ROOMMATES, BAD DATES & GREAT MATES
Purity “. . .neither of them felt any shame”
Hello everyone, and welcome once again to the Hammerstein Ballroom. If this is your first time with us, my name is Nelson, and today we are continuing this series called Roommates, Bad Dates and Great Mates. So, find your outline and today we are talking about purity. And really, as I think about the last five weeks that we have been in this series, this has been the key theme. We haven’t talked about it all the time, but purity is the big theme that this whole series has been built on. So, today, as we wrap up this series and turn the corner toward the new series called Vertical, which we are kicking off next week on prayer, I think that it is appropriate that we spend a little time talking about purity. So now that you have found your notes, look at the first verse from Matthew 5. This is from the Sermon on the Mount. It’s Jesus’ take on purity. So let’s begin by reading this out loud together. Here we go. Matthew 5. “God blesses those whose hearts are pure for they will see God.” Now what is Jesus saying? Jesus is saying that there is a connection between purity and blessing, that if you want God’s blessing in your life, you must learn to live a life of purity. That there is a connection. So whatever area of your life you want God to bless, you have to learn to live in that area in a pure way. For example, if you want God to bless your work life, what does it mean to work with integrity and to have purity at work, and be honest and be a person who stands for what they believe at work. If you do that, then God can bless that area. In the sexual area, the relational area that we have been talking about in this series, if you want God’s blessing on your sexual life, then you have to learn to live pure in your sex life. And we are going to talk about that. And God wants to bless your life more than you can possibly believe. And now, blessing is one of those big theological words that we talk about but never define. Blessing is simply the tangible and intangible favor of God. So it means, if you want the tangible and intangible favor of God on your sex life, if you want God to bless that, if you want God’s best in that area, then we must learn to live a life of purity. Now practically, what does that mean? Well, if you are married, purity for someone who is married simply means that you remain faithful to your spouse and you keep your marital bed pure from outside temptation. And you get God’s power so that you can resist any temptation toward adultery, or even toward pornography that might come in and upset your marriage. Purity for someone who is single doesn’t mean that you can’t date or you shouldn’t pursue relationships, but it means preserving your sexual purity until marriage. You do that by abstaining from premarital sex, or not going so far as we go in our day so that you avoid that kind of sexual contact, premarriage. Look in your notes at II Corinthians. Building on what we have been talking about II Corinthians 7:1 says this, “Because we have these promises, dear friends, let us cleanse ourselves from everything that can defile our body or spirit and let us work toward complete purity because we fear God.” Underline those words—complete purity. We are going to talk about what it means to live our lives with complete purity and I want to challenge you to make a decision to live the rest of your life with complete purity today. But why do we do this? This verse says something interesting at the end of it, it says, “We work toward complete purity because we fear God.” Now, some people have a very unhealthy fear of God. They believe that if they mess up, if they do something and they sin, then God, sitting up in heaven, He’s going to send lightning bolts down and kind of strike them dead. So they live in this unhealthy fear of God. But this verse says, we work toward this purity because they fear God. What’s a healthy fear of God? What that means is, we are afraid that we might miss out on God’s best plan. In other words, God has such a great plan for us, God has something better for our lives than we could ever imagine and we are afraid that we are going to settle for something less and we are going to miss out. And the way that you can ensure God’s blessing that God’s best plan happens in your life is by pursuing complete purity. So in your notes, I ask, how do you pursue a life of purity? Well, four steps from the Scriptures.
