Guilt and Shame
Transcript
Good morning. My name is Chet. I'm one of the pastors here. We are going to be in Genesis chapter 2 today. We're going to start out there. So if you want to go ahead and grab your Bibles, we'll be in Genesis chapter 2.
If you're in a blue and white Bible, that's going to be on page 2. So you won't have to go very far. And if you don't own a Bible, take one of these blue and white Bibles with you. That's our gift to you. If you see a nice leather one laying around and you want to grab that one, that's cool. But that will be somebody else's, but you can have it.
We forgive you. We're going to jump right in this morning, and then we're going to talk a little bit about, after we read a little bit and kind of set up what we're doing today, we'll talk a little more about the series we're in and kind of how we're thinking about and approaching this. But we're going to be in Genesis chapter 2. We're going to start in verse 22. And what we're picking up on is God has created man, and he's now creating woman, and then he's going to kind of bring them together, and we're going to get to see this picture at the beginning of the Bible. So 22.
And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man, he made into a woman, and he brought her to the man. Then the man said, This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh, and she should be called woman because she was taken out of man. Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. Okay, so if you will, this is the first marriage in the Bible. God's created Adam and Eve, and he brings them together, and he brings them to each other, and they kind of have a marriage ceremony where this is, you belong to her and she belongs to you.
And what it says right there at the end of that chapter is that the man and the woman were both naked and not ashamed. And what that is, is a picture of perfect unity, perfect transparency, perfect openness, that neither one of them had anything to be afraid of. Anything that the other one would find out about them. Anything that they had to try to hide or cover up. That they could be completely themselves. That they were fully known and fully loved.
They didn't have anything to be worried that the other one would eventually discover. Nothing to be concerned about. Can you imagine that? Perfect and complete transparency. No amount of hesitation when it comes to, yeah, I'm an open book. Can you imagine?
Anybody can go home, talk to your parents, interview them, ask any question they like, and you have no concern. Anybody can flip through all your old yearbooks. Anybody can take your phone right now and flip through all the pictures in your phone. Some of you, you hand somebody your phone and you're like, hey, look at this picture of my dog. And then you see they start swiping and immediately your blood pressure is like, and you're trying to think like, maybe you don't usually take inappropriate pictures or anything, but you're immediately like, did I? Did I?
Could you imagine? Not having anything to hide. Not having anything to be concerned about. Anybody could go talk to any of your old relationships. Ask them any question they like and you wouldn't have any amount of hesitation, tension. They were completely, fully known, fully loved.
That's the picture we're given here this morning with Adam and Eve when they first come together. And what we're going to be talking about today is we're in our third week of our Killjoy series. What we've been spending our time on is basically talking about there's some things going on in the church, some things that we've gotten used to. Struggles and sins that have become normal. That it's just like, yeah, like some of us have begun to believe that this is just how life works for me. You've just learned to accept it.
Yeah, it's not great, but I'm used to it. It's kind of like after a while you don't notice the smell in your own house. Your friend comes over, they walk in. I mean, I think they do a whole series of commercials on this now, but this is a real thing. You can walk in someone's house and you're like, oh, y'all can't smell that anymore. I think the commercials call that nose blind.
And there's some of us who've become that with certain sins and certain struggles that we have. We've just accepted it. It's become a part of us. It's become so normal for us that we've just gotten used to it. And it's actually robbing us of joy. It's robbing us of the benefits of the genuine relationship that we have with Jesus as he's redeemed us and made us his.
And so what we're doing in this series, we've actually made some books where we're just trying to walk through and as best we can dig into that and then take it to Jesus to redeem it. So when we have in our books, if you hadn't grabbed one yet and we're walking through this with our community groups, I would encourage you to grab one of our Killjoy books, hop in a group. There's going to be inventories in there, something we stole from a recovery program. And then we've made some ourselves. But basically for the purposes of not just looking into our hearts and seeing what's there, but looking in and then taking it to Jesus to have him change us and make us new and go to work on us.
And so that's what we're doing in this series. Today specifically we're talking about guilt and shame. Guilt and shame. And for those of us who have just grown used to this, hopefully today we'll see how Jesus steps in and begins to interact with our guilt and shame and set us free. All right, so let's keep reading.
We're going to jump to chapter 3. God had told Adam and Eve a very specific tree not to eat from. It was the one rule he gave them. And they ate from it. And the moment they ate from it, sin entered the world and brought with it all of the evil and brokenness that's ever happened throughout humanity and brought with it guilt and shame. And so we're going to pick up on what it tells us here in verse 7.
So this is right after they've eaten the fruit. It says, Then the eyes of both were opened and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. So this moment that they ate of the fruit that they weren't supposed to eat of, it says their eyes were opened and they knew that they were naked. It was that moment in your dream where you're given the presentation at work or you're up in front of class and suddenly you realize that you're naked. That shame and that fear washes over you.
It had to be terrifying for them because they'd never experienced it. This moment of overwhelming shame. And they feel so exposed. That's what shame does. That's what guilt does. You feel so exposed.
You feel so out in the open. You feel like you want to, you have those moments in life where you just want to disappear. If you could just disappear, that would be for the best. I remember in, I was in fifth grade. My teacher was up in front of the class, teaching, I guess is probably what she was doing. She was talking to all of us.
She was standing near my desk and so I was on the front row. Now, I don't know why I was on the front row. I don't know if that was, like she chose that or if I chose that. I don't really think it has much to do with the story, so just try to pay attention. But I was on the front row.
How I got there, irrelevant. I'm on the front row. She's talking and I dropped my pencil. Complete accident. Just dropped my pencil. Innocent thing.
I bent over to get it. Now, you have to know something about me. You know, middle school, fifth grade. I was, I was portly. If, you know, like, I mean, I wasn't, I wasn't like huge, but I did have to, I shopped, like all my pants said husky on them. Like some of you, some of you know about husky pants.
I was in that section. And so I bent over to pick up my pencil. And when I did, I passed gas. Loudly. And there was this moment where I just froze. Like I was bent over getting my pencil.
She's standing right here by my desk. And I just freeze. And you know, you're thinking like, maybe I'm the only one who heard that. There's a moment of dead silence, which, which just made it worse. And then the entire room just, I mean, erupted in laughter. And then, so like, I wanted, like, if I could have disappeared, that would have been for the best.
I was pretty sure, like, if I had been able to cut off the lights, I would have blown in the dark at that moment. Like, it was, it was terrible. And she, then the teacher, because she's going to be really helpful, starts talking about how that's natural. And everybody passes gas. And like, it was, it made it way worse. But guys, I feel uncomfortable just having told you this story.
So fifth grade me was mortified. Like, but that's what happened to Adam and Eve in this moment. They bit into this apple and heart rate starts racing and blood rushes to their face and they, they want to disappear. They immediately feel absolutely exposed. And the story I just told, and some of you have similar stories, that's embarrassment. That's, that is so far down on the scale of shame and guilt that they were overwhelmed.
So what'd they do? It says they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. Do you know how long it took to sew leaves together? First of all, they're inventing clothes at this point. So they don't really have much to go off of.
They're sewing leaves together. Do you know how long that took? Do you know how difficult that was? Me either. But probably difficult in a long time.
Like, this was a very intentional process. And here, here's what happens throughout the rest of history. All of humanity has lined up behind Adam and Eve in sin. All of humanity has lined up behind Adam and Eve with the guilt and the shame that comes along with the brokenness in this world. And all of us have lined up behind Adam and Eve trying to sew together fig leaves. Trying to do whatever we can to cover our shame.
To bury it. To hide it. To mask it. To misdirect. Like, if you've got shame over here, you want to be really good over here, you want to have everybody look this direction. We've come up with a lot of different methods, but it's all sewing together fig leaves to try to hide our shame.
To try to hide, to mask, to cover what's broken, what's wrong, what's messed up. Let's keep reading. So verse 7 ends with, they made themselves loincloths. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord called to the man and said to him, where are you?
And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself. So, quick question. Adam and Eve naked? Adam says he is. He says, I was naked so I hid myself. But verse 7 said they made clothes.
I think one of the things that's showing us, and I think we all know to be true, is that any amount of work we do to cover up our shame ultimately doesn't work. That as soon as God showed up, they had to hide because they were like, I'm still exposed. You could see right through me. And this shame and this guilt has worked already in this perfect garden where there was a perfect relationship between a man and his wife and there was a perfect relationship between humanity and God and what it's done is it's worked to alienate. The man and his wife are no longer naked and unashamed but they're covering themselves because of their shame and they're hiding from God.
And all of us are like them. Some of us in here have spent years sewing together fig leaves. You've gotten really good at it. You have a very ornate fig leaf facade. But like Adam and Eve, let me ask you, do you feel comfortable?
Are you free? Because as soon as God showed up, they immediately felt exposed again. And for some of us, you've worked at it for years but it still feels so fragile, so fleeting and like it could easily fall apart at any point. I want to read a few definitions to help us understand guilt and shame a little better to help us picture this in our minds and then we'll spend some time looking at different passages in the Bible and trying to understand how God interacts with our guilt and shame and how we can ultimately be free from it. Guilt and shame are overlapping issues. So let's talk about guilt first.
Guilt is the condition. It can be one, the condition of having broken the law, not lived up to the standard or hurt someone. So it's the, I'm condemned for something that I did. I'm guilty for something that I did, for some behavior that I had. It can also be too, guilt can be the feeling of responsibility or remorse for some offense, transgression or harm that you've caused. And so what that means is it can be a state of being, you're actually guilty, you've actually broken the law, you've actually harmed someone, you've actually done something.
It can also be the feeling of remorse, of regret. So here's how that works. It means that you can be actually guilty and not feel guilty. Or you can be both. You can be actually guilty and feel guilty. Or you can just feel guilty, feel remorseful, feel like something is wrong but not have any real thing that you can point to to say this is exactly why I feel like this.
You can be haunted by something. And some of us in this room are haunted by guilt, crushed by it, followed around by it. Shame is the lingering sense that something is wrong with me because of something I did or something done to me or something I'm associated with. I'm unacceptable because of this. So some of you feel shame because of your family background.
Some of you feel shame because of things that have happened to you or things that have been said to you. Some of you have spent years just trying to get over things that your parents said to you, that people said to you, did to you. And you feel like there's something wrong with me now. There's something broken about me now. There's something marked now. I'm a failure.
I'm a reject. I'm damaged goods. I'm worthless. This idea that you carry around in yourself some form of Mark or scar. It can be broad and vague. It can be very specific.
Some of you, maybe you just feel like I'm just trying to get a win. Like I just, at this point, I'm just trying to, I'm just trying to get a win. And I heard one pastor say that that's shame at work. When you feel like I just gotta get a win. I just gotta, I just need to have something to show. Like I, I'm a South Carolina fan.
We beat Tennessee. That's the only game I wanna talk about for the rest of the season. Because I felt like I just want us to get a win. And the reason was I'm pretty ashamed of everything else. And some of you, that's what life looks like right now. It's a, I'm just trying to get a win.
I just need something that I can point to to say that I have value. I just need something that I can point to and say, this is working right now. And it shows up all over the place. Shame shows up for me when I, when I talk to a mechanic. Because I don't know anything about cars. Like if the car's broken down and the little, you know, the little things on E and that light's on, I'm like, I got this.
But otherwise, I don't, I don't, I can't do much. I can change the oil. I can call somebody in our church who knows something about cars. But when I talk to a mechanic, like shame shows up when I begin to pretend like I know what they're talking about. This mechanic can come out and be like, alright, look here. We had to retorque the TIG whistle on your chassis plate.
And I would be like, yeah, retorque that sucker. Shame is what immediately makes me want to tell y'all right now, I'm pretty sure a TIG whistle isn't a real thing. Like, I know enough about cars to say that. But, like, shame goes to work all over the place. For some of us, shame is at work when, it's the reason why you can't lose at a game. It's the reason why you care more about winning the game than the person you're playing with.
It's the reason why you throw fits over a game of spades or Monopoly. Monopoly's terrible, but other games. You can't lose. You have to prove that you're the best. For some of you, this is why you can't lose an argument. You can't.
You can't show weakness. You can't admit that you're wrong. You're arguing with somebody and they make a really good point and you just blow past it. You don't say, oh no, that's a good point. You got me there. Why?
Because you've got to prove that you have value. You've got to prove that you have work. You're trying to work away from where you're ashamed. This is why you pretend like you know stuff you don't know. This is why you wait in the conversations and just act like you have information you don't have. This is why, for some of you, if someone points out sin in you, your immediate response is, oh yeah?
Well, you did this. You can't just listen to what they say. You've got to point out how they're wrong. That's shame. See, we're all hiding. We're all sowing fig leaves.
We're all trying to mask what's going on. This is why we have, in our groups, we have like halfway confession. So we're talking about like we're going to confess some sin and people will be like, yeah, I just need y'all to be praying for me. You know how I got some anger stuff and I just have really been struggling. Or you see him later and you ask, hey, you told us to ask you about that. How's that going?
Yeah, it's been a struggle but I'm alright. That doesn't mean anything. You've said no words that mean anything. What's been a struggle? How are you alright? Yeah, I'm good.
This is halfway confess. We want to get as close to as close to being in the light without actually having to expose ourselves. Without actually having to let anybody see, I'm not okay. that's shame. That's guilt at work in us. It's that we feel not lovable as we are, not welcomed as we are, that we cannot be fully known and fully loved. We've begun to believe the lie that this is normal.
That this is how life is going to work. Some of you have been repeating to yourself over and over again, they can be known, they can be loved, they can be honest, but I can't. They can be real about who they are. They can confess. They can say how their marriage is going. They can say how their relationships have been.
They can tell their story about what's happened in their past, but I can't. I'm going to always feel like this. My life is always going to work like this because of what I've done or what's been done to me. And for some of us in this room, there's an overwhelming, crippling sense of guilt and shame and your life has been you working to overcome that. Every day feels like an uphill battle to fix something that you feel like is broken in you or to hide something that you feel like is going on in your life or something that's happened to you. There's a story and it's an intense, heartbreaking story from 2 Samuel and we're going to look at a quote on the screen here in a minute, but I just want to set it up for us.
King David has a bunch of children. He's king at the time and he's got a son and a daughter and they're both his children but he's got them for two different wives so they're half brother and sister to one another. And the text tells us that the son falls in love with his sister or his half sister and so he devises a plan with one of his friends on how he can rape his half sister, how he can take her to himself. And so he decides to get her to, he pretends to be sick and gets her to make food for himself so that he can take her and make her his. When she comes to feed him he's going to ask her to cook and when she comes to feed him then he'll have his opportunity and there's this passage where it tells us what happens when he comes to her.
And 2 Samuel 13, 11-13 says this, But when she brought them near, that's the food she'd made, near him to eat, he took hold of her and said to her, come lie with me my sister. She answered him, no my brother, do not violate me for such a thing is not done in Israel. Do not do this outrageous thing. As for me, where can I carry my shame? And as for you, you would be as one of the outrageous fools in Israel. She looks at him and she says, where would I take my shame?
Where would I carry my shame? If this happened to me, what would I do with the shame? And she says, and if you did this, you'd be an outrageous fool. And for those in the church who feel the way she felt, what am I going to do with my shame? I want to say a few things. First, I'm so sorry.
I'm so sorry that what happened to you, that you feel like you've been marked or scarred. God, I want you to know that that was not God's original intent and plan for humanity, that he hates sin, that he's sovereign and good, but he hates sin, so much so that he was willing to die for it. And you are not to blame for the sins of others. But the question still is there, what do I do with my shame? Where do I carry it? And for those of you who feel guilt for something that you've done, and she says you'll be an outrageous fool.
Some of you maybe think, yeah, that's me. Maybe you wouldn't use those words. Maybe you'd say I'm a terrible person. I'm a complete idiot. I'm absolutely worthless. What do we do?
What's the Bible's answer to this? How does God respond to Adam and Eve in the midst of their guilt and shame? And then how does he respond to us when we say I have nowhere to carry this? I don't know what to do with this overwhelming guilt. I don't know what to do with this shame. The beginning of the answer is found in Genesis and how God responds.
And we're going to move from this point, we're going to spend a little bit of time in Genesis and then we're going to move through a couple of different passages in scripture to help us get a complete answer to how God responds to our guilt and our shame. And before we do that, I want to take a second to just pray for us. So let's do that now. God, I pray that in the time that remains, that your Holy Spirit would be at work to help us to see how you respond to us when all we want to do is hide. how you responded to us when the best plan we could come up with was to cover ourselves and run. And I pray that through your Holy Spirit you would make your response more real, more palpable to us than it has ever been.
And you would cement in our hearts and minds today your overwhelming love for us in the midst of our guilt and shame. In Jesus' name, amen. Back to Genesis. We already read some of this in Genesis chapter 3. It says, they heard, this is verse 8, they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees in the garden.
But the Lord God called to the man and said, where are you? The first thing God does to us in the midst of our guilt and our shame is that he pursues us. Because our guilt and our shame makes us want to hide. Some of you feel like there's no way I could talk to God right now. There's no way I could pray right now. There's no way I could be brought in front of him right now.
There's no way I could even talk to people in the church or talk to people in our community group. There's no way. And God's immediate response is to pursue. It's God that seeks out the first contact with the man and the woman. And then verse 21, God talks to them about the effects of their sin and the issues that are going to follow this. And then he sums it up with this in verse 21.
And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them. He made for Adam and his wife garments of skins and clothed them. Okay. Skin is not just lying around. Fig leaves are. Fig leaves are what we have access to.
But skin has to come from somewhere. And what we see in this text is that God kills an animal to make a better covering for Adam and Eve. His response is not, no, no, no, don't worry, this isn't a big deal. No, no, no, no, you can be completely uncovered. No, no, no, don't worry about the shame that you're feeling. His response is, no, you do need a covering, but I'm going to give you a better one.
