with anger or sulking. It “rejoiceth in the truth.” It wants to know what is really going on, even when the truth is uncomfortable.
These are not abstract ideals. They describe how a husband or wife can approach intimacy in practical terms. Patience means not rushing. Kindness means tenderness and attention. Seeking the other’s good means caring about whether your spouse is comfortable, at peace and glad to be close to you. Rejoicing in the truth means being willing to hear “this hurts” or “I’m not ready” or “I need something different” without feeling rejected.
It also helps to remember that closeness in marriage is built long before the bedroom door is closed. A wife who has been spoken to harshly all day, left alone with the children and the cooking, and ignored at the dinner table will not suddenly feel cherished at night. A husband who has been belittled in front of his relatives will not easily feel desired. Intimacy grows out of the ordinary kindness of the day: a word of thanks, a hand on the shoulder, help with the dishes, a phone call from the office simply to ask how she is, a wife’s warm welcome when her husband comes home tired from the traffic. These small acts say, “I see you. I value you. I am glad you are mine.” They prepare the ground.
This care runs in both directions. Paul’s instructions in 1 Corinthians 7 are addressed equally to wives and husbands, and wives too are called to attend to their husbands with understanding. A husband’s needs, fears and insecurities in this area are real, and many men feel them deeply while saying nothing. A wife who learns what makes her husband feel loved and honoured, and who receives his longing as a gift rather than a burden, is practising the same self-giving love.
Closeness that grows in this atmosphere is very different from closeness extracted by pressure. It becomes, as God intended, a place of mutual delight and rest. Both spouses feel safe. Both feel valued. Both give freely.
The freedom to speak honestly
Ahmed had never asked. Mary had never told. Fourteen months of pain and loneliness passed between them, in the same house and the same bed, because neither knew how to speak.
Many couples live this way. They can talk about school fees, the generator, the children’s exams and the in-laws. But they have no words for their own closeness. They do not know how to say “I miss you,” or “I am tired,” or “That hurts,” or “I would like this to be different.” And so misunderstandings grow in silence.
Part of God’s design for intimacy is the freedom to speak honestly about it. “Naked and not ashamed” includes being able to tell the truth about your body, your desires and your fears. A husband should be able to say, without shame, that he longs for his wife. A wife should be able to say, without fear, that she is in pain, or exhausted, or carrying something from the past. Both should be able to talk about what they enjoy and what they do not.
It also helps to recognise that every marriage passes through seasons. Pregnancy, a newborn, illness, grief, job loss, a husband posted to Port Harcourt while the family stays in Abuja, the changes that come with age: each of these affects closeness. Spouses often differ in how much physical closeness they want, and that difference is normal, not a sign that something is broken. These seasons and differences can be faced together if they are spoken about. They become wounds if they are not.
Decisions about children and family planning also belong in this conversation. Sincere Christians hold different convictions here, from those who leave the number of children entirely to God, to those who believe responsible family planning is part of good stewardship. Whatever your conviction, it should be reached together, with both spouses’ health and wellbeing in view.
When there is pain, trauma or struggle
Some of what couples face in this area cannot be solved by better communication alone. It needs help.
If intimacy is physically painful, please see a doctor. Pain after childbirth, pain caused by infection or other medical conditions, and many other difficulties are common and often very treatable. A good gynaecologist, and in some cases a physiotherapist who specialises in such problems, can make an enormous difference. Pain is not something a Christian wife is meant to endure in silence. It is a signal that her body needs care.
Husbands too can face physical difficulties that cause great embarrassment and are rarely discussed. These are also common, and often have medical causes that a doctor can address. Seeking help is an act of love for your spouse and of stewardship of the body God gave you.
Some spouses carry wounds from the past. A history of sexual abuse, assault or exploitation can make closeness frightening even in a loving marriage. If this is your story, you are not broken beyond repair, and you are not failing your spouse. “The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart” (Psalm 34:18). A trained Christian counsellor who understands trauma can walk with you, and with your spouse, toward healing. That healing often takes time. A loving spouse will be patient, and will never use your history as a reason to pressure or shame you.
Some couples are struggling with pornography or other habits that damage trust and distort expectations. These need to be brought into the light, honestly and with help. Many believers have found freedom through a combination of confession, accountability, counselling and the grace of God.
And where there is coercion or abuse, the priority is safety. Speak to someone you trust. Contact a counsellor, a pastor or, where necessary, the authorities.
PunchlinePrayer and medicine are not rivals. You can pray for healing and see a doctor in the same week. God works through both.
Mary saw a gynaecologist at the National Hospital the following month. The doctor found that an injury from the delivery had never properly healed. It was treatable. She began a course of physiotherapy. The pain eased slowly over the next few months.
But the medical treatment was only part of what changed. In that first meeting in my office, after Mary spoke, Ahmed sat silent for a long time. Then he turned to her and said, “Why didn’t you tell me?” And she said, quietly, “Because you never asked. You only told me what the Bible said I owed you.”
He wept. I had never seen him weep before.
Over the following months Ahmed learnt to ask. He began getting up for the baby at night so Mary could sleep. He started cooking on Saturdays. He sat with her in the evenings and talked, without expecting anything to follow. He went with her to two of her physiotherapy appointments, because he wanted to understand. Slowly, gently, closeness returned to their marriage, freely given on both sides.
About a year later, at a men’s fellowship breakfast, someone asked Ahmed what had changed in his marriage. He thought for a moment, then said, “I used to read verse four to my wife. Now I read verse three to myself.”
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- What did you learn, spoken or unspoken, about intimacy in marriage from your family, your church and your culture? How has that shaped your expectations?
- How does the mutuality of 1 Corinthians 7:3-5 challenge the way you have understood it?
- Is your marriage a place where both of you feel safe to be fully seen and fully known? What would increase that safety?
- Is there something about your closeness that you have never been able to say to your spouse? What would help you say it?
- Is there pain, trauma or struggle in this area that needs medical or professional help? What first step could you take?
This Week
This week, find an unhurried moment with your spouse when you are both rested and nothing is expected to follow. Ask each other two questions and listen without defending yourself: “Is there anything about our closeness that you have found hard to tell me?” and “What would help you feel more cared for and safe with me?” If either answer involves pain, fear or a past wound, agree together on one concrete step toward help, such as booking a doctor’s appointment or speaking to a counsellor.
A Prayer
Father, thank You for designing marriage as a place of closeness, honour and delight. Forgive me for any way I have treated my husband or wife as an object or an obligation, or used closeness to punish, pressure or manipulate. Heal the shame and fear that make us hide from each other. Teach me to nourish and cherish, to be patient and kind, to seek my spouse’s good and not only my own. Where there is pain, lead us to the help we need. Where there are wounds from the past, bring Your healing. Make our marriage a place where we can be fully known and not afraid. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.