BST No.5 Love, Sex and Marriage in what order?

It's estimated that 95% of British people have seen some form of soap opera in the last couple of years. They've been hooked into Dallas or Dynasty or one of the better or worse, if you can get any lower, sort of sequential programs that are put across by the BBC and the ITV, where sexuality is presented as being very much forefront in relationships and promiscuity abounds from one partner to another. You make your money without any reference to others who are being exploited.

You get your sex with exactly the same attitude. When I was away on holiday, I forget whether I bought the Independent newspaper or the Guardian, but it was one of the two that was saying that the BBC and ITV are vying for greater audiences and during the autumn they're going to be hotting up in the whole area of promiscuity and putting more explicit programs on our television. Sex sells, it gets audiences, and it's often used, therefore, wrongly.

It says, Alex, comfort, chastity is no more a virtue than malnutrition. He's a professor who made that comment on the BBC a few years ago. Zeffirelli, a film producer, made a film entitled Endless Love.

This film purports to show the love relationship between a 16-year-old and a 15-year-old. It's explicit, and he says, I'm not telling 15-year-olds to make love, they do so already. I'm just telling them it's quite normal.

Somebody, because of the amount of sex that there is on television and on the rest of the media, has made this comment, it is difficult to imagine that any young person who watches today's films could ever feel, let alone think, about sexual intercourse in the same way as their parents did. What was very much a private thing, perhaps as I've indicated, too private a thing, has now become so explicit that the whole thing has become distorted, and so many young people have got a wrong impression as to what sex is really all about as far as God is concerned. What is the Christian view of sex? Have you ever thought, and let me ease the atmosphere just a moment or two, have you ever thought that the first sexual thought that ever occurred in the cosmos was in the mind of God? It was He who creates Adam and Eve and brings about the conception of one fleshness.

The first sexual thought was in the mind of God. That means to say that sexual thinking in and of itself is pure. It's how that sexual thinking is allowed to develop in the thought processes and in the activities of the body that can make it distorted and therefore become impure.

When you read the opening chapters of the Bible, you discover that God does not back off on the subject of sex, not at all. But in the 26th verse of the first chapter of Genesis, He could hardly have raised the topic more speedily. God is depicted as in the process of creation, and He says, let us make man in our own image.

Previously in the six stages of creation, He's spoken to the inanimate world or to the cosmos. He said, let the land bring forth fruit. Let the land bring forth animals.

But when He comes to the summit of His creation, He says, let us make man in our own image. And when you read man there, you read it in a bisexual sense because He's referring to man and woman. And so you discover in the 27th verse, God created man in His own image.

In the image of God, He created him. And then, because man is not bisexual, though sometimes the nouns for man in the Bible can also include women, He goes on to say, male and female, He created them. God is not for unisex.

There is that about a man that differs from a woman. There is that about a woman which differs from a man. That is how God made them.

And to blur the sexual distinctions is to take something which God has pronounced good and to distort it. There is nothing wrong with your masculinity. There is nothing amiss with your femininity.

Male and female, He created them. The story is told, if memory brings it back to the forefront of my mind accurately, of Lady Astor who was a leading high Anglican. And she was talking to Cardinal Manning, the principal Roman Catholic in the country.

And she was really speaking theologically, though he took it deliberately in a different way. And she said to him, what really distinguishes you and me? And he says, Madam, I can't conceive. Think it through, it's quite clever.

God has created man and woman. And in the second chapter of Genesis, there is an extension of development of the information that you're given in the first chapter. For this reason, verse 24 of chapter 2, A man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.

That's the first time the Bible actually uses a description of the sexual relationship between husband and wife. Between man and woman. It's a wonderful Hebrew word, one fleshness.

You'll find it referred to again in Malachi. You'll find it in two of the Gospels. The Apostle Paul uses it in Corinthians.

And he also uses it in Ephesians. And always the Bible is talking about that sexual relationship that rightly exercise is between husband and wife. So, you see my point right at the beginning.

That the older generation that I don't represent really did get it wrong by not handling these sort of subjects more publicly. What is written in the Bible is written for us to study. There is no spiritual value in glossing over the Song of Solomon when God put this love poem in the Word of God.

Not to preach on that. Not to read that. It's to be puritanical and Victorian in the extreme.

The Bible calls sexual relationships within the right context, good. Even the Apostle Paul, who some people wrongly believe was anti-marriage. He speaks most frankly to the husbands and to the wives in the church at Corinth.