That's how he responds to Adam and Eve, and ultimately throughout time turn to Isaiah 61. We're going to read, this is what we read earlier. Isaiah 61, it's on page 401. As we continue to see how God responds to us in the midst of our guilt and our shame. Guilt for what we've done, sense of having failed, shame for what's been done to us, or the fact that we can't be lovable as we are. This passage, I love this passage from Isaiah because it's what Jesus, when he comes to one of the synagogues in the book of Luke, he takes this out, he opens this scroll, he reads the first section, he sits down and says, that's been fulfilled in your hearing, meaning I've come here to accomplish what I just read.
So what we're reading is when Jesus steps in, he says this prophecy that was made by the prophet Isaiah, I've actually come to fulfill this, I've come to accomplish this, and this is how he responds to guilt and shame. The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, so this is Jesus, this is fulfilled in him, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound. Jesus says, I've come first and foremost to take those who are broken, those who are hurt, who feel like they can't ever love again, or be loved again, and to bind them up.
To fix their hearts and to set them free from the guilt and the shame and the sin that's been marking them and holding them captive, that's been keeping them in a prison, all the walls they've built to hide, I'm going to bring freedom and liberty, and I'm going to work in those that are broken hearted. So for you, if you say my heart's broken, it'll never love again, it'll never work again, I've been harmed, I've been hurt, he says I'm here for you. And I'm here for your heart. Verse 2, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn. I'm here to sit with you while you weep, I'm here to sit with you while you hurt, I'm here to put my arm around you, every person who is broken and hurting, I'm here.
To grant those who mourn in Zion, to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes. When they mourned, they would take ashes and they would put them on their head. And what he says is no, no, no, no, you're not wearing the clothes of someone who's lost someone, you're not wearing the clothes of someone who's failed, I'm going to give you a headdress, which is what they wore on a wedding day. He says instead of a widow's garment, I'm giving you a bride's address. I've come to take away your guilt and your shame and what you think your mourning is lost, forever gone, never to be recovered, and I'm making it new and I'm covering you with a wedding dress.
The oil of gladness instead of mourning, the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit, that they may be called oaks of righteousness, the planning of the Lord that he may be glorified. They shall build up the ancient ruins, they shall raise up the former devastations, they shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations. He says what do you think has been devastated? What do you think has been ruined? What's a total loss for you? It's going to be rebuilt.
I'm going to work for what you think has completely been destroyed. The parts of your soul, the parts of your heart, the parts of your past, I'm redeeming them and fixing them and rebuilding them. That's what Jesus has come to do for humanity and it's what he's come to do for us in the midst of our guilt and our shame. move to verse 7. We won't have time to walk through this whole thing. Verse 7, Instead of your shame, there should be a double portion. Instead of this honor, they shall rejoice in their lot.
Therefore, in their land, they shall possess a double portion. They shall have everlasting joy. You know the shame that follows you around? You know the shame that's overwhelming you? He says I'm giving you a second helping of my goodness and my grace. There's going to be everlasting joy.
Instead of shame, you get a double portion. Verse 8, For I the Lord love justice, hate robbery, and wrong. I will faithfully give them their recompense and I will make an everlasting covenant with them. Move to verse 10. This is the response. So the first is what God's going to do, what Jesus is going to do.
And this section in verse 10 is how we get to begin to respond. I will greatly rejoice in the Lord. My soul shall exult in my God, for he has closed me with the garments of salvation. He has covered me with the robe of righteousness. As a bridegroom decks himself like a priest with a beautiful headdress and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels. You see, Genesis began with this man and woman brought together who were fully known and fully loved.
And Isaiah says that's how we get to respond to Jesus. Jesus. That he wants us like a groom wants his bride. That he desires us. That he loves us. And that Jesus knows everything about us but he's gone to work to cover us, to clothe us with his righteousness and to make us his.
Jesus loves you, pursues you, desires you, and wants to make you his the same way that a groom wants to take his bride and have her belong to him and have her to cherish. That's Jesus' response to the church. How? How does he do that? How does he get to respond to us in the midst of our brokenness, in the midst of our filth and our dirtiness and in the midst of all the things that have happened to me and all the things that I've done? How does he respond to me that way?
The answer is the cross. And on the cross he does two things that counteract and go to work on our guilt and our shame. The first one we're going to look at is because we have to ask how does he handle my guilt? 2 Corinthians 5.21 We're going to have the verse up here. For our sake he, that's God, made him, that's Jesus. So for our sake God made Jesus to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
This is the same thing Isaiah just said. He clothes us with righteousness. God took your sin and placed it on Jesus. Jesus became your sin. For those of you who have harmed somebody who have abused somebody who have still feel the lingering guilt about how you've treated your children and how you spoke to people and what you did in high school and college and what you did to your first wife what you did like those of you who have this lingering over you he became that and went to the cross. He became our sin.
The worst in all of us was placed on Jesus and he became our sin was nailed to a cross and when he did that we became his righteousness. He clothed us with all that was good in himself. All the love that he deserves all the grace that he deserves he's clothed us with. Yeah but what about what happened to me? I know he I know he pays for guilt I know he forgives sin but what about what's happened to me? What about the shame that I have?
What about even though I'm forgiven what about this shame that I carry around? This embarrassment this feeling of being exposed. We're going to turn to Ephesians 5. Paul in Ephesians 5 is writing a letter to a church and he's explaining to husbands and wives how to love one another specifically in the section we're going to read he's talking to husbands and the way he does it is he points to Jesus and he points to the church and he says this is how Jesus has treated us and he says husbands this is how you ought to treat your spouse. So I just want us to look and see how Jesus treats us.
Ephesians 5 we'll pick up in verse 25 husbands love your wife as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. Christ is Jesus the church is all of those who he's redeemed who he's saved who've placed their faith in him. So if you are a follower of Jesus if you are a follower of Christ you are in the church. So what he says is husbands love your wife the way that Christ modeled for us and so we're going to take a minute to look at what Christ did. He says Christ loved the church so much that he gave himself up for her meaning that Jesus came on a specific rescue mission for those he was redeeming for those he was saving for those he loved and he died to redeem us to make the church his.
Redeeming for those he was saving for those he loved and he died to redeem us to make the church his. He died to make you his. Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her verse 26 that he might sanctify her that means clean and set apart make her special is a way to say that that he might sanctify her having cleansed her
By the washing of water with the word so that he might present the church to himself in splendor without spot or wrinkle or any such thing that she might be holy and blameless and without blemish. Jesus died on the cross to take the church and to present her to himself spotless without wrinkle without blemish that if you are in the church you stand
Before God before Christ completely covered completely free without spot or blemish or wrinkle or anything like it he says or any such thing you name it it doesn't make it there you name what you think it would be that would come with you and it doesn't make it there there is no spot or blemish
Or wrinkle he's redeemed you to present you to him as a husband presents a bride to himself that he's covered you completely now I know you well enough and I've been a pastor long enough it's not been real long but it's been long enough to know that some of you who know enough theology are trying to argue with me and so let's argue you're saying in your head yeah yeah yeah but that's that's the church
That's big C church that's not me specifically yes I'm a Christian but that's what he's saying is he did that to the entire church what he he did that to all of those who belong to him that the whole church gets to be presented and to himself and what happens is you try to push it off on the church and act like it doesn't somehow apply to yourself and so it somehow doesn't count
To you that yes he I get like swept up with the church but I'm I'm on the tail end I'm on the fringes I'm kind of loved because Jesus loves all of them and I can hang out with them and he loves me but here's what you're saying just so you know when you're making that argument you're saying yeah yeah he does it to the whole church
But in the midst of the whole church I'm a spot wrinkle blemish no such thing no such thing not in the church not because of Jesus not because of what he's done for us that Jesus the God of the universe has died to present the entire church without a spot without a wrinkle without a blemish that we stand before him completely clothed in white that's how
That's how Revelation pictures this for us it shows the throne of God and it shows all of the saints all of the church all of those who've been saved by him dressed in white before God that when we stand before God we're clothed in the righteousness of Jesus that if God right now said okay church it's time to take you to task okay I'm calling you in front of me present yourself
You get to walk in front of him blameless because of Jesus righteous because of Jesus because you've been clothed by Jesus some of you are saying yeah but I I can't get rid of this I don't I don't know how to get rid of this scar I don't know how to get rid of this Mark I'm stained by this Jesus dies he goes to the cross he goes to the grave he rises again he's glorified at this point he's back to being healthy
He's back to being alive he rose from the grave then he meets Thomas and Thomas says I won't believe unless I see holes in his hands a scar on his side and Jesus still has holes in his hands and a scar on his side and he shows him to Thomas and in the book of Revelation it says look the lion of the tribe of Judah and John's writing this down and he says I look to see the lion of the tribe of Judah which would be Jesus and he says I didn't see a lion I saw a lamb
That looked like it had been slain the marks of your guilt and your shame exist into eternity they're not on you they're on Jesus the marks of what I've done the marks of what have been done to me exist forever in eternity on the lamb that was slain but I get to wear white you get to wear white what was said to you what was done to you Jesus has washed you he's clothed you
He's wrapped you in a garment of righteousness and he's presented you to himself as without a blemish or a wrinkle or a spot because he took all of our wrinkles and our stains and our spots and our blemishes and our sin and our shame on himself the answer to the question in 2 Samuel where do I carry my shame is I carry it as far as I can to get to Jesus and once it's at Jesus he carries it on his back up a hill
Onto a cross into a tomb and he carries it into eternity and he's sitting right now this very moment on a throne next to the creator of the universe where he holds the marks of our shame where he holds the marks of our guilt on himself and everyone who belongs to the church is covered in a robe of righteousness and Jesus sits next to the father where he makes intercession forever and he says you can't blame them
They have no shame they have no guilt it's right here if you are in the church your guilt and your shame have been nailed to a cross have been laid in the grave have risen again and sit next to the throne of God and when we walk in front of that throne the marks of our guilt and shame are there and we're covered in righteousness and then we'll spend eternity praising the lamb who was slain because we didn't
Have to be because our shame doesn't have to follow us around because our guilt has no hold over us anymore because we have a God who loved us so much that he clothed us in righteousness and made us his Bianca's going to come back up here's how we're going to respond here's how we get to respond believe that believe what the Bible says is true take your shame and your guilt
To Jesus and believe that he pays for it trust him the way you begin to do that is you get to start praying specifically over the things that haunt you and you get to say Jesus I don't have shame for this anymore when they said this it's not true anymore when I did this this guilt is gone you get to start naming it specifically
As you pray to him and you praise him that he's paid for it that he's covered it you get to read these passages and remind yourself I wear white I'm clothed in righteousness the way we respond is not to do something not to earn something because Jesus has already done it and he's already earned it the way we respond is we get to take it to him and say you've covered it you've paid for this I've been made new because of you secondly you get to respond as you walk through
The killjoy books by showing up to your group and maybe being honest for the very first time you get to walk into your community group this week and you get to lay your fig leaves down because they don't make you righteous they have no power to save they have no ability to cover you but Jesus has made you righteous he's clothed you in a garment of salvation he's wrapped you in a robe of righteousness and you get to say hey this would have
Crushed me this would have destroyed me I should have been destroyed by this but Jesus has paid for it Jesus has covered me and I'm celebrating the righteousness I have by being able to be honest and not ashamed open but not smothered by guilt and then your community group gets to respond by saying yes isn't Jesus amazing that he stands before God and he intercedes for us that he went to the cross
For us and that we're all covered that you don't have to feel shame for that you don't have to feel guilt for that that we get to respond by believing the gospel and being set free that he really does set captives free and right now this morning we get to respond by taking communion where the church celebrates by partaking in the broken body of Jesus and his spilled blood and reminding ourselves
That that is what makes us okay not our ability to hide not our ability to put on a mask not our ability to be good to go back in time and fix something or to do so many good things now that we can pay for it but that Jesus' death on the cross his resurrection saves us clothes us makes us his and so that's for the church if you're a Christian you get to celebrate that way
If you're not a Christian here this morning there is no answer for 2 Samuel for you you have nowhere to carry your shame you have no way to not be an outrageous fool outside of Jesus only Jesus can take your guilt can take your shame and can set you free only Jesus you're not going to find that anywhere else you're not going to find that in any other religion you're not going to find that anywhere but Christ and anywhere but the cross and anywhere but the empty tomb
So I'd invite you to place your faith in Jesus today and take communion for the very first time let's pray God we're righteous we wear white because you took our sin and you took our shame because you were stripped bare and nailed to a cross we get to be clothed because you died we get to have life God we praise you we thank you that we get to be the people that celebrate forever with everlasting joy clothed in righteousness dressed like we're going to a wedding to celebrate forever
Your goodness and your grace and I pray specifically for those in our church family who struggle with shame and guilt that they would find so much freedom so much joy in the cross they begin to be honest with their groups they begin to live a life as if they're clothed in righteousness as if they're dressed for a wedding in Jesus name we pray Amen
Oct 30
The Serpent and the Savior
Transcript
The Old Testament is kind of framed up over these five major covenants, these major promises that God makes to different people and to kind of the nation of Israel and then just these promises He really kind of makes to humanity in some ways. And so we're going to be walking through looking at how those promises ultimately find their fulfillment in Christ how we can better understand the Old Testament and how we can ultimately better understand Jesus through studying these covenants. And so what we're going to be doing a good bit is reading stories from the Old Testament. And I think, and maybe this was just me, but it seems like you would kind of think the Bible was mostly rules.
Like it would be mostly God saying, here's how life should work. I mean, there's like a section on marriage and then there'd be a section on work and there'd be a section on, like it would just be kind of a framework, a guidebook for how things should run. But when you start reading the Bible, it's long stories. It's a lot of history. It's a lot of telling these interactions of people. And I think one of the reasons is because that's really how life works.
When you get to know people, so like maybe your grandmother, your great-grandmother was very frugal. She, when she used bar soap, when it got really small, she didn't throw it away. She put it in a jar and she'd put it with other bar soap. And then eventually she'd fill that up with water and use that as hand soap. Maybe you've met people who do things like this. And like maybe at this point in her life, you're like, you have, like I'm pretty sure you don't have money under your mattress.
Your mattress is made of money. Just throw it away. And her response isn't, I learned an adage when I was eight years old that you should never be wasteful. No, her response was, I've seen the Great Depression. I could see one again. I won't be wasting money.
Because it's her story. One of the things we do in our groups is we actually tell each other our story. Like tell us how you became you, how you got here. And the reason we do that, the reason we tell stories to each other is because that's kind of what makes us us. That's how we, that's how life works. Most of you are who you are based off of long periods of time.
Years where things played out in relationships with your parents. Or years where things played out in finances or in work or in, when you were overseas. Or when you were, like there's, it's your story. You don't have, oh, I learned this rule and this rule and this rule. And now I follow my life based off of these three rules. Like that's not usually how that goes.
Usually it plays out in this context of life was like this for me. And so that's why I treat alcohol this way. Life was like this for me. That's why I treat money that way. And then maybe we pick up some, some understandings of how things work and some rules along the way. But life plays out in the context of story.
And so we're going to spend a good bit of time reading some stories because that's how humanity works. That's how life works. We're going to be in Genesis chapter 2. It's on page 1. If your Bible looks like this, you just got to move just a few things out of your way. And then you're there.
So page 1 is like five pages deep. They didn't make page 1 the first page because they wanted you to have to, you know, pay attention and be focused and have your A game. But page 1 just says Genesis at the top. So we'll start there. We're going to be in Genesis chapter 2. Starting in verse 5.
And then we're going to read all the way through Genesis 3. And we're just going to kind of look at this story today of Adam and Eve and how this plays out with what theologians call the fall. So we sang that song earlier. It said, I was an orphan. Lost it. The fall.
Running away when I hear you called. That's this. That's this fall from what God had intended. God's original plan that he had worked out with humanity. And ultimately, his ultimate sovereign plan will be carried out. But we get this picture of, as he walks through history with humanity, us falling from a relationship with him.
So we're going to be in verse 5. And we're just going to read through and talk. And then we'll kind of see how we can, what we can learn from this today. So I'm going to pray. And then we'll start reading. God, we thank you that you do make promises, that you keep your promises.
We thank you, Lord, that you intersect with our stories, that you're interested in normal human life, and that much of your word is devoted to you intersecting with normal human life. So, God, we pray that as we look at the lives of the first humans, we would come to understand more about you, more about your promises, and more about your grace. In Jesus' name, amen. When no bush of the field was yet in the land. So what we got in Genesis 1 was this big overview of God creating, and now we've got kind of a zoomed-in version on it.
So when no bush of the field was yet in the land, and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land and watering the whole face of the ground. Okay, so, have you ever been in a field that's freshly turned up, that's just soil, maybe it's had some seed on it, maybe it's got some rows of things planted, but there's nothing there. It's just dirt. The earth looked like that. It was just dirt. Now, there may have been, over on our side of town, some clay, maybe there was some sandy spots, maybe there was some nice, rich, dark topsoil, but it's just dirt.
Everywhere. No bush, no small plant, dirt. It's lovely. Okay, seven. Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.
Now, there are some places on earth with really nice, white, sandy beaches. There's not a lot of them, so I don't think the first man looked like me skin tone wise. I think he was darker, soil colored. Like, that's what he, God forms out of the ground a man and breathes life into him. And so this clump of dirt, we'll read that again. And then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.
And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. This is a beautiful garden. Every single tree that is pretty and that you can eat from was there. People pay money to go pick apples. Maybe you have done this.
If you go to the grocery store, you can pay less money for apples that someone else already picked. But maybe you paid money to walk around in a garden, in an apple orchard. Orchard? Maybe you went to an orchard and you got ripped off. I don't know. But you paid money to pick.
So God has planted all of the fruit trees, all of everything that he made, all the trees that are beautiful. Maybe you've never done this. There are times where I have just stared at a tree and thought, that is a pretty tree. Like, that's just a cool, that's a good-looking tree. All of the good-looking trees were there, and all the trees you could eat from were there. This is a good garden.
Lord God planted a garden in the east. We're at verse 8. In the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed, and out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. There's not much explained to us about these two trees other than they are different and have some sort of spiritual something to them. It seems like there's something to them.
