October 23, 2022 / Origins / Theology for Life

Welcome to Walk in the Truth podcast.

Today John Metter, lead pastor of Cross City Church, brings a message in the Origins series

that helps answer the five most important questions in life.

How you live today depends on how you answer these questions.

Here's John Metter with the teaching on the five questions.

We are so glad that you're joining us this morning and if you have your Bibles I want

you to take them and turn to Genesis chapter two today.

Genesis chapter two.

I can't think of a more timely or important set of verses than what we're going to read

today for your life.

Nothing more applicable than what we're going to talk about today because as we get into

this message called Theologies of Life we're going to talk about the theology of gender,

the theology of marriage, the theology of sexuality.

And we're going to look at the original pattern that God gave us in Genesis chapter two in

the creation of camp.

But before we begin that I want to remind you of the importance of foundations.

You know as I walk through Genesis I'm always reminded of how incredibly important the foundations

that underlie any of our belief systems or even our homes or wherever we are at the time

those foundations are incredibly and amazingly important.

I've got a picture of what's called the Western Stone on the screen.

The Western Stone is a foundational stone to the Western Wall of Jerusalem.

Some of you might have guessed what that was.

Three thousand years ago that stone was laid under the Western Jerusalem Wall and it continues

to upgird and hold up that Western Wall today.

Millions and millions of visitors will come by every day to the Western Wall and be amazed

at all that God did in Jerusalem and all that that city represents.

But that foundation stone is what holds it all up.

In fact if you were to remove the Western Stone from the Western Wall can you imagine

what might happen?

And of course the answer is the entire wall would crumble because it's built on that foundation.

That 570 ton foundation underneath the Western Wall.

Well today when we dive into the text I want you to see three foundational stones if you

will for life, for relationships, for culture.

And I want you to imagine what happens when we remove those stones, those theologies from

our life.

Please stand with me as we read God's word beginning in Genesis chapter 2 verse 15 through

Genesis 2:15

the end of the chapter.

As you know Genesis chapter 2 is another account of the creation on the sixth day.

Genesis 2 · chapter mention

We go into great detail of the sixth day in Genesis chapter 2.

Genesis 2 · chapter mention

You find the overview of all of creation in Genesis 1.

The chapter 2 goes into the details of help us know all that was behind God's creation.

Verse 15 says, and the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to cultivate

it and keep it.

The Lord God commanded the man saying from any tree of the garden you may eat freely

but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat for in the day

that you eat from it you will surely die.

Now last week we began to talk about that.

Next week we will fully look at that.

And we move on to verse 18 here.

Then the Lord God said it's not good for the man to be alone.

I will make him a helper suitable for him.

Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky

and brought them to the man to see what he would call them.

And whatever the man called the living creature that was his name.

The man gave names to all the cattle, to the birds of the sky, to every beast of the field

but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him.

Now if you can imagine with me Adam in that day naming all these animals, letting all

the time go by while realizing there's nothing that matches me.

Verse 21, so the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man and he slept and then

he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place.

The Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which he had taken from the man and brought

her to the man.

The man said this is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.

She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man.

For this reason the man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife and

they shall become one flesh.

And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

Father in Jesus name today I pray that you will illuminate this text for us.

Not only the immediate meaning of it but the implications of staying with this foundation

or moving off this foundation.

Help us to see what goes on in the world around us.

Help us to see the importance of standing firm on your foundations.

Father thank you that you foresaw all these things that we experience today and you still

call out to us with answers from eternity.

We ask this in Jesus name.

All God's people said amen.

Please be seated.

Today's text has three foundation stones.

I call them theologies for life.

The reason I call them theologies for life is because they are the perspectives of what

God has given us.

In Psalm chapter 11 verse 3 there's a verse that the psalmist calls out to us about.

Psalms 11:3

It says if the foundations are destroyed what can the righteous do?

And the question of course is if you remove all the God's given foundations that we have

what in the world is going to happen around us?

And the answer in Psalm 11 is judgment will come.

Judgment will come when we move away from the theology the truths that God has given

us.

