Mark Clark [00:00:03]:
First Corinthians, chapter five is where we are. So if you got a Bible, hopefully you do. It's kind of what we do here. And we're going through the book of First Corinthians talking about how it affects so many things about our life. The questions of God, the questions of how we live, the question of what we believe. And today is somewhat. A little bit more of a lecture style. We're gonna be dealing with something super important in regard to cultural reality, but also church reality.
Mark Clark [00:00:29]:
Paul says in First Michael last week about the ideas of. At the end of chapter four of First Corinthians, and he hit verse 21. And now it shifts and it's beginning to take on a different feel as we hit chapter five. Cause Paul starts to deal with some issues that actually exist in Corinth in the context not only of the city, but of the church. And he says it's actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you. And so what we gotta hit today we're gonna spend our time talking about is this issue of sex. Not so much the issue of sex as a concept in the culture, but sexual immorality specifically, which obviously needs a little more time to unpack. The word here is actually the word, the Greek word porneia, from which we get obviously the word pornography.
Mark Clark [00:01:21]:
And it means to buy. But it didn't literally just mean prostitution. It meant the idea of treating someone as an exchange where you're getting something from them and you're not actually sharing with them the reality of the way God set up sexuality. And so I. I really have one major thesis. There could be a million things to talk about in regard to sex and sexuality and sexual immorality. But the reality is I wanna kind of hit one major idea, hit it from a bunch of angles, because it's what Paul was facing and what we face. And basically, Paul is speaking into this reality that he's facing in Corinth.
Mark Clark [00:01:54]:
And people lived a sexual, promiscuous life. And then they became Christians. And what they wanted to do is simply remain a Christianized version of what they already were and what they were determined to remain. So they wanted to be in the church, they wanted to doing whatever they wanted sexually. And Paul says, listen, there is actually a way of doing sexuality. There's a right way and a wrong way. And of course, culturally, today, that basic idea is fundamentally pushed back against culturally. That the church would ever say that seems to be odd that we would ever say that there's a wrong way to do sexuality, because And I'm gonna talk about how we got there as a culture.
Mark Clark [00:02:30]:
But the reality is, G.K. chesterton said, a philosopher, way back in the day, he said, if there's a fence. Now, of course God said, sets sexuality up. And he says, there's ways of doing it right and there's ways of doing it wrong. And so there's restrictions around it. And that fundamental idea, something our culture doesn't like. GK Says, if you're gonna tear down a fence, you better ask the question of why he was put up in the first place. And so don't just start tearing down ideas and saying, well, restriction is by default wrong.
Mark Clark [00:02:54]:
And so there's never any good that comes out of restriction. Of course, when God restricts something, he's doing it for our flourishing. And so Paul says, listen, the sexual immorality, specifically in Corinth that I'm talking about, that he was talking about here, is the kind that is not tolerated among pagans. For a man has his father's wife. And so this idea was that the guy was in the midst of the church, he was creating division, and he was sleeping with his stepmom. His biological mom had passed away. And so his father married another woman, and he was sleeping with her. And so he says.
Mark Clark [00:03:25]:
But then he expands it out, and he says, I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people. That's fascinating. And then he says, this not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world. And this is gonna be really important for what I wanna say. Or the greedy and swindlers or idolaters. Notice that this is all in the same list. So before you elevate sexuality as the ultimate sin and the penultimate issue in a culture, or you hold people accountable for their sexual lives, realize that he talks about the greedy and the swindlers and the idolaters in the same reality. And so every time you want a better car and more square footage and a better watch and a better this, you better understand you're in the same list as the sexually immoral.
Mark Clark [00:04:04]:
And what he's saying is. What I'm talking about is actually, I'm not even talking about the sexually immoral of the world. Because then you'd have to go out of the world if I was saying, hey, you can't actually be around. He says, I'm not talking about what I'm actually talking about. Cause that's what Christians like to talk about. The world is so sexual immoral. Da, da, da. What he says is, but now I'M writing to you not to associate with any who bears the name of brother, if he bears the name of brother, if he's a Christian, if he's in the church and is guilty of sexual immorality, or as an idolater rival, a drunkard swindler, not even to eat with such a one.
