Consumeristic Sexual Individualism
What is the purpose of sex? Should it be casual and convenient? Apocalyptic and ultimate? Or something different altogether? Is sex an appetite we satisfy, or a gift we enjoy?
Transcript
Well, good morning. We are in our sixth week of our Theology of Sex series, and today we are talking about sex. So if you are just now hanging out with us, that might not seem surprising. If you've been here for the other five weeks, you may be thinking, I thought that's what we were going to talk about the whole time. It's about time. Why have we waited so long?
It wasn't bait and switch. Really what it was is there's so many other things we had to say before we could ever talk about sex by itself, for us to even understand how God designed it and what his goal was for it and what his aim was for it. And so we had to kind of build a framework for God's good design for sex before we could ever even talk about sex. It's kind of like jumping right in and talking about trigonometry. If you don't know how to add and subtract, it's like we got to cover the basics first. We got to understand the framework here before we can we can talk about sex.
And so for five weeks, we've spent some time walking through different passages of Scripture, trying to understand gender, trying to understand God's design. And so I'm going to try to recap that a little bit, maybe using some different words to help us understand what we've been looking at for the past five weeks. So we talked about God created humanity in his image, that we were designed by God for his purposes. And what we're seeing there is that God, who is very different from us, makes us similar but different from him. So humanity made in the image and likeness of God is similar to God, but very different from God.
And hopefully we're all tracking with that. You're like God. You are not God. So just if you're confused about that, we can talk about it later. But you are not God.
You're like him, made in his image and likeness. And so there's this idea of similar but different. And then when God made gender, he did the same thing. He kind of followed the same pattern where he made both male and female similar but different. He designed us distinct from one another. And so it follows that same setup, that same paradigm of similar but different.
And then we saw that Christ's love for the church, Jesus' pursuit of the church in the cross, was his covenant love for the church. And that is where this very different being from humanity joins with humanity, makes himself one with humanity to join together in a covenant relationship and to make himself one. So the church is called the bride of Christ and Christ's body. So we're both his pursuit and what he loves and cherishes and also we're made one with him. And then we saw that marriage is actually a small picture of that. Marriage is these two similar but different beings coming together and becoming one and covenanting together with one another for a life of devotion and submission to one another.
And so we see that God designed humanity similar but different from him. He designed gender similar but different from one another. And then God through Christ makes a covenant with humanity and makes us one with him and that marriage is designed to be the same thing, to be similar but different brought together in a covenant relationship. And only in that relationship sex is designed to exist. So sex exists inside of this covenant relationship.
And so we've kind of walked through all of that. And now we're going to spend some time today talking about sex. So we're going to go to Genesis 2 real quick. You don't have to flip there. We're going to have it on the screen. We've gone there every week.
You should about have this memorized by now. This is vastly important for our understanding of who we are, how we were designed, and how we view and understand God and understand our place with one another and understand sexuality. So it says, Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And so we spent time last week talking about this. This is the covenant relationship in marriage, that two become inseparably one. So Paul's going to go to this verse in Ephesians 5 and say, this actually gives us a small picture of the love that Christ has for the church, how he dies on her behalf, how he sacrifices to pour out his love and to just give and just to lavish love on his people.
And that's the design for marriage. And then Jesus is going to go there in Matthew 19 to say that whatever God's brought together, we're not supposed to tear apart. And so then it says, And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. This is the very beginning of Scripture. In the very first few pages, what we are given is that God creates humanity distinct from himself. He creates gender distinct from one another, and he designs them to be brought together.
And he sets them in a garden naked without shame. And then he tells these shameless nudists to be fruitful and multiply. It's one of the first commands that God gives in Scripture. And so from the very beginning of humanity, God designs covenant marriage and sex and sexuality to play a part in his good design for humanity. Now, in our culture, jump ahead thousands of years, we, you would not have to do much cultural research at all to see that we have begun to place a lot of value on sex. You can't stand in line at the grocery store without looking over at the magazine racks and seeing that we have concepts like sex sells, but you can't look at a magazine rack without seeing little on the sides.
It's not always the main thing, but they'll be on the side, this little article tells you what's going to be inside it, and you'll get five tips on how to wow your man. Seventeen tips to a sexier summer. Thirteen tips for making your bed the best place ever for sex or whatever. Like, there's just all of these kind of, and it's like, really, farm and garden? Come on, man. Like, take it easy.
But it really, we've overemphasized this. You can't watch a TV show, watch a movie, without some sort of message about sex and sexuality being pumped into our brains. And now we have the pornographic revolution that has come with the internet, and we are overly inundated with sex and sexuality, and we have some competing views in our culture where we both, we say things like, when two people love one another very much, and we act like sex comes out of this emotional, deep connection, and it's designed to be love, and we call it lovemaking, and it's supposed to be this meaningful thing. And then we also, at the same time, will say, it's also kind of like a game of checkers, like just a recreational activity for enjoyment.
And it doesn't really mean anything at all, and it just kind of depends on how you approach it. And so what we need to do is to grow in our understanding of what the Bible says about it, how God originally designed it, because He's the one who invented it. I heard someone put it this way. God created Adam and Eve, put them in a garden, naked. He did not come back later and go, Oh my goodness, what are you doing? Like, He came up with the idea.
He invented it. He made it for a purpose, for a reason. And God's design for sex was to exist inside of this covenant relationship and to be a covenant renewal ceremony. So throughout the Bible, God makes covenants with His people, and then He has physical Acts, physical, tangible reminders that they go through to remind themselves of their covenant. So an example of that for us is my wife and I got married six, seven years ago, and we stood up in front of people and we held hands and we like said things to each other and we repeated after this guy and then we had to keep holding hands while he talked and I would kind of forget what we were doing and let go of my wife's hands and she still fusses at me about that so that when I do premarital stuff with people, I say, Hey, hold hands the entire time or your wife will never forget it.
Because it was like it was just going on forever and I just kind of let go and be like doing like this. But during that, what we said was we were making an invisible commitment to one another. But then we said we're actually going to take something visible, a tangible reminder, and we're going to use this to remind ourselves and to show other people what our relationship is designed to be. We have an invisible, physical, emotional, personal attachment to one another, spiritual connection to one another, but we're going to take a symbol. And it wasn't this one because this is like I'm on my third one because I keep losing them.
But it was something very similar to this. And we put it on my hand. We put one on her hand. She still has the same one. And we celebrated that this is a physical reminder of this spiritual, emotional, invisible reality. And sex is designed to be that in marriage.
Now, it's not as public as this one. It shouldn't be. You're doing it wrong. But it is a tangible, physical reminder of your vows, of your covenant. It is a covenant renewal that is designed to be. It is a covenant renewal that is designed to say all of me belongs to all of you.
Everything I have, everything I am, everything I will be, I sacrifice and submit to you. That's celebration of the covenant that you have. And that is God's good design for sex. He made it as an intentional covenant renewal ceremony inside the context of marriage. So as we walk through the day, we're going to continue to talk about that definition.
We're going to continue to pull that up. And we're going to hold that up as our, this is what sex was designed to be. Therefore, this can't be correct. So as we walk through and look at these other things that we believe about sex, we're going to hold that up and keep saying, because this is true. So from the very beginning of the Bible, it lays that out as this is what sex is.
And so for the rest of scripture, anything that falls outside of a covenant marriage, anything that falls outside of any sexual activity that falls outside of that is considered sexual immorality. It's outside of God's good design. So that's why the Bible is going to treat so many other things as, no, you're not supposed to do that because God's good design for it was very specific. So we're going to actually find a lot of help as we study this in first Corinthians. So if your Bible looks like this, go to page 620.
I'll give you a second to get there. Then we're going to pray. And then we'll talk a little bit about what's going on here in this passage before we kind of dive in and begin to look at what Paul's saying here. Okay. Let's pray really quick.
God, we thank you for sex. We thank you for the good that it is. We pray, Lord, that we would rightly view it, rightly understand it, that we would see the beauty in your design for it in a way that might cause us to worship you. We pray, Lord, that married or single, we would rightly appreciate, view sex so that we might rightly love and worship you. We pray that as we study this today, Lord, you would give us clarity and wisdom and lead us to repentance where we've begun to believe lies about this good gift. In Jesus' name, amen.
So Corinth, think Las Vegas. So the city of Corinth was what happens here stays here kind of a place. It was a port city. They had a very lucrative sex slavery trade, sex trade, and a lot of prostitution. They had temples with prostitutes. They had other regular just prostitutes.
And then they had a very, people would come in. They would reload their ships. They would re-get supplies. And people would go visit prostitutes. And so that was a big thing in Corinth. And in the midst of that, Jesus saved some people.
A church was formed under Paul planting churches. And Paul's, in this letter, writing back and forth with the Corinthians and coaching them up. And so it honestly, it's a young church. It reminds us some of us, reminds me some of us, where we've got a lot of people who've just met Jesus. If we asked you a couple years ago, would you be following Jesus, you would have laughed. But now there's people who are repenting, following Jesus, and just trying to figure out what that means.
And so they're writing a letter to Paul, and they have all these questions about sex and sexuality because their culture has just bombarded them with how to think about it. It's kind of like this. If it's raining really hard, even if you get an umbrella, even if you put on a rain jacket, if it's just pouring, I mean sheets of rain, sideways rain, when you get inside, you are still wet. You did everything you could to cover up, but you're still wet. And Corinth's culture and our culture is similar when it comes to the concept of sex. We can do everything we want to to try to protect ourselves or guard ourselves, but some of it still soaks in.
