The Power of Sex

Good morning, Summit Church, and welcome at all of our campuses around the Raleigh-Durham area. This weekend, we are beginning a series called From the Beginning, where we are going to take a look at God's designs for sexuality and relationships. And as your campus pastor, I think, said earlier in your service, we always encourage you, if you have kids, to take advantage of the excellent programming that's going on in the Summit Kids area. But over the next few weeks, I really want to encourage you to consider that I am not going to be intentionally risque, but we might, from time to time, delve into a little PG-13 content. And I do not want to force these conversations on you if you are not ready for them the way that other people have forced them on me and my family when I was not ready for them. So if you think your kids might not be ready for this yet, right now might be a great time at your campus to stage an emergency bathroom run, and then while you're out, drop your kids off at Summit Kids.

If they are 13 and up, they really should be fine. In fact, they might end up having to explain a few things to you throughout the series, but know that you have been warned. One of the legendary stories around here at the Summit Church seems to be about a word gaffe that I committed while preaching about sex. People that have been around here for a while now just refer to it as the sex and the fireplace story.

But if you're new here, you're like, what are you talking about? So I was explaining how, because sexuality is one of the greatest gifts that God gave to the human race, it had incredible power to bless. But the flip side is it has incredible power to destroy. And I said, it's like fire, you know, fire. Do you want fire in your house?

And your answer ought to be, it depends on where you put it. Fire in the fireplace is awesome. Fire in the sofa, not so much. But instead of saying that, I said, sex and the fireplace is awesome. And I didn't realize what I said until people began to laugh.

And it probably would have been fine if I had just left it there. But no, I had to say whatever the first thing that popped into my mind was. And so I said, well, it's dirty and it's hot.

And at that point it became a Summit legend. So our pastoral team has requestfully asked that I not say anything that spontaneously pops into my mind throughout this series that I stick really closely to the script, which I will be happy to oblige them on that. I use that illustration because it sets up the main idea that we're going to get into over the next few weeks. And that is that sexuality is a special creation of God. It is among the loftiest of the natural gifts that God has given to the human race. And as such, it has incredible powers for life if it's engaged correctly and destruction if it is misused or abused.

Think of it almost like you would think of a nuclear power. Human sexuality is so much more than just the propagation of the species. It is, to use the words of a friend of mine, a mingling of human souls.

One sociologist pointed out that human beings are the only species who procreate face to face. Because for us, it is not just biology. There is something profound that is happening that goes down into the soul, the very core of who we are as people. And when we go back to the very beginning, we find that God first designed human sexuality to teach us primarily about Himself and what His love was like. You see, in sex, one person loses themselves in another and becomes one with them, mysteriously. The two, those separate and distinct, become one, which is, Paul says, like the Trinity, different persons, distinct persons, yet one essence. That is my new pickup line, by the way, for Veronica. Would you like to contemplate the mysteries of the Trinity together this evening?

It has not worked yet, but I'll keep trying. We're going to delve into this sacred mystery over the next few weeks. Next week, we are going to talk about singleness and dating, and we're going to see that Jesus had a very different view of singleness than what our culture currently crams down our throat.

The week after that, we are going to ask some difficult questions about same-sex attraction. Is it really wrong? If it is wrong, why would you say it's wrong?

I mean, it's not harming anybody. It just seems like a choice that adult people should be able to make. And after that, we'll talk about why it is that divorce can be so devastating.

Why, how it is that you can avoid it or how to deal with it once you've been through it. A few weeks ago, I said that if love is a dream, then marriage for many people is like the alarm clock. And I want to try to show you on that week that it doesn't have to be that way. And then finally, to wrap up our series, we're going to take a look at a precious gift that God has given to us that is unfortunately obscured through our culture's obsession with sex. And that gift is friendship.

Let me tell you why I really want to get into this now. Many of you listening to me each week are engaged in sexual sin. And you think it's no big deal.

You're like, you know what? We're adults. We love each other. We're going to get married someday. But God says in his word that you are bringing his curse upon your lives.

