The Carnage of Sexual Immorality

The Corinthian Warning Against Sexual Immorality

1 Corinthians 6, 12 through 20. Everything is permissible for me, but not everything is beneficial. Everything is permissible for me, but I will not be mastered by anything. Food is for the stomach, and the stomach for food, and God will do away with both of them.

However, the body is not for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. God raised up the Lord, and will also raise us up by His power. Don't you know that your bodies are a part of Christ's body?

So should I take a part of Christ's body and make it part of a prostitute? Absolutely not! Don't you know that anyone joined to a prostitute is one body with her? For Scripture says, the two will become one flesh.

But anyone joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him. Flee sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body. But the person who is sexually immoral sins against his own body. Don't you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you?

Whom you have from God, you are not your own. You were bought at a price. So glorify God with your body. Let's pray. Father, as we live out the faith in this world, we ask that you would give us strength and perseverance to not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of our minds through your powerful word.

Lord, we understand that we were slaves to sin before you purchased us, and now we are slaves to righteousness. May we live accordingly. Teach us today from your word. Use your messenger to clarify these truths so that we may be strong and steadfast in living out a life that glorifies you.

In Christ's name, amen.

Such Were Some of You

1 Corinthians 6 .11 says, And such were some of you. But you were washed and you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the spirit of our God. Unfortunately today, such are many in the church.

The effects of our cultural revolution against God have resulted in the inversion of biblical ethics, and it's made this sort of sin that Ephesians tells us is not to be even spoken of among us. It has made us celebrate it in some churches.

You guys know what I'm talking about. You see the flags fly. You see the tomfoolery, the craziness. And we look, it's our bent in the conservative, reformed world to look down our nose and say, Oh my, look at those Lutherans.

Look at those PCUSA guys. Can you believe what's going on over there? And we think that would never happen here. And maybe we're not as blatant, but the sin is maybe more deadly in our midst because what happens is in our neck of the woods, we practice a perverted line from the 90s coined by Bill Clinton when he was trying to compromise, and it is, Don't ask, don't tell.

Because if you ask and they tell you, you have to do something about it. And doing something about it seems scary because confrontation makes people leave, and confrontation makes us nervous, and the worst thing we can ever feel is nervous.

We're not comfortable. To further illuminate our problem, we have pretty much zero inter-church cooperation for church discipline. So what happens instead of the loving response of discipline to make someone confront their sin in front of the body, and if they hold to their sin hard-heartedly, that they are barred from the table, that they are treated as a sinner and a tax collector, that is the loving discipline of the people of God.

Instead of that, what happens is that we incentivize the sexual reprobate to flee and go somewhere else, and the church right down the road will take them in, give them membership, and invite them straight to the table so that they can drink death, curses, and sleep on themselves.

Very loving. But at least we get to stay comfortable. It's so out of order. What do we do? What do we do? And what I don't want us to ever do is to get into the frame of mind where what we look at as we look out on the landscaping, we see, can you believe the craziness with people doing interpretive dancing at church, and doing plays, and strobe lights?

Can you believe what all those dirty people are doing over there when we are completely blind to what goes on in here? And so our prayer has to be this. Our prayer has to be that God would bring order to our house.

This message is crucial. Crucial to the mission of CBC. But even more fundamentally, this message is crucial to the existence of CBC. If this leaven gets in the loaf, we will die. God will take our lampstand.

Our marriages will crumble. Our kids will be the sexual degenerates that we have been. Pornography will scourge across. We will not escape it. It will destroy our homes. It will destroy our men. It will destroy our country as it has.

Sexual immorality within the church always brings desolation and devastation. We cannot house it. We cannot foster it. We cannot tolerate it. That goes at every level. The individual level. The family level.

The friend level. The church level. And then outflowing from that is the level of the state. But we know from this week, as it's all that anyone's talking about, is Epstein files get released, and what we see is that our state does more than tolerate it.

They use it. What is good is declared evil, and what is evil is declared good, and the judgment of God will fall. It's obvious that we're under judgment today because of who rules us. It's not a Republican or Democrat issue.

