SPEAKER_00: Today's reading is from 1 Corinthians chapter 6, verses 12 to 20.
SPEAKER_00: All things are lawful for me, but not all things are helpful.
SPEAKER_00: All things are lawful for me, but I will not be dominated by anything.
SPEAKER_00: Food is meant for the stomach, and the stomach for food.
SPEAKER_00: And God will destroy both one and the other.
SPEAKER_00: The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.
SPEAKER_00: And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power.
SPEAKER_00: Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?
SPEAKER_00: Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute?
SPEAKER_00: Never.
SPEAKER_00: Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her?
SPEAKER_00: For as is as it is written, the two will become one flesh.
SPEAKER_00: But he who joins the Lord to the Lord becomes one spirit with him.
SPEAKER_00: Flee from sexual immorality.
SPEAKER_00: Every other sin a person commits is outside the body.
SPEAKER_00: But the sexually immoral person sins against his own body.
SPEAKER_00: Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God?
SPEAKER_00: You are not your own, for you were bought with a price.
SPEAKER_00: So glorify God in your body.
SPEAKER_00: And so reads God's Word.
SPEAKER_01: Welcome to you.
SPEAKER_01: If you joined us while we were singing, my name's Mark.
SPEAKER_01: I'm one of the leaders here at uh at City Church.
SPEAKER_01: You're very welcome with us.
SPEAKER_01: And uh we are in a series called Him Her, uh, where we are uh thinking about issues to do with uh gender, sex, sexuality, identity, uh, all of uh those things.
SPEAKER_01: We've moved into the second half now, and uh we begin uh this morning uh to think specifically about uh about sex.
SPEAKER_01: So if you're here and this is your first time, welcome.
SPEAKER_01: Um and uh if you're sitting beside your parents, sorry.
SPEAKER_01: Um so this is uh this is where we are, this is where we're going.
SPEAKER_01: Let me give you a quick plug.
SPEAKER_01: Um over the last couple of weeks, we were thinking about uh about men and women and the relationships between men and women, the differences between men and women, and how that's expressed uh in things like society, but more uh perhaps in the home and in the church.
SPEAKER_01: And uh one of the books that the elders have been reading, and I know a number of the women uh have been reading as well, is a book uh that is just newly out called Embracing Complementarianism.
SPEAKER_01: You know, what's complementarianism?
SPEAKER_01: It's basically what we've been talking about.
SPEAKER_01: Um, and you may want to pick up this book, um, but just to fuel some thinking.
SPEAKER_01: There is uh there's probably no other area where uh where Christians in the surrounding world uh differ more than uh what we're gonna be talking about over the next two weeks: sex and then sexuality.
SPEAKER_01: Um Christians have either done this or been perceived uh to do this, uh, lobbying Bible verses, proof texts, like moral grenades uh at people outside of the walls of the church, into the surrounding culture.
SPEAKER_01: And as a result, we begin to sound a little bit like moralists, uh people who are never happier than when we're invading other people's bedrooms, obsessed with what folks do with their body.
SPEAKER_01: Talking about sex obviously is uh contentious and controversial, not least of all because each of us experiences uh a drive and desire towards expressing ourselves sexually in our world, it often consumes a lot of what we uh what we see around us, it consumes our advertising, uh our daydreaming, our time, and it's Lil Wonder.
SPEAKER_01: Because if you're looking for uh for a potent, transcendent, significant experience that draws you outside of yourself.
SPEAKER_01: Well, if you're not religious, where you're gonna tend to look is to sex.
SPEAKER_01: It is often so profound because it can be so meaningful.
SPEAKER_01: It's what it's little wonder then that this is one of the chief ways in which people find a sense of identity and a sense of meaning in the world.
SPEAKER_01: Now, broadly speaking, uh either historically or in various parts of the world, there are three predominant views of sex.
SPEAKER_01: Let me quickly run through what those three predominant views are.
SPEAKER_01: First is the what we're going to call the low view of sex, uh, that sex is it's base, it's a it's an animal drive, it's not very spiritual, it's kind of uh if you must, you must uh sort of way of thinking.
SPEAKER_01: And this is perhaps what's what's lying behind uh some of the some of the thinking in Corinth.
