Video Transcript: Holy Sexuality

So it's very early and of course all the parts of the New Testament are equally important and given by God. But 1 Thessalonians is Paul's letter to a church that he really ran into a lot of trouble when he established it. He ran into a lot of persecution and difficulty, but the Lord helped the church to take off there anyway and to keep on going and he wrote to them to encourage them in various aspects of the faith.

Chapter 4, verse 1. Finally then brothers, we ask and urge you in the Lord Jesus that as you received from us how you ought to walk and to please God, just as you are doing, that you do so more and more. For you know what instructions we gave you through the Lord Jesus. For this is the will of God, your sanctification, that you abstain from sexual immorality, that each of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God.

That no one transgress and wrong his brother in this matter, because the Lord is an avenger in all these things, as we told you beforehand and solemnly warned you. For God has not called us for impurity, but in holiness. Therefore whoever disregards this, disregards not man, but God who gives his Holy Spirit to you.

This ends the reading of God's word, and God always blesses his word to those who listen. The Bible calls us to avoid sexual immorality and to live a holy sexuality, and if you want to understand what the core of that is, here's a summary from our church's statement of faith. Sexual intimacy is for marriage only.

Marriage is a lifelong union of a man and a woman. That's it. It's short, it's simple, it's narrow.

There are other roads with many, many lanes, and as the Bible says, there is a broad road that leads to destruction, so just because there are a lot of other lanes out there, don't forsake the simple, clear, and narrow road that God gives. There's a lot of variety in practice today, and there certainly was in the time of the Roman Empire. I'll look at a few of the deviations from the road God gives, but just a little bit of background about the Empire and about the situation we're in, because the apostle tells us don't live in passionate lust like the heathen who don't know God.

How do the heathen who don't know God behave? Well, back in the day when this was being written, the recent emperor Tiberius, who was emperor during the time that Jesus was crucified, had been a man with preference for little boys and who spent a lot of time in orgies on the island of Capri. His successor, one of them, was Caligula, who was a man who, according to some writers, had married his horse and married his sister and was given to all kinds of terrible deviations from God's original design. The emperor Nero had a boy that he took a liking to and had him castrated so that he would be more like a woman.

I happen to see in one of the cases for same-sex marriage that same-sex marriage goes back. It's not something new. And one of the incidents cited was, well, Nero castrated a boy and married him, so I guess that's pretty normal.

So that tells you something about Nero and the Roman emperors, but also about the time we're living in. We're living in a time that is going back into the paganism of the Roman Empire before Christianity began to shape it. We're going back into a sub-Christian, pagan way of thinking and behaving.

Some of you who follow the news may have noticed that just in the last couple of weeks, a very prominent fashion company, favored by the Kardashians and others who know a lot about style and fashion, ran an ad campaign with little children holding bondage bears. And it is what it sounds like. It's bears with the various things that people who are into that sort of thing like.

And so they had a campaign, and one of the pictures even had a photo of a Supreme Court decision from 2002 that struck down part of the Child Protection Act. So when we look at the immorality of our own time, there are still people who believe, well, coercion is wrong, rape is wrong, consent should be given. And there are those who object to pedophilia, using children, underage people, for your own gratification.

And let's face it, that's about where the line gets drawn nowadays. If they are consenting adults, that is the simple way of understanding sexual morality today. Of course, the adults part is eroding rapidly, as that ad campaign indicated, and as a recent article in USA Today indicated.

It said, well, you know, pedophilia is really misunderstood. What if minor attracted persons are just another kind of sexual orientation? We've got a hundred others. Why not minor attracted persons? So that's the kind of age that we find ourselves increasingly living in, and so you get new ways of describing things instead of pedophilia, which itself is an overly nice word.

The more accurate word is child molesting. Pedophilia is Greek for loves kids. But, of course, that word has even gotten some things that are negative to it.

So now you're a minor attracted person. Instead of prostitution, there are now sex workers. And so you're just kind of, you know, it's another financial transaction.

If you go seek a prostitute, you're just paying a sex worker the way you pay somebody at the grocery checkout. That's the kind of situation that we increasingly find ourselves in. And the challenge for us is to be aware that those things that cross the boundaries still today are really the final outcome of boundaries that were crossed a long time ago.

