The Sexual Captive, Part 3

Today on Summit Life, a gospel message from J.D. Greer. Welcome back to Summit Life with Pat Pastor J.D.

Greer. As always, I'm your host, Molly Bitovitch. We're in the middle of a teaching series called Can't Believe, and we're looking at different factors that can hold people back from saving faith in Jesus. We've been looking at the story of the woman at the well, discovering how her desire for romantic love had taken her captive.

And if you missed any of that teaching, you can hear it again anytime at jdgreer.com. But today we're turning our attention to the story of another woman who was caught in the act of adultery. A story familiar to us all. We're finding freedom from past sins with the conclusion to our message titled The Sexual Captive. So let's join Pastor J.D.

right now. In the act of adultery. Now, in the law, you see Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?

They're setting up a test for him to see what he's going to do. And so Jesus, if you know the story, kind of kneels down, he starts to write in the dirt. But after a while, Jesus looks up and he says, alright, you want to stone her? Let he who is without sin in this group, let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Now another awkward silence pursues as they all kind of stare at each other knowing that they all have sinned and one by one they drop their rocks and go home. So then this woman looks back at Jesus and she says to Jesus, are you going to, essentially, are you going to stone me too? And Jesus said, you see the rocks in my hand?

Where are your accusers? And she said, I have none left, Lord. And he says, verse 11, what is probably the most remarkable statement that gives us the greatest picture of the gospel that you might ever have heard, neither do I condemn you, go and from now on sin no more. What captivates me about Jesus' response to her, listen, is the order of what he said.

Do you see it? Neither do I condemn you, go and sin no more. What captivates me is I would tend to flip the order of those. I would say, if you don't go and sin anymore, then I won't condemn you. But he was telling her to change, not in order to gain acceptance.

He was telling her to change because she had been accepted. So see, from these stories, I have three, what I would think are revolutionary ideas for those for whom sex keeps you from fully following Jesus. The first one is this, number one, you've got to understand, number one, that sex is not just a physical thing. The Bible presents sex as a covenant relationship in which physical oneness is to be accompanied by oneness in every other area.

Sex outside of that kind of covenant is half human. It rips you apart. It disintegrates you. I've been reading a book recently called Hooked. It's a scientific study written by a couple of neurologists showing that multiple sexual partners, having multiple sexual partners, especially when you're young, showing what it does to your brain.

And they make the case that it actually rewires your brain in a way that makes genuine, lasting, selfless relationships much more difficult. The authors use the metaphor of tape. You think if you took a piece of duct tape and you put it around my arm, which has a lot of hair on it, right, and then you ripped off that piece of duct tape. I've got little pieces of the tape that are on my arm and a lot of my arm and a hair that are now on that duct tape.

And so you need to take that piece of duct tape that's got pieces of me all over it and you go over to somebody else and you wrap it around their arm and you do the same, it's going to have a little bit of the same effect but not quite as much because it's lost some of its stickiness. And these authors say there's something like that happening in this sexual act. No one will read the book and say congratulations, you came up with the exact same thing the Apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 6. The one who sins immorally and the one who sins sexually, sins against his own body. What I'm trying to do in that point is just get you to see that God's rules are not arbitrary. God's the designer. God has reasons for what he does. But I also need you to see that at the end of the day we obey what God says not because it makes the most sense to us, we obey it because he's God. Because there may be some of you that aren't convinced by what I just said.

You're like oh the tape thing, I don't buy that, blah blah blah, you know whatever, you're just making stuff up. Fine, okay, if that's where you are, I want you to, the reason that we obey is because Jesus is God and because Jesus makes the rules. And Jesus gives his word. Hebrews 13, 4. Marriage is honorable and all and the bed is undefiled but the sexually immoral and the adulterous God will judge. Jesus did not come to give a party platform that you're supposed to vote on. He came as the Lord who gave commands and said these commands are to be obeyed.