And I don't say that because I think that there's a third way between them. I say that because the power has grabbed onto this sexual revolution that we sowed decades ago and now we reap today. The correlations between the church at Corinth and us today, it's almost one-to-one.

Think about it. There's a church that is afraid of church discipline, so they sue each other because they don't trust the people inside the church as much as they trust obviously crooked judges in the world that will take bribes.

They have a man who is sleeping with a stepmother, and no one wants to bring it up because they show their love by tolerating him and allowing him to operate. And then as chapter 6 opens and we see today's text, we see that sexual immorality is not only something that's being practiced in the church, it is being rationalized and excused with sophistry and philosophical arguments.

This passage is very, very Greek.

Very Greek.

It's very philosophical. Their arguments are precise, and they give way to a heresy that would ravage the early church, which is the Gnostic heresy. We see proto-Gnostic leanings in this, which is essentially the body is neither here nor there.

The only thing that matters is the spiritual, so who cares what the body does? Friends, that is the message of the evangelical church for my whole lifetime. It doesn't matter what you actually do. It matters what you believe.

That is nonsense. What you believe will always result in what you do. The fruit of the tree always reveals the nature of the tree. So if you do evil, you think evil, and no matter what your mouth says, you are evil.

It's a sad state, and Paul argues, and he will confront these paper-thin arguments, and so our structure for this morning is that we have what's called in the business the indicatives. These are the truths.

What you are, what God has said, what is factual, and then in the middle of this, in verse 18, there is the imperative, and that is the meat of the passage, and it is very simple to understand. Flee sexual immorality.

So I'm going to end there, and we're going to start with the indicatives. We're going to do the bread, and this is the fun stuff. The meat in this one is not very fun. The two pieces of bread that sandwich the meat is pretty fun.

Liberty, Profitability, and Self-Mastery

Verses 12 through 13. All things are lawful for me, but not all things are profitable. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be mastered by anything. Food is for the stomach, and the stomach is for food, but God will do away with both of them.

Yet the body is not for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord is for the body. There's a few arguments in this passage that Paul is confronting. The first one is pretty obvious. The Corinthians, they say this thing.

They say, we are free, and they mean that just how Americans mean it.

Liberty.

It means you can do whatever you want. Isn't that our concept? That is our definition. If I'm free, that means that I can do anything I want, and I often tell my students at school, you are free to do anything you want.

You can take a gun and shoot me in the face right now. You can do that, and you will suffer the consequences of it, such as it always is the case. You're free to do what you want, but there are consequences.

See, the Corinthians, though, the twist is, they think they're free to act in a godly way, doing whatever they want, because it's all about what you believe. See, Paul's response is that our ethics are actually rooted in the love of God and neighbor.

This is where the profitability. He is not doing a treatise on conscience here. That will be later. What he's talking about here is that there is a value to our actions, that they're not neutral, that what you do affects the people around you, and so what you should do is, just like any smart person, you should do things that are profitable as opposed to things that give you loss.

Who goes into business and wants a loss? No one, unless you're defrauding with tax write-offs. We want to make profits, and so if our ethics are rooted in the love of God and neighbor, we do things that are profitable, and we know what's profitable.

The Old Testament speaks of it over and over and over again, but let me give you a verse out of my favorite passage in the Old Testament. Psalm 1 -2 says, But his delight, this is the righteous man, his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law he meditates day and night.

See, the love of law in Scripture, understand this, right? You cannot be a Christian if you don't love the law of God. That's what the Holy Spirit does when you become a Christian. The Holy Spirit changes your heart into you becoming a new creature, and the heart of this new creature looks at God's law and loves it.

The psalmist says, I love your statutes, I love your rules, they are a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. I want to meditate on it day and night. God, I want to have the same mind that you have.

That's what the Christian heart says. To not love God's law is to absolutely be foreign to Christianity no matter what your mouth says. Orthodox confession saves absolutely no one. James says, faith without works is dead, and the works are going to profit you if you are a Christian, because God works all things for good to those who love him.

We detach that and put it up in the air and say, yeah, it'll be good, it'll make me feel better. It's not about that. It's about being salt. It's about being an influence on this earth. It's about discipling your kids.

