Lust

Lust

Chet Phillips

Download

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We love you in Jesus' name. Amen.

Hate-Filled Bigots and Hospitality

The Church has gained a reputation over the years as being intolerant, closed-minded, and bigoted. And to be honest, some of it is probably deserved. But what if there was a way to believe faithfully while still loving extravagantly? What if Christians were better known for the openness of their homes than the slogans of their picket signs?

This week's sermon comes with an added Q&A session with one of our Community Group Leaders, Jordan Surratt.

Hate-Filled Bigots and Hospitality

Chet Phillips

Download

Transcript

Well, good morning. My name is Chet. I'm one of the pastors here. We are in our sixth week, sixth and final week of our Theology of Sex series. I know many of you are thinking, man, I'm about sick and tired of talking about sex. So this is the last week.

We'll be spending any significant amount of time on that. But what we're going to say today really is a culmination of all the things we've said throughout this whole series. So this is more, maybe more than any other series. This series has kind of built off of what we said the previous week. Even the series where we walk just straight through books. This series has been basically we've got to get this concept so we can.

I'm going the wrong way. We've got to get this concept so we can discuss this concept. So we can discuss this concept. And we've kind of just built off of everything we've been saying. And so we're going to tag back to a lot of those ideas today as we talk through this issue. We're going to be discussing homosexuality and how we ought to respond and interact with that from a biblical understanding.

And so before we hop in, we're going to pray and then we're going to get started this morning. God, I pray that you would give us grace as we study your word. That you would help us to be gracious and loving to one another. And that you'd help us to really approach this difficult topic that is highly polarized in our culture. In a manner honoring to you and loving to others. And so God, I just pray that you'd bless us this morning as we as we seek to understand your will for us and your will for for your creation.

So God, we praise you and we thank you in Jesus name. Amen. So just just go with me for a second. Imagine remember back to middle school. For some of you that that's going to take a little more work for others of you. That was a couple of years ago, so it should be pretty easy.

Remember back to middle school and kind of just imagine for a minute that just kind of as as puberty began to hit you, which it hit people in different stages. And some people it was like it attacked them overnight and other people it like dragged it out for years. But just kind of begin to imagine with me for a second where you begin to just your body starts going through changes. So if you're a guy, maybe like your voice starts cracking. So like you're trying to talk and it just does that for no apparent reason whatsoever.

Which makes it really hard to like talk to humans without being made fun of and maybe maybe for girls like there's just maybe your parents began to let you I don't know like shave your legs or wear makeup. I don't know what happens with girls going through through all that. It was hard enough for me on my own. I wasn't trying to learn what was happening with y'all. But like you just you just begin to like the world just starts kind of changing around you.

And so for guys, maybe you spent way too much time looking at your armpits in the mirror to try to see if you were growing any hair like I don't I don't know. But just this stuff begins to change in you and you start realizing it's like in the movie Bambi where everybody gets Twitter painted in the spring. It was like suddenly in middle school all the guys started like you just started noticing the opposite gender. Like there was just this moment where it was just like there are girls here. And like I never really thought about how much that's going to impact the rest of my world. Like there was just kind of these moments.

But just imagine for a minute that when when that began to happen, when you began to have desires, sexual thoughts, when you began to have attraction to people in a whole new way, that it that it was the same gender. But just as that began to happen, you just began to find that I'm not attracted to what it seems like everybody else. Like I'm not I'm not experiencing the world the same way that everyone else is. So when I'm in the locker room changing and they're talking about the opposite gender, like I just I don't connect with that. And and I'm beginning to realize that my whole experience is just a little bit different.

And the amount of questions and confusion that would come along with that to begin to ask him, am I gay? What does that mean? Will I always be like this? Is there a way to to change this? Do I tell people what will they say if I tell them? How will they respond?

What happens to me if I tell people this? What happens to me if this is true? If this continues this way and just the amount of inner turmoil and pain? And confusion that just applies to all of life as you begin to try to just understand your place in the world, because because middle school and high school begin to be that anyway. Like you're trying to figure out who am I? Who am I going to be?

And you're basing that so much off of how people respond to you. So it's really interesting if you're around middle schoolers or high schoolers. They're a different person every time you meet them, because sometimes they're trying to be like, I'm going to be quiet and brooding. See how this works. Or I'm going to try to be a clown. I'm going to try to make everybody laugh and see if that works.

Like there's just this constant, I'll try to be really smart. I'm going to act like I don't understand anything. And you're waiting on your body to try to tell you, like, am I going to get really tall? Am I going to be athletic? Is this, like, what's going to happen here? And then add on top of that, I don't even understand my own sexuality.

And I'm beginning to realize that this puts me in a very small minority among everybody else around me. And then looking into our culture and realizing that it's so absolutely polarized. That on the progressive side, people who would refer to themselves as progressive, they're going to say, you need to just embrace your desire. You just, that's who you are. You found out your identity. You need to pursue that.

That's going to define you. And then on the other side of that, it's like this, maybe people made fun of you. Maybe people talked about you behind your back just based off of your mannerisms or the way you act in certain situations. And you begin to realize that there's not really a middle ground for you when it comes to culture. There's no way to just approach this in a non-polarized way. No way to process it in a non-polarized way.

And so when we begin today to discuss homosexuality, which has become absolutely polarized in our culture, we're talking about real people made in the image of God and loved by God. So absolutely loved by God that he would go to the cross and absolutely in a situation where struggling through. What does it mean to be safe? What does it mean to be me? What does it mean to be loved? What does it mean to exist with this?

And so as we talk about it today, I just want us to realize that we are going to discuss the logical end of it. We are going to discuss what the Bible says about it. But we also have to realize that we're talking about real humans, valuable based off of the fact that they were created in the image of God and that they're loved by him. And so we just want to be able to enter into it, understanding that. Now, the church has existed for over 2,000 years. Some would argue it was when Jesus kind of in Matthew 16 begins to say, I'm going to build my church on this, this proclamation of the gospel and those that proclaim it.

Some would say it specifically happened at Pentecost when the Holy Spirit filled 3,000 people and made them into the church. But it's existed for over 2,000 years and there has been agreement across the board with what the Bible says about homosexuality. Even as the church went Catholic and Protestant and there was Eastern Orthodox and like the church split at different times there, up until the last 30 years, 50 and maybe some really progressive circles, has there ever been any question of what the Bible has said about homosexuality? Now, there have been people who have outright rejected what the Bible has said throughout history and that's one thing.

But we've only recently begun to approach the text and say it doesn't actually say what we've always said it says. And so as we get into this this morning, I want us to realize that what we're going to do, I just want to walk us through what our plan is for today. We're going to lay some groundwork to try to even be able to enter into the conversation. We're going to spend a little bit of time talking about what the New Testament actually says about this and how we ought to understand that and some of the common kind of pushbacks on what the Bible says. And then we're going to spend a good bit of our time just talking to the church and how we ought to respond, how we ought to think and treat people.

But this issue has become massively polarized to the point that there's no way for me to say things in a way that everybody leaves happy. So welcome. It's not going to happen today. Do try to be a couple of caveats. I'm not trying to make any political statements. So if you hear some, that's just because it's become a very political conversation.

But I'm not making any political statements. I won't be endorsing any candidates or anything like that. Lord, help us with all of them. I'm not making any political statements. Anything I say will sound like I've said 12 other things. So just try to base it off of what I'm actually saying, not what it sounds like I could be saying.

And I've had to work really hard to just say what I've got here and not just things that pop into my head so that I can be as helpful as possible. Here's the other thing that we all have to realize. In our culture, on especially very polarized issues, what we're taught is if we disagree, you're against me. If we disagree, you hate me. Especially on this issue, this is dividing us. We're going to join teams.

And if we're not on the same team, then we're against one another. And can I just tell you, that's not helpful and it's not true. So we are absolutely able to disagree and still be friends. Absolutely able to disagree and still love one another. Still spend time with one another. Still hang out with one another.

And can absolutely disagree on very important issues. And still be gracious and loving to one another. And we even see in our culture where it's gotten to where if we disagree, I've got to call you a name. That we've just broken down what adult conversations should look like and how we ought to interact with one another. So, real quick, as we get started this morning, the Bible does teach that homosexuality is a sin. Now, we're going to go through and explain what the Bible teaches sin means so that we can better understand that.

But the Bible does teach that homosexuality is a sin. That homosexual Acts are a sin, more specifically. But before we hop in and start looking at some of this, I want us to see Romans 3. Because this is what we believe as a church. This is absolutely primary to us. So we're going to have it on the screen.

But you can jump to Romans 3, verse 23. It will be on page 611 if your Bible looks like this. Romans 3, verse 23. For all have sinned. Welcome. You're included.

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. No one measures up. And are justified, made to measure up, made to be okay. By his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. Whom, that's Jesus, God put forward as a propitiation. Which means a blood sacrifice to turn away God's wrath by his blood.

To be received by faith. That is what we believe. That is the primary message of the church. Which is that all of us fall short. All of us sin. None of us bring anything to the table.

And all of us are only made okay and only made right by Jesus. Period. That's what we believe. That's what we're here confessing. That's why we started the church a couple years ago. That's why I'm here.

If this weren't true. If it weren't true that sinners could be saved by Jesus. I would be doing something else. Probably more lucrative. Just guessing. I went to business school and tried to make some money.

That's what I'd be going for. Just letting you know. I might not make money, but I'd try. That wasn't helpful. Anyway. That's what we believe.

That Jesus saves sinners and that's all of us. That what we bring to the table is essentially nothing. Just our sin that made us qualified for Jesus to save us and die for us. That's all of us. There's not one thing that the Bible doesn't say. These are good people and these are bad people.

Or these are the people that God likes more. And these are the people that God likes less. What the Bible says is all have sinned. All have fallen short. And all are made okay only through Jesus. And his work on the cross.

That's the primary belief that we have. And in order for us to even have a conversation about this. We have to understand that that's what we believe. That's ultimate for us. Okay. The Bible in that way is very progressive and inclusive.

Everyone is welcome. Because everyone has fallen short. And everyone is a sinner. And it's only Jesus that makes us okay. I now have seven quick points I'm going to try to make. And I mean quick.

Because I've got way more other points coming later. Our culture has a track record of being unloving. To those who struggle with same gender attraction. To the gay community. We have a track record of being unloving. Hateful.

Our culture just in general has not treated them well. And that is not okay. Especially for the church. Those who claim to know and follow Jesus. Those who claim to believe what we just read. Which is that all of us are only made okay by Jesus.

All of us have. The only thing that we've brought to the table. Is what should exclude us. There's nothing that brings us. Makes us included other than Jesus. The church should be the absolute safest place on earth.

Because there are no disqualifiers. Absolute safest place on earth. To struggle with anything. And so where the church has responded poorly here. We ought to repent. We ought to look different.

Because it's Jesus that makes us okay. Two. Our culture sees sexuality as identity. Just to be helpful. This is a bunch of stuff we need to say. It's not in any kind of particular order.

And it won't necessarily be like. How does one connect to two? It probably doesn't. Our culture sees sexuality as identity. Meaning that whatever kind of sexual desires you have. That's who you are.

So when someone says I'm gay. They mean that as a. This is who I am. This is my identity. The Bible doesn't treat your identity that way. Your identity actually transcends sexuality.

It's much bigger than your sexual desires. Three. The Bible does not really speak to sexual orientation. Does not really speak to having a desire for someone else. We'll see where it kind of. It talks about it.

But it's not addressing that as sinful. To have a desire for someone else. To have a desire for the same gender. The Bible is going to specifically say. That homosexual activity. Is sinful.

So the Bible is going to say that. Having a thought or a desire for the same gender. It doesn't ever really get into that. It does say that lust is sinful. Which is where we have a thought or a desire. Heterosexual or homosexual.

And then we actually take active work in our minds. With that. So Martin Luther put it this way. When he's talking about sexual temptation. That you can't stop birds from flying over your head. But you can keep them from making a nest in your hair.

And that's the difference between having a sexual thought or a sexual desire. And lusting. Where lusting is where we actually take kind of an active part in choosing to let those thoughts grow. And take action in them. But the Bible isn't going to address desire as much as it's going to address action.

So the Bible isn't specifically after someone who has same gender attraction. As much as someone who Acts on it. Four. Sin is not just the bad things that we do. So we are tempted to think that sin is just my bad actions.

Sin is actually searching for satisfaction in anything other than Jesus. That's why we read Romans when we first started. Where we said that ultimately our biggest problem is that we've put something above Jesus. And that's what leads us into sin. Most of the time it's something good. Something applaudable.

Something that we would see value and worth in. And then we've begun to pursue that over and against Jesus. Here's the other thing. Sin is actually born in biblically. Like we're born sinful. I have an 11 month old.

I'm not going to have to teach him how to sin. I didn't explain to him how to throw a fit when I take my iPhone from it. I didn't explain to him to love my iPhone like a psycho. Like he just sees it anywhere and he's like, he'll drop whatever he's doing. He picks it up. And if I take it from him, he's like, why do you hate me?

And he falls in a little pile on the floor. And I just step over him and walk away. Nobody had to teach him that. We're all born with certain sinful proclivities. We're all born that way. So when someone says, I was born this way, I've always only ever had sexual desire for the other gender.

Christians shouldn't respond with, no, that's actually perfectly a biblical idea where it's like, yeah, it just doesn't mean what our culture means by that, which is if this is my identity, if I'm born this way, then ultimately it's okay. So I'll give you another example. My family filled with loud, aggressive people. Willing to be violent. Anna's family filled with quiet, nice people. That won't, like Anna, if you call her the wrong name, if you're like, hey, Susan, come here.

She'll, she'll, she just comes. Like she doesn't, she's not going to go, my name's not Susan. Like I've been around her before where someone called the wrong name and I've had to be like, her name's Anna. And they're like, well, I've been calling her this for a long time. It's like, well, that's really on her, but I'm sorry. You're going to have to change.

So I've had to do a lot of work to make Anna want to like assault me. Like I've gotten her there. It just takes a lot of work. I've had to be really active in my pursuit of making her that angry. But other people don't have to do that with me.

Like just my natural proclivity, like you can get me to where I don't want to talk and I just want to punch you pretty quickly. And that's in, that's born into me. But what I don't say is, sorry, this is how I am. Like, I don't, I don't get to do that as much as I would like to. They're all, all of us have some natural proclivities, natural desires that are born into us that are not God's good design. And all of us have to fight against that.

So when someone says I was born this way, honestly, we ought to say, yeah, okay. That makes sense. But that doesn't change what the Bible says. Sin is a big deal because it is always harmful. And when God addresses sin in us, it is not because he does not love us. It is because he does love us.

The primary place where we see Jesus, we see God actively addressing sin is on the cross. That's the primary place where God proclaims actively sin is horrendous. Sin is destructive. And I love you enough to work on it. So we don't believe as Christians when we say something is sinful, that we're against someone or attacking someone.

We're being helpful. When my wife points out sin in me, as much as I sinfully want to argue with her, she's actually doing that because she loves me. She doesn't point out sin in people she doesn't care about. She points out sin in me because she cares about me. And that's the way the Bible treats sin. So when the Bible says something sinful, it's not mad at you.

It's helping. Secondly, Jesus' primary place that he addresses sin is on the cross, which is where he dies to save us. So we can't act like him addressing sin is somehow hateful. It's actually the most loving thing he does. There are people in our church family who have varying levels of same-gender attraction. They have helped lead groups, served on teams, led teams, been a part of groups, and have been actively following Jesus and repenting of sin.

Absolutely believe that you can struggle with same-gender attraction. And be a spirit-filled Jesus follower on his mission for his glory, 100%. I have no doubt in my mind. Culturally, you're going to kind of be forced to decide where you land on this issue. There's not really a middle ground. So if your response is, well, I just don't care, culturally, they're going to say, sweet, you've joined this team.

There's not really a place where you can just say, doesn't matter to me. Culturally, you're going to kind of be forced to be on a team. And so it's helpful for us as Christians to study the Bible and decide where we land and be, to be as helpful as possible. Okay. Now I want to kind of move to the current discussion we've got going on when it comes to this.

We're going to look at three specific passages in the New Testament. So people bring up Old Testament. When it comes to homosexuality, a lot of people use what they call clobber passages, which is they just kind of go to this one passage and they act like, see, there it is. And they call it a clobber passage because they use it to like assault someone. That's not helpful. It is helpful to know where passages are that point to things, but not to use them aggressively to like Bible bullets to shoot someone.

Old Testament does address homosexuality. It does address, it'll say not to lie with a man as you would lie with a woman. Give specific instructions. And so people a lot of times will say, well, yeah, but there's a lot of stuff in the Old Testament we don't believe anymore. A lot of stuff in the Old Testament we don't follow anymore. We cut the, we cut our hair, we can get tattoos, we can eat lobster.

