Living Clean in a Dirty World

Christians Respect Personality

August 18, 1996

Re-worked from January 26, 1992

Matthew 5:27-32

A TIME OF GREAT CHANGE

Every generation takes its turn living on the seismic fault-line where past and present crunch together. Our crunch time comes when everything is shaking, and the upheaval between old and new has never been so fast and violent. Change is the order of the day. Facts that once were considered immutable have been discarded.

A majority of young people believe that there are no absolute truths. The only thing for sure is that tomorrow will be different.

I think it all began with something my children brought home from school twenty-five years ago or so, something called the "new math." At least I'd like to find some one thing I could blame it on.

My friends from IBM showed me different ways to count numbers back then— I had always used my fingers and based my number-sets on "10." Now they had machines— machines that cost millions of dollars and filled whole rooms— machines that could do hundreds and even thousands of complicated calculations in just a few minutes. And these machines only counted up to "2." Or, as they told me, just "on" and "off."

Now I have a desk top computer two or three years old...obsolete already, I know... it cost less than $2,000.00- - and it could do some things those big million-dollar main frame computers of two decades couldn't do— and faster, too—if I knew how to tell it how. I just use it for e-mail and as a word processor— maybe a computer game or two—.

We've gotten pretty blase‚ about progress and change. We have even gotten a little bit contemptuous of the past. If it isn't newer and faster and cheaper and better it isn't worth our time. Almost everything is changing.

CHANGE CAN BE BOTH GOOD AND BAD

Change is not all bad. This past year both Helen and I were in hospital. We both benefited from surgical procedures that were not even heard of just a few years ago. Helen had angioplasty that literally stopped a heart attack before it really got started. I'm grateful for change. But change has not all been good, either. Along with the "new math" and the personal computer has come the "new morality" and the individualization of religion. Yesterday's certainties have been called into question. The traditional family concept is under attack. Many denominations of the Protestant wing of the Church have sold out their prophetic birthright on the altar of keeping up with the latest fads of humanism.

CHANGE IS CHALLENGING THE BIBLE

Among the SACRED THINGS we used to take for granted that have been called in question have been the most basic tenets of the Judeo-Christian heritage. The First Table of the Ten Commandments have been scrapped altogether as absurd and irrelevant. The Second Table has been modified beyond recognition. We now have, for our religious enjoyment, THE SIX SUGGESTIONS!

No commandment has suffered greater attack and vilification than the seventh commandment, Thou shalt not commit adultery. Jesus has not only affirmed the "absurdity" that the commandment is still in effect, but in our text for this morning He has gone way beyond absurdity, and has stated that unless we are prepared to live clean and even to think clean in a dirty world we are guilty of sin.

"Sin," is a word that does not "compute" in our modern thinking.

The reason "sin" is an obsolete word is because it is a word related to "God- things" and God has been "privatized." All the same, Jesus seems to take the word "sin" very seriously. And because Jesus thinks sin is so serious, we are left with a serious problem ourselves: We have to decide who we shall believe and trust with our lives- Jesus— or David Letterman.

I. WHAT IS THE SEVENTH COMMANDMENT? WHAT IS "ADULTERY"?

  1. In the precise English definition, "adultery" is sexual infidelity involving person or persons who have taken marriage vows. But in its broader scope, the seventh commandment means "Thou shalt not have illicit sexual relations."

    The commandment includes the full range of wrongful sexual relations; fornication, or relations by unmarried people; adultery, or marital infidelity; sodomy, or sexual relations with the same sex; or bestiality- sexual relations with an animal. In a word, sexual activity outside of the heterosexual marriage relationship is forbidden by the Word of God, which is focused in this commandment: "Thou shalt not commit adultery."

