Porn Ruins Love (and Your Soul) | Ben Stuart

[Applause] [Music] suffering okay hi porch all right hard to not walk with a swagger with an intro like that that's nice you gotta incorporate that in dc man it is so great to see all of you and it's just fun to be back in texas i'm from here born raised my wife and i and kids are up in washington d.c uh which is crazy covid just ended there apparently it ended here quite a while ago but um we're still carrying our mass around and such but uh this is fun to see us all together and uh it's such an honor to be here and before i jump into the text we're in tonight we're gonna be in matthew chapter five if you've got a copy of your scriptures and want to read i'll be there if you don't just listen uh but before we get to it i just want to say um you know i know this series hot takes this is not a hot take this is just a fact uh and that is that uh david uh marvin is a phenomenal leader and watching him lead this has been inspiring to me yeah you can let's keep going because he's done an amazing job of leading this ministry and um the fact that cities all over the us are taking their cues from you is something that's uh special it's special brother it's an honor to be here and uh so grateful to see all your faces so all right with that said let me read a passage about sex and make it weird here we go matthew chapter 5 verse 27 this is jesus speaking by the way it says this you have heard that it was said you shall not commit adultery but i say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart if your right eye calls you to sin tear it out throw it away for it is better for you to lose one of your members than your whole body be thrown into hell and if your right hand causes you to sin cut it off throw it away for it it's better that you lose one of your members and let your whole body go into hell let me pray for us well father thank you for every person here whether they um love you in in worship was the thing they were looking forward to all week or whether they're not sure about any of this and they're just here trying to maybe find some answers i just thank you that we're all here and there's a possibility tonight to to know what our our maker thinks about how we're made and how to best live the life we've been given and so i'm asking for your help god would you open our minds that we would understand what it is you're thinking about and i pray you'd open our hearts that we could feel what you care about and then lord i just pray we could be changed as a result of these few minutes i i feel it tonight i need your grace we do we just ask for your grace god to teach us to help us and i just want to invite you whether this is like a normal thing for you or not if you're up for it maybe take a second here and if you're willing you just pray for a second and ask him if you're up for it you talk to god and say lord please teach me something tonight and then if you would please pray for me that the lord used me and i'd be helpful to you well father we love you and we trust you use this time we pray that in jesus name amen well i fell asleep driving one time uh when i was in high school i was making a long run down to laredo by myself and uh woke up bumping along the side of the road and did what a lot of people do over corrected in a panic spun my truck 180 a miracle that i didn't kill myself or anybody else but uh as i kind of hit reverse and got back into the right direction and had to keep going because i was in the middle of nowhere in texas i realized i need something to keep me awake and the music i brought along is not doing it and so i remembered that a mentor my like as a college kid at the time had had encouraged me to um listen to these sermons he had given me these sermons said hey man you need to listen to these and i remember just thinking that was the strangest thing ever like who listens to a sermon in a car uh but i brought him and then suddenly i thought well you know what i need to stay awake maybe listening to someone talk will help but i got to find something that's going to keep me conscious and so i opened this thing and looked at all these titles and in the middle of it there was a talk entitled sex and i thought that ought to do it and so i put it in and started playing it and the craziest thing happened about midway through it i started crying like like an embarrassing snotty cry and it wasn't because he was shaming me at all there was no finger wagging in the whole thing he was just actually unpacking the book the song of solomon the book of love in the old testament and just painting the picture of what the enjoyment of the gift of sex was meant to be like and i started crying i realized because the image i had been given and the assumptions i'd been given by pornography which was introduced in my life at a fairly young age was such an anemic and distorted view i realized i had such a small view of what sex was meant to be and so i i cried over the loss of a beautiful picture and the possibility of discovering it again and so as i say that i read you the language of jesus from uh the sermon on the mountain i want to get into what jesus is saying about it but before that i want to pick up where david and jd had left off a little bit and talking about the subject to to really just make the point before we get into what jesus is doing which is kind of restricting some expressions of sexuality i want to talk about the reality that i think many of you know maybe some of you