Singleness, Sex and Self-Control

I want to talk about Mary or Burn, Mary or Burn,

and I'll lift these two verses verse eight and nine,

where Paul gives some specific advice to single people in

the church at Corinth. He says, now, to the unmarried

and the widows, I say it is good for them

to stay unmarried, as I do. Paul is addressing two

different types of people, but with the same life situation.

He says, whether you are unmarried and you've never been married,

or whether you were married and through some incident you're

no longer married, the widows or widowers, and we know

that Paul was one of these two types of people.

He was not married. He's speaking not from theory but

from personal experience. And I think it's better sometimes to

hear from somebody from their personal experience than it is

from their theory, because if you theorize about my problem,

you'll tell me what you think it's like. But if

you can speak from a place of experience, it tends

to be a little bit more compact. And so he

says it is good for them. I'm saying to both

groups of people, those who are either longing for love

or who have lost love, and I want to say

it is good for them to stay unmarried as I do.

In other words, he's reaffirming the fact that singleness is

not as strange as culture makes it out to be.

He's referring to the fact that you don't need another

person necessarily to fulfill your purpose on this earth. And

by way of proof, he says, look at me, I'm Paul. Paul,

I wrote, you know most of the New Testament, and

I don't have a wife. So don't let anybody ever

tell you that until you have another person you can't

fulfill your purpose, or that your life or purpose doesn't

begin until another person enters your life. Is just not true.

Paul put on his resume. You know, wrote wrote the Bible,

and he did his single So you can be successfully single. Amen,

you can be successfully single. And he talks about that.

He said, Hey, it's good if you can stay unmarried.

There will be advantages to that. It's fine, it's good,

it's fine, it's good. But then verse nine, he says, but.

Big butt.

How many of you like big butts in the Bible

because they serve as transition points?

He said, But let's be real about it.

If they cannot control themselves, they give big butt.

If they cannot control.

Themselves, they should marry. For key statement, it is better

to marry than.

To burn with passion, Mary or burn.

What we're talking about here is what do I do

with the fire inside of me? Whether I'm single or married?

What do I do with my passions that are hard

to control? When I propose to Holly, I kind of

had to call an audible because I went to go

see her dad and I asked his permission to marry Holly.

And he is a very straightforward person, so he said, yeh, sure, whatever,

you can marry her. I knew this was coming. He

said a couple things. Number one, you only have three

thousand dollars to get married on. That's the budget, which

is a great budget in nineteen twenty seven. And then

he said, you know, and here's a few other things

and about our family that I just want you to

know and be aware of. And then he said, and finally,

when are you doing it? I said, in a couple

of weeks. I'm going to propose in a couple of

weeks because I had this big plan. I was gonna

take her to Charleston because there was a certain place

where they had filmed a scene of The Patriot, which

is a movie she really liked, and we were going

to go to Charleston and I had it all planned out.

But then he said, he goes, you're gonna wait a

couple of weeks. What do you not have the ring yet?

I said, no, Man, I got the ring. I bought

the ring a while back. I've been saving it and

I actually brought it to show it to you. And

I showed him the ring. He said, man, if I

was carrying that thing around, it'd be burning a hole

in my pocket. I wouldn't be able to wait a

couple of weeks. And when he said that, something got

in me and the ring started burning a hole in

my pocket. So I'm gonna tell you what I did,

and I'm not real proud of it, but I took

her to Pizza Hut that night. This is this is

the God's Heaven truth, man. And I took her to

Pizza Hut that night. And then I took her and

I had written a little song for her that I

sang her the song and I gave her the ring

and the song is pretty cool. Though, Yeah, would you

like to hear a little bit?

I don't think I don't think.

But I. The chorus went, It's not hard to love you.

With my heart because you're amazing.

You're amazing.

I smile, Oh, why each time you by my side,

because you're.

Nay a little running there.

Your smile turns my world around. Your tears turned me inside.

