My Connect Group

Session 4: Sexuality
Ps Corey Turner

- You need to understand your sexuality from God's perspective

¹²"Everything is permissible for me"—but not everything is beneficial. "Everything is permissible for me"—but I will not be mastered by anything. ¹³"Food for the stomach and the stomach for food"—but God will destroy them both. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. ¹⁴By his power God raised the Lord from the dead, and he will raise us also. ¹⁵Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never! ¹⁶Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, "The two will become one flesh."¹⁷But he who unites himself with the Lord is one with him in spirit.

¹⁸Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body. ¹⁹Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; ²⁰you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.

1 Co 6:12-20

-We should only be mastered by the Holy Spirit

- Note in v19, that we are not our own. We belong to God, as He has bought us with His life

- When animals mate, there is nothing more than pure instinct. They do not have a spirit

- Yet the world thinks that we can't stop ourselves from having sex because that's what we were programmed to be; that we can't transcend our physical instinct
- eg. schoolies week - full vent to those 'deep dark primal instincts'

- Who decided that we can't restrain ourselves?
- Society's world view is not the voice of realism, it's the voice of despair

- The other extreme of human instinct is angel impulse

• Just as destructive and negative
• The "just don't, just don't" mentality
• Fails to address that sexuality is an important part of our life
• Leads to sexual indulgences and sexual dysfunction

- There needs to be a balanced, God-centred example of the right temperature and level of intimacy and affection

- To act like an angel is to reject your sexuality

- Paul in the passage was trying to elevate our understanding of our sexuality - that it is connected to our spirituality

• Paul is challenging the dominant world view at that time by saying that our body is a temple i.e. sacred
• renewing the Corinthian's ideologies - that God is involved in our sexuality
• sex is meant for an appropriate time/moment

- Genesis: the earth was a wild wasteland before man set upon it

• every day that passed led to a departure from chaos and disorder
• God made Man His crowning glory
• an angel can manifest in physical form for a time, but is only a spirit. Animals are physical beings without spirit. If we act like either, we are not acting the way God intended, for we were made in God's image with body and spirit. So stop acting like an angel, cos you ain't one!

- Often, the church thinks that something's too difficult to understnad and so just prohibits them. Too often, the world only knows us by what we are against, not what we are for

- Paul is saying that if God created something, it is not to be denied: God created sex for our enjoyment, but Satan came to use it to destroy that which was pure

- Because God is holy, sex is holy

- It isn't a question of how far, but it's a question of the right time - we are all capable of self restraint

- God never intended any guilt to be attached to sexuality

- 1Co6 tells us that sexual sin is different from other sin and carries different consequences

• you are involving Jesus in it because He lives in your body
• but Jesus is holy and pure, and therefore cannot be there -> hence He will distance Himself
• therefore sex outside what God intended makes us feel more disconnected, alone, meaningless, further away from God than ever
  

- When you sleep with someone, you're with them as one in spirit

- Sexual sin therefore doesn't only require forgiveness, it requires healing

- Understanding sexuality is an understanding of relationships

As leaders, stop justifying and excusing your sin. How you relate, how you act, acts as the litmus test for others to see. We'll never be healed and whole until God is in the centre of all relationships.