Marriage: Sex, Gross Good or God? — Shane Idleman

Lord, I just pray that you'd visit this service tonight. Lord, we desperately need you. Lord, the nation needs you. Lord, the church needs you. This valley needs you, dear heavenly Father. I pray that you'd bring revival to us, Lord.

Bring revival to our homes. Lord, bring revival to purity and have the blood-bought church of Jesus Christ begin standing up for what is right in this fallen and perverted culture, Lord. I pray for the strength to deliver this type of message, Lord.

Lord, I pray that hearts would be broken. Lord, that lives would be changed tonight, that your spirit would descend upon this place, Lord, and we would leave here different than when we arrived. Lord, we want to honor you.

Lord, we want to cherish you. We want to look to your word, and we thank you again for what your son did on that cross, Lord, that allows us to experience the freedom from bondage and guilt and addiction.

Lord, we look to you tonight. Please bring revival. Please bring hope to those who are hurting, Lord. Bring restoration, Lord. Your word says that you will bring back those who are driven away. You will bind up the broken, and you will strengthen the sick, Lord, but the arrogant you will feed in judgment, and we pray for humility tonight.

We pray that men will begin leaving their homes in the fear and admonition of the Lord. Lord, we pray that you change, Lord, this valley. Bring us closer to you. We pray this in Jesus' name, amen. Well, it's definitely a weighty topic tonight, and I'm sure you all saw the bulletin, and you said, oh my goodness, is he going to talk about that?

Yep, I'm going to. I thought we'd lose half of you with the rain and the weather. It's good to see you tonight. But I want to say up front that there's a lot to unpack with this. So I'm going to walk cautiously.

I'm going to walk slowly. I'm going to walk carefully, and I'm going to try to unpack important points and not get in a hurry. And like I was talking about to Russell at the beginning of the service, that it might go into part two.

I'm not sure. I'm going to try to get it out. There's a lot to say, but I want to be sensitive to what I believe that God's putting on my heart and hopefully to use that to help convict and challenge many of us, myself included.

But I can't really steal, I didn't steal the title, but I borrowed the title of this message. Many of the younger kids have heard of Mark Driscoll, and he taught on this, and he's wrote a book recently, and one of the chapters is called something like this.

I think it's sex, gross, gift, or God, or something along those lines. But I thought it's so relevant because we fall, do you realize we fall in one of those three categories? And I talk about intimacy, sexual intimacy between a husband and a wife, or if you're not married, or depending on your situation, it's either gross, or it's God to you, or it's a gift, or it is good.

It's one of those three things. And I will submit to you that in our culture, it is God. The God of sexual immorality, the God of perversion is ruling and reigning in our culture today. And sadly, you see the church kind of drift in that direction too.

You know, we'll get to that in a little bit, but I just want to encourage you guys to, we have to look to God's Word and to His standard. What does He say about this? Because if you look to the culture, you will be deceived.

You'll be misled, you'll be thought something, you'll be sold a bill of goods. Because it is no good. It's deception at its core. And the enemy likes to go in and he likes to pervert sexual orientation or this topic, because what God has made for good, and ultimately to glorify Him in the context of a man and a woman in marriage, has been perverted by our society and our culture.

And I believe it's okay to talk about these topics, because we can't go run in a corner and hide from it as our kids are being exposed to pornography and as young as 8, 9, 10, 11 years old, knowing more about it than I did at that age.

I mean, you'd have to go somewhere out in the desert and friends would show you something they hid a long time ago, and it wasn't as prevalent as it is today. Young kids are being seen everywhere. And if you don't guard your homes, man, I'm often reminded of the Scripture, some might say it's out of context, but I think of this often when I study on this topic for thinking about the household, when Jesus said, it's better for a millstone to be hung around your neck and cast into the sea than to ever lead one of these little ones astray.

And as we as men, we're supposed to protect our home, protect our children, not help lead them astray, help give them the things that pervert them and bring all kinds of distortion to sexual intimacy.

So with that said, let's look at God's Word. I'm going to be all over the place here, but there's a reason for it. I think God's Word is so relevant in this topic that it blows my mind, because I think sometimes we forget about these things, but we're going to start in 1 Corinthians 7.

1 Corinthians 7. Now Paul is writing, as you know, to the church in Corinth. It's a pretty, I don't know what I would call this church, it's a mixture of lukewarm, kind of letting everything go, gifts are going crazy, and Paul's trying to bring them back.