SPEAKER_01: Um you have some people who are like, well, it doesn't matter who you sleep with, and then you had other people who were saying, well, um actually you don't want to be, you don't want to defile yourself with physical things anyway.
SPEAKER_01: You don't really want to be engaging in sex because to engage in anything physical, well, that's less holy and that's less spiritual.
SPEAKER_01: That thought doesn't come from the Bible.
SPEAKER_01: And I would like that to be emphasized at various points this morning.
SPEAKER_01: That thought doesn't come from the Bible, it comes from uh from Greek thought, it comes from Plato, who uh divorced the the body from the spirit, uh, and saw what what you did in the spirit, those those spiritual pursuits, those virtuous, as he called them, pursuits, as much more holy, much more significant.
SPEAKER_01: And the things that you did in the body, like eating and having sex and all of those, they were just kind of they were kind of less meaningful and more degrading.
SPEAKER_01: Now, sadly, that sort of thinking has infected the church.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, when you get to ideas of uh of priestly celibacy and of monks, where you know the case it's uh you sex is something that it's that's that's base, that's lesser.
SPEAKER_01: It's not so much even in our uh Roman Catholic friends, it's also uh infected uh our um our thinking as well.
SPEAKER_01: We have not done a good job in uh in the Western church of articulating a view of of sex which really encompasses human flourishing.
SPEAKER_01: Teenagers and youth groups are told about the the evils of uh of fooling around with your boyfriend or girlfriend or the wickedness of masturbation.
SPEAKER_01: Yes, I said it, you're welcome, without being shown the beautiful narrative of what God is doing and unfolding and how sex fits into that.
SPEAKER_01: And so what ends up happening is that people imbibe this sort of idea of sex is dirty, nasty, and wrong, so save it for the person that you love.
SPEAKER_01: It's kind of no wonder people kind of feel this incongruence.
SPEAKER_01: There's no wonder that people reject that.
SPEAKER_01: First idea is the low view of sex.
SPEAKER_01: Second would be kind of neutral.
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna call it sex as appetite, and that certainly lies behind um verse 13, where the Corinthians in writing to Paul have this little slogan uh you know, food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food.
SPEAKER_01: What they're saying is having sex is no more, it's no more significant than having dinner.
SPEAKER_01: You know, I need to eat in order to live, and so I need to have sex in order to fulfill that appetite, sex as appetite.
SPEAKER_01: And sex is is just like that.
SPEAKER_01: It's just another human activity amongst the others.
SPEAKER_01: And so it's there's no moral, um, there's there's no morality connected to it.
SPEAKER_01: There's no morality to you having your dinner, unless you're accountable, but I'm assuming that you're not, right?
SPEAKER_01: So there's no morality connected to your dinner, and so others say, well, there's no morality connected to my to my sex life.
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't matter who I have sex with.
SPEAKER_01: I need to um to satisfy that drive and that desire.
SPEAKER_01: And so uh it is a morally neutral thing.
SPEAKER_01: That tends to be, I think, what what is kind of pushed in uh in kind of high school secondary education sex ed.
SPEAKER_01: It's kind of sex is something that you're going to do.
SPEAKER_01: So do it in a uh in a safe way that's pleasurable.
SPEAKER_01: But it's kind of as long as it's safe and everybody's consenting, apart from that, it's kind of morally neutral, right?
SPEAKER_01: Just have at it, fulfill that appetite and that desire.
SPEAKER_01: You might see that expressed in things like hookup culture, you know, whatever, whatever app is on your phone that needs to be deleted.
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, that could be an application point for today, this idea of I need to express myself in this sort of way.
SPEAKER_01: And all it is is another appetite to be satisfied.
SPEAKER_01: Low view of sex.
SPEAKER_01: Sex is appetite.
SPEAKER_01: The third, and I think the most prevalent uh one that we have to contend with today is sex as ultimate self-expression.
SPEAKER_01: Sex as ultimate self-expression.
SPEAKER_01: If you are new and this is your first sermon, one of the things that I would encourage you to do is go back in Spotify or Apple Podcasts and listen to the first two.
SPEAKER_01: Because in the first two, what we do is we lay some of the philosophical underpinnings for how it is that we got here, how the West got to where it is, and the Christian view of ethics and morality and what makes something good.
