Pursuing Sexual Wholeness

[Music] i love these moments all day long been in this room preaching and it really does feel like all of that has been a warm up for this moment right now and there's no gathering that's more important than another but there's an elevated level of expectation especially given what we're about to talk about that you can feel and what gage is saying you can feel it from our team leading you in worship and i right now have made it a point before this one to just let go and go god i've been so careful to try to say the right thing today and at this gathering i just want to with zero fear of man whatsoever be unchained to say what you called me to say so i'm more than prepared to preach to you but all day just felt like i've been tiptoeing around some things that i've been bold to speak into but it's like god was going for this moment right here and right now there needs to be overwhelming clarity and vision for what god has called us to as the remnant so if you're just joining us for the first time you need to know what that word remnant means because you're seeing it on t-shirts you're seeing it on hats you're seeing it all over the place because we want that to become a battle cry for our church but we don't want that to be the name of a sermon series that we did on the sermon on the mount this is so much more than a sermon series this is literally our leadership coming in front of our church and going hey this is who we feel like god has called us to be moving forward for years to come so if you're just checking out acc and you're going i don't know if this is going to be my home church this is a great season to be doing that because we're literally talking about where god's calling us the word remnant means group that remains and in the word of god the remnant of the people of god is always this like small group that's staying faithful to god through prayer and even when the people of god are taken away into exile there's this group that remains and and they're faithful to god and what we've been saying is that we as a church don't want to grow and grow and grow to the point that we start to drown out the remnant of being a praying people and start to cater to masses of new people so last sunday i'm bringing that message we're seven years in as a church last sunday there were over 4 000 people who came to this building which is daunting because for us we're not the church that goes home in high fives and goes so many people came to our thing that's awesome we're nervously reacting to that going gosh i hope they know what they're being called to do as followers of jesus i hope they know this is a narrow path not a wide one i hope they know that the path that we're talking about few find then many end up on paths to destruction and so what we're clarifying in this season is that when jesus preached the sermon on the mount he invited the masses to be a part of the remnant so here's where we're going as a church instead of catering to the masses and becoming the type of church that sort of reacts to the size that we are now and creating all these different programs and organizing with all these different systems which are good by the way you need to do that stuff but the last thing we want to do is drown out the power of the holy spirit and drown out the remnant of the praying people we want it to be normal at our church for you to have a vibrant prayer life we want it to be normal for you to read the bible for yourself and we want spiritual growth as a disciple of jesus to be the main marker of what it means to be someone who is saved by grace through faith in jesus so here's what we're praying and we'll put this on the screen we're praying god transform us from being consumers of jesus's merit to being disciples of jesus way this is what we want to see happen as we walk through the most famous sermon ever preached which by the way was not jesus from a mountain shouting to thousands of people it was jesus seated on a mountain teaching his disciples and inviting thousands of others to listen in and so what that means is we've gotten so good as the church in 2021 at consuming the merit of what jesus accomplished on the cross but we don't accept that hand in hand with what's called the cost of discipleship have you ever noticed that there are people who will give their lives to jesus for eternal fire insurance but never fully accept that the cost is their entire life here and now and the two aren't separate it's not like bonus christianity to actually follow the sermon on the mount it's no jesus accomplished on your behalf what you could never accomplish on your own and when you come to saving faith in him and you get a right relationship with your heavenly father you become a disciple of his ways now his way of life becomes your way of life and he's slowly but surely transforming you from the inside out by the power of the holy spirit it's called sanctification and he's undefeated at it and that's what you're invited into in your relationship with god and so we don't want you to settle for a surface level version of christianity we don't want you to settle for just emotional moments of worship where you apologize for your sins lately we want you to get the real thing we want you to have a transformed life we want god to touch the areas of your life that you've called off limits for too long we want god to touch your career we want him to define your future family we want him to set your family free from generations of sin that have been passed down to you and we're believing by the power of the holy spirit that that is possible when the people of god pray so here we are at the very end of 21 days of prayer the last time we were in a moment like this was in january brad jones from passion city church was here and we had a man at our early service who had a conversation with brad during the sermon you guys remember this a dad in our church talking back and forth with the guy preaching something about brad going to texas a m and this guy went to texas a m and that dad his name is mike power and he had passed away by noon that afternoon no idea happened out of nowhere he actually served on our parking team and he's gone by lunch in the presence of god and so i got to go be with the family that day and then that last gathering if you remember this is the very end of 21 days of prayer that sunday night we saw god do something in this room that seemed like it was something out of the bible i saw people falling out emotional before the lord in droves and but not like moved by a high part of a song or if you believe that jesus is touching your life right now just fall on your face like i mean out of nowhere people just boom submitted to god tears shouts joy pain jesus moved and woke us up to the eternal story that we were invited into and now here we are at the end of another 21 days of prayer and we're walking through the sermon on the mount and we land on this passage and if there's one passage in the bible that i don't want to preach tonight it's this one jesus is going to give us his explicit direction for how we are called to handle our sex lives and when you read it it's going to sound restrictive it's going to sound impossible it's going to sound disconnected from what you really want and it's going to sound like something you actually want to walk away from but i believe it's not an accident that we're in the moment that we're in right now preaching this sermon because i believe there is not one area quite like this one that is stealing the potential of what god could do in and through the next generation like sexual sin i believe within the sound of my voice right now there's a thousand people in this room who this area of your life could make or break your story and for a lot of you it's already breaking you right now it doesn't matter how many times you sing run to the father you know you're gonna run back to porn it doesn't matter how many times that emotional feeling of connectedness to god overwhelms you at a church service you know you and your boyfriend are going too far you've compromised and when you read what jesus teaches about this it is not encouraging it's if anything discouraging and overwhelming