"Sanctity in a Sex-Saturated Society"
Sermon Transcript for March 19, 2000
(7th Commandment: Sermon Series on the Ten Commandments)
By Rev. Mike Beck
Scripture Reading: Exodus 20:1-17
Let’s pray together: " Lord thank you for being our Savior. Thank you for being our Healer in many areas of our lives. Thank you for being a Friend that is above all earthly friends. As friends, speak to us through these lips of clay, a word of guidance, a word of forgiveness, a word of hope, as we break the bread of life together. In Christ’s name, Amen."
God has granted to us many good gifts. Two of those gifts are interwoven within the subject of the message today. One of those gifts is the gift of marriage. In the creation account, God saw that it is not good for Man to live alone. And marriage, therefore, became God’s design where two persons could share in commitment together the joys and the struggles of life. The other is the gift of our sexuality. Friends, our sexuality is something good not something dirty or shameful. Within the gift of our sexuality is tremendous potential for pleasure and intimacy with our marriage partner. These two gifts of God bring great joy when used according to God’s design. However, they can be the source of tremendous heartache and grief and pain when God’s design for their use is violated.
At the risk of being overly simplistic, let me suggest that the Bible teaches this as God’s plan for our sexuality.
1. The building of relationships between a man and a women that contain mutual love and respect.
2. The sealing of that relationship in the covenant of marriage.
3. Then sexual relations in a context of faithfulness and fidelity.
Dating, engagement, marriage, sexual relations and babies in that order! And it seems to me the order is important. But you don’t have to be very bright to realize that all too many persons are not following God’s plan and are reaping all kinds of negative consequences because of it.
We live in a society that is obsessed with sex to a degree probably never seen before. Those of you who’ve used the Internet know what a search engine is. A search engine is where you type in a word which will lead you to all kinds of information. Do you know what the most typed in word on the Internet search engines is? Three letters - S-E-X. But you don’t have to use the Internet to be aware of the misuse of God’s gift. All you have to do is take your grocery cart through the checkout line at the supermarket and you will see that sex is constantly before you used to sell everything. On TV and in the movies we have paraded before us an endless stream polluted with one night stands, sex-for-hire, unfaithfulness and adultery. Marriage, chastity, self-controlled are delighted and dismissed as relics of a free and enlightened age.
Now it’s true sexual sin has always existed. But what’s happening in our age is we find a logically presented philosophy of life that for most what previous generations called immorality. Secular humanist would have us believe that we now live in a liberated, enlightened age. But as I look around me at the world, as I...they say if you’re going to be an effective pastor to new generations, you’d better turn in MTV at least one or two hours each week to know what’s going on. But I want to tell you, as I turn that on I wonder if our behavior today isn’t a whole lot more like the apes from which the evolutionist would say we evolved.
When I counsel couples getting married I have to say to them, "A large percentage of the society around you will say most couples are unfaithful in their relationship." That’s what the culture would say; it’s no big deal. And I try to remind them that’s not what you’re promising when you take those sacred vows. So it’s within that time of society that we are called to live out God’s plan concerning sex and marriage.
Let me interject a couple of personal notes, especially for the sake of our young people. I want you to know that it is possible for you to follow God’s plan. Mickey and I dated for five and a half years before we were married. And young people, to use the words of a bumper sticker that I saw recently, virgin is not a dirty word. Either for young women or young men. Was it easy for us to live by that high standard for five and a half years dating? Heavens, no! But I want you to know it’s possible; it is possible. And the same thing holds true within marriage. On May 29th Mickey and I will celebrate our 30th Anniversary. Have we had our difficult times? Absolutely. Every marriage has its difficult times. Were there temptations to unfaithfulness along the way? Without question. But we, along with dozens of couples hearing my voice today, have been faithful to our marriage vows that dealt with that Seventh Commandment given so long ago which says, "You shall not commit adultery."