Take an example that used to, not that long ago, I mean, those of us, we don't have to be very old to remember when same-sex marriage was a very odd idea that even people who were homosexually attracted never thought that that was a thing because marriage was between a man and a woman. Everybody knew that until they didn't. And so you have a Supreme Court decision of Obergefell that approved of same-sex marriage.

Now you have the United States Senate just passing a bill to codify it and put it into law nationwide. That would have been inconceivable a few decades ago. But here we are.

Now what has happened, though, before that, of course, the stigma associated with childbirth out of pregnancy was gradually removed. Stigma of divorce was gradually removed. And it was removed in many cases by our heroes.

The major landmark in a shift in sexual immorality occurred when the governor of California, and we know what kind of place California is, the governor of California signed a bill approving of no-fault divorce. The governor of California at that time in 1970 was named Ronald Reagan, who went on to become our first divorced president and a hero of the people who love family values. And so then we had a more recent president who was a hero of family values.

People had three wives and uncountable numbers of affairs. So that's the situation we find ourselves in now where even the people who hold so-called conservative family values have presidents who are very, very far from those values. And so when we look at what God's standard is, we need to realize, as the Bible phrasing puts it at one point, you live in a wicked and depraved generation.

It's not normal. It's not healthy. It's not the way God intended.

And you need to know that no matter how much entertainment you see that just makes it all normal, no matter how much some of your favorite politicians go into certain behaviors, that does not make it something that's acceptable to someone who is born again by the Spirit of God. So just to go through the list very rapidly, you know, it's unfortunate the Apostle speaks of things that it's shameful to even mention what the disobedient do in secret, but we've got to mention it because it's blared everywhere in our culture, and so we need to hear what God has to say. Forcible taking of another person's body is always wrong.

That's wrong even if it's the person you're married to. Force is out. Coercion is out.

Pedophilia, the molesting of underage children, is certainly wicked. Incest, which is sexual relations between closely related people, is condemned in the Bible. Polyamory, sometimes called polygamy because that's a man with many wives, but polyamory works either way, where it's a woman with many men or a man with many women.

Transgenderism, the notion that you can simply become a different gender if that's what you decide. Same-sex intimacy is condemned in the Bible. Prostitution is again and again warned against in the Bible.

It's often associated with idolatry, but even when it's not associated with idolatry, the Apostle says, when you unite your body with another, you become one with that person. You may say, oh, that was just a one-time thing. The Bible says you become one.

It was designed by God to create oneness. Even when you violate God's design, it has its kind of effect, and it will pull you in many different directions. In our society, just hooking up, having consenting adult relationships with somebody you barely know, or maybe somebody who's just a friend and thought, well, that'd be fun for a night.

Moving in, that's considered now the prelude by many people to marriage. Many, many couples move in together before they get married, and that's thought to be a normal, healthy thing. Even the sociologists can tell you that your probabilities of divorce increase greatly when you move in together before marriage.

And so these things that, you know, we kind of take as more normal, but oh boy, we wouldn't want those child molesters anywhere nearby. The Bible, you know, you probably don't want to see some of these things on the same slide with some of these other things. They're all on the same slide, okay? They're all in the same Bible as different lanes that lead away from God's design.

Lust, Jesus said, if you look at someone lustfully, you've already committed adultery in your heart, and so all the various forms of pornography that are so abundant in our world today are harmful to us, and they're not meant to be that way by God. And of course, there is adultery in the Ten Commandments. Thou shalt not commit adultery.

If you're a married person and you ditch your spouse for another person or have sexual relations with another person, that's defined as adultery. And divorce does not always mean that both divorced persons committed sexual sin. Sometimes divorce is initiated by one person or caused by one person by their sins against the other.

But where a divorce occurs, you can be sure that something went wrong somewhere, and that's not meant to stigmatize people who've been through divorce anymore. The Bible says that sin is sin. And when we sin and fall short of the glory of God, we need His forgiveness.