So he talks to them about this issue in the beginning part of chapter 7. Then he moves into divorce, those who maybe their spouse has left, and then he goes into being single, so he kind of covers everything in chapter 7 and gets it all out of the way.

But he's writing to the church in Corinth, and I want you to take specifically, take note to this first sentence. Now for the matters you wrote about, these people were looking to Paul for advice. Paul's saying, now concerning the matters that you wrote about, it is good for a man not to marry, but since there is so much sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband.

Now Paul I don't think is necessarily down-talking marriage, he's saying it is good for a man not to marry, because as we learn later in Corinthians, the single man or single woman cares for the things of God, how they might please the Lord.

That's a single person's focus, should be not on dating and hooking up and meeting the next person, getting in and out of relationships, but seeking the Lord. Single life is invaluable. I look back and me and Morgan joke about this often, I mean we would never change anything, but those single years of just no agenda, no things going on, and people pressing for your time, but you could spend hours in the Word, hours in worship, and let God build and restore your life.

So Paul's saying, I wish that you were as I am. And theologians are divided on if Paul was married and to hold his position as a Pharisee or Sadducee or religious leader, he would have had to been married, and that's kind of irrelevant, I tend to agree with that.

But for this, he's talking to those people in the church of Corinth, he's saying it's good for a man just not to marry, or a woman if you want to be single, because also they were facing a lot of persecution as well in the church.

We talked about people being beheaded, martyred for their faith. We don't know that in America today. We get upset if there's not a parking spot out front. But back then in this culture, Christians were being killed for their faith.

And to watch your wife die or your kids would be absolutely traumatic. So I think Paul's writing in that setting saying, listen, if you can remain single and focus wholly on the Lord, do it. Don't run to get married.

However, Paul understands how God created us. He said it's better to marry than to burn with this passion, be sexual and immoral, and doing all these different things. It's better to put yourself in marriage because marriage then acts as a shelter, as a covering for these passions, God-given passions.

But in the context of marriage between a man and a woman, how God created it. So it's a shelter, a safe haven, if you will, for these things. So Paul goes on to say in verse two, but since there is so much sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband.

The husband, now this is a tricky one. A lot of people like to throw this out. The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife and likewise the wife to her husband. Talking about intimacy. The wife's body does not belong to her alone.

And that's interesting. I think it's the New King James, this is the English Standard Version, I think the New King James just says that the wife's body does not belong to her. Well, I'm glad they put that word alone in there because it clarifies it's not hers alone but his and the sexual union that God created, that God has created us for that purpose.

And the man and the woman likewise should be open and honest and allow the other person to be available, for lack of a better word. So Paul's saying, listen, it's not just your own body and you can't just say, sorry, you've upset me all week.

But understand that the man needs a certain thing and the woman needs a certain thing and not to put that to an end and not to say sorry too bad. And I meet couples that haven't had intimacy in months, if not a year sometimes.

And it blows my mind, the reasons, excuses and things. But Paul's saying, don't do that, don't refrain from these areas. The wife's body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. Now husbands, in the same way, the husband's body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife.

Do not deprive each other except by mutual consent, both agreeing that for mutual consent we'll give ourselves away for a time of prayer and fasting, which seems a little odd. Let's refrain from that but go into prayer and fasting.

I mean, that's kind of challenging, I'm sure. But that's what Paul is saying here. And the reason, I think, is because any time you go into prayer and fasting, what you're doing is you're fighting the flesh.

So I believe that Paul is putting the deeds of the flesh aside, these lusts aside, so you can focus on the Lord in time of prayer and fasting. That would be powerful. If you could fast from intimacy, food, these things, and just seek God wholly, I bet he would move.

But both spouses have to consent with that. You can't be on a fasting program here for six months. You know, it has to be a mutual consent of what's going on. And of course, I'm not going to delve in too deep with this because it's obviously the Rated G version, and because couples need to talk and come up with certain things on their own.

I mean, I can't give out, you know, here's your checklist and do this and time frames. I mean, that's up to a couple to decide and prayerfully consider, and of course, a lot of different things come to play in that.

Verse 5. Actually, let's go to verse 6. I say this as a concession, not as a command. And Paul's basically saying, I say this as a concession, not as a command. Some things he would say, as thus saith the Lord, versus, hey, this is my thoughts as Paul the Apostle, what I believe God's put on my heart.

This is a concession, not necessarily a command. And that's a whole other topic there. Verse 7. I wish that all men, again, were as I am, single. But each man has his own gift from God, and another has that.

