The Carnage of 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. 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, responsive discipline to make someone confront their sin in front of the body, and if they hold to their sin hardheartedly 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, you know, 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 on to 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, okay?

The two pieces of bread that sandwich the meat is pretty fun. 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 a 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 will 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, 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's not ruled by anything. Food does not rule him. Recreation does not rule him.

Sexual immorality for sure does not rule him. Okay? Paul is a man who is somebody 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're 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. 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 finger sticking out, talking about Greek philosophers here. I'll try to keep it in the lanes.

I read a lot about Plato this week. Okay, 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, okay? It's very difficult to make anything out because your senses get in the way, all right?

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, and 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, 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 it's 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. Are you going to carry hot coals in your pocket and not get burned?

Here's the command, flee. Verse 18, flee sexual immorality.

So simple, isn't it? Every other sin that a man commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral man sins against his own body.

That's why it's so much worse. See, other sins are against others. They bring temporary harm to the body.

Overeating brings temporary harm. You feel sick, right? It takes a long time for the cumulative effects of gluttony to weigh on you, and they do eventually.

And with gluttony, it's obvious because you can walk around and you basically got a sign on you that says I'm a glutton. Sexual immorality, not so.

You can hide it. It lives in the dark. Men, you know this, don't you? If you're of a certain age, you know what

I'm talking about and what happens is you can go by yourself, you can delete your history, you live in that dark, dank space, and no one knows about it.

You teach Sunday school. You lead small groups. You might even preach. We know a lot of them are doing it.

You come up here and preach and nobody knows. You are a coward because there is a piece in the armor. You know what you're doing.

God knows what you're doing. And eventually, everyone's going to know what you're doing because sin doesn't stay still.

It keeps growing. And if you don't kill it, it's going to get bigger and stronger and more invasive.

Proverbs 6 .30 says, Men do not despise a thief if he steals. Listen to this. Men do not despise a thief if he steals to fill himself when he is hungry.

We understand that, right? It's the Les Miserables story of which the musical is better.

But when he is found, he must repay sevenfold. He must give all the substance of his house.

The one who commits adultery with a woman is lacking a heart of wisdom. He who would destroy his soul does it.

It's better to steal and have to pay back seven times as much as it is to be sexually immoral.

Jesus said in Mark 7, Are you lacking understanding in this way as well? Do you not perceive that whatever goes into a man from outside cannot defile him?

But it's what happens inside. The church is the temple. You are the temple.

Both of those things are true. You're the temple of the Holy Spirit. The church is the temple of the living God. If you bring reproach to the temple, you will be destroyed.

The enemy puts so much focus on this sin because it is so very effective. It's effective in its temptation, but it's also effective in its devastation.

If you want to destroy the church, you bring the sexual immorality in because it's going to fall down.

Can you imagine? Everything that I have ever said in my entire life is worthless if it gets found out that I am a sexually immoral pervert.

Everything I've ever said, you'll never listen to it again. You'll see those podcasts or whatever, and you'll be like, you know, that might have been good at the time, but that guy was a raging hypocrite.

That's the stakes. Elders, be careful. Be very careful. Because you carry your disqualification and your ruin in your pocket every single day.

You're at war with the world in many ways, but most primarily in this way. Let's look.

Flee, run away. Here's what this means. It's very simple in the Greek. Fly, do not talk.

Do not reason. Do not rationalize. Do not coddle. Get out as though your life depends on it and keep on doing it forever.

It's a present tense. Keep on fleeing and don't stop fleeing. Every time you see it, run away.

Run away like it's somebody that's about to kill you because it is. The enemy disguises himself as an angel of light.

What do you think that means? Have you ever thought about that? We spiritualize this, don't we? Well, the devil, he looks like an angel of light and he's going to come in and tell us to baptize our babies.

No, that's not how he works, okay? The angel of light is that what he does is he cloaks death in beauty.

He disguises himself as an angel of light in much the same way sexual immorality is death draping itself in the appearance of life and pleasure.

It's not. It's death. Here's our posture. This sin is death, especially this sin, more than others.

So know that it will kill you. It will kill your family. It will kill the church. Think of it this way.

And I will tell you, I would rather die. I would rather die than sin against God this way. I don't say that lightly.

In God and his mercy, I wish that he would take me away before I would fail in this way. Does that mean

I'm not tempted? No, it does not mean that. I live in the world. I see things, right? This sin is a wrecker and a devastator.