Ah. I sing her that song and then I proposed

to her. It was great, and it was preceded by

Pizza Hut. It was preceded by Pizza Hut. And I've

been taking her all over the world since then. In

an effort to make it up to her, I thought

about that phrase. He said that ring will be burning

a hole in my pocket if I were you. And

you know, I think that's the way that certain unfulfilled

passions and unmet desires feel inside of us, especially in

this issue of singleness. It's like it's burning a hole

in my heart, burning a hole in my Soul's like

it's like burning. That's an illustration that Paul uses. He

wants to talk about it, and he says, it's.

Like a fire.

It's like the passion is like a fire that it

burns in you. It can be a sexual fire, it

can be an emotional fire. And he sets out to say,

what do we do about this? Let's talk about it

from a couple of angles in the remainder of our time. First,

let's talk about it from the angle of oversimplified struggles.

Oversimplified struggles. Reading Paul, it sounds so straightforward. He says,

if you have passions that are hard to control, go

ahead and get married, for it is better to marry

than to burn with passion. It's as if he say, Hey,

if you're just burning with sexual passion and it feels

like a fire that you can't control, get married. That'll

put it out. He makes a case. He says, he

says is better to marry than to burn with passion.

But if I were single, I'd read that and I'd go, yeah, Paul,

it may be better. But everybody say, but that seems

to me oversimplify the struggle, and often, in an attempt

to be encouraging to single people, married people will say

some really stupid things, meaning well, preachers like me, we'll

say some really stupid things, and we will oversimplify the struggle,

and on the surface, it appears that's what Paul's doing.

You know, Hey, if you're just burning inside and you've

got to have somebody. It's better to be married than

to be tormented, than to be frustrated, So go ahead

and get married. And oh, yeah, Paul, he'll just go

out to the husband tree and he'll.

Just give me a husband. Like he's telling you to

go buy some milk.

You know, Hey, if you're out of milk, go to

the grocery store and get some. If you're burning with passion,

go ahead and get married. Yeah, Paul, I wish you

were that easy. Not quite that easy. Nothing like a

single person trying to give somebody advice on how to

get married. Hey, Paul, if it's so easy, I said, no, no, no,

I'm called to be single. But if you're not, it's

okay to be married. It's better to marry, in fact,

then to burn with passion. But it's a struggle, isn't it.

I mean, I would want to speak to this. I

would want to speak to this if I were speaking

on behalf of somebody that I cared about who was single,

I'd want somebody to say, wait a minute, it's not

quite that simple. Because see, we tell you in church,

we tell you, if you're single, don't settle, So wait

for the right one.

Hold out.

You know, don't just compromise and just marry anybody. You

got to wait for the right one. Don't settle and

so you know, we'll use all this biblical we have

all these things we say, like wait for your bo As. Now.

Boaz is a character in a book of the Bible

called Ruth, and Ruth was in a crazy life situation,

but God gave her a man. God gave her a

man named Boaz, and Boaz was very blessed. So I've

heard a lot of messages to single people about wait

for your Boas and women who want a Boass. And

I came across this. I have shared it before in

the church. As we're sharing again this piece of advice

on that same subject for single people. I want to

read it to you now. It says biblical advice, Ruth

patiently waited for her mate Boas. While you are waiting

on your Boas. Don't settle for any of his relatives

broke as po Az, lion as, cheating as dumb ass,

drunk ass, cheap as, locked up as good for nothing

as lazy ass, and especially his third cousin beaten you as,

wait on your Boas and make sure he respects yo ass.

If you find this offensive, please send us an email

to we need your seat at Elevation Church dot org.

That's the address bird. And of course, yeah, so everybody

say don't settle, so we teach that, but then we

also teach don't sin. Everybody say don't sin, all right,

so you bet don't settle, say it, don't settle. Now

you beat don't sin, say don't sin. And the people

in the middle are like, but what about the struggle?

Don't settle, don't sin? But what about the struggle? And

Paul actually he addresses that at on. He says, it's

like a burning. In fact, I didn't show this in

any other worship experiences because they weren't a spiritually advanced

as you, and they couldn't have been able to receive it.

