Sexuality - Church vs Culture

What a transformative week we had last Lord’s Day, when we spoke very purposefully and honestly about the role (or the lack thereof) the Church has played in the life of educating Christians, both young and old, about the true nature of sexuality. Rather than embracing the gloriousness of all God’s “good and very good” creation, we have used fear and guilt as our method of preaching against sexuality. By doing so, we have decreased the self-esteem of God’s people and created a culture where the body and sexuality is evil – rather than a full expression of God’s manifold wisdom and love for his children.

Yet if the Church has failed in its role to educate and form Christians’ sexuality, the culture around has had a catastrophic and devastating impact on such formation. To say that our culture is permissive or even promiscuous about sex and sexuality would be as inept as referring to Hitler as a misguided leader! The fact is, our culture has done everything within its power to promote and stigmatize its followers against the beauty of heterosexual, monogamous sex and perverted into a 24/7 free for all. Movies, commercials, entertainment, advertisements, jokes, apparel, consumables . . . everything under the sun has been used to push one agenda and one alone – sex is for everyone and anyone at any time. By doing so, the media has taken something which we have established as God-made, and cheapened it to an immediately and temporarily gratifying, fleshly experience between any two human beings – or even more perverted still. Pornography, adultery, homosexuality, lust, sexual abuse and perversion . . . these are all gifts of a culture which persists in making the holy profane, the sacred ordinary.

In the movie, “Down With Love,” the heroine in the story is a frustrated suburban housewife fed up with an unfulfilling life with her drab husband. In response, she leaves him and writes a book called Down With Love, in which she outlines the need for all women to leave their chains of marriage and find fulfillment in, what she called, “sex a al carte.” While the outcome of the movie was a surprise to all the players, the idea of “sex on the side” is a true reflection of a culture which has taken its gaze off of God and caught a captivating glimpse of the perverter of all good things.

In our worship this week, we will emphasize the beauty of God’s handiwork – namely in the form of man and woman and the beauty of their relationship. In connection, we will build up one another by reestablishing self esteem, not built by the world, but by our identity with Christ: the name changer. In dong so, we will once again express the place of God’s grace in sexual falleness and stir all to a greater commitment of holiness and purity.

Resounding Themes:
The Creative Genius of God
Holiness
Identity
Grace
Purity