Ten(der) Command #7: Keep Your Body & Mind Sexually Pure

Thank you, excuse me.

Thank you, worship team.

Today is Sunday, the twentieth of September, two thousand and fifteen, and you know what that means.

God is still on the throne.

I don't know what your week was like, I don't know what the week ahead is going to be like, but I know with confidence and assurance, and it's got to be the foundation of the way we look at the past and we view the future.

God is still on the throne.

God is good.

God is gracious.

God is kind.

God is patient with us.

God is holy.

God is the one who sets the direction of our lives.

He's involved in our lives.

God and who God is and what God has said is the foundation for our lives.

And this morning we're looking at a particular aspect of what God has said.

And when God speaks, he does not stutter.

When God speaks, he does not mislead.

And the passage before us today, the verse before us today, says very clearly, without blushing or without stuttering, you shall not commit adultery.

I think we need to pray.

For what this means is keep your body and your mind sexually pure.

That's what God is saying to us.

Can we pray together?

Heavenly Father, we are weak people and we are surrounded by a society of weak people.

We wander, our hearts are pulled in many directions.

And Lord, as we have sung how we need you.

We need you today.

Lord, I pray that you would take your word and that we would hear your word as it is intended to be.

Not a word of condemnation, not a word that binds, but a word of freedom and a word that leads us in the ways of life.

Oh Lord, would you tenderly and clearly help us understand what it means and why it's so important to keep our bodies and our minds sexually pure.

Father, I pray you would give us hearts that would respond to what you are saying to us.

We want to worship you and adore you and obey you in all that you say.

Help us, Father.

We need that so desperately.

I pray in Christ's name.

Amen.

Well, you shall not commit adultery.

It's part of the tender commandments.

Someone uh who hadn't been here for a while last week, uh, hadn't been part of this series, when they heard that expression, they said in what was something more than a stage whisper, uh, tender commandments?

What's he mean by that?

Well, what I mean by that is God God is speaking to us.

And when he speaks to us, he always either speaks and instructs us to provide us with something good, or he speaks and instructs us to protect us from some harm.

And when we hear God's word in any other sense, when our hearts are tending to say, this is harsh, this is difficult, he doesn't want us to have any fun, he just wants to, then we're not hearing God.

God is saying, go this way, don't go that way.

Here is the way of life, that's the way of destruction and death.

I don't want that for you.

I want you to have life and to have it abundantly, and part of that has to do with our sexuality, and part of that has to do with keeping our bodies and our minds sexually pure.

It's a pretty clear statement.

You shall not commit adultery.

It's actually pretty clear unless you read it in the King James Bible.

Now, before you say, no, wait a minute, Walt, I'm talking about a particular edition of the King James Bible that was printed in England in 1631 by the king's printer Robert Baker.

And as a result of perhaps the most famous typo in history, the word not was omitted.

So thousands of people had a Bible that said, you shall commit adultery.

Now we need to pay very close attention to God's word.

Actually, Robert Baker paid a high price uh for that.

Uh the uh the archbishop of uh uh fined him 300 pounds for that mistake.

And in that day, 3,000 pounds was the equivalent of a lifetime's wages.

Uh for us today, probably between two and four million dollars.

The cost of not paying attention to God's word is very great, but it's not the financial cost that is of great concern, but what we actually read in the book of Proverbs is that if we follow the wrong path, it leads to misery, to destruction, and to death.

And God says, don't go that way.

I want so much more for you.

We can flaunt the rules of the universe if we will.

We can ignore what God says to us if we want, but we cannot and we do not escape the consequences of the realities of how life works.

We can go against the grain of the universe, but we cannot avoid getting splinters.

We do not really break the laws of God, we break ourselves against them.

And God says, I don't want that for you.

I want so much more.

God lovingly, tenderly, with deep desires says to us, don't commit adultery.

Now, if we hear that as something controlling, as something restricting, as something binding us, we misunderstand the way life works.

God created the universe, and we can no more flaunt the way God created the universe and the way life works than we can flaunt the rule of the law of gravity.

You can jump off a skyscraper if you want, but you cannot escape the consequences of being a splot on the ground at the bottom.

You just can't escape that.

You cannot escape the consequences.

We will not escape the consequences of living our own way, doing our own thing, thinking that we know best, knowing what we want, and we will experience sooner or later the awful consequences of that.

And that applies to this portion of God's word as much as anything else.

Sometimes the commands of God have a harsh feel to us.

I came across this and it was very, very helpful.

Um do they have a stern quality about them, the commands of God, that puts us off?

Isn't that the first reaction when you even hear someone talking about the Ten Commandments?