Some of it still gets into our thought processes, into how we approach it. And so they're writing to Paul saying, isn't this true about sex? Isn't this true about sex? And Paul is going to be responding. And so everything we see in quotations, that's Paul saying, y'all said this. Here's your answer.
So it's a Q&A session with the church in Corinth. And surprisingly, they have a lot of the same thoughts and questions that we have. So we're going to go through and see what they ask and how Paul responds to help us better understand God's good design for sex. So chapter 6, verse 12. In quotations, he's quoting them. All things are lawful for me.
And then he says, but not all things are helpful. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be dominated by anything. So he's saying, okay, y'all said this, and it's in the context of sex. He said, y'all said this, and let me help answer that. So what they said was, all things are lawful for me.
And here's basically what their question was, what they were saying about sex. Question one is, isn't sex an individual and private matter? So when they say, all things are lawful for me, it's kind of like our phrase, well, it's a free country. What they're saying is, if it doesn't hurt anybody, if it's just my private business, why does it matter? Live and let live. If whatever I do in my own personal sphere doesn't matter.
And so sometimes this has been taught as what they were saying was, all things are lawful for me in Christ because Jesus has fulfilled the law for me. That's less likely because the Corinthian Christians weren't well-versed in the Old Testament and were significantly dealing with cultural issues. So really what they're saying is they're kind of repeating a cultural thing, which is, it's a free country. If I'm not hurting anybody, why does it matter? If it's my personal business, why does it matter? And so Paul gives a quick response to that and he's going to keep responding to it as he goes through the rest of the section.
But the first things he says are very helpful. So really, when we ask questions like this, there's an underlying belief system that makes us ask that. And so it's really the first lie that they believe and that we believe, because we say this same thing, is that sex is individualistic. That's the first lie that we believe when it comes to sex. That's what they were putting forth. Like, why does it matter?
It's just a private thing. Why does it matter what I do? Sex is individualistic. Now here's Paul's quick response to that. First of all, sex is an individualistic approach. Paul says it's not helpful.
And given the way he uses that phrase throughout the rest of his book, what he means is, nuh-uh. He's saying sex is not individualistic at all. It's not helpful. There are other people involved. So a quick recap of what sex is.
It's two people coming together. So when I say sex is just about me, then I'm doing it wrong because there's supposed to be two people coming together. It automatically means that there's someone else involved. So it can't just be an individualistic approach. It automatically affects other people. So Paul's response is no.
It's not individualistic. That's not a helpful way to approach it. Other people are involved. Other people, if you just approach it as what do I get out of it? If it's just a, it's about me and my enjoyment and my pleasure, then you've undercut and you don't even view it correctly. You're not approaching it correctly.
That's not helpful and that actually harms other people. And then he gives a response. So our immediate kind of pushback on that is, yeah, okay, sure, you can't say that sex with another person is just individualistic because other people are involved. But we've done a lot of work in our culture to make sex as individualistic as possible, primarily through pornography, that that can be enjoyed by yourself and does not harm anybody else. First of all, Paul's first response helps you because he says, no, it's not actually helpful in the context of community. Your life and decisions don't exist in a vacuum.
What you do does affect other people. And so when he says it's not helpful, he means it doesn't work well in the context of community, in the context of society. Looking at pornography creates a demand for pornography and pornography is videoed prostitution. It is videoed sex slavery. That's what the porn industry is. And studies are beginning to show that it seems that there's a link between pornography and an increase in sex slavery and sex trafficking because people are moving from what they're viewing to enacting that.
There's also a link now between males that view pornography and then how they treat a real female when they are with them in a very aggressive, domineering, physical, unromantic, unemotional way that is portrayed for them in pornography. And where young boys as early as 10 now is the average age of the boy seeks out pornography. At 12, most young men in advanced cultures that have the Internet have a significant exposure to pornography. A Canadian researcher went to do a study on porn use in college students, college males. When you do a study, here's how it works. You need the people you're studying and you need a control group so that you can compare them.
So if you were studying smokers of a certain age, you would need to find same gender, same age, non-smokers. The problem with his study was he couldn't find non-pornography users when he went to college age males. He could not find a control group large enough to use. So it would be like if everybody smoked and then you asked, does smoking affect you? And you said no. But then we also put out reports that said all humans get lung cancer by the age of 40.
It's just a thing that happens to humans. It's like, no, if we had a control group that showed non-smokers, we'd realize that wasn't a human problem. And so the problem with his study was he couldn't find people who had not been significantly exposed to pornography, and some of them for over 10 years. And here's what happens. That affects how they view females, how they approach females. It affects all the females who are looking at pornography, how they view males, how they approach males.
It becomes an unhelpful problem. But here's Paul's second response to that. But I will not be dominated by anything. When we approach sex in an individualistic way, specifically for our culture through pornography, it becomes very addictive. Sex was designed to be addictive anyway. It sets off the same pleasure sensors in your brain that other addictive drugs do.
So you were designed by God to become more addicted to your spouse. That was the way sex was designed. And inside the covenant of marriage, that's beautiful. Outside of it, that's kind of scary. Because it creates an addiction that is crushing people in our culture, that is crushing through pornography. There's a lady named Naomi Wolf.
She's just been doing some research on this. She was an analyst or an advisor to several different presidents, President Clinton being one of them. She wrote an article called The Porn Myth. And so here's what she says in that. But does all this sexual imagery in the air...
She's not a Christian, by the way. She's just been studying this. Does all this sexual imagery in the air mean that sex has been liberated? So we act like we're free, we're open about it. Sex is free. It's liberated.
Or is it the case that the relationship between the multi-billion dollar porn industry, compulsiveness, so addiction being dominated by it, and sexual appetite has become like the relationship between agribusiness, processed food, supersized portions, and obesity? If your appetite is stimulated and fed by poor quality material, it takes more junk to fill you up. But people are not closer because of porn, but further apart. People are not more turned on in their daily lives, but less so. Mostly when I ask about loneliness... She goes around to colleges and speaks to young adults a lot.
Mostly when I ask about loneliness, a deep, sad silence descends on the audience of young men and young women alike. They know they are lonely together, even when conjoined, and that this imagery, porn, is a big part of that loneliness. What they don't know is how to get out. Because of an individualistic approach to sex, which is not how sex was designed, it crushes our ability to have meaningful relationships because we only begin to respond well to pornography, and we begin to hold everybody up, every significant other, every person as a sex object, or we compare them to past relationships, or past videos that we have watched, and it begins to erode our ability to appropriately approach sex in the way that God designed.
I saw a guy doing a TED Talk, and he said that one of the problems with this, one of the problems with constant pornography viewership and then having real relationships, is that pornography viewership cuts out all of the beautiful stuff about sex, like conversation, laughter, touching with your hands, kissing, emotional connection. It turns it into this really male-dominated, aggressive, twisted, constantly changing to other things, and he said it erodes a lot of the beautiful... He said when he used to fantasize, this is not a Christian guy, he's just talking through this, that he used to think about having a conversation, and where that would lead, and how he... And he said once he began to view porn all the time, that wasn't there anymore.
There was no more intimate, emotional connection, because an individualistic approach to sex dominates us, becomes addictive, begins to control how we view it, and takes it out of what God designed it to be, which was not individualistic at all. So the major problem with this is this is a massive misunderstanding of what sex is. Sex was designed to be not just for personal pleasure and fulfillment, although that's a part of it, but it was to be complete surrender. It was to be you making yourself vulnerable and giving yourself to someone else for their pleasure and their enjoyment in the context of a covenant marriage.
Because it was a covenant renewal ceremony, because it was a pouring yourself out on behalf of another, the way you are in life in a covenant, in marriage in a covenant, sex becomes a gracious response and a gracious, humble giving yourself to someone else. And when it's approached in an individualistic manner, it's robbed of that. So this can be seen in dating, where someone just uses another person for sex. A person, a lot of times we see this as in males, but it can be anybody, just uses someone for sex, and once they have sex, they just move on, because that was the only goal. So they've treated a person with a soul, made in the image of God, like nothing more than an object.
This same individualistic approach can be seen in marriage, where somebody is just, I want to have sex right now. That's it. That's my approach. And you need to have sex with me, regardless of context, regardless of how you feel. And on the other side of that, someone who in marriage is never in the mood. So that as long as that's the hurdle, I don't feel like it.
And all that is on both sides of that fence is just sex exists for my individual pleasure. So if I want it, let's go. Or sex exists for my individual pleasure. So if I don't want to, no. And that's still the same approach. These aren't just problems for single people.
This is a problem with how we view sex in general. C.S. Lewis says that this approach to sex, that this idea of sex without covenant is like chewing food and then spitting it out without swallowing it and digesting it, which does not leave us more satisfied, but more hungry, which ultimately guts eating food of what it was designed for in the first place. Question two, they ask. So Paul's response to the first question, the question two, they ask.
He spends a little more time here because he's also still addressing the first question. 13. Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food. So they say, okay, Paul, food's meant for the stomach, the stomach for food, which what they're really asking is, isn't sex just an appetite? Isn't it just an appetite? Isn't it just like, okay, Paul, let me break this down for you.
I have a stomach. My stomach sends signals to my brain. It says I'm hungry. My brain sends signals to my hands. I grab food. I stick it in my mouth.
