WWUTT 1513 Flee Sexual Immorality (1 Corinthians 6:18-20)

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Sexual sin is a very serious sin. In fact, it's unique.

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There is something about sexual sin that is different than any other sin. And so flee sexual immorality when we understand the text.

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This is when we understand the text, a daily Bible commentary that we may be equipped for every good work in Jesus Christ our

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Lord. Please tell others about our ministry at www .utt .com.

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Here once again is Pastor Gabe. Thank you, Becky. We come back to our study of 1 Corinthians Chapter 6.

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And once again, the subject matter that we've been addressing is sexual immorality. We've been talking about this over the course of Chapters 5 and 6, and a few more things will come up as we continue through 1

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Corinthians. There's more about this subject that could be said. But for today, we will bring our study of Chapter 6 to a close with this last section, beginning with verses 15 through 20 in the

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Legacy Standard Bible the Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?

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Shall I then take away the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? May it never be!

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Or do you not know that the one who joins himself to a prostitute is one body with her?

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For he says, the two shall become one flesh. But the one who joins himself to the

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Lord is one spirit with him. Flee sexual immorality.

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Every other sin that a man commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral man sins against his own body.

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Or 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?

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For you were bought with a price. Therefore, glorify God in your body.

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Verse 18, a very direct, very strong command that comes from the apostle, very impassioned as he loves this church and desires this church to walk in holiness and it's what

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I desire for you as well. That's why we've spent so much time talking about this subject and not rushing through these chapters.

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This is so very serious and I have seen so many people fall to sexual immorality and think that they were above the temptation only to give in to it.

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The apostle says here and I plead with you as well, Christian. Flee sexual immorality.

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Again, what are we talking about when we say sexual immorality? We're talking about sex that is outside of marriage because that's what

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God created sex for, to be enjoyed between a husband and a wife. The two shall become one flesh and it's not just talking about sex here.

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As we discussed yesterday, this is a picture of something greater. Back to verse 14,

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God has not only raised the Lord but will also raise us up. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?

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Shall I then take away the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? That should be unthinkable for Paul to phrase it that way with the

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Corinthians and surely there were Christians among them who were hearing that being read as this letter was read aloud to the body of the church.

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They're hearing this read and they're going, no, no, we should not unite our bodies with prostitutes.

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So Paul is saying to those here that are listening to this message, he's saying to them don't do it, don't be a part of it, don't be partakers in it, but also don't tolerate it.

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Because even though there were some among them who were holy in their conduct, there were members of this church that were not sexually immoral, but they were tolerating it.

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You go back to chapter 5 where you had the man who had committed adultery with his father's wife, with his stepmother, incest even, a sin that is so absurd that even the

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Gentiles know it's bad. And yet the church is not dealing with this man so they tolerate it, they don't do anything about it, and they allow the sexual immorality to go on.

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You should be appalled by that. So he uses this extreme example. Shall I take away the members of Christ?

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You've been won out of the world, you are being sanctified in Christ, so am I going to now take my

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Christian body here and I'm going to unite it with a prostitute? And surely there are people in the congregation going, well that would be awful, no we can't do that, that would be going right back into the sinful paganism we were in here in Corinth before we became

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Christians. And so Paul is saying, right, may it never be. Do you not know that the one who joins himself to a prostitute is one body with her?

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That should be every bit as much a rhetorical question. We should know that. That a man who unites himself with a prostitute has become one flesh with the prostitute.

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Sex is for marriage, it's not for becoming man whores and prostitutes. But the one who joins himself to the

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Lord is one spirit with him. So again we're talking about something greater than sex here. We're talking about the unity that we are to have with Christ and that is to be our greatest joy, our greatest ambition.

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What does that holiness look like? God is holy, he is set apart, he is perfect.

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What should we look like in our conduct, in holiness and uprightness and in the righteousness of Christ that we've been given by faith in him?

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What is that supposed to look like? And if we are united with Christ, then certainly we should not be uniting our bodies in sexual immorality.

