Passion City on the Hill: Jesus and Your Sex Life

well i fell asleep driving one time when i was in high school i was making a run for a company i was working for driving down the freeway woke up bumping along the median did what many do over corrected and spun the vehicle in a 180. uh it's a miracle i didn't kill myself or other people uh on the road but after the crisis of it i course corrected and had to continue driving i was in the middle of the freeway in the middle of nowhere in texas and as i did that i was really scared as a teenage kid i was like man i gotta do something to keep myself awake and the music i brought with me isn't doing it and so i was trying to figure out how do i stay conscious while driving and i remembered a mentor of mine a college kid had given me a series of sermons that he really wanted me to listen to and i remember thinking that was just the weirdest thing ever like who listens to a sermon in a car as a high school kid i thought that was so bizarre i was like i don't want to do that but he kind of forced me to take these sermons from him and like whatever so i got in the car and i was like let's see if maybe listening to someone talk would be helpful so i opened up this set of sermons he had given me and about midway through it there was a sermon entitled sex and i thought that ought to do it and so i turned that one on and this pastor speaking began to tell the story of this explorer that uh went to visit uh an isolated uh tribe and as he showed up there and was visiting with the native people he watched a crocodile come out from the river snatch a young man pull him into the river and drag him away and this man stood up shocked like whoa wait did y'all see that crocodile grab that guy and he starts to panic and then notices that nobody else is responding and after his moment of panic they look at him and say sir in our culture it's impolite to talk about crocodiles and then as he looked around he noticed people that were missing arms and missing legs and missing family members that had been chomped and maimed and injured and killed over an issue that no one wanted to talk about so nothing ever changed because in the culture it's impolite to talk about crocodiles and he i presume made up that story to illustrate the point sex we don't talk about it but the reality is as much as it's a gift from god for many of us our interaction with it has caused pain and yet there's this taboo to discuss the subject and i remember in this talk he began to unpack the song of solomon in the old testament the book of love in the bible and as he did it as a high school kid driving i started crying like an ugly cry not because i was being shamed i wasn't being shamed he was just talking about the beauties of what sex was meant to be and as he presented what it was meant to be i remember mourning that what i had been handed through the pornography that had been introduced to my life from a very young age was so distant from the biblical beautiful picture of sexuality i mourned the loss what i had was an anemic pale version of the real the beautiful and the good and so jesus here is going to talk to us and he's going to talk to us the way a lot of people i think the bible expects to kind of give some restriction and prohibition but i need you to know that contextually jesus is talking to people that the people of god throughout all the scripture story were not prude about sex they weren't and just to make the point let me read to you a passage from song of solomon song of solomon enjoys the gift of sex and there's a moment where man you see at the very beginning the man is excited to see this girl he compares himself to a gazelle leaping towards his beloved she sees him as someone riding on a luxuriant couch riding with all these soldiers around to come get here on their wedding day she feels provided for and protected and so they whisk off together and song of solomon leads us into their bridal chamber and you see as they get there the man begins to complement her body from head beginning at her hair down to her eyes and her nose and her mouth and her neck and he works from the top of her head down complimenting this woman celebrating her and you get midway through it and he says in song of solomon four verse five your two breasts are like two fawns twins of a gazelle that graze among the lilies why does he call her breasts fawns because you don't run up on fawns hey there like you don't do that there's a gentleness to it and of fragility to it and then he says but until the day breathes and the shadows flee i will go away to the mountain of myrrh and the hill of frankincense now if you were to turn to the map in the back of your bible you will not find an ancient hill of myrrh or mountain of frankincense because they don't exist topographically earlier she said that her little sachet of perfume was couched between her breasts so when he says man i am going to the hills of frankincense he is not talking about some town you are all together beautiful my love there is no flaw in you come with me from lebanon my bride come for me from lebanon depart from the peaks of amana from the peak of sinear and hermon from the dens of lions in the mountains of leopards he says let's get away from something that just wants to use and exploit lions i want to devour let's go to a private secret place with just us and he says you have captivated my heart my sister my bride you've captivated my heart with one glance of your eyes