Latest / Madison Church of Christ Bible Studies / 2025 Adult VBS series | Jason Helton | Night 03 Holy Sexuality

Transcript

2025 Adult VBS series | Jason Helton | Night 03 Holy Sexuality · Madison Church of Christ Bible Studies

• 0:00
  Hey, thanks so much for listening to this message. My name is Jason and I'm one of the ministers here at the Madison Church of Christ. It's our hope and prayer that the teaching you hear today will bless your life and draw you closer to God. If you're ever in the Madison area, we'd love for you to stop by and study the Bible with us on Sundays at 5pm or Wednesdays at 7pm if you have questions about the Bible or want to know more about the Madison Church, you can find us online@madisonchurch.org be sure to subscribe to this podcast as well as our Sermons podcast, Madison Church of Christ Sermons. Thanks again for stopping by. I hope this study is a blessing to you.
• 0:38
  Back in the in the 1900s, the late 1900s as I like to call it, microphones worked.
• 0:47
  But here in the 21st century, they like to keep you on your toes. There were a couple of TV shows that were at their peak of cultural influence in America. The first of those would be the the TV show Friends.
• 0:59
  In Friends, there's one particular episode where these two roommates get access to a pornography channel. And if you remember, back in the 90s, we had cable television, which meant that you didn't get every possible television show that you wanted. Sometimes you had to pay for certain things and adult content was something that you had to pay extra for.
• 1:18
  Well, they got lucky, as they would say it. And the entire episode for about 20, 25 minutes is devoted to these two guys doing everything they can to keep access to that channel. They don't sleep, they don't. They. The whole it's just a bunch of craziness, all for the purpose of keeping that channel.
• 1:37
  Just a few years before that, there was a television show called Seinfeld and to this day, the highest rated episode on IMDb. That's the international database for, for movie database movie TV shows. I keep track of all the actors, actresses, TV shows and movies. To this day, the highest rated episode of Seinfeld is called the Challenge.
• 2:00
  And in the episode of the Challenge, these four friends make a wager to see who can go the longest without pleasuring themselves sexually.
• 2:10
  The whole episode is devoted to that.
• 2:13
  To this day you will still hear people quote Both of these episodes, they made a huge impact on American culture. When I was in junior high, one day in the middle of school, several girls showed up with the, I guess it was called the Bob a new haircut because Jennifer Aniston had a new hairdo and they copied that.
• 2:34
  The jokes that we tell at the lunch table and at work and at school come from our entertainment.
• 2:41
  When was the last time you heard a class, a Bible class or a sermon on those two topics?
• 2:48
  What's the least studied book of the Bible? It's not Revelation.
• 2:52
  Song of Solomon. That's right. In college, a bunch of us were. Our college minister would say, all right, what do you guys want to study? You know, we're like, all right, we're going to make you real uncomfortable. So we studied Song of Solomon, and then we got real uncomfortable. And there's a lot in there, as it turns out.
• 3:09
  I know in the church, sometimes we have this list of unspoken, taboo topics, right? We don't talk about Bruno, but doesn't mean that Bruno doesn't happen, doesn't get discussed. It doesn't mean it just goes away. So particularly a topic like sexual intimacy and sexuality, when we don't talk about it at church, among God's people, all we do is not bring it into the light.
• 3:35
  It doesn't mean it just goes away. It means that we never put it in the context of God's word, of God's plan and God's people.
• 3:42
  And so tonight, there's a good chance that some of this will be uncomfortable for you. And that's okay, because a lot of times, the first time we talk about important matters, it's a little uncomfortable.
• 3:53
  But this should not be the last time that we talk about these things, because both of these topics, I may not have talked about them extensively in Bible class, but I've talked about them in 10 years of youth ministry with a lot of teenagers, a lot of college students.
• 4:06
  I've talked about both of these topics with young married couples and with folks that are a lot older than you might think.
• 4:14
  Just because we don't talk about Bruno doesn't mean Bruno doesn't exist.
• 4:18
  There are two types of sexuality that I see in scripture. I usually ask people, and we get some really strange answers. So tonight, I'll just reveal to you what I think those two are. There's holy and there's unholy. Those are the two options.
• 4:31
  I think we see what God has designed, and I think we actually see some reasonable explanations as to why.
• 4:37
  And then I think we see a whole lot of examples and a whole lot of instances where people exercise unholy sexuality and they exploit what God has designed for their own pleasure, power, or influence. And I don't think today is much different. I don't think today is much different at all. In Matthew, chapter five, Jesus says, you have heard that it was said, you shall not commit adultery. But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman will with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
• 5:07
  Have you ever had a parent, probably maybe your mom, that baked fresh cookies and she gets the cookies out of the oven, sets them out, puts them on the cooling rack, and then puts them over in a container and says, now don't touch those cookies.
• 5:19
  What is the one thing you are focused on for the next 24 hours? Or if you're like me, six hours, because there's no way they're lasting longer than that. You want to eat the cookies, right?
• 5:29
  Because she said, don't do this action. Now all I'm focused on is doing the action.
• 5:35
  Now, what happens when you say why?
• 5:37
  Well, if you're like me, it's because I said so. That's it. That's all that needs to be known, is that I am your father, do as I say. And that works every time.
• 5:46
  What if the response to why is, well, because our neighbor across the street, their dad just died and we're going to take those cookies in just a little bit over to their house and we're going to spend some time with them and pray with them, and we're going to eat cookies together because the kids love cookies.
• 6:04
  Now you go and sneak a cookie, you're just a terrible person, right?
• 6:09
  Because there's a purpose for those cookies that you understand is greater than just your desire.
• 6:15
  When our kids grow up hearing don't have sex outside of marriage, but they never hear the why.
• 6:23
  It's a lot like those cookies.
• 6:26
  I grew up in the 90s, and today we have this thing called 90s purity culture that I think actually it's a little bit of a.
• 6:34
  I don't know. I think there's truth to it. I guess there's a little bit of truth to every stereotype, right? And I think there's a lot of truth to this one. I think there was so much emphasis put on the act. What does Jesus say here? He says, you have heard that it was said, don't commit the act of adultery.
• 6:49
  But I'm telling you that lustful intent is in your heart. That's where the sin is committed. The action is the manifestation of what's in the heart.
• 6:58
  So if we spend all of our time focused on the action. The action, but we don't ever get to the heart of the issue, then we may not necessarily commit adultery, but we can still be guilty of lust. We can be guilty of cultivating Lust. And in the digital age, it's effortless to have lust cultivated in your life.