and so what i want to do is as i deliver this word i wanted to invite us into a moment where it's not accidental that we're in this together and it's not accidental that we're in this passage but if we let god illuminate what's true from the scriptures i actually believe your story your marriage and your future could be rewritten right here and right now and that is not hype that is not me trying to get you excited about what i'm about to say this is something i have said one time today you can ask the people who have been here four times god is here and he is speaking and he's not speaking because i'm talking loudly he is speaking because our hearts are open to what he says in his word let me give you the title of this sermon just so you know where we're going the title of this sermon is called pursuing sexual wholeness pursuing sexual wholeness so could you look at someone next to you in the eyes and say here we go here we go we are like what am i gonna have to say buckle up y'all it's happening so that is a strange to obscure is it probably a better word way of titling a sermon on sexual sin and sexual intimacy in the context of marriage i grew up in the true love weights generation where every talk about sex was about purity and the idea was that you make a purity commitment in retrospect it wasn't a purity commitment it was a virginity commitment that very few people truly had the intention of fulfilling but it was a cool yellow card that you have to put in your wallet and so i was like sure yeah i'll sign that i'm not gonna have sex until i'm married and then when i become old enough to actually find out what i signed i'm hiding that or throwing that away somewhere that's how it was for most people in the true love wage generation and so the words that we used to motivate the next generation were always purity it was this idea that god calls you to be holy you should not look like the culture around you you should chase purity the people of god are pure and that's true but the motivation was basically god said it you should do it and that did not work for probably 95 of the people receiving the message including me then the other sermons i heard that were a little bit better weren't necessarily about purity they were more about intimacy and so i would hear the statement purity now paves the way to intimacy later and the whole motivation was hey purity is not enough of a motivator intimacy in marriage is the true motivator so you should chase after purity because you'll get intimacy in your marriage and then we had a lot of christians grow up believing that if they just didn't have sex before they were married they were guaranteed a powerful sex life in their marriage if them and their partner did the same thing which is a lie total lie you take two people who have believed that sexual desire is rooted in shame and they've stayed away from it their entire lives just because they're afraid of it and you get them married and send them on their honeymoon and tell them to have sex all the time and watch them try to turn the lights on on an area of life that they've been shutting down their entire life they're so rooted in shame they have no idea how to connect that did not deliver and it definitely did not deliver for me and purity is a great word intimacy is a great word here's here's a word that i love more wholeness because what it means to be whole is to have an undivided heart to be healed to be one to have one purpose one vision for your life for your marriage for your body is so attractive to me i want to be one in mind body and spirit and word and indeed i want to be whole and that's an invitation for any and every season so we do have a lot of college students here tonight but we have multiple different seasons of life and i realize the level of baggage that people are carrying in this area of life and the complications of the way you grew up whether it was in a sexually abusive environment or something where you were taught the wrong things or something where purity culture kind of shamed you into thinking that your desires were actually a bad thing and that discussion is finally happening now or maybe you were in a more liberal household that was like no no you just need to liberate your desires whatever you want all the time i've had people who we've had to get into counseling because that type of environment was equally as abusive in their development and who they became sexually overtime i know we got a lot of baggage in this room we got a lot of seasons of life but the invitation for all of us is wholeness and it's an invitation to experience a gift of god the way he created it so i know right now if i asked you to describe god's intention and design for sex most of you would struggle and the vast majority of us would fall short and if i looked into who's actually experiencing and enjoying god's design for this the numbers would be even lower because at a fundamental level a lot of us have never fully agreed to the fact that god's the designer of sexuality in the first place that throws us off that makes us uncomfortable did you know god is not opposed to pleasure he created it do you know the pleasures of god are actually the things that are supposed to usher you in to glorify god they're not held contrary to what a life glorifying god looks like this is the teaching of a brilliant man named john piper it's called christian hedonism and the idea at the center is this god is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him i love that it means the glorification of jesus in and through your life happens when you experience the pleasures of god he actually wrote a book called the pleasures of god and it will blow your mind if you check it out and the idea is the pleasure i experience in a godly way maximizes the glory of god through my life it's when i settle for pleasures that are less than the way god created them that i circumvent his purpose in and through my life so god created pleasure and god created sex always got to remind our church when god created adam and eve he didn't go for a walk in the garden one day and go oh my goodness what are you guys doing adam get off of her like what what is what is and we picture him like that we picture us us acting on our desires as deviating from the design of god not living in the center of it you got a god who this is his idea this was his intention and what he wants is for human beings made in his image to express themselves sexually in a way that maximizes their personal fulfillment and his glory and through our lives that's what god wants now here's the thing about the devil and what sin does the devil is not creative he never initiates anything on his own all he does is distort things god created perfectly so sex is not the only area he does this you look at the good gifts god gives us like food or medicines or alcohol you could go down the list what the enemy does is he twists a good gift and he goes hey let's take it out of the context god created it for let's overindulge on it make you addicted to it and ruin your life from the inside out and his ultimate goal for all of you and whatever he twists and distorts is suicide and be very careful when you think to yourself i'm not mentally unstable i would never take my own life i'm telling you there is a plan in an evil realm that exists i believe for every single one of us who are in christ to self-destruct and take our own lives i truly believe that and his avenue and pathway for you doing that is that you would take one of the distortions and like poison over time it would ruin your life from the inside out and there's no area quite like sexual sin where he's more blatant about it so he takes something god makes perfectly twists it redistributes it in a cheaper distorted version and it bites like poison the same way the fruit did and that is why there is a massive level of destruction in this room when we have this conversation but i need you to bring that destruction i need you to bring that baggage i need you to bring what you brought or what you did last night or what happened last week in the most secret space of who you are because if we are going to experience everything the holy spirit wants to say