PAUL TRIPP MINISTRIES, INC.

Transcription

1 PAUL TRIPP MINISTRIES, INC. So You Want to Be Pure? March 7, Corinthians 6:12-20 Over the last few months as I've been thinking about what we re now about to do and considering what in the world is purity, the Lord began to reveal to me the impurity of my own heart. I resisted that. I want to think that I'm one of the good guys. I know how to fix the bad guys. That's my job, and God revealed to me how I am yet in need of His rescuing grace. I think about what we re about to consider is a particular area of deceit for us. It's a particular area of self-righteousness for us. It's a particular area of resistance for us. So I m going to do what we don't normally do here at Tenth. I'm going to pray one more time and ask for God's particular care for us during this next moment of time. Let s pray: Lord, my prayer to you in this moment is simple, that You would deliver us from self-righteousness; You would deliver us from deceit; You would deliver us from resistance; You would open our hearts to what You have to say to us from Your Word; that we may be people who increasingly live in purity of heart and purity of hands to your glory. In Jesus name, Amen. Most of you know I'm a Center City dweller, and as a Center City dweller, I love the Metro paper. I love the Metro paper for one simple reason; it's free. I'm enough of a Philadelphia guy who has lived here since 1987 that I mourned when the daily news would cost me another quarter. I calculated how much that would mean for year, and five years, and 10 years. Well, somebody recently gave me a copy of the Metro. I don't know how I missed this. This is January 14, On the front of the paper is this gripping picture of Haiti's despair, and on the back is something so shockingly opposite of that; it's hard to take in. On the back is this ad: 74% of men say they would have an affair if they didn't get caught. Oh, I'm not done yet. What are you waiting for? I ve blocked it out; there's a website there. It's a website for husbands and wives who are interested in a discreet affair, and you can join this website and have that experience. We have gone sexually crazy. No longer is sexuality the expression of long-term, committed relationship in marriage; sex, now, is entertainment, sex is a principal means of advertisement; sex is a way of engendering relationships, something it should never be. In fact, we have now taken on sex as a replacement identity. We are literally putting knives to our bodies and placing in plasticine substances in order that we would have a stronger, more alluring, sexual self. We've gone crazy!

2 And brothers and sisters, we must admit that that craziness is not just outside the church. I'm very afraid for us that we would point the finger, that we would be quasi condemning, we d be smug and we wouldn t realize we are in trouble! As I prepared to preach, this'll sound selfish, my heart didn t first break for you, it broke for me. I want you to turn with me to I Corinthians 6. Paul, in this passage, (we are going to read verses 12 to 20), is speaking into a sex saturated culture. There are a lot of analogies between the Corinthian culture and our culture, but he s speaking into something else. He s speaking into two very dangerous heresies that were in the Corinthian church. The first one is captured by that phrase, All things are lawful for me. You notice if you look at verse 12, that s in quotes, which we ll read in just a minute. It was a misunderstanding, a distortion of the freedom that we have in Christ. No longer do we sit under the weight of the requirement of the law because Christ has fulfilled the law on our behalf, and so Corinthian theologians were saying: That means because Jesus has fulfilled the law, you can do whatever you want; it doesn t make any difference. There was another heresy distortion. It was that the body doesn't matter; you see that in verse 13: Food was meant for the stomach, and stomach for food. That was a way of saying that because God's work is a work to give birth to our spirits and to renew our hearts, that the body doesn't make any difference. What you do with the body doesn't make any difference; anyway the body is going to be destroyed in the final analysis. Well, the body is not going to be destroyed; true gospel theology says, The body is going to be resurrected, so the body does make a difference. And so, Paul is speaking into that context, this sexually saturated culture, much like ours, and this culture that had abused liberty and had negated the importance of what one does with the body. Let me read for you, 12-20: All things are lawful for me, (notice the quotes), but not all things are helpful. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be enslaved by anything. Food is meant for the stomach, and the stomach for food; (notice the quotes), 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? Never! Or do you not know that he who is joined to 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. For every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually 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? For you were bought with a price: so glorify God in your body.

