Sex Ethics and the Christian (Part 1)

No Compromise Radio Thanks for tuning in to No Compromise Radio with pastor and author,

Dr. Mike Abendroth. Today on No Compromise Radio, we'll be hearing Pastor Mike open the

Word of God in a recent message he preached at Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston, Massachusetts.

Now let's join Pastor Mike in progress as he preaches through the Scriptures, verse by verse with no compromise.

What does the Bible teach about sex, the sex ethic and the Christian? We started in 1

Corinthians dealing with this subject back in chapter 5, and there was incest going on and Paul had to deal with that issue, and we move into chapter 6 and more sin.

And now in chapter 7, we're going to deal with this topic in the realm of marriage.

And so let's open our Bibles, but I want you to open to Romans chapter 8 first. The subtitle of this series is

How to Overcome Sexual Temptation. And I will quickly recap what we've learned in the weeks past.

The first one is rehearse the gospel. That is to say, at the beginning of 1 Corinthians, before we get to chapter 7, chapter 6 regarding with this sex ethic, and even chapter 5,

Paul is making sure that the people realize who they are in Christ and what God has done. Because the

Christian faith is not work hard, do good, try harder. It's in light of what God has done for you, respond with obedience and respond with loving submission.

And so for you today, if you're struggling with sexual temptation or you'd like to be more pure in your eyes as we walk through it,

I want you to be reminded of the gospel. And what a great little summary that we have here in Romans chapter 8 of how great

God is. And then in light of God's greatness, we should respond with being pure with our bodies.

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, Romans 8, 1.

For the law of the spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.

I'm glad for that. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do.

The law could never save anyone. It wasn't meant to save anyone. It was to show everyone that they needed a savior.

By definition, by intention of God, the law could never save anyone. But God could save.

For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh.

He wasn't sinful, but in the likeness, frail flesh, human flesh, in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemns sin in the flesh.

In order that the righteous requirement of the law, because God is holy and just, might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the spirit.

Can you believe God condemned sin in the flesh? And just think about it for a minute, how great this salvation of yours might be.

What if God sent the son because we were so good? Can you imagine in the councils of heaven that God said,

I want you to go, son, and I want you to go check out these people because they're great people. These people on earth, you'd be surprised unless you see it firsthand.

They love me with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength. They're loving their neighbor as themselves. They love me, they trust me, they follow me, they submit to me, they honor me.

They are so righteous, so holy, so beautiful. Son, go down there and check them out because I think you're going to be really impressed.

Isn't it amazing to think of the love of God when He does know who we are?

He does know how vile we are, how sinful we are, how far we would fall, all our sins before we even committed them,

He knew. And yet God the Father sent the son, and the son willingly went, impelled by the spirit of God, to go die for people just like us.

Is it good to know that when you think about your life and specifically in the sermon today, if you've committed sexual sins with your mind or with your body, and you're a

Christian, you know those sins are forgiven? Because God the Father sent His son to redeem you for all sins, including these sins.

And if you think I've been washed, I've been cleansed, I've been justified, I've been sanctified, I will be glorified one day,

God, you care for me. I'd like to respond with now a new biblical gospel resolve to obey you in this realm.

So that's why the gospel is important, because if the solution today to overcoming sexual temptation would be, don't ever do it again, we're going to fall, and we're going to fail, because the law can't prop us up.

Here we have a great Savior, Jesus Christ, who never failed in this area, and He stands in our stead,

He stands on our behalf, because He perfectly, even though He was in the likeness of sinful flesh, never sinned in this area at all.

Let's go back to 1 Corinthians chapter 6, please, how to overcome sexual sin, one, rehearse the gospel, we've talked about that a long time.

Number two, don't rationalize sexual sin, and that was in chapter 6, verses 12 and 13.

Just don't rationalize it, admit and confess, Proverbs 28, 13, you see some of the slogans that they had for rationalizing these libertines, these people that just had license to sin in their mind, all things are lawful for me, he says it again in verse 12, all things are lawful for me, he says in verse 13, food is meant for the stomach, and the stomach is food, what do we care, you get hungry, you eat, you have a sexual desire, just go ahead,

God's not going to condemn us for that. We don't want to rationalize it, we just want to admit, God, you say that if we look upon someone with lust in our heart, it's like committing what?

Adultery, God, I agree with that, God, please forgive me, please restore me, thank you that you've had your son pay for those sins, and I stand righteously before you based on the work of another.

Number three, saturate your mind with the word, we looked at that for a long time. Number four, found in verses 13 through 18, and really 12 through 18, all the way down through verse 20 in chapter 6, is have the right view of the body.