SPEAKER_01: And so that's going to really help you.
SPEAKER_01: But one of the things that we did there in those sermons was we talked about how we got to where we are in terms of um the 18th century and the profound effect that that had on the West, particularly with the with the romantics.
SPEAKER_01: And so, what the romantics, by way of refresher, for those of you who have been here, what the romantics were saying was this is that um human beings, when they're born, they are born free and unrestrained and unrepressed.
SPEAKER_01: And then society, and more particularly the church, comes along and it and it locks people down, it curtails their freedom uh and uh and makes them almost less human.
SPEAKER_01: And so what the romantics were saying that you needed to do is you needed to throw off the shackles of the morality of society and the morality of the church in particular, and express your true free self.
SPEAKER_01: And how did you do how do you do that ultimately?
SPEAKER_01: You do that ultimately in the bedroom.
SPEAKER_01: You do that with your sex life, that that's how you experience true freedom.
SPEAKER_01: That your your urges, your drives are instinctively and innately good and pure and should be followed.
SPEAKER_01: Now we don't need to go too much over the roots of that, but hopefully that sounds familiar with you.
SPEAKER_01: We could take that on into the 20th century, and you've got uh thinkers like the like the French philosopher uh Michel Foucault, who then linked sex with the idea of of power, divorcing it from love and sex being like a power play, and uh and all of those ideas.
SPEAKER_01: But for us, what happened what has happened is that if you say you cannot have sex with this person, if you you should not have sex in this way or with this person, the way that's interpreted uh is you're shutting down my humanity.
SPEAKER_01: What it means for me to be human is to express myself sexually.
SPEAKER_01: If you are placing a moral injuncture on that, if you're closing that down, what you're doing is you're closing down my humanity.
SPEAKER_01: You're saying that I have to be less than truly human.
SPEAKER_01: Sex is seen as ultimate self-expression.
SPEAKER_01: So either the low view of sex, sex is bad.
SPEAKER_01: The neutral view, well, sex is kind of meaningless, it's just an appetite like having your dinner, or sex is ultimate.
SPEAKER_01: The Bible's view of sex rejects each one of those for different reasons.
SPEAKER_01: The Bible begins by saying this sex is good.
SPEAKER_01: You're taking notes, that's point number one.
SPEAKER_01: Sex is good.
SPEAKER_01: You have to keep on taking more notes.
SPEAKER_01: Don't just write that one and then go home and then and then look! Right?
SPEAKER_01: So keep listening.
SPEAKER_01: But point number one, sex is good.
SPEAKER_01: It's been commonly thought that uh the Christians want to diminish the goodness of sex.
SPEAKER_01: See it as a kind of well, you know, close your eyes and think of England, kind of an if you must, you must sort of attitude.
SPEAKER_01: But contrary to the low view of sex, the Bible teaches that sex is part of God's good creation.
SPEAKER_01: God made sex.
SPEAKER_01: He encourages it in the blessing of the man and woman back in Genesis when he says to be fruitful.
SPEAKER_01: They're not gonna have a special hug in the cabbage patch, right?
SPEAKER_01: It's an encouragement towards that productiveness.
SPEAKER_01: It's part of the command to fill the earth and subdue it.
SPEAKER_01: It's part of the pre-fall blessing.
SPEAKER_01: Sex doesn't just come into the world after sin comes into the world, it exists before it.
SPEAKER_01: To more fully understand why sex is good and what makes it good, we need to understand its purpose.
SPEAKER_01: And we'll return to that in a moment.
SPEAKER_01: But just hold that in your mind that the Bible begins with this idea that sex is good.
SPEAKER_01: Now, keep taking notes.
SPEAKER_01: Point number two, sex is broken.
SPEAKER_01: Sex is very often broken, and we are all broken sexually.
SPEAKER_01: The devil cannot make, he can only mock.
SPEAKER_01: Let me say that again.
SPEAKER_01: The devil cannot make.
SPEAKER_01: He can only mock.
SPEAKER_01: Sin is the distortion of something good, it is the twisting and perversion of something that is good and turning it into something that's wrong.
SPEAKER_01: This idea is is picked up.
SPEAKER_01: Um Tolkien fans, listen for a second.
SPEAKER_01: Everybody else, you can go to sleep.
