Lust

Lust

Chet Phillips

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Well, good morning. We'll be in Proverbs chapter 5. That'll be on page 341. If your Bible looks like this, go ahead and get over to Proverbs chapter 5. We've got a good bit of work to do today. We're going to be talking about lust in our Killjoy series and about how our approach to sexuality and our approach to lust has begun to rob us of our ability to have joy, to have peace, to rest in God.

And so we've got a good bit to go through. I'm going to pray, and then we're going to hop in. God, we thank you that you're good. Lord, we thank you, Lord, that your word speaks about topics that we need to learn. That you don't leave us on our own to figure it out, but that you speak to us, that you lead us, that you give us wisdom that we would not have on our own. And so, God, we praise you.

We pray that we'd listen and we'd follow. In Jesus' name, amen. Verse 1 and 2, I love how this starts. It says, My son, be attentive to my wisdom. Incline your ear to my understanding, that you may keep discretion and your lips may guard knowledge. First little thing I just want to throw out there for us as we get started this morning.

This starts off, it's Solomon writing. So he was a king and he was very wise and he's writing to his son. Later he says, sons, for the parents in the room, you need to have some conversations about sex that start off with my son, my daughter. You've got to talk to your children about sex. I came across some statistics this week I want to share with you. This is from the National Center of Biotechnical Information.

I don't expect you to know what that is. I don't know what it is. It had a.gov website, so it's important. They do good things, I guess. They basically took television shows and it says they coded them. They tried to see what kind of material was in them.

So, for example, a recent content analysis found, this is a quote, that 82% of episodes coded contained sexual content. However, only 2.9% of episodes with sex, so 2.9% of that 82%, contained messages about sexual patience and 5.2% had messages about taking sexual precautions. So 82% of the episodes they looked at talked about sex and only a very small portion of those talked about any sort of waiting or at least taking precautions. It says the American youth, and I don't know what age group that is, it just says youth, see 14,000 references to sex per year. 14,000. That's like 38 a day.

One source I saw said that about 156 of those, so right at about 1%, will actually be references to sex inside of marriage. So 14,000 references to sex, the average age that an American youth engages with pornography for the first time is 11. That's sixth grade. That's the average age that someone first sees pornography. Parents, you've got to talk to your kids about sex. You've got to talk to them about sex the way that Solomon does, which is both here's what's dangerous about it and here's what's good about it.

And I do want to give you some encouragement. The number one impact that they've studied, children growing up or whatever, the number one thing that has impacted them is parental conversations. That has the biggest impact. It's the biggest assigning factor on how they're going to view sex. They are hearing about sex. They are learning about sex.

It's not like you can wait until they're older and then be like, oh, let me explain this to you. They already know. At this point, they might know things you don't know. Like, I don't know. I mean, they're handing out iPads to sixth graders. Praise Jesus they never handed me an iPad when I was in sixth grade and told me to do all my schoolwork on it.

Like, we've got to start having some conversations, but parental conversations actually impact them, have an effect. Now, is it going to be awkward? Certainly. If it's not awkward, you didn't do it right. Like, of course, talking to your kids about sex is going to be awkward. I remember my parents sat me and my two brothers down, and I was in the middle.

So one was older than me. One was younger than me. I was pretty young. I don't know how young I was. I mean, like, eight or ten or something. And they're like, all right, you're hearing about sex.

Let's talk about this. And so it was my mom and my dad. They drew pictures. Not stick with me. My mom was a nurse. So they drew, like, what happens inside.

So, like, there's nothing that takes the mystique out of sex like phrases like fallopian tube. But, like, they talked to us about how everything worked. And then when it got a little more intimate, I don't know. Like, my dad just, he was like, he took the back half of the conversation. He was like, let me explain how this works. And I remember he's telling us, like, this is how, you know, you learn the science.

Let me explain what it's going to, you know, you're not going to be thinking about fallopian tubes. Let me talk about, you know, the other stuff that happens. And he got done talking to his three sons, and I went, no, that can't be right. Like, that is not correct. And my older brother, Logan, who is one of our community group leaders, hit me and said, shut up. He knows what he's talking about.

He's done this three times. Here's the thing. I grew up in the United States. My parents did not do a whole lot of governing what we watched on television. I'm one of the people who has seen 14,000 references to sex a year, if not more. And I remember very distinctly the four or five conversations that my parents had with me about sex.

Parents, we've got to start having some conversations that start off with my son, my daughter. We need to talk about something. Sure, it'll be awkward, but it's going to be very, very good. Secondly, as we get started, I love that it starts off with my son. This is God who cares about us through the Holy Spirit authoring this, and this is the conversation he's having with us. He's saying, my son, my daughter, listen to me.

I care about you. He's not bringing the hammer down. He's not mad at you. He's sitting us down and saying, let's talk. Let's have a conversation about this.

Now, in our Killjoy series, we're going to approach this a little bit differently. Our culture, every time we talk about sex, we have to say so much because our culture has already said so much. When we start talking about, in a couple weeks, when we talk about worry and anxiety, and we're like, hey, worry and anxiety are bad. Like, we need to work on this. Everybody in the room is going. When we stand up and say, hey, sex outside of marriage is bad, we're like, hmm, I don't know.

Seems kind of great. We just have to do more. We have to say more to help explain what we're talking about here. So we did a series at the beginning of the year called The Theology of Sex. I would really encourage you to go back and listen to it if you have questions about where we stand on things. We talked about masculinity, femininity, gender, homosexuality.

Like, we tried to do as best we could for seven weeks. Open the Bible. Here's what it says. Today, specifically, we're going to do a little bit of work to just say, here's what the Bible says about sex, and here's how we as Christians who are trying to follow this can find some freedom and some joy in what God's called us to. So before we jump in, I think we've got to take just a second to talk about what the Bible says is the framework for sex, what the Bible says positively about sex.

So the Old Testament sex ethic and the New Testament sex ethic are the same, and here's how it works. No sex of any kind outside of a covenant, period. All right? Let's talk. What's a covenant? Do we have a modern equivalent word for that?

No. Here's how a covenant works. A covenant is a relationship with a commitment. So it's a relationship with a legal commitment so that the relationship is actually better, made stronger by the legal commitment. What we're most used to are relationships and contractual consumer relationships where both of them are based off of what am I getting out of this. A covenant is the opposite.

A covenant is where I say, here's what I'm going to do, period. It doesn't matter what you do. Here's what I'm going to do regardless of how you respond, how you act. That's what a marriage covenant is. It's where a man and a woman say, I covenant with you to give myself to you, everything I have to you forever. That is where sex belongs.

In the Bible, sex is a covenant good, meaning that sex only happens inside of a marriage covenant. Now, that sounds crazy to our culture. And for us who've grown up and even like we've listened to the 14,000 messages a year, we're going, yeah, okay, I know that the Bible says that. Let me tell you a few things really quickly just about us as a church and why we open this every week and spend so much time talking out of it. This has authority over us. If we come to this and we get to pick and choose what we like and what we don't like and what's in date and what's out of date, we're in charge.

This isn't. And let me explain something to you. If we get to do that, if I get to approach the Bible with I'm in charge, let me say what I like and let me skip what I don't like, what we're doing right now is a waste of time. If we get to be in charge of the Bible, studying it is a waste of time. If the Bible is in charge of us, then it's absolutely valuable, although sometimes frustrating and difficult. Okay?

Is that fair? We believe that Jesus is in charge, so we spend a lot of time studying his word. What the Bible says about sex makes us seem crazy. Now, if you're a Christian and you actually believe the Bible and you're trying to follow it, I have good news for you. Christians have always seemed crazy when it came to sex. Does that make you feel better?

That's how it started. The original Christian sex ethic seemed crazy to their culture. We actually have a letter that was written where somebody was trying to explain, okay, let me try to help you understand Christians because they're a phenomenon now. They're all over the place now. The whole Roman Empire is crawling with these people. Let me start explaining to you why they're weird.

One of the quotes from that is he says, one of the things that's weird about Christians is they have a common table but not a common bed, meaning they'll share their table with anybody. You can go over to their house. You can eat a meal, which was completely opposite from culture because eating a meal meant you and I are on the same level. And they said, but they don't have a common bed, meaning that they only sleep with the person they're married to. Isn't that weird? That was the point he was making because in their culture it was the opposite.

You could sleep with whomever, but you didn't share your table with everybody. And Christians showed up and said, no, anybody can come to my house. Anybody can eat with me. We're on the same plane with everybody, but you leave my bed alone. So I hope it makes you feel better.

We've been weird for thousands of years. Let's, as a church, continue that and find out what it's supposed to look like. Here's the thing. We're used to consumer relationships, meaning that whatever I get out of this relationship matters. My needs matter more than the relationship. So some of you iPhone people, we have iPhone people in here.

Like raise your hand. You can participate. You got iPhone people. Okay. Any Motorola. What is it?

Nokia. What is it? What's the other one? Android. Not Nokia. Android.

Man, I miss my Nokia phone, y'all. It's like a brick that made phone calls. It was amazing. Android people. Okay. So some of you, you had an iPhone.

They keep updating it. Eventually, they made a new one that bends when you put it in your pocket and doesn't have a headphone jack. Now, you weren't like, no, I'm committed to iPhone. I've got to stick with it. Some of y'all realize that Androids have that little thing where you don't have to pick up your thumb when you're texting. Have you seen Android users' text where they just go, and it's like magic, and your iPhone keeps auto-correcting words to nonsense so it doesn't make any sense?

