Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Hebrews 13:1-4

Well, I could just tie it in. Maybe this will work. Probably not. Well, the sermon text today is found in Hebrews 13. Again, I’ll just use this one. And while I want to preach specifically on the last part of verse four. Again, I’ll provide a little context by reading Hebrews 13:1-4. Please stand reading God’s word.

Hebrews 13, beginning at verse 1. Let brotherly love continue. Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing, some of unwittingly rather, entertained angels.

Remember the prisoners as if crucified with them, those who are mistreated since you yourselves are in the body also. Marriage is honorable among all and the bed undefiled. But fornicators and adulterers God will judge.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you that it is transformative. It has transformative powers. Your Holy Spirit takes it and writes it upon our heart and gives us the graces and virtues of the Lord Jesus Christ by means of his word.

Lord God, we do pray that you would strike us and cause us to repent of sexual sins specifically. And we pray, Lord God, that you would cause us to be raised up, healed as it were, once your word slays us, put back together with high fidelity to proper sexuality. In Jesus Christ’s name we ask it, and for the sake of his kingdom. Amen.

Please be seated.

Well, so I warned you a month or two ago about this sort of sermon. The Bible addresses sexuality in the verse before us. You know, as I was looking at my notes last night, reviewing what I was going to say today, I looked at the offering song and the first line is one that probably some of you may be saying even now as Pastor Tuuri begins his talk on the Bible and sexuality. “God be merciful to me.” May God be merciful to us. May we treat this subject with its proper reverence and deference but help us Lord God to honor you in what we say here.

My goal for today based on this sermon is repentance first and foremost. We live in a culture where the judgment of God is not affirmed and it’s hidden away. And today’s cover is taken from the golden calf incident. God’s people rebelling against him even while the representative is receiving the law and God’s judgment comes upon him afterwards. I hope that the words of God’s judgment against sexual sin rings out clear and strong from this pulpit today. And I hope that young men particularly and older men, that men post puberty, as they come forward to give God their tithes and offerings, as they walk the aisle of this church as you’re supposed to do every Lord’s day, that you would do so with a heart that’s broken relative to your sexual sin and recommit yourself to sexual purity and chastity in the context of God’s word and relationship.

Now, you know, it could be that some of you have no need to repent about this. I’d say that’s probably a pretty small group because we live in a culture in which there are temptations to sexual sin all around us. And so it’s likely that there is much sin even in the group of people here who have gathered together to worship God. And I know your hearts are that. And so, I pray that the Lord God would use his word today to cure us, to strike us, and then also to heal us.

“Correct us with thy judgments, Lord, then let thy mercy spare.” As we just sang in Kings Academy this last week or two, one of the songs we’ve been singing in chapel time is “Rise Again, Ye Lionhearted, Saints of Early Christendom.” And the particular subject of today’s text is one that the early church was known for. Even when they were trying to get the dirt on the Christian church for the Roman Emperor, guys that would go and spy and figure things out, they’d hear that what’s going on there is they’re being admonished every Sunday to keep their marriage vows, to be chaste sexually, to take that portion of your life and consecrate it to their God.

And they did it. The Christian church were known as a group of people who were pure and chaste and had good thoughts and had control of their eyes and their thoughts and the rest of their body as well. They were known for that. They were men. They were an army of God. “Rise again ye lionhearted.” A saying about a song rather about martyrdom. But we want to have the strength of Christian manhood exhibited once more in the context of a culture in which men have become absolute slaves to this particular kind of sinfulness. It’s horrific what’s going on.

Now, to remind us where we’re at in this text, remember I’ve said before that what we want to do is the super thing, the great thing. You know, we want to be the one that does something great for Jesus. Well, it’s very interesting to me. I think about it every week, and I know I’m repeating myself every week as well, but we have all this wonderful, somewhat complicated doctrine in the book of Hebrews, the sermon of the Hebrews, and we have some very obvious application at the end.

And there’s nothing really here that says they’ll go out and win the world for Jesus Christ. But I think that what it does tell us is that this is the way you win the world for Jesus Christ. Normally, you don’t go out and knock on people’s doors. You don’t street preach. All that stuff’s good and proper in its place. But for the average guy, average Joe and Jane, right? This text says the way you apply all of this and by implication, the way the kingdom comes—and we said that this is the sixth slot matching the second slot, you know, heaven on earth.

The way we do it is through doing the simple things of life faithfully. We’re not told a great many subjects in this application part of this sermon. We’re told about the church. “Brother, let brotherly love continue.” We’re told to exist in the context of Christian community. It’s not prison ministry of the unsaved that’s the emphasis here. It’s visiting Christians who are in prison for their faith.

And it’s those who are being mistreated for their faith. So, it’s not the kind of benevolence evangelism we think of when we get to this text. No, it says that you have a Christian community and then you have obligations to the broader Christian community and specifically to those who are suffering for their faith. This is what Christian community is, this extension of it.

And now it talks about family by way of marriage relationship.

And then the next thing we’re going to start talking about next week is our vocation or how we do business and not having covetousness and instead having contentment. And then the very last thing he talks about is obeying rulers. Now that’s five very simple things. They’re things that you can do. They’re things that are easy for you to do. I mean, they’re not the super thing. They’re the average ordinary thing.