• 7:19
  Sex is so much more than an act. It is a vital part of a holy and intimate relationship. And again, when we focus solely on just the physical act, we leave out the exact design that God has given to us.
• 7:32
  We live in a culture that is driven, we said last night, by comfort and convenience, but also pleasure.
• 7:40
  We are given the opportunity to be consumers at every turn. Consumers of stuff when it comes to Amazon and those things we talked about last night, but also consumers of pleasure, for instance, when we said Amazon takes away any kind of road bump from, or any kind of resistance from what I desire to what I can have when it comes to stuff. What happens when you take that mentality that what I desire is what I'm supposed to have and you apply it into the sexual context?
• 8:06
  Well, then your partner, your husband, your wife becomes an object of your pleasure.
• 8:12
  And I would challenge you to go from Genesis to Revelation. I don't think you'll find a single text, I don't think you'll find a single sentence of scripture that would lead you to believe that sexual intimacy is about you being a consumer of pleasure. There's nothing about the life of Christ that gives me the impression that his people would be consumers of anything we are to give of self. And I think the Bible is very clear with that. In 1 Corinthians, chapter 6, we read flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You're not your own, for you are bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.
• 8:53
  The new English translation translates this just a little bit differently. That every sin that a person commits is outside the body, but the foolish person sins against their own body. When it comes to sexual immorality, we kind of have a tendency, I think, to put sexual sin on this. This pedestal.
• 9:13
  That it is the unforgivable public disgrace of a sin.
• 9:17
  When it comes to homosexuality, when it comes to extramarital affairs, when it comes to fornication, sex outside of marriage at all. There's just like this hierarchy of a public reaction that's very inconsistent.
• 9:32
  When I was growing up, there was an illustration that was really popular, and that illustration involved a rose. This happened at a lot of youth events where a rose was given to someone in the crowd, and they said, just pass that around while I talk. And so the speaker speaks for a little bit and then eventually the rose gets back to the speaker and they're holding a stem because if you've ever dealt with a rose, they're pretty delicate, right?
• 9:55
  And all of the petals had fallen off and the speaker would oftentimes look at that rose and say, now who wants this?
• 10:03
  What a horrific message.
• 10:06
  A couple of things happen when we stick to that example and that illustration. One, every girl in here is unredeemable if they have any kind of sexual activity outside of marriage. Two guys, you get all scot free. You're not a part of the equation at all.
• 10:19
  Two, bold faced lies.
• 10:21
  That's a horrific, horrific illustration. I have given this workshop now at probably close to 25, almost 30 churches and almost every single time someone about my age comes up and says, yes, I heard that. And it has taken me a lifetime to understand that that's not what scripture teaches.
• 10:40
  I think a lot of times we teach, we teach the things that we're most afraid of, but we don't always teach them. Well, this is one of those things that when we talk about sexuality, if we talk about it at all, sometimes we don't talk about it. Well, Scripture should guide us through this. Colossians 3, 5 says, put to death, therefore what is earthly in you? Sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desires and covetousness, which is idolatry. These first four are sexual in nature. Put to death those things that are earthly because now you are spiritual, right? You have the spirit of God. So these things are the things that you have died to.
• 11:16
  These urges and these passions inside of us, when we don't try to contain them, when we don't direct them godward, then we become something other than the image of Christ. We see other people for something that they're not. We see them as objects to be devoured, to be consumed. And that is not at all what God describes in scripture.
• 11:35
  Pretty sure that's. There we go. If we get. Let's go back one more.
• 11:38
  Two years ago I did this class at Madison and at the time both my parents and in laws were in the audience. So if you're uncomfortable tonight, you got nothing on me.
• 11:49
  So we're good, right? We can all giggle, we can all laugh. This is great.
• 11:52
  This is a very interesting set of statistics here. We did a survey in that class and we had about 110, 111 folks that took that survey. And one of the questions on there was, did you have a conversation with your parents? Growing up about sex or sexuality. And this was kind of the breakdown of that. We had roughly 57% in that class never had a conversation with their parents. All total. When you break it down according to gender, male and female, about 50, 50. And when you break it down according to generation, it's interesting here. Millennials, Gen Z and Gen X, Gen X were a little bit more, more of them had had a conversation, but millennials and Gen Z, right around the 50% mark. But look at that, look at the boomers.
• 12:32
  That's like 85, 90% of the boomers in that survey never had a conversation with their parents. Remember the Generation, the Boomers, 1946-1964.
• 12:43
  So they came of age in the height of the sexual revolution, all the while not being given any kind of direction from mom and dad.
• 12:52
  They would then go on to raise kids that were Gen X and millennial who would grow up in the heart of the digital revolution.
• 13:02
  So the people who had to figure it out themselves would then go on to try and raise the next generation in the midst of another really chaotic time in our history.
• 13:12
  Some of this I would call self inflicted wounds.
• 13:16
  When we don't talk about Bruno, it doesn't mean that it goes away.
• 13:21
  This is a stat, a set of stats. Now I've done that survey a bunch of churches. I've got a little over 1100 people that have taken it.
• 13:28
  Six percent of members of the silent generation had a con. Did not. They did have a conversation. Now let me preface that for a second.
• 13:36
  Shout out to the like 14 members of the silent generation that could scan a QR code and take an online survey like bravo.
• 13:43
  That's a very small sample size. So skewed a little bit. But you still see the trend I think holds true. You get to the boomers, 35% did. That means 65% did not.
• 13:53
  34% of Gen X, that means 64%. 66%.
• 13:57
  Right. With math shouldn't do that in real time. The encouragement is we get down to millennials in Gen Z, we get a little bit of a jump up. The discouragement is the best we're doing is Gen Z. 51%. Barely half, barely half in that survey asked, when did you get exposed to adult content?
• 14:18
  The average age of exposure as well as the talk is 12 years old. If you survey just about any church, this, this spans now, I don't know how many churches, but just on average you walk into a church building and about 60% of that auditorium never had a conversation with their parents. All Total.
• 14:36
  And then this is what I mentioned. Age 12. The most common age of exposure in the church, based off of my research, is 12. The most common age of a conversation from mom and dad, if they do have one, is also age 12, which at first glance that seems maybe okay. But wouldn't it be great if we wouldn't be great if we had a talk before we had the exposure.
• 14:55
  And that also tells me that we are likely having conversations because of exposure.