And so you were like, I'm going to get an Android. I'm going to get a Samsung Galaxy. And then it turns out that those are flammable. You bought an expensive Molotov cocktail. You didn't stick with Samsung anymore. Like you went and traded that one in.

You were like, good, y'all fix it. This one isn't going to catch on fire. And they were like, well, eh. And that one's still calling fire. And so you moved back. You went to a different one.

Some of you saw the commercials where you were with Verizon, but with Sprint you can cut your bill in half. And we've moved because our needs matter more than the relationship. None of us are committed to Samsung so much that even though they're recalling their phones and their washing machines, you're like, I'm sticking with it, even though it's going to set my house on fire and somehow harm my children. Like you're not doing that. We're used to consumer relationships where whatever I want, whatever I'm getting out of this matters more than the relationship. And that is not a covenant.

A covenant is the relationship, the commitment matters more than what I get out of it. And that biblically is where sex was designed to take place. In the Bible, the guardrails for sex are high and narrow. But once you're on that road, it's the Audubon. Go for it. That's the biblical approach.

That's why later in this chapter it's going to get a little intense. So let's read a little bit about what this says here. Jump to verse 15 because I still want to show us the biblical picture for picture for where sex is supposed to happen. And then we'll walk back through and talk more about lust. So 15 drink water from your own cistern.

Flowing water from your own well. So this is in the context of sex. What he's saying is be married. He's going to later say the wife of your youth. He says be married, have a husband, have a wife. And that's where you drink water.

Flowing water. Morning water. Evening water. Afternoon water. Drink some water. Should your springs be scattered abroad?

Streams of water in the street. That's a rhetorical question. The answer is no. Your water at your own place. Not out in the streets. Let them be for yourself alone.

Not for strangers with you. So, is this person my spouse? This is my husband. Is this my wife? That's the sexual question. If this is your spouse, then yes.

Go for it. Any other people. Any other strangers. Any other anything. Isn't allowed in there. It's just you.

Sex was designed by God to be a sacrament in some ways. A sacrament is a physical act that reminds us of a spiritual reality. When we take communion, that's a sacrament. It's a physical act that reminds us of the broken body and the shed blood of Jesus. When we have baptism, that's a sacrament. That's a physical act that reminds us that we were buried with Jesus.

We rose again. When you have sex, it's meant to be a sacrament for your marriage. Which is a physical act that says, I give everything to you. My whole life. My finances. My economics.

My social standing. Everything. We share everything. I'm completely vulnerable with you. Everything I have. Everything I'll ever be.

Everything I ever was. I'm giving to you. I'm committing to you. That's what sex inside of a marriage was meant to be. A covenant renewal. All of me belongs to all of you.

C.S. Lewis says that sex outside of marriage is like chewing food and then spitting it out. Sex outside of a covenant is kind of like bulimia. In bulimia, you eat food, but then you make yourself throw up. So what you want is the flavor.

What you want is the taste. But you're not committed. You don't want the calories. You don't want the trans fat. That's sex outside of marriage. When somebody wants to sleep with you, but not commit to you, what they're saying is I want your flavor, but none of your baggage.

I don't want any of your trans fat. A philosopher, Immanuel Kant, he's a central figure in modern philosophy. He said it this way. Sexual love makes of the loved person an object of appetite. As soon as the appetite has been stilled, the person is cast aside as one casts away a lemon which has been sucked dry. But that was never meant to be how sex worked because sex is in the Bible a covenant good, not a consumer good.

It exists inside of a covenant, not a consumer relationship. Keep reading verse 18. Let your fountain be blessed and rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely dear, a graceful doe. I love that he says that. He says the wife of your youth, the person you married a long time ago, that's your wife forever. That's your husband forever.

Let me explain to you. If you're married, let me answer a few questions for you. A lot of times in our culture we ask the question, is this person the one? Are you married to them? They're the one. You found them.

Good Job, you guys. So proud of you. If you're married to them, that's the one. That's your one. Stick with them. That's it.

You got the one. You don't have to keep asking that question. And what's your type? Well, are you married? That's your type. When you started, your type was athletic.

Now your type watches sports. That's your type. Your type's gotten bigger. You like bigger. Your type went bald. You love bald.

You're into bald. Your type got old. Your type got wrinkly. Your type changes its hair color every month. You change your type every month. Sometimes you got to check.

I don't know. I might be in the blondes. I hadn't seen her. She went to the thing. I don't know what I'm going to be into when she gets home. But when she gets home, I'm going to be into something.

Mom, that's how that works. You enjoy the wife of your youth, the husband of your youth forever. Verse 19. A lovely dear, a graceful doe, let her breasts fill you at all times with delight. Be intoxicated always in her love. People give Christians a hard time and they'll periodically say, you take the Bible literally, sometimes it has its benefits.

Here's what it's saying. Nowhere else. Nowhere else do you enjoy sexual relationships. Nowhere else do you go to find any sort of sexual fulfillment in the covenant relationship with a real person that you've committed your life to. A real person that you've committed everything you have to them. The person that still like cries at every sappy movie even if they've seen it a hundred times.

The person that's still secretly into 90s boy bands. The person who has road rage issues. The person who at the end of a hard day sits next to you and knows exactly what to say. Or always knows how to make you laugh. Or the person that consistently sticks their foot in their mouth. That real person that's going to change throughout your life, that's the person you're committed to sexually forever.

A real person that you know that you've committed everything to. There's a John Legend song that says, Because all of me loves all of you. Love your curves and all your edges. All your perfect imperfections. Give your all to me. I'll give my all to you.

I don't know if he had covenant marriage in mind. That's what he just described. Everything I have belongs to you. And sex out of that context is saying, I want your flavor. I want some of you. But I'm keeping me back.

I don't belong to you. You don't really belong to me. I don't want any of your baggage. I just want to physically enjoy some of this. And it's holding back. It's not giving.

It's not free. 20. Why should you be intoxicated, my son, with a forbidden woman and embrace the bosom of an adulteress? So as we go back through this, we're going to start back up in verse 3. We're going to talk about the forbidden woman. And here's the forbidden woman biblically.

Here's what lust is. It is a desire sexually for anyone who is not your spouse. A desire sexually for anyone. A covetous desire sexually for anyone who is not your spouse. So the New Testament is going to use the term porneia, which is translated a lot as sexual immorality.

It just means all sexual anything outside of covenant marriage. Jesus is going to say, don't look at another woman lustfully who is not your spouse. So it means any sort of desire sexually for someone you're not married to. That is the line that the Bible draws. Sex is supposed to be, I do forever, not you'll do for now. That's the Bible's approach.

Now our culture wants it to be a consumer good. It wants it to be just a physical appetite. That's what we're told over and over again. Go to verse 3. We're going to start talking about our culture a little bit. Try to understand where we are.

What we've been told, for the lips of a forbidden woman drip honey and her speech is smoother than oil. Okay, that's imagery. That's a picture. Do her lips actually drip honey? No. Does she actually squirt oil out of her mouth when she's talking?

No. He's giving imagery. He's saying this is what it seems like. What he's saying is the forbidden woman, the person that you're not married to, seems amazing, sweet, healthy, enjoyable. She drips honey. Have you ever wondered why all the other husbands are not idiots?

You ever wondered why they do such a good job parenting? Have you ever wondered why they treat their wife so well? Have you ever wondered why this guy seems so great? It's because it's a lie. You ever wondered why their wives never talk to them like this? You ever been up until 2 o'clock in the morning arguing?

You got mascara running down your face and then at some point you get on Facebook and you see these pictures of people on vacation and you see, look at how magic that is. It's a lie. Nobody's taking a selfie at 2 a.m. after an argument. Hashtag exhausted. Hashtag 2 a.m. life. Hashtag depressed.

Nobody's doing that. The person you're not with, the person you're not married to, the person, and if you're not married, anybody you're not married to, they drip honey. Smoother than oil. The way they talk is like Barry White. Hey, baby. Like it's smooth, seems great, but it's a lie.

That's the point he's making. It seems wonderful. See, we're told that sex is just physical, but that's not why we go to it. It's not why we chase after it. See, we're pursuing sex to be free, to be loved, to not be alone anymore. I'm not alone, at least not right now.

I'm wanted. I'm desired. I'm approved of. I'm cared about. You don't go back to porn over and over again just for some sort of physical pleasure. You've got to be comforted.

You've got to be in control. You've got to have someone desire you and long for you. See, we're on a soul-level pursuit when it comes to sex. That's why Fifty Shades of Grey was the fastest book ever to sell a million copies. How many people read that book or went to that movie with this question? Am I missing something?

Am I missing out? What am I missing? Because we've begun to believe that sex gives life, fulfillment, satisfaction, and that we have to have it. But it keeps going. Verse 3. For the lips of a forbidden woman drip honey, and her speech is smoother than oil.

But in the end, she's bitter as wormwood. Wormwood is just a plant, a spice that's very bitter. Sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death. Her steps follow the path to Sheol. That's the Old Testament word for the pit or the place of the dead.

So it's hell. He's saying her path goes to hell. She does not ponder the path of life. Her ways wander, and she does not know it. And I would argue that this is us in our culture when it comes to sexuality. We've been promised life.

We've been promised fulfillment. We've been promised honey and oil. And we're wandering off the path of life towards hell, and we don't even know it. We've been promised satisfaction and freedom. And we've wandered off, and we don't even realize it. There was a quote from a lady.

