(22) Human Sexuality I
Randy Peterman · Mar 12, 2006
Apologetics, No. 23
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/48262345435105

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

This morning we're going to be talking about heterosexual perversion. One of these buttons is the right button. The left button is the right button. This will be a two-week class, so today and then next week, on heterosexual perversion today and then homosexual perversion next week. I'll refrain from saying.

Okay, does everybody know who this is, Pamela Anderson? Not related directly to Wayne and Sue and Brian and Aaron and Trish. Does everybody know who this is? This is the G-rated version. I tried to find a picture that was appropriate to present, but I just thought I'd put her face in there, it's safer.

We all know that she was an actress in like Baywatch and some other shows, which I don't know and haven't watched. Also known, she's been in Playboy and has done pornographic films. She's also a Sunday school teacher at a Unitarian church. Unitarian, so they don't necessarily adhere to the gospel of Jesus Christ, but apparently she considers that to be a good, healthy thing to be doing to be good or something.

I don't know how they define that. It's insufficient to prevent you from the fires of hell. OK, it takes salvation and faith in Christ. You can't compensate for various acts and things that you're doing by teaching a Sunday school class. The only thing I can think she's qualified to teach is Genesis before the fall.

They were naked. OK, so a brief and selective history of sexuality in the Bible. And you're going to need to follow along in the outline on this one, in the handout, Making a slide for each one of these seemed like it was more work than my limited time frame had.

First here, Adam and Eve were created as partners in Genesis chapters 1 and 2. Eve was the perfect mate for Adam. She was lacking in nothing that he would need. She was suitable in every way, including sexually. God told them to be fruitful and multiply. So here's the first instance of a man and a woman together, and God created them perfectly. This is the model that God set up.

After this, it's going to go downhill, but you have to have a starting point and a framework to deal with. I think it's important to recognize that in God's creation in Genesis 2, He created Adam, and there were all the animals around him, and it says that no suitable helper was found. So God puts Adam into a slumber, takes something out of his side, traditionally a rib, and forms Eve out of it.

And thus the weight problem began, where gals were always worried about how much to weigh. They started out as a rib and, you know, now look what I am! No, I'm just kidding. I'm sorry, it was just a joke, I couldn't help. But you have Adam and Eve, and they were perfect and compatible in every way, including sexually. I think that's important, that when God created The partner wasn't another Adam. The joke is Adam and Steve. No, it was Adam and Eve and it was male and female. He created them and it was good. So that's the starting point. From there we're going to go downhill.

Abraham messed up and had intercourse with multiple women. Is everybody familiar with the story of Abraham and Sarah? And God shows up and says, you're going to have a child by this time next year. And Sarah laughs. And God said, why did Sarah laugh? And she said, it wasn't me. I didn't laugh. And Sarah gives Hagar, her maidservant, to sleep with Abraham.

Now, what would be wrong with that write-off? Anybody can think of something that would be problematic with that? They didn't believe in what God said he was going to do. It's going to be instant jealousy. Sarah wasn't believing, she wasn't trusting in God to deliver on the promise that he gave, but then jealousy is instantly born in, and when Ishmael comes about, we see Islam is born. Later on through that line, not Islam, Ishmael was born, but later on through that line would come Islam, primarily, So you have the Jews, who are descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and then the 12 tribes, and then Ishmael. So through what was a perversion and man's attempt to get around what God said he would do, you suddenly have all kinds of problems. Oh, I'm just seeing that same kind of issue, or the same idea of man saying, well, gosh, God isn't doing this here, so he said this is what's supposed to happen, and it's not happening, so I'll do something to make it happen. Sure. I'm just thinking of another situation like that. Yeah, there's all kinds of situations where man tries to step in and compensate for our perception of God's failure to fulfill what we think he should fulfill.

Shortly before that, in Genesis chapter 19, Lot slept with his daughters. They got him drunk. Sure, the daughters did the deception, but there's something goofy there. I blame Lot for not having the mental wherewithal to figure out that his daughters were being dishonest. Frankly, that's just really creepy. Incest is just the gnarliest thing. I can't even comprehend what would drive somebody to that direction.