• 15:02
  There's a lot of other data out there. Most of the research today will tell you somewhere between seven and nine years old is the first age of exposure to adult content, which seems pretty reasonable to me. 12 was actually very surprising to me.
• 15:19
  But we don't talk about it.
• 15:22
  We don't put it in the context of God's word and God's people.
• 15:26
  And so now people grow up being exposed to adult things.
• 15:30
  What you learn first, you learn the deepest. I don't really have science yet to prove that, but I found that to be true in my life. I found that to be true in my kids life. They learn something at school and I try to tell them, otherwise they're going to die on that hill. No, no, this is what we said and I think that's true for most of us. So what we learn first through exposure to online adult content is the first expectation. The average span of time, I think we mentioned this last night between someone being exposed to adult content today and their first sexual encounter with a real person is about 10 years.
• 16:06
  So a decade of adult content casting a vision for what intimacy is supposed to be, creating expectation for what sex is supposed to be like 10 years before you actually interact with another person.
• 16:21
  Growing up in high school, we learned a lot of things. I went to public school in Montgomery and we learned how to put a condom on a banana in class.
• 16:31
  Most people showed up for class that day.
• 16:34
  It was very weird, very uncomfortable.
• 16:37
  I didn't learn what was actually happening in my brain whenever I was in an intimate setting.
• 16:43
  I didn't learn that in Bible class either. In Bible class I learned don't have sex before marriage. And you know what happens over time is when you hear that it turns into sex outside of marriage is bad, which then kind of turns into this sex is bad.
• 16:56
  And at 8am before your wedding, before your ceremony, sex is bad. 8pm be fruitful and multiply.
• 17:06
  So you agree that ain't how that works. Right?
• 17:10
  But that's kind of the way we teach it, right?
• 17:12
  The bride gets to her wedding day and up to that Point.
• 17:16
  He's a pervert, right? He's a weirdo, because all boys are. And up to that point, she's an object, but you got to stay away. And there's just so much miscommunication here on something that is so important, something that it's a pillar of the marriage relationship. So how many times and how often have we sabotaged marriages before they even start, simply by being silent?
• 17:47
  What I wish I had learned, either in Bible class or in anatomy and physiology, are these two words behind me. Oxytocin and vasopressin. These are two hormones that are. Are in your brain. They're prevalent in both male and female bodies, but in female bodies, oxytocin is more prevalent. There are three particular times in a woman's life where oxytocin is at its peak, and that is at sexual climax, giving birth, and nursing a child.
• 18:12
  My wife and I have four kids. I've been there, present for all four. That is a traumatic experience.
• 18:17
  She also seemed to be in some discomfort.
• 18:22
  I don't.
• 18:23
  I don't know what would cause a human to go through that trauma and then immediately say, I want to hold the source of the pain.
• 18:32
  But she did. And I didn't question it because I like being married.
• 18:37
  But in that moment, truly, it was a bit horrific because it's just so painful. And I felt helpless. I can't help you. You just, You. You gotta birth the baby. I can't do anything here, right? I'll hold your hand, get you some ice chips. But then her immediate response to that is, I want to hold this baby, and I love this baby.
• 18:56
  Oxytocin.
• 18:58
  Oxytocin bonds you with someone else.
• 19:01
  When you kiss someone for six seconds or more, oxytocin is released. Particularly in the female brain. When you embrace or you hold someone, hug someone for 20 seconds or more, oxytocin is released.
• 19:16
  Oxytocin is referred to as the bonding hormone.
• 19:21
  This is not. These are not Bible class terms. These are medical phrases for these things. This is how they're known in the medical community. Oxytocin is more prevalent in the male brain, and it's responsible for the male side of bonding. When it comes to intimacy, it also heightens the olfactory senses. So that perfume, the first time you kiss somebody, you walk through the mall. If you ever find a mall again, and you walk through the perfume aisle and you smell that same perfume, immediately you go back to that spot. It's not always in the sexual connotation. There is a very specific smell from A tree that. I don't know what tree it is. It's very sweet. Sweet gum, maybe. I don't know. But there were two or three of them in my backyard where I grew up.
• 19:56
  And to this day, the moment I smell that, I know fall is here and football's coming. Because I go right back to that spot in my yard because it's. It's mapped in my brain.
• 20:07
  Your brain is really. It's like a highway system, or it's like a force. The first time you walk through the path in the woods, there's no presence that you're. There's no. No evidence that you've been there. Right? But you walk it over and over again. You start to create circuitry in your brain, the synapse work together.
• 20:21
  Our brains are amazing, incredibly intricate and powerful.
• 20:27
  It would do us some good to learn about them.
• 20:30
  If you're a parent, you need to know how your body works in order to tell your child how their body is going to be working.
• 20:37
  That helps answer the why these two words are on a piece of tape. And there's some. There's some fault to this analogy as well. Every analogy falls short of being what it's actually trying to describe. But go with me for just a moment. If I were to take a piece of tape and I were to put that piece of tape on the COVID of my Bible, and just so happens there's about 30 of them right here, and I press firmly on that piece of tape, what would occur?
• 21:00
  A bond. Right. That tape would stick to. To whatever I'm. I'm putting on. If I remove that piece of tape and I try to reuse that piece of tape over and over again, that's using that tape in a way that it's not designed to be used.
• 21:13
  It becomes increasingly difficult for that piece of tape to create a strong bond when we.
• 21:23
  When we engage in intimacy. And I. I don't want to use just the word sex, because, again, that's. That's the very specific act of intercourse.
• 21:30
  When we engage in intimacy, our brain is bonding with the person.
• 21:36
  And when we have multiple sexual encounters, then it becomes increasingly difficult for us to bond deeply with the next person.
• 21:48
  But when you apply pressure on the same piece of tape in the same spot over and over again, that bond gets more and more difficult to break. And when we engage in sexual intimacy with the same partner over and over again, it builds a strong, resilient, healthy bond.
• 22:05
  A strong, resilient, healthy marriage.
• 22:10
  Because what's involved with intimacy?
• 22:12
  Vulnerability. They say that the Number one fear of most people is public speaking. I would say being naked in any capacity would be my number one public speaking while naked. Like extra number one. Right. So we can compromise there. We don't typically like to be vulnerable, especially in front of people.
• 22:32
  But to engage in sexual intimacy, there's some vulnerability that's required.
• 22:38
  And that's why it's so difficult to talk about, I think, because a lot of us struggle with it.
