Enough Sex...

After a month long series on sex, Passion and Purity concluded yesterday.

My prayer is that every person who has come on this journey with us continues to experience the freedom Christ has promised us. I pray we aggressively rebel against our own indifference. I pray that any lingering habits, addictions, compulsions, and attitudes that demean the life that God has given us are no longer supplied room within our souls.

Should any of us stumble along the way, I pray that we would find grace in our communities to continue on the path less traveled. I'm excited to see every person walk from strength to strength and glory to glory as we pursue Christ together, leaving behind our lesser desires for the greatest passion in the universe.

Give me one pure and holy passion
Give me one magnificent obsession
Give me one glorious ambition for my life
To know and follow hard after you
~ Mark Altrogge

I hope we have helped redefine and elevate what sex is from God's perspective. That's enough talk on sex from me for now, it's been quite the journey and therapeutic for myself personally and many levels. Audio Archives of John Piper's Desiring God' conference on "Sex and the Supermacy of Christ" are excellent and can be found here.

Thanks to our sister Julie for the cover art for the Passion & Purity manual.

Caught in the act...

Several weeks ago my wife caught me in the act. I never thought I would do something like this, let alone have Yvonne see me this way...

One of the deciding factors in us purchasing a ps2 recently, was my wife's obsession with the game Karaoke Revolution. I wasn't all that impressed with it at first, but I found it grew on me with time. We like choosing the hard songs like 'Under Pressure' and 'ABC' and singing in duet mode with all the overlapping parts.

But then it happened. Yvonne caught me one sunday morning playing on duet mode by myself. Exposed with both mics in my hands and singing both parts, I quickly explained to her how this took the game to totally new levels of excitement and challenge. She sighed and didn't say anything, as if she was wondering why I was even explaining myself.

Then it hit me as we were driving to church. I screamed, that was Karaoke Masturbation! (Keeping in mind that I had been thinking about nothing but sex for weeks in preparation for the "Passion & Purity class I was leading).

I had been doing something by myself that was designed for two. Underneath it all, what it said to Yvonne was that I didn't need her. What once was our pleasure, had become mine alone, to be enjoyed at anytime I wanted.

Sex before God is unselfish and sacrifical, a mingling of the souls, a sacred song sung by two.

Think Different...

Something that just came out of the ongoing iMosaic discussion on the Christ following movement for the 21st century... an old apple video courtesy of breathe_fire.

To the crazy ones.
The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.

They're not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can quote them, disagree with them,
glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can't do is ignore them.

Because they change things.
They push the human race forward.

And while some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can
change the world,

are the ones who do.

On another tangent, Karaoke Revolution Party just got announced for release this fall. Maybe i'll share my sex-related anaology relating to it in the next post.

My Worldview (supposedly)...

You scored as Cultural Creative. Cultural Creatives are probably the newest group to enter this realm. You are a modern thinker who tends to shy away from organized religion but still feels as if there is something greater than ourselves. You are very spiritual, even if you are not religious. Life has a meaning outside of the rational.

Cultural Creative		88%
Idealist		56%
Fundamentalist		56%
Postmodernist		44%
Romanticist		44%
Existentialist		38%
Modernist		0%
Materialist		0%

What is Your World View?
created with QuizFarm.com

Sex - Confession & Repentance...

One of the greatest breakers of the vicious cycle of sexual sin is confession. From a New Testament perspective, confession really means to agree with Christ. This includes agreeing with Christ about being remade, reborn, and renewed in Him, as well as being convicted and agreeing with Him regarding our sins.

Confession however, must also be followed by repentance. When we confess and do not repent we risk inoculating ourselves to the truth of Christ. Repentance typically means ‘to turn’ or to active ‘turn away’ from our sins. I always had some problems with this because I wasn't sure what to turn to. There is a Hebrew word that is often used for what is translated as to repent that has profound implications. It is Teshuva. It means not simply ‘to turn’, to turn from one sin to another, or to turn from one lifestyle to another, but to ‘re-turn’.

Lust, pornography, self-gratification, dehumanizing thoughts, sexual immorality, it’s not you. God desires that you live in authentic relationships – body, mind, heart, and soul – fully human and ‘very good’. Teshuva. Return to the person you were created to be.

For the Star Wars fans...

I love how Yoda's just floating on a dish.

Sex, Sinners, and Saints...

