Why does sex sometimes complicate life? Why is it, in our day and age, when God has given us this wonderful gift of sex, are there so many difficulties attached to it? Why does God put boundaries around sex? We're going to look at the ten commandments in Exodus 20:14 again. Which says: “You shall not commit adultery”. We are reminded in this commandment that there are many facets to the issue of sex. We know very well, that we live in a sex saturated world and sex is obviously an awkward subject at its best, especially in the presence of God, because of old stigmas and prejudices.
We don't often like talking about God and sex together. Yet God has something to say about this subject because He made you and me in his image. He made sex to be good. He made sex to be great within a heterosexual marriage, where he created it to function. Which often raises the questions that needs to be addressed, what about homosexual sex? That can be a really awkward subject as well, yet people are asking these questions. Many folk are wrestling with this in their own hearts. Folk are questioning their own sexuality and questioning their thought life. In our day, there is so much confusion on this matter. I remember one homosexual person saying to me, “Hey, I’m a good person. I obey the ten commandments. I'm a faithful to my mate and why is there any issue here?” Notice it's “not adultery,” this person said, because I’m faithful to my mate. Noticeably the problem was a question of his understanding, which was a very narrow understanding of the word “adultery”. This thinking of adultery being sex with another married person, outside of your marriage, is nothing new. That understanding of adultery being narrowly defined in that way is the way the Pharisees in Jesus’ day defined adultery. They said that adultery is simply sex with a married woman who is not your own wife. They later went on to say, “well if that's the case we can have sex with any unmarried woman!” Which is when general prostitution became acceptable and temple prostitutes came into the picture. However, Jesus came and confronted that fallacy among the Pharisees of His day, to paraphrase, He said, “You need to remember adultery is not just with a married woman. If you look at another person with lust in your eyes it is as good as committing adultery.” said Jesus. That's a sobering thought because Jesus was teaching us that any sex outside of marriage hurts everybody involved in the process. That is why we need to start with sex outside of marriage and look at why any sex outside of marriage hurts everyone.
Firstly, let's look at sex outside of marriage. Noticeably, sex outside of marriage is now the norm in our society; it's no longer abnormal. Many young couples are living together before they get married. This has been the case since the 1960s and since then, this situation has gotten progressively worse, prior to that there was immorality and there was sex before marriage. Since the 1960s there has been a deliberate attack on this accepted standard: that a person would leave their parents, marry and then engage in sex. Yet, today the whole question of immorality, of sex before marriage or outside of marriage is propagated in many books, films, television programs and plays have made it very popular. There was that very racy play a few years back called, “Oh Calcutta” and it caused a stir around the world as it promoted immorality. Strangely enough it was the Australians who came up with another play that was called “No, No Calcutta”, in which a doctor was questioned in court as a psychologist about this issue of immorality growing in society. The illustration was used in that play of the old experiment with frogs. If you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, that frog will immediately jump out. It knows the water is hot and it will jump out, in order to save itself. However, if you put another frog in a pot of cold water and you put that pot on the stove and switch the stove on, as that pot heats up this frog will constantly swim around the pot. Then the frog will swim slower and slower until it stops swimming and it dies. The point that was made was as culture has progressively promoted immorality and sex outside of marriage, more and more of us are not jumping out of it and saying, “Hey! this is wrong!” We are slowly going along with the immorality and being sucked into that vortex more and more. We no longer recognise the insidious moral danger which causes us to die spiritually in the process.
