He resurrected Christ in a physical body, showing that God cares about our physical bodies. He wouldn't have resurrected Jesus' physical body if he didn't care about it. Thus, the body's not for sexual immorality, the body's been resurrected for the Lord. Whatever Jesus purchased with his blood, whatever he raised from the dead, he should have lordship over. Thanks for joining us for the Summit Life podcast with JD Greer.
We're so thankful for you and it's an honor to encourage you weekly with this program. But did you know there are other ways to stay connected with Pastor JD and keep growing in your faith throughout the week? One of the best places to do that is on our YouTube channel. Every single week, you'll find these same podcasts in video form, along with other helpful content designed to keep you rooted in God's Word. Just open YouTube and search for JD Greer.
And for daily encouragement, you can also follow Pastor JD on social media. Just search for Pastor JD Greer on Facebook and Instagram. Today, Pastor JD explores a topic that is as contentious to us today as it was to the people in Corinth. And that's the topic of sex. Our society has a lot of competing ideas about what sex is for and what makes it good.
But God has ideas too. And since it was his invention to begin with, it's well worth listening to the wisdom he has to share. As you can probably guess, today's topic may not be appropriate for younger ears as well, so you may want to take a moment to put in some earbuds. Let's turn to 1 Corinthians chapter 6 and get started right now. 1 Corinthians chapter 6.
As I have told you, Corinth was a highly sexualized society. Sexual promiscuity was so common in Corinth, in fact, that Corinthianize had actually become a verb. If someone was Corinthianized, it meant they become sexually deviant. Corinth had over a thousand prostitutes in the city, and that was for a city about They say one twentieth the size of Raleigh.
So it is not surprising that the church in Corinth was dealing with these things. And by the way, if that could just be an encouragement to some of you, maybe some of you maybe some of you feel a little off being in church because of a sexual pass. Like you feel like if people found out about your history, they would not want you here. I just want to tell you that is not true. You should be encouraged.
Jesus's original band of disciples included a number of people with sexually dysfunctional pasts. And his earliest churches were filled with people with sexual issues.
So please understand, you belong here. It's okay. This is what the gospel is for you. And Jesus's first churches were filled with this. And so we're not surprised when many of us bring these same questions and issues into the church.
So feel no stigma. Feel no shame. Realize that this is the place for you. Specifically, with the church in Corinth, there were some who were even saying that the occasional visit to a prostitute was just not that big of a deal. After all, they said it's just biology, right?
When you're hungry, you eat. And then you feel better. It's natural.
So, in 1 Corinthians 6, Paul wants to show them that there is a spiritual dimension to sex because God made us. Here is your nerdy word for the weekend: God made us a psychosomatic unity. All right, that's all that means is that our soul, psycho, and our body, soma, are one. You cannot really separate one from the other. Yes, it is true that when our body dies, our soul goes on to be with Jesus and it is disembodied for a while, but that's not the way our soul was created to be.
And so when we are in that state, scripture says that our souls are uncomfortable. We are longing to be clothed with our resurrected bodies because our soul was created to be united to a body. This is not just like a temporary little machine that we're in. Our soul was created to be a part of a body. And thus Paul says he's going to argue that because our bodies and our souls are one, sex is far from a meaningless physical activity.
Sex has an extremely spiritual dimension to it. In fact, it's actually really tied up in how you know God. Check it out. Verse 9. Don't you know, Paul says.
that the unrighteous will not inherit God's kingdom. Do not be deceived. No sexually immoral people. No idolaters, no adulterers, no males who have sex with males. No thieves or greedy people, drunkards, verbally abusive people or swindlers will inherit God's kingdom.
Now, sexual sin is not the only sin that he mentions in that list, but just note how many times he brings it up in just those few phrases there. Verse 12, everything is permissible for me, they say. But not everything is beneficial. And I want you to notice the quotation marks around that phrase, everything is permissible. You see, to make sense of this passage, you got to understand what Paul is doing.
Paul is quoting some of the popular slogans of the day. I don't know if he got them from literature or poetry or they were song lyrics, but they were popular sayings in Corinth, and then he is going to rebut them. It's kind of like if I were to say to you, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. That doesn't mean that I approve of that statement. I'm just highlighting a horrible phrase in our culture, and then I'll offer an alternative.
