BFM Retreat 2017 - Session 2

Yes? Yeah. OK. All right. Well, again, it's just been a pleasure being amongst family. That's just what it is for me on this weekend. I just hear already the way the Lord is just speaking and ministering to you guys. It's just a blessing to my soul. Again, I think I mentioned last time, one of the things that James and Valerie sent me was a list of things that I like, and I wrote down Korean barbecue.

That's one of my favorite foods. And so you guys are great. Kettle chips. I also said that I like kettle chips. Why did they find Korean barbecue flavored kettle chips? I have never seen that before in my life, and I love those things. It's so good. They got me my Kavitas with probiotic in it.

They got me my protein shakes. So no, speaking of my legs, I'm a snack guy. I love eating. So I want food for sure. So it's just been good. And I know some of you guys that may not know me or wonder why I look like I'm 20 years old.

They have a saying in the black community, and I added Asian to it. Black don't cry, and Asian don't raise them. That's what it is, man. So I'm wearing a Benjamin Button as a knee. So I'm just glad to, again, be with you guys. So let's go before the Lord in prayer before we begin.

God, the topic that you have us discussing today is one that is vitally important to our understanding of just how glorious you are. And God, more than anything, I just don't want us to miss that. God, you tell us that all things were made through you and for you.

And even the thing, God, that we are going to talk about today was made for you to point us to you, to help us to encounter and experience you. So God, I pray that our perspectives will be forever different today, enabling us, Lord God, to consume more of your glory and the joy of our souls.

So Holy Spirit of God, will you please communicate in a way that only you can to the soul and allow for your word to come alive in our minds and our hearts? We pray this, God, in Jesus' name. Everybody said? Amen. Amen. Amen. If you will, please turn with me in your Bibles to 1 Corinthians, chapter 6.

1 Corinthians, chapter 6. When I was probably a kid, there was this song, and most of you guys probably don't even know what it is or have ever heard of it. It was this hip hop song by this rapper called Salt and Pepper. Anybody ever heard of Salt and Pepper before?

So he had this song called, let's talk about sex, baby. Let's talk about you and me. Let's talk about all the good things and the bad things that are going to be. Let's talk about sex. That's what we're going to talk about right now. Y'all ready? OK. All right.

So if you have children in here, or you've let your kids in here, please, if you could dismiss them. This may not be appropriate for them. And yeah, this is an area of our relationships and marriage that a lot of times we don't want to talk about. How many times have you guys talked about sex in marriage?

Yes? No? Yes? OK. All right. Well, it's a vital part of your relationship, and it's important that we talk about it, because a lot hinges on just what it means for you guys to live out your calling in marriage through sex. So today, many of you sex, as we already know in our society and our culture, has an appetite like food.

It's impossible, if you will, to live without sex. And there is no reason why we shouldn't be able to sample various varieties of sex, like cuisine continually having what Keller called new taste sensations. Our culture is infatuated with it. This vision of sex in our culture is not new.

Thousands of years ago, in a city called Corinth, they had a very similar vision when it came to sex. And so I'm going to have us actually stand as we read the word of God in 1 Corinthians, starting in chapter 6, verse 12. "All things are lawful for me, but not all things are helpful.

All things are lawful for me, but I will not be dominated by anything. Food is meant for the stomach, and the stomach for food, and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.

And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Or do you not know that he who is joined into a prostitute becomes one body with her?

For as it is written, the two will become one flesh. But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commences outside the body. But the sexual immoral person sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God?

You are not your own, but you are born with a price. So glorify God in your body. Now concerning the matters about which you vote, it is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman. But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband.

Thus ends the reading of the word of the living God. You may be seated. Now what Paul says in verse 12, "All things are lawful for me." He's actually quoting a Corinthian slogan that the Corinthian Christians had adopted to rationalize sex their way. Paul expounds upon this attitude by quoting another Corinthian slogan that we see in verse 13 of chapter 6.

"Food is meant for the stomach, and the stomach for food." Now this slogan here basically communicated the idea that the body should be permitted to have anything that it craves. So they did sex their way. Prostitution in Corinth was not only legal, it was actually a religious encounter, as temples had a guide for sex.

