Come to think of it No.5 Love, Sex and Dallas

Well, we come this evening in this series of reflecting on various issues that cause thinking people to stop and consider, to a title that I deliberately and somewhat provocatively put together, love, sex, and Dallas, with the undergirding thought, is Christian morality old-fashioned? I switched on the radio early, I forget whether it was Tuesday or Wednesday morning last, and I got halfway into a heated discussion between a man I took to be the editor of the New Musical Express and a lady who sounded quite vivacious, who was representing a group known as the Responsible Society. She was shooting at the editor of the Musical Express because she felt that he used his paper too much as a platform for promiscuity. She went on also to accuse him of using his paper to mingle news of the occult, and her whole argument was that what the paper stood for was actually causing harm to its readership.

She didn't get any answers, in my view, to the comments that she was raising. Instead, the editor used the ploy of any one with a weak argument, don't answer the point, go for the character of the person who's creating difficulties for you. And so he dismissed her as a bigoted fundamentalist in this whole area of sexuality and human relationships.

Well, he thought that she was old-fashioned, frumpish, I think would be the word that he would have used had he known what one to go for. A sort of legacy from the Victorian era. His comments were utterly unfair because they got nothing to do with what she was asking.

He was directing it personally at her, not responding to her questions. Well, is Christianity frumpish? Is it old-fashioned in regard to sex and love? Is there something that what I'm calling this evening the dullest mentality, is there something that that's got that is a great improvement upon what Christianity has stood for? You see, one of the problems that confronts all of us, and I'll take this up in a moment or two, is that we are constituted as asexual people. I mean by that we have certain desires, we have certain appetites.

And one of the things that has happened to the human race, I believe, because I take my directive from the Bible, since the fall of man, one of the problems that besets us is this, that it's not easy for a man, let alone a woman, to live with one partner, assuming that they get married, throughout the whole of their life. Now this isn't a difficulty that you discover just in the 20th century. Those of you who are conversant with the first part of the Bible will come across biblical characters, some quite outstanding men who had more than one wife, they went in for what is known as polygamy.

And in the 20th century it seems to me that we've got the counterpart of this, because the ethic, the biblical Christian ethic of just having one partner throughout life is by and large pushed on one side. And yet if you read the Old Testament, and this is where the Bible becomes very difficult, you discover that of the commands that God gave to his people, the seventh said, thou shalt not commit adultery. And Jesus lifted that commandment and made it much more difficult in his interpretation, because he said that if a man looked upon a woman with lust in his eyes, he would in effect have committed adultery and broken that commandment.

So then, we've got this difficulty that faces us today. This whole business about whether the ethic of the Old Testament, which wasn't completely kept by men in the Old Testament, and the ethic of the New Testament, that our sexual practice should fall in line with the teaching of the Lord Jesus, is it really just old hat? Is it really just old hat? We're told moreover that the evangelical section of the Christian church is anti-sex. You know, we feel that it's a sort of subject not to be discussed.

We're, to use my word, frumpish. The tribe of Mary Whitehouse, one of the most remarkable women in my book, one of the most libeled women that I know of in our country. And yet, anyone to make these sort of conclusions, they deliberately or ignorantly just pass by what evangelical people teach from the word of God in regard to sex and our own sexuality.

We're told, for example, and this we believe here in the tab, that God created men and women in the beginning. Man and woman. Not a product of an evolutionary machine, not some chance coming together with billions of years passing in a process of evolution that led up to the emergence of man and woman on the earth, but a deliberate creation of God.

And God was so pleased at the work that he did on the final stage of his creation that he pronounced it good. That means to say that every part of my body, every part of your body, God pronounced originally, essentially good. And for Adam, he made someone who was just delightfully structured to be his partner in life.

Someone with whom he could converse intellectually. Someone with whom he could relate emotionally. Someone with whom he could pray and share spirituality.

Someone with whom he could be one to the extent that the Bible gives us the daring word togetherness or oneness. And God says in the opening chapters of Genesis, it's not good for man to be alone, and he predicts the habit of marriage or the custom of marriage. For this reason, a man will leave or a woman will leave her mother and father and cleave to one man, and the two shall be one flesh.