How many of us do what we do because we think that’s just who we are? We lust because we are lustful people. We sin because we are sinners. Or what about the statement, “I’m only human”? When did being human become more of an excuse for the way we live, rather than our reason for living as we ought to?

Sure, there’s the fall. There’s the broken and fragmented human nature. Yet if there is nothing fundamentally different about who we are, at the core of our being, then what on earth did Jesus die for? If we were still just ‘sinners’ none of the great teachings of Jesus matter, because none of it would be possible without the Spirit of Christ residing in us. If we were nothing but ‘sinners’, there would be no hope in this life, and certainly no hope in the next. What we believe about who we fundamentally are, or more importantly who God sees us as, transforms every aspect of how we live. Conversely, we give power to the devil, when we believe lies, and reject God’s truths.

The scriptures are filled with God’s declarations of his unconditional love for us (Psalm 130:7, Romans 8:37-39). God describes us as “wonderfully made” (Psalm 139) as “His workmanship (Ephesians 2:10). As believers, we are “children of God” (John 1:12), that Christ has set us “free” (Galatians 5:1), that there is “no condemnation” (Romans 8:1), “a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God” (1 Peter 2:9). Repeatedly the Scriptures refer to all the believers as “Saints” (1 Cor 1:2, 2 Cor 1:1, Phil 1:1).

One of the greatest take-aways I’ve had from the writings of Neil T. Anderson, is that as believers, we are not sinners trying to become Saints, we are Saints becoming like Christ. A child of God engages the battle against sin and temptation from higher ground, through their identity in Christ. They are no longer defined by their mistakes or even their future stumblings, but based on the redemptive work of Christ. They are a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17).

How might saints see sexuality differently?

Mosaic Podcast...

You heard it here first... it looks like Mosaic messages have finally went public.

Current series on "Imagine"
http://www.mosaic.org/podcast/

Sex - Creation to Culture...

Our culture assaults our senses with sexuality in a way that often reduces people to being less than human, less than who we were created to be.

God created us as more than just sexual beings. God created us, both male and female, together to reflect his love, beauty, majesty, and wonder – to reflect his image (Genesis 1:27). Yet a sexual element remains, and often remains repressed or ignored in church-circles.

Sex is an extraordinarily good thing to God. He is the author of sex. Sexuality is not a product of sin or the fall. On the contrary, the only thing that God said was not good in all of creation was that man was alone (and this was pre-fall, Genesis 2:18). In creation God blesses man and woman and calls them to be ‘fruitful and multiply’. And there’s only one way of performing that act.

Yet there’s more. God could have had us reproduce and create babies a million other ways. Laced throughout the themes of the scripture is that sexuality is designed by God as a way to know him more fully. Sexuality as God designed it is to be a shadow or a taste of what our ultimate relationship with him is to be like. Not to imply pagan concepts of sexual intercourse with God, but the intimacy, the depth, the vulnerability, the pleasure, the commitment, the intensity, that fuels a relationship with God.

Scriptures declare God as a lover – a lover that passionately pursues a people for his possession. And though the people of the earth stray in adulterous ways, this lover continues to pursue, reveal, and sacrifice that they might return the same desire with their full being. The church is declared as the bride of Christ in which He makes pure and without blemish. All of this culminates in the wedding feast, a celebration of this cosmic union. Sex exists so that we might have language and images and physical expressions that help capture the glory of God and belonging to Him in faithfulness.

Also of utmost importance is how the biblical creation account describes that when God had finished creating man and woman, He stepped back and said it was ‘very good’ (Genesis 1:31). God did not create us and intend for us to be anything but fully human. He did not design us or desire us to be like animals, or angels, or anything else. At the most primal place of our origins fully man and fully woman is who God created us to be and ‘it was very good’.

Yet how often is this not enough for us? How often do we try to find our fulfillment and identity in things other than this? How often do we treat people as something other than fully human and ‘very good’? At creation, being fully human is supposed to be enough. God created us glorious and good that we might find satisfaction in being the works of His hands, fully human – body, mind, heart, and soul. Yet in our world today, we exalt one element, the body – elevating its sexual nature above all else - reducing the beauty of sexuality to something less than it was designed to be, and worse yet, we devalue what it means to be fully human.