• 22:43
  A lot of marriages, you look at finances and intimacy, those are going to be the two greatest challenges.
• 22:49
  There's nothing more easily weaponized in a relationship than intimacy.
• 22:54
  There's nothing more easily misunderstood.
• 22:56
  People come to a marriage relationship oftentimes with a sexual history in the past. And because it's difficult for them to bond and they don't know what's happening in their bodies, they can't articulate that. And so it's a guessing game.
• 23:08
  Sometimes for weeks, for months, for years, sometimes for the entire marriage.
• 23:13
  I don't think that is God's design.
• 23:16
  Now that the shortcoming of this particular analogy is that a piece of tape that you can't use, after a while, you just kind of toss it away, just like the. The rose. That's the horrific part. That's not the analogy part. The analogy ends before that. Because what's beautiful and what's redemptive about Scripture is that we are redemptive.
• 23:34
  The part of the story that never got told in the 90s in those youth rallies in those environments is that every single one of us were bought by Christ. And there are some physical elements to sexual intimacy that physically you can't really undo. However, as far as our purity before God, though our sins be as scarlet, they will be wiped. They will be white as snow.
• 23:58
  There is redemption in Christ, There is forgiveness in Christ, and there is healing. The part that's really difficult, like the physical part of this, particularly when it comes to sexual addiction, in particular pornography. There's also a healing of the brain that has to happen. And that's not instant, spiritually speaking, our sins instantly wiped away. From a physical standpoint, it takes time. It takes unlearning because we have mapped in our brain again. We have this whole national park system that we've created and that we have to undo. We have to repave the Internet. Excuse me, the interstate system in our brains. Right. We should probably repave the Internet while we're at it.
• 24:37
  Turn with me to First Corinthians, chapter 5 and verse 7.
• 24:40
  And I think this crowd is of the age where this will Land a little bit. In chapter five, verse one, we have what I refer to as the pilot episode of the Jerry Springer Show. Remember Jerry Springer? Like the armpit of humanity, but you just couldn't look away. It was a horrific car accident, and you're just like, that's terrible, but a little bit entertaining. And so we just watched it because all of these weird family dynamics were put on full display. Well, that's what's happening in Corinth. In verse one, it says, it is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you and of a kind that is not even tolerated among pagans. For a man has his father's wife, there's a situation where a man has a sexual relationship with, best case scenario, his stepmom and the whole church knows about it.
• 25:22
  Paul's like, man, the pagans are blushing at this. What in the world?
• 25:27
  And you were arrogant. Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you. You see, they ascribe in Corinth. They ascribe to. We don't talk about Bruno because Bruno sleeping with a stepmom. And we don't talk about it. We don't. We just kind of just leave it alone. None of our business.
• 25:44
  I don't know how they lived that out, but they definitely lived it out in a way to where the word got back to Paul enough for him to write about it.
• 25:51
  Not talking about it is not the answer.
• 25:54
  In the church, we said last night, you find two things, encouragement and accountability.
• 25:59
  We don't sweep sin under the rug. We bring it out into the light. To confess something means to agree with God. Confession is good, not just for the sinner, but for the next generation to see, to be able to rightly identify what sin is and to rightly identify how to respond to a sinner who has come home.
• 26:17
  But when we keep it to ourselves, we suffer in silence.
• 26:22
  We talked several months back about forgiveness and used this analogy of how when you withhold forgiveness, you just squeeze onto broken glass. You think you're hurting the other person, but you're only hurting yourself. When we don't forgive ourselves, we're doing the same thing.
• 26:35
  We suffer in silence and we choose to do so and just hurts more and more. And that more and more that hurt does one or two things. It causes us to withdraw from people or to become callous towards people or maybe even assume that everybody else is just like us. So then we don't trust people. There's not a positive at all when we deal with Sin that way. Look in chapter seven.
• 26:55
  Now, concerning the matters about which you wrote. It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman, but because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise, the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time that you may devote yourselves to prayer, but then come together again so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self control.
• 27:31
  Paul's a single dude, he's a bachelor, and he gets it.
• 27:35
  He said, you don't separate yourself unless you're in agreement with. And there's a purpose, there's a why, and there's also a time to come back together.
• 27:45
  And if you. If you just glance over it, you kind of miss it. Look in verse 4.
• 27:50
  For the wife does not have authority over her own body, who does?
• 27:55
  Her husband. Likewise, the husband does not have authority over his own body, who does?
• 28:00
  The wife. This is the Jesus part we were talking about.
• 28:06
  Sexual intimacy is not about being a consumer of pleasure. It's about giving of self.
• 28:12
  You want a great sex life. Husbands please your wives, wives please your husbands. Don't make it about you at all. Paul says that's not the point. The design here is to give of self, which makes sense if we are Christians. We are of Christ.
• 28:26
  All of our life is about giving of self.
• 28:29
  I never heard this growing up.
• 28:33
  This is the most important part. This is what makes it holy. Otherwise it's just physical abstinence for whatever sake. This is the part that separates us.
• 28:42
  Without the resurrection, we don't need the Jesus part of the equation. This is the Jesus part of the equation. Oh, by the way, the resurrection happened. Therefore we are a new creation. Therefore we see things differently. It's not for my pleasure. It's for me to pleasure my spouse.
• 28:55
  It's for their benefit.
• 28:58
  We see this not in the sexual way, but when a healthy church gathers together and there's a disagreement.
• 29:04
  Christians don't force their own way on other people. They submit to the other person. The church builds itself up in love. There's a common thread here, but for some reason we skip that when it comes to intimacy.
• 29:16
  And when we focus specifically on the act, we miss the whole picture altogether.
• 29:21
  You see how we got to where we are today.
• 29:24
  The digital age is a little bit more unique.
• 29:28
  See, technology, as we mentioned yesterday, it amplifies what's in our hearts and our brains are connected to our hearts. So what we look at, what we think about it shapes and molds how we view the world. There's an entire generation or two now that has a worldview about sexuality completely designed and formed by pornography and entertainment.
• 29:53
  Intimacy is not for entertainment.
• 29:56
  Intimacy is not for personal pleasure. Pleasure is a consequence, right? Almost. It's a part of it, but it's not the pursuit. We're not in pursuit of pleasure. First Corinthians 7 says that we are in pursuit of pleasing our spouse of their pleasure. How is pornography different today than in the past? I've heard people say in the past that, that, you know, they've. In other generations. Well, we had magazines, we all. So it's kind of the same. It's just not.