And we obey him not because his ideas make better sense than the other ideas out there in the marketplace, we obey him because he is the God of the universe who died for our sins and was raised from the dead. And I say this, listen, as your pastor having seen this so many times, it's beyond description, there is nothing that will destroy the work of God in you faster than sexual sin. Sexual sin blinds the eyes, sexual sin dulls the hearts, sexual sin corrupts the motives. Jesus was put up on a cross and the blood flowed from his body for the kind of sin that is lauded in Fifty Shades of Grey.

And it is hard for me to see how you could immerse yourself in something that cost you the life of your Savior without extreme torment of soul that would remove any enjoyment from reading a book like that. One of the valid complaints that women bring up about guys looking at porn is that it distorts how they look at women. It creates unreal expectations. One of the same way you are reading about these unnatural things that are so disconnected from the reality of true covenant faithfulness that it is destroying your capacity to be involved in a real covenant marriage. Because the one who sins sexually sins against his own body, his own ability to love.

This is serious. Sex is not just a physical thing. And the one who sins sexually, even if it's just a sin of the mind, sins against their own body. Sexual sin destroys your walk with God, it tears apart your soul, it captivates your spiritual emotions, it decimates your spiritual power, it obliterates your abilities for faith, it destroys your capacity for a healthy, committed relationship. My friends, God does not exaggerate. He does not exaggerate. And when he speaks with such seriousness about the damage that sexual sin does to you and about the offensiveness that it is to him, he is not over speaking because that's just not his style.

Number two. Sex is driven by soul thirst. Our craving for sex comes, it often is driven by the vacuum that is left by the absence of God in our hearts. That's what you see going on with a woman in John 4. I remember hearing Josh McDowall say years ago, sex is not the answer.

Sex is just an expression of the question. The state of our soul is thirsty. We thirst for love.

We want a perfectly accepting, unconditional love. So we look for it first in our parents. And when we don't get it from our parents, we develop all kinds of dysfunctions.

Right? I mean, that's the first place that we're supposed to experience unconditional love. And when we don't get it from our parents, not every time, but a lot of times that leads to massive dysfunctions in relationships throughout life, things that you can hardly ever shake.

That love exists and you went wandering from it when you didn't get it from your parents. We thirst for purpose. We want to know that we're important.

We want to know that we matter to somebody. We thirst for peace of conscience. Everybody struggles with guilt. We're like the man in Kafka, Franz Kafka's book, The Trial, who wakes up one morning under the sentence of death, but nobody will tell him what he's charged with.

Kafka says that's us going through life. Whether we believe in God or not, we get the sense that things are wrong and we're condemned, but some of us don't have any idea why we feel so condemned. We thirst for peace of conscience. We feel guilty. We want somebody to tell us we're okay.

And we look for answers to all those things in romance and sex, but they can't provide it. Because the only one who can give us perfect love is God. The only one who can give us real eternal purpose is God. The only one who can declare us innocent is God. We can do like this woman in John 4 and keep giving ourselves away to more people, but that just compounds the problem, multiplies our guilt and makes us thirstier because there's a deep innate part of us that knows that that's wrong.

And there's a part of us that keeps going after this and it just destroys it. The way I've described it to you is like this. You've got a guy who's floating in a sea of loneliness, despair, low self-esteem. You know, he can't hardly, he just feels he has no purpose. So he's drowning and along by floats a five foot two blonde-headed life preserver. What do you do if you're drowning in the ocean and a life preserver floats near you? You cling to it with all your might.

This guy clings to this girl and he suffocates the life out of her because he's looking to her for things that she was never designed to give him. It compounds our guilt. When somebody says to me, I struggle with guilt about my past, it is always sexually related, always. Sex God's way is a profound statement of covenant loyalty in marriage. Sex outside of marriage is often a quest to find something you can only find in God that just multiplies your thirst. Now before I go on to our last point, sometimes I'll have guys say to me at this point, they'll say, well, okay, I had a fraternity guy say this the other day. He says, now I get how like sex for a girl is like a deep soul need, but for guys it just feels good. He says that doesn't apply to us.