It goes to my stomach. My stomach exists because food exists and food exists because my stomach exists. And that's the same way that sex works. I have sexual parts and sexual urges and they exist in relation to one another. It's just an appetite. I love that this question is in here because we think we have progressed so far.
We are so far beyond all of those morons that used to live in history because I have Google. I'm so much smarter than everybody else who knew how to actually do things. I can just read about things and that makes me smart because I can buy shoes from Reebok. I don't know how to make shoes, but I can buy them. I'm smarter than all of these people. We just, history has just moved forward and progressed.
And here's the thing. We say stuff like this. We say stuff like, it's just a private matter. We say stuff like, sex is just an appetite as if we've moved on and outgrown. That argument's 2,000 years old. They have the same thoughts, same questions.
I got a stomach. I eat. I have sexual organs. I sex, right? Thank you, Paul. You are dismissed.
I have defeated you with logic. And so Paul responds. And this is really the second lie that we believe about sex comes from this, this idea that sex is just an appetite, is that sex is consumeristic. It's just a consumer good. It is designed for us to partake in however we feel because it's just an appetite. Now here, sex is, does have a desire that goes along with it, does have appetite that goes along with it, but it's not just that.
And it's not the same as eating food because if you don't eat food, you will die. And although some people in our culture might would argue that not having sex will kill you, it will not. Sex is not just physical. That's the argument being made here. It's just physical. It's just an exchange of goods, just a physical enjoyment.
And so Paul responds. One of the best examples of this in our culture right now, I believe, is the app Tinder. Tinder is an app, for those of you who are not familiar. It's on a smartphone. You take a picture of yourself and I think there's a little bit of information, but it's not like bogged down by information about the human. It's mostly just the picture.
And then you just swipe one way or the other to like the human or unlike the human. I don't know what it's called. It's just called swiping and it's become like a manic. People do this all day long, looking at people and swiping one way or the other they're based off of. And really what it is, this is a very advanced form of human shopping. It is a handheld brothel in so many ways.
Now, some people would say, no, no, no. You can make real, meaningful connections through Tinder. And that's what I'm using it for. Okay, maybe. The majority of people aren't. The person on the other side swiping your picture probably isn't.
And if you've been on Tinder for a while, via the text and pictures they have sent you, you might have picked up on that. It is a lineup of humans with souls that we have reduced to a quick ability to say, nope, don't like that one. Nope, don't like that one. Yes, yes, yes. Nope. Nope.
Yes. It's a brothel app. It's used that way. There's an article in Vanity Fair that is a very difficult read because of how painful it is to see how devastating this is. Now, you may say, okay, but hold on a second. Isn't that what people do when they go to bars?
Isn't that the same thing people have been doing forever when they showed up and looked around for a person to talk to? Yes. In a lot of ways. We've just become more efficient. In that article in Vanity Fair, they're talking to three guys and they say, why do you like Tinder so much? A couple of different things.
They said it was easy to meet Tinderellas. They said, it used to be you'd have to go to a place like a bar, put forth energy. You can only talk to one, two, maybe three girls a night. But on Tinder, you can be in 15 conversations at once and one of the other guys piped in and you don't have to spend any money. And they were like, yes, that's good too. Now, that's people shopping, but it grows out of how we've begun to approach sex.
It ought to be free. It ought to be easy. It ought to be simple. Humans exist for my pleasure. Sex is a consumer good. We ought to be able to line this up easily.
We ought to be able to get supply and demand connected. And so, Paul is going to respond to this, I have a stomach, it's designed for food argument. This sex is just an appetite. This lie that sex is consumeristic. And so, Paul responds with a couple of things that I find very helpful. Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food and God will destroy both one and the other.
The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord and the Lord for the body. Okay, his first response is very helpful. First of all, sexual immorality, when you see that in the Bible, mostly coming from the Greek word pornea, which is just sexual junk drawer. It really means all sex outside of God's covenant designed for marriage, all sexuality outside of God's covenant designed for marriage. So, everything, if you're thinking, well, does it include this? Yes.
Yes, it does. All of the sexual activity outside of marriage because making a list would have taken too long and then we would have invented something new and said, that's not in there. So, it's just everything outside of God's covenant design. He says, your body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord. Here's what he's saying. Sex is not ultimate.
That does not sound profound. It's very helpful for our culture. You can live your entire human life and never have sex and be fine. I'm going to go over here and say that. You can live your entire human life and never have sex and be fully complete and fully satisfied and fully human be fine. Jesus came and was single.
He is the God as a human perfection held up for us and he lived his entire life, never got married, never had sex. This is so bizarre to our culture that we make up. Obviously, he had to have secret lovers. Obviously, he's got some lineage somewhere. Obviously, this effeminate drawing here is not a boy, but it's some kind of a girl who's not very pretty. But what are you going to do?
Like, sorry, that was a very Da Vinci Code stuff there. If you haven't, you don't know what I'm talking about, that's fine. I was like, that got weird. Yeah, it did. It did. Read it.
It gets weird. It's so bizarre to us, but the truth is your body does not exist for sex. You will not die. You are okay. You can live your entire life and never have sex. Sex is not ultimate.
You were given a body designed for God and His glory and His worship. You were made in the image of God to reveal what He is like to the rest of creation. And that doesn't have to be sex. That's very helpful and sadly profound for us. Next thing He says, so first of all, you don't have to have sex. You're okay.
You were designed for something else, something bigger, something better. And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by His power. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? He's talking to Christians. He's saying, don't you know Jesus' covenant love that He's already poured over you that when you place faith in Him, He made you His and He loves you. You are His bride and He's made you one with Him.
You're part of His body. You're members of Christ. Like, you know, like your arm is a member of your body. That's what He means there. Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Okay, so this is getting deeper than we understand.
So let's keep moving here. Members of a prostitute never, or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? Okay, two things we need to know. One is, prostitution was the big socially acceptable way to have sex outside of your marriage. That's why He refers to prostitution. That was the big Corinthian way, perfectly fine, socially acceptable way to have sex outside of a covenant marriage.
So people were married young and you weren't specifically interested in having a good sexual relationship with your spouse. Wives were not allowed to have sexual relationships outside of their marriage relationship or they were in big trouble, but men could do whatever they wanted to and going and visiting a prostitute was perfectly normal, sexually acceptable way to have a sexual outlet. So, when He talks about prostitution in our culture, that honestly includes most everything. There are really three things that our culture is going to say aren't okay when it comes to sex and sexuality, just culturally.
Anything forced? Not okay. Anything with children of a certain age? Like, we kind of have an age limit on it. Not okay. And the third one is cheating and that one's more of a gray area for people, but mostly frowned upon.
Cheating's not good. So, those are kind of the only three. So, when He says prostitution, He's talking about the way they would have approached sex outside of a covenant relationship. And so, for us, He really just means all the sexual things that we're kind of okay with when He's talking about prostitution. Does that make sense? Tracking there?
Some of you are. Cool. Okay. Okay. Do you not know this is 16? Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her?
Okay. That's not very profound if you just take it for what He's saying. He has to mean something deeper because what He just said is do you not know that he who's joined with a prostitute is joined with a prostitute? Yep. Like, if He just means physical, that sentence isn't helpful and doesn't make a lot of sense. But what He's doing is He's approaching sex the way the Bible always does, which it is much deeper than physical.
Much more going on than just the physical act. So when they say, isn't sex just an appetite? Isn't it just physical? Isn't it just a consumer good? Paul says, no. It's not.
There's so much more going on. The same reason that we in our culture know that there's a difference between physical abuse and sexual abuse. because there's more going on there than just a physical interaction. Paul's acknowledging that there's much more to sex than physical, that it's actually emotional, psychological, spiritual. There's a pastor in New York. He wrote a book called The Meaning of Marriage. In one of his chapters on sex, he says this.
I think it's helpful. The Bible says, do not unite with someone unless you are also willing to unite with the person emotionally, personally, socially, economically, and legally. Don't become physically naked and vulnerable to the other person without becoming vulnerable in every other way. Because you have given up your freedom and bound yourself in marriage. So Paul's point here is that sex is wrong and out of place in all other circumstances than inside of this covenant.
Because it means more. So the Bible's argument is not that you have too high a view of sex. The Bible argues that you have too low a view of sex. The Bible's going to push us that we don't believe enough about sex. That we don't have high enough view about sex. That's the Bible's point.
The reason we're willing to flippantly have sex, the reason we treat it the way we do is not because we value sex too much but we value it too little. We don't understand all that's happening there. This is, sex creates a deep connection. It's a symbol of an invisible reality. That's what it was designed to be. That's how it functions all the time.
So here's what happens. Let me help you out here. During sex, when you have an orgasm, your body fires off a bunch of chemicals like explosions in your head. They are designed to create addiction. Same pleasure centers we talked about that earlier. They're designed to bond you to whatever is causing that.