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My friends if you are a Christian and you're still trying to find sexual pleasure outside of the intimacy that you can enjoy with your spouse, and let me let me just say this before continuing on, if you're married enjoy sex with your spouse.

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It's a beautiful thing, it's exactly what God created it for. A husband and a wife in marriage and we're going to talk about this even when we get to chapter 7.

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Husband, your body does not belong to you, it belongs to your wife. Wife, your body does not belong to you, it belongs to your husband.

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Enjoy that gift that God has given to you, it's a beautiful thing. You are not unholy because you're having sex as long as you're having it in marriage.

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In fact sex is holy when it's enjoyed between a husband and a wife, but if sex is outside of the marriage bed, if it's outside of the intimacy between a husband and a wife, then it is sexually immoral.

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And if you as a Christian are still trying to find ways of pleasing those sexual appetites outside of marriage, outside of with your spouse, maybe you're married and you're trying to find sexual gratification outside of your spouse.

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Maybe you're single and you're trying to dabble in enjoying sex, but you've made up in your mind as long as I don't cross this line then

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I'm fine. As long as I don't go over the line then I'm not committing sexual immorality. Your attention is still on sexual immorality.

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You're sexually immoral. You may not be crossing a certain line, but you are in this immorality.

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You're sinning, you're doing wickedly. Your mind is after those things that God has promised he will judge even the desire of.

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Going back to what we read in Colossians 3, 5, and 6, put to death what is earthly in you.

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Sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed which is idolatry.

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Verse 6, very important, on account of these the wrath of God is coming upon the sons of disobedience.

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God's wrath will be poured out even upon those who were desiring the sexual immorality.

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Maybe you weren't crossing the line, but it's what you really wanted. It was really what you desired in your flesh and you would not put to death those earthly things in you.

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And so still desiring the sin and trying to find ways to have this sin but honor

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God at the same time. Those two things are incompatible. You can't do both. You can either honor

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God or you can have your sin, but you can't do both. And so if you're still flirting with this sexual immorality and you're still wondering if there's is there a way that I can have this.

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You're married and you're trying to find sexual gratification outside of your spouse. Looking at porn, masturbation, whatever it might happen to be.

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You're sexually gratifying yourself apart from your spouse. You're having fantasies.

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You're thinking about this stuff. Wouldn't it be better if I could just have this, but I can't.

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I'm stuck in my marriage. Oh well, I'm gonna be in my marriage and honor God this way. No, you're clearly unhappy and not honoring

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God at all. Also, you're poor spouse and Satan is between the two of you. Repent of this.

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Turn from this because the judgment of God comes against these things. And this is not just toward men.

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We're not just talking to men here. This is women too. And oftentimes when we talk about sexual immorality, it's geared toward men.

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It's women also. Women, if you desire to dress a certain way or you want to look a certain way and you want men to lust after you, you like it when guys check you out.

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You want them to have that desire for your body. You're every bit as guilty as they are. You may not be undressing them with your eyes.

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You may not be fantasizing with them, but you want to lead them astray. You want them in their hearts to desire sinful, wicked things.

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Then you are just as much a part of it as they are. The Me Too movement right now is doing so wickedly toward women.

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It is such a horrible teacher for women because there's this mantra that goes with the Me Too movement, believe all women.

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So if a woman accuses a man of sexual abuse, you automatically have to give the benefit of the doubt to the woman.

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She doesn't even have to prove her case at all. My friends, women are just as wicked in sexual immorality as men are.

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She could have had a sexual encounter with this guy and felt guilty about it. But if I can get other people to think that he's the abuser and he's oppressed me, then

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I've alleviated myself of that guilt. I've absolved myself. That could be what's going on in her mind.

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She got into a thing with this guy and was guilty about it. Or maybe he's not willing to commit like she thought that he was.

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And so, hey, he's the man. He's got more power. He forced me into this. So if I can get everybody else to believe that, then

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I'm innocent. That's how our culture thinks about this. And that exact kind of thinking has even come into the church.

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Due process doesn't disappear just because a woman claims that a man sexually assaulted her.