3 Now, I don't know if you noticed, as I was reading, there are only two commands in this passage. These two commands really do capture what it means to be pure, what purity is, what purity does. And then those two commands are rooted in the passage in four significant spiritual realities. So, what we are going to do is look at the two commands first. Now, I want to start with the very last sentence in the passage there in verse 20: So glorify God in your body. Don't mistake what Paul is saying; the context is human sexuality. He is saying, Glorify God with your sexuality. Now, immediately when you hear that, you must understand that sexuality, if I can glorify God with my sexuality, sexuality in itself is not an ugly, dirty, bad thing. Sex belongs to the Lord; sex doesn t belong to Satan, and in itself isn t nasty, dirty and dark. Sex doesn t belong to you to use any way that you would like to use it. Sex belongs to the Lord, and it belongs to the Lord because human sexuality is the wise and beautiful creation of a holy and wise God. You will never understand sexuality if you don t start there. God made the particular shape of the male and female body and the way those two bodies coalesce in that physical relationship. God made your eyes that can see and understand beauty and can see depth and shape and those things reflect His glory. God made every sense that you would employ in sexuality, senses of smell and sight and touch; all of that is created by God. God created the particular members of your body that must function in certain ways in order for there to be proper sexual enjoyment. All of that is the wise creation of a holy God. And that means this: That I don't own one piece of my sexuality; it's all owned by the Creator. Sex belongs to the Lord! And, we should not be embarrassed, and we should not be reticent to recognize the glory of God expressed in human sexuality. But we must understand what this call is about to recognize that God is Creator and to have my sexual life bring glory to Him means this, oh, this is very important. Your sexual life must never only ever be driven just by your pleasure because the pleasure that you should be more motivated by, and more concerned by, in every moment of sexuality is the pleasure of God, that God, in every way, would be pleased with every way you express your human sexuality. Now that immediately means that we must only be involved in this area according to God's plan. What's God's plan? One man, one woman in the context of committed marriage. And so, any time what I'm actually motivated by is my glory, the glory of my fulfillment, the glory of my momentary titillation, the glory of my satisfaction, the glory of seduction and capture, all of those shadow glories when they are the things that are ruling me, I'm in no way marching toward purity. I'm marching toward impurity because the deeper drive than my pleasure must be a drive that God would find pleasure in every way I live in this area. Now, I would ask you: Is that the world of sexuality for you? Are your thoughts, are your desires, the use of your eyes, the communication of your mouth, all of those things driven by a desire that God would be glorified, that God would be pleased with every desire, every thought, every look, every action, every motivation? Listen, I don't know

4 what that does for you, but that drives me to the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ because I'm so aware of how much I'm still motivated by my own glory, how much I'm able to worship my own pleasure, and how much I need again His rescuing, forgiving, transforming grace. How thankful I am that He stood in my place, that He took my sin, that He received my punishment so I can run into His presence; I don't have to run away in shame and fear and guilt. I can run to Him instead of away from Him. Glorify God in every aspect of your sexuality. The pleasure that must drive your sexual life is the pleasure of God. There is a second side, it's there in verse 18, the only other command in the passage: Flee from sexual immorality. Now, what that immediately tells us is, this good thing that God has created has become a dark and dangerous thing. What do you run from? You run from danger; you run from something that would hurt you. And so, Paul is saying: Isn t it a terrible thing that this good thing that God created, by sin, has now become a dangerous thing, a thing that can seduce you and deceive you and harm you, and, yes, even destroy you. You can watch people be systematically destroyed by sexual addiction. You can watch the life sucked out of their soul. Now, that means I run every place I need to run from anything that Scripture would describe as being sexually immoral. I don't think we do that; I think, as a church, we've gotten pretty good at playing on the boundaries, going as far as we can go in telling ourselves, Well the Bible wouldn t really call this sin. Listen, if you're at God's fences, and you re pressing so far toward the fence that you have fence marks in your face, you're not fleeing. People who have fence marks in their faces are not fleeing very well; they're moving toward the thing. If you're a woman and you're reading romance novels, you are reading Christianized female pornography. And you say, Well, my romance novels don't have illicit sex in them, but what they do is they erect a world of desire that you'll never be able to achieve in your real life. Ladies, the men on those novels don't look like any human men I know. They all have one name Mr. Airbrush. That is evil seduction of your heart, and you need to run. Put away People magazine, OK, US magazines; why do you need to read 10 articles on Tiger Woods s sexual life? How is that going to help you? And, you don't need to see that 19- year-old starlet, half clothed, who has decided already to write an autobiography. That s playing on the boundaries; that may mean that there are things on your flat screen that you should not watch because they're moving toward immorality, not running away from it. And because we re not all tempted in the same way, all of us must ask the question: What does it mean for me to flee? I am very concerned, and this will upset some of you that while we have judgmental and condemning spirits toward people outside of this building, so much so, that we can, in moments, laugh over some homophobic joke. We are giving away our souls because we re dancing on the boundaries rather than running away. May the Lord forgive us! Powerful commands!