That's why I want to keep talking about is the tender commandments to get a sense of God's heart.

Imagine you are on a family vacation at Yosemite National Park.

Have anybody ever been to Yosemite National Park?

Imagine you're there with your family on a vacation and you've taken the long winding drive up to Glacier Point, a short walk, and you will come to a low, waist-high railing, and you can look straight down into the valley below, 3,200 feet below.

Now, the car door behind you flings open, and before you can even get your seatbelt unlatched, Tommy, your excited three-year-old, leaps out of the car and runs to the edge as fast as his chubby little legs will carry him.

Now, is this a time to whisper sweetly?

Oh, Tommy dear, please don't do that.

No.

Is this a time to speak quietly and softly?

Is this a time for a seminar on values clarification?

No! As your parents' heart lurches within your chest, you shout, Tommy, stop, stop, stop right now.

Do the tender commandments have a bit of a flavor of that to you?

Or do they seem written in bold capital letters and stern?

Could it be because the father heart of God lurches within him?

He sees us spiritually blind, unheeding men and women running for the edge of the cliff?

Listen to the urgent tone of the words of God in the book of Ezekiel.

As surely as I live, declares the sovereign Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live.

Turn, turn, turn from your evil ways.

Why will you die, O people of God?

Can you hear the heart of God?

Stop, stop, there's danger ahead.

There's sorrow ahead.

Tender words of warning from a God who loves us.

The seventh commandment is not harsh and restrictive.

It's gracious and kind and loving, and it gives us life and life abundantly.

We're going to be talking about sexual purity.

When was the last time we talked about sex here in the sanctuary?

If it's been a long time, then shame on us.

And I mean that very sincerely.

Are we offended by something that God is not offended to talk about?

God speaks very explicitly.

God speaks very extensively in the Word.

God speaks clearly, and He speaks almost as much about sexuality and sexual activity as our society does.

He really does.

And yet there's portions of Scripture that we shy away from.

It makes us feel uncomfortable, and so we don't pay attention to them.

Since when do we get to decide what portions of God's word we're going to listen to or want to hear?

Since when?

Do we pick and choose what God says based on what we like or what makes us feel good?

If we do, then shame on us.

God does not stutter and he does not blush when he talks about this subject.

He talks specifically, and why don't we?

We are not helping our kids, we're not helping ourselves if we don't say all that God says, and the corollary to that is to limit focusing on things that God says little or nothing about, and majoring on the things that God says a great deal about.

One of the blessings of simply going through a passage is you can't skirt the things you don't want to talk about.

So what we want to do is we want to listen and say what God says and not be afraid because it makes us uncomfortable.

Why would we ever be uncomfortable with what God says if our hearts are responsive to God?

What else do we want but words of life?

And that is what He gives us.

When we do talk about sex in the church, we usually direct it to teenagers.

As though it's only teenagers who have a problem with keeping their bodies and their minds pure?

Who are we kidding?

Who are we kidding?

Okay?

And we will see that Jesus takes it far beyond just the physical acts and he talks about the attitudes of our hearts.

Who is there among us who does not need to hear what God has to say about this subject?

So at the risk of offending some of you, and if you are offended by what God says, then I will be feel free to offend you.

Take my heart in that when I say that.

Understand what I'm saying.

I just want to say what God says.

So let's look and see what God says.

So we'll begin with Exodus chapter 20, verse 14.

Exodus 20:14

That's the seventh commandment.

It's repeated in Deuteronomy as well, in virtually the same context, in the same wording.

And the words in the original are just really clear.

No adultery, just like we saw last week with murder.

No murder, no adultery.

Two words, no adultery.

The word adultery has, in this sense, in this context, a very specific and rather narrow meaning.

It's unequivocal what it means.

There is no question about what it means.

It's talking about sexual relationships between a married person and someone who is not his or her partner.

God has called us when he created us for a very special relationship.

One man, one woman, one flesh for life.

We find that in Genesis, and that is carried all the way through.

One man, one woman, one flesh for life.

And that one flesh is not limited to the physical aspects of our relationships, but it certainly is talking about sexual relationships.

One man, one woman, one flesh for life.

And whenever that is destroyed or watered down or ignored, it's adultery.

Relations between a married person and someone who is other than his or her spouse.

So that's clearly what the seventh commandment says.

I want us to turn to another portion.

I'd like to ask you to turn to Leviticus chapter 18.

Leviticus 18 · chapter mention

It's a passage which builds upon what God has said in the Exodus passage, but now it expands it from the narrower definition of a married person having sexual relations with someone other than his or her spouse.

