5 Things to Remember (and Proclaim) in the Face of the Sexual Revolution

[Below you'll find the prepared message and video of the two Sunday morning worship service of Living Water Lutheran Church for Sunday, February 12. I want to thank Pastor Bryan Wolfmueller, who I've never met, for a sermon that inspired me to use the approach to the Gospel lesson I used. He provided a good context for the message I preached. But, of course, it's God's Word--Law and Gospel--that most inspired me. I pray people will find it helpful.]





Matthew 5:21-37

The Sexual Revolution began in this country and in western Europe about sixty years ago.

It started with the idea that because sexual intimacy is a natural human desire, it needn’t be confined to those married to each other and ought to be expressed in any way a person wishes.

Open Marriage, a best-selling book published in 1972, declared that, “Sexual fidelity is the false god of closed marriage…” And, the authors wrote, “We are not recommending outside sex, but we are not saying that it should be avoided, either. The choice is entirely up to you."

Starting in the Seventies, the revolution fostered more widespread acceptance of homosexuality.

And in its current iteration, this revolution is about “gender fluidity,” in which people can choose gender or no gender. 

Now, a sermon is no place for a preacher to talk about how public policy regarding sexual mores has changed or maybe should be changed. Those are political and legal questions. Churches and pastors should address such matters only in rare and specific circumstances.

But the sexual revolution isn’t primarily a political movement.

Effectively, it’s a religion subscribed to by millions of people, many of them our neighbors and family members, many in churches.

This religion tells us that whatever one’s sexual preferences, “Love is love.”

It tells us that a kind of redemption and freedom happens when we follow whatever our sexual impulses may be.

It tells us, as a prospective groom, explaining why he was living with his fiance, told a pastor, “You wouldn’t buy a car without taking it for a test drive,” as though the people we marry are commodities that need to measure up to our standards.

This false religion also tells Christians that if we don’t agree with the ethic of the sexual revolution, we are repressed bigots and haters. (I get that one on Twitter from time to time.)

So, what can Christians do or say in the face of the sexual revolution?

The first thing we can do is remember (and proclaim) that there is nothing intrinsically bad about sexuality or sex. Sex is God’s idea. God invented it. Genesis tells us that “God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” (Genesis 1:26) Christian faith isn’t anti-sex any more than people who build dams to prevent floods are anti-river.

The second thing we can do is remember (and proclaim) that sexual intimacy is a gift from God for husbands and wives committed to each other for life. Faithless, abusive marriage partners may destroy their marriage covenant with partners seeking to be faithful to Christ and to their partners. But God’s intention is that sexual intimacy will exist in lifelong heterosexual marriages. “A man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh,” Genesis 2:24 tells us. Marriages including sexual intimacy were part of the creation God called “very good.” Or, as it’s put in the Hebrew in which most of the Old Testament was written, “Tov. Tov.”: “Good! Good!” (Genesis 1:31)

Thirdly, we can remember and proclaim the Sixth Commandment that Jesus cites in today’s Gospel lesson. “You shall not commit adultery.” This is God’s Law and whenever law, holy or secular, is brought up, we human beings look for loopholes. “Two consenting adults,” someone will say, “can’t be committing adultery if neither one is married.”

The English word adultery is related to the verb adulterate. It means “to corrupt, debase, or make impure by the addition of a foreign or inferior substance or element.” In God’s eyes, we adulterate the pure gift of marriage when sexual intimacy happens outside of marriage. Adulterating marriage is not what God wills for us and the condemnation for this sin is no different from God’s condemnation for any other sin.

Now, if all of this weren’t convicting enough, Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel lesson: “I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Matthew 5:28)

We violate the Sixth Commandment then, whenever we entertain lustful thoughts about others or give these thoughts a place in our imaginations, any time we see sexual intimacy as a commodity–a thing in itself–to be used outside of the marriage covenant.

Jesus then goes on to speak metaphorically about our need to get rid of any element of our lives or thinking that turns us away from God’s will in this matter. “It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.” (Matthew 5:30)

Critical though we Christians must be regarding the sexual revolution however, we need to remember two additional truths from God.

The first is that none of us is guiltless when it comes to the Sixth Commandment. (And all the other commandments!).

If we say otherwise, we fall for a self-righteous delusion. The Bible teaches us that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23)

The Sixth Commandment, along with the other nine commandments, convict us of sin.

We sin when we put other things ahead of God; resist spending time hearing God’s Word; dishonor parents and others charged with leading us; lie, covet, or steal. When we hold grudges, let bitterness invade our relationships, or commit adultery. We can violate God’s commands in thought, word, OR deed.

