Temptation, Suffering, and the Greater Will of God
Transcript
Good morning. Y'all, that was some worship. That was good. My name is Spencer. I'm one of the pastors here. We are in Genesis 39 today.
We are in the Joseph narrative. We're in the back stretch, the home stretch of Genesis. And we are following the story of Joseph. We're going to be on page 19 in our Blue Bibles. If you don't have a Bible at home, please take that. We want you to have a Bible that you can read at home, but it will be on page 19.
All right, so we've been in Joseph for the past couple of weeks. We started off the Joseph story, and we're introduced to Joseph. He's one of the 12 sons of Jacob. Joseph, he was the favorite. He was loved by his father so much so that he gets this technicolor, this rainbow coat that probably would have looked really tacky to us, but back in the ancient Near East, probably would have killed it. He gets this coat, kind of shows that he is the favorite, and then God starts giving him dreams.
And these dreams are prophetic, and he's explaining them to his brothers and his dad that these dreams are one day they're all going to bow down to him. And that doesn't go well for him. His brothers get jealous. They beat him up, throw him in a pit, plan to kill him, but his brother Judah steps in and says, no, let's sell him into slavery. We can make some money off this. So Joseph went away, and while he was away last week, we walked through Genesis 38, which is the story of Judah, that God, out of all the brothers, chooses the most broken one, the most messed up one, to bring about his line.
That's ultimately what we see, is that Jesus comes through the line of Judah, and now we're back to Joseph. And we're following Joseph down to rock bottom. His story builds you up, or breaks you down to build you up later. It's a classic rags to riches story. One of the earliest ones I remember, as far as rags to riches stories goes, was Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. I remember in middle school being assigned to read it, and I was like, man, that book is that thick.
So I did what every other kid did back in middle school. I went to Books A Million, and I got the Cliff Notes. And I read the Cliff Notes. And y'all, the Cliff Notes is a good story. Like, it's a really good story. It only needs to be that long.
But it's like a classic rags to riches. Pip is this little orphan, and he gets some good luck. He gets a benefactor. He rises through the ranks of English society. And he lives happily ever after. He gets the girl of his dreams.
We love stories like that. If you were like me, and you didn't like to read stories like that, but you'd like to watch all of the movie. I got to watch all of The Pursuit of Happiness. And that's another classic rags to riches story. It's a true story. Will Smith, he plays this guy that in the 80s lost everything.
Him and his son had to live homeless on the street as he was doing an internship at a brokerage. And it's like 90 minutes of Will Smith getting his teeth kicked in. And five minutes of he made it. Yay. And it just kind of breaks you down and builds you up. Joseph is a little bit better.
We get some more chapters with some more length of how he's going to rise. But today we're going to follow him to rock bottom. So we're in Genesis 39. And in this story today specifically, we're going to see that he undergoes sexual temptation. And I want to spend some time in this today because we're in an overly sexualized culture. And the Bible has some stuff to say about it.
So we're going to spend some time in that. When we take a step back from it, we're going to see that all the suffering, all the trials that Joseph is undergoing is part of a bigger plan that is in play. So let me pray. And then we will jump into the text. God, thank you so much that you've given us your word, that we get to open it every Sunday. Be exposed to the gospel.
Be exposed to you. God, I pray that you would speak to us in this story. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. All right.
Verse 1. Now Joseph had been brought down to Egypt, and Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh, the captain of the guard, an Egyptian, had bought him from the Ishmaelites who had brought him down there. The Lord was with Joseph, and he became a successful man, and he was in the house of his Egyptian master. So let me pause for a moment. I want to point out something the text clearly highlights. Joseph is about to, he's in suffering, he's about to suffer.
He is in a whole bunch of mess, and it makes it clear the Lord is with him. The Lord does not abandon his people, no matter the situation. So whatever mess that you may be in life, God is with us, for those of us who have trusted in Christ. He is with Joseph. Verse 3. It picks up.