In a nutshell, he's saying, be content with whatever situation God has put you in. Now, I know that was a lot, but let's unpack that a little bit. I want to talk about this first issue. He sought godly counsel.

These people, the church in Corinth sought godly counsel, and I would encourage you, you must seek godly counsel. You must seek godly influence, because the enemy's coming in like a flood. The enemy's coming in with sexual perversion and distortion, and it begs the question, are we infecting, are we affecting, with an A, are we affecting the culture, or is the culture infecting us?

So what's happening in the church, we're not being the salt and the light, affecting the culture. The culture's coming in and infecting us. And we walk around as Christians with sexual orientations perverted and disordered, we're filling all our minds with all this kind of lust and wonder what's going on.

It's because everything from a Carl's Jr. commercial to buying a car on TV, everything is filled with sex and perversion. I mean, I'm amazed at what pornography 30 years ago now fills the television screen on a nightly basis.

You say, why do you shame, do you talk about these issues? Because I have to, for as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. I can't avoid this topic and not talk about the media or outside influences that are coming in like a flood.

Thousands and thousands of images we're watching now, girls, they look at this, they look at Barbie, 36, 24, 36, and mom, this is how I have to look, and look at all this, and guys are dating and getting, we're just filling our kid's mind with all of this stuff.

And we wonder why we're seeing divorce rates skyrocket, we wonder why sexual perversion is at an alarming rate. All these things, everybody's coming out of the closet, why can't we as Christians come out of the closet and say, according to God's word, these things are wrong.

A .W. Tozer said on our bulletin, in every generation, every generation, the number of the righteous is small, make sure you're among them. He says there's a remnant out there. This message is for the church global, but there's going to be a small minority to say, as Joshua, as for me and my house, we're going to serve the Lord.

And it's difficult, it's challenging. I'm not up here saying I've mastered everything, but you look at our culture, it's infecting the church. Look at things, look at Facebook, what we post on Facebook, what we do on our weekends, what do we call entertainment, what are we watching, what are we viewing, and Christians are looking no different than the world.

Where Paul tells us later, come out from among them and be separate. One thing you have to be separate in is impurity. Sexual purity is not a bad word. Sex is good and God-given, thank God for it. But when it is perverted, the word pervert comes from that, perversion is to take what is initially going a certain direction and pervert it off course.

To take something how it was initially made and pervert it. And that's what society's doing, so if you do not look to God's word on a daily basis and get your mind off of that junk, you wonder why guys walk around continually feeding their mind with lust and they struggle with it.

It's controlling them, sex has become a God. It's because the culture is perverting and doing it basically on purpose because they know the famous line, sex sells. What's the old saying, what happens in Vegas stays on Facebook.

So all this stuff is getting out there, sexting, whatever that is now, they're texting things and young adults and it's getting out at young ages and it's a wake-up call. Come out from among and be separate.

God does not appreciate sexual immorality, especially among His people. It's not some weird prudish thing like the Puritans, you can't do anything. It's being bold and righteous and standing up for what is right.

Who may ascend into the hill of the Lord or stand in His holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart and has not lifted up his soul to an idol, nor has he sworn deceitfully. For if the eye be good, the whole body be full of light.

If a man even thinketh in his heart that he's lusting after a woman, he's committed adultery. As a man thinks, so is he. For if you're led by the flesh, you will feed your mind on the things of the flesh.

Roman is crystal clear on this. Live by the Spirit, feed your mind on the things of the Spirit. Live by the flesh and you will die. This is serious. This is not some little topic, yeah, this and that.

This is serious. I've seen pornography destroy more marriages than I can count. I've seen it reverse a normal sexuality and people start getting more perverted because the flesh is never satisfied. You realize that the flesh wants more and more and more and it perverts and it gets perverted.

And God says, come back. Come back to my word, to my standard. And one of my concerns is now Christians are looking to the porn industry for advice and examples and this. Can we do this? Can we do that?

I don't know. How did God create you? Is it lawful? Is it mutually beneficial? And how did God create you? I mean, but now the porn industry is setting the standard. It's ridiculous. And I've just seen the church drifting and what happens is we become desensitized.

You know what that is? It's when you no longer feel what you used to feel. You're desensitized to it. There is a lack of discernment and a lack of clarity in the church today. And I've told this story, you know, before, but it bears repeating about it up in Alaska, how they'll kill a wolf.

You know, they'll take the knife, a big knife, and they'll dip that knife in blood. They'll let that blood freeze and then they'll put the blade up in the snow with just the blade sticking up. So the animal comes upon that knife and begins licking that blood and licking that blood and licking that blood.