So, we dare not let our critique of the sexual revolution turn into an excuse for bragging about how wonderful we are.

As Christians, we should be proclaiming God’s truth on these matters not from self-righteousness, but to remind ourselves and others of God’s love for all people.

The Bible tells us that “the wages of sin [any sin] is death.” (Romans 6:23)

But God asks in Ezekiel 18:23: “Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? Rather, [He goes on to say] am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?”

This leads us to the final thing we need to remember and proclaim on this subject: The God we know in Jesus Christ has entered our world to give us a new, a better, and an eternal way of life.

Jesus says of all of us born “lost in our sin”: “The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” (Luke 19:10)

This includes violations of the Sixth Commandment.

To the woman caught in adultery who didn’t run from acknowledging her sin, Jesus said after He chased her self-righteous accusers away, “Neither do I condemn you. Go now and leave your life of sin.” (John 8:11)

To the woman at the Samaritan well, Jesus offered “living water”--Him and His grace and forgiveness–”welling up to eternal life.” (John 4:1-14)

The wonderful thing about the God we meet in Jesus Christ is that He doesn’t wait for us to get our acts together before He takes action to save us from our sin.

He dies on a cross to take our punishment for sin before we even knew that sin brings eternal damnation to hell.

Before we knew we were sinners in need of a Savior, Jesus said, “It is finished!”

Every one of us can and is called to repent for all our sins and to trust that when Jesus died for us, then rose again to open up eternity and new life to all who repent and believe in Him, He did it for us!

Jesus is bigger than your sin, friend.

Jesus has borne your sin.

Jesus has conquered your sin.

God justifies and makes saints of sinners who, by the power of God’s Spirit-borne Word receive Jesus’ call with gratitude: “Repent and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15)

At the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, of which today’s Gospel lesson is a part, Jesus said, “Blessed is the poor in spirit.” (Matthew 5:3)

The “poor in spirit” are all those who, on hearing God’s Law, such as, “You shall not commit adultery,” recognize that they are far from guiltless.

It’s the poor in spirit, convicted for their sin, who are then ready to hear the Gospel–the good news–that Jesus gives forgiveness and everlasting life with God to all who turn to Him in trust and are empowered by God to believe.

Sisters and brothers in Christ, let us not be proud in either self-righteousness or in resisting God’s good will for our lives.

But let us speak God’s truth in love, including both the truth that the sexual revolution that pervades our culture is the way of sin, selfishness, condemnation, and death, AND the truth that forgiveness, joy, and new and everlasting life belong to all who daily turn from sin and follow Jesus.

No sinner will be morally perfect on this side of the resurrection of the dead Jesus gives to all who believe. But any sinner who daily entrusts their sins and their lives to Jesus will live in the joy of forgiven sin, will be given the power of God to live more in God’s grace, even in the midst of a world gone mad with sin, and will one day stand in the presence of God, our sin eternally covered in the righteousness of our sinless Savior Jesus.

That’s the message that God has called this sinner justified only by God’s grace through faith in Christ to proclaim to you today.

And this is the message it is our joy to remember (and proclaim) to all we meet. Amen

What Biblical writer really says about sex, marriage, & divorce

The apostle Paul is often portrayed as a rigid sexist. You can isolate passages from Paul's New Testament writings to force such a message on him. But that's eisegesis, imposing our own constructs onto a piece of Scripture, rather than exegesis, deriving its clear meaning from the actual words and context of the passage.

Paul views marriage as a covenant of mutual submission and service which wives and husbands enter under the lordship of the God we know in Christ.

This morning for my quiet time with God, I read Paul's inspired words in 1 Corinthians 7. In the chapter, Paul talks about marriage. I found that Eugene Peterson's rendering of the chapter refreshed my understanding of Paul's words, written to a congregation among whom sexual escapades were on the loose, just as some devout believers wondered if they should even be married.

A sampling:

Now, getting down to the questions you asked in your letter to me. First, Is it a good thing to have sexual relations?

Certainly—but only within a certain context. It’s good for a man to have a wife, and for a woman to have a husband. Sexual drives are strong, but marriage is strong enough to contain them and provide for a balanced and fulfilling sexual life in a world of sexual disorder. The marriage bed must be a place of mutuality—the husband seeking to satisfy his wife, the wife seeking to satisfy her husband. Marriage is not a place to “stand up for your rights.” Marriage is a decision to serve the other, whether in bed or out...

...if you are married, stay married. This is the Master’s command, not mine. If a wife should leave her husband, she must either remain single or else come back and make things right with him. And a husband has no right to get rid of his wife...

