Sex is a good thing.

You can do a good thing in the wrong way

and it becomes a bad thing.

Sex is a good thing. We don't 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 arm sermon illustration.

So like, I was just thinking of a way 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 the

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's 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 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 is 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 were 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 all 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 the 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. Is 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. 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 involved. 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 well maybe and I

have one in the closet. 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

love it.

I said, go ahead, we can do it. But nobody

showed me how to use it.

So the first time I went to go build 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. She'd give us 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 this is

like getting close to Christmas time and there's stockings up,

and I thought this was going to be a picture

of 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 sure 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

going to 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 disks and.

Neia, Well, 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 try and behateful, 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, as 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 Bachelor. 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 Hyundai. 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 oh

ice bucket.

You know what the church does 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. Hey,

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