Cancelled Conversations: Sex and Sexuality with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaCurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

MetaCurch, how you guys doing?

Good.

115, it's good to see you.

Uh, welcome back to our canceled conversation series.

If you're new with us, my name is Clayton.

I'm the lead pastor here at MetaCurch, and we are covering some of the hot topics in culture.

Culture speaks loudly and often about these, and you often don't hear these subjects spoken about at church, but uh we submit to the word of God.

That's our authority, and we believe God's word has something to say about everything we experience, that it brings clarity to our life, and clarity is what we all need to function and to thrive.

The way that we're talking through these often very tricky topics is following Jesus' example.

Scripture says Jesus came full of grace, like 100% grace, and full of truth, 100% truth.

We don't ignore one for the other.

We have full grace for one another and for ourselves.

And we cling to the truth no matter what the cost.

And we're gonna need both of those things, especially today.

Today, our hot topic is sex and sexuality.

Sex and sexuality.

In week one, we laid out a template for how life and faith works according to scripture.

If you missed week one, um, it's really important for you to go on our YouTube channel and get caught up.

You can't really understand what we're talking about in this series if you haven't watched that.

So make sure you get caught up on week one of the series.

Briefly, what we discovered is that humanity has a problem because of our sin, which is all of the ways that we miss God's mark for his desire and intentions for our life, that we're separated from God.

And that's why Jesus came.

The gospel is the good news that Jesus came to earth and he lived a perfect life, he died, substituting his life for our own, and he rose again, defeating death and giving the promise that we could defeat death as well if we simply believe in him.

The New Testament talks about the work of Jesus and a lot of different metaphors, and one of those in Colossians is that he destroyed the dividing wall between us and God.

And what that means is that we can come to Jesus, we can come to the promise of the cross, no matter who you are or where you've been, no matter how many skeletons are in your closet, there's no hoops to jump through, you don't have to get cleaned up, you don't have to memorize a ton of scripture.

All you have to do when you hear the good news of Jesus is believe that Jesus is what he says he is, and that he's done what he says that he's done, and scripture promises you will be given eternal life.

You'll become a child of God.

And that is a promise that lasts forever.

You did not earn your eternal life, and you cannot lose your eternal life.

But that's not the end of the story.

Next, you are called to follow Jesus, and following Jesus costs you.

Following Jesus often entails very real suffering.

All series long, we've said the invitation to believe in Jesus is to come to the cross and gain eternal life.

The invitation to follow Jesus is to carry your cross and to die to yourself.

Jesus said it this way: if anyone wants to follow after me, let him deny himself.

That means deny yourself of your own desires, sometimes your own dreams, your own ideas, your own version of truth, sometimes your own attractions.

Deny yourself anything and everything that doesn't line up to God's word, and then carry your cross.

That means intentionally and willingly suffer for the glory of God and the sake of the people around you.

In a very real sense, if you want to follow Jesus, there is a cross in your way.

It's some kind of suffering that you will go through to line your life up to Jesus's.

And if you're not willing to carry your cross, you're not yet equipped to follow Jesus.

And here's what we're doing in this series.

All series long, we're getting clear on these topics, and then we're asking the question: what does it mean to deny myself?

And what crosses are is Jesus calling me to carry?

And we're gonna ask that question for the issue of sex and sexuality.

Now I want to say a few things before we get started.

Uh, one of the things that I love most about MetaCurch is that we are a very diverse congregation across every imaginable demographic.

And we actually disprove a major theory in the church world, which is that you can't have a local church that stands firmly and unapologetically on the truth of scripture and be a church that attracts a diverse range of people.

And we're able to do that because we take seriously not just the truth of scripture, but the grace of God in our culture here.

We disprove that by our very existence as metachurch.

I also want to say that I understand this is a very sensitive topic.

And as we go into it, full of grace and full of truth, it's going to take me a little while to fully develop the Christian sexual ethic.

I'll tell you a little bit about me growing up.

I grew up in church.

I'm a very curious person.

I'm someone who overthinks almost explosively.

I have so many questions all of the time.

Growing up in church, I would ask what I thought were very thoughtful questions, and what I would get were responses that were not very thoughtful.

Christian cliches, like, you just need to believe, you need to have more faith, or even sometimes Clayton, for the love of God, quit asking so many questions, right?

Like, those are the responses that I would often get.

And because of that, I think that's part of my story that I have like this core conviction inside of me that people deserve robust answers.

I've been studying for this message for about eight months.

And here's what I think the conversation's gonna be.

I think it's gonna be a journey of uncomfortability.

And I think different people are going to get uncomfortable at different times.

And it's gonna take a while for the full picture to develop.

And so I hope that you will hang in with me through the whole message, even if you get uncomfortable.

Are we good with that?

Good.

Let's pray.

Jesus, we love you.

We thank you for loving us.

We're asking again for like an extra helping of grace.

