Glorify God in Your Body

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That's PRCUA.org. Welcome to If Not For God, stories of hopelessness that turn to hope. Here is your host, Mike Zwick. Welcome to If Not For God with Mike Zwick. Mike, we have a sort of a touchy subject here. Yeah, um, well, uh, and before we start, I don't know if, uh, I don't know if you need an arc, but if you do, I know a guy. Um, as a matter of fact, uh, I don't know if it's because I'm on the radio, but the cashiers around here, they keep checking me out. And, uh, well, Frank, I'd have to change my name. Yeah, that's good.

I like that you've been studying. Yeah. I mean, I, you know, one other thing, Robbie, uh, you know, the guy who invented Velcro, he died. Rip. Rip. Right on his tombstone. And, uh, the, uh, the energizer bunny, he was actually, he was actually arrested.

He was charged with battery. I've heard that. So, yeah. So we, uh, but, uh, you know, what, what we were gonna, and I, and I say that because sometimes when we have a serious subject, you know, you kind of, kind of have to lighten it up a little bit, but looking at, at scripture and it's a first Corinthians six, 13 through 14. And it says, you say that food was made for the stomach and the stomach for food, but you can't say that our bodies were made for sexual immorality.

They were made for the Lord and the Lord cares for our bodies and God will raise us from the dead by his power. Just as he raised our Lord from the dead first Corinthians six, 18 through 19, it says, run from sexual sin. No other sin. So clearly affects the body is this one does for sexual immorality is a sin against your own body. Don't you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy spirit who lives in you and was given to you by God.

You do not belong to yourself. Uh, first Thessalonians four, three through four. God's will is for you to be holy. So stay away from all sexual sin. Then each of you will control his own body and live in holiness and an honor. And one of the things that we were talking about just a minute ago, Robbie is I was looking through a lot of the 10 commandments.

And you look at some of them. Don't murder. Okay, well, I can not murder somebody. Don't steal.

Okay, well, I can not steal. Don't commit adultery. Okay, I can physically not commit adultery and stuff like that. But Jesus actually says in Matthew chapter five, he says that you say, you know, don't commit adultery. And he says that true.

He says, but anybody who lusts upon a woman in his heart has committed adultery already in his heart. And one of the things that I was thinking about is that this is kind of a tougher one. And we were just saying as well, not only for men, but it's becoming a tougher one for women as well. More women are looking at pornography now. More women are cheating.

I actually read an article in a newspaper probably about 10, 15 years ago, and it says that more women are cheating. And so one of the things that I was praying and thinking about on the way over here this morning was that I'm not having this talk. Number one, not having it because I want to.

This isn't something I wanted to talk about. It's something that the Lord laid on my heart. And then number two, it's not to condemn anybody.

You know, it says judge not so that you too may not be judged. And that was a verse that was on my heart this morning because this is something that most men and a lot of women have really dealt with. And in many ways that even in my own life, you know, have overcome it from when I was a younger man. But it was just through the grace of God and the help of him.

So I think if anything else that I'm trying to do or we're trying to do today is just to encourage other people. But where do you start with this, Robbie? I think we start in Adam and Eve. You know, here you have a serious horrible situation where, you know, God designed us for sexuality. He designed us for this very strong desire. And he clearly designed Eve.

Beautiful. I mean, absolutely amazing that, you know, for Adam to be and enjoy. And a really neat thing when I think about it is that, you know, when Eve was standing there and Adam took a look, man, she had nothing to hide. I mean, yeah, I know you giggle and who wouldn't, but the truth is she had nothing to hide. And so she was available for complete intimacy in a way that we have no way of understanding that. But by the same token, Adam had nothing to hide.

I mean, he was completely innocent and he was completely available for intimacy. And, you know, that was what God had in mind. And so here you have this situation where Adam is put in this moment and it says, and I've looked at these scriptures several times. It says in Hebrews, Adam was not deceived. Eve was deceived. But Adam went into the deal full open because what he simply did was he chose Eve over God. And, you know, that particular choice for a man is looking at pornography or you could be sitting at the beach. I mean, easily.