We need His blood to cleanse us. One thing we don't need is excuses. And one thing we don't need is false prophets telling us that those were the old days and the Apostle Paul was a little more restrictive than Jesus.

Read Jesus. Jesus was asked, now, is it okay for a person to divorce someone for any and every reason? And the Pharisees said it was okay. The thing that made divorce moral was getting your paperwork right.

Because back in the Old Testament, Moses had said, hey, if you're going to divorce a woman, you've got to write a bill of divorce. That just proves it. That if you've got the paperwork right, it's okay.

Moses said so. And Jesus said, didn't you read a little earlier in Moses and a little more deeply that at the very beginning, He created them male and female? And He said a man shall leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. And therefore what God has joined together, let no man put asunder.

He said, Moses gave you that divorce regulation because of the hardness of your hearts, not because it was God's will or because, you know, anything goes as long as you have the correct paperwork. Yeah, it's better to have the correct paperwork if you're going to leave your wife so that she at least has some sort of legal defense, but better yet, stay faithful to her. So you have all of these different forms and, you know, each of us, you know, each of us may have our own kind of temptation.

Some of these on this list, you'll say, well, that's just so gross and inconceivable to me. I would never do that. And well, I'm glad that's so.

But there may be others. And the great temptation is to dial it back and say, yeah, that's my temptation, but thank goodness it's not a very serious thing if I do it. Yes, it is.

So we need to be able to identify what is God's will when he says, this is my will for holy sexuality and this is outside my will. And don't let the latest preachers who think they're really with it now, they understand this generation. They're going to update the Bible for you.

Yeah. So the apostle says, say no to immorality. Why would you say no to immorality? Well, the first reason is one I've already highlighted.

You don't want to be like godless pagans and recognize the fact that you're living in an environment that's sliding back into godless paganism and Sodom and Gomorrah and the Roman empire and all of its wickedness. Just recognize that what's called normal now was called normal back then too, before Christianity got ahold of people and changed the way entire civilizations thought about sexuality and marriage. Before that, anything goes.

If you had power, you did whatever you wanted. If you had money, you could hire whatever you wanted and you just did whatever you wanted. But that is not who you are in Christ Jesus.

So don't act like godless pagans and don't reject and rebel against the Trinity. Read the passage carefully. It says, we urge you in the Lord Jesus.

You know what instructions we gave you through the Lord Jesus. I want to emphasize that again, as I have before. One of the first signs of trouble when you're dealing with people who are changing the Bible and leading people into wickedness is they will tell you, yeah, we follow Jesus.

We're not really into that Paul guy or into Moses or other Bible writers. What does Paul say here? He says, we instructed you in the Lord Jesus and we instructed you in what the Lord Jesus taught. Now I've just told you what the Lord Jesus taught about marriage, where God created us male and female.

He brought male and female together and then said, stay together. That's the teaching of Jesus, not the teaching of Paul only. So when you reject this writing of Paul, you're not just rejecting an old guy who lived a long time ago.

You are. It is kind of a weighty thing. Come to think of it, to reject a guy who wrote half of the New Testament and spread Christianity throughout the Mediterranean world.

And now you've got some bozo who comes along 2000 years later and thinks they know better than him. You know, that's pretty stupid. But grant, let's just suppose for a moment that you thought you could avoid Paul.

You can't avoid Jesus on this. And it not only says that it's what Jesus teaches, but he says, you need to know how to walk and to please God. It is the will of God, not the will of Paul or some person with some hangups, the will of God.

And then he says, not only is it the will of Jesus and of God, the father, but anyone who rejects this command, he says, does not just disregard man, but God, what God who gives you his Holy Spirit. When you have God, the Holy Spirit living in you, you're a temple. Your body is his temple.

And so every sin of misusing your body is a sin against the Holy Spirit who indwells you as a Christian. It's a sin against Jesus Christ who calls you to a life of holiness. It's a sin against God, the father.

And the Bible says that God is going to judge those who go against his will in this matter. So it's, it's acting like pagans, but it's also rebellion against all three persons of the Trinity. Another reason is don't violate and cheat others.

