Sermon
Moral Purity
I Corinthians 6:9-11
Why would Paul assault the Corinthians with a catalog of sins that would keep them out of heaven. His words do not dance around their sinful behavior, but make it crystal clear that those living immoral lives were destined for hell.
He had to be direct with his language to the Corinthian church. He was not attempting to win a popularity contest by telling them what they wanted to hear. He told them what they needed to hear.
The Corinthian believers had lived morally bankrupt lives in a society conditioned to believe that illicit sex was an act of worship. Their temple to the love goddess Aphrodite housed 1,000 male and female prostitutes. A Friday night for them meant dinner at a local restaurant and consorting with a prostitute in the evening hours—all in the celebration of love.
Just as our society continues to sink into the immoral abyss of fornication, adultery and homosexuality, the Corinthians had already sunk. The cancer of homosexuality riddled the ancient world. This unnatural love was practiced by so great a man as the philosopher Socrates. Shockingly, fourteen out of fifteen of the Roman emperors were homosexuals. Emperor Nero had taken a boy called Sporus as his wife. Later, Nero’s perverted sexual appetite led him to marry a man named Pythagorus who he claimed as his husband. How confused and perverted could one man be !
Making a case for moral purity among the Corinthians Christians had to be part of Paul’s message in such a morally twisted world. They lived in a society that had taken sex—a God-created act meant for pro-creation and the expression of love within marriage and turned it into a debased form of recreation.
As we turn the pages of history to modern America, we have the same ignorance and outright hostility to the Bible’s commandments for moral purity. The self-made gods of our day call the Scriptures old fashioned, outmoded, and out of date.
We’ve evolved; we’re smarter, wiser than the God of the Bible. That’s foolishness! We’ve devolved; we’ve learned nothing from history. We see our young people sucked down into sewers of sin; our homes coming apart at the seams; children without mothers or fathers in the same home; and venereal disease and AIDS killing thousands.
Illicit sex and out-of-wedlock births has always created social, psychological, economic, and emotional problems. Our liberal brothers prefer to preach birth control over abstinence believing that will diminish out-of-wedlock births. Free condoms and other means of birth control under Obama-care will do no good for a teenage audience who don’t even consider making their beds or picking up after themselves, let alone taking time in the middle of their passionate embracing to think about birth control. Birth control has been available through planned parenthood’s public health clinics for more than 25 years, yet the pre-marital pregnancy rate has skyrocketed. Honestly, is the way to solve a problem giving in to it or preaching against it? Besides, there is no birth control that can prevent STD’s, which can be transmitted any day of the month.
Statistics show astronomical growth in sexual permissiveness and its attendant social problems in America since the sexual revolution of the 1960’s.
Couples Living Together:
YEAR TOTAL
2000 5,500,000
1997 4,000,000
1995 3,700,000
1990 2,856,000
1980 1,589,000
1970 523,000
1960 439,000•
(1 ) Sex before marriage, a rate increase of 25,000% since 1960
(2) In 1960’s, one in 50 teens had a STD. Now over 1 in 4 do. That's an
increase of more than 1250% of infected teens.
(3) Sexually active girls are 2 times more likely to commit suicide than abstinent
girls
(4) Sexually active boys are 7 times more likely to commit suicide than abstinent
boys
A. What are the causes of such an increase in immorality in the last 50 years?
(1) Attitude of Parents—Many parents can’t wait for their children to grow up to make their own choices. We see babies and toddlers with pierced ears and tattoos.
• Parents take kids on dates at age 10; they end up going steady at 13; some
are married before 17; and they are divorced before they’re old enough to
vote.
• Parents can push kids or allow kids into situations that they’re not
emotionally or mentally capable of handling
• Parents need to straighten up with some good old-fashioned discipline and
teaching in the home.
(2) Failure of Liberal Clergy—Some preachers are fearful people will leave the
church if they say, “The Bible says.” Dismissing Biblical commandments
on moral purity, removes the ultimate authority over man’s behavior—God
Himself
• One preacher speaking at a girl’s college in the chapel said, “Sex is good;
sex is fun. Premarital intercourse is not bad or dirty; it can be beautiful.”
• Can you imagine a virgin girl taught to wait for marriage hearing that kind of
message from someone thought to be representing God? Preaching like
that could weaken her resolve, putting in doubt her parents’ and her
church’s teaching.
(3) Pressure of Madison Avenue Advertising
• Advertisers sell everything with sexual innuendo—toothpaste, hand lotion,
soap, cars
• You name it—if the sinful nature can find a sexual spark to sell something,
you’ll see it on the screen. It’s no wonder many young women have more
trouble putting clothes on than taking them off. Some young men won’t be
outdone by mini-skirts or low-cut shirts or midriffs, so they put their pants on
then pull them half way down the side of their legs. They look absolutely
stupid running around with their polka dot boxer shorts fluttering in the
breeze.
• Looking sexy is more important than modesty. In fact, the word modesty is
so foreign to most young people today that they would have to look for its
meaning in the dictionary. Madison Avenue has done an excellent job
reshaping sexual mores.
(4) Influence of Corrupt Media
• Hollywood’s movie makers glamorize homosexuality, adultery, pre-marital
sex. A steady diet of movie watching that portrays sexual intercourse as the
ultimate success in a relationship, turns males and females into objects of
sexual gratification, not love
(5) Godless Education
• School systems are teaching that homosexuality is just another family
arrangement.
• School clinics in large cities dispense contraception
• Sex education courses in many schools emphasize contraception over
abstinence
• Teachers who hold Biblical views are told to avoid discussing controversial
subjects.