And there she goes. And the next thing you know, I mean, this desire, which is a beautiful thing. God designed us so that desire is over intellect. And I can illustrate that, like, I just spent the last four months learning how to play classical gas on the guitar after being 65 years old and not picked up a guitar for 30 years. But, man, I wanted to play that so bad that my desire to do that overran my intellect, showed me what I needed to do in order to accomplish classical gas.

Because it was something I really, really, really wanted to do in spite of the fact that I had a lot of agreements to break in order to do that. But by the same token, you know, how many times did I desire something, you know, in the way of lust that got to the point where I desired it so bad, I did something really stupid. And, you know, so I have not a single pebble to cast at anybody that's made bad choices, but if we just look at David's life, King David, there he was, right?

And he looks out over the rooftops and what does he see? I mean, and clearly this was a man that loved God, had a phenomenal relationship with God and all of a sudden, but this desire over drove his intellect. And Paul describes it, we don't know what his thorn in the flesh was, we don't know what he was, but he said in Romans, right? I do what I don't want to do, okay? And so what some people do is they try to kill off the desire, like a monk in Buddhism. Like, if we kill off the desire, I won't have any more problems. Well, your wife won't care for that a whole lot, I'm just saying.

That this was a really good thing and she really wants to be pursued and she really wants intimacy and she really wants all the way that that stuff was really designed for. Or vice versa, if the wife kills off the desire, which I see happen, you know, clearly a lot of times, and she doesn't desire her husband anymore, that's really a bummer on that side of the equation. And so by killing off the desire is really a fact, so it's just as devastating to a relationship as feeding the desire with the wrong food.

It's like you've got a great desire to be hungry in your stomach, but if you decide to be hungry every time for ice cream, then this may not play out so good for you. But you have to feed, right? The right intimacy you have to feed, and then there's this other little trick that I learned at boot camp. It's called taking your question to Eve, which is, you know, do I have what it takes? Am I a real man? And wanting to get that question answered by Eve, and she can't answer that for you.

There's only one, you know, there's God the Father was designed to answer that question for you and the intimacy with him in order to do that. But how many of us, including me, many, many, many times gave my girlfriend, my wife, whatever the power to validate me, the one to make me feel like that I was worthy, that I was worthy of being loved, that I was worthy of being a real man. But the problem with that is if you give your spouse the authority to validate you, you are also giving her the authority to do what?

Invalidating her to put you down or to correct you. Right. Right.

And so, and she can be trusted with some of that to some extent, depending on the relationship and all that. But there's only one that I know of, though, where there is no condemnation, you know, that God is the person that that was meant to be handled through. And it takes some reconciling to him in order to get the solution, because killing off the desire really destroys something that was vital to your heart. Yeah. And vital to God's heart, because he wants, he wants that intimacy. And, you know, that's the whole reason he died on the cross. You know, just like, and I love this, and maybe you've seen the picture before, I've shown it at boot camp. But, you know, Eve came out of Adam's rib.

Right. And so the fact that they gashed Jesus's rib for that blood to come out so that, you know, so that his bride could come to him is no accident at all. It's like out of Jesus's rib comes the church, which is his bride, which, believe me, he has this phenomenal desire, phenomenal desire, like we have this phenomenal desire to rescue his beauty. And, you know, he does that beautifully and is a model of that.