in these moments we have got to be open before the lord going okay my rabbi is teaching me this is his way this is how i'm called to walk in this i'm bringing everything about my story and laying it out there for him to transform and i believe he will do it are you ready to look to the word of god if you have your bible hold it up hold it up now hold him up high there is no good way to do a bible drill given the context of our conversation tonight but i promise you over the course of the next few weeks i will make this up to you turn with me to matthew chapter five matthew chapter five let's do it y'all and i know it's serious i know it's heavy but this is so needed that this conversation would happen in church and for so long the church has been afraid to not just take this on and address sin as sin but to also do the opposite and address pleasure as pleasure so over the course of this message some of the content it's not going to get weird but it's going to get interesting some of the faces i've seen today have been oh wow we're saying that and okay yeah he just said it so that's what's happening you got to go with me on this but we got to get it from the context in which it was written from the teacher jesus is preaching a sermon the most famous sermon ever preached and he's unleashing some truths about the law of moses and what he is saying is that the righteousness of the pharisees and the teachers of the law which is external adherence to rules and restrictions he's teaching that that does not equal entrance into the kingdom of heaven and that the laws of moses were external laws that didn't get fully to the heart issue of what is wrong with humanity so he takes the sixth commandment and he says you've heard it said do not murder but you think god just wants you to check the box that you didn't kill anybody no in the kingdom of god god wants to transform you from the inside out and eradicate anger from having a place in your heart and life now he's going to move on from the sixth commandment about murder to the seventh commandment which is about adultery matthew chapter 5 verse 27 if you're there say i'm there you have heard that it was said you shall not commit adultery but i tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart if your right eye causes you to stumble gouge it out and throw it away it is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell and if your right hand causes you to stumble cut it off and throw it away it is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell that's jesus on sexuality and i i get nervous to even read the words because for so many of you all that's doing is confirming what you assumed that god wants to shut down not just the fun that you want to have in this area outside of marriage but even a realistic sense of what it means to be a human being in our day and i just want to caution you if you look at this in the context it was written as jesus taught it there's actually freedom to be found in the limitation so go with me on this verse 27 you've heard that it was said you shall not commit adultery but i tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart what is he saying in saying that he's saying it's not enough to check the box i didn't have sex with anyone who's not my spouse he says what god wants to do on the inside of you is do an internal transformation that deals with what's wrong with your heart what's wrong what's wrong with your heart is that the direction of your eyes will become the intention of your heart if you're not careful so he goes after men and he says hey that look that you give where someone's body causes you to want to lust intently after her so he's not talking about being tempted okay he's not talking about yoga pants right walked by in front of you and you're like thank goodness that was invented because that makes my battle so much easier and no no he's not talking about those moments where you're just like i am so tempted to look again right now it's not the first look it's the second the third and the fourth and more than anything it's the plan to stow away in the rolodex of your mind what you saw for your own enjoyment and pleasure later that's adultery of the heart to hold on to the objectification of a body for the purpose of enjoying it for yourself and leaving every other part of that person out of the equation it's just for you jesus aims this at men and is using an example from real life but i need to say i'm so tired of the purity or sexual intimacy conversation being had in church and it's like we talk to the guys over here and we go men now you know this is our issue and the ladies don't struggle with this only we struggle so let's talk about it let's confess let's get it right and that's such a problem because there's so many ladies in this room who you need to hear it is not weird that you struggle sexually you are not strange and needing to hide because you watch porn regularly you need to know in this moment that you have a safe place to go this is what i'm struggling with right now acc is the safest place in the world for people who are open about their own sexual brokenness who are like i have issues and i'm tempted to hide them away but there's something wrong from within me if that's god's standard your inner world my inner world has a major problem so notice this jesus is not painting an impossible standard going i know you struggle with this and i just want to annoy you and show you you have no place in the kingdom of god he's going i know you struggle with this and the change i want to make on the inside of you is going to be mandated or dealing with it is going to mandate a radical response so he goes if this is what is wrong within you if that's the standard no pun intended we are screwed y'all if the standard is i that has not happened yet if the standard is i have to watch every level of my thought life in inner world and make sure that there is no objectification of another that there is no crossing the bounds of one man one woman for one lifetime that is the context for which sexual intimacy is meant to be celebrated i have an issue that i have to deal with and he wants to get you there and then and then what what's his prescription like a good doctor he gives you a diagnosis and then he gives you a prescription oh if your right hand causes you to sin cut it off and if your eye causes you to sin gouge it out so for the first two weeks of this series we've been talking about how the sermon on the mount is not theoretical jesus actually intends us to obey this stuff begs the question are we going to do this like we are we going to have and we have surgeons in this church like they're going to be up front we're going to play some songs after this and you can just bring your members down like that's what we're going to do and and that's a legit question through church history i don't want to tell you that that's not exactly what jesus means without telling you that there were people who thought that's what jesus meant by this there was a guy in the early church his name was origen and he was like no we got to take what jesus said literally so he cut off his hand gouged out his eye still struggled with lust and he was like man i really thought that's what jesus had in mind but i am still lusting this is a problem so he goes oh maybe i'm supposed to be a little this is true story maybe i'm supposed to be a little more radical so he goes all the way i mean yeah that yeah ouch and then he comes back this is not funny for him but funny for us he comes back and he goes yeah i i did that and i'm still struggling with lust i don't think that's what jesus had in mind and it was like that's a very unfortunate misinterpretation of the scriptures for you sir but unfortunately we can't do anything for you but pray now because you took that radical step i love that john piper said it this way he said if i gouge out my right eye because i lust with it i could just as easily lust with my left jesus is going after the heart with this and he is not advocating for mutilation of bodily members but he is advocating for the mortification of your flesh from the inside out and he is intentionally using an example that makes you go whoa