So obviously the Old Testament is just kind of discredited. There's a very long, helpful answer to that, that we're not going to get into because the New Testament talks about it. So where the New Testament does release us of some things like the dietary laws, it specifically continues to address other things like homosexuality. So we're going to spend the majority of our time focusing on the New Testament passages. If you'd like to have a discussion about the Old Testament passages, I'm sure Raz would love to talk to you about it, but I'll also talk to you about it if you want to. One of the other arguments, before we even get into, this is the kind of a prohibiting argument before we even get into looking at the Bible.

People say things like, it's 2016, aren't we over this by now? Or haven't we just progressed? Like there's this idea that progression of time just makes us better. And that idea came from Christianity and then got kind of co-opted and changed. So one of the things that you'll hear is just like, come on, like that's last century.

We're moving on. And the reason that that idea came around, historically people thought that that history went in a cycle. Christianity showed up and was like, no, there's a God who created everything. He has a beginning point. He has an end point. And he's working it towards something.

There's a redemptive history playing out. And so it's a Christian idea. Then the Enlightenment took it and basically just moved God out of it and said, as long as we move forward in time, everything gets better. Which once World War II happened, we should have gotten over, but we kind of haven't. We should have, be able to look at World War II and just go, no, time doesn't just fix things. All we've successfully done is figure out how to kill each other more efficiently.

But people still make that argument, which is really just a disconnect from what a Christian idea that God is actually working to redeem history. Also, people say things like, well, of course, Paul would say, that's who wrote some of these New Testament letters. Of course, Paul would say homosexuality is a sin because he wrote that such a long time ago. Meaning that the further you move back in time, the more prudish people get. Like, it's like you just go back and at some point you just, everyone turns into like a Puritan or a nun. Now, anybody who studied history doesn't really make that argument because the Romans and the Greeks, the Greco-Roman world was way sexualized.

Like massively. The reason Paul addresses it is because it was actively a normal part of life for them. And so he's going to address it. He's not addressing it because of course everybody agreed this was sinful because they were all old. He's addressing it because it was an act of practice going on. Okay.

The Bible clearly, directly, and repeatedly states that homosexual activity is a sin. None of these address same gender attraction as sinful. But there's been throughout history no real question about these verses. Go to Romans 1. We're going to spend a little bit of time there and then we're going to look at the other two where the Bible specifically addresses this. And I just want us to study them for a second and try to learn a little bit.

So Romans 1. We read this when we started this series. We read this a lot because this actually encapsulates sin for all of us pretty clearly. So we'll be in Romans 1. It's on page 610. If your Bible looks like this.

We're going to start in verse 18. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them from his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and his divine nature have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse for although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him. But they became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened, claiming to be wise.

They became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. So we're going to pause there for just a second to catch us all up. God made the world. We notice that there's a creator. He has designed the world to reflect him, to point back to him from the Grand Canyon to massive waves. It's to bring glory and honor to him.

And we reject him and worship other things. That's our primary issue for humanity is that we put other things above God. We'd rather have money. We'd rather have power. We'd rather have a relationship. We just raise up all these other things, pursue those as primary, pursue those as that is what fulfill me.

And that's the major issue. 24. Therefore, God gave them up in the lust of their hearts to impurity, to dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. For this reason, God gave them two dishonorable passions. So it's now talking about passions, desire for one another.

Their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature. And the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless Acts with men, receiving in themselves the due penalty of their error. One of the results of this, and we talked about this in week one, is that we become overly sexualized, overly led by our lusts when we've begun to place something else above God, because it's easiest for us to believe that another human will fill this void. Money's great, but relationships hold more promise because we were made in the image of God.

So that's one of the things we talked about in week one. Specifically out of that, Paul's going to address that they exchanged natural relations with one another with the opposite gender for relations with the same gender. One of the arguments made against this passage currently is, first of all, it was saying that they weren't being true to themselves, that they were, it was heterosexual people who denied their natural desires for one another and pursued against their own natural desires, relationships with one another. Meaning that the biggest problem is not being true to yourself. The problem with that argument is that Paul says they were inflamed with passion for one another.

They burned with passion for one another. So it wasn't just their activity changed, but their desires changed. The second thing that is argued here is that Paul doesn't understand the concept of soulmates. Not the concept of soulmates, concept of orientation. That really the biggest problem is he didn't understand that people could actually be oriented in such a way to only be a desire of the same gender. The problem with that is in Plato's symposium, he talks about the idea of soulmates.

And when he discusses the idea of soulmates, we talked about this the other day for those of you who are looking for your soulmate, that originally the gods made people with two heads and four arms and four legs and then cut them in half and then you spend the rest of your time looking for your soulmate. So the problem with you looking for your soulmate is that this is a myth and it doesn't exist and you'll never find them. You're as likely to find a unicorn or Nessie. But in that myth, some of the people were male-male, some of them were female-female, and some of them were male-female. They had the idea and understood that some men were going to spend their life looking for a man and some ladies were going to spend their life looking for a lady.

They already had the idea and understood the concept of some people are just going to be oriented this way, directed this way, whether or not they use the language. So it was a familiar concept to them, but Paul's still going to say that this was a problem. Here's the biggest issue with us because we elevate your desires. One of our only hero stories left is the, everybody told you you couldn't be what you wanted to be and then you went and beat it anyway. Like that's one of our hero stories. Have you all seen previews for Eddie the Eagle?

Anybody seen previews for that movie coming out? If you haven't, this is going to be really hard for me to explain. Anybody seen it? Okay. It's about a really goofy, uncoordinated kid in England who wants to be an athlete, wants to go to the Olympics. The problem with Eddie going to the Olympics is that he's a really goofy, uncoordinated kid.

So there's no like real way he's going to do that because most Olympians are good at what they do and Eddie apparently is not good at anything. See how that works? Like, well, I'm not like going to go do the high hurdles or whatever. It's just not going to happen. So that's his problem too.

He's just, he can't. Then he finds out about the downhill super long ski jump. That's what it's called. Look it up. And decides he's going to do that because all he really has to do is like, bend, I don't know. It's probably way more complex than this, but bend and then not be afraid of dying.

I think that's basically the two qualifications. And the whole movie is that nobody wants him to do it because he's goofy and uncoordinated, but he does and does it anyway. And you can watch basically the preview and know what the movie is. And I still want to see it because that's our hero story. People told him he couldn't and they told him he couldn't and they told him he couldn't and they told him he was ugly and that was why he couldn't and he was uncoordinated. But then he can go do it anyway.

He's going to, he's going to thumb his nose at all of them and go accomplish it. And that's why when it comes to things like this, when it comes to your own personal desires, our culture just rallies around you and says, follow your heart, whatever you want to do. And if anybody tells you to stop and anybody tells you that you're wrong, you found your enemy and you found the person you've got to overcome so that we can make a really amazing movie about you. That's our cultural story. That's what we celebrate. And so when it comes to personal desires, we just come along and say, if you desire it, then it's real.

Pursue it. And if anybody tries to stop you, they're wrong, they're evil, they're against you. And you now know who your enemy is. The problem with that is that the Bible says that our passions and our desires and our heart are part of the problem. That our heart is actually deceitful above all else, that you've lied to you more than anyone else ever has. You've tricked yourself more than anyone else ever has.

And the other problem is it's just a small view of what passions are, how we associate our desires. Like we're really just saying, find something that you like, but we don't realize that's culturally connected. So let's take two men. One of them is an Anglo-Saxon way back in the day when they were super aggressive and right around just killing people. And the other person lives in Manhattan today. So another man lives in Manhattan today.

Both of them have the same desires. One of the desires is when anybody mouths off to them or stands in their way, they just want to harm them physically. Overly aggressive, want to harm people. The other one is they have same gender attraction. Now, in Manhattan today, the man who has both of those desires is going to say, my desires to harm people and crush my enemies is not me. And I need to suppress that and maybe get counseling because that's going to stand in the way of who I'm designed to be.

But they're going to look at their same gender attraction and say, this is who I am. This is what needs to be welcomed. And this is what needs to flourish because of our culture. But the Anglo-Saxon man is going to do the exact opposite. He's going to look at his desire to crush his enemies and go, that's who I am. Because his culture celebrates that.

And he's going to look at his desires for same gender attraction and say, I need to suppress this. This isn't going to help me. And so when we say, whatever desire you have, that's ultimate, we actually are taking a really small view of what desires, how they actually work as if we don't have competing desires. We're not understanding that our culture affects that. And the Bible says at the end of the day, your desires are messed up anyway. So you don't have to think about the logical stuff.

Just know your desires aren't helpful. You need to trust Jesus. Was that helpful? Okay. 1 Corinthians. It's going to be 10 pages over if you're in one of these Bibles.

This is another place that Paul addresses this. This is actually, we're in 1 Corinthians 6. We picked up right after this last week where Paul's addressing sexuality. Verse 9. Okay. We'll keep going, but we're going to have to come back to this.

A lot of times these passages get read wrongly as if the only thing that was written there was men who practice homosexuality. That's a long list. And that's just kind of stuck in the middle. What Paul's saying is all of those pursuing active sin are disqualifying themselves from the kingdom of God. They're not trusting in Jesus. They're pursuing their own desires.

They're idolaters and adulterers and sexually immoral, which sexual morality, we talked about it last week, is everything outside of monogamous heterosexual marriage as the way the Bible is going to hold up as the standard. The problem with us is that we want to point out one thing and say, see, see how that's a big issue? But we're not repenting of our own sexual sin. I'm acting as if my own heterosexual sin is okay or somehow blessed by God or somehow more acceptable than someone else who struggles with something else, and that's nonsense. But the Bible is going to list it as a sin with other sins that people struggle with and that Jesus redeems us from.

That's how he ends. Such were some of you, but you've been washed and sanctified by Jesus. It doesn't disqualify you from his love. It actually is what qualifies you. For Jesus to redeem you is your sin. And it lines up in these categories.

Now, people will try to argue in this one and in, even though there's some different words used, and in 1 Timothy, where we're going to go in a second, that we don't really understand what that word means, that it actually is referring to maybe pedophilia, or it's referring to unwanted sexual contact, or it's referring to promiscuous homosexual activity. The problem is there's not really, you're having to do work to make the text say that when the writing's pretty clear. And there's other issues with that that we'll see in just a second. So go to 1 Timothy. It'll be on screen, but if you want to flip over there, it's to your right, and it'll be on page 642.

Starting in verse 8. Now, we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully, understanding this, that the law is not laid down, for the just, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane. For those who, okay, so basically Paul's going to say the law is good because we're messed up. That's what he's, that's the point he's making. The law is good for all of us who are rebellious, because it helps us change. It helps us see our sins that will be pushed to Jesus.

For those who strike their fathers and mothers, for murderers, the sexually immoral, men who practice homosexuality, enslavers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine. It accordance with the gospel of the glory of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted. Again here, it does specifically in 1 Timothy and 1 Corinthians, although Romans addresses it, it does say men. Romans does address female homosexuality. And the men who practice homosexuality was a much bigger cultural issue for them. That's why Paul's going to keep bringing it up.

Because women didn't get to do what they wanted to, but men could do whatever they want. So that's why Paul's going to keep bringing it up. But sexual immorality basically covers everything outside of monogamous heterosexual marriage, which is the goal. And here's the thing. I have a friend of mine. His name is Thor.

And he is a PhD in linguistics. Thor. Which means that, first of all, he's one of these guys who's like so smart. He's kind of, kind of can be awkward at times. Because he's so smart and he approaches everything like from a really like mental place, he can say things that other people can't say. Because it's like, there's no way I could say that without like laughing or thinking about the inappropriateness of what was just said.

But Thor can. Like he can just talk about whatever because he's just so academic. He was a PhD in linguistics and he knows language. And they were doing a discussion at Midtown Fellowship, which is where I was training there. He was a pastor in training there. And one of the things he said is he can go into all these verses and he can dazzle you, his words, not mine, with the Greek.

And make it say basically whatever he wanted to say. He struggles with same gender attraction. He struggles with this on a very personal level and says he's studied all the arguments against why the Bible doesn't say this. But none of them hold up. As much as he would like for them to be true, none of them hold up. All of them are weak understandings of the text.

And he said it seems as if people look at these passages and say these are the pillars holding up this argument. And if we can just knock down those pillars, then we would have the ability to basically pursue long-term, loving, homosexual relationships. And the Bible could be on our team. So they basically attack these verses. And so here's what he had to say. And this is a transcript.

So it's a terrible run-on sentence. Don't get caught up in the grammar. It's a transcript. If it helps you to read it, read it. But if you're a grammar person, maybe just listen because this was said out loud.

And so I'm going to read what he says, though. Even if you were to somehow take out those verses by reinterpreting them. He's talking about these verses. Or even if the Bible had never contained any verses that mentioned it. The biblical position on this issue is not resting on those verses. It's not resting on a few specific prohibitions.

It's resting on this gigantic tree trunk of the whole beautiful picture of why God put gender in the universe. And what gender and complementarity do. And how that runs through everything and all of creation. And his desires for intimacy. And his desires for life. It's this much, much bigger picture of what the Bible upholds.

And what the Bible says is the center. And what we should be running to is so unambiguous and so clear. So what he's saying is even if you took these verses out. The Bible's picture of what sexuality was meant to be. What we talked about last week is so clear. One of the things he says is because people think this is the pillars that I've got to knock down.

He said it's actually way more. It's held up by this massive tree trunk of God's good design for complementarity. God's good design for gender. God's good design for marriage. And for life together. And for creation.

And for the multiplication of the human race. And so he says it's this tree trunk of what God's woven into creation. He said it's actually more like you're climbing out on a few limbs and trying to saw those off. But in order to actually have the Bible agree with homosexuality as a perfectly fine way to live. You'd actually pretty much have to cut down the whole tree. And then you'd be left with no gospel and no Jesus.

And no real understandable picture of what it was designed to be in the first place. So the Bible is clear. And it holds up for us a good design that we ought to pursue and understand. Here's one of the major problems. We immediately say okay but what about love? What about long term relationships?

What if it's a committed long term relationship? What if they're good to one another? What if they love each other more than... Like there's so much messed up heterosexual relationships. And there's so many beautiful, loving, gracious, caring gay relationships. That why can't this be good?

Why can't we just look at this and say this is okay? Here's one of the reasons we make that argument. And here's one of the reasons that's so hard for us to respond to. Our culture says we've all bought into the idea that happiness is primary. That the purpose of life is personal happiness. That's the goal.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We've enshrined it. And then we've all agreed that the best way towards happiness is a romantic relationship. So if we've agreed to that, that happiness is primary and the best way to get there is a romantic relationship. The most cruel, harmful, evil things we can commit in our culture is to stand in the way of that. To tell anybody what we just said.

You can't pursue this type of relationship. That's not okay. The problem with that is that the Bible doesn't agree with either of those first two statements. Doesn't agree that your happiness is the point. You're going to have a really hard time forcing that on the text. I know people do.

I know someone who's stood up before. I had a friend who was a part of a church where they used to stand up and chant, money come to me now. Because God wanted them to be rich. And that was one of the prayers they would say. Read the New Testament. The call to Christianity is take up your cross, deny yourself, come die.

You're going to lose your friends. You're going to lose your family. This is going to go terribly for you. And then at some point after you've been tortured enough, you'll probably die. And guess what? It'll all be absolutely worth it.

Come take everything that has ever been a part of who you are and how you define yourself and lay that down for the God who died for you so that you might have a better eternity. You might have a real hope in something that absolutely matters. Everything matters. Jesus is going to tell stories about a guy who finds a treasure in a field and sells everything just to get that treasure because of how much more immensely valuable it is than anything else. That's what the Bible is going to say, that your happiness here is not primary. God loves you.

He's for your joy and your ultimate happiness, but that doesn't happen here through finances or relationships or anything else. And the Bible is also not going to agree with us that romance is primary, that it's the primary way to get to happiness. The Bible is pro-relationships. It's for love. It's not against it. I don't think it's primary.

It never holds that up as this is the way to pursue life. So when Christianity says, no, you actually should deny yourself, you should not pursue these relationships, we're not disagreeing with anything else the Bible says because we don't believe that happiness and romance are primary. Okay. Church. Four things for us and then we're going to do some Q&A. Four things for us that we have to realize in order for us to love people well and to act in such a way that someone who's a part of our church family who struggles with this can actually be loved, actually be welcomed, and actually live long-term pursuing Jesus.

Here's some things that have to be true. Number one, we can't keep pretending that happiness and romance are primary. As a church, the church in general can't keep buying into that idea. We agree to that, that happiness and romance aren't primary when it comes to someone who's struggling with same-gender attraction, but then we act like that's primary in all the other things we say. So every time you come up to a single person and go, have you found anyone yet?

Just keep trying. They're out there. Maybe you should lower your standards. Oh, I saw you talking to that person. Every time we do that, what we're doing is coming alongside someone and going, just remember where happiness is found. Just remember what life is about.

And it's nonsense. The Bible doesn't back you up on that. Perfectly fine for someone to pursue a romantic relationship with someone of the opposite gender, but it's not held up as supreme. Every time we say stuff like, well, I just know God wants me to be happy. How do you know that? Where did you find that?