But I think the scriptures are telling us this is the way the heavenly kingdom comes. This is what happens. You know, we will supplant the ungodly with our Christian community. As we grow it, it will supplant the ungodly. First, it’ll drive it out as we, you know, grow over it, as so to speak in our in the blessedness of God and having kids and multiplying and all that stuff. And secondly, it’ll be the sort of beacon of truth that affirms the truth of Jesus Christ that brings people to repentance for their sins.

And so there is a downstream evangelistic perspective to this. This is how we achieve victory, I think, primarily through displacement, not through you know evangelism in the primary sense of that term and not through the sort of super things we want to do. You do what’s right. You love your brother in this church. You love the extended community of Christ. You have good marriages and good families. You go to work and you do an honest day’s work for your employer and you see your vocation and calling correctly, not with covetousness, but contentment, and you obey the authorities in the church and the state. And if you do those things, you’ve done some super things for Christ. You’ve done some things that are in opposition to fallen men’s propensities as we see around us.

I’ve got these two terms now. I kind of, you know, I felt a little bad put them on the outline. I have Mexifornia and Eurabia. I heard this Eurabia phrase this last week from Steve Sykes at the Valentine’s dinner. And this could be taken by fallen man as kind of a racial slur or something. That’s not the idea. The idea is that California is becoming—there’s a book written called Mexifornia—and the idea is that people from Mexico and Central America are supplanting, you know, the gringos there.

And so we have a different state emerging and you know in a way that may be a good thing. I mean because typically people coming up from Mexico and Central America have much more of a Christian sense of the world even though it’s funneled through the Roman Catholic church, which is not good, but still, well, you know, if the white race so to speak, the white people in California who are not Christians are continuing toward a zero population growth and maybe negative population growth, then the demographics alone mean that California will be ruled increasingly by the people coming up immigrating up from Mexico and Central America.

Same thing’s happening in Europe. You know, Europe—the European Christian culture, post-Christian culture—they’re negative population growth and the Muslim and Arabic people are coming into those countries and they’re having a lot of kids. And over time, a generation or so, they say they’ll be the majority population in Europe. Now, that’ll be bad in Europe because this is a Muslim faith as opposed to at least a nominally Christian faith that’s starting to become more and more dominant in California.

But my point is just that it doesn’t take some superdeal to rule a world. It takes simple obedience, you know, to having kids, solid families. Don’t, you know, ruin yourselves out with sin and corruption the way Europe has done and way California tends to do. And over time, you can displace a culture by simply going about doing the simple things like having kids. So, you know, these texts are, you know, they’re not unimportant. They’re simple texts, but they’re so important. This is the way we achieve victory.

Now, we’re going to talk about sex. And you know, it seems like every time we get involved legislatively, it’s against sex. And you know, people say, “What’s wrong with Christians and sex?” They talk about it all the time. Well, you know, this verse is kind of instructive because it talks about sexuality not removed from marriage, but in the context of marriage.

And when we talk about sexuality, it could be a result of some sort of weird twisted victory thing going on, but biblically, why the Bible addresses it a lot is because Satan uses improper sexuality to strike at the foundational blocks of a culture, which is the family. Okay. So our emphasis on sexuality, at least in this text, the reason why sexual sin is talked about and God’s going to judge it is because it eats away at the very foundation of a Christian culture by blasting away, by adulterating families.

You know, we have adultery and we have this word “adulterate.” To adulterate a compound is to mix something else with it that isn’t—that isn’t the same thing. You adulterate gold by mixing dross with it. It’s an adulterating compound. And well, when you commit adultery in the context of marriage, you bring something into the marriage that weakens it, debases it. So improper sexuality here is seen as having a negative effect in the context of marriage specifically.

And another aspect of this is that sexual holiness is something that is—we’re told in Hebrews 12 that we’re to be people who are holy. And so the implication also of course is that in this area of our lives, it’s very much an area that is subject to the mandates of God’s word and we’re to be holy.

And on your outline, the next thing I have in terms of introduction to the text is “Rehallowing the Bedroom,” the removal of defilement of the curse. In the Old Testament, you were unclean just through nature of sexual relationships with your wife. You weren’t sinful—it wasn’t sinful. And when we think of it that way, that uncleanness is the same as sin, we end up with a theology of physical relationships that is not right.

Uncleanness in the Old Testament meant to show the effects of the fall. The effects of the fall are pervasive. They go right through all kinds of elements of our lives, including sexuality. And what Jesus has come is to roll back the effects of the curse. “Right? Far as the curse is found,” Isaac Watts’s version of Psalm 98. That’s where the blessings now flow. And so, human sexuality is now no longer an unclean thing. The effects of the curse on human sexuality have been rolled back definitively by the Lord Jesus Christ. And human sexuality is a great thing.

We don’t like to talk about sex. You know, we use this term “gender.” And I have all these conversations with lots of people these days. You know, humans don’t have gender. Gender was always a term used about vocabulary. Things have gender. It’s a thing that it’s used in the context of vocabulary. Up until the modern age, humans had sex. Sexuality is what we have. We’re sort of reticent to speak about sexuality. And so, we want to talk about it as gender somehow as if it’s unrelated to our sexuality. It isn’t.