That's God speaking, without a blush, in the opening chapters of the book of Genesis. And this concept of physical unity, the most intimate relationship that there is possible between two people, is taken in the New Testament by the writers thereof, and used as an illustration of that relationship that exists between the Lord Jesus Christ and his church. So, any idea that the Bible is a little bit reticent in expressing itself in regard to sexual ethics is really quite ridiculous.

And any idea that the evangelical church is frumpish and ignorant and anti-sex is, again, so absurd, it really ought to be ruled out of all consideration. How do you take a book like the Song of Solomon, which is one of the most exquisite depictions of a beautiful physical relationship that you will find in any of the literature that comes from the ancient world? Now, I say that very particularly for some friends here, with respect perhaps older people, who find the subject matter that I'm dealing with this evening very difficult to take, because you know that 30 or 40 years ago it would not have been touched in the pulpit. And more is the pity.

I have on my file somewhere a letter from a man who must now be moving into his seventies, who on one occasion heard me preach on this or a related subject at a tabernacle, and he said, if only somebody had told me this 50 years ago, I would have been saved a great deal of mental torment in my life. You see, there is that sense in which the evangelical church perhaps was guilty at the beginning of the century, inheriting a Victorianism, but not perhaps being directed completely by scripture and looking towards sex as being something that was, well, not a fit subject to be spoken of on a Sunday. And yet here in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, in a very wonderful way, and sometimes in a very blunt fashion, this whole business of human sexuality is referred to.

To the extent that the anonymous writer of the book of Hebrews can say that marriage is good and the bed is undefiled, it is honorable. And the Apostle Paul, who may have been a bachelor or possibly married and at the time of writing these epistles was a widower, can write in an unabashed fashion to the Corinthians in the sixth chapter of the first letter that a husband is not to defraud his wife or a wife to defraud her husband in terms of sexual relationships. Now, you see, I'm saying all this not to shock you.

Indeed, it's not shocking at all. I'm saying all this to remind you that the Bible does speak about sex, but it puts what it has to say within the context of a very loving relationship. And you see, the reason why it seems to me we've got to try and deal with this subject matter publicly today is because there is an inversion of the biblical ethic which has been screamed at people from a thousand different sources in our land, and they don't beam the message on people who are over 18.

It hits everybody through media, the like of which I have just quoted, through television, and so on and so forth. And we believe that it is right for us to come to Scripture and to speak to this subject matter of sex and love, and the inversion of the biblical ethic is found in some of the popular TV programs. You see, in summary fashion, you can say this about the Bible and its teaching on sex.

One, it's a good thing, because it was blessed by God. It's part of one of those things that He has given to the children of Adam, to the sons of Adam, the sons and daughter. But this relationship, where it exists, must exist, the Bible says, within a context of love, of two people committed to one another, a man and a woman, for the Bible will allow for no perversion.

It will deal tenderly with perversion. It will accept that it exists, as most manifestly it does today, but it will always call perversion by its name. The Bible will also go on to tell us that the man, the woman who goes through life on his or her own, because they are celibate by choice or because nobody came along to share their life with them at a physical level, does not go through as an emotional or a physical cripple.

The Bible teaches us that within the community of the saints, an expression that's become exceedingly precious to me in these last few years, there is safety where every brother and sister can relate one to the other in a context of love that has within it the parameters laid down by the Lord Jesus, so that all of us, whether married or single or not, can go through life belonging to one another and can find satisfaction and fulfillment within a Christian context even though we be not married people. I think that's most important to say because, you see, this is part of the teaching of the Word of God, and as I shall seek to show you in a moment or two, it's diametrically opposed to what is now accepted as standards in the area of sexuality today. Sex is part of the creative ordinance of God.

That's, in a word, how he wanted things to be. It's how he put things together. Now look, do you own a hi-fi set or some other modern appliance? You have a television? A radio? Where did you buy it from? Well, don't answer the question.

There are several shops that you may have gone to. But when you took the thing out of the package in the first instance, what did you do? Having got it out of the package, if you had a grain of common sense, you looked for the manufacturer's instructions, didn't you? I mean, after all, there's only one way to line up a plug in order to put it in a socket so that electricity comes through, shall we say, to your television or to your stereo. You always go by the manufacturer's instructions because if you do not adhere to the manufacturer's instructions and you wire the thing up the wrong way and it fuses or it blows apart, it is your responsibility.