Hebrews 13, 4. The marriage is honorable and the bed is undefiled, but those who violate that covenant, God will judge. And the many of you that think it's just a, it's a light casual thing and it's not a big deal, but I'm going to tell you, it is a big deal. For others of you, many of you listening to me, pornography is destroying your soul. And when I say that, I'm talking to both men and women. I know the statistics.

I know that it might be a little different than the church, but I know what they are for Riley Durham. And I'm going to tell you, there's a lot of you listening to me that are held captive by this. And there's a lot of you that it is destroying, not only your relationship with God, it's destroying your capacity to love and relate to somebody else. For others of you, your craving for romance and sex has gotten so out of balance in your life that you've become obsessed with getting married or maybe getting into a new marriage or a better marriage.

And you feel like you just could not be happy unless you're in a different marital situation than the one that you're in right now. And that idolatry is ruining your life. There's nothing that gets down to the core of why we are unhappy. Nothing that gets into the core of what's broken in our relationship with God. There's nothing that touches that as much as this subject does right here. And so I am asking God to speak life into this area of our lives and mine, particularly mine over the next several weeks.

And I'd love for you to pray together with me for that, because when God establishes himself as the Lord of this part of your life, you will find it brings untold blessing to multiple dimensions of your life. Today, Proverbs 5, if you've got a Bible, Proverbs 5, we're going to look at the power of sexuality. Tim Keller, who I have told you before is kind of like a spiritual Yoda to me, great Bible teacher he is, says that our culture both overvalues and undervalue sex.

It's ironic. We undervalue it on one hand and we overvalue it on another. So Proverbs 5 unpacks that a little bit. In fact, the whole book of Proverbs does. So let's look first how we undervalue sex.

As you're finding Proverbs 5, let me explain that our society wants to believe that sex is just physical. It's like food. You get hungry, you eat. Or it's like a sport. You just got to figure out what you enjoy, what position you're good at. And then you play.

It's like tennis or wrestling or football where you just tackle each other and stay on the ground for a while. But the really only important questions are what do you enjoy? What satisfies you?

What works for you? And the idea of any rules for sex, particularly strict rules about sex seems terribly draconian because if certain kinds of sex are a crime, well, they seem like victimless crimes. But let me ask you, present you with some questions I heard once that will tell you what you already know. And that is that sex is not just physical. If sex is just physical, why is rape so much more harmful to a woman than simply being beat up? You know, women will more often report physical abuse much more often than they will rape.

Why is that? Why is it if sex is just physical that when a child is sexually abused, when they become an adult and they finally connect the dots, why is it so difficult for them to shake? It's not that an authority figure just betrayed them.

The wound goes much deeper than that. If sex is just physical, why is adultery always so devastating to a relationship? If sex is just physical, why is it that men with the deepest sexual issues often had uninvolved or missing fathers?

Why would those two things be related? If sex is just physical, why is it that most people's greatest regrets have something to do with a sexual mistake? When somebody comes in my office and they sit down and they start to cry and they say, I've never told anybody this, Pastor, but I've got to tell somebody what comes out of their mouth 999 times out of 1,000 has to do with a sexual mistake that they made.

Everything in our experience screams out, sex is not just physical. We know that. Something much greater and more profound is at work. And so Solomon says in Proverbs 5, to his son, drink water from your own cistern, flowing water from your own well. A cistern is an image of female sexuality. You went into a cistern to get water. He continues, verse 16, should your springs be scattered abroad, streams of water in the streets? Now, verse 16, he switches to a male image for sexuality, springs or fountains. I am not going to explain that any further to you. If you do not get it, well, ask your campus pastor.

That's why we pay him the big bucks. Solomon continues, verse 17, let them, let these treasures be for yourself alone and not for strangers with you. Let your fountain be blessed and rejoice in the wife of your youth. A lovely deer, a graceful doe, let her breasts fill you at all times with delight. Be intoxicated always with her love. Be so erotic in your sexual passion with her that you feel drunk. I think I saw some of you guys for the very first time underline something in your Bible.

Whatever it takes, man. You might not realize how countercultural this passage was in Jewish culture. In all ancient cultures of the time, there were really only two reasons that you got married. Economics, you married strategically into another family so your family could be in a better position.

