Would you take your Bibles, please, and turn to Deuteronomy, chapter 5, verse 18, which is the seventh commandment, you shall not commit adultery. Every time I have to speak on this subject or some such related to sexual immorality, I want to give parents a rating on the sermon. This is a PG-13 sermon. Not PG-13 or R-rated, but if you have little children in here that you don't want them to hear certain words and you don't want to answer other questions and perhaps it would be and I'm not joking a good opportunity if you'd leave. Unfortunately during this summer, we don't have anywhere for you to go. This is not air condition, so maybe you could take them out and the lobby will close the doors and they can run up the hallways. But we will be talking not explicitly, but frankly about a major problem in our culture. And that is that we are in America the most sexed, crazed, sexually perverted society on the face of the earth. The fact of that is almost undeniable. Statistics I'll share with you in a moment will confirm that. But back in the Cold War in the 1940s and 50s and 60s, the Russians realized that the number one weapon they had in dealing with American people was the weapon of sex. They trained their agents to seduce both male and female, American officials and military personnel and other key people in business, so that they could either blackmail them into giving them information or get them in compromising romantic relationships where they would willingly come forth with top secret information. It's interesting that that was their chief weapon against us and worked and our chief weapon against them was money. We were able to get what we wanted from the Soviet Union simply by giving them things that their culture could not provide. The fact that we are a wash and a sea of immorality is staggering. If we took just the subject of internet pornography every second, $3,075.64 is spent on pornography on the internet every second. Every second, 28,258 people click on to an internet porn site. Every second, 372 internet users search for porn sites. Every 39 minutes, a new pornographic video is produced in the United States and put online. In 2006, the internet pornography revenue exceeded $97 billion. That was more than the combined revenue of ABC, CBS and NBC. In fact, it was more than the revenue of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo Apple and Netflix combined. America is the number four user of pornography in the world behind three oriental countries, China, South Korea and Japan. There are 4.2 million pornography websites, in other words, 12% of all websites. 90% of children 8 years to 16 years have already viewed pornography online. The average age they do so is age 11. The bigger users of porn are men between the ages of 35 and 49 and 80% of all teenagers. And shocking is it may be almost 15% of all women regularly visit online pornographic sites, 15%. We looked at premarital sex, the statistics are worse. Men between the ages of 20 and 44, 91% of them have engaged in premarital sex, that is, fornication. And 85% of the women of the same age. Adultry claims 25% of all men and 70% of all women. And of all the marriages affected by adultry by one or both spouses, only 35% of them survive. One website called theotherwoman.com that offered help for women who had been the victims of adultry by their husbands. Said that there is growing psychological evidence that adulterous behavior in parents dramatically affects the behavior of children when they reach adulthood. Just as divorce and a family influences the likelihood of the adult children to consider divorce, so adulterous behavior by parents seems to be get similar behavior by their offspring. Adultry has become such a problem that over 30% of all Protestant ministers in America have at least at one time engaged in an adulterous relationship. And 70% of all Protestant pastors have at one time or another counseled a woman or a man who has been involved in an adulterous affair with a clergyman. These are not statistics online, but I myself have been in the ministry 28 years and I have 28 men that I know in our denomination who have fallen into immorality and are now no longer in the ministry. 28th my associates and colleagues and friends claimed by adultry. We mentioned a few weeks ago when Gabe preached on lust on the sermon on the mount that sexting is now a major problem. 20% of all teenagers engaged in this, 22% of the girls and 18% of the boys with the average age of being the age of 13 that they first began to sext. 39% of all teenagers do so with a verbal message, but 20% of them do so with a photograph of themselves or someone else that is illicit. What they don't realize is that is not only against the law, but it's absolutely stupid because once they post that online, the whole entire internet around the world is open to that picture and we'll use it. And I have not even begun to touch upon the influence of homosexuality and the rising problem of lesbianism among teenage and college age women. A recent Senate report indicated that our sexual addictions have reached the point where, quote, Americans are more in danger of being addicted to illicit sex than they are to crack cocaine because pornography is more addictive than crack cocaine. We live in an age where infidelity is rampant. Statistics after statistic range between 30% of all marriages that have experienced some infidelity is highest 60%. More and more women, as they enter the workforce, as they find their liberation as they become man's equal, also become his equal in the sleazy life known to men. And more and more in our culture, it is women who are beginning illicit affairs and women who are breaking up marriages. There is evidence that in entering the workforce and having access to the internet that women are becoming just as addicted to sex as men are. And ladies, let me say