Not so. Now don't you see, my friend, that in this whole area of human sexuality, of human relationships, we have in this book, Old Testament and New Testament, each converging with the other, the manufacturer's instructions. God is not some sort of tyrant who wants to impose upon young, middle-aged, and elderly people some pressures that they cannot bear.

I do not believe that of God. The God whom I worship is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has infinite compassion towards you and me, and whose wish for us is that we may have the greatest sense of satisfaction and fulfillment in our lives. And when God lays down what are rules of conduct in the areas of human sexuality, He has in mind the well-being of those who will receive His teaching.

And those who don't receive His teaching and blow the thing apart have none else than themselves to blame. For sexuality is a precious thing. Human relationships outside of worship to God are the most valuable thing in the world.

When God calls sex good, it is wrong for an evangelical Phariseeism, I don't believe it exists actually in this area, to call it bad, and that we are not doing this evening. But it is oh so very important that everyone young and old is aware of the lines that God has set down for these relationships to develop. Now what's happening today? Well, in one sense what has happened before but on a much more intensive level.

The sexual nature that you and I have, the tendencies that you and I have, the God-given capacities that you and I have are being exploited. They're being exploited by the by the means of communication and the suggestion and the putting across of erotic stimuli in a way that our fathers never had. Because of television, because of radio, because of magazines and so on and so forth.

And you see there are some humanists, and by a humanist I'm referring to someone who doesn't work out a code of ethics from the Bible, who are saying this, that what is happening at the end of the 20th century is one of the greatest things because man is now being freed. He's being freed from those restrictions that a Victorian era placed upon him. He no longer acknowledges God nor the mandate of God upon his life.

And as a result of that he is free. Man has come of age and we rejoice in the freedoms, particularly sexual freedom. Let me nail that for the lie that it is.

Do you know who is behind the erotica? Behind this harmful stimuli which you find in so many books and so many magazines and taken up in a large part of all the media? Well it's not those who want to free men so they can enjoy themselves. It's the old Marxist principle. There's money in exploiting human weakness.

Not just thousands. Millions and millions and millions of pounds constitute the turnover as the mind of men and women is drenched with stimuli that does not have as its base Christian ethic. So let's go to Dallas for a moment.

Some of you may think I've got a thing about Dallas. Actually I'm still one of the few people in the country that's never actually seen an episode through. And don't tell me therefore I have no right to speak about it.

I can speak about murder without being a murderer. And I'm not really just referring to Dallas as a program. See it seems to me that Dallas is a type.

Stands for the soap opera. Incidentally soap generally produces bubbles. And bubbles are almost intangible things.

At least when you grip them you discover that there's nothing really there. And this I believe is a parable of what that type of soap opera really stands for. It's a bubble.

When you try and squeeze it it's not really there. It's not bringing to you all that it might suggest that its lifestyle can convey. Dallas is part of the culture that we have at the end of the 20th century in which there's a worship of the God and the Goddess of physique and sexuality.

Dallas has the ethic of the jungle. It will tell you that might is right and that it doesn't matter how you get something whether it's in the area of sexual experience or material wealth as long as you get it. Acquisition? That's success.

Greed? That's honorable. Lust and love? Well these are interchangeable words. This is why the famous JR has to be presented as a sort of macho figure.

When they suggest that he may have a nice side to his nature, the ratings, they tumble downwards. The more women he has, the more wealth he gets, the higher the ratings. And as for the women, well they're presented either as bitches to be hated or as goddesses to be desired.

Morality doesn't really come into it. You see this type of program, and as I say I'm using it as an illustration of the media at its worst, this type of program is an inversion of the biblical ethic. All those things that I've been trying to teach you in summation about the Bible's attitude to sex are stood on their head in the philosophy of these program producers.

If JR was buck-teethed and bandy-legged, the ratings would go down tomorrow. He's not. He's a macho.

He's a man with the even teeth, the straight nose. He cuts quite a figure. And as a result of this, and the women who play alongside him, he and this type of program is contributing far more to the neurosis of the 20th century than the evangelical fire and brimstone preacher might do at his worst.

