Sexual immorality

 Hooray!  Let's talk about sexual immorality!

When this topic comes up, you can be assured that I'm feeling like Vince from the SlapChop commercial - It's making you cry, it's making me cry.  Life's hard enough.  You don't want to cry anymore.  And yet, here we are.  The reading from the scriptures is all about sexual immorality, so we have to talk about it.

And every time the readings from the scriptures talk about sexual immorality, people get upset, and say that the Bible is full of horrible outdated ideas about sexual immorality, and so on.  But here's the scoop - nobody gets too upset when the Bible talks about theft, murder, or things like that.  And that is the case whether people themselves are thieves or murderers.  Even if you're an open, profligate sinner, you can see some kind of truth in the reality that your sins may still be, you know, sins.  

But sexual immorality gets a pass.  People get mighty mad if you point out that they themselves may be, you know, sexually immoral. They get awfully peevish, because it gets to the heart of who they are, not of what they do.  You sin against your own self, thereby you are the perpetrator and the victim.  That means that you are probably in league with the sin, and can seek no redress but repentance.  And that's a hard thing to imagine.

But I want you to think about how we have managed this time of sexual immorality.  Have we done a good job?  Once all the prudery of the Victorians was swept away, once the era of free love, man, showed up, did things get either spiritually or materially better? Or was there a howling hunger that was unleashed upon us, the likes of which we could not possibly have been prepared for?

In reality, something happened to us, when we viewed the sexual appetite as one that can and should be indulged under whatever circumstances with essentially no restraint.  Heck, we viewed it as our highest goal, though not involving children in any way. Goodness no.  And when St. Paul says that food is made for the stomach, and the stomach for food, that's another appetite that, if satisfied whenever it felt and urge, would lead to untold misery, and typically has.  Once our passions have been revealed, and encouraged, they can be exploited.

That's where we're at with sexual immorality.  Someone quite a while ago talked about this, mentioning that if you want to control people, promote vice!  Think about how almost every product is sold. If you don't sell the steak, you sell the sizzle, what is the sizzle in the vast majority of cases? It's sex appeal.  Sex drives an awful lot of industries, and pornography is responsible for between 10-30% of all web traffic.  That's a lot, isn't it?  And we've gotten to the point now where if you are on the internet in any real capacity, you're going to have to work harder to avoid pornography than you are to find it.  It finds you.  Gone are the days when you were going to have to go and seek out a man in dark glasses and a dark overcoat behind the A&P to get a sketchy magazine.  Now, you have to work on avoiding pornography instead of trying to find it.

But have you ever stopped to ask yourself why that is? Why is it that sexual messages are everywhere all the time, free of charge, and take effort to avoid?  Why is it that pornography is a billion dollar industry that nobody seems to pay anything for?  Why is it that sexuality is being exploited constantly, and yet we haven't found ourselves living necessarily more fulfilled lives?  Well, you're not being given satisfaction.  You're being manipulated.

In reality, you are being told to find satisfaction everywhere expect where the vast majority of people who have ever lived have found it - in a loving, caring, sexually fulfilled marriage.  In the culture today, that's the last place anyone thinks of being sexually active.  With a spouse who loves and cares for you? Who wants that?  But in a loving committed marriage, in which you care for and about one another, you're not quite as easy to manipulate.  As I said on Sunday, you can try to sell me beer by getting me to think about bikini girls showing up, but I'm not interested, and I can look at it relatively clearly.  I'm aware that the girls from the beer ad aren't going to show up, and I don't need them to. The more we as a culture are enslaved to our passions, the easier we are to manipulate.  As Paul says, all things are lawful, but not all things are profitable.  All things are lawful, but I will not be mastered by anything.

Jesus came that you may have life, and have it abundantly.  He came that you may have joy, and that your joy may be full.  He hasn't come to be a killjoy, to shut down your happiness or pleasure.  He came to make it all massively better, more meaningful, for you to find a girl, settle down, and be one flesh with her.  To create a life together, a family together, to build for the future and to find meaning together.  Or, you can watch beer ads, go to the club, and put all your effort to get a girl to join you at your place before she leaves to never call you again.  Which of these two is going to eventually be more fulfilling? Which of these two does God want not for his benefit, but for yours?

An awful lot of progress can be made once you see how things work.  Part of Jacob wrestling with God at the ford of the Jabbok is what we have to do as Christians; wrestling with the word of God, instead of running away from it.  Wrestling with the word of God to see why it says what it does, gives you a better idea of not only what's in the Bible, but why it matters for you.  Yes, that'll likely take some wrestling, but the struggle is the glory.