You mean here? I doubt it. You mean long-term? Sure, yeah. And we see that on Jesus dying on the cross and calling us into a mission that matters so much more than everything else. That's his pursuit of our joy.

But I just enjoy my relationship so I know that God wouldn't want me to break up because I'm like, every time we say this stuff, we're not helping anything. And honestly, one of the major issues that those who struggle with same-gender attraction in the church face is not the sexual desire. It's that they're staring loneliness in the face. It's the emotional side of, I just want to be connected to someone. I want to be known and loved and cared about. And the church says your options are be celibate or pursue a heterosexual relationship, which to a lot of people who struggle with same-gender attraction, that's not really an option.

And celibacy just sounds terrible, not because of the sexual nature of it, maybe for some, but for a lot of them it's just that I want to be lonely forever. And here's what we're saying. Look, we know that happiness is primary and that romance is the only way to get there. I'm sorry. God's got rules. And then we're like, well, people are just going to keep pursuing this stuff and they won't repent.

And it's like, well, we pointed them to something that wasn't true. We kept holding up something that wasn't real and then acted like we were exempt from this. This false belief, this romance idolatry. All of us need to repent of romance idolatry. Some of you have stayed in really bad relationships for a long time or relationships that are really good but are outside of God's good design. And you're not repenting.

You're not changing. And we're all called to. And we honestly need to regain the biblical understanding of friendship. So one of the things that the, if you go to GayChristianNetwork.com, I think it's GayChristian.net. So the first website I said wasn't true at all.

It's the Gay Christian Network. One of the things they point to is they say, see, in the Old Testament the friendship between Jonathan and David was actually a homosexual relationship. The reason they're saying that is because we fall really short of the biblical idea of what friendship is supposed to look like. We're also approaching that in a very Western way, which is non-emotional. So like when David and Jonathan like cry and kiss each other, we automatically make that really sexual.

Whereas for Middle Easterners, that's not weird. Not sexual. Like it can happen in a perfectly non-sexual context. Did y'all ever see the pictures of George Bush walking down the street holding that guy's hand in Iran or whatever? Because that's how they indicate friendship. So he was with another leader and he held his hand.

And I was like, I remember seeing that when I was in high school. I'm going, that's super weird. I think we just have to go to war. I'm not walking around holding your hand, buddy. Like this is weird because I'm approaching that from a very Western mentality. But the truth is that the scope of emotion found in the Bible and the ability to love someone in a completely non-sexual way we've lost.

And so what we say is, yeah, the only real way to have actual friends is to get married. Like that's the only way you can really know somebody and really have intimacy and really over the term of life. And it's like that's foreign from the Bible and we have to redeem our understanding of friendship. Number two, we are all called to deny ourselves, take up our cross and follow Jesus. So when you're living with your girlfriend but you're having a fit about someone who's struggling with homosexuality, it's nonsense.

When you won't repent of your sin but the gay's better, nonsense. It makes sense. The way that we get to grow together as Christians is all of us are called to take everything that we hold dear, everything that we hold in our heart that makes us us, all of our uniqueness and say, Jesus, you're king. All of us. And so then when we look at those, our same gender attracted brothers and sisters and we say, yeah, it makes sense because they see it. They see that all of us are repenting of sin.

All of us are fighting our own proclivities. All of us are fighting against our own sinful natures and all of us are seeking to pursue Jesus and submit everything to him. But when we act like, no, no, no, no, I'm okay. My porn struggle is not an issue. I am kind of fighting or whatever. But the fact that I'm really greedy, the fact that I'm really selfish, this doesn't really matter.

But you, big deal. I'm going to skip all the other things in that list. Big deal for you. Big deal for you. We have to all surrender and all deny ourselves. I have to all submit our sexual desires to Jesus.

The third thing is that the church has to actually be family. We have to actually care about one another and spend time with one another, relate to one another. Because honestly, it's the emotional side. It's the loneliness. It's the lack of friendship that makes it so untenable. When we say, you just got to be alone forever.

But if the church is actually what the New Testament holds up, where it's going to hold up consistently the church as family over and above nuclear family, then we begin to open our homes and invite people in to those who struggle with same-gender attraction or just our single brothers and sisters to come celebrate Thanksgiving with us. Come celebrate, quote-unquote, family time. Because ultimately, biblically, we're all going to die and we're going to be a part of a family. And I'm not going to be married to Anna anymore, but she will be my sister for eternity. And we get to celebrate that now, that we've been made into a new true family where God, through Jesus, has adopted us to be brothers and sisters.

And so one of the ways that we get to help those who struggle with this is by opening our homes and treating them like brothers and sisters, inviting them out to coffee, getting a conversation going, talking to them, being their friend, playing laser tag. We have an actual eternal family. Here's honestly, the LGBTQ community has been beating the pants off of the church when it comes to community, to friendship. In a lot of ways, it's really beautiful. It's what God designed it to look like, for them to care about one another, to love one another, to accept one another, not accept their sin as the church.

We would accept them and help them fight their sin the same way we accept everybody else in spite of their sin because it's our sin that actually qualifies us for Jesus to save us. But here's the other thing going on in the LGBTQ community. In the U.S., the most likely thing to kill someone who's a youth, get grades 7 through 12, anybody, is suicide. Lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth are more than twice as likely to have attempted suicide than their heterosexual peers. This is according to the CDC. They did a study on 55 transgender youth and found that about 25% of them reported suicide attempts.

25%! The Trevorproject.com says that LGB youth are four times as likely as their peers and three times likely if they're questioning to attempt suicide. And we're the church saved by Jesus in spite of our sin. And they're not welcome here? Not loved here? We bring nothing to the table.

You aren't special. And then we're going to look and say, but my sin's different than yours. No. This has to be the safest place. The most welcoming group of people you have ever met. That's so wildly welcoming that it makes people uncomfortable.

That they don't know how to handle it. I know you disagree with me, but you've loved me more than anybody I've ever met. I know we're not on the same page here, but you won't stop calling me. You won't stop inviting me over for dinner. Stop being my friend. No.

That's what we're designed to be. The most absolutely overwhelmingly welcoming people because we know that nothing makes us special outside of the blood and savior. The blood of Jesus who saved us from our sin. So number four is we have to actually believe the gospel. You have to actually believe that it is Jesus who has saved you and has made you okay in spite of your sin. Not because of your specialness.

Not because of your good behavior. That your sinful desires aren't somehow different or better than someone else's. You have to actually believe that it's Jesus that saves us. And if we do that, if we actually believe the gospel, then we're free to love one another, to care for one another, to accept one another in spite of our sin. And then continue to confront one another in our sin because we care for one another. Free.

Okay. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to do some Q&A now. And I'm going to invite my friend Jordan Surratt. He's one of our community group leaders. He's going to come up here.

Help do some Q&A. Jordan struggles with same-gender attraction. He's going to help us as we talk about this today. So if you don't mind giving Jordan a hand. So this is my good friend Jordan.

He helps lead one of our community groups, the Pine Ridge group. Yeah. Jordan, real quick before we get into doing some of the other Q&A, I want to ask you a few questions just to help. People out here and talk about this a little bit as a church family. Can you tell people who you are, catch them up a little bit on your story, maybe just like the two-minute version of from when you were born to the moment you just sat down on that stool? That'd be great.

All right. Got to move quickly. All right. So I grew up in southwestern Virginia. It's kind of very super traditional, heart of the Bible Belt kind of area. And so I noticed that I started having same-sex attractions around seventh grade, so puberty time.

And I found myself just like, this is going to sound weird, but like looking at my teacher. And it wasn't like in a sense of, ah, I'm super attracted to him. It was more of like an interest. I didn't quite understand what was going on inside of me. And I noticed that like my peers, they would all be like starting to date girls. And I'm just like, I don't get that.

That doesn't make sense. But you kind of do. And so it would just be a little weird or whatever just growing up. But all through my middle school years, high school years, and even partly into college, it was just because of fear and shame and things like that, I wouldn't talk about it. And so the very first person I ever told, I think I was 18 and a half. And so I went basically the majority of my life.

I guess it is the majority of my life. Still keeping up with the half years at that point? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the first person I ever told was my cousin. That was after I started going to church. So I was already involved in a local church for about five to six months or so.

And I was just broken. And I could just feel God being like, you have to tell someone. You have to tell someone. I'm like, okay, the next person who comes up. And lo and behold, my cousin pops down in front of me. She's like, I got to tell you something.

I'm like, I do too. And so she was the very first person I told. Went off to college in Lynchburg studying religion, pastoral leadership. And I started opening up a little bit more as the years would go by. And then I moved down here. And I've been open with my community group, open with my friends, with Chet, with Matt, with Raz, and everybody else here that I love.

So you may have said this. Became a Christian in college? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So my second semester of community college, I started following Jesus. Okay. And that's, yeah, about that time.

And during all that, like, I never really pursued a relationship with someone. I struggled secretly, and so, like, I couldn't have imagined, like, someone else finding out by me flirting with them. But, you know, like, I just struggled with things like pornography and masturbation and whatnot. Okay. Well, help us out this morning. Or help.

If there's someone in the room struggles with same-gender attraction or identifies as homosexual, maybe is a part of our church family, what would you want to say to them? How would you want to address them? Cool. Cool. Well, part of this is going to depend on where you are at in your own walk and how open you have been already. I found one of the most encouraging and helpful things to me, even though it was super hard, was just beginning to talk about it.

And so it would take years for me to really build up that courage. And I've been lucky enough to have never really had any kind of, like, anybody lash out at me or whatever. I've had a lot of people just like, well, I don't understand, and I'm really confused, and I have a thousand questions. But through them asking those questions and through them talking about it, it actually even helped me. And so my encouragement to you would be, if you are struggling with that, to find someone here. I think there's a ton of people in this room who love you and care about you and genuinely welcome you as family, as brothers and sisters.

And I think you're safe and loved and cherished. Cool. Another thing on that that I just want to help everybody here, when it comes to hiding sin or hiding any kind of personal struggle, if we don't talk to people, any people whatsoever, we kind of disconnect our ability to actually receive love. Because we'll always, when someone tries to say they care about us or say good things about us, we'll always just kind of discount it as, yeah, well, if you only knew. If you only knew the real me. And so there is something, too, when we're in sin or when we have particular struggles or whatever, being able to be honest actually opens us up to have people really genuinely care about us and us to actually be able to receive that.

All right. Okay. So I'm in a community group or someone out here is in a community group and someone in my group talks about this now, confesses it, says this is going on or I struggle with this or whatever. Help me, heterosexual white guy, respond well. Like how do we love people well in church family if that happens, if they talk about it? Yeah.

Okay. I want to break that up into two parts. Okay. One is short term and one is long term. Okay. You have to do whatever you want to with the question asked.

Yep. We'll do. We'll do. So short term, don't skip over it because you're uncomfortable. Engage them. Ask them questions.

Talk with them. Be like, what was that like? Like engage emotion. That's one of the hardest things for me has been just the emotion behind it. And check kind of talked about that a little bit in his sermon was just like the thing that hurts me the most is not me not having some sexual outlet. It is me more than likely being alone.

It is me more than likely not having someone who genuinely knows me and cares for me and understands me for who I am, which sexual sin and homosexuality or whatever isn't my identity. I am much more than that. But there are still some amounts of me being unknown, even now at this moment, because I'm constantly changing. I'm a different person all the time. But so ask questions like genuinely engage them.

Talk with them. And if you do, this is kind of going back to the second question. If you if you do open up, be willing to give some grace to the people that you're telling. So whenever I told my dad, he was just quiet the entire time and it took him a day to process through that. And he called me back. He's like, OK, you know, I got a ton of questions and we had like an hour long conversation, you know, but we be willing to give them grace because they're having to process through this stuff as well.

So that's kind of the short term. Love them. Well, love them. Well, hug them. Don't be afraid of them because they're terrified. I'm terrified.

OK, so ask questions. Yeah. Bring it up later. Yeah, I think that would be very helpful. OK, which is kind of the long term. You know, it's just like how if someone is like, hey, I'm struggling with a drug addiction.

You're like, OK, you don't mention it. Don't mention it ever again. You know, see how that's going to go for you. You know, that doesn't make much sense. So long term.

Yeah. Don't make everything about that. You know, I'm much more than my same sex attraction, but I struggle with same sex. Sex attraction. OK. And so long term, that would be talking with them, talking with me, talking with us, I guess I should say.

Loving us well. Inviting them into a family. You know, that's that's we already you know, we are a family so long as our faith is in Jesus. And so you are my brothers and sisters. I think for the longest time, like I wrestle a lot with this just imagery, this this picture of I'm a sheep who's outside of the flock and I'm really struggling, feeling like I'm part of the flock. And so that just that just makes it so much more easier for wolves to come in and snack snatch me, you know.

But I think that is just very common in people who struggle with same sex attraction. I've seen it so many times in a lot of my friends who I've spoken with who struggle with the same thing. They're just like, I can't tell anyone. You know, they don't I don't know what to do. I'm afraid. You know, it's just a consistent, constant fear across the board.

Even people who are proud, you know, they call it pride for a reason because they're ashamed and they feel guilty. One of the things you talk about being family, one of the things Thor has talked about before is that Kent Bateman is one of the pastors. He actually spoke here recently about going to planting in Knoxville, went to Thor and basically was like, look, I know you're kind of kind of pursuing celibacy, but I know you also have some desires to to be a husband, to be a father. Like that's part of what goes along with this. It's not just the sexual nature of stuff. And he was like, man, if you ever just get lonely, just come live with us.

Like he was about to get married to his wife, Anna, at that point. He said, just come. You can come live with us. You can help me father my children. You can help be a part of this this family. And and so there is room for that as you begin to build genuine, real relationships to just invite people in, divide them to be around, to be a part of your family.

The other thing, I think one of the reasons we don't respond when someone confesses sin is we don't know what to say, which actually means that we probably when we do know what to say are saying unhelpful things. And here's what I mean. When someone confesses sin and I'm like, oh, I got this because I've experienced that before. Mostly what I'm blasting them with is good advice. And so when confesses something I don't understand and I'm quiet, it's because I don't have any good advice. Our goal as a church family is to point people towards Jesus, which means that you get to respond to any sin because Jesus is the answer to all sin.

So let me just help you out there. If you're like, I don't have anything. Jesus, just Sunday school it. It's Jesus. Jesus is the answer. Like, just write that on your hand.

And someone confesses something. Go, let me tell you about Jesus. Like that's realize that ultimately it's Jesus that saves us and Jesus makes us OK. And you get to do that. You get to point towards Jesus in all of it, even if you don't know how to to be the most helpful there. And then, yeah, you can always ask questions.

I think that's a very helpful thing to say. OK. Yeah, I think that's what we'll take some Q&A kind of here together. And then appreciate you. Thank you for sharing all that with us. And we'll look at what kind of what's been sent in.

When it comes to the theology of sex, are there topics that are simply off limits for Christians? No. Let me caveat that, though. The short answer is no. The long answer is what's the point of talking about it? If your goal is, so Paul at one point talks about people having itching ears.

And I just think that's a helpful. If your goal is it just feels good to talk about sex stuff, you probably should stop. Like you should confess that to your group. And we should work on that together. If your goal is like I genuinely have questions. I want to talk about this.

There are words that are used in dirty ways, but they're also used to describe things. So like Miss Libby came up to me last week and was like, it's just so refreshing to hear a pastor say orgasm. And I was like, that's so weird that we can talk about this. But we're just having a straight up normal conversation about an actual thing that exists. And we have to use words to describe it. And so there are things you can talk about.

What's the point of saying it? Are you going for a flashbang or this will be exciting or something like that? So it's really more of a what's the point? So they're okay topics. What's the point? What's the context?

Why are you talking about it? Is it okay to discuss your marriage bed with someone other than your spouse? Okay. Okay. Yes-ish. Again, big question.

What's the point? What are you talking about? Like, are you just wanting to tell stories? Are you wanting to gossip? Are they sharing? And so you feel like it's your turn?

Like, no. How does your spouse feel about that? Have you talked to them? Are you talking to your spouse about your marriage bed? You probably should be having some of those conversations. But it can be very helpful to have some conversations that are, I need to discuss this with you.

I need to, I wonder if my heart's right here. I need to have some of these conversations that aren't detail specific, aren't any kind of, let me tell you, like, it's just, I need to talk about this for my own sake, for my own sin, for me to grow. And I'm trying to get some clarity on this, and I think that's okay. Some of it is you need to talk to your spouse. You need to talk about what they're comfortable with. And you need to not, the goal can't be, let me share stories or let me do this because it's, I think it's entertaining or interesting or anything like that.

It's got to be way more of a, I'm wanting to grow and I'm wanting this to be healthy, and so this is worth us having a conversation. Kind of how I say that, so. Can someone be in a long-term, committed, same-gender relationship and still be a Christian? I'm going to take a shot in the dark and assume you've maybe thought about this more. So do you want to give an answer to that, and then I'll kind of fill in if there's any.

