Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / October 30, 2022 | 1 Corinthians - Marriage in Christ

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October 30, 2022 | 1 Corinthians - Marriage in Christ · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: How are you doing today?
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: So Connor um assigned me a passage that I've been avoiding for my entire life.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a continuation of the text that he took last week, and he started with a warning.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, if you haven't uh listened to, watched uh last week's message, you should.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Phenomenal message.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I watched part of it again this morning.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: And uh listened to his warning uh where he cautioned you that he was going to talk about sex and um and that and that if you have children or if there's you know something that you you know if you want to avoid you know difficult topics, you may want to leave.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it was it was thank you.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I I really so for those of you in the cab building, we had a person get up at that moment and walk out.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: And it it wasn't related, but uh but anyway, it was perfect.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: It was perfect.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: And and um so uh looking forward to talking to you.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: No, I'm not.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm dreading talking to you about going where angels fear to tread.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: But let me start with a word of prayer, and uh that'll give you time to leave if you want.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: And if if nobody's here when I look up, then um then I'll know what happened.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Heavenly Father, we thank you that um your word isn't uh isn't isn't narrow.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: It covers more than just the topics that we think of as spiritual.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: And uh we thank you for the fact that um we were able last week uh to listen as Paul went head to head, went straight at one of the most difficult issues that we have that's messing up our society today and ruining people's lives, the issue of sexual immorality.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: And um we thank you for that message.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: We pray that many people have heard it, that it will have uh influenced uh people, and I ask that this morning, as we sort of take the flip side of that coin and talk about um that issue in marriage, that that Lord, you may give uh people ears to hear and give me a clear head and uh an accurate tongue.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' name.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um imagine that you and a friend uh decide that you're going to go on a trip together to a country you've never visited, and so you fly into the capital city and check into the hotel.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: Decide that uh you still have some hours left in the day, so you're gonna go you're gonna go check things out, walk down the streets.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: So you're walking down the streets of the city and you're looking uh at at this place that you've never been before, and then you see a long line.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: And people seem to be really excited about this, so you decide to fall in line with them.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: They're waiting outside a theater, and then the theater doors open, and so you go and you pay uh the entry fee, and you go in and sit down with them in the theater.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: And and and more and more you're thinking this is gonna really be great because there's such a buzz of anticipation and excitement about this crowd.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: And then finally the the lights dim and the band strikes up, and the um and the curtain, uh, the curtain comes up, and on stage what you see is a pot roast without anything on it.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: And you and your friend start to laugh, but nobody else is laughing.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, everybody else is stomping and they're cheering and they're whistling.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: You think that's really weird.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: But for the rest of the night, as the comedians come out and give their comedy, as singers sing their songs, there's always a reference to incorporated to a piece of to a cut of meat, uh, a leg of lamb, a New York strip.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: At the end of the evening, as you're walking back to your hotel room, you go, man, that was weird, that was random, but you get back to your hotel room and you turn on the television set and and pops up the show, steak in the city.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: So about uh a few friends who moved to New York City just looking for the best the best stake that they can find.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: As you left the country a few days later, you'd say that country has taken a normal and natural uh desire and need and turned it into this weird obsession.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: That illustration, it seems to me, is even more apt today than it was 80 years ago when C.S.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis first came up with it in Mere Christianity in his chapter on sex.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: And that is that we've turned from uh the sexual revolution of 50 years ago into, well, that's turned into sexual obsession of today.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: You you can't uh turn on any kind of media or open a magazine or even walk through a store nowadays without saying something sexual to the extent that this last week's news include the fact that a school somewhere in our country felt that it was sex was so important that they brought in sex workers to explain to their kindergartners alternative means of sexual expression.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's a society that has taken something that is a normal human need and turned it into an addiction, an obsession.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: Now, that sexual smog obviously has, I have to confess, has seeped into our churches.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: There's not a year goes by, right, that we don't hear of some Christian leader who's been caught in a secret sexual sin that he's been engaged in over the years.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: And before long his reputation is shattered and his ministry is shattered.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, what happens in the pulpit happens even more in the pew, and there's not a month that goes by, right?