The golden rule is due to others as you'd have them do to you. Do you want your spouse cheating on you repeatedly? If you're single, do you want the person you're someday going to marry to be sleeping around all over the place? Do you want that? Well, if not, then don't do it yourself. That's the golden rule.

Treat others the way you would have them treat you. The apostle here says that you don't want to be someone who violates or cheats or defrauds others. You're defrauding the person you're dealing with if you're having sexual relations with them without a marriage commitment and you're sinning against the person whom they could eventually someday marry.

And then of course there is the matter of how it affects yourself. You can do great damage to your own body and to your own spirit by living in a way contrary to what God says. So those are some of the reasons in this passage to say no to immorality.

You don't want to mimic the pagans. You want to be unlike them. You want to be in tune with God.

You want to be loving and blessing others and you want to be doing what's good for yourself. If you had to summarize it, just take the two greatest commandments Jesus gave. Love God above all.

Don't reject the Trinity. Love your neighbor as yourself. So love your neighbor.

Do to them what would be best for them. And as yourself, well, do for yourself what's best for you. And the positive part of that is act like children of the King.

You're not a pagan when you belong to Jesus. Delight in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This is one of the most important things in living a holy life, in your sexuality, or in any other part of your life, is a delight in God.

Because if you haven't learned to relate to God and to rejoice in God and to be glad that He's your Father, that Jesus became one of you, and that the Holy Spirit lives in you and is your friend, if that's not a meaningful part of your life, then to be told what you're supposed to do here and there just sounds like orders from somebody you don't know very well or like very much. Is that how God seems to you sometimes? You don't know Him very well and you don't like Him very much, but He's out there and you've kind of got to, okay, I better do what He says. That's not going to lead to obedience.

When temptation becomes strong, you're going to do where your pleasure, what gives you the most happiness and pleasure, is what you're going to do. And so it's very important to be finding your pleasure in a relationship with God before you seek pleasure anywhere else. Yes to holiness means that you love others, that you bless them.

You want their life to be better. And so you want to bless your spouse or your future spouse. And you want to bless those who aren't going to marry you.

You don't want to mess them up or detract from the joy they're going to eventually have in marriage and in your own flourishing to flourish and enjoy a holy life. So those are the reasons and the outcomes of saying yes to holiness. Now before I move on, I've got to just, I'll just pause here.

Maybe I'll say it again. But anytime you give nearly any sermon, and especially this sermon, people will know that something is wrong somewhere. You look at your own life, at your own relationships, at your own sexuality, and there's much often to feel guilty about or to be ashamed of.

And God's purpose is not to get us stuck in that, but to rescue us from it. To know again that these are things for which Christ died and that His blood covers and that His Holy Spirit can move us in a new direction and transform us. But one thing you don't want to do is keep just along in the same rut.

Let the Lord lift you out of that rut. Receive that forgiveness, pray for it, and accept again the fact that He loves and transforms and leads in the path of holiness. Now I want to zero in a little bit on a particular verse here, the fourth verse of chapter four.

Every one of you should know how to possess your own vessel in holiness and honor. That's literally what it says. And then most translations will say that that means to control your own body.

It's really, it literally is just know how to possess your own vessel. And so one meaning is control your own body if you consider the vessel to be your body. Another would be to take a spouse for yourself if the vessel is the spouse that you're going to be taking.

It's been interpreted both ways. The first is a little more common. I'm just going to suggest that both are conceivable because both are taught, you know, in the Bible more broadly.

It is important to be able to control your own body. And if you're going to live in holiness, you do need to know how to get a spouse, a husband or wife in a manner that's holy. So we'll think about that.

I just want to look at what it means briefly to be holy within the bonds of marriage and also be holy when you're looking for someone to possibly marry. Holy marriage basically involves quite a number of things, but I want to highlight three. God's 3D design.

One purpose of marriage is to dramatize the relationship between Christ and his church. The apostle Paul says in Ephesians five, wives submit to your husbands because the head of the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body of which he is the savior. And as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands.

And then it says husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. So marriage is at its deepest level. The apostle says this is a great mystery, but I'm talking about Christ and his church marriage, especially Christian marriage is designed to show the relationship between Jesus and his church in which a husband takes the lead in sacrificing himself.