• 30:22
  What young people are exposed to today is largely video based.
• 30:27
  Your brain is, again, really interesting. If you and I are driving down the road and I hold up my phone, I show you a picture of my family. Oh, there's Jason. He's wearing a black shirt. Okay? You kind of file that away and you keep going on about your day.
• 30:38
  But if we're driving down the road and I hold up a video, well, you're driving, but you're doing this.
• 30:43
  There's a reason we don't have video billboards. I hope we never do. Right. It's very dangerous because your brain loves novelty. It craves it. That's what makes video really interesting. Instagram started off as a photo platform, but now it's almost exclusively videos. That's why every other platform has added some kind of reel or story to their platform. Because video, video maps differently. It's more engaging, it's more enticing.
• 31:09
  So if you grew up in the age where you had a magazine full of images, a couple of things about that one, there was a finite amount of images in that magazine. You go from the COVID to cover and then you're done. There's nothing else. Right.
• 31:23
  If you've ever been on YouTube, you pull up a video on YouTube and on the right, right hand column, what. What pops up there was that. More videos. That's right. And what happens if you click on one of those videos, another video pops up. And how long can you do that until they don't pop up anymore?
• 31:39
  In the words of Smalls, forever.
• 31:41
  Right? That's the infinite, not the eternal, that we talked about last night. That suggested video algorithm will pop up over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.
• 31:53
  And it's going to give you videos that you've asked for, but it's also going to give you some things that you didn't ask for. Right, just on YouTube. We're not confessing anything right here. Just on YouTube. We all agree, we've all all been there.
• 32:04
  Well, when the Internet changed from dial up to high speed Internet, that was a game changer. When tube sites came into existence like YouTube, that was a game changer because if you grew up in the 60s and 70s and the 80s, you might have had some access to some videos, you might have had access to some magazines, but you probably had to go to a store and see another human face to face, or you had a friend or a cousin whose uncle had a bunch of magazines hidden under the couch or whatever, right?
• 32:35
  Well, there's a big difference. Today video maps differently and access is a completely different ball game altogether. So let's look at a few excerpts here. This comes from a book by Gary Wilson called you'd Brain on Porn. And here he says porn poses unique risk beyond supernormal stimulation. First, it's easy to access, available 24, 7 free and, and it's private. All of those things that made it difficult to access, or at least a hindrance to access, are gone now.
• 33:02
  Most users start watching. By puberty, their brains are at their peak of dopamine sensitivity plasticity, which is the ability to learn new things, and vulnerability to addiction and an inadvertent rewiring of sexual taste. Anybody know a teenager that just like clings to one thing and then they cling to another thing? They're just obsessed. They go from one obsession to the next. They're vulnerable to addiction because their brains are learning how to be a brain. They're learning how to think, they're learning how to process thoughts, and they're moving from concrete to abstract thinking. And in the midst of this, if they're exposed to adult content, they're trying to reconcile all of that at the same time. It's not fair, but it is the reality.
• 33:40
  In contrast, there are no physical limits on Internet porn consumption other than the need to take a bathroom and food break. He contrasts the like gluttony for food, binging on food versus binging on Internet pornography. Food, you got to stop at some point. There's a physical limit to how much you can consume.
• 33:55
  There's some natural physical breaks that have to be taken in there, but with pornography it's just right back and there's so much content.
• 34:05
  You can consume more content. Not even sexual, just you can consume More content in 10 minutes Sitting in front of a computer than other generations consumed in their lifetime.
• 34:17
  Binging on porn feels like a promise of pleasure. But remember the message, or recall the message of dopamine isn't satisfaction, it's keep going. Satisfaction is just around the corner. We talked about oxytocin and vasopressin, two very powerful hormones. There's another chemical in our brain called dopamine and it's become very popular over the last few years. There have been some books and podcasts that talk a lot about dopamine.
• 34:38
  It's also a bit dangerous. If you've known anyone that's ever struggled with an opioid addiction, dopamine is a big catalyst for that. Dopamine is interesting because it gives you that promise, it gives that adrenaline rush that you can get addicted to, but it doesn't actually bring the pleasure.
• 34:53
  It says pleasure is just around the corner. So it dangles the carrot and you're chasing it.
• 34:58
  There's another hormone called delta phosb that we'll read about here in just a moment that's important in that process. The highly malleable adolescent brain wires to sexual cues in the environment.
• 35:08
  Adolescents wire together experiences and arousal much faster and more easily than young adults will just a few years later. Teens are especially vulnerable because the reward circuitry is in overdrive.
• 35:18
  A 15 year old that's exposed to adult content wires differently than a 25 year old.
• 35:28
  Timing is really important on this.
• 35:31
  The access is what's changed. Sexual sin clearly was around in the first century. Scriptures are as relevant today as they've ever been because humanity has struggled with this for a long time. But the access now and the depths to which people can engage in that content is unbelievable.
• 35:51
  The depths of the world that used to be found in the brothels of Rome are now easy to find with the click of a button, the touch of a screen.
• 36:00
  Wilson goes on to say, in response to Internet novelty, their brains produce higher spikes of dopamine, but become bored more easily. Their brains are also more sensitive to dopamine and produce more delta phosphb, the remember and repeat process. So the adolescent's brain's oversensitivity to reward means its owner is more vulnerable to addiction.
• 36:17
  So we're taking our most vulnerable demographic and when we give them phones or we give them access without any guardrails whatsoever to the Internet, we're saying, good luck.
• 36:27
  I'm going to drop you off in downtown Tokyo or New York City or Moscow and be home by dinner. Oh, and be well adjusted, be respectful.
• 36:37
  That makes sense.
• 36:40
  It doesn't. Math, as they might say, right?
• 36:43
  Their brains are so susceptible to learning, which is good. But we're wasting the sponge.
• 36:50
  We're wasting the sponge with toxic things and we're allowing it to happen and then we don't ever talk about it at church.
• 36:58
  I think we're missing the boat here. I think we're missing a really big deal, a really big opportunity. 2014 Cambridge study shows that neurochemical reality primes young brains, urging them to define sex according what offers the biggest sexual buzz. Thus, a teen brain can deeply condition itself to Internet porn with surprising ease such that eventually feels like an alien experience to some. I ran across one report from Italy and my search history during this time was really weird. Don't judge me when when this report came up in Italy there were 14 year old boys.