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: That we don't hear about a friend or a family member, a fellow believer who has somehow been engaged in sexual immorality.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: They've broken their marriage vows, they've they've broken their family, and they leave behind broken lives.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: We're not the first culture, of course, to be fixated on sex.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, it's interesting that again and again through history, when cultures have wandered away from God and turned their backs on him, it seems that the they always turn to the strongest alternative idol that they know, and that is the desire of the body.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: One such culture was Corinth, Greece.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, there's my there's my there's my cut of meat.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry, I'll move, I'll move along from that if if the lust of desire starts coming in your eyes.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: So but Corinth, Greece was known as being sin city, uh of the you know five famous cities in ancient Greece.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: Delphi was the sacred city, Athens was the intellectual city, Olympia was the city, of course, of the games, and Sparta was the military city, but Corinth was known as the city of sex, and across the empire, entire empire of that day, to be a Corinthian meant that you were obsessed with sex, or you were a sex worker, or you were a pervert, or something like that.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: And that's partly because uh Corinth was uh at a prime place of trade in the world.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: It it it it uh there were three perfectly wonderful harbors around there, and ships would come into Corinth and uh and they would dock and they would have a couple of days because oftentimes what was happening is that um uh wow, yeah.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: I can see why.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: Was that so yeah, mm-hmm.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's the last time I'm gonna do that.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: So it was on a land bridge that was four miles across, and and ships, in order to avoid a 200-mile uh week-long trip uh from the Ionian around to the Aegean Sea and the other side of Greece would pay money generally to have uh workers take the ship out of the water and roll it across that four miles on rollers and then get into the Aegean Sea.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: But there would be a couple of a couple of days there at least that the people on ship, you know, could could could spin their leave.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, I've actually made that mark uh right over the top, almost over the top of a canal that's there today.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: So it takes much less time.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: So um uh, you know, forget that.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um so as a result, they would come into a city, and the city is still in beautiful shape today, in this marketplace that you're looking at right now, and they would walk down the marketplace, and by the way, there's good evidence that the leather tent shop where Priscilla and Aquila invited Paul in to help them is right over on that right side where I've put an arrow.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: But right behind, you can see hovering over the entire city is Upper Corinth or Acro Corinth, and on top of that mountain was this giant temple to Aphrodite, the goddess of the sex of love, uh, you know, uh the goddess of love, as expressed by sex.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so uh as a result, uh, this city is known for sin, and it had at any time between 1,000 and 3,000, shall we say, prostitutes, uh sex workers up there at that temple.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: And they would come down in the evenings and they would ply their trade right there on the street that you're that they're standing on right there.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: And you can imagine, you can imagine, with your pastoral staff consisting of those kind of personal workers, you're gonna be able to get converts rather easily.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so as a result, this whole town is is obsessed with sex.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: And God has reached down despite that into the city, and he has started, he has planted a church.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's very similar to the way perhaps some of you uh chose a pumpkin.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: You went out to a field and you saw this nice-looking pumpkin, but you plucked it out of the ground and it was dirty, so you washed it off, and then you opened it up and you scooped out all the yuck inside, and eventually put a light in there so that it could shine in the darkness.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what God had done there in Corinth, that he reached down and he chose some of those people, and he washed them off, and he opened them up and he cleaned them out inside, then he put the light of his Holy Spirit inside them so that they would be lights there in that dark place, that dark society of Corinth.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: And yet they were part of the city.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: They were still part of the city, and the temptations of the city were seeping into the church, and they were breathing that air.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: And this book, as Connor's explained to you in the last few weeks, just directly hits the fact that right there in the church you had some of the worst kind of sexual sins going on.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so as a result, Paul writes in that text that Connor preached on last week flee sexual immorality.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the person who's sexually immoral sins against his own body.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: Don't you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God?
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: You're not your own, for you were bought with a price.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: So, so glorify God with your body.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: But Paul, uh fortunately, Paul doesn't stop there.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, he's he's spoken to them.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: He tells them, by the way, uh, twice in chapters three and six that they'll eventually be judged before the bima seat.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: Christians will be judged before the bhima seat for their behavior, what they've done in the body.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: What's interesting is right there on that street, on the opposite side of the street from where Paul and Aquila and Priscilla, you know, wove and sold their tents, you have the central judgment seat of Corinth.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, it says right there, bemah seat, and that's where Paul stood before the Corinthian authorities.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: But Paul then is able to use that word, bimah, several times here in Corinth to the Corinthians to tell them, you know, just like there's a bema seat, there's going to be a bima seat one day, and God cares deeply about your sexual purity, and he will hail you before his judgment seat one day.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: Even as a believer, what did you do with the responsibilities and the gifts he gave you?
