You Were Made For Love

Title: You Were Made For Love
Text: Exodus 20:14

Introduction:

This week I was thinking about Faraday cages. Einstein had three pictures of three scientists in his study, Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, and James Clerk Maxwell. Faraday was a great experimental scientist. And I suppose these days he is best known for the Faraday cage. Which is an enclosure meant to protect an object from electromagnetic fields.

And the reason I was thinking about Faraday cages is that as I pressed into our text, I began to realize how much misinformation about the subject is buzzing around in the world.

Our text is Exodus 20:14, “You shall not commit adultery.”

Back in 1943, an academic named Walter Langer was tasked with writing a psychological profile of Adolf Hitler. And it is in those writings we find a phrase that has gained some popularity:

“People will believe a big lie sooner than a little one, and if you repeat it frequently enough, people will sooner or later believe it.”

The world is full about big, bold lies about sex. We are living in a psy-op. Propoganda is buzzing all around us. And that’s why I began thinking about a Faraday Cage. I wondered – how do we protect people from all of the misinformation?

Now, I want to concede on the front end that to the outside world, any effort to “protect yourself” from the world’s lies about this sin is going to appear crazy. In other words, to the world, your faraday cage is going to look like a tinfoil hat.

Which is what the word of God predicts.

1 Peter 4:4 reads:

With respect to this they are surprised when you do not join them in the same flood of debauchery, and they malign you; but they will give account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead.

In a world gone crazy, sanity appears to be insanity. I said a moment ago that the world is filled with sexual propaganda. We’re being played.

So that’s what I think the Lord would like us to do today on this subject. Let’s put a stake in the ground and discern truth from lies. Let’s deprogram and perhaps even develop some protection against the world’s lies on this subject.

Before I do that, I want to show you this kind of sermon is biblical. Let’s take a look at 2 Corinthians 10:4-5

“For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ,”

Many of us are familiar with that phrase, “take every thought captive and make it obey Christ.” But we might not realize that Paul is not talking about individual believers. He is talking about his own ministry. One thing Paul does with his ministry is he tears down intellectual strongholds that are raised against the knowledge of God. He invades the castle of bad thinking and captures thoughts and forces them to obey Christ.

You can feed a congregation on these kinds of sermons alone. But from time to time, people need help seeing through the lies that surround them in the popular culture. So that’s what we will do today.

Sexual Heroes & Villains

Almost all of the heroes are villains

This week I was reading a book entitled Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture. The book details various pseudo intellectual cons run on the western world.

“In the worldwide culture war, our progressive friends honor no conventions. Unchecked by God or tradition, largely unedited by their peers in the academy or the media, they fall back promiscuously on the one weapon that their opponents are loath to use: fraud. As weapons go, however, it is no match for the truth. At the end of the day, one prays, it is the latter that goes marching on” – Cahill

This makes sense. As Jesus said to the Pharisees in John 8,

“You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” – John 8:44

The last section of the book deals with the various cons associated with the so-called sexual revolution.

Going from Sanger, to Margaret Mead (boy what pieces of work). You know, many years ago in the late 1600s, the so-called Salem Witch Trials took place. In which, we called some women witches who were not witches. But the more I learn about Sanger and Mead, I now see that we sometimes make the opposite mistake.

Anyway, he finally lands on Alfred Kinsey – who has had an enormous influence on how the western world thinks about human sexuality. The short version is that Kinsey was a total fraud. And an avid champion of and participant in pedafila, etc…

At least some of the villains are heroes

How did these people get away with all of the lies? They used Christianity as a foil. They suggested that repression was dangerous. Kinsey in particular spent his entire life opposing Christianity labeling it as prudish, puritanical, etc…

There was, in the early 1900s a whole propaganda campaign against the puritans. We see it in statements like HL Mencken’s hilarious: “Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy.” Truly funny, but not all factual.

So we’re living in a world in which almost all of the heroes are actually villains and some of the worst villains are actually heroes.

That is certainly true of the Puritans and how they viewed human sexuality. CS Lewis once wrote,

Relief and buoyancy are the characteristic notes . . . It follows that nearly every association which now clings to the word puritan has to be eliminated when we are thinking of the early Protestants. Whatever they were, they were not sour, gloomy, or severe; nor did their enemies bring any such charge against them . . . Protestants are not ascetics but sensualists

On many questions, and specially in their view of the marriage bed, the Puritans were the indulgent party;

You need to understand that the world you’re living in has been propagated with lies. Many of those presented to you as heroes are villains and many presented to you as villains are heroes.

1. The Worldview Divide

When it comes to establishing sexual sanity, I suggest you start with this piece of fundamental first principle thinking.

You need to decide which came first – lust or love.