something. I put this up front before you go to sleep although I don't think you're sleeping this sermon. That the last bastion against immorality in any culture is its women. When a wife, a mother, a girlfriend says, no, no, men won't do it. But now that you're strong women, you've been liberated, you're every bit of man's equal, just as filthy as we are. And the way to stop this thing is to back up and for women to begin to say, I will not reduce myself to the level of the immoral American male. I went to one website that was about helping people who've been the victims of infidelity in their marriage. This would be comical excepted it's so sad. And as I read down the different resources they had for people and the statistics about marital infidelity, alongside the panel was an advertisement. Of two attracted women drinking in a bar, and a young boy looking across the room with him. And it said, ever fantasize about your friend's mother, your neighbor, a teacher at high school or college, then date Mrs. Robinson is for you. We connect young men with sophisticated single ladies, divorces and recently separated women looking to put some adventure back into their lives. This is an ad on a site trying to help us to guard ourselves and get sexual immorality and adultery. Recently, National Public Radio ran a story, an interview actually with Alan Tippergore about their announced divorce. They've been married for 40 years, they're getting divorced. And in the NPR.com response program they have, where you can kind of email in your responses about Alan Tippergore's divorce, 90% of Americans approved of it, saying that they had done a heroic thing. That quote, for better or for worse, dept to a spot, may be a lofty goal, but it is no longer a reasonable expectation for an American couple. One person said, consider the life-long journey the gores took as young singles and then young married couple. They were both mature and honest enough to discover that after 40 years, they both had changed. Some people undergo changes early in life, while others at later stages in life. If you're Larry King, it's ongoing. What the gores taught, many people in public and private need to learn, that couples, no matter how long they have been with us, may grow out of love. And the gores were able to make that transition with respect, indignity, and teach us that there's no shame in doing the same. The average American who responded to National Public Radio, approved of the gores getting a divorce and said it was the right thing to do. Except for Stephanie Coons, who writes for CNN magazine. She wrote an article, why the gore breakup touched the nerve? Divorces over 40 years old are rare, but in 2008, a people who reported divorcing recently, one fourth of all of them had been in marriages that had lasted at least two or three decades. The divorces among couples 55 years are older, seems to be rising moderately, even as divorce rate in general has fallen from a high of about 23 divorces per 1,01979 to less than 17 per thousand in 2005. The article will on to say that the reason that older baby boomers are divorcing after 20 and 30 and 40 years of marriage is for two reasonable reasons. Do rational reasons? Number one, they have more options available to them if they're not happy in their marriage. And number two, their expectations of their marriage are much more demanding than their moms and dads. Fidelity and a good partnership, a good provider and a faithful wife are not enough. They expect exciting couples to have conversation in exciting ways all of their life, to have gratifying sex, to the day they die, and to have all of the privileges of being free as well as the benefits of being married. In other words, Stephanie Kude said, what the baby boomers want is quite frankly unreasonable. In the midst of all this pornographic discouraging and disruptive information about love and sex and marriage stands one little commandment. Deuteronomy chapter 5 verse 18, and you shall not commit adultery. I wonder tonight folks if I should even try to exegede or expound upon or apply this commandment. Here at our own church, your pastors in the last six months have been dealing with an increased number of unbiblical divorces, of adultery, of homosexual behavior, of internet pornography, premarital sex, sex, name of abuse, separation, sexual discrimination, gender equality, sexual intercourse, sexual discrimination, sexual sexual discrimination, sexual discrimination, sexual oppression of sex, sexual reseq and sexual discrimination, sexualmic underscoreings of sex, sex, sexual discrimination of sex, sexual ser manchmal is angeneration. that I seldom get discouraged in the ministry. And when I do, I rarely tell the congregation, but I must tell you that in this last three or four months, it has been overwhelming to me, to deal with a number of troubled marriages and unbiblical divorces, the tidal wave of internet pornography that has swamped our men, especially our older men. The sexual immorality among our teens and the nonchalant way that they look at it. The confusion about our genders and the implicit approval of homosexuality is something that people can't help being or doing. And the loss of male leadership in our homes and churches. We've got to begin to realize that all of these things fit together. Gender preference, gender confusion, marriage, love, sex, feminism and chauvinism, heterosexuality and homosexuality, sexting and internet sex, and all the other dimensions of boy meets girl relationships in the world, they all come under the banner. Of these simple words, and you shall not commit adultery. Before I wanna tell you what I hope to accomplish before we end tonight, that you will realize that number one, this panoply of different opportunities to violate your own human nature is ultimately attack against God's nature, God in whose image and likeness