His master saw that the Lord was with him, and the Lord caused all that he did to succeed in his hands. So Joseph found favor in his sight and attended him. And he made him overseer of his house and put him in charge of all that he had. From the time that he had made him overseer in his house over all that he had, the Lord blessed the Egyptian's house for Joseph's sake. The blessing of the Lord was on all that he had in house and field. So he left all he had in Joseph's charge, and because of him, he had no concern about anything but the food that he ate.
All right, so Potiphar is the one that purchases him ultimately. Potiphar is an officer of Pharaoh. Pharaoh is the king. He's the ruler of Egypt. And he's not just an officer. He's a captain of the guard.
So he is a high-ranking official in the Egyptian government. So we're already starting to see here that God has a plan for Joseph. He doesn't get sold to just anyone. He gets sold to this high-ranking official. And he starts to make Potiphar rich. And Potiphar realizes this.
He's like, your God is making us successful. And every bit of success that Joseph had rolls over into Potiphar. Potiphar becomes so successful that he hands over the keys to his business empire to Joseph. So that the only thing he has to worry about is his next meal. And y'all, that is crazy successful. Because you asked me, hey, man, how are things going?
How's real estate? How's the church? And I said, man, deals are going well. These sermons preach themselves. Let me tell you what I'm concerned about. Breakfast.
Duck donuts in the morning. Cafe strudel for brunch. I don't know. Like, real Mexico for lunch. I mean, Libby's. I mean, dinner.
I got options for days. And I don't really, I mean, if I start rolling into that, you'd be like, okay, this is weird. You must have some success. The only thing that you worry about is your next meal. And that's Potiphar. He is growing successful.
He's handed it all over to Joseph. Everything is going well until it's not. Verse 6. Now Joseph was handsome in form and appearance. And after a time, his master's wife cast her eyes on Joseph and said, lie with me. But he refused and said to his master's wife, behold, because of me, my master has no concern about anything in the house.
And he has put everything he has in my charge. He is not greater in the house than I am, nor has he kept back anything from me except you because you are his wife. How then can I do this great wickedness and sin against God? And as she spoke to Joseph day after day, he would not listen to her to lie beside her or to be with her. So Joseph, Joseph is starting to make lemonade out of this situation.
Things are starting to go well. And then his handsome form catches the eye of Potiphar's wife. And it's about to get messy. There's a couple layers to how messy the situation is. The first deals with sexual temptation. Potiphar's wife repeatedly solicits herself, repeatedly offers herself.
It is direct at the start. She says, lie with me. And we get messages like that all the time in our culture, that sexual temptation can be direct. That it shows up on the internet. You are only a click away from being solicited into sexual immorality, into a whole world of broken sinfulness and sexual temptation that leads to sexual sin. We're a click away.
And with smartphones, there are apps for days. There are like 8 billion dating apps that are designed to invite you into this casual hookup culture where sex has been so detached from the way that God created it that it was deeply spiritual, meant for a husband and a wife, for the procreation of children, for the enjoyment of one another and intimacy. It's been so detached from that that there's all kinds of tech companies that are trying to profit off of it. I mean, Facebook. Facebook used to be like, oh man, look at his family. Look at that guy I went to high school with.
What a beautiful family. Look at his kids. Man, it's great. So like old flings soliciting you, like sending messages in your inbox, porn bots reaching out to you. There's no safe space anywhere on the internet. And it's gotten so casual that it's not uncommon to hear stories, even in office environments where someone is just asking, soliciting themselves for casual sex.
It is direct. We see it all over our culture. Over and over again, we see direct messages. And when it's not direct, it's subtle. It's subtle temptation. That's what Joseph also got.
It says, and she spoke to Joseph day after day and he would not listen to her. To lie beside her or to be with her. So she makes the appeal, lie with me. And then she says, no, just lie beside me. Just come join the bed. Lie beside me.
It's subtle. It lures you in. It's just coffee. It's just lunch. It's just text messaging. It's just messaging back and forth.
