Guarding the Honor of Marriage - Part 2 (Hebrews 13:4) | Worship Service

Good morning and thank you for joining us today. On the last Sunday in February,.

Welcome to Kootenai Church. Would you please stand as we begin. Did I say February? Wow, this is gonna be a great set. January. Join us as we do a call to worship from Psalm 2. And it says in verses 1 to 4, why do the nation's rage and the people's meditate on a vain thing.

The kings of the earth take their stand and the ruler take counsel together against Yahweh and against His anointed saying, let us tear their fetters apart and cast away their cords from us. He who sits in the heavens laughs, the Lord mocks them.

So join us as.

We sing the psalm together. Why do the nation's rage? One announcement this.

Morning and that is that next week is our annual business meeting where we recognize new members and talk about the ministry of the church, things coming up in the next year, and report on some things that have gone on in the past year.

So we would heavily encourage you to attend that. You don't have to be a member to attend that. If you're interested in Kootenai Community Church, this will be your opportunity to see what goes on in the ministry here and to hear about what we are doing.

And that will be after a potluck right after the service. Will you please turn now to Psalm 84. And I would just point you to your bulletin, by the way, for information on what to bring and what to expect for next week.

Psalm 84, the prescript says this is for the choir director on the Gitteth, a psalm of the sons of Korah. How lovely are your dwelling places, O Lord of hosts. My soul longed and even yearned for the courts of the Lord.

My heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God. The bird also has found a house and a swallow, a nest for herself, where she may lay her young. Even your altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God.

How blessed are those who dwell in your house. They are ever praising you. How blessed is the man whose strength is in you, in whose heart are the highways to Zion. Passing through the valley of Bacchae, they make it a spring.

The early rain also covers it with blessings. They go from strength to strength. Every one of them appears before God in Zion. O Lord God of hosts, hear my prayer. Give ear, O God of Jacob. Behold our shield, O God, and look upon the face of your anointed.

For a day in your courts is better than a thousand outside. I would rather stand at the threshold of the house of my God than dwell in the tents of wickedness. For the Lord God is a sun and shield. The Lord gives grace and glory.

No good thing does he withhold from those who walk up rightly. O Lord of hosts, how blessed is the man who trusts in you. Will you stand with me as we open in prayer? Let's bow our heads. Our Father, our hearts resonate with what we have just read in this psalm.

A desire and a longing to be in your presence and before your throne. A longing to be in the house of God where the people of God meet together to rejoice and fellowship, to serve you and to worship, to sing your praise.

And it is a blessing to us that we get to do that here today. That you have called us to yourself, that you have called us out of the world, out of the kingdom of darkness and into the kingdom of your son.

You have called us to bear your name before the nations, to bear your name before a watching world, to bear your name before one another and to honor and glorify you. You've called us to sing praise, to worship, to offer our lives as a living sacrifice to you.

And we pray that you would be honored through that sacrifice and through our offering here today. Be honored and glorified in our meditation upon your truth, our time of worship together, our singing.

We do pray that the words that are on our tongues may indeed be true and faithful expressions of the sentiments of our heart. As we cling to you, as we love you, as we worship you, be honored amongst your people and glorified in this place today.

We pray in the name of Christ. Amen.

The earth give way, for heaven's lights grow cold. Almighty God, my strong, be still, be still, all I see.

In chapter 3, verses 7 to 11, it says, but whatever things were gained to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ. More than that, I count all things to be lost because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered in loss of all things and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ and be found in him.

Not having a righteousness of my own which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God upon faith, that I may know him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings being conformed to his death, in order that I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.

Join us as we sing together, Cling to Christ.

Turn now, if you will please, to Hebrews chapter 13. Hebrews chapter 13. We'll read the first six verses of this chapter. Hebrews 13. Let love of the brethren continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers for by this some have entertained angels without knowing it.

Remember the prisoners as though in prison with them and those who are ill-treated since you yourselves also are in the body. Marriage is to be held in honor among all and the marriage bed is to be undefiled.

For fornicators and adulterers God will judge. Make sure that your character is free from the love of money, being content with what you have, for he himself has said, I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you.

So that we may confidently say, the Lord is my helper. I will not be afraid. What will man do to me? Let's pray together. Our Father, we come now to your word and we desire to hear the voice of our God in the pages of his written word.

