Flee Baby Flee
Genesis 2:19-25 I Corinthians 6:12-20
We are in our 3rd message on guardrails. Guardrails are a system designed to keep vehicles from straying into dangerous or off limit areas. Guardrails are designed to cause a limited amount of damage now, to prevent major damage or loss of life later. The guardrails are always placed in the safety zone. A guardrail is a personal rule, or standard of behavior that becomes a matter of conscience.
A guardrail is designed to light up our conscience before we hurt ourselves or others. Our culture does not like guardrails when it comes to actual behavior, it prefers painted lines and guidelines. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the area we are going to talk about today which is sex. It is amazing how many of the shows and movies we watch glorify sex outside of marriage and present affairs as delightful. We laugh at them and enjoy looking forward to the next episode.
But then when our daughter in law who has an affair, it isn’t so funny. Or if our husband is going with his secretary, it’s not so romantic. Of if our grandson is the one with three girls pregnant at the same time, it’s not something to joke about. We realize that real people are being hurt, and lives are being devastated by the irresponsible acts of others. As much as we want to watch those shows, if we’re honest with ourselves, what we want most for those we love the most is fidelity and faithfulness.
When our sons and daughters get married, we want them to keep their vows to be faithful to each other. We don’t want our kids going off to college jumping in bed with whoever comes along. If someone comes into our lives, we want them to be faithful to us and us faithful to them. We actually want for ourselves and our loved ones, what God wants for them which is to have the best lives possible.
I hope when you heard the Old Testament reading, you discovered once again where sex came from. Sex was God’s idea. Look at how he created the man and the woman. He structured them in such a way that they could literally become one body. He even said, “a man shall leave his father and mother, and is untied to his wife, and they become one flesh.” Chapter two of Genesis ends with the words, “Adam and his wife were both naked and felt no shame.” There was nothing dirty or bad about sex when God created them. Sex didn’t have to be done in the dark.
God gave them this wonderful gift of sex to enjoy, and God gave it to them to enjoy in the context of a committed marriage relationship. The word leave means to put everything else at a lower priority including parents to this other person. The word cleave or united means to stick together as something that was glued together. You can’t rip it apart without doing damage to both parts.
Now knowing all that you know about how sex has been misused and how families have been destroyed, if God told you to come up with a simple rule for using sex in a way that honors both people involved and the people that loved them, what would your rule be?
I think the most difficult rule we have in the bible is the new commandment that Jesus gave to us. The old standard was do to others as you would have them do to you. The new standard is to love one another just as Christ has loved you. The new standard means doing what it takes to present this other person in a right standing right relationship with God. It means seeing this other person, not as an object of desire, but as a child of God who belongs to God. God wants you to protect His child.
Sexual temptation is such an issue for us, because we see the other person as someone who is going to fulfill a desire that is inside of us. Once that desire is fulfilled, there is a bond that takes place in which something is both given and something is taken. As a society, we know there is something different about sexual behavior. You can see the confusion in our laws in the Ohio Revised Code. Listen to the definition of what “obscene is in our Ohio Law”
(F) When considered as a whole, and judged with reference to ordinary adults or, if it is designed for sexual deviates or other specially susceptible group, judged with reference to that group, any material or performance is "obscene" if any of the following apply:
(1) Its dominant appeal is to prurient interest;
(2) Its dominant tendency is to arouse lust by displaying or depicting sexual activity, masturbation, sexual excitement, or nudity in a way that tends to represent human beings as mere objects of sexual appetite;
Does that provide a clear guardrail of identifying obscene sexual material? Does anyone know what a prurient interest is? Or listen to what our law tells us about sexual relationships involving teens and minors.
The Ohio Revised Code tells us, “if an 18 year old has sex with a 13, 14, 15 year old that is a felony of the 4th degree. If the person is less than 4 yours older, than it is a misdemeanor of the first degree, but if the person is 28, then it is a felony of the third degree. Any person have sex with someone under the age of 13 is guilty of rape. Yet nobody is telling our kids this, and some are committing a felony of the first degree.
Do we really want juniors in high school having a felony conviction for having sex with a freshman whose birthday came late? Do we want ninth graders with felony rape convictions for having sex with 7th graders? Why do we have these laws? It is because even our society knows there is some value in protecting the sexual nature of our bodies.
How did the early Christians look at the areas of sex and what was the basis for it? The apostle Paul is writing at a time when sexual immorality is everywhere. In Corinth, there was the Temple of Diana. Diana was the goddess of sex and love. In her temple, there were over 1,000 female priestesses. In reality, they were nothing more than prostitutes. Because to worship Diana, you had to have sexual intercourse with one of the temple prostitutes. Many in this church were used to this lifestyle. They reasoned that God had saved their souls and that their bodies were different. They had the mind set that said “What I do with my body has no impact on my spiritual walk.” This is worlds away from the truth!
Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 6:18-20 (NIV2011) 18 Flee from sexual immorality. This is what we want people to do that we love and care about. We want them to be able to get themselves out of situations that could cause them future harm and damage. Paul is setting up a guardrail, when you see sexual temptation coming, take off running.