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: So Paul goes right at this.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: He speaks to them very bluntly.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: He doesn't pull his punches.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: But but as I said, Paul is also a realist.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: He realizes that you can't just condemn something.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: You need to give people reasons, you need you need to give them options.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so we come to our passage of today, 1 Corinthians chapter 7, 1 through 5, and we find that after uh condemning this kind of sin and after telling them that they must stop this, he gets very practical.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: And Paul says, now in response to the matters you wrote about, quote, it is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: And end quote.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: Well, because sexual immorality is so common, he says, each man should have sexual relations with his own wife, and each woman should have sexual relations with her own husband.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: A husband should uh fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise a wife to her husband.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: Verse 4, a wife does not have the right over her own body, but her husband does in the same way.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: A husband does not have the right over his own body, but his wife does.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: Do not deprive one another except when you agree for a time to devote yourselves to prayer.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: Then come together again.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, Satan may tempt you because of your lack of control.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: Now, as you read this, it's part of that previous discussion, but it sort of heads in an opposite direction, doesn't it?
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's clear that some of the people there in Corinth had decided that the way to handle this problem of sexual immorality in the church was to deny sex altogether.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: He says now, in response to the matters you wrote about, quote, it's good for a man not to have sexual relations with.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: Literally, your Bible may say, it's good for a man not to touch a woman.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: In the ancient world, in the Old and the New Testament, they they had no word for have sexual relations.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't use that.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: They used euphemisms, they used other ways of expressing it.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: You know, Adam knew Eve his wife.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: Or in the Old Testament, several times you have God saying, I did not allow you to touch her, Abimelech.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: Or in Proverbs 6, 29, so it is with the one who sleeps with his neighbor's wife.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: No one who touches her shall go unpunished.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: So this has to do with sexual relations, and there were apparently some people that had decided, good Christians, conservative Christians, fundamental Christians, who said, you know what, the way to handle this terrible thing, which is the ruination of families and spiritual lives in the church, is for people just simply to deny their bodies, to deny sex altogether.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: And that, frankly, is um was was not a weird thing to say in that day, that might be today, because they lived in a Greek society.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: And in the Greek culture, uh, as you may know, they they they they ate and breathed Platonic dualism.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: And Platonic dualism uh said that um the body was bad and the spirit was good.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: The body was um um the the lower thing.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: All physical things, all matter were were part of the lower realm.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: The higher realm was the mind and the soul and the spirit, and that was the only thing that was immortal.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: The body was more like the box, and your mind or your soul or your spirit was like the diamond ring inside, and you could do without the box.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, it might be better to throw the box away, but the mind or soul or spirit were what was important.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: And as a result, um uh you you have this view in the early church that since sex ruins lives and homes and lures us to sin against God, the best solution is to deny ourselves sex.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: And some of the people in the Greek world would have said, well, yeah, it's what we've been telling you all along.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: But God disagrees with that.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: And the Bible goes directly against that.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so when Paul was writing to churches and Christians in the Greek world, he said things like 1 Timothy chapter 3 says to Timothy, who's at Ephesus, God was manifested in the flesh.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: And the Greeks would have been baffled by that.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: They would have said, we understand that God may want to come down to earth.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: We have all kinds of mythological stories where Zeus comes down, the gods like to come down to earth and check things out, but they don't take on human flesh with all of its lower earthly, dirty desires.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: Never.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: God would never do something like that.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: So they had trouble believing in this God and in this Jesus.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: But Paul goes on and he says in the previous chapter in 1 Corinthians 6, what we read, don't you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit?
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: And the Greeks said, no.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: No, it doesn't work that way.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: The Holy Spirit would come down and he would be in our spirit, or he would be in our mind, but he would never be in our body.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: In our body.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul's gonna, you know, double down on this.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: He's gonna say, you know what?
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: One day God's gonna actually raise our bodies.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: Bodily resurrection is really important.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: They said, no, we want.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: No, we won't.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: The mind or spirit is immortal, but bodies aren't.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: Why would God want to raise these bodies?