So the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first river is the Pishon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold, and the gold of that land is good. Bdellium and Onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is the Gihon.
It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Cush, and the name of the third river is the Tigris, which flows east of Assyria, and the fourth river is the Euphrates. Okay. We still know where the Tigris and Euphrates are. I'm going to show you a map. This is called the Fertile Crescent. A lot of human history has played out here.
Over here by the Nile River, you've got Egypt, and that's the top part of Africa. Right there, where the word says fertile, that's Palestine, Israel. Then it comes around, and so you'd have this Mesopotamia right here, and you see Euphrates and Tigris River. Somewhere on that spot of earth, God planted Eden. Somewhere around the Euphrates and the Tigris River, maybe up top there, where they're kind of splitting down, maybe over here near the Persian Gulf. We don't know.
Somewhere in there. But a lot of the oldest amounts of history we have, and writings and stuff we have, come from this area on the earth. And this is where history started, humanity started, somewhere in this zone. And we'll keep looking at that map over the next couple weeks, as we see where people migrate, and how the story plays out. But this happened on a real earth, in a real place.
God planted the garden, and put the real first man to tend it. Fifteen. The Lord God took the man, and put him in the garden of Eden, to work it, and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat. For in the day you eat of it, you shall surely die. Okay.
Every tree in the garden is open to Adam, and eventually Eve, but she's not here yet. Every tree in the garden is open to Adam, except for one. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The tree of life is open to him. No rules on that one. But the tree of knowledge of good and evil, he's not allowed to eat from.
And God says, In the day you eat of it, you'll surely die. Now, immediately, there's some questions that pop up. A little bit. I had someone ask me this past week, If God didn't want to mess him with that tree, why did he put it in the middle of the garden? And it's like, That sounds like a good question. I kind of, I don't know.
When I don't want Archer messing with stuff, I don't just set it with all his other things, and say, Don't touch it. I put it away from him. So, it's like, what's the, but I think kind of what surrounds this idea is, really, Adam is created, and we're told that he has one rule. Don't eat of this tree, of the knowledge of good and evil. And I think in that one rule, it sums up all of the nature of God's relationship to Adam. Which is, I control good and evil.
I'm in charge of what is right and wrong. You are not. And you will obey me and follow me because of who I am and because of who you are. God does not feel the need to explain himself to Adam. God does not have to explain himself to Adam. He just made him out of dirt.
He owes Adam nothing. Plants him in the garden and then says, here's the one rule, don't mess with this tree. And in that one rule, sums up the nature of humanity's relationship to God. God will be God. Humans will be humans. God will decide what is right and wrong.
Humans will not. God will be followed because he is God. There will be times in my relationship with my son Archer where I give him a rule and he will want an explanation and I don't have to give him an explanation. I'm his dad. I'll try to explain things to him, but there's going to be times where it's just like, you're going to follow me because I'm your dad. You're going to do what I said because I'm your dad.
And that's it. Like, I don't need an eight-year-old to agree with me. That's not how this works. I need you to follow me. I don't have to explain myself to an eight-year-old. Probably couldn't.
So God, same thing. This is how it's going to work. So not oppressive, though. The garden wasn't like, oh my gosh, this place is a prison. There's one rule. Leave that tree alone.
All the rest of them, they're great. Okay. Now, turns out Adam and Eve were kind of like us. You can have everything but that one. And we go, ooh, that one. So a little bit of foreshadowing there.
18. Then the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone. I will make a helper fit for him. Now, out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field.
But for Adam, there was not found a helper fit for him. That section is really interesting to me. So God says, it's not good that he's alone. We'll find a helper for him. And then God brings all of the animals to him. Adam names them.
And at the end of that section, it says, but no helper was found. It seems to imply that at least on Adam's level, he thought he was looking for a teammate in all of the animals. Animals, I'm willing to bet that got really depressing. Because animals are cool. They're great. But you shouldn't go speed dating at the zoo.
If your friend tries to pitch that idea to you, just like, if they're like, oh, you know a great place to meet women? The zoo. And you're like, okay, sure. You go to the zoo. You walk over to one of the little railings and he goes, what do you think? Your friend needs help.
And probably you need new friends. Join a community group. Those people will be forced to be your friend. Like, I go to the zoo. We have a zoo membership. And I have stood and stared at a lion.
And I've stood and stared at a tiger. And I've thought, man, these are massively beautiful animals. But I have never thought, how you doing? Like, it's just never. So at some point in all of this, Adam's seeing all these animals.
And no helper was found. No one was fit. There wasn't anything that showed up that he thought, yes, this is it. Like, this is the one. Nothing. He's like, these are great.
Really cool things you made here. Some really neat stuff. Wasn't a helper found for him. Okay. 21. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man.
And while he slept, took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man, he made into a woman and brought her to the man. And then the man said, this at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. And he'd seen every animal on the face of the earth. God brings a woman to him.
And Adam goes, at last. Like, he resonated with him. He'd already seen everything. He said, this was correct. You did a good job. This is what was supposed to have been.
Like, this is it. God gives, brings Eve to Adam. And he says, this at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. Basically saying, she's like me. Those other things weren't like me. She's like me.
She should be called woman because she was taken out of man. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife. And they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. Okay. That verse is there.
Not to say God had made them well. Like, they were well built. That's not the point. Or to say that they were prideful or anything. What it's saying is there's something fundamentally different about humanity at this point. Because that fact is going to show up later in the story.
That humans could be naked and not ashamed. And so, he says this was the case here. And then, let's go to chapter 3. Now, the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. Okay. So, Adam has seen the serpent.
Has named the serpent. We are told later. It may not have been this serpent. I don't know how that worked. I don't know if God just made a couple of each one. Or if he went ahead and populated everything and then just brought them in front of Adam.
We're not told that. But, um... We are told later in the Bible, though, that this is Satan. And so, we don't know if Satan was originally made as some sort of a serpent type thing. Or if Satan took on the form of a serpent. We're not really told that.
We're just told later. This is Satan. So, a serpent shows up. That's what we're told in the story. So, he said to the woman. So, the serpent is talking.
And immediately, people are like, I think I'd have been weirded out by a serpent talking. Yeah, but if no one's ever tricked you or lied to you and nothing bad has ever happened. And you're in a garden made by God and everything has been perfect. You're not suspicious. Just for the record. We're suspicious because bad things have happened a lot.
So, if a snake talks to you, probably don't talk back. But, maybe see what it wants. I don't know. Okay. He said to the woman. Did God actually say, you shall not eat of any tree in the garden?
So, the serpent comes in and just takes kind of what God said and twists it. Did he actually say? He goes over and goes, really? Like, he's in the garden with her and he says, really? God said you can't have any of this? That's what God told you?
You can't have any of this? This is all really nice. He told you you can't have any of it? He's already pressing into her heart this idea that God's holding out on them. And the woman said to the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden. But God said, you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden.
Neither shall you touch it lest you die. Now, we just read that. God didn't say you shouldn't touch it. Maybe Adam told her that. Just don't even get near the tree and we'll be okay. Like, I don't know.
I don't know where that came from. Maybe she made it up. We do like to add rules to God's rules. Neither shall you touch it lest you die. But the serpent said to the woman, you will not surely die.
For God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. So the serpent lies. You won't die. And then he lies again saying, God knows this. And he's this lie that God can't be trusted. That maybe God's holding out on us.
Creeps into Eve's heart. Maybe God, you know, I never really questioned him. Maybe he should be questioned. I've just always kind of did what he said. I just always kind of trusted him. But maybe, like, why have I never thought about that?
Why would I just trust him? Maybe he is holding out on me. Maybe you've got a good point. And so she begins to believe some of what the serpent is saying. So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate.
So it seems as if they are not near that tree when this conversation starts. But then it says, when she saw that it was good. So at some point she travels over to the tree. Because she says the tree in the midst of the garden. So it seems as if she heads that way to look at it.
And it says, when she saw that the tree was pleasant to the sight and that it was good for food. So she's staring at this tree and thinking, you know, this is a really nice tree. I've never paid that much attention to it. She's looking at the fruit and thinking, that does look like good fruit. That does look like you could eat that. That is like all the other trees in the garden.
But then this one was desired to be, to make one wise. And she begins to think, she begins to tell herself, she begins to believe the lie of the serpent that this one, if I could just have this one, then I'd be special. If I could just have this one, then I'd be complete. This one's different. If I could just have this one, then I'd be made into something. If I could just have this one, then I'd be built up.
I'd be different than I am now. Now this one would provide for me something that the rest of them won't. This one will make me wise. She believes that by somehow taking this fruit, she's going to be promoted. It's going to make her into something that she isn't already. And she has a desire, I believe, to be like God.
This one offers me something that the rest of the trees don't. Verse 6. So when the woman saw the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes, and the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. And she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. So Adam hadn't shown up until this point, but it turns out he was there.
He was just there the whole time going through the same process. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. Okay, so at the end of chapter 2, they were naked and unashamed. They tasted the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. They go and they basically break the one rule they've been given, fundamentally altering the relationship that they're going to have with God. They're saying, no, we don't believe that satisfaction will be found in you.
No, we don't believe that you are to be trusted. No, we don't believe that you're the one who's going to say what's right and wrong. We're going to have some control over that. We're going to decide what's good and evil. And let me tell you something. When they found out they were naked, that was not a fun experience.
I don't know if that's ever happened to you where you just suddenly realized you were naked. Maybe some of you sleepwalk. Maybe you've had that dream where you were doing a presentation at work, or you were standing up in front of class on show and tell day, and it turns out you were showing more than telling. Like you suddenly realize in your dream, like, I am naked. And never in your dream have you had that moment and you thought, I don't have any clothes on. And immediately went, all right, cool.
Like, no, it's overwhelming shame and guilt and fear and this immediate desire to hide. Let me tell you something. The moment they realized they were naked, the opposite of joy flooded the hearts of humanity. Guilt and shame and fear and this desire to protect yourself and to hide from others overwhelmed them. Biting into that fruit did not provide for them what they thought it would. That moment that they tasted that fruit, they were almost overwhelmed by a crushing sense of inadequacy where there used to be freedom.
Of shame where they had never felt that before. Guilt when they had never known wrong, it crushed them. Like, like a child who has done something wrong and does not have the ability to stand before their parents and handle the guilt. So they hide. So that they can't even speak.
So that when their parent begins to talk to them, they just flooded with tears because they can't handle the separation. That flooded into humanity and overwhelmed them. The eyes of both were opened. They knew that they were naked. They sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.
So God's presence used to be among them. He used to come walk among them. He used to come enjoy their company. He used to allow them to find enjoyment in his. And the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. They couldn't face him.
But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, Where are you? And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself. He said, Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat? And the man said, The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me the fruit of the tree and I ate. Then the Lord God said to the woman, What is this that you have done?
The woman said, The serpent deceived me and I ate. She understands at this point, I was lied to. This did not provide for me what I thought it was going to provide for me. That serpent lied to me. This wasn't freedom. This wasn't a promotion.
This wasn't a level up. This wasn't, this didn't bring satisfaction. I was lied to. The Lord God said to the serpent, I love the fact that God, when we later find out this is Satan, that God addresses Satan first. That he, he addresses the main problem here, which is sin and Satan and death and destruction that's coming to the world. He addresses him first.
And he says, because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock. He's talking to the serpent and above all beasts of the field. On your belly, on your belly, you shall go and dust. You shall eat all the days of your lives, of your, of your life. So apparently snakes didn't slither around on their stomach prior to this.
Go home and think about that one. Um, and, uh, I guess this is where he added in the, you're going to use your tongue to smell. So I'm pretty sure snakes have nostrils. If you look at them, they use their tongue to, to smell stuff. So he made it to where they have to like lick to figure out what's going on around them.
So that would be terrible. What color is this? Like that would be a, that would be a bad way to go through life. Okay. Um, uh, don't overthink that. Okay.
Um, and then he says this in verse 15, I will put enmity. I'll make you an enemy of, uh, enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. On the surface, this means humans won't really like snakes. And for the most part, that's true. Um, maybe you have a friend who really likes snakes.
And again, I would encourage you, you know, get in a community group, get new friends. Uh, sorry, personal preference, not a fan. Um, and it's biblical. So I'm just, I'm just saying I'm on, I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. But theologians also believe that this is a promise made to the serpent.
This is the first gospel that is ever preached because here's what God says. He looks at the serpent, which we're told is Satan. And he says this, I'm going to put enmity between you and the woman, between her offspring and your offspring. Now, on the surface, that means all the people that are born. But, throughout the Old Testament and the New Testament, genealogies are, are done through men. This guy was the father of this guy, who's the father of this guy, who's the father of this guy.
Every once in a while, they'll bring a woman in if she was like, you know her story or she was important or something. But, all the other ones are man to man to man to man to man to man to man. There was one human, born on earth, who did not have an earthly father. And his name was Jesus. He was conceived of a virgin by the Holy Spirit. And there's this picture here, where God's looking at the serpent and saying, there's going to come a day, where someone in the line of Adam, the line of Eve, is going to be born, and he's going to crush your head.
At harm to himself, you're going to bruise his heel, but he's going to bruise your head. You're going to harm him, but he's going to destroy you. And that promise is made to the serpent. And that's one of the first promises, that we can clutch onto, that the serpent won't have the final say. As we talk about the covenants that God makes, this one's a little bit different than the other ones, where he looks at a person and says, I'm going to make my covenant with you. But it's massively important for us to understand, that God had designed earth, where he was in a relationship, a covenant relationship with Adam and Eve, and Adam and Eve rejected his rule, and then he looks at the serpent and says, you don't have the final say.
This isn't how the story ends. There is one coming, who is going to set this right. Who's going to do what this Adam should have done, which was crush your head as soon as you began to tell lies. There's going to be a second Adam that shows up, and accomplishes what needs to be accomplished. Let's keep going.
We're going to come back. To the woman he said, I will surely multiply your pain and childbearing. In pain you shall bring forth children. Okay, so from what I understand, childbearing is painful. People have told me that. The other thing that happens here that plays out is, childbearing, like giving birth, was going to be a way that life was brought about.
And now there's, with humanity, with females, there's this anxiety and pain over having children, or not having children, or ability to have children. Throughout history, childbearing is one of the most dangerous things for females. In most third world countries, and throughout time, before we got modern medicine, it was one of the number one killers of females. Death during childbearing. So what was supposed to bring in life, was now bringing in death and pain.
Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you. Okay, we don't have a whole lot of time for that. The only other time that sentence structure is used, your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you, is the next chapter over where he's talking to Cain, and he said, sin's desire is for you, but you shall rule over it. So this desire isn't like, oh, your desire will be for your husband, oh, like it's not that. But it is the way sin desires to rule and control.
And so what he's saying is that, wife, your desire will be to control your husband. And so I just, and then he says he will rule over you. I just want to ask wives, how's controlling your husband going? Pretty good? They're pretty obedient? They pretty well do what you ask them to?
Really smart? Have you found that your husband's just really smart, and just knocks it out of the park all the time, and every time you give him simple instructions, he just crushes it? Like, is that what we're finding? Because biblically, what he says is, you're going to really want to do this, and it's not going to be that easy or good. He's going to rule over you. The other thing I think happens with this, your desire will be for your husband.
One of the ways that I see this as a pastor, is I sit down with females who are not married, who are in terrible relationships, and should have already gotten out of this relationship, but for some reason believe that they can turn this guy into something, that they can somehow be his savior, that they can somehow, they have this desire for him when there should be no desire for him whatsoever. Maybe you've had friends who've stayed in really bad relationships for far too long. I think that's a result of the fall. I know the sin is. And Adam, he said, because you listen to the voice of your wife, I quote this to Anna all the time.
She'll tell me something, and I'll be like, don't you Genesis 3 me. I'm not listening to you. It works out really well. It goes back to the curse that she's under. I'm going to be hard to rule. Because you listen to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree, basically saying you should have led your wife, you should have protected your wife, she was deceived.
We're told in scripture over and over again, she was deceived. She believed the serpent's lies. We're not told that Adam was deceived. Adam made a willful choice from what we understand. Adam rejected fully the rule of God. And he's saying, because you did not lead, because you did not protect, do not defend, and you have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, you shall not eat.
Cursed is the ground because of you. In pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat of the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread. Till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken, for you are dust, and to dust you shall return. So, originally, the world just responded the way it was supposed to.
The plants were easy to tend. Crops grew all the time. The world bent to the dominion of humanity, that Adam and Eve were designed to co-rule the world. We're told in Genesis 1, when it gives us a summation, it says he made Adam and Eve, and he says, be fruitful and multiply, and have dominion over the world. Like, he told both of them, y'all are a team, do this. The teamwork is broken down, and the response of the world has broken down.
Work is now going to be very difficult. That phrase in there that says, by the sweat of your face, some scholars believe that's an idiom. It doesn't just mean it's going to be hard, and you're going to be outside, and you're going to sweat. But it also brings to mind anxiety. So an idiom is like a turn of phrase, or something like we might say, when pigs fly.
We don't actually, we don't mean it literally. We're using it as an example, like a snowball's chance, or whatever, like we say those kind of phrases. It means anxious. It means that you're going to always feel like, there's not enough time. You're going to always feel like, I'm not, am I actually going to be able to provide? You're going to always feel like, you're coming up short.
You're going to eat bread, but it will be an anxious toil, rather than a joyful work. Because Adam was supposed to work. He was supposed to tend the garden, but now it's going to fight him. The man called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all living. And the Lord God made for Adam, and for his wife, garments of skins, and clothed them. That's another small picture of the gospel for us.
That something had to die to get skins. And God sacrifices that to cover their guilt and their shame. They're going to have to wear clothes now, because that freedom is gone. And so God makes a way for them. Then the Lord God said, Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil.
Now lest he reach out his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat and live forever. So that would have been a surprise. The tree of life was in the garden, and I don't know if death wasn't ever going to happen, or if they were going to get old, and God was going to let them eat in the tree. Like, I don't know how that worked, but it was there, and it was magical and amazing, and he didn't say anything about it. He just planted it there. And one day they were going to eat it, and he was like, You found the tree of life.