It's an article that went viral for a little while. It said her name is Jamie Varon. The article is called This Is How We Date Now. It starts off this way. They've always said there are so many fish in the sea, but never before has the sea of fish been right at our fingertips. On OkCupid, Tinder, Grindr, Dash, take your pick, we can order up a human being the same way we order up Pad Thai.

Those are dating websites or apps. I'm not saying those are wrong, but I am saying that our approach to dating has changed. That's the point she's making here, that we've begun to approach it as approaching a buffet. She says, if we commit, we are still one eye wandering at the options. We want the beautiful kind of filet mignon, but we're too busy eyeing the mediocre buffet because of choice. Our choices are killing us.

We think choice means something. We think opportunity is good. We think the more chances we have, the better, but it makes everything watered down. Never mind actually feeling satisfied. We don't even understand what satisfaction looks like, sounds like, feels like. We're one foot out the door because outside that door is more, more, more.

We don't see who's right in front of our eyes asking to be loved because no one is asking to be loved. We long for something that we still want to believe exists, yet we're looking for the next thrill, the next jolt of excitement, and the next instant gratification. Sex has offered us an endless buffet of satisfaction, and it's robbed us the ability to ever actually be satisfied because we've got one foot out the door, one eye on our options, and we've forgotten how to covenant. And we've taken sex out of a covenant relationship, put it in a consumer relationship, and it was never meant to be there.

The New York Times actually ran an article entitled The Downside of Cohabitating Before Marriage. They did some research, and they found that 20-somethings, half of 20-somethings agreed that they would not ever get married unless they had lived with someone first to see if they were compatible. And about two-thirds said that they believed moving in together before marriage was a good way to avoid divorce. And then the New York Times article goes on, and it's walking through this pretty well and trying to not get too far. It's New York Times. They've got to kind of thread the needle here.

But basically their point is that's not actually true. Cohabitating before marriage increases your negative statistics, increases the chance of divorce. And so they're basically looking at it and saying, okay, we know we have the cohabitating effect. That's what they call it. And they're like, why? What is living together before marriage?

How does that affect things? And here's one thing. This is a quote. One thing men and women do agree on, however, is that their standards for a live-in partner are lower than they are for a spouse. And that's because they're consumers. They've got one foot out the door, one eye on their options.

The lady interviewed said this, I felt like I was on this multi-year, never-ending audition to be his wife. They end the article with, a life built on top of maybe you'll do simply may not feel as dedicated as a life built on top of the we do commitment of marriage. See, sex in that kind of a relationship is marketing. It's a desire to keep someone focused on you. At best, it's you holding back while trying to take, but also trying to have enough sex so that you're on an audition. Sex has promised us security and love, and what it's given us is year-long auditions.

It's given us years of insecurity trying to keep someone when it was never meant to be in that relationship in the first place. Sex has promised us freedom. It drips. Honey, it's smoother than oil. It promises us freedom. But more and more scientists and neurosurgeons have come out, and they're looking at neuroscience, which is the study of the brain, and they've begun to understand about neuroplasticity, which means that your brain can change.

It can physically change. This is what happens in addiction. Your brain physically rewires itself throughout your life. One of the ways that it was explained in an article I read was if every time you hang out with your uncle, the first thing he does is give you a hug, and then he hands you an ice cream cone, and pretty soon your brain is going to rewire around my uncle is awesome. Because when you get a hug, your brain releases oxytocin. When you get ice cream, your brain releases dopamine, and your brain begins to set up, based on the circumstances, what caused this feeling, what caused this emotion.

When you have sex, your brain releases dopamine, oxytocin, vasopressin, endorphins, and it begins to rewire your brain. Oxytocin is a bonding chemical. Here's what that means. Here's what they're saying. Sex rewires your brain to be addicted. It works like a drug.

If you're in a covenant relationship, that's beautiful. That God designed sex to make you more and more addicted to your spouse. More and more addicted to them so that your brain actually rewires to where that's the person that I'm hooked on. That's beautiful. But if you take sex out of a covenant relationship, that's terrifying.

They actually said that sex becomes like taking a piece of duct tape and wrapping it around the hairy arm of a large man and then peeling it off. You get a lot of hair. You get a lot of skin flakes. Because sex was meant to bond. So it's like duct tape.

It's sticky. And then they said if you take it and wrap it around someone else's arm and then peel that off. This is in the book Hooked. It was written in 2008 by some neurosurgeons who were studying this. They said if you keep doing that, eventually the duct tape loses its stickiness. What they were arguing for is that brain science says – they're not Christians.

They're not arguing. They're just saying brain science says that sex with multiple partners actually makes you less sticky, makes sex work less the way it was supposed to. This is actually why pornography is so addictive. There's a website now called Fight the New Drug. They have a lot of really good statistics. Basically, pornography addiction works like a heroin addiction.

It changes your brain's chemistry so that pornography becomes the thing you're absolutely addicted to. It works with the same reward loops and the same addiction centers. Basically, what happens is your body during pornography and during sex releases a bunch of dopamine. So your dopamine receptors are overloaded. Eventually, if you keep doing this, your body takes away dopamine receptors. So you need more and different to continue to feel the same feeling.

That's how heroin works. That's how pornography works. You need more and different. And because your body has less dopamine receptors, your brain has less dopamine receptors, other things don't seem as good anymore. That's why pornography has become such a crippling issue. I saw a statistic that said one survey said that 50% of Christian men and 20% of Christian women reported feeling addicted to porn.

I want to say this. Pornography is not just a man problem. One of the issues we have in the church is that we have females who are addicted to pornography and they feel this extra layer of shame that I can't tell anybody because this is a man's issue. It's not. It's a human issue. It's a sin issue.

And Jesus saves sinners. We need to begin being able to talk about these things. Here's the thing. Sex was meant to be addicting. And inside of a covenant relationship, praise Jesus, that's beautiful. But when we move it from the right context to the wrong context, it breaks down and doesn't work the way it was supposed to.

We were promised freedom. And it's enslaved us. One of the articles I read, it was absolutely devastating because sex has promised so much for us. It's promised security and love and connection. One of the articles I read is called Sex Before Kissing. They interviewed 600 females from the age of 15 to 19.

This was from Australia. They're asking these females from age 15 to 19, what's it like living in a world where all the guys are addicted to porn? That's the question. How does this affect relationships? How does this affect dating? 15 to 19-year-old girls.

This is a quote. Some see sex only in terms of performance, where what counts most is the boy enjoying it. I asked a 15-year-old about her first sexual experience. She replied, I think my body looked okay. He seemed to enjoy it. Many girls seem cut off from their own sense of pleasure or intimacy.

The main market of a good sexual encounter is only if he enjoyed it. Girls and women are under a lot of pressure to give boys and men what they want, to become a real-life embodiment of what the boys have watched in porn, adopting exaggerated roles and behaviors and providing their bodies as mere sex aids. Growing up in today's porn culture, girls quickly learned that they are service stations for male gratification and pleasure. We're wandering towards hell. We've left life and joy and fulfillment and satisfaction and security and love. We're not there anymore.

We've started wandering towards hell and we don't even realize it. What was supposed to be freedom? What was supposed to be so good? What was supposed to end repression? Seventh-grade girls are asking questions about bondage and S&M. Many of them have seen Fifty Shades of Grey and wonder, if a boy wants to hit me, tie me up, and stalk me, does that mean he loves me?

Girls are tolerating demeaning and disrespectful behaviors and thereby internalizing pornography's message about their submissive role. Sexual conquest and domination are untempered by the bounds of respect, intimacy, and authentic human connection. Young people are not learning about intimacy, friendship, and love, but about cruelty and humiliation. One of the arguments for pornography is that it teaches sex education, and I would argue that it does, but it's a bad education. It teaches about aggression, dominance, and bad sex. No intimacy, no love, no kissing, no talking, no friendship.

Teens who have had sex, this is a different article, are three times more likely to be depressed than teens who haven't. Female teens are three times more likely to commit suicide, this is in the U.S. Males are eight times more likely. That's not causation, that may be correlation, but we've got to start asking some questions. We were promised love, we were promised security, we were promised freedom, and we've gotten everything but, because we've left the path of life and we've started wandering towards hell. That's what the Bible says about sex, that it was meant to be beautiful and addicting and good.

You can't argue that the Bible is anti-sex. You cannot make that argument. It begins with a God who creates a man and a woman naked, brings them to each other. The man begins to sing or just make up some poetry, which seems like an appropriate response. God brings a naked man, a naked woman, brings them together, and the first thing he says to him is, be fruitful and multiply. And that's just how the Bible starts.

There are sections in the Song of Solomon, which is about the enjoyment of married sex, that every time translators get to it, they kind of shy away because they're given some imagery that's really graphic. And so they tone it down as best they can. But if you can read Greek, which I can't, but I've been told, it makes people blush. But we've been lied to. We aren't secure. We've got one foot out the door.

We keep having to sell other people on our benefits. We're not satisfied. One of the pictures that the New Testament gives for hell is a place of unending thirst. And that's where we are in the U.S. when it comes to our sexual desires. We have an unending, eternal, unsatisfied thirst. One of the things, if you look at magazine covers, they used to say you need to be having more sex.

Now what do they say? You need to be having better sex. Why? They sold us on more sex. Are we satisfied? No, we must be doing it wrong.