The thing that is interesting, and I was talking with my dad about this, is that in Genesis, in the early chapters, God says, be fruitful and multiply. In Genesis chapter 2, he says that. And so, the beginning of Genesis, you see this drive for people to have children. They've got to have kids. Now, everybody's on birth control and doing abortions and everything else because we don't want children. The world's overpopulated or some such story. But in the time of the beginning of Genesis here, we've got to have all the kids we can. Of course, they were living for a long time, so they had a different perspective on this time span of life. Now, let's jump next to the law.

Leviticus 20.10 says that a man and a woman caught in adultery should be killed.

That's a sin that will not be tolerated. It's not going to hang around the camp. We're not going to have that going on a long time. If we jump ahead into the New Testament briefly here, the second point there is the woman who is being stoned was caught in adultery. It's important to note that the man was not being stoned for adultery. The Jews had taken what was the commandment of the law and kind of sidestepped the issue. Oh yeah, the guy, well, we'll kill the woman. They had already taken and corrupted what God had set in His law in this case, so sexual perversion was not to be tolerated in any way.

David and Solomon both had wives. Solomon had 700 wives, or many wives. Solomon had 700 wives and princesses and 300 concubines. There's lots of jokes that could be made about that, but the truth of the matter is it's a very serious infraction of the commandments of God. gave, which was to not marry outside of Israel, and Solomon had wives from all over the place.

Some of it was political maneuvering, and some of it was perversion, just, hey, I'm an amorous king, and I want that woman, so I'll go take her. Moving on to the next point here, the Song of Solomon. How many of you have actually read the Song of Solomon? I find that many people have read it, and It's confusing because there's a lot of cultural differences between what was then and what is now. Idioms and phrases used to describe body parts. I think it's interesting to note, I was reading Arnold Fruchtenbaum's work, the source for this, I should have put a footnote there.

He's got a commentary on the book of the Song of Solomons and he notes that the rabbis weren't allowed to read the Song of Solomon until they were 30. because by then, hopefully the male hormones would have died down enough that it wouldn't be problematic, because it's very graphic and descriptive of sexual acts.

They don't use it now, huh? Everybody gets the wrong idea, huh? That's unfortunate. It's inspired by God, but don't read it. Okay, in fact, well anyways, the prophet Hosea here, looking at the last point under the Old Testament, was told to marry a harlot. The second verse, you get into Hosea and it's like, okay, God says marry a harlot, and it's going to represent the adultery of Israel to God, because they'd gone around and looked for other things. Now, let's be very careful with our hermeneutics.

This is not permission for anyone to go out and marry prostitutes, okay? I don't think we can take this to happen. The Bible says prostitution is okay! And with that in mind, this is a news report from earlier this week on March 11th. I'm just going to read the first couple sentences. This ties in.

A retired salesman alleged a stripper and her friend beat and robbed him in his home. John Skinner, 54, said he was on his way to Bible study on January 23rd when exotic dancer Marie Murphy, 25, knocked on his door and offered him a free stripogram. Murphy said a friend had already paid for the show. When Skinner agreed to let her perform, knife-wielding Richard Adam, 23, allegedly forced his way inside and told Skinner he owed Murphy, owner of Bikini Assassins and another woman, money for earlier services.

He was going to Bible study. Temptation knocked on the door and that was too much. He was already ready to sign up. This is a really serious problem if we take a look at what is needed to be walking and living and breathing believers. That's not the direction we should go, but I thought it was interesting he was going to Bible study and heading that way. Let's take a look at the last point under New Testament there, and we'll move on.

Paul directed that younger people should remarry, or younger widows should remarry, so as to not be tempted by sexual desires. It's important that we recognize that as human beings we are sexual in nature at some level and that kind of thing is, it gets suppressed.

How many of you are familiar with the rights and orders of nuns and priests in the Catholic Church in the sense that they're not supposed to get married? a life of celibacy. Yes, Tom? Well, there are those who try to circumvent the rules, but the official policy is that you're not supposed to get married, because they're married to God. The question is, is that biblical? And the answer, I think, is pretty much a resounding no. But it's important to take a look at that.

Now, speaking of nuns, we need to talk about perversion or to pervert. To pervert is to bring to a bad or worse condition or to debase something. We've all heard pervert used in a noun form, but it's important that we recognize what perversion is. It's taking something that is of good and useful purpose and degrading it and turning it into something less useful.