Within an hour or two, they're dead. Because their tongue was cutting on that knife and they're bleeding to death and consuming their own blood, consuming their own blood. They're bleeding. Blood is all over the snow.

Desensitized. Desensitized. That's what's happening to the church in America. If you're not broken and humble and worshiping and getting into the Word of God, asking Him to direct you and wanting purity and want it.

And again, it's a struggle, not a, not a, I'm not talking about perfection. This is an area most of us will struggle in, me included. Absolutely. But what do you do with that struggle? Do you feed it or do you starve it?

That's really, that's really what it boils down to. Do you feed that or do you, or do you starve it? Because lust and sexual perversion either grows or it withers. There's no standing, there's no middle ground.

You don't just, oh, here's where I'm going to stay all year. No, it's either growing and growing and getting more perverted and things coming in is damaging the marriage, it's damaging your character.

You don't love your spouse anymore. You don't want to see them. You don't want to touch them. You don't want to be around them because now it's controlling, it's getting worse. Or you starve it, repent and get back into the Word of God.

Those are the choices. There's no middle ground on this topic. It's very important that we look at how and what we're feeding our mind because the battlefield is right here. The battlefield for sexual purity is right here.

And I will submit to you, if you're engulfed in sexual morality, you will not be filled with the Spirit of God. You cannot be filled with the Spirit of God and be filled with lust and perversion. It's almost like there's not enough room in the house, if you know what I mean.

Either you fill it with the Holy Spirit of God, yes, people struggle, I understand that, but they repent and they get back on track. I was actually going to do this later, but I'll do it now because it fits.

Are you all wondering what's under here? I've been dying to do this, but it's been a while. Okay, real quick analogy. On this topic, the world in you, the Holy Spirit in you. You're going to either be filled with the world or you're going to be filled with the Holy Spirit of God, righteousness, the things of God.

What happens is, things of the world. Get up, Howard Stern, I know that's a bad example, but talk radio, this and that, nothing of the things of God. You've got some Facebook images, you're just, oh, this isn't working as good as I thought.

I'll clean it up later. You've got all this stuff, and I'm not putting down these things per se, I'm telling you what happens. All these commercials, the Carl's Jr. commercial I talked about, oh, we better put a little more in for that one.

And you just, I mean, The Bachelor, that was pretty good. What about that pornography clip? I just can't really get away from it, it really entices me. And then you get to work and you guys start talking about this and that, you start thinking about that girl at work and she's wearing what.

And now you're filled with the world. You're not filled with the Spirit of God, nothing, it's empty. So you wonder, why am I filled with all this lust and things? Because you tell me. This is what happens, filled with the things of the world, and the church of Jesus Christ.

Why they have no discernment? Why they have no power? Why there's no inunciation? Why there's not healing taking place? Lives being radically changed, repentance, marriage is being restored, it's because we're filled with the world.

So pastors want to come up and give pop psychology and seven points and a poem, and no lives are affected. That's just the truth, because many times we're filled with that too. The pulpits across America are filled with the world.

A .W. Tozer also talked about this in the same book. He said, who a man is all week, is who he is all month, is who he is when he steps to this pulpit. If I'm feeding on the things of the world, I'm going to come in here and give lifeless messages that fall on deaf ears and nothing changes.

If you want your marriage restored, how in the world are you going to build a solid marriage with this junk in you all day long? The Bible's boring, Shane, I have no more passion, I don't like worship, I don't even like what you're saying.

What are you filled with? Because the Spirit of God is not divided. The Holy Spirit is not divided against himself. There's people in here saying, amen. There's people saying in here, how quick can I get out of here without anybody noticing?

And there's people in here saying, I need to repent. Those are the three options, and that's good. I make no apologies, because that's my job, is to help build and encourage. Well, it doesn't sound like very encouraging, Shane.

Oh, it is, because you know what you can do? Tonight, the same thing, the same process that filled it up, repentance, brokenness, humility, get in the Word of God, turn that darn TV off, stop renting those movies, stop going online, stop playing with that stuff, because the enemy is the prince of this world.

The forces controlling this world ultimately control you if you give yourself up to that. That is how important this is. And I made a radical shift in my life when I started to put things in here that were edifying the Word of God and worship music.

I mean, when I came in here, I was like, oh man, how am I going to get through all this? And then Chelsea's up there, I didn't want to finish. I just want to sit down and worship. Lord, break my heart.