We want to, you know, here again, one of my goals today is that in the context of married—well, not just married people. I want us every one of us to rehallow the bedroom. There’s this book by Thomas Howard, *Hallowed Be This House*, and Doug Wilson, I think, preached some sermons based on that or maybe even wrote a book or something. I don’t know. But Howard’s book was great. He just went through the various rooms of the house and he talked about the significance of what they are, what’s going on in these rooms.

In this verse before us, when it says “the bed undefiled,” that’s what it literally is. It’s bed. And this word can be used to talk about the place where you rest. It can be used to talk about sexual sin. It can be used to talk about proper marital sexuality. All those things are included in the bed. And if nothing else, you know, you walk away from the sermon with here’s what I want you to do. When you walk into your bedrooms tonight, you know, as you go through that threshold, through that liminal space, you transition to your bedroom.

I want you to think of that place as “hallowed be this room.” Okay? That this room is like every other room in my house to be hallowed, to be seen from God’s perspective. The bedroom is the place of rest. It’s the place of origins. It used to—until modern day we don’t want to see death around us. Now everybody goes to the hospital and our old folks home to die. But the bedroom used to be where you’d die too. Beginning and end right there. Conception, birth frequently in the bedroom and then you die in that same place. You see?

So, so these are the things that we think about when we move into bedrooms. Places of rest, repose, places of origins, places of death, and places of sexual activity in the context of marriage. And you want to, you know, we want to have, this text tells us, a pure bed. That’s what it means. You want to have a pure bed.

And young men, you want to have a pure bed. You recreate that portion of your house as well. Okay? You go to that and you rehallow it.

Now, we have here in this text—we’ve had this, we have in the second half of what we talked about last week. And you’ll notice the way I read the text today, these first four verses, they’re in doublets. They’re doubled up. So, we’re to love the brothers and we’re to love strangers. And then we’re supposed to have grace and mercy toward prisoners and the afflicted. You see a double reference. And then there’s two exhortations relative to marriage.

Okay? So, it’s a doubling up. And this is the other half of it. And the way—if we were to read this in the Greek, remember we said last week that honored marriage is to be and the bed undefiled. And I’ve actually got that I think on your outline, that there’s that structure to what goes on here.

And these things kind of link up. If you see there that the marriage honored must be and the bed must be undefiled. Now on your outlines where it says verse four, “honored marriage, bed undefiled,” that is the simplest form of a chiasm. Okay. Never be fooled by a kiss or kissed by a fool. And if you line up the kisses and the fools, you got an X. And the Greek letter X is called chi. So this is a simple chiasm.

And so it talks about honor, marriage, bed, undefiled. Okay? And if you link up that marriage and bed are related and honor and undefiled are related. And so what this tells us is that the bed is an integral part of marriage. Okay? And that to honor marriage, we want to make sure we don’t defile the bed. A pure bed is one of the most significant ways, as we said last week, to honor marriage.

Sexual meekness—and I use that term for a purpose, of course. You know, meekness is not weakness. A meek horse was a horse that was broken to harness. It had all its power and strength, but it was under the control of the master of the horse who had broken it. Right? A horse was more powerful than ever because its power is directed toward a particular end by the master who rides it. That’s what meekness is in the Bible. “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the world.” We think that’s weakness. It’s not.

A meek man, we think of as somebody who’s, you know, spineless. No. A meek man is a powerful man who has that power under the authority, under the reign, under the bridle of the Lord Jesus Christ. And what we’re—what this verse encourages us towards is not sexual weakness but to sexual meekness, where sexual drive and that whole part of our lives is under the dominion of the Lord Jesus Christ. And it’s an important part of our life.

And so we’re not talking here about getting rid of sexuality because it’s bad. No, just the reverse. Sexuality is integral to the marriage relationship. And you young people, we don’t warn you against it because we don’t want you to, you know, enjoy all the delights of it, but you’re not going to enjoy the delights of it unless you’re meek and broken to the harness of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So, marriage is to be honored via sexual meekness within marriage.

And in addition, after this little chiasm, the bed undefiled, we then read there’s a motivating statement here. Okay? There was a motivating statement to loving your brother and entertaining strangers. You might entertain an angel. There was a motivating statement to remembering the prisoners and helping those who are mistreated. You have the body too and so you could suffer in your body. Have empathy for them.

There’s a motivating statement here to this little thing. “Honored marriage must be and the bed undefiled. Why? Fornicators and adulterers God will judge.”

The King James says “whoremongers and adulterers God will judge.” That’s why the heavy emphasis on the order of worship, the cover on judgment. God wants you to be frightened of sexual sin. He wants you to be very frightened of engaging in sexual sin because sexual sin eats away at the foundation of a Christian culture. It will devastate the individuals involved in sexual sin and it removes our ability to supplant the culture with strong community based upon the basic building block of the family.

And so because of that, God wants you very frightened of sexual sin. And I mean over the course of the centuries, sexually transmitted diseases were something to be frightened of. We put it away. We get it out of our sight these days, but it comes roaring back. Always has. You know, people’s noses fell off from syphilis. That’s the kind of judgment God would bring upon the bodies. And not only that, but even worse, men who engaged in illicit sexual activity and spread syphilis, you know, in the 1800s, their children would contract it. Babies born to syphilitic women would have this as well. Their flesh would rot. Horrible things. Just a picture of the sort of judgment that God brings upon sexual sin—because, and not because God doesn’t like sex.