we have been made. I want you to see that the reason we have trouble sexually is a deeply, theologically rooted problem. And I want you to see that there are some definite things we must do some difficult choices we must make. And these things are not easy. Even with the help of God's grace, the difficult choices we must make are not easy, but they are fundamentally crucial. I don't think I exaggerate what I say and my pastor friends on staff would agree with me. This is the number one issue we face today. We have become a grossly immoral people and we are approaching a grossly immoral church in the United States. So let's look at commandment number seven. That's by the way, parents is bad as it gets. We're going to look at three things as we looked at three things with every other commandment. What this commandment says about the nature of God, what this commandment says about the finished work of Jesus Christ and what this commandment does to benefit you and me as men and women made in his image. What does this commandment say about God, the author of this commandment and you shall not commit adultery? This commandment concerning marital fidelity and gender clarity and sexual integrity is rooted as all the other commandments are in the nature of God. And what this commandment reminds us is that God is faithful to his wife, the church. God is faithful to his wife, the church. We're gonna leave Deuteronomy, we're not coming back and we're going to look at other texts if you'll turn to Jeremiah. You'll find here a statement God makes about the new covenant. Comparing himself to the husband of the Old Testament people, Israel, the Old Testament, Jeremiah, chapter 31. Jeremiah 31, verse 31. Behold, the days are coming declares the Lord. When I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke though I was their husband, declares the Lord. Now there God says when he made the covenant with the Old Testament people with Moses as he brought them out of bondage and slavery. The same thing he says at the beginning of the 10 commandments, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the house of slavery, out of the land of Egypt. God says I brought them out and they broke my covenant though I was their husband. God likens himself in the Old Testament to a husband of a bride. Jeremiah 16 says the same thing. In Ozea chapter two, God says to the prophet, plead with your mother, plead for she is not my wife and I am no longer her husband. Tell her that she must put away her adultery from her face and her immorality from between her breasts. God says his wife, the church, Israel was being unfaithful to him. He told them that unless they repented, he would divorce them and cast them aside. We went to the New Testament, we'd find the same thing that husbands are to love their wives as Christ loved the church. Christ likens himself to the bridegroom, the church is his bride. The love a husband has for wife and the wife has for a husband is that between Christ and his church. After Paul begins talking about all that wives should do and husband should do to create a biblical, Christ and a marriage, he says this mystery is great but I'm speaking of a reference to Christ and the church. If we turn to the very end of the Bible to the book of Revelation and we see the second coming of Jesus Christ, we see first, the second coming of his church and then the second coming of the bridegroom. Hallelujah for the Lord, our God, the Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and exalt and give him glory for the marriage of the Lamb has come and his bride has made herself ready and it has been granted to her to clothe herself with fine linen, bright and pure for the fine linen or the righteous deeds of the saints. And then I saw New Heaven and a New Earth for the first heaven and the first earth that passed away and the sea was no more and I saw the Holy City, the New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. The Old Testament presents God as the husband of Israel, the New Testament presents Jesus Christ as the bridegroom of the bride known as the church. And the human covenant of marriage is rooted in and reflective of the covenant of grace between Christ and his church. The fact of the matter is God has always and from eternity been faithful to his wife, the church and he has never had another lover, true. In Hosea, he speaks of devising her. And yes, in Jeremiah, chapter three, he talks about her going away into captivity where she will be a wife separated from her husband for a season. But then he goes and gets her back. And Isaiah chapter 54, God says, for your maker is your husband, the Lord of hosts his name. The Holy One of Israel is your redeemer, the God of the whole earth he is called, for the Lord has called you like a wife deserted and grieved in spirit, like a wife of youth when she is cast off says your God. For a brief moment I deserted you, but with great compassion I will gather you and bring you back. In overflowing anger for a moment I hid my space from you, but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you says the Lord, God, your redeemer. God will never have another lover. He will never have another bride. He will never desert us. And the reason that we are commanded by scripture to be faithful to our wife and husband is simply because God is faithful to us. Let me prove that to you by asking you to turn for a moment to Hebrews chapter 13 where the faithfulness between a husband and a wife is directly derived from the faithfulness of God to his church. Hebrews chapter 13 in the early verses there, the first five verses. In fact, if you look at Hebrews chapter 13 verse four and five you'll see this. Let marriage be held in honor among all and let the marriage bed be undefiled. For God will judge the sexually immoral and the adulterous. Keep your life free from the love of money and be