1. Place my life in God’s hands
And it’s number one because it’s the most important. Place my life in God’s hands. This is the first step toward purity, and it’s the step toward finding God’s power and doing God’s will with your life. This is the great decision that we are talking about today. As a matter of fact, this one is so important, off to the side of your notes, will you put a little asterisk or a little star beside this one? Because I want you to understand what this is all about. Just to say it very clearly, you can’t live a life of purity alone. You need God’s help. And God’s help is given when you place your life in God’s hands. Whatever you place in God’s hands, He, in return, will give you His help in. For example, the moment you place your marriage in God’s hands, you get God’s help. The moment you place that temptation that you have been dealing with in God’s hands, in return, you get God’s help. The moment you place your dating life in God’s hands, you get God’s help in that area. This is the great decision. Why? Because you can’t remain pure on your own. And God never designed it that way. God never meant for you to try to live a life of purity by yourself. God never said you had to pursue purity alone. God never meant for marriage to only be between two people. He set it up as one man, one woman under God. So He meant for marriage to involve more than just the two individuals, He has to be a part of that and you get His help. God never meant for a single person to face premarital sexual temptation alone. Because that single person can have His help. That’s why He offers His help and power whenever we place something in His hands. Now, and this is not the whimpy way out, by the way. Asking for God’s help is not whimpish. There are all kinds of things in life that you need help on. For example, just to give you a quick story of something recent in my life. I had a television that I have owned for about 11 years. Kelli’s dad, my father in law, bought us a 32” television, much bigger than we needed, and much bigger than my little apartment can stand, but 11 years ago, he bought us a 32” television. Now, if you remember what televisions were like 11 years ago, these things were huge. I mean 32” screen had this huge casing that it was in. It weighed a ton and I have moved that thing back and forth across country at least twice, along the way. Finally, the other week, we had enough. We had been saving and we said we were going to go out and buy us a new television. So I went out and bought a smaller, high definition TV and if you bought one of those things lately, they weigh almost nothing. I mean they were really light. I carried that thing home easily in the box. So now I have this big TV up in the shelf, and I had this little TV and I had a problem. Kelli is 6 months pregnant. That TV weighs about 200 pounds. There is no way that I can move that thing by myself and she couldn’t help me out moving it. So I did what you think I might do. I called Kerrick on the phone. And I said—hey man. Some really cool stuff happening over at my place. Can you stop by tonight? Now, the really cool thing was we were going to haul this TV out to the corner and put it out with the garbage. He comes over and helps me haul this out and we put it out by the garbage and a couple of hours later it’s gone. Probably one of you got it and put it in your apartment now. We hauled this thing out. Was it wise or foolish for me to ask help in this situation? I mean, on a good day, I could have somehow manhandled that television down to the street. I probably could have. I could have risked Kelli’s life, our future baby’s life, you know. I could risk my back and my leg, you know, hit two or three people on the way down. I might could have done it by myself, but it would have been foolish for me to try. The wise thing for me to do was to seek help and to get somebody else’s power involved in that. Now look, if that is true with a small thing like moving a television, imagine how much more true it is when it comes to living the life of purity that God wants you to live. You see, asking God’s help is a smart thing to do. It’s not being whimpy. It’s being wise. It’s understanding how you’re wired. That God wants to help you. That’s why this first decision in your notes is the greatest decision. Saying, God, I’m going to take this area of my life, and I am going to hand it over to you. Now, handing your life over to God is a supernatural experience. And if you have never made that decision before, if you have never taken your life and placed it in God’s hands before, that’s what we talk about around here when we talk about becoming a follower of Jesus or becoming a Christian. Because you have to make that decision. And some of you have been thinking about this for a long time. You have been thinking about what it means to be a Christian, to be a fully developing follower of Jesus. And so, maybe today you need to make a decision to take your life and to place it into God’s hands. And if so, I hope you will mark on the back of your Connection Card—today, I have decided to follow Jesus Christ for the first time. And I will send you more information about what it means to be a Christian. And some of you will do that. For others, it means making a continuing decision. Sometime in your past you became a Christian, you made a decision to give your life over to God, but because Christians aren’t perfect, what we tend to do is we tend to give our whole life over to God, but then occasionally we will take back little slices. We will take back our work life. We will say—let me have control of my career for just a little while. Or we will take back our social life and we will say, God, I want this area back and I think I know better than You do in this area. So, what we have to do is we have to renew our commitment. And we say, God, we are going to give that back to You. You have my heart, now I’m going to give You my body and my mind and every other area of my life. Maybe that’s what you need to do today. You need to recommit yourself to giving all that you are to God. With that in mind, let’s look at this verse. Romans 13:13-14, “We should be decent and true in everything we do so that everyone can approve of our behavior. Don’t participate in wild parties and getting drunk, in adultery and immoral living down in the east village”, sorry, that just came to mind when I was reading that. Let’s go back to “don’t”. “Don’t participate in wild parties and getting drunk, in adultery and immoral living or in fighting and jealousy, but let the Lord Jesus Christ take control of you and don’t think of ways to indulge your evil desires.” Would you underline that last sentence? “Let the Lord Jesus Christ take control of you and don’t think of ways to indulge your evil desires.” Two things are going on. I want to talk about the latter part of that sentence in just a moment in step number three, but I want you to see here, it says-- Let the Lord Jesus Christ take control of you. That’s what I’m talking about. Letting Jesus come into your life, committing yourself for the first time to follow Him as a Christian, or recommitting yourself to following God in every area of your life. That’s the first and greatest decision that we are talking about today. That’s step number one.