And he says that they are not to deny one another sexual relationships for their bodies do not belong to themselves individually but belong to each other. So really you can't get a clearer statement threading its way through Scripture, Genesis, Malachi, Matthew, Mark, Corinthians, Ephesians, which sanctions the fact that as far as God is concerned in the right context the sexual relationship is a good one. But when you come to the way the moderns are speaking of sex and taking it outside of the context that God intended its operation to be, then you're in great difficulty.

Graham Turner for example in the Sunday Telegraph wrote just a little while ago, he's doing a survey in Reading University, only one out of nine students I spoke to disapproved of sex before marriage. Two out of nine of student nurses said if it was just sex you wanted, two out of seven said if it was just sex you wanted you might easily sleep with a man the first night you come into our education center. So long as you both knew it was a one-night stand and, quote, played the game, unquote, there's no harm in it.

Derek Jarman, a film producer, he says, The sex scene, I don't think of it as a love scene on the television, has a drunken impotence about it which I like. Safe sex can be so drab. You see the contrast that I've just given you? The Bible talking about one fleshness, the Bible speaking about a relationship between two people that's extremely precious, and now playing the game, taking a drink.

What a difference in estimation between what the Bible is stating and what is being said so frequently in modern times. There's a young girl, to whom Joyce Huggett makes reference in her book, who, having been brought up in the modern decade, is coerced by her boyfriend and by her peer group into sleeping with him that night. The following day, after she, to quote her words, had given him her all, he says to her, There's nothing in it as far as I'm concerned.

I just know how to touch a girl in order to get her excited. And Joyce Huggett comments, To have been so used and tossed aside like a rag doll is devastating. She gave what she considered to be her all.

He assumed it to be playing the game that night, just like downing a pint of beer. There's something wrong. Not with sex, for that was created by God even before man fell.

The whole business of the church of associating sexuality and sinfulness is so absurd it shows biblical ignorance to an absolute degree. We're in chapters one and two. We're in paradise when God gives this gift to the first man and the first woman.

To associate that with sinfulness per se is ridiculous. It's utterly absurd. But to take that into the modern context, which I've just illustrated, is to distort, is to pollute, is to degrade.

Not sex in itself, but the human beings who are taking one of God's good gifts and dragging them down to the level of commonality and to the sewer. Three things about sex. God thought of it before you did.

The first sexual thought in the cosmos was God's. It's not good for man to be alone. I'll give him a partner for one fleshness.

The Bible explicitly teaches about sex and the way that it's to be handled by ordinary people like you and me. And the third thing, sex though a hunger, is not vital to your life. You can't live without water.

You have a hunger for water. You can't live without food. You have a hunger for food.

But you can live, if necessary, without your sexual desire being satisfied. For God does not place that within you as though you were some animal out of control. He made you and me of the dust of the earth, but he implants into us his image.

And he gives us the capacities to use all the potentials that we have in our psyche, in our personality, to use them for his honor and for his glory, to control them and not them, us. The next word in my title is love. Sex, love and marriage.

Does the order matter? Love I reckon to be the most abused word in the English dictionary. I love I scream. I love my cat.

I love my wife. I love my work. We use the same word, don't we, for differing sorts of things and sometimes they are the trivial and sometimes they are the important.

But how that word love has been exploited in its sexual connotation. As one of the modern pop songs indicate, I'll love you forever tonight. I don't need to make the point clear.

You're intelligent. You've got it. There are three forms in which you can come to that word love.

Three forms in which the Bible handles it in some measure. There is love that's erotic, comes from the Greek word eros. And it's by and large the only understanding that Hollywood has, that Dallas has, that Dynasty has, that the media has of love.

But it's a part, a vital part, a valid part, but not the total part. Eros, erotic love, is that sexual attraction between a woman and a man. It can be stimulated by tight clothing.

It can be stimulated by acting in a beguiling fashion. It's set out in all its intimacy and in all its beauty in the Song of Solomon, where the woman does her best to ensure that she's physically attractive to her man. She places scent on her body.

She ensures that she is an enticing person. But perhaps that word should have been softer because that seems beguiling. An attractive person, someone who would be wanted by the loved one, as he himself maintains that sort of physical attraction for her.

When you're married, it is right that you look after your bodies. It is right that you don't overindulge. It is right as best you can to maintain the youthfulness of the years as long as you can, though some of us are losing the battle.