So what you have to do is you have to build yourself a dangerous situation with all of the force pushing in the right direction.

Follow me as I follow Christ and let me tell you how I do that. If I fall in this way, every single thing

I have is going to blow up. Everything. I won't be able to work where I work because my co -workers will shun me and push me out.

I'm not going to be able to live where I live because my wife's not going to tolerate it. My kids are going to see me as a delegitimate pervert who walked out on them for a fleeting pleasure.

My family is going to call me to repentance. My church is going to throw me out and I will sit in that pew. Hopefully, if God granted me repentance that I would be able to sit there and take communion and be the pillar to make you all afraid of what happens to a man who falls in this way.

It's a terrible, terrible thing. So how do we flee? How do we do it? I know we're going to run long, but this is so important.

There is a right remedy for this natural desire and we know it. It's marriage and we're going to talk about that the next three weeks after today.

Okay, so I'm not going to touch that one too much. Here's the first thing we have to do to flee is we fight it at the first scene where it's weakest.

When it gets a hold on you, it's stronger and it's much more of a battle. If you fight it early and fight it quickly, it's easier.

So what do you do? You fight it in the mind first. Men, guard your eyes.

Guard your thoughts. Be ready to run. Be ready to cut off the opportunity.

If your phone causes you to sin, cut it off. It's better to have no phone than it is to burn in hell where the worm never dies and the heat never turns off.

If you can't handle it, get rid of it. That's what it means to flee. That's what it means to flee.

Women, guard your emotions. Guard your thoughts. Guard your communications.

Guard what promises to comfort you that is out of bounds. So you have to know the propensities that you have and you have to know the habitat of this temptation.

This temptation, this sin, it lives in idleness. It lives in discontent. It lives in idolatry.

Men, one of the best practical things you can do is just work. Work. Work hard.

Be tired. Go to sleep at night. Be tired.

You know when you're never being sexually immoral is when your mind is focused and you're working really hard on something. Do that more.

It'll make everything better. Women, it's pretty hard to sin this way when you are satisfied with your lot in life and you are pursuing your husband, when you're following him.

Very hard to sin in this way. We work in different ways. We have to understand how this thing takes root.

We have to flee the danger. So if we are fighting the battle in our mind, we also have to look at these propensities and run from them.

You have to flee the social media. You have to flee the TV shows and movies. You have to flee the subversive infiltration.

Do not play with fire. We have an example in Scripture. Joseph with Potiphar's wife. What happens is she comes on to him.

She had to have been beautiful. She was very powerful. She comes on to Joseph. Remember who he is. He's a slave boy.

And she is the mistress of the house. Fabulously powerful and wealthy and beautiful.

No one would know. She's in control of the servants, right? And so she comes on to him.

And what he does is he regards his master and more importantly his all capitals master as more important than the threat and cost to his temporal safety.

And Joseph runs away and he goes to prison for it. Do you think he regretted it?

I don't think so. I don't think he did. Are we flippant and casual with what our eyes see? Images and words and what our ears hear and what we allow our minds to linger on.

I would guess that we are to some extent. Girls, women, you're more tempted to get emotionally swayed by the soap opera slop that's getting put out on all the streamers all the time.

That gives you a perverted view of romance and what's going on. And you never get talked to this way, but that stuff is garbage.

Flee it. It's making you think about this stuff in a way that is wrong and twisted.

When's the last time you see really masculine men on that stuff? Never. Never.

See, they are using the enemy's lie of telling you what you want is a guy who basically is just a little stronger than you but gives you everything you want.

That's the world's lie. It's not true. Run away from it. Don't be flippant with that stuff. Be careful about what you're seeing.

You have to flee by confession. This sin has necessary consequences and it's going to be hard to confess.

It requires rebuilding broken relationships. Men, women, in your marriage, it's going to hurt if you're doing this and you have to confess it, but you have to confess it.

Don't be a fool. You will not run away unless you're willing to confess it at the very least to the person that it most affects, which is your spouse.

Confess it. Live in the light. Get your courage back. Get your holiness back.

And pray to God that they will forgive you. Usually they do.

Christians like to forgive. We're kind of wired that way. Christians like to forgive, but you're not going to work it out by yourself.

Tyler can tell you, ask him after the service, you're not going to work it out by yourself. You can't. You can't.