Sex hasn't led us to heaven. It's led us towards an unending, unsatisfied thirst and longing, which the Bible says that's hell. We're not free. We've been enslaved. We aren't loved. We're used.

We aren't known. We're sucked to dry and thrown away. Chewed up and spit out. Our progressive, free, enlightened approach to sex has not delivered. It's dripping honey, but it's as bitter as wormwood. It promised life.

It's leading us towards death. It promised heaven. It's led us towards hell. My wife, when she was in high school, the first time she ever filled up her car, she had a big Ford Explorer, and the first time she ever filled it up, it was on E. She was all excited. She was going to fill it up.

She filled it up. She drove across the street, and her engine stalled out and died. So her dad had to come, and they were like, does it have gas? Yes. Is it overheating? Like, it took them forever to realize she had filled it up with diesel.

Ford's floors are big. They're not that big. The reason it didn't work was because she put diesel in a gasoline engine. That's what we've done with sex. We've taken a covenant good and put it in a consumer setup, and it's not going to work. It's not going to provide.

It's not going to do everything it promised. So what do we do? How do we respond? If we're caught up in lust, if we're caught up in pursuing the person we're not married to, if we've already done this, if we're addicted to pornography, some people in the church have been addicted to pornography for decades. Began when you were 15, 13. It's been decades of lust.

Decades of, well, this is normal. This is the way guys are supposed to be. Or this is, every woman does this. Or this is how it works. And we've been told over and over again, 14,000 messages a year about how sex is supposed to work. It's robbing us of joy.

It's not freedom. It's slavery. There's a pastor in New York. His name's Tim Keller. He says that whenever someone comes to him and they say, a young person unmarried, and they come to him and say, I'm not a Christian anymore. I'm leaving the church.

He says his first question is, who have you been sleeping with? Immediately they're like, what? What does that have to do with anything? And his response is, nine times out of ten, the reason they're leaving the church is because they've been caught up in sex, and willful disobedience to the Bible makes God's presence unnoticeable, imperceivable. Some of us would say, I am a Christian. I follow the Bible, but when it comes to sex, we've bought in hook, line, and sinker to every message we've heard in our culture.

The Bible's repressive. The Bible's outdated. I follow it in these areas, but not this one. And it makes following Jesus joyless and difficult. So what do we do?

Solomon gives us some help. Verse seven. First thing we've got to do. Listen to what the Bible says about sex. Verse seven. And now, O sons, listen to me, and do not depart from the words of my mouth.

A lot of churches don't talk about sex. We've talked about sex a decent amount this year. We've devoted eight sermons to it, but you'll hear 38 messages on sex today. Eight isn't a lot. It seems like we talk about it a good bit, but our culture is pounding us with the ideas of sex and how we ought to think about it. It's aggressively telling us what we've got to believe, and we've got to start opening our Bibles and reading and meditating on what God says about sex because otherwise we're going to believe what our culture is telling us.

He says, listen, don't depart. That sounds crazy. It sounds prudish. It sounds restrictive. Yes. Yes.

But true freedom is found inside the bounds of healthy restrictions. That's how that works. Birds can fly because they're restricted by little body weight and thin little bones and wings. Fish are most good and okay in underwater. They're restricted by that, but that's where they find freedom. That's how it works.

Great pianist has only become that by practicing hours a day. They become free on a piano because they've completely restricted themselves. That's how sex is supposed to work. We've got some restrictions, but that's what leads to freedom. Verse 8. First thing we've got to do is listen to what the Bible says about sex, which means some of us need to open our Bibles and begin reading, trying to find out.

Verse 8. Keep your way far from her and do not go near the door of her house. We've got to take drastic steps. We've got to take drastic steps. Don't go near the door of her house. Keep far away from her.

The way Paul's going to say this in 1 Corinthians 6 is flee. The way Jesus says it, he says if you lust, pluck your eyeball out. That's crazy. He says cut your hand off. That sounds crazy, but he says it's better to have life and be maimed. It's better to have life and only one eye than to be led astray towards death and hell.

We have to take some drastic steps. Martin Luther says if your head's made of butter, stay away from the fire. We got a lot of butter heads in our church that are just sitting next to a fire and we need to make some good decisions here. Some of you, next week when you show up, you need to be showing off your new flip phone. Some of you need to save $9 a month and get rid of Netflix. When I counsel some of the guys in our church and they're struggling with pornography, one of the questions I've asked before is how many times, you got roommates?

Yeah. How many times have you looked at porn at your kitchen table? Zero. Good. That's where your computer stays from now on. On your kitchen table.

Some of you, your biggest temptations at night with your smartphone, put it out, put it out in the hall, sit on the table. Well, yeah, but I use it as an alarm clock. Walmart sells ones that just have red lights on them and they sound like this in the morning. Eh, eh, eh, eh. That will wake you up. Some of us need to take some drastic steps.

Some of you are in relationships. You need to break up. You need to move out. You need to leave their house at 8 o'clock at night. I heard one pastor say that he's got daughters and he tells them, don't believe anything a guy says after 8 that he doesn't say during the day. If he says it after 8 p.m. but he doesn't say it the rest of the day that it's not true.

Some of us just need to leave the house sitting up, watching a terrible show on Netflix until 2 o'clock in the morning that you're not really interested in next to your boo isn't staying far away from the door. Let me take some drastic steps. Now, that's not going to change your heart, but it can let you catch your breath enough to start trying to pursue Jesus. A couple of other drastic steps that need to be taken. Some of you, for the first time, need to tell your community group. You need to have someone in your group, some ladies in your group, some guys in your group that you say, I'm struggling with this.

You need to be honest. Sexual sin is sin, but it's just sin. And Jesus saves sinners. There's hope for us. 1 John 1, 6-9, we'll have it on the screen. If we say we have fellowship with Him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth, but if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus, His Son, cleanses us from all sin.

That we can bring things into the light. Sin grows in the dark, so what you've been told over and over again is you can't tell anybody this. You've got to win it on your own. You've got to fight this on your own. What if they find out? What if they know?

Bring it into the light so that we can have fellowship with each other and then Jesus can cleanse us of all sin. There's not a single thing that you can bring into the light that He can't handle. There's not a single thing, groups, when y'all get together this week and somebody confesses this, don't look at them like a lobster just crawled out of their mouth. We're together because Jesus saves sinners. sinners. Yeah. People in your community group struggle with lust.

Absolutely. In our culture, if you don't struggle with lust, it's amazingly difficult and you're special if this isn't one of your issues. Praise Jesus, but we've been bombarded with message after message about sex and sexuality and lust. And we need freedom, but Jesus saves sinners. Keep going. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.

If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Some of us need to have conversations, bring some things into the light and find some freedom. Quickly, and we've got to keep moving. Some of you need some friends. Not just friends you confess your sin to. You need that.

Some of you need some friends of the opposite sex. C.S. Lewis says one of the quickest ways to get rid of lust is to get to know a person. It's hard to lust after a person you actually know. Some of you need some friends of the opposite sex. Now, there's some wisdom to be applied here.

I don't do counseling with females alone. There's some things that you need to be aware of, but one of the teachings that has happened at least throughout my life growing up in the church is guys, you can't be near girls. Can't be friends with them. Sex. Girls, stay away from guys. Can't be friends with them.

Okay. If one of our problems is that we treat the opposite sex like an object, running away from them and being absolutely afraid of them because if we get alone with them, sex will magically happen is a pornographic fantasy and it is also still treating them like an object. We need brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers. That's how Paul says to treat people in the church. If they're older than you, they're a mother. If they're older than you, they're a father.

If they're younger than you, brother or sister. You know what's beautiful about those relationships? Sex is completely off the table. If you are not married to them, they are a brother, a sister, a mother, or father. Dating relationships. If you are not married, brother or sister, mother or father.

If you need to know how that practically applies to your dating relationship, I'd love to talk with you about it. I'm serious. We can talk about it. We need some actual friends. We need some actual friendships with people of the opposite sex that we treat like a brother or a sister. brother. He keeps going.

He's going to say throughout 10 through 14, he keeps going back into, so he gives some advice, seven and eight, and then he keeps going back into some issues and struggles you're going to have. Get back to 15. We read this a minute ago. Drink water from your own cistern, flowing water from your own well. Third thing we need is we need a better well. We need a better well.

Tim Keller, I quoted him a second ago. He says this about covenantal marriage. He says that in covenantal marriage you're given three things that you can't find in any other type of relationship. One is you're given a zone of security. You do not have to continue to perform. If you actually have a covenantal relationship, you are not performing to keep somebody.

Two, when you've committed to someone beyond your feelings, deeper feelings grow. The only other relationship we have like this is parents to children. You know how this works, right? Like you have children. They bring nothing to the table. They're kind of the worst.

I've heard comedians say that having a child and a really drunk roommate is the same thing. That's pretty true. Then they keep getting older and they keep getting older and you keep sacrificing and you keep giving and you keep loving them regardless of your needs being met. They aren't meeting your needs as like the most special amazing children. You're not getting anything out of this relationship. You're giving and you're giving and you're giving and you're giving and then when they turn 14 you tell them a rule and you say you can't do this and you know what they say?

You hate me and I hate you and you've never done anything for me. And so you choke them but you keep giving and giving and giving and sacrificing and sacrificing and sacrificing and it's one of the most beautiful pictures of unending sacrificial love that we have because when you are in a relationship beyond what your needs are deeper feelings grow and that gets to happen in a covenant marriage and in having children and that's it. When you commit to someone regardless of what you're getting out of it and you say I'm here no matter whether you're sick or healthy, poor, or rich, nice, fun, not fun, mean, I'm here you actually get deeper feelings that get to grow. The third one he says he says if you're you actually get freedom in a covenant relationship because in all other relationships you're a slave you're a slave to your feelings.