What does he say down in verse 19 to summarize, do you not know that your body, and he's talking about the sexual body that God made for you, that he gave to you, that he designed for you, 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 therefore glorify

God with your body. So that brings us up to speed. There's two ways to glorify God with your body in the sexual realm, and that is, one, if you're not married, stay pure, and two, if you are married, what should you do?

Verses 1 through 6 in chapter 7, so now we move to the fifth way to overcome, the gospel way of overcoming sexual temptation, and that is number five.

If you're married, regularly enjoy your spouse. So I don't know about you, but I'm glad I'm preaching verse by verse, because these aren't topics that I just would normally pick, but I stand behind scripture, and by the way, in the last several weeks during this series,

I've probably gotten more positive feedback from this series than I have almost any other series. Why?

Because the parents are coming to me saying, my children get taught about sex, but they get taught about sex from their neighbor, and from their friends, and from the people at school.

What does God say? What does God say? And I believe every verse should be proclaimed from the pulpit, whether it's

Song of Solomon or Revelation, don't you? And so we'll stand behind that, and if you have kids today, I'm not going to say things that are inappropriate,

I will say things that are cloaked in biblical language, but your kids, if they're four years old, they're not going to understand.

If I say the word sex to them, I don't know what they think it is, kissing maybe or something, or you know, sex is a boy or a girl, you know, you have a child, and what's the sex?

They don't know, and so you should say to yourself, gospel preaching is an appropriate thing for all levels, and so far,

I think that's been the tenor of the church, and we'll look today, how do you overcome sexual temptation? If you're single, you stay pure, but if you're married, you regularly and often enjoy your spouse.

Now let's read verses one through six to see what Paul is saying in general, and then we'll dissect it a little bit, and we'll work through this passage together.

One other comment first. In the next several weeks, short of Resurrection Sunday next week, we're going to deal with all kinds of subjects.

This subject for the married, and maybe you say, you know what, I'm not married, but I'd like to be. Well, I think God wants you to know about this, doesn't

He? Very much so, especially if you'd like to be married one day. Maybe you're a grandma or a grandpa, and you say, you know, my spouse is deceased, and if you're a grandma or a grandpa, you should be saying to yourself,

I should be praying for the church so that those young people and even the married people would be pure and holy and have a great marriage.

Soon we'll be talking to single people in two weeks, and then the married people should say, you know, I know this message isn't directly to me, but it's for me because it's all the

Scripture. And so don't say to yourself, you know, I'm not married, and so I can't believe He's going to talk about this.

I think it almost betrays, if you're not careful, a selfishness where I want the message for me when this is going to be good for the congregation.

Don't you want a good message for the entire congregation? That should be your desire. So everybody needs to know it, even though it's not necessarily to everyone, because it's to the married people.

But for the single people, here's the standard. For the people who would like to have a spouse, this is the standard.

For those who are divorced or remarried, there'll be verses that Paul will address to you soon enough.

And by the way, whoever said the Bible is boring has never opened this book. This is action -paced.

The last two weeks, I've not caught one sleeper in the congregation at all, and I doubt we'll get sleepers even back there in that backsliding room, whatever you call that video overflow room.

You know who you are. No, I'm thankful to you to make regular rotation because now the church is growing in numbers and we want the visitors to sit in here so they can hear gospel ministry.

Let's read verses 1 through 6 of 1 Corinthians chapter 7.

Here we move to the second part of the book. He's dealt with four problems, and now comes answers to the questions he received.

We don't have the questions, but we have his answers. Now concerning the matters about what you wrote, it is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman, but because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband.

The wife should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does.

Likewise, the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time that you may devote yourselves to prayer, but then come together again so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self -control.

Now as a concession, not a command, I say this, why don't you bow with me and we'll pray before we start.

Father in heaven, thank you this morning that you have given us your word and your spirit to help us understand.

Father, I would pray that you'd help everyone here this morning glorify God in their bodies, that they would give you honor and glory as singles, chaste and pure.

We're thankful that for the singles who have committed sexual sins, that your gospel, your forgiveness,

Christ Jesus is a great savior, that all those can be cleansed and you would see those sexual sinners in the perfect robes of Christ's righteousness.

Father, for the married people today, I pray that you'd strengthen marriages, that you would help marriages to more reflect how much

Christ loves this church and how she responds in a wonderful submission to him.

And Father, when there's been sin in a marriage, how wonderful you are to forgive and to clean and to cleanse and to purify.

Jesus Christ's death was enough for our salvation and Father, by faith we do believe that. For those that are older or younger or it doesn't apply to specifically,

I pray that you'd encourage them today as they sit underneath your word in Jesus' name. Amen. All right,

I just said it a moment ago, but Paul has two sections in 1 Corinthians besides intros and conclusions. First section, four problems, he addresses those four problems, unity, sexual sin, church discipline, lack thereof, et cetera.