In your head. They are designed to create addiction. Same pleasure centers we talked about that earlier. They're designed to bond you to whatever is causing that. There's multiple brain chemicals that take place during this that are designed to connect you far beyond a physical interaction. Some of the same chemicals that are given off when a mother breastfeeds, the skin-to-skin contact stuff, it's become real big recently so they've been pushing for men to have skin-to-skin contact
With their babies because mothers get to and it helps you bond to the baby and so that was one of the things they talked about like in the hospital I should have some skin-to-skin contact with Archer and so when they first went to hand me him they were like here you want to hold him and I was like yeah let me take my shirt off first and they were like okay and I was like I'm kidding and they were like well a lot of dads do that and I was like I didn't mean to mock them
I just I was a joke I'm sorry just give me the baby not doing it I'm not stripping down to hug a baby it's not happening sorry if that's you you go for it bro that's great proud of you it was just one of my things but there's something to the chemicals there that take place with a mother bonding to a baby with the skin and it happens during sex and it is designed by God
Who invented sex to make you addicted to your spouse to make you more aroused by your spouse whatever is causing this interchange whatever is causing this explosions in your head it almost slows everything down for you to suck it all in so it becomes a smell it becomes the context of what's going on it becomes the person this is why this becomes so devastating
Outside of a covenant marriage so beautiful here so beautiful that God designed you to become more and more addicted to each other that is beautiful and it becomes almost horrifying when you take it out of that context because your body is designed to latch on to people and you have to begin to if you're having casual sex
With people you have to begin to harden your heart on that you have to begin to shut that off you have to begin to over time grow callous to that so that you're not hurt over and over and over again this is why relationships become much harder to break off once sex enters the picture it's why people stay in relationships with morons because they've begun to do something that happens
On an emotional psychological spiritual basis where God's bringing them together designed and they feel like they owe the person something the person owes them something they become beholden to one another and they shouldn't be this is why pornography addiction becomes such a problem because you're rewiring your brain
To be all the things that were designed for you to soak in and be aroused by it's now being alone looking at a screen clicking changing from image to image novelty whereas in marriage it's designed to be so many other things so Paul says don't you know when you have sex when there's sexual interaction with another person so much more
Is happening here Bible clearly teaches that sex is designed for the context of marriage and the reason that we approach it the way we do is because we have too low a view of it not that we think too high of sex but too little of it so or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her
For it is written the two will become one flesh so he's talking back Genesis he brings it up again and says this is this is why this is a problem because it was designed for something else but he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit
With him so he's saying you already have this relationship this fulfillment in Christ you don't need to pursue it other places and then he says this flee from sexual immorality every other sin a person commits is outside the body but the
Sexually immoral person sins against his own body or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit within you whom you have from God so he says flee flee from
Sexual immorality we're pretty terrible at this flee means be afraid and run as fast as your little feet can carry you that we should have such a high view of sex that we should run from anything
That would lead us outside of what it was designed to be we should flee from it for some of us practically that means putting some blocker things on your computer that means having a dumb phone that only receives phone calls and is
Almost useless that means having some very serious conversations with the person that you're dating about where you're going to go ahead and pre-build in some lines build some fences in your brains to protect yourselves that means that maybe
Netflix and chill isn't an option for you because chill becomes way less chill after a while that you just have to build some ways that we're going to run from this and that's difficult but the reason we don't run is that we
Believe lies about sex we don't understand what it was designed to be so we're willing to toy with it a lot more when it actually has a lot more power and a lot more value than we understand man then Paul says this which means a lot to them and I'm going to try to
Help us understand it do you not know this is verse 19 do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit within you whom you have from God you are not your own for you were bought with a price so glorify God in your body they were not far removed from the slave trade the way to gain freedom from slavery
Was to be bought out of it that was it you were enslaved or you were bought out of slavery so when he says you are bought with a price what he's referring to is that when Jesus Christ went to the cross and gave up his life on our behalf he paid our debt to set us free
From slavery that we do not have to be enslaved to anything but that we were bought with a price and owned by Jesus who purchased us by his blood and who loved us so much to pursue us so far as to go to the cross and die for us to make us his you're not
Your own if you're a Christian you've already been bought you've already been purchased by a much better slave owner by a much better king who set you free from everything else so that you might enjoy a real true depth of relationship with him when it comes to our approach to sex
Paul says hey you don't have to be a slave to it it doesn't have to own you don't have to be a slave to your appetites you don't have to be a slave to your own personal desires you've been purchased by Jesus to be free and only through Christ can we actually find freedom so then they
Move on to the next question which is kind of a reaction against the first two questions I can almost see the Corinthian church wrestling over this and people being like okay we'll put this in the letter put this in the letter and someone's like no put this in the letter and so he gets to this
Next thing he says now concerning the matters about which you wrote so he's saying okay now you've said this verse chapter seven it is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman okay so sex isn't just individualistic it's not just consumeristic there's a group in Corinth saying no no no no
Just no sex whatsoever right like shouldn't we just avoid sex whatsoever so the third question is isn't sex dirty like isn't it just kind of wrong like there's you see so much abuse of it you see this handled so poorly shouldn't we just avoid it that's the third question and it kind of lines up with the third lie we believe which is that sex is dirty or it's at best a necessary evil like sex is good because it makes other
Humans and we should have other humans but that's really it and this this I think has been taught in the church some some people could kind of sum up with what the church has taught at times not not it's we've been fixing this I think but there are some churches who basically taught sex is gross and dirty and wrong save it for your spouse and give them that gift when you get married that's so beautiful thank you so basically they're saying shouldn't we just react against this and avoid this and it best to just
Not have sex at all I remember when Anna and I were going through marriage counseling we just the the church has just kind of avoided this in some ways I remember going through marriage counseling it was like a one session thing and the pastor flipping through a book and talking to us about like do you have a budget just different things and he flips over in his book and like the heading said sex and he goes now when you get married you you'd be able to have sex do y'all have any questions about that
And I couldn't do it I couldn't bring myself to do it I really wanted to be like I have a lot of questions I hope you got a lot of time on your hands no I just we're just like no and he goes well good here's some books you can read and he just moved right along and the truth is this our culture has a lot to say about sex and the church has just kind of avoided it I know parents a lot of times Christian parents don't want to talk to their children about sex if you're not talking to your kids about sex television is their friends are the internet
Is at some point we got to step in and start redeeming this picture and so this response was isn't it dirty shouldn't we just avoid it and Paul begins to answer this question so here's what he says now concerning the matters about which he wrote verse one it is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman he says okay but because of the temptation to sexual immorality each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband what he's not saying is everyone has to get married because you may be tempted what he is saying is pursue marriage if you are overly tempted
Towards sexual things you need to reign that in but you can pursue marriage it's perfectly fine to desire marriage that is not wrong you should not feel bad it's perfectly fine to have a desire for sex that's that is it is a desire it is an appetite it's not just that it's not just a consumer good but he's saying yeah you can pursue marriage to keep you from sin each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband the husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights and likewise the wife to her husband for the wife does not have authority over her own body but the husband does likewise the husband does not have authority over
His own body but the wife does okay first of all don't get caught up on the word conjugal I know it sounds prison-y it's not he's just saying when you're married you should have sex and then he says something that is mind shattering in their culture he starts off by saying the husband owns the wife's body and there were people just not in the law correct that is true you are right Paul when I married her I own her now I can do what I want she does whatever I want and then he says the wife owns the husband's body and people got whiplash they were like read that part again in that letter where he said that crazy stuff because they didn't believe that they
Believe that the wife belonged to the husband that was it and what Paul says is no let me tell you a few things that you've misunderstood about sex first of all it's good you should have sex with each other and your marriage was designed to be a place where there was enjoyable sex so they would have approached it as you got married to have kids and then if you want to have enjoyable sex you would just pursue that outside of marriage what he's saying is no marriage is designed to be a place filled with enjoyable sex and for the enjoyment and pleasure of one another both the wife to her husband and husband to her wife and so then he follows that up with this for the husband should give his wife this is verse 3 husband should give to his wife
Her conjugal rights and likewise the wife to her husband for the wife does not have authority over her own body but the husband does likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body but the wife does do not deprive one another except okay so he's gonna give us the reasons why you can deprive one another perhaps okay except perhaps is like he's limiting this down by agreement okay this has got this is a lot of caveats here Paul for a limited time joke for real except perhaps by agreement for a limited time so Paul's not married he doesn't have anything to gain from this he's just explaining how this works so he says you you own her she owns you you should have sex with each other except perhaps if you both agree for a little bit of
Time so he like even if you agree we're gonna take a year off Paul's gonna say nope I don't care if you agree on that limited time that you may devote yourselves to prayer okay y'all you've been having so much sex you ain't praying y'all might need to take to agree to fast from it for the purposes of prayer what else but then come together again okay that was it that's the only one he gives but then come together again and he says this so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control okay that's massively helpful and sounds a little bit crazy to us and here's why that sounds a little bit crazy to me okay I it is odd I mean maybe odds not the right word doesn't happen often I guess that's another way of saying odd but for people to get married and have the same sexual desire on the sexual desire scale it doesn't always happen