I don't buy that for two reasons. Number one, for many guys, sexual prowess is a source of identity. I read this thing that men go through three major stages in their life for building their identity. In high school, it's athletic prowess. That's how you establish where you rank among guys is how athletic you are. In college, it is sexual prowess.

When you're in your 40s, it is earning potential. So for a lot of guys, it absolutely is something that establishes their manhood. But beyond that, an idol, listen, an idol is anything that commands your obedience.

Should we talk about Esau? Esau was a guy who was, he came in one afternoon, he's really hungry, feels like he's so hungry he wants to die. So he trades his eternal birthright for a cup of lentil soup because he can't say no to his stomach. And the author of Hebrews says that that is a picture of sexual immorality. That there are people who are forfeiting their soul because they can't bring into captivity these urges of their body. So they sell their soul so they can have satisfaction for this urge. So for guys, this is an idol that has more weight to them, their sexual urges have more weight to them than God himself does. So sex for them is also driven by idolatry.

God has got to have that kind of weight in their life and it's the fact that they take God so lightly that they get so quickly enslaved to all these other things. You're listening to Summit Life with J.D. Greer. To learn more about this ministry, visit us online anytime at jdgreer.com. Before we get back to today's teaching, I want to take a moment to remind you about an extremely helpful resource that we offer our listeners in addition to this daily teaching. If you have questions about life, theology or the Bible, you won't want to miss Pastor J.D. 's Ask the Pastor podcast. In each episode, Pastor J.D.

answers real questions submitted by listeners just like you using biblical wisdom along with practical advice that he's gleaned from his many years as a pastor. You can access Ask the Pastor with J.D. Greer by visiting jdgreer.com slash podcasts or by searching for it on your favorite podcast app.

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Greer. Now let's get back to the conclusion of today's teaching. Once again, here's Pastor J.D. So number three, the gospel liberates the sexual captive. If you're familiar with your Bible, you can't hardly read John 4 without thinking about Jeremiah 2.13.

For my people, Jeremiah said, God says, have committed two evils. One, they've forsaken me, the fountain of living waters. And two, they've hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns at that, that can hold no water. Now in case you don't know, a cistern is like a hole that they would dig to collect rainwater in. And he draws this comparison. He's like, this is the cistern you build to drink water from. He is telling them that they have drunk from wells that can't and won't satisfy.

Are you mature enough yet to realize that not everything your soul feels like satisfies it will actually do that? I mean, think physically. Imagine you're dying of thirst. You just got to have something. And somebody hands you a nice warm cup of pancake syrup. Now it's liquid.

It's smooth. It tastes good. When you get done with that glass of pancake syrup, you're not going to be less thirsty. You're going to be thirstier. They say that when you're dehydrated at sea, you have this incredible desire to guzzle seawater. People that do that say it satisfies, when it touches your mouth, there's a split second, a nanosecond of satisfaction.

And then almost immediately, this multiplied craving that just leaves you thirsty or goes to work. That is how bodily pleasures like sex work when they're done outside of God. You see, things on earth can't satisfy you because you're not just made of things of earth. God made you, yes, out of the dust of the ground, which means that physical things like food and sex satisfy us to one degree, but you're also made out of heaven too. And when you pursue earthly pleasures at the expense of heavenly ones, it's like drinking salt water.

Because we have the breath of God put into us, and we have the image of God instilled in us, so if we try to satisfy earthly things without taking into consideration heavenly things, then the earthly things actually just multiply our thirst. And I love, by the way, I love the contrast here between the cistern and the spring. Think about it. Cistern, if it fails to rain, what happens to your cistern? It rises up. What happens if your neighbor throws dirt and trash in your cistern? It clogs up.