content with what you have. That is including your spouse. For he has said, I will never leave you or forsake you. You want to be faithful to your spouse and keep the marriage bed undefiled to be content with the wife or husband of your youth because God has said, I will never leave you or forsake you because God treats you that way. One book I think you all ought to read if you can still find it in print, I'm assuming it is, is a book by a German theologian named Werner Nuer. N-E-U-E-R, man and woman in Christian perspective. And Dr. Nuer says to call God husband is to describe and is the one who made church his beloved partner in an unbreakable fellowship and to call the church's wife is to characterize her as the recipient and target of divine love and faithfulness. Even I think the pagans agree. God would never stop loving his people and he would never cast them off for someone else. Can you imagine God speaking to us, the way husbands and wives speak to each other? Can you imagine God saying I've had enough with these unfaithful Christians? I'm going to divorce them and take the Muslims and the Hindus as my brides. I want new wives. In fact, I want to become a polygamist. I'm no longer in love with the church. I owe it to myself to be happy and the church has caused me grief over 4,000 years and even the death of my son. I will arrive at an amiable and mutually agreed upon dissolution of our covenant. After four millennia, we're simply grown apart. After all, I married Israel when she was very young. She has changed the way I have not. People often grow apart. We will remain friends, but I will never love them again as my wife. Can you imagine God saying that? And yet those are the very words your pastor is here again and again. I owe it to myself to be happy. We married young, but we've grown apart. People change. And we tend to, at least if not verbally, judge your heart. Half of your irritated now saying, what's wrong with this man? Doesn't he realize that people deserve to be happy? And I'm saying, at the expense of someone else's happiness, how about we take this principle to all the commandments? Anybody here driving a Mercedes tonight would you raise your hand? Because I deserve one. Anybody who have a house at the beach because I've never had one in. I owe it to myself to be happy. See, we don't want people to live that way with the things that we have. And yet, that's how we live. Even with other men and women. At the expense of their happiness in our children's and the pleasure of God. Can you imagine, if God said, I owe it to myself to be happy? When was the last time? The church made God happy. This is why God says in Malachi chapter 3 verse 16, I hate divorce. Because it's so contrary to a station to calm down. He doesn't say, I hate divorcees. If you stick with me on the trail of grace, this sermon has a happy ending. But the fact of the matter is, God does not like unbiblical, unwarranted, divorce, and all of the immorality that contribute to it. And that's why Jesus Christ enters this commandment and enters the picture. Jesus Christ, in commandment number seven, has come to redeem the bride for God, the husband. The church's spiritual adultery, called idolatry in the Bible. And her estrangement from God necessitates the redemptive rescue mission of Jesus Christ. Christ used repeated parables about marriage and family to describe not only his relationship to the church, but what he was doing to the church. In fact, John the Baptist describes himself as the friend of the bride, that is the best man. And as Jesus the bride, a bridegroom who deserves the church is bride. John chapter three, you yourselves bear witness that I told you I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before him. The one who has the bride, he is the bridegroom. The friend of the bride who stands and hears his voice rejoices greatly at the bridegroom's voice. Therefore, this joy of mine is complete because he must increase and I must decrease. Vernon Newer is correct when he says in the New Testament, Jesus is frequently characterized at the bridegroom or as the husband of the church. Here again is the relationship between Christ and the church and it is not compared to an earthly marriage, but it is viewed as a real marriage covenant. And everlasting covenant that exists just as surely as a human contract of marriage does. Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word so that he might present the church to himself and splendor without spotter wrinkle or any other thing that she might be holy and blameless and in love. In the same way, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it just as Christ does the church because we are members of his body. Therefore, man shall leave his father and his mother and cleave to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. This is a great mystery and it is profound, but I am saying this in reference to Jesus Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself and let the wife see that she respects her husband. Jesus Christ is compared here to a husband who loves, sacrifices for nourishes, cherishes, cleanses and sanctifies and cleaves to his wife eternally. Christ is eternally faithful to his wife in order to win her back to God. That's what the scripture says that Christ, I've written since once for all the just for the unjust in order that he might bring us to God. Jesus Christ is the one who goes out and finds gomer, who zealous unfaithful wife and leads her back. He cleanses her of her filth. He renews her patiently in their covenant relationship. He loves her when she does not love him in return. He cherishes her when she neglects him. He nourishes her when she strikes out at him. He continues to do this until his faithfulness overwhelms and overpowers her infidelity and she falls in love with him and with God all over again. In fact, my friends, I