Boundaries Series

Flee Baby Flee!

1st Corinthians 6:18-20

If there is one message Hollywood has successfully sold to the public it is this… if you are going to market a product … if you want to raise the image of your company or raise your personal self image… if you want to be successful then your image, your sexual image is very important. What we have come to understand unfortunately, is that sex sells. Now how do they do this? Here are a few ways.. One company shows a young man and woman … very attractive of course embraced.. on an elevator, making out.. Can I say that? The entire ad shows the couple from the waist up—they seem to be madly in love. Then the words appear on the screen.. Calvin Klein jeans. The clincher for me is that in this ad they never actually show a pair of jeans. Now if I was going to buy that pair of jeans, I guess I’m a bit stranger but I would want to see them. If I am going to purchase a bottle of cologne I want to smell it first. But that doesn’t concern them because they are not really selling cologne or jeans, they are selling an image. Sex sells.

Now in the previous two messages I have preached we have defined a guardrail as a system designed to keep vehicles from straying into areas that are either dangerous or off limits. Last week I updated this by defining guardrail in this way. Aguardrail is a standard of behavior that becomes a matter of conscience.

The temptation for most of us of course is this… we want to live right on the edge. Financially we rack up all kinds of debt over things we don’t even need to impress people we don’t even care about. We live right on the edge of disaster morally… we flirt with sin… we live on the edge in our thought life spending time on websites we should never be looking at. We live right on the edge of disaster in our friendships because we think we can be friends with just about anyone without being involved in their activities. There’s a Greek word for that right here in the NT. Hogwash. Bologna. Not going to happen. What must happen is that we must all take a step back and establish a guardrail, a blockade, a boundary line that says we will not go any further.

You see we need guardrails in any area of life—any area where we are tempted but in the area of our physical and sexual intimacy we need reinforced steel when it comes to guardrails. And the reason is this. Unlike any area of your life or mine we can recover from almost any kind of disaster, financially-I have seen people do it—they rack up all kinds of debt but with enough time and discipline they recover. People drop out of school-they make a mistake-but they go back-summer, work hard and get back on their feet. There are professional disasters. You can go bankrupt. Get fired, kicked out but eventually through a lot of work and determination you bounce back. And eventually you can look back on it and you have stories to tell your children and maybe you can even laugh about it eventually. But here’s the deal—when it comes to the area of our sexuality these are the stories no one ever laughs about because these are the kinds of disasters that are very difficult if not impossible to recover from. And this is why.. Please write this in your notes.

Sex is not just physical. It is also emotional..In fact it is spiritual. It’s much more than a physical thing. And when we cross certain lines in our desire for intimacy, our sexuality there are things we can carry with us for the rest of our lives. We know that, we just don’t talk about it because we live in a culture that has convinced us that sex is purely physical but we know better. So we need a guardrail because this damage can follow us around for the rest of our lives.

So this is where we really need to listen and to follow what the Bible says. Paul puts it this way…

Verse 18. Flee from sexual immorality. Flee. Not be careful. Watch out. Get as close to the line as you possibly can. He says flee baby flee. Run as fast as you can. He is clear. Now one of the things I know about some of who are here today is this…there are some who are thinking that’s exactly what I would expect a preacher to say and then you go back to life as usual. But if we could put down some guardrails in this area it would change a number of things in our nation…