Lie beside me. We will justify ourselves that it's just coffee, that it's just a drink, that it's just a meal. It's just messages. Yeah, there's some sexual jokes that got thrown in. It's not that big of a deal. It lures you in like a frog on a slow boil.
The old wives tale, for those of you that like cooking frogs, was that if you want to cook a frog, you don't just throw it in boiling water. That you put it in a normal pot of water and you slowly turn up the heat. And it won't do that. The frog will just stay in and it slowly turns up the heat until finally it doesn't realize that it's been boiled. And that is us. As coffee rolls over into someone's place, as lunch turns into more intimate meetings, as messages turn more intimate, it lures you in slowly.
Slowly, until you have slowly boiled over from sexual temptation into sexual sin. The reality is that no one is immune to it in this culture. It is all over the place. That's why we need to take the Proverbs seriously. The Proverbs has a lot to say on this. There's one passage I love in 721-22 that says, Whether direct or subtle, sexual temptation lures us into impurity, into sexual immorality, into adultery.
And what that can ultimately do is for those of us who say we love Jesus, it lures you down a road that you may never return from. And if you reject Jesus all together on that road, that ultimately leads you to death in hell. Like an ox to the slaughter. That is what Joseph was facing day in, day out. But that's not the only layer that makes this messy.
You see, the second layer that makes this worse is that Joseph is a slave. There is an imbalance. There is a power imbalance here. She is a free woman and she's not just any free woman. She's the free woman wife of a powerful official. And Joseph doesn't have certain rights.
This is so picturesque of what we discovered a couple of years ago that was at the heart of the Me Too movement. That a couple of years ago, our nation's eyes were open to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of stories that came out that showed the brokenness of this world and how it has been for thousands of years. That there are those in power and authority who objectify, who harass, who assault. And some of you have seen this and some of you have been through this. And I am sorry. I'm sorry that we live in a broken world where this is the reality.
I'm sorry for some of you that we're not able to escape this. But we're stuck in this. Let me say very clearly. God is judge. And that one day Jesus will sit on the throne. And every single wrong will be answered for.
You can take that to the bank. The Bible gives us the picture that Jesus is a judge who will judge all of these wrongs. But the Bible also gives us people that we can empathize with. Joseph being one of them. Joseph knows what it's like every day to go to work thinking, I'd just like to do my job and being harassed over and over and over again. Wondering if you say the wrong thing, what is that going to do to your standing?
Wondering who you can talk to. Wondering if anyone is going to believe you. Feeling powerless. Let me also say clearly, if that is you, if you are currently in that situation, we want you to come and talk to us as pastors. Because you do not need to be in that. We want to be able to help you out of that situation.
This is the situation of many. This is the situation of Joseph. So how does he respond to the sexual temptation? How does he respond to this abuse of power? He responds by declaring truth. He has three points of truth.
He says that this would be an abuse of trust with Potiphar. He says he has put everything in my charge. He's like, I'm not going to abuse the trust that I have. He's given me everything. I'm not going there. Then he says, you are his wife.
He makes the point, this would be an offense against Potiphar. I'm not going to sin against him. And then he makes a third point. He says, how am I going to sin against God? He says, how then can I do this great wickedness and sin against God? He ultimately sees what is true about the Bible, that all sins ultimately and primarily are a sin against God, and he's not going to do it.
He responds with truth. He speaks truth into the situation. And I want to expand this category for us. I actually want to take a moment to step away from the story and as a pastor talk to you guys because every season I see different people in our church that are wrestling with this, that are fighting sexual temptation. So I want to expand Joseph's categories that he gives of truth, and I want to give five ways that we can battle sexual temptation, that it might not roll over into sexual sin.