And don’t be wishing you were someplace else or with someone else. Where you are right now is God’s place for you. Live and obey and love and believe right there. God, not your marital status, defines your life.

Important things to pay attention to in the twenty-first century.

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

"Hotter Than All the Fifty Shades of the World"

A "holy tension": The wonder and the meaning of God's gift of sexual intimacy to husbands and wives.

Megan Hill writes:

When our marriage bed sinks low, barely visible under crumpled laundry and half-read books, the Evil One [the devil] scores a victory. So we meet the challenge. We persist in writing tender notes, and giving gifts, and making love: strategic maneuvers against the Devil's drift. We hold the marriage bed high, honoring our pleasurable commitments there, to buttress ourselves against marital malady and nothing less serious than its death.

And:

For non-Christians, the ultimate meaning of these symbols is love itself. Love: part emotion, part fantasy, part pleasure. A passionate equivalent to the iTunes Cloud, to which all human love songs and poetry and feelings are collectively entrusted.

For Christians, the symbols mean so much more. This mystery is profound.

In the tenderness, the holy jealousy, the delight, we mean to show Christ and his church. In the oneness, the sacrifice, the nourishing and cherishing, our weak symbols become something greater.

Read the whole thing.

5 Things God Wants You to Know About Sex, Plus 1 He Wants You to Know About Forgiveness

"You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act--that is, to watch a girl undress onstage," C.S. Lewis, friend of J.R.R. Tolkien and creator of The Chronicles of Narnia, wrote.

"Now suppose," Lewis went on, "you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally [strange]* about the state of the sex instinct among us?"

That question, written for a series of radio talks the English writer gave on the BBC that later became Mere Christianity, speaks with equal power to us today when, if anything, the obsession with things sexual has only increased.

I think it's time to consider what God has to say about sex. So, just to introduce this subject, I'm going to arbitrarily present you with 5 things God wants you to know about sex. (Plus 1 thing God wants you to know about forgiveness.)

Here we go...

1. God invented the sexes. Genesis 1:26-27 tells that the trinitarian God (one God in three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) had a conversation with Himself in which He said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness...So God created humankind in His image...male and female He created them."

2. God invented sexual intimacy for marriage between a wife and her husband.

Sexual intimacy is the way these two different but complementary bearers of Gods image seal the oneness of their marriage.

In Genesis 2:24, we're told: "Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh."

Many centuries later, when God came into the world in the person of Jesus Christ, He underscored God's intent that sexual intimacy was to be an act between a man and a woman who are married. He said, "Have you not read [in Genesis] that the one who made them at the beginning [God] 'made them male and female,' and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'?" (Matthew 19:4-5)

3. God invented sexual intimacy as a means by which husbands and wives physically affirm their oneness, give each other pleasure, and, sometimes, produce children.

In the Old Testament, a woman named Sarah, long after she'd gone through menopause, hears God tell her husband Abraham that she will give birth to a son, who will become the ancestor of many nations. Sarah laughs and asks, "After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?" (Genesis 18:12)

I once asked a Hebrew scholar of the Old Testament, a Lutheran who received his doctorate from Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, and he confirmed that, in the original Hebrew in which Sarah's words are rendered in the Old Testament, the pleasure to which Sarah referred included the pleasure of intimacy with her husband and the physical pleasure to which such intimacy can lead, as well as the pleasure of bearing a child.

By the way, Sarah did again enjoy pleasure with her husband, both in their sexual intimacy and in the birth of their son, Isaac.

4. People who engage in sexual intimacy outside of marriage are stealing a blessing from God that He intended only for a husband and a wife who, before witnesses, declare in the presence of God, to build their lives on Him.

God views every act of sexual intimacy apart from the marriage bed of a husband and wife as theft, in much the same way that He regards murder as stealing a life that He has given or every use of His Name for anything other than prayer, praise, or thanksgiving to Him as a theft of His good name. The New Testament calls sex outside of marriage fornication and sees it as a violation of the Sixth Commandment, "You shall not commit adultery."

Like all the sins enumerated in the Ten Commandments, God's moral law, the punishment for violation of this command as a sin, is eternal separation from God.

Sexual intimacy is like fireworks: Great when set off at the right times; worthless and even dangerous when used under other conditions.

5. Living together is not an option for those who want to follow the God we know in Jesus Christ into forgiveness for sin and everlasting life with God.

"I see so much divorce or I've been hurt before," people planning on moving in with someone tell me. "Moving in together helps us to learn if we're compatible."

That's about the dumbest thing I have to hear people tell me as a pastor!