SPEAKER_01: This is the creation of the uh of the orcs.
SPEAKER_01: How are the orcs made?
SPEAKER_01: Uh the the creator in Tolkien's world does not make elves and orcs, he makes elves.
SPEAKER_01: And the evil force, Morgoth Melkor, comes along and distorts the elves.
SPEAKER_01: A ruined and terrible form of life, Saruman calls them.
SPEAKER_01: It's a twisting and a perversion of something good.
SPEAKER_01: And there Tolkien is picking up this idea that the devil doesn't create, he only mocks and counterfeits and twists and distorts.
SPEAKER_01: And he's done that with sex.
SPEAKER_01: Contrary to the view that sex is just a morally neutral appetite, the Bible would contend that our appetites have been twisted and corrupted.
SPEAKER_01: They don't work quite as they should.
SPEAKER_01: We obsess over sex.
SPEAKER_01: People are harmed using sex rather than seeing it as the gift that it was made to be in the bigger picture of human flourishing.
SPEAKER_01: C.S.
SPEAKER_01: Lewis in Mere Christianity has this has this idea uh about uh sex as appetite.
SPEAKER_01: He says, imagine for a second that you were beamed down onto a planet, and on that planet, people were obsessed with um, so he uses mutton chops, think of like lamb chops or uh or meat of any kind.
SPEAKER_01: So imagine that you beamed out on this planet and everybody was obsessed with meat, and that men would uh would go into darkened rooms and they would pay money to watch a cloth be slowly drawn back over this this piece of meat and then covered up again and then drawn titillatingly back again and then covered up again.
SPEAKER_01: So what would you determine about that society's interaction with food?
SPEAKER_01: What would you say about those persons' appetites?
SPEAKER_01: You'd say that they're distorted, that they're not quite working right.
SPEAKER_01: That's not how you're supposed to treat your steak as wonderful as steak is and so it is with sex.
SPEAKER_01: We do not approach sex rightly in our world.
SPEAKER_01: Our appetites have been distorted.
SPEAKER_01: This is why Paul in verse 18 of our reading that Young read for us encourages us, encourages this fleeing of sexual immorality because our appetites, our desires, are not a good and reliable guide for what we ought to do.
SPEAKER_01: They're not a reliable guide for what is good or moral or God honoring.
SPEAKER_01: So sex is good, sex is being distorted by the fall, and it's broken.
SPEAKER_01: Third sex has a purpose.
SPEAKER_01: Remember, I said just a minute ago that in order to understand the goodness of sex, you need to understand what its uh what its goal is.
SPEAKER_01: This is actually how all of Christian ethics works.
SPEAKER_01: All of Christian ethics says, okay, what is this thing designed for?
SPEAKER_01: What is this thing made for?
SPEAKER_01: What what is its purpose?
SPEAKER_01: And then the good, what is ethical, is having that thing run along the tracks of the purpose for which it was made, right?
SPEAKER_01: That's what that's what Christians mean when we say that thing's good and that thing's bad.
SPEAKER_01: It's not arbitrary, it's based on purpose or goal or intent.
SPEAKER_01: Do you see?
SPEAKER_01: So, in order to understand the goodness of sex, we must understand the purpose of sex.
SPEAKER_01: Sex is not simply a good in and of itself, necessarily, because it can be used to harm people.
SPEAKER_01: It is good when it is used for what it is made.
SPEAKER_01: So, what is it for?
SPEAKER_01: Well, first point here is that sex is certainly for pleasure.
SPEAKER_01: I remember um my biology teacher, uh, we had biology in high school, and it immediately preceded religious education.
SPEAKER_01: If you're an American, you're like, you had religious education in school.
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
SPEAKER_01: So we had biology and then we had RE or R S religious studies.
SPEAKER_01: And our biology teacher, Daphne Myers, um, shout out if you're listening on the podcast, uh was uh was a fairly avowed atheist.
SPEAKER_01: And I remember when she was teaching us uh uh the mechanics of sex, and she knew that our RE was coming in afterwards.
SPEAKER_01: She said, I'm gonna teach you how to do it, and then he's gonna come in and tell you that you shouldn't.
SPEAKER_01: Um because we kind of shrink away, Christians kind of shrink away to the idea of sex as pleasurable, but it is pleasurable for particular biological reasons.