We pray, Father, that you would send your spirit to give us understanding in this text so that in our obedience and in the yielding of our lives, our hearts, and our minds to this truth, that we may honor and glorify the Son upon whom you have set that honor and glory.

We pray that you would be magnified through our contemplation of your word, that you would grant us soft and humble hearts to apply these truths and to honor you through that. We pray your blessing upon this time and your presence here with us in your word in Christ's name.

Amen. Well, the world is at war with God's truth. That is obvious even to the most casual of observer, that the most fundamental aspects of God's creation, of his ordinances, of his truth, of reality are under attack.

And we see this even in the fact that humanity is attacking humanity, and not in terms of war, but you actually have humanity making the case that the world would be better off without humanity. We live under a death cult.

We are ruled by people who worship at the altar of a death cult. And so they make the argument that human beings should be destroyed in the womb, and that the planet, and that the environment, and that all of creation would be better off if more people were dead and less people were alive.

That is nothing less than a cult that worships death. They do this because Scripture says that those who hate God or those who hate his wisdom love death. And so those who hate God hate the image of God, and they hate those who bear the image of God, and they therefore reject and kick against and assault and attack anything that reminds them of that creation and of God's creative act, or even of the God who created us.

And so you have humanity going to war with the very existence of humanity and making the case that humanity should be destroyed. Man in his rebellion despises God as creator and hates everything that points to either God's creation or the goodness of God's creation.

And they do this all the while being earth-worshipping hippies themselves who worship that creation. So rather than worship the triune God who made all things, instead they worship the creation itself, worshipping and serving the creature rather than the creation.

God's creation of two genders, of two sexes in the garden, was a good thing that shows his image. And by the way, up until about five minutes ago in human history, we all understood that sex and gender were the same thing.

It's only recently where our culture and people who are insanely at war with God have tried to differentiate between those two things and divide them as if your sex can be different than your gender and your gender may or may not conform to the reality of your biological sex.

So you can identify with whatever gender you want even while having a certain biological sex and the gender with which you identify may or may not comport to the biological sex with which you are born.

Does that sound confusing? It is confusing and it's intentionally confusing because the death cult has come up with this ideology. And so though God has created man and women, and only men and women, and he has created these two genders and only these two genders, these two sexes, only these two sexes, since that is true, God himself has the authority to determine the sex of every person that is created.

So therefore to deny that, to reject that, is an assault against the creator himself. It is to say that God has made a mistake, that in his wisdom he is fallible, that he has not made a good decision, that he has not ordained a good thing, and so it is an assault against God as creator.

And because he has created the sexes and he determines the sex of every person who was born and everybody who has ever existed, he determines the roles that each gender is to fulfill and how they are to interact and thus how they are to treat one another.

He is the one who has instituted marriage and he defines the nature of it and he is the one who has created sex and therefore he has the authority to command or to forbid the ways in which sex is used inside of marriage and among humanity.

And we are surrounded by insane people who are at war with all of these basic and self-evident truths, all of them. Now I'm not worried about that and neither should you be because reality has a way of harming those who do not take it seriously.

On the battlefield of human history, reality is like 1 ,000 and 0, always a winner, undefeated on the battlefield. Reality always wins. You can fight against it, you can deny it, you can go to war with it, but reality will always win.

And the institution of marriage is always in the crosshairs of the devil and his people because it is part of God's creation, it is a good thing, and it is for the flourishing of those who are created in God's image because it portrays the glory of God, it shows his redemptive handiwork in Christ, and therefore the devil hates it.

The devil hates it. And so we are inundated daily by overt as well as subtle attacks against marriage and against the family. Marriage is dishonored when immorality or divorce or infidelity are glamorized.

Polyandry, which is having more than one husband, polyamory, which is having more than one sexual partner, and polygyny, having more than one wife, are all dishonorable perversions of God's good gift.

Spouse-swapping, open marriages, throuples, hooking up, shacking up, all have become more commonplace in our culture and they are all dishonoring acts toward God's good and holy gift of marriage and the marriage bed.

Now these things, polyandry, polygyny, polyamory, divorce, immorality, and fidelity, these things are not new in human history. Not like they just broke onto the stage last week and we're wondering, oh what do we do this in a once a nation that was founded on Christian principles?