don't though but that the scriptures are not prude when they talk about sexuality actually they're more bold-faced than often we are even comfortable talking about in spaces like this uh the book of song of solomon if you've never read it is this book of great love and celebrating sexuality it's fun and sex is meant to be fun you see the guy at the beginning is likened to a gazelle and he's just leaping towards the woman's house very excited all right she's saying let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth she's very excited it gets to their wedding day and you see that he's riding towards her in this luxuriant couch surrounded by soldiers that man she feels protected and she feels provided for and then you show up at the wedding and then the book does not drop off at the door of the bridal chamber it walks you right into it and as you walk into that chamber he begins to compliment her and he starts with her hair and then moves down to her eyes and her nose and her mouth and her neck and he travels down her body and you get into song of solomon 4 i'll just read you some of this this ought to be fun in song solomon 4 5 he says your two breasts are like two fawns twins of a gazelle that graze among the lilies why does he call her breast deer well the idea is you don't run up fast on fawns you're not like hey bones like you there's a gentleness to the entry into their sexuality and he says until the day breathes in the shadows flee i will go away to the mountain of myrrh and the hill of frankincense let me tell you if you were to look at the maps in the back of your bible and try to find in israel the mountains of myrrh and the hills of frankincense you won't find them they don't exist there geographically earlier in the book she says that she kept a little statute of perfume between her breasts so when he says all night long i'm going to the mountains of myrrh he's not talking about a place out of town he's gearing up for good times and as he says it he's talking and he says you are all together beautiful my love there is no flaw in you come with me from lebanon my bride come with me from lebanon depart from the peaks of amana from the peak of sinear and hermond from the dens of the lions from mountains of leopards he said let's get away from from uh a context where you just want to be devoured that's a wild animal let me just use and devour you let's get away from that world let's let's steal away to a secret place that's life-giving for us and as he speaks to he says you have captivated my heart my sister my bride you've captivated my heart with one glance of your eyes and with one jewel of your necklace he calls her sister not because they were biologically related but because they had such a deep connection of friendship and familial love that's now blossoming into erotic love that he calls her in other places a word you could translate best friend she's his friend but as he speaks to her he says your love is much better than wine the fragrance of your oils than any spice your lips dripped nectar my bride honey and milk are under your tongue honey and milk were the only foods back then that didn't require a death and so he's saying this this enjoyment of your body this sexuality has no sorrow added to it there's no death in this place it's just life it's just life he tells her in verse 12 he compares her body her sexuality to a garden he says a garden locked is my sister my bride a spring-locked a fountain sealed your shoots are an orchard of pomegranate with all choice fruits henna and nard nard and saffron calamus and cinnamon with all trees of frankincense myrrhs and aloes with a cheat all chief spices a garden fountain a well of living water and flowing streams from lebanon he compares her body to this garden and then she speaks and says awake oh north wind come o southwind 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 mirror with my spice i hate my honeycomb with my honey i drink my wine and my milk now it's unclear how much time elapsed between those two verses could have been three minutes could have been five it'd been 15 minutes commentators aren't sure but the point is the very next statement is not made by him or her it's made presumably by their friends maybe by god himself but this is inspired scripture i think you could say both the response to this erotic expression is eat friends drink and be drunk with love that's your bible what's the bible's response to sexuality eat drink get drunk with your love the bible's not prude as it speaks to sexuality it's a gift it's a gift that's meant to be enjoyed and yet it's also did you catch it's it's compared to a garden and if you look at the text a garden lot it's it's a it's a walled garden the idea of a garden back then is you would nurture exotic plants and fruits and so it would be wild and exotic and exciting and have fruit that was nourishing and life-giving but then it's also walled off sealed protected secret and so the picture of their sexuality here is that it's pleasure that's protected and in the bible the boundaries pretty clear that god puts around sex all of us incidentally in society put boundaries around sex well most all of us do but boundaries around sex uh the common boundaries in america today are consent and age uh in the bible the boundary is covenant that someone says i want all of you not just your body but but i want all of you i want to know your your thoughts i want your mind i want your emotions i want your heart and i want your