And I hope I'm building a picture here of this enemy that perverts and rots this whole ethic. And it's the worst of all of those. The love of law in Scripture is not a bizarre attachment to a system of rules, but instead, it is a full-scale adoption of the mind of God.

What we want as Christians the most is to think about everything the way God thinks. That's what holiness is. We'll sing today, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. And what his people want is to be holy.

His men of old have been willing to die.

For holiness.

That is our heritage. See, the love of the law is in agreement with God about who we are and what we are for. So what happens is, when we look at other people as vehicles to our own self-serving happiness, that is without profit.

Think about this. Take it to the conclusion. Despite what Adam Smith, the father of capitalism said, okay, despite what he said, take it to the conclusion. If you always only pursue self-interest, what do you gain temporally?

If everything you do is about self-interest, what do you gain here? And let's stretch that out. What do you gain eternally? Do you have any friends? Do you guys have any friends where it's all about them all the time?

That friendship doesn't last, does it? Are you going to be able to be around someone who is using you constantly? If when you see their name flash up on your phone, you know they're about to ask you for something.

That's not a friendship. That's a master-slave relationship. And if you pursue other people that way, you will be left with nothing. But if you pursue love of neighbor the way that God instructs us to do, then you will have spiritual friends in heaven and you will have real friends here.

I hope that it's never the case that when people see my name flash up that I need something. And that it's instead that I want to talk to people, that I love you, that I want to further our relationship.

See, we don't have to worry about the conscious yet, but this argument, the first one is very simple. Paul says, I do the things that are profitable and I don't do the things that are not profitable. And then it's going to branch into food because food is the second part of the argument.

Here's the argument, so it goes. Eating is a natural good desire, so is sex. Therefore, eating meat offered to idols, which we're going to see is okay later on, is okay, so is having sex with anybody I want to.

Sounds good, right? Except there's a problem. We see with food, the first rule of good governance for yourself is self-mastery. If you are not ruled by things, can you truly say that you are not ruled by anything?

Well, Paul can. Paul is not ruled by anything. Food does not rule him. Recreation does not rule him. Sexual immorality for sure does not rule him. Paul is a man who is somebody, the way he tells us to do what he does, imitate him.

And the way you imitate Paul is to be a maniac for the gospel. We wouldn't have wanted to meet him, friends, and we would be afraid if Paul was coming to preach in this pulpit today.

We would be very afraid.

He was single-minded, but we're not. And what we understand is that if you were trying to make the argument that it's okay to have sex outside of the bounds of marriage because eating is neither here nor there, that is a ridiculous argument.

Because even food can be sinful. You're not at freedom to eat food. Eating without control is enslavement. And you should be enslaved to nothing because a man cannot have two masters. Do you see how the Bible works together?

You will hate the one and love the other. If you are enslaved to food, then you're going to think about food all the time. This one hits near and dear. And this is the acceptable sin in churches today that we can laugh about.

We have 350-pound pastors who are telling you to be manly while they can't push away from the table. You going to listen to somebody like that? It's difficult. You cannot be mastered by it. You cannot be mastered by anything because we are mastered by one person.

And every apostle, in introducing themselves in the New Testament, says what? I, Paul, a slave of Jesus Christ. I, Jude, a slave of Jesus Christ. Peter, a slave of Jesus Christ. How do we say, I, Josh, a slave of cheeseburgers?

Doesn't have the same ring, does it? And it's not a man to be respected. But see, eating is a lesser thing. Eating without control is enslavement, but sex out of bounds is deadly. It will enslave you, to be sure.

But it's not keeping you in slavery. It's going to kill you. It's going to kill everything about you. See, the syllogism, as the Corinthians would pull it out, is this way. This is kind of difficult. Premise number one.

Your belly and meat's two idols will be abolished. This is what Paul says. Sex and the body will be abolished. So the conclusion is, sex is just like food.

It's indifferent.

The problem is this. The body will most certainly not be abolished. And therefore, since the body will not be abolished, sexual immorality is not corresponding to food. So he destroys their argument the way a philosopher would.

And here's the thing. What we understand is that the belly was designed for food, but the body was not designed for sexual immorality. And we see this with our eyes, right? When you eat a good meal, you feel better, do you not?