That's awesome. You know, one of the things that I was thinking about was that, you know, Robbie is, when I see this again and again and again in the New Testament about fornication and avoiding sexual sin and stuff like that, it's not that God is a killjoy. It's not that he just doesn't want us to have any fun, but he does it for our own good. And I mean, even when I look in, whether my own life or whether you see famous people who have been brought down by women or men or whatever, and it's like, or whether you're talking about sexually transmitted diseases or whether, I mean, there are so many reasons, even from a worldly perspective, to obey the Lord. But even if there weren't any, you'd still want to do it because you're, but I mean, when I look at it, you know, Matthew 10 37, it says anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy than me. Anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matthew 22 37, Jesus replied, love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and love your love your neighbor as yourself. And so when you're choosing other things, and it could be pornography, it could be sexual immorality, cheating on a spouse or sex outside of a marriage, or we've talked about it before, same sex relationships, if you're choosing that over God, what you're really saying is, yeah, Jesus, I love you, but I want a little bit of Jesus and I want a little bit of the world too.

And that's really not the way that it works. You know, I was reading a book about Robert F Kennedy Jr. And I was really impressed by some of the work that he did for the poor and he really cared and he really wanted to help people out who didn't have any money and he wanted to, he had a heart for them and stuff like that. But, um, everybody knew about his liaisons that he was having with, you know, Jackie Kennedy or prostitutes or just all of these different women. And he was married and, you know, his wife, Ethel, they had 11 children, but you know, I mean, whether it was the FBI or the CIA or all these people who, you know, they, they, they knew what he was doing. And so it was almost like, you know, if he wanted to really push something, they, they had all of this evidence on him. And, and, and I wonder in a way, and the same thing happened with Martin Luther King Jr. He, uh, the CIA was following him. They had wiretapped him and they threatened to, uh, take some of the recordings that he had to his wife.

So he couldn't go as far as he wanted to go in certain areas. Um, but man, there's a, there's a whole lot of reasons to obey the Lord and other than just the, the temporary pleasure of sin, there's, there's really not a lot of reasons to disobey him. And, uh, you know, I was, I was watching a documentary on, um, alcoholism and prohibition. And one of the things that one of the people they were interviewing was saying was that the reason why sin has to be talked about so much, and the reason why people have to talk about avoiding sin is not because it's bad or not any fun. The reason they have to talk about it so much is because it can be so pleasurable.

And Satan plays this like a symphony. I mean, he, he understands that a young boy, including me, right? Um, when I was 11 years old, you know, it wasn't, you know, pornography the way you would normally get it. You know, I had a family member that decided that I needed to see her without her clothes on and all those things. And it literally took away my innocence. And Satan used a good, good strategy to tell me, well, you know, you're a pervert because you knew that was a family member and you shouldn't look at her.

So you're guilty. You know, you're a pervert, you're a pervert, you're a pervert, right? Well, if I'm, as long as I'm a pervert and that sure seemed like it was pretty inviting, then you start taking that road a little bit more.

And the more you take that road, the more that you're a pervert. And at some point in time, you completely find yourself, um, if you've seen the movie Good Will Hunting, you know, like the character that Matt Damon played had these bruises all over his body, like somebody had taken a wrench to him because he chose the wrench. And if you recall, Robin Williams telling him, it's not your fault. It's not your fault.

So, you know, I was very fortunate to walk with a band of brothers that would, that helped me through these kinds of things. And when Jesus took me there, when I got sick, sick, sick, sick and tired of the battle and finally decided that me and Jesus needed to talk this over. Jesus said those very words to me, Robbie, it's not your fault. And I went, oh yeah, because I'd been convinced for years and years and years and years that I, and he says, Robbie, do you want your innocence card, right?

And I said, no, you don't understand. I'm guilty. I'm guilty, not just from that situation that we're talking about right now, but I've been guilty for 40 billion other things. I'm guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty.

And unfortunately, it works with all sorts of addictions. Like I just heard testimony from one of the men at Winston-Salem and I was listening to his story and he'd been so poured in that I was a sinner, I'm a sinner, I'm a sinner, I'm a sinner, sinner, sinner, you know, that Satan had piled on to the point that it's hard to say, oh yeah, I am innocent. I'm innocent, but Jesus gave me my innocence card. And he says, no, there's no, no, Robbie, didn't I pay enough for you to be clean, to you to be innocent?