It's like me saying, whatever happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but the regrets and the venereal disease stay with you forever. That's kind of like what Paul is doing here. People sometimes see these phrases in quotes and they think that Paul is affirming what's in the quote. He's actually doing the opposite, he is contradicting what's in the quote. Everything is permissible for me, the statement goes.
And Paul responds, but not everything is beneficial.
Some of the Christians in Corinth were like, hey, we've been freed from the law. And now we can do whatever we want. And Paul says, look, even if that were true, your freedom from the law was to love God and love others. Are casual, open, sexual relationships loving and beneficial for either you or your neighbor? Paul continues, everything is permissible for me, he repeats again.
But Paul counters a second time: I will not be mastered by anything. Being freed from the law does not mean just giving myself over to sinful desires. You're trying to tell me that just because my body desires something, that makes it right? That's crazy talk. If my body says eat a dozen donuts, which it does quite often.
That doesn't always mean it's the right decision. If my body feels like violently raging at the person who just cut me off in traffic, and I may or may not be talking about a real situation, I should not obey that impulse. Scripture tells me what is right. My mind and my reason tell me what is right. My body is the least reliable thing in telling me what is right in a particular situation.
Verse 13, Paul addresses another Corinthian slogan. Verse 13, it said: food is for the stomach and the stomach for food. God will do away with both of them.
Now, unfortunately, the CSB that I'm preaching from ends the quotation mark after the word food. But I actually think that's wrong. By the way, the quotation marks were not in the original Greek because they don't use quotation marks in Greek, so the English translators added them, and I think it's the wrong place to add the quotation mark. I think the quotation mark goes after the end of the whole statement because the whole statement is what Corinthians would say. And what it meant was this: it meant this: food is for the stomach.
And the stomach for food. Basically, that just means when you're hungry, you eat. That's what it's there for, right? That's what you're created for. And that's all that's happening with sex.
Your body has a desire. And so you satisfy it. It's nothing more than any other biological urge. And God will do away with both of them. The second part of that phrase was the idea that God was mostly unconcerned with the physical body.
What he cares about, what God cares about, is the spirit. One day, in fact, it was said, he's just going to do away with the physical body, and what will remain with God in eternity, all that really lasts is your spirit.
So, the place that you know and love God, that's going to be your heart. God's not as concerned about the body, it's the heart. That's the place that you know God. That is something called, you ready for more nerdiness here? That is something called Platonic dualism.
The belief that the physical body is basically worthless and only the spirit matters. Plato, you might know, was a major figure in ancient Greece. He'd lived not too long before all this took place. And the place that Plato philosophized was, you know, about an hour away by car, about 70 miles or so from Corinth. And so Plato's ideas were a major influence in this part of the world.
Food is for the stomach, and the stomach for food, and God will do away with both of them because what really matters is your spirit. But y'all, here's the thing: the Bible never teaches that God's just going to one day do away with your body. In fact, Scripture always talks about our bodies in terms of. Resurrection and redemption, not discarding.
So, the Corinthian lie about sex has two parts. I would summarize it this way: Part A: sex is just physical. It's like any other biological need. And then part B, what you do with your body really has no bearing on your soul.
Now, before we get into Paul's answer, can we just ask? Do people still believe versions of this lie today? Uh yeah. It sounds like this. You know, casual sex between two consenting adults doesn't really hurt anybody.
And we just had some fun for a while. We were both lonely. It was no big deal. There were no strings attached. Or it was just a harmless little affair to break up the monotony.
We both agreed it was nothing serious. Or, like Katy Perry said, one of her songs, I don't even know your name. It doesn't matter. You're my experimental game. It's just human nature.
And I know some of you are asking, how is he up on the latest Katy Perry songs?
Well, others of you are like, ah, that song is 13 years old. My kids consider Katy Perry in the genre of classic rock, which hurts me just a little bit, okay? But I'm telling you, when I think of secular lyrics to illustrate a point, I'm always go to Run DMC or REO Speedwagon or Reba McIntyre.