would suggest to you that the Christian experience is nothing but one lifelong marriage renewal conference. And just as Jane and I have had many times, many times we ran up against the wall, we came to some plateau when there was some spiritual decline, some difficulty in our marriage. I would lie to you if I said we got married in July of 1978 and we lived happily ever after. No, it hasn't been that way. Mainly because of Jane and Michael. Those are the two problems. We've had different places where one of us had to redeem the other and it's amazing. It's been like that there have been times when I have pulled my wife out of some spiritual despondency where she was perhaps less enchanted than me than she should have been and I wander back and there have been many times she's done the same to me. That's what Jesus Christ is doing. That's why Christ loves the church as a man loves his wife. We just keep going after each other and saying, till death do us part is a long term commitment. And since Jesus can never die again, when he says till death do us part, it is forever. He will pursue us forever. This commandment is fulfilled by Jesus Christ in two ways. He is the incarnation of God's husbandly love for his chosen people, the church. And he reclaims an adulterous wife and washes away all her filth and immorality and brings her back to God. So that Christians filled with his spirit and grace finally have the power to not commit adultery. That's the third thing we come to now, the Christian and his sexual integrity. For me to cover all the issues and the comprehensive manner would be quite frankly impossible in one sermon or even a series of sermons. But let me read you from two documents that you're familiar with. Both of them reform statements of our faith, both of them catechisms, the Heidelberg catechism of the Dutch reform people, the Westminster, larger catechism for the Presbyterians. As they both talk about this seventh commandment, what is God's will for us in the seventh commandment, the Heidelberg catechism acts, and it answers. God condemns all in chastity. We should therefore thoroughly detest it and married or single have decent, chased lives. Does God in this commandment for bit only such scandalous sins as adultery? No. We are temples of the Holy Spirit, body and soul. God wants both to be kept clean and holy. That's why He forbids everything which incites unchastity, whether it be action, looks, talk, thoughts, or desires. Our own Westminster, larger catechism, answers much more comprehensively. The duties required in this seventh commandment are the following. Chastity and body, mind, affections, word and behavior, the preservation of it in ourselves and in others. Watchfulness over the eyes and all the senses, temperance, keeping of chase company, modesty in apparel and dress, marriage by those who have not the gift of self-control, conjugal love and cohabitation, diligent labor in all of our callings as husbands and wives, shunning all occasions of uncleanness and resisting all temptations they run to. What are the sins forbidden by this commandment? The seventh commandment forbids besides in the neglect of the duties required, all adultery, fornication, rape and incest, soldering all unnatural lusts, all unclean imaginations, thoughts and purposes and affections, all corrupt or filthy communications or listening thereunto. Wanton looks, impudent or lighthearted behavior, immodest apparel, prohibiting of lawful and dispensing with unlawful marriages, allowing and tolerating the keeping of stews or brothels and resorting to them, entangling vows of single life, undue delay of marriage, having more wives or husbands than one at a time, unjust divorce or desertion, idleness, gluttony, drunkenness, unchaste company, the lascivious songs, books, pictures, dancing, stage plays, and all other provocations too or acts of uncleanness either in ourselves or in other people. It's overwhelming. It would take me a month to write that in a year to preach through it. So let me do this. Let me break down this vast subject into five major issues that you and I have to grab a hold of and wrestle under grace tonight. Here's issue number one. It has to do with your gender. Your gender is rooted in the nature of God and is a reflection of the image of God in you. You must embrace the gender God gave to you. Let me read that again. Your gender is rooted in the nature of God and is a reflection of the image of God in you. You must embrace the gender God gave to you.
Gender is not negotiable. It is innately self-defining and permanent. It is eternally permanent. You may not change genders. Embrace homosexuality or lesbianism or live bisexuality. God did not make a mistake placing any female soul in any male body or vice versa. Now that is a popular myth today that I was born a woman trapped in a man's body. I was born a man trapped in a woman's body. God made a mistake. I have actually had people tell me that God made a mistake. He gave my body the wrong gender. It is kind of like you were manufactured on Friday at 4.55 pm. Okay, everybody wanted to go home the injured. My goodness, we've got a problem here. We've got one female soul and one male body. It's Friday. They put them together and out. They went. No, that's not how it works. God is hand-picked in your soul in your life the gender he wants from you. And all listen to me. All sexual, whether it's heterosexual immorality or homosexual immorality is rooted in and unwillingness to accept the gender that God gave to you and live as a man or woman by God's design. That means that we need to redefine and embrace and do what biblical masculinity and biblical femininity are. In their landmark book about biblical perspectives on men and women, John Piper and Wayne Grudem defined what masculinity is, listen men, and what femininity is, ladies, listen. At the heart of mature masculinity