God says sex and marriage is great, but because God is protecting the building block of a Christian culture by bringing strong judgments against sexual sin.

So the motivation is sure, terrible, and comprehensive judgment.

You know, we talked last week about proper use of words and we shouldn’t, you know, here we don’t talk about you know, gallant or romantic people, we talk about whoremongers and adulterers, fornicators and adulterers. We use biblical language about these things. And these two particular Greek words were frequently brought together in Jewish writings of the time to indicate the whole comprehensive set of sexual sins. So fornication, you know, is sexual sin not in terms of having sex with somebody that’s married. That’s what adultery is. But between these two terms, there is a comprehensive statement of sexual sin.

And the judgment is assured here. There’s judgment, you know, now, but it also points to the future judgment as well that God brings upon fornicators. Now just listen to some of these texts. And I’ve got the references for you on your outlines.

1 Corinthians 6:9. “Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, adulterers, homosexuals, sodomites, etc. shall inherit the kingdom of God.” So, right at the front of the list of people that will not inherit the kingdom of God are fornicators, idolaters, and adulterers. You see, so strong statement of judgment.

Galatians 5:19. “Now, the works of the flesh are evident which are adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, other things. And then in verse 21, ‘the like of which I tell you beforehand, just as I also told you in the past, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.’” The beginning of the list in Corinthians and now in Galatians is sexual sin. And in both cases, he says, you’re not going to inherit the kingdom of God if your life is marked by this kind of sexual sin.

Ephesians 5:5, “for you know that no fornicator, unclean person, nor covetous man who is an idolater has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God.” Notice, by the way, that it moves there from fornication to covetousness. And that’s just what our text in Hebrews will do. We see this pairing frequently. We’ll point this out next week when we begin to talk about covetousness. But, you know, marriage and work, that’s what it’s talking about. You have to apply your Christian faith diligently in those areas. That’s how you build Christian culture.

But again, and the point is that no fornicator has an inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God.

Colossians 3, “therefore put to death your members which are on the earth. And what are the things you’re supposed to put to death? Fornication, uncleanness, wrong passions, evil desire, and covetousness.” See the link again there, which is idolatry. “Because of these things, the wrath of God is coming upon the sons of disobedience.” So our text says the wrath is coming in the future. This text says that when we’ve got a fornicating group, God’s judgment comes upon them now. Sexually transmitted diseases, the breakup of culture, all kinds of things.

And that’s why we sang the song, “Great King of Nations, hear our cry, while at thy feet we fall.” You see, we’re part of this, the Christian church. We’ve got Christian churches now, groups actively encouraging sexual license in the context of relationship such that books are having to be written. Well, no, no, no. We’re not just supposed to have sex outside of marriage. That’s wrong. The Christian church has not been careful in this area and now is actually permitting sin.

Revelation 22:15, “outside of, you know, the gates of heaven are dogs, sorcerers, and sexually immoral murderers and idolaters.” So, the sexually immoral in the context of murderers and idolaters, not a small deal. Don’t think you can get away with a little bit of it. Well, I just killed one or two people in my life. God, well, I just engage in sexual sin once or twice doesn’t cut it. Okay, God forgives you when you repent. But my point is, I think with sexual sin, we seem to want to look at this as somehow not as grievous to God, not as important in terms of having receiving God’s judgment.

And God says that isn’t true. It’s the one thing he articulates in this list that definitely will receive his judgment upon it. Again, because it strikes—it’s related to Christian marriage and strikes at the very part of it.

So you know, I’m going to talk a little bit about ways to avoid this, but I want you to understand the importance of seeing this as a very bad thing in your life. I want you to put it to death.

Let me read another scripture, and you’re familiar with one, but Matthew 5:27. “You’ve heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not commit adultery. But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.’” You see, the biggest problem here is men. He doesn’t say a woman that looks at a man to lust, but you know, no, this is a sin that predominantly relates to men.

Now, as a culture rebels against Jesus, as we know in this church by watching the pornography thing and working against it, and all those women who drove by, those of you that stood out there and tried to get that thing taken away successfully from God, thank you for that. But you remember all the women that would go by and flash and say, [inaudible]. As a culture degenerates and deteriorates, women follow the sexual promiscuous lead of men. But our savior addresses men first and foremost here. Okay?

So you know he says this, he says adultery. But I say whoever looks at a woman to lust for has already committed adultery with her in his heart. Now see Jesus is talking about the heart motivation of what you do here. Young man, I know you go to these movies. I watch movies. We have got to be careful with this stuff. This is dynamite. This is you know this is a real big deal. Listen how big a deal Jesus says it is.

“If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. Better not to watch movies. If watching movies produces adultery in your heart, pluck it out. And if you, you know, if your eye offends you, pluck it out. If it’s going to cause you to stumble in this way, pluck it out.

“And now listen, men, you know, ‘it is more profitable that one of your members perish and that your whole body be cast into hell. If your right hand if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off. Cast it off from you.’” You see what he’s saying is this had better be a priority. If you sin with your eye and your right hand, young man, God says deal with it. Don’t feed that beast.