So at least appreciate my attempts to get within this millennium, okay? All right. Or how about this one? For those of you that are 50 and above, Woody Allen, Woody Allen. Remember him, the screenwriter and actor?
He says, I know, I know sex without love is an empty experience. But as empty as experiences go, it's one of the best. Both him and Katy Perry are saying the same thing these people are saying in Corinth. It's just physical. It's just biology.
That's all that it is. Here's another variation of the Corinthian lie that you'll hear today. I should be able to love whomever I want. Because God doesn't really care about who you sleep with, who you have sex with. Love is love.
So just figure out what works for you, what God really cares about. Is that you're a good Honest person, and that you love people. and that you're compassionate and that you're happy. Y'all, that's just another way of saying the physical design doesn't really matter. Only the spirit matters.
So, yes, the Corinthian lie about sex is alive and well in the world today. Satan is a master deceiver, but he's not very original, okay? He just recycles the same stuff over and over and over again. Right, so this is alive and well.
So look at how Paul counters this, verse 13. He says, however.
However, contrary to what the Corinthians will tell you, the body is not for sexual immorality. The body is for the Lord and the Lord for the body. God, verse 14, raised up the Lord Jesus after all, and he will also one day raise us up by his power. That is a direct refutation of Platonic dualism. And if you lived in Corinth, you'd immediately recognize that he was picking a fight there with Plato and his followers.
Verse 15: Don't you know that your bodies are a part of Christ's body?
So, should I take a part of Christ's body and make it part of a prostitute? Absolutely not. Don't you know that anyone joined to a prostitute has become one body with her? For scripture says, Genesis 2, second chapter of the Bible, Genesis says the two, when they have sex, become one flesh. But anyone who is joined to the Lord is already one spirit with Him.
Now, y'all, if nothing more, notice that he is saying there's an extremely spiritual dimension to sex. You just cannot have sex with somebody and not become one flesh with them. And if you've got Christ in your heart, you're actually making him one at that point with that person that you're having sex with also. Because you just can't separate body and soul. Paul's answer to the Corinthian lie is: sex is not just biology, it's not just physical.
There's something deeply spiritual about it.
Now again, before we unpack Paul's reasoning. Could we just take a moment and acknowledge? That we all know this is true. Again, whether you're religious or not, just ask yourself and be honest, be honest with yourself. Ask yourself the question.
If sex is just physical. Why is rape so much more psychologically damaging than other forms of physical abuse? The National Domestic Violence Center says that both men and women. Are much less likely to report rape than they are other forms of physical abuse. Because they say there's a trauma and a shame that is attached to rape.
That usually makes it difficult to talk about even when you know that you're only the victim. Or how about this? If sex is just physical. Why is it that when a child experiences sexual abuse? It can be so difficult for them to shake off, even after becoming an adult.
It's not just that an authority figure let them down. No, it's deeper than that. It's a lot more complex than that. Or, how about this? If sex is just physical.
Why is adultery so hard to get over? If sex is just physical, why is that the one sin? in a marriage that seems so hard. to forgive and forget. Or one more.
If sex is just physical, like all our songs and all our movies say, if sex is just physical, why is it? that so many people's deepest regrets are sexual. When somebody comes to me, okay, and they're like. Pastor, I need to talk to somebody. And I got to tell you something I've never told to anybody before.
I know exactly what it's going to be about. It's not usually like last week I overate like you would not believe. Or in 11th grade, I cheated on this test, or I hadn't paid my taxes in five years. I never hear that. It's almost always about some sexual regret that hangs over them like a dark cloud that they can't shake off.
You see what I'm getting at? Yo, if sex was just physical, none of those things would be true. There's something about sex that That touches our deepest and our most intimate selves. Here's why, Paul says. And here's your theology lesson for the weekend.
He says number one. Number one, God created the soul and body to function as one. I showed you that when we went through verses 16 and 17, you can't do something with your body. And not do it with your soul. Again, look at verse 16.
You'll notice how Paul goes back and forth between the spiritual and physical oneness in those verses. You join with them when you have sex. You become one with them. Notice how Paul uses for his illustration the cheapest kind of sex imaginable. Sex with a prostitute.
If there were ever sex that was just physical, It would be that, right? I mean, think about it. It's with a stranger. It involves no commitment. You likely will never see each other again.