How delicious was that? I don't know how he would have done that, but I just, it was there, and now they can't be there around it. Therefore the Lord God sent him out of the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man at the east of the garden of Eden. He placed the cherubim, that's a big scary angel, and a flaming sword, that is also scary, that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life. So there was a rejection of God's rule, and God's response is gracious because he doesn't just immediately kill them.
Death does enter the world. He says, Okay, our relationship is not the same anymore, and you came from dust, and eventually you're going to turn to dust. You're going to deteriorate. Your death has begun. But he doesn't immediately destroy them for their rebellion.
And he sends them out and says, Okay, go for it. You know good and evil now? It's on you. See, Adam and Eve got what they wanted. They're in charge. They have autonomy that they did not used to have.
This is what's happened to humanity. We can trace all sin back to this moment where we fundamentally made a choice as humanity. See, Adam stood in our place and said a few things. One is, I don't believe God can be trusted. I think satisfaction will be found somewhere else. And ultimately, I want to be in charge of what's good and what's evil.
I want to be in charge of what's right and wrong. I want to be like God. I want to be in charge. All of us, unfortunately, Adam made that decision on our behalf. Like if, when you were young, your dad walks into the house or your mom walks into the house and says, Hey, pack your stuff. We're moving.
Just took a job halfway across the country. And you're like, I, what? We didn't, we didn't vote. We don't, I'm, I know I'm 12, but I feel like I should have a say. I got some friends. And your parents are like, you make new friends or you won't.
We're moving. Like, this is what Adam did. Hey guys, started this off. Just want to give you all a heads up. Death, sin, we're all kind of in charge. We're not good at it.
It was a good talk. That's it. It was Adam's choice. And here's the thing. We all lined up single file behind him and made the exact same choice. I want to be in charge of what's right and wrong.
I think joy will ultimately be found somewhere else other than God. And I'm pretty sure he can't be trusted. I don't think he really knows my situation. I don't think he really knows what I'm going through. I don't think he really knows what I'm like. I think he can't really be trusted.
And that ultimately I know what's best for me. And all of us single file have lined up behind Adam and said, yes, this is the system we want. Death enters the world. Death is as natural as anything else we have. It is as natural as sneezing. It is natural as sunrise.
Every person in this room will die. And there is something that every time there is a death, something inside of us screams that this is not how it ought to be. Every time you stood over a casket, every time you've walked through that little line, shaking hands of people who no longer have a family member that they had a few days ago, there's something inside of you that's rolled over and said, this is not how it was supposed to be. Because it's not how it was supposed to be. But Adam and Eve got what they want, what they wanted.
And every time we say, why doesn't God just stop this? Why doesn't God just step in and fix this? If there's such a great God, why hasn't he taken care of this by now? But here's the problem. All of us have stood in line behind Adam and all of us have said, I don't want God's rule. I want control.
I want my desires to be met. I want to choose for me what's best. And all of us deserve death. And so when we say things like, why wouldn't God just stop all this murder? Why wouldn't God just stop all this? The only way he can do it is by resetting it.
The only way he can do it is by crushing everyone. What you're really saying when we say that is, why doesn't God just end all of us now? Why don't we just meet the justice we deserve now? And the reason is, God is very gracious. And very merciful. And he wants a different end for us than the one that we find in Adam.
See, the reason why this is so messed up shouldn't be surprising to us. The reason why earth is so painful shouldn't be surprising to us. It's what we asked for, which is us in control. I was listening to the radio. They were doing an interview with some people from Europe who have set up a camp outside of Fallujah in Iraq. There's 50,000.
Fallujah is currently controlled by ISIS, unless something recently changed. And there's about 50,000 people who were in Fallujah that are now controlled by ISIS because ISIS has taken over. So there's 50,000 women, children, families that are in there that are under ISIS's control. And when they break free and escape, they've set up a camp kind of close that's like, here, come here, we'll give you some food. And this is, I got online and got the transcript. She's talking about the people in the camp.
She says around me, her last name's Koch, Elizabeth Koch, K-O-E-K, so that may not be how you pronounce that actually. But around me, I see mostly people who are relieved. I was in the camp and I had a six-year-old boy who was given our basic kit of food and he just burst into tears at the sight of bread. He hasn't seen bread in five or six months. People have been surviving on rotting rice or dates or a little bit of yogurt. The people have had access to any, have not had any access to any kind of safe or clean drinking water in months.
People were telling me about drinking water from agricultural wells where dead carcasses were floating about. Here's the situation. If you're drinking water out of an agricultural well that has dead, rotting carcasses in it, you're not surprised if some people get sick. You're surprised when some people don't. Racism, genocide, murder, countries just looking at other countries and saying, we want this piece of land is not surprising because we have humans ruling the earth deciding what's good and what's evil. it's surprising that there's some joy. It's surprising that there's still some life.
It's surprising that God does step in and answer prayers and set people free from ailments. It's surprising that we've accomplished so much in the midst of we're all drinking out of a poisoned well. What's surprising is the vast amount of grace that's still present for us. The vast amount of work God's still doing to redeem that. See, everyone is a victim of Adam's choice. So in order for God to step in and stop the corruption, he has to reset the whole system.
He'd have to crush everything. He'd have to unmake everything and remake everything. And so God, rather than doing that, has a different plan. He looks at the serpent and he says, I'm going to reverse this. Someday, you will be crushed. There's going to come someone who does what needs to be done.
See, when it comes to this big redemptive story, the real question is, what did Adam lose? When Adam rejected God, what did he lose? And what did this second Adam, the second person that's going to come, what did he buy back? Sandra Richter, in her book, Epic of Eden, puts it this way. I'm going to read a quote here. It says, In some, redemptive history is all about fixing what went wrong in the garden.
What went wrong in Eden is what must go right in redemption. What was done in the garden must be undone in Christ. In the garden, humanity made a choice for autonomy. The choice cast the cosmos in disarray. Moreover, that choice birthed in our race the power of sin which has passed down to every son of Adam and every daughter of Eve. Thus, you and I stand guilty on two fronts.
We are guilty because our forefather represented us in a sinful choice. And two, we're also guilty because we followed our forefather in that choice with our individual choices. Thus, we need to be delivered on two fronts as well. First, we need a representative who will stand in for us making a different choice and second, we ourselves need to make a different choice. We need somebody to go stand in for us and then we need to follow after them not after Adam. And God looked at the serpent and said there's going to come someone who reverses this.
Your victory will be short. There is going to be a day when someone is born who will crush your head. There is going to be a day when someone is born who will reverse this. There's going to be a second Adam who fixes this. First Corinthians says this when talking about Jesus. Let's talk about Adam first.
First Corinthians 15, 21 and 22. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all shall be made alive. Jesus came and took our death. He stood in our place to take the death that we deserve for the rejection of God. He took the penalty we deserve for our sin.
He took the curse onto Himself and then He rose from the grave. And as people on earth, you are either lined up behind Adam or lined up behind Jesus. You're either in Adam or in Christ. in Christ there will be a resurrection. In Christ death won't have the final say. In Adam death rules and reigns. Jesus is the second Adam who came to fulfill the promise God made to the serpent so many years ago in a garden.
First Corinthians when he's wrapping this chapter up in verse 45 says this, Thus it is written the first man Adam became a living being. We read that when God breathed life into him. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. We need Jesus to come in and redeem us. We need through the Holy Spirit for Him to give us life. You see, the promise was made that the serpent would not rule forever, that the victory would be over at some point, that someone would come at some point and reverse this.
And that Jesus did. You needed somebody to stand in your place and make a better choice. Jesus did. Now, we all need to make a better choice ourselves. And the opportunity given to us is that we can repent of sin and follow after Jesus. That we can turn from our desire for autonomy, that we can turn from our desire to be in charge, that we can stop believing the lie that something else will give us satisfaction.
We have all walked to some tree, looked at it, and said, this is the one. This is the one that will fill me up. This is the thing that will make me happy. You can hang anything you want to from that tree. It can be a relationship. It can be money.
It can be a job. It can be sex. It can be anything you want to put up there. It can be approval or just having a nice, easygoing, comfortable life. But we've all looked at something and said, if I can just get that fruit down, I'll be complete.
I'll be full. This one is to be desired to level me up. Every single one of us has chosen our own autonomy. Every single one of us has chosen that we'll know what's best for us and we have the option to go to Christ and say, I need you to pay for my sin. I need you to set me free. I need to find my satisfaction in you.
You see, on the cross, God proved that he can be trusted. That lie that's crept into all of our hearts that maybe God's holding out on us was destroyed the moment he gave everything on the cross. He is holding nothing back. Paul says, if he would give us his own son, how much more would he not give us all things? Everything has been laid down for us that we might have freedom, that we might have joy, that the curse might not rule and reign over us forever, but that at some point we can have an eternity where we're in God's presence, in God's place, being God's people as he originally designed and as he has proven he was going to work out throughout the courses of time as he promised beforehand that he would save us in Christ.
If you're in this room, you're either in Adam or you're in Christ. You're either lined up saying, I want to be in charge and I'll take the death that comes or you're saying, I need Jesus to take my death and I need to surrender. Those are your two choices. In Adam, all die. In Christ, all will be made alive. Death does not have the final say over Christians because Jesus destroyed death on the cross on our behalf.
So we can turn from our sin and be set free. You see, God made a promise years and years ago that someone was going to fix it and Jesus did on the cross and we can have freedom and we can find satisfaction in him and we know that he can be trusted and all of the lies that have crept in our heart can be reversed as we faithfully follow after Jesus. The response for everyone in this room needs to be the same. Follow Christ. Repent of sin. If you say, yeah, I've already believed in Christ, continue to repent of sin.
Continue to turn away from all the parts of you that still want to follow Adam and follow after Jesus and if you've never done that, let me tell you something. You're either in Adam or you're in Christ and you will either face death or Jesus will face it for you and you have the opportunity to say, I trust Jesus to pay for my debt and to make me his and to find ultimate satisfaction in him. Let's pray. God, I pray that you'd help us see how we've followed after Adam. I pray, God, that you would help us see our sins so that we can repent and follow after you, that we can turn away from all the things that you say are evil, that we can believe what you say is good and what you say is evil is correct and quit choosing for ourselves.
God, I pray that you'd help us to run and follow after Christ. God, I pray that you would work in us now through your Holy Spirit to draw us to yourself. And God, we thank you for this promise that you made, this covenant that you kept, that Satan wouldn't win, that death wouldn't have the final say. We love you and we praise you, Jesus. Amen.
Consumeristic Sexual Individualism
What is the purpose of sex? Should it be casual and convenient? Apocalyptic and ultimate? Or something different altogether? Is sex an appetite we satisfy, or a gift we enjoy?
Transcript
Well, good morning. We are in our sixth week of our Theology of Sex series, and today we are talking about sex. So if you are just now hanging out with us, that might not seem surprising. If you've been here for the other five weeks, you may be thinking, I thought that's what we were going to talk about the whole time. It's about time. Why have we waited so long?
It wasn't bait and switch. Really what it was is there's so many other things we had to say before we could ever talk about sex by itself, for us to even understand how God designed it and what his goal was for it and what his aim was for it. And so we had to kind of build a framework for God's good design for sex before we could ever even talk about sex. It's kind of like jumping right in and talking about trigonometry. If you don't know how to add and subtract, it's like we got to cover the basics first. We got to understand the framework here before we can we can talk about sex.
And so for five weeks, we've spent some time walking through different passages of Scripture, trying to understand gender, trying to understand God's design. And so I'm going to try to recap that a little bit, maybe using some different words to help us understand what we've been looking at for the past five weeks. So we talked about God created humanity in his image, that we were designed by God for his purposes. And what we're seeing there is that God, who is very different from us, makes us similar but different from him. So humanity made in the image and likeness of God is similar to God, but very different from God.
And hopefully we're all tracking with that. You're like God. You are not God. So just if you're confused about that, we can talk about it later. But you are not God.
You're like him, made in his image and likeness. And so there's this idea of similar but different. And then when God made gender, he did the same thing. He kind of followed the same pattern where he made both male and female similar but different. He designed us distinct from one another. And so it follows that same setup, that same paradigm of similar but different.
And then we saw that Christ's love for the church, Jesus' pursuit of the church in the cross, was his covenant love for the church. And that is where this very different being from humanity joins with humanity, makes himself one with humanity to join together in a covenant relationship and to make himself one. So the church is called the bride of Christ and Christ's body. So we're both his pursuit and what he loves and cherishes and also we're made one with him. And then we saw that marriage is actually a small picture of that. Marriage is these two similar but different beings coming together and becoming one and covenanting together with one another for a life of devotion and submission to one another.
And so we see that God designed humanity similar but different from him. He designed gender similar but different from one another. And then God through Christ makes a covenant with humanity and makes us one with him and that marriage is designed to be the same thing, to be similar but different brought together in a covenant relationship. And only in that relationship sex is designed to exist. So sex exists inside of this covenant relationship.
And so we've kind of walked through all of that. And now we're going to spend some time today talking about sex. So we're going to go to Genesis 2 real quick. You don't have to flip there. We're going to have it on the screen. We've gone there every week.
You should about have this memorized by now. This is vastly important for our understanding of who we are, how we were designed, and how we view and understand God and understand our place with one another and understand sexuality. So it says, Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And so we spent time last week talking about this. This is the covenant relationship in marriage, that two become inseparably one. So Paul's going to go to this verse in Ephesians 5 and say, this actually gives us a small picture of the love that Christ has for the church, how he dies on her behalf, how he sacrifices to pour out his love and to just give and just to lavish love on his people.
And that's the design for marriage. And then Jesus is going to go there in Matthew 19 to say that whatever God's brought together, we're not supposed to tear apart. And so then it says, And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. This is the very beginning of Scripture. In the very first few pages, what we are given is that God creates humanity distinct from himself. He creates gender distinct from one another, and he designs them to be brought together.
And he sets them in a garden naked without shame. And then he tells these shameless nudists to be fruitful and multiply. It's one of the first commands that God gives in Scripture. And so from the very beginning of humanity, God designs covenant marriage and sex and sexuality to play a part in his good design for humanity. Now, in our culture, jump ahead thousands of years, we, you would not have to do much cultural research at all to see that we have begun to place a lot of value on sex. You can't stand in line at the grocery store without looking over at the magazine racks and seeing that we have concepts like sex sells, but you can't look at a magazine rack without seeing little on the sides.
It's not always the main thing, but they'll be on the side, this little article tells you what's going to be inside it, and you'll get five tips on how to wow your man. Seventeen tips to a sexier summer. Thirteen tips for making your bed the best place ever for sex or whatever. Like, there's just all of these kind of, and it's like, really, farm and garden? Come on, man. Like, take it easy.
But it really, we've overemphasized this. You can't watch a TV show, watch a movie, without some sort of message about sex and sexuality being pumped into our brains. And now we have the pornographic revolution that has come with the internet, and we are overly inundated with sex and sexuality, and we have some competing views in our culture where we both, we say things like, when two people love one another very much, and we act like sex comes out of this emotional, deep connection, and it's designed to be love, and we call it lovemaking, and it's supposed to be this meaningful thing. And then we also, at the same time, will say, it's also kind of like a game of checkers, like just a recreational activity for enjoyment.
And it doesn't really mean anything at all, and it just kind of depends on how you approach it. And so what we need to do is to grow in our understanding of what the Bible says about it, how God originally designed it, because He's the one who invented it. I heard someone put it this way. God created Adam and Eve, put them in a garden, naked. He did not come back later and go, Oh my goodness, what are you doing? Like, He came up with the idea.
He invented it. He made it for a purpose, for a reason. And God's design for sex was to exist inside of this covenant relationship and to be a covenant renewal ceremony. So throughout the Bible, God makes covenants with His people, and then He has physical Acts, physical, tangible reminders that they go through to remind themselves of their covenant. So an example of that for us is my wife and I got married six, seven years ago, and we stood up in front of people and we held hands and we like said things to each other and we repeated after this guy and then we had to keep holding hands while he talked and I would kind of forget what we were doing and let go of my wife's hands and she still fusses at me about that so that when I do premarital stuff with people, I say, Hey, hold hands the entire time or your wife will never forget it.
Because it was like it was just going on forever and I just kind of let go and be like doing like this. But during that, what we said was we were making an invisible commitment to one another. But then we said we're actually going to take something visible, a tangible reminder, and we're going to use this to remind ourselves and to show other people what our relationship is designed to be. We have an invisible, physical, emotional, personal attachment to one another, spiritual connection to one another, but we're going to take a symbol. And it wasn't this one because this is like I'm on my third one because I keep losing them.
But it was something very similar to this. And we put it on my hand. We put one on her hand. She still has the same one. And we celebrated that this is a physical reminder of this spiritual, emotional, invisible reality. And sex is designed to be that in marriage.
Now, it's not as public as this one. It shouldn't be. You're doing it wrong. But it is a tangible, physical reminder of your vows, of your covenant. It is a covenant renewal that is designed to be. It is a covenant renewal that is designed to say all of me belongs to all of you.
Everything I have, everything I am, everything I will be, I sacrifice and submit to you. That's celebration of the covenant that you have. And that is God's good design for sex. He made it as an intentional covenant renewal ceremony inside the context of marriage. So as we walk through the day, we're going to continue to talk about that definition.
We're going to continue to pull that up. And we're going to hold that up as our, this is what sex was designed to be. Therefore, this can't be correct. So as we walk through and look at these other things that we believe about sex, we're going to hold that up and keep saying, because this is true. So from the very beginning of the Bible, it lays that out as this is what sex is.
And so for the rest of scripture, anything that falls outside of a covenant marriage, anything that falls outside of any sexual activity that falls outside of that is considered sexual immorality. It's outside of God's good design. So that's why the Bible is going to treat so many other things as, no, you're not supposed to do that because God's good design for it was very specific. So we're going to actually find a lot of help as we study this in first Corinthians. So if your Bible looks like this, go to page 620.