is a sense of benevolent responsibility to lead, provide for and protect women in ways appropriate to a man's differing relationship. Three words, men, lead, provide for, protect. It says nothing about sexual dominance, prowess, being a stud, and has nothing to do with masculinity. You know, as well as I do, the demand according to Jesus Christ teaching and according to Moses could have an accident so that he could never engage in normal heterosexual, procreate a behavior and he does not stop being a male. We've got to start thinking with our souls, men, and not with the image of this macho stud that has captivated the American male, including the American Christian. Biblical masculinity is the responsibility to lead, provide for and protect women in ways appropriate to your differing relationships with them. Your sisters in Christ, your sisters at home, your moms, your grandmothers, your wives, your people you work with in the workplace who are female, lead, provide for, protect. What about femininity? At the heart of mature femininity is a freeing disposition to affirm, receive, and nurture strength in leadership from worthy men in ways appropriate to a woman's differing relationships. Again, it is a freeing disposition. It's not this angry feminist mindset that I'm going to prove that I'm the equal of the man. It's a free disposition to be different from men, to be their opposites, to compliment them, and to do these three things, to affirm them, to receive a nurture strength in them, and to encourage their leadership, the leadership of worthy men, not all men, worthy men in ways appropriate to your differing relationships with males. Masculinity is rooted in God, and it reflects the image of God. We don't have time tonight, but I just want to say this. If you read this book by Vernon Nure, you'll find out that God often refers to Himself. In fact, He always refers to Himself in male terms. He refers to Himself as Father, as husband, as son. All the pronouns for Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are the male pronoun. That is not a patriarchal male authorship. God is fundamentally masculine in the way He deals with us, and so when He made the first creature to reflect Him, He made a male. He made a male. Listen to what Vernon Nure said. He said the masculine terminology in the Bible is based on the nature of God, whereas feminine terms are unsuited to designating anything of the divine nature. For if because of His nature, God may be termed Father or bridegroom, but not Mother or bride, then the possibility of using any other feminine term for God, such as Lady or Queen, also lapses into nothingness. The masculine shape picture of God in Scripture is therefore not a result of its patriarchal thinking, but the result of the self-revelation of the living God Himself. The masculine picture of God in the Scripture has a necessary consequence that man in His mailness is a special way of reflecting and representing God, whereas the woman is a special way of reflecting and representing the creation and the redeemed church whom God the Father deeply loves. Masculinity men is neither machismo nor chauvinism, and it is never this lost-boy syndrome where I'm afraid to be a leader and so I'm the passive mama's boy. Likewise, femininity reflects the nature and work of God. God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness, let us make them, so He created them male and female, He created them in His own image. So what does the female image reflect in God? Listen to what Werner Neuer says. As the bride of Christ, the woman reflects and a special way of the creation and the church. As the creation is subordinate to the creator and was created for Him, so the woman is subordinated and designed for Him. Women are therefore called to portray the creation as loved by the creator. They are to be receptive in their nature as a female that makes them a unique reflection of the creation which lives entirely to receive the divine love and equally to reflect the church whose existence depends entirely upon receiving the electing, redeeming, and sanctifying love of God. It is precisely as wife that the woman is capable of portraying an unsurpassable fashion, the church. Just as the church has entered into a covenant of unbreakable loyalty, so too the woman is received by her husband in an indesolable bond of marital love. All this shows how deeply the biblical view of male and female is rooted in the nature of God. Whoever rejects the Bible and their biblical ordering of the sexes must ultimately reject the God revealed in the Holy Bible and come up with a new one. There is something deeply, profoundly glorious, about a husband and his wife. And the fact that our human husbands and wives usually blow it does not mean that we need to find another paradigm for masculinity and femininity. There is something glorious about a God who leads, provides for, and protects a church he made for himself. And there is something glorious about a church who lives to receive into her arms the kisses and affections of this heroic Jesus Christ and to be the love of his life. Once we grasp that, what it means to be male and female will radically change, and so will most of our sexual behavior. Femininity is not feminism, nor being a sexual victim, nor is it being the strong woman of today. We have much to learn about our genders and new paradigms to embrace. God's grace will enable us to do so. Secondly, sexual immorality begins with a pop-review of your body. It's sexual powers and the ownership of both. Here's the second thing I want you to grasp tonight. Sexual morality begins with the proper view of your body and sexual powers and who owns both of them. Paul explicitly says in 1 Corinthians 6, after he talks about sexual immorality and how addictive it can be, he said, you are not your own, you were bought with the price so glorify