that's jarring that's difficult for me to hear he wants you to go did he just say that and jesus would go yeah i just said that i just said that because you're dealing with an area that does not fight fair so you can't fight this the way you fight every other area of your life you have to fight this with a level of radical intentionality that looks nothing like any other area of your life and in just a few minutes i'm going to give you a playbook for how you are called to fight sexual sin in your own life and it's going to look so different so radical so strange and borderline legalistic to a lot of you but what jesus is trying to get you to see is that the reason why i'm dealing with it like this is because it's that damaging now jesus is aware of how damaging it is but when you read this through the lens of two thousand years of christian history you can tell he thinks it's damaging but what you can't tell because we didn't live in this time is that jesus has a deep appreciation for the enjoyment of sexuality in the context of marriage we don't think of jesus that way at all we see everything that we've encountered from our church history and we go yeah of course this is what jesus is teaching nothing good about it nothing celebratory about it nothing to draw me to it but what you don't realize is two thousand years ago in jewish culture there was this book of the bible that's right in the middle of the old testament and it's called song of songs or song of solomon and it's literally an erotic love poem that involves letters back and forth between a guy and a girl and their friends joining in and cheering them on as they do this they are headed for marriage together and they are talking about their relationship and it is a back and forth account of them detailing what they want to do to each other physically some of y'all have never read the bible you're like i know what i'm reading tonight bible reading plan song of songs that's what we're studying i mean it's explicit it's so explicit that at the time jesus was alive they would not show this to young jewish boys until they were 12 years old that's right in the middle of your bible but the reason why jesus's understanding of a letter like that is different than ours is because in song of solomon there's a progression of the word love and we use the word love for every usage of the word whether it's i love my wife or i love football or food it's like oh my i got the same word and you know in greek there's like six different words for love but in hebrew that the old testament was written in there's three main words and in song of solomon they all build hand in hand the first one is called raya and that means like brotherly affection like friendship think of your best friend on planet earth the person who you would rather go on a trip with than anybody that's raya that's like i love being around him i love being around her we just are there's some kind of chemistry that we have together that it's just right when we're together ahavah is like covenantal commitment deep ferocious faithfulness when the bible talks about how yahweh is a god of love and faithfulness that's ah it's like i would rather be with you and i will commit to be with you on the good days and on the bad days for richer or for poorer sickness and health when we throw that into our marriage vows that's the type of love that's being referred to here it means covenantal commitment i am in this good or bad and then the third love is called it doesn't sound like the other two it's called dode and that one is all about erotic passion it means this is where song of solomon arrives it talks about the friendship and it talks about the deep commitment but then it gets to i want all of you and part of me celebrating my want of all of you is my enjoyment of your body physically and i want that so bad i almost feel like i have to have it right now and in that letter it says do not awaken love until it so desires it says don't awaken that one until it desires and so here's here's the hebrew thought about what sex is sex is the celebration of all three of those worlds meeting in one fire called marriage think multiple logs on one fire you got the friendship you got the deep commitment and you got the physical expression boom that's marriage and what jesus is saying is hey don't pull out the physical objectification of somebody else's body who you have no commitment to who you have no intention of even spending any level of life with you have no friendship to don't use that for yourself because it will kill you he said it'd be better for you to lose part of your body than for your whole body to go to hell what does hell mean that's the word gehenna we talked about that last week it's a place in israel that was considered to be the darkest place on planet earth he's going if you take the physical expression of this and just use it for your own pleasure and take it outside of the boundary that i've placed it in you will destroy yourself you might hear that and go no i won't but if you think of the context of fire fire is awesome when it's kept in the context for which it's supposed to burn a fireplace but you take a fire and you let it burn in the living room it'll take everything from you it's exactly how sexuality is you have everything going against you i'm about to depress everybody in this room look up here you have three things working against you tonight you have church culture that has told you god is not for pleasure and you have a dating culture that goes in the opposite direction of the way life was 2000 years ago and you're on the back end of a sexual revolution that did not plan to have technological innovation take said sexual revolution to new levels of accessibility every single day of your life so i told you about how depressing number one is that you believe god's not for pleasure let me tell you about two and three the second one would be the progression of dating two thousand years ago the level of um or the order of those loves is in the opposite direction of the way we experience them so 13 14 15 years old you would get an arranged marriage set up they would make a commitment before they even knew each other as friends and definitely before they ever slept together however you feel about that of course i don't advocate for that and of course that's super weird to us but for them this is the progression you make the commitment of marriage right when your body is physically ready for you to do that and a lot of that's based on your family and the right fit from whatever tradition or walk of life you come from but you make that commitment and then you grow the friendship and the sexual passion over time in the context of marriage fast-forward 2000 years we go in the opposite direction 99.9 of the relationships in this room my marriage included the first filter of whether or not you want to date that person is sexual attraction that's number one so if i am not physically drawn to your body i'm not interested in you i'm not saying that there aren't times where other things happen but for the most part that's what we're looking for first and foremost does your body draw me to you and then after that what do we do we look for friendship and we go okay it's not enough just that we're physically attracted is there chemistry do we enjoy spending time together and then that's what dating is it's the overtime progression of evaluation where you go are we the right fit physically spiritually emotionally and then at the very end you see how it's in opposite order we make the commitment but culture has pushed that commitment back so much further biologically than when they were getting married 2000 years ago so you see that it's like 15 16 17 years old and now we made a joke earlier about oh people get married so early in auburn but if you compare it to back then it was it's actually a lot later and what we've done is culturally we've said hey he's got to have his career figured out we've got to be graduated from college we got to be out of debt and the ring's got to be big enough to impress your friends which can we just stop with that like however impressive the ring is we we know your parents bought it like none of us