body i want our futures and our life and our finances bound together i'm giving all of me and i want all of you and as we commit our entire lives together so our sex together is an expression of this covenant that we've made so the bible kind of blocks sexuality within the boundaries of a covenant of love and within that covenant a promise to care for you you're meant to enjoy it it's meant to be fun proverbs 5 says let your fountain be blessed rejoice in the wife of your youth a lovely deer a graceful dough let her breasts fill you at all times with delight be intoxicated always in her love a man enjoying his wife's breasts is not necessary for procreation like that's not what he's saying there he's saying have fun enjoy it it's a gift but he says earlier should your springs be scattered abroad streams of water in the streets he says enjoy that garden within its protective boundaries don't let it flow out into the streets and i say all that because that was the context is jesus is preaching that people would have about sexuality and jesus kind of picks it up and talks about that in joy but within the confines why let the springs flood the streets so he says in verse 27 of the passage i read in matthew 5 you've heard that it was said you shall not commit adultery he's quoting the seventh of the ten commandments adultery is someone who's married having sex with somebody who they're not married to and he says this is a boundary and incidentally this is a boundary that almost all americans agree with that if you've made a covenant of marriage with somebody you should not take your sexuality outside that covenant there's a nationwide study called relationships in america that conducts a study all across america to talk about the nature of our relationships and in that a phrase was offered up it's permissible for a married person to have sex with someone other than their spouse 10 of men in america in this survey said yes 5 of women said yes so 90 of men in america 95 of women agree with jesus here it is not right for someone who's married to have sex with someone who's not their spouse so i'm not going to belabor that verse because most of america already believes that one we agree with jesus on that one except for roughly 10 of men so look out ladies but jesus is going to do something pretty crazy in the next verse he says you've heard that it's in the ten commandments in verse 28 he says but i say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart he does something there that if you really think about it in the old testament he just takes the seventh of the ten commandments and the tenth of do not covet and put them together so so it's it's not in a sense new but it is an intensification of verse seven he's he's paddling upstream from the act of infidelity and he says you know where we need to cut this stream off is all the way back at images in intent and imagination how what you take in through your eyes affects your heart he says more than action i want to talk about images and intent and imagination that's where jesus puts it what's going on inside your heart right and really what he's doing here is he's creating a very different boundary a much higher one you could say it and maybe modern language is what he's doing is he's calling for the end of objectification of women that's the idea i think we're more comfortable with some of that language but we can say if jesus is saying hey looking at images that are affecting your imagination with lustful intent is out of bounds i think we can acknowledge that's a pretty high bar like that's pretty wild that that sexuality is only meant to be enjoyed within the covenant of marriage is very restrictive and i think if we're honest in the culture today a lot of people might say that's too much that's too restrictive that's too much it wasn't that long ago in america a couple decades ago that there was a great sexual revolution that people said hey these boundaries around sex are too tight we need to kick some of these walls down loosen up a little bit and kind of let the streams flow we got to move it out a little bit right and then as technology caught up in the 80s and the 90s this loosening of sexual boundaries really took off through technology and has created i think today a really different world for you and for me and so what i want to do in the rest of our time is not really talk about sex so much we talk about what jesus is talking about imagery that's affecting our imagination the what we see with our eyes that's affecting our hearts because there's been a shift in the world today particularly for your generation to deal with and so i want to look at the proliferation of sexual imagery the the problems it creates the principle jesus lays out and the practices that he would recommend now as soon as i say that let me say this my goal is not to shame anybody right and that's always the risk when you talk about stuff like this it's like you can see the wave of shame hit people and it's sad because the reason i started where i did is talking about sex is supposed to be fun but as soon as we moved to this i watched the shame hit people's face and i don't like that i don't think we feel good about some of how we're handling this gift from god so let me just tell you my goal here is not to make anybody here feel ashamed or feel bad i just want to kind of give you the lay of the land of where we are as a culture assess it and then show us a different path that jesus offers us that makes sense so