Sometimes people read the Ephesians five passage and misunderstand it and say, well, that means that in every disagreement, the husband gets his way because it mentions that the husband is the head of the wife. Well, you're kind of missing the passage because the message of the passage is Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. Jesus said the son of man came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.

And you will get nowhere with this passage and it will be very damaging to you as a couple if you think that it's telling us who gets to pull rank. It's not. It's telling us who takes the lead in making the sacrifices, who takes the lead in setting the tone of the marriage.

And Christ came not to be served, but to serve. He said, I am among you as one who serves. And if you're not going to wash your feet like Jesus did for his disciples, you might wash the dishes once in a while, at least.

But the point is, you're dramatizing a relationship and the husband has the Jesus role and he shouldn't get a Messiah complex, but he should get the idea loving and sacrificing and serving is what I do as a husband. And when I set that kind of tone for my marriage, then my wife is very happy to follow that lead. All things fall apart if the wife is determining excellent lectures for how the husband ought to behave and the husband for how the wife ought to behave.

When you listen to the Bible, listen to what it says to you and take it to heart and live by it. But dramatizing Christ in the church is the first thing that holy marriage does. A second purpose of holy marriage is developing godly offspring.

And that's one of the main reasons. It's not the only reason, but it is a major reason that the Bible tells us not to marry someone who doesn't share our faith or follow the same Lord Jesus. The apostle says of someone, she is free to be married.

She's free to marry who she wishes only in the Lord. You know, you can take your pick, ladies or men, if there's somebody out there that you like. Great.

You're not following some rigid blueprint, but must be in the Lord. Don't be unequally yoked with unbelievers. In Malachi chapter two, God talks about Judah being faithless and he says, how have they been faithless? They married the daughters of a foreign God.

Did not God make them one with a portion of the spirit in their union? And what was the one God seeking? Godly offspring. That's the answer that you get in Malachi chapter two when it talks about marrying someone who shares your faith. You want godly offspring, and that's less likely, far less likely to happen when you marry outside the faith.

When both of you know and love the Lord Jesus and want your children to grow to know him, that is the best environment for a child to grow up and to know God. And then delight in each other is a third major element, of course, of marriage. And, you know, read Song of Songs.

There's a lot in the Bible. Proverbs has several major chapters devoted to that as well. Song of Songs opens with let me let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth for your love is more delightful to me than wine.

And and he says, all beautiful you are, my darling. There's no flaw in you. You've stolen my heart, my bride.

You've stolen my heart with one glance of your eyes. How delightful is your love, my bride? How much more pleasing is your love than wine? So to dramatize that wonderful relationship between Christ and his church, to develop Godly offspring and to just take delight in each other as companions, as well as as sexual partners. So there's a lot of different ways to measure marriage, but those three are a good place to start.

Does our relationship tell truth or lies about Jesus and his church? If people looked at us and they saw the level of of the wife respecting her husband and honoring him and of the husband loving and giving himself for his wife, would they say, wow, that that really makes me want to know more about Jesus and his church? I can really see how she's reflecting the role of the church and how he's doing things like Jesus does. That's a that's a very high measure, but it is one of the main measures. A second measure of how our marriage is doing is are we leading our children into faith and holiness and biblical wisdom? Do we spend time with them talking about the Lord? Do we pray with them? Are we reading the Bible with them? Are we answering questions and making it part of conversation when when people when kids are curious and want to know more about Jesus? Is that something that both husband and wife are really intentional about and seeking to help your children to know Jesus? And then thirdly, are we delighting in intimacy and are we guarding our garden from intruders? If it's made for delight, it's also an exclusive delight.

So are we faithful to each other and are we enjoying each other in each of these areas? Again, it's good to ask the questions to get an evaluation of our marriage, but then also to ask God for forgiveness where we're failing and for help in doing better. Guarding your marriage, if we're called to follow the way of holiness, it means that we need to know also how to guard ourselves. And one of the main guards is to just have a lot of affection for each other, to have an emotional affection for each other that you express and have physical intimacy regularly.

