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What Did Jesus Say About Sex?

Maintaining five basic commitments will safeguard sexual righteousness.

Five commitments can lead to sexual righteousness.

Jesus in this section of the Sermon on the Mount talks about what it really means to be righteous or right sexually. People tend to get legalistic or superficial about righteousness, so here Jesus tries to paint pictures of what it looks like to be righteous in different categories of life. He contrasts distorted "You have heard it said" what is true "But I say to you." Let's look at what he says about true righteousness as it relates to our sexuality.

Matthew 5:2730: "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to go into hell."

I want to walk us through five commitments that I'm going to ask us to make.

We must acknowledge and confess our sexual fallenness.

The first commitment is confession. I must acknowledge and confess my fallenness as it relates to my sexuality.

In these first verses, Jesus is speaking to some types. They thought you could divide the human race into two categories: adulterers, people who have problems sexually, and the , the righteous who have no problems sexually. Jesus says, "You've heard that it was said, 'Don't commit adultery,' but I say that people who look and lust have committed adultery already in their hearts."

Jesus is not saying that it's wrong to find someone attractive. That's part of being a human being. The word used that translates "to lust" is the word epithumeo, which means mishandled or misdirected sexual desire, fantasy, or intent, even if you've never committed adultery.

Imagine how offended the religious leaders are when Jesus tells them they have problems with sexual righteousness. It's as if Jesus were to come here and say, "Anybody who lusted this week, who engaged in any behavior or thought that was sexually inappropriate, will die in ten seconds." I'd be speaking to an empty auditorium.

Jesus is not saying, "If you've done adultery in your heart, you might as well go ahead and do it physically because one is just as bad as the other." He's not saying one is as bad as the other. Physical adultery includes everything that's wrong with lusting in the heart plus more: deceit, betrayal, the breaking of a promise, damage to family, deeper hurt to a spouse. Ask anybody who has been hurt by it.

Jesus' point is, if you think you're sexually perfect and need no repentance because you have avoided committing physical adultery, think again. It runs deeper.

In church it's easy for people to pretend that they don't have a problem, because that is a vulnerable area. But all of us have been affected. Maybe you're affected by being tempted to escape from your spouse, if you have one, by fantasizing about somebody else in inappropriate ways. Maybe you're keenly aware that we live in a society that idolizes sexual attractiveness, in which beauty is power. So you find yourself too attached to the need to appear sexually desirable, or jealous of someone who is more attractive. Or you find yourself flirting inappropriately to prove your attractiveness.

Maybe you struggle with some form of sexual addiction. Maybe you struggle with homosexual feelings. Maybe you've been playing games, and you've already crossed some lines that you shouldn't have crossed.

The truth of Jesus' teaching brings us to acknowledge the truth to ourselves and to God. God longs to forgive. Some of you carry deep guilt in this area, but nothing you have ever done is so bad that it cannot be covered by Jesus' death on the cross. Nothing.

But you must confess.

Accept God's gift of human sexuality.

This leads to a second commitment. I must accept and be grateful that God made me a sexual though I have problems handling it. I must not despise what God has done.

In Matthew 19:4 Jesus says, "Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning 'made them male and female. "God made human beings as male and female. God made sex up. It was not some great mistake God made when he ran out of good ideas. When Eve was brought to Adam, Adam's response was not, "I'll bet she's got a wonderful personality." Remember what Adam said? "This now is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. Yea, God!"

When people don't understand this, tragic things happen. If you followed the story of the Heaven's Gate cult, you know that the leader and several members had themselves castrated. They were following this same distorted principle. If I mutilate my body, I won't be capable of sinning. They despised God's gift, their bodies.

I need to be grateful for God's gift.

For some that may be hard. Some of you have been victims of incest or abuse or trauma of one sort or another. You may need to talk to someone. Maybe you need to see a Christian counselor. You need to get to the point where you can say honestly, "Thanks, God, that you made me with a body. Thanks that you made me male or female. Thanks that you gave to the human race the capacity for oneness within the covenant of marriage."

Righteousness as Jesus defines it is not simply the avoidance of sin. Of course, don't put yourself in a place where you know you're going to be sexually tempted. But the ultimate goal is to become the kind of person who can look at a person of the opposite sex and see what Jesus sees. If that's not your spouse or a person with whom you're romantically involved, you'll see a brother or a sister. When you extend a hand, you'll touch as Jesus would touch. That's righteousness.

Keep God's standards of purity.

The third commitment is to keep God's standards. Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 4:3: "It is God's will that you should be sanctified: that you should avoid sexual immortality."

This means that I will restrict a sexual relationship to the permanent commitment of marriage. God intended that for a husband and a wife who have committed themselves to each other permanently, because it is only in the context of a permanent commitment that a permanent intimacy can be safely expressed. Beyond that, seek to relate to those of the opposite gender the way Jesus would.

One word to those who are single. Single adults live in a society where it is not to be sexually active, to reserve a sexual relationship for marriage. All of us struggle to be sexually right and righteous, but there's a unique struggle for those who are single.

We live in a world that often harbors an illusion: If you're married, that's normal; if you're single, that's abnormal. Not in the body of Christ.

Making this commitment is important because sexuality is such a deep part of us. Guilt in this area has a way of making people feel separated from God like almost nothing else. We need to make a commitment together to say, I'm not going to allow fallenness in this area to keep me from God. I'm going to rely on his Spirit day by day, and despite whatever fallenness there is in me, I'm going to get back up and cling to God.

Fulfill the marital sexual relationship.

Then a word for those who are married or who may someday be married. A fourth commitment is to maximize our marriages by serving and loving our spouses in our whole relationship, including our physical relationships.

Paul puts this strongly in 1 Corinthians 7:34: "The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. The wife's body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the husband's body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife."

