Reversing Sexual Consequences

There used to be shame associated with it, guilt associated with it.

It has become the drug of choice within the culture. Dr. Tony Evans says sex is a gift from heaven, but what our culture has turned it into is a design of the devil. Satan is an expert at taking what has been created by God for good and turn it around against us for bad. Celebrating 40 years of faithfulness, this is The Alternative with Dr. Tony Evans, author, speaker, senior pastor of Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas, Texas, and president of the Urban Alternative. The world works overtime to sell us its broken version of sexuality, but today Dr. Evans confronts what our culture is saying with solid biblical truth as he brings us a message called reversing sexual consequences.

Let's join him. Sex was created by heaven, not by Hollywood. It was God's idea and God's creation, and the Bible says, and what he created was good. Satan is an expert at taking what has been created by God for good and to turn it around against us for bad. In Genesis chapter 6, he opens up the chapter with the world having to be destroyed in the first seven verses because demons inhabited men who had relations with women giving birth to children and all manner of wickedness, so the whole world had to be destroyed. So Satan used sex in order to get women pregnant, in order for wickedness to spread so that God has to now send a flood and judge the whole world because it was viewed as irredeemable.

International consequence for rebellion in this area. And the problem with this particular area is it is the most natural area to sin in because it is birthed out of a natural God-given desire. It's not where you have to go out there and find something. It's the something is already there. It's built into our human makeup.

But like salt water, when you drink salt water, you drink it to satisfy you, but the salt in the water only creates more thirst, and if you drink it long enough, the kidneys can't flush it out fast enough, and the very salt water that you use to quench the thirst winds up killing you. And so we find ourselves unraveling in the culture because of a lack of understanding and or application of this most vital, critical, yet sensitive area. In our culture today, hedonism rules, pornography is off the charts, and this dominates the thinking, the entertainment, and the morality of our day. So let's start off with why it was created. God created sex, since it comes from heaven, not Hollywood, to inaugurate and renew a covenant, a marriage covenant.

That's why it was created. It was created to inaugurate, set in motion, and renew, revisit, a covenant. Paul gives an extended discussion of this in 1 Corinthians chapter 6, and I do want you to turn there because he gives a theological understanding of this area that we need to take into account as we move forward here today. Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God, do not be deceived, neither fornicated or adulterous, or the effeminate, or homosexuals, or thieves, or covetousness, or drunkards, or revilers, or swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. He says this lifestyle blocks you from inheriting the kingdom of God.

Now don't misunderstand that. He doesn't say it stops you from entering the kingdom of God. You enter the kingdom of God based on faith in the finished work of Jesus Christ, but you inherit the kingdom of God. That is, you accrue the benefits of the kingdom of God having to do with lifestyle. So while you may be on your way to heaven, heaven may not be on its way to you because when you adopt this lifestyle, he says that inheriting that is receiving the benefits of the kingdom do not accrue to you. He says in verse 14, such were some of you. That's how you rolled in your unsaved days, but you are washed and sanctified and justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. That's not who you are now.

Now it may be how you feel, but that's not who you are. That we've been duped into thinking it's only natural. The desire is natural, the activity is not. He takes it deeper theologically. He says all things, verse 12, are lawful for me, but not all things are profitable. All things are lawful for me, but I am not mastered by anything. So whenever anything in your Christian life, my Christian life, our Christian life holds us hostage, it is spiritually illegal. He says I will be mastered or controlled by nothing including my passions.

I have them, but I'm not going to let them rule me. He says while food is for the stomach and the stomach is for food, he says yet your body, verse 13, is not for immorality, but for the Lord and the Lord is for the body. So your body is not for anything you want to do with it, just because it's your body, and he explains why. Now God has not only raised the Lord, but will also raise us up through his power. In other words, if God got Jesus up from the grave, he can get you up from the illegitimate bed, because he's in the resurrections. So it says he's in the resurrections. Just as he got Jesus up out of the grave, he can get you out of that yielding to that legitimate passion that's being addressed in an illegitimate way.

He then goes deeper. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take away the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute?

May it never be. Or do you not know that the one who joins himself to a prostitute is one body with her? For he says and the two shall be one, but the one who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with him. He says when you have sex, you enter into a union. You enter into a union, and you are now, as a Christian, unified with Christ.

So wherever you go, you take him with you. Flee immorality, verse 18, for every other sin that a man commits is outside the body, but the immoral man sins against his own body. He says that this sin is unlike any other sin because of the unique internal damage it does to the soul. If you get chewing gum on the carpet and then you try to remove the chewing gum from the carpet, you're going to take some of the carpet with you because of the intertwining of the gum with the carpet. So you may know the gum shouldn't be on the carpet.