People need God. They need to draw closer to Christ. And when you go back and you struggle with lust, it's probably because at 12 years old, your dad wasn't there and there wasn't affection, stop excusing, stop making blames, start repenting.

The Word of God doesn't make excuses. It doesn't coddle our feelings like counselors tend to do. It crushes them. The Word of God crushes our feelings, so repentance takes place. If we have a whole bunch of excuses, I just don't love my wife anymore, she's not attractive, she's not single, I'm single now, what am I supposed to do?

All these excuses, the Word of God is not full of excuses, it's full of truth. And we either embrace truth or we don't. And you might say, man, this is radical. Do you know that this was normal Christianity in the early church?

Now when I come up here and I see Pastor Gary here too, when he proclaims truth or I do, people think, oh, you're so extreme or so this. No, we're just going back to the early church. Back to the foundational doctrines of the Christian faith.

So now when we preach this, we're looked upon as extreme. Back then it was normal. So who's really drifted? Who's really drifted? We have. I'm scared now, I can't even, I'm going to write on this topic in the Valley Press.

I know as soon as I send it, they're going to say, oh, you can't have this part in here about homosexuality, it's wrong according to God's Word. Well, you know what I'm saying, the water analogy. This is, you've got to take, if you take anything away from this message, I hope it's this, because you can begin to clean your life, you can get back on track, but God does it.

See, not you, I've got to do all this stuff if I just don't have a TV, if I don't go to the movies, if I don't do this, if I wear a dress down to my ankles, guys won't think I'm attractive, blah, blah, blah.

No, no, no, no, no, you don't do anything. You live a moderate life, of course. Sexual purity, women should be concerned with how they dress because men are visual. Be careful what you post because we're not concerned about such and such, we're concerned about what you're wearing because it's an attraction, it draws us.

That's how God created us. But he says, if you come back to me, if you come back to me, if you seek me with all of your heart, repent of these things, but then you've got to remove things. Who repents and keeps playing with the enemy?

That's not genuine repentance. Oh, Lord, I'm so sorry, and get home, I'm still going to click those things, I'm still going to do those things. Me and Morgan right now are seriously considering, I have a couple guys, any questionable website I go on to my computer, goes to them.

We're thinking of just putting her email in there too because people are saying, oh, you shouldn't do that. Well, if there's transparency and I want true accountability, wouldn't that be something to do?

Sometimes she's like, yes, no, I don't know. But I have guys that hold me accountable. Anything that's questionable, we have to have those things in place. If you don't and put away things that distract you, I mean, there's certain movies we just don't watch because it's going to stimulate unhealthy lusts in the marriage.

And what happens is if you're continually feeding your mind with that on a daily basis, that's who you become. As much as we don't want to admit it, as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. When I look at someone, I talk with them, I see where they're at spiritually, I can tell you exactly what they've been feeding their mind with, either the things of God or the things of the world.

There's no middle ground there, though. So now that I've belabored that point many times over, and I'm going to probably continue to do so, I'm going to talk about the first topic, sex. Gross. Do you know that the early church thought it was gross?

I mean, I've got old books of the Puritans I'll read and the wife will talk about, you know, they'll counsel another wife, they'll say, now, once a month, you've got to perform your wifely duties, and oh, gosh, it'll be over soon, don't worry about it, and like, what the heck?

I mean, yeah, we have, you know, it's like they looked as gross. And there's some in the church who were raised never to talk about this topic. The problem is your kids are being taught at a very young age.

And if you don't, as the man, it's difficult for me to talk about these things. They're going to get it from somebody else. They want to, why was my parents not telling me this? Why didn't they explain this?

And there must be, they want me to have fun. I know they want you to have fun, but they want you to do it in the right context. So it's been gross in the early church. Many times, you know, if you go to Augustine or Justin Martyr, Polycarp, Irenaeus, Agnadius, you read some of these topics on this issue, and they're kind of, they don't want to talk about it.

You know, in the church, it's just something you don't talk about. So it's kind of brought that into the church, and you'll see the church sometimes goes to extremes. You know, sex is gross, and then the other extreme, it's like it is now sometimes.

We're going to follow the pornography industry. Can we do all this stuff? Can we get radical? Can we get crazy? All this crazy stuff that goes on. Instead of getting in the middle, what does God's Word say?

And you'll see a swing the church did in poverty. It was if you were, when you were so poor, you were so spiritual. The poorer you could be, the more spiritual you were. And then the church shifted back, probably 1970s, 80s, and you see now, you've got to drive a limousine and jet, and you've got to have $10 ,000 every time you speak, and you've got, it's poverty, I mean, it's riches.