Now I've used that word theology several times.

Let me go into a background of what theology is.

It's really a combination of two words.

Theos which is God and Logos which is God's word and God's intelligence.

It is the view that a study of what God says and the study of God's view of things.

Now I would think to anybody in this room today to look at the word theology a study

of the view of how God sees things would be important to you because this is creator God.

Because it's not God that came on the scene like many world religions have a God who showed

up and began to have followers that follow them.

These are not the true Gods of the world but the God of creation is the God that we have

been looking at and his word the Bible is the truth that we have.

And to know what God's view is of anything in life it's incredibly important that you

and I who are God followers and Christ followers.

It's incredibly important to the world around us too because he is the creator of the world.

He is the designer of the world and so his view of the world is amazingly important.

So what are those theologies?

The truth is if we don't utilize and stand on the theology of God we only have a few

other options.

And culture is taking those options.

Those options are thoughts like humanism or independence or outright rebellion or agnosticism

or even atheism where the world looks to man to solve the problems and man to fulfill

desires and man to come up with explanations about how the world came into existence.

That's your option.

Theology or the idea that man has all the answers.

I don't know about you but I've been around long enough where I know man does not have

all the answers and God does.

And so that's why we study the theology of scripture, the theology of what God says.

So there are three theologies I'm going to give you today.

Let me share them one at a time with you and then come back and begin to elaborate.

First of all we're going to look at the theology of gender today.

Then we're going to look at the theology of marriage and then the theology of sexuality.

Now those are three really big rocks wouldn't you say in our culture today?

Three big topics of contention and argument today.

What does God say about gender?

What does God say about marriage?

What does he say about sexuality?

Well going back to the creation account we see the foundation God has laid for each of

those understandings from God's perspective and what should be from our perspective.

Beginning first of all with the theology of gender.

If you look with me in verse 18 we pick out the creation account there.

Then the Lord God said it's not good for the man to be alone.

I will make him a helper suitable for him.

And in this creation account we hear for the first time something that's not been said

in all the six days to that moment of creation.

We've never heard the phrase not good.

Every day it is God created, God spoke and these things came into existence and it was

good the Lord saw it and it was good.

And again the next day the Lord saw it and it was good and the next day the same way

and the same way all the way through creation until now.

At this point it simply says that God said it's not good for man to be alone.

It's not that God's created something bad in creating man it's just simply that it's

not complete yet.

It's not good in that it's not complete and he still has another aspect of creation to

go where he creates the second gender which is woman.

Now all this is coming from the architectural designer of life.

All this is coming from the creator himself.

And when we talk about genders, when we talk about how God created man and God created

woman we're really talking about very sacred, very holy ground.

There's nothing holier than this, nothing more sacred than this.

This is God's design being created and lived out from the day of creation.

Let me be clear today the Bible speaks specifically of only two genders of mankind, the male and

the female.

The reality is in God's perfect wisdom this is what he designed, this is what God created.

And what do we find out about them?

First of all that man and woman distinctively differ.

Men and women are different.

Do we agree with this today?

We know that's true.

And in verse 22 the Bible says that Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which he had

taken from the man and brought her to the man.

Now he's got this great creation account and as you read that account in chapter two you

see that God did put Adam to sleep.

He did open up a side and take from his side a rib with which he created woman.

All kinds of interesting insights in that but I'd like to stop and just make an observation

first of all.

It's a personal observation.

I'm glad God put man to sleep when he created woman otherwise I have no idea what we would

come up with.

He didn't need man's advice, he didn't need man's interference, he didn't need anything

like that.

Who knows what we would have if man had spoken into the creation of woman but God put man

to sleep and he took out of his side that rib with which he created the woman.

Now this is a really beautiful picture of creation here, very, very specific.

They are a part of each other unlike all the other living creatures.

He shaped man but he fashioned woman and she is more fashionable, wouldn't you agree?

I mean it's not a joke, it's just the way it is.

Adam was just a clump of dirt but Eve was far more refined in this creation aspect.