But Paul says something else.

In Second Corinthians, he wrote them another letter and he's

listening in Second Corinthians, chapter eleven, all the different difficulties

that he's been through in a saying, I relate to

any of you who are going through hard times. And

he says in verse I think this is actually Two

Corinthians eleven twenty nine, he says, who, Yeah, who is weak,

and I do not feel weak, who is led into sin,

and I do not inwardly burn. Hmmm, the same image

that he uses in First Corinthians to talk about.

Some of you are burning.

He will acknowledge in a later letter saying I burn too.

So he's not he's not simply speaking to the struggle

with a cold heart and the theoretical theological mindset.

He says, I know it's a struggle. It's it's it's part. Part.

Part of the struggle I think is cultural because we

have this, we have this teaching out there that that

there's there's the one for you. You'll not find us

in the Bible, but you'll find it in every chick

flick that you ever watch on Netflix.

I'm waiting for the one.

I'm waiting for the one. Just by a show of hands,

so I can see how many of you have never

thought this fully through. How many of you think there

is only one person for everybody that they can marry.

And if you don't marry that person, you married the

wrong person. Just if you want to go ahead and

acknowledge that you're wrong, raise your hand, because it wouldn't

make sense, Like we don't have to prove it from

the Bible. We can just prove it with logic, just

the power of thinking it through. Because if there's only

one person you're supposed to marry, and then you get

with the wrong person and the two of you pro create,

you can't have the wrong baby. Now, if you have

the wrong baby, then there's no chance that baby's going

to marry the right one because they're not even the

right person to begin with, because they weren't supposed to

be in existence, because you weren't supposed to have that

baby with Sally. You're supposed to have that baby with Tina.

But now you and Sally had a baby named Michael,

and the baby was supposed to be Michelle. But you

guys got that excess, and the wives and mixed up,

and all of the chromosomes are all floating all over

the place now looking for a place to call home

because you didn't find the one. It just kind of crumbles.

Most of the emphasis when you talk about dating and

marriage and singleness and culture seems to be on finding

the right one. Most of the emphasis when you come

to the scripture tends to be on being the right one,

being the one. And I think this is so important

to point out. Now. I'm not trying to oversimplify the struggle,

but I just want to let you know that if

you'll focus on being the right one, then God has

this ability to put you in the right place and

develop within you the right passions. And that's so much

more important than this elusive chase for the one. Yes,

it's better to marry than to burn with passion, but

it's also better to learn to control your passion than

it is to marry an idiot. It's better to marry

than to burn with passion, but it's also more important

that you develop a real passion for God than that

you find the right person who you think is going

to stir up a passion inside of you. Let's don't

oversimplify the struggle. Paul would say, skipping right past Boaz,

will move along to mismanaged passions. That's the next thing

I want to talk about. Mismanaged passions. He says, This

desire for relationship, this sexual desire, is like a fire inside.

The interesting thing about fire as a metaphor is fire

is actually a substance that is purifying in its nature.

So when Paul wants to talk about sexual passion. I

find it interesting that he uses the metaphor of a fire.

What he's saying is the desire inside of you is

not dirty in and of itself.

It's a pure desire.

It was put there by God. There's nothing wrong with

the passion, Ah, but when the passion gets misplaced, it

can cause great destruction in your life. It becomes very

dangerous misplaced or mismanaged passions. And as an illustration of

this from the Bible, I thought about Moses, who Moses

was certainly very passionate, and God used him to fulfill

a great purpose. In fact, God showed up and appeared

to Moses in a burning bush in Exodus chapter three.

But forty years before.

That burning bush, which is where many people think the

story of Moses' life began, when God called him to

be a deliverer of the Israelites out of Egyptians slavery.

Forty years before this, Moses had an incident that was

the result of mismanaged passion. Watched this Exodus chapter two,

verse eleven. It says one day, after Moses had grown up,

he went out to where his own people were and

watched them at their hard labor. Now Moses was conflicted

because he grew up as a Hebrew, but he grew

up being raised as Egyptians. He was from the Hebrew people,

but he was raised an Egyptian.