And it doesn't matter, in the last analysis, however many facelifts you have, whatever frenetic activity you engage in, whatever delightful art you may have as far as cosmetics are concerned, sooner or later, the beauty that you had in earlier years will dissipate. And to some degree, that will affect eroticism as far as love is concerned. And when I come to a marriage like I did yesterday, and I say to a young fellow and then a young girl, will you love this man as your husband the rest of your life? Will you take her as your wife? Will you love her? I am not just thinking of erotic love.

When he's bald-headed and toothless, when she's no longer rushing down to Worthing Beach to have a swim, at least to linger long on the beach, will you still love her? Now, why I despise Dallas, I'll tell you, is this reason. It's an affront against womenhood per se. What do I mean? The woman's always got 36 flashing teeth.

She's always got beauty. She's never got thick lenses. She's never got a crooked nose.

She comes across as a rival as far as fantasy is concerned to all the millions of men who may be watching the box at that time. And the same occurs as far as the men are concerned. There are always attractive men.

And the projection of Hollywood is that if you haven't maintained this, you have not maintained love. And the Bible says erotic love is not bad in itself, but there's more to love than that. You come across another lovely word in the Greek language.

It's the word phileos. It really refers to romance, romantic love, that sort of racing of the blood corpuscles through the body when you look across from one side of the tabernacle gallery to the other side, assuming you're in your early teens, although it has happened for people in later decades. And someone you see strikes you as being, well, maybe Mr. Right, maybe Mrs. Right, and, well, you see all the stars and all the colours of the rainbow and it's all wrapped up and it's hard to speak about what you feel because even the poets lose language.

Romance, romantic love. Actually, you don't get that so much in the Old Testament because marriages then were arranged. In the Middle East to this day marriages are arranged.

Can you imagine your father going to pick your future wife or husband? Strange, isn't it? But not only does it happen there, actually it works even more, as far as I know, than the romantic love unions in Europe. I'm not opting for the Asian way of doing things. But, you see, that romance, it's something that you can't really help, can you? It suddenly hit me.

I fell in love, marvellous. And I mean it because I went through it. Still am.

But there's a sense, don't you see, in which erotic love and in which romantic love, they really depend upon other things than your will. They're centred in the head. They are centred in the heart.

And they have, as a result of the affection that you have, they have their own external stimulus. You're attracted to this person. You're fond of this particular lady.

But when I ask two people down here if they will love one another for the rest of their lives, I'm not talking about phileas, romantic love. And I'm not talking about eros, erotic love. Then what am I referring to? Well, the third word in the New Testament that speaks of love is the grand word agape.

It's the love that God shows towards us, God so loved us, He gave His life for us in the form of His Son. This love is not based on emotion. It's not just based in the head.

It's based in the volition, it's based in the will. God loves us despite ourselves. Romantic love may have its peaks and its troughs.

Erotic love could ultimately dissolve. But the love that the Bible is asking that you and I have as Christian people is that love which we take first of all from God and we exert it towards one another. When someone says to me, as so often they do when I'm in counseling sessions in my vestry, I don't love him anymore.

I don't love her anymore. I've fallen out of love. And my response is, is it a question that you don't or you won't? Because love in the strongest sense has nothing to do with the emotion.

It has everything to do with the will. Now think it through, stay with me this evening. This is so desperately important.

You maybe never have been confronted with this teaching before. I will prove to you biblically that I'm right. Three categories of people we are asked by Jesus Christ to love.

We are asked to love our neighbor. We are asked to love our wife, our partner. We are asked to love our enemy.

I do not naturally love my enemy. Fortunately I've got a very interesting neighbor who comes along to the tab from time to time and is helpful to Rowena and myself. So the analogy perhaps personally falls apart, but the majority of people don't have a natural love for their neighbors.

If I can love my enemy, and Jesus said I can, because I will it. If I can love my neighbor, and Jesus says I can, because I will it. Then hear me you people who have been married for two decades or more, or less.

You can love your wife. The Bible doesn't suggest. The Bible demands.

Husbands, love your wives. You heard Jonathan's reading. Wives, love your husbands.

It may not at some point have much to do with romance. It may not have much to do with eroticism. But it's there in the Bible that you have the capacity to keep unloving your partner.

And this is why I despise Dallas. And Dynasty. And the rest.