She's perfectly unique from Adam and at the same time perfectly equal to Adam.

In fact the woman couldn't be more different from the man.

If you wonder about that Sunday just Google differences between men and women and see

what you come up with and all these lists of the differences between men and women.

Every Mary seminar I've ever been to or watched opens up with the differences between men

and women as though we need to be reminded.

So many differences, we're so different from one another.

We're on opposite ends of the spectrum.

God made us to differ.

We differ physically, we differ mentally, we differ socially, we differ emotionally,

we differ verbally, we differ in every way that our brains work and our bodies work.

We're complete opposites but we're also complementary.

What an incredible thing God has done and created male and female, man and woman in

that we are different but at the same time we are complementary.

That leads me to also say that men and women distinctly fit each other.

There will never be a better fit.

No social construct, no orchestration of how people fit together will ever match.

Men and women fitting together, being different but at the same time uniquely fit for each

other the way God has created this.

In verse 18 it says this, I will make a helper suitable for him.

I know sometimes people spend a lot of time with that word helper insinuating that it's

somehow inferior to man but it absolutely is not inferior in any way.

In fact in the New Testament Jesus referred to the Holy Spirit, the third member of the

Godhead, he would come after Jesus ascended as what?

The helper.

The Holy Spirit, the helper will come to you and he'll dwell in you forever.

So Jesus refers to someone who is coexistent, co-eternal, co-equal as the helper.

In no way do we look at the word helper as inferior in any way.

It simply says that she is another just like Adam except complementary and different.

Men are distinctly fit.

Just like members of the Godhead fit together means that they work together in incredible

harmony.

That's God's design.

And only by both genders being present is mankind complete.

Only when God has created man and then woman does he say it is very good.

It is complete.

Now when God says something is complete that means you can't add anything to it.

When God says something is complete it means that there is no later revision to that.

He doesn't have to go back and rebuild humanity.

When God says something is complete and something is very good that's the exclamation mark from

God that says this is the way it is and it is very good.

So here we have this picture of creation with male and the female, the man and the woman

portrayed in a beautiful way.

Now 4000 years after creation Paul acknowledges that and he says this in 1 Corinthians chapter

1 Corinthians 11 · chapter mention

11.

He says however in the Lord neither is the woman independent of the man nor is the man

independent of woman.

For as the woman originates from the man so also the man has his birth through the woman

and all things originate from God.

So there is Paul the apostle acknowledging both the difference and the fit and they alone

constitute complete creation.

Now there is another line here in this creation account and that is in verse 24 and it says

and they shall become one flesh.

Now I realize we have jumped down to the latter part of the passage but this also is part

of their complementary differences.

They shall become one flesh.

The Bible says when Adam saw Eve, God brought Eve to Adam and when Adam saw Eve he responded

in a poetical way.

I mean here is a guy, the first guy speaking poems the moment he sees the woman.

This is now bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.

She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man.

That still today is a statement that is used in Israel as they acknowledge the beauty of

creation and the goodness of what God has done.

So they shall become one flesh.

Different authors write over the years about man's response to woman and I have included

some of these kind of in a collage of statements.

She's my unique kind Adam said.

She's human like me, one flesh with me.

She's like me and yet perfectly unlike me so as to be the exact suitable counterpart

for me.

It's not only true physically and anatomically for sexual relationships but deeper than that

in profound personal psychological ways.

John Piper who loves superlatives who uses lots of adjectives said it like this.

Together they are good, there is no other creature on the planet that is suitable for

him but the woman.

She is radically, gloriously, profoundly human standing before God with Adam side by side.

That's John Piper.

All those statements are so true.

God has done an incredible thing by making male and female.

However our culture today would argue the point of two genders.

I don't think it's necessarily just recent but in recent years like no other era of history

our culture has rejected this design and created an intersex fluidity between male and female

that's got many stopping points on the line between male and female and it's everywhere.

That's being taught in schools, you find it in HR departments of businesses, in medical

clinics and politics, on social media.

Everywhere the word is gender fluidity.

Be whatever you want to be on any spectrum you can possibly imagine.