Living together will give you no idea about how compatible your prospective marriage will be or how long it will last. In fact, data I've run across from time to time reveals that married couples who started out living together have higher divorce rates than those who wait to take up residence together after they've said, "I do."***

There's a simple reason for that: When you're shacking up, there's always a net.

Until you commit yourself publicly, under God, with a dedication to building your marriage on God, you can always bug out.

Getting married is a bit like what my friends and I would do when we were kids. We'd find a good place to play ball and some scaredy-cat would say, "I don't think we can play there." That's when one of us would take all the balls, bats, and ball gloves we had and fling them far over the fence. Now, we were either going to see things out by climbing over the fence and playing ball on the lot or just leave everything behind.

Of course, couples should spend time getting to know one another before saying, "I do." But sexual intimacy is a gift God wants to be reserved for the married.

It's only after you've committed yourself in marriage to the other person that you are all-in. No amount of "playing house" will simulate marriage.

And why would you want to accept anything less than marriage anyway? When God wants to give you a Porsche, why would you settle for a Gremlin?

6. BONUS POINT: God can forgive any sin. If you've already had sex outside of marriage, God is willing to forgive the sin of any who want to turn away from (what the Bible calls repent) for a sin and turn to the God we meet in Jesus Christ. (Turning to Christ, repenting, by the way, is a continuous struggle even for the most seasoned Christians I have known, including me.)

If you're already living with someone in a sexual relationship, I urge you to move away from one another now, even if you're engaged to be married.

It will help you to see that sexual intimacy isn't just something you do to punctuate a night out or a night with seemingly nothing else to do. You will be restoring sexual intimacy to its proper place as total giving of a husband to a wife and of a wife to a husband that God intended it to be, no holding back.

Almost everyone is blessed with the physical capacity for a sex life. But just as you should only eat food when you're hungry or use God's Name when you're speaking to Him, for Him, or about Him,  sexual intimacy is only for people in marriages between husbands and wives. Any other use of this precious gift is dissing the God Who created the gift. My guess is that you don't want to do that.

*Lewis's original word here was queer. But he used the term in 1952, long before it became commonplace to use it for anything other than an adjective for strange.

**Probably not uncoincidentally, the explosion of our culture-wide sexual-obsessions has been accompanied by a similar almost grotesquely pornographic interest in food, if shows like The United States of Bacon on the Food Channel, of which my wife and I caught about five minutes the other night before being so grossed out, we turned off the TV. What was a farfetched absurdity to Lewis in 1952--lust for food--is a craving obsession in 2013, it seems.

***I couldn't care less about marriage licenses, by the way. As an added service to couples whose weddings I perform, I fill out the state paperwork. But frankly, I think the state ought to get completely out of the marriage business. So, my arguments in favor of marriage have nothing to do with the often and rightly dismissed, "piece of paper." When I talk about marriage here hasn't got a thing to do with any piece of paper!

Faith Tidbit #48

In his book, Money, Sex, and Power, Richard Foster compares our sexuality to a river. When we use our sexuality within the boundaries created for it by God, sex also is a good and beautiful thing. But when misused, sex can hurt and destroy and disrupt people’s lives. To King Solomon, who certainly would have done well to pay greater attention, God said, "Drink water from your own cistern...rejoice in the wife of your youth...May her breasts satisfy you at all times; may you be intoxicated always by her love..." Sexual intimacy, one component of that special order of the friendship between a wife and a husband, is a beautiful (and even intoxicating) thing, meant only for a wife and a husband.

Faith Tidbit #47

The second creation account in the Old Testament book of Genesis reveals God's intent for human beings who choose to express their sexuality in an intimate way. There, we're told, "...a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh." Sexual intimacy is meant to be the sign and seal of a lifetime connection between a husband and wife.

Boo-ring

I never cared for Halloween while growing up. The costumes were OK--I usually was a hobo. (One year, I went in drag to the school Halloween party, leading to somewhat embarrassing results. I talked about it in a sermon here.)

But my taste in candy, the collection of which is a real object of the holiday, was limited. I liked Hershey bars, candy Kisses, Milky Way bars, and Tootsie Rolls. That was pretty much it. (Today, Milky Ways are too rich for me and it's probably been ten years since I ate one. I picked up a Tootsie Roll offered to customers at the tellers' windows of our local bank a few weeks ago and was glad when I finally got the thing chewed and digested...probably my last Tootsie Roll. I doubt of the thing is fully digested yet.)

If baked goods--cookies, cakes, breads, snack cakes, and pies--were what people had given away on Beggars' Nights when I was growing up, I would have been a lot happier. I can also guarantee that, as a result, in adult years, I would have become the subject of a reality TV series, Rescue of the Morbidly Obese Twinkie Inhaler. (It may have become a Halloween classic.)