And they would actually have prostitutes that would line the streets. And it was more than acceptable for a Corinthian man to marry for social status, while having a little something, if you will, on the side. And the Corinthian church here was beginning to buy into that culture of sex.

Now this lack of sexual restraint that we see calls for some of the Corinthian church to swing to the other extreme, that meaning basically you can't have sex of any kind, even within marriage. That sex was to be avoided entirely. So it was actually more glorious, if you will, and you were actually more in line with God if you didn't participate in it at all.

And as we can see in chapter 7, verse 1, "Now concerning the matters about which you wrote, it is good for a man to not have sexual relations with a woman." So here you see him addressing just that. Now wait a minute. Didn't God ultimately create sex? And if we are going to image, reflect Him, then there must be something about sex and its creation that images or reflects ultimately God.

He intended ultimately to reveal His glories to us in creation, in all that He had made. All things were made through Him and for Him, including sex. And so I want us to see three things today. First, what makes sex so glorious? Second, how should we handle such a glorious gift?

How should we handle this gift? And then thirdly, what does it reveal about God that should cause us to hunger more for Him? What does sex reveal about God that should create a desire and a passion, not necessarily for one another, but for God Himself? So now let's see two glorious visions of sex.

What makes sex so glorious? We'll look at two visions of it. 1 Corinthians 6, starting at verse 15 and 16. The first glorious vision. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute?

Never. Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body? Everybody say one body. One body. With her. For as it is written, and now he goes back to Genesis, the two will become one flesh. Now, verses 15 all the way down through 17, because he goes on to say that he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him, is called a syllogism from verses 15 through 17.

And Paul here is giving a three-part argument with two premises and a conclusion that ultimately follows. So premise number one, the bodies of Christians are members of Christ Himself. So the bodies of Christians are members of Christ Himself. So you are an actual member of Christ. What you do with your body is exemplary of him.

That's why it's so critical that God says, Be holy as I am holy, because what we demonstrate in the world is an extension of who he is. Premise number two is in verse 16. Sex unites two human beings. So sex in the act of it, it brings a unity or a oneness.

So the first glorious vision that we see here of sex that God reveals to us is, here it is, sex laces us to one another. Sex laces us to one another. Paul here is quoting from Genesis chapter 2, verse 24, defining sex as one flesh. Now when God created Eve out of Adam, when he took the rib in half and he built Adam into Eve, they became one person.

Now we talked about this in my first message. What did oneness ultimately look like in that context? Well, one, they both shared the same image, God. They both shared the same flesh, Adam's rib. They both had the same position, dominion. And they both shared the same resources, the garden.

They both shared the same purpose, be fruitful and multiply. But that's not the only area of oneness. One flesh refers to the personal union of a woman and a man at all levels. So then watch this. After creation, of all these oneness demonstrations that I just articulated, God creates verse 24 of Genesis 2, and he gives them an explicit graphic illustration of the depth of their oneness.

After all these other onenesses, he ends by saying, "And the two shall become one flesh." Now we can see it almost in Adam's response in verse 23, as you hear the first--he becomes the first hip-hop artist ever to walk the planet. He just starts rapping. I mean, for you ladies, we'll say he started doing poetry.

That'll make it a little more romantic. "This is flesh of my flesh, yeah, and bone of my bone." When he comes and sees Eve, it's like, "What? Are you kidding me?" We can paraphrase what Paul is saying here in this way, in Corinth. Don't you know that the purpose of sex is always one flesh?

To become united to another person in every area of life is that you are seeking that in a prostitute? That's what he's saying. You're seeking that in a prostitute? Of course not. So don't have sex with her, because ultimately, sex is a blending and a bonding of two individuals into one, and it culminates oneness.

That's why God ends in verse 24 of Genesis chapter 2 by saying, "And the two shall become one flesh." We know that because here he uses that as the analogy for flesh--for sex. Paul says, "The two will become one flesh." So verse 24 of Genesis chapter 2 is talking about sex, among other things.

There's no more pronounced way to communicate that sex is one flesh than the byproduct of sex. What's the byproduct of sex? Children, right? When a child is born, it's one individual that's been blended in by two. There are people who look at my daughter and they'll say, "Man, she is your twin.