We live in a world that is sexually desensitised, it is largely morally bankrupt. We need to reflect and ask, what did God create us to be? We need to ask the question, why is premarital sex or sex outside of marriage wrong? Well there are a few reasons. Why can't we for instance, have sex outside of marriage if we love one another. “We're going to get married one day anyway?” Premarital sex, is sex by anticipation. It denies the biblical and mature concepts of self-control that we read about it in Galatians 5. We read about it in 1 Corinthians 13, the idea of love being patient. So if we are having sex before marriage we are not being patient, we are not being Spirit-filled and self-controlled. We are not experiencing true love. We are simply falling into the temptation of lust. That's why we need to remember that premarital sex, is not true love. It is not a biblical love. Last week we looked at what true biblical love is: “agape” love, a self-sacrificing love. A love that seeks the highest good of the recipient of that love. Sex before marriage is taking what is not ours, before it is offered. We need to remember that it falls short of God's standards. When anything falls short of God's standard, it is sin. God calls us to the highest standard of 100%. Following his ten commandments, but when we fall short of 100%, we sin. That means it is not God's kind of love.
Premarital sex is wrong, firstly because it is sex in anticipation but it is also wrong secondly because of experimentation. Someone might say: “Let young people experiment” or “You have got to see if you're compatible with one another sexually”. We need to say “no” to that thinking. Premarital sex by experiment has no permanence. It's not a solid foundation on which to build our lives. We find it ultimately destroys our lives. It is a little bit like the rich man who says, “I want to experience what it's like to be poor. I’ll go and live in the slums for a while.” For one to assume that it is going to be beneficial to know what it is like to be poor, by living in the slums is a false understanding of poverty. Why? That is because unlike the slum dwellers, the rich man can always walk out of the slum any day he likes. The same happens with sex. If we touch it before God created it to be enjoyed, it loses its beauty. Marriage can never be an experiment. Marriage is always a commitment, “till death do us part.” It is a lifelong commitment. It is the one relationship here on earth that God has called us to, that should not break up, ghost us or disappear on us. Premarital sex is wrong because of anticipation. It is wrong because of experimentation.
Thirdly, one may perhaps ask, “well why can't we just live together. I can't be bothered with all that fancy ceremony, white gowns and all the paperwork. It's just a piece of paper.” In this case, premarital sex is still wrong because living together fails to mark an obligation. A formal marriage is where we obligate ourselves and commit ourselves to another person. At the very least marriage is meant to be a contract. But far more than a contract, in God's eyes marriage is a sacred covenant. Just as no business deal on earth would be legally contracted by simply a nod, a wink, a quick jump into bed, or a drunken bit of passion. We expect a signature at the bottom of the page and lawyers to draw up all the contracts. At the very least we need to be wise and do what protects that marriage in the long term. Living together is then naïve and it is short-sighted because it almost certainly creates problems down the road.
Then you might perhaps ask, “Well what about the career woman who wants a baby but doesn't want a husband?” or “She wants a test-tube baby or a sperm donor?”. For her, premarital sex is simply selfish because the child will lose that second parent. Including the second parent's financial support. The child will lose the support of a father and all the impact that a father can make. God designed us to be parented by two parents and nothing can replace that. This woman is simply thinking too much of herself and too little of the child that will come from that pregnancy by convenience.
Sex outside of marriage is a far greater temptation in our day and age. Today we are discovering that we have removed so much of the fear linked with premarital sex. The fear of contraception for instance, is limited by people taking the pill, by condoms as well as using all the offers of abortion that are made, both illegally and legally. There is also the fear of detection, which is no longer there because the whole societal attitude is that premarital sex is permissible. “Everybody's doing it.” The TV shows say, “it's normal.” There is now little shame left. It is really only the incurable diseases that are evading a cure, that have sobered people. HIV /AIDS has reminded us that we cannot always get away with what we think we can. Deadly sex outside of marriage is a sobering reality. But if we all remain faithful and we all only marry one spouse, as in when two virgins marry. Then HIV/AIDS would be wiped out in a few years because it wouldn't be passed from one person to another. That vivid picture that any sex outside of marriage hurting everyone is seen in the tragedy of folk dying from AIDS or needing to spend huge amounts of money on antiretrovirals.