Mark Clark [00:04:37]:
He's saying, and this is what we'll talk about next week. But he's saying, listen, there is a place for consequences in regard to sin when it enters the church. It's not so much about what's outside of it. And so I remember if you start talking about sexuality in the context of the church, I was a young adult pastor for a lot of years and I would do a lot of premarital counseling. And so this one couple came to me one time, I remember, and they said, listen, I've been looking through my Bible and I can't find a verse that says that you can't have sex before you're married. And we're really wanting to find that verse because we wanna have sex and we actually are having sex and we wanna get married. But I can't find the verse that says we can't. I don't understand why you say this and the church says this.
Mark Clark [00:05:20]:
Of course, this is a classic thing that people say. And so Christopher Hitchens, who was a great skeptic, said that the sexual ethic of Christianity is the worst feature of Christianity to begin with. And so people look for that verse all the time. They say, oh, I can't find that verse. Whee. Sweet. Now, the problem is, this is why. It's because we're bad readers of story and we don't understand that when Paul uses this word, sexual immorality, what he's doing is he's using it as a junk drawer category for anything outside of the way God defined sexuality in Genesis 2.
Mark Clark [00:05:53]:
And if you go back to Genesis 2, he makes Adam and Eve, he makes male and female. He puts them in the context of marriage. He says, listen, a man will leave his mother and father and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. And the man and the woman were there naked in the garden. And that's how the paradigmatic set for sexuality from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22 is the idea that anything outside of male, female sexuality in the context of marriage is actually a defile. It's wrong of the version of what God said. Listen, this is the way of human flourishing. This is the way sexuality, male and female, was a binary kind of climax to his Story, light, dark, land, water, male, female.
Mark Clark [00:06:31]:
They come together, they're gonna exemplify, and they're going to actually say, this is the way sexuality runs all the way through. So he doesn't need that verse. Anything that falls outside of male and female and the concepts of marriage is what the Bible would define as sexual immorality. It falls outside of the way God actually set it up. And so when I talked them through that, they said, oh, I don't really like that. And they left my office and never came back. But here's the reality. When the Bible talks about sexuality, the first thing we gotta understand is the church.
Mark Clark [00:06:59]:
And I wanna pause before I talk about sexual immor. Gonna sound like I'm talking about what the church is against or what the Apostle Paul is against. The first thing to understand is what it's for. And in chapter seven, and we'll get here in a few weeks, because chapter five, six, and seven talks about sexuality a lot. But in chapter seven of First Corinthians, if you look over, Paul says, now, concerning the matters about which you wrote, it's good for a man to have sexual relations with a woman, but because of the temptation of sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights and likewise the wife to her husband. That's a verse you can put up on the fridge and say, hey, honey, look. Because there's literally a conjugal right aspect to sexuality where Paul says, I want you to actually be flourishing in regard to sexuality.
Mark Clark [00:07:43]:
That's the positive picture of sexuality that Paul gives the church. And he says, listen, I want you guys to be doing it often in order, he goes on to say, to keep you from the sexual temptations of the world. Which means if you're married, you should be able to give one another those conjugal rights constantly, consistently. I remember we did a survey a couple years ago as a church. We did a marriage series, and a high percentage of you were happy with your sex life. You actually said that we're having sex two or three times a week. Awesome. That's great.
Mark Clark [00:08:10]:
That's the advice I give people. Because Martin Luther said, twice a week keeps the tempter at bay. Sweet wish. That was in the Bible. It's not Martin Luther, but it might as well be. So if you go for two or three times a week, it's great. There's a goal for you. And many of you said, you know what? It's not so much how often we do it.