Unfortunately, sadly, you know, I know a man who sinned sexually when he was drunk many years ago, ends up in prison, gets out, builds himself a better life, works hard, studies his Bible, knows his Bible better than some of you. Some of you adults seem as committed to the Lord Jesus as some of you. This man thought he could have a computer with internet in his home. Went to a bad website, broke the conditions of his parole. He is now in prison again for 18 more months, and after that, he’ll have another 3 years of probation.

This guy’s life was ruined by sexual sin and by the sexual sin recurring to him. Now, the horrible thing is that in the treatment for sexual offenders, the state, your state tax dollars are used to encourage men to sin with their body. I don’t want to get more explicit, but that’s what they’re encouraged to do. Just have good fantasies. You see, well, this is sin and this is a beast. And if you feed that beast, it will devour you. And very sadly, it’s devoured this man’s life. Took him out of the game.

Now, the Lord God is gracious. I don’t know what he’ll do with this fella in prison. But young men, this culture is becoming less and less tolerant, properly so, of sexual sin. And young men, you had better watch yourselves. Even if the state doesn’t get you, the Lord God will bring some other judgment into your life.

Young man, I want you walking the aisle today, bringing up a nickel, a dime, offering yourselves to God, something in your pocket. And I want you as you walk this aisle to commit yourselves to sexual purity and to striving toward that as you’re single that you might become like that when you’re married.

All right. So, judgment of God. Now, let’s talk about three specific things that we can do.

First of all, avoiding fornication before marriage.

Know your limits. Said this before. Unless you think you’re more devoted to God than David or wiser than Solomon or stronger than Samson, understand your propensity to sin in this way. Young men, know your limits. A man has to know his limitations. And know and limit your knows. Limit what you know about a member of the opposite sex.

I can almost guarantee you—I can almost guarantee. And now there’s exceptions to every rule, but I can almost guarantee you that if you’re a young man and you’re involved in a dating relationship with a girl for any length of time and you are out from under the eyes of somebody watching you, you are going to sin sexually. This thing we’re talking about here that the Lord God will judge. You young men know what I’m talking about. And you old, older men, you know it in your youth, what you did—it’s a tendency that we have tremendous temptation in this area, men.

So you know, understand your limit. “Oh no, I’m a good solid Christian. I don’t have to have a chaperon and stuff. We can control…” No you can’t. You cannot control yourself in this area unless you think you’re better than David, Solomon, Samson. They’re all tempted and fell in this area. What does that mean? That means control your environment. Use the environment of people around you, chaperones, etc., to avoid sexual sin.

And parents, when we let our kids go off for extended periods of time with girlfriends or boyfriends away from the eyes of parents, you it’s like giving them a lighted match and a gasoline can. That’s what it’s like. Why would we do that? What possible benefit does that provide to us? And look at it cost-benefit, right? Okay, maybe your son won’t sin sexually with your daughter, but look at the tremendous problems that will enter into their lives if they do. A violation of this verse, and this verse is one of the ways they build Christian community.

Know your limitations. Limit your knows.

Men and boys, buffet your body and covenant with your eyes. Paul said that he buffeted his body. He disciplined. He brought it under subjection. Body’s not a bad thing, but you got to control it. Thoughts are not bad things. You got to control them. You exercise dominion. You buffet your body and you covenant with your eyes.

Job said, “I made a covenant with my eyes that I would not look upon a maid.” Man, have you done that? Do you avert your eyes or do you say, “Well, I’m just it’s okay if I see a naked woman on the screen. It doesn’t bother me at all.” No, no, no, no. God says covenant with your eyes not to look upon a maid. You’re hardwired, men. You are hardwired for sexuality. If you see sexual imagery, you are going to start responding. That’s the Lord God gave it to us. That hardwiredness is a gift. And it’s a gift that has to be protected by you making a covenant with your eyes, buffeting your body that you don’t fall into this sexual sin.

I can guarantee you, well, I know that sexual sin has happened in this congregation. And I know that if we do not, you know, consecrate ourselves afresh, it’s going to happen more and it’s going to have deleterious effects. God will judge us. God says, covenant with your eyes.

Psalm 101, David says, “My wife gave me this verse when we she bought a big screen TV.” You know, I wasn’t supposed to use her as an illustration of the sermon today, but she bought this big screen TV for me years ago. And she made a little thing from Psalm 101 that says, “I will set nothing wicked before my eyes.” A verse from Psalm 101, verse three. Excellent verse to have on top of your television set to memorize. Set nothing wicked in front of our eyes.

Understand this is better than whiskey and just as powerful. Sexual relationships are much better than whiskey and they are more powerful. You know, we used to have, you know, we think that drinking’s okay. Alcoholic beverages are a gift from God. And one of our family camps where we used to have not a dry camp. Older guys will remember this story. They know what I’m going to say. You know, we had some guys there that had never were really drunk hard liquor and they’d had a little beer and wine with us. And somehow some guys one night—I fortunately was in bed already so I have culpable deniability, I don’t know, I wasn’t there, wasn’t my fault—but you know, there were these young, there was these men there and they started drinking whiskey.

And you know, if you drink whiskey and you don’t understand what you’re doing, by the time you realize you know its effect upon you, it’s too late, you’re drunk. And that’s what happened. Some of these guys got drunk, not because they didn’t care about getting drunk, but because they really didn’t know how to handle whiskey.

You have to be careful with that stuff. You see?