I'll give you a second to get there. Then we're going to pray. And then we'll talk a little bit about what's going on here in this passage before we kind of dive in and begin to look at what Paul's saying here. Okay. Let's pray really quick.
God, we thank you for sex. We thank you for the good that it is. We pray, Lord, that we would rightly view it, rightly understand it, that we would see the beauty in your design for it in a way that might cause us to worship you. We pray, Lord, that married or single, we would rightly appreciate, view sex so that we might rightly love and worship you. We pray that as we study this today, Lord, you would give us clarity and wisdom and lead us to repentance where we've begun to believe lies about this good gift. In Jesus' name, amen.
So Corinth, think Las Vegas. So the city of Corinth was what happens here stays here kind of a place. It was a port city. They had a very lucrative sex slavery trade, sex trade, and a lot of prostitution. They had temples with prostitutes. They had other regular just prostitutes.
And then they had a very, people would come in. They would reload their ships. They would re-get supplies. And people would go visit prostitutes. And so that was a big thing in Corinth. And in the midst of that, Jesus saved some people.
A church was formed under Paul planting churches. And Paul's, in this letter, writing back and forth with the Corinthians and coaching them up. And so it honestly, it's a young church. It reminds us some of us, reminds me some of us, where we've got a lot of people who've just met Jesus. If we asked you a couple years ago, would you be following Jesus, you would have laughed. But now there's people who are repenting, following Jesus, and just trying to figure out what that means.
And so they're writing a letter to Paul, and they have all these questions about sex and sexuality because their culture has just bombarded them with how to think about it. It's kind of like this. If it's raining really hard, even if you get an umbrella, even if you put on a rain jacket, if it's just pouring, I mean sheets of rain, sideways rain, when you get inside, you are still wet. You did everything you could to cover up, but you're still wet. And Corinth's culture and our culture is similar when it comes to the concept of sex. We can do everything we want to to try to protect ourselves or guard ourselves, but some of it still soaks in.
Some of it still gets into our thought processes, into how we approach it. And so they're writing to Paul saying, isn't this true about sex? Isn't this true about sex? And Paul is going to be responding. And so everything we see in quotations, that's Paul saying, y'all said this. Here's your answer.
So it's a Q&A session with the church in Corinth. And surprisingly, they have a lot of the same thoughts and questions that we have. So we're going to go through and see what they ask and how Paul responds to help us better understand God's good design for sex. So chapter 6, verse 12. In quotations, he's quoting them. All things are lawful for me.
And then he says, but not all things are helpful. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be dominated by anything. So he's saying, okay, y'all said this, and it's in the context of sex. He said, y'all said this, and let me help answer that. So what they said was, all things are lawful for me.
And here's basically what their question was, what they were saying about sex. Question one is, isn't sex an individual and private matter? So when they say, all things are lawful for me, it's kind of like our phrase, well, it's a free country. What they're saying is, if it doesn't hurt anybody, if it's just my private business, why does it matter? Live and let live. If whatever I do in my own personal sphere doesn't matter.
And so sometimes this has been taught as what they were saying was, all things are lawful for me in Christ because Jesus has fulfilled the law for me. That's less likely because the Corinthian Christians weren't well-versed in the Old Testament and were significantly dealing with cultural issues. So really what they're saying is they're kind of repeating a cultural thing, which is, it's a free country. If I'm not hurting anybody, why does it matter? If it's my personal business, why does it matter? And so Paul gives a quick response to that and he's going to keep responding to it as he goes through the rest of the section.
But the first things he says are very helpful. So really, when we ask questions like this, there's an underlying belief system that makes us ask that. And so it's really the first lie that they believe and that we believe, because we say this same thing, is that sex is individualistic. That's the first lie that we believe when it comes to sex. That's what they were putting forth. Like, why does it matter?
It's just a private thing. Why does it matter what I do? Sex is individualistic. Now here's Paul's quick response to that. First of all, sex is an individualistic approach. Paul says it's not helpful.
And given the way he uses that phrase throughout the rest of his book, what he means is, nuh-uh. He's saying sex is not individualistic at all. It's not helpful. There are other people involved. So a quick recap of what sex is.
It's two people coming together. So when I say sex is just about me, then I'm doing it wrong because there's supposed to be two people coming together. It automatically means that there's someone else involved. So it can't just be an individualistic approach. It automatically affects other people. So Paul's response is no.
It's not individualistic. That's not a helpful way to approach it. Other people are involved. Other people, if you just approach it as what do I get out of it? If it's just a, it's about me and my enjoyment and my pleasure, then you've undercut and you don't even view it correctly. You're not approaching it correctly.
That's not helpful and that actually harms other people. And then he gives a response. So our immediate kind of pushback on that is, yeah, okay, sure, you can't say that sex with another person is just individualistic because other people are involved. But we've done a lot of work in our culture to make sex as individualistic as possible, primarily through pornography, that that can be enjoyed by yourself and does not harm anybody else. First of all, Paul's first response helps you because he says, no, it's not actually helpful in the context of community. Your life and decisions don't exist in a vacuum.
What you do does affect other people. And so when he says it's not helpful, he means it doesn't work well in the context of community, in the context of society. Looking at pornography creates a demand for pornography and pornography is videoed prostitution. It is videoed sex slavery. That's what the porn industry is. And studies are beginning to show that it seems that there's a link between pornography and an increase in sex slavery and sex trafficking because people are moving from what they're viewing to enacting that.
There's also a link now between males that view pornography and then how they treat a real female when they are with them in a very aggressive, domineering, physical, unromantic, unemotional way that is portrayed for them in pornography. And where young boys as early as 10 now is the average age of the boy seeks out pornography. At 12, most young men in advanced cultures that have the Internet have a significant exposure to pornography. A Canadian researcher went to do a study on porn use in college students, college males. When you do a study, here's how it works. You need the people you're studying and you need a control group so that you can compare them.
So if you were studying smokers of a certain age, you would need to find same gender, same age, non-smokers. The problem with his study was he couldn't find non-pornography users when he went to college age males. He could not find a control group large enough to use. So it would be like if everybody smoked and then you asked, does smoking affect you? And you said no. But then we also put out reports that said all humans get lung cancer by the age of 40.
It's just a thing that happens to humans. It's like, no, if we had a control group that showed non-smokers, we'd realize that wasn't a human problem. And so the problem with his study was he couldn't find people who had not been significantly exposed to pornography, and some of them for over 10 years. And here's what happens. That affects how they view females, how they approach females. It affects all the females who are looking at pornography, how they view males, how they approach males.
It becomes an unhelpful problem. But here's Paul's second response to that. But I will not be dominated by anything. When we approach sex in an individualistic way, specifically for our culture through pornography, it becomes very addictive. Sex was designed to be addictive anyway. It sets off the same pleasure sensors in your brain that other addictive drugs do.
So you were designed by God to become more addicted to your spouse. That was the way sex was designed. And inside the covenant of marriage, that's beautiful. Outside of it, that's kind of scary. Because it creates an addiction that is crushing people in our culture, that is crushing through pornography. There's a lady named Naomi Wolf.
She's just been doing some research on this. She was an analyst or an advisor to several different presidents, President Clinton being one of them. She wrote an article called The Porn Myth. And so here's what she says in that. But does all this sexual imagery in the air...
She's not a Christian, by the way. She's just been studying this. Does all this sexual imagery in the air mean that sex has been liberated? So we act like we're free, we're open about it. Sex is free. It's liberated.
Or is it the case that the relationship between the multi-billion dollar porn industry, compulsiveness, so addiction being dominated by it, and sexual appetite has become like the relationship between agribusiness, processed food, supersized portions, and obesity? If your appetite is stimulated and fed by poor quality material, it takes more junk to fill you up. But people are not closer because of porn, but further apart. People are not more turned on in their daily lives, but less so. Mostly when I ask about loneliness... She goes around to colleges and speaks to young adults a lot.
Mostly when I ask about loneliness, a deep, sad silence descends on the audience of young men and young women alike. They know they are lonely together, even when conjoined, and that this imagery, porn, is a big part of that loneliness. What they don't know is how to get out. Because of an individualistic approach to sex, which is not how sex was designed, it crushes our ability to have meaningful relationships because we only begin to respond well to pornography, and we begin to hold everybody up, every significant other, every person as a sex object, or we compare them to past relationships, or past videos that we have watched, and it begins to erode our ability to appropriately approach sex in the way that God designed.
I saw a guy doing a TED Talk, and he said that one of the problems with this, one of the problems with constant pornography viewership and then having real relationships, is that pornography viewership cuts out all of the beautiful stuff about sex, like conversation, laughter, touching with your hands, kissing, emotional connection. It turns it into this really male-dominated, aggressive, twisted, constantly changing to other things, and he said it erodes a lot of the beautiful... He said when he used to fantasize, this is not a Christian guy, he's just talking through this, that he used to think about having a conversation, and where that would lead, and how he... And he said once he began to view porn all the time, that wasn't there anymore.
There was no more intimate, emotional connection, because an individualistic approach to sex dominates us, becomes addictive, begins to control how we view it, and takes it out of what God designed it to be, which was not individualistic at all. So the major problem with this is this is a massive misunderstanding of what sex is. Sex was designed to be not just for personal pleasure and fulfillment, although that's a part of it, but it was to be complete surrender. It was to be you making yourself vulnerable and giving yourself to someone else for their pleasure and their enjoyment in the context of a covenant marriage.
Because it was a covenant renewal ceremony, because it was a pouring yourself out on behalf of another, the way you are in life in a covenant, in marriage in a covenant, sex becomes a gracious response and a gracious, humble giving yourself to someone else. And when it's approached in an individualistic manner, it's robbed of that. So this can be seen in dating, where someone just uses another person for sex. A person, a lot of times we see this as in males, but it can be anybody, just uses someone for sex, and once they have sex, they just move on, because that was the only goal. So they've treated a person with a soul, made in the image of God, like nothing more than an object.
This same individualistic approach can be seen in marriage, where somebody is just, I want to have sex right now. That's it. That's my approach. And you need to have sex with me, regardless of context, regardless of how you feel. And on the other side of that, someone who in marriage is never in the mood. So that as long as that's the hurdle, I don't feel like it.
And all that is on both sides of that fence is just sex exists for my individual pleasure. So if I want it, let's go. Or sex exists for my individual pleasure. So if I don't want to, no. And that's still the same approach. These aren't just problems for single people.
This is a problem with how we view sex in general. C.S. Lewis says that this approach to sex, that this idea of sex without covenant is like chewing food and then spitting it out without swallowing it and digesting it, which does not leave us more satisfied, but more hungry, which ultimately guts eating food of what it was designed for in the first place. Question two, they ask. So Paul's response to the first question, the question two, they ask.
He spends a little more time here because he's also still addressing the first question. 13. Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food. So they say, okay, Paul, food's meant for the stomach, the stomach for food, which what they're really asking is, isn't sex just an appetite? Isn't it just an appetite? Isn't it just like, okay, Paul, let me break this down for you.
I have a stomach. My stomach sends signals to my brain. It says I'm hungry. My brain sends signals to my hands. I grab food. I stick it in my mouth.
It goes to my stomach. My stomach exists because food exists and food exists because my stomach exists. And that's the same way that sex works. I have sexual parts and sexual urges and they exist in relation to one another. It's just an appetite. I love that this question is in here because we think we have progressed so far.
We are so far beyond all of those morons that used to live in history because I have Google. I'm so much smarter than everybody else who knew how to actually do things. I can just read about things and that makes me smart because I can buy shoes from Reebok. I don't know how to make shoes, but I can buy them. I'm smarter than all of these people. We just, history has just moved forward and progressed.
And here's the thing. We say stuff like this. We say stuff like, it's just a private matter. We say stuff like, sex is just an appetite as if we've moved on and outgrown. That argument's 2,000 years old. They have the same thoughts, same questions.
I got a stomach. I eat. I have sexual organs. I sex, right? Thank you, Paul. You are dismissed.
I have defeated you with logic. And so Paul responds. And this is really the second lie that we believe about sex comes from this, this idea that sex is just an appetite, is that sex is consumeristic. It's just a consumer good. It is designed for us to partake in however we feel because it's just an appetite. Now here, sex is, does have a desire that goes along with it, does have appetite that goes along with it, but it's not just that.
And it's not the same as eating food because if you don't eat food, you will die. And although some people in our culture might would argue that not having sex will kill you, it will not. Sex is not just physical. That's the argument being made here. It's just physical. It's just an exchange of goods, just a physical enjoyment.
And so Paul responds. One of the best examples of this in our culture right now, I believe, is the app Tinder. Tinder is an app, for those of you who are not familiar. It's on a smartphone. You take a picture of yourself and I think there's a little bit of information, but it's not like bogged down by information about the human. It's mostly just the picture.
And then you just swipe one way or the other to like the human or unlike the human. I don't know what it's called. It's just called swiping and it's become like a manic. People do this all day long, looking at people and swiping one way or the other they're based off of. And really what it is, this is a very advanced form of human shopping. It is a handheld brothel in so many ways.
Now, some people would say, no, no, no. You can make real, meaningful connections through Tinder. And that's what I'm using it for. Okay, maybe. The majority of people aren't. The person on the other side swiping your picture probably isn't.
And if you've been on Tinder for a while, via the text and pictures they have sent you, you might have picked up on that. It is a lineup of humans with souls that we have reduced to a quick ability to say, nope, don't like that one. Nope, don't like that one. Yes, yes, yes. Nope. Nope.
Yes. It's a brothel app. It's used that way. There's an article in Vanity Fair that is a very difficult read because of how painful it is to see how devastating this is. Now, you may say, okay, but hold on a second. Isn't that what people do when they go to bars?
Isn't that the same thing people have been doing forever when they showed up and looked around for a person to talk to? Yes. In a lot of ways. We've just become more efficient. In that article in Vanity Fair, they're talking to three guys and they say, why do you like Tinder so much? A couple of different things.
They said it was easy to meet Tinderellas. They said, it used to be you'd have to go to a place like a bar, put forth energy. You can only talk to one, two, maybe three girls a night. But on Tinder, you can be in 15 conversations at once and one of the other guys piped in and you don't have to spend any money. And they were like, yes, that's good too. Now, that's people shopping, but it grows out of how we've begun to approach sex.
It ought to be free. It ought to be easy. It ought to be simple. Humans exist for my pleasure. Sex is a consumer good. We ought to be able to line this up easily.
We ought to be able to get supply and demand connected. And so, Paul is going to respond to this, I have a stomach, it's designed for food argument. This sex is just an appetite. This lie that sex is consumeristic. And so, Paul responds with a couple of things that I find very helpful. Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food and God will destroy both one and the other.
The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord and the Lord for the body. Okay, his first response is very helpful. First of all, sexual immorality, when you see that in the Bible, mostly coming from the Greek word pornea, which is just sexual junk drawer. It really means all sex outside of God's covenant designed for marriage, all sexuality outside of God's covenant designed for marriage. So, everything, if you're thinking, well, does it include this? Yes.
Yes, it does. All of the sexual activity outside of marriage because making a list would have taken too long and then we would have invented something new and said, that's not in there. So, it's just everything outside of God's covenant design. He says, your body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord. Here's what he's saying. Sex is not ultimate.
That does not sound profound. It's very helpful for our culture. You can live your entire human life and never have sex and be fine. I'm going to go over here and say that. You can live your entire human life and never have sex and be fully complete and fully satisfied and fully human be fine. Jesus came and was single.
He is the God as a human perfection held up for us and he lived his entire life, never got married, never had sex. This is so bizarre to our culture that we make up. Obviously, he had to have secret lovers. Obviously, he's got some lineage somewhere. Obviously, this effeminate drawing here is not a boy, but it's some kind of a girl who's not very pretty. But what are you going to do?
Like, sorry, that was a very Da Vinci Code stuff there. If you haven't, you don't know what I'm talking about, that's fine. I was like, that got weird. Yeah, it did. It did. Read it.
It gets weird. It's so bizarre to us, but the truth is your body does not exist for sex. You will not die. You are okay. You can live your entire life and never have sex. Sex is not ultimate.
You were given a body designed for God and His glory and His worship. You were made in the image of God to reveal what He is like to the rest of creation. And that doesn't have to be sex. That's very helpful and sadly profound for us. Next thing He says, so first of all, you don't have to have sex. You're okay.
You were designed for something else, something bigger, something better. And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by His power. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? He's talking to Christians. He's saying, don't you know Jesus' covenant love that He's already poured over you that when you place faith in Him, He made you His and He loves you. You are His bride and He's made you one with Him.
You're part of His body. You're members of Christ. Like, you know, like your arm is a member of your body. That's what He means there. Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Okay, so this is getting deeper than we understand.
So let's keep moving here. Members of a prostitute never, or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? Okay, two things we need to know. One is, prostitution was the big socially acceptable way to have sex outside of your marriage. That's why He refers to prostitution. That was the big Corinthian way, perfectly fine, socially acceptable way to have sex outside of a covenant marriage.
So people were married young and you weren't specifically interested in having a good sexual relationship with your spouse. Wives were not allowed to have sexual relationships outside of their marriage relationship or they were in big trouble, but men could do whatever they wanted to and going and visiting a prostitute was perfectly normal, sexually acceptable way to have a sexual outlet. So, when He talks about prostitution in our culture, that honestly includes most everything. There are really three things that our culture is going to say aren't okay when it comes to sex and sexuality, just culturally.
Anything forced? Not okay. Anything with children of a certain age? Like, we kind of have an age limit on it. Not okay. And the third one is cheating and that one's more of a gray area for people, but mostly frowned upon.
Cheating's not good. So, those are kind of the only three. So, when He says prostitution, He's talking about the way they would have approached sex outside of a covenant relationship. And so, for us, He really just means all the sexual things that we're kind of okay with when He's talking about prostitution. Does that make sense? Tracking there?
Some of you are. Cool. Okay. Okay. Do you not know this is 16? Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her?