Do you want to take this? Do you want to believe with me that you really are free from sin? Because if you don't take that, you know, what an insult to what Jesus did for you. But you've got to have it and you've got to come to the conclusion that, yeah, there was a strategy to take away your innocence. And Satan was working with people, working with people that would feed young boys pornography or capture young girls into sex slavery or all the things that he's doing to take away their slavery. And I'm sure you've heard, we hear it online on Rescue every week, that these girls, they go back into it if a lot of stuff doesn't happen to break the cycle because once they think they're a prostitute, just like if you watch Live Miserable, you know, you don't understand, I'm a whore. And we have to live in our innocence in Christ, that we are a new creation and we simply, you know, are no longer a pervert. And do I believe that in order to get to where Jesus can continue to work with me? And don't think I got this, don't sit there, well, Robbie has, no, okay? I mean, I'm one click away from trouble at any moment in time.

And I can't imagine there are many men who are. That this is something that, be wary if you think you got it under control. Because, you know, however, Jesus is there, just like, you know, he's right there with you, Mike. I mean, and I said this at the beginning, but I'm not saying this or we're not having the show to condemn anybody, I mean, as a matter of fact, when I look at Matthew chapter 12, verse 31, it says, Therefore I say unto you, all manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men, but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. So if you've messed up or if you're in the process of messing up, this, you know, it doesn't, from what I see, Robbie, it doesn't say it's the unforgivable sin.

You know, I mean, but it does talk about it again and again. And I have seen sexual immorality get in the place of Jesus, get, you know, people have put it ahead of Jesus. As a matter of fact, listen to Pastor Chad Harvey, who we had on the show, and one of the things that he said was, there was a Christian psychologist. And he said, young Christians would go off to school, go off to college, and they'd come back and they said, well, I found out there's no such thing as God. Do you know what he would say to them? He said, so when did you start sleeping with your boyfriend?

When did you start sleeping with your girlfriend? So it wasn't like it was an intellectual thing that, oh, there's no such thing as God or anything like that. But what happened was, was that if they knew something was wrong and they knew something was a sin, but they were doing it. It was so, you know, it's almost impossible to know that you're doing something wrong and continue to do it. So what they do is they rationalize and they go, oh, well, I guess there's no such thing as God because I want to enjoy my son.

I want to live my son. And, you know, Jesus, he says, what good is it to a man if he gains the whole world and yet loses his soul? And so it's not a pleasant subject. It's not something, like I said, I wanted to talk about, Robbie. But I think it's something that many of us, many of us, almost all of us have, have dealt with at some, at some point or another. And, and it's, I think it's a process. I think it's a process. I know, you know, when I was in my early 20s, this, you know, the stuff that I dealt with and I felt like it was impossible to stop, you know, fornication or whatever it was.

But, you know, slowly, just through prayer, prayer, prayer, asking the Father to help you with this. I mean, he, he could do so much. I mean, it says, Jesus said, he said, with man this is impossible, but with God, how many things are possible? All. All things.

So. Yeah, it's, yeah, I, I would go further and say we all struggle. I mean, and, you know, all of sin falls short of the glory of God, and this is one place that we all have huge desires. We have desires for intimacy that were God-given, you know, we have desires for pleasure, and all those things drive behavior. And the neat thing, that really, we are after a life that's abundant. And I think that as, you know, God comes after that through prayer, he starts to get you out outside, right back out to where you can see beauty. And all our hearts crave beauty, you know, those, if you look at any Christmas movie, I was telling you about this earlier, I love Christmas movies because I, you know, I like the happy ending kind of things.