none of us are wow you did that for her it's like no you go to auburn out of state clearly your dad has money like what are we talking about what are we doing guys um come on i will i will and then it's uh it's just so much more about the wrong things and i'm not saying you don't need to be prayed up you do but in the right context marriage needs to be something that we go okay like even if we're not ready on every level in the world's eyes if you've got that spiritual maturity figured out you know who you are in christ when the time is right the time is right and so here i'm just trying to paint a picture of how depressing it is to be you tonight you have i think i'm so glad i came um church culture painting a picture of a jesus who's not for your pleasure dating culture pushing marriage further and further back in the opposite direction so if you're already super sexually attracted to the person who you have a friendship with of course you want to have sex with them of course you walk around all the time going when are we actually going to make this commitment because my body's ready your body's right this is why so many people get off of god's timetable just so we're clear i'm not advocating for experiencing sexual intimacy with someone who you're not married to i'm just painting a picture of how that makes this road so much more difficult and then for a lot of you who actually take jesus seriously like me and my wife did we put our physical relationship on hold until we got married and then getting married was a whole nother battle of re-figuring out okay so we just like stopped that and we probably should have been doing that all along because we knew i'm in this is the one for me but we couldn't do it because he's got to graduate figure out his life and we got to do all the things that i talked about before so you got that working against you and then the third thing you have working against you the sexual revolution and technological innovation in the 60s and 70s our culture did a shift and it said hey stop pressing down sexual desire liberate it be you be who you are sleep with who you want to sleep with marry who you want to marry divorce who you want to divorce have kids with who you want to have kids with watch what you want to watch and watch as our sexual ethic plummeted technological innovation skyrocketed so we got movies we got music we got websites we got computers in the palm of our hands that statistics say the guys in this room who is probably somewhere around 96 97 percent have some type of an issue with pornography the guys in this room who watch porn in five minutes you will see more sexually explicit images than your grandfather or great grand and great grandfather saw in their lifetimes combined in five minutes you'll see that and your brain is not ready for that and we've got females in the room who are struggling with the same thing many of them falling into the same addictions that guys are into but you add on to that that females are a lot more motivated by the feeling of being wanted of being desired of being beautiful so what they have is they have a knowledge of the fact that the guys are watching that they're comparing themselves to porn stars and models who are doctored to the nth degree and they're getting devices at 12 13 years old and they can compare themselves to not only the impossible standard but to people who are all around them in everyday life and you look at what that has done and i don't have to keep talking right now because i'm looking at a group going yeah we know we're in it i could give you a full sermon worth of statistics right now on divorce on sexual abuse on addiction to pornography things that are unwanted anxiety and depression related to sexual issues i could spend the whole sermon unleashing these and all it would do is throw you further and further into a state of depression tonight because you would go this is ridiculous this is where we are right now and then enter jesus the sermon on the mount if you commit adultery in your heart you are tainted and you are hell bound based on the doctrine of the kingdom of god but thank god that's not the message of the sermon and thank god that's not the first thing he said in this sermon you guys remember how the sermon on the mount started blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven who did jesus come to give the kingdom to people who are aware of their own spiritual bankruptcy and i would add on to that people who are aware of their own sexual bankruptcy so if you're here tonight and this entire sermon is one big depressing reminder of how short you fall of god's standard if it's one big reminder of how much baggage you're carrying welcome to the club but jesus says hey the kingdom is actually for you and if you're poor in spirit what's the next beatitude blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted you mourn your sin you don't throw it away like it's nothing you go through the progression what ends up happening in the beatitudes blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they will be filled blessed are the pure in heart for they will see god only jesus can take you from spiritual poverty to sexual purity only jesus can meet you in the state that you're in right now with all of this stuff weighing against you and go i got something new i got something different i got something better and if you let me i will totally and completely transform your life and i don't preach that as someone who is ignorant of what i'm talking about i am the representation of the fact that he's able you're hearing this sermon from a physical body who did the opposite of what jesus says to do i didn't listen and i don't tell you that tonight to go hey you can get away with doing your own thing for a while if you just come back to jesus in the right time i tell you that that would be a foolish way of interpreting this i tell you this to go there is a level of transformation that is possible for you i would not discount the furthest person away from god tonight i don't care if you slept with a guy you don't even know last night don't care if you've been watching porn for so long you can't have a conversation with a female who's attractive for longer than three seconds before in your mind you are sleeping with her in your mind which is way more the guys in this room that would make some of y'all comfortable it's all of us in this but when jesus gets a hold of you things change but they don't change because you sang a song and had a moment in church they change what's the whole message of the sermon on the mount because you start practicing what jesus calls you to practice so for the remainder of this sermon i got three practices for sexual wholeness and i believe if you consistently do these things everything will change you can't change you will your marriage will be changed you'll be like me waking up today to a picture on the wall of my house looking at my two daughters and looking at my wife and going you got to be kidding me he is that good it is possible i talked to so many guys today who just by looking in their eyes they're going it's it's not possible for me i'm too far gone and i'm going look at me look right here you see these eyes see these eyes they've seen what your eyes have seen and i'm telling you right here right now standing as the man of god that god calls me to be not perfect not completed it's possible for you and i could give 15 practices but these three are the most central especially given the age group that is the predominant group that's in this room tonight so can you all handle a few more minutes of this i know this is the most intense sermon you've ever heard in your life look at the person next to you say we made it this far we might as well keep going we made it this far all right three practices number one practice limitation for the sake of freedom practice limitation for the sake of freedom so what are the matthew verses about that are saying cut off your hand gouge out your eye they're about radically fighting and combating sexual sin with an attitude that accepts no compromise because sexual sin is built different this is not something you can fight if you fight it it will beat you