Okay. That's not very profound if you just take it for what He's saying. He has to mean something deeper because what He just said is do you not know that he who's joined with a prostitute is joined with a prostitute? Yep. Like, if He just means physical, that sentence isn't helpful and doesn't make a lot of sense. But what He's doing is He's approaching sex the way the Bible always does, which it is much deeper than physical.
Much more going on than just the physical act. So when they say, isn't sex just an appetite? Isn't it just physical? Isn't it just a consumer good? Paul says, no. It's not.
There's so much more going on. The same reason that we in our culture know that there's a difference between physical abuse and sexual abuse. because there's more going on there than just a physical interaction. Paul's acknowledging that there's much more to sex than physical, that it's actually emotional, psychological, spiritual. There's a pastor in New York. He wrote a book called The Meaning of Marriage. In one of his chapters on sex, he says this.
I think it's helpful. The Bible says, do not unite with someone unless you are also willing to unite with the person emotionally, personally, socially, economically, and legally. Don't become physically naked and vulnerable to the other person without becoming vulnerable in every other way. Because you have given up your freedom and bound yourself in marriage. So Paul's point here is that sex is wrong and out of place in all other circumstances than inside of this covenant.
Because it means more. So the Bible's argument is not that you have too high a view of sex. The Bible argues that you have too low a view of sex. The Bible's going to push us that we don't believe enough about sex. That we don't have high enough view about sex. That's the Bible's point.
The reason we're willing to flippantly have sex, the reason we treat it the way we do is not because we value sex too much but we value it too little. We don't understand all that's happening there. This is, sex creates a deep connection. It's a symbol of an invisible reality. That's what it was designed to be. That's how it functions all the time.
So here's what happens. Let me help you out here. During sex, when you have an orgasm, your body fires off a bunch of chemicals like explosions in your head. They are designed to create addiction. Same pleasure centers we talked about that earlier. They're designed to bond you to whatever is causing that.
In your head. They are designed to create addiction. Same pleasure centers we talked about that earlier. They're designed to bond you to whatever is causing that. There's multiple brain chemicals that take place during this that are designed to connect you far beyond a physical interaction. Some of the same chemicals that are given off when a mother breastfeeds, the skin-to-skin contact stuff, it's become real big recently so they've been pushing for men to have skin-to-skin contact
With their babies because mothers get to and it helps you bond to the baby and so that was one of the things they talked about like in the hospital I should have some skin-to-skin contact with Archer and so when they first went to hand me him they were like here you want to hold him and I was like yeah let me take my shirt off first and they were like okay and I was like I'm kidding and they were like well a lot of dads do that and I was like I didn't mean to mock them
I just I was a joke I'm sorry just give me the baby not doing it I'm not stripping down to hug a baby it's not happening sorry if that's you you go for it bro that's great proud of you it was just one of my things but there's something to the chemicals there that take place with a mother bonding to a baby with the skin and it happens during sex and it is designed by God
Who invented sex to make you addicted to your spouse to make you more aroused by your spouse whatever is causing this interchange whatever is causing this explosions in your head it almost slows everything down for you to suck it all in so it becomes a smell it becomes the context of what's going on it becomes the person this is why this becomes so devastating
Outside of a covenant marriage so beautiful here so beautiful that God designed you to become more and more addicted to each other that is beautiful and it becomes almost horrifying when you take it out of that context because your body is designed to latch on to people and you have to begin to if you're having casual sex
With people you have to begin to harden your heart on that you have to begin to shut that off you have to begin to over time grow callous to that so that you're not hurt over and over and over again this is why relationships become much harder to break off once sex enters the picture it's why people stay in relationships with morons because they've begun to do something that happens
On an emotional psychological spiritual basis where God's bringing them together designed and they feel like they owe the person something the person owes them something they become beholden to one another and they shouldn't be this is why pornography addiction becomes such a problem because you're rewiring your brain
To be all the things that were designed for you to soak in and be aroused by it's now being alone looking at a screen clicking changing from image to image novelty whereas in marriage it's designed to be so many other things so Paul says don't you know when you have sex when there's sexual interaction with another person so much more
Is happening here Bible clearly teaches that sex is designed for the context of marriage and the reason that we approach it the way we do is because we have too low a view of it not that we think too high of sex but too little of it so or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her
For it is written the two will become one flesh so he's talking back Genesis he brings it up again and says this is this is why this is a problem because it was designed for something else but he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit
With him so he's saying you already have this relationship this fulfillment in Christ you don't need to pursue it other places and then he says this flee from sexual immorality every other sin a person commits is outside the body but the
Sexually immoral person sins against his own body or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit within you whom you have from God so he says flee flee from
Sexual immorality we're pretty terrible at this flee means be afraid and run as fast as your little feet can carry you that we should have such a high view of sex that we should run from anything
That would lead us outside of what it was designed to be we should flee from it for some of us practically that means putting some blocker things on your computer that means having a dumb phone that only receives phone calls and is
Almost useless that means having some very serious conversations with the person that you're dating about where you're going to go ahead and pre-build in some lines build some fences in your brains to protect yourselves that means that maybe
Netflix and chill isn't an option for you because chill becomes way less chill after a while that you just have to build some ways that we're going to run from this and that's difficult but the reason we don't run is that we
Believe lies about sex we don't understand what it was designed to be so we're willing to toy with it a lot more when it actually has a lot more power and a lot more value than we understand man then Paul says this which means a lot to them and I'm going to try to
Help us understand it do you not know this is verse 19 do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit within you whom you have from God you are not your own for you were bought with a price so glorify God in your body they were not far removed from the slave trade the way to gain freedom from slavery
Was to be bought out of it that was it you were enslaved or you were bought out of slavery so when he says you are bought with a price what he's referring to is that when Jesus Christ went to the cross and gave up his life on our behalf he paid our debt to set us free
From slavery that we do not have to be enslaved to anything but that we were bought with a price and owned by Jesus who purchased us by his blood and who loved us so much to pursue us so far as to go to the cross and die for us to make us his you're not
Your own if you're a Christian you've already been bought you've already been purchased by a much better slave owner by a much better king who set you free from everything else so that you might enjoy a real true depth of relationship with him when it comes to our approach to sex
Paul says hey you don't have to be a slave to it it doesn't have to own you don't have to be a slave to your appetites you don't have to be a slave to your own personal desires you've been purchased by Jesus to be free and only through Christ can we actually find freedom so then they
Move on to the next question which is kind of a reaction against the first two questions I can almost see the Corinthian church wrestling over this and people being like okay we'll put this in the letter put this in the letter and someone's like no put this in the letter and so he gets to this
Next thing he says now concerning the matters about which you wrote so he's saying okay now you've said this verse chapter seven it is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman okay so sex isn't just individualistic it's not just consumeristic there's a group in Corinth saying no no no no
Just no sex whatsoever right like shouldn't we just avoid sex whatsoever so the third question is isn't sex dirty like isn't it just kind of wrong like there's you see so much abuse of it you see this handled so poorly shouldn't we just avoid it that's the third question and it kind of lines up with the third lie we believe which is that sex is dirty or it's at best a necessary evil like sex is good because it makes other
Humans and we should have other humans but that's really it and this this I think has been taught in the church some some people could kind of sum up with what the church has taught at times not not it's we've been fixing this I think but there are some churches who basically taught sex is gross and dirty and wrong save it for your spouse and give them that gift when you get married that's so beautiful thank you so basically they're saying shouldn't we just react against this and avoid this and it best to just
Not have sex at all I remember when Anna and I were going through marriage counseling we just the the church has just kind of avoided this in some ways I remember going through marriage counseling it was like a one session thing and the pastor flipping through a book and talking to us about like do you have a budget just different things and he flips over in his book and like the heading said sex and he goes now when you get married you you'd be able to have sex do y'all have any questions about that
And I couldn't do it I couldn't bring myself to do it I really wanted to be like I have a lot of questions I hope you got a lot of time on your hands no I just we're just like no and he goes well good here's some books you can read and he just moved right along and the truth is this our culture has a lot to say about sex and the church has just kind of avoided it I know parents a lot of times Christian parents don't want to talk to their children about sex if you're not talking to your kids about sex television is their friends are the internet
Is at some point we got to step in and start redeeming this picture and so this response was isn't it dirty shouldn't we just avoid it and Paul begins to answer this question so here's what he says now concerning the matters about which he wrote verse one it is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman he says okay but because of the temptation to sexual immorality each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband what he's not saying is everyone has to get married because you may be tempted what he is saying is pursue marriage if you are overly tempted
Towards sexual things you need to reign that in but you can pursue marriage it's perfectly fine to desire marriage that is not wrong you should not feel bad it's perfectly fine to have a desire for sex that's that is it is a desire it is an appetite it's not just that it's not just a consumer good but he's saying yeah you can pursue marriage to keep you from sin each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband the husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights and likewise the wife to her husband for the wife does not have authority over her own body but the husband does likewise the husband does not have authority over
His own body but the wife does okay first of all don't get caught up on the word conjugal I know it sounds prison-y it's not he's just saying when you're married you should have sex and then he says something that is mind shattering in their culture he starts off by saying the husband owns the wife's body and there were people just not in the law correct that is true you are right Paul when I married her I own her now I can do what I want she does whatever I want and then he says the wife owns the husband's body and people got whiplash they were like read that part again in that letter where he said that crazy stuff because they didn't believe that they
Believe that the wife belonged to the husband that was it and what Paul says is no let me tell you a few things that you've misunderstood about sex first of all it's good you should have sex with each other and your marriage was designed to be a place where there was enjoyable sex so they would have approached it as you got married to have kids and then if you want to have enjoyable sex you would just pursue that outside of marriage what he's saying is no marriage is designed to be a place filled with enjoyable sex and for the enjoyment and pleasure of one another both the wife to her husband and husband to her wife and so then he follows that up with this for the husband should give his wife this is verse 3 husband should give to his wife
Her conjugal rights and likewise the wife to her husband for the wife does not have authority over her own body but the husband does likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body but the wife does do not deprive one another except okay so he's gonna give us the reasons why you can deprive one another perhaps okay except perhaps is like he's limiting this down by agreement okay this has got this is a lot of caveats here Paul for a limited time joke for real except perhaps by agreement for a limited time so Paul's not married he doesn't have anything to gain from this he's just explaining how this works so he says you you own her she owns you you should have sex with each other except perhaps if you both agree for a little bit of
Time so he like even if you agree we're gonna take a year off Paul's gonna say nope I don't care if you agree on that limited time that you may devote yourselves to prayer okay y'all you've been having so much sex you ain't praying y'all might need to take to agree to fast from it for the purposes of prayer what else but then come together again okay that was it that's the only one he gives but then come together again and he says this so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control okay that's massively helpful and sounds a little bit crazy to us and here's why that sounds a little bit crazy to me okay I it is odd I mean maybe odds not the right word doesn't happen often I guess that's another way of saying odd but for people to get married and have the same sexual desire on the sexual desire scale it doesn't always happen
So sometimes you have a wife who has more desire for sex a husband who has more desire for sex culturally we act like it's always the husband that would but that's not true like it it just kind of ranges and so here's what Paul says here's what I would have thought he would have said but because I have kind of a wrong view about sex but here's what I thought what he would have said y'all need to agree what works for both of y'all if one of you likes to have sex more than the other person should have more sex but one of you likes to have sex less than this person who likes it more should have less sex y'all should kind of come to an agreement and figure out what works for y'all and and mutually agree on that it's not what he says what he says is your body doesn't belong to you you give conjugal rights to your spouse and you do not deprive one another which sounds to me like that's not really fair to the person who doesn't
Like to have sex as much here's why he says it if sex is individualistic and consumeristic what Paul just said is wrong and harmful and kind of rude to the person who doesn't like sex as much but if sex is a covenant renewal ceremony that always means more and was designed for you to sacrifice be vulnerable and give yourself to another then what Paul says makes a lot of sense that you in marriage are designed sex isn't for your own pleasure so if one of you desire sex more the person who desires it less should give graciously servingly because sex always means more always accomplishes more it's not just a personal desire it's not just a if I want to if I don't want to or for my own personal pleasure it's for the other it's for the other person for a mutual service and sacrifice to one another and it always accomplishes more so in marriage when we act like if I don't feel like it we shouldn't have sex and you should calm down
To not want to have sex all the time and maybe you're more gracious than the way I just put that but when we treat it that way what we are saying is I still believe sex is individualistic and consumeristic now for the person who desires sex more in marriage you can still be approaching sex in an individualistic consumeristic way I want to have sex I enjoy sex I don't care what you say don't pull this out Paul Bible naked don't do that not helpful and you're wrong you should repent your approach is not sacrificially serving and pursuing your spouse so if you if you're in a marriage and one person desires to have sex more often than the other person both of them need to consider each other the person who desires it more needs to figure out how to pursue their spouse and the perfect person who desires it less needs to figure out how to serve their spouse and once sex becomes a way to give to one another a way to pleasure
One another that your focus is less on yourself and more on your spouse then it becomes very beautiful and exactly what it was designed to be that I'm giving myself to you the same way I've given myself to you in marriage I sacrifice everything I have belongs to you for your good and your enjoyment and when both of spouses are saying that and approaching it that way it can become very beautiful and very enjoyable and it takes a lot of work and it's very difficult but Paul gives something else he doesn't just say sex is given sex is poured out for the other he does say that give realize that in sex in a marriage you are giving yourself to another you're not taking from them it's not for your own personal enjoyment you are figuring out how to give them enjoyment Tim Keller in his book where he talked about sex he said once sex becomes what's the most enjoyable thing about sex becomes giving enjoyment to
Your spouse then it becomes what it was designed to be then it becomes very beautiful but here he says this too he gives another reason for this this is helpful for single and married people I'm in first Timothy for some reason so give me a second here we go I was like this doesn't look right do not deprive one another except perhaps by agreement for a limited time oh you don't have sex you wanted to pray let's pray sorry okay anyway for a limited time to devote yourselves to prayer then come back together again so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control sex because of the covenant power that it has is actually a guard for your marriage against the enemy against a lack of self-control how the enemy works towards bitterness and anger and towards leading us away from our spouse let me tell you something about Satan's real we've talked about that
Before I could probably point you to a message that we've already said if you're confused by that or questioning that but Satan's real he's actively at work against us when Bible talks about Satan it's not just the main Satan guy it's always his forces in the world but here's how they work prior to marriage Satan wants you in bed because that goes against God's good beautiful covenant design and after marriage Satan wants you out of bed at least with your spouse because that goes against God's good covenant design so when I do premarital with couples and they're like yeah okay well we're struggling with sex right now but when we get married it'll be fine no that's a misunderstanding of how sin works what you're currently saying having sex prior to marriage is this is an area where we won't submit to Jesus this is an area where I'm going to hold what I believe above what he says and prior to marriage that
Means a lot of sex but after marriage that means a lot of withholding a lot of bitterness a lot of selfishness and a lot of not sex because the enemy works to bring us together prior to marriage and apart after marriage and one of the best defenses for your marriage is to covenantally continually give yourself to each other okay six finish here now as a concession not a command I say this what he's talking about is you don't have to get married because he says I wish all were as I myself am he's not married so he's saying I wish all of you could be not married and be okay so I'm not saying you have to get married I'm saying that if you do get married this is how it ought to work I wish all were as myself am but each has his own gift from God one of one kind and one of another the Bible is going to say that singleness is a
Gift and marriage is a gift and God graciously give some people with singleness don't use that against single people like what's a gift when they're like struggling with their singleness don't don't pull that out to like harm them like well just enjoy your gift why don't you shut up it's but it is a gift is God gifts singleness to some people the ability to be single and he gives marriage to some people and the only way either one of them works is for us to realize that Jesus bought us out of slavery with his covenant love to make us his when you are single it is so easy to believe if I just had a spouse I wouldn't be lonely I'd be full I'd be complete I could just get married I'd be okay and the only way to live single is to know the love that Jesus has for you and the fulfillment that is found only in him that he pursued you to the point of death on a cross to make you his and it's so easy when you're
Married to think you're supposed to fulfill me you're supposed to complete me you're not doing that right now and I'd be much happier if I could just be single or if I could find the right person you're obviously not it and the only way to exist in the covenant relationship that we're designed to exist in where we give ourselves continually regardless of what we're getting back is for us to be so filled up by Jesus and his love for us that we're free that we've been set free from slavery to our appetite set free from slavery to our individual desires to just love the person we're married to and just sacrifice and give John Donne is a poet he wrote he's lived in England during the Renaissance and he wrote a poem and he ends it this way he's talking to God take me to you imprison me for I accept you enthrall me never shall be free so he's saying God take me lock me up with you and unless I'm enthralled by you I'm going to be a slave to everything else unless you
Enthrall me never I never shall be free and then he says nor ever chased except you ravish me chased means sexually pure and so he says I'll never be sexually pure unless I'm so overwhelmed and filled up by you this is impossible and that's what Paul's saying here we've been bought with a price that God in his grace has gifted us and equipped us and the only way single people that you can remain single and have joy is to lean into Jesus and married people the only way you can remain married and have joy is to lean into Jesus then sex gets to be what it was designed to be not ultimate but a good gift from God for the covenant of marriage and we get to be free free from sex free from individualistic desires free from consumeristic desires and free to just love our spouses serve them be gracious towards them bands gonna come back up we're gonna sing and make much of Jesus who through the gospel went to a cross on our behalf to set us free who the God of the universe who designed
Things for our good for our joy for his glory some some single people in here you need to begin to you need to begin to flee need to begin to rightly view sex so that you're not putting yourself in compromising situations you need to be running from it for the sake of what it was designed to be as you glorify God realizing it's not ultimate need to begin to lean into Jesus and know know that it's his love that that sets you free and gives you hope and joy and fulfillment married couples needs to be some repentance over believing one of those three lies or some version of all three that sex is individualistic it exists for my pleasure until you treat your spouse like an object sex is consumeristic so if I want to or don't want to that's final I don't eat when I'm not hungry I eat when I'm hungry if I want to have sex we should have sex if I don't want to have sex we shouldn't have sex you need to pray about that and repent because sex was meant to be given and for those of you who have treated sex as a necessary evil in your marriage I
Pray that God would help you see the the beauty that he designed for it and how it protects your marriage and guards your marriage makes you addicted to one another need to have some gracious conversations so you might begin to have a sexual relationship as God lays it out he's not against sex if you believe he is read the Song of Solomon it's not against it he invented it was designed to be good and it's for us to graciously give and serve one another in a way that strengthens our marriages so I pray that we would see Jesus setting us free from selfishness and sin so that for single people there can be no sex whatsoever and you'd be fine for married people there can be a lot of sex that continues to draw you closer to one another and all of us realize it's not ultimate it's not where happiness comes from it's not what fills us up that we're free because Jesus sets us free let's pray God we thank you
That you're good thank you for your love for us that you give us hope that we don't need anything but you and that you give us other good gifts to enjoy that get to point back to you and glorify you in distinct and beautiful ways I pray God that you would work on our hearts that there might be repentance for the single people in here who've been wrongly viewing sex that you'd set them free that you'd let them run to you who've died for them to set them free that you're not going to crush them but love them and welcome them for the married couples in here who've been viewing sex wrongly
There is a small glitch at 9:20 in this recording that cannot be fixed. We apologize for the hiccup!