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She still has to prove it. Women lie too. Women are just as wicked in their hearts and just as sexually immoral as men are.

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By the way, every single person who has ever had an abortion is a woman. She committed sexual immorality.

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And to cover that up, the blood sacrifice to cover that up is the death of her unborn child.

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There are men who have been accomplices in that abortion. The abortion doctor, the guy that drove her to the abortion clinic, the man who got her pregnant.

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But every single person who has ever had an abortion is a woman. Women are just as evil and dark in sexual immorality as men are.

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Women, this is just as much for you as it is for men. I wouldn't be saying this if I didn't care about you.

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The wrath of God is coming against such things. Flee from sexual immorality.

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Ladies, you don't look at porn as often. Statistically, men look at porn far more than women, but the number is growing among women.

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And women participate in this, though they may not be looking at porn and receiving pleasure from that, looking at it online on their phone, scrolling through Instagram.

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You know, Instagram has like a no nudity clause or whatever. Oh, there's plenty of sexual immorality on there. You may need to delete that app, by the way, depending on maybe you've disciplined yourself to control it.

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But oh my goodness, it's all over social media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. They're just as much porn sites as Pornhub, RedTube.

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I don't even know the names of them. Thankfully, I don't know the names of them.

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But women, you participate in this too, whether you're looking at porn or you're contributing to the porn.

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A growing number of women taking their clothes off, texting naked pictures of themselves to guys to get them to lust for them.

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And you're hearing the stories, too, of a woman who took off her clothes, texted a picture of herself naked to a guy.

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And then somewhere down the line, she accuses him of oppressing her. I was forced into that. No, you weren't.

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You took your clothes off. You took your own phone, took a picture of yourself and sent that to somebody else.

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Nobody forced you into doing that. Women, stop contributing to men's lusts and fantasies.

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Men, stop looking at porn and fantasizing with women who are not your spouses. Homosexuals, transvestites,

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I've already told you how what you're doing is wicked. Flee sexual immorality.

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Every other sin that a man commits is outside the body, Paul goes on to say. But the sexually immoral man sins against his own body.

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Yes, my friends, sexual sins are unique. We've made it such a cliche to say that God sees all sin the same, as though any sin that I commit is just as bad as any other sin.

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It is true that if you've broken one law, you're guilty of breaking all of it, as it says in the book of James. But when you go through the law in the

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Old Testament, God had different consequences for different laws that were broken. A law without a consequence is not a law, it's a suggestion.

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Here, this is a law being spoken in the church telling Christians, flee from sexual immorality, and that the sin of sexual immorality is different than every other kind of sin.

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Every other sin a man commits is outside the body. But if you're committing sexual immorality, you're sinning against your own body, which is a sanctuary of the

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Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own. So are you therefore going to take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute?

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My genoita, may it never be. You were bought with a price, so glorify

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God in your body. There are teachers out there that are trying to say that even the sin of homosexuality is no worse than any other sin.

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Yes, it is. Oh yes, it is. Because not only is sexual sin unique, different than any other kind of sin, but homosexuality is even worse.

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Because you're not only committing sexual immorality, you're committing unnatural sexual immorality.

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It's just the next step down in your descent into sexual depravity. Name a sin in the Bible that God judged with fire.

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There's only one. Homosexuality. Sodom and Gomorrah. No, no, you're reading too much into that story.

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If you say that the judgment of God came upon Sodom and Gomorrah because of unnatural sexuality, read

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Jude 1 7. Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.

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Yes, my friends, sexual immorality is unique. Homosexuality is even worse than that.

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And the transgenderism movement is just further descent into this madness. God will judge these sexual abominations.

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Have nothing to do with them. Don't desire them. Don't even have it in your mind.

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I wish I could do this. I want to have this. But as long as I don't cross that line, it's fine.

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No, in your mind, you're still committing adultery. You're still sexually immoral. Don't desire the sin.

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Desire Christ. Honor God with your body. And have nothing to do with teachers who are glib about these things.