• 37:34
  20% of however many were surveyed they reported having zero interest in actual sex because they were completely saturated with digital lust content. They had watched so much porn that the idea of actually having a sex, having sex with a real person had no interest to them. Not only that, they also started having reports. This is a 9th grader, by the way. 14 year olds are in 9th grade.
• 37:56
  Erectile dysfunction and other sexually related dysfunctions and challenges ninth graders.
• 38:03
  It's something that we have to be aware of, we have to learn about.
• 38:07
  Pornography teaches the students to focus on the physiology of the sensations, not on the relationship. So the why is not even in there at all. It's not a part of their equation.
• 38:16
  Now they have been wired to sexual cues, to urges.
• 38:21
  Remember what Paul said we died to well now that's all they're living for. That's how the brain is being mapped. They think differently. The reward center doesn't know what porn is. It only registers levels of stimulation through dopamine and opioid spice, which this means porn's not even the issue. Lustful content.
• 38:38
  There's a good chance that your kid might not be looking at pornography but they go through their for you page and lustful content there they may not be having the act of sex and but man, there's provocative scenes everywhere.
• 38:52
  You can't even watch the super bowl without that, right?
• 38:56
  So why would we just let it happen? It porn affects brain development, personality development, current and future relationships, body image and it destroys a child's innocence. We can't sit by we can't not discuss this.
• 39:09
  There's a platform out called OnlyFans and if you've not heard of OnlyFans, you need to understand what Only Fans is. If you know YouTube, you can have a channel on YouTube and you can be a content creator, so you can put out content. People can subscribe to your page. It's free.
• 39:24
  A lot of people, influencers that have a big following on Instagram or on TikTok or on YouTube will now open an OnlyFans page. It started, I think back in 2017, 2020. It just skyrocketed in popularity for obvious reasons.
• 39:37
  On OnlyFans, though, the vast majority, almost exclusively, the content is sexual in nature.
• 39:44
  It's a little bit different from YouTube because you subscribe but you pay a monthly fee. It's usually a small fee, under $5 or so. You set your price, I guess, and, and then you actually can interact with your followers.
• 39:56
  So you can subscribe to somebody's channel and then you can say, hey, I'm into this and my name is this. And then they create content talking to that person, fulfilling that fantasy.
• 40:09
  So now we've taken the sexually explicit and we've sprinkled in a little bit of perceived relationship and now we're in really dangerous territory.
• 40:20
  The reason we need to know about Only Fans is because in 2024 they saw approximately 1 billion.
• 40:29
  1 billion monthly website worldwide. 1 billion a month.
• 40:36
  In our country, we love entertainment and the largest entertainment companies in our, I guess in the industry, in the entertainment industry would be the National Football League, Major League Baseball and my personal favorite, the NBA.
• 40:52
  NFL has a lot of football would be the translation here in our neck of the woods, right?
• 41:02
  Well, last year when it comes to revenue, Only Fans was second only to the NFL.
• 41:08
  And if you think the NFL and the MLB and the NBA have influence here, then the second highest grossing entertainment platform on the planet probably has some influence as well.
• 41:21
  But we largely don't talk about these things because we've allowed shame to guide the conversation.
• 41:29
  We've allowed the darkness to fill the room and we're afraid to turn on a flashlight, we're afraid to turn on the light and bring it all into the light. But that's what God tells us to do. Billie Eilish is known as one of the most influential pop stars on the planet.
• 41:46
  You would have thought that she was sponsored by UPS because mostly what she wore was baggy, oversized, khaki colored clothes. Right? She's not present herself in a sexually provocative way.
• 41:59
  Of all places, this conversation Took place on the Howard Stern show. She said, I think porn is a disgrace. I used to watch a lot of it. To be honest. I started watching porn when I was like 11. That's a sixth grader, by the way.
• 42:12
  Learn how to have sex. I was watching abusive porn when I was like 14, ninth grader. I thought I was one of the guys and would talk about it. Think I was really cool for not having a problem with it and not seeing why it was bad. And I think it really destroyed my brain. And I think that I had, like, sleep paralysis and these like, almost night terrors. Just nightmares because of it. I think that's how they started because I would just watch abusive bdsm, which is violent bondage related content.
• 42:37
  I couldn't watch anything else unless it was violent. I didn't think it was attractive. And I was a virgin. It led to problems where the first few times I had sex, I was not saying no to things that were not good. And it's because I thought that's what I was supposed to be attracted to.
• 42:53
  I thought that's what I was supposed to be. I had been taught that this is what it's supposed to be like, that I'm the object of their fantasy.
• 43:03
  And as a ninth grader, I said okay.
• 43:07
  And I was accepted by my peers because I was okay with it.
• 43:11
  I am so angry that porn is so loved. This is one of the most influential entertainers on the planet.
• 43:18
  And she was used and abused by a teaching that completely manipulates a beautiful design.
• 43:26
  She's not given this talk at a ladies day in a church Bible class. She's given this on one of the biggest platforms. Howard Stern, of all people. There's some irony in that.
• 43:37
  She gets it.
• 43:39
  She learned it the hard way.
• 43:43
  We have to steward our bodies. We have to cultivate holiness.
• 43:48
  And you can't do that silently.
• 43:50
  I get that these are awkward conversations, difficult we can do hard things mantra of our family. I can do all things.
• 44:01
  I can do hard things. Also.
• 44:03
  What's more uncomfortable than knowing something like that can happen to our children?
• 44:11
  Is that more uncomfortable or having an awkward conversation the first time? I think one of the things that we probably missed the boat on as well and not pile on to the past, because I think this is every generation.
• 44:22
  We just now have some of this data. But one of the things that we made a mistake of doing was calling it the talk.
• 44:28
  Did you have the talk?
• 44:31
  I don't know about you. I'm not overly mature, but the questions I had at 6 were very different than the questions I had at 16.
• 44:38
  So if I had one talk somewhere between 6 and 16, it's not going to fulfill all the curiosity as a teenager, as a 20 year old, as a 30 year old.
• 44:48
  So maybe we have a group of men that have prayer.
• 44:54
  Tuesday morning prayer, breakfast.
• 44:57
  If those guys then go out and they have lunch, because that's my favorite meal of the day.
• 45:02
  And we're talking and we talk about football and we talk about the kids and we talk about the stresses of life, and we might even have a prayer at the end.
• 45:12
  The question hey, man, how's your marriage?
• 45:17
  How's the intimacy going?