  2. In this comprehensive definition, "adultery" is irresponsible sex, or intimacy without commitment. The only scripturally condoned context for sexual intimacy is called marriage. All sexual intercourse outside of the marriage relationship is sin, and is condemned by the Word of God.
  3. This means that pre-marital sex, or fornication is a breach of the seventh commandment. [I am sorry to have to be so graphic in my language. But the times demand that Christian ministers speak out.]
    1. Loud voices in our society seem to say that "everybody is into promiscuous sex." They say "It is a fact that cannot be denied"' The message many in public media would have us to believe is that "everyone" is promiscuous, that all young people are sexually active before they are married, and so we need to accept that fact.

      When former Vice President Dan Quayle spoke out on the subject of AIDS and had the audacity to suggest that one answer to AIDS might be abstinence he was reviled and ridiculed. The media moguls of our society can forgive any kinds of character flaws, it would seem, except simply believing what the simple sense of God's Word says.

    2. But according to recent figures of the Department of Health and Human Services, 73 percent of fifteen-year-old girls in America are virgins. Fifty percent are virgins at age seventeen. And it is still sin if 99 percent were doing it— which they are NOT!
  4. This means that homosexual intercourse is also prohibited by the Seventh Commandment, as well as by other more explicit passages elsewhere. It is a sin, even though we are pressured increasingly to see what once was called perversion as "alternate life styles."
    1. I do not attack or despise homosexuals. I care about them. Homosexual people are people, made in God's image, people that God loves. But by the same token as a Christian minister I do not condone any homosexual activity; all such activity is sin.
    2. I do not condemn homosexual sin any more or any less than I condemn heterosexual activity outside the bonds of marriage. All pre-marital or extra-marital sexual intimacy is sin, and comes under the condemnation of God.

II. WHY IS SEXUAL SIN WRONG? WHY IS IT SIN?

  1. Because God says so. That should, perhaps, be enough. But God always has good reasons. Some of these reasons which we can follow are:
  2. Sexual transgression is wrong because it cheapens and threatens the integrity of the family. What is meant as love within total trust and commitment becomes self-gratification. It corrupts the relationship which mirrors the love which Jesus Christ has for you and me as members of the Bride of Christ, the Church.
  3. Sexual transgression is wrong because it subverts or distorts the normal result of intimacy, which is the conception and rearing of children in a stable and pure family situation.

    The abortion holocaust, with more than 1,000,000 babies killed each year in our country as a malignant form of birth control after the fact is an evil testimony to the truth that sex outside of marriage is sin.

  4. Sexual transgression is wrong because sooner or later it makes the I-Thou into the I-It. In refusing or denying a permanent vow of commitment, it
    1. desecrates the image of God in another human being; and
    2. it undermines the integrity of all society because of damage to the family.
  5. This is not an exhaustive list of "why adultery is sin." Your own soul mirrors the image of God, and testifies within you to the truth that God's commandment is right! Purity is better than defilement! We are all made in the image of God, as far as we may have fallen. In quiet times of reflection every person comes to say with Isaiah (and I paraphrase from the 6th chapter): "I am unclean! Would that I might be made clean!"

SEXUAL SIN IS ACTUALLY A SYMPTOM OF SOME DEEPER, MORE PROFOUND PERVERSION: THE LOSS OF GOD FROM HIS RIGHTFUL PLACE!

III. IS SEXUAL PURITY POSSIBLE? CAN IT COEXIST WITH WHOLENESS?

[If I live a celibate life outside of marriage will I somehow be less than human? No!]

  1. Sexual appetite is the only normal appetite of which complete indulgence is made to appear not only acceptable but impossible to control.
  2. Sexual purity does NOT mean an end to sexuality. We are made by God in two sexes. Sexual attraction is built in. It is not moral or immoral, any more than any other normal appetite. But like every other appetite it must be brought into line with legitimate restraints.
  3. Sexual restraint is commanded in the Bible. God's commands are also His promises. He never asks His people to do what He is not prepared to enable them to fulfill.