Yet, Paul says, even in that 30-minute encounter, there is a soul joining.
So that's peg one. You just can't separate soul and body. Number two, peg two, he says Christ died to redeem our bodies also. Did you note in verse 14 how he says, God raised up the Lord Jesus in a physical body. One day he's going to raise you up by his power.
Christ did not just die on a cross to pay the guilt for our sins. Part of the salvation process was he resurrected. That wasn't just a cool magic trick to show everybody that he had awesome power. It was part of salvation. He resurrected in a physical body to redeem our bodies.
Had our body been unimportant, God would have just accepted Jesus' death on the cross as the payment for our sins and just been done with it. But no, he resurrected Christ in a physical body, showing that God cares about our physical bodies. He wouldn't have resurrected Jesus' physical body if he didn't care about it. Thus, Paul says, verse 13: the body's not for sexual immorality, the body's been resurrected for the Lord. It is not the stomach for food and the food for stomach.
All of it is for Jesus now. Whatever Jesus purchased with his blood, whatever he raised from the dead, he should have lordship over. That includes your body. In fact, bodies, the word body is used eight times in this passage. All of it is for Jesus.
Which leads to number three. Number three, God designed sex. Paul is basically saying here to reenact the most intimate parts of our relationship with him. Let me see where you get that out of those verses. You see where it says, the two shall become one flesh, that phrase?
Again, that's a quote from Genesis 2. In Ephesians 5, Paul takes that same phrase, and he says this actually points to a spiritual mystery. Ephesians 5. Let me read it to you. Ephesians 5, verse 31.
The two will become one flesh. There's your phrase, okay? Right? Verse 32, this mystery is profound. What I'm actually talking about, and what Moses was talking about when he wrote Genesis, is he was talking about an illustration of Christ in the church.
In other words, get this. It's pretty mind-blowing. The whole marriage covenant. And the whole sexual relationship. Was created by God to re-enact.
Christ's relationship with the church. And think about all the weights. When you make a covenant in marriage, it's like the salvation covenant. You you stand at an altar? And you you unite all of yourself to the person you're marrying forever.
What that means is all that is yours becomes theirs. The good and the bad, the liabilities and the assets. It all becomes one. Their debts become yours, their assets become yours. And all that was.
Hers becomes yours. All that was theirs becomes yours also, the both the good and the bad. Then the wife takes on a new family name.
Now you got the same last name, and then you exchange rings, and then you celebrate with a meal, and then you have sex as the physical seal of that commitment, out of which God often brings forth new life.
Now do you see every single one of those steps illustrates the gospel? Do you see it? I mean, salvation, you go to the altar, so to speak, not actually physically altar, but in your heart, you go to the altar of Jesus, and there you say, I do to Jesus Christ. By the way, he said his I do 2,000 years ago, and he's been standing there waiting on you ever since. But you go back to the altar and you say, I do.
And in that moment, everything that is yours becomes his. What was that? Your sin, your shame, your condemnation, your guilt. He took all of it and he died for it on the cross so that it wasn't his sin he was dying for. It was because he was marrying you.
And so all your deaths of sin, all your shame of sin, all your deaths of sin, that became his. And in the moment you receive Christ, all that's his becomes yours. What was that? Righteousness, eternal life, and eternal inheritance with God. All that became yours.
You took on then a new family name. Your exchange of rings was called baptism. We celebrate that union with a meal. It's called communion, or the Lord's table, or the Eucharist, or whatever term you use for it. Then, at your salvation, Jesus puts His Holy Spirit into you, out of which God brings forth new life in us and through us.
You see it? Every step of the marriage preaches the gospel. The act of sex itself is a physical illustration of the love of God. Psychologists have told us for years that the deepest desire of the human heart is to be known and loved. Both components are essential.
Right? Because to be known but not loved, well, that's rejection. But to be loved but not known.
Well, that just feels sentimental. It feels like you don't really know me. It feels like you admire me from a distance. Our deepest desire, they say, is for someone to see us completely. To know us fully and still love and accept us unconditionally.
That's what's happening in sex as a symbol.