So sometimes you have a wife who has more desire for sex a husband who has more desire for sex culturally we act like it's always the husband that would but that's not true like it it just kind of ranges and so here's what Paul says here's what I would have thought he would have said but because I have kind of a wrong view about sex but here's what I thought what he would have said y'all need to agree what works for both of y'all if one of you likes to have sex more than the other person should have more sex but one of you likes to have sex less than this person who likes it more should have less sex y'all should kind of come to an agreement and figure out what works for y'all and and mutually agree on that it's not what he says what he says is your body doesn't belong to you you give conjugal rights to your spouse and you do not deprive one another which sounds to me like that's not really fair to the person who doesn't
Like to have sex as much here's why he says it if sex is individualistic and consumeristic what Paul just said is wrong and harmful and kind of rude to the person who doesn't like sex as much but if sex is a covenant renewal ceremony that always means more and was designed for you to sacrifice be vulnerable and give yourself to another then what Paul says makes a lot of sense that you in marriage are designed sex isn't for your own pleasure so if one of you desire sex more the person who desires it less should give graciously servingly because sex always means more always accomplishes more it's not just a personal desire it's not just a if I want to if I don't want to or for my own personal pleasure it's for the other it's for the other person for a mutual service and sacrifice to one another and it always accomplishes more so in marriage when we act like if I don't feel like it we shouldn't have sex and you should calm down
To not want to have sex all the time and maybe you're more gracious than the way I just put that but when we treat it that way what we are saying is I still believe sex is individualistic and consumeristic now for the person who desires sex more in marriage you can still be approaching sex in an individualistic consumeristic way I want to have sex I enjoy sex I don't care what you say don't pull this out Paul Bible naked don't do that not helpful and you're wrong you should repent your approach is not sacrificially serving and pursuing your spouse so if you if you're in a marriage and one person desires to have sex more often than the other person both of them need to consider each other the person who desires it more needs to figure out how to pursue their spouse and the perfect person who desires it less needs to figure out how to serve their spouse and once sex becomes a way to give to one another a way to pleasure
One another that your focus is less on yourself and more on your spouse then it becomes very beautiful and exactly what it was designed to be that I'm giving myself to you the same way I've given myself to you in marriage I sacrifice everything I have belongs to you for your good and your enjoyment and when both of spouses are saying that and approaching it that way it can become very beautiful and very enjoyable and it takes a lot of work and it's very difficult but Paul gives something else he doesn't just say sex is given sex is poured out for the other he does say that give realize that in sex in a marriage you are giving yourself to another you're not taking from them it's not for your own personal enjoyment you are figuring out how to give them enjoyment Tim Keller in his book where he talked about sex he said once sex becomes what's the most enjoyable thing about sex becomes giving enjoyment to
Your spouse then it becomes what it was designed to be then it becomes very beautiful but here he says this too he gives another reason for this this is helpful for single and married people I'm in first Timothy for some reason so give me a second here we go I was like this doesn't look right do not deprive one another except perhaps by agreement for a limited time oh you don't have sex you wanted to pray let's pray sorry okay anyway for a limited time to devote yourselves to prayer then come back together again so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control sex because of the covenant power that it has is actually a guard for your marriage against the enemy against a lack of self-control how the enemy works towards bitterness and anger and towards leading us away from our spouse let me tell you something about Satan's real we've talked about that
Before I could probably point you to a message that we've already said if you're confused by that or questioning that but Satan's real he's actively at work against us when Bible talks about Satan it's not just the main Satan guy it's always his forces in the world but here's how they work prior to marriage Satan wants you in bed because that goes against God's good beautiful covenant design and after marriage Satan wants you out of bed at least with your spouse because that goes against God's good covenant design so when I do premarital with couples and they're like yeah okay well we're struggling with sex right now but when we get married it'll be fine no that's a misunderstanding of how sin works what you're currently saying having sex prior to marriage is this is an area where we won't submit to Jesus this is an area where I'm going to hold what I believe above what he says and prior to marriage that
Means a lot of sex but after marriage that means a lot of withholding a lot of bitterness a lot of selfishness and a lot of not sex because the enemy works to bring us together prior to marriage and apart after marriage and one of the best defenses for your marriage is to covenantally continually give yourself to each other okay six finish here now as a concession not a command I say this what he's talking about is you don't have to get married because he says I wish all were as I myself am he's not married so he's saying I wish all of you could be not married and be okay so I'm not saying you have to get married I'm saying that if you do get married this is how it ought to work I wish all were as myself am but each has his own gift from God one of one kind and one of another the Bible is going to say that singleness is a
Gift and marriage is a gift and God graciously give some people with singleness don't use that against single people like what's a gift when they're like struggling with their singleness don't don't pull that out to like harm them like well just enjoy your gift why don't you shut up it's but it is a gift is God gifts singleness to some people the ability to be single and he gives marriage to some people and the only way either one of them works is for us to realize that Jesus bought us out of slavery with his covenant love to make us his when you are single it is so easy to believe if I just had a spouse I wouldn't be lonely I'd be full I'd be complete I could just get married I'd be okay and the only way to live single is to know the love that Jesus has for you and the fulfillment that is found only in him that he pursued you to the point of death on a cross to make you his and it's so easy when you're
Married to think you're supposed to fulfill me you're supposed to complete me you're not doing that right now and I'd be much happier if I could just be single or if I could find the right person you're obviously not it and the only way to exist in the covenant relationship that we're designed to exist in where we give ourselves continually regardless of what we're getting back is for us to be so filled up by Jesus and his love for us that we're free that we've been set free from slavery to our appetite set free from slavery to our individual desires to just love the person we're married to and just sacrifice and give John Donne is a poet he wrote he's lived in England during the Renaissance and he wrote a poem and he ends it this way he's talking to God take me to you imprison me for I accept you enthrall me never shall be free so he's saying God take me lock me up with you and unless I'm enthralled by you I'm going to be a slave to everything else unless you
Enthrall me never I never shall be free and then he says nor ever chased except you ravish me chased means sexually pure and so he says I'll never be sexually pure unless I'm so overwhelmed and filled up by you this is impossible and that's what Paul's saying here we've been bought with a price that God in his grace has gifted us and equipped us and the only way single people that you can remain single and have joy is to lean into Jesus and married people the only way you can remain married and have joy is to lean into Jesus then sex gets to be what it was designed to be not ultimate but a good gift from God for the covenant of marriage and we get to be free free from sex free from individualistic desires free from consumeristic desires and free to just love our spouses serve them be gracious towards them bands gonna come back up we're gonna sing and make much of Jesus who through the gospel went to a cross on our behalf to set us free who the God of the universe who designed
Things for our good for our joy for his glory some some single people in here you need to begin to you need to begin to flee need to begin to rightly view sex so that you're not putting yourself in compromising situations you need to be running from it for the sake of what it was designed to be as you glorify God realizing it's not ultimate need to begin to lean into Jesus and know know that it's his love that that sets you free and gives you hope and joy and fulfillment married couples needs to be some repentance over believing one of those three lies or some version of all three that sex is individualistic it exists for my pleasure until you treat your spouse like an object sex is consumeristic so if I want to or don't want to that's final I don't eat when I'm not hungry I eat when I'm hungry if I want to have sex we should have sex if I don't want to have sex we shouldn't have sex you need to pray about that and repent because sex was meant to be given and for those of you who have treated sex as a necessary evil in your marriage I
Pray that God would help you see the the beauty that he designed for it and how it protects your marriage and guards your marriage makes you addicted to one another need to have some gracious conversations so you might begin to have a sexual relationship as God lays it out he's not against sex if you believe he is read the Song of Solomon it's not against it he invented it was designed to be good and it's for us to graciously give and serve one another in a way that strengthens our marriages so I pray that we would see Jesus setting us free from selfishness and sin so that for single people there can be no sex whatsoever and you'd be fine for married people there can be a lot of sex that continues to draw you closer to one another and all of us realize it's not ultimate it's not where happiness comes from it's not what fills us up that we're free because Jesus sets us free let's pray God we thank you
That you're good thank you for your love for us that you give us hope that we don't need anything but you and that you give us other good gifts to enjoy that get to point back to you and glorify you in distinct and beautiful ways I pray God that you would work on our hearts that there might be repentance for the single people in here who've been wrongly viewing sex that you'd set them free that you'd let them run to you who've died for them to set them free that you're not going to crush them but love them and welcome them for the married couples in here who've been viewing sex wrongly
There is a small glitch at 9:20 in this recording that cannot be fixed. We apologize for the hiccup!
Church as Family
Transcript
It's good to see you guys this morning. My name is Matt. I'm one of the pastors here with Mill City Church. And it is an honor and a privilege to continue on with you guys in our Anchor Series. So we're in about the middle of it.
And the question that we've been seeking to answer is, what does the Bible say about the church? And then from that, how do we live that out as Mill City Church, as a local church body, as a gospel-centered community on mission? And so we've kind of taken it in those chunks. For three weeks, we looked at what is this idea, what does it mean to be centered around the gospel, the good news that Jesus saves? So we took one Sunday and just looked at the gospel message as we see it from the book of Romans.
We looked at Romans 1 through 6. And we see that we were created to worship God, but we choose to worship other things instead. We saw that we all fall short, and there's no amount of work that can fix this. But Jesus died to pay our debt and to make us right with God, so we're saved by His work and not ours. That's the gospel message that we're saved by Jesus' work and not ours. And coming out of that, it's the message, but it's also more than that.
It's how does that impact our lives on a day-in and day-out basis. So two weeks ago, we looked at the idea of gospel fluency. Since the gospel is the story that changes everything for us, it impacts everything. It impacts the way we think. It impacts the way we speak. It impacts the way we view the world and live in a relationship with other people.
And then last week, we just took that a step forward. Since the gospel applies to all of life, it actually applies to my individual life. And we talked about what it looks like to apply the gospel to our hearts, because our hearts are prone to wander and to drift. And when we speak that gospel truth back into it, it brings us back into right understanding of living in relationship with God. So today, we're switching gears just a little bit.