IV. PURITY MUST COME FROM THE INSIDE OUT!

  1. PURITY CANNOT BE LEGISLATED IN SOCIETY
    1. THE SEXUAL SICKNESS OF OUR SOCIETY IS A SYMPTOM OF A PEOPLE WHO HAVE FORGOTTEN GOD.

      We want to attack this sexual problem by attacking the smut-mongers of society. Let's get rid of porno— let's get the TV cleaned up! [I want to attack on that front, too!] But what we may not be able to see is that the sexual problem is more of a symptom than it is simply a disease. The root of the trouble is not sex, it is self!

    2. THE CHURCH IS OCCUPIED WITH OTHER THINGS ??

      What we desperately need is a genuine revival, a spiritual awakening of mighty proportions, that will bring Christians everywhere to put God back in first place in our lives. We are NOT in the minority!

      It isn't that Christians are in the minority. It isn't that nobody is going to church. George Cornell, a writer for the Associated Press worked out a comparison of church attendance and sports attendance for one year (1980), and added up figures for professional and college football, baseball in major and minor leagues, basketball, hockey- all pro leagues- soccer, tennis, boxing, flat and harness racing and even dog racing. He came up with a total sports attendance of 356 million for the year in the USA. Attendance at churches and synagogues was thirteen times greater, totalling 4.7 billion. More people attend worship every month than attend any sports whatever in the entire year. All evidence suggests that the pattern has not changed in the past twelve years. 88 percent of Americans belong to the Judeo-Christian heritage. But we have forgotten the secret of spiritual power is that when God's people cry out to Him He hears and sends refreshing and revival!

    3. A CHURCH IN TOUCH WITH GOD WILL HAVE A CHANCE TO CALL THE NATION TO PURITY

      God's people look to pass legislature and to take part in boycotts, and in various kinds of anti-this action or anti-that letter campaign. There is a place in the Church for these.

      But this is a spiritual problem, and we must fight with spiritual weapons. God's people need to clean up our own acts! We are getting used to the sound of evil! We live in Sodom and Gomorrah, and we all too easily get used to hearing things that a few years ago would have shocked us beyond speaking.

    4. YOUR CHILDREN AND MINE ( Let alone "the world,") ARE NOT GOING TO AUTOMATICALLY LIVE CLEAN IN A DIRTY WORLD UNLESS WE ARE SERIOUS ABOUT OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD!

      The secret to saving our own children just now is not laws (first;) it is Jesus Christ as Lord of your home! Jesus Christ first in all that you do!

  2. OUR PERSONAL LIVES MUST BE MADE PURE FROM THE INSIDE OUT, AS WELL. If society cannot be legislated into purity, neither can you simply force your inner self to be clean. If the uncleanness of our age has invaded your private world, you need to heed Christ's call to purity!
    1. OWN WILL POWER CANNOT 'LEGISLATE' PURITY!. It is not a supreme act of will, to stop acting a certain way, or stop saying certain words, or stop thinking evil thoughts that will purify our hearts. We must bring our lives to the Cross. It is impossible for a person to cleanse his/her own mind and heart.
    2. ONLY GOD WITHIN CAN MAKE AND KEEP US CLEAN It is possible to submit the mind and heart to God, and ask Him to undertake the job.

      The key here is: submit.

      What must be done is a simple surrender, an acknowledgment, saying, "Lord, I don't even know my own mind! But I am willing for You to take control, to make me willing, to cleanse my mind and heart!"

    3. Addictions are strong! There must be submission to a stronger One. [The addictions of evil are many and varied. One pernicious one is pornography. Some of those in church today will have this addiction!]

CONCLUSION:

We are in a deadly battle for life itself! We will never learn to keep the Seventh Commandment, or the other five of Table Two until we remember the First Four!

When we bring God back into the equation, we will find purity, beginning in the center of our being!

Prayer

No. 490 (STL) O to Be like Thee (Verses 1 and 5 only)