The thing is that in the life of the believer, sanctification is the critical issue, the setting aside of our lives and our walk unto Christ and having a relationship with Him. Obviously, everybody here has, at least at some point in time, been exposed to the idea of position and condition, and being identified with Christ and that we're growing and we should walk in our relationship with Him, this also applies to the life of the believer in the bedroom. Okay? Sanctification and setting aside things unto God includes the bedroom and the love life of a married couple.

The world and has had an influence on the way that people think about sex, even in the church. There are misconceptions, things where people have not read scripture, not seen what scripture says as believers, and adapted ideas from the world into Christianity. And so I want to look at some of the common misconceptions, two in this case and two in the next case, when we talk about misconceptions that are outside of the world.

When we take God's truth and the gift of sex and we pervert it, it turns into legalism and burdens. Sex is carnal and leads to walking in the flesh. I had a guy in Texas that I knew that basically held this position. Anytime something was sexual, it would lead him to walk in the flesh. Therefore, sex is bad, which is really problematic. That's a chastity belt, by the way, just in case you're wondering what that is. That was one form of dealing with walking in the flesh, to make it impossible for people to act on those things, or at least partially. You'll notice the spikes right there. Yeah, that's going to hurt. Don't want to be doing some of those things. Don't take that too far with your imagination. All right.

Paul writes to the church in Thessalonica that they should abstain, not obtain. Wow, that would be different. from sexual immorality in 1 Thessalonians 4, 3. So we need to abstain from sexual immorality, which would be adultery and various other perversions on what sex is, but that doesn't mean that sex is bad. It means that walking in the flesh is bad.

If we read what Paul writes about the law, any time there's a rule or a law, what does the flesh want to do when you read Romans? Somebody said something. We want to break the law. We want to find the rule. If sex outside of marriage is wrong, if some kind of perversion is unbiblical and wrong and not righteous and not right for the believer to be acting upon, then the flesh wants to do it. But recognizing that it's the flesh, says, oh, I have to deal with the flesh, not that sex is wrong.

Sometimes people will cut off something and make a new rule ahead of what the actual rule is, because if I make a new rule in front of that law, then I'll never get there. Which is why the 613 laws of the Old Testament were still insufficient, and the rabbis had added new laws and new rules and ways so that you could never actually get to the 613 laws, because they had other laws in front of them. They weren't given by God, but that's the way that the law works. We always want to circumvent it.

And I want to make a quick distinction here between married sex and fornication or sex outside of marriage. It is important that we recognize that when I'm talking about sex being good, it's in the context of marriage. I don't want to encourage people to step outside of that. The second misconception that's pretty common is God doesn't like sex.

It should only happen in the case of procreation. Can anybody think of a Bible verse that we've already mentioned or a concept we've already mentioned where that might be rooted in? Be fruitful and multiply. Okay. Sex is okay as long as it's for procreative purposes. That's the only time it would happen.

There's letters circulating on the internet I have no way to prove their origin and the quality of such letters as far as how authentic they are, but the concept behind this letter is that it's from an 1850s Methodist wife talking about how she was a minister's wife, and this letter she'd written to young Christian women saying, listen, sex is only for making babies, and once you've had the babies you've had, close the door, so to speak. We're going to shut things down, no more sex. which is hard to justify on a biblical level, but that was the position that they held, and it's common for... I've run into various non-believers that think that that's a Christian view.

Oh, sex is bad. No, God doesn't hate sex. He made it. Eve was perfectly matched for Him, and it wasn't just for the purpose of having babies. If that was all there was to it, I don't think there would be pleasure involved and various other things make the intimacy required.

Now we need to talk about the ways of the world. This is the adaptation that the world has, or the corruption of things. If you have your Bibles with you, please open up to Romans chapter 1. We're going to read verse 24 to the end of that chapter. Therefore, God gave them over, in the lusts of their hearts, to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.

For this reason, God gave them over to degrading passions. For their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural. And in the same way, also the men abandoned the natural function of the women and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men, committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error. And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind to do these things which are not proper, being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice, their gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful, and although they know the ordinances of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them."