Now, this is a hard message to keep on track for a couple of different reasons. Number one, we have a tendency to elevate sexual sin to a higher plane than the areas covered in the other commandments. That’s unbiblical. Sexual sin is not the Red-Letter sin up here higher than all the others. The Bible doesn’t make that distinction. One could pile on plenty of guilt in a message of this type and throw grace out the window. And I will try very hard not to do that.
The second problem is the struggle to distinguish what’s being talked about in the Seventh Commandment, which is adultery within the confines of a marriage relationship, and another word that the Bible uses, fornication, which is translated as sexual immorality. Now, the Bible has a great deal to say about sexual immorality. That’s a broad point. But the Seventh Commandment is more narrow. It’s talking about adultery.
And so today I will try to speak to that specific issue and therefore I am talking to couples who are married or those persons who will someday be married. Why this command? Now, you don’t have to read very far of the Old Testament to realize it’s a different world than the one we live in today. In the Old Testament the Israelites tolerated polygamy. Now I could never understand how you could afford to have more than one wife. But in the Old Testament days that’s how it was practiced. And in a male dominated society, which is what the Old Testament was, in some ways they took a very lenient view on prostitution. But on this matter of adultery, they were absolute.
Why? I think the answer has a great deal to do with how God put us together and the high place to which God has elevated the institution of marriage. For the Seventh Commandment, like all the other commandments, friends, is not just written on stone or paper. The commandments are etched on the very fabric of how God put us together. The commandment is written in to us physically. It’s written in to us mentally and emotionally. It’s written in to us spiritually. Let me illustrate. The Seventh Commandment is written in to us physically because of the implications of the spread of sexually communicable diseases. It’s written in to us mentally because what happens is when one commits adultery the thrill of the moment gives way to guilt and agony that follows because something that God made to be holy and joyful and wonderful is now transformed into a secret rendezvous with the fear that somebody will find out. It’s written in to us emotionally. Sex is one of the tangible ways in which God has designed us to say to another person we love them. But young people, it involves a whole lot more than just your bodies. In the gift of sex, we share with one another our most precious private feelings and we bond ourselves with that individual. Don’t take that lightly. The bonding that occurs in sexual intimacy has tremendous carry over to other areas of life. One of the reasons that half the marriages today will end in divorce is unless God’s liberating grace has been poured out on an individual, they may get married to this person; but if they have been sexually active during the years preceding marriage, he may be bonded to 15 people and she may be bonded to 10 and then they wonder why they are having trouble getting connected emotionally. It’s also written in to us spiritually when sexual sin invades our lives. What do we do? We begin to hide from our spouse. We begin to hide from God. And it seems to me that’s exactly what Adam and Eve did in the garden when sin entered the picture.
Probing deeper, the Hebrew word for adultery comes from the same root word which was used when the Israelites were worshiping idols thereby adulterating pure Jehovah worship and substituting something different. That’s what adultery is. It’s taking something pure and good and putting something cheap and counterfeit in its place. That’s the way it is with all of God’s good gifts to us. They can be perverted if used freely. In fact, if you haven’t learned this principle, you need to. The greater the potential something has for good, it will have an equal potential to be used for evil. And oh how we’ve seen that to be true with God’s good gift of sexuality.
Now I need to detour. Because here as in every area of life we need to balance law and grace. Some of you hearing my voice today, who have broken at some point the Seventh Commandment, you need to hear God’s clear word of forgiveness and new beginnings. In fact, when you look at the New Testament Jesus had tremendous compassion on persons who had fallen in to the area of sexual sin. Let me lift up three examples. We remember Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the Samaritan well. The love and compassion he poured out upon her. She had had numerous husbands. In John, Chapter 8, when the religious leaders had caught the woman in the very act of adultery and the law said she could be stoned, Jesus said, "You who are without sin, cast the first stone." And we don’t know for sure, but reading between the lines of the New Testament, I don’t think Mary Magdalene was exactly your sexual purest before she met Jesus. Jesus took Mary Magdalene into his inner circle. She was the first to come in contact with the risen Lord. Some of you today need to see this Christ and know not His word of judgment but His word of forgiveness and new beginnings. But having said that, grace does not do away with the law. To the woman caught in adultery, Jesus’ follow up words to her were very clear. He said, "Go and sin no more."