Or fertility, you wanted to have children. Sexual erotic desire was not a part of the marriage process. In fact, most people would satisfy that outside of marriage with a prostitute or something of that sort. But here you have Solomon talking about sexuality in terms of finding erotic delight to the point that you feel inebriated in a partner that you've given yourself to for life. In Proverbs chapter 2, he calls a wife the companion of your youth. The word in Hebrew he uses for companion, haloop, means something like what we would mean when we say soulmate. That was so far beyond how Solomon's culture saw sex.

They saw it functionally or they saw it as the satisfaction of an appetite. Solomon says there's something much more profound than that. Let me take you to another passage where Proverbs talks about this again, perhaps even more colorfully.

Proverbs chapter 30, flip over 25 chapters there in your Bible, Proverbs chapter 30. Proverbs 30 verse 18, three things are too wonderful for me for I do not understand. This is called a three four poem in Hebrew used to express wonder. Three things are awesome, they're wonderful.

The fourth just totally blows me away because you're working in this escalating sense of wonder. By the way, that word wonderful is the Hebrew word palau, which is a very strong Hebrew word that usually gets tied to divinity, something divine. It's incomprehensible, it's mysterious. It's the name given to Jesus in Isaiah 9, 6.

You will call his name palau, wonderful. So he's saying there's something divinely mysterious about these three and this fourth, oh my goodness, it just blows it out of the water. So what are the three?

What are the three? The way of an eagle, verse 19 in the sky, the way of a serpent on a rock, and the way of a ship on the high seas. The air is mysterious, it's invisible, yet the eagle glides effortlessly through it. The snake has no legs, yet it's able to kind of magically work its way up a rock face, slide up a rock face, and you and I would not be able to do it with our arms and our legs. How does that work exactly?

A ship weighing thousands of pounds is able to glide, soar across the top of the ocean. To other creatures, these things seem almost like magic. There's a special mysterious design at work. Then he builds his way up to number four, the big ultimate mystery beyond all these is the way of a man with a virgin.

Now there's a little tongue and cheek humor there that you just don't want to miss. He's saying just like the sea and the air and a rock face seem unmanageable to most creatures, so the woman also is mysterious and unmanageable. By the way, when I said that last night in our service, a guy yells out, Amen.

I'm like, bro, this is not the time for you to be yelling out, Amen. That's why you're still single. But just as the eagle seems designed to mysteriously work in the air, he says, and just like the ship worked magically on the sea, there's a wonderful divine mystery taking place between a man and a woman in a sexual relationship. The next image, verse 20, is deliberately jarring, but this is the way of an adulteress. She eats and wipes her mouth and says, I have done no wrong. You see here, by contrast, you have a woman for whom sex is like sloppy eating. I had an appetite. I ate. After I was done, I wiped my mouth and got rid of the traces. That was it.

There was nothing magical at work here. It was an appetite. I just had a snack. I got hungry.

I ate. Solomon says that totally misses the incredible wonder that God built into sex. It is a complete devaluing of sex because it puts it back on the animal level. In sex, the two become one.

Physically, you can imagine that, right? Two bodies become one, and that oneness, the apostle Paul would later explain, is to be achieved in a context where everything else in their lives has become one also. That's what marriage is. In marriage, your lives have become one. Your families have become one. Your last names are one. Your finances are one.

Your future is one. Sex outside of marriage separates that physical oneness from the oneness and all the other dimensions. You are saying to that person when you have sex with them outside of marriage, I don't really want all of you yet. At least I'm not willing to commit to all of you yet. I just want your body for right now. That's what I want oneness with. Not everything else.

C.S. Lewis had a great analogy for this. The guy who wants to have sex, he said, with a girl without marrying her, feels about the girl the way that the bulimic feels about food. The bulimic person loves the taste of food.