Truly, that we would humble ourselves, open our hearts and our minds to what you have to say to us, Holy Spirit.

You're here and you're moving.

Your greatest desire is to speak to us, encourage us, challenge us, convict us.

Have your way.

We love you, and we pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

It's a little bit difficult to understand where our culture is at on sex and sexuality without understanding really clearly where we're at today and also where we've been in human history.

Today, we are openly calling our culture sex positive.

Hookup culture is a regular part of society.

It's not seen as a big deal at all to have lots of sex with lots of different partners.

Promiscuity is encouraged, it's actually championed by the influencers in our world.

Pornography is being propagated as a net positive.

All of these things are very different than even 20 years ago, and certainly 50, and definitely 100 years ago.

Things have changed, and the change continues to escalate and speed up.

And so, how did we get here to this really open sex positive culture?

How we got here is, of course, a very complex question.

We could do a survey of like thousands of years of human history, and I would find that so fun, and you would all be asleep.

So we're not gonna do that.

We're gonna just kind of look at like the basis of where we're at in society.

Right now, we are a culture of rights and individualism.

Rights and individualism.

And in today's very sex-positive culture, the church and its teachings are seen as the primary oppressor of our individual rights to live and act however we want sexually.

The church and its teachings are seen as the primary oppressor of the individual rights to express our sexuality freely.

So let's be sure to give the devil its due.

The church has absolutely used things like guilt and shame and fear and even the legal system at certain points in history to castigate and ostracize and marginalize anyone who fell out of step with the church's sexual ethic.

The lack of grace in our churches has been heartbroken, heartbreaking.

I'm sure it breaks the heart of God as well.

We're supposed to have truth, but we're also supposed to have grace.

And so think about it.

If the church is the great oppressor to our rights and individuality, then the culture must push against the church with full force.

About 70 years of that gets you to today.

And today, our Western culture has all but thrown off the shackles of a biblical sexual ethic.

And the question we should be asking is: is it working?

Are we happier, healthier, more fulfilled sexually and relationally?

Did we crack the code to happiness with our sex positive, institution shattering, easy hookup, anti-marriage, pornography addicted society?

If you're paying attention at all to what's going on in society, the obvious answer to that is no.

Antidepressant use is at an all-time high, suicide rate is at an all-time high, single motherhood is at an all-time high.

Division among our nation is close to an all-time high.

Job satisfaction is historically low, drug dependency is historically high.

Think about this: loneliness.

In a culture where people are encouraged to have more sex, freer sex, more sexual partners than any other time in modern history, and people are lonelier than any time that has ever been recorded.

Full-on hedonistic sexual liberation is just not working.

The question then is: does the ancient wisdom of Scripture offer us something better?

To understand that, one of the things I think we have to see is a historical sexual ethic.

And I want us to look at that.

The historical, and by that I mean the pre-Jesus sexual ethic.

What did the world look like before it was influenced by Jesus, his movement that we call the church, and the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament?

The Greco-Roman world is a great comparison to where we're at today because it's the predecessor to the modern West that we all live in.

And even though it had many things in common, they were figuring out democracy, they were figuring out rights, they had a lot of technological innovation, their sexual ethic could not have been more different than ours.

In Greco-Roman culture, sex was almost exclusively about power.

Men dominated women, the rich dominated the poor, and the resident dominated the foreigner always.

Sex was not an identity, sex was not a lifestyle, it wasn't about pleasure.

Sex was a way to display your dominance.

It was seen as normal for a man to have sex with anyone beneath him in stature.

This means if you were poor, which by the way, almost everyone was poor, if you were poor, a higher class man could lay claim to you, to your daughter, to your sons, to your employees, anything for their sexual gratification, and there was nothing that you could do about it.

The only people who had any sexual freedom in the ancient world were the wealthiest men who were also in the ethnic majority.

That means you had to be born the right gender, the right ethnicity, and to the right family that had the proper social status.

If you were male and wealthy, but a foreigner, your life was hell.

If you were a male and in the majority ethnically, but you weren't wealthy, your life was hell.

And if you were a woman, no other factors mattered, your life was hell in the ancient world.

In the ancient world, sex was not a good thing.

It was a tool of power and of dominance.

The cultural sexual ethic was about power for those at the top and simply about survival for everyone else.

And you can look in our modern world at the places on earth that the gospel has never infiltrated, that Judeo-Christian values have never shown up, and places who have completely kicked Christianity out of their cultures, and what you will find are high levels of sexual oppression.

It's right here that we get to the primary tension in our world right now, because it was uniquely the movement of Jesus and the teachings of the New Testament that took a historic sexual ethic that was selfish and ruthless and purposeless and overall horrible and transformed it into something selfless, beautiful, consensual, and meant for the flourishing of both individuals.

In a very real sense, and this isn't a Christian truth, this is a historic truth.