The Apostle Paul wrote in First Corinthians seven that you should not deprive each other when your husband and wife for any lengthy period of time shouldn't deprive each other at all, except by mutual consent, but certainly not for a long period of time. And he says, because we don't want Satan to get in there and mess things up. And so we ought not to we ought not to be committing adultery with other people's spouses, but we also ought not to be withholding ourself from our own spouse.

We also need to guard our marriage by avoiding temptation. Some of you travel a lot. That's hazardous business.

It gives you access to motel rooms where there's a lot of smut on the TVs and where there's more opportunities just for anonymous hookups. And so when you're on the road, you need to have safeguards and accountability and just stay in touch with somebody, your wife or somebody else who can just help you and talk with you and be aware also of what entertainment does to you. I'll take a little tidbit, which all of you probably would find laughable now.

I didn't grow up with TV, and I remember reading a few comics and one of the comics that I kind of liked was Superman. And I saw the first Superman movie. And then I remember going to the second Superman movie and being aghast when the great American hero Superman went to bed with Lois Lane.

Just horrified me that that Superman would do that in a movie. That'll happen 500 times if you sit and watch 24 hours of TV. 500 is probably a low estimate.

But I'm just saying how we get desensitized by the entertainment. Now I'm watching a football game and the ads are so atrocious, you can't believe it. You watch a football or a basketball game and the ads in between are all about the drugs that can help you to behave in hideous ways and still not die of it and maybe hopefully not kill anybody else with it.

But we got a drug for you for that. Be honest and accountable. Don't keep secrets from your spouse.

If you are struggling with pornography, don't keep that secret. Talk with your husband or wife and talk with somebody else who can help with that and be part of a fellowship. I mean, there are many reasons for church.

One is to make the normal seem normal again instead of the bizarre, the wacko, the wicked and the immoral to seem normal, because that's what you're going to get if you have a steady diet of what you get through today's entertainment and education systems. So you do need a marriage friendly, a family friendly spiritual fellowship. Now we've talked a little bit about marriage.

And so I want to I just hope that each of you can just pray together and think about how how are we doing and how can the Lord lead us into better paths if we need to be dating and getting a spouse for yourself is also an important part of this whole equation. And the first thing I just want to say is that not everybody is meant to be married and not everybody is meant to be married yet. And those are both important things to keep in mind.

Everybody has a season of singleness. For some, your season of singleness might be your whole life. That might be God's purpose for you.

And you don't want to waste your whole life saying the goal of my life and the purpose of my life is to wait for the right spouse to come along. Make the most of your season of singleness. It may be that God will bring a spouse your way.

But if he hasn't yet, then make the most of that season. And by saying make the most of it, I don't mean play the field and sleep around with 40 different people because you're not committed yet. That's what some people think about is it means to make the most of singleness is to just chase everybody and everything.

Now, by making the most of singleness, I mean living the the single life before you're even looking for a spouse or dating anybody. I remember I'll just take one example that I enjoyed a lot when I was in seminary. There was an offer that one one student from the seminary could go to Israel for two months and study with some leading professors there and do some street evangelism.

Well, I was asked if I wanted to do that. And I said, yes, and so I went there and had a great time studying and doing street evangelism, dodging a few eggs and fire hoses once in a while. But, you know, overall, I survived and it was a wonderful time.

But I could do that in part because I was not leaving somebody else behind for two months. I was single. And when you're single, you can do some stuff that you can't do so readily when you're unattached.

So do something daring. Seize opportunities that you might not be able to pursue once you're not in your season of singleness anymore to serve the Lord or an adventure that he sends your way. But make the most of your singleness.

Don't just pine away and waste that season of singleness, hoping and waiting for a different season. And then when if you're a person who says, you know, I'd really prefer not to be single the rest of my life. And there that is the case with most people, not all, but most will then look for ways to meet other people and to mingle.

You're not going to likely meet somebody if you're never out among other people and among other people of your own age and possibilities. And as you're doing that, Christians have especially sometimes emphasized modesty and rightly so, and sometimes too strongly. Where frumpiness equals godliness, this is not so.