Now we move to the question and answer session beginning in chapter seven. So if you ever had to outline 1

Corinthians, intro, four problems, now questions that they have asked chapter five, verse nine, matter of fact you can go back there, we can tell there's a letter.

I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people. So the church of Corinth had

Paul as a pastor, 18 months as the apostle preacher and Paul taught them everything he knew.

At Ephesus he could teach all the Old Testament in three years and so now he must have condensed all that into 18 months and they knew.

Paul moves away and now the Corinthians have questions and so they send him a letter and they say, we've got some issues going on, can you help us?

And so Paul writes back and we have this inspired word. We don't know exactly what his questions are, but we know what his answers are so we can make a pretty good deduction.

And in this section from chapter seven through 16 he'll deal with sex and marriage, celibacy, meat offered to idols, spiritual gifts, speaking in tongues, head coverings, et cetera.

And so for today we're going to stick with chapter seven verses one through six. Now interesting dynamics are happening here.

Early on in chapter six there were people in the church who would say things like, you know, it doesn't matter what we do with our bodies, we can go to these prostitutes and we can have many wives and we can have slaves and we can have other issues going on.

I don't have to be faithful to my wife because you know what, this body doesn't really matter what we're going to do.

The spirit is really the important thing. And they would latch onto a slogan like all things are lawful, including sexual sin.

And so the liberty we have in Christ is never a liberty to sin, but they ran too far this way.

If Bible truth is six o 'clock on a clock, what do we do as sinful people? Even redeem people.

We either overdo things or we what? We underdo them. So they say, you know what, let's, we're not really under some law anymore.

Let's just sin as much as we want sexually. And Paul deals with that in chapter six. But then something else was going on.

People overdid it this way. You live in a sex crazed, sexual sinning culture, and it's just, you don't have to look very far on your internet or on TV, or just walk around a city someday to think this is a perverted culture.

And some of the Christians who lived in the perverted culture and who were perverted then became opposite in.

If this is biblical truth, we're going to overdo it the other way. We would love, we'd like to be monks.

We're married now, but we used to be so promiscuous before even in marriage. Let's just not even concern ourself with that anymore.

By the way, they lived in a culture where, and I just was there several months ago, down the way, just a few hours, is

Delphi. And all of a sudden, if you're a virgin, you've got extra power. If you're celibate, you've got extra power.

Celibacy somehow is good. Paul writes to them, and I think it's perfect for us because what do you do if you live in a sex saturated culture?

Well, Paul tells us. By the way, I think what also could be happening here is

Paul must have been married. His wife dies, and now he's celibate. People are saying, Paul's celibate, so maybe we should be.

But they were saying maybe we should be while they were married. So Paul addresses it. So with these great trans -chronological truths, we will see how

Paul deals with sexual relationships in a marriage. I've said before that God made us as sexual creatures.

God has given us hormones. God has designed sex. It's not wrong. It's just only right in the context of marriage, and the

Christian sex ethic is not no. The Christian sex ethic is yes, regularly in marriage.

No outside of marriage. This is going to be a very interesting study because listen to a church father,

Augustine, what he said, and you'll get an idea what the Church of Corinth is thinking. Even though Augustine was several hundred years later.

That he thought it was a venial sin to have sex with your spouse if you would have sex for pleasure and not procreation.

The pagans thought this way all the time. Sex is for having children, but the pleasure side and the intimacy side and the relationship side, no.

Now, marriage is about a lot of things, pleasure, procreation, great picture of Christ loving the church, companionship.

There are a lot of different things that a marriage will show, but here there was this idea that, do you know what, if you have children with your spouse, that'd be an okay time, but if you want to have fun, you want to have a time with your wife that's a time for pleasure sexually, then you go find yourself a concubine.

You can even think about it, why didn't Solomon have 700 wives and 300, as I say to the kids all the time, porcupines, concubines.

With this kind of sermon we need a little exhale for comic relief. They had wives for children, they had concubines for pleasure, and Paul's going to say here, listen, of course a marriage is to show

Christ loving the church, of course it's for companionship, of course it's so you have a helper, of course it's for procreation, but none of that is being dealt with here.

It's all about the pleasure of a man and a woman underneath the auspices of a great God who created this for good.

Actually, how do you glorify God in your body? What's 620 say? 620 says you're bought with a price, so glorify

God in your body. Isn't it interesting that it's tied to chapter 7 verse 1 to 6? How do you glorify

God in your body? 612 to 820, don't have sex before marriage. How do you glorify God in your body while you're married?

