Our Nation's Sexual Sins (3) — Albert N. Martin

Our study in the Word of God this evening will be, in reality, a further continuation of that word which we began to consider on the first evening of our conference, God's Word to Our Nation. And I wish publicly to express to the men responsible for ordering the life of this conference, including its ministries, for their willingness to accede to my request that I be given liberty to carry on this theme.

It was not my original intention. It was not even the intention when I asked Liev to extend that ministry for one night to think that in all likelihood this theme will carry through with us to the final evening of my part in the conference.

It is a wonderful thing to know that the Spirit of God, who is the God of order, is also the God who, at times, works in ways that we cannot predict. And I am confident, as much as I can be without any claims to direct revelation or to having heard a voice from an angel, that God has indeed guided us in this mutual decision to consider together in these evenings this one great burden from the scriptures, God's Word to Our Nation.

In our previous studies I have sought to set the subject in a biblical context, disclaiming any direct revelation from God, disclaiming any direct equation between Israel and the Church, and then setting before you from the scriptures a justification for taking up such a theme.

And that justification resides basically in what we would call a biblical theology of God's relationship to the nations. And then last evening I suggested that if there is any text in all of scripture which constitutes the essence of the Word of God to our nation at this time, it is that text found in Proverbs 14 and verse 34, in which the writer of the Proverbs declares, Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.

And having looked briefly at the meaning of those words, I deduce this principle, that if sin is a reproach to any people, then surely the Word of God to our nation at this time is a word on the one hand of scathing rebuke and denunciation for our national sins, and a summons, a regal call to repentance and reformation on the other hand.

And then as we began to open up this theme, I sought to use the analogy of a mountain range with its foothills, its main major peaks, and then those high mountain peaks that jut up above the others. And any sin has nations like a mountain range, and it is my concern and burden to address the Word of God to those great high peak sins of our nation, which I suggested can be ranged under two very simple headings, our sins of putrid moral degeneration and our sins of horrible religious apostasy.

And under that first heading last night, we had only time to direct your attention to the first aspect of our putrid sins of moral degeneracy, namely, the unrequited blood of the murdered multitudes. And I've been encouraged with the number of you who have come to me and expressed that perhaps for the first time you have seen from the Word of God and its cumulative testimony how indeed our nation is guilty of blood, and how the unrequited blood of the multitudes of the murdered literally cries to heaven, pierces through to the ear of God upon the throne of God, that that blood may be requited even with the proper, just taking of the life of murderers, or by the direct judgment of Almighty God.

Sensuality and Sexual Perversion as National Sin

Tonight I want to look at the second aspect of this great first mountain of our sins of putrid moral degeneracy, namely, our unrestrained and unashamed abandonment to sensuality and sexual perversion.

Along with the unrequited blood of the multitudes of the murdered, I submit to you that a sensitivity to biblical teaching leads to this conclusion, that another of our greatest national sins is our unrestrained and unashamed abandonment to sensuality and to sexual perversion.

There are many in our day who say something like this, We need a God, and if that God does indeed take any cognizance of the affairs of men upon the face of the earth, then surely that God is concerned with larger issues than what goes on in people's bedrooms, what goes on in the furtive meetings of individuals in motel rooms.

If there is a God, and if he's aware of what goes on, and if he's concerned, surely he is concerned with larger issues than someone's sexual preferences and sexual activities. Well is that so? Is that perspective in any way reflective of the teaching of the Word of God?

What I want to attempt to prove to you tonight from Scripture is this, that when any city, any nation, any large segment of humanity abandons itself with shamelessness to sensuality and sexual perversion, that city, those cities, that nation, those groups of people call down upon themselves the frightening judgment of Almighty God.

We saw in our study of this subject of innocent blood and how it affects God, that God used for the first time in his Word the vivid imagery of the innocent blood of Abel turning into an eloquent voice which cried to God himself.

In Genesis chapter 4, God said to Cain, your brother's blood cries unto me from the ground. As we read on in the book of Genesis, we read the tragic account of the degeneracy of the human race, a degeneracy that reaches the place recorded in Genesis 6 where God says, I am grieved that I ever made man.

And God commits himself to blot out the entire existing human race with the exception of the family of Noah. But in all of the record of all of the degeneracy which brought about the universal flood which blotted out the entire race, the language of sin crying to heaven is never once used.