Jesus and his movement are why we see sex as good.

And it's almost ironic because earlier we said that in today's culture, Jesus, his movement and teachings are seen as the greatest oppressive force against sex and sexuality.

And so we have a very real conflict because the cultural view is that the church is the greatest sexual oppressor, and history teaches us that the church and its teachings are the greatest sexual liberator.

And so, which one is right?

Much of the sexual protest of the last century has been aimed at the church, and we see this as secular society versus the church.

But it's far more complex than that.

Tom Holland, not Spider-Man, the historian Tom Holland, he's a famous historian.

He was agnostic, he didn't believe in God until he studied for years and years the Greco-Roman world.

And what he found is the one thing that transformed this barbaric ancient world into the flourishing world that we see now was Jesus and his movement.

Here's what Tom Holland wrote in his book Dominion.

That every human being possessed an equal dignity was not remotely a self-evident truth.

A Roman would have laughed at it.

To campaign against discrimination on the grounds of gender or sexuality was to depend on a large number of people sharing in a common assumption that everyone possessed an inherent worth.

The origins of this principle, the origins of the idea that just because you are human, you have inherent worth and value and dignity and therefore God-given rights, that idea, Tom Holland writes, lay not in the French Revolution or the Declaration of Independence or in the Enlightenment, but in the Bible.

In other words, the idea that any socially marginalized group has inherent, unalienable rights is uniquely a biblical idea.

Marching for your individual rights is an idea founded on the movement of Jesus, the church, and its teachings.

If your group held less power at any other point in human history, you had no power.

You were simply overlooked at best or persecuted at worst.

Which means that a march for the freedom of cultural sexual ethics today is not a secular idea versus a Christian idea.

Marching for your individual rights is a uniquely Christian idea going up against the church and its teachings a uniquely Christian idea.

It's the uniquely Christian concept of inherent worth, value, dignity, and rights versus the uniquely Christian idea of the biblical sexual ethics.

This conversation is far more complex than we give it credit for.

Consider what Paul wrote in the book to the Galatians.

He says, there is no Jew or Greek slaver-free, male and female, since you are all one in Christ Jesus.

I love this verse.

I use it a lot.

And I always point out these words do not set on the pages of human history as simply unique.

They sit as a concept diametrically opposite of everything else in human history.

Human history was the story of humanity dividing itself along race, class, and gender always.

And Paul comes in and says, Because Jesus died for all people in all places, we must conclude that all people have equal value, dignity, and worth.

This verse changed the world forever.

The call to love everyone, even people radically different from you, even your enemies, it changed the world forever.

Jesus came 100% full of grace and 100% full of truth.

And before we move into the details of the Christian sexual ethic, we must pursue both of those.

If we have all the details right of God's sexual ethic, but we have no love or grace for those who are struggling to understand it or to uphold it, we have simply missed the mark.

And so let's go to scripture and let's look at what God's sexual ethic looks like.

And there's kind of two directions you can make this argument from, and by the end of today, we'll have made it from both directions.

But if you've heard a sermon on sex, then you probably have heard all of the verses that show the prohibitions against sex, all the things you're not supposed to do, all the thou shalt not about sex.

And that is an important aspect of what Christi of what scripture reveals.

However, most people fail to give the positive case for the beautiful picture of what sex and relationship was meant to be as revealed from God.

And we find that first and foremost at the beginning of Scripture.

Genesis 1 through 3 are so important, and there's so much to learn there because the garden narrative pulls back the curtain and shows you God's desires and his intentions for how the world is supposed to function.

And what we get is Genesis 1 is this 50,000-foot view of the story of creation, all the high-level highlights.

And then Genesis 2 is like on the ground, really telling the story from a closer perspective.

And what you see is God is creating, and everything he creates, if you remember the story, God creates something and he's like, Yeah, that was pretty good.

You know, and then he creates something else, and he's like, Yeah, I did that one too.

That was pretty good, you know.

And it just keeps coming together.

And finally, he creates man, and he says, It's very good.

And we get all the way to the middle of chapter two before God says something is not good.

And the first thing God says is not good is for Adam, the man, to be alone.

In Genesis 2.18, the Lord God said, It is not good for the man to be alone, so I will make a helper corresponding to him.

A helper corresponding to him.

That phrase is two words in the original Hebrew of the Old Testament.

It's the words Edser, coneggo.

Now, Edser is a word that's not difficult to translate.

It means a partner or a helper, it can mean a warrior in a military sense.

Sometimes etzer is used to describe God and it's translated savior.

Connecdo is a wildly unique word because it's a compound word, which means two words brought together.

The first word is just K-E, K.

And that means like or similar to.

And then negdo means not like or dissimilar.

Kennedgo is one word that means like but not like, or similar, but also not similar.

And so to translate Edser Konegdo literally would be something like a helpful partner that is both like Adam and also unlike Adam.