It brings pleasure and comfort to them, but they don't want to carry around the calories and the saturated fat of the food in their bodies, so after they eat it and taste it and have the pleasure of it, they vomit it back out. That's what the guy is doing, Lewis says, who has sex with a girl outside of marriage. He's saying, I love the taste of you. I love the sense of oneness with you, but I don't want all of you yet, so we'll just have sex and I won't fully unite myself to you. You say, well, I'm not married yet, but I love this person and I do want all of them. Then why haven't you gotten married? I'm not saying that you don't love them.

I'm not saying that you're not on some level committed to them, but at least be honest enough with yourself to admit that you have not given yourself to them yet, and you and I both know that as committed as you feel to them today, you retain the right to walk away at any minute. Let me be very clear on this since there seems to be some confusion. According to God's word, in the clearest of possible ways, sex of any kind in any context before you've made that lifelong commitment in marriage is sin. Hebrews 13 four, marriage is honorable, the bed is undefiled, but those who participate in that outside of that marriage covenant, God will judge. That means sex during the engagement stage. It means sex during the serious dating stage. That kind of oneness is to be experienced only after the indissolvable covenant of marriage has been made. Well, somebody says, okay, okay, I get it. Sex is better in marriage, but what's the big deal if we just have a little fun?

I think of the words of Woody Allen here, sex without love is an empty experience, but as empty experiences go, it's one of the best. Or Katy Perry, I don't even know your name. It doesn't matter. You're just my experimental game, just human nature. You're like, how does he know the words of that song?

Not taking questions at this time. But see, that's it. That's it. Because you're human and because you're not just an animal, it's more than just nature. And it's never just an experiment. I told you about a book that I own.

I think I told you this a couple years ago. It's called Hooked. It's not a Christian book. It's a scientific study written by a couple of neurologists showing what having multiple sexual partners, especially when you're young, does to your brain. Again, they're not writing as Christians, but they explain that multiple sexual partners actually rewires your brain in a way that makes, they say, genuine, lasting, selfless relationships much more difficult, if not nearly impossible. Here's what they say, and I quote, the individual who goes from sex partner to sex partner is causing his or her brain to mold in such a way that eventually accepts that sexual pattern as normal. The pattern of changing sex partners therefore damages their ability to bond in a committed relationship in the future. The kind of attachment damage caused by repeated sexual encounters is, in many respects, more devastating than pregnancy, unwanted pregnancy, more devastating than STDs.

Repeated sexual encounters actually hinder our abilities to form lifelong and satisfying relationships. The authors use the metaphor there of tape, with duct tape, which you've probably heard. If you take duct tape and you wrap it around an arm and you pull it off, you're going to pull off, you know, bits of hair and pieces of skin. And you're going to pull off, you know, bits of hair and pieces of skin on that duct tape because it's really sticky. But then you take that same piece of duct tape, you wrap it around somebody else's arm and you do it. It still has powers of cohesion, but less.

You do that 20 times, and by the 20th time, that tape has lost all of its stickiness. And they said that's what multiple sex partners does to somebody's brain. It prohibits their power of cohesion in a lifelong, satisfying relationship. And again, these are not pastors. These are people writing from scientific analysis of the brain.

Here's what they conclude. You can no more try out sex than you can try out birth. The very act of sex produces a new reality that cannot be undone. Let me talk for a minute here about the damage of pornography because looking at pornography, these authors show, perhaps to an even greater extent, destroys your capacity for lifelong and satisfying relationships.

It's not only an offense to God, it is because he's pure. It's an offense so up first it causes you to start looking at the opposite sex like a commodity, as someone without a soul. Let me talk to men specifically here, though this issue, as I noted, plagues both men and women. Men, when you gaze at pornography, you are looking at an image of a woman whose body you just want to use.

You don't see her as a person, as a soul. And that trains your mind to begin to see all women in a certain way. And that's how you start to relate to all women in your life. When you look at pictures of women with no recognition, they have a soul, your mind starts to see the real women in your life as objects. Next time you pull up a pornographic image, why don't you remind yourself that behind every porn star is a father whose heart is broken with his little girl. When you begin to think of women that way, you begin to relate to all women that way.

No, no, no, I can keep it separate, I can keep pictures, and that's where you're wrong. That's why the authors of this book are showing you that pornography literally rewires your brain to begin to relate in certain ways. They say that the way that many Germans got comfortable with committing the worst atrocities against Jews during the time of the Holocaust was because for nearly two decades they'd heard Jews talk about a subhuman.