But almost all of them nowadays, you know, at some point in time, the man's going to take off his shirt and show his six pack, and you can almost, you know, this is going to be the scene where this is going to happen. And it's why the rest of the movie is completely G, they don't use any foul language or whatever, but they're going to throw that out there because all of us crave beauty. And so where are we getting our beauty? And adventure, right? Like, you look in the Song of Solomon, how many times that, you know, the beloved wants to take her away, right, on an adventure, and she says, oh, here comes my lover, we're going to go off to the vineyard.

She's looking to go off on an adventure. And so how much are we putting adventure in our life? You know, so how much are we enjoying beauty and we're looking at beauty, it's so important to our souls, because we sit inside a house way more than we were ever designed to sit. We got to be under God's beauty.

So we need beauty in our hearts. We got to be out there in that. And then we need adventure. We just do. And so to take my wife sailing, I'm just telling you, you know, especially, you know, for whatever reason, it's more adventurous at night. So, you know, I have my new little sailboat, and so Tammy and I, we play this music and we go out there, and it's an adventure. And it's romantic.

And you have this sense of, you know, God's there with you, and these things are core. So unfortunately, so many people sit on the couch, watch TV. They don't have any adventure in their life. They don't see any real beauty outside of what God's doing. And so when they see this artificial, stuff starts to show up. Other people's relationships, other people's adventures, you know, other people.

And by the way, it's all coming from the world. And Satan is using it to play your fiddle. Well, if you look at King David, when he saw Bathsheba, what was he doing? He was just kind of laying out, hanging out, being lazy. I mean, you know, and it's... Yeah, because Scripture said it was a time that kings go out to war, and what's he doing? Hanging out. Yeah, he didn't go.

Yeah. And so that's a very telling Scripture right there, that he was just going to take it easy while he sent his men off to do what he was, you know, supposed to be part of that adventure. And, oh man, Satan's just right there waiting on you and perfectly setting you up.

And the consequences, oh my gosh. When you think about what happened in King David's life with his sons, you know, of all that happened with Absalom and all those things, you know, were part of the penalty that he paid in cursing his own family with his body, like what Paul is talking about there. And so, but interestingly enough, and to turn it back I guess to the positive, is that later on when God was talking to a prophet, I believe it was, and he said that he wasn't going to do anything bad during Solomon's reign.

Because Solomon messed up, he did all of these things, but he said, for the sake of my servant David. So there is forgiveness, right? Yeah, and that's, you know, like the critical thing. Like, wow, repentance is not a bad word. It's a really fun word. It's like coming home and eating steak dinner with dad, okay?

It's just what it is. I mean, you get the fattened calf and you're the favorite son. And that's, you know, that's what grace is. And so when you turn to dad, no matter what you've done, right, he's there to help you, he's there to forgive you, and for you to enjoy the life abundant that really he has for you. But you got to want it, you know, you got to turn to him and you got to turn. Yeah, and Revelation chapter two, he's talking to the church and he says, nevertheless, I have this against you that you have left your first love.

And maybe there's somebody out there listening today, Robbie, who's, when you're saying, they're saying left my first love, what are you talking about? Well, at some point you have to say yes to Jesus. You have to say that I repent of my sins. I turn away from my sins. We certainly can't do it on our own, but with his help and we turn to the cross, we turn to Jesus and we choose to follow him all the days of our lives. And if that's what you want to do today, then Robbie, would you pray with us?

Absolutely. Jesus, thank you for, wow. I mean, when I really consider the price that you paid, it's phenomenal to have the innocence that you've given us. And Lord, you know that it's as simple as ABC, if we admit that we have sinned and we've fallen way short and we've chosen things that were just really bad for our families, bad for us, we admit those, we give those to you and we believe that you indeed did die for those things. That those very things that we did and we confess with our mouths that you're Lord and that you are the way to the Father who wants to seat us at the table for eternity in an abundant life. Lord, we pray that you would hear our prayers, that you would help us to seek your face and that you would heal our land. In Jesus' name I pray. Amen. If not for God. If not for God. This is the Truth Network.