Somebody sees you literally uncovered, and they embrace and they receive all of you. It's why sex is not just thrilling, it is beautiful. It is because it is an echo of God's love for you. It resonates with your deepest heart because it is something that God created to say: this is how. This is how I see you, and I see you, and you are fully known, and you are fully loved.
Even the complementary nature of sex, meaning that it's between two different genders, male and female, even that was given to us as a picture of our relationship to Christ. Our union with Christ is not a union of identicals, right? I mean, Jesus is fully God and fully man. We're just fully man, or in your case, fully woman of some of you. Right, it is a union, not of identicals.
We are alike, but we are different. What you see in creation is God wrote this all through the creation. Do you notice this? He always uses opposite pairs over and over to produce what he calls the good. day and night.
Sun and moon, land and sea, earth and heaven. Right? Birds and fish. And on the ultimate day of creation, what's he create? Male and Female.
Complementary. All that was a setup for salvation. We humanity Are united to Christ. Christ is the God human, and we're the human human. Christ in this relationship plays the role of the male.
He's the life giver. We all play the role of female, the life receiver. That's why C.S. Lewis always said that in relation to God, all souls are female. In relation to God.
So, sex is a picture of our role as the bride of Christ. By the way, same-sex marriage destroys that picture. Marriage is supposed to be the union of two things which are alike but different, complementary. The point is, every part of marriage and sex illustrates, it was given to us to illustrate the love and the nature of God.
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So, what then is Paul's conclusion? Verse 18, he said, Therefore, flee. Sexual immorality. Run from it. Why?
Why? Paul verse 18.
Well, because every other sin that a person commits. Is committed outside the body. But see, a person who is sexually immoral because of how integrated it is into who we are, they actually sin against their own body. You see, when you sin, when you sin sexually, you're actually sinning against three things. First of all, you sin against God.
Because you're rejecting his design, you're rejecting his lordship, and you are turning what he intended to be an act of worship and self-giving commitment to others. You are perverting that into a selfish satisfaction of your lust.
So you sin against God. Second, Paul would say you're sinning against the person you're having sex with. Because you have reduced them to an object to satisfy your physical desires. These Corinthian men, Paul says, you're the worst because you're treating these prostitute women like they're disposable objects. I mean these men did not see these women as divine image bearers.
They were something you can purchase, consume, and then leave. She's just an object. To satisfy your desires. You have no thought of commitment to her, no thought of uniting your lives together. She's just an object that's satisfying a physical urge.
Reducing her to an object is a sin against her.
So it's a sin against God. It's a sin against the person you're having sex with. Finally, Paul says it's a sin against you. Sex is so integrated into our souls that what we do with our bodies deeply affects our souls. Other sins, he would say, primarily hurt others.
I walk into a place and I punch you in the face, okay? I sin against you. You're the one with the broken jaw, you're the one with the bloody nose. It didn't hurt me that much. He says, Sexual sin is different, though.
Sexual sin actually destroys you. Because it is doing damage to your soul. When you join yourself to somebody and then you just walk away casually. It's damaging and deadening your soul, and prohibiting your ability to actually experience what God intended for you to experience in sex. And the more you do that, the more damaged your soul becomes.
The easiest analogy that I've heard of this, and I've explained it to you before, is like putting duct tape around my arm. If I put duct tape around my arm and then just ripped it off. Part of my arm comes off the duct tape. Right? And so you take that same piece of duct tape and wrap it around some other guy's arm.
Right, and then you do it with his.
Now, it's actually going to hurt him less because a lot of the stickiness is still on my arm, and a lot of my arms are already on the tape. And you do it with him, and it's a little less sticky, a little less cohesive, but it still hurts. And then you do that three, four, and I don't know how many times, but eventually you do that enough, and that. Duct tape loses all of its stickiness, loses all of its connectivity. And Paul is saying, hey, look, when you do this, you're actually hurting yourself because you are.
Inhibiting this ability that God gave you to reflect Him and to experience His love and to unite yourself in this way. Y'all, even if you tell yourself that it's just casual, even if you tell yourself you're just messing around, that there's no connection taking place, I can assure you that it is happening because you cannot escape God's design. And therefore you can't escape the connectivity of sex of sex. This is how God designed you. In fact, I thought this passage from Tim Keller's book, The Meaning of Marriage, captured it well.