And the first one being, cultivate a deep love for Jesus. Cultivate a deep love for Jesus. If we are so in love with God, if we are worshiping Him, if we are delighting in Him and enjoying Him, if we are doing that well, seeking Him in worship, in word, in prayer, if we're doing that, when sexual temptation comes, we'll see it for what it is, that it's gross, that it leads to death, that it does not satisfy. That's why we say over and over again in our church that we believe that Jesus is better than everything else is because we want to believe that, even in the midst of temptation, that we might see that He is better.
That is your primary way. If you're enjoying God, you can absolutely take sexual temptation and push it to the side. But there are going to be seasons where we are not doing that well. Let me give you a second way to fight this. The second way is to memorize and quote Scripture. Memorize and quote Scripture.
Psalm 119.11 says, I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you. That's the hope, that we might know God's word, that we might hide it deeply in our hearts, that we might be able to use it to combat sexual sin in all temptation. That's what Jesus does when He's being tempted in the wilderness by Satan. He quotes the Old Testament, fires back, uses the Bible as a weapon. That's what Paul is getting at in Ephesians 6 when he says, put on the full armor of God that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. He gets to the sword of the Spirit, which is imagery for God's word.
That you might use it as a weapon, that you might use it as a weapon to defend yourself against evil. Store up the word in your heart. Have some fighter verses memorized that you might be able to repeat them in a moment's notice. Third, pray for an escape. Pray for an escape. 1 Corinthians 10.13 says, No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man.
God is faithful, and He will not let you be tempted beyond your ability. But with temptation, He will also provide the way of escape that you may be able to endure it. That's been taken out of context. And people will say, God doesn't give you any more than you can handle. Sometimes He does. So that's not what the passage is getting at.
What He's saying is, is that when you are being tempted, if you pray, God will give an escape. That needs to be our heart. That we would pray, as Jesus prays, lead me not into temptation. That we might not engage in sin. That we might find an escape. 4.
Invite church family in. Invite church family in. We are not meant to walk in this alone. The reality is, is in an over-sexualized culture, where all of us have faced this, and all of us have fallen in some form or fashion. You are not alone. If you have stuff hidden, the Bible calls you to bring it to the light.
As 1 John 1, 5-10 teaches, that we might walk in the light together. That brings true fellowship with the body, and also helps expose light to darkness. There are times, there are seasons in my life, where I'm asking the people in my life, whether it's Chet in the office, or the guys in my group, hey, this is what's going on. Can you pray about this? Can you also ask me about this in three weeks? We are not meant to walk in this alone.
Invite church family in. Fifth, fear God. Fear of God is important in battling sexual temptation. Now that is not popular in our culture. It is not popular to uphold the fear of God, to uphold the wrath of God, but it is vital in your fight against sexual temptation. That's what Joseph ultimately does.
He says, I'm not going to sin against God. That's what Jesus teaches in Matthew 5, when he's teaching specifically on this. He says, If your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out, throw it away from you, for it's better for you that one of the parts of your body perish, then your whole body be thrown into hell. And the reason why that's important is because in seasons where you're not cultivating a deep love for Jesus, when you're not remembering his word to use it, when you're not praying well, when you're not inviting people in, you know what will help? Fear of God. Because flames are hot.
It is deeply helpful for me in those seasons to remember that eternal flames are hot, and I don't want any part of that. I want Jesus. So we are called to use fear of God as a means to battle this. And then Joseph gives us a bonus one in how he responds. Verse 11. But one day, when he went into the house to do his work, and none of the men of the house was there in the house, she caught him by his garment saying, Lie with me.
But he left his garment in her hand and fled and got out of the house. So Joseph's working, gets in a situation where he is alone. It says she caught him by his garment. That isn't just, oh, she grabbed his garment. The idea in the Hebrew is that she grabbed and seized his garment, and she pulled him in and said, Lie with me. Now there's no amount of declaring truth in this moment.
It's going to help. She's got him by his outer garments. They would have had outer robes with a sash, and then there have been inner garments that have been more like long underwear, like a long gown. She has his outer garments in hand. And he does one of the more biblical responses to sexual temptation. He books it.