2. Understand God’s forgiveness
As you place your life into God’s hands, you have to get great clarity as to what it means to live a life that is fully forgiven and to fully understand God’s plan for purity, we have to fully understand God’s plan for forgiveness. And one of the big reasons that people are afraid to pursue this life of purity that we are talking about, is because they are afraid it will force them to deal with their past. In this series, we have touched on a lot of sensitive issues. And if your emails and my conversations and some of the things that have come up in this series are any indication, we have touched on some sensitive, really sensitive issues. We have talked about lust, temptation, your past sexual history, things like adultery and even oral sex and masturbation. We have put out the challenge that God’s plan for marriage is one man, one woman, for life. And this conversation has somehow churned up our past failures and mistakes and it has caused many of us to face this critical point of will we leave our past in the closet or will we bring it out into the light and seek God’s forgiveness. And see, some of you have been afraid to let God fully and freely forgive you because you are afraid that it is going to cause all kinds of shame and guilt in your life. But I want you to see some wisdom on that from two verses. One is from the wisdom writer of Proverbs, Proverbs 28. Notice what it says. As a matter of fact, let’s read this verse out loud together. “People who cover over their sins will not prosper. But if they confess and forsake them, they will receive mercy. Now, is this in alignment with your thinking? My thinking for many years was almost if I cover over my sin, then no one will notice. And I will somehow prosper by keeping it covered. But this verse says, if you cover over our sins you will not prosper. You will not find freedom. You will not find forgiveness. So what do you have to do? You have to confess and forsake them. You confess it to God. It means you agree with God. That’s what confess means. To agree with God. I agree with God that I have sinned, and God, I’m letting go of that old way of living. And then notice what God gives you. It says, “They will receive mercy.” You aren’t going to receive a lecture. It’s not that God is going to back up a dump truck of guilt into your life and pour it on you. No. You will receive mercy. Mercy is a theological word. It means—act of God’s steadfast love by which God sustains our ongoing relationship and repeatedly forgives His people. God is a merciful God. God wants what’s best for you. So, just bring it out into the open. And if you have placed your life in God’s hands, then you have to understand His forgiveness and to let Him cleanse you from all the past so that you can have a determined future. Now, just to make this clear, using some of the strongest imagery in the Bible to describe forgiveness. One of those passages, Isaiah 1:8, which is your memory verse on the back of your notes, and I know we just read the verse together, but let’s read this out loud as well. “Come now, let us argue this out says the Lord. No matter how deep the stain of your sins, I can remove it. I can make you as clean as freshly fallen snow, even you were stained as red as crimson, I can make you as white as wool.” Did you get a piece of wool when you came in today? I know some of you snuck in the side door and you didn’t get it. We’ll give it to you on the way out. But we gave you these little pieces of wool and some of you have been playing with it during some of the more boring parts of my message today, and I can see you out there, but if you want to pull that out, now would be a good time. If you look on the back of that, there is just a paraphrase from Isaiah 1:18 that says, “Even if you are stained as red as crimson, I can make you as white as wool.” The Old Testament writer of Isaiah chose this image. He said even if your past is crimson. Even if there are some things that you are not proud of, or you are ashamed of, or you want to keep hidden. If you bring those things to God and let Him forgive you, He will, and He will make you as white as snow. If you didn’t get one of these, you can pick this up on the way out. But I wanted you to take this with you this week as a reminder of how God makes us clean, how His forgiveness makes us pure. Jesus. Even in the New Testament, or even farther than the Prophet Isaiah did in the Old Testament, in the New Testament Jesus instituted tradition, Christians are to practice to be reminded of this idea of God’s forgiveness. And that tradition is the symbolism of baptism. The wool in the Old Testament, baptism in the New Testament. And Jesus said in baptism, we are modeling what it means to be fully forgiven. You’ve seen a baptism, right? Usually there is a baptism pool, which is full of water, and a baptismal candidate, who has already made a decision to follow Jesus, now, symbolically walks into the pool of water, representing their old life, before Jesus Christ, their sinful life, they go into the water and then they are taken all the way under the water representing God’s full and free forgiveness that covers all of their sin. Then they come all the way out of the water and usually the person administering the baptism says—raised to new life in Christ. And they walk out of the pool, now, fully forgiven, having the symbolic understanding of the forgiveness that God offers us for past sexual sin, as well as any other sin in our lives. You see, God wants His forgiveness to be so clear that He gives us these symbols, powerful symbols of understanding God’s forgiveness that He makes you as clean and as white as wool and He washes you fully in baptism. If you have never been baptized, the only requirement to be baptized is you are a follower of Jesus. We have our next baptism this coming Sunday afternoon, one week from today, at 3:00 in the afternoon, down in the East Village, and I had been making fun of the Village, but it will be down in the East Village and I hope you will be part of that. If you want to learn more about that baptism, or about what we believe at The Journey about baptism, mark that next step on the back of your Connection Card related to baptism and we will get you more information. But maybe you want to follow through. Because it is such a picture to help us understand forgiveness and there is no reason to be afraid of bringing your past to God, because He will forgive you. And so place my life in God’s hands. We talked about that. Understanding God’s forgiveness. And then here’s number three.
