Printer Friendly VersionSeveral months ago on a crisp autumn afternoon, I was on my
way downtown for an appointment. I was driving my car north on the interstate,
minding my own business--having a rather pleasant drive. When suddenly, there
she was--off to the side of the road--right between the ads for Blue Bunny
ice cream and Boatmen's bank.
Stretched across a billboard, bigger than life was the representation
of a beautiful young woman wearing nothing but a smile and a pair of high
heels. The words of the advertisement covered certain portions of her body
in such a way as to barely make the ad legal and the advertisement was inviting
me to come to a certain club in the city and watch girls like her "perform"
for me.
Well, after I pulled my car out of the ditch--I realized how
profoundly that billboard depicts the spirit of our age. I mean it's not like
I was in the back room of a seedy bookstore, or even in the privacy of my
home--I was driving down an interstate highway!
Today sexual images have pervaded every corner of our society.
You can't open a newspaper, you can't pick up a magazine, you can't turn on
the television, you can't even drive down the street without very quickly
being confronted with a sexual image. In the space of thirty short years we
went from the Beatles singing "I want to hold your hand" to George
Michael singing "I want your sex."
We are confronted every single day with sexual images and a
sexual philosophy that says "anything goes that is mutually pleasurable
between persons." And what was once confined to secret places and unrevealed
actions is now available to every person, even children, through print, video,
and the Internet.
And yet while there is unprecedented permissiveness in our culture
and some people want to call the accessibility of sexual images and experiences
"progress", we just don't seem to be getting the connection to the
epidemic of sexual abuse and violence in our culture. Officials project that
one of every four girls in America today will be sexually assaulted during
her lifetime. Out of one side of our mouths we say, "Anything goes and
everything is permissible" but out of the other side of our mouths we
cry outrage when people get hurt. Are we really that stupid?
Well, I know I don't have to convince you that we live in a
sex crazed culture. We live in a pornographic age. But I want to talk to you
today about sexual integrity in the midst of a pornographic age. We must speak
openly about it. Part of the problem is the silence of the church. We pretend
it isn't an issue. We pretend it's all out there. I promise you, it's not
all out there--it's in here. As Christian people, as people whose desire is
to serve God and lead pure lives, the fact of the matter is we are struggling
with sexual issues. And a lot of the time, we are not doing very well.
Now unfortunately, for most of the history of the church, the
only response we could think of to sexual issues was to try and shame people
into holiness. Shaming each other over our sexual sin doesn't change anything,
it only creates a bunch of shame-filled sinners. And it is easy for us to
feel shame over sexual issues. Some are ashamed because of what they have
done. Others are ashamed because of what has been done to them. Still others
are ashamed because they were lead to believe that sex itself is dirty.
The truth is, sex is good. Sex is beautiful. God created sex,
He's the one who thought it up! What a God! The problem is that because of
our selfishness and sinfulness sex has been stripped from its rightful place
of dignity within the boundaries of the marriage covenant and made a slave
to the very worst lusts of the human spirit. And that's why as Christians,
we need to bring sexuality back to its rightful place. The only way that will
happen is if we begin to talk openly about it on the basis of the truth of
God's Word.
So I want you to know that as I talk about this subject today,
I do not come to you as a prophet trying to stand above the problem. I come
to you confessionally, as a person who knows what it is to live in a pornographic
age. I know what it is to deal with sexual temptation. I know what it is to
struggle with keeping my thoughts pure in the midst of a sex-crazed culture.
I'm with you here and my desire is to help, not to condemn.
The worst thing we could do today is to try to convince ourselves
that this is not really a significant issue in the church. Much of what I’m
saying to you today is based on information that comes from an excellent book
put together by Dr. Archibald Hart, a Christian psychologist and educator.
In his book, The Sexual Man (W Publishing Group, 1995), he traces the
patterns not of the general population but of what he calls “good men.”
The results of his study suggest that it’s our problem in the church
as well as a cultural problem.
Now I want to very clear about what I mean when i use the term
"pornographic age." I'm not really talking about certain kinds of
materials or even behavior, although that's certainly a part of it. I'm using
the word in the same way the New Testament uses it. The root "pornea"
from which we get pornography, is a common biblical word. And it most often
means: "sexual immorality." It refers to an attitude and a spirit,
a mindset. So I am using the term “pornographic” as any expression
of our God-created sexuality outside it's God-intended boundaries.
I think there are basically two questions that we need to deal
with today. One: "What has gone wrong to create such a dismal situation?
Two: "How should we be responding to it?" The truth is these struggles
we are talking about are really nothing new as the passage from Proverbs bears
out. I mean the scene that we read from Proverbs could be the basis of a blockbuster
movie today, yet it was written thousands of years ago.
Dealing appropriately with our sexuality has long been a major
dilemma for the human race since the beginning. I really believe one of the
major reason for that is because we have separated sex from intimacy. That
separation is what is being so dangerously exploited by our culture today.
This is especially pronounced in men. Women usually learn to connect their
feelings to their sexuality, but men don't. Most often in men, the act of
sexual release is separated from relationship and intimacy. Now part of the
reason for this is critical to understand in order to see clearly what's happened
in our culture.
While a woman's sexual response is triggered primarily by intimacy
and closeness and romance and conversation and warmth, a man's sexual response
is triggered primarily visually. A woman responds to the person. A man responds
to the body. That's why men so often become fixated on certain parts of a
woman's anatomy. It’s why when a couple goes away on a special anniversary
weekend, she's thinking about the dinner conversation and sitting together
watching the sunset and sharing thoughts and feelings about each other--you
know, the romance and playfulness of it. But all he's thinking about is the
negligee he saw in the corner of the suitcase!