For the next time it occurs, it occurs in Genesis chapter 18. And I want you to turn to that passage with me. What is it that once again constitutes a voice that pierces the ear of God upon his throne and brings God down out of heaven in order to deal with the occasion of that cry?

In Genesis chapter 18, the answer is given to us in very clear language. The angels have visited Abraham, the father of the faithful. By a careful reading of the entire 18th chapter of Genesis, it becomes clear that one of those angels is the angel of Jehovah.

That is Jehovah himself who comes in visible form and appearance. He receives the worship of Abraham. He speaks in the first person in the name of Jehovah. And as he speaks to Abraham, he says these words, Genesis 18 and verse 20,.

And Jehovah said, Because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous, I will go down now and see whether they have done altogether according to, and this word is the same root word in the Hebrew as we have in Genesis 4, according to the cry of it which is come unto me.

And if not, I will know. Here Jehovah informs Abraham that a cry has once more reached his ear. And it is this cry that has brought God down from heaven in the person of the angel of Jehovah, Jehovah himself, to see if indeed the cry accords with reality.

Now granted all of this is figurative language in the sense that God doesn't need to come down to see. He fills heaven and earth. God is omniscient. He knows all things concerning all there is to know at one given point in time.

And yet to speak to us and to communicate the realities in a manner that we can understand and grasp, God accommodates Himself to us and says to Abraham, Abraham, I have heard a cry from my throne in heaven.

The cry has come up from the cities of the plains, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Abraham, I am now come down to see if indeed the facts of the case accord with the measure of this cry. The cry is great. It is a grievous cry of grievous sin.

But I will come and establish by my own visible presence whether or not the cry accords with reality. Then we read on into chapter 19 of the experience of the angels as they come. Chapter 19. And the two angels came to Sodom at evening.

And Lot sat in the gate of Sodom. And Lot saw them and rose up to meet them. And he bowed himself down with his face to the earth. And he said, Behold now, my lords, turn aside, I pray you, into your servants' house.

And tarry all night and wash your feet. And you shall rise up early and go on your way. And they said, No, but we will abide in the street all night. And he urged them greatly. And they turned in unto him and entered into his house.

And he made them a feast and did bake on leavened bread. And they did eat. But before they lay down, the men of the city, even the men of Sodom, compassed the house round, both young and old. All the people from every quarter.

And they called unto Lot and said unto him, Where are the men that came unto you this night? Bring them out unto us that we may know them. And that knowing was but not the knowledge of social introduction.

It was an appeal that they might have these men to enter into illicit, abominable, homosexual practices with them. How do we know that? Read on in the subsequent context. And Lot went out unto them to the door and shut the door after him and said, I pray you, my brethren, do not sow wickedly.

What they desired was wickedness. And the precise nature is indicated in verse 8. Behold now, I have two daughters that have not known man. They are virgins. They have never entered into sexual intimacy.

Let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you. And do to them as is good in your eyes, only unto these men do nothing. Then we read the sad history of the resolute determination of these men. Inflamed with their aggressive, beastly lust, they are not satisfied to take even these two virgins and to abuse them and make them their playthings for the night.

And they would have fain laid hands upon these two visitors forcefully had not the angels struck them with blindness. Then you know the subsequent history, how God forcefully removes Lot and his family from those cities.

And after he reiterates this, verse 13, for we will destroy this place because the cry of them is waxed great before the Lord. And the Lord hath sent us to destroy it. Then God did something he had never done before in human history.

God literally rained hell down from heaven and destroyed the cities. Now what was the most aggravated sin of Solomon Gomorrah? There are some clever manipulators of the Bible who say, well if you think it was abandonment to sensuality and sexual perversion, you are all wrong.

Then they quote in a cavalier way the remark of the prophet Ezekiel in chapter 16, verses 46 and 48, in which certain other of the sins of Sodom are underscored in another context. Pride and fullness of bread and indifference to the needy.

And then they proceed to say that these were the great sins, inhospitable-ness, not homosexuality. My friends, that is a perversion of the word of God. For when we turn to the inspired comment upon this incident in the book of Jude, it is very clear what the crowning sin of Sodom was according to the inspired penman of the New Testament.

For here we read in the book of Jude and verse 7,. Even as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities about them, having in like manner with these given themselves over to fornication, and gone after strange flesh, are set forth as an example, suffering the punishment of eternal fire.