And so these Germans, who were not moral monsters, but they just became very accustomed to the pain and the suffering of Jews not really mattering because they had started to think about Jews in a certain way and that made them begin to relate to Jews in a certain way. Then the same thing happens when you consume pornography as it trains your mind so that it affects every female relationship in your life. If you have pornography, man listen, for the sake of your relationship with all future women, you need to get rid of it today. And just like I would tell you, if you got on your playlist a song in which a woman is referred to as a bitch or a whore, it ought to be erased from your playlist forever by tonight. And you should not support any artist who's going to talk about a woman as a commodity that way.

Why? Because how you train your mind to think about women is how you're going to start seeing them and how you see them is how you're going to start relating to them. The other thing that pornography does is it destroys your own capacity for sexual fulfillment.

That's why Paul in 1 Corinthians 6 said these things are a sin against you. Andy Stanley says that every time you look at porn you rewire your heart to believe three things. A real body isn't enough. Only one body is not enough. Number three, my wife's body is not good enough. Because no woman, no matter how beautiful she is, can live up to what you see in porn.

Remember reading an article by Naomi Wolf who is not a Christian, she's like a super radical feminist. She says for most men real naked women are just bad porn. No man, I will tell you this, no man has ever gorged himself on porn and then gotten married and put it behind him because his wife met all of his porn fantasies. That never happens.

In fact the opposite happens. He breaks her heart. In fact men, I'll tell you this, if porn is something that's in your life and you're just not willing to deal with it, you ought to at least have the character to look that fiance or that girlfriend in the face and tell her that you're not willing to deal with it and tell her you're going to bring those three assumptions into your marriage. That number one, a real body is not good enough.

That only one body is not good enough and your body isn't good enough. So she at least has the option to know what she's getting into so that she can opt out now before you destroy her heart later. You at least ought to have the character to tell her this is a problem for me and I'm not really willing to deal with it.

Now like I said, I direct a lot of that issue toward men but in our society it has become just as much one for women. In the wild success of Fifty Shades of Grey or its coming sequels, Fifty Shades of Gross and Fifty Shades of Gonorrhea, you see soft porn for women made mainstream. These books, these movies are not romantic. These books are destructive and they are destroying your capacity for romance. And man, I'll tell you again, if you took your wife or girlfriend to go see one of those movies because you thought it was romantic, you need to repent to God and you need to apologize to her because you were not a man of character at that point. What you did is you played into a lie. Now at this point I know that there are some of you feeling overwhelmed because you've made these kind of mistakes or maybe you're trapped in them right now.

You're like, man, you're describing my life. What I want to tell you is that there's not one of us who stands before the throne of God pure. We don't stand there clothed in our righteousness.

We stand there clothed in the righteousness of Jesus Christ. A righteousness that he purchased by his blood and a righteousness that he put upon us. It is not my purity.

It's not what I've done that makes me whole. It's the blood of Jesus. All precious is the flow.

That makes me white as snow. No other fount I know, nothing but the blood of Jesus. You see, I get to tell you that the blood of Jesus can actually make you purer after his blood has been applied than before you even sinned.

Maybe you're broken right now by all the sexual mistakes that you've made. I get to tell you that the resurrection of Jesus is such that he can put you back together again stronger and more whole than before you were broken. You see, God made the death of Jesus gruesome.

Why? Because he was punishing Jesus for your sin so you would know that there is no sin you ever commit that his blood cannot cleanse you from. He made Jesus resurrect from the dead because he was showing there was nothing broken that cannot be put together. And so the prophet Isaiah says, come now let us discuss together says the Lord, though your sins are like scarlet, though they stain you to the soul, yet I can make you white as snow. Second Corinthians 5 17, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. Old things have passed away, behold all things to become new. Romans 8 1, there is no condemnation toward those of us who are in Christ Jesus. God has made us new in him. Romans 6 3, we are buried with him by baptism into death that just like Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. Hebrews 7 25, because of the death of Jesus, God is able to save to the uttermost to the deepest point of brokenness and pain, all those who come to God in him.