He flees. He runs from the situation, so much so that she's got his garment. He like wiggles his way out, just has the inner garment on, and books it, and leaves with his garment left in her hand. That's what Paul is getting at in 1 Corinthians 6, 18, when he says, Flee sexual immorality. When everything else fails, when all defenses have been exhausted, run. That's the biblical picture.
Run. If you are single, if you are not in a covenant marriage, and you are dating someone, and you put yourself in a compromising situation, run. If you're on the couch, if you're in the car, get out. Flee. That's the command. Run from sexual temptation.
When the culture is wooing you, and saying, Explore your sexuality. Explore sexual freedom. I want to plead with you. There are millions of people who have gone down that road, and have never come back. Run. Flee.
When your phone is tempting, and you are scrolling, drop it. Run. Flee. Whatever situation you are in, or you are feeling this, the last line of defense is to run. Get out. Flee.
We have got to start taking sexual temptation, and sexual sin seriously, because it will kill us. I have a son who's two. We do fires in the backyard. We have this fire pit, and my daughter, she knows when the fire is going, and she's kind of a timid person in general. She stays far enough back, but my son is like a bug, led to a bug zapper. I mean, he just, he sees the flames, and it's not like he just runs into it.
He just slowly, you know, gets closer and closer, and I've got to pull him out. I've got to yell at him, because he doesn't realize, that if he gets close enough, it will mar him. It will kill him. And that is the same with us. If we are not careful, we will get lured in, and we will not survive. And we need to treat it with the seriousness that the Bible treats it, and respond like Joseph.
Joseph responds righteously, but as we're going to see next, his righteous response leads to more suffering. Verse 13. And as soon as she saw that he had left his garment in her hand, and had fled out of the house, she called to the men of her household, and said, see, he has brought among us a Hebrew to laugh at us. He came in to me to lie with me, and I cried out with a loud voice, and as soon as he heard that, I lifted up my voice and cried out, he left his garment beside me, and fled, and got out of the house. Now she has made up a rape allegation.
And what's worse is, is she's got evidence. This false allegation, she's got his garment. And this is a big deal. It's a big deal, period. It's a big deal for him, because Joseph is a slave. He does not have certain rights.
She is a free woman, and she's accusing him. And in his culture, he can be put to death for this. And she adds to it. It wasn't just the attempted rape. It was, he's making a mockery of our family, and a shame on our culture. That's a big deal.
And there's a little bit of a racist tinge there. This Hebrew, who is going to make a mockery of us. All of the goodwill that Joseph has stored up is about to be exhausted as soon as Potiphar gets home. Verse 16. Then she laid up his garment by her until his master came home.
And she told him the same story, saying, The Hebrew servant, whom you have brought among us, came in to laugh at me. But as soon as I lifted up my voice and cried, he left his garment beside me and fled out of the house. As soon as his master heard the words that his wife spoke to him, This is the way your servant treated me. His anger was kindled. And Joseph's master took him and put him into prison, the place where the king's prisoners were confined. And he was there in prison.
So Potiphar hears this, and justifiably, he gets angry. But he doesn't kill him. He throws him into the king's prison. And I want us to imagine how Joseph would have felt. I mean, he was sold into slavery by his brothers. He worked his tail off for years to work his way up in this household, only to do the right thing and end up suffering regardless.
Sometimes suffering is so unfair. Sometimes you do the right thing and you still suffer. Sometimes we suffer because of our own mistakes. But there are situations when you respond the way you're supposed to and you still suffer the consequences. I love movies that do this. I love stories that bring out this feeling because there's a feeling in all of us when we see unjust suffering that just makes us mad, that makes us upset.
I love stories that do this. There are two movies that we watched all the time growing up, my stepdad and I. We watched them when they come on TNT. My mom would literally get out of the chair and leave because we watched them so many times she was tired of seeing them. We watched Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. Two Stephen King novels made into awesome powerhouse movies.