So much sexual dysfunction in marriage is related to a failure
on the part of both spouses to understand that about each other. But I'll
tell you exactly who does understand that: the people who produce pornographic
magazines and videos and Internet sites. I'll tell you what advertisers and
big business and organized crime (the largest producers of pornography) know
about men. They know we are visually stimulated and they know that we will
spend money to get that stimulation.
You see there's a level at which our pornographic age is not
really about sex but about money. Big money. The kind of money that can take
a runaway girl from living out of garbage cans to a six-figure salary simply
for taking off her clothes and submitting to the lustful desires of men. It’s
a reality about men that our culture has learned extremely well how to exploit.
To the point that though 61% of Dr. Hart's "good men" report thinking
about sex daily, many are not finding fulfillment in a wholesome and intimate
relationship with their wives.
According to a University of Chicago a few years ago, 41% of
all men in the previous twelve months to the study had either watched an x-rated
movie, gone to a strip club, bought a pornographic magazine, or called a phone-sex
line.
And 16% of all women had participated in one of those. Now with
the explosion of the Internet, those figures would be much higher. And the
stats are really not significantly different when you look at Christians.
Do you know what that means? That at least a third of the men in this congregation
have in the last twelve months have watched an x-rated movie, bought a porn
magazine, gone to a strip club, or logged on to cyberspace porn. It is our
problem.
Dr. Hart says he sees more and more men in his practice who
report the same attitude that was expressed by one man in particular when
he said: "I’d rather just go off by myself with a sexy video or
some magazines and take care of myself. Sex is just too complicated, too demanding,
and not really as great as private self-stimulation."
Now let me throw in another factor here. Virtually everyone
agrees that the average age at which puberty sets in is dropping. And yet
at the same time, the average age at which young people marry is rising. So
the waiting period between the onset of sexual ability and marriage is increasing.
To the point that most in our society believe it's completely unrealistic
to tell young people that they should wait until marriage to experience sexual
intercourse. But while the entertainment industry continuously finds new ways
to cater to developing adolescent sexuality, most moms and dads (especially
Christians) prefer silence and denial.
No wonder we have such a terrible mess on our hands. No wonder
there are so many conflicting messages in our world. We have tried to convince
ourselves that sex is no big deal, while God says to us: "Wrong: it is
a very big deal, it's one of the greatest things I created."
And so into this madness, comes a sane, holy, peaceful word
from God: “It is God's will that you should be sanctified: that you should
avoid sexual immorality; that each of you should learn to control his own
body in a way that is holy and honorable, not in passionate lust like the
heathen, who do not know God. For God did not call us to be impure, but to
live a holy life (1 Thessalonians 4:3-5, 7, NIV).
I'm sure we wouldn't debate that here, the question is, “How?”
There's no doubt that God desires our purity, but at the moment lust takes
control, God can seem quite unreal to us. So how can we be people of sexual
purity and integrity in the midst of pornographic age? I think there are some
ways to do that and I wish I could take a lot more time with each, but allow
me to at least outline for you. First, we must learn to talk openly as Christians
about these issues. The Promise Keepers movement helped us tremendously in
this area.
Issues of sexual struggle have tremendous power of us when they
are kept in the realm of mystery and secrecy. But if we can begin to share
our struggles honestly with each other, we will begin to see their power over
us broken. I know that for a fact. I have watched in the last year, men and
women in this congregation experience healing and freedom from sexual sin.
And most often it started, when they reached out to someone and said, "Help
me, I'm struggling."
Second, we must take seriously the influence of our culture
and do whatever it takes to protect ourselves. This could include taking drastic
measures to protect ourselves from the insidious encroachments of those who
would entrap us into illicit relationships or pornography or even careless
conversation. When the Bible speaks of sexual immorality it always gives the
same answer: "Flee."
Third, no amount of external safeguards will solve the problem
of living in a sex-crazed culture. Purity has to come from the heart. Something
has to change deep within. God has to do a work in my spirit in order for
me to really have victory over these issues. So I want to give you the hope
of the gospel this morning. That is exactly what God wants to do for you.
The Apostle says here: "God gives you his Holy Spirit. He wills, he desires
your sanctification, your purity, your holiness."
God doesn't want you to go around constantly defeated spiritual
because of your sexual struggles. He wants to give you strength in the temptation,
victory over the sin, and freedom to enjoy his gift the way it was meant to
be enjoyed.
And that has to be the bottom line in this whole issue. We live
in a society that is teaching us to separate sex from true intimacy, but God
wants to teach us how sex is the expression of real intimacy between a husband
and a wife. And so in a very real sense the issue is, "Am I going to
surrender my will and my life to God's way of doing things?" By the way,
according to that university of Chicago study, do you know who in our society
reports by far the greatest degree of sexual satisfaction? Married couples
in a faithful, exclusive relationship where sex becomes the natural and beautiful
expression of the intimacy that is being developed between them.
I'm know that I've raised more issues this morning than I could
possibly deal with in one sermon. What I am asking us to do is to commit this
morning by the grace of God to take whatever steps are necessary toward spiritual
health in this area of sexual purity.
Perhaps couples need to have an open, serious conversation
about this. Parents should talk to teenagers. Teens, ask your parents about
this. They want to talk to you and are sometimes afraid about bringing it
up. Christians, let’s talk to each other about this. Let’s work
to create in the church a culture of truth and healing instead of a culture
of shame. Set up accountability systems in your life. Get rid of negative
influences that are leading you down a dangerous path.
But most of all, let us humble ourselves before God. Let us cry out to him to save us from this wicked and perverse generation. He wants to help us. And it's time we let him.