Listen to this. Even if you're not legally married, when you're having sex with somebody. You may find yourself very quickly feeling marriage-like ties. Feeling that the other person has obligations to you. But the other person has no legal, social, or moral responsibility even to call you back in the morning.
This incongruity leads to jealousy and hurt feelings and obsessiveness if two people are having sex but are not married. It makes breaking up vastly harder than it should be. It leads many people to stay trapped in relationships that are not good because of a feeling of having somehow connected themselves. The point is that it is impossible to have sex and not engage the spiritual dimensions. God just designs you that way.
A lot of people feel like Christians are anti-sex. Like we don't appreciate sex's goodness enough. On the contrary. We understand that the limitations that God gives are because of its goodness and its power. It's like Tim Keller says: sex outside of marriage is not a sin because it's so bad.
It's a sin because it is so good. Our culture says, yeah, sex is no big deal. I see your body. I want it.
So I'll just take it. What's your name again? Or, in the words of Ariana Grande, I see it, I like it, I want it, I got it. Our culture's attitude is basically: hey, we've been dating for four months now. That means I've paid for enough dinners.
I've earned the right to now use you like an object. Of course. I'll probably leave you in another two or three months because by then I'll be bored with your body. And by then, after six or seven months, I would actually have to start dealing with you as a human and not just a sex object. And I am not interested in that right now.
Church, we got to say nope. That person is more than an object. Stop. Covenant with them. Cherish them.
You dare not use their body without covenanting with their soul. You dare not. You are sinning against God, you are sinning against them, and you're sinning against you.
So Paul says, flee sexual sin. You know, even other temptations, other temptations God tells us to endure or to withstand. But when it comes to sexual immorality, he tells us to flee, get out of there. Don't even put yourself in a tempting position. Do not be over at his apartment late at night by yourself.
What do you think is going to happen? Like Martin Luther said, if your head is made of butter, stay away from the fire. Sexually, we're all made of butter. To flee. Flee, flee pornography.
Our city may not have 30,000 prostitutes. But we have tens of thousands of pornographic websites accessible at our fingertips. Did you know? Porn traffic on the web every day. Brings in more revenue.
than the traffic of Amazon, Netflix and Twitter combined. The porn industry in our country takes in more money each year than Major League Baseball, the NBA, and the NFL. combined. Recent studies show that 40 million Americans are regular visits to porn sites. And get this, a third of them are women.
It is totally a myth that this is only a male problem. It is true. that men and boys seem to have a particularly difficult time with it. 70% of men between the ages of 18 and 24 visit a porn site every month. Seventy percent.
That means a solid majority of our young men have a habit of objectifying the human body. Most people think that looking at porn is, they think it's not that big of a problem, right? I mean, something to joke about. It's a victimless crime. What are you really hurting just looking at a picture?
Well, first of all, men, you realize That perfectly airbrushed woman that you were gazing at is the result of eating disorders, heavy editing, and based on the statistics, likely a horrible life of abuse, likely even sex trafficking.
So I hardly think you can just brush it off as victimless. But beyond that. There's some other very clear victims in that sin, Paul would say. And those victims are you and your future spouse. Because, like other forms of sexual immorality, pornography rewires your brain in some fundamental ways.
When you gaze at a pornographic image, And you look at an image of a woman whose body you just want to use, that trains your mind to see all women in a certain way. And see, that starts to affect how you see other women in your life. When you look at pictures that reduce women to objects. and you start to see the real women in your life also as objects. And then you get married.
And sexually, it's going to be hard for you not to see your own wife as an object. Because that's how you train your mind. And for a while, for a while, she'll be like your own personal live porn. But if your brain, if your mind has been rewired to think of sex as just the satisfaction of a bodily urge, then soon you're going to get bored with her. And you're going to need new porn.
So, you'll have to turn somewhere else for a hit. You'll have to turn to a new lover or a prostitute or just new porn images. No person. In history, has ever gorged himself on porn and then put it behind him after marriage because their spouse met all their porn fantasies? Instead, the opposite happens.