You say, what do you mean by that? Well I mean this, my friend. You remember the doctor to whom I referred some while ago, in whom I was engaging with in discussion? He said to me that one of the problems of the evangelical pulpit is this, that they create guilt. Those pulpits do.

You see, you give the impression that people are not what they ought to be and as a result of that they go away so chewed up, not liking themselves at all. That's the problem with the evangelical pulpit, or so my medical friend told me. But don't you see that it's the media with its perversion that creates the neurosis? You see, here is this man JR. Here are these women.

We could go to other series, Dynasty or whatever they call the thing. You could even go to an Anglicized version, the East Ender, which again I've not viewed. When you look at these people, they seem to be so very much more than you are.

Isn't that so? Not many men are like JR physically. Thus my quip that if he was bandy-legged and he got teeth like a rabbit, the ratings would be down. And it's the same with the women.

You see, there aren't that many women that are like these well-prepared women, dressed or undressed in whatever state they might be. And so what sometimes happens? Well, you see, the ordinary woman, if there is such a thing, she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror, or what have you, in the bathroom, or maybe in her dressing room. She's not what they are like.

She can't be what they are like. And in comes the complex. I don't exaggerate.

I have dealt with women who have told me they hate themselves. They despise the way that they look, the way that their bodies are formed. They wanted it so much different.

They cannot accept how God made them. And then you see, you get within this media presentation of sex, and the so-called success of people like JR, men to whom perhaps husbands cannot live up to, they cannot be that type of person. You cannot live that sort of lifestyle.

And you may say that I'm making too much of it, but this fantasy world, it does begin to affect people. This is really how we ought to be living. This is the level at which we are living.

And as a result of that, there is a tension. And thereby come the neurosis and the guilt processes. We're just not functioning properly.

Ours isn't the sort of life that it ought to be. You see, Dallas stands for expression. Express yourself.

Express your animal instinct. Express your acquisitive temperament. But Christianity does not stand for expression.

Christianity stands for submission. Christianity stands for suppression. And now if there was a non-believing psychiatrist here, at this point, at least mentally, he'd get up and he'd say, there he goes again.

You see, this is the thing that we psychiatrists and psychologists have against the evangelical pulpit. It's a question of repressing. Repressing those very desires that find at least a valid expression on a program like Dallas.

Now the psychiatrist couldn't be more wrong. You see, I use the word suppression, not repression. You say, I don't understand what you're talking about.

All right, I'll make it very clear. Let's imagine you've got a dog, shall we? Let's just suggest for a moment that it's an Alsatian pup. Now, a pup may be born tame in some degree, in as much as as a domestic animal, but he doesn't have all the graces that you want.

So you don't allow him just to develop in his behavior patterns as he likes, or else anyone who comes up, who comes into your house, he might be all over them, chewing them up, or slobbering over them, or what have you. You see, you won't allow that sort of expression, will you? Not if you're kindly to him, and if you're considerate to your fellow. So what's the other alternative? Well, there is a possibility that every time somebody came, assuming you've got a cellar, that you push the dog down in the cellar and you lock the key of the door.

That would be repression, or else you could so train Fido that when you say, lie down, boy, he lies down. Hand me a paw, he'll hand you a paw. You see, what you have done with your dog is, you haven't allowed him full-blooded expression.

That would be harmful to him and unacceptable to you. You haven't repressed him, you haven't locked him up, you've suppressed him. In other words, you've brought some loving discipline to bear so that Fido recognizes that there is a master outside himself who has a loving control.

Now, don't you understand, my dear friend, that that's exactly how the Bible talks about our sexuality. You see, the Dallas Syndrome is expression. It doesn't really matter what you do, provided you find the experience satisfying.

That's animalistic. It's the expression of the 20th century. And the psychiatrists say of the evangelicals, your problem is you repress.

You don't even admit that these desires are there. And we say, a plague on your logic. Well, you've never wanted to repress, because the Bible suggests that the way we deal with our sexuality, our feelings, is suppression.

In other words, mastery, control. I once had a contribution to make to a meeting in Haringey, in Haringey education circles that went up like a lead balloon. I followed the medical officer of health.