SPEAKER_01: Sex in the Bible's mind is not about the self, but about the other.
SPEAKER_01: It's not primarily about individual happiness, but the the pursuit of uh of pleasure together.
SPEAKER_01: However, that's not where the Bible ends.
SPEAKER_01: That's where society ends.
SPEAKER_01: Society ends ethically with is it pleasurable?
SPEAKER_01: And are both people consenting?
SPEAKER_01: That's the kind of moral guardrail, consent, right?
SPEAKER_01: But there's no positive vision for sex beyond does it feel good?
SPEAKER_01: The Bible says way more than that.
SPEAKER_01: And it's far more beautiful and far more life-giving.
SPEAKER_01: But it does have pleasure as part of a goal for sex.
SPEAKER_01: Second, sex is inextricably linked with reproduction.
SPEAKER_01: Why are you saying that?
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: Now, I need to, I mean, I'll can I confess I often get invited to to universities, particularly UCD, uh, to uh to do their sex talk, lunch bar, right?
SPEAKER_01: Um because the because the Trinity students are all cowards.
SPEAKER_01: Uh and oftentimes uh and oftentimes over the years, I have I've majored on the sex as pleasure, and then I've kind of come in with some other things and I've kind of lessened the goal of reproduction.
SPEAKER_01: But I want to introduce that again because I think it's important.
SPEAKER_01: So listen, hear me out on this one.
SPEAKER_01: First is to say that it's really only over the last hundred years, certainly over the last 50 years since the advent of the contraception, the contracept of pill, that we have divorced the idea of sex from the idea of childbearing.
SPEAKER_01: Now, I'm not here to make moral pronouncements in this sermon.
SPEAKER_01: We can talk about it in the QA.
SPEAKER_01: There'll be a QA after the service about contraception per se.
SPEAKER_01: But I am suggesting that even as Christians, we have assumed that it is normal to separate sex from its chief outcome.
SPEAKER_01: And one of the consequences then is that we all fall back into the pleasure ethic and say sex is just about pleasure.
SPEAKER_01: But God made sex in order that we might be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.
SPEAKER_01: The part of the good purpose and design of sex is the furthering of the human race.
SPEAKER_01: This, and this is why this is important.
SPEAKER_01: This is why, certainly part of the reasoning behind why Christians do not see all sex as morally equivalent.
SPEAKER_01: Not all sex is morally equivalent.
SPEAKER_01: Because not all sex has the potential for life.
SPEAKER_01: That is the second purpose behind sex.
SPEAKER_01: Third, and we'll expand this third one more.
SPEAKER_01: Sex is made to reflect what God is like.
SPEAKER_01: Sex is an act of self-giving that reflects the character of God in whose image we are made.
SPEAKER_01: For the Christian, sex is worship.
SPEAKER_01: It is a way of reflecting to one another something of who God is.
SPEAKER_01: And so, in order to determine the rightness and goodness of sex, we cannot neglect this vertical dimension, this Godward dimension.
SPEAKER_01: Sex gives us a glimpse into the love that God has within himself, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and that Christ has for his people, the church.
SPEAKER_01: So what does God's love look like?
SPEAKER_01: And how does it relate to sex?
SPEAKER_01: First, God's love is an unwavering commitment to another.
SPEAKER_01: It is an unwavering commitment to another.
SPEAKER_01: God calls his people, believers, the church, into an exclusive relationship with himself.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord Jesus does not play the field with another people.
SPEAKER_01: He weds himself by his death and resurrection to the church.
SPEAKER_01: And that is often imaged in the Bible with the idea of marriage.
SPEAKER_01: And walking away from God, particularly in the Old Testament, is seen in terms of adultery and unfaithfulness, because God resolutely pursues one people.
SPEAKER_01: Christ pursues one bride, laying down his life in loving sacrifice for her, and then unites himself to her.
SPEAKER_01: This is why Christians see sex as something reserved for marriage.
SPEAKER_01: Because marriage is the context of that promise and commitment.
SPEAKER_01: It is pledging to one another that you are one at every level, not just physical.
SPEAKER_01: United legally, emotionally, financially, in terms of outlook and values and desires and your plans for the future and how you want to run your house and all of those things.
