Jesus is not your ordinary prophet. He descended from outside earth and operated outside the conventional world system. The message Jesus brought cuts like a sword. Join us as we look at some controversial topics through the lens of the life and ministry of Jesus.
Sex: The Bigger Picture
Speakers
Sarah Blount
Lead Pastor
Notes
A video put out by the Children’s Television Workshop defines sexual relations as simply ‘something done by two adults to give each other pleasure.’ No hint that sexuality has any moral or social significance. No suggestion that it has a richer purpose than sheer sensual gratification... Instead, sexuality is portrayed as an exchange of physical services between two autonomous, disconnected individuals. It’s sex as a commodity. - Nancy Pearcey
Luke 16:8 The master commended the dishonest manager for his shrewdness. For the sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the sons of light.
Shrewd - wise, smart, artful, clever, perceptive.
The sons of this world have done a better job at spreading their compelling narrative about sex than we, as sons and daughters of light, have done in spreading THE MOST compelling narrative about sex- the BIBLICAL, beautiful, grand, hopeful, redemptive, and true narrative.
As we live into God’s compelling narrative for sexuality, we become beacons of hope for those who are living in sexual darkness.
Every age has its darkness and its dangers. The task of the Christian is not to whine about the moment in which he or she lives, but to understand its problems and to respond appropriately to them. - Dr Carl Trueman
Christ is its grand subject, my good its design, and the glory of God its end.
Genesis 2:18-25 Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken.” Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.
Hebrews 13:4 Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous.
1 Corinthians 7:2 But because of cases of sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband.
“Sexual immorality” refers to any form of illicit (or unlawful) sexual behavior outside of what is prescribed by God in His Word. This encompasses both the body's actions and the heart's thoughts. Sex, according to God, finds its perfect fulfillment only in the marriage relationship between a man and a woman.
Genesis 2 defines marriage as a lifelong one-flesh covenant union between two sexually different persons (male and female) from different families.
We believe the Bible to be both trustworthy and authoritative and that God guided the authors by the Spirit so that what they wrote was what God wanted his people to hear.
Jesus bases his teaching on sex and marriage on Genesis 2.
Matthew 19:4–6 He answered, “Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
Jesus did not contradict, change, or adapt the sexual ethic laid down in Genesis.
There were ever only meant to be two created genders. Human beings come in only two created sexes. Anything other than this is some form of a distortion and disordering of the creation and God’s purposes for it. And this, too, is the view endorsed by Jesus. - Sinclair Ferguson
Matthew 19 and Genesis 2 sound unloving only if we believe that what is most important is that every person gets the happiness they demand or that every person's pursuit of happiness should be understood and affirmed. Jesus does not believe that personal happiness is the most important consideration.
The GLORY OF GOD is most important to Jesus, and humans factor into this because our chief goal is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. The road to human flourishing, and to God’s glory, is to work with the grain of God’s reality, not to try to manufacture a reality of our own. - Glynn Harrison
To affirm any form of distortion or disordering of the creation and God’s purposes for it is unloving.
Genesis 2:16 And the LORD God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden
The use of the verb COMMANDED is surely significant in this context: The enjoyment of plenty is the first element in the command; the prohibition of one tree is the second. The Serpent’s tactic was to cause a fixation on the one negative command. - Sinclair Ferguson
Genesis 2:17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”
Psalm 16:11 God makes known to us the path of life; in his presence there is fullness of joy; and at his right hand are pleasures forevermore.
And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild. - G.K. Chesterton
We need a fresh revelation of the gospel, which reveals in the coming of Christ and his death for us the love of a Father who gives us everything he has.
The very word sex comes from a Latin verb that means to cut off or sever, and sexual impulses drive us to unite, to restore somehow that union that has been severed. Freud diagnosed the deep pain within as a longing for union with a parent; Jung diagnosed a longing for union with the opposite sex. The Christian sees a deeper longing, for union with the God who created us. Sexual intimacy is a sacred pointer to something even greater, something truly out of this world. In one sense, we are never more Godlike than in the act of sex. We make ourselves vulnerable. We risk. We give and receive in a simultaneous act. We feel delight, entering into the other in communion. Quite literally we make one flesh out of two different persons, experiencing for a brief time a unity like no other. Two independent beings open their inmost selves and experience not a loss but a gain. In some way- ‘a profound mystery’ not even Paul dared explore- this most human act reveals something of the nature of reality, God’s reality, in his relations with creation and perhaps within the Trinity itself. - Philip Yancey
Human sexuality, when it is working WITH THE GRAIN of God’s created order, is pointing beyond itself to the greatest love story in human history.
The Church has been really good at critiquing the surrounding culture and really bad at forming a distinct counterculture, a gospel-shaped culture, where life to the full is on display as an invitation to all.
Two becoming one through the act of sex within the marriage bed is both an echo and a seed of a greater union with Christ that is to come.
Let’s tell a better story. A story that will beckon hearts to long and ache and cry for the bridegroom to return for his bride.