Sugar, Spice & Everything Nice?
Our culture puts an immense amount of pressure on women. So many women are crushed by the weight of having a perfect body, perfect kids, and perfect relationships. But is that really what it means to be a woman? What if femininity has nothing to do with wearing a dress?
Transcript
Well, good morning. We are in the fourth week of our series, The Theology of Sex, where we're just taking some time to look at what the Bible has to say about gender, sexuality, romance, marriage, masculinity, femininity. A lot of times, we love the Bible. I have a problem. I start multiple sentences and that wasn't going to work out well together. A lot of times, because we love the Bible, we just study straight through a book of the Bible.
We'll just open it up. We'll go straight through. We spent a good bit of time this past year in 1 Peter. Some people might say a little too much time, but we walked verse by verse through 1 Peter. Really, we like the Bible. We study the Bible.
We believe that it's Scripture that helps us grow, that changes us, that Jesus works through that, through the Holy Spirit, to move us and to change us. But we also like to take time to say, okay, we're confused about this or we're having a hard time with this in our culture. And then we, instead of just studying straight through a book, we'll actually just kind of go to the Bible and say, what does the Bible have to say about these topics? And try to dig in that way. And that's kind of what we're doing right now. We're just spending some time talking about the theology of sex.
So last week, we talked about masculinity. We talked about what it meant to be a man, what biblical manhood was. And this week, we're going to talk about femininity, what it means to be a woman, what biblical womanhood is. And in general, in our culture, we're a little bit more positive towards women right now in our culture. We, in general, celebrate women. We want to promote women.
And there's really good examples of women in the workplace. And just in our culture, we're trying to look for ways to promote, to highlight. We kind of agree as a culture that women are great, even when maybe culturally the jury's still out on men. We're kind of on board with the idea that women are good, like we're pro-woman. And that hasn't always been the case throughout history. And that really is kind of a small window right now where we're saying, no, we need to, women are wonderful.
Let's promote them. Let's highlight them. But just because the climate is different for men and women, I actually don't think it makes it easier to be a woman. I don't really know, but I don't think it does. Just because there's so much now where it's the cause for, you need to be free from a man. You need to be, this is where joy comes from.
This is where freedom comes from. And then you'll also have the, no, if you just find the right man, then you'll be complete, then you'll be fulfilled. Or freedom comes from a career, or you have these mommy blogs that are like, you need to raise your own chickens and grow your own kale so that your kid doesn't turn into some weird high fructose corn syrup blob of a monster. Like all of this pressure to be all of these things. And it just seems in general like it makes being a woman more difficult kind of in our culture. And we really need to have a good handle on what is femininity?
What is the essence of womanhood? Because it just seems like we've got kind of a cluttered message out there right now. When my wife and I sit down and watch TV in the evenings, mostly, I look pretty good. Like as long as I'm not like an overgrown boy, I kind of know my kid's name and talk to my wife and have a job. And in general, I'm not an idiot. I'm beating most of the people we watch on TV.
Like most of the characters in shows, I look pretty good. But my wife, there's a lot of like really good examples of women in these shows that just have everything together. They've got their jobs working out perfectly. They're the one that tends to the house. Whenever the kids have problems, they fix it. And it just seems like there's a lot of pressure on females to kind of be everything at this point.
And so we really want to just kind of get some handles on biblically. What is the essence of femininity? What does it mean to be feminine, to kind of stretch into and press into womanhood? And so a few kind of disclaimers as we get started. One, I am aware that I am a man and therefore not a woman. But like always, we're going to try to open the Bible and say, here's we're going to let Scripture teach us, God instruct us and try to to learn as best we can from the text and not from personal opinion or personal experience, which I have very little of.
So single ladies in the room, like last week, femininity is not based off of role. So you don't have to be a wife. You don't have to be a mother. It doesn't wait for those things. That's not the completion of womanhood throughout Scripture. Let me just say this to help the ladies in the room that that read the Bible on a regular basis, that you study the Bible on a regular basis.
You read the Bible on a regular basis and you just kind of like, I don't see a lot of single women in Scripture. You are correct. There aren't a lot of single women in Scripture. Reason being is two primary reasons. One is in the Old Testament, we're mostly following the story of a family. So God's working through a race, through a people.
And so most of the major characters are going to be people who line up in that family. And so we're going to follow a lot of wives and mothers when you when they enter into the story because it's a people group. God was working through a family leading up to the lineage of Jesus. That's why the New Testament is going to start off with lineages. And most of the women that were highlighted in the Old Testament line up in those lineages. The other thing is just culturally.
There wasn't a lot of room for females to go get jobs, to just enter the marketplace. Just culturally, it didn't work that way. Most people were farmers. Most females were married off at a very young age. And so just because Scripture gives a lot of examples of wives and mothers, it does not mean that it's wrong to be single. Well, actually, in the New Testament, Paul's going to say it's great to be single.
You do really well to be single actually affirms singleness and says that's a beautiful, wonderful way to live and to reflect the image of God. And that's that's good and wonderful. And people don't have to get married. So even as we study Scripture and as you study Scripture and you see a lot of mothers and wives, they're going to live out their femininity in the role they were given. And you're going to get to do the same in the roles that you have. So femininity isn't based off of role.
It's actually just going to express itself through the roles that you're given. And so don't have to be married. Don't have to be a mother. Femininity is much deeper than that. So as we go in, just remember that men in the room, I'm going to intentionally, overtly, maybe even at times a little bit aggressively go after some of the moronic stereotypes that we have of women.
And your role will be to repent of the ones that you have believed and anywhere that you have helped propagate those. And then actively in the future to tell people to shut up and to help them not continue. So that's that's what you get to do. Also, it's about a thousand times easier for females to to express and to step into their femininity when men express and step into their masculinity. For the most part, when men abdicate their role, women step in and begin to cultivate and provide and protect like we talked about last week. And it becomes dang near impossible for them to do both for them to pick up your slack and do what they're supposed to.
So one of the best ways that we love the ladies in the room is by actually being men. And so if you didn't hear the sermon last week, I would encourage you to listen to it and then seek to grow with us as we try to be men. Guys in the room, if you're single and feel called to get married and are looking to date, this is what you're looking for in a female. And this is if you're married, what you're encouraging and celebrating in your wife. OK, one more one more quick caveat. I am I want I want us to remember that what we're talking about, we're saying specifically this is essence of femininity.
This is something that is core to femininity. This is maybe an issue that maybe ladies struggle with more. When we say those things, we don't mean men can't do these things or if a man does them, he's wrong in the same way. We didn't mean that last week. So if you're like, wait a second, I'm not supposed to protect.
I'm not supposed to provide just because I'm a woman. It's like, no, we're not saying that. We're just saying that's essential to masculinity. So it's like I looked at my wife one time. We're about to leave and go somewhere. I said, I said, you look, I really like that shirt.
She looked at me and she went, you don't like my other shirts. And I was like, why would you take it that way? Why would that? Why would one compliment to a shirt immediately be like me attacking all of your other clothes? That's not what I. So if we say something in a positive way, this is for femininity.
Don't immediately turn it around and apply it to everything else because we're not trying to say that. So don't be like my wife, I guess, is the way that's supposed to work. So I didn't mean it quite that way. I'm going to pray because, Lord, I need help. And we're going to hop in and try to avoid more ditches. God, we thank you that you're good.
We thank you that you're gracious to us. And we pray, Lord, that in this that we would study your word and that we would grow in our understanding of what femininity is, how you designed humanity, both male and female, on purpose and with a good design that brings joy and human flourishing. We pray for the ladies in the room that they would press into you as they learn to press into and flex and grow in their God-given design. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. All right, we're going to be in Genesis chapter 1 and chapter 2, and then we'll move around a little bit.
But we'll start there this morning. Genesis chapter 1 is on page 1 in this Bible. If you don't own a Bible, this is our gift to you. Take it with you. Genesis chapter 1, starting in verse 26, 27, and 28. We're going to read that real quick together.
We've read this about every week through this series because it's essential to us understanding gender and sexuality. Then God said, Let us make man in our image after our likeness, and let them, such humanity, have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them. And God blessed them and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.
So God in creation makes male and female in his image and likeness. That both masculinity and femininity are designed to reflect God to the world. That both are. So it has been wrongly taught and wrongly taught from this passage, from a poor reading of the text, that this is only that men are made in God's image and females are not. It has been wrongly taught that women are innately inferior to men, and that is garbage. It's not true.
It clearly says that male and female were made in the image of God, and that that was God's good design from the very beginning. That there are ways that masculinity images God and ways that femininity images God. I'm going to try to say womanhood from now on, because that's going to get harder and harder as the day goes on. Womanhood images God that masculinity can't. So God intentionally designed manhood and womanhood differently on purpose.
So there have been the wrong ideas of women are inferior to men. They need to be barefoot in the kitchen. They need to know their role. They need to know their place. And that that is completely backwards, incorrect and is a as a heinous, aggressive stare down in the face of God's good design to make women in his image. And we completely reject that.
And out of that has arisen, actually, a rightly began the movement of feminism, looked at that and rejected that idea correctly, correctly rejected that idea. But then went the opposite direction with it. So that feminism says women and men are the same. If not, women are better than men. They can do everything a man can do. They're designed to operate the same way men are designed.
And they can do all the same things. They're designed the same way and are even better and superior in a lot of ways. And it's like, no, actually, God, when he designed humanity, made them distinct on purpose. That it's more than a biological distinction over how babies are made. That he actually intentionally created a gulf and made masculinity a certain way and femininity a certain way, far beyond biology, that was designed to be lived out in a way that together imaged him. That they were not complete without him.
So that masculinity and femininity are designed to complement one another, to shore up each other's weaknesses, to make each other's strengths stronger. One of the ways that this shows up, he gives them the, he says, God blessed them and said, be fruitful and multiply and subdue the earth. So the call to human flourishing is given to humanity in general, to males and females together, to work together, to subdue the earth. And it would not happen outside of both being there. Outside of masculinity and femininity playing out on a global scale, you wouldn't have human flourishing. One of the coolest examples of this, that's kind of in our own country, and I heard somebody talking about it recently and it reminded me of a Ken Burns documentary.
I don't know if you all know about Ken Burns, but that man can document stuff. And he does a lot of like PBS documentaries and stuff. And I watched one of the Old Wests. And when the West got started, when U.S. citizens started moving out that way, it was mostly just men. Men went, they were hunting, they were kind of trapping, getting furs, they were chasing after gold, they were chasing after land, they were being chased after by people. But they all just kind of moved out that way, and it was just men.
And there were a lot of like shanty towns and tents, and it was pretty terrible. But it was mostly just men that moved out there. It wasn't until the second wave when a large proportion of females went with them. And then suddenly, towns, laws, streets, like systems of government. Men by themselves could only take it so far. They were like, I'm here, there's a tent.
I use the bathroom over there. Got it. Like it was for some reason, masculinity only had half the picture. Like it could only handle so much. And then it wasn't until masculinity and femininity worked together that we began to see flourishing, began to see sustainable forms of life and growth. And honestly, that's kind of the picture we see at the very beginning of Scripture, where God makes male and female on purpose and says, this is how the world is going to flourish, is if you work together distinctly complementing one another.
So let's hop in. Let's look at some three essential ways that women image God to the world. And we're going to start in Genesis chapter 2. We're going to look at 15 and 18 to begin to see this. So Genesis chapter 2, that's one page over.
Oh, I jumped away too many pages. 15. The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and keep it. That's what we talked about last week. So God takes the man and puts him in the Garden of Eden to work it and keep it.
And then he says something really kind of surprising in the text in verse 18. Then the Lord God said, it is not good that the man should be alone. I will make a helper fit for him. If you've been reading through Genesis 1 and into Genesis 2, every time it would say God said something, he did something, and he saw that it was good. And then God said something, he saw it, and it was good. And God said something, he saw it, and it was good.
This is the first time that God does something and then goes, that's not good. And it's not a slight on Adam. It's just that masculinity alone is incomplete. Manhood alone is incomplete. And so when God designs femininity, he intentionally designs it different. He did not make one generic human person.
It wasn't like, oh, he just needs a team. No, he specifically intentionally made femininity different from masculinity. Womanhood different from manhood in order to work together on it. And so it says that I will make a helper fit for him. So the first kind of essential thing we see, we're going to look at that word helper.
And so immediately you're going, really? Helper? That's what we're starting off with? Yes, helper is what we're starting off with. It's from the word azer in the text. And it's really kind of two words stuck together.
It's the word strength and rescue kind of smooshed together. So the idea of helper in the text is not the idea that we have where we'll say stuff like, oh, you're going to be my little helper today. It's not at all what we're talking about. It's kind of the same as I was at the zoo the other day and was looking at a tiger and the little things like, tiger is a part of the cat family. And it's like, yeah, but they're a lot different from cats though, right? And so when we say the word helper, we kind of hear cat.
And it's like, sure, technically, but think more tiger. So when it says strong rescuer, that word helper is used 21 times in the Old Testament. 17 times it's referring to God. It's always referring to this moment of like a last ditch. Everything was going to be terrible until help came, until rescue came. The Septuagint, which is the Greek version of the Old Testament, actually translates that word auxiliary, which would be a backup reinforcement unit in the military.
So when it says that God looked at Adam and said he needs a helper, he doesn't mean little sidekick teammate. He means he needs a strong, empowering rescuer in some ways. That if you were reading the text in the original Hebrew, you'd be going, okay, this isn't looking good. This isn't looking good. Ah, reinforcements. We're not going to lose this battle.
This is actually going to work out. And so when it comes to biblical essence of femininity, one of the things woven into the heart and soul of womanhood is this, to be a helper, to be an ezer, which is, think about the idea of foreign aid. When a country comes to another nation, they're torn apart by war and famine and poverty, and they approach a bigger, stronger nation and say, hey, we need your help. We need you to step in and lend us your strength. That's the concept here. That's the picture we're given of biblical femininity, which means this.
Your strength exists for the benefit of others. Biblical femininity is that you were given strength on purpose for the benefit of others. That you're designed to notice weakness. That you're designed to notice pain. That you're designed to see those who need help and step in and empower them and equip them and help them. To step in where there's brokenness and bring healing and joy and life.
That's the idea here. It's like a mother that, over time, pours out her life for a child that is going to take life out of her and take life out of her and take life out of her. And less and less and less over time until the child is a full-grown, capable adult. That's the idea. That you would come around everyone around you. And it doesn't have anything to do with role.
It doesn't have anything to do with where you find yourself. You're going to do this with your roommates. You're going to do this with your community group. You're going to do this with your husband, with your children. You're going to look and see weakness. You're designed to see weakness and pain and step in and realize that your strength exists to be on loan for others.
That your energy exists to be on loan for others. That your joy exists to be on loan for others. To empower them and equip them. So there's currently kind of a conversation going on where there's this movement for if anybody around you drains you. If anybody around you is needy, you just need to get rid of that person. You just need to get them out of your life.
They're just a leech. They're just sucking the life out of you. You need to get rid of them. That's actually very unhelpful. Because part of the design of femininity is to pour out your life and your energy for the behalf of others. To lend your strength for others to grow strong and to be healthy.
And so one of the ways that this can... It is designed for other people to grow, to be empowered and to be equipped and to be sent out. It's not designed to be codependency. To where you only feel valuable if you're needed. So there have been, and even like in situations where a husband is on drugs and having issues with drugs.
Where a wife will actually come along at some point when he's doing better and help him relapse. Because she only understands her role as being needed. And if he's not on drugs, she doesn't understand how she has value anymore. It's not that idea at all. It's not the idea that you have to be needed at all times. It's just that you notice, step in, equip, empower and send out.
We sometimes use the term woman's intuition. So like my wife and I will go hang out with people and when we'll leave, she'll go... So, what was up with Gary? What? What was going on with him? Nothing?
There was definitely something going on with him. No, there wasn't. Y'all didn't talk about it? Talk about what? The thing that was going on. There wasn't a thing going on.
Like, we have these conversations all the time. She's like, what was wrong with them? Or I'll go hang out with someone that I already know there's a thing going on. And when I come back, she'll go, so what did y'all talk about? I'll be like, nothing. What about that problem they're having?
Oh, yeah. Nope. Didn't come up. How did it not come up? He didn't bring it up. I didn't.
I didn't. I didn't bring it up. What am I going to say? How's that pain going? Like, I'm not. But there's just something in femininity in her for her to notice that, to be drawn to that, and to step in, to help, to equip, to fix.
And honestly, there's a little bit of, okay, but what about my strength existing for me? What about what I'm equipped with existing for me? But the truth is, this is a very biblical concept to its core for humanity, not just femininity. That Jesus is going to say, deny yourself. He's going to say, pick up your cross, follow me. He's going to say that if you seek your own life, you'll lose it.