And what happens next in Genesis 2 is Adam names all of the animals.

And as he sees all of the animals, he's like, none of these are gonna work, you know?

Like, dogs are man's best friend, but there's no romantic spark here.

And so then God causes Adam to go to sleep, and he takes a part of Adam and he makes the first woman, Eve.

When Adam wakes up and he sees Eve, he has this amazing line.

He looks at her and he says, Bone of my bone.

For the first time, Adam saw something and was like, That's like me.

And then Adam was like, but also not like me, you know?

And don't matter.

She is like him in her humanity.

But she is not like him in that she's a woman.

She is like him in species.

She's not like him in sex.

And we see this same thing emphasized in Genesis 1, this big overview.

The famous verse 27, Genesis 1, 27.

So God created man in his own image, and he created him in the image of God, and he created them in the image male and female.

Singular, singular, plural.

They're like each other.

But they're also not like each other.

At the end of Genesis 2, God concludes this way.

He says, This is why a man leaves his father and mother and bonds with his wife, and they become one flesh.

And this is the biblical foundation for marriage, and that matters.

Because marriage is the biblical boundary that all sexual activity is contained within.

Jesus himself fully affirms this view in Matthew's gospel.

Jesus is asked a question about divorce, and he answers with a holistic.

Perspective on marriage itself, and you will recognize Jesus' words.

In Matthew 19, Jesus replied, Haven't you heard that he who created them in the beginning made them male and female?

That's Genesis 127.

And he also said, For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.

Finally, in verse 6, Jesus gives some commentary.

He says, So they are no longer two but one flesh, therefore, what God is joined together, let no one separate.

This is such a key text, not only because it's the deepest thoughts that Jesus shares about marriage, but because he roots his beliefs in marriage in the Genesis story.

He quotes it directly.

Now Matthew is adding some commentary, but they ask him about divorce.

Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?

Here's how Jesus actually answered.

Haven't you read that he who created them in the beginning made them male and female?

For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.

He just quotes them directly out of the Old Testament.

And what's also interesting is we're reading out of Bibles with chapters and verses.

They didn't have that back then.

They read off of scrolls.

And so Jesus literally took like a line from up here and a line from down here and combined them together to give his answer.

And it's so important because it shows the cohesiveness across the canon scripture, from the Old Testament to the New, spoken by God the Father in Genesis and affirmed by God incarnate Jesus in Matthew, all saying the same thing.

Number one, that the Christian sexual ethic is framed by biblical marriage.

The Christian sexual ethic is framed by biblical marriage.

And here's where the conversation does get controversial in our world today.

From Genesis to Jesus, a biblical marriage shares the same definition, which is the union, that's a covenant, the union of one man and one woman for life.

All sexual activity is bound biblically inside the union of one man and one woman for life.

What's interesting is that Jesus fully upholds the Old Testament view on marriage.

While in the very next verse in Matthew 19, he changes Old Testament teaching about divorce.

After he says that, in the next verse, they asked him, why then did Moses command us to give divorce papers and to send her away?

Now you have to understand, he's in a Jewish context, and no one trumps Moses.

Moses is the top dog, he is the most important figure in all of Israel.

Moses is the Old Testament.

Moses gave the law.

He's saying, look, what God brought together, let no one separate.

And they're like, that's not what Moses said.

Then Jesus says in verse 8, he told them, Moses, Old Testament, permitted you to divorce your wives because of the hardness of your hearts.

But it was not like that from the beginning.

Genesis, God's desires and intentions for our relationships.

Verse 9, he says, I tell you.

And if you're curious, in the Greek that this is written in, Moses told you, I tell you, directly contrast each other, which means Jesus is changing and updating an Old Testament law.

Now I tell you, whoever divorces his wife except for sexual immorality and marries another commits adultery.

Here's why this matters.

Jesus is God.

If he disagrees with the Old Testament view on marriage, he could have done exactly what he did to the Old Testament view on divorce.

He said about divorce, Moses, Old Testament told you, but I'm changing it.

That's not what he did on marriage.

And many people who want to redefine marriage from Scripture make a case outside of Scripture.

That if Jesus were alive today, then he would have changed things.

And Jesus never really talked clearly about marriage.

And if he would have, he would have updated that Old Testament outdated principle.

Not only would he have changed it, but he could have changed it.

He just changed the Old Testament law on divorce in the next verse.

He could have said, I know what it says in Genesis, but now we're doing this.

But he didn't.

Instead of doing that, he affirms as God that God's plan for sexual activity was for it to be exclusively reserved for marriage, and that marriage is very clearly and consistently defined in the Word of God as a union of one man and one woman for life.

Now, the rest of the New Testament, after the Gospels, what it does is helps us apply the Christian ethic into our everyday life.

And this is where we get some of the sexual prohibitions in Scripture, and we're gonna get to those, but I want you to keep in mind the simplest way to understand what is prohibited is anything outside of a biblically defined marriage.