You know, even when you're reading the Bible, when Ruth was supposed to go visit Boaz, she was supposed to dress up in her best clothes and put on a little perfume and look her best and make herself attractive. So whether you're male or female, you don't have to dress and act like the world, but you don't have to try to be as ugly and as plain as you possibly could just in case somebody looked your way. You might want them to look your way.

That might be a good idea. And hang out with people for a while before getting serious and get to know a variety of people, get to know them in non-serious contexts where you just want to spend some time together and have some conversation before you even think about getting very serious. Another element is involving family and friends.

Now, there have been times when terminology gets us in trouble. I know the word courtship was one that a lot of Christians preferred. And in some ways I do, too, because dating had taken on too many other meanings which are just recreational romance and and play games with each other's feelings and each other's bodies.

No, but courtship can be something that that kids can go allergic to. Oh, no. So what I'll just phrase it this way.

Date wisely. If dating is the word you prefer, then add the adverb wisely. And involving family and friends.

Now, that's not always possible. And the level of involvement has to be done wisely as well. Sometimes when I met Wendy, I didn't involve my family and friends.

They were all gone. I was sixteen hundred miles away from home. OK, so she came out to Montana and met my parents.

But you're pretty serious by that point. You know, you're not asking mom and dad for permission or or even talking much about dating at that point. But when your family and friends are around, hang out with them.

That enjoying other people's company together can be a healthy way for relationships to develop without always just being alone and without always just thinking about the physical part of your relationship. So as appropriate, involve family and friends. Again, this is as in the case of modesty can be taken overboard where you should involve family and friends.

In fact, you should involve the father so much that you get to date dad for about six months before you get a peek at the girl. Well, no, most people don't prefer to date dad. At least that's been my experience.

And I have several married children. Avoid the situations, though, that are going to get you in trouble and get you get beyond your powers of self-control. And so we don't have to legislate.

Oh, thou shalt never hold hands. Oh, thou shalt never kiss. You know, we can try to legislate and get very legalistic about all these things.

But even if you decide I'm not going to be legalistic, the alternative is not. And therefore I will be stupid. You know, that's sometimes you're either legalistic or the path of stupidity is what no, there is such a thing as dating wisely, avoiding the situations that are most likely to cause difficulty for you.

And this last one, I think, is important. And that's where the whole courtship concept came in once upon a time and maybe still can and should. Don't start dating somebody if you know for a fact you're never going to marry him.

I mean, I'm not saying you can never go out for coffee or just have a nice conversation with somebody. But if you're starting a relationship and you already know, no way not going to happen. But, hey, you know, I mean, there's a lot of people nowadays who will go into a relationship knowing they're not going to get married, knowing they don't want to get married, but knowing they enjoy the feelings of romance and the pleasures of sex.

And so that's what the relationship is for. Don't date unless you can conceive of the person being married. And so how do you know if somebody might possibly be the one for you? Well, you go back to the design for marriage.

What's God's design? Dramatizing Christ in the church, developing godly offspring, delighting in each other. And that means when you're dating and you're wondering, well, is this the one? Or even before you start dating, if you're wondering, is this one at least in the realm of possibility? First question, an absolute non-negotiable question, is he or she committed to Jesus and to the Christ church drama in marriage? Do they understand who Jesus is and love him? And do they want their marriage to reflect the way Jesus and his church relate? Second question, and I think a very helpful one to evaluate where your relationship is and where it ought to go, does this person have a relationship with God that I want my children to have? Because that's likely to happen. If you marry somebody who is very far from God, don't cross your fingers behind your back and say, I'm going to change him.

And by the time the kids roll around, we're going to be just this wonderful Christian household. God in his grace can sometimes bless even moronic decisions, but don't presume on that. Marry somebody whose faith is the kind of faith you want your kids to have, because that is the most likely outcome.

And a third one, do we have romantic attraction and physical desire for each other? Because that's one of the things that distinguishes a friendship from a marriage is you are attracted to each other. If you say, boy, that person is a dynamite Christian and I really would be pleased if my kids had a faith like hers. I had a best friend like that and I had no attraction to her whatsoever.

I didn't marry her. I didn't date her. And she was a wonderful person and she's married.