We're moving from this idea of gospel-centered to talking about what it means to be a community. And what we're going to see throughout the entire New Testament is that the way that believers grew in their understanding of the gospel, grew in their understanding of how to follow Jesus, was in the context of community, of living in real relationship with other people. And I think part of the reason that is, is that the society in that day, the culture in that day, was very communal. Like people had to live in a relationship with each other, which is actually very different than the culture that we live in.
We live in a very individualistic society, where most people are just kind of looking out for number one. So the money that they make from their job, or how they spend their time, or with their hobbies, is we live in an individual society where most people will say, you take care of you, you take care of your family, and then whatever else you have left, whether that be time, or money, or resources, whatever, you can use that to, to be in relationship with other people, or to bless other people. And so we see that. That's one way to think about it. I heard someone say that it seems like in America, the goal is for you to work a good nine to five Job, to get a good paycheck, to be able to go home, and not have to talk to anybody, watch TV for four hours, and then go to bed.
Like that's the individualistic American dream. And I don't think, I don't think it's because we don't want to be in relationship with other people. I really don't think that's it. I think we just don't feel like we need to be in relationship with other people. That people aren't a necessity. That relationships aren't important.
Don't enhance life. Don't make it better. And the culture of Jesus' day didn't see it that way. They needed each other. And as we look at places in scripture today, what we're going to see is that this idea of community, or relationships, it's expressly taught, some, but it's way more just implied in the relationships that people shared as believers, as they lived out this community together. That's what the culture was like at the time.
And Jesus shows up on the scene, and begins to preach a gospel to everyone, that salvation is for everyone. He's preaching to the Jews. So the Jews were God's chosen people that lived in relationship with him, that he said that he was going to love, and to bless, and to multiply. And Jesus comes preaching a salvation for everybody. And through his death and resurrection, he opens up access to God for everyone. And the entire New Testament is this beautiful story of all these different kinds of people coming together and figuring out what it looks like to follow Jesus in relationship with each other.
And the Bible is going to describe those relationships as a family. That's the word that's going to be used. So today, that's absolutely what we're talking about, is the idea of church as a family. And I just want to say this, before we dive into the scripture, I realize that family is not the easiest thing for everyone to talk about. So we all come into this room from different backgrounds, different experiences.
And in fact, when I said the word family, some of you went ahead and checked out, because you don't want to talk about it. The pain, the emotions, the feelings that you have, whether it be from a divorce, or some type of abuse, or just a bad home life that you grew up in, or are a part of now, you don't want to talk about family. And so what I want to ask you this morning is regardless of your background, regardless of how you walked into this room, I just want you to open up your mind and open up your heart to this idea of family that the Bible is going to talk about. Because I believe if you do, it will change everything.
Just like it did for Josh and Nadine, it will change everything for you. And I'm going to pray that God would help us to do that. So you guys pray with me. God, we ask that you would help us grasp this idea that you have made us into a family. God, it wouldn't just be something that we know or something that we recognize, but it would change us. God, it would change the way we live, the way we speak, it would change the way we lived in relationship with other people.
God, I pray for everyone in the room, regardless of the family background that we've walked into this room with, I pray that you would redeem that idea and you would give us a beautiful picture of what your word says you have invited us into. I pray that you would do that through your Holy Spirit. In Jesus' name, amen. All right, so if you got a Bible, go ahead and grab that. And if you didn't bring one with you, look to your right or to your left, because this scripture isn't going to be on the screen. So just grab one of those Bibles that we have sitting on the seats.
We're going to be in Galatians chapter four. Galatians is in the New Testament. If you got the blue and white Bible, it's going to be page 623. And if you don't have a Bible, we want you to take that one with you when you leave. We have lots of these and we want everyone to have a Bible. So please take one of these with you when you go.
Okay, the book of Galatians is a letter that Paul is writing to a church that's in the Southern province in the Roman Empire. Okay, and what we know from the book of Acts about Paul is that Paul becomes a Christian. He becomes a believer and he starts going on these different missionary journeys. Yes. Well, and you know what? I'm a little dyslexic, guys.
I told them it was. So if you go to 623, I don't know where you're going to be, but if you'd like to join us in 632, sorry about that. But anyway, so this is a letter that Paul's writing to the church in Galatia. So when Paul became a Christian, he began to go out on these missionary journeys and one of the areas he ends up is in Galatia. Paul shares the gospel. People become Christians.
They begin to follow Jesus. He begins to teach them what it means to be a disciple and they start a church there. And then Paul moves on from that place. And we know that by this time, there are many churches in this area. And what Paul, the purpose of Paul writing this letter is to continue instructing them in how to follow Jesus in normal, everyday life as a church family. And that's important for us.
That's important for us to remember that Paul is speaking to a church family because I want us to listen to this as a church family. I want to hear this as a collective. So chapter 4, verse 4 on page 632, if your Bible looks like this, let's read it together. Verse 4, But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law. Okay, let's stop there. All right, this is what we've been talking about for the last couple of weeks.
This is the gospel message. What it said here is that God sent Jesus, born of a woman, conceived of by the Holy Spirit, which meant that Jesus was fully God and fully man. So Jesus was God in human form. And it says that he sent Jesus to be under the law. The law, God gave the law to his people to tell them how to live in relationship with him and with each other. So it says that he sent him to be under the law.
But here's the catch. Nobody could live up to the law. That's what we talked about in our first week, is that no amount of work could fix this. Nobody could live up to it. And so it says that he sent him to be under the law to redeem those who were under the law, which is this beautiful picture that Jesus comes and he lives a perfect, sinless life. He perfectly obeys God's law, perfectly lives in relationship with God, and then he dies to pay for the fact that we never could have lived perfectly in relationship with God.
And in doing so, he paid for our sin. That's the gospel message, and that's important because Paul, before he goes into how this plays out, he just sets the stage again. He said, here's the gospel that Jesus came to redeem us, and then it begins to give us the practical outworking of what that means. It continues on. We'll read verse 5 again and keep going. to redeem those who were under the law so that we might receive adoption as sons. To redeem those who were under the law so that we might receive adoption as sons.
And that's beautiful. That the reason that Jesus came wasn't just to save us, but it was to adopt us as sons. That Jesus, in doing this, was creating a new family that was made possible for those who placed faith in him. And I want you to think about this idea of adoption for a second. I want you to think about adopted parents versus biological parents. And this idea of adoption.
How many of you know someone who's gone through the adoption process? Okay, so kind of all across the room. It's insane what you have to go through to adopt a child. So you have to fill out a ton of paperwork. You have to have all these different background checks. You have to go through interviews.
They come to your house and look through how your house is set up. They not only interview you, but they interview your family. They interview your friends. And then when you add into that the cost, oh man, it costs a ton of money. Thousands upon thousands of dollars. And especially if you're adopting somebody from overseas, you have to pay for the adoption and pay for the plane ticket to go over there.
And a lot of times ending up in another country, you're just paying to fly out there for another interview. And then you've got to fly back and then they let you know and then you get to fly back over and you get to pay for another ticket as you bring your adopted child home. Adoption is very costly. And it's absolutely the same thing for God. It costs Jesus his life to adopt us into his family. And in an adopted family, and think about an earthly family for a second.
Biological children and adopted children have the same rights and same status within a family. But how much more grateful is the adopted child because they were chosen? The parents could have could have left them, not provided for them, not protected them, not cared them, just left them out on their own. But how much more grateful is the adopted child because they were chosen? And it costs a lot. And that's absolutely what's true for us.
That God was willing to allow his son to be murdered to bring us in to adopt us into his family. It gets better. It gets better. Keep reading with me. Go back to verse 6. And because you are sons, God has sent the spirit of his son into our hearts crying, Abba, Father.
So you are no longer a slave, but a son. And if a son, then an heir through God. I'm going to read that one more time. And because you are sons, God has sent the spirit of his son into our hearts crying, Abba, Father. So you are no longer a slave, but a son.
And if a son, then an heir. So for those that have placed faith in Jesus to redeem them, it says that God sends his spirit into them to cry, Abba, Father. Just this beautiful picture of family. And we can kind of gloss over that and not catch it because Abba is actually the Aramaic word that means Father. but it's way more relational than Father is for us. It's much more akin to the word Daddy. How awesome is that?
I want you to think about that. The creator of the universe is allowing us to be brought into a family where the relational tie is where he's our Daddy. That's absolutely beautiful that we've been, as verse 7 says, that we're no longer slaves. We're not slaves to sin. We've been made sons. And God is our Daddy and not only sons but an heir.
The inheritance that we have as sons is salvation, is God himself. It's his presence. And the reason that it says sons and not sons and daughters, it's not trying to be exclusive. So it isn't just saying only the males. No, no, no. What God is showing us is actually the nature and the value of the adoption that Jesus' redemption brings us.
You see, in this culture, the way that inheritance was passed down was from male descendant to male descendant. It was passed from father to sons. And the way that females were blessed in this culture or taken care of was through the finances that were provided by the males. And what Paul is saying here is that men, women, and children alike are given the new standing as sons in this new family. Which means that all of us are heirs. And here's another thing.
Don't miss this. Not only are we given Jesus' right standing with God, we're also given his relational standing. not only does Jesus take care of our sin, but we're seen as sons. We're given his relational standing as well and it changes everything. What we're looking at is the theology behind this idea that we've been made into a family, that we've been changed forever, that our identity is no longer in ourselves, but it's in Jesus and in this family that he's invited us into. That's what we mean when we say that Mill City Church is a gospel-centered community on mission. That's what we mean.