let's talk about the proliferation of sexualized imagery uh again mark regnerus who's a research professor at the university of texas of all places can you believe i'm quoting a guy from ut but there it is he uh studies sexuality particularly yours folks and he quotes a lot of information that i'm going to mention here including this relationships in america survey and based on the surveys he looked at currently in america 84 of 14 to 18 year old males and 57 percent of 14 to 18 year old females have viewed pornography so almost all high school age boys in a little over half high school age girls so just to give you again where we are as a society it's now normal for minors to watch adults have sex on a screen uh depending on what number you check the number of explicitly pornographic sites in america consistently rank as some of the most visited websites on the planet depending on when you check it will land often in the top 10. i looked at november of 2020 at the top 10 websites viewed around the globe number one was google that's not surprising number two youtube facebook twitter wikipedia instagram baidu which is china's version of google yahoo which frankly was surprising number nine was an explicitly pornographic website with 3.4 billion unique views per month there's only like six seven billion of us walking around here that's quite a bit and number 10 was a pornographic website that gets 3.3 billion unique monthly visits and so if you combine those last two those two websites alone are visited more than instagram or wikipedia so what i'm talking about here is is a global phenomena there's been a big shift on the planet earth as it relates to sexual imagery all right according to covenant eyes the highest percentage of subscriptions to porn sites are found in zip codes that are more urban 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 meaning they like to donate volunteer and participate in community projects so basically a city like dallas basically this room um if limited to men 18 to 39 years old uh this was a maybe the most helpful statistic it's hard to kind of read who's struggling with pornography if you ask somebody that's kind of a weird question to ask somebody so the way they did it in the surveys asked when's the last time you intentionally looked at an explicitly pornographic image when's the last time you did that uh 46 of men between 18 and 40 uh said this past week uh 16 of women uh between 18 and 39 said the same so within your age bracket 46 percent of men 16 of women said over this past week uh 24 of men in america indicated uh today or yesterday so almost half of american adult men under 40 are weekly viewers of pornography about a quarter of them viewed it yesterday or today one commentator said this way he said men today can see more flesh in five minutes than their great grandfathers could their entire life searching actively for it that there's been a big shift in the culture today now let me say again i'm not trying to shame any of you because here's the deal you didn't make this i don't know maybe some of you did i don't know where you work but based on your age none of you created this environment but the point is it has affected you so this proliferation is new in your day it's not it's it's unlike anything we've ever seen on the planet earth before the same guy who said man you can see more than your grandfather could in five minutes he said and we are not prepared for that in an evolutionary perspective you're not ready for it it's thrown us for a loop so the proliferation is historic and the problems it's created are are fairly acute relationally it's impacted the way we relate to each other and so that's really i want to talk about in the next little segment here's how it's affect the way we relate to each other and everyone i'm going to quote is not a christian doesn't have any kind of religious dog in the fight as they kind of assess what's happening in the culture today naomi wolf as a self-described liberal feminist she says this 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 by just showing up she said well i'm 40 and mine is the last female generation to experience that sense of sexual confidence and security and what we had to offer she said the young women who talk to me on campus about the effect of pornography on their intimate lives speak a feeling that they can never measure up they can never ask for what they want and if they do not offer what porn offers they cannot expect to hold a guy so so one of the impacts of this proliferation of imagery is an effect on the confidence of women in society today whether they view it or not and the ability to feel that they can hold a guy jennifer lawrence you know the academy award winner was victim of hacking you remember uh she had taken nude photos of herself to send to her boyfriend who lived in another town and someone hacked it and put him out online and she was talking to vanity fair about that experience and they asked her why'd you even take those photos in the first place and this is what she said either your boyfriend is going to look at porn or he's gonna look at you that's that's how she views relationship today uh naomi wolf comments this way 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 in obesity she said sex has been commodified we took it out of the bedroom and we gave it to multi-billion dollar corporations and she said so as that's happened it shifted the way we are able to relate to each other uh christopher