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: But God says, I care about the body.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: I made the body, the body is a gift.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to give your body during your whole life to me as a living sacrifice.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: So, in that kind of a world, you can understand why uh why you know uh why the church might go in that direction, and then why the early church would really go in that direction.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, throughout the history of the church, I don't think it's a mistake for me to say that this has been the primary response in the history of the church to sexual immorality, and that is to deny the body and to deny sex altogether.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: Ascetics, A-S-C-E-T-I-C-S, denied the body in the early church so that its desires wouldn't overcome them.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: We have loads of what I consider funny illustrations in the second and third century.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: Baserian, who was a monk, wouldn't lie down.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: Sixty years he didn't, 40 years, 40 years he did not lie down while sleeping because he wanted to, you know, he wanted to not allow that body to do what it wanted to do.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: About the same time as he uh somebody else went into the swamp for six months just because it was a horrible place for their body to be, and six months later he came out looking like a leper because he had so many mosquito bites on.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, maybe the most famous story that that Hank will remember from seminary really well is Simon, we called him Simon, but his real name was Simeon Stylite.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: Styleite is simply the word for pillar in Latin.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: So he was the pillar guy, and and to get away from the desires of the world and the desires of the body, first he built a pillar that was just six feet high, and that turned out not to be high enough.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: So then the rest of the time, his pillar, he built the pillar up to up to, believe it or not, sixty feet with a little railing there so he wouldn't fall off.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: And and food was brought up to him by rope or by ladder.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: And and for 37 years, until they woke up one morning and found out that he had woken up dead, and uh for 37 years he hunkered up there, denying his body.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's the church took that and they applied that not just to the body in general, but but to sex.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: And some of the greatest saints in our history, some of the people that we admire the most in history, in our background, had this same view of sex.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: Jovi in the fourth century actually became an emperor for briefly, but he was excommunicated by the bishop of Rome for teaching that marriage was just as holy as celibacy.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, the reply from Augustine and from Jerome and from the others was that celibacy is uh is as far above marriage with its sex as the heaven is high above the earth.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: Chrysostom, godly man.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: Adam and Eve could not have had sex.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: When they were sinless in the garden before the fall.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: Augustine, the sex act is not sinful actually in itself for a married couple, he said, but the passion and the pleasure that always come along with it, those things are sinful.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: Peter Lombard, maybe my favorite line.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: Whenever a married couple has sex, the Holy Spirit leaves the room.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's a good one.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: And then you come to the Middle Ages.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: We're talking about about 1000 A.D.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: and then there the leaders of the church urge that you should not have, married couples should not have sex on a Thursday because that was the day that Jesus was arrested.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: And they should not have sex on Friday, of course, because the day our Lord was crucified.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: And they shouldn't have sex on Saturday because that's the day our Lord was in the tomb.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: And they shouldn't have sex on Sunday because that's the day of the resurrection.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: And they shouldn't have sex on Monday or Tuesday because there, that was the memory time for dead saints.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: And that left just Wednesday, the liveliest night of the week.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: So that was the church in the Middle Ages.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: Church in the Reformation.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: They brought us many good things, but they but they really didn't change our view of sex, with the wonderful exception of Martin Luther, you know, and a couple of others.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: Because shortly after we get to the Victorian age in the 1800s, and that was a strange age where, on the one hand, you denied sex, even in public.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: You never talked about a woman getting pregnant.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: You said, you just said, if you've if you've read the old books, Jane Austen and so forth, that she was in an interesting condition, right?
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: And and you didn't call them table legs because of the word leg, you know, and they called them table limbs.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: And oftentimes, of course, you know, the host would cover cover those limbs because, you know, you guys, you guys get turned on by table legs all the time, I know, you know.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: Or you know, I have trouble today figuring out I'm always asking when I have dinner, you know, uh this on Thanksgiving.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I don't understand.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: What when what's the white meat and the dark meat again?
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: But that was during the Victorian age when they came up with those words because they didn't want to use the words like thigh and breast and leg.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so we come up with white meat and dark meat, but it to me none of that makes really good sense because sometimes we hold anyway, I I'll just say the Victorian age was was a uh was a fascinating age, but even today we come up, we come up to today and we find that we find that still we have uh we tell our children interesting things about sex, some of which uh, you know, hurt them later.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: You know, mother will tell her her daughter, she's combing her daughter's hair, you know, sex is dirty and nasty, so save it for marriage.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas God, of course, says sex is a wonderful thing, it is a good thing, so make sure that you don't waste it on something or someone that you wish you hadn't.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: So the question is uh w what is Paul saying?