If you don't overeat, if you have it within bounds, and you eat good food, you feel really good. Is there any regret at all? There's not regret. It's a good thing. That is the thing that exists that is made for another thing, and everything's working naturally.

The problem with sexual immorality is it never works that way. It always breaks everything. I see it as a high school teacher.

It's so easy to see.

It's so easy to see the fights that happen, the rage and the hatred and the anger, the blindness in relationships where people don't understand what's going on. And the thing is, when you put the cart before the horse and you act immorally, you are completely blind to everything about that person.

That's one of the minor effects of sexual immorality. The major effects are that we are promised. It defaces the glory of God, and it destroys who you are. Your identity is bound in your sexuality. We know this.

Paul will tell us later that we give more honor to certain parts, right? We hide them. We treat them delicately. I will take my fist and I will pound something in anger, but I'm not pounding anything with those parts that are of honor.

I'm going to protect them. I'm going to shield them. That's how we treat it. It's not just out there. No matter what, the nudist colonies and the sexual debauchery and the craziness of the day, where you can type in any word on Google and it will bring up all kinds of filth that is unbelievable.

You can't scroll social media without them infecting you with the reels. The reels are where Facebook gets you. I know Tyler gave sage advice to put in your information as though you're a 65-year-old woman on there so that it doesn't do it to you.

It's awful. It's really difficult out there. And just as food is hard to stay away from because you have a natural desire to do it, sexual immorality is difficult because you have a natural good desire that is defined by boundaries.

We'll talk about the boundaries a lot more next week, but as we move on and as we talk about very heightened language here, it's going to be extremely important to understand what we're talking about.

Sexual immorality, defined by our church fathers and defined scripturally, is any sexual gratification whatsoever that comes outside of the bounds of your marriage and whose object is your spouse. Husbands, wives, if you're daydreaming about someone else, you are sexually immoral.

If you derive that kind of thrill or that kind of passion or that kind of desire from anyone besides your spouse, you are sexually immoral and it will kill you and you will come up to this table not understanding that that sickness will give you hellfire.

It is impossible to say that you're a Christian and embrace your sexual immorality and think, ah, it's not that big of a deal. And yet, that happens every day. It is happening right now and I pray to God that it won't happen in a few minutes here.

The thing is, if you are enslaved to this thing, you have to kill it. It's making war with you.

Even as we speak.

Raised with Christ and Joined to Him

The third thing that we're going to get into, the third argument, is that, and this is a very platonic argument, you know, you might start drinking tea with your fingers sticking out talking about Greek philosophers here.

I'll try to keep it in the lanes. I read a lot about Plato this week. Here's the thing. The argument is, you have no senses when you die, so you need to experience them now. When you die, you don't feel anything.

You'll reach true consciousness, but you lose the senses. See, the platonic mind, the idea was is that senses are getting in the way of understanding full consciousness. It's the shadows on the wall. It's very difficult to make anything out because your senses get in the way.

So the idea and the argument is this. If the senses are getting in the way and when you die you're going to have true consciousness, what you should do is just feel it all now. The problem is that that's bunk and Paul is going to go into that in the next argument, so we're going to move ahead.

Verses 14 through 17. Now God has not only raised the Lord, but will also raise us up through his power. This is a theme of Corinthians. Don't miss it. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?

What an astounding thing to say. Shall I then take away the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? May it never be. Or absolutely not. Or do you not know that the one who joins himself to a prostitute is one body with her?

For he says the two shall become one flesh and the one who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with him. You do not live in order to fulfill your senses. That is animal talk. It's animal talk. Who lives to fulfill their senses?

Dogs.

Tigers.

Chimpanzees. Right? There's this idea. I saw it on the internet the other day that AI is trying to make this deal that's going to give us the innermost thoughts of dogs. Here's what they think about. Hungry.

Hungry.

Sleep.

Hungry.

Sleepy.

Hungry.

Visitor! Visitor!

Hungry.

Squirrel.

That's what they think about. It's not a mystery what animals think about. They think about their senses.

Okay?

They respond biologically to their senses. And see, understand that to treat yourself, to treat your body this way is to deface property. Because whether you claim God or not, He owns you. You understand?