ryan's guy who uh wrote a book entitled sex at dawn which i'm not recommending and um he's a proponent of non-monogamy but he was asked in an interview with vanity fair about tinder and particularly what what they were asking about were the problems of sexualized technology and uh he says it's the same pattern manifested in porn use he said the appetite's always been there but it had restricted availability with new technologies the restrictions are being stripped away and we see people are sort of going crazy with it i think the same thing that's happening with this unlimited access to sex partners people are gorging that's why it's not intimate you could call it psychosexual obesity that's what he said now again these are people with a liberal sexual ethic so they're not reading a bible they have no like moral constraints because of religious convictions they're just looking at society and saying hey we kick down some boundaries and we're seeing as it spills out it's it's less like nourishment and more like fast food and it's creating an isolation so the idea that you know do whatever sexually as long as it doesn't hurt someone doesn't really hold because the reality is the lustful gaze unrestrained is hurting all of us and uh mark ragnaros i won't go into details now but he quotes a neuroscientist that says you know in the past the porn industry has uh characterized their opposition as is primarily religious he says but the reality is porn addiction harms human bonding and and i won't quote many more stats we got to move on but the reality is uh dozens of studies have confirmed that that this bathing and sexualized images has led to self-reported lower relationship satisfaction lower relationship quality tend to experience more negative communication with a romantic partner feeling less dedicated to the relationship less sexually satisfied more likely to commit infidelity tend to see monogamy as unrealistic and lower self-esteem in the men and women and it's led to earlier sexual debuts in relationships because rather than sex now being the culmination of our love it is now an anchor i throw into a relationship to try to secure the possibility of love so rather than expressing love it's a thing we introduced earlier hoping that love will be on the other side but statistically what we're seeing among your generation is an earlier sexual debut in a relationship is not a good predictor of the survival of a relationship it's actually a good predictor that the relationship won't survive that all this sex has led us away from each other and from god that's one of the craziest things uh samuel perry's a sociologist at the university of oklahoma do they have those there i guess they do good for you oklahoma the parking lot of texas um he says there's a direct so i had to throw a joke in oklahoma you got to laugh sometimes to keep from crying but um he notes a direct correlation between a relationship with sexualized imagery and growth and religious doubt and declining importance of religion then that fascinating thing that god gave us the gift of sex for bonding it releases hormones that create bonding it's meant to reinforce emotional bonding but when we remove it from a relationship with a human and put it into these situations where we're just now using it as a commodity it's actually damaged our ability to connect with each other and it's damaged our ability to connect with god that what he created for bonding is now reinforcing isolation last quote then we'll move on naomi will she says mostly when i'm asked about loneliness a deep sad silence descends on audiences of young men and young women alike they know they're lonely together even when conjoined and this 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 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 sort of sacredness to it when it's not on tap all the time in many more traditional cultures it's not prudery that led them to discourage men from looking at pornography it is rather because those 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 to 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 let me let me just clue you into what you just heard there self-professed non-religious liberal feminist just quoted the old testament sexual ethic favorably she says maybe there was something to this idea of boundary not as a restrictive septic pond but as the banks of a river that allow this to flow in a life-giving way maybe there was something to this maybe what we have here all this liberty has not brought us freedom maybe this liberation of sexuality has led us to bondage and i would argue to you that a lot of the movements you see in the streets now are so different than what you saw back in the 60s now the call is for restraint the metoo movement that people are saying we kick down some boundaries that maybe should go back up now let me just say again it's really different for our generation because of the amount of it that's online but this whole situation is not particularly historically new like in ancient rome there was a much looser sexual ethic men could sleep with whoever i guess anybody could but whenever you have a society with a looser sexual ethic it tends to favor men because they're more interested in sex and powerful wealthy men because they have the influence and money to create situations where they get more sex and so it created a moment where men would exploit women and other men and children for their sex that happened in ancient rome uh it happened