Because they're not honest. They do not give a full odd definition of love. They take one aspect, they exploit it, they squander it, they pollute it.

But don't go away from wording tabernacle and saying that we fuddy duddies evangelicals are against sex. I once heard some pipsqueak of an interviewer take Mary Whitehouse to task because she was anti-sex and she said, how can I be? I've been a grandmother seven times. Or whatever.

What did she do, just use baby bile? What then does the Bible have to say about marriage? For I brought to you as clearly as I understand it what religion can teach it, what it says about sex, what it says about love. Now let's box that in to what it says about marriage. And actually, it's got a superb statement.

It's the one that's listed in Nottson News and the one again which, no, Jonathan, yes he did, he read that one from Genesis 2, 23. Turn to that, will you? It's important you understand what Scripture is saying. I'll give you the context as you're finding it.

Adam has the opportunity of naming all the animals in Paradise. Finds no suitable helper. I think God had a sense of humor.

Can't really believe that Adam would have cuddled alongside an elephant. Adam had no suitable helper. So, verse 21, the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep.

It's going to be a marriage ceremony in a moment. The God anesthetizes the man before he gets married. While he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and closed up the place with the flesh.

Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib. He'd taken out of the man. He brought her to the man.

Now here you miss it with the NIV. You get it with the RSV. I'm not too sure about the AV.

I can't quite recall. But the Hebrew, giving Adam's reaction, indicates that frustration has been brought to an end. And you could translate verse 23, as he sees Eve, at last, this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.

You see, he's gone through all the animals. He's got a quick course in zoology and all the rest of the associated sciences in regard to animals. He's named them and so on and so forth.

He's got a tremendous brain as Adam, the first man. But God never really intended, I don't think, that he would have had one of those as a companion. God has something special.

And he takes a woman from Adam, from his side. As Matthew Henry says, not from his head, so that she would overlord it over him. Not from his feet, so that he would trample over her.

But from his side, so she could be a partner, a companion to him. This now is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. And Adam, he suggests the name woman, because she has been taken out of man.

And now you get the commentator, probably Moses, underlining the significance of what has happened. For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and they will become one flesh. He will leave his parents and he will cleave to his wife, as the authorised version puts it.

There is a separation and that is followed by a permanence. Severance, permanence. Leaving, cleaving.

She will be united to him. One flesh. Unity.

Harmony. Intimacy. One man.

One woman. One. Together.

For life. That's what the Bible says. That's what it's teaching.

It's the clearest crystal. It's the manufacturer's instructions. And as for God being fuddy-duddy in the area of sex, Moses puts in verse 25, the man and his wife were both naked.

They felt no shame. There's no reference to children here. There's no reference to family descent.

There's just reference to the creation of a new unit in society. Adam and Eve had no parents, no in-laws to have to cope with. Adam had no father at the human level.

No mother was Eve's at the human level. But here is Moses working out the teaching for this reason a man will leave his parents. He will break from that society, from that little chip of the society, and he will form his own little chip, his own little building block.

And God stamps his permission on marriage and calls it good because it's vital to his whole program of populating the world. He told Adam and Eve at least he discloses his intentions in Genesis 1 that they are to go forth and multiply. And the multiplication will be in families.

And when families start to break apart, then societies crumble. And what you are seeing today with the proliferation of sex and the distortion of sex is nothing else but the attack of Satan on the unit that God has said is vital for humankind around the world. Are you hearing me? When we break up families, we ruin civilizations.

Talk to me that promiscuity is really nobody else's business but my own. Then I start to ask you about your family. I start to talk to you about kids who are still born despite all contraceptions.

I start to talk to you about diseases. I start to talk to you about AIDS. And I ask you in the name of sanity, give me a lifestyle that's better than this one.

Find something that will enable the human race to be a healthful community of people handling human relationships better than is set out in this word. And I defy you to find it. Karl Marx years ago was talking against marriage.

But when the Marxist experiment started in the Soviet Union, they soon changed their tune in regard to putting a greater premium on marriage than they had at the beginning of the revolution. It took some time for God's ideal purpose to work its way through Biblical history. Abraham was polygamous.

He had more than one wife. So did Moses. So did David.

The whole idea of divorce came along. But when Jesus sharpened it all, he takes you, in his teaching, back to Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. And he says, of divorce, that's not how it used to be in the beginning. Because, you see, when two people become one, if they separate, it's like trying to divide paper that's been stuck together.