It's not like these things are new. These things are as old as time itself. It goes back to the garden. But the more our culture gets away from biblical truth and the more we regress back to pagan ideas and pagan practices, the more our culture is going to try to replace a biblical morality which always results in the flourishing of God's creatures with a pagan morality which always results in the non-flourishing of God's creatures.

And so like Indiana Jones trying to swap a bag of grain for an idol, our culture is trying to do this. They're trying to change out their moral standards and hoping that we don't notice and that everything, the whole temple doesn't come crashing down.

Well the whole temple is going to come crashing down when you try to do that. And that's what our culture is doing. God's truth honors marriage. God's truth never disparages marriage. God has placed upon marriage the highest honor possible by making it a picture of the relationship between Christ and His church.

That is why we as part of the church are called the Bride of Christ. It's not that any one of us individually is the Bride of Christ, but this body to which we belong is the Bride of Christ. And that analogy that Scripture makes between Christ and His church and the man and the woman in the marriage covenant and that covenant that exists, that is a way of honoring marriage and glorifying marriage and showing how God esteems that.

So we have in Revelation 19 verses 6 through 9 this reference to that someday you and I are going to sit down with Christ and enjoy the marriage supper of the Lamb. Then I heard something like the voice of a great multitude and like the sound of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder saying hallelujah for the Lord our God the Almighty reigns.

Let us rejoice and be glad and give the glory to Him for the marriage of the Lamb has come and His bride has made herself ready. It was given to her to clothe herself in fine linen bright and clean for the fine linen is the righteous acts of the Saints.

Then He said to me write blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb and He said to me these are the true words of God. Revelation 21 verse 9 then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues came and spoke with me saying come here I will show you the bride the wife of the Lamb.

That's who you are. If you're in Christ you belong to this bride the wife of the Lamb. No higher honor. Marriage is a picture of redemption and thus it was not an afterthought. It was not in the mind of God just 2 ,000 years ago to draw this analogy.

It was in the mind of God before He ever spoke an atom or a molecule into existence. It was His design before the garden to make marriage a picture of the relationship between Christ and His church. So as long as you have been on the mind of God as an elect sinner whom He chose He has had in vision the relationship between you and your Savior between Christ and His church and in the garden when He brought Adam and Eve together He was instituting that picture.

Therefore that is an honorable institution. The Father chose a bride for His Son and gave that bride to the Son so that the Son then would come into the world take upon Himself human flesh live in the place of that bride earning all of the righteousness that that bride would need to be wed to Him.

Then He died in her place rose again the third day and is ascended to the right hand of the Father and that bridegroom will come again and receive His bride to Himself and then we will sit in glory and we will sing hallelujah and praise to our God who has done this great gift.

And when did He choose you in Christ? Before the foundation of the world. When were you elect in Him? Before and ever an atom was spoken into existence. As long as God has been God you have been in the mind and the plan and the purposes of God and therefore marriage as an institution created and ordained in the garden has been the plan and purpose of God from the very very beginning.

So when did one was the beginning? The beginning was begun before there ever was a beginning. That far back. That's how far back you have to go. That's when marriage was designed. And so that brings us to our text Hebrews 13 verse 4 which we got halfway through last week.

Verse 4 marriage is to be held in honor among all the marriage bed is to be undefiled for fornicators and adulterers God will judge. We ran out last week before we had time to finish considering all the implications of this first part of the verse.

There is an exhortation here to hold marriage in honor and to hold the marriage bed in honor. And just by way of review let me quickly bounce off just three four quick statements to remind you of what we covered last week.

This is a command in verse 4 to honor marriage because marriage is honorable. It is honorable as God's part of God's design which is one man and one woman becoming one flesh for one lifetime. That is God's design.

That is an honorable design. Second marriage is honorable because God has ordained it. He ordained it before the fall. It was in his mind before creation. It was part of his plan from eternity past. And since it was ordained before the fall it was given to man in his innocence.

Meaning that also the unity and the sexual intimacy of the marriage bed was a gift to man before sin ever came into the world. Before sin ever entered in that was to be enjoyed in a holy and pure environment with holy and pure and undefiled minds and hearts.