He owns you. He created you. You are His. You are His in one of two ways. You are a vessel of blessing, or you are a vessel of wrath. You are going to show, if you're a vessel of wrath, you're going to show God's holy righteousness and His justice through your condemnation for your sin and your cosmic rebellion against Him.

But if you're a vessel of blessing, you're going to show God's mercy, His compassion, His loving kindness that endures forever. It is not your property to deface. So what do you think the Creator is going to do when you start vandalizing His stuff?

See, it's foolish to try to live for your senses because the real life, contrary, it's similar, and it's a perversion, right? Plato said you reach full consciousness and you understand things when these senses are out of the way.

But see, understand this, guys. You don't have real senses until you do die. Because then we experience the true life, the garden renewed. God comes to live among man where sin does not corrupt. There is no crying out for the consummation because when the real life happens, that's when our corrupted body is sown and it drops its shell and it becomes the new plant, the plant that was always intended.

We will have pleasures that Adam and Eve could only dream about in Eden. That's what awaits you, Christian. Are you going to deface your property now? Are you going to claim the name of Jesus Christ and join yourself to a whore?

But you're not even joining yourself, are you? That's not what Paul says. You're joining Jesus Christ to a whore. Have you ever thought about that when you're scrolling the internet late at night when you're alone and the blue screen of disgustingness is looking into your eyes and you're thinking to yourself, you know what I'm going to do right now?

I know I feel this little itch inside me, so what I'm going to do is I took communion last week. I'm just going to go ahead and join Jesus Christ to this OnlyFans girl. Disgusting. You have to see it that way.

You have to see it that way.

See, Christians, you don't have a choice about this. You are in union with Christ. You are part of his body. It's a mystery. And understand the language that Paul invokes. Just as ancient Israel defiled the temple by bringing in the Baals and the Asherah, we defile the temple whenever we bring in the OnlyFans girl, the daydreaming, all of that stuff.

We deface the temple. See, God raised up Hosea to marry a whore, Gomer, to show the extent of Israel's betrayal. What we do today is far worse. We have more revelation than Israel had at that day. We are more accountable.

It's so much worse. When you look out and you see a church and it seems we have no voice in the public sphere, do we? Our leaders don't care what churches say. All the pastors can line up and say, we totally denounce your immorality.

What's the politician going to say?

Okay.

Why?

It's because we're infested with this sin and it's taken our courage and it's taken our power. We have no witness because we are defiled. We have to know this. See, sex inevitably and unavoidably results in one flesh.

It was designed that way from the beginning. Do you remember the story? It was beautiful. God made man. And man was good.

He was very good.

And he looked out and he took dominion and he named all the animals and he was in the garden protecting the sanctuary of God. But he was alone. And it wasn't good for him to be alone because it's not good for man to be alone, normatively.

We know this, don't we, men? It's not good to be alone. We're like a truck driving around in the snow that doesn't have anything in the back. It's just sliding around everywhere.

Okay?

We need some weight. And what happens is when we look out, as Adam looked out, there was nothing there. He was looking at the lions and the giraffes and all the animals and they're not him.

They're not his type.

And so God puts him to his sleep and he makes woman out of man and Adam wakes up and he says, this is flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone. And it's a mystery, isn't it? Every married man. Do you remember?

Do you remember what you thought when you saw her walk down the aisle? Was it not very similar to Adam? This is my wife. She's flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone. It cannot be any other way. Sex was designed to draw together what man, what God had put together.

It is a metaphor and a mystery of Christ in the church, not in some creepy way, but to show that there is no division and no distinction between Christ and his body, his church. Christ does not draw away from us being passive aggressive.

He's not a chauvinist. Christ loves his church with no separation whatsoever, even when she's unfaithful, just as Hosea did. You cannot practice this without bringing one flesh. And what happens, friends, let me be very, very clear and pointed.

When you join yourself to a prostitute, you are bringing in a one flesh union with Satan. That's what Israel was doing. They were worshiping Satan in the temple with their Baal idols and their lewd sexual rituals.

It's disgusting. Why would you titillate your senses for some cheap thrills when you have the creator of the universe who is one with you who has put his spirit in you and you dwell with him every day?