Let me pause for just a moment and say those who follow God cannot be discipled by social

media.

You cannot be discipled by mass media, by culture.

You cannot be discipled by people who do not know the God of creation.

You must be discipled by the God of creation.

He will grow you and help you know the truths by which we are to walk.

And yet all around us is the noise of gender fluidity and we need to be aware of that.

The only reason there is an idea of gender fluidity is because there is the resisting

of theology.

I'll say that word again, embracing what is atheistic and humanistic, removing trust in

the creator and placing trust in the creature instead.

I'm going to put a timeline on the screen here for a moment and you'll notice on that

timeline there is on the left the male and on the right there's a female and then a series

of dots in between.

Now if you were to go and research gender terminology and gender ideas you'll find about

64 to 72, depending on what articles you read, types of genders that people identify as today.

I've left just a few dots on there because we don't have enough time to talk about everybody's

imagination but just a few.

Here are some of those gender names.

Those gender names include agender, gender fluid, gender queer, intersex, nonconforming

or trans.

And they would place themselves somewhere between the created male or the created female.

And the reason they place themselves there is because they have paved their way with

feelings and desires and dissatisfaction with who they are and what they were created to

be.

And in their search for finding a fit in their life with what they feel that they are, they're

looking for some other kind of gender to be.

And along with the false promises of sexual fulfillment from exploration, they really

find misery and they find dissatisfaction and regret.

It's literally a mental issue, not a physical one.

Now that's not just me saying that and that's not just the Bible saying that.

Did you know that today's gender fluid crowd simply says it is a matter of brain and not

organs?

You are what you think you ought to be, what you want to be.

It's not a matter of how you were born biologically.

But the Bible would teach us that how we were born biologically, male or female, we were

also given a brain to that same biology makeup.

A man, for example, who is a biological male has a male brain.

A woman who is biologically female has a female brain and we understand how that works well

together.

But the world today would say whatever you think you ought to be, that's what you ought

to be despite how you were born physically.

Psychiatrists and psychologists actually use the term gender dysphoria, which means gender

confusion.

They call it confusion.

It literally means dissatisfaction with one's gender and uneasiness or unhappiness about

how one was born.

But confusion about one's gender only comes from the preoccupation of a few questions

in your mind.

And those questions are what do I want?

What do I desire to be?

What do I feel like I ought to be?

The more you focus on that, the more you can imagine different forms that you might turn

into but you're still biologically male or biologically female based on creation.

I read a fascinating story last week of a man whose name was Ollie England or Ollie London.

His name was Ollie London.

He's from England.

If you haven't followed this story, it's very interesting.

He came out last week saying that he was transitioning once again to yet another biological makeup.

He was born a male, but he was dissatisfied with how he looked facially.

He'd been raised for a time in Korea and loved the appearance of the Korean facial structure.

So he had a number of surgeries so he could be more Korean in his look.

And after a time with that, he realized that didn't bring satisfaction.

That didn't make him happier.

It didn't make him have any more acceptance than he had before.

So he thought, you know, this is not working, but maybe if I turn myself into a female,

I'll find more happiness and more joy there.

So he had a number of surgeries that made him more feminine.

He didn't have the most radical surgeries, but he had a number of them so he could look

and appear more feminine.

He became a transgendered woman.

And after 200 days of that, he said, this is enough.

I realize now I can't find my satisfaction in another makeup in terms of Korean instead

of English.

I can't find satisfaction in being a woman instead of a male.

Now I'm transitioning back to my original biological state.

I am now a man from this day forward.

Well, I have news for Ollie and that is he was always a man.

And I think he's coming back to that saying, okay, I now know I was always a man.

I don't say this to ridicule him.

Here's a man who says, accept me for who I now know I am.

And then in his article, he simply says, don't go and experiment with your gender.

I made the experimentation.

I had the multiple surgeries and I'm telling you, it does not bring satisfaction.

This is not a Christian.

I'm not even sure he's a God-fearing man at all.

He may be atheistic, but here's the voice of experience.