Pornography, for example, dehumanizes sexuality and depersonalizes people by turning the viewer into a taker and the one viewed into an object to be consumed. Yet we all do it. It’s in our media, our language, our casual glances, our relationships, our lingering thoughts, our hearts. Sex is so much more than what we reduce it to, and even worst, we rob one another of our full humanity in doing so.

Sex, Soul, and Society...

A couple months ago I was driving some young girls in grade seven at our church to an event. I started ranting on about how great it would be to be their age again, when one of them blurted out ‘when we’re with boys all they want to do is look at porn’… I was speechless. Pornography has seeped into the foundations of our culture more than we think it has.

The $4 billion that Americans spend on video pornography is larger than the annual revenue accrued by either the N.F.L., the N.B.A. or Major League Baseball. But that's literally not the half of it: the porn business is estimated to total between $10 billion and $14 billion annually in the United States…People pay more money for pornography than they do on movie tickets, more than they do on all the performing arts combined." NY Times, May 20, 2001, Naked Capitalists

The average age of first exposure to Internet pornography is age 11

There are more outlets for hard-core pornography in this country than there are McDonalds restaurants

At $10 billion, porn is no longer a sideshow to the mainstream like, say, the $600 million Broadway theater industry -- it is the mainstream

Advertisers and companies that use sex to sell their products use it because it works. They do not throw in billions of dollars using sex to sell without knowing for certain that it will have an impact on not only our thoughts but our actions.

There is absolutely no question that the way our society portrays sexuality impacts us, the real question is how. How does it affect how we see the world? How does it encroach upon our relationships? How does it shape us as individuals or as humanity? I believe it can shake and shatter our very souls.

A call for Purity...

I wrote this letter a few years ago after a communal experience of the Holy Spirit. A current series of teachings that I am doing on passion & purity is one of the manifestations of that experience. I sat down to write a bit about what God has to say about sex a few weeks ago, and it's turned into a 50 page manual. Excerpts and additional thoughts from this journey will be the focus of discussion here the next few weeks.

"Looking back, I was too consumed to comprehend all that was happening as we laid hands and prayed that Sunday night. Although I did not even know all the names of the brothers that night, as we cried out there was a unity in our humility and worship before God, unlike anything I had experienced before.

What made the conference different this year was that God didn't just speak to each of us individually, but that we left knowing we had experienced God together. I praise God for His Spirit breaking through this weekend, and I commend all the men who came on stage to take a stand for purity. God has brought such conviction to my heart on this issue over the years, I feel the need to reiterate and add to a few thoughts.

I have no doubt that the sins revealed that night are just a small sampling of what plagues our entire generation. Extending from sexually immoral relationships, to pornography, to masturbation, to lustful thoughts, people are being held in bondage especially to these sins. We are bombarded daily with images from the media and have allowed Satan to gain a foothold. These sins are poisoning the body of Christ and Christians, including leaders are dropping like flies. Though we are often found busy struggling with God's will in our lives, one thing we know for certain – God desires that we "be holy" (1 Peter 1:15), (1 Thessalonians 4:3-5). We need to adopt God's standard of purity in our lives (see Ephesians 5:3, 1 Corinthians 6:18).

After what was shared, I pray that we don't carry on as if it never happened. As uncomfortable as it may seem, we need to press on in our conversations, and hold each other accountable. We give Satan power when we refrain from sharing and fight our battles alone. Too often have I heard of the vicious cycle of people coming clean with God, sinning in secret, and finally crawling back to God feeling even more guilty. Accountability and the prayers of our community is the only effective way of breaking the cycle (James 5:16).

I pray that this spirit of authenticity and vision for purity spreads throughout our churches. I ask that you take a stand in your fellowship, or gather up a small group, or even just share with a friend, let's just not sit on what God has revealed. We only close our hands to God's grace when we hide our sins.

One word of caution with all the declarations of purity that have been made. Self-imposed rules and disciplines will not work. I've been humbled and have come to realize over the last while, that I can't change myself, and only God can change me. There's something in the heart that needs fixing and it is a God thing. Don't let your personal quest for purity take the place of your relationship with God. Or else it becomes a form of lust in itself. We need to continue seeking the Blesser and not simply His blessings of purity. I pray we all become so consumed with Christ that there no longer remains any room in our lives for sin.

Some brothers have shared with me their fears of how people may view them following confession. If we are to truly become a community of Christ, we also need to pray for understanding, particularly with the sisters. Sisters, we need your support and prayers as well."