God is blessing the man of God. No, he's not. Humble yourself. Come back to the middle ground. But if it's not for the grace of God, there go I. He must increase, I must decrease. And so the church, you'll see swing.

The church, you'll see, don't go to the movies at all. Don't be involved in Hollywood. Don't even drive down that freeway. Don't dare get on the 101. Don't even go down to that place of filth. The church, and then, or the other extreme, yeah, get involved, watch whatever you want.

And I had a youth pastor tell me this, my mouth almost dropped. He goes, Shane, I don't care what I watch as long as my heart is right. You don't care what you watch as long as your heart is right. Do you know that what you're watching is affecting your heart?

And as you can imagine, he didn't like my message. What is that? I mean, it's because it's challenging that lifestyle. So the church, we can watch whatever we want as long as our heart is right. Doesn't matter.

Get involved in Hollywood. Be an actress on a soap opera, kissing all these different guys. It doesn't matter. At least I'm being an example for the Lord. How are you being an example for the Lord? Nobody even knows you're a Christian.

You're compromising the gospel. So come back over to the middle ground. Absolutely, be involved, do things. But let God truly guide you. Not self-gratification, but God's Spirit. So the church has found, and it comes with sexuality as being gross, mainly because of what the Bible says about sexual immorality.

So the church kind of just lumped that as a whole. Anything to do with sex is bad. No, it's very good within the context of how God designed it. Anytime you get away from God's design, you're in trouble.

And that's why I said I wrote down actually the definition of perversion. If you look in the dictionary, it's an alteration of something from its original course. Adam and Eve, Adam knew his wife. God brought them together.

Here's my original course. And then man takes it and perverts it from its original course. That's where we get that word from, pervert. They take what is good and pervert it, twist it. I mean, we see this, I saw this in the health industry all the time.

Take what is good, God-given food, and pervert it. Load it with all this junk, you know, all this food that's not even real, it's fake. We're perverting it, doubling the sugar content, tripling the caffeine, everything.

So the addiction pulls you in, pulls you in. All this food we're eating, we were never even designed to eat. We were designed to eat life-giving food that dies. That's why you see this big movement now towards raw, raw food, raw vegetables, because you're eating living enzymes that are about to die.

You eat those, the body takes in that living energy, the living enzymes and nutrients, and lives because of it. Now we eat things that have a shelf life of 15 years, filled with polyunsaturated, or partial hydrogen, oil, sodium, nitrates, aspartame, all this junk that is just pure junk.

I don't know how we've made it so far. Probably because we're fearfully and masterfully made is why. But we've perverted that. That's put in tons of sugar, tons of this, so we pervert what is good, and we get the lust of the flesh tied right in there.

Everything is tied to the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, or pride of life. That's what the enemy uses. Those three things, he'll go after the lust of the flesh, what your flesh craves, or the lust of the eye, oh I sure want that, or the pride of life.

That's what he tried to get Jesus with in the garden, and that's what he tried to get Eve with. When she saw that the food was good to the eye, pleasant to the eye, desirable to make one wise, looked good, it was there, everything was there, he hit her with all three of those.

And he's doing the same thing today. So it's not gross. That's what we're telling young adults. Sex is not gross. As Christians, we love sex in the context within marriage. How God designed it. He did it.

There's nothing wrong with that. We shouldn't be ashamed of that. But then what the culture does, and what people do in their own mind, gets distorted, and the flesh, as I said before, is never satisfied.

Whew, and I'm halfway done. Ephesians 4 .19, having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality as to indulge in every kind of impurity with continual lust for more. You have to realize that the flesh is never satisfied.

The flesh is never satisfied. It'll keep getting more perverted, more outrageous, more out of control if you do not control that area of your life. And as Christians, no temptation has overtaken you. But God, who is faithful, will not allow you or I to be tempted beyond what we are able.

But with that temptation makes a way that you may be able to escape. Paul says later, make no provision for the flesh. Provision is forethought or foreplanning. Don't plan ahead for the flesh. Paul says to starve the flesh.

But it's the same Paul who said, oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of sin and death? I do the things I don't want to do, but with the mind I serve the law of God, but with the flesh I serve the law of sin.

The flesh is never satisfied. And I will submit to you that I believe that sexual immorality has been the destructive force that's come against the church and the children of God since even the beginning with Adam and Eve.