There's a broader, a broadening out of this concept that we find in Leviticus 18.

And now it's dealing with illicit or illegitimate or unlawful wrong sexual relationships in general.

And so we read, and the Lord spoke to, this is chapter 18 of Leviticus, the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, speak to the people of Israel and say to them, don't hide this, don't pretend this, don't blush when you say this.

Isaiah 18 · chapter mention

This is what God, you are supposed to say this to God's people.

You shall not do as they did in the land of Egypt where you were.

And you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan to which I am taking you.

You shall not walk in their ways, you shall follow my rules, keep my statutes, walk in my way, for I am the Lord.

You shall keep my statutes and my rules.

If a person does them, he shall live by them.

It will go well with them, is the way that is translated in one of the other translations, for I am the Lord.

And now he begins to explain what that means.

None of you shall approach any of his close relatives to uncover nakedness.

It's the way it's translated in the ESV.

That is a euphemism.

A euphemism is a somewhat softer, somewhat more acceptable way of saying something that is very in your face and harsh.

We can talk about sexual issues without being crude and offensive.

God does.

So he uses this euphemism to uncover one's nakedness.

If you happen to have an NIV in front of you, you will see that consistently in this chapter it's translated to have sexual relationships.

Okay?

And that's what it means.

He talks about these things that it may go well with them.

None of you shall approach any of his close relatives to uncover nakedness, to have sexual relationships with him.

I am the Lord.

You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father, which is the nakedness of your mother.

She is your mother.

You shall not uncover her nakedness.

You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father's wife, it is your father's nakedness.

You shall not uncover the nakedness of your sister or your father's daughter or your mother's daughter, whether brought up in the family or in another home.

You shall not uncover the nakedness of your son's daughter or your daughter's daughter, for their nakedness is uh for their nakedness is your own nakedness.

You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father's wife's daughter, brought up in your father's family, since she is your sister.

You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father's sister.

You shall not uncover the nakedness of your mother's sister.

You get the point that he's making here?

He's being pretty specific.

Um verse 18, you shall not, uh 15, you shall not uncover the nakedness of your daughter-in-law, she is your son's wife, shall not uncover the nakedness of your brother's wife, it is your brother's nakedness, shall not uncover the nakedness of a woman and of her daughter, and she will not take her son's daughter or daughter's daughter to uncover her nakedness, you shall not, verse 18, uh, take the a woman as a rival wife to a sister, uncovering her nakedness, you shall not approach a woman to uncover her nakedness while she is in her minstrel uncleanness.

You shall not lie sexually with your neighbor's wife, so make yourself unclean.

You shall not give any of your children to offer them to Molech.

Sacrificing your children is put in the same uh line.

You shall not lie with a male as with a woman, that is an abomination.

You shall not lie with any animal and make yourself unclean, neither shall any woman give herself to an animal to lie with it.

This is a perversion.

He's getting very concrete, very specific about things.

Do not make yourself unclean by any of these, verse 24.

For by all of these, the nations I am driving out before you have been unclean.

And the land became unclean, so that I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants, but you shall keep my statutes and my rules, and do none of these abominations.

Lest, verse 28, the land vomit you out when you make it unclean, as it vomited out the nation that was before you.

For every one who does any of these abominations, the person who do them shall be cut off from among the people.

So keep my charge never to practice any of these abominations, abominable customs that were practiced before you, to never make yourself unclean to them, for I am the Lord.

Now we could go on.

We actually could go on to chapter 20.

I really don't have the heart for it at this point.

He's talking about these things to protect us from some harm and to provide for us some good.

This is not written or read by me for shock value.

This is not written for shock value.

We're not talking about this to be edgy, okay?

We're talking about it because God.

God says it plain and simple.

And if we can't say here in the sanctuary what God says, then there's a problem with us.

It's certainly not a problem with God or His Word.

Okay?

We could turn to Leviticus 20, but Matthew chapter 5.

Matthew 5 · chapter mention

Jesus picks up the same thread in Matthew chapter 5, verses 27 to 30.

Matthew 5:27–30

And just as he did last week with a matter of anger, and he showed that anger is the root of which murder is the fruit.

Remember last week, he does exactly the same thing now.

And he talks about lust.

Have you ever heard that was said to you, shall not commit adultery?

And again, his opponents were saying that he's undermining the Old Testament.

He's trying to make it something else.

And he's saying, Not on your life.

I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery within his in his heart.

Who is there among us who has not had problems with lustful thoughts?

Women as well as men, old people as well as young people.

That's just part of who we are.