5 And so what does purity look like? I wake up every morning, and what motivates me in this area is glorify and flee, glorify and flee, glorify and flee! What does it mean for me to conduct myself in this area to the glory of God? Listen, if you're a woman, and you enjoy sort of the sanitized flirt, whose glory is that about? Where is that going to lead? If you re a man, and you re standing in the store in front of a rack of magazines, and you know the weakness of your heart, where do you think that's going to lead? Could you honestly say, I'm about to glorify God with what I do next? If you've been tempted by a thought, and you are now ready to go with that thought and to go where those visual images would take you in your brain, could you say, What I'm doing next is glorify and flee, glorify and flee, glorify and flee? Purity is found in the middle of glorify and flee. May God help us! First, admit our need. And, second, to find the help that can only be found at the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. And, third, hear what I'm about to say, seek help. There are people in this room right now; you need to believe in the body of Christ; you need to believe in your elders; you need to believe in your pastors; you need to believe in the maturity that God put in the body of Christ; you're in trouble! Seek help! Now: Four redemptive realities in which these protective and preventative commands are rooted. The first one is the reality of the ongoing war for the mastery of your heart. Verse 12: All things are lawful for me, but not all things are helpful. All things are lawful for me, (Uh! Listen to this.) But I will not be enslaved by anything. It's this side of eternity; it's never enough to say things are permissible because the issue actually isn't just whether this is permissible, the deeper issue is in the light, in the face of this permissible thing, what is ruling my heart?...because my heart is always under some kind of rulership, because I, by my very nature, am a worshiping being. And so, my heart is either being ruled by the Creator, seeking to live for His glory, glad to stay inside of His boundaries, or my heart is being ruled by some aspect of the creation. Now, stay with me; the pleasures of creation are enslaving because the lies of the pleasure of creation are lies. Creation can't do for you what the Lord can do, the Creator can do. You don't get identity there; you don't get lasting fulfillment there; you don't get the peace and rest of heart you seek there. Physical creation doesn't have the ability to heal your soul, and so what happens is: If you feed on those pleasures, asking those pleasures to be your own personal messiah, then they have a very short shelf life. And so, you have got to go back quickly because what you get there, doesn't last because it doesn't have the ability to give lasting relief to your soul, and so you go back. But as you go back again and again, what gave you pleasure before, doesn't give you pleasure now, so you need more and greater and bigger and more frequently, and before long, this thing that you sort of had under control, now has you totally addicted. Danger! You have to recognize the war that is yet being fought for the mastery of your heart. Second is the reality of eternity's verses 13 to 14:

6 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 the Lord for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God raised the Lord, and will also raise us up by His power. Listen, the culmination of redemption in the resurrection of the body gives sanctity and holiness and importance to your physical body. What you do with your physical body matters! But there's something very powerful, also, about understanding that we are marching toward the resurrection; we re marching toward eternity. If you understand that we re marching toward eternity, you then get what the agenda is for the here and now. Think about this: One of the most dangerous aspects of Western culture is that Western culture is taking eternity away from us. In the modern media or modern education, you never hear anything about eternity. So if you lop off eternity, then what is the nature of the game? The nature of the game, if this is all you have, so if this is all you have, grab all the pleasure you can get because life ends and it s done. You see, we don't believe that; we believe that s shockingly untrue. We believe that this is a short moment before an extended life. Does that make sense? Most of our life will be on the other side, and what is this short moment about? This short moment is not about your delightful pursuit of your definition of pleasure. No! This moment is preparation for a final destination. And so, everything that I do in the here and now must be done with that preparatory paradigm. Now, what does that mean? What's the goal of the here and now? What's the agenda for this moment? Here it is: That I would progressively submit all that I have and all that I am to the Lordship of the Jesus Christ who will be my Lord for eternity. I'm actually, by sanctifying grace, being prepared for that long-term experience of eternity. The agenda for the here and now is progressive growth in holiness (i.e.), submission in all parts of my life to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. And so, a gratuitous, self-oriented, outside of God's boundary sexuality has no place in that agenda because everything that I do with my sexual self must be part of that progressive submission to the Lordship of Jesus Christ as I'm being prepared, by His grace, for eternity. Third reality, it's the reality of your new identity in Christ, verses 15 to 17: Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make the members of a prostitute? Never! Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For it is written, The two will become one flesh. But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. What an incredible mystery. My identity, now, hear what I'm about to say, is in Christ. I have been joined by grace to Christ. In fact, Paul says, Every part of you has been joined to Christ; all of your members have been joined to Christ. And, he actually