Do you understand that for the Darwinian, lust is undeniably more natural and more fundamental than love. We are, afterall, just animals.

And so as Kinsey said, the only unnatural sex act is the one you can’t physically do.

This seems undeniably important… The Darwinian propaganda beaming all around you believes lust has existed far longer than love. Indeed, they would be hard pressed to explain love at all.

On the other hand, Christianity asserts that love came first. It does not deny the existence of lust, but it sees it as an unwelcome intruder, a kind of parasite on the human spirit.

Can you see why this is so important? We need to ask fundamentally, was a human being created for love or for lust? And again, the Christian story is that we were created first and foremost for love.

So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. – Genesis 2:21-25

Yes you are fallen, yes sin has entered the world. But you need to be fully convinced that most fundamentally, you were made for a monogamous, one-flesh relationship with a member of the opposite sex – that is provided by and blessed by your creator.

Every other sexual arrangement: Hook-up culture, self-pleasure, polygamy, etc… is fundamentally anti-human.

So in 1 Corinthians 6, when the apostle Paul makes statements like,

“the body was not made for sexual immorality”

“Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body.”

He’s making those statements with this insight — you were not made for lust – you were made for love.

Illustration: Lust is like a cancer cell

Lust is like a cancer cell. Is it organic? Yes… in one sense. Does it have our DNA? Yes… a cancer cell is “you” – but on the other hand it is not you. Cancer cells are evidence that something has gone wrong with nature. They are technically natural – but it is obvious they are mutations of something more natural. This is how Christianity views lust.

Meanwhile materialistic Darwinism views lust as more natural and actually sees love as the mutation.

I cannot overstate how central this one perspective is in explaining the way of the world vs. the way of Christ.

And this is all evidence in in the created world as well…

Francis Bacon, another preeminent Christian scientist once said,

“God has, in fact, written two books, not just one. Of course, we are all familiar with the first book he wrote, namely Scripture. But he has written a second book called creation.”

We do not need to rely only on scripture to show that in regards to sexuality, human beings were made to behave differently than other created organisms.

Sexually transmitted diseases
Sins against his own body
Receive in themselves their due reward

Bonding chemicals / oxytocin
Brain development
Children need both mothers and fathers

If you repeat a lie often enough… And so it is with the truth. Here’s the truth…

You were made for love. You were not made for lust.
You were made for love. You were not made for lust.

You were made for covenantal love. What is covenantal love. It is love with full commitment and full passion. There is no necessary division between those. We can trace the idea all the way up to God himself. He is fully committed to us. He also fully loves us. That’s what you were made for.

For many of us, the covenantal love of God, the steadfast love of God – needs to land on this very issue. The world is full of sexually wounded people. Some were wounded by their own hand. Some were wounded by others. For 2000 years, the gospel of Jesus Christ has healed all sorts of gaping wounds – but it has in reality, for a very long time, specialized in healing people broken by sexual sin.

It starts with Jesus sitting with the Woman at the Well. It continues all the way into Paul’s ministry where he writes to the Corinthians…

9 Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, 10 nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. 11 And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.

– 1 Corinthians 6:9–11

God has healed countless sexual sinners. And he can heal you. He can pull you out of the psy-op. He can purge of the propaganda. He has paid the price to redeem you fully from any and all stronghold.

Illustration: Man in an orchard

Here is an image of man standing in a orchard of some kind. I want you to imagine that all of the fruit above him (apples) are just outside his reach. And all of the berries and stuff on the ground are all obviously within his reach – but all slightly poison. Not enough to kill him in the short term, but enough to make him sick and eventually kill him.

So he’s faced with a problem, his appetite and his reach.

Friends, all the sexual sin you can think of is like those berries. Their main virtue is that they are low-hanging fruit. You can reach them without any effort, commitment, prayer, faith, etc…

Meanwhile, over your head, and out of your immediate reach is the fruit you were really created to eat. And it is healthy for you. You can eat as much of it as you want. But it is much much harder to get.

The world is full of people who have learned to subsist mostly on the low hanging fruit. Yeah it makes them sick. Yeah, it leads to death. But we have these appetites – and that fruit way above our heads is too hard to get!

So they stoop down one more time to eat the low hanging fruit of self-pleasure, hook-ups, etc…

Christ has come to save people from this very thing. Please hear me brothers and sisters. Christ did not die only to offer you forgiveness. He also died to give you freedom.

2 And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2 in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— 3 among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. 4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, 5 even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— 6 and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7 so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. – Ephesians 2:1-10

There is a whole other life available to each person in Christ. That’s the gospel of Jesus Christ.

This table stands before us as God’s offer:

Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. – Isaiah 1:18

“Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear, and come to me; hear, that your soul may live; and I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David.” – Isaiah 55:2-3

Come and partake of the table that stands for life…