Have sex while you're married. That sound kind of funny to you? How do you glorify God with your body sexually?

By having regular and often relationships intimately with your spouse. That's good information for us to know so we can think biblically about this topic.

Now they had a slogan in verse 1, ESV rightly puts it in parenthesis so we can think that it's probably a quote from the letter that they wrote to Paul, a summary of the letter, the gist of the letter, it is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.

Now ESV is great in many regards, but really NAS has got it right here. It's good for a man not to touch a woman.

It's the same difference. The touch is a sexual touch. It's a euphemism for sexual intimacy.

And so somehow when Paul taught them and then wrote them and discussed it with them, they got it that, you know what, it's not good to touch a woman.

It's not good to have sex. And they went off the deep end, ascetically. But he's not saying it's never good to have sex because in verses 2, 3, 4, and 5, he's encouraging couples to get together.

So this is some phrase that they took out of Paul. They took it out of context or they got it wrapped up in their mind because of the culture.

And they just said, you know, it's not good to touch a woman. Both in Hebrew and in Greek, to touch a woman is to have intimate relations.

You get this with Abimelech and Sarah. Just listen to Genesis 20. Don't turn there. Then God said to him in the dream, yes,

I know that in the integrity of your heart you have done this. And I also kept you from sinning against me. Therefore, I did not let you touch her.

Abimelech was not able to touch Sarah this way because God prohibited it.

Proverbs 6, 29, so is the one who goes in to his neighbor's wife.

Whoever touches her will not go unpunished. Paul cannot be saying celibacy is the norm.

If you're married, now be celibate, because he's just going to go on in verses 2 through 5 to say, no, you should regularly and often be together.

Let me give you from the text in verses 2 through 6, three exhortations for married people today in regards to sex in your marriage so that you might glorify

God, honoring God with your bodies if you're married. And of course, it goes without saying if there's an ailment or there's an illness or husbands and wives are not able to physically, that's not going to be a sin, but you're going to find out very quickly that if you're married and you're able, it's going to be a sin for you not to be together on a regular basis.

Why? Because God has designed marriage for many things, but the context here is the way to avoid sexual temptation is to be regularly with your spouse.

He's going to say there's going to be no desire of the man or the woman to go outside the marriage relationship and to flirt and to commit adultery and to do anything else if there's a regular sexual component to the marriage.

So exhortation number one, if you're married, on how to glorify God with your body,

I just already said it, but I'll say it again now to make implicit explicit. One, if you're married, you are to have regular sexual relations, and it's going to be strange because this is commanded.

Verse two, but because of the temptation of sexual immorality, RZNAS says better, immoralities, it's plural.

Each man should have his own wife and let each woman her, let each woman her own husband.

Now already with this touch, have, conjugal rights, can you see that the

Bible's speaking properly, appropriately, this isn't some kind of anatomy lesson or some kind of graphic thing or inappropriate, just nice couch language with euphemisms so everybody who's old enough can understand, and those who are younger, they don't know.

Paul says because of, here's what would be a theological description, because God has designed you to have sex if you're married, because if you're not designed to have sex in your celibate, then you shouldn't have got married.

If you have a desire for sex, God has said this is the realm, this is the arena, this is the hedged in area where it's safe, it's good, it's holy, it's pure, it's right, and have regular relations.

And so it helps for those who are tempted in other areas to have a regular relationship with their spouse.

God has designed marriage that sex and marriage go together. Singleness and abstinence go together, sex and marriage go together.

Marriage and abstinence do not go together. Love and marriage, love and marriage joined together by a whoresome carriage, right?

I'm not going to sing that song. But marriage and sex go together as well. It's good we have to laugh once in a while because it's a tense subject.

By the way, my goal is to honor God by preaching this so you'll have a good marriage, and also another goal that I have is just that I don't say anything untoward, because you need the message, and I don't want to say something inappropriately so then you hang everything on, he shouldn't have said that.

Be praying for me because this is going to be good for marriages, it's going to be good for the congregation. Paul says sexual fulfillment is good in a marriage.

Do you notice the language here? Each man his own wife, each woman her own husband, polygamy, out, polyandry, out, concubine, out, each man, each woman, and we're going to get into this a little bit more.

There's no language of the woman's a slave, the woman's a thing, the woman's an object. They were thinking this way back in these days in Corinth and some

Jewish thought coming into that you pretty much own your wife, she had to do what you had told her to do, and she was second class citizen.

We're going to see in this passage, you want to see the first equal rights movement? It's by Paul because Jesus believed in equal rights as well, and there are equal rights even, may

I say it, in the bedroom. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life transforming power of God's word through verse by verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on route 110 in West Boylston.

You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

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