You may not want the gum to be on the carpet, but to get the gum off the carpet, you got to lose some of the carpet. What he says is this sin is unique because when you disconnect from it, you take some of your soul with it. And it's not hard to testify that that's what happens in scenarios that Paul is describing.

He goes deeper. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you have been bought with a price, therefore glorify God with your body. You are not your own.

You have been purchased. He makes an interesting statement. He says, your body is the temple of the living God. A temple is the house of worship. So whenever you have sex, you have church. For sex is supposed to be a worship experience. It was designed to be a worship experience because he says it is a temple. Temple is a place of worship. You are to glorify God, he says, with your temple. Therefore, sex for the believer is not merely a physical thing, nor is it merely an emotional thing.

It becomes a spiritual thing. That's why I want to take you back to the scripture that I've read in your hearing and want you to stick with me here. Because of a situation that happened in John 8. The scribes bring a woman to Jesus while he's teaching in the temple, and they say to him, teacher, because you're teaching Jesus, we caught this woman in adultery in the very act.

What do you say? Because the law of Moses says she is qualified for stoning, stoning she is to be put to death. It says that their motive was to test him in order that they might accuse him. So they were trying to put Jesus in a catch-22, in a trap, in a trick, because any answer he gave would be a losing answer. They bring her to Jesus, and when they say, what should we do? Jesus stooped down, the end of verse 6, and with his finger began writing on the ground. But they kept pressing him.

What are we going to do with her? Verse 7, Jesus says, he that is without sin casts the first stone. But he stoops down again and he writes again. So the question on the floor is, what did he write? Because after he writes the second time, they drop their stones and they go home. So whatever he wrote was a doozy, because it emptied the temple. It emptied him out. Homeboys had to leave because of what he wrote. But we're not told what he wrote.

Well, actually, maybe we are. Now there's a mystery, and Dr. Evans will come back with a possible solution to it when he continues our message in just a moment. First though, what you're hearing today is just one part of his life-changing series, U-Turn, Reversing Spiritual Consequences. This collection will teach you what it takes to turn your life in a whole new direction, even if you've spent years dealing with issues like financial responsibility, substance abuse, sexual promiscuity, or family sins that go back generations. To expand on these lessons, Tony has written a helpful companion book entitled U-Turns, Reversing the Consequences in Your Life.

Together, these two resources can help you finally discover how to reverse flaws and failures that you thought were irreversible. Request them right away, and we'll send you the book and all 12 lessons in the U-Turn series on both CD and digital download as our gift when you make a donation to help support Tony's ministry. And if you're wanting to gain an even deeper understanding of this important subject, Dr. Evans has produced an in-depth U-Turns Bible Study Kit and DVD featuring custom content for six sessions, including tips on how to lead a group study on this topic.

You can find out how to get this entire package of U-Turn resources when you visit tonyevans.org. Again, that's tonyevans.org. Or let one of our resource team members help you with your request day or night at 1-800-800-3222.

That's 1-800-800-3222. Well, Dr. Evans, we'll come back with more of today's message right after this. If you're like most Christians, there are people in your life who know you but may not know Jesus. You really want to do something about that, but don't feel equipped to share your faith effectively.

In other words, maybe if you knew more, you could do more. Well, that's where the Tony Evans Training Center comes in. It's an online Bible school with classes that will take you deep into the most important core concepts of the faith. You can start with our free introductory course on evangelism, then move on to subjects like spiritual warfare, marriage building, maturing in the faith, and many more. The content is challenging, but you can move through it at your own pace any time you're online. There's also lots of custom content from Tony and an online forum where you can get your specific questions answered.

Go to tonyevans.org and follow the link to the Tony Evans Training Center. It's like having a seminary on your smartphone. They said the law of Moses said we should stone her. So they are thinking about the law and talking about the law, and the divine standard is on their minds for the test they're doing. Jesus kneels down and writes once. He that is without the sin casts the first stone. He kneels down and writes a second time.

Rewind. God called Moses up to meet him on the mountain to give him the law of God, and God took his finger and wrote the Ten Commandments. He took his finger and he wrote it on one tablet. He took his finger and he wrote it on a second tablet, because there were two tablets with the Ten Commandments. So God's finger wrote twice.

So when Jesus Christ stands in God's house and takes his finger, he is telling them, I'm the one who wrote this, because he uses the finger of God to rehearse with them the law of God. You have to understand that the law of God didn't just talk about adultery. There's a whole bunch of stuff in the law of God, and there are a whole bunch of penalties in the law of God. So if you want me to stone her, we need to make sure you're qualified to do the stoning, because you can't stone somebody for something you yourself have done. So if you're telling me you've never been immoral, if you're telling me you've never done this or that or the other, throw the first stone.