You have to feel it to stay. And he says that makes you a slave because you're not in control of your feelings. Sleep habits what you've eaten your body chemistry your physiology have a lot to do with your feelings. He says if you want to be free from your feelings make a promise and you can actually be free. That happens inside of a covenant relationship. Married couples you need a better well meaning that the Bible's going to say repeatedly that married couples should have sex.

They should enjoy sex. They should continue to have sex. They should have conversations with each other be open about it. Some of the married couples in this room the way to apply this sermon is to go home have a conversation be open and honest with each other repent of sin and selfishness repent of fantasies and lust and then have sex. That is a good way to apply this message. You're welcome.

That's what the Bible says. We need a better well. Healthy marriages is not just a gift to the people inside of them. It is a gift to the church. We need healthy marriages of people that love one another serve one another are committed to one another in a covenant relationship and that help the single people in our church see what that's supposed to look like and know what how to walk in one of those in the future. It doesn't mean you need to be real graphic or open about your sex life.

I'm not saying that. You don't need to be talking bad about sex. You don't need to be mistreating your spouse. You need to be open and honest and inviting single people and dating couples into your home to share a meal have an open table have conversations and help them begin to see what marriage is supposed to look like because our culture is telling them a whole lot and we as a church have to begin to model what this is supposed to look like. But all of us need an even better well.

We can't I don't know if y'all know this we can't talk about sex without talking about Jesus. If you've been a part of our church for a while you knew that was true. If you're here for the first time surprise Jesus is better than sex. Sex is just a poor representation of what we can ultimately find in Jesus. Jeremiah 2.13 says this for my people have committed two evils they've forsaken me the fountain of living water and they've honed out cisterns broken cisterns that don't hold water. A cistern's a big well that catches rain water and what he says is I'm a fountain where all of life and fulfillment and joy and satisfaction come from and you've dug a hole and you're trying to drink out of it and it can't give you water.

Here's what we've done culturally as Americans we've said sex is the good life. It's where joy and satisfaction and freedom and hope and life come from and we've been told that over and over and over and over again. It's how you know a relationship is good. It's how you know your life is good. You're missing out if you're not having this. We've been told this over and over and over again and we haven't quenched our thirst yet.

We're continuing to drink from a cistern that will never satisfy us because it was never meant to. Jesus is better than sex and ultimate freedom is only found in him. He is a fountain of living water that fills us up. The Bible steps in and says something to us that I think is so helpful for us as a culture. You can have a full fulfilling and complete life and never have sex and never masturbate and never be addicted to porn. You can have a full fulfilling and complete life without sex.

You can have a full fulfilling and complete life and never have sex. The Bible tells us that repeatedly because fulfillment comes from Jesus. The only thing we can ever look at and say I have to have you to be okay is Jesus. Everything else is optional. Romance, relationships, sex, money, everything else is optional. The one thing we can look at and say I have to have you to be okay and to be fulfilled is Jesus.

As we've been talking this morning some of you have had shame and guilt welling up inside of you. When we talked about the duct tape analogy you began to ask is that me? When we talked about pornography you begin to feel overwhelmed and enslaved. Sometimes when you talk about sex people begin to ask the question am I lovable now? Am I damaged goods? Am I broken?

There's so much pain that goes along with sexual sin and here's the answer to that question. Yes you are loved. Yes you are wanted. Jesus loves you and desires you so much so that he went to a cross to die for you. To cleanse you and to make you his. That Jesus is the fountain that both cleanses us and satisfies us.

There's a song we sing periodically that says this. There's a fountain. This was written in the 1700s. It says there is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel's veins and sinners plunge beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains. Jesus is the fountain that pays for our sins that sets us free and that satisfies us completely. But until we're satisfied in Jesus we will forever be stuck trying to quench our thirst in sexual sin.

You can learn all the rules. You can take all the drastic steps you want. You can get all the blockers on your computer that you want. Until you're satisfied in Jesus you'll continue to be addicted. Until you begin to realize that Jesus is the only one that can set you free. The only one that can give you hope.

The only one who loved you so much that he died for you. That he was buried in a grave and that when he rose again he conquered your sin on your behalf. You are loved. You are wanted. You are pursued. You just need a better well.

You are not going to find in sex what was only ever meant to be found in Jesus. I've got one more quote because why not? I've had a thousand today. John Dunn wrote this poem. I think it's helpful. But I'm betrothed unto your enemies.

He's talking to Jesus. Divorce me. Untie or break that knot again. Break up this relationship. I'm chasing after your enemy. I'm running after sex and lust.

Break that up. Take me to you. Imprison me. For I except you enthrall me never shall be free nor ever chased. That means sexually pure. Except you ravish me.

He's talking to Jesus and he says unless I'm so overwhelmed by your love, unless I'm so engulfed in you, imprisoned by you, enthralled by you, I will forever believe this lie. Matt and Raz are going to come back up and here's what we're going to take just a second to pray together. We're going to pray that we'll begin to believe that what the Bible says about sex is true and that we'll be so overwhelmed by the genuine love of Jesus and his death on the cross for our behalf that we won't chase after anything else. We'll be so satisfied in him that we can actually begin to truly in our hearts believe that we can have a life without sex and be okay.

Let's pray. God, we thank you that you save sinners. God, we hate sexual sin, but we thank you that it's still sin and that your blood cleanses us from all sin, that we can be free. God, I pray that we would be a church that you bless with healthy marriages and people that believe what you say about sex, that it's good. It's just not ultimate. It won't satisfy.

It won't fix us. God, I pray that we would see the cross and the empty tomb and your glorious throne in such a way that we'd be satisfied in you. We'd be enthralled with you, imprisoned by you, overwhelmed by your love for us, your death on our behalf. God, I pray that you'd help us to, in our groups this week, be open, honest, bring some things in the light and find some freedom. Confess, have fellowship with one another, genuine, true love and connection based off of truth and not hiding, based off of knowing someone and caring about them. God, I pray that you'd help us to find freedom from our lust and that we as a church would begin to tell a better story about sex than our culture has to offer.

We love you in Jesus' name. Amen.

Broken Cisterns

Broken Cisterns

Chet Phillips

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Transcript

Alright, if you've got your Bible tonight, turn with me to Jeremiah chapter 2. We'll be spending some time in Jeremiah chapter 2 tonight. My name is Chet Phillips. I get to be one of the pastors here. I'm very excited about being here tonight. We are in the third week of our Idol series, which is where we're taking some time to walk through and see what the Bible has to say about idolatry.

And specifically how idolatry is not just something that people used to deal with or that is something that only takes place in other countries, but that is actually a heart level issue for us. And so what we talked about the first week was that we were looking in Exodus chapter 20 and we talked about how God starts off by saying, You shall have no other gods before me. And so we just talked about what that looks like for us to have always have an object of worship and that we as humans will always have an object of worship. If you don't have a Bible, we actually have some. I forgot to say that.

So Jack and Mitch can help hand those out. If anybody doesn't have a Bible, if you want to raise your hand, we'll get one to you. So and if you don't own a Bible, just take that one home with you. That's our gift to you. So anyway, we've talked about how we always will have an object of worship.

We will always have something that is supreme in our lives. And so we just kind of discussed in week one why we would actually want that to be God. And we talked about how Jesus is the only God who was crushed in our place, who was crushed for us and that all other gods will eventually crush us. Last week, we talked about how we just kind of turned and looked at all of the things we can worship, how God basically says not to take anything and make it into a God and how we are as humans capable of turning anything into a God. And so one of the things we've said is that sin is not primarily us breaking rules.

So that God hasn't laid it out as I am God. Here are my rules. If you follow my rules, then we'll be good. If you break my rules, then you'll be in trouble. That's not how he lays it out. First of all, he rescues before he gives the law to his people.

So he chooses and rescues and redeems and brings them out of slavery before he ever says this is how we're going to relate to one another. And the way he sets up the law is I am God. There are no other gods. And so for most of us, we feel like sin is primarily me just breaking God's rules. But actually, the way he designs it, the way he lays it out is object of worship is first before rule breaking is.

And so Martin Luther actually said that we don't break any of the other commandments until we first broken the first one, until we've taken God and decided that something else is more important to us, something else is more supreme. That's when we'll lie. That's when we'll hate. That's when we'll do all the things that we're not supposed to do because we've actually decided that in this moment something is functionally greater to me than God. And it actually makes sense because our primary way to relate to God is not based off of works. It's not based off of rules.

It's not based off of following rules. I'll give you an example. Let's say that I ran an underground gambling casino out of my backyard in one of my sheds or something, which would be pretty amazing because I have pretty small sheds. It would be hard to get a lot of people in. Let's say I did that.

And let's say that I did not report this on my taxes and I did not tell Anna about it. Let's just say I had some form of income that wasn't illegal because I realize that in my story that's probably illegal and I can't do that. So it wasn't illegal, but I didn't tell the IRS and I didn't tell Anna about it. If I got caught, if the IRS audited me, the way that the auditor would relate to me would be completely different from the way that Anna would relate to me on the same issue. So the auditor would basically be like, all right, you owe us this much money, pay it plus interest or you're going to jail.