The hard thing is, is I want that to be so true because of what we were talking about earlier. I don't want to be alone. I don't want to not have someone, you know, that I can talk to, that I can trust, that I can lean into. You know, it's just like, God, there's just this deep desire to just be with someone. And obviously with my heart, like, I have no desire to be with a woman, which means that my desire is to be with a man. But I can't just for biblical reasons, you know.

But in regards to this question specifically, yeah, there's the emotional side of it, and there's the, well, they love each other, and they're committed to each other. But in regards to any sin, you know, homosexual, heterosexual, it doesn't really matter. If you are a heterosexual couple who is living in a relationship outside of marriage, you're in sin. And so I think the real question behind this is, can, let me read it, can someone be in a long-term committed, unrepentant sin and still be a Christian? And I think the biblical answer is no. So I'll read things like when Jesus says, why do you say you love me, but don't do the things that I've commanded?

Or John in 1 John when he says, you know, if you're continuously living in sin, then you actually never knew Jesus. You never knew God. The love of the Father is not inside of you. It's not what we want to hear. It's not what I want to hear. But it's true and actually better.

Yeah, thank you. It's a massively difficult question. I agree with that. I think it's where we try to gauge it, where we try to look into a situation and say, well, is this person a Christian? How long have they been sinning? Do they know about the sin?

Because there's, like, ignorance. And I've had friends who became Christians and continued doing very sinful things until they got to that place in the Bible. And then they were like, oh, this is no bueno. And I didn't know. Like, and that's one thing. It's a, is it an active, unrepentant?

I know what the Bible says. I just don't care. I had another friend who said, well, I'll become a Christian. But if I become one, I'm not going to do that no sex thing. He wasn't married. And it was like, you don't understand what becoming a Christian is because you get a king.

That's not how you show up with a, all right, king, here are my terms. That's not how it works. And so I think, yeah, long, long enough term, unrepentant, unwilling to repent, non-wrestling with it, just I'm just going to do what I want to do here. The Bible is going to say, well, you probably never were. But can you be a Christian in sin?

Yeah. Can you be a Christian in struggle? Yeah. Can you be a Christian in fall on your face all the time? Yeah, that's why we're Christians. We're the first people who raised our hand and said, I'm really messed up and I need someone to help me.

So, yeah, that's helpful. One more thing. I think it's very telling because if someone has an idol in their heart, which is what they worship to be God, and then God confronts them on that sin, and they're saying, no, capital God, I'm not surrendering this idol. I'm not surrendering this lowercase g God. Then that's idolatry.

And it shows that they're not even surrendered to God to begin with. At least that's the way that I process through that. I think the Bible processes through it the same way. Yeah. Can someone who struggles with same-gender attraction be in Christian leadership? You're a group leader.

You want to answer that? Well, I'm a group leader. So I'm a group leader. Yes, the more the merrier. Can someone who struggles with any sin be a group leader? I hope so.

Yeah. Yeah, for real. For real. We are really – That would be a real short list of groups. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's the question there.

So I think the key in that question would be the struggles with – so someone who's unrepentant, that becomes an issue. But someone who struggles with sin, that's every Christian in the room. Like that's everybody, every Christian should be fighting sin. And there would be no Christian leadership if you couldn't struggle with sin and lead. And so, yeah, I think the answer to that is are you fighting it, loving Jesus, hating sin, versus, no, just this is me. I've accepted it.

This is who I'm going to be, and I don't care what the Bible says. That becomes a problem. So, yeah. How should our beliefs on sexuality affect our politics? Okay, so just in general, whole theology of sex series and how should that affect politics? I said I wasn't going to say political statements.

I still don't intend to. I think you need to realize that your belief should affect your politics, should affect how you vote, should affect how you approach candidates, how you think about things. I think you need to also realize there is no political group that perfectly is backed up by Jesus. So when you read the Bible, you're going to see some things that are going to line up with our different political parties in different ways. And I think in America, especially during this time, we need to realize Jesus has an endless kingdom where he reigns supreme throughout all of eternity. And no political candidate is going to save us or fix us or make us whole or complete everything.

There was a Messiah. His name is Jesus. He will return and set up a kingdom that will last forever and you won't see a Messiah on any of the tickets. So, think about it. Have your beliefs affect your politics. If you're just like, no, I just don't even think about what I believe.

It's like that's a culturally given thing. That's foreign to the Bible. You should absolutely have what you believe affect how you vote. Christians are told, don't bring your Christianity into this room. And it's like, that's nonsense. Take it with you everywhere.

But realize that it's not ultimate regardless. But Christians should vote. And all the people you're going to vote for are going to have some things that are just completely messed up. Do you want to take this one? All right.

We're good. I'm going to pray. And Matt and Bianca are going to come back up and we're going to sing a little bit together. And so, I'll send it to you. Yeah, you can come on. No, we're good.

We'll move this and then I'll pray and we'll sing. Y'all thank Jordan again for hopping up here. Thank you. Father, we thank you that you're good. Lord, we thank you, Lord, that our sin qualifies us for you to be a very good and loving Savior. Pray, God, that you would help us to grow to be family.

To all of us repent of sin. For all of us to quit believing the lies about happiness and romance so that we actually, in our marriages, can just love our spouse well but without believing they're supposed to fill us up. That in our pursuit of relationships, we can love you more. And that in the midst of all of our life, we'll quit just believing the lie that you want us to be happy here in this moment right now. Rather than you want us to pursue you, which is an ultimate good. God, help us to believe the gospel.

And help us to love our city and our gay neighbors well. And all those in our church family who struggle with same-gender attraction. That they feel wildly loved and cared about and welcomed. Because you are our king. And we hold no other allegiances. In Jesus' name, amen.

Consumeristic Sexual Individualism

What is the purpose of sex? Should it be casual and convenient? Apocalyptic and ultimate? Or something different altogether? Is sex an appetite we satisfy, or a gift we enjoy?

Consumeristic Sexual Individualism

Chet Phillips

Download

Transcript

Well, good morning. We are in our sixth week of our Theology of Sex series, and today we are talking about sex. So if you are just now hanging out with us, that might not seem surprising. If you've been here for the other five weeks, you may be thinking, I thought that's what we were going to talk about the whole time. It's about time. Why have we waited so long?

It wasn't bait and switch. Really what it was is there's so many other things we had to say before we could ever talk about sex by itself, for us to even understand how God designed it and what his goal was for it and what his aim was for it. And so we had to kind of build a framework for God's good design for sex before we could ever even talk about sex. It's kind of like jumping right in and talking about trigonometry. If you don't know how to add and subtract, it's like we got to cover the basics first. We got to understand the framework here before we can we can talk about sex.

And so for five weeks, we've spent some time walking through different passages of Scripture, trying to understand gender, trying to understand God's design. And so I'm going to try to recap that a little bit, maybe using some different words to help us understand what we've been looking at for the past five weeks. So we talked about God created humanity in his image, that we were designed by God for his purposes. And what we're seeing there is that God, who is very different from us, makes us similar but different from him. So humanity made in the image and likeness of God is similar to God, but very different from God.

And hopefully we're all tracking with that. You're like God. You are not God. So just if you're confused about that, we can talk about it later. But you are not God.

You're like him, made in his image and likeness. And so there's this idea of similar but different. And then when God made gender, he did the same thing. He kind of followed the same pattern where he made both male and female similar but different. He designed us distinct from one another. And so it follows that same setup, that same paradigm of similar but different.

And then we saw that Christ's love for the church, Jesus' pursuit of the church in the cross, was his covenant love for the church. And that is where this very different being from humanity joins with humanity, makes himself one with humanity to join together in a covenant relationship and to make himself one. So the church is called the bride of Christ and Christ's body. So we're both his pursuit and what he loves and cherishes and also we're made one with him. And then we saw that marriage is actually a small picture of that. Marriage is these two similar but different beings coming together and becoming one and covenanting together with one another for a life of devotion and submission to one another.

And so we see that God designed humanity similar but different from him. He designed gender similar but different from one another. And then God through Christ makes a covenant with humanity and makes us one with him and that marriage is designed to be the same thing, to be similar but different brought together in a covenant relationship. And only in that relationship sex is designed to exist. So sex exists inside of this covenant relationship.

And so we've kind of walked through all of that. And now we're going to spend some time today talking about sex. So we're going to go to Genesis 2 real quick. You don't have to flip there. We're going to have it on the screen. We've gone there every week.

You should about have this memorized by now. This is vastly important for our understanding of who we are, how we were designed, and how we view and understand God and understand our place with one another and understand sexuality. So it says, Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And so we spent time last week talking about this. This is the covenant relationship in marriage, that two become inseparably one. So Paul's going to go to this verse in Ephesians 5 and say, this actually gives us a small picture of the love that Christ has for the church, how he dies on her behalf, how he sacrifices to pour out his love and to just give and just to lavish love on his people.

And that's the design for marriage. And then Jesus is going to go there in Matthew 19 to say that whatever God's brought together, we're not supposed to tear apart. And so then it says, And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. This is the very beginning of Scripture. In the very first few pages, what we are given is that God creates humanity distinct from himself. He creates gender distinct from one another, and he designs them to be brought together.

And he sets them in a garden naked without shame. And then he tells these shameless nudists to be fruitful and multiply. It's one of the first commands that God gives in Scripture. And so from the very beginning of humanity, God designs covenant marriage and sex and sexuality to play a part in his good design for humanity. Now, in our culture, jump ahead thousands of years, we, you would not have to do much cultural research at all to see that we have begun to place a lot of value on sex. You can't stand in line at the grocery store without looking over at the magazine racks and seeing that we have concepts like sex sells, but you can't look at a magazine rack without seeing little on the sides.

It's not always the main thing, but they'll be on the side, this little article tells you what's going to be inside it, and you'll get five tips on how to wow your man. Seventeen tips to a sexier summer. Thirteen tips for making your bed the best place ever for sex or whatever. Like, there's just all of these kind of, and it's like, really, farm and garden? Come on, man. Like, take it easy.

But it really, we've overemphasized this. You can't watch a TV show, watch a movie, without some sort of message about sex and sexuality being pumped into our brains. And now we have the pornographic revolution that has come with the internet, and we are overly inundated with sex and sexuality, and we have some competing views in our culture where we both, we say things like, when two people love one another very much, and we act like sex comes out of this emotional, deep connection, and it's designed to be love, and we call it lovemaking, and it's supposed to be this meaningful thing. And then we also, at the same time, will say, it's also kind of like a game of checkers, like just a recreational activity for enjoyment.

And it doesn't really mean anything at all, and it just kind of depends on how you approach it. And so what we need to do is to grow in our understanding of what the Bible says about it, how God originally designed it, because He's the one who invented it. I heard someone put it this way. God created Adam and Eve, put them in a garden, naked. He did not come back later and go, Oh my goodness, what are you doing? Like, He came up with the idea.

He invented it. He made it for a purpose, for a reason. And God's design for sex was to exist inside of this covenant relationship and to be a covenant renewal ceremony. So throughout the Bible, God makes covenants with His people, and then He has physical Acts, physical, tangible reminders that they go through to remind themselves of their covenant. So an example of that for us is my wife and I got married six, seven years ago, and we stood up in front of people and we held hands and we like said things to each other and we repeated after this guy and then we had to keep holding hands while he talked and I would kind of forget what we were doing and let go of my wife's hands and she still fusses at me about that so that when I do premarital stuff with people, I say, Hey, hold hands the entire time or your wife will never forget it.

Because it was like it was just going on forever and I just kind of let go and be like doing like this. But during that, what we said was we were making an invisible commitment to one another. But then we said we're actually going to take something visible, a tangible reminder, and we're going to use this to remind ourselves and to show other people what our relationship is designed to be. We have an invisible, physical, emotional, personal attachment to one another, spiritual connection to one another, but we're going to take a symbol. And it wasn't this one because this is like I'm on my third one because I keep losing them.

But it was something very similar to this. And we put it on my hand. We put one on her hand. She still has the same one. And we celebrated that this is a physical reminder of this spiritual, emotional, invisible reality. And sex is designed to be that in marriage.

Now, it's not as public as this one. It shouldn't be. You're doing it wrong. But it is a tangible, physical reminder of your vows, of your covenant. It is a covenant renewal that is designed to be. It is a covenant renewal that is designed to say all of me belongs to all of you.

Everything I have, everything I am, everything I will be, I sacrifice and submit to you. That's celebration of the covenant that you have. And that is God's good design for sex. He made it as an intentional covenant renewal ceremony inside the context of marriage. So as we walk through the day, we're going to continue to talk about that definition.

We're going to continue to pull that up. And we're going to hold that up as our, this is what sex was designed to be. Therefore, this can't be correct. So as we walk through and look at these other things that we believe about sex, we're going to hold that up and keep saying, because this is true. So from the very beginning of the Bible, it lays that out as this is what sex is.

And so for the rest of scripture, anything that falls outside of a covenant marriage, anything that falls outside of any sexual activity that falls outside of that is considered sexual immorality. It's outside of God's good design. So that's why the Bible is going to treat so many other things as, no, you're not supposed to do that because God's good design for it was very specific. So we're going to actually find a lot of help as we study this in first Corinthians. So if your Bible looks like this, go to page 620.

I'll give you a second to get there. Then we're going to pray. And then we'll talk a little bit about what's going on here in this passage before we kind of dive in and begin to look at what Paul's saying here. Okay. Let's pray really quick.

God, we thank you for sex. We thank you for the good that it is. We pray, Lord, that we would rightly view it, rightly understand it, that we would see the beauty in your design for it in a way that might cause us to worship you. We pray, Lord, that married or single, we would rightly appreciate, view sex so that we might rightly love and worship you. We pray that as we study this today, Lord, you would give us clarity and wisdom and lead us to repentance where we've begun to believe lies about this good gift. In Jesus' name, amen.

So Corinth, think Las Vegas. So the city of Corinth was what happens here stays here kind of a place. It was a port city. They had a very lucrative sex slavery trade, sex trade, and a lot of prostitution. They had temples with prostitutes. They had other regular just prostitutes.

And then they had a very, people would come in. They would reload their ships. They would re-get supplies. And people would go visit prostitutes. And so that was a big thing in Corinth. And in the midst of that, Jesus saved some people.

A church was formed under Paul planting churches. And Paul's, in this letter, writing back and forth with the Corinthians and coaching them up. And so it honestly, it's a young church. It reminds us some of us, reminds me some of us, where we've got a lot of people who've just met Jesus. If we asked you a couple years ago, would you be following Jesus, you would have laughed. But now there's people who are repenting, following Jesus, and just trying to figure out what that means.

And so they're writing a letter to Paul, and they have all these questions about sex and sexuality because their culture has just bombarded them with how to think about it. It's kind of like this. If it's raining really hard, even if you get an umbrella, even if you put on a rain jacket, if it's just pouring, I mean sheets of rain, sideways rain, when you get inside, you are still wet. You did everything you could to cover up, but you're still wet. And Corinth's culture and our culture is similar when it comes to the concept of sex. We can do everything we want to to try to protect ourselves or guard ourselves, but some of it still soaks in.

Some of it still gets into our thought processes, into how we approach it. And so they're writing to Paul saying, isn't this true about sex? Isn't this true about sex? And Paul is going to be responding. And so everything we see in quotations, that's Paul saying, y'all said this. Here's your answer.

So it's a Q&A session with the church in Corinth. And surprisingly, they have a lot of the same thoughts and questions that we have. So we're going to go through and see what they ask and how Paul responds to help us better understand God's good design for sex. So chapter 6, verse 12. In quotations, he's quoting them. All things are lawful for me.

And then he says, but not all things are helpful. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be dominated by anything. So he's saying, okay, y'all said this, and it's in the context of sex. He said, y'all said this, and let me help answer that. So what they said was, all things are lawful for me.

And here's basically what their question was, what they were saying about sex. Question one is, isn't sex an individual and private matter? So when they say, all things are lawful for me, it's kind of like our phrase, well, it's a free country. What they're saying is, if it doesn't hurt anybody, if it's just my private business, why does it matter? Live and let live. If whatever I do in my own personal sphere doesn't matter.

And so sometimes this has been taught as what they were saying was, all things are lawful for me in Christ because Jesus has fulfilled the law for me. That's less likely because the Corinthian Christians weren't well-versed in the Old Testament and were significantly dealing with cultural issues. So really what they're saying is they're kind of repeating a cultural thing, which is, it's a free country. If I'm not hurting anybody, why does it matter? If it's my personal business, why does it matter? And so Paul gives a quick response to that and he's going to keep responding to it as he goes through the rest of the section.

But the first things he says are very helpful. So really, when we ask questions like this, there's an underlying belief system that makes us ask that. And so it's really the first lie that they believe and that we believe, because we say this same thing, is that sex is individualistic. That's the first lie that we believe when it comes to sex. That's what they were putting forth. Like, why does it matter?

It's just a private thing. Why does it matter what I do? Sex is individualistic. Now here's Paul's quick response to that. First of all, sex is an individualistic approach. Paul says it's not helpful.

And given the way he uses that phrase throughout the rest of his book, what he means is, nuh-uh. He's saying sex is not individualistic at all. It's not helpful. There are other people involved. So a quick recap of what sex is.