I get the privilege of telling you that the gospel can cleanse and the gospel can heal, but you got to repent and you got to come to God and receive it. That's how we undervalue sex and we do it to our destruction. Here's how we overvalue sex, it's kind of the irony. Proverbs 11 22, like a gold ring in a pig's snout is a beautiful woman without character.

Discretion, you can read that as character. Now y'all this is Solomon at his absolute finest. Here you got a gold ring, that's awesome, everybody wants a gold ring. Problem is it's got a big old nasty hog attached to it. But you got a guy who wants the ring so bad that he figures he'll put up with the swine as long as he gets the ring. So every night he's got the satisfaction of gazing at this ring but he's got to sleep with this big old nasty hog in his bedroom.

You say what idiot would do that? And Solomon says the person who thinks that sex and beauty are everything. Our culture overvalues sex and beauty giving those things entirely too much weight and what makes for the good life.

And they'll put up with any hog as long as they get that. First for many of us we feel like physical beauty is all that matters. Physical beauty is all that really gives a person value. A lot of people put way too much emphasis on physical looks when they're dating. They will settle for hog-like character if they get gold ring level beauty.

Man I'll say this to you. You would do well to remember that when Proverbs 31 describes the ideal woman. When Proverbs 31 describes the woman who will bless your life day after day after day until the day that you die and your children will rise up and call her blessed. Not one time in Proverbs 31 does it ever discuss her beauty. In fact the only time it mentions beauty it mentions it disparagingly. Proverbs 31 30 charm is deceptive. Beauty is fleeting. It's a woman who fears the Lord. That's the one who's going to be praised.