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Paul is actually harking back to the theme of the Old Testament, which is that sex is actually a wonderful thing in the garden.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: Some of the phrasing used of Adam and Eve indicates that God saw sex as a good thing.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: And when we come to the book of Song of Songs, yes, it's true that Israel saw that as an illustration of the Lord's love for them, but it is a book of love poems, erotic love poems.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: And not only Israel saw it as a picture of God's love for them, but the church in the first century, yes, saw it as a picture of Christ's love for the church.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: But at the same time, they did not deny, uh Paul and Peter, that this was this was a book of erotic love poems about sex between a husband and a wife.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: And therefore, it it what Paul is trying to reclaim in our text, 1 Corinthians 7, 1 through 5, is this idea that yes, sexual immorality is a terrible fire.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: And this fire can burn and it can be really bad.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: But fire in and of itself is a good thing, and it has a good use, and we mustn't deny either fire or sex simply because it can be dangerous.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_00: We come to Hebrews chapter 13, verse 4, and as clearly as God can say it, he says marriage is honorable, and the bed is undefiled.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: He really cares that we understand that a prudish view of sex is as ungodly and unbiblical as the pagan view of sex.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: That sexual relations in God's will within marriage are a wonderful gift that He has given.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the worst things that we can do as parents or as Christians is to somehow react to the sexual immorality around us by flopping over to the other side and thinking that somehow denying the body or sex altogether will at least perhaps keep us safe.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: Simon Styleides ended up coming down from the pole because he realized that while you could take the man out of a sexual society, you couldn't take the sexual thoughts out of a man.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: A prudish view of sex is, I'll say it again, as ungodly as the pagan view of sex.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: Sex is like fire.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: It is a gift from God, but it can be extremely dangerous.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: It can kill and ruin and maim.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: Paul continues in verses two and three by explaining why he's now defending sex in marriage after telling people to flee sexual immorality.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_00: He says, because sexual immorality is so common, each man should have sexual relations with his own wife, and each woman should have sexual relations with her own husband.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, in this entire chapter, Connor, next week we'll talk about celibacy.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: We'll talk about singleness from later in chapter 7.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the interesting things about this chapter is that unlike any other ancient writing about sex and marriage, Paul continually refers to the wife as an equal partner with the husband and having equal responsibilities and equal rights.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's really, really an absolutely unique piece of ancient literature here, coming from what we usually consider to be a patriarchal society.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: But you'll see this starting here in verse 2, and you'll see it all the way through this chapter.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: He says each woman should have sexual relations with her own husband, just as the man with his own wife.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: A husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise a wife to her husband.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: What Paul is saying here is that to be realistic, one of the ways of dealing, one of the ways that God has given us of dealing with sexual immorality, let's be practical, is that he's given us marital sex.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's simply denying sex does not work.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: Simply stopping ourselves from doing it does not work.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's a need that God has put in us, it's a good thing, and as a result, one of the ways, maybe the best way, of fighting off sexual immorality is for a husband to fulfill this need in his wife, and a wife to fulfill this need in her husband.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the way he says it in verse 3 when he says, it's a duty.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now we like not to think of anything as a duty, but this is something he calls conjugal, we call it a conjugal responsibility, a conjugal duty, and that's the way we got that idea from Paul, who says that this is a marital duty to his wife, and likewise a wife to her husband.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_00: And then he says, a wife, he says something really startling in verse four.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: He says, wife does not have the right over her own body or authority in the old translations, but her husband does in the same way.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: Notice he flips it and says it the opposite way.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: A husband does not have the right over his own body, but his wife does.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's hard for me to even imagine how that second half of that sentence would have hit people, even in Greek society, much less Jewish society, when the man sort of owned right, in many places owned his wife.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_00: He had all the control over his own body and over his own time and his own schedule.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: And Paul says it's not true.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_00: Not only does a wife not have the authority and right of soul ownership over her own body and her own schedule and so forth, speaking about a wife, neither does the husband, neither does the man.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's an astounding idea.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_00: And immediately you have to say, wow, this does not sound like romance that he's talking about at all.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: He uses the word duty.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: Now, uh don't get me wrong, I I like, I did love that title, Over the Moon in Love.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: He's not talking about romantic love, is he?
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: There are different kinds of love in the Bible.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: You can read about this.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: My favorite is C.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: S.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis's book, The Four Loves.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: You ought to read that someday before you die.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: But but there's romantic love in there, Eros, E-R-O-S, Romantic and Sex.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: And then, you know, there's family love, Philia, or I mean storage, and then there's friend love, that's Philia.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_00: But then there's agape love.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the kind of love he's talking about here, which is a self-giving love, which recognizes rights and responsibilities and duties.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what he's speaking about here.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_00: But I don't want you to understand.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_00: I I like I like an occasional Hallmark movie with my wife.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: I really do.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I like, I'm the one who lights the candles, you know, as often as not late at night, and and so forth.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's uh, you know, I old guys get mushy.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_00: Am I right, Hank?