And from the perspective of a pastor, it happens all the time. Pour and retrains your appetites to crave more of that. And I just say to you guys that are dating a girl right now, or you were engaged to be married. If you got a problem with this, if you do this, And you're not making any plans to stop it. Then you owe it to her to tell her that.
Because I can predict with accuracy what your future is going to be. And so she has the right to know. You ought to tell her that this is just something I think is harmless and that I want to do. She has the right to know. Every other sin that a person commits is outside the body.
But the person who's sexually immoral is sinning against their own body. Oh, listen, this is nothing to play around with. One psychiatrist said he said, porn is more enslaving to people than heroin. And what's scary is that the porn industry markets itself to 12 to 13-year-olds. And they know it only takes three days to become an addict.
Three days. And can I just say I'm not trying to judge you as a parent. I'm not trying to tell you that I know what you should do. I got plenty of my own questions, but parents, I will say this: if you let your kids have phones in their rooms. And especially if they've got no filter on their internet.
I just have to think you're not being wise. You might as well give them a a loaded gun that they can put under their pillow. Again, I'm not trying to judge you. I'm not trying to tell you how to parent your kids. I'm just telling you to wake up to what is happening.
Now again, I directed a lot of this. Issue, this discussion toward men, but in our society, like I told you, it has also become one for women. Let me just go ahead and connect another dot here. Romance novels often function like pornography for women. They're not just romantic or harmless fantasies.
They ruin marriages and they are destroying you because they are rewiring how you see sex and sexuality. The Fifty Shades of Gross Erotica series, or whatever it was called, sold more than 100 million copies worldwide. Flee that stuff. Romance novels are often just porn for the soul. He cannot be a poetry writing vampire who loves you, okay?
That guy is not real. Flee it. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his or her. Own body, flea, sexual immoral flea means taking radical measures. to separate yourself from.
I love what John Mark Comer says. He says, flee. That means get filters on your internet. That's a real easy way to apply that. My family uses a service called Covenant Eyes.
It's on every single device in our house because Me, all the k all of us. Why? It's a way of fleeing it. Or to like, get rid of your computer for a while. I know that sounds radical.
I know of one college student at Duke University in our church who gave up his computer for a month to a friend. And just said, I'm going to the library. I'm going to use it there. He said, I got to break this habit. He said, it's a dramatic step.
It's terribly inconvenient, but I have to break the habit. I asked him, Michael, was it worth it? He said a thousand times over, it was worth it. Jesus is worth it. My future spouse is worth it.
Flee. Philippe, don't go to her apartment at night. Don't put yourself in a situation where you're going to make stupid decisions. And if you're afraid of being somewhere where you're going to be tempted and you can't help it. Then ask somebody to hold you accountable.
I was going to be somewhere not long ago where I knew temptation would be around me. And so I told a friend: ask me at this hour. And then ask me right after that if I just told you the truth about what you just asked me about. Because I know it's like I can't escape this situation. I've got to flee it.
I'm going to flee it by making myself accountable to you. Flee, flee sexual immorality. How? Listen, he's not just saying try harder. You've tried harder.
Right, and it didn't work.
So I want you to see, he does not end this passage by saying, just try harder. He says, flee not by willpower. Flee sexual immorality by fleeing. to Christ. Did you see verse 19?
What you know? Don't you notice your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit now in you? You've got him from God? You bought with a price. You were bought with a price.
God doesn't waste his possessions.
So now you can glorify God with your body. Paul says there's two things that will give you the power to actually do this. One is the blood of Jesus. You see, Jesus shed his blood to purchase you back from sexual sin. And if Jesus gave his blood to wash you from sexual sin, then his blood will also give you the power to overcome sexual sin.
So, don't walk out of here and say, I'm going to do better and I'm going to become a better man or a better woman. You put your faith in Jesus' blood, which was shed for you, to wash away that sin. And because Jesus shed his blood for you, Paul said, he deserves your sexual purity and he will give you the strength to live in it. Which leads me to the second thing he points to: the Holy Spirit. You may feel like you don't have the strength to overcome this, and you are probably right.
But Christ in you does. And so Paul would say, look, I'm crucified with Christ. My physical body has no power to do these things, but I'm crucified with him, yet I'm still alive. It's just not me anymore. It's Christ living in me.