And to somebody where she's happier than she would have been with me. But my point is, there are some people who are not going to, you know, let's say I'll take an extreme case. If you're kind of a same sex attracted person, then marriage isn't really open to you unless something very different were to change in your sense of attraction.

Otherwise, you would need to live singly and in a holy life as a single. But even if you're drawn to people of the opposite sex, that doesn't mean you're drawn to all of them. And so Song of Songs is part of the Bible.

And Proverbs is part of the Bible, and we're not doing ourselves or our spouse any favors if we say, well, I could walk into a marriage as a platonic relationship. Now, there's a phrase I know some of you use it and I won't pick on it too hard because it's said so often, but I married my best friend. Now, that's all very nice, but I hope not most of the time, because a lot of girls have a best friend and your husband is not going to understand you the way your girlfriends do because he ain't you and he's not a girl.

OK, sometimes girls understand girl stuff better than any guy ever will. Sorry, that's the way it is. And so don't just look for somebody who can replace your best friends by being all of your best friends rolled into one.

Plus, you're a romantic partner and everything else that's putting a little too much weight on one relationship. It's OK to have other great friends who aren't part of the marriage and to keep those as your friends, because otherwise you're going to be putting too much burden on your spouse to be everything to you. Hey, have some friends.

There may be stuff you like doing that your spouse doesn't like doing. Don't you don't have to rope them into doing all of it. You may still have a few friends to do that with once in a while.

Anyway, different people handle that differently. My mom and dad, he would go to ballgames. My mom would go to concerts and they'd do that with their friends, not with each other.

I had another friend who one loved drag racing and was a mechanic, and he married a woman who loved the cello and the arts. And she ended up going to drag races and he ended up going to concerts and took up the cello himself. And it worked out great.

So there's no one formula for all of this. But it is to say that you don't just have to have a friend and you should have a strong attraction and desire for each other. So sexual intimacy is for marriage only.

It's a glorious gift of God and one so powerful that once we fell into sin, there were a whole lot of different ways that we could go wrong. Marriage is a lifelong union of a man and a woman. And God calls us to honor that standard, to dismiss anybody who holds a different standard as a false teacher if they happen to be a preacher, and to pursue that in our lives, to seek God's forgiveness where we fail, his renewal to do better.

And don't settle. Some of you here may have a marriage that at a formal level is holy in the sense you haven't committed adultery, you haven't run off from each other, but you're kind of stuck in the rut of putting up with each other. You know, just toiling along and not being unfaithful, but not exactly delighting in each other either.

And so if that's where your marriage is at, keep it up in terms of be faithful to each other, but then seek more. Don't just settle. Ask God to help the flame of your marriage, the love and the attraction that you have for each other, the delight that you have for each other.

And yeah, it might not. I made a little bit of fun of I married my best friend, but companionship, enjoying each other's company, supporting each other the way best friends do. Just pray that God will not only keep us from acting like pagans, but to help us delight in each other.

Let's pray together. Well, Father, we thank you for the great gift of male and female and the wonder of marriage. And we ask, Lord, that you will renew us in this area of our lives.

One that's so important, that's taught so clearly by our Lord Jesus and throughout the scriptures. We pray that, Lord, that you will just ignite afresh the love between husband and wife and that you'll also give wisdom and guidance to singles. Lord, some Lord who have been going steady for a while and are possibly moving toward marriage, help them to discern whether that's your will and the step that you want them to take and guide them, Lord, in that relationship and bless them each and bless others, Lord, who may just be kind of at a at a beginning stage of getting to know folks and help them in that and help those, Lord, who are single, but really kind of wish they weren't.

And we pray, Lord, that you'll either help them to become content in that situation or to find the person that could be a blessing to them and that they could have a future marriage with. Lord, we have a lot of different situations and we need your help. We pray to Lord for those who have been guilty of sexual sin and pray, Lord, for your cleansing and your pardon and your renewal in their lives.

We pray for those whose marriages are broken and ended in divorce and ask for you to bring them to your way, Lord, to live for you from where they are now and can't go back and change everything. We just help them to move forward by your grace and your truth. And we pray that you will help all of our marriages to honor you in the way that the church honors Jesus.

We pray in his name. Amen.