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: We're the ones who get mushy.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_00: So um, anyway.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: But he's not talking about it.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_00: He's talking about a grown-up love, isn't he?
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_00: He's talking about a mature love, he's not talking about a childish love.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's always going gimme, gimme, gimme.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: Romantic love, you see.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_00: The husband comes home and and and if he helps with the dishes and if he helps around the house and so forth, then perhaps he has earned, see, romantic love.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's a love you must earn.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's a love to be one.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, and so if he does that, then perhaps his wife will be responsive later.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: Or if, on the other hand, the husband, if he's in the right frame of mind and the wife, you know, pushes the right buttons with him, then he'll be responsive and attentive later, right?
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's all it's it's that's romantic love.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: That's the there's a requirement there, and if you fill the bill, you know, then you'll win my love.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_00: You'll earn my love.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_00: But Paul's talking about something different.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_00: He's talking about a love that is a self-giving, unconditional love that recognizes what I owe to my spouse, right?
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so he concludes in 1 Corinthians 7 5 on this same thing with do not, therefore deprive one another.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: And the word means deprived, but but it's uh it's only used one other time, and that's in the previous chapter when he used it of a contract, and when he's talking about people not cheating one another in business.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_00: And there he it means defraud.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so he's speaking here in a way about don't defraud one another except when you agree for a time to devote yourselves to prayer.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_00: What's that all about?
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_00: Well, he says this is so important, such priority that that it it is breaking a contract.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_00: That contract that you made with your spouse to have in the home from this day forward.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: You're breaking that vow, you're defrauding them, actually, if you reserve your body for yourself, and so you you know, don't defraud them except except, you know, for a little bit of a time for maybe for some devotional reasons, but you have to do it, there has to be an agreement, and it has to be for a short period of time, and it has to be for a specific purpose, then come together again.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, he says, and here's his point back in verse one Satan may tempt you because of your lack of self-control.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, sex in marriage is one of God's ways of helping us fight against Satan and flee sexual immorality.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't this remarkable?
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Margaret Johnson, uh, a Christian book writer and so forth, uh, includes this paragraph in one of her books.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's a book written for women, but it it could just as well have been written for men.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: Notice that, and this is about the idea of fraud and sort of a contract.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: She says when we talk about infidelity, we think of sexual unfaithfulness, adultery.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_00: But there's also a non-adulterous infidelity that undermines a marriage.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_00: For in the dictionary, infidelity also includes unfaithfulness to a charge or moral obligation.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: Many times when we come to marriage, we feel we will be perfectly adequate to satisfy the needs of our mate.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_00: But then after marriage, we find we were not as capable as we thought.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_00: And rather than face our problem and deal with it, we begin to retreat.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_00: We find excuses, we are tired, we're not feeling well.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: And in a hundred different ways, we find that we can avoid the responsibility.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's infidelity.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_00: For we stood at a marriage altar and swore in the presence of witnesses before God that our partner would have us to have and to hold until death do you part.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_00: And to go back on that promise, solemnly and honestly made, is an infidelity that can be most damaging to a marriage.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: So speaking about an infidelity, that's a broader idea, a bigger idea than simply adultery.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what Paul would say.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_00: He would say it's an infidelity, it's a fraud for you to deny your partner something that you promised your partner.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_00: Let me share with you quickly takeaways from today and tell you a story.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think that some of the takeaways, and I've just jotted these down, maybe you've gotten some different ones, a prudish view of sex is as bad as a pagan view of sex.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_00: Sex like fire is a good thing that can be misused.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_00: Marriage is given partly to help us flee immorality.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_00: It is fraud to treat our bodies as entirely our own.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_00: Sex in marriage is not a favor to be earned, but a debt owed and a love given.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_00: Let me say that one again.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_00: Sex in marriage is not a favor to be earned, but a debt owed and a love given.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, sex is to have high priority in marriage.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I know that these lead to loads of questions.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_00: And um don't see me, go see Hank about these or or Connor.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_00: But but just really, really quickly to deal with with some of the most practical questions.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_00: Why does Paul put this emphasis?
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_00: Why is it uh on marriage sex?