All the problems that go with it are reminders that this was not how God intended us to live. That is why any sex outside of marriage hurts everyone. It threatens the very welfare of the individual and all of society. This we have seen historically, as JD Unwin reminded us as a historian, when he studied 88 civilisations. From civilisations here in Africa, like Egypt, as well as Rome and Greek civilizations. He came to a conclusion, in which he says, “Every civilisation is established and consolidated by observing a strict moral code, it is maintained while this code is kept and decays when sexual license is allowed.” We can think of the classic example of the Roman legal code. Roman Dutch law is what originally formed the basis of South African law. Now it can be shown historically that the Roman Empire collapsed largely due to sexual immorality. It collapsed from within. We need to be reminded that God is a God who says, that any sex outside of marriage hurts everyone, not just yourself.
If sex outside of marriage is something that God condemns, whether it is pre-marital sex, extra-marital sex or post marital sex. Then secondly, we need to address the question of sex with the same sex (as in gender). Homosexuality is simply another form of sex outside of marriage. A few years ago, most statistics put homosexual men at around about five percent of the population and homosexual women at another five percent of the population. However, more recent statistics both in the United States and South Africa put that figure far lower, at about two and a half percent for each gender. Then all homosexuals combined form about five (sometimes six percent) of the population. Yet this small five or six percent of the population (the LGBTQ+) is very vocal and they have plenty of money. This is because many of the times they have no children to support or families to develop. They are often part the higher intellectual and economic strata of society. The voice from the gender activists is very loud.
The Bible is clear that homosexuality is something that has been known throughout history. It has been linked with idol worship. Homosexuality is clearly condemned in the Old Testament, in passages like Leviticus 18:22 and in the New Testament in passages like Romans 1:26-27. Throughout history and even today, homosexual acts have been the problem. For the Christian the Bible is clear: God forbids homosexual acts. The discussion of homosexuality as a state or as something that people say they've grown up in, is a difficult question altogether because of the aura of the unnaturalness around the subject. This makes discussion difficult.
The different kinds of homosexuality require different responses. For instance, those effeminate males and masculine females who are struggling with their sexuality and their sexual identity need great compassion and love. While those who are homosexual by choice or just for the fun of it, or “the kicks”, as the saying goes, need to be challenged on the immorality of it. The latter group need rebuke for using people in these sort of sexually deviant ways.
Now that homosexuality has been legalised in our country, and around much of the world, appropriately that makes discrimination homosexuality is wrong. Discrimination or hatred is wrong. Yet question then arises: “what do we do? What do we say to this issue?” Firstly, we need to accept that the Bible is our supreme rule of faith and practice. What your opinion or my opinion are, is immaterial. God gives us his Word as an absolute in this relativistic age. Secondly, we need to say that the practice of homosexuality is wrong; not the person that has fallen into that temptation. Thirdly, prison (or any other inhuman treatment) is not the solution or answer for the crimes of homosexuality, which is what happened in our country before our present dispensation. Prison for a homosexual is a little bit like locking up an alcoholic in a distillery for the night; it does not solve the problems.
You may have seen the news this past week about that women's prison in Maryland in the United States that has a whole number of pregnancies because two transgender “women” (but biological men) are in that prison, guess who has impregnated the female inmates in that prison? While that may have a tragic humour to it, the reality is that we also need to recognize that any sex outside of marriage hurts everyone. We might even laugh at it. We might be tempted to fall into the temptation of seeing the funny side, but the reality is human beings are hurt by it. Babies are born and raised in prisons, or worse, murdered in abortion.
We need to find a biblical solution by accepting that homosexuality is not normal, it is not what we are called to do as God's people. We need to offer biblical solutions to this, we need to offer spiritual counsel and know that there is a solution to those temptations, emotional anguish and physical dangers in people's lives.