• 45:19
  The first time? I admit that may be awkward, but you know, by the fourth or the fifth or the sixth time that you ask that to that young man, that newlywed, he just might break down and cry because he doesn't know how to talk about it. And he didn't know that he could talk about it. But you have told him over and over again, this is a place where we can talk about it, about it. I'm praying specifically for that. Not because I'm nosy or weird, but because it's important, because these things are important. Because we talk about Bruno here.
• 45:46
  There's nothing off the table at church.
• 45:50
  If it's a part of life we talk about. If it's sin, we don't condone it, we don't embrace it. We call it for what it is, and then we help. Accountability and encouragement, that's what we're after.
• 46:01
  That's the purpose of being together every single week.
• 46:05
  It's not to keep an appointment, it's to be in each other's lives.
• 46:09
  God designed it that way. Ephesians 2 says that you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, not in God's people, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh.
• 46:29
  The problem is these are passions.
• 46:31
  The part we forget is that passions get cultivated. Remember what we said last night? Our identity informs our passions. Our passions don't inform our identity. We cannot get that twisted.
• 46:42
  Carrying out the desires of the body and the mind. Be transformed, right? Do not be conformed, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
• 46:50
  And we were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But we've been bought with a price.
• 46:57
  We died to those things. We died to this earthly, carnal way. Of life. And it's not void of pleasure.
• 47:03
  It's just no longer our pursuit.
• 47:06
  I believe God designed intimacy to be pleasurable when done correctly and cultivating the right kind of transparency and vulnerability and connection and bond.
• 47:17
  I heard it once said that about someone older than me, said growing up, they always said, you're going to marry your best friend.
• 47:22
  And he said, I've had a lot of best friends. I don't want to marry any of those dudes. Well, that's a fair point.
• 47:29
  He said, you marry your lover.
• 47:32
  I've been very blessed. I've got a lot of best friends in this life. Every stage, every chapter of my life, I can find and look back, and usually not just one, but two or three. Just those really close friendships where you can confess anything, you talk about anything.
• 47:46
  But there's a part of my relationship with my wife that I will never share with those guys, right?
• 47:51
  By design.
• 47:52
  There's a limit to the intimacy in those relationships.
• 47:58
  The emotional intimacy can go a long way in a friendship, in a marriage. It's emotional and physical.
• 48:07
  That's the challenge of the dating scene, is that you start to connect emotionally, and you can continue to connect deeper emotionally, and there's pressure on that physical part to follow suit. But when you're not in that holy matrimony, it's not the right time.
• 48:23
  I'm not saying it's easy. I'm saying it's actually really, really difficult.
• 48:27
  Which is why it's more important for us to talk about this regularly with each other. To confess sin, to confess not even sin, but temptation. What if we had a culture here of confessing temptation and we were able to hold each other accountable so it never did develop into sin?
• 48:43
  James gives us that progression.
• 48:45
  But what if we addressed it at temptation? What if we were so connected in each other's lives that everything changed? Pornography is not the heart of the issue. Lust is the heart of the issue. Remember what Jesus said. You have heard. It was said, you shall not commit adultery. The act, but what everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent in their heart, the sins already committed.
• 49:09
  So if you've got Instagram on your phone, you click that little magnifying glass and it cultivates all the things you've searched for.
• 49:16
  That's a reflection of what you're after.
• 49:19
  If you go to TikTok and you scroll through TikTok and it gives you a very specific type of content, it's because you've told it. That's what I like to look at. These Algorithms are not neutral. There's not a neutral algorithm on the planet. They have a slant in some direction and they're going to show you what you've told it that you like to look at based off how long you look at it, how you engage with it.
• 49:40
  And what's crazy is that even when you don't, I've seen some of these experiments done. If you start fresh new account and you just look at, I don't know, this old house reruns, but it also knows that you're a 35 year old male, every now and then it's going to slip you in something else. It's going to say, let's see if he likes this.
• 50:00
  And I know we talk about this a lot of times as, as a male struggle, but the heartbreaking part is the stats now are saying, well, it's getting a little bit more equality when it comes to this struggle.
• 50:12
  It's not exclusively one or the other.
• 50:16
  We also have a generation of girls that have grown up now thinking that in order to express interest to a guy, you got to send a nude picture of yourself.
• 50:25
  That's a common conversation among our teenagers and college students and young professionals and probably older.
• 50:35
  They think that's normal.
• 50:37
  Normal has nothing to do with good. Normal is exclusively talking about frequency. You can grow up in a home where abuse, physical or emotional or verbal, is normal. That doesn't mean it's good or healthy or right. It just means it happened and occurred frequently.
• 50:54
  What is the normal that we want for our marriages and for our homes?
• 50:58
  We have a very small window. Have a 10 year old, an 8 year old, a 6 year old and about to be 3 year old.
• 51:04
  I get just how small that window is becoming for me to influence them and to establish what normal is supposed to be.
• 51:13
  Normal is First Corinthians 7.
• 51:16
  That's the normal that God intends. Not chapter five, not chapter five.
• 51:23
  And if they had just said something, perhaps it would have stopped before it got to the point where it was in 1st Corinthians 6, 18 we go back here. Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin the person commits outside the body. The sexually immoral person sins against his own body. Skip down here to the end of verse 18. So glorify God in your body. I've started trying to use the word stewardship a lot because I think it helps me understand the situation better. I don't own my children. They make that a abundantly clear often because they do what they want to do when they want to do it right you don't have ownership of your children.
• 51:55
  I get to steward them for a period of time to where I can try and teach them and show them and put some guardrails, put some consequences in place that aren't massive consequences, so that when they get out on their own and they feel all of the consequences, the big ones that they can't undo. They already have some learning there. They already have some education, hopefully some wisdom.
• 52:18
  But I'm also a steward of my body. I don't have ownership of this. I don't have ownership of my house. It takes one tornado for you to realize you have ownership of very little in this life. I think God put us here to be stewards, to steward the time, the resources and the relationships that we have. Paul even saw his citizenship as something to steward. He played the Roman citizen card when he needed to in order to glorify God and bring about his will.
• 52:42
  Have you ever thought about sexual intimacy being part of something to steward that takes away ownership, that takes away the consumer mentality.
• 52:52
  Glorify God in your body. Steward every aspect in every corner of this life. Sex is so much more than an act. It is a vital part of an intimate and a holy relationship. We can't miss this. We can't mess this up. Now more than ever, there's no room for passive parenting or grandparenting. There's no room for passiveness in the church.