she wasn't his biological sister but what he's saying there is we have this familial bond of love that's beyond just the erotic and yet this familial and friendship love of sibling has grown and blossomed into erotic love as they're married and he continues to compliment her body he says your love my sister my bride how much better is your love than wine the fragrance of your oils than any spice your lips drip nectar my bride honey and milk are under your tongue honey and milk were the only two substances you could consume that didn't require death of something that he says man this this invitation and intimacy with you is nourishing and life-giving it's just pure pure life and then as he begins to travel down her body he gets towards the bottom and says a garden locked is my sister my bride a spring locked and a fountain sealed your shoots presumably your legs are an orchard of pomegranates with all choice fruits henna and nard nard and saffron calamus and cinnamon with all trees of frankincense mers and aloes with all choice spices it's the best of the best he says a garden fountain a well of living water a flowing stream from lebanon and then she responds as he compares her body to a garden she says awake o north wind and come o south wind blow upon my garden let its spices flow let my beloved come into his garden and eat its choice fruits dang and then the very next verse he says i came to my garden my sister my bride i gathered my myrrh i ate my honeycomb i drank my wine with my will now commentators divide on how long a gap there is between those two verses some people say three minutes some five some fifteen hard to say but the point i wanna make before getting off song solomon is right after that a different voice speaks and is it god or is it the people of god it's probably the people of god but again this is an inspired scripture and this is what they say after this hot presentation of marital love it says eat friends drink and be drunk with love that's what the bible says about sex drink my friends and be drunk without love all right so the bible celebrates sex it is not prude right the book of proverbs says to the man let your fountain be blessed rejoice in the wife of your youth a lovely deer a graceful doe let her breasts fill you at all times with delight delighting in her breasts is not necessary for the reproductive process right that is for fun but he says earlier should your springs be scattered abroad in your streams of water in the streets and what he's saying there is is really what jesus is talking about here jesus said it uh well let me say this you see all through this old testament picture the sexuality of this couple is presented like a garden like a walled-in garden and that's a beautiful image a garden was lush and exotic filled with beautiful flowers and fruit that was nourishing exciting life-giving but it was also a walled garden it was secret and private and protected that that's how the bible presents sexuality that it's life-giving and nourishing and is meant to be enjoyed within proper boundary don't let your springs be cast into the streets and to some degree everything i'm saying the vast majority of you agree with by the way most of us believe that sex is meant to be fun and enjoyable and meant to be enjoyed within certain boundary we set boundaries of consent around age and different things like that and so this is nothing new that i'm saying to you even if you don't believe any of this but jesus starts with a boundary that would have been very commonly understood in his culture in verse 27 he says you've heard it said you shall not commit adultery that was from the ten commandments this is the seventh of the ten adultery is having sex with someone other than your spouse which interestingly i'm gonna quote a lot from a survey that's a nationwide survey of religion in america or excuse me relationships in america nationwide survey about people's relationships and in this survey the question was asked or posed a statement is it sometimes permissible for a married person to have sex with someone other than his or her spouse ten percent of men said yes five percent of women so the point is when america was asked the question is it okay for a married person to have sex outside their marriage ninety 90 of men said no it's never okay 95 of women said no so no religious affiliation most americans say there should be a boundary if you've made a covenant with that person that you don't take sexuality outside that wall to garden right so i'm not going to belabor verse 27 because most of you believe it 10 of guys don't so watch out ladies but most people believe it where jesus takes us on another level is verse 28. he challenges us by saying but i say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart john stott points out that what jesus is doing really here is not something new again he's taking the seventh commandment and the tenth commandment don't covet in putting them together so they should have figured this out from the old testament don't want something that's not yours and uh don't commit adultery he's putting them together but jesus is doing this because there was an attemptation to sort of narrow the boundaries of what's acceptable sexually or where restraints should be jesus is widening where that boundary should land beyond just adultery all the way out to lust he paddles upstream and says do you want to see where a lot of the hurt that can come from sexuality misused comes from