(6) Uncertainty of the Age
• Children growing up today live in a dangerous world. Terrorist groups
threaten our way of life.
• Radical regimes continue to pursue nuclear missles that can decimate
thousands.
• Economic prospects for good jobs look bleak
• Why wait—hope for this world seems non-existent
• We have instant coffee, instant cereal, instant breakfast, instant
communication—why wait for sexual gratification in marriage
• The hope for our children’s lies with us who profess Christ and Biblical
morality. We must take time to teach our children the errors of a world bent
on satisfying itself without considering the consequences. You’re going to
have to speak plainly and directly to kids about sex. If you don’t speak up,
there is no other voice that will call them to account. The message our
society has drummed into our young people’s heads is “If is feels good, do
it.”
B. What Are the Dangers of Moral Impurity?
1. When God thundered from Mt. Sinai, “Thou shalt not commit adultery”
(Exodus 20:14), He was not trying to make you squirm like a worm in a fire.
2. When God says, “You shall not” He’s saying, “Avoid this, or you will hurt
yourself.” When He says, “You shall” He’s saying, “Do this and you’ll find
happiness.”
3. God has set the boundaries for human behavior to protect us from harmful
consequences of sinful desires.
Transition: Young people need to be told the harmful consequences of premarital
sex.
a. Moral impurity is sin against your mental health.
• Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his
body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body (I Corinthians 6:18).
• Sex before marriage is like no other sin—it disrupts the mental well being of
a person
• A head psychiatrist of one of our great Eastern universities said that 50% of
all university students were suffering from psychological problems from
immoral relationships
• A lovely young lady away at college wrote to her dad for advice. She said,
“When I see how casually sex is taken by my classmates, they make it sound
so natural, so inevitable that there are times when I wonder, ‘What am I
waiting for?’” He wrote back, “I can tell you what you’re waiting for:
(1) You’re waiting to be free from the nagging voice of conscience and the
shadow of guilt
(2) Free to give of yourself to your husband, not a fraction of yourself
(3) There’s a deep understanding in you telling you what a joy your first
complete union with another person can be.
(4) That same voice also tells you don’t blur what your marriage to that special
man can be –don’t waste it on a one night stand; it’s worth saving yourself
for.
• David committed immorality wrote: For I know my transgressions, and my
sin is always before me (Psalm 51:3).
• “No torture the poets name can match the fierce, unutterable pain he feels,
who carries his own accuser within his breast.”
b. Moral impurity is a sin against society.
• No society can endure which holds a loose view of sex.
• It’s a sin that led to the downfall of Greece, Egypt, and Babylon
• In his book the Rise and All of the Roman Empire, Gibbons listed sexual
immorality as the No. 1 cause for the fall of the Roman Empire
• Immorality is the enemy of the home, of the nation. It diminishes all of our
lives creating complicated family arrangements, poverty, and insecure
children.
• People who treat sex lightly treat other human beings lightly, natural feelings
of love for others are extinguished by a spirit of selfish gratification.
• In the end, premarital sex breaks hearts, produces jealousy and resentment,
anger, and even suicide.
• Moral impurity is a sin against mental health, against society, and—
c. Moral impurity is a sin against personal relationships
• It destroys love. Kids who become physically attracted to one another and
fall into immorality find that the love they thought they had is no more than lust.
• Sometimes, a young man will say to a young lady, “I love you” He says that to
get her to compromise her purity. What he means is, “I love me! I love me!”
• He loves her like a man loves oranges. He takes an orange, cuts it,
squeezes the sweet juice from it, then throws it to the ground like a piece of
garbage, wipes his mouth, and says, “Man I love oranges!” That’s the way
he loves you, young lady.
.
• Often a young man will say after she yields, “I no longer love her.” There’s no
such thing as free love; love costs.
• We live in a generation of people who do not know the difference between
love and lust. Immorality takes the tenderness, sweetness, the purity and
wholeness of love and steps on it. It’s a sin against your future marriage.
• God meant for sex to be a wonderful gift—the complete union of a man and
woman in marriage. Anything less makes it dangerous and sinful.
• Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for
God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral (Hebrews 13:4).
Conclusion
1. A young girl was speaking to another girl who lived fast and loose. Come
on, we’re have a great time. Everybody’s doing it. Don’t be old fashioned.
No one saves her virginity for marriage anymore.
2. Do you know what the pure girl said to the girl who had already become
slightly soiled and greatly reduced in price? She said, “ Listen, anytime I
want to become like you I can, but you can never become like me.”
3. My dear friend, follow this time tested advice: Premarital purity and post
marital fidelity is God’s plan for your happiness. You’ll never improve on
what God has planned for you.
4. You say, “My heart has already been broken. My life has already been
scarred.I did not listen to what I know was right. I’ve already failed.”
5. This story can change how you feel. In Scotland, some fishermen sat
drinking tea in a local inn. One flamboyant man gestured with his hand
while telling a story and knocked a cup of tea against the wall making an
ugly brown stain on the white plastered wall. He was horrified by what he’s
done. Suddenly, a man from another table got up, took out some crayons
and started to sketch. When he finished his drawing, what emerged was a
royal stag with his antlers spread. The man was Sir Edwin Lancier who
was England’s foremost painter of animals. He was a creative genius who
could take a stain and make something beautiful of it.
6. Jesus Christ is that kind of artist. Jesus can take a blotted, stained life and
transform it by his power. The Spirit of the LORD is upon Me because
He has anointed Me … to heal the brokenhearted (Luke 4:18).
7. Jesus heals broken hearts. Give Him all your brokenness and allow him to
make you whole and free.