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_00: And and I think that that maybe the reason is that this is this is something that only you can do, right?
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_00: I um my wife can get someone else around the house, you know, so I mean someone else who's not around the house.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_00: She can get someone else to to to mow the lawn, though we both love to do it, or to cut down the trees, or pick up branches, or or rake leaves, or she can get someone else to do that.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes I wish she would.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_00: But um, not true.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_00: But but to fulfill this need in the will of God, I am the only person on earth for her.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_00: I can get someone else to do housework, to do the laundry, to wash the dishes, to cook food and and so forth.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but in the will of God, Melody is the one person in the entire world that can meet this need for me.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why I think Paul treats this as a high priority, as something very important to us.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: What gets in the way of this priority?
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I I think that if you decide you're gonna be real realistic and apply this, you have to ask yourself honestly or maybe discuss what gets in the way of this priority?
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_00: And and and the answer, of course, is gonna include things like like children, you know, uh, or or um or the media, or or past experiences, or pornography, or um um a lack of desire, lack of sexual drive.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's there's just a number of things that that can affect this, and and practical steps for a couple to take.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_00: And busyness would also be maybe the main one, and tiredness that comes from busyness, but of course, you know, if you're too busy to do something this important, then you're you're too busy.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: Practical steps you can take, you can read a book together, you go to a marriage conference together, you can go see a therapist together, you you can go talk to Connor Hank, you know, or Patty, something like something like that.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_00: But but that all I'm saying is that this is this is something that God says is really important.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_00: When uh when I was first, you know, I when I was here at the church and uh became asked to be lead pastor, I was still single, and then shortly after that, a few months after that, I married a girl who was still 18.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_00: She would be 19 in about a month and brought her up here.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_00: And the church was small at that time, but then during those first five years, which we planned to wait to have children, but somehow three popped out in the first five years, and uh I I and her father, her father actually called me out of the blue.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_00: He was a marriage counselor, he had a counseling center, a marriage counseling, and he said, I'm just curious, this is this makes three you know, pregnancies, you know, four years.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, uh, do you know?
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_00: Do you know how this happens?
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_00: You know?
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_00: So, no, I said, tell me, Jim.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so so um so she'd have children, but because the church was small, when we had special speakers, we couldn't afford to put them up at a hotel, so we'd have them stay at our house.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_00: And uh one of my favorites, uh, my mentor, you know, uh stayed at our house doing a special speaking here and uh Valentine's Banquet and stuff.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_00: And um, you know, I just uh I admired him greatly.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_00: And for some reason, I didn't expect this of him.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_00: He wanted to talk to us, he wanted to find out about you know uh why I thought that the church had started growing and what we were doing and this and that.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_00: And he talked to us at length, and it was just so humble.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_00: So but eventually, as Melody's sitting there, you know, with one of the babies, you know, whatever, you know, he turns to her and he says, so you're a pastor's wife down at seminar, like to talk to pastors' wives and so forth.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_00: What what do you see as your major job, you know, at the church?
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_00: And she said, after thinking with a twinkle in her eye, she said, Well, I think one of my major jobs is to seduce the preacher.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_00: He he he nearly fell on the floor laughing.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_00: Some of you have heard her say stuff like that.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_00: You've asked Melody a Bible question, somebody says, What?
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_00: I just sleep with a man.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_00: So um, so so he laughed.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_00: I I really think that Paul, too, would have laughed, or at least smiled mildly.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um because that's part of the point that he's making here, is that one of the, and this this maybe just to summarize very simply this message, is that one of the most effective ways that you can help your loved one, your partner, your mate resist Satan, the temptations of Satan, is to give them the love and affection and responsiveness of a good husband.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the ways that you wives can help protect your husband against the onslaughts of Satan, as Paul says, is to give them the love and affection and responsiveness of a good wife.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what God's word says to us, and it's important to him.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, uh, you've told us that you want us to give you our bodies, to give them to you as a living sacrifice, and now this morning we hear more.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_00: We hear that we are to give our bodies to uh our partners.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_00: That um we do not own them, really.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_00: That we have a duty out of mature love.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that it's not a chore.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_00: We understand that it's not a chore, that it is a gift, a wonderful gift.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_00: So for that, we we thank you this morning.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_00: We pray that you'd give us Christian minds that we might think about this and talk about this to ourselves and our children, our grandchildren, as we should.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_00: For Jesus' sake and for the sake of our families and the church, we pray.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for coming.