Mark Clark [00:08:26]:
It's actually. And many of you said this. It was actually the quality of it that you didn't like. And so some of you were in these settings where you're like, yeah, we do it two or three times a week. But the quality is actually something I don't like. It's starfish sex. It's just kind of laying there. All right, one of you got that.
Mark Clark [00:08:41]:
All right. There's like, nothing really going on. It's just kind of ran. It's happening, whatever. And so what you gotta do is you need to work intentionally to make sure the quality of your sex is good, not just the quantity of it. And the reality is, I was reading a book yesterday called the Good Girl's Guide to Great Sex. All right, I shouldn't have been reading it. Cause my wife's away, but I was reading it.
Mark Clark [00:09:03]:
And throughout the book, she starts talking about all these good girl dares. And I can't read them to you because they're very explicit. But go buy that book, guys, and put it on your. Whatever, your bedside table and be like, oh, I'm just reading this book because there's these great good girl dares where she's like, write down 10 things that you wanna do on cards. And then every weekend you pull out a card randomly. And then you have to do that thing together, you know? And then she said, you know, one girl go there was. Lead your husband to the bedroom tonight. Not by his hand.
Mark Clark [00:09:35]:
All right, anyway, best book ever. And I'll let you go read it on your own time. The point is, statistically speaking, people, even secular studies have shown that Protestant conservative Christians tend to have the best sex life. And totally defiant of the myths of culture that, hey, if you're Christian and you're conservative theologically, then you're not gonna really have a good sex life. The reality is, stats show that there is a massive great. And that's what the Bible wants. It says, life is too short. God has put you together, make sure that you have a good sex life, and that it's consistent and it's great.
Mark Clark [00:10:11]:
Now, that's what God wants from Genesis 2 onward. So the reality is he knows what is best for us. He says, here's what sexuality is. And then everything that falls outside of that is actually not the way I designed it. And there's going to be consequences for it, which he says there has to be consequences in the context of the church. If you're defiling this, if you're living a life of Sexual immorality. And you're trying to call yourself a Christian. Those two worlds don't fit together.
Mark Clark [00:10:37]:
And there needs to be discipline within the church. There actually needs to be consequences. Now here's the thing. You and I, this is one of the big issues that our culture would wrestle with. They would look at the church and go, how can you possibly. And this is what we're gonna talk about, how we got here. How could you possibly ever hold someone accountable for their sex life? There's nothing more private, there's nothing more subjective. There's nothing more about their true identity than their sexuality.
Mark Clark [00:10:59]:
How dare you look into their sexuality and talk about that? And what we gotta understand is the God that we're dealing with. No matter how you wanna craft him in your mind, no matter how palatable you wanna make him in regard to his character and the way he functions. And you read the Bible and he is relentless in regard to wanting what's best for you out of love. But also as a good father, as we talked about a couple weeks ago, will bring about consequences in our life both in the present life and in the future life if we don't pay attention to the way he sets stuff up. That's just the reality of it. There's no way around it. You can only ignore the Old Testament and the New Testament so long until you understand this version of God. Friday night, I'm literally saying, sitting with my kids, my 10 year old and my 8 year old, and they'd never seen Prince of Egypt before.
Mark Clark [00:11:43]:
And I was like, okay, look, this is a great movie we're gonna watch. It's great. You know, it's got this biblical story of Moses. So we sat down, got the popcorn out, we watched this. And you know, halfway through it, they're digging it down. And all of a sudden Moses comes down to the burning bush and God gets all jacked up. He's like, you should go toward Pharaoh and Moses. Like, I'm not going toward Pharaoh.
Mark Clark [00:12:01]:
You don't understand. I gotta stutter. I can't go. And then God goes, you know that beautiful Prince of Egypt scene? He kind of comes at him, he goes, you will go, it is who am I who made the deaf and the blind, you know? You know, it's just this big like. And he like comes at him and my. And my 10 year old daughter goes, man, God is speaking rather meanly to him. And I'm like, yeah, that's kind of what God does sometimes. And I said, why do you think that is? And she's like, well, he must really want him to do what he's asking him to do.