Third marriage is honorable because Christ honored it by affirming the teaching of Scripture in Matthew 19 going back to Genesis chapter 2 verse 24 and by affirming marriage in performing his very first miracle at a wedding.

It was honored by Christ. And then fourth marriage is honorable because it is a picture of Christ in his church. It is in marriage that the gospel gets really applicable. You take two people, two people who are sinners and you cram them into one house and make them live face to face every day, day in and day out.

To go to sleep looking at each other, to wake up looking at each other. When you do that you are setting yourself up for all kinds of conflict. Well there's good news. This is where the gospel gets lived out.

That we confess to one another, we repent to one another, we forgive one another, we are restored to one another, we learn to lay ourselves down for one another, to sacrifice for one another, to serve one another, to do everything for the benefit and the blessing of the other person.

This is where marriage is. This is where the gospel is displayed. It is on the stage of marriage. There's no greater relationship. Marriage is, I think it was Martin Luther who said, marriage is a school for the soul.

You want to take your soul to school? You can try saying that, especially in front of people. You want to take your soul to school? Get married. You will learn the greatest lessons that you can possibly learn inside the marriage relationship.

You will learn to sacrifice. Marriage will be for you the source of your greatest joys and your most profound disappointments and sorrows will be the marriage relationship. It is a teacher of the greatest lessons.

It is a tool to conform you to the image of Christ and it is not only a means by which you are conformed to the image of Christ, it is the stage upon which you pursue holiness without which no one can see the Lord.

Now all of that is by way of review. Today, we want to consider how this verse answers some theological and practical errors, three of them particularly, how the verse answers some theological practical errors and then I want to talk specifically about how it is that we honor marriage and ways in which some people dishonor marriage.

Let's talk about the the errors that this answers first. We can affirm the scripture from scripture that marriage is honorable. It is holy, sacred, created by God, given to man as a blessing for his flourishing in the garden before sin.

It is worthy of holding in high regard and high esteem. It is God's good gift to us and it serves many good purposes. Further, you'll notice in verse 4 that the author mentions the marriage bed, that the marriage bed is to be undefiled.

The word translated bed there is koite, from which we get our English word coitus. The word can be translated bed, it can be translated as sexual life or even it is used as conception. It describes sexual intercourse or the sex act.

It is not describing a piece of furniture upon which two people sleep and never touch. It's not describing a piece of furniture. It is describing the expression of covenant love, the marital union, marital coitus, the physical one-flesh relationship or act that is reserved for marriage.

That coitus is the expression of covenant love and unity and the mingling of souls. It is part of marriage and should be enjoyed regularly inside of marriage. Physical handicaps, the only thing that might withstand that.

This also, the sex act or coitus, is good. It is a gift of God, a beautiful expression of service to one's spouse, of expression of love and pleasure and delight and joy and this was God's design. And listen, it was part of creation before the fall, an aspect of Adam and Eve's life before sin ever entered into the world.

Get that in your mind. It was an aspect of their life before sin ever entered into the world. Adam was not tempted to sin by lust. Adam was tempted to sin by a piece of fruit. I've never been tempted to ruin all of humanity for a piece of fruit, but probably every man in the sound of my voice has been tempted, would be tempted to ruin all of humanity to satisfy or gratify a lust.

Therefore, Adam's sexual desire, Eve's sexual desire and the fulfillment of those desires are things that were created by God for human flourishing and given to our first original parents in the garden before there was ever a sin.

Therefore, coitus is not dirty. It is not disgusting. It is not impure. It does not defile. We defile it. It does not defile us. We defile it. Notice that the text does not say, don't let the marriage bed defile you.

It says, you don't defile the marriage bed because it is something that itself is pure and holy and so the purity of it should be guarded at all costs. The sexual act does not pollute a marriage. It doesn't defile the spouse.

It doesn't tarnish your piety or impede your holiness. It doesn't corrupt your mind. It is not a necessary evil or a begrudged obligation. It is not sinful within the God-ordained context of the marriage covenant.

I'm going to stop there because my wife by this point is probably becoming very uncomfortable with the fact that I have to stand up here and say all of this. But the discomfort will only increase next week when we talk about guarding the marriage bed.

So make sure that you come back for that and if you're not here, we will all know why you're not here. So we want to answer some practical questions, some practical theological errors that often creep up in our thinking regarding these things.