this is something that the bible actually calls you to flee here's what paul says in first corinthians chapter six it says flee from sexual immorality all other sins a person commits are outside the body but whoever sins sexually sins against their own body do you not know that your bodies are temples of the holy spirit who is in you whom you have received from god you are not your own you are bought at a price therefore honor god with your bodies flee from what sexual immorality that's the greek word porneia it's where we get pornography porneia means any sexual action that is indulged outside of the context of marriage marriage defined by god not by culture which is one man one woman for one lifetime now i just defined porneia because that's what it means you live in a culture where you can look up pastors who will tell you that that's not what porneia means i don't know any other way to say it other than that they're lying to you like we're having this conversation in culture that deals with relativism in a way that denies objective truth so it's like my bible's black and when are you going it's not black to me it's offensive to me you would call that black i'm so sorry that it dude it's black like it's like i don't i don't know any other way to say it other than don't be mad at me saying that that's black don't be mad at me defying porneia as what it actually means in the bible and paul says what does he say fight it no he says that in other places about other sins he says don't fight this one you'll lose you run fast that word flee means like to to pick up your garment and take off like go it's actually reaching back i can't believe i forgot about this all day long it's reaching back to the story of joseph he leaves his garment behind and he ends up getting arrested for it but he's like he's like i'm out part of his wife coming after me i just need to get out of here but when paul talks about fleeing he's going hey the key to fleeing is not ending up in a moment of temptation and then going okay i gotta run so some of you guys are gonna hold each other accountable like when you're in there in her in her apartment like where you're just gonna you're gonna get tempted and i want you i don't care if you have to jump from the balcony you're gonna jump and i'll come pick you up like we try to make hero stories of fighting our sin and go you know what if you're in that moment and you're in your room and you're tempted you got your computer you got your iphone like you just need to run we just need to run we need to make it a habit to run here paul's going no don't do that because if you if that's your plan you've already lost you need to flee before the temptation you need to create structures of limitation in your life that keep the desire in certain confines it's good for a river to have banks that limit its power and it is good for you even when it's radical to go okay i'm going to flee sexual immorality because all other sins a person commits are outside the body but whoever sins sexually sins against their own body what does that mean what does paul mean by hey any sin you commit outside of you is external but there's one that's internal and it's sexual sin i've always been confused by the meaning of that here's what it means it's got a biological meaning attached to it because when god created sexuality he wired it so strongly into the brains of men and women that it has an equally as powerful capacity to enslave you outside of the context he created it for this might be a little too mature of a conversation for some of you but i'm hoping y'all can stick with me what was god's design for sexuality his design one woman one man one lifetime together what happens they have a sexual experience together where in god's mind what he dreamed of is that this chemical would be released when a man and woman and woman both have an orgasm and that chemical is called oxytocin and what that chemical does is it literally tells your whole body like a drug this is what you want and the woman is bound to the man the man is bound to the woman it's like a magnetic pull of when we get the opportunity we are doing that again because that's what we are made for well the oxytocin release happens similarly to the way dopamine is released in the brain of a drug addict by the way dopamine is what is has you addicted to your phone as well you're similar to a heroin addict and so am i because that notification just fires dopamine and it creates pathways in your brain and when you have neural pathways in your brain those pathways want to be traveled down so here's what happens when you sin sexually oxytocin is released in your brain when you masturbate to pornography when you all go too far physically when you and what you do is you end up attaching an oxytocin release to a screen to individuals who are all over the place and so over time what happens your soul becomes divided you lose that wholesomeness that god created you with and you become divided all over the place now when i was growing up i heard it said if you have sex with all these people your soul gets split in all these different directions and then you get married and then you have nothing to give that person that's a bad way of teaching it what really happens is your soul gets split so many times that you become numb to god's design for sexual pleasure some of y'all are scared to death of how addicted you've become because you know it takes so much more to even arouse you than it did 10 years ago and you're going how am i ever going to get married this is going and there are legitimately scores of people within the sound of my voice who are thinking that as i preach this because you've attached that oxytocin release and what's happened over time is it's lost its effect so i've had people tell me yeah i felt really ashamed the first time i slept with somebody but now that i've done it 10 20 30 40 50 time it just it doesn't even matter anymore like it's just fun and i don't feel anything and i go oh god the fact that you don't feel anything is the ultimate warning sign that you have hardened your heart to the holy spirit the fact that you don't feel anything is the effect of splitting it that many different ways and then you try to enter into a marriage and you're going to be bound to one woman ladies you're gonna be bound to one guy and that's the habit that you've created with your brain and paul's going don't openly sin sexually because you don't know this but you are screwing up your brain in a way that you can't get it back like you will mess yourself up your brain will go to levels that you'll go i i don't even know how to get this under control anymore i can't even that's where a lot of us are right now and what god would do is he would say okay how are we transformed romans 12 by the renewing of our minds scripture says that we have the mind of christ god can give you a new mind but that progression begins with a radical commitment to walking in a new sexual ethic and so i promise this is the longest point of the three but fleeing sexual immorality is all about knowing that being freaked out by that and creating safeguards not because you're fearful but because you know what god's calling you to so here's the first call when i say limitation that leads to freedom what does it look like for you to put limits on your sexual desire so that you don't completely mess this up what does it look like to to talk to your friends and go hey we're not going to decide once we get back to the room if we're going to go too far tonight we're going to tell our friends hey by this time we should both be home in separate beds and you need to text us just real quick and make sure that happens i know that feels like legalism that feels like i don't need a mom i don't need a dad and i'm saying yes you do because your desires will enslave you if you're enslaved to pornography the road to freedom looks like heavy limitation we have a group called conquer and i would highly encourage anybody who's in that place to go through conquer series but one of the things you'll learn is that you got to get ruthless with your own limitations so before gage was here i was the lead pastor of acc but i was also the college