It's a family and we're not just talking about it in means of the relationships that we're aiming to grow. No, no, no. This is a declaration of what God has made us into. We've been made into a new family for those that have placed faith in Jesus to redeem them. That's why the New Testament letters are written to brothers. It's a shout-out to this family of people that come from all different walks of life, all different backgrounds.
I want you to look around the room for a second. Not for real. Y'all still looking at me. Look around the room for a second. Okay. For those that have placed faith in Jesus, you have been made into a new family.
Just as much family as your flesh and blood family. real family. That's what Jesus has made us into. All right. So we're tracking. We're getting this idea. We're understanding.
Like we can see it very clearly from Scripture. This isn't just something that we talk about. It's absolutely true. It's what Jesus has done. He's made us into a family. So the question then becomes, okay, I'm on your team.
That's true. How does that play out in life? What does that actually mean? How does that affect me on a day in and day out basis? And what we're going to do is we're going to take a zoomed overview. We're going to zoom kind of through the New Testament here.
We're going to look at a little bit of Jesus' interactions with people. We're going to look at how the early church lived in relationship with each other as we see it in Acts. And we're going to kind of talk about the New Testament so that we can begin to see this idea of church as family. What does it look like? Because here's the deal. This wasn't so much commanded as it was assumed because of their culture.
You're not going to see Jesus sit down. You're not going to see two chapters in the gospel where it says Jesus sat down and told them how to be family. It doesn't say that. It just shows how they followed him in relationship with each other. It's way more fish than water. Y'all get that illustration, right?
No. That's why I'm going to explain it. Okay. If I was going to, so if I was going fishing and I was telling you about the bass that I was trying to catch, all right, you tracking with me? I'm going to tell you about that bass. At no point do I have to tell you that that bass is in water.
No point do I have to do that unless I'm talking to the part where I hooked him, battered him, fried him, and then we ate him together, which is the intended purpose of the fish's life. But if I'm telling you about the fish, if I'm telling you about what the fish ate, how it moves, how it breathes, at no point do I have to remind you that the fish is in water. And that's very much the way the Bible treats this idea of living in family. It's not, it's expressly taught some, but it's way more understood in the relationships that we're going to see. So again, if you're a note taker, you may just want to jot down some of the references rather than try to flip back and forth in your Bible because we're going to kind of go all over the place.
The first place I want to go is Matthew 12, 46 through 50. Matthew 12, 46 through 50. We're going to have it up here on the screen. It says this, while he, and this is talking about Jesus, while he was still speaking to the people, behold, his mother and his brother stood outside asking to speak to him. But he replied to the man who told him, who is my mother and who are my brothers?
And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, here are my mother and my brothers for whoever does the will of my father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother. Okay. So Jesus is hanging out with people and it says that his mom and his brother show up and someone says, hey, your mom and your brother are outside. And he said, who are my mom and brothers? It's not like Jesus forgot. He didn't just have a moment there because he then points to his disciples and he says, here are my mom and brothers.
Whoever obeys my father's will is my mother or, I'm sorry, I said father or mother, mother or brothers. Okay. Here's another one. This is another interaction of Jesus with people and this is going to come from John 19. Okay. This is at the end of Jesus' life.
He's giving his life. He's on the cross. It says this, but standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, woman, behold your son. Then he said to the disciple, behold your mother.
And from that hour the disciple took her to his own house. Okay. So Jesus is on the cross and it says the disciple whom he loved, which is John, which is my favorite. Like John calls himself that. This is John writing the gospel. You know, it's a little cocky, John.
Take it easy. But it's true. He did. He did love John. And as he's dying, he gives the care of his mother to his disciple. And it's not that Jesus didn't have other brothers.
We just saw that in the passage before and we know that from other passages in scripture. But there's some amount of, but they didn't believe in him yet. We know that from, we know later that they become Christians and they follow him. But he hands care over of his mother to his disciple. So Jesus begins, is beginning to change this dynamic.
He's beginning to shift our understanding of earthly family and this new faith family that he's creating. And then Jesus rises from the dead and then he ascends into heaven. And so these believers, these disciples and others that he had spent time with, they just go into action. They begin living like the words, the things that Jesus had taught them, the things that Jesus had showed them. And we get a very clear picture of that in Acts chapter 2. We get to see this, this new family playing out.
Acts chapter 2, starting in verse 42. You might be familiar with this. And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And all came upon every soul. And many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common.
And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple, I'm sorry, and day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. It says that they shared all of their possessions, that they spent time together, that they prayed together. What you see there is a picture of a new family, that their understanding of family had been radically changed.
They realized that the only way that they could follow Jesus was in the context of these family relationships with other believers. And that makes perfect sense when you tie together with what we've already seen that Paul says to the church in Galatian, the Galatian church, they've been made into a new family and so they're absolutely going to live that way in their relationships with other people. But here's the problem with that. That messes with our Western minds, right? When I say that you should be living in relationship with other people and sharing your faith with them and that's actually how you grow, don't, don't, some of us just kind of go, really, I think I can handle it on my own.
In fact, the thought of Jesus ignoring his mom and his brothers when they came to visit makes most of us cringe. Right? Just a little bit. What about honoring our mothers and fathers? Isn't that one of the commandments is Jesus saying that I shouldn't obey that commandment? No, he's not saying that.
I mean, we see very much that Jesus has a deep love and compassion for his mother. He entrusts her to one of his dearest friends and his disciples. But what all of these passages are emphasizing is this idea that the new family is going to play as significant a role in our lives just as much as our earthly family. So is Jesus saying that we shouldn't spend time with our spouses or with our kids? No. But is Jesus saying that this new faith family is to be viewed the same way?
Same amount of love? Same amount of care? Same amount of compassion? Energy? Absolutely. Now, before mothers start to take off their shoes and hurl them at the stage at the thought of not being able to spend time with their children, it's not to the exclusion of our families.
It's an extension of it. Think about the entire New Testament for a second. Again, this is the zoomed out version. Jesus spent the three years of his ministry with twelve dudes. Some of them were fishermen. Some of them were tax collectors.
One of them was a zealot. And here's why that's funny. A tax collector basically worked for the Roman Empire getting money for them. A zealot was someone who absolutely wanted to overthrow the Roman Empire. So next time you're in a conversation in your community group, realize that the tax collector and the zealot probably wouldn't have had a whole lot in common too.
But, they learned to follow Jesus in relationship with each other. It was in relationships that Jesus poured into them and they learned to follow Jesus in relationship with each other. And then Jesus ascends and we see the early church doing the same thing. And now the barrier has been broken down. Salvation isn't just for the Jews, it's now for the Jews and the Gentiles which means it's for everyone. And this early church is learning how to live in relationship with each other because they've been separated for so long the door has been thrown wide open.
As you read the letter to the church at Rome, at Colossae, at Philippi, at Thessalonica, you're going to read through it. And what those letters are going to be is it's going to put the gospel on display and then it's going to talk about how do you live that in relationship with other people. In fact, more often than not when you're reading those letters, when you see the pronoun you, it's usually not singular. More often than not it's going to be plural. The idea that the letter is being written to y'all. It's not written in there like that but it is to y'all and it's to be understood and lived out in the context of community.
In fact, if you just read through the New Testament you're going to see a whole bunch of these things called one another's. Okay? Fill in the blank, one another. The greatest example of that is love one another. It doesn't say love yourself. It implies the fact that to grow in our understanding of love means that it needs to be between two people or a group of people.
Love one another. That's how we grow in our understanding of how Jesus loved us is with other people. And that's just one of them. And I just tried to brainstorm all the ones that I could think about and just kind of create a list. Listen to this. Love one another.
Pray for one another. Serve one another. Bear with one another. Encourage one another. Teach. Be at peace.
Be devoted to. Give preference to. Same mind toward. Edify. Admonish. Accept.
Greet one another. Have patience with. Speak the truth in love to one another. Be kind. Be subject to. And on and on and on.
This idea of relationship. And they got that. That the way they grew in their understanding of the gospel and how to follow Jesus was in the context of relationships. You see what the New Testament is pointing us to? Family. Real family.
And it's not to the exclusion of your earthly or your biological family. Instead of thinking of them as distinct and different, the goal is to begin viewing them as the same. Same amount of love. Same amount of compassion. Not that your children aren't going to get your time, but you're actually throwing open the doors of your family so that your children receive more love, more care. Now let me be clear.
I understand that not everybody grew up as a part of this idealistic, earthly family that I've been describing. Maybe you grew up in a home where your parents split up, in a home where there was abuse. I get that. And in fact, you're kind of cynical towards this whole idea of church family like I'm talking about right now. But all of us know what a good family should look like.
Every single one of us. Whether you have that, have that or not, we all know what it should look like. And all of us have this intrinsic desire within us to belong, to be accepted, to be a part of that. All of us want a father that instead of raising his fists, open his arms in love. All of us want a father that will speak words of love and care and not tear us down with abuse. And what I'm telling you is, what the New Testament is screaming to us is that you've been invited into that family.
Regardless of our backgrounds, regardless of whatever baggage we come in with, the New Testament is going to say is that Jesus redeems people into this family, which is really good news. You know why? It means that no person in that family is going to be perfect. That the entrance exam to that family is not, you've got your mess together. No, no, no. The entrance exam is, I don't.