You won't find satisfaction looking for yourself to be another gender.

Now when I hear stories like that, I don't get angry.

It's not something that makes me upset with them, but I'm grieved.

I'm grieved that someone would walk in that direction.

They would bring all those consequences on their life.

I'm grieved and I'm sad because Christ and the creator God of the universe could bring

them satisfaction right where they are.

It's so important for us to know that that's the truth.

In Romans chapter one, 2000 years ago, Paul said to the Romans, for they exchanged the

truth of God for a lie.

They worship and serve the creature rather than the creator.

For this reason, God gave them over to degrading passions.

Right at the heart of it all, this is the truth that people are ignoring.

When we worship the creator, then we began to surrender to his ways, to his truths.

When we worship the creature, we only get how we feel at that moment.

We only get how someone else lures us to feel about ourselves or our lives or our gender

or our sexuality or anything else.

You cannot worship and serve the creature, worship and serve the creator.

It's the only way to be in alignment with the creator who is your God.

The theology of gender tells us that God made us male or female.

No matter our momentary feelings or our confusion or our frustration, we are called to live

in alignment with how God has created us in his perfect design.

Only in alignment with our creator will we ultimately find joy and satisfaction and purpose.

This is not just true of gender questions.

It's true of every aspect of our life.

Only in the alignment of God, only in alignment of his ways and his purposes for our life

will we find the joy that everybody wants.

We won't find that joy anywhere else except in him.

I think the evidence is clear.

What do we do with this?

First of all, know who we were created to be from birth.

Make sure you know who you were created to be from birth biologically.

God makes that very clear.

Make sure your children, your family understand that.

Make sure those around you understand that.

Then lovingly and patiently point the way to satisfaction in life through Christ and

no other way to people that are on all those spectrums.

You won't find satisfaction through sexual pursuits or through a gender identity that

you weren't born with.

We need to point out that there's freedom from the sinful self-worship by coming to

embrace Christ.

There are people who think they can't change from their feelings, and they're right.

They can't change by themselves.

We can't change them either, but the gospel of Christ can change everything on the inside

of us to fit with how we're created on the outside.

The Bible says, if any man be in Christ, he's a new creation.

All the old things have passed away.

All things become new.

The answer is always the gospel, and that's why it's such good news for people of every

walk of life, the theology of gender.

The creation account also gives us the theology of marriage.

Look at verse 24.

For this reason, a man shall leave his father and his mother, be joined to his wife, and

they shall become one flesh.

Do you notice something here?

Already, God is talking about his marriage design.

Before there's an earthly father, before there's an earthly mother, he's already talking about

what's going to happen when a man leaves his father and his mother.

He's always already making his plan known.

In a nutshell, God's designed for a man and a woman to become husband and wife and experience

spiritual, psychological, and physical oneness.

Not all marry, of course.

But if we marry, God's designed for marriage is this one.

Men and women who simply live together do not have this alignment.

Those who are in same-sex relationships do not have this alignment, nor any other variance.

You do not experience what God has designed for you to have in marriage, nor can you be

till you come back to God's design.

Only then can it be real and deep and thorough.

I have people today say, well, what about Jesus?

Jesus didn't say anything about gender.

I say, I want to take a moment and just ask the question, what does Jesus say about gender?

What does he say about sexuality?

What does Jesus say about marriage?

And Jesus quotes Genesis 2, just like we're quoting Genesis 2 right now.

If you have your Bibles, in Matthew chapter 19, Jesus asks a question about divorce.

Matthew 19 · chapter mention

And as he answers that question, he affirms the creation account and brings the listeners

to the point of what marriage is all about.

Here's what he says in Matthew 19, verse 4.

Matthew 19:4

Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female,

and said, for this reason, a man shall leave his father and his mother, be joined to his

wife, and the two shall become one flesh?

So they are no longer two, but one flesh?

And then Jesus adds, what therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.

So here's Jesus, the sonless son of God.

One agrees that Jesus is compassionate and loving and understanding.

He identifies fully with us in every way, yet without sin.

And when asking the question, how many genders are there?