I will share a about a man by the name of Andres. When I was a Pastor in Pretoria he was a member of the church and I visited Andres. He was an upstanding citizen, he was a school teacher, a Head of Department, he had been a Deacon in his previous church, he was married yet, he also was practicing homosexual acts. What he did was after supper with his wife, he made her a cup of tea or coffee, and then put a sleeping pill in the cup. When she fell asleep, he went off and engaged in homosexual practices. Then in one incident he was confronted by his sin and cried out to God, to be saved and to be changed. God in his mercy worked a miracle in his life. Later Andres made it his goal to help other homosexual people to find the freedom that they can have in Jesus Christ. What Andres did was put a little advertisement in the newspaper in what was called, “The Classifieds” in those days. The advertisement simply said, “If you're battling with homosexual urges and a homosexual temptation and you'd like someone to counsel you and pray with you, I'll gladly do that.” He also gave his telephone number in the advertisement. Andres shared that in an average week he received between five and six phone calls, from men in particular, whom he counselled. He was able to lead many of them to the wonderful freedom that Jesus gives us, he forgives our sins and transforms our lives. The wonderful thing was that Andres was greatly used for God, for many years.
Then our country changed the laws, homosexuality became decriminalised and legalised. Andres made the observation that the number of people now phoning for help went from five or six a week, down to less than one a week because people no longer saw it as something that they needed help with. They no longer turned to Jesus and they no longer remember that any sex outside of marriage hurts everyone.
Just as in the case of sex outside of marriage, premarital sex, it is the same with homosexual sex. God simply says that all of that is sin. It falls short of his standards and we need to start with agreeing with God that homosexual practice is a sin. That is what the word “confession” means, it means to agree, “God you're right, this practice of mine is destroying me, hurting relationships. It is destroying me emotionally, mentally and physically. It's destroying even our country.” We agree with God that it's wrong. We turn to God from that sin and in the case of sexual sin, we cry out to God, not only to forgive us and cleanse us but to supernaturally empower us to change in these days.
Many times God can work His salvation of us, when we simply get on our knees and earnestly seek Him. But sometimes this battle is so great that we need to call in the help of other mature Christian believers, who can pray with us. Maybe speak to your pastor or other mature believers to join with you in prayer. Jesus Christ can save anyone. Jesus can set us all free from our sin and Jesus can give us new life. He can make you a new creation and as a gift from God He can give you new life. If you will turn to him because of what he did for you on that Roman cross, two thousand years ago. He did it for us, to set us free from any sex outside of marriage, that will hurt us and will lead us on a downward spiral, into worse and worse things. He can forgive us of homosexual sin because of what he did for us, as well as any other sexual sin as he calls us to the joy of beautiful sex within heterosexual marriage.
Do you need to turn to Jesus Christ today? Do you need to cry out to him, “Jesus save me” before that downward spiral sucks you literally into the drain of eternity. Turn to him today and join with me even now and pray.
Shall we pray: “O Lord Jesus please meet with us we ask. Touch us and help us as we've touched on these sensitive issues. Help us to not only cry out to you to save us from our sexual sin but to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Even sins like pornography, masturbation and other premarital and extramarital sins of a sexual nature. Free us we pray to live wholeheartedly for you in this day and age. O Lord Jesus pour out your love into our lives and give us a supernatural power to experience the joys of sexuality within the bounds of heterosexual marriage where you created it to be a beautiful thing. Watch over us Lord. Lead us by your Holy Spirit to grow in this area of our lives. Lead us to be a blessing in our world and not part of the relational breakdown that we see all around us. O Lord we pray for a supernatural transformation. We cry out to you Jesus “Save me!” Save me even in this area of my sexuality. For this I ask in the all-powerful name of Jesus Christ, who is fully human and understands me and is fully God and alone can transform me supernaturally. I pray then in Jesus Christ's name. Amen.”
Well may God empower you and strengthen you. If I can pray for you or help you in some way please get in contact with me. You can email me at pastordrbc80@gmail.com and may God strengthen you. If there is some way that we can pray with you we would gladly do that. May God lead you to wholeness and then go live your life to the glory of our one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. To him be all the praise and the honour both now and forevermore, Amen.