He got some lads, I forget how many, 200 or 300 in front of him. I'm going back some 16, 17 years now. And he was saying how these lads could get out of difficulty if they found that they couldn't control their sexuality.

Come to him and he'd patch them up. You know, OBD disease and all that, it doesn't really matter, as long as when you realize that this is a problem, or a possibility of a problem, then come and see your doctor. And after he'd finished on birth control, I took five minutes on self-control.

You see, self-control is not repression. Obviously, it's not expression. But it is suppression.

Mastering yourself. You see, I have to control the amount that I eat. If I hated my body, then I could become so very, very greedy in trying somehow to punish it.

That's gluttony. The other end of the extreme in punishing your body is not eating at all. What they call that anorexia.

That's a very great problem. Now, in the matter of food, you control, don't you? You master your body. And this is what the Bible is teaching in regarding to our sexuality.

We master it. Easier said, of course, than done. But nonetheless, it's part of Christian discipleship.

And when you start to master your body, and to ensure that relationships are lived within the context of what the Bible allows, you discover there not the greatest amount of misery, but the greatest amount of happiness. Now, let's go back to the manufacturer's instructions just for a few moments more. You see, you can blow the whole thing up, can't you, as far as your television is concerned, as far as your hi-fi is concerned.

And you can blow the whole thing up as far as sex is concerned. Homosexuality is a perversion. You should love the pervert, but hate his perversion, and endeavor to help him.

Any form of homosexuality is wrong. Solitary sexual experience is wrong. That doesn't mean to say that you can't have sympathy with any, with the larger proportion of people who are caught up sometimes in this area with a problem.

But nonetheless, it is wrong. And when these things are taken outside of the conduct, outside of the parameters that God lays down in His Word, then sooner or later you get yourself, as an individual or society as a whole, into great, great difficulty, with the net result that now we are facing a scourge that is worse than that of the Black Death. I'm told as far as AIDS is concerned, the projection is, in this country, by the end of the decade, two million people will be carriers of AIDS.

The United States of America, 27 million. That's not by the end of the century. I'm talking about the end of the decade.

This full-paged article in one of our leading papers strains over backwards to try to highlight the problem that is presenting itself now, because our sexuality in the 20th century has largely got itself out of control. And you've got to the point where the media are afraid to fully depict the nature of the difficulties that people have when this particular disease gets hold of them. Now, I don't want to be dramatic.

I'm not suggesting that anybody here, particularly, is in danger of AIDS, or that promiscuity automatically leads to that sort of problem. All I am saying is that in the overthrow, in the spin-off of not living your life along the line set down by the Word of God, the whole thing, your sexuality, can bring to you untold harm and difficulty instead of pleasure and fulfillment. You see, the Bible does have a lot to say about sex.

It has a lot to say about love. And it speaks very, very much against the dullest mentality. It says that if you follow the teachings that it lays down, then not only can you know fullness of blessing in terms of your spiritual relationship with God, but you can know fullness of joy in terms of your relationship with your partner in life, and with your brothers and sisters who are called into that particular Christian community, whereby you can express your affection within the parameters laid down by our Lord Jesus Christ.

Do you know that makes sense? I'm not saying to you, don't watch Dallas, or any of these other television programs, unless you find that it affects you. Now, I am prepared to confess publicly that that sort of program would affect me. You see, I'm not strong enough to cope with it.

You may be. Well, God bless you. I hope that one day I will attain to your maturity, but I find it very difficult.

Therefore, if there's a possibility that it's going to harm, the best thing is to be noted by my absence. If you want that put scripturally, it says, make no provision for the flesh. Now, that's going to require discipline, but I'd rather apply discipline in this area than allow my own convictions to drop a few notches.

It may not affect my behavior pattern, physically or sexually, but it might affect what I begin to accept as the norm. In other words, to express myself in the words of the Apostle Paul, I might become squeezed into the mold that the world sets, and I don't want this world. I don't want it set.

I don't want its perverted ethics. I have been bought by the blood of Jesus Christ, and I believe that there is a better way, in his grace, for me to live my life. Now, just hold it there for a moment.