What is marriage all about?

What's sexuality all about?

Jesus answers the same way Genesis chapter 2 teaches us.

Genesis 2 · chapter mention

Bring your theology into the modern day.

Jesus says, this is what God created.

And when he talks about marriage, it means a few things.

First of all, it's a unique relationship.

A unique relationship.

A man shall leave his father and his mother.

Do you notice the leaving?

It's not rejecting the biological family.

He's sat from two families.

A third one is formed.

And that third one is the one with the husband and the wife, the man and the woman who become

an entirely unique family and begin an incredible journey that they have before God.

Hey, married couples, you're a thing.

I mean, God had it designed for you to be married.

And you're a part of two families, but now you're a part of a new third family.

So where will you go?

What will you do?

Who will you worship?

What will you pass on in terms of faith to the next generation?

The responsibility is amazing.

The opportunity is incredible.

It's an unprecedented call to pass faith on.

But keep in mind also, if you leave your father and mother to be joined to another, you also

leave a lot of friends behind, not in the sense of having no social interaction, but

in the sense of not having interaction at that level.

Because the husband and the wife have this unique covenant relationship that's far beyond

anything our friends could bring us.

Marriage is not just two friends, but it's more.

It's more personal.

It's more intimate.

It's more unique, more unmatchable in the relationship than anything else on the planet

and it's closely linked with your relationship with God himself.

That's why marriage is to be protected and cultivated and invested in.

That's why you must grow in marriage.

That's why you thrive in your marriage.

That's why you rejoice and enjoy and celebrate your marriage because God has given you something

incredibly special.

But it's also interdependent.

Not only is it unique, but the scripture says he should be joined with his wife.

Join means to stick together, to adhere, to be glued together.

This is not random.

God said, I've got this design where a man and a woman are to come together as husband

and wife for all of their lives.

Jesus basically said, God has joined together.

Let no man put his son to you.

You're joined.

You're glued together.

I remember 44 years ago saying I do to my wife, putting the ring on my finger, putting

the ring on her finger and walking out.

I thought to myself, I didn't really say it out loud to her at the time, but I said,

you're stuck with me now.

I'm really glad you are.

I'm still glad she is because we needed to be committed permanently.

This is not a contract.

It's not a negotiation.

This relationship is a covenant relationship.

It means we're in it for the long game.

It means sometimes it's extremely difficult in the way we interact and how we have to

make it work, but it takes commitment to do that.

This marriage is not based on sexuality and it's not based on compatibility and it's

not based on having common interests.

It's based on commitment that plan A, plan B, plan C is for that marriage and that's

what it's based on.

It's a covenant and we're dependent upon each other.

Then in this same text is the theology of sexuality.

In verse 25 and 26 we see these words, and they shall become one flesh and the man and

his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

As if it's not enough to cover these other two, we have yet another item that needs clarity

and that is sexuality.

The idea today is that sexuality is fluid, just like gender is fluid for so many.

First we heard more about sexual fluidity and now we're hearing more about gender fluidity.

It's a slippery slope.

When you start moving away from God's clearly designed purposes, it's only going to become

more complicated as time goes on.

The idea that sex is fluid today is very dominant.

Cultural celebrates, cultural celebrities and others celebrate individual identification,

individual expression and these amount to dreams and illusions and desires and lies

that have been cultivated by the enemies of our soul.

What they don't often realize is they're pulling at massive foundation stones that all of life

is really built on and expecting that nothing really bad will happen as a result of that,

but unfortunately that's not how foundation stones work.

Some experiment with sexual fluidity hoping to escape crumbling lives or crumbling culture

or they're just absolutely oblivious to it all, which is a very real possibility today.

That creation makes it very obvious.

God's design declares that human beings find physical and sexual completeness exclusively

in monogamous heterosexual marriage.

A scripture calls this in essence the original design or natural order.

It's clear and unmistakable in creation.

It's clearly affirmed by Jesus in the gospels.

It's clearly accepted by the epistles and the writers of the epistles, which are the

apostles.