SPEAKER_01: United in your desire to pursue Jesus together, husbands lovingly dying to self, wives joyfully, following the loving care of their husbands.
SPEAKER_01: And what is sex in that context?
SPEAKER_01: Sex is the capstone, the seal on levels of unity that already exist.
SPEAKER_01: Financial, emotional, legal, spiritual.
SPEAKER_01: Let me give you an idea.
SPEAKER_01: I haven't read it anywhere.
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to set it forth, but I think there's something, I think there's something to it.
SPEAKER_01: In the context of marriage, sex is covenant renewal.
SPEAKER_01: What do I mean by that?
SPEAKER_01: In the Bible, when a covenant, that is a binding promise, when it is made, there is always attached with it a covenant renewal ceremony.
SPEAKER_01: And so when God makes a covenant with uh with Israel in Mount Sinai, this binding promise, there is renewal ceremonies all through the sacrificial system, culminating in the Day of Atonement.
SPEAKER_01: That is the covenant renewal where the people pledge themselves again to God, and God, in the action of sacrificing the Lamb, pledges himself to his people and says, I will be your God, you will be my people.
SPEAKER_01: It's a covenant renewal ceremony.
SPEAKER_01: In a few minutes, we will go through a covenant renewal ceremony.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord's Supper is us, in a sense, week by week, rededicating ourselves to walk with Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: That's part of the reason why we say, if you're not a follower of Jesus, don't take it.
SPEAKER_01: Because you don't want to rededicate yourself to following Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: And it is a reminder of his pledge to us that he is with us always, even till the very end of the age.
SPEAKER_01: It is a covenant renewal ceremony.
SPEAKER_01: And marriage is a covenant, it's not just a contract.
SPEAKER_01: Marriage is a covenant, a binding promise.
SPEAKER_01: And I think sex is the covenant renewal ceremony.
SPEAKER_01: So in essence, what happens, it is it is husband and wife without words saying to one another in their self-giving, everything that I pledged to you, all the faithfulness that I said that I would that I would give to you on our wedding day, all of the promises to remain yours and to give all that I have to you, all of those commitments that I made before our family and friends and before God, I now rededicate to you in this moment.
SPEAKER_01: That's what sex is.
SPEAKER_01: It's beautiful, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01: Sex is covenant renewal.
SPEAKER_01: It is saying again, I am yours and you are mine, and we are one at every level of analysis.
SPEAKER_01: And that in turn reflects something of God's love and what God is like.
SPEAKER_01: That he comes and is unwaveringly committed to his people.
SPEAKER_01: Another idea is this that sex is complementary self-giving.
SPEAKER_01: Sex is a sacred and beautiful dance in the Christian worldview, because it is an analogy of the joyful self-giving and pleasure and love that God has within Himself, Father and Son, and Holy Spirit, living in a relationship of glorious devotion to the other, each different to the other.
SPEAKER_01: The Son is not the Father, the Spirit is not the Son, the Father is not the Spirit, that they are one and they are different, and they are complementary, and they pour out love and joy to one another.
SPEAKER_01: And again, in the New Testament, this idea is picked up with Christ in the church, uniting two different complementary halves in Christ and his bride.
SPEAKER_01: Christ does not unite himself to himself.
SPEAKER_01: The church does not unite herself to herself.
SPEAKER_01: So if sex is designed to image of some image something of who God is and what Christ has done for us and his work of salvation, then it must be an act that it that occurs between two different, committed, complementary opposites, male and female.
SPEAKER_01: Sex is therefore God's invented way of saying to a person who is your complementary other, that I belong completely and exclusively and permanently to you.
SPEAKER_01: This is why Paul, Paul's not a prude in 1 Corinthians.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, in the very next chapter, after the one Jung read, in um in 1 Corinthians 7, he encourages husbands and wives not to uh not to deny one another, but to be regularly renewing that covenant.
SPEAKER_01: And so it's not just that the New Testament is kind of prudish, and doesn't, you know, that its ethic is, well, I find that distasteful, so uh I'll say that that one's wrong, but this one's right.
SPEAKER_01: That's not really what uh what Paul's getting at.