That's a pretty blunt statement about the character of the non-believer. We talked about the passage before this in the beginning of this apologetic series, talking about how Man had rejected God and therefore tries to fill that void with various things. Sexual perversion is one of the ways that mankind tries to get around the problem of lacking God. When you have your life in the context of God, when you understand abiding, when you understand relationship with Him, it affects the dynamic of your marriage or your relationship with other believers. And it's important to understand these things when you come in contact with non-believers. At this point in time, we're going to talk about some misconceptions. I want to take a few moments to share my own personal experience in this. I have some co-workers or former co-workers in Texas that went to lunch with me one day, or I went to lunch with them, or we all went to lunch together.

And the topic of going to the the topless bars or the strip clubs came up. I didn't bring it up. But being the only believer there, I was like, OK, this is where this is going. So I thought, you know what, I'm just going to throw the wrench in the works. So I asked him something. This is something my dad had talked about.

I said, now, isn't it unfulfilling to go out and be sexually stimulated, and then you go home and you're by yourself. And yeah, you got stimulated, but you have nothing to say for it. You don't go home and there's no quality of a relationship or anything else. It's just short-term stimulation.

And they all kind of stopped and got real somber. Instead of laughing and joking and being perverse, they got real serious, which was a shock for me. And one of them actually just blatantly said, yeah, it is really disappointing and it's tough. And he was like, I don't want this to be going on forward forever.

He would like to have a relationship a wife and get married." And I was like, wow, amazing. I actually communicated something and they listened. But the truth of the matter is that when we look at the ways of the world, they're looking to fulfill things in a short-term perspective. We have a heavenly perspective, we have a long-term perspective as believers, and they have a short-term perspective. Okay, how do I feel about this now? What do I get out of it now?

So let's take a look at pornography here. I put down my remote control. Let's not look at pornography. That's a funny way to say that. Man, if you're listening to this on tape, I apologize. Pornography is okay. It can help people get sexually excited and keep the marriage bed interesting. This one is really, really common with today's counselors and psychologists that do, especially if you ever read through these various advice columnists where people write in, you know, oh, I'm doing this, and is this okay? And they're looking for validation for their sin life, which is an oxymoron, really, but looking for validation for their life of sin. And so we need to look at what does scripture say, because if somebody comes to you and says, hey, pornography is okay, benefits my marriage or something to that effect, or I enjoy it, or I'm not married, so since I'm not married, I'm going to look at pornography or whatnot. What does the Bible say about it? I'm just going to ask, if you could read this, don't read what I wrote. Oh, darn. Okay, you've already read it.

Building on Christ's statement in Matthew 5, 27 and 28, looking at a woman with a lustful attitude is the same as adultery. What's the root of the motive, and what's the consequence of that? If the motive is lustful, sexual, looking at a woman, Christ says to the man, then that is adultery. If that's the case, then in the case of pornography, looking at those gals, no matter how much they're appearing to be that way, or the men, no matter how much they appear to be enjoying what they're doing, is still adultery. It doesn't fit in the context of a biblical marriage.

Specifically, we can look at 1 Timothy 3.2, which talks about the elders. If you want to be an elder, you need to be a one-woman kind of man. Looking at other women isn't going to help you be thinking and acting and living as a one-woman kind of man.

I also want to share another personal story, and that is when I was a teenager, I had a neighbor down the street that had access to his dad's pornographic collection of magazines and my mom's looking at me and I was like, I'm going to hide behind my paper. I'm sorry.

But no, I had access to the pornographic material and it was very addicting because it was stimulating. The hormones inside of my body were quite excited that they could be excited and so I thought, hey, this is great fun. Only, the problem is that pornography also has a negative effect on marriages, and tactfully and carefully I will say it had an effect on my marriage because what I saw in the magazines, movies, and read in the short pretend books, I don't know how that's a book, there's not much of a plot line, but corrupted what I brought into my marriage bed when I got married to Jessica, I expected some frankly, perverse and funky things because that was what I had exposed myself to. So when you look at, oh, it causes us to be excited and it leads us to sex. If this idea is true, sure, it keeps our marriage bed interesting.

Right. It also may put things in an awkward situation because what someone saw is now maybe their expectation and they go, Let's say if a man, in my case, myself, I was looking and seeing this stuff, and I got married to Jessica, and there were things that I had expected, that there was no way in her mind that she wanted to be participating in.