That which caused Almighty God to bring down fire and brimstone, and literally to rain hell out of heaven upon the sins of the plains, was this unashamed, this unrestrained, this unembarrassed abandonment to sensuality and to sexual perversion.

The cities of the plains had come through the various stages of this abandonment and this commitment to perversion. They had passed through the stage in which these sins were merely tolerated, while it was known that they were, to use contemporary jargon, carried on in the closet.

And from the stage of toleration, they had become an acceptable form of behavior. And it's at the point that they become an acceptable form of behavior, that they become a contagious form of behavior.

For on that evening, it was not only men, but it says men and boys. And not just from one pocket of the city, from every single quarter of the city. From tight, aggressive propagation of their perverted lifestyle, until they were now so evangelistic about it, they would impose it upon two women.

And to reach that point, God says, enough. The cry that has come to heaven is indeed worthy of my response in frightening judgment. And so God performs this strange act of judgment and rains down what in Scripture is used as the very symbol of eternal fire.

Hell is described as the lake of fire and of brimstone. And God rains hell out of heaven upon the cities of the plains. To make it manifest to all mankind from that point onward, the holy hatred of his soul.

To this kind of abandonment to sensuality and to sexual perversion. Now you may ask the question, why is this so, Pastor Martin? Well, you remember yesterday when we asked the question, why does God hate innocent blood?

The answer was found in the language of Genesis 1, for in the image of God made he, him. Well, this is the same answer to this question. Why is there that in God which is so violently provoked in his holy nature, when there is this abandonment to sensuality and in particular to perversion, in which sexual distinctions are blurred and ignored and blatantly rejected in the most intimate expression of that sexual distinction, namely sexual intimacy.

Well, the doctrine of the image of God is again the answer. For when we read in Genesis chapter 1 that God said, let us make man in our image. In our image let us make man. Do you remember what the scripture says?

In the image of God created he, him. Male and female created he, them. Mankind created in the image of God is created male and female. And in a way that I confess I am not prepared to expound, this much is true.

There is something in the distinctiveness of maleness and femaleness, masculinity and femininity that answers to that which is in God himself. He is one God. We believe in the great truth there is but one true and living God.

And yet our Bibles teach us within that one God there is Father, Son and Holy Spirit so that the Spirit can commune with Father and Son and Son with Spirit and Father and Father with Spirit and Son. One God and yet within the one there is three.

And in a way that I would not dare attempt to unravel with precision, surely there is something of this perspective in God making man in his image male and female so that anything that obliterates that distinction and in particular that which obliterates it at its cynical, the sexual affront to almighty God, it is in a sense an attempt to march up to the throne of God and re-dictate the very structure of man creating, God creating man in his own image.

Sexual Purity in the Mosaic Law

And this holy antipathy of God to sexual perversion and to licentiousness again is picked up and expanded and underscored in the Mosaic legislation. And I ask you to turn now to Leviticus 18 as a specimen passage.

Leviticus chapter 18, the throne of God is articulated in verse 2. Speak unto the children of Israel and say unto them, I am the Lord your God. After the doings of the land of Egypt wherein you dwelt, you shall not do.

And after the doings of the land of Canaan where I bring you, you shall not do. Neither shall you walk in their statutes. And then in verses 6 through 18, God gives specific directions that all fall within the realm of laws against incest.

Laws against certain marriages within certain blood relationships. Laws against incest, verses 6 through 18. Verse 19, God gives a prohibition of what we would call an unnatural sexual activity. Verse 20, he speaks against adultery.

Verse 21, he speaks against the sin of offering up children to heathen idols as blood and burnt sacrifices. And then in verse 22, notice the clear prohibition. You shall not lie with mankind as with womankind.

It is an abomination. Thou shalt not lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith. Neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto. It is confusion. God is very explicit in prohibiting all forms of sexual perversion, all forms of sensuality, all forms of adopting the policy, my sexual appetites and preferences are my business.

I shall fulfill them according to the dictates of my own passions and my own inclinations. God says you shall not do so. Now why is he concerned about these matters? Why is this legislation hammered out in such detail which it is almost embarrassing to read in a mixed public gathering?

Well, God gives the reason in the following verses, and I ask you to follow again as I read. Verse 24, defile not yourselves in any of these things. For in all these things the nations are defiled which I cast out from before you.

And the land is defiled. Therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land vomits out her inhabitants. You therefore shall keep my statutes and mine ordinances and shall not do any of these abominations, neither the homeborn nor the stranger who sojourns among you.