he said let's paddle to the top of the stream and look at lustful intent let's look at the relationship between your eyes and your heart he says what proceeds in our actions begins in our imagination and so where jesus pushes us it's not the activity of adultery but the intent and our imagination lust is the problem and so the bible has a barrier around sexuality and that barrier is within the covenant of a marriage i promise to love you and to never leave you and never forsake you and in that promise of i want all of you i want to care about you for better or for worse in sickness or in health whatever may come i want all of you i want to commit all of me to all of you within that safety this sexuality is meant to be enjoyed that's what the bible presents and for many of us we look at this bar jesus said so lustful intent jesus says is out of bounds for many of us look at that and go that's just too restrictive i mean if we can just be honest a lot of people in our culture diego that's that's a little too far jesus is calling for the end of objectification primarily here of women and we like that language but some of this just if we're honest feels a little bit restrictive previous generations decades ago in america fought for a a sexual revolution part of which was hey there's some boundaries around sexuality that are stifling we need to knock these walls down and let sexuality move beyond these barriers and so a generation before us wanted to push the boundaries of where sex was acceptable and so now we are in a place where we can see there's been a radical change in how sexuality has experienced in america over the last couple years so i want to talk about the proliferation primarily of sexual imagery jesus here is talking about what goes through your eyes into your heart he's talking about images and imagination and there's been a big shift in our culture with how we do that so i want to talk about the proliferation of it and the problems it's called and then the principles that jesus gives us and let me say again as i do this my goal is not to shame anybody at all my goal is just to help us see where we are as a culture and where we want to be and how jesus calls us to live in the world that he made so let's talk about the proliferation of sexual imagery and again i'm using stats from the relationship in america survey along with a few others i'll try to quote as we go along but as of today 84 of 14 to 18 year old males and 57 percent of 14 to 18 year old females have viewed pornography almost all young boys little over half of young girls it has become a common experience of a minor in america to view adults having sex through a screen and depending on when you check the numbers pornographic websites land somewhere around three out of the top 20 websites on the globe i checked in november 2020 and two of the top ten most visited websites on the planet were pornographic websites number one was google was uh the number one website visited around the planet youtube facebook twitter wikipedia baidu which is kind of a chinese china's google yahoo which was surprising number nine was a pornographic site that gets 3.4 billion monthly unique visits and number 10 was an explicitly pornographic site that gets 3.3 billion unique monthly visits if you combine those two that's more people visiting explicitly pornographic websites than are visiting instagram or wikipedia we don't talk about it but this is the world we live in right uh according to covenant eyes higher percentages of subscriptions to porn sites are found in zip codes that are more herbal than rural have higher than average household income have a greater density of young people have a higher proportion of people with undergrad degrees and have a higher measure of social capital like donating blood volunteering or participating in community projects so basically washington d.c and it's hard to estimate the size of the business of pornography where do you draw the lines but i looked several places and it's roughly porn generates 97 billion dollars annually around the globe 12 billion of which comes from the united states so there has been a massive shift in our usage of imagery into our hearts that's what jesus is talking about there's been a massive shift to that one commentator said uh a young man in america today in five minutes can see more naked women than his great grandfather could in his entire lifetime and we are not prepared for this from an evolutionary perspective that was his take that this was a new shift technologically and it's changed the way we've related to each other so again statistically uh i thought it was a helpful way to ask the question the relationships in america survey ask like how do you say like so are you addicted porn people like what no like how do you get a real number of our usage the way they get to it is by asking when's the last time you intentionally looked at pornography on this again nationwide survey when's the last time you intentionally looked at pornography 43 percent of men and 9 of women said this past week the number of women goes up if you lower the age bracket uh to women under 40. the number of men stays roughly the same up into their 60s 24 of american men indicated their most recent use as today or yesterday so 46 of adult men are weekly porn watchers a quarter of them viewed it yesterday or today this thing jesus is talking about lustful images into our imagination has proliferated to a historic degree in your