That's your twin." When they look at one of my other daughters and they'll look at Mom, they'll say, "Man, she looks just like you." Or, "Does she look like me or does she look like her?" "No, she looks like the both of us." Only when they act up, then I'm like, "That's your son." You see him over there?

That's your daughter. I don't know where that came from. That wasn't from my side of the family. If there's more to one flesh, there's more to this than the one flesh of sex. There exists an intangible, mysterious, spiritual lacing that occurs in lovemaking. We instinctively, even if the Bible didn't even tell us, we know that at the core, sex cements us.

It's in the midst of sexual passion that you naturally want to say things like, "I will always be with you forever." It's in the midst of that that you say, "I want to be with you forever." If someone goes out and does it with someone else, what do you feel?

You feel betrayed. You feel cheated on. You feel devalued. So, sex is glorious. One, because it laces us. It is the actual culmination of what I talked about in my first message when it comes to oneness. Now let us see the second glorious vision of sex from God's perspective.

Secondarily, sex is intimate knowledge. It's intimate knowledge. You see, sex from God's vantage point is very different. Many of you are familiar with maybe, I don't know, you've heard of the common kind of colloquial phrase that we use in conversations when we say, "Yada." Like, "We played ball, we swam in the river, shelled oysters, yada, yada, yada, and then we went home." Have you heard of that before?

That colloquial phrase? When your husband asks you what you did at the ball, you say, "Well, you know, we kind of took the kids over to the train, and then we had a little bit of food, and then we just yada, yada, yada, did all of that." Then when the credit card bill comes, the rest of the yada kind of starts showing up.

You don't want to tell me that. Well, yada means much more, actually, than that. It's very interesting. And I think the great theologian Seinfeld will actually give us a better picture or an idea of what yada means from God's perspective. So let's go ahead and take a look at that clip.

So, I'm on third avenue. Mind you, I'm in business. Yada, yada, yada. I get a free massage and a facial. That's a six, Laura. I'm surprised you brought the camera. Oh, it's not mine. It's my mother's. Are you close with your parents? Well, they gave birth to me, and yada, yada.

Yada what? Yada, yada, yada. We used to be married. We bought the wedding invitations, and yada, yada, yada. I'm still single. So what's she doing now? Yada. I guess I'm speaking of exes, Mom. My old boyfriend came over late last night. Yada, yada, yada. I'm really tired today. Listen to this.

Margie comes over and she tells me that her ex-boyfriend was over late last night, and yada, yada, yada, I'm really tired today. You don't think she'd yada, yada, six? I've yada, yada, six. Yeah. I met this lawyer. We went out to dinner. I had the lobster bisque. We went back to my place.

Yada, yada, yada. I never heard from him again. Gee, yada, yada. I don't know about the lawyer. No, I mentioned the bisque. Well, I gotta do something. Well, I gotta do something. Do something. And you notice the way they used the word yada to gloss over sexual encounters. Yada is actually a Hebrew word used for, guess what?

Sex. And the translation is actually a very stunning one. In Genesis chapter 4, verse 1, we see the word in Hebrew, yada, being actually used. Now Adam yada'd Eve, his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, I've gotten a man with the help of the Lord. We see the second yada in verse 17.

Cain yada'd his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch when he built a city. And then we see the third yada in verse 25. And Adam knew his wife, yada, and again, she bore a son. So there it is. Yada, yada, yada. Verse 25 translates the word as what?

What's the word there? Knew, knew, knew. Yada is a Hebrew word that reveals that sex is much deeper than a physical act. What it is, is it's intimate knowledge. Adam knew his wife. Now what's also interesting about that word is that that word also comes into context meaning mercy.

Another occurrence of yada can be found in the Hebrew wisdom books and is translated as mercy. In Proverbs chapter 12, verse 10, the righteous knows, yada, the needs of their animals, but the mercy of the wicked is cruel. So you see the parallel there. The righteous knows the needs, but the mercy.

So that's a parallel. So mercy is helping us to understand what the knowing is in Proverbs chapter 12, verse 10. In other words, yada expresses intimate understanding of a need like no one else does. And it lets that person know that you are committed to taking care of that need.

Sex says, I want to know you, know you. Adam knew his wife. I want to know you. Sex says, I'm committed to studying you. I want to know you through face-to-face encounters with you. I'm committed to living for your needs and not my own. That's what sex was designed to communicate by God.