The other reason I never cared for Halloween is the holiday's emphasis on ghosts, ghouls, witches, graveyards, and monsters. That stuff creeped me out. I remember that I was the only member of my Cub Scout den who didn't watch Chiiler Theater on Columbus' Channel 10 every Friday night. "Hey, stay overnight at my place. We're all going to watch Chiller," one of the guys would say. "That's OK," I'd answer and come up with some excuse about a prior commitment I had from 11:30pm on Friday through 1:00am on Saturday...when I was ten years old. (I'm pretty sure that the other guys knew I didn't have prior commitments.)

I did stay up to watch Chiller one night. WBNS presented a double bill, each film considered, by some, to be great movies: Frankenstein and The Mummy. I already considered myself a sort of film aficionado (I doubt that I knew that term, which I'm sure I heard used for the first time years later by a sports radio host), so I had to see these classics.

But I arranged to watch them lying between my parents in their bedroom. It didn't matter if they fell asleep while Boris Karloff improbably chased down people able to run while he ambled, slowly dragging one foot behind him, in The Mummy. I knew that as long as my parents were with me, I wouldn't get done in like the little girl with the flowers in Frankenstein.

So, between the emphases on being frightened out of one's mind and the bags of candy I never ate, Halloween has, for me, always been something more to be endured than enjoyed.

Now, comes yet another reason for indifference to Halloween: Its hypersexualization. Young women, who should be confident in themselves, instead put on shows for young men, betraying a need to be validated by men, rather than believing in their own intrinsic value. "Girls like to get attention from guys, and guys will gladly give it to them," says one female, a junior at Ohio State, in an article on "sexing up Halloween" that appears in today's Columbus Dispatch.

In willingly putting on a sex show, these young women both devalue sex and elevate it to a place far outweighing its importance. That shouldn't surprise, I guess. It fits right in with a generally sex-obsessed culture.

Back in the 1970s, when I myself was a student at Ohio State, I entertained the notion that the fledgling women's movement, with which I was sympathetic, would finally drive a stake in the heart of the objectification of women. I thought that women would be seen as equal and serious human beings, not as sex toys or masseuses for the male ego.

But the opposite has proven to be the case. Today, we find younger children dressing in sexually suggestive ways and, consistent with patterns historian Christopher Lasch first identified in the late-1970s, we see people extending their adolscent hormonal obsessions deep into adulthood.

Don't get me wrong. Unlike candy or monster movies, I like sex. Also unlike those aspects of Halloween that have perennially bored or frightened me, sexual intimacy is, I believe, the invention of God. And when the gift of sex is used as intended by God, it can be as God implicitly describes it in Genesis, "very good."

As I read the Scriptures, which I believe are the inspired Word of God for humanity, I see three functions for sexual intimacy:

• a sign and seal of the commitment of husband and wife to one another
• an opportunity for a husband and wife to bring pleasure to one another
• and, sometimes, a means by which a family may be created

Sex was never meant to be a thing in itself, but a wonderful subordinate reality. Not an object, a gift along the way of married life.

But, with our human penchant for misplaced priorities, we've allowed sex to become more like a god than a gift from God. We have both cheapened it and, in many ways, from porn to slinky Halloween costumes, monetized it.

It bores me and it saddens me. It even frightens me.

[UPDATE: Over at The Moderate Voice where I linked to both the Columbus Dispatch article mentioned here and this post, a commenter apparently thought I wanted to limit or eliminate people's freedom to wear sexy Halloween costumes. That person wrote:

Halloween isn't just for kids anymore. If adults (male and female) want to dress up sexy to attract the opposite sex, isn't it their right to do so? Doesn't bother me too much, since I'm neither a social conservative nor a prude. Not surprising that some Americans will be in an uproar, the Victorian roots of this nation makes it inevitable. I for one approve of the more sexually [sic] openness of Europe.

I responded:

No one is arguing about people's rights. At least I'm not. Of course, people have the freedom to choose to wear whatever they wish.

I just find it interesting how we sexualize so many things and then monetize sexuality.

Our absorption with things sexual seems disproportionately obsessive to me.

To observe trends is not the same as advocating a curtailment of people's freedoms.

By the way, I find a lot of the efforts to break the Victorian envelope sort of boring, tedious, and redundant. The envelope got broken a long time ago. Few things are really shocking, taboo, or countercultural any more. A lot of people who think they're being daring are really only repeating the supposedly daring acts that have been done continuously in recent decades. That's why I think the sexualization of Halloween--like the sexualization of almost everything else in the culture--is "boo-ring," a yawner.]