It's two people coming together. So when I say sex is just about me, then I'm doing it wrong because there's supposed to be two people coming together. It automatically means that there's someone else involved. So it can't just be an individualistic approach. It automatically affects other people. So Paul's response is no.

It's not individualistic. That's not a helpful way to approach it. Other people are involved. Other people, if you just approach it as what do I get out of it? If it's just a, it's about me and my enjoyment and my pleasure, then you've undercut and you don't even view it correctly. You're not approaching it correctly.

That's not helpful and that actually harms other people. And then he gives a response. So our immediate kind of pushback on that is, yeah, okay, sure, you can't say that sex with another person is just individualistic because other people are involved. But we've done a lot of work in our culture to make sex as individualistic as possible, primarily through pornography, that that can be enjoyed by yourself and does not harm anybody else. First of all, Paul's first response helps you because he says, no, it's not actually helpful in the context of community. Your life and decisions don't exist in a vacuum.

What you do does affect other people. And so when he says it's not helpful, he means it doesn't work well in the context of community, in the context of society. Looking at pornography creates a demand for pornography and pornography is videoed prostitution. It is videoed sex slavery. That's what the porn industry is. And studies are beginning to show that it seems that there's a link between pornography and an increase in sex slavery and sex trafficking because people are moving from what they're viewing to enacting that.

There's also a link now between males that view pornography and then how they treat a real female when they are with them in a very aggressive, domineering, physical, unromantic, unemotional way that is portrayed for them in pornography. And where young boys as early as 10 now is the average age of the boy seeks out pornography. At 12, most young men in advanced cultures that have the Internet have a significant exposure to pornography. A Canadian researcher went to do a study on porn use in college students, college males. When you do a study, here's how it works. You need the people you're studying and you need a control group so that you can compare them.

So if you were studying smokers of a certain age, you would need to find same gender, same age, non-smokers. The problem with his study was he couldn't find non-pornography users when he went to college age males. He could not find a control group large enough to use. So it would be like if everybody smoked and then you asked, does smoking affect you? And you said no. But then we also put out reports that said all humans get lung cancer by the age of 40.

It's just a thing that happens to humans. It's like, no, if we had a control group that showed non-smokers, we'd realize that wasn't a human problem. And so the problem with his study was he couldn't find people who had not been significantly exposed to pornography, and some of them for over 10 years. And here's what happens. That affects how they view females, how they approach females. It affects all the females who are looking at pornography, how they view males, how they approach males.

It becomes an unhelpful problem. But here's Paul's second response to that. But I will not be dominated by anything. When we approach sex in an individualistic way, specifically for our culture through pornography, it becomes very addictive. Sex was designed to be addictive anyway. It sets off the same pleasure sensors in your brain that other addictive drugs do.

So you were designed by God to become more addicted to your spouse. That was the way sex was designed. And inside the covenant of marriage, that's beautiful. Outside of it, that's kind of scary. Because it creates an addiction that is crushing people in our culture, that is crushing through pornography. There's a lady named Naomi Wolf.

She's just been doing some research on this. She was an analyst or an advisor to several different presidents, President Clinton being one of them. She wrote an article called The Porn Myth. And so here's what she says in that. But does all this sexual imagery in the air...

She's not a Christian, by the way. She's just been studying this. Does all this sexual imagery in the air mean that sex has been liberated? So we act like we're free, we're open about it. Sex is free. It's liberated.

Or is it the case that the relationship between the multi-billion dollar porn industry, compulsiveness, so addiction being dominated by it, and sexual appetite has become like the relationship between agribusiness, processed food, supersized portions, and obesity? If your appetite is stimulated and fed by poor quality material, it takes more junk to fill you up. But people are not closer because of porn, but further apart. People are not more turned on in their daily lives, but less so. Mostly when I ask about loneliness... She goes around to colleges and speaks to young adults a lot.

Mostly when I ask about loneliness, a deep, sad silence descends on the audience of young men and young women alike. They know they are lonely together, even when conjoined, and that this imagery, porn, is a big part of that loneliness. What they don't know is how to get out. Because of an individualistic approach to sex, which is not how sex was designed, it crushes our ability to have meaningful relationships because we only begin to respond well to pornography, and we begin to hold everybody up, every significant other, every person as a sex object, or we compare them to past relationships, or past videos that we have watched, and it begins to erode our ability to appropriately approach sex in the way that God designed.

I saw a guy doing a TED Talk, and he said that one of the problems with this, one of the problems with constant pornography viewership and then having real relationships, is that pornography viewership cuts out all of the beautiful stuff about sex, like conversation, laughter, touching with your hands, kissing, emotional connection. It turns it into this really male-dominated, aggressive, twisted, constantly changing to other things, and he said it erodes a lot of the beautiful... He said when he used to fantasize, this is not a Christian guy, he's just talking through this, that he used to think about having a conversation, and where that would lead, and how he... And he said once he began to view porn all the time, that wasn't there anymore.

There was no more intimate, emotional connection, because an individualistic approach to sex dominates us, becomes addictive, begins to control how we view it, and takes it out of what God designed it to be, which was not individualistic at all. So the major problem with this is this is a massive misunderstanding of what sex is. Sex was designed to be not just for personal pleasure and fulfillment, although that's a part of it, but it was to be complete surrender. It was to be you making yourself vulnerable and giving yourself to someone else for their pleasure and their enjoyment in the context of a covenant marriage.

Because it was a covenant renewal ceremony, because it was a pouring yourself out on behalf of another, the way you are in life in a covenant, in marriage in a covenant, sex becomes a gracious response and a gracious, humble giving yourself to someone else. And when it's approached in an individualistic manner, it's robbed of that. So this can be seen in dating, where someone just uses another person for sex. A person, a lot of times we see this as in males, but it can be anybody, just uses someone for sex, and once they have sex, they just move on, because that was the only goal. So they've treated a person with a soul, made in the image of God, like nothing more than an object.

This same individualistic approach can be seen in marriage, where somebody is just, I want to have sex right now. That's it. That's my approach. And you need to have sex with me, regardless of context, regardless of how you feel. And on the other side of that, someone who in marriage is never in the mood. So that as long as that's the hurdle, I don't feel like it.

And all that is on both sides of that fence is just sex exists for my individual pleasure. So if I want it, let's go. Or sex exists for my individual pleasure. So if I don't want to, no. And that's still the same approach. These aren't just problems for single people.

This is a problem with how we view sex in general. C.S. Lewis says that this approach to sex, that this idea of sex without covenant is like chewing food and then spitting it out without swallowing it and digesting it, which does not leave us more satisfied, but more hungry, which ultimately guts eating food of what it was designed for in the first place. Question two, they ask. So Paul's response to the first question, the question two, they ask.

He spends a little more time here because he's also still addressing the first question. 13. Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food. So they say, okay, Paul, food's meant for the stomach, the stomach for food, which what they're really asking is, isn't sex just an appetite? Isn't it just an appetite? Isn't it just like, okay, Paul, let me break this down for you.

I have a stomach. My stomach sends signals to my brain. It says I'm hungry. My brain sends signals to my hands. I grab food. I stick it in my mouth.

It goes to my stomach. My stomach exists because food exists and food exists because my stomach exists. And that's the same way that sex works. I have sexual parts and sexual urges and they exist in relation to one another. It's just an appetite. I love that this question is in here because we think we have progressed so far.

We are so far beyond all of those morons that used to live in history because I have Google. I'm so much smarter than everybody else who knew how to actually do things. I can just read about things and that makes me smart because I can buy shoes from Reebok. I don't know how to make shoes, but I can buy them. I'm smarter than all of these people. We just, history has just moved forward and progressed.

And here's the thing. We say stuff like this. We say stuff like, it's just a private matter. We say stuff like, sex is just an appetite as if we've moved on and outgrown. That argument's 2,000 years old. They have the same thoughts, same questions.

I got a stomach. I eat. I have sexual organs. I sex, right? Thank you, Paul. You are dismissed.

I have defeated you with logic. And so Paul responds. And this is really the second lie that we believe about sex comes from this, this idea that sex is just an appetite, is that sex is consumeristic. It's just a consumer good. It is designed for us to partake in however we feel because it's just an appetite. Now here, sex is, does have a desire that goes along with it, does have appetite that goes along with it, but it's not just that.

And it's not the same as eating food because if you don't eat food, you will die. And although some people in our culture might would argue that not having sex will kill you, it will not. Sex is not just physical. That's the argument being made here. It's just physical. It's just an exchange of goods, just a physical enjoyment.

And so Paul responds. One of the best examples of this in our culture right now, I believe, is the app Tinder. Tinder is an app, for those of you who are not familiar. It's on a smartphone. You take a picture of yourself and I think there's a little bit of information, but it's not like bogged down by information about the human. It's mostly just the picture.

And then you just swipe one way or the other to like the human or unlike the human. I don't know what it's called. It's just called swiping and it's become like a manic. People do this all day long, looking at people and swiping one way or the other they're based off of. And really what it is, this is a very advanced form of human shopping. It is a handheld brothel in so many ways.

Now, some people would say, no, no, no. You can make real, meaningful connections through Tinder. And that's what I'm using it for. Okay, maybe. The majority of people aren't. The person on the other side swiping your picture probably isn't.

And if you've been on Tinder for a while, via the text and pictures they have sent you, you might have picked up on that. It is a lineup of humans with souls that we have reduced to a quick ability to say, nope, don't like that one. Nope, don't like that one. Yes, yes, yes. Nope. Nope.

Yes. It's a brothel app. It's used that way. There's an article in Vanity Fair that is a very difficult read because of how painful it is to see how devastating this is. Now, you may say, okay, but hold on a second. Isn't that what people do when they go to bars?

Isn't that the same thing people have been doing forever when they showed up and looked around for a person to talk to? Yes. In a lot of ways. We've just become more efficient. In that article in Vanity Fair, they're talking to three guys and they say, why do you like Tinder so much? A couple of different things.

They said it was easy to meet Tinderellas. They said, it used to be you'd have to go to a place like a bar, put forth energy. You can only talk to one, two, maybe three girls a night. But on Tinder, you can be in 15 conversations at once and one of the other guys piped in and you don't have to spend any money. And they were like, yes, that's good too. Now, that's people shopping, but it grows out of how we've begun to approach sex.

It ought to be free. It ought to be easy. It ought to be simple. Humans exist for my pleasure. Sex is a consumer good. We ought to be able to line this up easily.

We ought to be able to get supply and demand connected. And so, Paul is going to respond to this, I have a stomach, it's designed for food argument. This sex is just an appetite. This lie that sex is consumeristic. And so, Paul responds with a couple of things that I find very helpful. Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food and God will destroy both one and the other.

The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord and the Lord for the body. Okay, his first response is very helpful. First of all, sexual immorality, when you see that in the Bible, mostly coming from the Greek word pornea, which is just sexual junk drawer. It really means all sex outside of God's covenant designed for marriage, all sexuality outside of God's covenant designed for marriage. So, everything, if you're thinking, well, does it include this? Yes.

Yes, it does. All of the sexual activity outside of marriage because making a list would have taken too long and then we would have invented something new and said, that's not in there. So, it's just everything outside of God's covenant design. He says, your body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord. Here's what he's saying. Sex is not ultimate.

That does not sound profound. It's very helpful for our culture. You can live your entire human life and never have sex and be fine. I'm going to go over here and say that. You can live your entire human life and never have sex and be fully complete and fully satisfied and fully human be fine. Jesus came and was single.

He is the God as a human perfection held up for us and he lived his entire life, never got married, never had sex. This is so bizarre to our culture that we make up. Obviously, he had to have secret lovers. Obviously, he's got some lineage somewhere. Obviously, this effeminate drawing here is not a boy, but it's some kind of a girl who's not very pretty. But what are you going to do?

Like, sorry, that was a very Da Vinci Code stuff there. If you haven't, you don't know what I'm talking about, that's fine. I was like, that got weird. Yeah, it did. It did. Read it.

It gets weird. It's so bizarre to us, but the truth is your body does not exist for sex. You will not die. You are okay. You can live your entire life and never have sex. Sex is not ultimate.

You were given a body designed for God and His glory and His worship. You were made in the image of God to reveal what He is like to the rest of creation. And that doesn't have to be sex. That's very helpful and sadly profound for us. Next thing He says, so first of all, you don't have to have sex. You're okay.

You were designed for something else, something bigger, something better. And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by His power. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? He's talking to Christians. He's saying, don't you know Jesus' covenant love that He's already poured over you that when you place faith in Him, He made you His and He loves you. You are His bride and He's made you one with Him.

You're part of His body. You're members of Christ. Like, you know, like your arm is a member of your body. That's what He means there. Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Okay, so this is getting deeper than we understand.

So let's keep moving here. Members of a prostitute never, or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? Okay, two things we need to know. One is, prostitution was the big socially acceptable way to have sex outside of your marriage. That's why He refers to prostitution. That was the big Corinthian way, perfectly fine, socially acceptable way to have sex outside of a covenant marriage.

So people were married young and you weren't specifically interested in having a good sexual relationship with your spouse. Wives were not allowed to have sexual relationships outside of their marriage relationship or they were in big trouble, but men could do whatever they wanted to and going and visiting a prostitute was perfectly normal, sexually acceptable way to have a sexual outlet. So, when He talks about prostitution in our culture, that honestly includes most everything. There are really three things that our culture is going to say aren't okay when it comes to sex and sexuality, just culturally.

Anything forced? Not okay. Anything with children of a certain age? Like, we kind of have an age limit on it. Not okay. And the third one is cheating and that one's more of a gray area for people, but mostly frowned upon.

Cheating's not good. So, those are kind of the only three. So, when He says prostitution, He's talking about the way they would have approached sex outside of a covenant relationship. And so, for us, He really just means all the sexual things that we're kind of okay with when He's talking about prostitution. Does that make sense? Tracking there?

Some of you are. Cool. Okay. Okay. Do you not know this is 16? Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her?

Okay. That's not very profound if you just take it for what He's saying. He has to mean something deeper because what He just said is do you not know that he who's joined with a prostitute is joined with a prostitute? Yep. Like, if He just means physical, that sentence isn't helpful and doesn't make a lot of sense. But what He's doing is He's approaching sex the way the Bible always does, which it is much deeper than physical.

Much more going on than just the physical act. So when they say, isn't sex just an appetite? Isn't it just physical? Isn't it just a consumer good? Paul says, no. It's not.

There's so much more going on. The same reason that we in our culture know that there's a difference between physical abuse and sexual abuse. because there's more going on there than just a physical interaction. Paul's acknowledging that there's much more to sex than physical, that it's actually emotional, psychological, spiritual. There's a pastor in New York. He wrote a book called The Meaning of Marriage. In one of his chapters on sex, he says this.

I think it's helpful. The Bible says, do not unite with someone unless you are also willing to unite with the person emotionally, personally, socially, economically, and legally. Don't become physically naked and vulnerable to the other person without becoming vulnerable in every other way. Because you have given up your freedom and bound yourself in marriage. So Paul's point here is that sex is wrong and out of place in all other circumstances than inside of this covenant.

Because it means more. So the Bible's argument is not that you have too high a view of sex. The Bible argues that you have too low a view of sex. The Bible's going to push us that we don't believe enough about sex. That we don't have high enough view about sex. That's the Bible's point.

The reason we're willing to flippantly have sex, the reason we treat it the way we do is not because we value sex too much but we value it too little. We don't understand all that's happening there. This is, sex creates a deep connection. It's a symbol of an invisible reality. That's what it was designed to be. That's how it functions all the time.

So here's what happens. Let me help you out here. During sex, when you have an orgasm, your body fires off a bunch of chemicals like explosions in your head. They are designed to create addiction. Same pleasure centers we talked about that earlier. They're designed to bond you to whatever is causing that.