You lead the way. So I can be true to the law of Moses, but I just want you to know, after you've thrown your stone, just make sure you understand some rocks are coming your way. And so Jesus, as only Jesus could do, threw the same law in their face that they were throwing at him.

It says that they began to walk away. So now it's just Jesus and the woman. And Jesus, straightening up, says to her in verse 10, Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you? And she says, No one, Lord.

And then Jesus hits her with the motherlode. I do not condemn you either. Go from now on, sin no more. From now on, go and sin no more.

Okay, let me say that again. I have not condemned you either. So you go and you stop living like you were living. You go and sin no more.

What we do is we reverse that. We say, Go and sin no more, and I won't condemn you. Stop sinning so you're not condemned.

That's not the order Jesus said it in. He says, I'm going to take away your condemnation, and I want me taking away your condemnation to be the motivation for you to go and sin no more. In other words, I want you to be motivated to stop sinning, not merely because the law says, Don't do it. I want you to stop sinning because you are so appreciative of my goodness, mercy, grace, favor, and I didn't do to you what I could do to you if I was strictly operating by the law. I want my grace to motivate you to go and sin no more.

Please do not misread what he said. He did not say, Your sin does not condemn you, because her sin did condemn her, which was the reason she was there in the first place, because sin brings with it condemnation. What he said was, I do not condemn you. So we've got to distinguish between the condemnation of sin and the liberation of Jesus Christ. Jesus never covered it up. He said, Sin no more. He knew sin was on the table. Grace does not mean you cover up sin.

Grace means you respond to the goodness of God so that you no longer keep sinning. Or as Titus 2 says, grace teaches us to deny ungodliness. See, here's what the law does. The law says, Thou shalt not or I'm gonna hurt you. The law says, I'm gonna hurt you because of what you've done. God does not change the law, the standard.

It's still sin. But what grace does is shift the motivation. In other words, I want you to respond to me out of the fact that what could have happened didn't happen. You could have rocks bouncing off of your head, girlfriend, right now, but I stepped in and I didn't.

See, somebody here knows what it's like, that what could have happened didn't happen, because God's grace met you in that place. Even when the Lord disciplines us, the Bible says, He disciplines us for whom the Lord loves. He disciplines. So even consequences of discipline come out of a heart of love. When we correct our children, it shouldn't be vengeance enacted to hurt them.

It should be love enacted to correct them. It is a motivation of love. And He says, if you really understood the true understanding of grace, you would be motivated not to hurt the Lord, motivated not to disappoint the Lord, motivated to want to give your body to please Him and not please everybody else and even yourself over and against Him. And He says when this shift response comes to God, then He says the power of the cross comes to you for now there is no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, not because He skipped sin, go and sin no more, but because He wants the motivation for the transformation to be the goodness He extends to you even though you deserve stones. Dr. Tony Evans, with important insight on what it takes to maintain morality in the midst of an immoral culture. And if you're struggling in this area or any area, stay with us because he'll be back to pray for you in just a moment. First though, today's teaching is just one part of 12 powerful life-changing lessons in the comprehensive two-volume U-turn series and it's available along with Tony's brand new book U-turns, reversing the consequences in your life. For a very limited time, we'll send you both of these resources as our gift when you help us keep Tony's teaching on this station. Just visit tonyevans.org today to make your donation and request your copy of the U-turn series. And don't forget to look into obtaining the companion U-turns Bible Study Kit, including the DVD featuring six video lessons from Dr. Evans. Drop by tonyevans.org today or call our resource center at 1-800-800-3222. Team members are standing by to help you day and night.

Again, that's 1-800-800-3222. Competition is a healthy thing in the business world, but Dr. Evans says it's dangerous to let anything or anyone in your life compete with God. Tomorrow, he'll help us learn how we can keep our faith in focus. Right now though, he's back to wrap up our program with a word of prayer. Father, right now I want to pray for my brothers and sisters who are hurting in some way right now, who are going through something in their personal life or family life or just struggling with life in general and who need the comfort of God, the provision of God, the grace of God, the mercy of God to sustain them during this time of trial or difficulty. May you comfort them with comfort that blows their mind. Will you show that grace is all sufficient for wherever they are and for whatever they need? And may the encouragement that comes from the Holy Spirit ease their pain, lower their stress, and give them the ability to get up and keep going until their change comes. And we pray their change will come sooner than later and that they will experience you and be able to say like Job, they've heard about you with the hearing of the ear, but now they've seen you with their own eyes. And we pray this in the name of the risen Christ, Jesus our Lord. Amen. The Alternative with Dr. Tony Evans is brought to you by The Urban Alternative and is celebrating 40 years of faithfulness thanks to the generous contributions of listeners like you.