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I always find myself laughing when I watch a new episode of The OC. I have lived in the real Orange County all of my life, and the TV version certainly is not the O.C. I know. My life is not nearly as exciting, controversial, dramatic and glamorous as the TV version. I'll say this: My life sure isn't like Seth's or Ryan's. And I wouldn't want it to be—especially as I think about their attitude toward sex. Watching this TV version of where I live, I can't help but think, Boy, the people in this town really like having sex.

I guess it makes sense that people on shows like The OC, One Tree Hill and Summerland enjoy sex so much. It is supposed to be pleasurable and fun. God says so. He ought to know. He created it. In fact, there's quite a bit in the Bible about the beauty of sex and love (especially in Song of Songs).

But this is not the whole story. The Bible tells us that God has meaningful reasons other than pleasure for sex.

After Ned Flanders' wife dies on The Simpsons, Ned believes he's finally found another woman to love. They sleep together. When he learns she isn't ready for marriage, Ned feels completely empty and worthless. He feels like a part of him left when she left.

Ned's experience demonstrates an important truth from the Bible. One purpose of sex is to experience real intimacy—to know someone in a deep and complete way. Intimacy is feeling like you belong to someone else, and that person belongs to you. It makes you one with a person—the kind of "one-flesh" closeness God designed for a man and woman who are married (Genesis 2:24). Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6:16: "There's more to sex than mere skin on skin. Sex is as much spiritual mystery as physical fact" (The Message). God doesn't mean for anyone to share this "spiritual mystery" with someone they don't want to truly know and be known by in the lifelong commitment of marriage.

The pain, emptiness and regret Ned felt was from sharing the ultimate means of knowing someone—and then having that intimacy torn away. God wants us to stay away from sex outside of a life-long commitment because he wants to protect us from that pain.

In Elizabethtown, Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst's characters make love—and then later realize they are in love. This is the reverse of what God wants. You can have sex with a person without really loving them, but you can't experience true intimacy with a person without loving them selflessly through the joys and struggles of married life together. God wants intimacy to be more important than sex. Sex can last a night, but intimacy is meant to last forever.

In an episode of Summerland, Jess McCartney's character loses his virginity by candlelight on the beach. The next day, he catches the girl flirting with another guy. What's he do? He immediately asks another girl out.

It seems like sex doesn't mean a whole lot in Hollywood—as if you can just do it with whoever you want. But that attitude ignores God's purpose of sex as a lifelong commitment to one person. Mark 10:8-9 says that God made man and woman so that "the two will become one flesh; so they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate" (NIV). That last line is important. Once you've created a bond through sex, God didn't mean for it to ever be separated. God meant for sex to be an unbreakable promise two people make with each other. The Bible calls sex an important "marital duty" that spouses commit to share only with each other (1 Corinthians 7:2-5). In fact, the verse speaks so highly of this commitment that it says, "The wife's body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the husband's body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife" (NIV).

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