That's the one who's going to bless your life. Beauty is good. Solomon was into beauty. I'm into beauty. Beauty is good he said but character that's the real beauty and character is better. I've told you before I remember the first time that I laid eyes on the girl who would become my wife. I was speaking at a high school camp where she was a counselor not a camper and just want to be clear on that and she got out she was leading worship and I was supposed to speak after she got done leading worship and I remember thinking I'm supposed to be back here concentrating on God and the sermon and I feel like I need to repent and uh and and and I got to talk to her and our first real conversation we ever had was about Calvinism. I get chills just thinking about it now it was awesome and I just the way she talked about people and the way she respected people and the way she treated people and I knew that's the kind of character that I wanted to be united with so now here we are what 15 years in the marriage she's still beautiful to me she's still beautiful period but I see a woman now who has sacrificially devoted her time and her body to having and raising our four children she can no longer devote herself all day long to beautifying herself that makes her more beautiful to me today than the day that I met her because there's nothing more beautiful than a beautiful spirit because I know that when people oppose me and when I go through difficulty she's the one I want by my side and when we walk through tragedy she's the one that I want as my companion and when I get old and unattractive and you're like you're there now um when I get old and really unattractive and I got six chins I know that she's not going anywhere because she has beautiful character because charm as much as she had it is deceitful and the beauty is fleeting but it's a woman who fears God that's a woman who blesses you for every day of your life for eternity there are some women who think that physical beauty is so important that they feel absolutely worthless worthless without it so we got a lot of young girls who do really destructive things to their bodies to try and look good anorexia and bulimia are often built on the assumption that your primary beauty and your identity your real worth is established by your shape and your size did you know that anorexia and bulimia are five times more common in our country than in non-developed countries and they are two times more likely on the college campus than they are in society at large tim keller says what that shows you is that the closer you get to the heart of western civilization the closer you get to the culture forming womb of civilization because that would be a college campus the more that women are bombarded with the message that all that matters about you is your looks and your character doesn't matter at least not that much and so we've got girls who do destructive things to their body because i gotta have i gotta have that gold ring a lot of women get depressed as they age because when their physical beauty is gone so goes their identity so goes their happiness it's all they had and what solomon says his physical beauty is good it's good it's a creation of god but a person who walks with god has a beauty that lasts forever that's the real beauty another way that we overvalue sex is that we convince ourselves that the good life the happy life is impossible without good romance and good sex and so we're willing to give up anything to have that that's why not too infrequent it's tragically i know men in our church who in their late 40s early 50s leave their lifelong companion and their kids for a younger sexier woman even though it destroys their family and their finances but they feel like at all cost i gotta have that ring who cares about the hog of a ruined family i read a book one time where a guy listed out all of the things that would happen if he committed adultery and i'm so moved by it i made my own list and i gotta i pull it out every once in a while just to remind myself because i'm a guy like you guys and i know what temptation is like and i just want to make sure i have in my mind the things that i know these are not ifs the things i know would happen if i committed adultery i won't read all them to you but here's a few of them i would cause untold hurt to veronica and i would have to endure the loss of her respect and her trust and i would likely forfeit my entire relationship with her i would cause deep hurt and confusion to carris ali rya and aden who may never understand why i was willing to trade them for a thrill my relationship with them would never be the same i would bring shame on my mother and father i would heap shame on the girl that i committed adultery with and bring endless mockery to her i would cause shame to you my church family i would enable the laughter and the blasphemous smugness of professors at unc and duke and nc state and north kalana central who already disrespect god and mock him in the classroom and i would give them just another exhibition and reason to do that i know i would follow in the footsteps of men whose ministries i admired but who forfeited that through their immorality and whose example now causes me to shudder with horror i'd become another example most importantly i would grieve my lord and my savior and one day i would have to look him in the face and explain why why after all that he had given to me after all the beauty he had put in my life why i just had to have something else it's just not worth it it's just not worth it now you say i have sinned that way can i not be forgiven yes you can and it's like i told you the power of god's grace is amazing in its restoration we have people in our church that have been restored in this and it's beautiful but you of all people should want others to understand how devastating and how powerful these things are it is not trifling and i feel like some of you are here this weekend and the reason that god has you here is i'm supposed to warn you you're standing on the precipice and you're about to destroy everything i take this so seriously and some of you will say i'm psychotic and i'll seriously i'll tell you i will not go to lunch with a woman who's not my wife i will not be alone with a woman who is not my wife when i travel i always take a guy with me why because my family and this church and the reputation is entirely too precious to me to put a gun to my head and hope the chamber's not loaded and i will not take it said you like well that's ridiculous like that's ridiculous maybe you just ought to think about how important this is and how much you don't want to take a chance with the things in your life that are most precious that gold ring is not worth it and there are some of you that are forfeiting your very soul over this issue and the reason i say that is because this is the number one reason especially among people in college in the first few years after why they won't take the lordship of jesus seriously why because they don't want to bring this underneath the lordship of christ and i want to look at them i want to say you would trade your soul you would trade god for that i mean it's fantastic yes but not worth god it's not worth your soul hebrews 13 for marriage is honorable the bed is undefiled god wants you to be drunk with your passion in it but those who do not do it his way god will judge some people overvalue