Right? What if you've got a spring though? Does it ever dry out?

Nope, it's independent. If it doesn't rain, it's independently resourced by some outside area. If you throw dirt and mud and trash in it, what happens? That spring will just bubble up and push through.

What Jesus is doing is putting a fountain of life in you that does not depend on everything in your life going correctly, all your relationships being in order. It is a source of joy that comes from a never-ending supply because it is the finished work of Christ and the eternal love of God. And when people in life throw dirt and junk into that spring, guess what? It just bursts through.

There's nothing. I mean, yes, you get discouraged, and yes, things go wrong, but that spring is so powerful it pushes through all the dirt and junk that people put at you. The Gospel liberates you from this downward cycle of sin. It shows you a love that is better and more sustaining than what you have sought in sex. The love you are seeking, hear this, does exist. It's just not in Fifty Shades of Grey or Twilight. It exists in the love of the Heavenly Father.

And that means to the one that feels like they have no more worth because they've given themselves away to too many people, or maybe because they've been abused or raped, Gospel tells you that you have incredible value because the Son of God Himself spilled His blood for you, to restore you, to beautify you, to clothe you again in white and to make you new. You know, I fly a lot, and the airline that I almost always fly with rewards my loyalty to them by constantly losing my luggage no matter what flight I'm on or where I'm going. But you ever go down and you complain to the person at the desk about your lost luggage? You know, we'll probably get it back to you in a week or so.

And I'm always like, great, as long as I don't need underwear for the next week, that should work out fine. Or if it's on the way back here to Raleigh-Durham, I'm like, oh yeah, yeah, my four-year-old that I bought this toy for her on the thing, she's really going to understand when it shows up seven days later and she doesn't even remember that I've been anywhere. They lose my luggage honestly because they don't care about my luggage. It has no value to them.

Now it has value to me. If I were in charge of it, I wouldn't lose it. If they would give me permission if I had to check a bag, I would carry it down myself, I would walk onto the cargo, I would put it there. I would do all that work for them, save them money. If they would let me because that's my bag, it has value, I'm going to make sure it gets to where I need it to go.

Right? They don't care about it, it has no value to them, so they lose it. When I hear a girl say to me, I've already gone this far, why not keep going? I'm damaged goods, what I hear in that is I no longer value my body. Jesus valued your body and soul so much that he died to cleanse it and to make it new.

He gave the supreme sacrifice so that you would be clothed in white, dressed in righteousness and so that he could say, all things are new and you are spiritually a virgin in my eyes again. For you guys, it is the gospel that will give you power over those desires. The Puritans, they all, you know, 400 years ago, guys, they had a great statement that I love and I use all the time. They called it the expulsive power of a new affection. The expulsive power of a new affection. What they meant by that was that we have all these small attractions in our lives and the way that you bring them under captivity or the way that you push them out is that you possess a much larger affection. So let me explain this to you.

Here's the way I always explain it. It happened a few weeks ago, or actually, I'm going to take it back, it happened a couple of years ago. I was with a small group of guys and I made the statement just offhand. We weren't even really talking about this, but I said that I told this group of 22-year-old guys that they could turn their sexual desires on and off like a light switch. You should have seen the expression on their faces when I said that. And one of them actually kind of looked around at each other and one of them said, look, we knew that you were older, but we had no idea this is what happened to a man's body in his 30s, that you could actually make that kind of statement. And I said, no, no, no, yeah, I understand.

I'm not in college, but you really could. You could turn your sexual desires on and off like a light switch. I said, I'll prove it.

So here you are. You are with your girlfriend. You are at her house. You guys are by yourself. The lights are low.

Nobody's home at all. So one thing starts leading to another. I don't know what y'all called anymore.

And when I was in college, it had something to do with a baseball diamond, but whatever. So you get to whatever place you are and you're past the point of no return. Those passions are alive. There's nothing else you can think about.