It's also clearly accepted for 6,000 years in human history.

Here's what's accepted, here's what's known.

Any deviation from sexuality outside of one man, one woman marriage has been prohibited

by scripture for thousands of years and continues to be.

No matter how people try to re-architect or re-look at the scriptures, it still says

the exact same thing.

Modern sexual experimenters are doing everything they can to twist the scripture today to make

them feel more validated in their sexual kind of exploration, but it's always going to say

what it says.

It's always going to mean what it meant originally.

Paul wrote in Romans chapter 1, which by the way is an incredibly difficult chapter to

Romans 1 · chapter mention

walk through, especially if you have people like me that you know, that you love, that

have departed from God's design.

You don't read this in celebration of somebody's right and somebody's wrong.

You read this in analysis of what went wrong.

And you read it with grief in your heart.

You read it with sadness for those that may never experience God's goodness until they

come back to his design.

And this is what Paul wrote in Romans 1 verse 26 and verse 27.

Romans 1:26

For this reason, God gave them over to degrading passions.

For the women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural.

And the same way also, the man abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in

their desire towards one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving

in their own persons to do penalty of their error.

Now scripture is written by the Holy Spirit.

Ultimately, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit are bringing scripture to

us.

There is no greater love.

There is no greater passion for anyone except what Jesus did when he came and died on the

cross to pay for our sins.

Greater love has no man than this.

And yet he still speaks the truth to people that are making decisions all over the board

from his creative order.

So these words are hard.

They're hard to hear and they're hard to share and they're hard to realize in our minds that

this is where people are who make choices outside God's design.

Now instead, God calls us to rejoice and thrive in the gender given at birth to look for the

kind of marriage he calls us to and to express sexuality and the bonds of marriage.

So pastor, how are we supposed to respond to people around us in the world today?

And I just wrote a brief sentence that I hope you'll take to heart.

I believe it's my responsibility, your responsibility to be kind and loving and calm and pointing

out the truth that Jesus gives us, but also that we love them with the love that Jesus

has.

And we love our gay friends.

We love those who make gender decisions and marriage decisions and sexuality decisions

with our whole heart, knowing that Christ is always the only answer for them.

You're not going to change somebody's mind by arguing with them, but you're going to

pray for them.

And you're going to be amazed at what God can do when you pray.

Many have prayed for years for their friends to come to know the truth that we're talking

about today.

Keep praying.

Don't stop.

God is faithful to the end.

There's a game out there that's called Jenga and most of us are familiar with it now.

Jenga is a block building game.

The object is to build a tower with blocks and then players take turns removing one block

at a time, leaving an increasingly unstable tower.

Of course, the object of the game is to see how many blocks you can remove until the tower

crumbles and hopefully your opponent is the one that makes the tower tumble and not you.

That's the object of the game, to stay safe.

But I want you to look at this Jenga stack for just a moment and I want you to imagine

what happens when we remove blocks in our lives.

Some of us remove the blocks of relationships or health or routine.

Sometimes we pull out family or finances or rest or time alone with God.

We remove worship.

We remove prayer.

We remove study and we think it'll be fine, but at some point it gets kind of shaky.

But when you get down to the bottom, the base foundation in our lives are things like God,

creation, truth, gender, marriage, sexuality.

If you remove the bottom blocks, these foundational blocks to this stack of blocks, everything

will crumble.

It's like the picture and it's crumbling today.

It's crumbling in our culture.

It's crumbling in our schools.

It's crumbling all around us.

There is no other outcome but this crumble for culture.

But there can be a different outcome for you if you come to Christ, if you surrender to

His ways, if you allow Him to determine all the things about your life that are so important.

It can change for every individual who comes to Christ and He makes them new, but it's

going to crumble around us as people continue to pursue these kinds of lifestyles.

So within God's design, Adam and Eve were standing before God as one.

They were holy, they were blessed, they were naked, they were unashamed of the passion

and the desire and even the consummation of their marriage together before God as God

designed it.

So a married couple, you stand before God as one.

And I would say you should be unashamed of what God caused you to.