Mark Clark [00:12:28]:
And if he doesn't do it, he's in trouble. And I'm like, yes, that's the way God is, and you can only deny. And then, you know, an hour later, the angel of death is coming into Egypt and he's killing all the firstborn children of the Egyptians who don't put the blood over the doorpost and the lintel. And my youngest daughter's like, looking at me. She's like, daddy, is he killing kids right now? And I'm like, yeah.
Mark Clark [00:12:52]:
Right?
Mark Clark [00:12:53]:
And she's like, wow, this is crazy. And I'm like, yeah, but no, he gave them all these chances. He sent the plagues and the locusts and the plagues and the darkness and the water. He did all these things and they wouldn't listen. So then there was this consequence to their actions. And my. And you can't get away from this. God will lay something down for us, but there are consequences when we step outside of it.
Mark Clark [00:13:15]:
There are consequences in this life and in the next life. And we've got to understand that, that Paul is saying for the sake of the witness of the church, your sexual life, if it is toxic and you bring it into the church, it needs to be called out. And of course, it's the most private issue of our culture. And we think to ourself, there's no way you can ever do that. And this is where the Bible comes up against us and says, no, you're wrong, actually, we have to for the good of everything else. We have to in regard to meaning. We have to in regard. And what I mean by that is NT Wright, who's a New Testament scholar, says that every worldview is built around four basic things.
Mark Clark [00:13:50]:
Questions, symbols, praxis, and stories. Praxis is of course, a way of being in the world. And he says, listen, all these things are an ecosystem that interact with one another. And if you take a symbol and you destroy it, it impacts meaning, it impacts stories, it impacts your behavior, it impacts the questions you raise as a culture. And he says, for instance, the first century temple, if you destroy the temple, it impacts everything about Judaism, right? If Jesus walks into the temple, the temple was the greatest of God's presence. If you go in and say, this thing's gonna come to the ground, people freak out. That's what they do. In John 2, he says, I'm gonna rebuild this temple in three days.
Mark Clark [00:14:25]:
And they freak out because he destroyed a symbol. Well, the reality is Sexuality, as one philosopher says, is the greatest non verbal signal that God has set into the world. It's a non verbal signal that says this is what husband and wife look like, but it's also what Christ and the church look like. Right? It climaxes Revelation 20 with a wedding feast of the lamb and he marries the bride and, and there's this great supper. And the reality is sexuality was always pointing to the relationship of God in the context of humanity and covenant and marriage, all of that. And when we destroy that symbol, that non verbal signal, it's not only sexuality that gets destroyed, it's actually meaning. It's purpose, it's practices, it's the stories we tell, it's the questions we raise in life. All of that disintegrates when we fragment out our life in such.
Mark Clark [00:15:12]:
And really in the way that Paul is trying to address it. And so here's the reality, I'm not talking about the outside world, don't think that I'm gonna be talking about things. But as we go through this, understand, what I'm talking about is the infiltration of cultural values into the church in a way that aren't questioned well and aren't lived outright. There was a research, Barna research recently that went into a website called the Christian Mingle. Alright, so I guess this is a website where, where single Christians get together to try to figure out who they should date. Christian Mingle survey 61% of self identified Christian singles said that they were willing to have casual sex. Only 11% said they're gonna wait until marriage. That's the reality.
Mark Clark [00:15:56]:
This has infiltrated the church. That's Paul's concern. The casual nature of sexuality, the fact that you do whatever you want with your body, but don't worry, it's not gonna infect. And that's the fundamental issue Paul's addressing that I'm gonna talk about. But it's infiltrating the church, churches, denominations. Recently there was a book by a pastor arguing that you can do anything you want sexually as long as it's not hurting anyone and it's not geared toward children or animals. All right, that was literally her argument. Sexually, the church shouldn't talk to you or hold you accountable for anything sexually at all as long as it's not geared toward children and animals.