That's it. Anna, who I did the same thing, same situation, still money, still didn't tell her about it, she's going to approach me in a completely different way. She's going to be like, why didn't I know about this? Why on earth would you have hidden this from me? The auditor is never going to look at me and be like, an entire year? You kept this a secret for an entire year?

Like the auditor is not going to cry. He's not. He's going to be like, pay up or go to jail. That's something to you. Because the way I relate to the IRS is based off my ability to follow their regulations. And the problem between my relationship with the IRS and my relationship with Anna would actually be much different.

Because Anna and I have a whole lot of other issues that we need to talk about. Trust. We've got to talk about our communication. We've got to talk about all of the times that I told her things that weren't true. Why I wasn't willing to share this with her. And so it actually makes sense that when we feel like sin is just breaking God's rules, that he's going to say, no, it's deeper than that.

And the issue is bigger than that. Because God does not primarily relate to us on our ability to follow his rules. It's not that if we behave, then we're in. And if we don't behave, we're out. God's actually going to look at us and it's going to be that, no, if we're sinning, it's actually indicative of something deeper, something bigger, something greater. And so that's what we're talking about.

That's what we're trying to dig into a little bit. It's trying to understand how not only does our sin indicate where we are a little bit off, but actually how we might have set up idols in our own lives. And so we'll be in Jeremiah chapter 2. I'm going to pray and then we're going to hop in. God, we thank you that you're good. We ask you to speak to us tonight, that you would reveal your truth and yourself to us through your word.

God, I pray that we would grow closer to you and that your Holy Spirit would have free reign in here tonight. In Jesus' name, amen. Amen. So the prophet Jeremiah, he's going to speak. God's going to be speaking through him. And so basically what God's going to do in this passage, this section of text, is he's talking to the nation of Israel and he's going to lay out two symptoms that they have.

And then he's going to give them their diagnosis. So he's basically going to say, you're doing this and you're doing this, but here's the main problem. So we're going to talk about the two symptoms and then we're going to talk about the diagnosis. I'm going to go ahead, spoiler alert, the diagnosis is idolatry. For those of you who are type A people, you now want to kill me because you know point three before we get to talk about the first two. So you're welcome.

And we're going to go ahead and move forward. So he lays this out this way. He says, The word of the Lord came to me saying, go and proclaim in the hearing of Jerusalem. Thus says the Lord. So this is Jeremiah speaking on behalf of God.

God says, I remember the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride, how you followed me in the wilderness in a land not sown. Israel was holy to the Lord, the first fruits of his harvest. All who ate of it incurred guilt. Disaster came upon them, declares the Lord. So God starts off by saying, I remember how we used to relate to one another.

I remember your love for me as a bride. And so God over and over in the Old Testament is going to say that he relates to the nation of Israel as a husband to a bride. In the New Testament, we're going to be told that the church is the bride of Christ. And so the relationship stays the same. Jesus is our groom, which I'm a man that's a little weird for me, but OK. It's that there's a real, genuine, intimate relationship there.

And that's why in the Old Testament, it's such a big deal when Israel runs away from God. It's as if a bride had left her husband. And so there's when we talked about in the first week about God being jealous for us, not of us. So God doesn't look down from heaven and go, man, this hipster thing is pretty cool. I wish I could get in on that. And I mean, when, you know, moon shoes came out, he wasn't like, oh, I love a pair of those.

Like that wasn't a thing. He's not jealous of us. He's jealous for us the same way that a husband would be for a bride. And so he fights for that relationship. And it's actually fitting. And he ought to.

So it says that I remember your devotion of your youth, your love as a bride. So then we're going to move down to verse four. Hear the word of the Lord, O house of Jacob, and all the clans of the house of Israel. Thus says the Lord, what wrong did your fathers find in me that they went far from me and went after worthlessness and became worthless? Some other texts are going to translate worthlessness a little different. Some will say worthless idols.

The word there is the Hebrew word, Abel. I don't read Hebrew, but I have a computer program that does for me. It's H-E-B-E-L. I don't know how to pronounce it, Abel. So that's how it's spelled out in English.

If you spell it out in Hebrew, it's some squiggly lines that don't mean anything. But the word worthlessness there is used in the Old Testament for nothing, for vanity, for worthlessness. And it's also used for idolatry. So it will be idols. And so some will translate that as worthless idols. But here's what he's saying.

This is the first symptom he lays out for him. He says, you went after worthlessness and you became worthless. We become like what we worship. So whatever we set up as supreme, we will over time become like that. And we spent some time talking about it the past couple of weeks. So here's my question.

Are we becoming more like Jesus? If he is who we worship, over time, we'll become more like Jesus. That's just how that works. If you look out, if you've been a Christian for a while and you look out over the past three years. I'm not talking about last week. I'm talking about the past, or as long as you've been a Christian.

Some of you haven't been a Christian for three years. But if you've been a Christian, are you becoming more like Jesus? When you look out over the past three years, you've grown in some areas. So we might say, well, I'm in better shape than I was three years ago. Some of us will be like, well, my waistline grew over the past three years. And I now can breathe heavier at the top of a flight of stairs than I used to.

That's kind of where I am. It's like, man, I remember when this didn't make me tired. So I've got to get back in shape. But there's certain things. Maybe we've grown. You could say, ah, my portfolio.

It's better. My net worth is. I've grown in that. And so the question is, what are we growing in? Because we become more like what we worship. So are we becoming more like Jesus?

Do we hate sin more? Are we quicker to repent? More open in confession? Do we care about our neighbors more? Do you care about your neighbors more now than you did two years ago? Do you care about your coworkers more now than you did three years ago?

Because the Bible says that we're predestined to be conformed into the image of his son. And that's a slow, messy process. That's what we say when we talk about being in community groups. We say, hey, come be a sinful jerk with us. Like, come be messed up with us. That's what we're going to do.

You're going to spend your life annoying somebody. Come annoy us. Like, let's annoy each other together in community groups. That's what it is. But over time, we grow to be more like Jesus.

So he says, you went after worthlessness and you became worthless. So I would just have us ask and begin to look at what are we becoming more like. Verse 6. They did not say, where is the Lord who brought us up from the land of Egypt, who led us in the wilderness, in the land of deserts and pits, in a land of drought and deep darkness, in a land that none passes through where no man dwells. And I brought you into a plentiful land to enjoy its fruits and its good things. But when you came in, you defiled my land and made my heritage an abomination.

The priests did not say, where is the Lord? Those who handled the law did not know me. The shepherds transgressed against me. The prophets prophesied by Baal and went after things that do not profit. So here's what he says.

He says, I rescued you out of Egypt. And that's where we've been the past two weeks where we've been looking at the Exodus. He says, I rescued you out of Egypt. So I took you out of the house of slavery. I made you my people. And then I walked you through a desert of deep darkness, pits and destruction and despair where no one goes.

And I kept you safe. It's basically like, I walked you down dark alleys in New York and nobody messed with you. That's kind of what he's saying. He's like, I took you into the wilderness where nobody goes. Everyone who goes there just kind of dies. And I took care of you all for years.

And then I brought you into a good place. A place that's plentiful. I brought you things to enjoy. So we talked about last week, we said that God doesn't tell us not to enjoy things, not to love things. He doesn't say, I have created bacon. Now stay far away from it.

He did for a while, actually. But then there's grace and there's some stuff that happened in the book of Acts. And so you should read it. It's amazing. We get to eat bacon now because we're Christians. And so, but he doesn't say, he doesn't not want us to enjoy things.

He just doesn't want us to worship them. So he said, I actually brought you and gave you good things. And then you quit following me. The people who taught from the law didn't even know me. Your prophets prophesied by other gods and you went after things that don't profit. Not only did you chase after other gods, but you went after things that have no life in them, have no fulfillment in them, that will give you no abundance.

You went after things that don't even bring profit. And so what he says here in this section is basically, I rescued you, I made you my people, I brought you into a good land, and then you acted like all the other nations around you. You worshipped their gods and you looked like them. So the second symptom is, he says, you chased after worthless things and you became worthless. And then he says, you went into other nations and you went into, I brought you and made you a people and then you looked like all the nations around you. And so the second question I have for him, I think Jeremiah is pointing it out to the nation of Israel is, do we look like the rest of the Americans we know?

What I mean by that is, we would say, if we're Christian, I would say that I was in slavery to sin. That I could not get out of it, I could not save myself, I could not rescue myself, I was in trouble. And that Jesus rescued me, and that he brought me through my mess, and he's still doing that. And that he's actually blessed me with good things. With life and joy and peace in him. The Bible says that we are blessed with every spiritual blessing.

And so I would say, I know that Jesus is God and that I have an eternity to come that I'll spend with him. But if I view the world the same as everyone else, it doesn't seem like that's true. So what he's saying is, I made you into my people, I brought you through this, and then you started looking like everyone else. So what I'm not talking about is what beverages you partake in or abstain from. What we're not talking about is what rating of movie you're willing to watch. We're talking about some deeper stuff than words you may use or don't use.

What I'm asking is, we're not talking about like culottes. You all know what culottes are? You know what culottes are? Okay. Culottes are great. Because there's certain Christian groups that, I say culottes are great.

I've never really been around culottes. I just, I think the concept is funny. There's certain Christian groups that females aren't allowed to wear pants. So they believe in that. And that's okay. That's fine.