There's one instance of a guy at our church. Actually, you guys, well, some of you guys know Charlie. Charlie used to attend here at the podium. He's now over at our church. And if you know Charlie, he can sometimes get really close to you when he's talking to you, and really uncomfortable close.

It's like, man, get back up, dog. And I remember just one time him doing that to my wife, and she got really uncomfortable. So intimate knowledge of sex is it's knowing someone so well that you can finish their sentences. It's knowing someone so well, you're so close to them that you can see the freckles on their nose.

It's knowing someone so well that you know when they hurt and you know how to comfort them. You know their stink and their glories and everything else in between. You see, the glory of sex is that it declares to all that you are known. Listen, the glory of sex is this.

This is why it should be so exclusive. It's because it declares to everyone around you in the world that you are known in ways that no one on earth will know you. That you have been let into places that only you will know. It is a declaration that I know you, and I'm committed to knowing you more deeply for the rest of my life.

That's why God says it has to be exclusive. So the first glory of sex that we saw is that it laces us. The second is that it's intimate knowledge. Thirdly, sex belongs in the marriage bed. Sex belongs in the marriage bed. Back in 1 Corinthians 6, verse 16. "For do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with hers?

For as it is written, the two will become one flesh." Verse 17, "But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him." Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. Now here we begin to see the eternal glory and perspective of sex.

In chapter 7, verse 2. "But because of temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband." Keller says this. Let me ask you this. Does God give you intimacy apart from total commitment? Is he okay with showering you with eternal pleasures when he asks for your total devotion?

You say to him, "I don't want to get up in front of the world and declare that I'm completely yours and only yours." You see, the parallel to the exclusivity of sex is a demonstration of a call of exclusive devotion to God himself. You see, we are not the center for why God made sex.

God is. And sex was made by him and for him. And we were ultimately made to reflect that design for sex when we choose to do sex our way, we begin to muddy up, if you will, that image. We don't do it God's way. We say to the person in our own relationship, "I don't love you enough, and I'm willing to go and tie myself to someone else." We declare to the world in that process that, you know what, this is what a relationship to God looks like.

Non-exclusive. Just as ridiculous as it would be to say to God, "I want your intimacy," without commitment, is just as ridiculous for us to talk about sex outside of marital commitment. So, that's what sex ultimately tells us. Now my second question. How then are we to wield such a powerful gift from God?

I'm going to give you three ways. Looking back at 1 Corinthians 7, we're going to go to verse 3. "The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does.

Likewise, the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourself to prayer, but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control." How are you to wield this gift?

The first reason, the first way, is I live to please. Everybody say, "I live to please." Look at your spouse and say, "I live to please." Sex and marriage is to be used to please the other and not self. That's what Paul is telling us here. Fulfill marital duties in verse 3.

When it says, "Fulfill marital duties," you know what it literally means in verse 3? It means, "Give back that which is owed." Give back that which is owed. In verse 4, "Does not have authority over." What does that say? That you are to surrender authority over your body to your spouse.

Ah man, this is rough. This is not how things act in the world. Verse 5, he says, "Do not," what? "Deprive." You know what that means? Stop defrauding. That is, cheating someone else out of what is properly his or hers. That's what Paul is saying. That's very strong language.

And then he gives the exception. One, if both partners agree. In other words, number two, other than that, you are to live to please. Now here's something I want to say. Sex and marriage should never be used as a bribe or a reward for good behavior. Don't do that.

All right? Some of you guys are smiling because I've had good behavior in sex. I've had it. My wife says, "Honey, if you do this, you're a good boy now." All right, cool, I'm doing that. Okay? Marriage is about displaying the what? Gospel. And when we do sex that way, what it does is communicate.

It works salvation. You see, in marriage, the posture should be this. I want to do all that I can to please you. Even when I'm not in the mood. If you desire to have me, then I'm yours. If you desire to have me, then I'm yours. If you desire to have me, then I'm yours.

If you desire to have me, then I'm yours. If you desire to have me, then I'm yours. If you desire to have me, then I'm yours. If you desire to have me, then I'm yours. If you desire to have me, then I'm yours. If you desire to have me, then I'm yours.

BFM Retreat 2017 - Session 2

Transcript