And it's not by power, not by might, it's by my spirit, says the Lord, because greater is he that is in me than he that is in the world, and he's greater than my shame, and he's greater than my addictions, and he's greater than all the things that I feel like I can do. He's just greater than all of it, and now he lives in me, and I can do all things now through Christ who strengthens me.
So flee to Jesus.
Now, I know some of you are sitting there thinking, you're like, well. This is way too late. Wish I'd have heard this 15 years ago. I already got a sexual rap sheet a mile long. I skipped that.
I skipped the best part of this passage. on purpose. Go back to verse 9 where we started. Very first words. Look at it.
Don't you know? But you know the wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God. Don't be deceived. Neither the sexually immoral nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men. Verse 11, and that is what some Of you.
Were. But you Washed. You were sanctified. You were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. You see, when you accept Christ, that verse tells you at least three things happen right there on the spot.
When you accept Christ, number one, he washes you. He takes away your guilt. There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel's veins, and sinners plunge beneath that flood loose all their guilty stains. Though your sins are like scarlet, Isaiah says he could make them as white as snow. There is no sin, there is no mistake, there is no choice that the blood of Jesus is not capable of making new and washing clean.
He says he washes you and then he sanctifies you. You know what sanctifies means? It means he sets you apart, he makes you holy, he makes you pure. pure. Maybe you're somebody, maybe you're a teenager, a young adult, maybe you're an older adult who's given themselves away sexually and now you feel permanently defiled.
That's not true. Maybe physically it would be true if there were no Jesus, but he can sanctify you by his blood and by his spirit. If any man or woman is in Christ, he or she is a new creation. Just like God brought beautiful creation out of nothingness in the beginning, he can create a new man or woman out of you. All things are passed away.
Behold, all things are become new. Maybe you feel like porn has already damaged your soul beyond repair. I can tell you with the authority of scripture, that is a lie from Satan. He can restore you, he can sanctify you, he can make you new. He says, I will restore the years that the locusts have eaten, which means I can, through the power of the resurrection, make even the most damaged thing, I can make it new.
And then he justifies you. Justifies you means he removes your guilt before God. Friend, Jesus died for your sexual sin. He paid the full price for your disobedience.
So now you can say there is therefore no condemnation. To those of us who are in Christ Jesus, there's no condemnation for sexual sin. There's no condemnation for any sin. Because God made him who knew no sin to become sin for us. That's what he got out of this marriage.
So that I could become the righteousness of God in him.
Now one last group I want to talk to you here before I close. Maybe you are one of the ones you struggle with. Same-sex attraction. And you saw that little thing in Paul's list where he actually calls that out. And you say, I want my body to glorify God, but I've got.
desires that I feel like I can't. Control. And scripture is telling me that they're sinful. Friend, I want you to hear me, okay? That's okay.
It is okay. All of us All of us have desires. That goes opposite from God's will. That's why Jesus. Crucified, not a part of his body, but the whole thing.
What God wants for you is for you to submit yourself to Him. Which means realizing that he loves and accepts you just as you are. And that he will not only wash away the guilt of your sin, he will also give you the strength to obey his commands, even though it might be difficult. I will tell you, there is more forgiveness and acceptance and help in Jesus than there is sin in you. For all others.
Those with sexual sin. For those with messed up desires, those with twisted desires, all of us alike. Can be washed, we can be sanctified, we can be justified in the name of Jesus and by the Spirit of our God, church. That is good news for a sexually broken culture. Amen.
No matter your sin. no matter your shame. you can have a relationship with God today. Give him your life. We are so glad that you've joined us today for the Summit Life podcast.
A heart for helping you follow Jesus more fully is behind everything we do here, including this month's featured resource releasing today for the very first time. It's the brand new Bible study on Revelation that I promised a couple of weeks ago. If you'd like to go deeper, we'd be glad to send you a copy. The physical copy that we shipped to you is available now with the digital version releasing later this fall. You can take a look now at jdgreer.com.
Thanks for listening. If this podcast has been helpful to you, please rate and subscribe. It helps more people discover Pastor JD's teaching wherever they listen to podcasts. See you next time.