As we draw to a close,... boy I’ve had your attention today better than I’ve ever had it I think. How do we keep this command? Let me suggest a few very simple, but I think workable things to help you.
1. Love your wife or your husband. Love them in greater ways than you love your kids. Did you hear that? We love our kids, but friends last I checked the kids will be gone. Husband and wife will still be there. One of the best pieces of advice that I was ever given was someone who said, "The greatest gift you can give to your children, is to love their mom or love their dad."
2. Spend time together. I’ve counseled numerous people in my office whose relationship has fallen apart. And so often they say the same thing. We didn’t intend to get to this point. But I got busy with my job, with my friends. We spent less and less time together and all the sudden we realized we were living in different worlds. It didn’t happen overnight, but the relationship had died. Friends, no relationship can be built without time. That’s non-negotiable; there are not shortcuts.
3. Build each other’s self-esteem. When a person slips into an adulterous relationship, hear me carefully, the unmet need is usually not sex. The unmet need is usually not sex. It is the emotional void. They have not heard enough the spouse tell them they loved them. They have not been affirmed enough. And there’s this unmet emotional need. And then they find somebody at work that meets that need and they begin to spend some time with them. And they have no intention of it leading to adultery; but it eventually does. The unmet need was not sex. It was emotional in nature.
4. Learn how to add some sizzle to your relationship. And I’m not just talking to the 40-year-olds. I’m talking to the 75-year-olds and the 80-year-olds also. Men flowers are never a waste of money, never. Don’t forget the value of an unexpected card. Cards are almost as expensive today though as flowers. If you go to the Dollar General Store they’ve got great cards for 50 cents. Spend a romantic weekend together. If I’ve talked to a couple whose children are 7 and 10 someplace in that age range, and they say to me...I ask them, "When’s the last time you got together with your spouse for a romantic weekend?" "Oh, we’ve never gone away without the kids." That relationship is in trouble. Spend a romantic weekend and leave the kids at home. Put some sizzle in to your relationship.
5. Recognize the seasons within a marriage relationship. The honeymoon’s not the whole thing. The passionate flame is not the whole thing. Although nobody told me when I was in my 20's and the hormones were flowing so freely that that part of the relationship didn’t end. In fact that part would get better with the passing of time. But there are seasons in every relationship. A marriage when we are in our late 20's and a marriage when we are in our 50's are in a different seasons and we have to recognize that sex and physical beauty will fade but real love remains. In fact I’m looking out here at some couples who’ve been married 50 and 60 years and you’ve got some lines, Ruby, that you didn’t have in your wedding picture. But friends, do you want to know what true beauty is? It’s found in the life of a couple that have kept it together for 50, 60 or more years. That have gone through the different seasons of marriage.
6. Be on your guard in this area. The person who says, "It will never happen to Me." is in big trouble. We’ve got to recognize it sure can happen to me and guard against it like the plague. James, Chapter 1, says, "Each one is tempted when by his own evil desire he is dragged away and enticed. And after the desire has been conceived, it gives birth to sin and sin when it’s full grown gives birth to death." I must constantly say, "It can happen to me." And the minute I begin to feel some impulses, I’ve got to run as hard as I can run in the opposite direction. To those of you who are married, let me remind you again of this promise that you’ve made to your spouse and to Almighty God. You declared you wanted him to be your husband or your wife. To live together in the Holy state of matrimony. You said that you would love them and comfort them. That you would honor and keep them in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, for better or for worse. And you promised forsaking all others; I will keep myself only for you as long as we both shall live.
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