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Do you know what I mean by glib? Glib is like they're unclear. They're thoughtless about it.

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They're superficial and they're insincere. And they're going to be the ones that say to you things like there's nothing worse about sexual sin.

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There are other sins that are worse than sexual immorality. The Bible whispers about sexual sin.

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You've heard that one, right? It was in January of 2019 at the Summit Church in Raleigh -Durham,

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North Carolina, that J .D. Greer, then the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, preached the following.

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We ought to whisper about what the Bible whispers about and we ought to shout about what it shouts about.

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And the Bible appears more to whisper when it comes to sexual sin compared to its shouts about materialism and religious pride.

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That was a religiously prideful statement for him to say that. It's dead wrong.

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It comes from the pit of hell. And there are people who will believe in themselves that they can get close to and flirt with this sexual immorality because, oh hey, after all the

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Bible whispers about sexual sin. Was Sodom and Gomorrah the fire of the judgment of God upon those wicked cities?

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Did that look like a whisper to you? And how much did the Southern Baptist Convention learn from this wicked preaching from J .D.

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Greer? They voted the next guy in who preached exactly the same thing. Of course he did. He's a carbon copy cut out of J .D.

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Greer. He plagiarizes all of his sermons. And so Ed Litton has also preached exactly the same thing.

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The Bible whispers about sexual sin. Now I know that Ed Litton's plagiarism is disqualifying.

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He should be fired from his church. He should resign. And if he won't resign, then he should be fired, let alone resign as president of the

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Southern Baptist Convention. But the worst thing about what Litton has preached is not the fact that he's just taken

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Greer's sermons and ripped them off and preached them to his church. The worst thing about what he preaches is his doctrine and that he would dare preach in the midst of a wicked and crooked generation that the

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And so many others tolerate it. Paul was rebuking the church in Corinth for tolerating the sexual immorality that existed among them.

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And so much sexual immorality that exists in the church that is not being addressed or confronted.

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Church discipline not being practiced. And instead so many are falling into condemnation because of glib preachers who will not say flee sexual immorality.

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And that every other sin that you commit is outside the body but the sexually immoral man sins against his own body.

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Do you not know 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?

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For you were bought with a price. The precious son of God who came down off of his throne in heaven and put on flesh the likeness of sinful flesh.

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And he took on the form of a slave being made in the likeness of men and found in appearance as a man he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death even death on a cross.

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Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name.

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So that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth.

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And every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the

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Father. Jesus died for sins such as these. Do not desire the sins that the

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Son of God gave his life for but crucify those sins put them to death and live for Christ.

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The Apostle Paul in Galatians 2 20, For I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer

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I who live but Christ who lives within me. And the life I now live in the flesh

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I live for sexual immorality. Is that what he says? No. May it never be.

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The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who died for me who loved me and gave himself for me.

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Flee sexual immorality. The Son of God gave his life for you. You are not your own.

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You were bought with the precious blood of Jesus. So honor God in your bodies.

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I beg this of you my friends. Flee sexual immorality.

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Cling to Christ. Be conformed to his image. Your eternity depends on it.

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Heavenly Father rescue us from this crooked and depraved generation in which we live.

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And let us not be glib about sins such as these. We take it seriously because it took a serious price to rescue us from it.

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The Son of God himself. Forgive us our sins.

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Give us minds that desire Christ. Give us a new heart that goes after not the things of this world but the kingdom of God and your everlasting righteousness.

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Clothe us in that righteousness. Jesus said in Revelation chapter 3 those whom

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I love I reprove and discipline. So may we be zealous and repent.

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Those who love God will hear these words that have been spoken today in this program. In this broadcast they will be convicted of heart.

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They will repent of their sin and they will love Jesus Christ. I pray that for myself too

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Father. Make me in your image. Conform me to Christ. It's in his name that we pray.

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Amen. You've been listening to When We Understand the Text with Pastor Gabe Hughes. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday Gabe will be going through a

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New Testament study. Then on Thursday we look at an Old Testament book. On Friday we take questions from the listeners and viewers.