Three of them. Roman Catholicism, Gnosticism, and Asceticism. Roman Catholicism, Gnosticism, and Asceticism. If you're not sure where any of this is going, I will explain it as I go through this. First, Roman Catholicism, particularly as this applies to Roman Catholic leaders.

They, that is the Catholic Church, forbids marriage to their bishops and to some of their ecclesiastics. In some instances and in some wings of Roman Catholicism, you can be a married priest. That is true.

If you become a priest or are ordained to the priesthood after you have been married, Rome does not suggest that you take a vow of celibacy. Though there are some segments of the Roman Catholic Church that will only choose their priests if they are single and if they're willing to take a vow of celibacy.

Now to be fair, Roman Catholics would object and say, no, we do not forbid marriage of our priests. We do not forbid it. They would say that the vow to celibacy is a voluntary vow. They voluntarily give it up.

We don't forbid it. They voluntarily give it up. Okay, kind of voluntary like your taxes are voluntary, right? You don't have to pay taxes. They're voluntary contributions to a well-functioning government.

But try not paying taxes and what do you get? So they do forbid marriage as if marriage is not worthy of their holy men. In fact, you can go to the Catholic Answers website and read up on this question and Roman Catholics will say, and this is a quote, celibacy is a sign of purity, close quote.

Celibacy is a sign of purity. Do you buy that? Do you buy that watching any of the headlines about Roman Catholic priests in the last, I don't know, 1700 years? Because it's been about that long? You can go back to times in Roman Catholicism where they referred to the pornography, a Roman Catholic hierarchy that was known for its immorality.

They didn't even make a pretense of being holy. As if piety and holiness and purity are incompatible with marriage and with the marriage bed. True piety and true holiness comes in denying marriage, they would say.

And so John Owen says they vainly imagine that they are more pure than Adam and Eve were in their innocence. It was okay for Adam and Eve in their innocence before they sinned, but our priests, they're too holy to be engaged in marriage or in the marriage bed.

God said it's not good for man to be alone and Rome says, no, it's better for men to be alone. And how has that worked out? You know, as it turns out, marriage goes a long way when properly used and when properly enjoyed, marriage goes a long way toward prohibiting and preventing sexual immorality and sexual deviancy.

And when you take men who have those desires and you say holiness is achieved by you denying those desires and not enjoying any of that common blessing, that blessing of common grace, instead you're going to take a voluntary vow of celibacy and then you put them alone with that.

That does nothing to subdue the desires of the flesh, nothing at all. 1 Corinthians 7 verse 9 says, if you do not have self-control, let them marry, for it is better for them to marry than to burn with passion.

In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul does acknowledge that there are times and circumstances in which singleness might be preferred to marriage. There are instances in which that is the case. So Paul mentions the distress of the current time and he says it might be that because you sense persecution is coming or things are difficult, that you might remain single.

And if you have that gift of singleness, God gives you that ability to do that and you can do that, then you might remain single for the sake of giving yourself more wholly to the Lord's service and not having the concerns that come with the family.

But Paul says there might be people who are not able to do that and they might determine to get married and the one who marries doesn't sin and the one who decides to stay single does not sin. And so sometimes circumstances determine that somebody might be better off single and they might pursue that as a legitimate option.

1 Corinthians 7 verse 32 says, I want you to be free from concern. One, who is unmarried, is concerned about the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord, but one who is married is concerned about the things of the world, how he may please his wife.

And his interests are divided. The woman who is unmarried and the virgin is concerned about the things of the Lord, that she may be both holy in body and in spirit, but one who is married is concerned about the things of the world, how she may please her husband.

I say this for your own benefit, not to put a restraint upon you, but to promote what is appropriate and to secure undistracted devotion to the Lord.". So Paul says there might be instances where remaining single will allow you to give undistracted devotion to the Lord.

But then for many people, being single doesn't result in undistracted devotion, it results in undevoted distraction. So Paul says get married in that case. So you evaluate your circumstances in that, and you apply wisdom to the circumstances and say, man, I can't give undistracted devotion.

All I'm consumed with is undistracted, undevoted distraction, and so I have to get married. That's fine, Paul says. To require celibacy for a Christian is the very kind of false doctrine that Paul describes as doctrines of demons in 1 Timothy chapter 4.