pastor and i was the uh i don't know if it was called spiritual advisor for one of the fraternities on campus i'm not going to say which one but um but i would meet with these guys and these guys came to me one day it's like right after i moved to auburn and they were like we're so tired of it so tired of porn consuming my whole life i know it's going to ruin my future marriage and we've decided it was like six guys they're like we've decided we're not letting this happen so you you got to tell us how do we get free so i was like okay here's what me and my friends use we use this internet software called covenant eyes and what it does is it basically sends a report of everything you look at on your devices to your accountability partners and they can go through and like check in on you and and then they'll know and they're like great we're getting covenant eyes then we met again the next month and they're like okay we figured out a way around covenant eyes because if you download another browser it doesn't register with covenant eyes so we're still look we want to get clean but like we're still looking at porn so what do we do so then one of them said okay what if we gave our password that we put in to download new apps to each other and like what if you set my password and i set yours and everybody doesn't know their password so if you want to download a new app you have to go to one of the guys so they were like yes and then that was working and then we met the next month and one guy was like such a good plan but he goes this is hilarious he goes i got tempted one night and he looks at one of the other guys and he goes i figured out if i could guess the password that would be your password for my phone and i slipped up again but so i need you to put in a new password and and like they're doing everything they can to make sure that they get victory in this area that's the level of fight that we're talking about here not because we're afraid but because we recognize what's at stake and if we're going to call ourselves the remnant this is the area that we have to be the most radical about if we're going to go we are the remnant of followers of jesus who take the word of god seriously sexuality is not one area where that has to be clear that is the area this is the battleground for your generation i did a sermon series that you've probably heard about called grace truth 2020. we were coming into 2020 and i was like god has a vision for the 20s and it wasn't coronavirus in my mind at the time but i said three things are going to define the next decade number one is sexuality number two is politics and racism and number three is anxiety and depression so we're going to talk about each one and it's been amazing to me to watch how those themes have actually carried out but the sexuality one is the one that i think will define the remnant of god so i'm calling you practice limitation for the sake of freedom number two and i promise this one's a lot faster practice vulnerability for the sake of intimacy by the way is this helpful is this like is this like we're tuned in and god's doing something okay because i feel like for people the lights are just coming on spiritually right now practice vulnerability for the sake of intimacy so sexual wholeness demands that this area come out of the dark and i aimed this one today specifically at married couples because no one tells you this but getting married is not the end of your battle sexually it's the beginning of a new one and it's a fight for intimacy with one person so remember all those issues i talked about earlier here's what i'm witnessing happening as people get married people are coming out of this church they're getting married which is awesome but then immediately after going on their honeymoon they're hitting a wall sexually and they're going wait wait wait wait we weren't ready for this level of attack against our connection to one another we didn't know that you don't like go on your honeymoon and have everything go right and fireworks every single time and this is amazing this is going to work out and we're going to just have sex all the time it's great and this what they start to do is they start to pull back and they start to not talk about it and put this area of their life over in a corner and many couples go through decades without talking about it without being vulnerable and have a really weak sex life and it's the reason why as they get older once their kids move away there's no heat there's no relationship being cultivated just because they were afraid to actually have a conversation the whole time so when you get married i need the most vulnerable consistent conversation you have with your spouse to be about your sex life and i'm only telling you this because if i could go back 10 years ago this is what i wish someone would have told me in fact you all know i officiate quite a few weddings and we're gonna have to bring that down soon because it's like every weekend somebody's getting married which is good it means god's purposes are happening in this church but i always meet with the groom and the bride right before and we don't do full premarital counseling because i think you need to get premarital counseling from a couple that's old enough to actually raise kids and can tell you hey this works because we're like figuring it out as we go but i always i always tell the bride in the groom do not go on your honeymoon come home and stop talking about sex you need to be honest about the connection you have with each other you need to be honest about your daily rhythms you need to be honest about how often it is working for each one of you you need to talk about ways that you can better serve one another because one of the things i didn't know about sexuality is that the most enjoyable part of your sexuality is the pleasure that the other person finds in you god created it as this beautiful picture of self-sacrifice for the sake of pleasure it's awesome and so for me courtney and i got married and no one told us this stuff we thought if we make it to our wedding without having sex everything will go great guess what courtney and i made it to our wedding without having sex and everything did not go great we're super attracted to each other and the honeymoon was great and year one was great but we're going you know what we got to talk about this and we got to have a conversation about all these things that we want to hide off in the corner and you know what happened over time the more we talked about it the better it got and the better it got the more we wanted more of it and now here we are 10 years in i'm sitting across the table from another couple in our church and they're they've been married for like 20 25 years and i was like man i'm just trying to help couples who are getting married because nobody talks about how you have to keep this conversation open but i was like i'm just being honest with you like i would have thought the best sex of mine in courtney's life would have happened right when we got married but i was like am i crazy that 10 years in it's like the best it's ever been right now and i go you know i don't want to be that pastor who's like ugh i have sex all the time like i'm not that guy all right i'm not courtney was at the first service today and i said it's the best it's ever been and i like looked at the corner of my house like you better be nodding over there a woman cause if only one of us thinks that this is a problem but i was telling this guy i was telling this couple no lie like so good and they looked at me and they were like that is so encouraging to hear because they see that in the younger generation as well and the guy kind of smiles at me and he goes as excited as you are about 10 years in here's the good news so much better at 20. and i was like yo i know this is uncomfortable but this is what the church should be if we're going to be the remnant intimacy must burn brighter than immorality intimacy must burn brighter your immorality is burning pretty bright and it looks like the world is having all the fun doing whatever they want all the time and they're going you're boring you've got this shoved into the corner of your life that you can't