God in your body. As he rolled on into 1 Corinthians 7, and he talked about a man and a wife living together in conjugal bliss. He told the husband not to deny the wife, his sexual pleasures, nor the wife to deny him, he says, because you do not have authority over your own body, but your spouse does. As he goes to 1 Corinthians 4, he tells us that we should guard the marital bed so that we do not defraud our brothers and sisters around us, that we should manage and keep chased our own vessel. That is our own body, our own wife. We don't know which one he's referring to in the text, but either one fits the point. And therefore, when a woman says, this is my body, I have a right to it, she's wrong. When a man says, this is my body, and I'll do with it whatever I want, he's wrong. Your body first belongs to God who made it, then it belongs to Jesus Christ who redeemed it, then it belongs to your father or mother who was guarding it until they give it to someone else, then it belongs to your spouse, then to the child in the womb, then to the infant that suckles at your breast, the child in your lap, the teenager, depending upon you looking for you for a moral example, and ultimately to your neighbor who's expecting you to guard your body and your spouse so you keep away from his in an inappropriate manner. Your body's never been your own, and it never will be. And the proof of that is on judgment day, you will not be able to say to God in the look, you don't want to live with me fine, but I'm taking my body, and I'm going up, no, I don't think so. Jesus Christ will take your body and soul, and dispose with one way or another as he sees fit, because the Bible says he gives the soul and the body, and they return to him. Once we realize that our bodies are not, ours to do with whatever we please, that radical and un-American but patently clear and biblical idea will force us to look at our sexual behavior differently. Our sex is a great power, it is the power to do three things, to procreate a human life and an immortal soul, and bring it into the world, to fulfill the spiritual nature and destiny of another living being, and to determine where we will spend eternity with the God who gave us our bodies and souls. Sex is not something to be toyed with. Thirdly, you must realize that sex is by God's design, the addiction of all addictions. Turn, if you will, to 1 Corinthians 6, and read with me, beginning in verse 9. Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the king of God, do not be deceived, neither that sexually immoral nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy nor drunkers, nor revilers, nor swindlers, were inherit the king of God, and such were some of you, but you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, by the Spirit of our God. All things are lawful for me, but not all things are helpful. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be enslaved by anything. Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food, and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord and the Lord for the body. Jesus Christ says here, through Paul, that the greatest addiction of all is sexual addiction. I just mentioned that a study commissioned by our United States Senate in the recent year reported to the U.S. Senate that internet pornography is more addictive than crack cocaine, and it's designed to be that way. It is God's intention that I use my sexual urges to be addicted to one woman, that all of my fantasies and all of my pleasures and all of my need for intimacy, and all of my wanting to feel masculine, and bring children into the world and experience the procreative juice of God flowing through me, be practiced addictively with one woman, and she with me. And so when we practice it with other people, Paul says the man who sins, and every other way he sins outside of himself, but the inn more man sins against his own flesh, he becomes addicted to the very people he thought he would use. He is used. Who is the predator? Who is the abuser, folks? When a young man clicks on an internet pornography site and watches a young lady, who is using whom? They're both addicted, and both abused by one another, and they'll never be free as long as they are addicted to sex. Fourthly, you must become singly committed to a lifelong relationship with a heterosexual spouse. I don't need to read the scriptures. All I have to do is reference this phrase. The man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. Genesis 2, Jesus in Matthew 9 says from the beginning it has always been this way. God never said that marriage would be easy. He never said it was primarily for your happiness. It is for your holiness. It would have been a lot easier had we not fallen into sin, but there's nothing to indicate that it would have been free from trouble even in our sinless state. Our marriages, God intends to be complementary. A man or a woman who are complementing and strengthening and enriching and fulfilling each other. It is not egalitarian. The genders cannot be the same. They never are the same. It is not competitive, feminist versus chauvinist. It is not exploitive, mutually using one another, and it is not convenient as long as it's fun. But the promise is for those who persevere in faith and work hard in love and rely upon divine grace there is a great blessing. The Bible teaches that an enriched marriage in this world is the closest thing to an experience of heaven above that you'll ever have in this world. It's worth working for. And finally, it's time once again for a radical embracing of virginity for all single people, all of them. Even when Paul talks to the virgins who are not yet married and 1 Corinthians chapter 7, he says, You were bought with a price. Do not become a slave to men. Do not become a slave to yearning for a spouse you don't have. Don't think that if you give yourself young