The physical actions are sinful, but Jesus takes it further than that, and he makes it very clear that the thoughts and the intentions of our heart.

You probably have not committed murder, but as we saw last week, I can say with a great deal of certainty that you have had anger and I have had anger, and Jesus puts it in effect in the same category.

Far better not to actually take a gun and shoot someone, but still the attitude of our heart of anger, Jesus says, is in essence equivalent.

And he says exactly the same thing about lustful thoughts.

Now there's there's actually many other passages.

Don't skip over them.

Don't ignore them.

Don't fail to talk about them in your family.

Don't fail to talk about them with your kids.

Everybody else is talking about it with your kids.

It's all out there.

If you don't think it's out there, then you don't know the world we live in.

And you can try to protect them, you can try to build fences around it, you can try to provide your own education for them, and I'm not opposed to homeschooling whatsoever.

But if the attitude is simply to protect them from the world, you are being foolish.

You cannot protect your kids from the influences of our society, and you cannot protect your kids from the evil within their own hearts.

So we need to deal with this.

We need to deal with it as a church.

We need to deal with it as families.

And this is not just some grouchy old man.

I wish I was giving this message 30 years ago when I didn't have gray hair and a punch.

This is not just something that some crotchety old guy who's out of touch with reality is saying.

This is God who is saying, Tommy, Tommy, Tommy, stop.

Don't go that way, go this way.

Hear the heart of God in this.

I want to summarize a couple of things here.

What does the Bible say about this?

The Bible says very clearly, it doesn't stutter, it doesn't blush.

It talks both about adultery when a married person has sexual relations with someone who is not their partner.

And it also talks about sexual immorality.

And in Romans 7, one of the verses that I'm not going to take the time, don't have the time this morning to take a look at, he talks about, and the Greek word is pornea.

I wonder what contemporary word pornea has led to.

Pornography.

It's the same, I mean, pornography is a specific ex a specific part of pornea, but it's talking about all kinds of sexual immorality.

And you'll see more if you look at the New Testament passages, but it's keeping our bodies and our minds sexually pure.

It's talking about adultery, it's talking about incest, it's talking about rape, it's talking about homosexuality, it's talking about bestiality, it's talking about pornography, it's talking about fantasizing, it's talking about solo sex, it's talking about cyber sex, and whatever kind of new adventure we will come up with next in our society.

The issue is not just our actions, but the thoughts that lead to the actions.

Far better not to carry them out, but just because you don't carry them out necessarily doesn't mean that we don't face these same things.

You do.

I'm quite confident.

I can say with a with a great deal of confidence.

And it's not just whether or not you do those things, it's what's in our hearts.

And our hearts are confused, they're mixed.

There's an old nature, there's a new nature, we're not yet what we would be, we're not, we're not yet what we will be.

And in the process we struggle in this area as well.

And the Bible makes it clear that even if there is not another person involved, a lot of times we say, well, if if you know, just me, there is no such thing of solo sin.

It does not exist.

If there's a consenting partner, it doesn't make it right.

Even if there's nobody else out there but you, God is out there.

Psalm 51, 4, David with his sin, with Bathsheba and Uriah the Hittite arranged Uriah's death and the whole thing.

You know that story.

When David comes to his senses, he said, Against you, O God, and you only have I sinned.

God is always involved in this.

Even if another person is not physically involved, God is involved.

All right, I want to try to say, why, why is this particular sin such a big deal?

Now the very fact that God says, don't go there, don't do that, ought to be enough for us.

If Tommy's running and and and mommy says, Tommy, Tommy, stop, he doesn't really need to know.

He just needs to stop.

However, uh good parenting will help a kid understand that there's some reasons behind that.

Why does God make such a big deal, and he does, about sexual sin?

Um two things.

Sexual sin defames the glory and the image of God in us, it describe uh disgraces and disfigures something about us that is the image of God.

Now, those are probably just words.

Let me try to flesh that out just a little bit.

We were created, we saw it last week with reference to uh to stealing.

It went back to the very beginning, the the the reality of who God is in our lives.

We were created to be image bearers of God, and we stand at the apex of creation.

In the 1 Corinthians 6 passage, which I didn't take the time to read, Paul makes it very clear that there is something, there is something unique about sexual sin.

And and the theologians have pondered long and hard over the years to try to understand this.

And I believe that not maintaining the one man, one woman, one flesh for life relationship, which was set before the fall, and in the context in which that was given, says, for in male and female we made them, we made them in the image and likeness of God.

There is something about our sexuality that reflects something in the image of God.

Let me try to just explain what I believe the big deal here is.

God is not a solo God.

God is a God of community.