It wasn't love that was being worked out. It wasn't the Holy Spirit working on our lives. It was me being selfish, because I had been shown this concept of selfishness, and so the idea that pornography can be good for a marriage or okay to look at, one, biblically, is wrong, but the ramifications of that long-term can be really severe. I'll say it took probably three years into our marriage before I finally got that I was holding on to perverse and corrupt ideas about what should have been our sex life.

Dad? TV, magazines, things of that sort. You'll see even front cover of the magazine, primetime TV, will have things like the world's sexiest men or the world's sexiest women, that kind of thing. Really, that whole mentality is outside of what God intends. Because what that's doing is taking the sexuality which is intended to be expressed within marriage and trumpeting it out in front of the whole world. That's not God's intent. No, certainly not.

So there's a little bit more personal testimony in that. Obviously this is going to be broadcast over the internet, so some of my friends are going to listen to that and go, oh well that's interesting Randy. I had no idea. Some of my friends are going to say, wow I can't believe you told people.

There's another aspect of this. most pornography that's produced shows a man or woman, or men and women, or some variation on the theme, doing things and that's stimulating. They all appear to be consenting adults, which is one of the other issues there, and that is what goes on between two consenting adults should not be asked about nor questioned. Hey, they agreed to do it. They're okay with the idea of whatever's going on there, and therefore it's justifiable or validated or okay.

It completely ignores an absolute standard. If you have a pen, write down on your handout there, on that box, of truth, not just any absolute standard, but a standard of truth. If God has set something in order, if God has put things in place a certain way, if you ignore that, you're ignoring the standard that God has set.

That's a very serious issue, because I had various people say to me, oh, why don't you come to Hooters with me? No, I don't want to look at those people, because that's not okay. I don't want to be a consenting adult, even in the scenario of going and checking out women, because it ignores those things.

Romans 1.30 there makes it clear that mankind will make up new ways to sin.

Consenting adults can still come up with some really bizarre, freaky things. I think it was this last week or the week before in Washington, they officially passed a law that makes bestiality illegal in Washington. Because a man there died of a perforated colon after having relations with a horse. And that's all I'm going to say about that.

It's really gross, but the idea is that the sinfulness and the perversion of the flesh makes it so that all of these things can progress, and it's a downward spiral. If you're looking for the next high, so to speak, the hormonal high, the emotional high, it builds and elevates. When I was in high school, I actually did a report because I had experienced the effects of pornography in a negative way. I did a report on the effects of pornography for a social studies class, and every time you see these rapists, every time you see these people that have been involved with slashing where they go out and they kill people or they have sex and then they kill the people or variations on that murder and sex, most of them started out looking at pornography, looking and starting out with small steps towards these things. They didn't just wake up one morning and decide, I'm going to kill people.

It was a process of the downward spiral, so to speak. It was, we're going to take this. And that was kind of exciting, but it wasn't as exciting as I was hoping. So let's find the next level up. What's the next most extreme perversion past where I'm at? Just like a drug addict or an alcoholic will tell you after a while, they can handle more of whatever the substance is. Not really, yeah. But the high wasn't as high as they thought it was going to be, so they can up the volume or up the amount that they consume or inhale or inject or whatever it is that they're going to do.

The same thing with perversion. Well, that was okay. That soft pornography, that R-rated movie was okay, and you just progress from bad to worse. Don't be surprised. We read Romans 1, 24 through the end of the chapter there. When people are walking in the flesh, even believers, if you're walking in the flesh, the old man is only capable of leading to sin and death. So don't be surprised when you see this in the world.

One thing that growing up in Nevada taught me, because we had prostitution, I don't know, it was probably about 15 minutes away from where we lived, we could get up to the cat houses, or brothels or whatever you want to call them, we would have to go past those periodically to get to the junkyards. Ironically, the junkyards were out by the junk, and so you drive by and there's these nasty bright petro-bismol pink trailers, like a mobile home type trailer, with Porsches parked out in front of it, and that was the brothel. So you go there, and you've got these wealthy guys who are willing to pay for sex in their expensive cars, out in front of these really hideous trailers, and then you go to the junkyard. But there's no reason to be surprised by this.

Part of what the world expects is for Christians to be shocked by their perversion. They actually want, to a certain degree, some people want you to be uncomfortable and shocked. If I tell you enough about the naughty things I was doing, maybe you'll be surprised or offended or something, and some people get a kick out of that. Don't be surprised. Don't be shocked. If they're creating their own perversions and encouraging others to continue and follow in those perversions, there's no reason to be shocked. They're only fulfilling what God said they're going to do. That should irritate them and shock them back even worse than if, you know, I did this. You're like, yeah, God said you would.