It is that simple.

Anything outside of one man and one woman for life is prohibited.

And so any kind of sexual activity prior to marriage is prohibited.

Once you are married, sexual activity outside of your spouse, it's one man, one woman, not two women and four men.

It's very, very simply defined.

Lust is off the table for all people in all times, which means pornography is off the table for all people in all times.

It's one standard that all people are held to.

Before we get to the next scriptures, I want to pause and I want to make a clear nuance for us.

That matters so greatly.

And if you're uncomfortable right now, then just hang in with me for a minute.

We're gonna talk about the difference between sex and sexuality.

Now, we asked y'all at least three times already to check your kids into Medikids.

So what happens next is on you, not on me, okay?

Because we are gonna define these terms very carefully, and you might have an awkward ride home.

Are we ready?

Sex is any sexual activity intended to result in orgasm.

Any sexual activity intended to result in orgasm.

Here's what religious people do: they get a command and they try to either find the loophole or they try to get as close as they can to the line without crossing over it.

This is how scripture defines sex.

Any sexual activity, which of course is intercourse, but is also oral sex, is also mutual masturbation.

And even if you stop short of orgasm, if it is an act that is designed typically to result in orgasm, it is sex.

That's how it defines it.

And sex is limited and constrained to inside of a biblically defined marriage.

That's sex.

Sexuality is the attraction a person has to a particular gender.

Now you can just tell by the definitions, those are two very different things, sex and sexuality.

Really, we're talking about sexual activity and sexual attraction.

Sexual activity, sexual attraction.

We've gotten clear on what God intended sex for inside the constraints of a biblically defined marriage.

This obviously brings up questions about sexuality.

If you are gay or lesbian or bisexual, and sexuality is confined to marriage, and marriage is between one man and one woman, then what does that mean for you?

I want to suggest that the majority of us here who are heterosexual, attracted to the opposite sex, that a misunderstanding of the nuance between what the Bible says about sexual activity and sexual attraction has done immeasurable harm.

And I'm not pointing at any of us in particular, but we have to acknowledge the church at large has engaged these topics like a culture war to be won instead of a gospel to be spread.

For those who are here or online who are same-sex attracted, I know many of you here at MetaCurch.

I've heard your stories.

Stories of usually around puberty, realizing that you're exclusively attracted to the opposite sex.

The shame and guilt and fear and terror, often the self-hatred.

For those in a religious context, years of sleepless nights begging God to make you straight.

I've heard about your spiritual wounds, from Christians telling you that you're an abomination to God, pastors kicking you out of churches without even knowing you.

I couldn't begin to guess at all of the reasons that those situations happen.

But theologically, I do know one reason why this happens, and it's because knowingly or unknowingly, there are many Christians who have not allowed for a distinction between sexual attraction and sexual activity.

And what happens is we have collapsed this distinction and treated them both as the same.

And because they're both the same, we have to pick a side.

And the two sides that have emerged broadly are those who condemn it and those who affirm it.

Those who take the condemning theology, they collapse attraction and activity, and they call both of them sinful.

And so your same-sex sexual activity is sinful, and your same-sex attraction is sinful.

On the other side, you have those who are affirming.

Once again, they make the same mistake of collapsing activity and attraction, but they say both of them are not sinful.

Your same-sex attraction is not sinful, and as long as it's faithful and monogamous, your same-sex activity is not sinful.

By not allowing the nuance of attraction and activity, the affirming side of the equation kind of obviously falls into a simple reading of the Bible's commands that they just missed the mark on.

They also completely have to skew the Bible's definition of marriage.

At the same time, the condemning side has a host of issues as well, and these issues typically stem from reading the sexual prohibitions that are about sexual activity and assuming sexual attraction into them.

1 Corinthians 6 is perhaps the most famous passage on sexual prohibition.

And it's famous for a few reasons.

The top of the list is that the Apostle Paul was writing to a church in Corinth, and Corinth was a very sexually promiscuous culture, much like our culture today.

And here's what Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 6.

We're gonna take our time.

This is our key text.

Don't you know that the unrighteous will not inherit God's kingdom?

Do not be deceived.

No sexually immoral people.

That's the Greek word pornea, where we get our word for pornography.

Now, what's interesting is Paul is a Jewish man.

And in the Jewish mind, pornea simply means any sexual activity outside of a biblically defined marriage.

But Paul is Jewish, he's writing to a non-Jewish congregation.

And so he's going to elaborate on this.

He says, no sexually immoral people, idolaters, those who worship false gods, adulterers, married people who have sex outside of the marriage bed, or males who have sex with males.

This is actually a two Greek word, arsenicoites and malakoit.

And both of those words refer specifically to both the active and the passive partner engaged in same-sex sexual intercourse.