In your head. They are designed to create addiction. Same pleasure centers we talked about that earlier. They're designed to bond you to whatever is causing that. There's multiple brain chemicals that take place during this that are designed to connect you far beyond a physical interaction. Some of the same chemicals that are given off when a mother breastfeeds, the skin-to-skin contact stuff, it's become real big recently so they've been pushing for men to have skin-to-skin contact

With their babies because mothers get to and it helps you bond to the baby and so that was one of the things they talked about like in the hospital I should have some skin-to-skin contact with Archer and so when they first went to hand me him they were like here you want to hold him and I was like yeah let me take my shirt off first and they were like okay and I was like I'm kidding and they were like well a lot of dads do that and I was like I didn't mean to mock them

I just I was a joke I'm sorry just give me the baby not doing it I'm not stripping down to hug a baby it's not happening sorry if that's you you go for it bro that's great proud of you it was just one of my things but there's something to the chemicals there that take place with a mother bonding to a baby with the skin and it happens during sex and it is designed by God

Who invented sex to make you addicted to your spouse to make you more aroused by your spouse whatever is causing this interchange whatever is causing this explosions in your head it almost slows everything down for you to suck it all in so it becomes a smell it becomes the context of what's going on it becomes the person this is why this becomes so devastating

Outside of a covenant marriage so beautiful here so beautiful that God designed you to become more and more addicted to each other that is beautiful and it becomes almost horrifying when you take it out of that context because your body is designed to latch on to people and you have to begin to if you're having casual sex

With people you have to begin to harden your heart on that you have to begin to shut that off you have to begin to over time grow callous to that so that you're not hurt over and over and over again this is why relationships become much harder to break off once sex enters the picture it's why people stay in relationships with morons because they've begun to do something that happens

On an emotional psychological spiritual basis where God's bringing them together designed and they feel like they owe the person something the person owes them something they become beholden to one another and they shouldn't be this is why pornography addiction becomes such a problem because you're rewiring your brain

To be all the things that were designed for you to soak in and be aroused by it's now being alone looking at a screen clicking changing from image to image novelty whereas in marriage it's designed to be so many other things so Paul says don't you know when you have sex when there's sexual interaction with another person so much more

Is happening here Bible clearly teaches that sex is designed for the context of marriage and the reason that we approach it the way we do is because we have too low a view of it not that we think too high of sex but too little of it so or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her

For it is written the two will become one flesh so he's talking back Genesis he brings it up again and says this is this is why this is a problem because it was designed for something else but he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit

With him so he's saying you already have this relationship this fulfillment in Christ you don't need to pursue it other places and then he says this flee from sexual immorality every other sin a person commits is outside the body but the

Sexually immoral person sins against his own body or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit within you whom you have from God so he says flee flee from

Sexual immorality we're pretty terrible at this flee means be afraid and run as fast as your little feet can carry you that we should have such a high view of sex that we should run from anything

That would lead us outside of what it was designed to be we should flee from it for some of us practically that means putting some blocker things on your computer that means having a dumb phone that only receives phone calls and is

Almost useless that means having some very serious conversations with the person that you're dating about where you're going to go ahead and pre-build in some lines build some fences in your brains to protect yourselves that means that maybe

Netflix and chill isn't an option for you because chill becomes way less chill after a while that you just have to build some ways that we're going to run from this and that's difficult but the reason we don't run is that we

Believe lies about sex we don't understand what it was designed to be so we're willing to toy with it a lot more when it actually has a lot more power and a lot more value than we understand man then Paul says this which means a lot to them and I'm going to try to

Help us understand it do you not know this is verse 19 do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit within you whom you have from God you are not your own for you were bought with a price so glorify God in your body they were not far removed from the slave trade the way to gain freedom from slavery

Was to be bought out of it that was it you were enslaved or you were bought out of slavery so when he says you are bought with a price what he's referring to is that when Jesus Christ went to the cross and gave up his life on our behalf he paid our debt to set us free

From slavery that we do not have to be enslaved to anything but that we were bought with a price and owned by Jesus who purchased us by his blood and who loved us so much to pursue us so far as to go to the cross and die for us to make us his you're not

Your own if you're a Christian you've already been bought you've already been purchased by a much better slave owner by a much better king who set you free from everything else so that you might enjoy a real true depth of relationship with him when it comes to our approach to sex

Paul says hey you don't have to be a slave to it it doesn't have to own you don't have to be a slave to your appetites you don't have to be a slave to your own personal desires you've been purchased by Jesus to be free and only through Christ can we actually find freedom so then they

Move on to the next question which is kind of a reaction against the first two questions I can almost see the Corinthian church wrestling over this and people being like okay we'll put this in the letter put this in the letter and someone's like no put this in the letter and so he gets to this

Next thing he says now concerning the matters about which you wrote so he's saying okay now you've said this verse chapter seven it is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman okay so sex isn't just individualistic it's not just consumeristic there's a group in Corinth saying no no no no

Just no sex whatsoever right like shouldn't we just avoid sex whatsoever so the third question is isn't sex dirty like isn't it just kind of wrong like there's you see so much abuse of it you see this handled so poorly shouldn't we just avoid it that's the third question and it kind of lines up with the third lie we believe which is that sex is dirty or it's at best a necessary evil like sex is good because it makes other

Humans and we should have other humans but that's really it and this this I think has been taught in the church some some people could kind of sum up with what the church has taught at times not not it's we've been fixing this I think but there are some churches who basically taught sex is gross and dirty and wrong save it for your spouse and give them that gift when you get married that's so beautiful thank you so basically they're saying shouldn't we just react against this and avoid this and it best to just

Not have sex at all I remember when Anna and I were going through marriage counseling we just the the church has just kind of avoided this in some ways I remember going through marriage counseling it was like a one session thing and the pastor flipping through a book and talking to us about like do you have a budget just different things and he flips over in his book and like the heading said sex and he goes now when you get married you you'd be able to have sex do y'all have any questions about that

And I couldn't do it I couldn't bring myself to do it I really wanted to be like I have a lot of questions I hope you got a lot of time on your hands no I just we're just like no and he goes well good here's some books you can read and he just moved right along and the truth is this our culture has a lot to say about sex and the church has just kind of avoided it I know parents a lot of times Christian parents don't want to talk to their children about sex if you're not talking to your kids about sex television is their friends are the internet

Is at some point we got to step in and start redeeming this picture and so this response was isn't it dirty shouldn't we just avoid it and Paul begins to answer this question so here's what he says now concerning the matters about which he wrote verse one it is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman he says okay but because of the temptation to sexual immorality each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband what he's not saying is everyone has to get married because you may be tempted what he is saying is pursue marriage if you are overly tempted

Towards sexual things you need to reign that in but you can pursue marriage it's perfectly fine to desire marriage that is not wrong you should not feel bad it's perfectly fine to have a desire for sex that's that is it is a desire it is an appetite it's not just that it's not just a consumer good but he's saying yeah you can pursue marriage to keep you from sin each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband the husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights and likewise the wife to her husband for the wife does not have authority over her own body but the husband does likewise the husband does not have authority over

His own body but the wife does okay first of all don't get caught up on the word conjugal I know it sounds prison-y it's not he's just saying when you're married you should have sex and then he says something that is mind shattering in their culture he starts off by saying the husband owns the wife's body and there were people just not in the law correct that is true you are right Paul when I married her I own her now I can do what I want she does whatever I want and then he says the wife owns the husband's body and people got whiplash they were like read that part again in that letter where he said that crazy stuff because they didn't believe that they

Believe that the wife belonged to the husband that was it and what Paul says is no let me tell you a few things that you've misunderstood about sex first of all it's good you should have sex with each other and your marriage was designed to be a place where there was enjoyable sex so they would have approached it as you got married to have kids and then if you want to have enjoyable sex you would just pursue that outside of marriage what he's saying is no marriage is designed to be a place filled with enjoyable sex and for the enjoyment and pleasure of one another both the wife to her husband and husband to her wife and so then he follows that up with this for the husband should give his wife this is verse 3 husband should give to his wife

Her conjugal rights and likewise the wife to her husband for the wife does not have authority over her own body but the husband does likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body but the wife does do not deprive one another except okay so he's gonna give us the reasons why you can deprive one another perhaps okay except perhaps is like he's limiting this down by agreement okay this has got this is a lot of caveats here Paul for a limited time joke for real except perhaps by agreement for a limited time so Paul's not married he doesn't have anything to gain from this he's just explaining how this works so he says you you own her she owns you you should have sex with each other except perhaps if you both agree for a little bit of

Time so he like even if you agree we're gonna take a year off Paul's gonna say nope I don't care if you agree on that limited time that you may devote yourselves to prayer okay y'all you've been having so much sex you ain't praying y'all might need to take to agree to fast from it for the purposes of prayer what else but then come together again okay that was it that's the only one he gives but then come together again and he says this so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control okay that's massively helpful and sounds a little bit crazy to us and here's why that sounds a little bit crazy to me okay I it is odd I mean maybe odds not the right word doesn't happen often I guess that's another way of saying odd but for people to get married and have the same sexual desire on the sexual desire scale it doesn't always happen

So sometimes you have a wife who has more desire for sex a husband who has more desire for sex culturally we act like it's always the husband that would but that's not true like it it just kind of ranges and so here's what Paul says here's what I would have thought he would have said but because I have kind of a wrong view about sex but here's what I thought what he would have said y'all need to agree what works for both of y'all if one of you likes to have sex more than the other person should have more sex but one of you likes to have sex less than this person who likes it more should have less sex y'all should kind of come to an agreement and figure out what works for y'all and and mutually agree on that it's not what he says what he says is your body doesn't belong to you you give conjugal rights to your spouse and you do not deprive one another which sounds to me like that's not really fair to the person who doesn't

Like to have sex as much here's why he says it if sex is individualistic and consumeristic what Paul just said is wrong and harmful and kind of rude to the person who doesn't like sex as much but if sex is a covenant renewal ceremony that always means more and was designed for you to sacrifice be vulnerable and give yourself to another then what Paul says makes a lot of sense that you in marriage are designed sex isn't for your own pleasure so if one of you desire sex more the person who desires it less should give graciously servingly because sex always means more always accomplishes more it's not just a personal desire it's not just a if I want to if I don't want to or for my own personal pleasure it's for the other it's for the other person for a mutual service and sacrifice to one another and it always accomplishes more so in marriage when we act like if I don't feel like it we shouldn't have sex and you should calm down

To not want to have sex all the time and maybe you're more gracious than the way I just put that but when we treat it that way what we are saying is I still believe sex is individualistic and consumeristic now for the person who desires sex more in marriage you can still be approaching sex in an individualistic consumeristic way I want to have sex I enjoy sex I don't care what you say don't pull this out Paul Bible naked don't do that not helpful and you're wrong you should repent your approach is not sacrificially serving and pursuing your spouse so if you if you're in a marriage and one person desires to have sex more often than the other person both of them need to consider each other the person who desires it more needs to figure out how to pursue their spouse and the perfect person who desires it less needs to figure out how to serve their spouse and once sex becomes a way to give to one another a way to pleasure

One another that your focus is less on yourself and more on your spouse then it becomes very beautiful and exactly what it was designed to be that I'm giving myself to you the same way I've given myself to you in marriage I sacrifice everything I have belongs to you for your good and your enjoyment and when both of spouses are saying that and approaching it that way it can become very beautiful and very enjoyable and it takes a lot of work and it's very difficult but Paul gives something else he doesn't just say sex is given sex is poured out for the other he does say that give realize that in sex in a marriage you are giving yourself to another you're not taking from them it's not for your own personal enjoyment you are figuring out how to give them enjoyment Tim Keller in his book where he talked about sex he said once sex becomes what's the most enjoyable thing about sex becomes giving enjoyment to

Your spouse then it becomes what it was designed to be then it becomes very beautiful but here he says this too he gives another reason for this this is helpful for single and married people I'm in first Timothy for some reason so give me a second here we go I was like this doesn't look right do not deprive one another except perhaps by agreement for a limited time oh you don't have sex you wanted to pray let's pray sorry okay anyway for a limited time to devote yourselves to prayer then come back together again so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control sex because of the covenant power that it has is actually a guard for your marriage against the enemy against a lack of self-control how the enemy works towards bitterness and anger and towards leading us away from our spouse let me tell you something about Satan's real we've talked about that

Before I could probably point you to a message that we've already said if you're confused by that or questioning that but Satan's real he's actively at work against us when Bible talks about Satan it's not just the main Satan guy it's always his forces in the world but here's how they work prior to marriage Satan wants you in bed because that goes against God's good beautiful covenant design and after marriage Satan wants you out of bed at least with your spouse because that goes against God's good covenant design so when I do premarital with couples and they're like yeah okay well we're struggling with sex right now but when we get married it'll be fine no that's a misunderstanding of how sin works what you're currently saying having sex prior to marriage is this is an area where we won't submit to Jesus this is an area where I'm going to hold what I believe above what he says and prior to marriage that

Means a lot of sex but after marriage that means a lot of withholding a lot of bitterness a lot of selfishness and a lot of not sex because the enemy works to bring us together prior to marriage and apart after marriage and one of the best defenses for your marriage is to covenantally continually give yourself to each other okay six finish here now as a concession not a command I say this what he's talking about is you don't have to get married because he says I wish all were as I myself am he's not married so he's saying I wish all of you could be not married and be okay so I'm not saying you have to get married I'm saying that if you do get married this is how it ought to work I wish all were as myself am but each has his own gift from God one of one kind and one of another the Bible is going to say that singleness is a

Gift and marriage is a gift and God graciously give some people with singleness don't use that against single people like what's a gift when they're like struggling with their singleness don't don't pull that out to like harm them like well just enjoy your gift why don't you shut up it's but it is a gift is God gifts singleness to some people the ability to be single and he gives marriage to some people and the only way either one of them works is for us to realize that Jesus bought us out of slavery with his covenant love to make us his when you are single it is so easy to believe if I just had a spouse I wouldn't be lonely I'd be full I'd be complete I could just get married I'd be okay and the only way to live single is to know the love that Jesus has for you and the fulfillment that is found only in him that he pursued you to the point of death on a cross to make you his and it's so easy when you're

Married to think you're supposed to fulfill me you're supposed to complete me you're not doing that right now and I'd be much happier if I could just be single or if I could find the right person you're obviously not it and the only way to exist in the covenant relationship that we're designed to exist in where we give ourselves continually regardless of what we're getting back is for us to be so filled up by Jesus and his love for us that we're free that we've been set free from slavery to our appetite set free from slavery to our individual desires to just love the person we're married to and just sacrifice and give John Donne is a poet he wrote he's lived in England during the Renaissance and he wrote a poem and he ends it this way he's talking to God take me to you imprison me for I accept you enthrall me never shall be free so he's saying God take me lock me up with you and unless I'm enthralled by you I'm going to be a slave to everything else unless you

Enthrall me never I never shall be free and then he says nor ever chased except you ravish me chased means sexually pure and so he says I'll never be sexually pure unless I'm so overwhelmed and filled up by you this is impossible and that's what Paul's saying here we've been bought with a price that God in his grace has gifted us and equipped us and the only way single people that you can remain single and have joy is to lean into Jesus and married people the only way you can remain married and have joy is to lean into Jesus then sex gets to be what it was designed to be not ultimate but a good gift from God for the covenant of marriage and we get to be free free from sex free from individualistic desires free from consumeristic desires and free to just love our spouses serve them be gracious towards them bands gonna come back up we're gonna sing and make much of Jesus who through the gospel went to a cross on our behalf to set us free who the God of the universe who designed

Things for our good for our joy for his glory some some single people in here you need to begin to you need to begin to flee need to begin to rightly view sex so that you're not putting yourself in compromising situations you need to be running from it for the sake of what it was designed to be as you glorify God realizing it's not ultimate need to begin to lean into Jesus and know know that it's his love that that sets you free and gives you hope and joy and fulfillment married couples needs to be some repentance over believing one of those three lies or some version of all three that sex is individualistic it exists for my pleasure until you treat your spouse like an object sex is consumeristic so if I want to or don't want to that's final I don't eat when I'm not hungry I eat when I'm hungry if I want to have sex we should have sex if I don't want to have sex we shouldn't have sex you need to pray about that and repent because sex was meant to be given and for those of you who have treated sex as a necessary evil in your marriage I

Pray that God would help you see the the beauty that he designed for it and how it protects your marriage and guards your marriage makes you addicted to one another need to have some gracious conversations so you might begin to have a sexual relationship as God lays it out he's not against sex if you believe he is read the Song of Solomon it's not against it he invented it was designed to be good and it's for us to graciously give and serve one another in a way that strengthens our marriages so I pray that we would see Jesus setting us free from selfishness and sin so that for single people there can be no sex whatsoever and you'd be fine for married people there can be a lot of sex that continues to draw you closer to one another and all of us realize it's not ultimate it's not where happiness comes from it's not what fills us up that we're free because Jesus sets us free let's pray God we thank you

That you're good thank you for your love for us that you give us hope that we don't need anything but you and that you give us other good gifts to enjoy that get to point back to you and glorify you in distinct and beautiful ways I pray God that you would work on our hearts that there might be repentance for the single people in here who've been wrongly viewing sex that you'd set them free that you'd let them run to you who've died for them to set them free that you're not going to crush them but love them and welcome them for the married couples in here who've been viewing sex wrongly

There is a small glitch at 9:20 in this recording that cannot be fixed. We apologize for the hiccup!

Sugar, Spice & Everything Nice?

Our culture puts an immense amount of pressure on women. So many women are crushed by the weight of having a perfect body, perfect kids, and perfect relationships. But is that really what it means to be a woman? What if femininity has nothing to do with wearing a dress?

Sugar, Spice & Everything Nice?

Chet Phillips

Download

Transcript

Well, good morning. We are in the fourth week of our series, The Theology of Sex, where we're just taking some time to look at what the Bible has to say about gender, sexuality, romance, marriage, masculinity, femininity. A lot of times, we love the Bible. I have a problem. I start multiple sentences and that wasn't going to work out well together. A lot of times, because we love the Bible, we just study straight through a book of the Bible.