But if you lose your life for my sake, you'll gain it. He's going to say that he didn't come to be served, but to serve and to give his life on behalf of others. And there's actually something very godly in a way that you image God by using your strength for the benefit of others. That it's written into your soul. You're designed to do it. To see weakness, to step in, to equip, and to help.
The second one that we're going to see, we're going to jump to 320. We're just kind of following along this story, looking at Eve and realizing that a lot of this is talking specifically about her, but we're just trying to see as a type, as the first woman, as the first essence of femininity, representative of all femininity on earth. How does this play out? What is she called to? And how does this continue? So verse 20 says, the man called his wife's name Eve because she was the mother of all living.
Okay, this is actually really interesting where this shows up. It says he called his wife's name Eve. Eve means life because she was the mother of all living. This is prior to her having any children. So a lot of times, in a lot of cultures, not our culture, people are named names, given names based off of their characteristics, based off of their role, based off of who they are.
So in the Bible, there's a guy named Barnabas, which just means he's an encourager. They gave him that name because he was already encouraging. They weren't just like, hey, you seem like in the future you might encourage people. I'm going to start calling you Barnabas. It's like, hey, weirdo, don't change my name. It's like, but he was very encouraging.
So they just like, that became his nickname. That's what they called him. They changed his name to that. A lot of cultures still do this. My cousins, my parents, my grandparents were missionaries in Nigeria. I've got some first generation African-American cousins from Nigeria.
And one of my cousins married a guy named John. And it's really funny when I get to introduce them to people because I get to say, this is my cousin John. This is my cousin Iannu. Sorry, I messed it up. This is my cousin Iannu and her husband John. And John is aggressively white like I am.
He's got a big head. He's got kind of reddish beard like I do. And so immediately when I say, this is my cousin Iannu and her husband John, people like twitch because it's like, wait, I think he said that wrong. Because this is your cousin, the big white guy that looks like you. And so it's always fun. But this past Christmas, they sent from Nigeria, from their family, sent over clothes for all of them and had written their names in the clothes that they sent.
So they were going to have traditional Nigerian clothes and they've written their names in it. And John saw his and it said, John Oyinbo. And he looked at my uncle, my uncle Abel and goes, oh, Oyinbo, is that like my Nigerian name? And my uncle started laughing so hard he couldn't talk. Like he was like wheezing, couldn't get words out. Finally, when he caught his breath, he said, it means John white guy.
They also call you Okalawan, which is different person. But there's this idea in a lot of cultures that you get a name that goes with who you are. You get a name that kind of defines your. And so when he names her Eve, when he names her life and says she's the mother of life prior to her having children, there's actually this picture of not just she's going to be the mother of everyone, not just she is the mother of all life later, but also just this design in her, in femininity to bring life, to give life, to be a refuge is kind of the second idea we're going to look at this morning. So it's one of the ways that helped me understand this idea was I was reading a book by C.S.
Lewis and he was talking about his relationship with his father and his relationship with his mother. And when he was really young, his mother passed away. And after she passed away, he wrote this in this book. He said, with my mother's death, all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs at joy, but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands.
Now, the great continent had sunk like Atlantis. There's just this idea that without his mother, there there wasn't the same amount of of a refuge. His home wasn't home anymore. It was certainly a place to go to when he was out of school, certainly a place to be. But he never would feel quite like he was just free, just at home.
It's kind of the idea of if last week we said manhood is like being four walls and a roof, then femininity is a fireplace. It's everything that makes life livable. It's it's it's and it's not your ability to Martha Stewart, your house or to Pinterest, the fool out of everything. It has nothing to do with that. It doesn't have anything to do with your craftiness and whether or not your house has anything on the wall at all. It doesn't have have anything to do with you own a home.
It all it is is that home is where you are. Family is where you are. And we've all known people like this that just set us free to be ourselves. You know, you have certain friends and maybe your family that when you get around them, you're just more you than you are anywhere else. You're just a little less guarded, a little more free. I'm like this with my brothers.
They already know everything about me. So it's just and they have to be my brother forever. Like I just if I took them off, it's like, see you later. You're still my brother. See you at Christmas. How do you like them apples?
Like there's no no getting rid of me. And then there are certain people you get around and they just do the same thing. Certain ladies you get around and they just completely make you feel at home, make you feel welcome, make you feel free. And that's the idea of that she almost the infemininity written into the soul of femininity is the idea that you're actually a little bit of a mother to everybody. And I mean that in the most beautiful way, like the idea that everybody becomes part of your family. Everybody is fully welcome and free around you.
I can remember when I was in high school, my mom, any any story I had to tell, she was interested in just because I was telling the story. Like all that mattered was I was one of the characters in the story and she was happy, just like if I thought it was interesting. So I didn't the threshold for what she wanted to hear when I came home from school was very, very low. So on the way home, I'd be like, all right, let me think of something I can tell my mom. And I come up with some story that was just really not even a story. It didn't have any plot twists.
It didn't even really have any kind of where it was going. It was just like a thing. And in the middle of these stories a lot, my dad would walk into the room and he'd go, what? And I'd go, no, nothing. And he'd go, no, what? What are y'all talking about?
Because my mom would be laughing. She would actually make this story that wasn't a story like sound good. She'd laugh. She'd ask questions. She'd be like, what was his name? How did that happen?
Oh, my goodness. A Pepsi Cola. Like she just would make it like it didn't have to have any point. And somebody would go, what? What? No, y'all are talking.
What is it? And I'd go, this guy at school, he didn't have his homework. Before the teacher was going to take it up, he freaked out. And my dad would go, that's a stupid story. And walk off. And this happened on a regular basis.
And he never learned that the story wasn't going to be good. I like, he has a threshold for what makes a good story. I know that. I don't tell these stories to him. But there was something about my mom that just made it free.
Made me get to be me in a way that nobody else does. And there's something in femininity that allows you to just lower everybody's guard. That you're designed to make people feel comfortable and welcome and free. And it doesn't have anything to do with personality type. My wife's very quiet, very reserved. Three of her best friends were, it was a girl her age, a girl that was her sister, four or five years older, and their mom.
And that group of, that family, those three ladies, they believe if they have a thought, they had it for them to share with you. If they have an opinion, it was designed for them to say it out loud. They are very flamboyant, loud, happy, loud people. And they absolutely are themselves and they make you feel like yourself when you're around them. It doesn't have anything to do with personality type. It has to do with the ability to, you're not being judged.
You're not being graded. You're not having to live up to a standard. Ladies, if you're consistently having to compare yourself to other people and having to jockey for position and posture yourself to look good, you destroy your ability to do this. Because people aren't free around you because you need them to build you up. But when you're free in Christ to just be open to everybody, to just be welcoming to everybody, you get to kind of step into this role where home is where you are.
Family is where you are and your circle of concern just extends to everybody around you. My grandmother is like this. She hasn't met a person that she hasn't just adopted into her family for however long she's known them. Whether that's they sat near each other on a plane or she knew them for a couple of years before she moved or they moved. Everyone around her, she extends her circle of concern and they are just welcome with her. They're a part of her family the same that everyone else is.
And there's just something distinct in femininity that allows that to happen, that allows you to welcome and to be a refuge to everyone around you. And it doesn't have anything to do with personality type, with role. It actually is just something that's designed in the nature of womanhood. The third one is kind of interesting. So we're going to jump back into the narrative here in Genesis chapter 223.
We're going to look at the narrative and then we're going to go to 1 Peter to try to understand this one a little bit better. 2 Peter to try to understand this one a little bit better. 2 Peter to try to understand this one a little bit better. 2 Peter to try to understand this one a little bit better. So God had put Adam on earth.
2 Peter to try to understand this one a little bit better. 2 Peter to try to understand this one a little bit better. 2 Peter to try to understand this one a little bit better. So God had put Adam on earth. He had had him name all the animals. So he brought animal after animal after animal by named all the animals and said there was no suitable empowering strength, no suitable auxiliary for him, no suitable helper. and so then he makes Eve and he brings him to Eve and then it says the man said this at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh she shall be called a woman because she was taken out of man so when Adam sees Eve we get the first poetry in history it's either poetry or song it's not great I know you read it and you're like Adam bro step up your game man like this isn't I don't even like it doesn't rhyme hopefully it rhymed in Hebrew this isn't really great but what he what he does it's a little bit of this moment where his his heart finds resonance with her he he feels like finally he actually starts off with at last it's like that song at last like he just he sees her and it's just like and and there's this idea in creation and in God God is beautiful he's designed to be captivating to be delighted in there's over and over in the Psalms where David and other psalmists are writing and saying I just want to look at you I just want to stare at you I just want to be caught up in you and God specifically designed creation to be beautiful and there's something about femininity that has some of that impressed in it and it is not physical beauty or at least not only physical beauty so let's jump to first Peter before this gets really confusing and we take this in the wrong direction first Peter three says this is first Peter uh some of y'all familiar with this we spent the time studying this last year uh do not let your adorning be external okay uh some versions are going to translate that do not let your adorning be
External only and the word adorning there is cosmos which really means world so we use the the world the same way that sometimes we will say uh his whole world is sports uh that family that like her kids or her whole world so what he's saying is don't let your whole everything around you your whole existence be external the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry or the clothing you wear but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit which in God's side is very precious God specifically in creation made things beautiful made them to have a a weight and a gravity to be delighted in and gazed upon and there's something specific to femininity that evokes that that God has impressed his own way that that women image the image God is through a captivating personhood through a soul-stirring beauty and our culture has twisted this and marred this and bulldozed this into some nonsense we have absolutely turned it into a physical only sham of what God designed it to be we we are we have held up as a standard airbrushed supermodels that don't even look like that like they've had so much photoshopping and airbrushing they don't even look like the standard that they're propagating we're holding up a unicorn culturally and saying that this is what beauty is and peter's saying no no don't let your adorning only be that there's something in femininity that is for beautifying beautifying the world beautifying yourself making things beautiful but don't let it be can you go back to first peter don't let it be external only let it be the hidden person of the heart let it be depth of soul that leads to beauty honestly as these first two things come together there can be an imperishable beauty that doesn't age that continues forever doesn't grow old doesn't need to have doctors step in later and fix things that there's a genuine depth of personhood that makes beauty that makes uh females a delight womanhood a delight to be gazed at there's some of you ladies realize this early and it starts early it's really interesting I was talking with josh pabone yesterday he's got four children he has two boys
And two girls his boys say this hey dad look at this hey dad look at this and they're like look at this and they're like hit their brother with a stick like look at this kick I can do look at this thing I set on fire look at this lizard I caught look look at me do this but it's always this look at this and his daughters he's got two daughters and they say dad look at me look at me look at me if they're even if they're doing an activity the thing is look at me do this activity the goal isn't to look at the activity is to look at me they'll get dressed up aren't I beautiful look at me they have this desire to be delighted in for themselves it's it's innate it's woven in and we have distorted it twisted it and marred it and traded it in for some nonsense we we sold out genuine soul-stirring depth of personhood we sold out genuine beauty for a cheap marred hollow expression of it we sold out soul level delight for a momentary lust heart stopping resonance for a heart racing momentary nonsense it's like we traded in a carnival roller coaster for a lifelong adventure it's not worth the exchange that you were designed to be beautiful to be captivating to be gazed upon to be delighted in but not just not a not just a physical thing but actually to have depth of personhood that is welcomed and loved and delighted in and and honestly out of this uh grows this desire so when he's talking about let your your world not only be external it grows this desire to build a veneer to to paint everything up as if it is perfect to paint up your whole life as if you have everything together and honestly perfection when it comes to a pursuit of perfection that's kind of just a a feminine thing ladies pursue perfection in a way that men do not that was there's a there's an article in the land at the atlantic recently that was talking about this it's talking about closing the confidence gap was the name of the article and they're basically writing saying that overqualified women still don't apply for jobs that they're overqualified for because they're not sure if they're quite qualified enough and that underqualified men apply in mass like have empirically the data shows this would be terrible you're going to break this in half and sink it and they're like I deserve a shot let me have at it I think I could do a good
Job like and it just it's it's baffling they said that um that women don't uh turn in reports until they've edited them ad nauseum that they've they just feel this weight of perfection that men just it just doesn't show up on their radar there was a they did a study at cornell in a in an engineering course where uh it was kind of a course where people would flunk out in the course is one of those courses that just you got kind of to the middle and it just created space in the school and they were doing a study on the the males in the class and the females in the class and whenever it got hard almost a hundred percent of the males uh reacted externally and this class is hard this professor's tough these tests just got ridiculous and almost a hundred percent of the females reacted internally I knew I wasn't smart enough to handle this I knew I wasn't I knew I knew I couldn't cut it there's this weight of perfection this weight of trying to build this everything's all right around me it seems to to specifically land on on feminine shoulders that's why uh barbie dolls we just now we have female shaped barbie dolls now so like we should celebrate like they're actually they've just come out with these uh but they made barbie dolls and there was this this is a standard of beauty that no one can live up to this is there's no way we can ever exist here there's no way this is crushing and then you can take like a he-man action figure and take the like most slouchy overweight guy and he'll be like I can kind of see me in that it's a little bit like me right here because there's just there's that weight it's just sitting there and there's this this push to be the the perfect mom the perfect daughter the the perfect employer the imperfect employee the perfect everything and and can I just help you out it's not going to happen it doesn't exist you're not you're not going to be perfect you're not you're not going to have it all together the ladies in in the u.s are three times more likely to attempt to commit suicide
91 Percent of women in the u.s say they're dissatisfied with their bodies uh... and and women are 10 to 19 times more likely to suffer from an eating disorder they did they did a study on uh... college students and they found that over half of the the females that were in whatever the the uh... correct weight range for their uh... body type or whatever were on diets even though they didn't really need to be adjusted like that for health reasons that need to be adjusting their diets like it was it's just crazy the amount of pressure and weight that gets put on and um... there's a there's a director over at midtown she's she helps head up their kid city area and she said that one of the things she feels this weight of um... proving that she's lovely so that she'll know that she's lovable she says she's felt that her whole life that if she could just prove that she's lovely then she'd know that she was lovable and the reason we're talking about this is that there is something in the design of femininity to be enjoyed to be captivating
But it's not it's not to be found in just a physical expression or just building these veneers around you to prove that you're okay let's go to Ephesians 5 this is a section that paul ends by saying that the true meaning of marriage is the way Jesus loves the church that the whole point behind marriage that we have now is to actually show us how Jesus loves the church and so he says this husbands love your wives just as christ also loved the church and gave himself up for her so that he might sanctify her this is the church this is his bride this is his people this is all those who place faith in Jesus he might sanctify her which means set apart having cleansed her by washing of the water with the word that he might present to himself the church in all her glory
Having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing but that she would be holy and blameless ladies you were designed for perfection you were designed to fully live out what it meant to have your strength benefit others you were designed to fully be so comfortable and free in yourself that everyone was welcome around you everyone was free to be themselves around you and you were designed to be captivating to be loved to be delighted in and sin has wrecked that ever since eve in the garden first believed the lie that God was holding out on her that he had hidden from her what it meant to truly be made in his image ladies have believed that ever since
And Jesus stepped in in the midst of our brokenness in the midst of our sin and he went to the cross on our behalf and he has made you blameless and perfect and holy and spotless without wrinkle or blemish or any such thing it says that Jesus loved the church gave himself up for her that he might sanctify her having cleansed her by the washing of the water with the word that he might present to himself the church in all her glory having no spot
Or wrinkle or any such thing but that she would be holy and blameless he actually saved the church just to present her to himself just to delight in the church in his bride that he's rescued and redeemed and only through resting in Jesus only through finding this to be true so deep and so soul level will you ever be free to know that your strength is on loan like Jesus's strength was on loan where Jesus stepped in and used his strength on behalf of others you get to step in
And realize that you've been gifted and equipped and strengthened for the benefit of those around you and you'll get to see that because Jesus has welcomed you into his home and made you into his family that you get to welcome everybody into your home make them into your family that you get to make home and family everywhere that you are for every person you're around and that you were designed to be delighted in and that through Jesus you are
You're perfectly spotless and blameless and free to be delighted in and welcomed and loved and ladies you're not perfect you're broken you're weak you're busted and that's okay because Jesus didn't leave you there he didn't leave you on your own to fix it on your own to make it all painted up and pretty and look good so that you could display it to the world but he actually stepped in and fixed
Every wrinkle spot and blemish on his own washed you through his own blood and made you his that he might delight in you you already have perfection you already have freedom you already have love and delight and joy through Jesus and only as you step into christ and only as you trust in the cross and only as you know that this is already true for you can you actually begin to be all that femininity
Was designed to be the band's gonna come back up we're gonna sing and praise Jesus and we're gonna together as a church family seek to step into masculinity and step into femininity in a way that doesn't have anything to do with stereotypes doesn't have anything to do with role doesn't have anything to do with personality types but has everything
To do with our desire to image God to the world to encourage one another to see flourishing happen and to begin to use everything we've been equipped with and gift with for the good of others for God's glory for our joy as we get to follow after him and if you haven't trusted fully in what the cross has provided for you you haven't fully seen
Jesus hanging on the cross to rescue to redeem to fix you to take away every spot and blemish and wrinkle every bit of imperfection that he might delight in you he might lift you up and it says the church in all her glory that Jesus makes the church beautiful and then delights in her
I'd encourage you to trust in Jesus today for your satisfaction your joy and ultimately your freedom God we praise you we ask Lord that you would bless the ladies in our church family that they would in the roles they're given in the time they have with their roommates in the time they have with their
Spouses with their children with their employees with their employers to give them the opportunity to use their strength to sacrifice on behalf of others to welcome everyone to make freedom and joy exist where they are and God I pray that you would
Help them to see that beauty is far beyond surface level things and that you through the cross delight in them you have cleaned them perfected them to present to yourself and all their glory is you have saved them through the cross I pray God that we would continue to grow in what it means to be men
And to be women as we follow after you in Jesus name amen