talk about it and i'm ready for the church to rise up of married couples who are going this is awesome and no it's not easy but we're experiencing this the way god created it and we're not going to lose our kids over this we're not going to lose our marriage over this we're not going to lose our calling over this we are actually going to experience the intimacy that god created us for with no fear of rejection with no fear of regret with no slavery it holds us back and so if you're here tonight and you're looking toward the future i want this for you i want this for our church and i believe god has laid it in our lap for right now here's a way to remember point number two god intends sexual intimacy to sanctify you sin intends sexual immorality to destroy you this is where the enemy gets you he takes what god created so beautiful so awesome to be a part of you becoming more like jesus and he goes let me just twist that just slightly and i want to destroy you completely so i told y'all all night i am not the person to be preaching this sermon how in the world has god gotten me to this place i'm 32 years old turned 33 on wednesday so jesus's age and this real secret the real secret is in point number three i practiced one and two and saw god do something great but number three is the one that you got to have and it's this practice confession for the sake of healing practice confession for the sake of healing james chapter 5 says confess your sins to one another that you may be healed it's powerful to confess your sins to god but here's the problem with just doing that as long as it's just you and god there's no true mandate to be changed from the inside out i had a best friend when i was 13 years old we came to know jesus together he's actually the pastor of a church in woodstock georgia and we have been as honest and open as we possibly can about our sexual struggles and i noticed that god started freeing me from things that had me bound the more open i became in the context of confession to another person so we like lay it out there and when we have accountability it's not yeah i struggle to have my quiet time it's like no this happened and this thought came up and did you know what we do after we confess we ask the other person hey that's great that you just told me that what did you just lie to me about or what did you just leave out that's real accountability and the most powerful part about it is not getting beat up because of what you did wrong it's having another person look you in the eyes and see all of you and go son your sins are forgiven him saying to me seeing all that see it's one thing for you to be impressed by the fact that i yell and wave my bible around but for me to have a friend who sees all of that and goes hey i still believe you're an incredible man of god and you're a great husband and you're a great dad you are a broken individual who's being healed over time by a loving patient god do not believe what the enemy is saying over you and some of you you're not bound because of your issue you're bound because your issue's in the dark and when you get things out of the dark you will notice that they become a lot lighter once they get in the light you get something exposed in the light and god goes hey that thing that's been pushing you around you can actually push it around because once it's exposed he can really deal with it but you need people in your life who you bear all with and who you go it might be one person this is who i am and this is what i've done and god can heal you psalm chapter 51 is david's confession to god of what he did when he slept with a woman named bathsheba i want to do a whole sermon series about psalm 51 because it's so powerful if you don't know this israel's greatest king was tempted one night when he was on the roof of his palace and he saw a woman bathing he should have been at war his problem was that he was in the wrong place first and foremost sleeps with her gets her pregnant needs to cover it up because her husband is away at war where he should have been he has him killed to cover that up and then the baby gets lost because of their sin and as all of this is happening it's all in secret and it's all unknown until he has a friend who comes to him and says we got to talk about this so when you read psalm 51 and you read the top of it it says when david went to lay with bathsheba [Music] then it says when nathan the prophet came you could say called david to confession but really he came and said i'm going to snatch you from the fire because i love you that much this is not a battle that you can win alone you have to have people around you who see it all and who are in it with you and some of you the best step you can take tonight is not just to confess your sins to god as we sing some songs which we're going to do is to leave here tonight and go to dinner with somebody and go i've never told anybody this but dot dot dot fill in the blank with whatever you're carrying right now because the goal in all of this i can't stress this enough look up here i know i talked long but this is such an important conversation tonight the goal of all of this is not just that you have a great sex life when you're married i hope you do but at the end of the day that's not that big of a deal i know to most people saying that would be like whoa tonight is not about hey don't you want a great sex life when you're married tonight is about don't you want more of jesus and are you tired of settling for less than the life he died and rose for you to live okay then it's time to get some things out in the open and what did david say in psalm 51 create in me a clean heart o god and renew a steadfast spirit to sustain me here's the prayer as we sing the prayer is god whatever it takes make me whole from the inside out i want to be whole right now you put your notes away let's stand up all over this room let's be faithful to just let god speak in this moment i'm trusting god to give me specific words for you as i pray and then we're going to respond like the people of god who have been redeemed for much you can bow your head all over this room god give me the words right now please holy spirit give me the words right now to say [Music] in jesus name to the girl in the room who's never told anyone about her pornography addiction you're not alone it's okay god knows about it he's not intimidated by it you can come out of hiding tonight you can come out to the guy in the room who's so scared of letting himself feel something right now because he knows he's not going to stop he wants to he doesn't want to be sneaking around his wife one day he doesn't want to be letting his kids down one day but he just he knows this noose is on him he can feel the enemy pulling on it right now going don't you dare try to feel something in this moment don't you dare try to make this your message this is somebody else's do not listen to that guy just pray in the name of jesus that you would shut that voice up right now you would tell him he's your son you'd throw a robe on him and you'd remind him of his identity that you would remind him that you ran to him before he ran to you you called him son when he would have been fined just being a slave in your house [Music] god i pray for the future marriages of this room god that they would be a beacon of light in a culture that looks at the church and rolls their eyes at our irrelevance at our boredom god will we radiate with the joy that comes from having intimacy with you and intimacy with our spouses god would you set our lives on a brand new trajectory right now we confess our sins we admit right now that our hearts have been tainted and what can wash away our sin what can make us whole again nothing but the blood of jesus so we claim the blood of jesus over the door frame of every heart in this room we ask you by your power to set them free tonight this is your moment god holy spirit say what you want to say in jesus name amen

Channel: Auburn Community Church

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Keywords: church, church online, auburn, jesus, God, sermon

Id: BZ1IwTsqUfU

Length: 67min 15sec (4035 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 30 2021