Both capture the same thing. The Green Mile is about a man that, it's about prison guards that are on death row. They're supervising death row. There's a new prisoner that comes in. He's accused of killing two little girls in a pretty horrific manner. And he's big and he's scary at first, but the more they get to know him, they see that he's softer.
And then they start to see there's actually something miraculous about him, something angelic almost. He starts performing these miracles and they slowly begin to realize there's no way he committed these murders. And towards the end of the movie, you realize there's somebody else on death row that's actually guilty who did commit the murders. But there's no way to prove it and he still goes to the electric chair. And there's this scene when all the prison guards are in tears and they're angry and they're upset that he is going to be put to death. And what's great about stories like that is they bring you in to the same feeling that you're upset, that you are mad, that it's not right that he would suffer for something he did not do.
I love that because it brings out what's written into us as being made in the image of God. There's a part of us that hates to see unjust suffering. But God operates within that fallen story and he uses suffering for greater purposes, which is what is ultimately going to happen here with Joseph. Verse 21, But the Lord was with Joseph and showed him steadfast love and gave him favor in the sight of the keeper of the prison. And the keeper of the prison put Joseph in charge all of the prisoners who were in prison. Whatever was done there, he was the one who did it.
The keeper of the prison paid no attention to anything that was in Joseph's charge because the Lord was with him. And whatever he did, the Lord made it succeed. So the chapter ends with a foretaste of where this story is going. But for now, we're at rock bottom in the prison. He is suffering. And as Americans, this is difficult for us.
We don't have a really strong theology of suffering. We don't grasp why God would use situations like this. But God makes it clear he is with him. This is not purpose. He is behind him. He shows him steadfast love.
But he does the same thing he did with Potiphar. God is with him. He blesses his work. He actually basically becomes a little bit of the sub kind of warden of the prison. That God is with him. He's not going to abandon him.
His suffering is aimed at a bigger purpose in this story. And we're going to walk through that in the coming weeks. But this is how our God works. God works within the broken story to bring about suffering for greater purposes. And suffering often is the way that God accomplishes his greater purposes. And God knows that that's not fair.
That is why he came. That is why Jesus came. That is why God took on flesh and entered the story himself. And when he took on flesh and he entered into our story he took on human suffering. He experienced suffering. He experienced temptation.
That's what Hebrews 4 is getting at when it says for we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are yet without sin. We have a God who can sympathize. Who knows what Joseph went through. Who knows what we went through. Who subjected himself to temptation in the wilderness from the devil himself. This is what C.S.
Lewis has to say about this. He says we never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it. And Christ because he was the only man who never yielded to temptation is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means. The only complete realist. You have moments in your walk where you are so tired of fighting sin and you are so weary. Jesus gets it.
He's the only complete realist and what he is getting at what C.S. Lewis is picturing for us is that he's the only one. All of us have fallen in temptation at some point. Jesus is the only one who's gone through the full extent of temptation and did not sin. He is the only complete realist. He knows what it's like to be Joseph day in, day out being tempted and he also knows what it's like to respond like Joseph to persevere in righteousness only to suffer in the end.
The greater purpose of Joseph leads to the greater purpose of Jesus and that was Christ going to the cross to suffer for all of us that have fallen. For all of us that did not respond like Joseph that have fallen to temptation. So that by faith in believing in his death and resurrection we might actually experience what it looks like to have the God the universe in us inside us the Holy Spirit helping us fight that we might not fall to temptation anymore. All of Joseph's story eventually leads to Christ on the cross for us. And that is good news for everyone in this room that did not run like Joseph.
For all of us that gave in to temptation for all of us that were swept up by lust. For all of us that have fallen and sometimes over and over and over again. For everyone in this room who has felt the crushing weight of shame and guilt the hope is that Jesus came that he might die for us that we might get his perfect standing and he might take our shame and our guilt that he might cover us those that have fallen. That is the hope of the gospel and the response for us is to run to Jesus to repent and run from sin and be made new. And we're going to celebrate as the band comes up.
Lust
Transcript
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.