sex and how and that they feel they couldn't be happy if they're not married or if they are married they feel like you couldn't be happy if they don't get in a different marriage a better one until you're always envying other people's relationships imagine how much better you'd be in a new situation you're fantasizing about the premature death of your spouse so you can get remarried or whatever ridiculous thing that you do it's because you put too much value on it beauty and sex are good they're beautiful creations of god but they're not the most important things and they're not what makes for life so here's the last verse i'll give you proverbs 6 23 for the commandments the commandment is the way of life in the commandment solomon says that is in a relationship with god that's where life is it's not in sex it's in god i want you to think i want you to think about this the most joyful the most fully fulfilled the most fully alive person who ever lived and whoever walked the face of the earth was a single virgin he was the happiest person ever walked the face of the earth every time you pray you pray to a 33 year old single adult virgin yet his life was filled with joy that was inexpressible because he had the love of the father in fact psalm 16 11 which he i think quoted in your presence is the fullness of joy he says not in a marriage or in romance that's joy it's awesome joy but it's not the fullness of joy your presence is the fullness of joy at your right hand are pleasures forever more not in the bedroom that's not where pleasures forever more pleasures forever more god are with you it's like i often tell you the love that you're seeking in romance is actually his love the arms you yearn for in romance are his arms sexual love can be a great demonstration of the love of god and the gospel but it's not the ultimate thing you see in sex you get a beautiful picture of the gospel in sex you're naked and somebody sees all of who you are and they love you it goes back to the soul need that we have listen to this to be known and loved that's what the human heart wants we got to be known and loved we can't be one of the other because if you're known but not loved that's rejection but if you're loved and not known that's just sentimentality so in sex you get a glimpse of somebody who knows you sees you completely and loves you unconditionally in the gospel you see the fulfillment of that because there you see a god who sees the nakedness of your soul they see all the deformity they see all the ugliness and they love you and they delight in you and they accept you unconditionally and that is the love that your heart is yearning for paul says excuse me solomon says that's where life is and then he goes on see how he finishes the verse it preserves you from the smooth tongue of the adulterous do not desire her beauty in your heart don't let her capture you with her eyelashes how do you escape the captivity and the power that sex and romance has over you whether that's your addiction to porn or the fact that you're a serial dater and you got to be in a new marriage or you got how do you escape that captivity solomon says by a greater captivity that's how you do it you get captured by the love of god and that releases you from this need to always have this other thing in your life and then you can become a whole person you get captured by the love of god for you and it makes you a healthy and a whole person who begins to love from the overflow and not because you're a desperate lonely person it's like i've often told you guys listen to this single lonely insecure people become married lonely insecure people in fact their loneliness and insecurity gets worse and now they're just mad about it because now they're blaming somebody else for their loneliness and insecurity that loneliness and insecurity wasn't a single or marriage issue it was a you and god issue problems like loneliness and insecurity are not cured by another human being they're only cured by the love of the father and i'm gonna say something it's gonna be kind of radical for you but i actually think it's great advice there are some of you this is so messed up in your life some of you single people you ought to just blow the whistle call a time out and you ought to take a year off from dating why because you need to get this relationship right you need to become a person who is full of life in god so that then when and if god brings that marriage relationship to you you can do it you can do it out of the overflow and not as a desperately needy person it's like i often say to single people you're not ready to date until you're ready not to date because when you're ready not to date that means that you've understood that life doesn't come from another human being it comes from god and then when you're ready not to date then at that point you can begin to to date and to love as a a real person a full person there are others of you that this is the area we've never surrendered to jesus yo when this service is over at your campus there's some of you guys i don't know you're engaged or you're seriously dating you're sleeping together you need to walk down the aisle and you need to grab a hold of your campus pastor's hand and say will you marry us we need to have some conversations but will you marry us and they're gonna do what it takes to get this corrected there are others of you that you just this is an area where it reveals brokenness what you need is the love of the father why don't you bow your heads at all of our campuses if you wouldn't as much as any other subject this area reveals where things are broken in your life if you're unhappy this weekend there's a real chance that it's connected to this issue somehow if you're overwhelmed by guilt there's a real chance that it's this issue if you feel broken if you feel broken it's a real chance that it goes back in some way to this issue the gospel is that jesus died for your sin so he can cleanse you from guilt the gospel is that jesus rose from the dead so he can put you back together again the gospel is that his love is the fountain that will satisfy the thirst of your soul do you get that his blood cleanses his resurrection heals his love satisfies and it's a gift you don't earn it it's not accorded to what you do it's a gift that you receive because of what he's done if you've never received it i would invite you to do it right now lord jesus i surrender and i receive if you know that you've already received that then i would invite you just to go deeper into it to meditate on it to turn it over again and again in your mind until it overflows out of your soul no other fountain i know nothing nothing but the blood and the love and the power and the resurrection of jesus in just a minute our campus pastors are going to extend an invitation for you to be baptized you don't get baptized because of regret over this you get baptized as a testimony that you trust in christ but what a beautiful picture it's going to give into the water showing that jesus cleanses your sin out of the water showing you're walking in newness of life i encourage you if you've never been baptized in just a minute when they give you that invitation that you not hesitate that you take it father i thank you for the blood that makes me whole that will never lose its power the resurrection that heals and redeems and the love that satisfies i thank you for that god in jesus