For all these abominations have the men of the land done that were before you, and the land is defiled. That the land vomit not you out also when you defile it, as it vomited out the nation that was before you.

O dear people, hear the word of God. The nations in the land of Canaan were pagan, non-covenanted nations. The law they had was the law inscribed upon their moral consciousness as creatures made in the image of God.

And yet from that law they were to know that these activities were sin. And when they defied that law of their own delusion, God uses graphic language. He says that Israel's conquest of the land was but the feather in God's hand in the throat of the land of Canaan, that it might wretch and vomit out the inhabitants of the land.

That's the gross, sickening language of Jehovah. The lands of Canaan, the nations of Canaan, that's the language of the passage, had become defiled and polluted for these national sins that provoked God to bring national judgment.

As then, so it is now. Even though our nation has the light of special revelation in the possession of the word of God and in the preaching of that word, even if we did not have the light of special revelation, when a nation gives itself to the kind of sexual perversion, the kind of sensuality forbidden in this chapter, adultery, indifference to proper laws concerning incest, insensitivity to the sanctity of the one-to-one marriage, sanctuary of a husband and a wife, when people give themselves to homosexuality, the passage says the land becomes defiled, the nation becomes defiled, and marching with the thrones of this land into a grave of atomic dust, whether He causes us to be vomited into the hand of a foreign totalitarian power, whether He causes us to be vomited out into the disruption and disintegration of civil and racial war, I do not know.

And this book says defile. We are now to give open, self-confessed, practicing homosexuals acceptance at every level of social, economic, educational, life, and even religious. So the great debate in many denominations centers around the ordination of homosexuals.

And already in some places we have proceeded beyond mere toleration and mere acceptance to aggressive propagation and forced seduction. How long before the feather touches the... ...18 and 19, the testimony of Leviticus chapter 18, the clear teaching of Romans chapter 1.

The Wrath of God Revealed in Romans 1

We move out of the Old Testament into the New. The great theme of this epistle is the exposition of the gospel, which is the power of God unto salvation. A gospel which sets forth a righteousness of God to be received by faith.

But the dark backdrop of that righteousness of God is the filth and the unrighteousness of man. And most of you, I'm sure, are familiar with the basic thread of argument in Romans chapter 1. Beginning with verse 18, the apostle declares that the wrath of God is present tense.

There is a coming wrath. He talks about it in chapter 2. There is a coming day of wrath, but there is a present manifestation of divine wrath. The wrath of God is revealed from heaven. And it's revealed against all ungodliness, and that which inevitably follows from ungodliness, all unrighteousness of men who hinder the truth in unrighteousness.

Then he goes on to declare in this context, the situation in which men had only the light of general revelation. What they could know of God by looking at his handiwork, the heavens which declare his glory, and the firmament which shows his handiwork, day unto day utter speech, and night unto night shows forth knowledge.

And what has man done with that revelation God has made of himself? Paul says he has turned away from it, and he has turned instead to silly idols and beasts. And as a result of it, God has acted in judgment.

Verse 24, wherefore? Wherefore God gave them up. Now notice. God gave them up in the lusts of their heart unto uncleanness, that their bodies should be dishonored among themselves. For that they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the creator, who is blessed forever.

Amen. For this cause, God gave them marvelous insights with respect to total sexual liberation. That's what we're being told our day has received. We are the day of great enlightenment, the dark shadows of the terrible Victorian mentality with regard to sex.

We've received the light of true benevolence and compassion that invites all of the perverts to come out of the closets and to declare openly their alternate lifestyle. And we are told even in evangelical circles by certain so-called evangelical leaders such as Mollenkopf and Hardesty and her ilk that it is a matter of Christian integrity to recognize homosexuality, whether between men or women, as a viable Christian lifestyle because we have now become enlightened by God to see that all of this homophobia is but a dark shadow of our past perspectives and influences.

Is that what the word of God says? Look at the language. For this cause, God gave them up unto fire. For their women changed the natural use into that which is against nature, and likewise also the man leaving the natural use of the woman burned in their lust one toward another, men with men, working unseemliness and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was due.

Where is the AIDS problem coming from? This text has the answer. Where is that new strain of venereal disease coming from? No longer can a few shots of penicillin and the medical world is baffled and wringing its hand against one and verse 27 receives that is due.

Wrath is already being revealed. The tragedy is, verse 32 says they know such conduct deserves the judgment of God. Who knowing the judgment of God and this is why I use the word shameless not only practice the same but with those that practice them.