Well, that’s what this is. You see. Young women are never prepared for the Spanish Inquisition. No, they’re never prepared for the kind of fire that starts shooting off in them and the electrical charges that start happening when a guy kisses them. You talk to women, you talk to your wife, men, and you talk to, you know, them and ask them, “What was it like when you first got kissed by a guy or you were held in a particular way?” I mean, they you are not ready for that.

Young girls, don’t think that you’ll be able to control yourselves if the young guy is not controlling himself. You’re not ready for it. And young men, you’re not ready for it either. Trust me, it is a great impulse that God has given you so that when you become married and enter into the marital relationship, there’s not a whole lot of worry about getting that area right, because you’re kind of wired that way, both of you.

But the implication is be ever so careful to avoid fornication before marriage.

Okay, so it says “fornicators and adulterers God will judge.” Fornication is sex outside of marriage. And so you young people should consecrate yourselves afresh to avoiding that.

But then there’s adultery, right? We have to avoid adultery after marriage. You know, “adulterers, God will judge.” It adulterates the marriage relationship.

For better or worse, we now lived in a supercharged work environment. We go to, you know, people go to work now and sexuality is all around them. By the way people dress, the leisure stuff that we enter into. We now have a supercharged work environment.

Men, you know, if you work in an office with other women, be on your guard. I know of in the last year two classical Christian schools where co-workers, men and women, married Christian men and women, had an adulterous affair with each other. Don’t think it can’t happen to you. Again, understand the environment in which we’re living these days. We’ve got a culture that’s gone mad in terms of sexuality and it’s everywhere.

I can’t believe over the last 10 years as I’ve gone to AOL more and more, you know, stuff that’s common, I guess, pops up when you go to AOL now, but it would have used to have been soft pornography sort of stuff, you know, 30, 40 years ago. Now it’s thrown up there. Your kids get on AOL. If your boys just go to AOL, forget the websites. They’re going to see images on that popup screen that are going to be tempting to them. You see, we live in a supercharged, a sexually supercharged work environment. That’s just the way it is.

Listen to a quote from George W. Bush. Actually, he was a 19th century commentator. “All the arts and blandishments resorted to by the seducer. All the amorous looks, motions, modes of dress, verbal insinuations which go to provoke the passions and make way for the criminal indulgences. All the writing, reading, publishing, vending, or circulating obscene books, all exposing lustfully contemplating indecent pictures or statues. All support and contrivance with the practices of prostitution, whether by drawing a revenue from houses of infamy or winking at the abominations of their inmates, partake more or less of the guilt and violating the seventh commandment.” That was George W. Bush, the commentator from the 19th century.

And it was common then and it’s worse now. We have tremendous temptations in the context of the workplace.

I missed something and this is a good place for it. The last point under the avoiding fornication before marriage is for women. I told young men, buffet your bodies, make a covenant with your eyes. Young women, make a covenant with your wardrobe, please. Men are hardwired. And if you have a wardrobe that is sexually attractive, you are tempting your brothers in Christ here to sin.

Now, you know, I’m not—it’s not your fault. Young men have to make a covenant with their eyes not to look at you. But I’m encouraging you young women to rethink your wardrobe today. When you go home today, think about it. Make a covenant with your wardrobe that you’re not going to dress in things that are sexually alluring and attractive to the men of the congregation. Just don’t do it. Okay? And I don’t—I hopefully I don’t have to get into specifics on this.

You just have to understand again that men are hardwired to respond. And when you go to work, you know, and if a woman goes to work, nothing wrong with that in the Bible, but if she goes to work and you know, she’s not careful, she’s going to end up attract. I’ve told you this story before. I remember going to the bank once to buy one of our cars and there was a woman working there, a young girl, probably 17, 18 years old.

I thought, does her parents know what she’s dressing like? And does she have any idea what probably 90% of the men who walked into this bank were thinking about her. And girls, if you don’t want men to think about you that way, make a covenant with your wardrobe. Change the way you dress. You see, but we don’t.

We have this supercharging work environment. Adultery is common. And so we have to really understand the need to commit ourselves afresh to no adultery.

Take the David lesson. Avoid idle hands and straying eyes.

2 Samuel 11:1, “David sinned with Bathsheba. But why does it happen? It happened in the opening of the year at the time when kings go out to battle that David sent Joab and his servants with him and all Israel and they destroyed the people of Ammon and besieged the enemies of God. But not David. David wasn’t going out to battle the time when kings go out to battle.

And that’s why he ends up committing adultery, sleeping with Bathsheba. He has not applied himself vocational diligence. You want to see a place where sex is 90% of what’s going on, conversations, etc.? Prisons. Men have nothing to do. They tend to devolve into base instincts and sexual thoughts and perversions. That’s what they do. So men, you want to avoid adultery, be hardworking, be diligent, be vocational, work 50 hours a week or more.

You see, and when you get home, help work for your family and get that household straightened away. Take the David lesson. And then also again, David sees Bathsheba, you know, take the David lesson—straying eyes.

And so we have to work hard because our culture is such that we are now tempted to commit adultery in many places and in many ways.

Hate selfishness. Love serving others.