And for all of us, we stand before God as men or as a woman, unashamed and embracing

who He called us to be.

Understand that, rejoice in that, learn to mature and grow and thrive in that.

That's God's plan for your life.

And within that alignment, you have the joy and the celebration and the satisfaction that

you can only find in being in tune with your Creator.

No sexual experience, no change of what you look like or what you're made up of can ever

bring the kind of satisfaction that your heart will find in being in alignment with God and

God alone.

And I call you to that alone.

God calls you to that alone.

Christ calls you to that alone.

And He paves the way with the blood that He shed on the cross so that you could come to

Him and find that alignment, that forgiveness and that salvation in Jesus Christ alone.

A few years ago, more than 30 years ago, I had a conversation with a young woman who

was attending a church.

And she came to tell me that she was going to pursue a lesbian lifestyle.

In fact, she had already begun to do that.

And she felt like she needed to let me know.

And I did appreciate her conversation with me that day.

But in that conversation, I responded to her that God's word says, that's not the right

direction for you, nor is it true for anybody.

And she allowed me to walk her through what the Bible said about homosexuality and about

sexuality and gender.

And when I got through reading Romans 1, verse 20 and verse 25 and 26, I read in the most

Romans 1:20

loving, compassionate way I could.

She stood up, she was angry, she slammed her hand down on the desk, she said, I will never

come back into this church again.

I will hate you forever.

And she left.

Obviously, she was very mad, very angry, very upset that someone would contradict what her

heart was telling her she thought she needed to do.

And I thought, well, I did my best to love her well.

I did my best to tell her the truth.

And I didn't like the way it worked out, but I couldn't do anything about that.

About three or four years later, I was at a student ministry camp and I felt a tap on

my shoulder and I turned around and it was that young lady standing there with a young

man.

And she said, do you remember me?

And I thought in my mind, how could I not remember you?

You see, I just want you to know that I'm thankful that you told me the truth.

You said, God has done a work in my life and I want you to meet my fiance.

We're going to get married in just a few months.

This young man, this young woman, we're going to be married because this young woman had

turned away from the direction she was going and surrendered herself to God.

And the joy on her face was so radically different from what I remembered her face being like

before.

People, there's hope, there's joy, there's satisfaction in Christ.

It can be very good in God's design.

It's on the foundation that God has given us and no other.

Just a few moments, we're going to close.

We're going to have decision stations as we do every week.

And I encourage you to stop by the decision station and talk to somebody about any part

of this message, any part of your life.

Talk to somebody about placing your faith and trust in Christ who died on the cross

for you, receiving forgiveness of sin and direction for life.

God is warning to do business with your heart and your life.

So those decision stations are lit up and ready to go when you leave today.

I also invite you to our guest reception center.

I'd love to personally meet you.

I'd love to say hello and thank you for coming today to our services.

So right out the center exit door across the hallway, there is a glass room and I'll be

in that room and please stop by and talk to us.

Thirdly, I want to encourage you to take the invite cards that are outside on the tables

as you exit.

Invite someone to come back next week with you.

Because it's very important for people to hear the word as it's planted in their hearts.

It's like seed.

And they may not agree with everything, but they get to hear what God has said in the

scripture and this allows them to be open to what God may say in their lives in the

future telling the truth to people and all people need to hear truth.

So I want to encourage you to invite someone and bring them with you next week.

Would you stand with me as we pray today?

Father, in Jesus' name, I'm so grateful for this day.

I'm grateful for the opportunity to worship you, to lift you up, to look at your word.

Father, I know in this room today there are many that have thoughts, decisions, or friends

that they need to speak with today.

Father, I know that there are those in this room that are at the brink of giving their

lives to you and they want to trust you, but they've always kind of made those decisions

themselves.

And Father, I pray today that they can have confidence that you will be the best possible

choice for them.

Lord, by your Holy Spirit, draw them to yourself, allowing them to know you as Lord and Savior.

Father, as we walk through this life, help us to represent you well in love, with kindness

and with truth.

In Jesus' name, amen.