In other words, when perversity becomes public and shameless that's the height of degeneracy. You find this theme, though time will not permit us to trace it out, you find it in the prophets, particularly with Jeremiah.

One sample is Jeremiah 6 .15 and the prophet says were they at all ashamed when they committed abomination? Nay, they were not ashamed. God says thou hast a whore's forehead. Thou refuse... What is it like when a woman takes her most noble faculty of sexuality and dares to parade it and sell it?

On 42nd Street in New York City something has died in that poor soul of native natural shame. Surely if she's going to do that she'll do it in the dead of night. She'll do it in the shades and shadows not in broad daylight before the rude stare of anyone who can look upon her.

When a woman has come to that place, God says she has a whore's forehead that refuses to be ashamed. And I say, my dear fellow believers, our nation has a whore's forehead. And we've lost the ability to be ashamed.

The testimony of the Word of God from Genesis cleaned through into this passage and on into the epistles is that for these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. Surely then God's word to our nation is this.

Sin is a reproach to any people. And not only is the sin of the unrequited blood of the multitudes of the slain our national reproach, but this unashamed, this abandonment to sensuality and perversion is our national sin and ought to be our national shame and brings us as a nation to the very brink of even further judgments from the Almighty.

Cultural Evidence of National Sexual Degeneracy

I will not pollute your ears by speaking in great detail of the clear indications that we have come to this position of unrestrained and unashamed abandonment to sensuality and perversion. Suffice but a few clear examples.

When men who are supposedly intelligent, trained in our so-called best universities, can write and have published books advocating constructive incest. And when they are given prime time to sit on national talk shows to give a justification for their book and a polemic for the possibility that authorities and the joys of men and women and democracy say our sin is a national sin for which we must hang our heads in blood.

When perverts lose all shame and brag that this has come out of the closet time and not only openly identify themselves by name but gather together in groups and in causes and march through our streets no longer any sense of shame for their perversion.

I say, dear people, we must hang our heads in blood. Don't let the word gay ever be used upon the lips of others. It is a euphemism to take off the edge of the horrendous nature of the perversion of homosexuality.

Adultery or so-called entertainment, the movies, the theater, the TV, the theme of the lyrics of popular songs, I say this is our national sin. When male and female virginity are laughed upon and mocked, when skin magazines are a multi-billion dollar business, both those appealing to women as well as to men, when the TV becomes the personal X-rated movie screen, no sooner does videocassette, the videocassette become a marketable thing when the number one item is X.

When our schools take upon themselves to show pornographic movies and slides and give pornographic literatures to preteens, when verbal titillation and double innuendo have become part and parcel of almost every social context, when a man who seeks to keep a pure mind must almost live with his eyes upon the pavement because of all of the...

Dear fellow believers, this national... And you cannot opt out and say, but Pastor Martin, I don't indulge in these things. I do not approve of these things. Remember the principle of solidarity. You and I are part of a nation that has sold itself to sensuality and to perversion.

The Need for Personal Repentance and Deliverance

But you ask the question, well, I want to give a little more attention in closing tonight than I did last night to the remedy. What can we do? If this is our state, what can we do? Let me first of all answer that question for boys and girls and men and women in this building who have been sucked into the whirlpool of our national sensuality and perversion.

I would be willing to make the statement without claiming prophetic insight that there are more than a few within the sounds of my voice tonight, boys, girls, men, women, even preachers who have not been able to withstand this climate, that whirlpool of sensuality and perversion that swirls around you with ever-increasing fierceness and power.

At first, you just came to the edge of it to look in out of innocent curiosity, you called it. Some of you who are preachers, you began to look into it under the guise, how can I denounce it if I don't know what it is?

That was your first contact with pornographic movies, your first contact with pornographic literature. How can I denounce it if I'm ignorant of it? I must have the right to speak from the matrix of real knowledge.

And I would not be surprised if I'm speaking to more than one adult and possibly more than one preacher who this night is an addict to pornography. You're an addict to pornographic movies. You've spent the last two, three, four years constantly looking over your shoulder to make sure no one sees you slip in and pay your three bucks or five bucks, whatever it costs.

You're constantly looking this way and that way when you go to that haunt where you look at your girly magazines. You're constantly living that fearful, frightening experience of wondering, who's going to see me?