Hate selfishness. Adultery happens because of selfishness. And I don’t mean selfishness in the sense of “Well, I want this and I’m going to go get it.” That’s usually not what goes on. But self-centeredness is what it is. When you serve your wife and your family, you’re not going to be committing adultery. But when you start to think, “Well, am I satisfied? Am I content? How’s my life going? Am I a happy guy or not?” Then you start to maybe make the list of reasons why you’re not happy.

And now you’re going to fall into the sin of looking elsewhere. You see, the grass is always greener once you start evaluating where’s the greenest grass for me. The sin is evaluating that grass. The Lord God has told you if you’re married where the greenest grass for you is. It is in your home and family. Period. And it is selfishness and self-centeredness of a horrific sinful way that God will judge, and judge hard, that leads men away from fidelity to their mates.

Hate selfishness in yourself. Love serving others. Love to love your spouse. You see, Satan attacks you. He attacks sexually because he knows that to tempt you to sexual sin will weaken the family and will weaken Christian culture. It’s like, you know, Satan not allowing us to do this in most churches. Weekly communion with the kids with wine. How often does that happen anymore? Simplest thing in the world. Bible teaches it real clearly. And yet it doesn’t happen. Why? Because Satan knows the power of the table.

So sexual sin is a big problem because Satan knows the power—the power of Christian marriage and Christian family and what it does in terms of affecting Christian culture. It’s the way to supplant things. Love to love your spouse.

1 Corinthians 7 says, you know, you’re not supposed to deprive yourselves of one another. Love to engage in proper marital relationships with your spouse. And of course, it isn’t just marital relationships. Delight in one another.

First thing this morning, my daughter got an email that’s going around the church this morning and I thought it was kind of germane to this. You’re supposed to go hit this link and then you type in your name and then the thing keeps coming back to you saying, “What a beautiful name Dennis. Dennis, you’re fabulous. Dennis, you’re one of the most talented people I know. Lots of people love you, Dennis. You’re smart, intelligent, and beautiful, Dennis. We enjoy working with you, Dennis.” That’s what we should be telling each other in our marriages. Right? We should be doing that. And you know, if you say that and you articulate it, first of all, that stuff’s true because God is sovereign and God is wise. He’s most wise. He knows just who you should have to marry. He knows that your wife is the wife. He knows that your husband’s the husband.

You can honestly tell each other that very thing, that you are the best, and you should be telling each other that. It’s dissatisfaction with marital relationships that can of course lead to temptation to adultery outside of that relationship.

And you know, you should delight, you should love to love your spouse, not just, you know, in words and deeds of service. All that’s true, but we’re talking about marital relationships here.

You know, I just, you know, I know that they’re well-intentioned, but I read these Christian books that say, well, you know, you got to have real unity between husband and wife. You got to make sure you’re tracking. You got to make sure everything’s great and you’re complimenting each other and you’re serving each other and you’re doing great and you got a really good friendship and all that stuff’s going and then you can engage in marital relationships. That’s ridiculous from my perspective. You’ll never get to it if that’s the case.

God says part of the way it becomes that way in your relationship is by engaging in the marriage relationship, the physical act activity. It’s like communion. You know, it’s interesting that God treats marriage here as a holy thing, doesn’t he? Marriage should be undefiled. That’s cultic. I mean, it’s religious language of defilement, impurity. It’s kind of relating marriage, you know, to the sacrament, for instance. It’s a sacred kind of a thing. It shouldn’t be defiled, but it can be. And it’s the same thing with communion.

You know, if you had to get yourself worthy to receive the table, you’re never coming to the table. God says, “Don’t do that. Repent of your sins. Sure, confess your sins before me. Endeavor to serve me, but then you take the table because it’s going to make you stronger.” And as couples engage in marital relationships, it builds unity. It’s part of the process whereby that happens.

We have this kind of odd idea again that really the whole thing is this gnostic bodyless relationship we’re supposed to have and then the body relationship is just part of what we got to do, you know, as a result of all that. Well, that’s not true. God says the marriage relationship is to be honored. You should love to love your spouse.

1 Corinthians 7 says, you know, “let the husband render to his wife the affection due to her and likewise also the wife to her husband.” No, it’s talking broader than just sexuality, but it’s certainly including that. The wife, “because it says the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. And likewise the wife to the husband. Don’t deprive each other.” It says what clearer commandment can we have here? He doesn’t say wait, you know, and then figure out your unity and all that stuff first. He says, “Do not deprive each other.

It’s bad for you and it’s a temptation to sin.” And he says in this same verse that “come together again so that Satan does not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.” He’s saying that God has hardwired you for these activities so that if you don’t engage in them in the context of marriage, then you’re going to be liable to the temptations of Satan to engage in them outside of marriage.

So, to avoid adultery in the context of marriage, we delight in each other and we commit ourselves afresh to each other and we understand the importance of the relationship side of marriage. Okay.

But we also have to avoid fornication within the context of marriage. What do I mean by that?

Well, he—you remember we could apply the fornication here to sex outside of marriage, but in the verse specifically, he’s talking about the marriage bed, right? Right. So “honored marriage must be. The marriage bed undefiled. Fornicators and whoremongers or hormongers—fornicators and adulterers God will judge.” So in its first application, fornication is seen in the context of the marriage bed. We can make, as we did, properly, and the Bible uses the same term to talk about you know sex outside of marriage. But apparently this verse is telling us that you can engage in fornication in the context of marriage.