We'll just open it up. We'll go straight through. We spent a good bit of time this past year in 1 Peter. Some people might say a little too much time, but we walked verse by verse through 1 Peter. Really, we like the Bible. We study the Bible.

We believe that it's Scripture that helps us grow, that changes us, that Jesus works through that, through the Holy Spirit, to move us and to change us. But we also like to take time to say, okay, we're confused about this or we're having a hard time with this in our culture. And then we, instead of just studying straight through a book, we'll actually just kind of go to the Bible and say, what does the Bible have to say about these topics? And try to dig in that way. And that's kind of what we're doing right now. We're just spending some time talking about the theology of sex.

So last week, we talked about masculinity. We talked about what it meant to be a man, what biblical manhood was. And this week, we're going to talk about femininity, what it means to be a woman, what biblical womanhood is. And in general, in our culture, we're a little bit more positive towards women right now in our culture. We, in general, celebrate women. We want to promote women.

And there's really good examples of women in the workplace. And just in our culture, we're trying to look for ways to promote, to highlight. We kind of agree as a culture that women are great, even when maybe culturally the jury's still out on men. We're kind of on board with the idea that women are good, like we're pro-woman. And that hasn't always been the case throughout history. And that really is kind of a small window right now where we're saying, no, we need to, women are wonderful.

Let's promote them. Let's highlight them. But just because the climate is different for men and women, I actually don't think it makes it easier to be a woman. I don't really know, but I don't think it does. Just because there's so much now where it's the cause for, you need to be free from a man. You need to be, this is where joy comes from.

This is where freedom comes from. And then you'll also have the, no, if you just find the right man, then you'll be complete, then you'll be fulfilled. Or freedom comes from a career, or you have these mommy blogs that are like, you need to raise your own chickens and grow your own kale so that your kid doesn't turn into some weird high fructose corn syrup blob of a monster. Like all of this pressure to be all of these things. And it just seems in general like it makes being a woman more difficult kind of in our culture. And we really need to have a good handle on what is femininity?

What is the essence of womanhood? Because it just seems like we've got kind of a cluttered message out there right now. When my wife and I sit down and watch TV in the evenings, mostly, I look pretty good. Like as long as I'm not like an overgrown boy, I kind of know my kid's name and talk to my wife and have a job. And in general, I'm not an idiot. I'm beating most of the people we watch on TV.

Like most of the characters in shows, I look pretty good. But my wife, there's a lot of like really good examples of women in these shows that just have everything together. They've got their jobs working out perfectly. They're the one that tends to the house. Whenever the kids have problems, they fix it. And it just seems like there's a lot of pressure on females to kind of be everything at this point.

And so we really want to just kind of get some handles on biblically. What is the essence of femininity? What does it mean to be feminine, to kind of stretch into and press into womanhood? And so a few kind of disclaimers as we get started. One, I am aware that I am a man and therefore not a woman. But like always, we're going to try to open the Bible and say, here's we're going to let Scripture teach us, God instruct us and try to to learn as best we can from the text and not from personal opinion or personal experience, which I have very little of.

So single ladies in the room, like last week, femininity is not based off of role. So you don't have to be a wife. You don't have to be a mother. It doesn't wait for those things. That's not the completion of womanhood throughout Scripture. Let me just say this to help the ladies in the room that that read the Bible on a regular basis, that you study the Bible on a regular basis.

You read the Bible on a regular basis and you just kind of like, I don't see a lot of single women in Scripture. You are correct. There aren't a lot of single women in Scripture. Reason being is two primary reasons. One is in the Old Testament, we're mostly following the story of a family. So God's working through a race, through a people.

And so most of the major characters are going to be people who line up in that family. And so we're going to follow a lot of wives and mothers when you when they enter into the story because it's a people group. God was working through a family leading up to the lineage of Jesus. That's why the New Testament is going to start off with lineages. And most of the women that were highlighted in the Old Testament line up in those lineages. The other thing is just culturally.

There wasn't a lot of room for females to go get jobs, to just enter the marketplace. Just culturally, it didn't work that way. Most people were farmers. Most females were married off at a very young age. And so just because Scripture gives a lot of examples of wives and mothers, it does not mean that it's wrong to be single. Well, actually, in the New Testament, Paul's going to say it's great to be single.

You do really well to be single actually affirms singleness and says that's a beautiful, wonderful way to live and to reflect the image of God. And that's that's good and wonderful. And people don't have to get married. So even as we study Scripture and as you study Scripture and you see a lot of mothers and wives, they're going to live out their femininity in the role they were given. And you're going to get to do the same in the roles that you have. So femininity isn't based off of role.

It's actually just going to express itself through the roles that you're given. And so don't have to be married. Don't have to be a mother. Femininity is much deeper than that. So as we go in, just remember that men in the room, I'm going to intentionally, overtly, maybe even at times a little bit aggressively go after some of the moronic stereotypes that we have of women.

And your role will be to repent of the ones that you have believed and anywhere that you have helped propagate those. And then actively in the future to tell people to shut up and to help them not continue. So that's that's what you get to do. Also, it's about a thousand times easier for females to to express and to step into their femininity when men express and step into their masculinity. For the most part, when men abdicate their role, women step in and begin to cultivate and provide and protect like we talked about last week. And it becomes dang near impossible for them to do both for them to pick up your slack and do what they're supposed to.

So one of the best ways that we love the ladies in the room is by actually being men. And so if you didn't hear the sermon last week, I would encourage you to listen to it and then seek to grow with us as we try to be men. Guys in the room, if you're single and feel called to get married and are looking to date, this is what you're looking for in a female. And this is if you're married, what you're encouraging and celebrating in your wife. OK, one more one more quick caveat. I am I want I want us to remember that what we're talking about, we're saying specifically this is essence of femininity.

This is something that is core to femininity. This is maybe an issue that maybe ladies struggle with more. When we say those things, we don't mean men can't do these things or if a man does them, he's wrong in the same way. We didn't mean that last week. So if you're like, wait a second, I'm not supposed to protect.

I'm not supposed to provide just because I'm a woman. It's like, no, we're not saying that. We're just saying that's essential to masculinity. So it's like I looked at my wife one time. We're about to leave and go somewhere. I said, I said, you look, I really like that shirt.

She looked at me and she went, you don't like my other shirts. And I was like, why would you take it that way? Why would that? Why would one compliment to a shirt immediately be like me attacking all of your other clothes? That's not what I. So if we say something in a positive way, this is for femininity.

Don't immediately turn it around and apply it to everything else because we're not trying to say that. So don't be like my wife, I guess, is the way that's supposed to work. So I didn't mean it quite that way. I'm going to pray because, Lord, I need help. And we're going to hop in and try to avoid more ditches. God, we thank you that you're good.

We thank you that you're gracious to us. And we pray, Lord, that in this that we would study your word and that we would grow in our understanding of what femininity is, how you designed humanity, both male and female, on purpose and with a good design that brings joy and human flourishing. We pray for the ladies in the room that they would press into you as they learn to press into and flex and grow in their God-given design. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. All right, we're going to be in Genesis chapter 1 and chapter 2, and then we'll move around a little bit.

But we'll start there this morning. Genesis chapter 1 is on page 1 in this Bible. If you don't own a Bible, this is our gift to you. Take it with you. Genesis chapter 1, starting in verse 26, 27, and 28. We're going to read that real quick together.

We've read this about every week through this series because it's essential to us understanding gender and sexuality. Then God said, Let us make man in our image after our likeness, and let them, such humanity, have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them. And God blessed them and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

So God in creation makes male and female in his image and likeness. That both masculinity and femininity are designed to reflect God to the world. That both are. So it has been wrongly taught and wrongly taught from this passage, from a poor reading of the text, that this is only that men are made in God's image and females are not. It has been wrongly taught that women are innately inferior to men, and that is garbage. It's not true.

It clearly says that male and female were made in the image of God, and that that was God's good design from the very beginning. That there are ways that masculinity images God and ways that femininity images God. I'm going to try to say womanhood from now on, because that's going to get harder and harder as the day goes on. Womanhood images God that masculinity can't. So God intentionally designed manhood and womanhood differently on purpose.

So there have been the wrong ideas of women are inferior to men. They need to be barefoot in the kitchen. They need to know their role. They need to know their place. And that that is completely backwards, incorrect and is a as a heinous, aggressive stare down in the face of God's good design to make women in his image. And we completely reject that.

And out of that has arisen, actually, a rightly began the movement of feminism, looked at that and rejected that idea correctly, correctly rejected that idea. But then went the opposite direction with it. So that feminism says women and men are the same. If not, women are better than men. They can do everything a man can do. They're designed to operate the same way men are designed.

And they can do all the same things. They're designed the same way and are even better and superior in a lot of ways. And it's like, no, actually, God, when he designed humanity, made them distinct on purpose. That it's more than a biological distinction over how babies are made. That he actually intentionally created a gulf and made masculinity a certain way and femininity a certain way, far beyond biology, that was designed to be lived out in a way that together imaged him. That they were not complete without him.

So that masculinity and femininity are designed to complement one another, to shore up each other's weaknesses, to make each other's strengths stronger. One of the ways that this shows up, he gives them the, he says, God blessed them and said, be fruitful and multiply and subdue the earth. So the call to human flourishing is given to humanity in general, to males and females together, to work together, to subdue the earth. And it would not happen outside of both being there. Outside of masculinity and femininity playing out on a global scale, you wouldn't have human flourishing. One of the coolest examples of this, that's kind of in our own country, and I heard somebody talking about it recently and it reminded me of a Ken Burns documentary.

I don't know if you all know about Ken Burns, but that man can document stuff. And he does a lot of like PBS documentaries and stuff. And I watched one of the Old Wests. And when the West got started, when U.S. citizens started moving out that way, it was mostly just men. Men went, they were hunting, they were kind of trapping, getting furs, they were chasing after gold, they were chasing after land, they were being chased after by people. But they all just kind of moved out that way, and it was just men.

And there were a lot of like shanty towns and tents, and it was pretty terrible. But it was mostly just men that moved out there. It wasn't until the second wave when a large proportion of females went with them. And then suddenly, towns, laws, streets, like systems of government. Men by themselves could only take it so far. They were like, I'm here, there's a tent.

I use the bathroom over there. Got it. Like it was for some reason, masculinity only had half the picture. Like it could only handle so much. And then it wasn't until masculinity and femininity worked together that we began to see flourishing, began to see sustainable forms of life and growth. And honestly, that's kind of the picture we see at the very beginning of Scripture, where God makes male and female on purpose and says, this is how the world is going to flourish, is if you work together distinctly complementing one another.

So let's hop in. Let's look at some three essential ways that women image God to the world. And we're going to start in Genesis chapter 2. We're going to look at 15 and 18 to begin to see this. So Genesis chapter 2, that's one page over.

Oh, I jumped away too many pages. 15. The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and keep it. That's what we talked about last week. So God takes the man and puts him in the Garden of Eden to work it and keep it.

And then he says something really kind of surprising in the text in verse 18. Then the Lord God said, it is not good that the man should be alone. I will make a helper fit for him. If you've been reading through Genesis 1 and into Genesis 2, every time it would say God said something, he did something, and he saw that it was good. And then God said something, he saw it, and it was good. And God said something, he saw it, and it was good.

This is the first time that God does something and then goes, that's not good. And it's not a slight on Adam. It's just that masculinity alone is incomplete. Manhood alone is incomplete. And so when God designs femininity, he intentionally designs it different. He did not make one generic human person.

It wasn't like, oh, he just needs a team. No, he specifically intentionally made femininity different from masculinity. Womanhood different from manhood in order to work together on it. And so it says that I will make a helper fit for him. So the first kind of essential thing we see, we're going to look at that word helper.

And so immediately you're going, really? Helper? That's what we're starting off with? Yes, helper is what we're starting off with. It's from the word azer in the text. And it's really kind of two words stuck together.

It's the word strength and rescue kind of smooshed together. So the idea of helper in the text is not the idea that we have where we'll say stuff like, oh, you're going to be my little helper today. It's not at all what we're talking about. It's kind of the same as I was at the zoo the other day and was looking at a tiger and the little things like, tiger is a part of the cat family. And it's like, yeah, but they're a lot different from cats though, right? And so when we say the word helper, we kind of hear cat.

And it's like, sure, technically, but think more tiger. So when it says strong rescuer, that word helper is used 21 times in the Old Testament. 17 times it's referring to God. It's always referring to this moment of like a last ditch. Everything was going to be terrible until help came, until rescue came. The Septuagint, which is the Greek version of the Old Testament, actually translates that word auxiliary, which would be a backup reinforcement unit in the military.

So when it says that God looked at Adam and said he needs a helper, he doesn't mean little sidekick teammate. He means he needs a strong, empowering rescuer in some ways. That if you were reading the text in the original Hebrew, you'd be going, okay, this isn't looking good. This isn't looking good. Ah, reinforcements. We're not going to lose this battle.

This is actually going to work out. And so when it comes to biblical essence of femininity, one of the things woven into the heart and soul of womanhood is this, to be a helper, to be an ezer, which is, think about the idea of foreign aid. When a country comes to another nation, they're torn apart by war and famine and poverty, and they approach a bigger, stronger nation and say, hey, we need your help. We need you to step in and lend us your strength. That's the concept here. That's the picture we're given of biblical femininity, which means this.

Your strength exists for the benefit of others. Biblical femininity is that you were given strength on purpose for the benefit of others. That you're designed to notice weakness. That you're designed to notice pain. That you're designed to see those who need help and step in and empower them and equip them and help them. To step in where there's brokenness and bring healing and joy and life.

That's the idea here. It's like a mother that, over time, pours out her life for a child that is going to take life out of her and take life out of her and take life out of her. And less and less and less over time until the child is a full-grown, capable adult. That's the idea. That you would come around everyone around you. And it doesn't have anything to do with role.

It doesn't have anything to do with where you find yourself. You're going to do this with your roommates. You're going to do this with your community group. You're going to do this with your husband, with your children. You're going to look and see weakness. You're designed to see weakness and pain and step in and realize that your strength exists to be on loan for others.

That your energy exists to be on loan for others. That your joy exists to be on loan for others. To empower them and equip them. So there's currently kind of a conversation going on where there's this movement for if anybody around you drains you. If anybody around you is needy, you just need to get rid of that person. You just need to get them out of your life.

They're just a leech. They're just sucking the life out of you. You need to get rid of them. That's actually very unhelpful. Because part of the design of femininity is to pour out your life and your energy for the behalf of others. To lend your strength for others to grow strong and to be healthy.

And so one of the ways that this can... It is designed for other people to grow, to be empowered and to be equipped and to be sent out. It's not designed to be codependency. To where you only feel valuable if you're needed. So there have been, and even like in situations where a husband is on drugs and having issues with drugs.

Where a wife will actually come along at some point when he's doing better and help him relapse. Because she only understands her role as being needed. And if he's not on drugs, she doesn't understand how she has value anymore. It's not that idea at all. It's not the idea that you have to be needed at all times. It's just that you notice, step in, equip, empower and send out.

We sometimes use the term woman's intuition. So like my wife and I will go hang out with people and when we'll leave, she'll go... So, what was up with Gary? What? What was going on with him? Nothing?

There was definitely something going on with him. No, there wasn't. Y'all didn't talk about it? Talk about what? The thing that was going on. There wasn't a thing going on.

Like, we have these conversations all the time. She's like, what was wrong with them? Or I'll go hang out with someone that I already know there's a thing going on. And when I come back, she'll go, so what did y'all talk about? I'll be like, nothing. What about that problem they're having?

Oh, yeah. Nope. Didn't come up. How did it not come up? He didn't bring it up. I didn't.

I didn't. I didn't bring it up. What am I going to say? How's that pain going? Like, I'm not. But there's just something in femininity in her for her to notice that, to be drawn to that, and to step in, to help, to equip, to fix.

And honestly, there's a little bit of, okay, but what about my strength existing for me? What about what I'm equipped with existing for me? But the truth is, this is a very biblical concept to its core for humanity, not just femininity. That Jesus is going to say, deny yourself. He's going to say, pick up your cross, follow me. He's going to say that if you seek your own life, you'll lose it.

But if you lose your life for my sake, you'll gain it. He's going to say that he didn't come to be served, but to serve and to give his life on behalf of others. And there's actually something very godly in a way that you image God by using your strength for the benefit of others. That it's written into your soul. You're designed to do it. To see weakness, to step in, to equip, and to help.

The second one that we're going to see, we're going to jump to 320. We're just kind of following along this story, looking at Eve and realizing that a lot of this is talking specifically about her, but we're just trying to see as a type, as the first woman, as the first essence of femininity, representative of all femininity on earth. How does this play out? What is she called to? And how does this continue? So verse 20 says, the man called his wife's name Eve because she was the mother of all living.

Okay, this is actually really interesting where this shows up. It says he called his wife's name Eve. Eve means life because she was the mother of all living. This is prior to her having any children. So a lot of times, in a lot of cultures, not our culture, people are named names, given names based off of their characteristics, based off of their role, based off of who they are.