still today a looser sexual ethic is how you get a harvey weinstein what's fascinating about ancient rome is man i got really interested in why would romans become christians like if you were a part of ancient rome and wealthy and successful why would you join this fledgling christian movement where you might get killed well this is a neat little club what do you guys do get murdered i'm in like who would join that club and you know one of the most attractive things about the christian community was their sexual ethic the fact that the women seemed happier and the men seemed happier and then and the children and so it was interesting because rome would look at him be like your sexual ethic is backward regressive weird and attractive you just seem happier than us and one of the things that drew people to jesus is what jesus is doing here i'll be honest when i first read this passage when jesus was like i tell you if you even look at a woman leslie you've committed adultery when i was younger i was like come on like that's just so like you already did it you're like she was i didn't oh man like it just felt a little too high but now i realize he isn't being the morality police here he's not measuring the hem of all your dresses like hold on you know like that's not what he's doing he can just see downstream the lustful gaze unrestrained is going to lead you to a place where it's harder to meet each other harder to date harder to get married and harder to enjoy marriage and so jesus sees the damage downstream and says let's cut it off up here he's not saying this because he's prude or rude he's saying it because he loves us oh how he loves us and i see it differently that way now so he warns us and here's the principle he warns us with it man he doesn't start with the bodies he goes back to the intent of their eyes and their imagination what you look at through the eyes affects your heart and he's quoting job there you know job 31 1. job said i made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully at a woman and then he says if my heart goes after my eyes my feet go after a woman may god judge me he understood what i gaze and in my eyes will stir my heart and move my life so what do you entertain with your eyes the book atomic habits talks about this you know maybe in a more kind of business-like language they talk about cues and craving and response and reward that when i see a queue it kickstarts a craving and so i respond to get a reward uh you see this with food this was me all through covet i would walk through the kitchen and be like oh cookie and as soon as i saw it it kicked started craving i want to eat you right and so then i would do it and i'd feel a reward i feel good inside until i gained about 10 coveted pounds and then was like you know what this costs too much i don't want to keep doing this but i realize every time i see a cookie it just starts the cycle it's like cue craving respond and i realized man i got to change the queue and what atomic habits says he says man eliminate the cues from your home and it'll decrease the cravings which happened i told my wife you got to get all these snacks out of the house what are you trying to do to me and so we got him out of the house and what would happen i would feel it sometimes like oh i want a cookie oh there are no cookies oh man i guess i'll read a book write a poem go on a walk i don't know and what happened suddenly my imagination was freed up you see that here's one of the crazy things i had a friend who's a was a sex addict and uh recovering and he said you know what's so wild man is he said when i got this stuff out of my life he said my creativity came back he said i didn't even know i lost it he said but my imagination had been so filled with these images when i cut the images out my imagination kickstarted in some other areas i started writing songs again i started biking again i started going on trips with friends he said it just it unlocked some things that i had lost and he realized man this was costing me things i didn't want to give up and so he made a change because what goes into the eyes affects the heart these images affect your imagination so if you want a pure imagination you got to get a purity to your eyes now again notice here he talks about lustful intent he's talking about your intent here uh the intent of the gazer because our our intent can change right i remember when i was a youth pastor right out of college i had all these young girls in my ministry man when i looked at them i thought uh word association uh people i meant to care for people i meant to help uh my little sister because they looked like my little sister so i just thought of like young women i want to see flourish under god and i remember coming and visiting some buddies up here in dallas and uh my same age and some girls walk by same age and they started making sexual comments about these girls and i got super offended like how dare you then i realized man we're the same age look at the same girls but our intent is really different and that intent matters and so notice he's not necessarily talking to the women in his illustration to make a change this isn't a talk where he was like all right ladies so everyone has to wear moomoos and hoods maybe a good idea he doesn't do that he puts it on the person who's looking and says hey you got to be honest with yourself about your intent and look i'm not trying to present myself as a super holy person like i said i i ran into pornography