Paul says that the Spirit explicitly says that in latter times, some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons by means of the hypocrisy of liars seared in their own conscience as with a branding iron, men who forbid marriage and advocate abstaining from foods which God has created to be gratefully shared in by those who believe and know the truth.

Both marriage and food are created by God to be abundantly and joyfully enjoyed by those who believe and know the truth. And it is a doctrine of demons to forbid marriage or to advocate for celibacy inside of a marriage covenant or to tell somebody that if you really want to be holy, avoid marriage.

I would say the opposite is the case. If you really want to learn what it means to mortify your sin, get married. That will give you opportunity to kill your selfishness faster than anything else.

At least it should.

Second, the Gnostics, not only the Roman Catholics but also the Gnostics. Maybe that's not a word that you are familiar with. Gnosticism was a...it's an ancient heresy that actually predated Christianity.

Nobody knew or called it Gnosticism in the first century but there were forms of proto-Gnostic belief. Gnosticism as a world view came into sort of full bloom later on after the formation of the New Testament but you can see references to certain Gnostic tendencies or certain Gnostic ways of thinking in, for instance, 1 John and the book of Colossians where some of the proto-Gnostic heresies were addressed.

Gnosticism was the belief that there is some secret knowledge that is available out there to only the initiated and that those who are the initiated who know how to get the secret spiritual decoder ring, as it were, can give you some kind of spiritual insight into the deep truths and in understanding these deep truths, then you would come into the fullness of what it means to live in this world and when it crept into Christian circles, it kind of manifested itself as the belief that if you knew these deep and profound truths, not the ones that are revealed in Scripture but the ones revealed outside of Scripture, then you could have sort of a fullness of understanding and come to a fullness in your Christian life.

One of the Gnostic beliefs was the belief that physical and material things are impure and evil and profane and that only the spiritual and the immaterial, the soul, was pure and good so that all things physical had been corrupted by the fall so anything which had any kind of a physical dimension to it was inherently evil and could have no good purpose whatsoever.

And so obviously they would believe that the physical body is evil and that we are chained to it in this life. Now Christianity has a direct answer to Gnosticism because Christianity says not that you are going to be free from this body after you die and go to some higher spiritual plane but guess what?

You're going to get shackled to this very same body but in resurrected form on the last.

Day.

So Christianity doesn't say everything physical is evil, Christianity says God created everything and it was very good in the beginning. It's sin that has corrupted this creation and marred it and in many ways ruined it.

The body is good and God pronounced creation good but we are fallen and broken and ruined by that sin and that is not...the ruin is not the result of being in a physical creation because we will spend all of eternity in a physical creation, a new heavens and new earth with glorified bodies, resurrected and glorified bodies and that will be very, very good.

Now interestingly Gnosticism resulted in two very different applications of that theology. In fact, these are polar opposites of one another. Gnosticism resulted first in an exaltation of abstinence and here's why.

If the physical body is evil, then the desires of the physical body are evil, therefore if I satisfy or gratify the desires of my physical body, that is evil. Therefore I have to abstain from any kind of sexual activity, even within marriage, and not give way to any kind of physical desire or physical comfort.

It's almost a form of asceticism which I'm going to address here in just a moment. And so rather than having anything to do with the physical body and satisfying that in any way, the Gnostic would say you need to abstain from anything that is physical for the sake of keeping your spirit and your soul pure.

That was one sort of application of Gnosticism. The exact opposite of that is something entirely different and that is lascivious sexual immorality because the Gnostic could also say since the body is evil and the spirit is pure, my body and my spirit never mix, therefore the functions of my soul and my immaterial self are never polluted by the functions of my body.

Therefore I can do anything and everything with my body to gratify its sexual lusts and that will not affect my soul at all. You could be a Gnostic and be committed to abstinence and you could be a Gnostic and be committed to sexual lasciviousness.

Gnosticism was very popular, very popular because it did give to the Greeks an excuse to indulge their every sexual passion, anything, and they could maintain then that this had nothing to do with their spirit and with their soul.

And of course Christianity says we are body and soul. These two things exist together and we can do things with our body that sins against ourself. And so we need to be careful with how we use our body so we use it for the glory of God and we don't just indulge in these sexual appetites simply because we think that it doesn't affect our soul.