Society, so he was torn.

He was conflicted by this. And one day he goes

out and he's grown up a little bit now, and

he sees something. He sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew,

one of his own people, and.

It stirs up a passion in him. And it says

that he.

Looked this way and that way, and it looked like

the coast was clear, so he didn't see anybody, and

he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. Well,

the next day he went out and saw two Hebrews fighting,

and he asked the one in the wrong, Hey, man,

why are you hitting your fellow Hebrew? And the man said,

who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you

thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian? Oh,

just because you hide something in the sand doesn't mean

it went away. I stand there from her bears repeating,

just because you covered something up in the sand doesn't

mean it won't come back up. Because the thing that

Moses did, nobody else saw it, so he thought. But

then his past catches up with him rather quickly. And

it says that when he heard this, Moses was afraid,

and he thought what I did must have become known.

Now he's exposed. And so Pharaoh hears of this, and

he tries to kill Moses. But Moses fled from Pharaoh

and went to live in Midian where he sat down

by a well, and he ends up on the run

for forty years because of a mismanaged passion. See what

Moses felt follow me was a good passion. He saw

one of his people being taken advantage of, and God

had put a passion in Moses.

Moses was called to.

Deliver the Hebrew people out of Egyptian slavery. So he

sees this going down and he thinks this isn't right,

and it lights the fire inside of him, and so

Moses just goes off. But it's one thing to have

the right passion, is another thing to act on it

in the right way. Did you know You can have

the right passion but have the wrong expression of the

right passion, and it'll create a terrible result in your life.

I can't get any help in this sermon. Man let

me ask it another way. Did you know that the

thing that God put inside of you that can make

you really great and can lead you into your purpose

can also bring you great pain if it's not managed correctly.

I'm teaching this to our oldest son right now. He

has a gift for being argumentative, and it's a gift

never seen anything quite like it. I'm told that he

got it from somewhere and he will verbally assassinate you.

He will take you apart about anything. And I'm teaching

him this could be your greatest asset, because boy, I

could see you one day on stage preaching to people,

and God's going to take this gift that you have

to kind of go through stuff and just take it apart.

And make it apart. And I see how God could

really use that.

You might be three times, ten times, one hundred times

the preacher that I ever am.

But if you don't learn how to.

Manage this, and you think that that gift is given

to you so that you can argue with your mom

about the cleanliness of your room, you are not going

to live long enough to see whether or not you know,

God could really use this. This is a good thing.

I see it in you, boy. I think it's awesome.

I think it's amazing. But you better learn when to

use it and how to use it, because you can

win the argument and still lose your video game time

for the next month if you don't shut your mouth

right now. It's a good thing that you can do this,

but you better learn to do it. You can do

a good thing in the wrong way and it becomes

a bad thing.

Sex is a good thing. Sex is a good thing.

Sex is a good thing.

You think if I could ever get an amen?

Not get an amen? Sex is a good thing. Teach that.

In the church, we teach you know.

Sex is dirty, sex is gross, Sex is disgusting, so save.

It for your husband. But the passion is pure.

However, the passion needs parameters if it is to serve

the correct purpose. And what's gotten a lot of us

and trouble in our lives is we had a good

passion but no parameters. So rather than building purpose, it

destroyed purpose. And that's what happened to Moses. He had

the right passion, but he put it in the wrong

place and acted on it in the wrong way. Right passion,

wrong expression, Bring me my sermon. Illustration. So like, I

was just thinking of a wait that I could show

you this, a simple way to show you this, And

it's like, imagine right now that at this point in

my sermon, I know this is simple. Just go with me. Hey,

I got an idea. Let's build a fire on the stage.