SPEAKER_01: He tells them to flee sexual immorality because sexual immorality does not reflect God's good design for sex, it is rather a reflection of the brokenness of sex.
SPEAKER_01: Why does he say that you shouldn't have sex with a prostitute here in here in these verses?
SPEAKER_01: Well, because you are not united at every other level.
SPEAKER_01: You're only doing the bodily physical one-flesh union.
SPEAKER_01: That's why it's wrong.
SPEAKER_01: Not just that Paul finds it morally distasteful.
SPEAKER_01: I think also, in part, because the whole of the New Testament is bringing forth a brand new sexual ethic.
SPEAKER_01: In the ancient world, sex was based in power.
SPEAKER_01: That a Roman citizen, a Roman male could have sex with whoever he liked as long as he was above them in the power structure.
SPEAKER_01: Male or female, slave or free, that was the governing ethic for sex.
SPEAKER_01: And Paul comes along and says, no, no, no.
SPEAKER_01: Men should be self-controlled.
SPEAKER_01: He should be the husband of one wife, he should be a one-woman man.
SPEAKER_01: It's a completely countercultural sexual ethic, and it's a sexual ethic that is based not in power, but in love and in self-giving, self-donation.
SPEAKER_01: This is the Christian view of sex, and so Christianity sees sex as something far more precious than the world around us.
SPEAKER_01: But it never sees sex as ultimate.
SPEAKER_01: So, in a sense, you have this tension.
SPEAKER_01: On the one hand, Christianity sees sex as far more valuable than the world around us.
SPEAKER_01: And simultaneously, on the other hand, it sees sex as less valuable than the world around us.
SPEAKER_01: And this is contrary to the idea that sex, that having sex, is the very apex of expressing your humanity.
SPEAKER_01: The Bible never sees sex as ultimate.
SPEAKER_01: Christians reject the idea that if you are not sexually active, you are living an unfulfilled subhuman existence.
SPEAKER_01: A celibate follower of Jesus is as valuable, as loved, and has the same potential for fulfillment as the married, sexually active believer.
SPEAKER_01: How do we know this is true?
SPEAKER_01: We think of somebody like Jesus, unless you're completely bought into what Dan Brown was saying 20 years ago.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus is the most truly human person that ever lived and never had sex.
SPEAKER_01: And so to say that sex is the very apex and epitome of what it means to be human is to denigrate Christ's humanity.
SPEAKER_01: That can't possibly be true.
SPEAKER_01: He is more human than any of us.
SPEAKER_01: Sex, remember, is an image.
SPEAKER_01: It is a picture.
SPEAKER_01: It's a shadow of a deeper reality.
SPEAKER_01: One of the things that the church can end up doing is we can we can become unhealthily obsessed with marriage and pushing people into marriage.
SPEAKER_01: You know, we go to go to people who have been single for a while and go, you haven't found anybody yet.
SPEAKER_01: It's awful, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01: It's terrible.
SPEAKER_01: The last sermon in this series will be a sermon on uh on singleness.
SPEAKER_01: Because I think there is kind of an obsession, but kind of as long as we we get these people married off, because that's a that's a higher form of existence, and that's wrong.
SPEAKER_01: Your marriage is a picture, it's a photograph.
SPEAKER_01: You don't become obsessed with the photographs that are on your camera roll.
SPEAKER_01: You obsess over rather the thing that they point to.
SPEAKER_01: Marriage points beyond itself.
SPEAKER_01: It will not always be.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus says that we are that in that in the new heavens and the new earth we will be like the angels, neither married nor given in marriage.
SPEAKER_01: And so sex is just an image, a shadow of a deeper reality that is being fulfilled in part now in the church as we embody our oneness.
SPEAKER_01: You the church should be the context for intimate, deep relationships with one another.
SPEAKER_01: One of the problems is that we hear the word intimate now these days and we think sexually.
SPEAKER_01: I want to recapture what intimate means.
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't mean just having sex with folk, it means a deep knowing and being known.
SPEAKER_01: And that is possible in the context of the Christian community.
SPEAKER_01: God is conducting a glorious symphony.
SPEAKER_01: He is the composer and author of the most enrapturing symphonic beautiful score in all of eternity.
SPEAKER_01: And in heaven, the angels are tuning up, and and in the new heavens and the new earth, we will experience that soul-stirring, mind-transcending wonder eternally.