Impressive. He did? What? Yeah. He said you're even worse than you think you are. And then share the gospel. Let's get back to sanctification briefly. We need to have a different perspective and look at things in a different way. I'm sorry, this is just a really bizarre picture of the guy. He's looking at life differently.

Colossians 3.2. Set your mind on things above, not on the things that are on earth. The concept here, really, I dealt with being addicted to the stimulation of the pornography in various different ways at different times, and they were ineffective. Why? Because I wasn't doing this.

I had an accountability buddy, my friend Tony in Austin, that if I was wrestling with his stuff, I would talk to him. Hey, this is really hard, because working on the Internet, it's not hard to get to this junk. The worst thing about the computers is they keep getting faster and faster, and you can access more and more junk faster and faster. So I tried accountability. That didn't work.

There's a psychological trick, the guy in this book, they call it the pink elephant trick. Every time you think of something wrong, you need to associate that with the pink elephant, which should remind you that you should be thinking righteous thoughts or something like that. The idea is that if I tell you don't think about a pink elephant, you're going to think about a pink elephant. So, you have these weird associations and you play the psychological trick to where, oh, okay, you're not going to have these problems anymore because you've done this.

The believer, instead, is called to rest in their position in Christ. And the Lord, as we walk in our relationship with Him, is going to sanctify our lives and draw those things around. the perversion that is out there cannot be fixed by the flesh. You can't make the flesh not think about the flesh. It seems silly when you say it like that. You go, well, that's dumb. Why would you do that? That's what a lot of people try. I tried it. It didn't work, obviously.

The truth of the matter is that when you're dealing with the world, when you're dealing with people who are perverse, the only way that that's going to be resolved and taken care of is by a relationship with Christ. That's an ongoing, moment-by-moment relationship.

Does anybody remember John 15? What did Christ say would happen if we were attached to the vine, attached to Him? Bear fruit, that's right. Can you bear fruit doing anything else? The answer is no. So the issue is, resting in your position, setting your mind on the things above, not the things of the earth, not dwelling on the, Oh, I sinned, not doing those things.

So when you talk to the unbeliever, they don't have a way to do this. Their propensity and their desire and their whole mode of operation is geared towards perversion, whether it's perversion of sexual things or something else. It's going to be there. So the believer can offer freedom from those things. There are non-Christians who genuinely are wanting to get away and out from a life of perversion.

How do you extend a helping hand carefully to not get drawn into the problem? You share the gospel. That's the only way out, so they need to know it. I'm not recommending this. There is a gal in Las Vegas who is an ex-stripper, she became a believer, and now she goes into the strip clubs and pays the gals who would normally do these lap dances money to come sit down for the time that they would normally give the lap dance, and she shares the gospel with them. I don't know how biblical that is and how you can justify it, but it's one of those things where apparently the church she goes to has donated $50,000 last year for her to do this. That's a lot of time to sit in a strip club, but the idea there is that you have people who are in need of salvation. The only way that that's going to end and change is a relationship with Christ and an understanding of who they are in Christ.

And this is where I failed to keep track of where my last slide is. I already said that. Okay, let's take a quick look at this. This is not in your handout, so take notes if you want to. We're going to do a little quick comparison between what the Bible says and what the world says. These are generalizations, so keep in mind you will run into people who hold variations or different views.

The non-believer is inclined to think selfishly and sinfully. There's no other way. They don't have the Holy Spirit. They can't not think about themselves. The believer is enabled by the Holy Spirit to think lovingly. That includes the marriage bed. That includes relationships with other men and women. There are a whole group of people that make a killing in selling pornography the guys and gals out there who are purchasing it are thinking selfishly. I like it. I want it for me. I want to feel good.

The Holy Spirit says, oh, hey, I'm in a monogamous relationship with my wife or my husband, and I'm going to love this person completely, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. It doesn't just limit itself to sexual fulfillment. It's an important thing that things be tied together.