And want me to tell you the dirty reason why? It's because you like the sin too much. The reason you're doing it is because you like it.

Don't be fooled. You don't like what it does to you, but you like how it makes you feel. You have to have external pressure that starts to let you not feel the same way.

It's pretty obvious. So if you're a child, listen, this is difficult. If you're a teenager, an early teenager, talk to your parents about it.

It's going to be horrible, but it'll be good. Can you imagine having that conversation with your mom and dad?

I pray that my kids will do that someday. If they fall in this way, when they're tempted, that they tell us.

We have to do it. They are your safety mechanism. Tell me.

Tell Corey. Tell a man you can trust and test us. Test us and see if we're not faithful.

We're going to work with you. See confession. Confession brings discipline that helps with the repentance.

You have to have the consequences to have the repentance. We flee through running towards the good.

See, sexual immorality defiles the marriage bed and it has disastrous effects even before the disclosure of the discovery.

It's destroying your marriage and you don't even know it's doing it because it's robbing you of intimacy. Don't fall into the trap.

Recognize the danger and run. And ultimately, here's the thing. I'll leave us with two points. We flee through repentance.

You have to turn away from it. Repentance means to turn the exact opposite direction. It does not mean to confess with your mouth that I don't like sexual immorality.

It means to say, I don't want sexual immorality and I'm going to run as fast as I possibly can in the exact opposite direction.

If you're in a relationship where someone is leading you to be sexually immoral, break it off and run away as fast as you can.

If you truly love each other, repent together, get accountability, confess your sin to someone else who's going to hold your feet to the fire so that you will stop and not sin against a holy

God. It's killing you. Is your marriage going to be okay? No, you drag it into your marriage.

It doesn't stop. It just becomes adultery then. It was fornication and then it becomes the much more serious sin of adultery.

You're a covenant breaker. God doesn't like covenant breakers.

And we don't like covenant breakers either. It's one sin that's on the table. As sexually immoral as we are as a country, does anybody really like to brag about having affairs?

Not really, right? We look at that like, ooh. It's like the last semblance of sanity we have on this issue in the country.

And the reason why is because it's the most serious and the most simple understanding of this law. Breaking up homes is not good.

It's not good at all. Take a chance, friends. Tell somebody and cast this off.

Throw it away. Now, let me leave you with tremendous encouragement. Many people have fallen into the lie that they think that this sin will always beset them.

It will always be this kind of battle and it will never get better. That is a lie from Satan. The cross of Christ is enough to take this away from you too.

His blood covers all your sins. All of them. And you do not have to live this way forever.

So the last thing you do is you flee for victory. You will win. You will win because you do have the

Holy Spirit inside of you. You will win because you are the sanctuary of God and he cares about the sanctuary.

He loves it. This is not guaranteed to be an active hot war for your whole life. It gets easier to win as you start winning.

You will not get tired of winning. You will love winning and then you will find out that you have something that you didn't remember.

That's courage and a free conscience. You know how your kids, they have a clean conscience.

They just say what comes to mind. That's an amazing thing. You will start to have that back.

You'll not be cowed by the pressure of the world, but you will say the words of God when you're not being hampered by this soul -sucking sin.

See winning comes through loving rightly ordered things. Love your wife. Love your husband. Pursue that.

Love the Lord. Such were some of you. We have to be such were. It is absolutely mission critical.

We cannot survive if we are not such were. See a church of courageous men and women is going to have a church full of chaste and pious men and women whose marriages are amazing.

Do you want an amazing marriage? Be sexually pure. It's key.

It's crucial. Remember men and women, our children are watching. They're watching you.

Your neighbors are watching. Our marriages and our future marriages are worth it. But most importantly, our eternal souls are worth it.

Don't be fooled. Don't be fooled. You can't hold to this stuff and be with Christ.

Can't do it. Repent today if it's you.

Tell who you need to tell. If someone tells you and you don't know what to do, don't be soft on them.

I understand brother. We've all gone through that before. That is worthless. You have to lay that sin on the table and you talk about it in vivid detail so that we can all examine how ugly it is.

If you talk to me, be ready. That's what I'm going to ask you to do. And we're going to look at it. We're going to draw what's in the dark into the light.

We're going to put it on the examination table with operating lights on it. It's going to be bright. You're going to see every micron of it and it's not going to be tempting to you anymore.

It's going to be disgusting and filthy and that is the first step to getting away from this is you have to understand what it really is.