So in the Bible, there's a guy named Barnabas, which just means he's an encourager. They gave him that name because he was already encouraging. They weren't just like, hey, you seem like in the future you might encourage people. I'm going to start calling you Barnabas. It's like, hey, weirdo, don't change my name. It's like, but he was very encouraging.

So they just like, that became his nickname. That's what they called him. They changed his name to that. A lot of cultures still do this. My cousins, my parents, my grandparents were missionaries in Nigeria. I've got some first generation African-American cousins from Nigeria.

And one of my cousins married a guy named John. And it's really funny when I get to introduce them to people because I get to say, this is my cousin John. This is my cousin Iannu. Sorry, I messed it up. This is my cousin Iannu and her husband John. And John is aggressively white like I am.

He's got a big head. He's got kind of reddish beard like I do. And so immediately when I say, this is my cousin Iannu and her husband John, people like twitch because it's like, wait, I think he said that wrong. Because this is your cousin, the big white guy that looks like you. And so it's always fun. But this past Christmas, they sent from Nigeria, from their family, sent over clothes for all of them and had written their names in the clothes that they sent.

So they were going to have traditional Nigerian clothes and they've written their names in it. And John saw his and it said, John Oyinbo. And he looked at my uncle, my uncle Abel and goes, oh, Oyinbo, is that like my Nigerian name? And my uncle started laughing so hard he couldn't talk. Like he was like wheezing, couldn't get words out. Finally, when he caught his breath, he said, it means John white guy.

They also call you Okalawan, which is different person. But there's this idea in a lot of cultures that you get a name that goes with who you are. You get a name that kind of defines your. And so when he names her Eve, when he names her life and says she's the mother of life prior to her having children, there's actually this picture of not just she's going to be the mother of everyone, not just she is the mother of all life later, but also just this design in her, in femininity to bring life, to give life, to be a refuge is kind of the second idea we're going to look at this morning. So it's one of the ways that helped me understand this idea was I was reading a book by C.S.

Lewis and he was talking about his relationship with his father and his relationship with his mother. And when he was really young, his mother passed away. And after she passed away, he wrote this in this book. He said, with my mother's death, all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs at joy, but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands.

Now, the great continent had sunk like Atlantis. There's just this idea that without his mother, there there wasn't the same amount of of a refuge. His home wasn't home anymore. It was certainly a place to go to when he was out of school, certainly a place to be. But he never would feel quite like he was just free, just at home.

It's kind of the idea of if last week we said manhood is like being four walls and a roof, then femininity is a fireplace. It's everything that makes life livable. It's it's it's and it's not your ability to Martha Stewart, your house or to Pinterest, the fool out of everything. It has nothing to do with that. It doesn't have anything to do with your craftiness and whether or not your house has anything on the wall at all. It doesn't have have anything to do with you own a home.

It all it is is that home is where you are. Family is where you are. And we've all known people like this that just set us free to be ourselves. You know, you have certain friends and maybe your family that when you get around them, you're just more you than you are anywhere else. You're just a little less guarded, a little more free. I'm like this with my brothers.

They already know everything about me. So it's just and they have to be my brother forever. Like I just if I took them off, it's like, see you later. You're still my brother. See you at Christmas. How do you like them apples?

Like there's no no getting rid of me. And then there are certain people you get around and they just do the same thing. Certain ladies you get around and they just completely make you feel at home, make you feel welcome, make you feel free. And that's the idea of that she almost the infemininity written into the soul of femininity is the idea that you're actually a little bit of a mother to everybody. And I mean that in the most beautiful way, like the idea that everybody becomes part of your family. Everybody is fully welcome and free around you.

I can remember when I was in high school, my mom, any any story I had to tell, she was interested in just because I was telling the story. Like all that mattered was I was one of the characters in the story and she was happy, just like if I thought it was interesting. So I didn't the threshold for what she wanted to hear when I came home from school was very, very low. So on the way home, I'd be like, all right, let me think of something I can tell my mom. And I come up with some story that was just really not even a story. It didn't have any plot twists.

It didn't even really have any kind of where it was going. It was just like a thing. And in the middle of these stories a lot, my dad would walk into the room and he'd go, what? And I'd go, no, nothing. And he'd go, no, what? What are y'all talking about?

Because my mom would be laughing. She would actually make this story that wasn't a story like sound good. She'd laugh. She'd ask questions. She'd be like, what was his name? How did that happen?

Oh, my goodness. A Pepsi Cola. Like she just would make it like it didn't have to have any point. And somebody would go, what? What? No, y'all are talking.

What is it? And I'd go, this guy at school, he didn't have his homework. Before the teacher was going to take it up, he freaked out. And my dad would go, that's a stupid story. And walk off. And this happened on a regular basis.

And he never learned that the story wasn't going to be good. I like, he has a threshold for what makes a good story. I know that. I don't tell these stories to him. But there was something about my mom that just made it free.

Made me get to be me in a way that nobody else does. And there's something in femininity that allows you to just lower everybody's guard. That you're designed to make people feel comfortable and welcome and free. And it doesn't have anything to do with personality type. My wife's very quiet, very reserved. Three of her best friends were, it was a girl her age, a girl that was her sister, four or five years older, and their mom.

And that group of, that family, those three ladies, they believe if they have a thought, they had it for them to share with you. If they have an opinion, it was designed for them to say it out loud. They are very flamboyant, loud, happy, loud people. And they absolutely are themselves and they make you feel like yourself when you're around them. It doesn't have anything to do with personality type. It has to do with the ability to, you're not being judged.

You're not being graded. You're not having to live up to a standard. Ladies, if you're consistently having to compare yourself to other people and having to jockey for position and posture yourself to look good, you destroy your ability to do this. Because people aren't free around you because you need them to build you up. But when you're free in Christ to just be open to everybody, to just be welcoming to everybody, you get to kind of step into this role where home is where you are.

Family is where you are and your circle of concern just extends to everybody around you. My grandmother is like this. She hasn't met a person that she hasn't just adopted into her family for however long she's known them. Whether that's they sat near each other on a plane or she knew them for a couple of years before she moved or they moved. Everyone around her, she extends her circle of concern and they are just welcome with her. They're a part of her family the same that everyone else is.

And there's just something distinct in femininity that allows that to happen, that allows you to welcome and to be a refuge to everyone around you. And it doesn't have anything to do with personality type, with role. It actually is just something that's designed in the nature of womanhood. The third one is kind of interesting. So we're going to jump back into the narrative here in Genesis chapter 223.

We're going to look at the narrative and then we're going to go to 1 Peter to try to understand this one a little bit better. 2 Peter to try to understand this one a little bit better. 2 Peter to try to understand this one a little bit better. 2 Peter to try to understand this one a little bit better. So God had put Adam on earth.

2 Peter to try to understand this one a little bit better. 2 Peter to try to understand this one a little bit better. 2 Peter to try to understand this one a little bit better. So God had put Adam on earth. He had had him name all the animals. So he brought animal after animal after animal by named all the animals and said there was no suitable empowering strength, no suitable auxiliary for him, no suitable helper. and so then he makes Eve and he brings him to Eve and then it says the man said this at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh she shall be called a woman because she was taken out of man so when Adam sees Eve we get the first poetry in history it's either poetry or song it's not great I know you read it and you're like Adam bro step up your game man like this isn't I don't even like it doesn't rhyme hopefully it rhymed in Hebrew this isn't really great but what he what he does it's a little bit of this moment where his his heart finds resonance with her he he feels like finally he actually starts off with at last it's like that song at last like he just he sees her and it's just like and and there's this idea in creation and in God God is beautiful he's designed to be captivating to be delighted in there's over and over in the Psalms where David and other psalmists are writing and saying I just want to look at you I just want to stare at you I just want to be caught up in you and God specifically designed creation to be beautiful and there's something about femininity that has some of that impressed in it and it is not physical beauty or at least not only physical beauty so let's jump to first Peter before this gets really confusing and we take this in the wrong direction first Peter three says this is first Peter uh some of y'all familiar with this we spent the time studying this last year uh do not let your adorning be external okay uh some versions are going to translate that do not let your adorning be

External only and the word adorning there is cosmos which really means world so we use the the world the same way that sometimes we will say uh his whole world is sports uh that family that like her kids or her whole world so what he's saying is don't let your whole everything around you your whole existence be external the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry or the clothing you wear but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit which in God's side is very precious God specifically in creation made things beautiful made them to have a a weight and a gravity to be delighted in and gazed upon and there's something specific to femininity that evokes that that God has impressed his own way that that women image the image God is through a captivating personhood through a soul-stirring beauty and our culture has twisted this and marred this and bulldozed this into some nonsense we have absolutely turned it into a physical only sham of what God designed it to be we we are we have held up as a standard airbrushed supermodels that don't even look like that like they've had so much photoshopping and airbrushing they don't even look like the standard that they're propagating we're holding up a unicorn culturally and saying that this is what beauty is and peter's saying no no don't let your adorning only be that there's something in femininity that is for beautifying beautifying the world beautifying yourself making things beautiful but don't let it be can you go back to first peter don't let it be external only let it be the hidden person of the heart let it be depth of soul that leads to beauty honestly as these first two things come together there can be an imperishable beauty that doesn't age that continues forever doesn't grow old doesn't need to have doctors step in later and fix things that there's a genuine depth of personhood that makes beauty that makes uh females a delight womanhood a delight to be gazed at there's some of you ladies realize this early and it starts early it's really interesting I was talking with josh pabone yesterday he's got four children he has two boys

And two girls his boys say this hey dad look at this hey dad look at this and they're like look at this and they're like hit their brother with a stick like look at this kick I can do look at this thing I set on fire look at this lizard I caught look look at me do this but it's always this look at this and his daughters he's got two daughters and they say dad look at me look at me look at me if they're even if they're doing an activity the thing is look at me do this activity the goal isn't to look at the activity is to look at me they'll get dressed up aren't I beautiful look at me they have this desire to be delighted in for themselves it's it's innate it's woven in and we have distorted it twisted it and marred it and traded it in for some nonsense we we sold out genuine soul-stirring depth of personhood we sold out genuine beauty for a cheap marred hollow expression of it we sold out soul level delight for a momentary lust heart stopping resonance for a heart racing momentary nonsense it's like we traded in a carnival roller coaster for a lifelong adventure it's not worth the exchange that you were designed to be beautiful to be captivating to be gazed upon to be delighted in but not just not a not just a physical thing but actually to have depth of personhood that is welcomed and loved and delighted in and and honestly out of this uh grows this desire so when he's talking about let your your world not only be external it grows this desire to build a veneer to to paint everything up as if it is perfect to paint up your whole life as if you have everything together and honestly perfection when it comes to a pursuit of perfection that's kind of just a a feminine thing ladies pursue perfection in a way that men do not that was there's a there's an article in the land at the atlantic recently that was talking about this it's talking about closing the confidence gap was the name of the article and they're basically writing saying that overqualified women still don't apply for jobs that they're overqualified for because they're not sure if they're quite qualified enough and that underqualified men apply in mass like have empirically the data shows this would be terrible you're going to break this in half and sink it and they're like I deserve a shot let me have at it I think I could do a good

Job like and it just it's it's baffling they said that um that women don't uh turn in reports until they've edited them ad nauseum that they've they just feel this weight of perfection that men just it just doesn't show up on their radar there was a they did a study at cornell in a in an engineering course where uh it was kind of a course where people would flunk out in the course is one of those courses that just you got kind of to the middle and it just created space in the school and they were doing a study on the the males in the class and the females in the class and whenever it got hard almost a hundred percent of the males uh reacted externally and this class is hard this professor's tough these tests just got ridiculous and almost a hundred percent of the females reacted internally I knew I wasn't smart enough to handle this I knew I wasn't I knew I knew I couldn't cut it there's this weight of perfection this weight of trying to build this everything's all right around me it seems to to specifically land on on feminine shoulders that's why uh barbie dolls we just now we have female shaped barbie dolls now so like we should celebrate like they're actually they've just come out with these uh but they made barbie dolls and there was this this is a standard of beauty that no one can live up to this is there's no way we can ever exist here there's no way this is crushing and then you can take like a he-man action figure and take the like most slouchy overweight guy and he'll be like I can kind of see me in that it's a little bit like me right here because there's just there's that weight it's just sitting there and there's this this push to be the the perfect mom the perfect daughter the the perfect employer the imperfect employee the perfect everything and and can I just help you out it's not going to happen it doesn't exist you're not you're not going to be perfect you're not you're not going to have it all together the ladies in in the u.s are three times more likely to attempt to commit suicide

91 Percent of women in the u.s say they're dissatisfied with their bodies uh... and and women are 10 to 19 times more likely to suffer from an eating disorder they did they did a study on uh... college students and they found that over half of the the females that were in whatever the the uh... correct weight range for their uh... body type or whatever were on diets even though they didn't really need to be adjusted like that for health reasons that need to be adjusting their diets like it was it's just crazy the amount of pressure and weight that gets put on and um... there's a there's a director over at midtown she's she helps head up their kid city area and she said that one of the things she feels this weight of um... proving that she's lovely so that she'll know that she's lovable she says she's felt that her whole life that if she could just prove that she's lovely then she'd know that she was lovable and the reason we're talking about this is that there is something in the design of femininity to be enjoyed to be captivating

But it's not it's not to be found in just a physical expression or just building these veneers around you to prove that you're okay let's go to Ephesians 5 this is a section that paul ends by saying that the true meaning of marriage is the way Jesus loves the church that the whole point behind marriage that we have now is to actually show us how Jesus loves the church and so he says this husbands love your wives just as christ also loved the church and gave himself up for her so that he might sanctify her this is the church this is his bride this is his people this is all those who place faith in Jesus he might sanctify her which means set apart having cleansed her by washing of the water with the word that he might present to himself the church in all her glory

Having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing but that she would be holy and blameless ladies you were designed for perfection you were designed to fully live out what it meant to have your strength benefit others you were designed to fully be so comfortable and free in yourself that everyone was welcome around you everyone was free to be themselves around you and you were designed to be captivating to be loved to be delighted in and sin has wrecked that ever since eve in the garden first believed the lie that God was holding out on her that he had hidden from her what it meant to truly be made in his image ladies have believed that ever since

And Jesus stepped in in the midst of our brokenness in the midst of our sin and he went to the cross on our behalf and he has made you blameless and perfect and holy and spotless without wrinkle or blemish or any such thing it says that Jesus loved the church gave himself up for her that he might sanctify her having cleansed her by the washing of the water with the word that he might present to himself the church in all her glory having no spot

Or wrinkle or any such thing but that she would be holy and blameless he actually saved the church just to present her to himself just to delight in the church in his bride that he's rescued and redeemed and only through resting in Jesus only through finding this to be true so deep and so soul level will you ever be free to know that your strength is on loan like Jesus's strength was on loan where Jesus stepped in and used his strength on behalf of others you get to step in

And realize that you've been gifted and equipped and strengthened for the benefit of those around you and you'll get to see that because Jesus has welcomed you into his home and made you into his family that you get to welcome everybody into your home make them into your family that you get to make home and family everywhere that you are for every person you're around and that you were designed to be delighted in and that through Jesus you are

You're perfectly spotless and blameless and free to be delighted in and welcomed and loved and ladies you're not perfect you're broken you're weak you're busted and that's okay because Jesus didn't leave you there he didn't leave you on your own to fix it on your own to make it all painted up and pretty and look good so that you could display it to the world but he actually stepped in and fixed

Every wrinkle spot and blemish on his own washed you through his own blood and made you his that he might delight in you you already have perfection you already have freedom you already have love and delight and joy through Jesus and only as you step into christ and only as you trust in the cross and only as you know that this is already true for you can you actually begin to be all that femininity

Was designed to be the band's gonna come back up we're gonna sing and praise Jesus and we're gonna together as a church family seek to step into masculinity and step into femininity in a way that doesn't have anything to do with stereotypes doesn't have anything to do with role doesn't have anything to do with personality types but has everything

To do with our desire to image God to the world to encourage one another to see flourishing happen and to begin to use everything we've been equipped with and gift with for the good of others for God's glory for our joy as we get to follow after him and if you haven't trusted fully in what the cross has provided for you you haven't fully seen

Jesus hanging on the cross to rescue to redeem to fix you to take away every spot and blemish and wrinkle every bit of imperfection that he might delight in you he might lift you up and it says the church in all her glory that Jesus makes the church beautiful and then delights in her

I'd encourage you to trust in Jesus today for your satisfaction your joy and ultimately your freedom God we praise you we ask Lord that you would bless the ladies in our church family that they would in the roles they're given in the time they have with their roommates in the time they have with their

Spouses with their children with their employees with their employers to give them the opportunity to use their strength to sacrifice on behalf of others to welcome everyone to make freedom and joy exist where they are and God I pray that you would

Help them to see that beauty is far beyond surface level things and that you through the cross delight in them you have cleaned them perfected them to present to yourself and all their glory is you have saved them through the cross I pray God that we would continue to grow in what it means to be men

And to be women as we follow after you in Jesus name amen