Similarly, the believer can't see sex as a gift from God created for our growth. The believer can't see it as a gift. He may say, oh, I'm glad the universe evolved me this way, or I'm glad that the spiritual pixies ran around naked in the forest, now I'm going to, or some other variation on strange alternative origins. But the believer is able to see intimacy as a gift of God, which he will use for our growth.

Romans 8, 28 says God will work all things. And we always use that verse when somebody goes through a hard time. Or in my own life, yeah, the pornography was a problem, but God's been able to use that in my life where I can talk to other young men who are wrestling with it. And I go, wow, Lord, I sure wish I hadn't have done that, but at least he's able to use it for me to identify and connect and offer them hope. But also in the marriage, God uses sex for our growth and benefit as well in our sanctification, in our walk with Him.

How's that? That's a different perspective on it than I've heard in a lot of... I've been to various seminars and talked to various things and been in seminary and all kinds of other places and really haven't been exposed to the idea of sex and sanctification. I think this is an application.

If God can use all things, that includes The non-believer sex gets better with more experience, often with more partners. If you have ever seen a soap opera, if you have ever seen half of what is put on television, there's always some kind of multiple partner or love triangle, or this is going on and there's this devious secret something or else going on. You may have co-workers or friends that seem to go through partners, like it's a grilled cheese sandwich or something. I'll just make another one, and another one.

Instead, the believer intimacy gets better in the marriage as a result of God's work in the life of the believer. Sex is benefited by this. As we grow in our walk with the Lord, and we have intimacy with the Lord, and we have intimacy with the Lord with our spouse, those things are bound to grow and develop in quality.

It's not going to get better based on selfishness. It's based on the Holy Spirit working in the life of the believer. Tell that to your non-Christian friends or those who are practicing the one night stand routine. Your sex isn't getting any better. It's not. It can't. It will not. You may learn new tricks or some other variation on perversion, but you're not going to have the quality of spiritual and physical and emotional intimacy that leads to long-term relationship growth.

Interestingly, recent studies are showing that monogamous relationships provide a happier, healthier person and a more satisfying sex life. For those of you listening to the recording, recent studies have shown that the Bible is right. monogamous marriages can have happier and sexually more satisfying times than people who practice the old skip around trick. And that's the end of the slideshow. Are there questions, disagreements, comments, G-rated testimonies? Anything anyone wants to add?

One of the problems that the world has no way to overcome is that they can't create meaning in the same way that the worldling's view is short-sighted. Their sexual relationships are also short-sighted. And if their life is meaningless, so will their relationships sexually be meaningless. They have this activity and you cannot make it deeper, you cannot make it have more significance, because their life doesn't have those things to begin with.

That's important. Anything else? Come on, I just spent like almost an hour talking about sex. You guys don't want to... Just kidding. Next week we're going to talk about homosexuality. We didn't really talk about it today, but one of the biggest issues right now in the homosexual agenda that you'll see being pushed is legalized marriages. The heterosexual marriage is definitely on the rocks, at least here in the United States. Thankfully, it's dropping, right? Yay, the divorce rate is dropping in the United States. Oh boy! No, because people just stop getting married. Why get married and go through all that headache? We'll just live together.

Again, outside of marriage, biblically adultery, it's a serious problem. So when you're dealing with heterosexual perversion, it may be still just the boyfriend-girlfriend pattern. That's still not the biblical model. It's still not a quality relationship with a long-term commitment in the eyes of God and with your family and friends, hopefully, as witnesses. Unless you're one of those people that likes to get married in some foreign country so nobody can come, keep the wedding expenses down.

But being from Nevada, we had lots of marriages and divorces. Reno used to be the marriage capital of the world. You had to be, or in the United States, you had to be in Reno, I think, for six weeks. So all the rich people would ship off their wives to take up residency in Reno for six weeks, and then they'd come in, get the divorce legalized, and then separate their ways. So Reno had an entire divorce industry back in the day, so to speak, historically.

Las Vegas, they've got the marriage industry. So you just have to take a one-hour flight or a nine-hour drive. You can get married and divorced in the same day. It's Nevada. It's a very serious issue. The church is obviously not outside of that. The only way that a marriage can be full of quality...

It's my cell phone again. You guys remember that last time that happened? I freaked out. Anyways, I think that's it. Our class is over. I'll turn off the microphone and then maybe I'll want to ask questions. I think that's what it is. It's the microphone, isn't it?