There is hurt. There is harm. That's why the Bible, speaking for God, says, God hates divorce.

And when Abraham and Moses and David and Solomon, when they got it wrong, their society suffered. And to this day, as Catherine was telling us this morning, because the Arabs and the Jews are cousins, they trace their ancestry back to Abraham, society is influenced by men and women who live their lives away from the teachings and the directives of God Almighty. And so I come back to my subject.

Sex. Good, says the Bible. Love.

Of course it's good in its several facets. Marriage. Essential.

For those who are called into that relationship. But to distort sex and to live promiscuously is to do harm to yourself and to society as a whole. I want to take five more minutes.

Pardon me, but this subject matter does need carefully handling. There are people here who are hurting in these areas, for whom sexual fantasizing has been a problem for years. I want to tell you that though God gives the instructions, the fact that you have broken His instructions does not mean that God will have no more dealings with you.

Perhaps you've anticipated your marriage or at the moment are doing so. The Bible calls that fornication and it is wrong. But God is not such a cruel taskmaster that you couldn't come to Him this evening and say, Lord, I have problems in the area of my fantasizing.

I have problems in these areas of promiscuity. But I do believe that what the pastor was saying this evening is from your word and I want to get my life right. And you can get it right.

And if you fall and fall again, provided there is sincerity in your heart, you can come back to this God. And you can say, Lord, help me with these fantasizing. Enable me, Lord, to have more mental discipline by the power of your Spirit.

Enable me to sublimate sexual desires when they cannot be released into other areas that are more healthful and helpful. The most important relationship that you have outside your marriage or even before your marriage is your relationship to God, through Jesus Christ. And He's open to take all comers, all sinners.

My last word, to single people here. I have great compassion and concern for single people, particularly when I touch upon subjects like this. Your singleness in no way means that in biblical teaching God has little concern for your life.

The Old Testament said it was not good for man to be alone. The New Testament even indicates that there are certain times when it's good for people not to marry. I believe that as far as the Christian Church is concerned there should be such a depth and such a warmth and such a biblical intimacy that people's needs are met as far as affectionate love is concerned.

The Apostle Paul speaks about young men and their attitudes to young women and he says, I just love young women with purity. I could not tell you that my wife is the only woman I love. And be honest, she's the only woman I love in one particular way.

There is agape overflowing within the Christian community to be directed to all of us who happen to be in that particular local fellowship. And it's for us to embrace our singles as our sisters and our brothers. And it's for them before God to ask for His help in this area of disciplining their own sexual desires, sublimating them.

Sex is good. A hunger that comes from the Lord that you can live without it. Sex, marriage, love.

The Bible makes its teaching very clear. Make sure your life is in harmony with it. And in the areas where perhaps at this moment you have difficulty, come to the Lord.

Come to some Christian counselor. Let's pray over it. Weep over it.

I believe that God in His grace can restore your marriage, can forgive your promiscuity, can control your fantasies. Let's bow our heads in prayer right now. Let's think about people perhaps who have needs here, people who once were married and whose loved ones are now in the glory and who miss that agape, miss that filios, miss that physical touch.

Let's remember handicapped people for whom very often these experiences tend to be removed and we forget their own needs. Let's pray for them. Let's pray for people who feel unloved.

Pray for people who are addicted in any area. Let's pray for cleansing in our world. Let's apologize to God for sometimes handling precious things in a wrong way.

Maybe some of you husbands need to apologize to God because you could have kept yourself more attractive for your wife and vice versa. He gave you your marriage to work at it in every area. Let's pray for our kids, the pressures being put on them to the extent that it's becoming less of an experience for folks still to be virgins in their mid-teens.

Let's pray for our youngsters here at the town. God will help them to see that though they're in a minority situation if they follow the teachings of Jesus, nonetheless, that's the best way. Be glorified today.

My thoughts. In my thoughts, Lord, be glorified, be glorified. In my thoughts, Lord, be glorified today.

With my friends. With my friends, Lord, be glorified, be glorified. With my friends, Lord, be glorified today.

We're going to sing that song from Songs of Fellowship. Bind us together, Lord, with cords that cannot be broken. Stand now.

Bind us together, Lord, bind us together, with cords that cannot be broken. Bind us together, Lord, bind us together, bind us together. Stand now.

With cords that cannot be broken.