Right? I mean, that train has left the station and they're like, they're all nodding their hair, like that's what we're talking about right there. There's no way to turn that off at that point right there.

I was like, all right, just at that moment when those passions are stronger than you have ever felt them, in that moment, in walks that girl's Navy Seal father who just got back from Afghanistan. Boom. Off like a light switch. Off.

Gone. Why? Is it because you suddenly lost all interest in your girlfriend?

Not really. It's because your attraction to your girlfriend was displaced by a stronger affection, the affection to keep all the parts of your body attached to your body. Your desire to stay alive brought into captivity your sexual passion for her. What I told these guys was the problem, the reason you can't control yourself sexually is not that your passions for sex are too strong. It's that your love for God is so weak.

The only way you're ever going to bring that into captivity is when your love for God is increased. Tim Chester, I was reading a book on pornography and studying up for this. Tim Chester says, porn is a sin of imagination. So we need to counter it by enlarging our imaginations. The answer to porn is to believe the truth.

But that's so much more than just an intellectual consent. We need to let the truth capture our imaginations. We need to meditate. We need to ponder. We need to wonder at and sing the truth. The way to be free from sexual captivity, you see, is by being more in love with Jesus that is such a weighty passion that brings into captivity all those lesser ones.

You say, well then how does that happen? How do you grow in love for Jesus like that? Look at him. See him lifted up. See him bleed for you. See the greatness of the sacrifice that he gave for you. See how great a price he paid to redeem you.

And then learn to think of a small thing to bring your bodily desires under control for him. You see, many of you can't believe because you're sexual captives. And for some of you it's because you are enslaved to your sexual desires and you can't take the lordship of Jesus seriously because of that.

Others of you are captive to the guilt and shame of your past. It is the gospel that liberates you from both. Because the gospel provides you with the love that satisfies the thirst of your soul. It is the gospel that gives you power over your passions even for things like sex.

It is the gospel that releases you from the shame of past mistakes by washing you in Jesus' blood and saying, behold I make all things new. The message of last week was look and live. The message this week is come and drink. Drink until your soul overflows.

The tragedy is that love that you're looking for exists. Many of you are, think of this, thirsty as if in the rain. You're thirsty in the rain. Imagine you've been in New Orleans this week and you're dying of thirst. There's 17 inches of rain coming down.

All you do is open your mouth. It's everywhere. That love of God is given as a gift and many of you are dying of thirst in the rain. Come and drink. Come and drink of the love of Jesus and let your soul overflow because he will be in you a spring of living water welling up to eternal life. As JD said, the cure for lust isn't just more accountability or setting up more boundaries.

The only true cure is to fall more in love with Jesus so that every other desire fades in comparison. And that happens when we fix our eyes on Jesus and his sacrifice on the cross. You're listening to Pastor JD Greer on Summit Life. JD, we recently finished a teaching series in the Minor Prophets and a lot of people view these books only as pictures of God's judgment. How does the premium resource that we are offering called Come Back to Me give us a different perspective? Sometimes we feel like back in the Bible days, their problems were maybe I slept a little too late and I got angry.

But these people were messed up. What you see is that there's one God who never changes, who has been speaking his love for and his relentless pursuit of his people. And you will find yourself in Habakkuk when you say, So everything around me falls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord and I will take joy in the God of my salvation. And so it's my delight to not only be able to share these messages with you, but also to give you resources like this companion study we have that will take you deeper into it so that you can hear these words of God for yourself. Come visit us at jdgreer.com.

I know you'll be blessed by it. We would be honored to receive your gift of $35 or more to this ministry. And to say thank you, we'll send you a copy of Come Back to Me, a devotional and 21-day scripture guide through all 12 Minor Prophets. To give, simply call us at 866-335-5220.

Or you can always give online at jdgreer.com. I'm Molly Vidovitch inviting you to join us again next time as we look at the next barrier that holds us back from saving faith, shortsightedness. Listen Friday to Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.