7 quotes that passage there from Genesis. Now, what Paul is doing is, he is giving us a marriage metaphor. He's saying, You have been, by grace, wed to Christ; you ve been married to Christ. And so, all that makes up you, no longer belongs to you. And, just as a person in marriage doesn't have the right to do whatever he wants with his physical self, in the same way, you don't have that right to use your members anyway you would choose to use those because those members now have been united to Christ, and it's unthinkable to Paul that I would reunite what belongs to Christ to a prostitute. That melts his brain! He says, May it never be. I have been wed to Christ. I belong to Christ. I'm one to Christ. Now, that means that you may be a person who has never committed the physical act of adultery whereby you have stepped outside of your marriage, and you haven t had a sexual relationship with somebody who was not your husband or wife, but you may be committing this spiritual adultery that Paul is talking about again and again in your personal life because you're offering your members to something other than Christ driven by the gratification of your own sinful nature. Fourth principal: Gospel reality, and that is that you don't belong to you. Verses 18 to 20: Flee from sexual immorality. For every other sin a person commits is outside of 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? So you are bought with a price: so glorify God in your body. Paul uses, for us to understand the ownership of Christ over us, two images. One is very clear in the passage and one not so clear. It s the image of a slave and an image of a temple. The slave is bought with a price, and that slave loses independent choice because he is now owned by a master who, because he owns him, can tell him what to do. He says, Don't you understand that by the blood of Jesus, by His life death and resurrection, you were redeemed; you have been bought with a price? That means in every way that you could think of this, there's nothing of you that belongs to you anymore; it all belongs to Christ, you are not your own. That means for some of us, that would be a good thing for us just to repeat. You d get up in the morning, and you would say to yourself, I'm not my own, so glorify and flee. That would be a really good start to maybe a better day. And then, he uses a second image: It s the image of the temple that God, in the glory of grace, has now chosen us to be the place where He and His holiness and power would live. We are the temple of God, and so, if Almighty Holy God would choose me to be His temple, I don't want to do anything that would defile the temple of Almighty God, in any way. Listen, if somebody ran into this room at this moment and started graffiti on the walls and the windows, we would be shocked. But you can regularly graffiti the walls of

8 the temple of the Holy Spirit with sexual sin and not know that that's what you're doing. But you're actually defiling the temple of a holy God. Where does this leave us? Well, I said this earlier; it leads us to the foot of the cross of Jesus Christ because I would look at these profound realities and I would say, Oh, Lord, so often I have esteemed the creation more than the Creator; so often I don't care about eternity; I would rather have the comfort and ease and pleasure of the here and now ; so often, I don't act like I've been joined to Christ. I act like I'm an independent operating human being. So often, I forget that I am the temple of the Most High God, and I shouldn't do anything in any way that would defile that temple. And so, once again, I prayed, Oh, Lord, meet me in Your grace. I am so thankful that You have taken my guilt and You've taken my shame. I don't have to run into darkness; I don t have to run away from You. I don't have to avoid and deny and rewrite my story and shift the blame and all those things that are gospel irrationalities. I accept your sacrifice as being sufficient, and I run to You for help. Help me! Help me! Help me! It's right for us to be concerned, brothers and sisters, about what's happening in our culture. It's right! It s godly to do that. But we must start by being concerned for what's happening in us and receive grace and forgiveness and grace of power and deliverance that can only be found in Jesus. For some of you, this is a hard sermon to hear because your lives have been broken by the sexual sin of another. For some of you, this sermon is hard to hear because you don't know how to get from where you are to where you need to be. And you wonder the devastating consequences of beginning to step forward with confession. For some of you, it's hard to hear because you're not sure you really believe the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ; you re really not sure you believe that you can be free. I would say to you, run to your Creator, run to your Savior, run to your Deliverer. It is there and there alone that help can be found; don't run from Him. Don't comfort yourself by saying, I surely don't struggle as much as this person does. Don't comfort yourself by saying, Well, I'm not sure that I'm doing anything that God would say is wrong. Gladly look at yourself in the mirror of God's Word, and receive the grace that God always gives to those who will come to him in humility. Let s pray: Lord, thank you for the beautiful truths of your Word. We've really only been able to survey them this morning. Thank you for that bifactoral call that protects us from us, to glorify and flee, glorify and flee. May we run to You in our neediness for the help that only You can give us. May we be thankful to the body of Christ. May we seek the resources of help that are available there, and may we be delivered by Your grace. In Jesus name, Amen Paul Tripp Ministries