In verse 10, no thieves, we know what that is, greedy people, drunkards, verbally abusive people, or swindlers, none of them will inherit God's kingdom.

The confusion over time has been reading what is very clearly in scripture: prohibitions against sexual activity among believers, and reading it as if it also means sexual attraction.

It says that what you risk by continuing to live this way as a believer is losing your inheritance.

And let me emphasize: our inability to allow scripture to speak with nuance is not just about sexual issues.

Most people see that we could lose an inheritance, and they immediately think that means heaven or hell.

And so let me ask you a question.

If I invited you to my house for dinner and you showed up and rang my doorbell, and I opened the door and said, Enter.

Now that'd be a weird way for me to invite you into my house, but let's just say that's how I host my parties.

Enter into my dwelling.

And then we ate together and you left.

At any point on your drive home or in the days and years preceding, would you ever assume that when I die, you inherit my house?

Of course not.

Because we know how words work.

And that entrance and inheritance are two different things.

God is our heavenly father.

The book of 1 Corinthians is a letter written to Christians.

It makes that crystal clear in the very first chapter.

When you put your faith in Jesus, you become a child of God.

That means God is your heavenly father.

I know a few things about good fathers.

Number one is a good father does not disown their children.

I'm a very broken, fallible father.

And I will never disown my children.

Here's something else I know about good fathers.

Good fathers don't leave inheritance to children living in rebellion.

Good fathers don't enable bad behaviors.

And our perfect Heavenly Father will never revoke your status as a child of God.

But on the other side of this life, there is reward waiting.

And your reward, your inheritance is jeopardized when you do not deny yourself and pick up your cross and follow the ways of your father.

Here's the next verse.

Paul said, and some of you to the Corinthians, you used to be like this.

Sexually immoral, idolaters, adulterers, males who have sex with males, thieves, greedy people, drunkards, verbally abusive, con artists.

Some of you used to be like this.

But you were washed, sanctified, justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ about a spirit of our God.

Activity or attraction?

Let me ask you something.

The drunkards in the Corinthian church, if they were really alcoholics, barring miraculous intervention, did they still have an innate attraction to alcohol?

Well, of course they did.

The heterosexual Corinthians, who were living sexually immoral lives, were they still attracted to people of the opposite sex?

Of course they were.

We're often not in charge of our attractions, but we aren't in control with what we do about them.

And here's what the Corinthians understood.

In January, we spent six weeks on identity.

They realized their identity is not in their attractions.

Their identity is not in their attractions.

Their identity is in Christ.

And when your identity is in Christ, you live with an eternal perspective.

And when you live with an eternal perspective, you realize the only way to live is to deny yourself and carry your cross so that you can follow Him.

Let's get a biblically accurate understanding of sex and sexuality.

The condemning and the affirming side both collapse attraction and activity into one.

The condemning side sees both of them as sinful.

The affirming side sees both of them as not sinful.

Both have major issues lining their views up to scripture.

A biblical understanding sees that all sexual activity outside of a biblically defined marriage is in fact sinful.

That is what the revelation of God's word tells us.

However, your sexual attraction is not inherently sinful.

Let me tell you one reason why this matters.

Far too many kids have come out of the closet to people in their church only to be guaranteed eternal damnation if they don't change an attraction that they have been begging God for three years to change.

Fourteen, fifteen, eighteen-year-old kids, most of whom have never had a single sexual experience.

No sexual activity in their entire life.

And they're being condemned for an attraction that they never asked for.

I believe that many of the debates in Christian circles around us are just unfruitful and unhelpful.

The big debate when I was growing up in church was nature versus nurture.

Are you born gay?

And if you are born gay, then can you like be converted to straight somehow?

And if you think there are simple answers to those questions, I want to suggest that you are trapped in an ideological bubble.

These are some of the most complex questions imaginable.

And when it comes to following Jesus, they might be the wrong questions altogether.

Every time I talk to the people at Meta who are same-sex attracted, I always let them know I'm not a scientist and I'm not you.

I'm not here to tell you if you were born gay or not.

I'm not here to tell you much of anything about you.

I'm here to tell you what Jesus says to all of us.

Follow me, deny yourself, carry your cross, and submit to my word.

The standard is the same.

I know same-sex attracted individuals who committed their lives to Jesus and ultimately found themselves attracted to someone, not everyone, but someone of the opposite sex.

They're married now, by all accounts, they're thriving.

God can do whatever He wants to do.

Is that what normally happens?

It's very complex.

I have more same-sex attractive friends who have prayed and begged God and nothing has changed.

But they've committed their life to Christ, they're pursuing singleness and celibacy in order to submit to God's word.

They are denying themselves.

They're carrying an unimaginable cross.

And I know that they will be rewarded someday more than they can imagine.

And let me just point out that this concept applies equally to everyone.

If you are straight, your attraction to the opposite sex is not sin.