like many of you at a very young age before i was looking at it and it had that weird effect of being really alluring because looking at naked women is fascinating to men and you're meant to find it to be so but then seeing it divorced from relationship the way that it was also introduced a bunch of shame into my heart and it just did that weird dance where like i'm drawn to it and repulsed by it and i'm repulsed by me and i dislike this proliferation of sexualized imagery because i see it rob people of their hearts so much and so i'm not mad at you if it's something you've struggled with i'm mad at it because it's a distortion sex isn't the devil's game the devil's game is distorted and i don't like that and i don't like the way it steals a lot of the vibrancy and creativity out of a lot of the young people i get to minister to and so i want to see it change and what jesus advocates is this practice of man if your eye calls you to sin he says your right eye if it causes you to sin tear it out and throw it away it's better for you to lose one of your members and your whole body be thrown to hell if your right hand causes you to sin cut off and throw away for it's better for you to lose one of your members and your whole body to go and help the practice he says is restraint can bring liberty restraint can bring liberty if what i see through my eyes is corrupting my imagination and corrupting my action that i will change what i see with my eyes now is he advocating mutilation no uh although some people historically in christianity have read it that way famously origen the great theologian read it that way he understood hand as a euphemism for the male organs so he cut his off uh at the council of nicaea they told everyone stop it don't do that anymore it's a bad call and that was a good decision by religious leadership um because i love the way john piper said it jesus says cut out your right eye is he being literal no because you could just lust with your left eye and if you cut out both eyes you can still lust in your heart he just located the heart as the source of the problem in the earlier verse and so he's being metaphoric here about the reality that hey we have to get a lot more radical with what we allow into our eyes to affect our imagination to affect our actions get radical he's not talking about mutilation he's talking about mortification there's some things that need to die in my life if there's some cues that always kick start this craving i'm eliminating the cue i'm getting it out of my life now again notice he says if because you have to gauge you if your eye caused you to sin then cut it out there may be some places and spaces that you go you know what this is a place that when i get here my eye has a lustful intent i can't do this anymore others of you it may not be an issue you have to be honest with you and how you deal with different challenges and frustrations i've got a friend that going to bars does not bother him he can have a drink with a friend hang out visit there's no temptation to get hammered and black out like it's not his problem but i have another friend that's a recovering alcoholic and he just had to be honest he was like dude as soon as i walk into a bar he's like the sights the sounds the smells he said it just kick-starts this craving that's almost out of control and he said i want to go hang with my friends there and i just realized i just can't do it i just for me i can't go in there and so he had to mutilate himself socially i'm going to cut off a part of me socially to protect my life my other buddy can go there without a problem but the buddy that can go there without a problem had a real issue with uh pornography and so he had to get pretty radical getting a lot of screens out of his house getting rid of computers in there locking up his stuff with accountability software and friendships but then he realized man as i was locking up all my screens i would go to bookstores sometime because i was so like hard up for a sexual image i would like be cruising this bookstore looking for books that might have something like that and i realized man this is nuts i got a problem i just can't go to this bookstore anymore and some of you have never thought that way about a bookstore and i'm sort of sad for even putting it in your mind but he had to be real for him bars fine but no bookstores and you've got to be honest with you there's places where you go hey to be honest all my friends are watching this show i can't watch that show hey i'm following these people online because all my friends do but i've noticed every time i look at that person's instagram i get unhappy and sad and don't like my body or my life well guess what cut your eye out or quit looking at their thing uh mortification i cut it off because that restriction actually brings liberty which we know in theory anyway right i mean all of us know that we we agree with it with food right uh how does simone biles fly through the air like a bird it's because there's some team of trainers behind her meticulously counting out like every grain of salt no no it's too much and her sugar intake and food intake she's had to put so much restriction to her diet to liberate her to do some super human activity in gymnastics and some of you are that way you restrict your diet so you can climb the highest mountain and swim the deepest river and all the stuff that you do so we all know that we agree with this practice jesus is advocating restriction just might bring