And that’s important I think to recognize. There is a lord to this stance.

Well, and one way we avoid fornication within marriage is to be pure before marriage. Young people, this is one of the reasons we warn you about sexual sin. God is a God who forgives. You walk around and you handle a gun improperly and blow your hand off. The Lord God will forgive you for blowing your hand off, but you’re not going to have another hand. I mean, he might grow one back, but probably not.

So, you engage in sexual sin and you repent of that and you get married. Well, that’s good. But don’t anticipate not having difficulties in that area of your life if you’ve engaged in sexual sin prior to marriage.

So one way you avoid turning human sexuality within the context of marriage into a bad thing—and that’s what’s being talked about here—one way you avoid that is by keeping yourself chaste in preparation for marriage.

Okay? So that’s one thing we do. And then and then secondly, we honor our spouses. I’m not going to tell you what you can and can’t do. That’s not for this and that’s not for me. But I will tell you that 1 Peter 3:7 says, “Husbands likewise deal with them with understanding, giving honor to the wife.” This means that to avoid fornication in the context of the marriage relationship, the physical relationship in it, you must be giving honor and glory to your wife, men. Okay?

So there’s an honoring of each other. And if you deny that, if you don’t honor your wife, or wives not honoring their husbands in terms of the physical relationship, you know, you’ve sinned and what you’re engaging with now is not biblical sexuality. It’s fornication even though you’re married. That’s my contention.

And very explicitly we’re told much the same thing in 1 Thessalonians 4:3-6. “This is the will of God. Your sanctification. So the immediate application your sanctification is that you should abstain from sexual immorality. That each of you should know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor, not in passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God, that no one should take advantage of and defraud his brother in this matter because the Lord is the avenger of all such as we also forewarned you and testified.”

So, it’s a parallel verse to our verse. God’s going to bring judgment if you engage in something that is a violation of your entire summation of your Christian sanctification, which is sexual sin.

And so, the question is, what does it mean to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor. Some people think the vessel refers to the wife, some people thinks it refers to the man. Either way, it’s a bodily statement. Okay? And in a way, it really doesn’t matter which it goes, like, because whether it’s talking about your wife or it’s talking about your own body in terms of marital relationships, either way, it’s saying that you should engage in that in a way that’s different from the Gentiles who don’t know God.

That there is a lust of concupiscence in the King James translation. There is an inordinate giving oneself into sexual activity that is very improper in the context even of married Christian couples.

And so there’s a way to go about doing this in sanctification and honor. There’s a lord of the dance. Every relationship we have is mediated through Jesus Christ and his word to us. And this relationship is also.

So we avoid fornication within marriage through honoring one another, sanctification, acknowledging the Lord of the dance, praying and giving thanks to God, and being content. It’s going to go right on in Hebrews 13 from this stuff about marriage to contentment versus covetousness.

And that has immediate application also, you know, at least application to the sexual relationship. God says to married people, and you’re married here today, I can tell you with the sureness of the word from the Lord Jesus Christ that he has provided you your mate and that mate is his choice for you and you should be content with that mate. You become content by giving thanks for that mate, by praying to God that in the marital relationship you would not engage in fornication and that you would use that part of your life to honor the Lord of the dance, the Lord Jesus Christ.

You know, marriage is at the root of a Christian culture. And what today’s text calls us to is high fidelity, high faithfulness. You know, we don’t like it if we’re playing a record and the hi-fi won’t produce the nice, beautiful, crisp tones of the music and if there’s just one scratch on the record, we’re lost. High fidelity. God doesn’t want you mostly faithful to your wife. He doesn’t want you usually faithful sexually to your husband apart from a stray thought here and there.

He wants you meek, harnessed to the Lord Jesus Christ, which produces a strength in the marriage relationship in the family that then allows you to help build that Christian culture.

I mentioned—I forgot to mention it in the sermon, but you know, marriage here can be seen as kind of an illustration of the whole family life, but your kids are going to leave home. At least they should these days. Some of them don’t ever, but they’re supposed to leave home.

And so another way to produce this kind of fidelity in the context of marriage is to not focus on our children so much that we miss the root of the Christian household, which is the marriage relationship itself. We should not have child-centered homes. We should have marriage-centered homes to which children come in, for a period of time, are raised by you and sent out, and the marriage maintains.

So many Christian couples end up failing in this respect. The children get older, they leave home and the husband and wife have nothing left because they really have not applied obedience to this verse to engaging in the marital relationship with sexual meekness under God and with focusing on one another. God says this is essential toward building a Christian culture. This is how we supplant the godless culture that we live in this country and around the world.

By the simple actions of Christian brotherhood, showing grace to those who suffer for their faith, being faithful in the context of Christian marriage and doing our jobs at work. May God grant us the grace to know that our sin, and I’m sure we have it in this area, is forgiven by him. And may he grant us the grace and high fidelity of the Lord Jesus Christ to engage in our relationships properly under meek submission to the King of Kings.

Let’s pray.

Lord God, we thank you for marriages, for each and every family here, for the young men and women that hear this sermon today. May they be warned, Lord God. May your judgments be before us. And may we, Father, help to see that the purpose of this is to drive us to build solid Christian families and marriages and as a result Christian communities. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.