What scripture calls sin goes beyond mere attraction into the realm of lust.

And lust is not a sin specifically for same-sex attracted people.

Lust is a sin for everybody.

Jesus says in Matthew 5, you've heard that it was said, do not commit adultery.

I tell you, everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

Attraction, in a very real sense, is innate.

Maybe even hardwired.

I don't know.

I know I've never decided to be attracted to females.

It just happened.

You often can't control what you're attracted to, but God has given you a free will and volition to control what you do about your attractions.

Lust is when you allow your attraction to become an ungodly desire.

James, the half-brother of Jesus, shows us how this works.

He lays out a path in James chapter 1.

James 1 · chapter mention

He says, each person is tempted when he's drawn away and enticed by his own evil desire, ungodly desires.

Then after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin.

And when sin is fully grown, it gives birth to death.

When we feed ungodly desires, they grow.

Ungodly sexual desire results almost immediately in lust.

And lust is a sin.

Lust, if we continue to feed it, leads to a very real spiritual death.

And it's worth noting, we live in a culture that speaks to your desires, especially your sexual desires, and even your lust, and at every turn encourages you to feed it and feed it and feed it.

It is an anti-Christ message who says, deny it and carry your cross.

Denying yourself means you deny those desires, you submit to God, and it probably will hurt.

It might hurt like hell.

And that's called carrying your cross.

God's sexual expectation for his people is that everyone denies themselves of all sexual activity outside of marriage.

Everyone.

Calls all of us to the exact same standard.

Lust is an issue for us all.

We all deal with sexual temptation.

We probably all have some forms of sexual hangups.

And we're all held to the same exact standard.

It's very difficult in our culture to find a 19-year-old man whose greatest dream is to have sex with just one woman for the rest of his life.

And God calls us to deny ourselves of ungodly desires.

In a world where pornography is everywhere all the time, we are called to deny ourselves from using it.

If you're married, by definition, you're attracted to the opposite sex.

The expectation is to stop at attraction.

You cannot dwell on a woman.

You certainly cannot desire her.

Desire turns to lust.

And lust, if it has its way, will lead to decisions that will ruin your life.

If you are lesbian, gay, or bisexual, let me just acknowledge again, I of course can never fully understand what you've been through in life.

The call to follow Jesus is intended to be a high calling.

And I'm fairly convinced that for you, it is one of the highest callings in our culture today.

The call to follow Jesus with our sexual ethic, it is the same call for every single person, but that does not mean it affects every person the same way.

In my months preparing for the sermon, I became friends with an author named Greg Coles.

He shares about his own journey in his book called Single Gay Christian.

Greg has committed his life to singleness and celibacy in order to submit his life to Jesus.

In a conversation, Greg told me there are sufferings much worse than this.

But there are none that are quite the same.

2,000 years ago, to be a Christian cost everyone.

Your family might disown you.

You would probably be kicked out of the marketplace.

It'd be difficult to even find money to be able to live on.

You might be imprisoned, your property might be taken away from you.

It might cost you your life in Rome.

You might be fed to the lions in the Colosseum.

In my months preparing for today, something dawned on me.

I actually feel like the Holy Spirit laid this on my heart, and I don't say that flippantly.

It registered with me that 2,000 years ago, the first church, it was such a high calling for everyone.

Paul comes to the Corinthians and is like, hey man, follow Jesus.

It's probably gonna cost you your job.

I promise you it's worth it.

Hey, follow Jesus.

I know your family will probably disown you, but what God will give you in return, I promise it's worth, hey, follow Jesus.

You'll probably lose your house, but I promise you, follow Jesus, follow Jesus.

You will probably be in prison.

Follow Jesus, you will probably lose your life.

And yes, follow Jesus, you will have to deny your sexual desires.

And everyone was like, fair enough, man.

It's a high calling for everyone.

And now, it just feels so easy to be a Christian.

What are our biggest problems here as a local church?

Like sometimes it's kind of rainy outside, you know.

Our attendance drops 24% because it's kind of rainy.

The cowboys play early, you know.

Those are our big problems.

And then we come and we sit in air conditioning and we listen to a world-class band.

The call is high for everyone.

People don't even preach sermons about sexual purity.

People don't even dare to challenge people to retain their sexual purity until they're in marriage for fear they will be laughed off the stage or seen as completely culturally irrelevant.

We don't bat an eye about divorce.

Scripture reveals three and only three reasons: adultery, abandonment, abuse.

Not because you're tired of each other, not because it wasn't everything you imagined, not because it's not what you signed up for, not because you're kind of unhappy.

That's it.

And sexual immorality breaks the heart of God, but I promise you, hypocrisy breaks it just as much.

And because of the way we manage ourselves in a Christian culture here in the West, it's like the call for same-sex attracted Christians is the closest resemblance to the call to the first century Christians.

