Overcoming Sexual Sin

As part of the Religion Saves and Nine Other Misconceptions sermon series, I answered Question #5 on February 3: "How should Christian men and women go about breaking free from the bondage of sexual sin?"Sadly, much of our attendance is normally at the evening services at our Ballard, Wedgwood, and Shoreline campuses, where singles and college students predominate. However, with the Super Bowl being the official "religious" holiday of our nation, our evening attendance looked as if I missed the rapture. The issue of sexual sin is so pressing for so many people that I do pray that those who missed church to watch half-naked people pitch products on their flat screen also tune in to catch the sermon online. You can also find my answers to anonymous text messaging questions from the final two evening services and I pray they are helpful. For those wanting to study the issue more fully, it is helpful to begin by noting the epidemic nature of sexual sin. In my forthcoming book Vintage Jesus I write,

In Paul's day, he accused some people of worshiping their stomachs as their god, and in our day it appears that our god has simply moved a short distance south. Americans spend more money each year on pornography than country music, rock music, jazz music, classical music, Broadway plays, and ballet combined. Additionally, some researchers have even said that we spend more money on pornography than we do on professional baseball, basketball, and football combined. Clearly, perversion is officially America's favorite pastime and a ten-billion-dollar business. The annual rentals and sales of adult videos and DVDs now top four billion dollars annually. Fully eleven thousand porno movies are made every year, twenty times the number of mainstream movies made by Hollywood! The porn industry now claims over 30 percent of all video rentals on the east and west coasts. Nationally, there are now over 2,400 strip clubs. Some of those clubs generate as much as eight million dollars a year in revenues and employ as many as two hundred dancers. On the Internet, the top word searched for is "sex," with "porn," "nude," "Playboy," and "erotic stories" also in the top twenty. Furthermore, 70 percent of porn traffic occurs between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. while people are sitting at work unable to focus on their job because the god of Eros continually beckons. The top research priority in the porn business is getting good quality porn to a cell phone or mobile device so that everyone can feed any twisted desire anytime and anywhere. The National Council on Sexual Addiction Compulsivity estimated that 6 to 8 percent of Americans are sex addicts, which is 16 to 21.5 million people. Their numbers include young people. Sixty-one percent of all high school seniors have had sexual intercourse, about half are currently sexually active, and 21 percent have had four or more partners. Adolescents have the highest sexually transmitted disease (STD) rates. Approximately one out of four sexually active adolescents becomes infected with an STD each year, for a total of three million cases. People under the age of twenty-five account for two-thirds of all STDs in the United States. By their graduation date, students will have watched fifteen thousand hours of television, compared to only twelve thousand hours in the classroom. While watching, they will see fourteen thousand sexual references every year, with only 165 of those occasions encouraging birth control, self-control, abstinence, or mentioning anything about the risk of pregnancy or STDs. Undeniably, people are worshipers and will worship someone or something.

Speaking in terms of worshiping God our Creator and enjoying His creation (including the human body) instead of acting like the pagans denounced in Romans 1:25 who worship creation instead of the Creator, I argued that in many ways sexual sin is now THE sacrament of pagan religion marked by religious zeal, devotion, and sacrifice. For Christians wanting to overcome sexual sin, I then explained eleven ways to worship God that will help to replace the desire for sin with a deeper and more passionate desire for holiness. For those who missed the list, here it is:

• Become a Christian and worship the Creator instead of creation.

"To him be the glory forever. Amen. I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship" (Romans 11:36-12:1).

• Live out of your regenerated heart by the power of the Holy Spirit.

"For this is the will of God, ^your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality; that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and ^honor, not in ^the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God; that no one transgress and ^wrong his brother in this matter, because the Lord is an avenger in all these things, as we told you beforehand and solemnly warned you. For ^God has not called us for ^impurity, but in holiness. Therefore ^whoever disregards this, disregards not man but God, ^who gives his Holy Spirit to you" (1 Thessalonians 4:3-8).

• Live as a new person with a new mind.

"Now this I say and ^testify in the Lord, ^that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, ^in the futility of their minds. They ^are darkened in their understanding, ^alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ!-assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness" (Ephesians 4:17-24).

• Put your sexual sin to death.

"Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming. In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. But now you must put them all away" (Colossians 3:5-8).

• Make no provision for the flesh.

"Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires" (Romans 13:13-14).

• Run to Jesus, your sympathetic High Priest.

"For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need" (Hebrews 4:15-16).

• Walk in the light with your church, and professionals if needed.

"This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin" (1 John 1:5-7).

• Flee temptation.

"Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body" (1 Corinthians 6:18-20).

• Pursue satisfying marriage when ready.

"Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: ‘It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.' But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control" (1 Corinthians 7:1-5).

• Have your spouse as your standard of beauty.

"Then the man said, ‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man'" (Genesis 2:23).

• Repent quickly and keep fighting.

"Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul" (1 Peter 2:11). To study the issue of sexual temptation and addiction further, the following books are helpful:

• For those struggling with addictions, Ed Welch's Addictions: A Banquet in the Grave.

• For those struggling with sexual purity, Stephen Arterburn's Every Man's Battle and Shannon Ethridge's Every Woman's Battle.

• For those who have been sexually abused, Dan Allender's The Wounded Heart.

On the issue of pornography, www.xxxchurch.com has some alarming facts and some frank discussions for Christians.