Sexual fulfillment within marriage, which God designed, is so important to God that he calls it a duty. That is the word Paul uses. Paul says you need to think about yourself as a servant, to the extent that you think about your body as belonging to the person to whom you're married. What is , especially in that day, is that he says not only is it true that a wife's body needs to belong to her husband, but a husband's body needs to belong to his wife. Unthinkable in those days.

Make a commitment to maximize your marriage. Talk about your physical relationship with your spouse. Often, there may be subtle differences in sexuality between husbands and wives. It may be that one of you, maybe the wife, requires a multifaceted connectedness. She needs for the two of you to be bonded, not just physically but emotionally, for there to be intimate, gentle, cherishing oneness in a sexual connection. It may be that the husband simply requires geographical proximity. Maybe he's a much simpler creature. As long as you're in the same continuum, he's all set.

One of the great illusions is that this side of life should come naturally.

When my wife, Nancy, and I got married, we were convinced that our honeymoon would be 24, nonstop passion. I told her, "Leave the honeymoon to me." I know how to make a woman happy, I thought. I knew just the place to take her; the right spot to put her in the mood for our honeymoon. Wisconsin. I grew up in northern Illinois, and if you wanted a romantic setting, you went to Wisconsin. I knew how to make a woman happy.

Nancy had several ideas of where paradise for a honeymoon might be; and, much to my surprise, Wisconsin was not one of them. But she trusted me.

After our wedding, we got on a shuttle bus to the airport in Los Angeles. We flew for four hours on a packed flight to Chicago next to a lady with a sick baby on her lap. Not a romantic setting, but I wasn't worried. I had Wisconsin. I knew how to make a woman happy. We got into O'Hare. Our luggage was an hour late. Finally, we got a rental car. I had forgotten how big Wisconsin was. We were going to Door C hours in the car.

So after an hour in the shuttle bus, four in a plane, three at various airports, five in the car, we got to our honeymoon hideaway, the Bates Motel. It was 2 a.m. No one was at the desk. No lights were on. We had to find the key to our room ourselves.

Anybody with brains would have gotten some rest at that point. But I knew how to make a woman happy.

I said to Nancy, "Take a hot shower. Relax." I tried to make the room romantic. I got candles out. I knew women like candles, so I got the biggest one I could find. It burnt like a Duraflame log.

Finally, Nancy came out of a really hot shower. The combination of the steam pouring out from the bathroom and the candle smoke set off the loudest smoke detectors east of the Mississippi River. Everybody in the motel rushed into the hallway. There was smoke and steam pouring out of our room, bells going off like it was the Fourth of July, my wife wrapped up in a couple of towels, and me saying, "It's okay. We're on our honeymoon. It's our first night. I'm a pastor. It's all right."

We were famous. People came up and asked me for my autograph. They figured I knew how to make a woman happy.

Honesty time now. How many of you have had honeymoons where at least one detail did not go exactly the way you planned? And it's not just the honeymoon. It's a great myth that this dimension of a relationship somehow happens on its own.

Some of you are married and have not talked about your physical relationship for a long time. Maybe you need to enhance the romance factor in your relationship. Maybe you need to talk about what most brings joy and pleasure to your spouse. Maybe you've never asked that, and you need, in a sensitive way, at an appropriate time, to ask those kinds of questions.

Maybe there's hurt or embarrassment or trauma in your past, and your spouse doesn't know because you'd be embarrassed to talk about it. Maybe there are things from your past that you need forgiveness for. Maybe you've been disappointed in your physical relationship, and you've responded by withdrawing; you're tempted to give up, and there's resentment in you and it leaks out.

Maybe your physical relationship involves issues that are complicated. They cannot be resolved in one talk. Maybe you need to pray and ask for guidance.

Teach your children godly sexuality.

Commitment number five is for those who have or in the future may have kids. Talk to your children about their sexuality and about God's plan for them.

Deuteronomy 6:67 was given to members of all households in the Old Testament. "These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children." The commandments referred to here are primarily the Ten Commandments, which includes the one about sexuality that Jesus talks about: adultery and coveting somebody else's spouse. God designed the primary place for sexual education to happen in the family.

This doesn't mean you have one talk about the facts of life and get it over with. This involves an ongoing conversation about children's bodies, physical changes they're going through, dating, marriage, how they feel about people of the other gender, responding to questions.

One barrier is that it often feels awkward. My dad grew up in a Swedish household. Swedish families are not famous for having open, frank discussions in this area. His sexual education from his parents consisted of a single statement from his mom before he went to college. His mom said, "John, there will be some bad girls at college." He said, "Where?" That was the only discussion of sexuality that took place for him in his home. Mostly it's not from ill intentions, but because it feels awkward.

There are good books written from a Christian perspective, that are targeted at kids at appropriate ages for appropriate kinds of issues and appropriate places developmentally about their bodies and how reproduction works. If these conversations don't happen naturally or spontaneously for you, I'd encourage you to go to the bookstore. Read through them with your kids, or have them read and then talk about them afterward.

If we will acknowledge our fallenness and live in accountability and practice confession, if we will understand and be grateful for God's amazing gift of sexuality, if we'll resolve to keep God's standard when it comes to sexual behavior, if we'll maximize our marriages as best we can, and if we'll equip our children to honor and follow God, this church will be an island of sanity and wholeness in a sea of sexual chaos and pain all around us.

John Ortberg is a teaching pastor at Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois. He is author of The Life You've Always Wanted.

(c) John Ortberg

Preaching Today Tape #180

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John Ortberg is pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in Menlo Park, California.

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Sermon Outline:

We must acknowledge and confess our sexual fallenness.

Accept God's gift of human sexuality.

Keep God's standards of purity.

Fulfill the marital sexual relationship.

Teach your children godly sexuality.