You believe females shouldn't wear pants. But then there's certain things that are hard to do, like run around and play games and do stuff in dresses. So they invented culottes, which are pants that look like a dress. Which is really confusing to me because it's like, what's the goal? To just look like we're doing stuff right as long as it's a secret that we're actually, like, it has more to do with appearances than, and a buddy of mine became a Christian. I met him up at Liberty.

He became a Christian and got a job at a Christian camp. And one of the first nights they were like, they were giving out the rules to all the counselors. And they were like, no, we don't believe in mixed bathing. And that's just a Christian terminology for guys and girls shouldn't swim together. But he'd only been a Christian for a couple of months.

And he was like, uh, yeah. No, I don't believe in that either. He said he was sitting in the meeting being like, I don't know if they know. I'm not sure a whole lot of people think that's okay. That's not like a big problem in society. Now, I know in other camps all the children just get to bathe together.

And so he's like, no, yeah. And he said he found out like a week later they meant swimming. And he was like, oh, I see why that was important to cover now. But he thought it. So that's not what I'm talking about.

What I want to know, and what I think he's pointing out here when it comes to our idolatry, when it comes to how we view the world, do we treat money the same as people who don't know Jesus? Are you thinking about your tax return the same way as your neighbors are? Do you treat relationships the same way? So that you think about marriage or you think about dating the same way that our culture does. Do you think about work? When you get in a conversation with a co-worker, do you talk about work and your boss the same way they do?

Is work just this thing you go to to get a paycheck and your boss is the worst because all bosses are the worst, but this one is specifically the worst because he's a moron. Is that how that works? Because we're supposed to fundamentally be different. Our hearts are supposed to be resting in a different place. Our hope is supposed to be grounded somewhere else. And if everything we do is just the same as our culture, I'm not talking about small stuff, I'm talking about fundamentally, like if we looked at your bank account next to your neighbors, do you all spend the money the same way?

Does your money just terminate on you? Or do we as Christians have places that we want our money to go because we know it's not ours? Places that we know that I've only got a short time here and then I've got an eternity of good things. My good things aren't here. Do we act like that? Do we treat relationships like the goal is for me to find some happiness in it, and once that stops, this doesn't need to exist anymore?

Or do we fundamentally view them differently? So those are the symptoms. He's saying, basically, your hearts are far from me. You're chasing after worthless things. You're becoming more worthless. And you look like all the other nations around you.

You're chasing after that which does not profit. Verse 9. Therefore I still contend with you, declares the Lord, and with your children's children I will contend. For cross to the coast of Cyprus and see, or send to Kadar and examine with care. See if there has ever been such a thing. Has a nation changed its gods, even though they are no gods?

But my people have changed their glory for that which does not profit. So God looks at him and says, He says, look, go to the countries around you. No, no, no, go. Go check them out. Nobody does this. No country does the stupid stuff you're doing.

They have gods that don't even exist, and they keep them. I'm real, and you swapped me out for stupid stuff. No, no, go. Go to Kadar. Same God they've had. And they carve that cat into rocks.

Go check him out. It's the same one. I'm real, and you swapped me out for stupid stuff. He says they exchanged their glory. They changed their glory for that which does not profit. I think we get this on small scale.

So let's take it away from thinking about God and other things. Movies where a dad only cares about work, and he has a family, so he neglects his kids all the time. So Hook was like that. The old Robin Williams movie where he was Peter Pan. Elf is like that. The dad doesn't care about his kids.

It's any other movie ever, pretty much. That's how that plays out. If a dad has a job, he loves it and hates his children. And we'll watch it and be like, don't you realize your family is important? And then he finally gets it at the end, and we're like, yeah, tell your boss he can shove his job and go hang out with your kids and figure out how to buy food later. We get that.

We get that on a small scale. I hung out with a guy named Jeffrey at Sears in Lynchburg. He was great. I was a fan of Jeffrey. He was a bigger guy. He had grown up in California and knew Spanish, so he kind of had a Spanish-y sounding voice.

I think his dad was African-American. His mom was Samoan. And apparently having an African-American dad and a Samoan mom makes you look all Hispanic because everybody just thought he was from Mexico or some Hispanic country, and he wasn't. So it was a lot of fun because people would say racist things to him, and I got to discuss it with him, and he was like, what the heck was that? But he was talking to me about it.

Basically, he did three things. He worked at Sears, sold drugs, and played video games. That was all Jeffrey did, pretty much. I assume he slept and ate, but that's pretty much what he did. And when he would play video games, he would come in sometimes and be like, dude, I was playing video games with this guy at 6 o'clock in the afternoon, in the evening, and I could hear this cat talking to his daughter and telling her to go away because Daddy's playing video games. He was like, I almost lost it.

He's like, I can't play with that guy anymore. And so here's a guy who understands that it's dumb to trade out things that have value for things that don't. And so what God's saying is, hey, you've swapped out your glory for something that doesn't profit, for something that at the end of life will have had zero meaning, and we have a real and genuine relationship, and I exist. So that's what he's laying out here. And so he says, I'll keep reading, he says this, Verse 11, Has a nation changed their gods, even though they are no gods? But my people have changed their glory for that which does not profit.

Be appalled, O heavens, at this. Be shocked. Be utterly desolate, declares the Lord. For my people have committed two evils. They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and have honed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water. He looks at the heavens and he says, Be shocked.

Be appalled. Be utterly desolate. And I think he says it to the heavens because I think he may be speaking to the angels that actually know him, that are in his presence. And he's like, Do you see? The angels in his presence, first of all, are superior to us in look and power and that kind of thing. Every time they show up in the Old Testament, they have to say, Don't be afraid.

There's one lady who goes and tells her husband, I met this awesome man, and I bet that made him feel great. He's like, Really, honey? You've got to call him awesome to my face? And then he walked up and was like, No, that was a good assessment. This guy's pretty awesome. I'm paraphrasing.

I'm just kind of helping you all. That's how I read it. So they, in God's presence, praise him continuously because he's worth it. And so he looks at the heavens and says, Be crushed by this. My people have swapped me out. Be appalled.

Be shocked. Be utterly desolate. Be crushed by this. There's some weight behind what we take lightly. He says, My people have committed two evils. They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and honed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.

So, okay, what we know is that swapping out a fountain of living water for a cistern is immensely stupid. That's what we know from context. So he says, Be utterly desolate. Here's what they've done. But here's the thing.

When he's bringing the hammer down with this living water cistern analogy that he's explaining this, that everybody in their culture would have been like, They did. What? That hits home with none of us. None of us are like, Oh man, cisterns are the worst. Nobody says that. We don't even know what that is.

Like, What's a cistern? Because we're really spoiled when it comes to water. Like, immensely spoiled. Like, we, even in our society now, so not even just then, but in the world now, we are spoiled when it comes to water because we can get it anywhere. It's free. Like, we complain that water has no flavor.

We'll complain when it's like, What? They're going to charge me 50 cents for the cup? This is ridiculous. I'm getting water. This should just be free. You should be able to get it anywhere you want it.

The only time I've ever had to go without water, Anna and I both grew up in the middle of nowhere on wells. And so when your power goes out and you have a well, you have no water. That's how that works, which is actually kind of funny because now that we've moved here to the big city, when the power goes out, Anna will remind me that we no longer have water. And I've had to explain to her, I think twice now, that we still have water. Like, she'll be like, Power's out, so, you know, no water. Basically, which is like, be careful with how much we use and you can only flush a certain amount of times.

I'm just coaching you up. I just want to remind you. And it's like, no, no, no. We have water. And she's like, no, the power's out. And I'm like, yeah, but like water towers and we don't have a well that runs off of electricity.

But when you grow up nowhere, you only have limited amounts of water. I remember when the power would go out, we would have to, we had a swimming pool so we would take buckets to fill up the back of the toilets. And one time it was really cold but I took a bucket and dumped it on my head on my back porch to try to rinse off because if you go without water, that's the most I've ever gone without water. It was like two days in an ice storm with no water. That's it. And I was really whiny about it.

Like, I've learned that I like water. It's very useful for things. When he says this, what he's saying is, so here's how societies work then. You want to build a city? You need flowing water. Like, you need a river.

That's why all large cities built up around rivers. That's why Columbia is here. We built up around a river. Columbia, West Columbia was built on the fall line to power mills. West Columbia started as all the mill villages that ran. That's why Gervais Street Bridge was built to get all the people who worked in the mills across the river.

But, Rome was on the Tiber. You've got Egypt on the Nile. You've got Babylon and Assyria on the Tigris-Euphrates. You've got, Israel was built on the Jordan. You want a big city, you have to have a river. And that's what living water is.

Living is either flowing, it means living, or running. So it's like moving water. Then you had wells. So you weren't near a river, you dug a well, that's groundwater, that actually wasn't that bad, although those could run dry. And then third, also here, worst, was a cistern. And a cistern was, you dug a hole and it caught rainwater.

And that's, and they were difficult to keep up, like you had to keep plastering them. They didn't have good plaster then, they would cave in, you'd dig them again, and then the water would get really gross. If you had water in it, depending on when it rained. And so what he says is, they traded out a river and built their life on a cistern. And this cistern doesn't even work. And everybody went, whoa, that's dumb.

That's ridiculous. So nobody would be like, I have dug this cistern. And upon this cistern, we will found our city. And we will become a great people. And we will water a plant. And, yes, just one.

And if, and we will have one person gets to drink water every day, if it's rained recently. And soon, as we multiply, we will all die of dehydration or dysentery. Who's with me? Like, you don't, you don't build a cistern, you don't build a city on a cistern. It just doesn't happen. It doesn't support life.