3. Remove any temptation.
Now, the first two steps we talked about God’s actions to help us live a life of purity. In the first step, we focused more on our part. In other words, how can we cooperate with God, so that we can live this life of purity? Let me give you some examples. Let me give you a couple of real life example, some scenarios in our church several years ago. There was a period of time when about three people came and talked with us about some issues they were dealing with about their sex life and about purity. One young lady came and said that she had a problem with premarital sex. She said she couldn’t control herself after a few drinks and she ends up going to bed with different guys and then later regrets it. That’s scenario number one. Second scenario. A guy in our church comes to us, says he can’t control himself around his ex-girlfriend. They had been broken up, there was no love there, no potential with this person, in fact the person had even moved outside the city, but yet, when she comes to town, she calls him, he ends up inviting her over to his place and then end up sleeping together or going pretty far in other things like oral sex. Third situation. Another guy comes to us and says that when he travels he ends up falling into the trap of watching pornography in his hotel room. Three very tempting situations. Are there solutions? Does God have a responsibility in each situation? Certainly, God does. God offers us His help and His power, but would you agree that even Christians can foolishly sometimes ignore God’s help and foolishly reject His power. For example, earlier I had you underline, going back to step number one, I had you underline the last part of Romans 13:13-14 that says this, “Let the Lord Jesus Christ take control of you,” but look at that last part, “and don’t think of ways to indulge your evil desires.” In other words, there is a responsibility that you have. You see, God can give us all kinds of power and help, but we can short circuit God and still think of ways to indulge our desires. So in those three situations, are there some solutions, are there some ways that these three people can remove some of that temptation? On their part, there certainly are. For example, the young lady who was going to bars and drinking and then going home with guys. She could avoid going to bars or avoid drinking in public places to avoid this temptation. She could remove that avenue from her life. The guy could have removed the temptation from being alone with his ex-girlfriend by either not seeing her when she’s in town, or by only meeting with her in public places where there is other accountability. And the guy, he could have asked the hotel to turn off the adult channels in his room, or unplugged the television, or even stayed in a hotel that didn’t provide the service. You see, sometimes, we say—God, help us in this area. God, I need Your help in this area, when there are solutions that we can take and there are actions that we can take, if we just engage our mind and we remove these temptations. Sometimes it’s not a supernatural activity to overcome temptation. It is a simple solution on your part. Here are a few verses that sum up what I’m talking about. II Timothy 2:21-22, “To keep yourself pure you will a utensil God can use for His purpose. Your life will be clean and you will be ready for the Master to use you for every good work. Run from anything that stimulates youthful lust. Follow anything that makes you want to do right. Pursue faith and love and peace and enjoy the companionship of those who call on the Lord with pure hearts.” Now, you could spend the rest of the afternoon unpacking that verse. But there are four big truths in that verse. Just real quickly.
1. This verse says “run from the wrong things”. In other words, if you are letting something around you cause you to fall into temptation, run from that. Remove that. Some of you need to do that. Some of you during this series have been battling with different tempting situations, like the three scenarios I described, and maybe there are other scenarios and you need to remove that temptation. You need to throw away the pornography. You need to resist, remove the temptation from your life. You need to run from it.
2. It says “follow what’s right”. In other words, let your mind focus every day on what is right and then get around the right people. That is very important. Not people who are going to drag you down, but people who will build you up.
3. Then finally, this verse says, “if you do all of that be prepared to be used by God” in a really big way.
Now, let me give you just one big tip before we move on to this last step. One of the best ways, every day, that you can center your life and focus your life on living a life of purity, is by spending time in God’s word. If you were around The Journey back in January, you know that we laid out a challenge for people to read the Bible this coming year. About 350 people have been reading with us and we are just going through the Bible in a year. Every morning we are beginning our day with about a 10 minute reading of the Scripture. That is one of the most powerful ways I know to bring focus and to bring centeredness into your life so that you can overcome the temptations that you are going to face. Maybe you want to get in on that challenge. Maybe you want to join us. If you do, we aren’t going to ask you to go back and catch up and read what we have already read, you can just extend it on into next year, but if you think you might be interested in getting more information about taking this one Bible challenge, write the word “Bible” on the back of your Connection Card and we will send you information so that you can start reading with us and about every month or so, we send tips and insights on how to more effectively do that. But I think this is a powerful way, you start your day with God and then you get these supernatural insights or these simple solutions to remove any temptation that you might face.