When will the lid be blown off? Perhaps I'm talking to teenagers who have been sucked into the idea that, well, it's all right to fool around with girls if you're a girl, as well as you still have an interest in boys and vice versa.

Am I speaking to boys and girls and men and women who now, sitting here tonight, known only to God and to yourself and if others are involved by way of sexual dalliance, only they know that you sit here tonight in the frightening chains of sexual perversion and next to heroin and to alcohol, there are no chains that I've ever had to deal with in a pastoral setting like the chains of sensuality.

My friend, is there any word for you? There is a word for you. That word comes to us so clearly in 1 Corinthians chapter 6. In verse 9, Paul says, Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God?

Be not deceived. The first word of God to you is this. Don't listen to what you're being told by the so-called experts in America. Don't be deceived. Neither fornicators and there he uses the general Greek word for all kinds of sexual impurity from which we get our English word pornography.

Pornia. Be not deceived. Neither unclean fornicators nor idolaters nor adulterers nor effeminate nor abusers of themselves with men nor thieves nor covetous nor drunkards nor revilers or extortioners shall inherit the kingdom of God.

What is the word to you sitting here tonight with all the semblance of a liberated Christian, but you know you're in bondage. Perhaps even the day or two before you came to this conference, not knowing what might be available in this area, you had a binge with your girly legacy.

And you're here in your church. What's the first word of God to you? It's this. Either those chains are broken or you'll go to hell. And you better take that serious. Liberty, then into hell. Don't let them tell you that self-abuse is Christian activity.

Who tell you that responsible, committed, loving, homosexual or lesbian practice is a viable Christian expression of lifestyle. The word of God says and perversion, you'll see. Oh, dear young people who've been spared, when the temptation comes, and when you're bombarded from the radio and the TV and in the school and by your peers, try this a little bit and try that.

And when you're tempted to go the first step in the direction of sensuality and perversion, hear the word of God will chain me and take me to hell. But now the second word of God to you is in the verse that follows.

And such some of you. You mean there's hope? Why, Pastor Martin, you've said there's no hope. That's right. No hope while the chains are there. No hope while you defy God's norms of sexual purity as a single person, as a married person.

I don't care what your psychological orientation may be. If you are not heterosexual oriented, if you are giving yourself man with man, woman with woman, be not deceived. Those patterns of life are utterly inconsistent with being an heir of the kingdom.

But such were some of you. Such were some of you. Something has happened. They're no longer like that. And what's happened? Look at the text. A combination of two mighty influences impinged upon many of these Corinthians.

You were washed. You were sanctified. You were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the spirit of our God. The Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. The Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.

What had happened? There in Corinth, this sink of iniquity, this center of commerce and pagan thought and pagan worship, whereas a very part of your worship of the heathen deities, one would commit acts of sexual impurity and fornication.

What had happened? A humble, hook-nosed Jew came and began to preach about Jesus of Nazareth. Began to preach about this Jesus who authenticated His claims by His life and by His works. Who was impaled upon a Roman cross by the decree and purpose of God.

Who there upon that cross bore the sins of His people. Bore sins of every kind and stripe. Who went from that cross into a grave. Who broke the bars of death and came out from that grave and ascended to the right hand of the Father and received of the Father the promise of the Spirit and sent Him forth upon men.

He says, such were some of you. But having come into contact with the message concerning the Lord Jesus Christ, you've been washed. You've been justified. And furthermore, you heard that He gives the gift of His Spirit to all who believe upon Him.

Yes, He sovereignly regenerates by the Spirit unto faith. But the Bible everywhere teaches that it is to the regenerate, believe in sinner, that the gift of the Spirit is given when he believes on the Lord Jesus.

And in the power of that indwelling Spirit, he can now see his chains broken and fought. A free man. A free woman. If you're here tonight bound by various dimensions of our national sin of abandonment to sensuality and sexual perversion, there is hope for you.

And that hope is not in trying to sell your conscience a bill of goods that your sins are not really sins. They are. But it's to flee to the fountain open for sin and uncleanness. Fall down before the Son of God like blind Bartimaeus and cry, Son of David, have mercy upon me.

What wilt Thou that I do unto You, Lord? To which He will say, Be Thou free. What can we do as a people? I've tried to answer the question to the individual. But what can we, the people of God, do? Well, ultimately, dear people, the greatest thing you can do is stop playing games with free time and ask God at any cost to make you a Jacob, an Israel who knows how to wrestle.