liberty and he looks sexually at us and says it's the same i'm not trying to hurt you i'm trying to help you trying to save your life this unrestrained boundaryless sexuality has cost us too much this costs us too much he says i don't want you to pay that cost anymore i want it to change now let me close with this uh you know you hear this and i do think some of us should look at his command and say i gotta make some changes i gotta be honest you may be like me where man i just i got rid of my tv at one point which for some people sounded so insane and i'm like man he said cut your eye out get rid of your tv he's like actually fine i like read a bunch of books uh you may need to make some real changes but look if all you do is walk out of here and feel bad about yourself this is not a good sermon and if you make some changes i hope you do that that's also not sufficient see we didn't read it but the way he starts this sermon is not with i'm going to tell you guys how to get your crap together write this down number one cut your eyes off you know like he doesn't start with a list of rules to get you to maybe earn god's approval do you know where he starts the sermon he says blessed are the poor in spirit because there's the kingdom of heaven what does poor in spirit mean means i have spiritual poverty i'm not enough to earn the approval of god i'm not i've fallen short my hands are dirty my eyes have seen things my hands have done things i have been depleted spiritually he says when you admit that you're blessed blessed are those who mourn he says when you realize how far you've gone from the standard you mourn you cry in the car like me he says and when you do that you're blessed because my comfort is coming for you he said blessed are those who are meek that means i'm not proud i'm not puffing up my chest well this is a problem for me i'm not dealing with he said no no no the meek are the ones who will inherit the earth he said i've come here to do something new i'm a king inaugurating a kingdom and the entrance into my kingdom the entrance into the blessing of god the smile of god the love of god that's inexhaustible he says it doesn't come by getting your act together it comes by admitting your need i am poor and i feel sad about it and i'm not proud i need you i need the king to be what i'm not and that's what jesus loves to do he loves to live the perfect life you couldn't and then the bible says the wages of sin is death death's the payment for sin he never sinned he didn't need to die so what he did on that cross is what david said earlier he who knew no sin became sin for you and for me he said i know what you've done and i'm taking all of it and the shame of it the sadness of it every sticky sad isolating lonely thing he said i am driving it like a stake through my heart and i am burying it in the grave and then i rise and i leave it behind and you trust me and you rise and yeah i've got to wait for you to live this good but where does it start jesus was asked what's the work of the father and he said belief and the one he sent you come to jesus his arms are open wide and i promise you he wants to change you from the inside out and then we can be what he says in the sermon a city on the hill shining out to a broken world to some answers being again what the early church was showing the world we don't have a regressive sexual ethic we have a liberating sexual ethic but you have slavery what we have is freedom and so if you're like well ben i don't know if any of this is realistic in the world today we're not supposed to be like the world today we're supposed to be like the kingdom today and the world's a mess but when they see what the king is doing in us ah the porch will be a city on a hill that's a pretty encouraging thought so father we love you we thank you that there's grace today in jesus we thank you that nobody has sinned beyond what your arms can reach it's insulting to suggest that our sin is stronger than your sacrifice so if anybody is tempted to feel that way well he doesn't know what i've done he doesn't know how far i've gone i haven't but i know how mighty jesus is and don't insult him by saying your sin is stronger than he is he can forgive you and it magnifies his grace to forgive you so come to him because his arms are open wide admit i'm poor in spirit i'm needy i'm not happy about that but i'm happy that i'm coming to you with that because you promised me those who mourn and are meek and are poor in spirit they're blessed they're blessed they're blessed and lord jesus would you heal me forgive me bless me anybody want that today the grace of god today i just want to encourage you right in your seat before we clear out of here and go wherever we're going to go let that be a holy space with jesus let this be a moment that maybe you never forget as you deal honestly with him about what he was unafraid to speak of the most intimate part of your life and let him speak healing into it let him speak grace into it let him speak life into it we're yours god we love you we look to you

Channel: The Porch

Views: 32,760

Keywords: the, porch, dallas, watermark, community, church, christian, christianity, ministry, movement, fort, worth, faith, sermon, dating, truth, bible, advice, biblical, counsel, jonathan pokluda, the porch, watermark community church, young adults, fort worth, david marvin, todd wagner, the bible

Id: f910CnzQlsk

Length: 47min 29sec (2849 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 01 2021