Jesus and Sex
My parents were from a culture and generation who found it very hard to talk to us about sex. Aren’t we all in that boat? One of the few things my mother said to me about sex was, "Stan, there are some bad girls out there!" I said, "Where?!" Well, I didn’t say it, but I thought it. But I’m sure my mother’s intentions were good. But she felt awkward and didn’t know how to talk to us four boys about this crucial area of growing up.
Today, that shyness is complicated even more by aggressive and overreaching courts, partisan media that cross the line from reporting to advocacy, sit-coms and movies, teen pregnancies, an epidemics of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. To make it even worse, confused churches and church leaders conspire to blur the lines around healthy human sexual behaviour. But that’s nothing new, is it? So during the five Sundays of February, with the help of several other Presbyterian ministers, John Ortberg, Mark Labberton, Craig Barnes, Tim Keller and others, we’ll open the Scriptures to let God shape and heal our attitudes and our actions about sex.
Today, John Ortberg, pastor at Park Presbyterian Church walks us through Matthew 5, where Jesus calls for three commitments that we need to make in order to be right sexually.
1. The first is a commitment to confession. To be right about sex, I must acknowledge and confess my own flawed sexual nature.
Did you hear what Jesus said? These religious keeners thought they could divide people into two categories: the adulterers, that is, people who have sexual problems, and the non-adulterers, people who have no sexual problems. So Jesus said to them, "Whatever else you’ve heard, I’m telling you that people who look and lust have already committed adultery in their hearts."
Now let’s be clear that Jesus is not saying that it’s wrong to find someone attractive or to admire their beauty. Sexual attraction and beauty are wonderful gifts of God. But Jesus is talking about mishandled or misdirected sexual desire, or fantasy, or intention, even if you’ve never committed the physical act of sexual intercourse with someone outside the covenant of marriage.
Now, that went over then like a lead balloon when Jesus said it. It still does. It’s as if Jesus were to come into this sanctuary and say, "Anybody who lusted this week will die in ten seconds." Would I be speaking to an empty room? Would I be here to speak?
And neither is Jesus saying, "if you’ve done adultery in your heart, you might as well do it physically, because one is just as bad as the other." That’s not what he’s saying. Because the act of adultery includes everything that’s wrong in the lusting heart, plus more. The act of adultery adds deceit, betrayal, damage to the family, vicious wounds to the spouse, and untold injury to the adulterer. Ask anybody who’s been there.
What Jesus is saying is this: if you think you’re sexually perfect and you need no repentance, think again. Sexual healing runs deeper than that.
In church, isn’t it easy for us to pretend that we don’t have a problem with sex? But all of us have been affected by the presence of sin. Maybe you’re keenly aware that we live in a society that idolizes sexual attractiveness. How can our kids escape the images of J-Lo and Britney, or the boys in the Calvin Klein ads? We live in an aggressively sexual, homosexual and bisexual culture. And the targets of the aggression are you and your kids. Maybe you struggle with sexual obsession, or with homosexual feelings or experiments. Is it possible that you’ve already crossed some lines that you shouldn’t have crossed? The truth of Jesus is a fiery, cleansing, freeing truth. It brings us to admit the truth to ourselves and to God. God longs to forgive. Is it possible that some of us carry deep guilt in this area? Jesus’ reliable truth is this: Nothing you have ever done is so bad that it cannot be covered and made right by Jesus’ death on the cross. Nothing.
But I must confess. To be right about sex, I must acknowledge and confess my own flawed sexual nature. And in confessing, I must be willing to change.
2. The second commitment Jesus calls for as a requirement of sexual health is for me to accept God’s gift. I must accept and be grateful that God made me a sexual person. That’s a commitment that I need to make, even though I have problems handling this beautiful gift, even though at times I abuse it, and make it a curse. I must not despise what God has done in making me male or female. God invented sex. It was not some great foul-up that God did when he ran out of good ideas. Remember what Adam said when he saw Eve for the first time? "Whoa, this is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh! Yeah, God!" Or something like that.
I need to recognize my sexuality as a good gift from God. Is that hard for someone here? Some of you are victims of abuse or trauma or incest. Did you know that God is willing tenderly to take you to the point where you can honestly say, "Thanks, God, that you made my body. Thanks that you made me male or female. Thanks God that you gave me the capacity to become one with somebody of the opposite sex within the covenant of marriage."
Sexual purity as Jesus defines it is not simply to avoid sin. Of course, it’s not smart to put yourself in places where you know you’re going to be tempted sexually. But Jesus’ goal for you and me is that we become the kind of person who can look at somebody of the opposite sex, and see what Jesus sees. If that’s not your spouse, if that’s not a person to whom you’re romantically committed, you’ll see a brother or a sister. When you extend a hand, you’ll touch as Jesus would touch. That’s purity. To know the joy of Godly sex, I must accept and be grateful that God made me a sexual person.
3. A third commitment Jesus calls for as a requirement for sexual health is a commitment to keep God’s standards. What is God’s will about our sexual behaviour? Did you hear it in 1 Thessalonians? "God wants you to . . . keep yourselves from sexual promiscuity." Do you know what that means? It means that I will confine my sexual relationships within a permanent commitment of marriage to someone of the opposite sex.
If you are single, you’ll know that we live in a society where it’s considered dumb not to be sexually active. The lie of our culture is that it’s oppressive and prudish to reserve a sexual relationship until marriage. Do you know what? All of us struggle to be sexually right and healthy. But there is a unique and sometimes fierce struggle for those who are single. Because we live in a world that foists an illusion onto us: if you’re sexually active, that’s normal. If you’re not sexually active, that’s abnormal, it’s sick. That’s an illusion. In the body of Christ, you are whole, whether you are single or married. Neither singleness nor marriage diminishes you.
Why is a commitment to keep God’s standard so important? Because sex is such a deep part of who we are. Sexual guilt has a way of making us feel separated from God like almost nothing else does. We need to make a commitment together in this Body of Christ to say, "I’m not going to allow my sexual weakness to keep me from God. I’m going to rely on the Holy Spirit every day, despite my flaws. When I stumble and fall, I’m going to get back up and cling to God.
It’s honesty time. How many of us who are married had honeymoons where at least one detail did not go exactly as planned? Somebody got the telephone number of our motel. And in spite of our instructions to the switchboard to block all calls, the phone rang every twenty minutes. What’s your honeymoon horror story? And it’s not just the honeymoon, is it? It’s one of the great lies of our age that the sexual dimension of a marriage somehow happens on its own. Maybe there’s hurt or embarrassment or wounding in your past. Maybe there are things from your past that you need forgiveness for.
If we admit that we are fallen and flawed people; if we live in accountability to God and to each other by practicing confession to God for our failures; if we will accept and be thankful for God’s amazing, beautiful, powerful gift of sexuality; if we’ll commit to keep God’s standard of sexual behaviour, then this church will be an island of sanity and healing and wholeness in the sea of sexual chaos and pain and confusion that threatens to swamp us and our children.
More about this next week. But today, hear this again. The truth of Jesus’ teaching is a cleansing, freeing truth. It brings us to admit to ourselves and to God our sexual failures and bondage. God longs to forgive. God waits to set us free. Is it possible that some of us carry deep guilt in this area? Jesus’ reliable truth is this: Nothing you have ever done is so bad that it cannot be covered and made right by Jesus’ death on the cross. Nothing.