I'm not just an aggressive preacher. I'm a pastor, and I know that for many people, this whole area of sexuality brings tremendous conflicts and pressures. I know that our kids there in the balconies have great difficulty.

We are asking them from this pulpit, and those who stand by me in this pulpit, to take a minority position in their school, in their college, in their university, or wherever it is that they spend their working hours, because the ethics of Dallas is more representative of life in Worthing, in terms of promiscuity and permissiveness, than the old-fashioned evangelical ethic of a man staying with his wife, and a wife staying with her man, throughout the years of their life. One out of six young folk, couples who are married in evangelical churches, have had sex before marriage, and Jesus says it's wrong, and we want to try to help people to be disciplined, people to cope with this situation in their teenage years, in their 20s, in their 30s, and all the way down, in a clean and in an honorable fashion, and those who are finding it hard, they've got hamstrung in one area or another area, we don't condemn you with a sort of insensitive Pharisee-ism. We want to pray for you, for you to be able to get out of whatever it is that perhaps is binding you, so that you might know the fullness and the freedom that there is in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

We want to address from our pulpit unmarried people, who sometimes, according to the Dallas ethic, do become just cripples going through the world, and we protest against this, and we say you are not a cripple, because you hold to your own self-respect, because you will not lower yourself, it does not mean to say that somehow or other you are less than human, and within the Christian Church, there is for you, God grant it, within this fellowship here, the love that can be expressed legitimately from brother to sister, and sister to brother, so that no single can ever go out of this world thinking that they were unloved, unsought, undervalued, uncared for. That's the message of our pulpit. And finally, there may be those this evening who perhaps have a measure of self-hate.

You know, there's nothing like pornography to turn a man or a woman against himself or herself. You see, this is, I can't tell you how much I feel this. This is the prostitution of the very ethic for which Dallas and the rest of the moderns stand for.

We are the ones who are free. I say that's a lie from the pit. You're not free, and you're not creating freedom for our world.

You are creating complexes by the dozen. The man, the woman who's hooked in terms of pornography, what habits from which they cannot free themselves, are not people who are having life in the fullest expression of what it ought to be. But don't you see, my beloved brother and sister, within the gospel of Christ, there's help for you, freedom for you, to lift you up to the position where you can accept yourself, so that you don't need this stuff to stimulate you because it's an artificial appetite that you yourself could have tamed years ago.

And I want you to know, through prayer, personal discipline, perhaps many a failure following one another, but distancing themselves out in terms of failures, how to get rid of whatever it is that binds you. See, this is possible. It's possible within the healing of Jesus Christ and his gospel.

Now come and tell me, where am I creating the complexes? We're trying to show you the way out to the fuller and the freer life that there is in Christ Jesus, living your life by his book. God is not anti-sex. He thought of the whole thing before you were even thought of yourself.

The Christian church is not frumpish. The Christian church has a wholesome attitude to every area of human relationship. And within the teaching of the church, my dear young friend, my dear young people, brothers and sisters, older friends too, within the teaching of the church is a way for you to progress in your life.

You kids keep yourselves for the one person in life that God has given you and pray for that person, even if you haven't met them yet, that they may keep themselves for you so that your marriage can be strong and true. Let's just come before the Lord in a moment or two of prayer. Let's just spend a second or so.

God knows my heart and he knows yours. And I haven't been here for the length of time without knowing the great struggles and conflicts that many of us face in this whole area. And some of us perhaps just want to ensure that right now before God we're clean in our minds.

We want help in tidying up our habits. Some who perhaps have been hooked on maybe video films or the semi-pornography that sometimes is spilled out late at night on the TV. You hate yourself for it.

No one else knows but you know and you don't like it. You've got the same sort of love-hate relationship of many an alcoholic that I've had to deal with. He hates the stuff yet he can't keep off it.

Now let's just pray. Let's pray for one another. You older friends, pray for younger folk.

You who are married, pray for those who are single. You who are single, pray for those who are married. You who are elders and deacons, pray for the whole of our church that we might be kept clean and pure, sinless before God in this area.

And most of all let's claim from him the blessings of the Lord Jesus that cleanse us from all sin and let's realize that Jesus came to re-establish our dignity to give us life and freedom.