I just think it'd be cool to build a fire

on the stage. I'm stacking wood to build a fire

on the stage. I actually thought about how far should

I take this sermon illustration, and I thought about gasoline,

and I thought I would see how far I could

go before people started leaving, exiting the building. But I

think it suffice it just to say that, you know,

everybody in the room understands the problem with this proposition,

And the problem isn't building a fire. The problem is

building a fire in a place where there's nothing to

contain the fire. It is fine if you want to

build a fire, but building a fire without any parameters

would be to unleash. See that the same substance that

warms your home when it's in a fireplace is the

same substance that burns a forest in Colorado in the summer.

The difference is whether it's contained and when you release

passions that were intended for marriage. Outside of marriage, you're

building a fire with nothing to contain it.

And God says the fire is a good thing.

Fire purifies, Fire brings warmth. Fire is a source of life.

There's nothing wrong with fire. But if you build the

fire in the wrong place, if you put the passion

in the wrong place, it will burn your home to

the ground.

It's a misplaced passion. It's a good thing in a

bad place.

And I wonder, I wonder how many of you would

have avoided some serious pain in your life if somebody

would have shown you before you build a fire, you

need somewhere to put it. And the only human relationship

that can sustain this force of passion is a covenant

relationship called marriage. If you go building fires and other

relationships that aren't built to contain the power of passion,

it's gonna it's gonna spread the places you don't intend

for it to spread, and it's gonna it's gonna destroy

things that God gave you as a gift.

And so Paul is not saying put the fire out.

He's saying, find the right place to build the fire.

Make sure you have the right place for the passion, or.

You'll get burned.

And I'm seeing so many people and so many families

get burned because they we're trying to get warm, because

it's cold out there, and because I need relationship, and

because I need somebody, So I think I'll stand up

next to this fire. I did a word study this week.

I studied the word intimacy, which is what we're all

truly longing for. That's really what we all want. That's

what our sexual expression, emotional expression is about. We want intimacy.

That's what we want. That's what we desire from God

and from others. We want to be known, we want

to be accepted. We want intimacy. But then I studied

the word infatuation, and I was fascinated to find out

that in Latin, this will make you sound so smart

at lunch this week. In Latin, infatuation literally means false

fire looks like fire but really can't warm you. Looks

like fire but really can't empower you.

Looks like fire, And.

That's what the world offers is an infatuation with images

of sexuality, but it won't really warm you. In fact,

it can actually run away from you and burn your

house down and some preacher needs to get up in

front of you and just have the guts to care

two cents worth of nothing what you think about it,

and say, if you're building these fires in the wrong place,

it's going to burn you.

It's going to burn you.

So it's mismanaged passions. Passion is pure. The enemy wants

to pervert it and use what God wanted to use

to develop intimacy in your life to destroy your capacity

for intimacy so that he gets a boy looking at

pornography at age ten, so he can begin to rewire

his brain and his standard of beauty, so that when

he's having sex with his wife one day, he won't

be able to do it without conjuring up images that

he saw before he even knew what was developing in

his life and in his heart, because a fire got

built but there was nothing to contain it. I say

this not to condemn you. I say this not to

bring all your mistakes up before you. But there are

some of you that are building fires and bad places

right now, sending text messages to the wrong person right now,

visiting some of the wrong sites right now, filling your

minds with the wrong kinds of images, indulging in the

wrong conversations. It's nothing wrong with the fire, it's just

where you put it. And let's close talk in about

something positive. Let's talk about shameless solutions. Shameless solutions. So

when me and Hollywood building our home last year, there

were all these selections that you have to make, and

for the most part, I never got in. But she

would bring certain things to me that she thought I

might want to weigh in on, and one of them

was what kind of fireplace we would have in the house.

I love sitting by a fireplace. I don't know why,

but I like the gas log fireplace because this is

about as much work as I want to do to

start the fire. Like, to me, that's my version of

roughing it, Like that's my outdoorsmanship right there, just flip

that little switch and the fire comes on. She said, no, no,

for this house, we need to have a real fireplace

with like real logs and stuff.

And I'm like, oh god, no, I mean.