Don’t stay there and flirt with it. It is something that is going to come to all of us, so we need to have a personal guardrail set up. There will be times you need to run when you really want to stay and see just how close to the line you can get.
But our culture gives us the exact opposite message. It wants to give us white painted lines. It glorifies the office affair. It lifts up the beautiful couples sleeping together on shows and they never have the kind of problems that married couples have. Then even wake up in bed with sweet smelling breath and perfect mascara on their faces.
Our society encourages us to commit adultery and then wants to destroy us with that adultery if we run for political office years later. It encourages us to dress seductively, and then objects when we are treated as sexual objects.
The Apostle Paul is going to give believers two reasons for why they should flee from sexual immorality. The first one is this, “All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body.” Here is the reason our society does not know what to do with sex, because it realizes that there is something different about sex.
While on the one hand, our society glorifies sexual freedom as something to be celebrated, we also know that it can have a negative impact on our lives for many years to come.
If someone steals a $1000 dollars from you, you may be very angry with the person. But if the person came back a month later and apologized to you and gave you $4000 as part of the process you probably could say, we’re even. But if that person raped your child or committed adultery with your spouse, or took advantage of you sexually, somehow, simply offering you money seems insulting. Something inside of you rises with anger.
When there is sexual abuse and incest in the home, we expect the victims to come out traumatized. Their bodies and their spirits have been sinned against. Sexual abuse occurs far too often in our homes even in the church. We live in a sex saturated culture which rejects boundaries. Just because someone looks as though they wouldn’t do something, does not mean they are not doing something horrible to other people.
Do you have family guardrails for how people walk around in your home with your kids and adults? Do you realize your older kids may be sexually abusing the younger ones. Your cousins, your uncles, your nieces, your husband, your wife, your nephews, your aunts and others close to you can be victimizing your own children.
When two people consent to have sex, they are giving away something to the other person that God has said belongs only to a person they are married to. They are giving away their fidelity or faithfulness. They are giving away their bodies and their futures over to the control of someone else. Sometimes depending on who they were with, they are forced to live in fear for the rest of their lives. They yield themselves to the other person’s mercy. They regret from having to do so. The abuser has to live in fear knowing that one day this person may get the strength to expose what was done to them.
Couples who live together deceive themselves into thinking, since they are not married, it will be easier if they chose to break up and go their separate ways. When a couple that’s been living together for a while breaks up, the pain is just as great as when a couple is married.
You can’t escape the reality that sex was designed to bind two people together so that they could become one not only physically but emotionally and physically as well. When we remove sex from the arena God intended, pain is sure to follow. What guardrails are you setting up once you begin dating someone seriously.
We are learning more and more about pornography. We find that it can be an addiction just as strong as cocaine or crack. It not only demands more and more, with it being more and more explicit, we now know it ruins our ability to be in healthy relationships years later. It becomes another form of betrayal and unfaithfulness for those in marriages.
God knew this over four thousand years ago when he told us “do not lust after another man’s wife. Proverbs 6:25 (NIV2011) 25 Do not lust in your heart after her beauty or let her captivate you with her eyes. Pornography is a huge problem in the church. What guardrails are you setting up for it in your life? The first thing you need to do is to tell someone you trust that you are struggling with it.
The second reason the apostle gives for believers to flee from sexual immorality has to do with our direct relationship with God. When we think of God’s house, we often think of churches and temples. These places are simply buildings that the church gathers in. The temple is somewhere much for sacred and close to home.
The Apostle Paul writes: 19 Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; 20 you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.
When you gave your life to Christ, the Holy Spirit literally came to dwell inside your body, You are a temple. Not only that you don’t belong to yourself you were bought with a price. If God is in my body, then wherever I take my body, I’m taking God with it. Whatever I do with my body, I am involving God with it. Earlier Paul made the point, look you can’t keep going to the temple with the prostitutes of Diana, because you are joining God’s body with that of a prostitute. It goes back to you are sinning against God’s body.
God sees you as being sacred and holy, not because you are some goody two shoes thinking you are better than someone else. He sees you as holy because of the Holy Spirit that is living inside of you seeking to make you more like Christ. God sees you as being very valuable not because of the things you can do for him, but because of the price He paid in order for you to be in a right relationship with him. It costs God the death of his Son Jesus Christ to purchase you from the effect of sin and death.
God’s forgiveness and grace can help us to overcome any kind of sexual sin, and nothing in our past can keep us from being able to come to Him. He promises to help us overcome any kind of sexual problem. If anyone is in Christ, that person becomes a new creation.
When we look at each other the way God looks at us, then we understand that we have no right to hurt each other with sexual immorality. It violates Jesus’ command to love each other as He loves us. God is not anti-sex. God is pro us and what’s best for us and the body of Christ in the long run. The guardrails he sets up in these areas are there to give us the most meaningful lives that we can live. He’s provided us with the boundaries, but we need to commit to some guardrails asking the Holy Spirit to lead and guide us in the process.
Some of the main ideas in this message come from Andy Stanley and his Guardrail series at Northpoint Church.