lifetime and again i'm not shaming you because you didn't make this you didn't make your phone you didn't make the technological advance well i don't know maybe some of you did but most of you didn't create this environment that has changed so rapidly on you and i i'm not helping you as a pastor if i just ignore it and tell you live your dreams like i'm trying to help us understand the world that we're in and the reality is this is a proliferation of sexual imagery and there's been a cost to it there's a problem to it uh it's fascinating naomi wolfe is a self-described liberal feminist who criticizes pornography she wrote an article called the porn myth in new york magazine and she said for two decades i've watched young women experience the continual mission creep of how pornography has lowered their sense of their own sexual value and their actual sexual value when i came of age in the 70s it was still pretty cool to be able to offer a young man the actual presence of a naked willing young woman you could get a pretty enthusiastic response enthusiastic response just by showing up well i'm 40 and mine is the last female generation to experience that sense of sexual confidence and security in what we had to offer and she continues the young women who talk to me on campus about the effects of pornography on their intimate lives speak a feeling that they can never measure up that they can never ask for what they want and that if they do not offer what porn offers they cannot expect to hold a guy uh jennifer lawrence many of you know academy award winner um was the victim of a hacking of her phone where they took nude pictures that she had taken of herself and sent her boyfriend and they were spilled out online she was asked in a vanity fair article why did you do that and her response was either your boyfriend's going to look at porn or he's going to look at you that's the assumption she's working in in her mind naomi wolf speaks to this she says does all this sexual imagery in the air mean that sex has been liberated or is it the case that the relationship between the multi-billion dollar porn industry compulsiveness and sexual appetite has become like the relationship between agribusiness processed food super-sized portions and obesity she's pointing out sex has become commodified people have become objects to use rather than people to love and we are poorer because of it sex has become transactional and soulless so it's interesting christopher ryan who's the author of sex at dawn and as a proponent of non-monogamy was asked by vanity fair about the advent of tinder and uh he admits there can be a problem with what he they called sexualized technology and here's what he meant he says it's the same pattern manifested in porn use the aptitude's appetite has always been there but it's been restricted by availability but with new technologies the restrictions are being stripped away and you see people sort of going crazy with it i think the same thing is happening with this unlimited access to sex partners people are gorging and that's why it's not intimate you could call it psychosexual obesity so it's fascinating the two people i quote are not christians do not have any sort of religious or moral tie to restricting their sexuality they're just looking at the culture proponents of a liberal sexual ethic and saying hey but what we're doing is not good it's not been good for women and not been good for relationships and not been good for men and i won't read them all weird and i have to move on but there's dozens of studies that have confirmed that uh regular porn use in a relationship lowers relationship satisfaction lowers relationship quality tends to experience more negative communication with their romantic partners commit more infidelity tend to see monogamy as unrealistic and have lower self-esteem and then here's the crazy thing sociologist samuel perry at the university of oklahoma notes that pornography use predicted subsequent growth in religious doubt and declining importance of religion it's also encouraged uh the earlier sexual debut within a relationship because now rather than sex being the expression of a covenant of love it is an expectation with the possibility of love on the other side it's become an anchor to try to win a relationship rather than the expression of love on the other side the tragedy is statistically now we're seeing an earlier sexual debut in a relationship is not a predictor of a strong relationship but of a weak one and that more relationships that bring sex into it earlier they don't survive and so what you see is that god created sex for bonding it releases hormones that promote bonding and yet when we've pulled it away from persons it's become isolating it's keeping us from relationships with god and with each other and even with ourselves that rather than being in bed with someone who's committed to love us through the highs and lows of life we're in our beds with our phones looking at someone we don't know and it's been painfully isolating for us so before we move back to jesus let me quote naomi wolfe one more time y'all are doing great and she says this she says mostly when i ask about loneliness a deep sad silence descends on the audience of young men and women alike they know they're lonely together even when conjoined and that's imagery is a big part of that loneliness what they don't know is how to get out how to find each other again erotically face to face other cultures know this