We're gonna have to go chop wood and I to

go buy a flannel shirt from All Navy and I

have one in the closet, and and She's like, no, no,

it'll be great. It'll be a gas start fireplace, but

it'll have real wood. And so I'm thinking, like, you know,

I trust you whatever, and she said, trust me, you'll

love it. I said, go ahead, we can do it,

and but nobody showed me how to use it. So

the first time I went to go built a fire

in the in the gas start fireplace. Which, let me see,

I'm going to give you the technical explanation for this.

There's a little thingy that you put in the hole on.

There's a thing on the side of the fireplace and

you turn that on and then it opens the gas

valves and so then then you can light the fire.

At least that's what I thought you were supposed to do,

is turn on the gas and then light the fire

in the fireplace. So I was so excited to have

our first fire of the year last year, and so

I turned on the gas to give it plenty of time,

like you know if you're turning on your car and

the cold, so give it some time to warm up, right,

And so I went to go get my kids because

I wanted them to see the first fire, and I

bring them in because it's like getting close to Christmas

time and there's stockings up, and I thought this was

going to be a picture perfect scene. And so I went,

I go and get a drink and get the kids,

and I gathered them around, and I went and got

the wood, not the wood that I chopped with, the

wood that the man who sold the wood to me

on the side of the road chopped at some point.

And I took that wood and I stacked it up

high because I wanted to it be a good fire.

I wanted to make our first fire was a good fire.

And now I figure we're warmed up, and and so

what happened when I put.

The match in?

So like now when I give an invitation for people

to receive Christ, I give it with so much more

passion because I feel like I have I have seen

what hell is going to be like. Because when the

when the flames came out, it was traumatic. It was

traumatic for Graham. Graham was crying. I was calling on

Jesus Christ. I was calling on Smoky the bear.

I was stopping and dropping and rolling. It was everything.

I was checking for eyebrows in the mirror.

Lesson learned.

Start the fire in the fireplace and then turn on

the gas, not the other way around. The difference between

a fire that will warm your house and a fire

that will burn off your face has to do with

the order in which you turn on the gas and

like the flame. And that's what Paul is saying, Church,

and that's what God is saying. He's saying, some of

you are running the gas valve wide open in your

thought life, and you're running the gas valve wide open

in your conversations, and you're running the gas valve wide open,

and so you're getting hit by all these flames that

are consuming you and burning you alive. What do you

expect when you turn the gas on and leave it

on and let it build up and just think what

you want and say what you want. You don't control

any of this. Like, how did you think this was

gonna end?

When you let the gas build up? And you you

never got any help with.

Those issues and you never found any place to discuss them,

And where did you think this was gonna end? He said, First,

first marriage, then fire.

Context is everything, And some of you, I'm not.

Trying to be hateful, I'm just trying to be helpful.

You're sitting here feeding the fire of lust and discontentment

and wondering why the flames.

Are burning so high.

He said, well, I just can't control myself. You know,

that's kind of what Paul says in the passage. He says,

for those who can't control themselves, you should get married.

You know, that's actually a poor interpretation of the original

language in Greek. He didn't actually say for those who

can't control themselves. He said for those who are not

controlling themselves. See because he said that the fruit of

the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kind is goodness,

faithful as gentleness and self control. So you have self control.

But when you feed the wrong fires all the time,

like some of you are just throwing logs on the

fire all the time, and you're you're.

Miserable because you're watching the past.

No man will ever be able to live up to

your standard. Because you're watching a guy take girls on

dates on a network budget.

Your man might drive a Hyndhi.

It may be a good car, but you're feeding the

fire of all of these ideals. Some of you men

have gotten your standard of beauty from people.

Who are airbrushed.

No wonder your wife can't satisfy you.

You're feeding the wrong fire.

It's flaming up and blazing up and.

You're running the gas, and you talk out.

You want to talk and do what you want to

do and say what you want to say. And now

you're wondering, why can't I control this? Because you didn't

control it. So what do we need? We need a

big old ice bucket, you know what the church and

what I used to do a lot of times when

I would preach about these topics, I would think that

the solution for sexual sin is a big old bucket

of shame, you know. So we just you know, something

like that, and all the sermons are based around shame.