That the reason we get to come and be a part of that family is because Jesus redeems us and brings us into relationship. And so, yeah, it's a messed up, jacked up family, just maybe like the one that you grew up in, maybe the one that you know, but here's the difference. The gospel changes us. Jesus works and he changes us and he brings us into real relationship with each other. And as we open up our homes and open up time with each other, it over time, as the Holy Spirit works in that, helps us grow closer to him. And there's a lot of love and there's a lot of joy.
And so that's what we mean. When we say that we're a gospel-centered community on mission, that we're a people redeemed by Jesus to look like and to live like family, and so we just act like it. That's how we express ourselves. That's how we grow in our faith is with other people. And so the question then becomes, okay, I'm with you, Matt. I'm tracking.
I understand that this is what the Bible says is what Jesus has done. That I see that this is how that plays out. How does that impact my life now? How do I begin living like that is true with the people that are in this room, the people that are in my community group? And so we're going to talk. I'm going to give you just a few practical, tangible handles for how this plays out.
But our community groups are going to talk about that this week too. And so I want you to be thinking about what would it look like for us to live in a relationship with each other. And the first way is this. The first way to begin thinking about how do I exist in family with other people is to ask the question, how do I exist as family with my earthly family? Seems pretty simple, right? Try to answer that question.
Okay, how do I relate to my family, my earthly family already? And so for me, the way that I'm going to answer that question is I'm going to think about Katie. I'm going to think about the way I relate to Katie. So Katie and I spend time together. We share meals together. We go to the grocery store together.
We read the Bible together. On Friday nights, we go to the grocery store and we buy cookies and we go home and we bake them and then we shamelessly eat all 24 within 24 hours. We go on walks together and it's the same way that you relate with your family. You fight and you forgive and you reconcile. You defend each other. You help each other.
You laugh together. You do Pinterest projects together. Yeah, I said Pinterest projects. You do it. You know, it's true. You pay for things for each other.
You give gifts to each other. You see how beautiful that is? It's not to the exclusion of the family you already have. You're just opening that up for other people. You begin to ask that question. It sets the stage for how we live in relationship with each other.
And I'm going to be really honest with you guys. This is absolutely from my heart. Katie and I moved to Columbia two years ago to be a part of helping start Mill City Church. And the only people we knew in the city were Chet and Anna and they had moved here three months before. We spent time praying and planning and asking God, what do you want this church to look like? What is this going to look like?
And then we started with our first community group meeting in a home and right off the bat I knew that something was different. It was real. There were real relationships. We spent time together. We shared meals together. We played spike ball together.
I began to love and care for the people that I was in a group with and they shared that same love and care for me. And then it went from one group to two groups, two groups to five groups and as we continue to grow as a church, that's our understanding. That's how we view ourselves in living in relationship together is in this idea of family. And Katie and I have this conversation every now and then. It's like, how did we ever exist without this? I never want to go back.
I never want to miss out. Life is so much better, has much more, I don't know, it's just better. I just love being in relationship with other people and it has changed my life. It has changed my walk with Jesus. It's improved. Like Katie and I have grown closer in our marriage.
It's changed everything. And so when you start to ask that question, how do I view my earthly family? It begins to answer the question, how do we relate to each other as church family? Let me give you a couple of scenarios. Think through this. Okay, if we really are family together, think through these scenarios with me.
You get a call in the middle of the night from somebody in your community group. It's not look at the phone and move it to the side. No, they're family, right? So it means I'm going to answer the phone and I'm going to run to help, whether it's something that's happened or their car's broken down or if they just need to talk, they're family. I'm going to answer the phone. Short on bills?
Can't pay their mortgage? Don't have enough money to buy groceries? Absolutely. I'm reaching for my wallet. Because they're family. I'm going to help.
There's relational drama in your group because of a fight. You're family. You're not running away from each other. You're going to stay and you're going to talk about it. You're going to be open. You're going to be honest.
You're going to forgive. You're going to reconcile. We've got college students who live with us, who live in this city with us but have family that live other places. What if you had a college student that didn't have money to travel home to see their family? What then? You're going to put them in the minivan and you're going to grandma's house and they're going to have to choke down the same terrible stuffing that you do.
Just part of it. When you start answering those questions, it begins to show us how we should relate to each other as church family. And I've got some examples of this. Tati and I have been putting hardwood laminate in our house. We're expecting our first child in May and wanting to do some house improvements. And so I told someone in my community group that I was going to be doing that and they said, I want to help.
Okay, we were going to be working on it on Friday. Well, that Thursday that person got sick. That Thursday night their child had to go to the hospital and it had to get stitches. And the next day he couldn't even go to work because he was so sick. But you know who showed up at my house that afternoon?
Drove an hour to my house to help me even though he didn't feel good. Stayed till nine o'clock on a Friday night and whose wife and children completely understood because we were family. We get that. He was willing to sacrifice. That's a beautiful picture of family. I have heard countless stories of people having trouble with their car.
I've heard stories of people riding with each other to go check out a new car that was an hour away. Of people stopping work in the middle of the day and going and taking care of somebody's vehicle. Of coming together to help people get a vehicle. Not only vehicles but like AC units. Like if there was something going on like an HVACalypse. People running to your rescue.
Absolutely. I almost died that week guys. I'm for real. But because I'm in church family came to my rescue. Helped me in my need. I've heard of stories of people trying to organize birthday parties and kids going I want church family there.
The people they're rattling off aren't their classmates. They're rattling off church family. Adults that they want to be there. People sharing in life experience together. Stories of people who have had to go to the hospital or had a family member that had to go to the hospital dropping everything in the middle of the day and just taking off. Because it's family.
It's real church family. Just as much family as our earthly family. See how beautiful that is? And that is absolutely the picture of the gospel. That Jesus opened up the door so that all of us could be welcomed in through his redemption. That we were offered forgiveness and grace and we've been made sons and heirs.
And so that's the way we live that out is as a church family. And I want to point out just a couple of groups of people where this is especially beautiful. The church has family for new Christians. For some of you when you placed faith in Jesus your old friends your family wanted nothing more to do with you. You might have had to leave old habits and old patterns behind. And what's beautiful about this is that the church steps in and helps and loves and serves.
That it's real family. It's real relationships. And so what you left pales in comparison to what you now have. The church is family for people who are single. Our culture says that the goal is to get married and have 2.5 kids and have a house with a white picket fence. Yeah, is the Bible going to say that marriage is a blessing?
Absolutely. Is the Bible going to say that singleness is a blessing too? Yes. But unless the church opens her arms unless we're opening our homes unless we're opening our tables to people what we're asking single people is to be alone. That's not the case when you have real church family that you're throwing open the doors and inviting and welcoming people in. And it's especially beautiful for people who come from broken homes.
If you come from a home where you didn't have a dad who was there or you had a parent who was abusive or you didn't have real loving relationships with people the church's family redeems that for you. Jesus invites you into a family where the entrance exam is Him. It's Him. He welcomes you in. He's the one who redeems you in. And the most beautiful and captivating part of this idea of church's family is this.
Is this last scripture that we're going to look at from Revelation. And I want us to read it together. And they sang a new song saying, Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals for you are slain and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God and they shall reign on earth. The striving that we put forth now together as a family is just practice for what we've been invited into. That one day all those that have placed faith in Jesus from every tribe nation language and tongue are going to sit at the table with Jesus our Savior and Lord and we're going to share a meal together and we're going to be together as a family for eternity.
You see, Katie won't always be my wife but she'll always be my sister so that when Katie and I open up our homes to people when we go out of our way to make time for people in our church family we're just getting a little bit of practice in for what eternity is going to look like as we share in relationship with Jesus forever because we know that our citizenship is in heaven just like Philippians says and so that when we open up our homes open up our time it helps us grow in our understanding of who Jesus is and it's just practice for the eternity that's waiting for us. Bianca's going to come back up and we're going to continue to sing this is going to be hard this is it's going to be messy we're going to have to fight everything inside of us our natural tendencies and the things that we think we're going to have to we're going to have to learn how to grow and how to sacrifice time and as we do so Jesus works in that and he brings us closer to him and he brings us closer to each other and he gives us real family and I say this all the time and it's absolutely true here it's messy it's beautiful and it's worth it and so we're going to stand and sing in a second and there are three ways that you can respond to this the first one is this you can become a Christian and you can be a part of this family so if you've been you've been listening the whole time like I want that I want that to be true for me but I know it's not it says that to be a part of this family is for those who place faith in Jesus that Jesus redeems them and saves us and brings us into this family so right where you are as we sing this next song just cry out to him place your faith in him for the forgiveness of your sin ask him to change you from the inside out and then tell somebody don't leave here without telling somebody that news the second thing is this join a group if you've been hanging out with us on a Sunday and you've been hearing us talk about this idea of community groups join a group that is absolutely where we grow and what this looks like on a day in and day out basis you can't become family with people in an hour and a half on a Sunday you just can't do it it's not possible and you don't want to miss out on that and the third thing is this if you're already a part of a group don't settle for anything less than the beauty of what we've talked about this morning let me pray for us God I pray that you would teach us what it looks like and what it means to be family that you've opened up the way for us to live in a relationship with you and in doing so you have invited us into a family God I pray that you would teach us what that looks like that we would grow in our understanding of you as you work through the relationships in our church in Jesus name Amen