And what he's saying is, they've swapped me out who gives life for things that they have to work on and manage and that will ultimately kill them. That's idolatry. Taking God who gives life, who brings life, and swapping him out for something else that ultimately destroys. I got some pictures because we don't, it doesn't bring anything to mind. This is Caesarea Philippi. That is a, a freshwater spring in Caesarea Philippi.

That's what you can build a city on. That's flowing fresh water that naturally just pops out and turns into that. This is a cistern, a modern cistern, so it's about as nice as they look. This is also, that's in Mount Arad or Arad or however you want to say that or however they say it. And then, the next one is in southern Israel and that's a cistern as well. I work for, my dad owned a swimming pool company, so I worked for that one for a long time.

The best I can picture is a cistern, is a swimming pool that the pump doesn't work and it's just filled up with water. And let me tell you, you don't want to drink that. And that's what we're doing when we swap God out for something else. And here's what he says. He says, they've swapped me out for that which does not profit. He says, broken cisterns that can't even hold water.

What happens when we do that, two things. It crushes us or it crushes the cistern. And ultimately, it'll do both. But what I mean by that, how that plays out is this. If I make money a God, that's a problem. But if I make Anna a God, that's worse.

If you make your job a God, that's a problem. But if you make your children a God, that's worse. Because they cannot provide satisfaction and fulfillment, you will crush them. What will happen is, you ever had expectations for something and then it just didn't work out the way you had kind of painted it up in your brain? So like you just expected this date was going to be great and then it could have been a decent date, but because it wasn't what you had painted up in your brain, it wasn't any good.

I did this some when I have gifts like at Christmas and stuff. I did this past Christmas. Somebody handed me a gift and I was holding it and it just seemed like the right shape and weight to me for some reason. I wasn't really squeezing it or doing a whole lot with it because I didn't want to be like, you know, like a six-year-old. So I was just kind of behaving myself but I had kind of just decided that it was a bag of coffee.

And that means a lot to me because I really love coffee. And so I just decided, I was like, sweet, I think this is a bag of coffee. And then when I opened it up, it was socks. Well, here's the thing. I needed socks and actually have worn the socks. I was very appreciative of the socks.

But when I thought it was coffee and then it was socks, the best I could come out with was like, oh, yeah. Like that was all I could do because it was immediately like, no, this is great. Yes. Like, you know, you just kind of stick your eyebrows up and nod your head a lot. Like, you've given people gifts before and they've done that. They're like, and you're just like, well, I missed on that one.

Like, I don't know what I was shooting for, but I didn't hit it. If you walk through life expecting a relationship to provide fulfillment and satisfaction, if you walk through life expecting your spouse to be that for you, you will live your life going, ah, because they could be a great spouse, but they'll be a terrible God. And you'll slowly steal from them. You'll have to take from them to make yourself feel valued and loved and validated and over time, you'll slowly just be looking at them going, ah, and stealing from them and crushing them. Same thing with your children. Your children will have to be perfect.

They'll have to make great grades. They'll have to always work everything out because your validation depends on it. Your worth depends on it. And when they don't, it'll crush you or you'll crush them. We build our lives around broken cisterns that cannot support life. That cannot bring joy.

That cannot ultimately satisfy and fulfill. This happens prior to being married. This happens prior to entering into relationships. There's a lady at Sears who, I didn't work with her, but they told me about her. That's why she was infamous. She had a list of 50 things that her future spouse was going to have.

The only thing I know is one of them on there was a hairy chest, which, great. Like, not even like character qualifications. It was like random stuff, left-handed. Like, I don't know, like a mole on his forehead. I don't know what she had put on this list. She had 50 things.

They said that she had shown it to them. Spoiler alert, she was still single last I heard. She might as well have been looking for a golden unicorn. She'd have the same chance of finding it. To expect a person to validate and fulfill, she's never going to find that guy and if she ever marries somebody, she's going to destroy them. There's only a few options when that happens.

We can, we can blame the idol. So you can get married and just assume, well, it's this, this spouse. You can just assume my kids are terrible. If I had those kids, this would work out great. You can blame the category. So you can just be like, all spouses are the worst.

Or you can blame, marriage is the worst. Things were great until we got married and that destroyed this. You can blame the whole system. You can blame, you begin to, you can blame yourself. I'm the one that messed this up. But ultimately, as we enter into this expecting anything to validate us outside of God, anything to bring us ultimate fulfillment and joy, it'll be broken and we'll be slowly killing ourselves because it cannot, will not, sustain life.

Your entire life will be Indiana Jones 4. You'll just be slowly disappointed over and over again until it's over. And you'll be glad it's over. If you've seen Indiana Jones 4, you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't, well done. My favorite part about Indiana Jones 4 was right before it began when I could have not watched it.

So when we build up these expectations, everything will fail because we'll functionally be walking into a relationship and not just looking for a good spouse that we can walk through life together with, but looking for something to be God. Looking for something to give us what only God can give to bring us life and joy and hope and satisfaction. That's how it works with jobs. That's how it works with everything that we can say that, no, this would sustain my life. I can build my life around this. Body image, self-esteem, whatever.

It'll fail. Pleasing your parents, making good grades, being the smartest of your siblings, being the most successful. successful. All of it. What will happen is it will control you because you have to have it. Anything you have to have controls you. And if you get it, it won't satisfy.

And if you fail it, it will curse you forever. I love the quote that C.S. Lewis has on this because a right view of God changes this for us. And C.S. Lewis says this in his book The Weight of Glory. It would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong but too weak.

We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us. Like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at sea. We are far too easily pleased. See, so often we think that we just have our passions are too strong. What C.S. Lewis is saying is like, no, we are just too easily pleased with stupid stuff.

We just too quickly run to a cistern and say, this will do it. When we are passing up living, flowing, life-giving, water, when we are passing up a God who brings joy and life always, here is what happens. When God becomes God, everything else can just be itself. When God's God, my marriage can just be my marriage, which is really nice. If Anna expects me to be perfect, she's going to be very disappointed. Extremely disappointed.

But if she knows that I'm just a sinful guy that she happens to live with and we're married and we're going to go through life together, then we just get to be friends who are married. We're just a team attacking life together. We get to repent and move forward. And it's really nice. If our marriage isn't going well, that doesn't destroy us. We get to work on it.

Because our marriage is ultimately about Jesus, not about us. If it's not the happiest moments we've ever had, that's fine. If we don't have a whole lot of money, okay. Because it's not about us. Your kids get to just be your kids, which means they can mess up. Your parents get to just be your parents.

They don't have to be perfect all the time. Your grades can just be your grades. Your money is just money. And you can have a lot of it or a little of it and it can... It's just money. Your value, your worth, your life isn't wrapped up in it.

When God is God, everything else gets to be what it is and then it's actually there's a lot of joy there. There's a lot of life there. There's a lot of hope there. Jesus died to rescue us from slavery and to make us his people. He died in our behalf for our idolatry. For the fact that we have rebelled and run from him.

And he's made us into his own. And we get to worship him and have everything else just be what it is. To actually build our life on something that will sustain, will fulfill, will bring joy. Because when we fail him, he forgives. Always. Because our merit and our worth isn't based off of us.

We entered into the relationship with him based off of his merit, his worth. So he always forgives. And when we're doing really well, we don't have to get prideful. We just get to enjoy it. Be a part of it. Because it's always about him.

And then everything else just gets to be what it is. everything else will be destroyed by the weight of glory except for Jesus. He actually was designed to stand under it. He's worth it. The weight of glory does not crush him. It'll crush your spouse. It'll crush your kids.

It'll destroy your job. If you base it off of your success, you'll crush yourself. because you aren't designed to bear the weight of glory. But Jesus is. And he's able to handle it. And he doesn't disappoint. He doesn't fail our expectations.

He exceeds them. So, the band's going to come back up to play. Here's verse 12 and 13. Be appalled, O heavens, at this. Be shocked. Be utterly desolate, declares the Lord.

For my people have committed two evils. They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters. And honed out cisterns for themselves. Broken cisterns that can hold no water. Some of us are worn out. We're stressed out.

We don't really know where to turn. Some of us have been building our life around a cistern. And we're dying. We've been basing our existence off of something that cannot satisfy us, that does not bring life and never will. The invitation is open and free to come to the fountain of living water where joy and fulfillment and refreshment refreshment and satisfaction and life are found always. There's peace and rest with Jesus.

So we're going to celebrate that that is open to us, that was open to us at God's expense. He paid for it on the cross. We deserve destruction for our rebellion, but He suffered in our place so that we might be able to come to Him freely based not off of our merit but off of His. Jesus died on a cross and three days later He rose again and we are invited to base our life off of a life-giving, running, fulfilling, satisfying, validating God. some of us are exhausted and it's because we've been trying to maintain a pit that was never designed to build our lives around. We've been trying to drink from dry dirt and it's killing us.

But we can come to Jesus and we can have freedom and we can have hope and we can have joy and we can have life forever. God, we thank You for Your grace and I pray that Your Holy Spirit would draw us ever deeper into the life that is in You, that You would fulfill us and You would satisfy us and You would help us see where we have begun to trust in something that will not fill us up, will not make us complete, will never be able to satisfy. God, I pray that You would show us where we've begun to build our lives around something that ultimately we will have to prop up and that ultimately will destroy. We love You and we praise You.

In Jesus' name.