It's like and that that's effective for like three days,

but then it flares right back up most of the time.

In our sexuality, shame is the source of our problem,

so it can't be our solution. Paul doesn't shame the

Corinthian Church. He doesn't shame God, doesn't shame you for

your struggles, for your passions. He simply wants you to

get him in the right place. And see, we talked

about Moses how he misplaced his passion in Exodus chapter two,

but check this out forty years later Exodus chapter three,

Verse one. It says that one day Moses was tending

the flock of Jethro, his father in law, the priest

of Midian, So he was just doing his basic responsibility.

He had gone on about his life, and he led

the flock to the far side of the wilderness and

came to horror of the mountain of God. So he

was out in a lonely place, and God shows up

and appears to Moses. But he did it in a

lonely place while Moses was simply doing his job. Would

that not be a good word for a single person

in this church today? You tend the flock that God

has given you, be faithful in the place where He's

positioned you. And watch what God did? Is that? Then

the Angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames

of fire from within a bush. So Moses saw, Remember

when he looked the first time after he'd killed the Egyptian,

he looked and he saw that nobody was there, and

so he thought he got away with it, But he

really didn't, because he tried to fulfill the right passion

in the wrong way. But watch this this time he

saw that though the bush was on fire, it did

not burn up. And so he thought, I'll go over

and see this strange sight. Why the bush does not

burn out. And when the Lord saw he had gone

over to look, God called to him from within the

bush Moses. Moses, and Moses said, here I am. Now

here's what the Lord spoke to me. He said, When

I am the center of your passion, your life will burn,

but it won't burn up. When I am the center

of a relationship, it'll burn, but it won't burn out. See.

Lust can set you on fire, but only God can

set you.

On fire and keep you on fire.

Anybody can light a bush on fire, but only God

can get in the middle of a bush and light

it on fire. But although it's on fire, and what

we want in this church and what God wants for

your life, is a passion that stays on fire, not

this little cheap imitation infatuation falls flame garbage that burns

you out and creates new patterns of processing information in

your brain that will cause you trouble for the rest

of your life. The enemy wants to burn you out,

but God wants to set passion on fire in your

life and put it in a place where it will

burn but not burn out. How many of you want

a holy passion that doesn't burn out, relationships that don't.

Burn out, and pursuits.

That don't burn out that burn out better alive and lighting,

but grow brighter and brighter.

As the seasons go by.

God's desire for you isn't just that you would have

the passing pleasure of sin for a season, but that

you would know the pleasure of passion that comes from

His purpose, that it would burn from within and.

Not burn out.

Some of you been feeding the wrong fires, see, and

yet it's not enough just to starve the wrong fires.

But God told me.

I said, God, well, if shame isn't the solution to this,

then what is? And he said, I want you to

tell everybody who's struggling with their desires that are burning

a hole inside of him today. I want you to

tell them that they need to fight fire with fire.

Fight fire with fire, not with shame. Shame isn't going

to help this. You've tried that shame doesn't make you

any better. It just drives you deeper into your own

dysfunction and isolates you from people who could help you.

But the scripture says, what's just Our God is a

consuming fire. So what do you do if you're consumed

with the wrong passions. Here's an idea, get more consumed

with the right ones.

That's how you do this. I'm single and I'm lonely.

I understand. I don't want to oversimplify your struggle. But

why don't you ask God to set you on fire

in this season of your life with a purpose that

will consume you with Him so you're not so consumed

with your desire for somebody else. See when you become

consumed with a passion for God's purpose, it consumes all

of this other stuff, all this false desire, all this

fake fire. And God wants to set somebody on fire

today with his purpose and his plan for your life.

Come on, shout it out, say set me on fire. Lord,

shout it out.

Set me on fire.

Lord, with your purpose, with your power, with your plan.

Holleljah.

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