and i'm not advocating a return to the days of hiding female sexuality but i'm noting that the power in charge of sex are maintained when there's some sacredness to it when it's not on tap all the time in many more traditional cultures it is not prudery that leads them to discourage men from looking at pornography it is rather because these cultures understand male sexuality and what it takes to keep men and women turned on to one another over time to help men in particular too as the old testament puts it rejoice with the wife of thy youth let her breast satisfy thee at all times these cultures urge men not to look at porn because they know that a powerful erotic bond between parents is a key element of a strong family this is a self-professed liberal feminist scholar quoting the old testament sexual ethic favorably i want you to see how wild that is and you feel it today we're in the past the cry was sexual liberty break down the walls let's get it out now the call is we need some restraint and a lot of the me too movement is like hey we broke down some walls that need to be rebuilt not to make sex like a a toxic stifling pond but a river that can flow and give life again because the way it's flowing now has meant less dating less marriage less kids less happiness less health and more loneliness has our liberty brought us freedom no our liberty has brought us bondage and so we need to change and here's the interesting thing as much as technology's advanced for us this is not new uh ancient rome had a much looser sexual ethic and when you have a more loose sexual ethic it tends to favor men because they're more interested in sex statistically and it favors powerful men because they have the money or social standing or influence to to get more sex so whenever you have more a more sexually liberated society it tends to favor powerful men and rome saw that and societies began to lose men women and children begin to lose and so one of the ways christianity grew so much in the ancient rome like why were people ascribing to christianity even though christians were getting murdered it's because they saw the health of their relationship their men and their women are happier because they have this fountain this garden that they sneak away to and come out of this covenant of love this boundary that isn't restrictive but liberating they saw the sexual ethic of christians it's backward weird and desirable and so they were drawn to it and so now today the same rome-ish antics are among us and they produce the harvey weinsteins of the world and so you have people like naomi wolfe going hey maybe the bible was on to something and i think it is and so when jesus says to you everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has committed adultery in his heart i remember when i read that as a kid i'm like man jesus is hard if you look at her it's like you're already committed adultery you're like well you know what man come on and it just felt like so over the top but now i read that so differently it's because jesus looks downstream and sees if you glut the eyes with imagery they fill the imagination and what happens downstream is you lose men lose women lose kids lose a culture loses and secular researchers of the culture are saying hey where we landed isn't good is there another way and there is and so what jesus is presenting us is not a restriction it's a liberty and he says we have to be honest about the principle that our eyes inform the heart job says it i made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully upon a woman how then could i gaze at aversion if i step if my step has turned aside from the way and my heart has gone after my eyes he would acknowledge he deserved judgment what job in the old testament what jesus promotes here is our eyes inform our imagination so what do you feast on with your eyes right imagination is a gift from god buildings architecture organizations a million things are created with human imagination but when we allow that imagination to be filled with distorted imagery we get a distorted imagination it's interesting i talked to a guy who uh was a recovering sex addict and i remember when he was talking to me he was like you know the craziest thing man he said when i started restricting the flow of this stuff into my life he said the weirdest thing happened i got my creativity back he said i didn't realize i lost it he said but i used to write sing play bike hang out with friends i used to do all this stuff that i just wasn't doing really because the hours were being absorbed and he said now man i got myself back there was a liberty in restricting the flow of this content now again i think it's important here to note that jesus used the word lustful intent i think intent matters so what i'm not about to do here is to say so everyone start changing your clothes we're going to have hoods here and long flowing moo moos like i'm not saying all kinds of restrictions externally for all of you because i don't know human beings are built differently it's about intent i remember for me when i was a youth pastor i took very seriously i'm shepherding these kids and so if i looked at a teenage girl i thought someone i meant to shepherd i saw my little sister and like how do i want my little sister to be cared for and then i remember going to dinner with some guys that were my same age and they saw these girls walk by and they were making sexual comments about them and i got super offended i was