ladies to a man and it's going to make him love you, it'll do the opposite. And don't think men that just because in the night of passion and the backseat of a car, you say, I love you that that's going to last any longer than the steam on the windows. It's not. It's time for you to trust Jesus Christ and one of the most difficult arenas of life. And that is with your sexual urges and your yearning for someone to satisfy that intimate longing with an extra marital and pre-marital sex always seem fun from the moment. Even glamorous or sophisticated because everybody's doing it until the sin, the shame and the guilt rub your soul of its innate beauty. We could say more. We probably need to but we don't have time. But I want you to think with me tonight about what happens when we take the top of this Pandora's box off and we look at all that's wrong in our society. And yet I want to end on a happy note. I want you to look again at 1 Corinthians 6 where Paul says that these kinds of people who are sexually immoral or adulterers or homosexuals will not inherit the kingdom of God. They're not going to heaven as long as that is their lifestyle. We'll listen to these marvelous words but such were some of you. Such were some of you he says to the Corinthians but you yourselves were washed. You were sanctified. You were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the spirit of our God. You were cleaned up. You were dedicated and consecrated to God. He removed all your sin and filth. Jesus Christ has a way of embracing immoral people and somehow when he does their filth never sticks to him. Paul says in this same passage the man who commits in with the prostitutes becomes one in flesh with her. That's not true with Jesus Christ. When Jesus Christ opens his arms to receive a young lady who's been promiscuous, a young man who's been a fornicator, a man who's addicted in his mind to filthy pornography, a woman who's a vixen, an adulterous couple. Somehow when he embraces them he absorbs their filth and his clean righteousness spills onto them and they walk away better people than when they came to him. But that means they had to make a choice. It's a difficult choice. Your young people know about a woman named Jennifer Napp. She's a Christian songwriter and singer. She's been in a lesbian affair for eight years. She's recently come out. She's published her story on the internet. Been interviewed by Christian D. Day and other magazines and appeared on Larry King Live to defend her life choice. I want to quote you exactly what she says, defending her belief in Christ and her homosexuality. As a Christian, I'm doing the best that I can. The heartbreaking thing to me is that we're all hopelessly deceived if we don't think that there are people within our churches, within our communities who want to hold on to the person they love, whatever sex they may be and hold on to their faith in Jesus Christ as well. She told Larry King Live, I don't believe that God would make me choose between Jesus and my lesbian lover. And I'm here to tell you that's exactly what he says. That's exactly what he's going to do. Because that's what it means to come to Christ. You lay everything down and he becomes your love of life. He becomes your manhood. He becomes your husband. He becomes your righteousness, your cleansing, your new opportunity to live clean and wholesome again. And if you will not make that choice, all these difficult choices to come to Christ and turn off that pornographic internet, to come to Christ and not date or sleep with that unconverted or converted girl anymore, to come to Christ and leave your lesbian or homosexual relationship, to come to Christ and go back to your wife, the one you don't love anymore and the one that you deserve to be happy but won't make you happy. Unless you come to Christ and do those things, you will perish in your sins. And you'll suck a lot of people down with you. Tough choices. I can remember the day that I got ready to ask my wife to get married. I said, Jesus, this is, I need to talk to you, this is very, very important. If I ask this girl and she says yes, this is the only one I've got for the rest of my life. What if she's not the one? And then Jesus led me to think that I already had the one. I had him. He was the one who would make me happy. He was the one who would make Jane Verden, love my cross. He was the one who would help me overcome my immoral past and be faithful to one sweet girl. And he's done that. He'll do that for you. He's offering you the choice and you have to make it for incoming to him all these things you must leave behind if you would inherit the kingdom of God. Amen? Father, this is a difficult thing for us because we're just inundated with this stuff all over the place. Our culture is a wash with this immorality. We fear not only for ourselves, but especially for our children here this evening. We're looking at a dire, a dire difficult situation in the future. Unless you move in some magnificent way to bring us back to yourself, to reclaim our masculinity and femininity, to reestablish our purity and give us a new start. This is the wonderful thing about you. When we come to you, the old things pass away and new things come. What we were doesn't matter anymore. Once we come to you, we'll never be unclean. Never be immoral again. Never bear the title, adulterer. Regardless of what people think, you will wash us and sanctify us and justify us and make us right with you. You will bring us back to the great husband of our life, God your Father, and to the bride who means will love forever your church. And you will never leave us or forsake us, but be faithful to us. And in the process, as we follow you and make the right choices, you will make us faithful too. This is what we ask for strength to do these things, because we ask these things in Jesus' name and for His sake, Amen.