You're being asked, it seems like to give up more than anybody else for the promise that God will reward you with so much more than you can imagine.

We are all held to the same high standard.

There are straight members of our movement who did not want me to do this series because they have no interest in giving up being sexually promiscuous before they're married.

And there are no Christians writing blogs about that, and no Christians marching in the street in protest.

We have same-sex attracted Christians here in our movement who are celibate in order to submit their life to God.

And a large percentage of Christians will still condemn them just based on an attraction that they're denying and carrying their cross, and that has to break God's heart.

Immorality breaks his heart, and hypocrisy and judgmentalism and uneven scales, it all breaks his heart.

And the call of the gospel is your sexuality does not save you, and your sexuality does not condemn you, and your sexual history does not condemn you, that we are all saved by the same unmerited, unearned, lavished upon us grace of Jesus Christ.

Jesus came to remove all barriers to the cross.

And as Christians, if we are putting back up barriers because of somebody's sexual past or sexual identity, then shame on us.

God broke down the barriers so anyone could come and he would meet them exactly where they are.

And he loves us enough to call us to follow him and to not leave us where we are.

So let me remind you how life and faith works.

Anyone can come to the cross.

Anyone can come to the cross.

And if you're gay, lesbian, bisexual, and someone has tried to convince you otherwise, don't listen to me.

Listen to scripture.

Everyone can come to the cross.

And by simply believing in Jesus, receive eternal life, and you will be a child of God forever.

And when it comes to the really difficult issues of sex and sexuality, the determining factor of whether we will pick up very heavy crosses and submit our lives in obedience to the word, it will ultimately come down to how much we trust our Heavenly Father.

Do we trust Him enough that even though it doesn't make any sense to us?

Do we trust Him enough that even though I have to deny some of the deepest desires of my heart?

Do I trust Him enough to follow Him?

The invitation to believe in Jesus is to come to the cross and live.

The invitation to follow Jesus is to carry your cross and to die.

In 1 Corinthians 6, that's the passage with the long list of those who may not inherit.

That passage ends, and I want to read this over you.

It says, Don't you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who's in you?

The Holy Spirit that you have from God, you are not your own.

For you were bought at a price.

And we know that price is the price of the life of Jesus.

You were bought at a price.

So glorify God with your body.

We live in a world that believes we have a right, almost a God-given right, an inherent right, to sexual gratification.

That is not the biblical view.

The biblical view is that our bodies belong to the Lord.

Our lives, including our bodies, are instruments of worship.

And for everyone who is outside of the covenant of marriage, one of the ways we worship God is through our celibacy and committing our life and our intimacy to Christ.

For those who are in the covenant of marriage, even our sex life is meant to be worship.

But for it to be worship, it must be selfless, consensual, loving, aimed at the flourishing of your spouse.

The church has done a really good job of painting the picture of the importance of marriage, and it is important.

It's actually the metaphor that is used in scripture to describe Jesus, the coming groom, and the bride, his church.

But the church hasn't done a great job of emphasizing how scripture highlights singleness.

And it's not just singleness for same-sex attracted people as an outlet for your sex life, it's a call to everyone.

Singleness is not a plan B in Scripture.

In fact, Jesus highlights it as potentially the best path, and the Apostle Paul highlights it as the ultimate way to prioritize God's kingdom.

Singleness is a total dedication of your life to the Lord.

It assumes a call to celibacy since you are outside of marriage.

It's the promise that the intimacy you give up sexually will be met and exceeded by your intimacy with Christ and your reward in the life to come.

The question for all of us is when it comes to sex and when it comes to sexuality, what does it mean to deny myself?

The ways that my life does not line up to God's word, what does it mean to deny myself?

And what crosses am I being asked to carry?

Do I trust my father enough to carry them?

Would you pray with me?

Father, we love you.

I'm reminded of the story in Scripture where Jesus asks a man if he believes, and he says, I believe.

Help me with my unbelief.

And maybe that's just exactly where some of us are.

Father, we trust you.

And help us in the areas where we're struggling to trust you.

Help us to get our eyes on eternity, not so focused on the right here and right now.

Keep our eyes on you, Jesus.

On your throne, on your coming kingdom.

I pray that we would rise to the high calling of following you, Jesus.

Committing our lives to you.

Living a life that is a bright and shining example in our culture.

A culture who pushes more and more and more sexual liberation and continues to become more and more depressed and divided.

Help us to be that shining light on a hill that you've called us to be.

We love you.

And we thank you, Jesus, for how much you love us.

And we pray it in your name.

Amen.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

If this was helpful to you and you want to help us get the word out, you can subscribe to this podcast.

You can rate and review or share it with your friends.

If you want to get connected further with what MetaCurch is doing, you can go online to metachurch.tv.

There you can learn how to take next steps.

You can learn where our different venues are at if you ever wanted to visit.

And you can also give financially to help push this movement forward.

And I love you guys, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.