like how dare you and i realized like we're the same age looking the same people but our intent is totally different and uh that matters so is it wrong for me to look at them no it's about what's happening in your heart that you have to be honest about now i'm not presenting myself as pure i mentioned it earlier pornography entered my life at a young age before i even understood what it was and i've experienced what a lot of you have where as men were designed to respond to naked women very exciting to look at so you're meant to do that and yet the way it was presented divorced from relationship instantly brought shame into my life too and that's the thing i hate about this and the thing i was dreading about this talk is when you talk about sex it's supposed to be fun but when you talk about it now you see this wave of shame hit the room it's not meant to be that way it's not that we don't feel good about it in our own lives and i've lived there and part of the liberty is finding there's liberty and restraint of saying you know what i am going to control what my eyes see because i care about what happens in my heart and how i move my hands and so jesus gives us our practice that restraint equals liberty if your right eye causes you to sin tear it out and throw it away it's better to lose one of your members and your whole body be thrown into hell if your right hand causes you to sin cut it off and throw it away now is he advocating mutilation no there are some people in christian history that thought that origen famously cut his own member off council of nicea said everyone stop doing that it's the wrong interpretation of the passage notice jesus says cut out your right eye if you're gonna lust i love the way john piper said it you can just lust with your left eye right or you can lust with no eyes just kind of euphoric recall inside so he's not actually saying rip your eye out what he's saying is you need to get way more radical on keeping this stuff out of your life sex is not the devil's business the devil's business is distorted sex is good and so for me i realize sex is good i don't need to be ashamed of liking it but i want the distortion of it out of my life it costs too much it costs too much and i don't want to pay that anymore and so i realized man i need to get it out and so what he's saying is a radical mutilation of parts of my life a radical mortification of cutting off of the moments where my eyes have access to material that's affecting my heart so he said that's what i'm going to look at and again he says if here because you have to judge you there's no hard rules here of here's exactly what you have to do and exactly where you can go and you can watch movies but not after midnight because nothing good happens after midnight like i'm not about to do that i'm saying it's about wisdom i had a friend that um going to bars not a problem for him not tempted to overindulge in alcohol didn't struggle with alcoholism not his deal he would hang out with friends at bars no problem i had other friends who were addicted to alcohol that just as soon as they walked into a bar like the the smells and the sights and the sounds just so kick-started all their craving for alcohol they were like i just can't even go in there anymore you're like all right man bars aren't wrong but it's probably not good for you to get there the book atomic habits changes this language a bit that it's the cues outside the kickstart the craving and then we respond to getting a reward and so atomic habits speaks of it so it's palatable to business people right when you see an external cue it kickstarts craving and you want to respond to get a reward that's how we handle food that's how we handle everything and he says one of the easiest ways if you want to put a restriction in your life that brings liberty like if you're snacking too much like i did during covid he says one of the ways to stop the craving is to eliminate the cue get it out of your life get all the sugar out of your house so when you're like oh this is normally when i'm eating cookies but there are no cookies all right maybe i'll read a book or write a poem or take a walk or i don't know and what happens your imagination starts to go a different way so i eliminate the cue to stop the craving because i respond and it gives a reward but it has a cost on the other side that i don't pay anymore see it so jesus says get radical about cutting it out cut it off get it out of your life and you have to be honest about where it happens to you my friend going to bars no problem my other friend had to be honest i can't do it i got to cut that out of my life will it cost me socially yes but it's better to cost me socially than cost me my life so i can't go but that same friend that could go to bars had a real addiction to sexual imagery and he had cut pornography out of his life like got rid of his computer and kind of put all this accountability software and accountability relationships in his life but then he noticed he would show up at bookstores just looking around for books that had sexual imagery of any kind and he realized dude i'm acting like a psycho he's like i can't go to bookstores now most of you have never thought that way about a bookstore you're fine but for him he just knew hey for real i can't go to bookstores i've had friends that there's certain parts of town they can't drive through because that's where they did a lot of things they don't want to do anymore they say as soon as