You stand on holy ground every single day when you wake up because God is with you. What does God do to the temple when it has fouled itself with perversion? We know this, right? We taught it in Mark.

What does God do to the temple when it has fouled itself?

He destroys it.

He tears it apart. We were warned, were we not, anyone who defiles the sanctuary will be destroyed. And then Paul will say, you are the sanctuary. Verses 19 and 20, do you not know that your body is a sanctuary of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own?

For you were bought with a price. Therefore glorify God in your body. What did God do when you defiled the temple? He killed Eli's sons. He made it desolate with Babylon. They took everything out and exiled the people.

He destroyed it forever with the fires of pagan Rome after the Lord Jesus Christ inspected it and found it to be defiled. That's a huge part of what the Gospels are about. We've missed it in our day, have we not?

We have Judeo-Christianity. We've forgotten that the New Testament was about Jesus coming and he was seeing a faithless people who had defiled the temple. There was a remnant to be sure. But when he came and he saw the temple and it was defiled, he declared destruction on it.

And some 40 years later, it was destroyed. And with it, the satanic religion that was being practiced in it. Make no mistake. There's no place for that. And if you practice the same way that those faithless people were practicing, you will be destroyed too.

And if we as a church practice the same way that those faithless people were practicing, we will be destroyed. See, you think you're a Christian because of what you believe. You think you're a Christian because you read the Bible and you know things.

And in our camp, it's even worse. You think you're a Christian because you have doctrinal fidelity and those dirty Pentecostals, they don't know the doctrines of grace the way you do. The problem is this.

You're not a Christian by what you believe. You're a Christian by who owns you and whether you acknowledge that or not. Have you bowed the knee to Christ? You cannot bow the knee to a king and then disobey his commands.

You are a criminal and a prisoner when you do that and he will destroy you. That's what kings are for. Kings are there to administer the law. And the law is very clear. Does anyone have a hard time with the seventh commandment?

Thou shalt not commit adultery. Any trouble? Do you understand what that is and what it isn't? Is there any nuance to be had with sexual immorality? Seriously. You get the youth group question, how far with your girlfriend's too far?

The answer to that is and always should have been you are sinning against your God by even asking that question.

Run.

How far is too far? You know. And the reason you ask that question is because you've already decided what you're about to do. You have hardened your heart against God. You have looked at his commands and said, that's not very fun.

So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to profess with my mouth that I'm a Christian and fool all the people around me in my school and I'm gonna join Jesus Christ to a prostitute. It's an ugly thing. It's a terrible thing and God will not put up with it.

And we see it. Look at what's happened. Does anybody have an argument? Does anybody have an argument that sexual immorality defines America? It's what we are. And what's happened? It has rendered the church impotent with the proliferation of terrible behavior and fake worship.

Tyler on campus has to save people from being saved. They think they're Christians because they made a prayer somewhere and they don't know anything about God who they're bowing the knee to. It's a dangerous situation.

We have pastors and elders dropping like flies. A pedophile sexual abuse scandal just hit the Lutheran Missouri Synod. We are eaten alive with it. It seems like every month a new one drops and the reason why is we think, oh, it's just a bad egg.

It's not a bad egg. It's the culture. It's what we've allowed to proliferate in here and we can't do it. Friends, are you feeling the warning yet? You need to have a warning. It's about to be personal.

It destroys civilization with a famine of poverty, disease, violence, laziness, and childlessness. What's happened? America embraced the sexual revolution and what happened is we have reaped the whirlwind.

We kill our babies if we have them in the first place. We have divorce rampant. We watch eight times as much pornography in this country as the next highest country per capita. Crazy. Are we doing okay?

Our whole government is run by a sex trafficking cabal and we don't know what to do about it and the reason why is because we can't do anything about it and what we know and the light bulb hit this week.

What we understand from that is that there are not Christian men in positions of power who are willing to lose it all like our fathers did because what we do, Paul tells us in Ephesians, not only do we not participate in these works, we expose them, but what we do is we cover them.

We can't do it. You're covering it with your wife. You're covering it with your husband. You're afraid to ask your kids what they're doing on the internet. You're giving them the internet unfiltered. It's foolishness.