4. Exchange my pursuit for God’s peace.
Here’s step number four. This is not only the final step in our message today, but this is really the big issue that we are talking about as we wrap up the whole series that we have been in for the last five weeks. Here it is: exchange my pursuit for God’s peace. Now, throughout this series, we have been challenging you to pursue God’s way of life. To pursue, to do everything that you can to remove the temptation, to set up boundaries, to let God into your life. We have been challenging you to make this a pursuit, but I want you to know, you should do everything that you can to pursue righteousness, but ultimately, it is not about your pursuit, it’s about God living in your life. It’s about you turning control and saying—God, I want You to take over. God, this is about Your working in my life. It’s not about my will power, God, it’s about You doing Your will and giving me Your power. And when you do that, that relieves all of that pressure you put on yourself and it brings about this peace, and God’s peace in your life, knowing that what you are doing is right, will allow you to guard your heart and protect your mind and to live in Jesus Christ. I didn’t just come up with that. That’s actually what Paul says in Philippians 4, in your notes. Here’s what it says, “If you do this, you will experience God’s peace, which is far more wonderful than the human mind can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus. Fix your thoughts on what is true and honorable and right. Think about things that are pure and lovely and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise.” Do you see that exchange? This exchange where you say—God, come and take control. And I want to challenge you today to let God into your life and say—God, I’m going to let You guide my sex life from here on out. Whether this is the first service that you have been to in this series, or you have been with us for the last five weeks, God, I’m going to let You work in my life. Replace my pursuits with Your peace. You know, the reason some of you are afraid to do this is because of your past. You say—I’m afraid to give God control of my future because I am afraid that I have already ruined it because of my past. Those of you who may feel that it is too late to pursue this pure life, maybe you feel like you have already messed up, or disqualified yourself from the pursuit of purity because of previous sexual encounters, or experiences. Let me reassure you, even though you can’t go back and undo the past, you can determine today the direction of your future. God says you can allow Him to come into your life. He can forgive your past. He can give you power for the present and He can give you hope for the future. So all of us, whether our past is dark or whether our past is pure, we can determine today from this day forward, God, it’s about Your plan. It’s about pursuing You. It’s about living in Christ Jesus. And if you don’t believe that, then you go home today and read John 8. Because in John 8 there is a story of a woman who is actually caught in the act of adultery. In those days, if someone was caught in the act of adultery they would be stoned, literally, pick up stones and throw them at someone, they would be stoned in the middle of the public square. So this woman is caught in adultery in John 8, and she is brought to Jesus. And the Pharisees say—Jesus, what do you want us to do? And Jesus says, “Let those of you who are without sin cast the first stone.” You may remember the story that one by one the accusers began to filter away and they go their way until no one is left but this woman and Jesus. And Jesus lifts her up and He says, “Woman, where are your accusers?” And she says, “They’re gone.” And then Jesus says something to her very profound in verse 11. I put it in your notes. He says, “I don’t condemn you either. Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.” In other words, the past is the past. Let Me forgive that. I didn’t come to condemn your past, I came to offer you a fresh start for the future. Jesus is not offering this woman guilt. He is offering her grace. And then He says, “Go and sin no more.” The future, pointing toward that. Maybe today you need to decide to make a fresh start with God and say—God, I’m going to live Your plan for my sex life from this day forward. I hope you will do that. Let’s bow our heads and pray together.
Dear God, we thank You that You are the God of fresh starts. That You give us power. You give us peace. You give us Your plan and You allow us to have this great exchange with You, where we exchange our lives for Your help and we can place everything in Your hands. So today, we want to have some time where we can do that. Over these next few minutes, as our worship team comes in a moment and as we pray, I pray that there will be holy moment where we can just invite You to come into our lives and into our hearts.
Maybe you want to pray that prayer right now where you are at. Just say,
Dear Jesus, I want Your best for my sex life. From this day forward, I am committing my self to living a life of purity. God, I want to follow Your plan. I want Your peace to know that I am doing what’s right and I can withstand the temptation that is going to come.
If you are here today and maybe for the first time, you were the person I was talking about earlier, and you are deciding to become a follower of Jesus, to become a Christian, today, maybe just right now you want to thank God for coming into your life, for giving you this new and better way of living and say,
God, help me to live for You from this day forward. And we all pray together in Jesus’ name. Amen.