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

That leads us into places we don't understand, but it's very clear that God is not alone.

And there are interrelationships between the members of the Godhead.

There is an interpenetration of the members of the Father is in the Son, and the Son is in the Father, and there's this, sometimes it's been called a divine dance.

There's this thing that goes back and forth between them.

It's a mystery to us, and Paul, speaking of marriage in Ephesians, says the mystery is very great.

But this relates to Christ and the church.

And in that connection, he's saying there's more to it than that.

And I think personally what's behind it is that God has a perfect relationship within the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And we are created for community.

We are created not to be alone.

We have marriage relationships, we have church, we have a larger community, and there's something about our nature that our relationships go to the very essence of who we are as people that reflects something about who God is, and there's a mystery there.

But what we do know is that animals are not created in the image and likeness of God.

Man is not just another animal.

We saw that last week.

Man is at the apex.

The animals are not given for one male, one female, one flesh for life.

Animals are what we would say promiscuous.

They just sleep all over the neighborhood.

And when we practice that kind of behavior, we are reducing ourselves to the level of an animal.

And God wants so much more for us.

That's not what we were created for.

And if we want to just lower ourselves to be like the rest of the animal world, feel free to do it.

But you have there's consequences that go along with that.

Sexual promiscuity reduces us to the level of animals and destroys the image of God in us.

And you were meant for more.

Second of all, sexual sin leads us along the path of destruction.

I want to read Proverbs 7 for you, which is very clear about this.

I'm going to read it in the message paraphrase.

Just listen.

This is God speaking in Proverbs.

I stood at the window of my house, looking out through the shutters, watching the mindless crowd stroll by.

I spotted a young man without any sense.

Arriving at the corner of the street where she lived, and he had just introduced the woman who was going to seduce him.

It could have been a man trying to seduce a woman.

In this case, it was a woman who was out to seduce a man.

Arriving at the corner of the street where she lived, then turning up the path to her house, it was dusk, the evening was coming on, the darkness thickening into light.

Then a woman met him.

She'd been lying in wait for him, dressed to seduce him, bras and brash she was, restless and roaming, never at home, walking the streets, loitering in the mall, hanging out at every corner in town.

She threw her arms around him and kissed them.

Him boldly took his arm and said, I've got all the makings for a feast.

Today I've made my offerings, my vows are paid, and so now I've come to find you, hoping to catch sight of your face, and here you are.

I've spread fresh, clean sheets on my bed, colored imported linens.

My bed is aromatic with spices and exotic fragrance.

Come, let us make love all night, spend the night in ecstatic love making.

My husband is not home, he's away in business, won't be back for a month.

Soon she had him eating out of her hand.

Just like an animal.

Eating out of her hand.

Before you know it, he's trotting behind her like a calf led to the butcher shop, like a stag lured to the ambush, and then shot with an arrow, like a bird flying in a net, not knowing that its flying life is over.

So, my friends, take these words of mine most seriously.

Part of the problem in the seriousness of sexual immorality is that it leads us in the path of death.

It does for us as individuals and it does for us as a nation.

Came across something that is worth repeating.

John Unwen, a British anthropologist, has spent years studying the rise and fall of 80 civilizations and has concluded that no society can long endure widespread sexual promiscuity.

He found that all of the cultures he studied followed a similar sexual pattern.

During its early days of existence, premarital and extramarital sexual relationships were strictly prohibited.

This period coincided with great creative energy, causing the culture to prosper.

Much later, people began to rebel against the prohibitions, demanding freedom.

As the morals weakened, social energy abated, eventually resulting in the decay or destruction of the civilization.

And he quotes, this is a quote from him any human society is free to choose either to display great energy or to enjoy sexual freedom.

The evidence is that they cannot do both for more than one generation.

What is true for us as individuals, that it leads us down a path of destruction, is true for us as a society.

There is hope.

There is hope.

We are in a battle against sin.

And if we don't see it that way, we're not seeing it God's way.

There is hope.

And that hope has a name, and his name is Jesus, who comes to give us life.

He transforms us from within.

In this life, we still struggle.

Ask who that may be.

Lord Sabyoth is he.

Lord Sabyoth means Lord of hosts.

And what that is really saying is the God of angel armies that is on our side.

That's what we need when we deal with sin.

The God of angel armies, Lord Sabayoth his name.

We have hope, and that hope is Jesus.

Any other help, any other effort to solve this problem that doesn't focus centrally and profoundly on Jesus is not God's way.

And that hope is Jesus.

Shall we pray?

Heavenly Father, we we've heard what you said.

I simply pray, Father, that you would help us return to Jesus.