SPEAKER_01: And sex here on earth is like playing that symphony on a piano.
SPEAKER_01: You can do it, and it sounds similar, but it's nothing compared to the orchestra that will strike up at the last.
SPEAKER_01: And nobody, married or single, will be excluded from that beauty.
SPEAKER_01: It would be remiss of me as we conclude not to speak for a few moments right at the end to those who feel like they have been wounded and sinned against sexually, those who feel broken or ashamed.
SPEAKER_01: The first thing that I want to say is welcome home.
SPEAKER_01: You're not a stranger to us here.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus has this image in John 3 when he's talking to Nicodemus.
SPEAKER_01: He says, you know, um, that the light shines in the darkness.
SPEAKER_01: People have loved the darkness because their deeds are evil.
SPEAKER_01: But anybody who comes into the light will see that that all of their deeds have been done in God.
SPEAKER_01: And you're one of the reasons, one of the things that Jesus is saying there is that it's like there's a big spotlight shining down in the world, and and people don't want to step into the light because it's exposing.
SPEAKER_01: You see all of your crinkles and wrinkles, and you see all of the sin that's defiled you, and all of the things that you have done.
SPEAKER_01: It all kind of comes out in the light and it's all shown.
SPEAKER_01: And so you shrink back into the darkness because you don't want to show it.
SPEAKER_01: You know, one of the assurances that Jesus would give you is that when you step into the light, you look to your right and you look to your left, and what do you see?
SPEAKER_01: You see that everybody else is there.
SPEAKER_01: Everybody else who's trusting in Jesus, we've all carrying baggage and sins that defile and leave us feeling wretched and broken.
SPEAKER_01: It's John in his letter, not in his gospel, in his letter, he says if you say that you're without sin, you're deceiving yourself.
SPEAKER_01: But if you confess your sins, he that's Jesus is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us.
SPEAKER_01: Cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
SPEAKER_01: One of the things that Jesus has done in coming into the world, in dying the death that we deserve, is that he's made us clean.
SPEAKER_01: He's cleansed us from those sins that have defiled and left us broken.
SPEAKER_01: And he's making us new.
SPEAKER_01: And as we journey forward together as a community of faith, we we live into that objective cleansing.
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes it takes time to kind of feel that and apply that to our hearts, but that is what he has done.
SPEAKER_01: And journeying with him is an exercise in appropriating that and living into that cleansing that he offers all.
SPEAKER_01: Whether it's our shame or our loneliness or our self-loathing, or our need for control, or connection, or for affirmation.
SPEAKER_01: You know, I said flippantly at the start about you hook up apps and you need to delete them.
SPEAKER_01: You can delete them if you want.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, it might be a good idea, but it's not going to change your heart.
SPEAKER_01: Because the thing that's driving you isn't necessarily the desire for sex.
SPEAKER_01: But the desire to feel connected in a city where we're lonely.
SPEAKER_01: Desire to feel known and loved and vulnerable.
SPEAKER_01: And yet completely at ease with someone.
SPEAKER_01: Those longings are what the gospel comes to satisfy.
SPEAKER_01: Sex is a very unsatisfying well to drink from.
SPEAKER_01: Every person who is addicted to pornography knows that.
SPEAKER_01: Outside of the context of marriage, it promises much and it delivers little.
SPEAKER_01: All of those deep longings, that longing to be known and to be loved, to be accepted, to be unashamed, to be truly human.
SPEAKER_01: They're fulfilled in the gospel of the Lord Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: They are why he came.
SPEAKER_01: And it is within that context that we can then see sex as the gift that it is.
SPEAKER_01: We no need to hold on to it tightly and crush it under the weight of expectation that it must fulfill for us.
SPEAKER_01: We can hold it loosely and enjoy it when it comes, if it comes, and let it pass us by, knowing that the surpassing glories, the surpassing realities, the surpassing joys are already ours.
SPEAKER_01: Because of Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: That is the Christian view of sex.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus invites us to find life and significance and grace and forgiveness in him.
SPEAKER_01: And he renews our humanity and satisfies our heart in ways that sex never could.
SPEAKER_00: If you found this helpful or want to know more about City Church Dublin, please visit our website found in the link below.