• 53:14
  If you don't know people, you've got a part to play. It's a two way street.
• 53:19
  If you have a past when it comes to sexual sin and that past just seems to haunt you, seems to chase you down.
• 53:28
  There's addiction in there that just that cycle of thinking and sinful action just keeps coming back and forth, back and forth. You have people here to help you, accountability and encouragement.
• 53:41
  There's not a sin that you've committed there that God has not prepared to be taken care of in Christ.
• 53:49
  He covers sin.
• 53:51
  There's a stop right there. There's a period, not a comma.
• 53:54
  He covers our sin. And so if you are a person that has sat here and this has been a really difficult conversation to hear, I want you to know that in this place you have family.
• 54:06
  I love you. And I am not the only one.
• 54:10
  If you are in a marriage and this is a really difficult part of your marriage, we have people here that have been married for decades that have probably navigated some very similar paths.
• 54:22
  If it's not something you want to talk about publicly, but you would be willing to talk about privately, Find myself, Brandon, Andrew, any of the elders ministers. Find someone here to confide in, to confess in, or if you want to help, you've been through that.
• 54:37
  And even if you didn't come out rosy on the other side, it was still difficult. But you want to be a part of helping somebody else navigate it. Come talk to us and we'll put each other in contact.
• 54:49
  Because an uncomfortable conversation is a small price to pay for eternity.
• 54:54
  It's a small price to pay for a fantastic, loving, healthy, stable relationship.
• 55:00
  And in this place, our aim is to provide accountability and encouragement. Two websites I want to leave with you that I have found to have some good resources. One is called fight the new drug.org you may remember Terry Crews. He was famous. He's an actor and a comedian. He was a athlete at one point. He was also half man, half horse in Old Spice commercials. Just be real. He's, he's a big guy, you know, very, very handsome. Anyway, he, during COVID he posted a video on his, I guess, Facebook page on his social media where he's in tears in his car and he just pointed out and he says, listen, pornography addiction has ruined my life, destroyed my marriage, torn apart my family.
• 55:43
  He became the spokesperson for Fighthenewdrug.org, it's a nonprofit organization. They have a ton of resources on their website. They have multiple podcasts. They, they won one series where they talk to people, particularly girls and some guys as well, that have been caught up in the human trafficking part of this. Listen, we live in Huntsville. I got a friend that's in one of those, you know, three letter organizations, government organizations, and, and I asked him one day, I was like, listen, like, just level with me. I've heard that Huntsville's in this quadrant for like human trafficking. He said, oh yeah, okay. You said that quicker than I wanted. And I've heard like parts of Highway 20, like, oh yeah, okay. He said, just recently, this was last year, we just rescued a young boy who had been groomed online thinking he was talking to a girl. It was a 30 something year old man and they were on the way to Atlanta. We caught him and we got him back.
• 56:34
  He said, but that doesn't always happen.
• 56:36
  It's a real thing.
• 56:38
  We thought in the 90s that it was too dangerous to go outside thanks to Unsolved Mysteries and America's Most Wanted. So we came inside and then a few years later, when that high speed Internet changed the game, the danger was online and we had no idea.
• 56:54
  It's a real world that we live in the second one there. Your brain on Porn is the. The website for Gary Wilson's book. Again, a lot of information that tells you this is especially the addictive side of this. It's more than like I used to think that chemical addiction was. You were addicted to a chemical. But what it is is the chemicals in your brain addict you to a behavior, to a thought process, to a lifestyle that you can break free from.
• 57:16
  It's very difficult oftentimes and you need accountability and you need encouragement. We have to have each other. If you're interested, this is an Amazon book list. It's kind of the culmination. And if you don't get it here, I'll leave this up later, so feel free. I can send you the link.
• 57:31
  The books on here. I'll put it this way. Here's my disclaimer. I guess if I recommend the burger at a restaurant, I'm not necessarily recommending the whole menu or everything on the walls, but I'm saying these books taught me a lot.
• 57:43
  Most of these are not spiritual or not written from the Christian perspective. Several of them are, but many of them are not. They're just about how our brains work.
• 57:50
  And then I have another. Another code here for a YouTube playlist. And I would say almost exclusively, most of these definitely are from a worldly perspective about how our bodies work. Lots of TED talks, it deals with technology as well as the sexual topics that we've had here tonight. Again, if you want either of these, let me know and I will get those to you. I want to remind you of one thing.
• 58:12
  We will be taking deeper dives into all of these topics this fall, beginning the first Wednesday night in August and going through October. If you're not able to join us in person, we'll be streaming this online as well for that series.
• 58:26
  But a lot of the things we talked about is kind of drinking from a fire hydrant. It's a lot of information to consume and absorb. So if we take a slower pace, then hopefully there'll be more good that comes from that. Most of all, from tonight's lesson, I just want you to know that you are loved.
• 58:39
  Also, if you need to hear this, you are lovable.
• 58:43
  And that's really important.
• 58:45
  You are lovable. So much so that the creator of this world sacrificed his son on your behalf and my behalf.
• 58:53
  We have been redeemed, and so we are to live with joy.
• 58:58
  If you have found it really difficult to live with that joy, then please, let's talk. Let's pray together, and let's begin walking in a different direction.
• 59:06
  Bow with me.
• 59:08
  Father, we thank you for the opportunity to gather in your name tonight to study your word, to find the context for something that you have designed so intricately, but so perfectly and so wonderfully.
• 59:21
  God, we live in a world that manipulates everything that you have created.
• 59:26
  And too often, we don't even realize it. We're not even aware of it. I pray that you would help us to be wise, help us to see beyond the surface, help us to pursue good habits, habits of thinking, habits of seeing people the way that you have created them, intended them to be seen.
• 59:43
  I pray that you would help us specifically tonight. Those that are here, those that are with us online, and those that may hear this later.
• 59:51
  I pray that you would bring healing and forgiveness and everyone that needs to have both of those. Each of us would feel that. And to understand that, to be able to experience your love and the brokenness and the hurt that has happened in the past, either actions that we've taken or actions that have been taken against us, that you would help those that need it to find forgiveness and, where applicable, full reconciliation.
• 1:00:18
  Ultimately, God, we desire to be reconciled to you and you make that possible through Christ.
• 1:00:22
  We thank you for hearing and answering our prayer. Tonight. It's through his name we pray. Amen.