i show up there it's like the queue kicks the craving and i'm on a road and i wake up miles down the road going how did i do this again and it starts with with being aware of my life and what i allow into it and so jesus here says get radical about the reality that restrictions can bring freedom which again we all know this pragmatically right we accept that right away with food right that we restrict ourselves for freedom how is simone biles able to fly through the air like a bird because someone is just measuring all her salt intake and sugar and there's just such a restriction of her diet to liberate her to go places human beings didn't think possible and some of you you limit yourself in what you eat so that you can experience physicality and climb the highest mountain and swim the deepest rivers and all the stuff that you do you know restriction brings freedom and here jesus what he's advocating is not a repressive sexuality but a restriction that leads to freedom he says that i'm trying to bless your life and part of that blessing is restricting you now i can give you a lot of practical examples but again i don't want to because you have to apply it to your own life you got to figure out for yourself what that looks like but let me say this as we close this section i know this isn't fun to talk about i can see it in your face but i think all of you know this is the culture we're in and for me it's interesting donna freitas said it as she did all this research looking at particularly this young generation which is so many of your faces she said the loneliness and isolation and distortion of the ability to even relate to each other she said it's a form of suffering and when she said that i was like that's what it is that's what i hear all the time when i talk to so many of you it's a form of suffering and i want better for you and i know some people go well ben that's just not really realistic in the world today i don't care what the world thinks we're a city on a hill we're meant to be something different in the way we treat us but let me tell you the worst thing you could do with the sermon the worst thing you do to this sermon is for those of you who don't wrestle with pornography like yeah those people are sick 80 of young men are gross you know like that's not helpful it's not helpful way to treat people a lot of us have been really damaged and really hurt by sexuality that was forced on us presented to us before we were ready statistically a lot of you have made a decision willfully and then afterwards wish he hadn't made it and the reality is no one comes into this room pristine we all come in broken and sad and so i don't want to talk like this to be a wave of shame over you because that's not what it was for jesus when he saw people who had devastated their lives in all the myriad of ways we devastate him he did not judge he did not condem when he saw they were sheep that were harassed and helpless and scattered he had compassion he said i hurt with you i suffer with you so he's not trying to bury you in shame he's trying to set you free so nobody needs to walk out of here feeling ashamed today you don't you really don't the grace of god is too good for that and yet let me take you back to the cert beginning of the sermon of the mount how did it start blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven blessed are those who mourn for they'll be comforted that's where it starts that you don't say well i better get it together i better buy some software and get rid of my phone and live like a monk and shave my head so no one will find me attractive like no i'm not saying that what i'm saying is you get to a place where you don't have to act like you get it all together you admit that you're poor and in need that's where the sermon starts i admit i'm spiritually bankrupt and i'm sad about it and when you admit i'm poor in spirit and i mourn that and i'm not coming in pride and acting like i got it together i'm coming with meekness jesus says comfort and the kingdom and blessing comes flowing your way and he knows everything you've done and he loves you more than you could possibly imagine so my hope today is that yeah you would make some changes to cut some things out of your life that need to go but more than that i want you to bring something into your life the unsurpassed beautiful love of god patrick karn says that addiction is an intimacy disorder i can't find relationship so i go to a substance to numb the pain when the numbing stops the pain rises but let the love of god be a balm to your wounds today can we do that and can we be gracious to each other as a church men and women created in the image of god with dignity can we be gracious to each other can we help each other in a broken world that is drowning can we be a city on a hill a lighthouse a refuge to the hurting they're not shaming anyone out the door we're welcoming everyone in if we let you in we'll let them in if you let me in then we're all welcome here we're a mess and god is good you

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Keywords: Passion, Passion City Church, Passion Sermons, Ben, Stuart, Washington D.C., Passion D.C., christian, sixsteps, (six), passion conference, passion, passion city church worship, passion church, passion music, worship, jesus, ben stuart, passion city on the hill, sermon on the mount, lust, sex

Id: y-OZygj70YU

Length: 39min 15sec (2355 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 28 2021