Mark Clark [00:16:29]:
Now what we're gonna realize is philosophically, it actually doesn't even make any sense if we buy into the philosophy of our culture to restrict someone from having a proclivity toward animals and children. Because in 20 years the way that we're going now philosophically, we actually won't have a great philosophical reason to restrict anybody from those things. I'll talk about that in a second. Because here's the reality, here's what has been elevated, how a person feels inside. And so what happens is the church, what people say is the only job, is to love and accept somebody, even if they're claiming to be a Christian. However, whatever they wanna do with their body, whatever they wanna do with their life. And of course, Paul fundamentally disagrees, and this is why it goes up against us. Paul fundamentally disagrees.
Mark Clark [00:17:10]:
He says, no, sometimes you gotta call each other out. It would be like me cheating on Aaron and you finding me cheating on Aaron because this happened to be my sexual sin. And you came, said, listen, bro, you can't cheat your wife and be like, dude, I'm doing me right now, all right? Do not project your values on me. I'm an individual. I'm by myself. This is how I feel. This is what I wanna do. And you can't actually hold me accountable.
Mark Clark [00:17:30]:
So Tim Keller says this truth without love is impossible to hear, but love without truth is actual, just sentimentality. If all we do is love, love, love, and we don't. We're not able to express truth with one another. If we're not able to sit one another down and say, listen, here's the reality, here's these things, here's what I need to call you out on, then it's just gonna be sentimental reality in the context of the church. And the witness of the church will actually be corroded. And so here's. Let me just take you back now. For the rest of our time.
Mark Clark [00:17:58]:
I want to take you back and explain how we got to where we are culturally and within the church in regard to sexuality, why modern people think the way they do, so that we as Christians know how and why we can speak into it, which is really one of the defining issues of our day. The reason people say that we can be with someone of the same gender, that gender is fluid, that we can sleep around inside or outside of marriage, that we can do whatever we want with our bodies, even in the church, is the exact same problem Paul was facing in First Corinthians, which is dualism. Greek thought basically said, your body was this and your spirit was this. That's why in the present culture, we have sex and gender, right? This is the distinction that we've made. Sex is the organs that you were born with, what the doctor wrote down on your birth certificate. That's your sex, but your gender is something that you choose. The gender is something you feel. The gender is fluid and it evolves and it's something about your self identification.
Mark Clark [00:18:55]:
And so this week in the news, I read about a gender reveal party that a mother had for her 20 year old son, gathered the family together and revealed his gender even though he was 20 years old. I read a story this week about a phrase that college kids are using called lug and it means lesbian until graduation. And basically what it means is, look, if you're dating in college, you're supposed to be going for your degree as a girl. You're dating. And it's all a mess with guys because they're so needy and you're distracted cause you're thinking about, do I marry this guy, whatever. So here's the better way to get through college so you can focus on your studies. Just be a lesbian until graduation, sleep with your girlfriends. You know, that's not where your life's gonna go.
Mark Clark [00:19:31]:
You can do it now and then when you graduate, you can go back to guys and it's all good because then you can start talking about the distracting realities of relationship and marriage and communication conflict. The reality is. What is that? How did we get there? Well, the fundamental issue is the same as it was in Corinth. You separate dualism, you separate body from soul, body from spirit, and you say you can do whatever you want with your body. Cause it actually has no effect on who you are as a person. So the reality is this sexual morality is built on what Francis Schaeffer talked about, many other people talked about around this story. Here's the fundamental story of secular reality is you have an upper story and a lower story. Okay? The lower story is the world of the Enlightenment where you have science, you have facts, you have objective reality, and it's valid for everyone.
Mark Clark [00:20:19]:
So we get into the realities of laws and physics and math. In those kind of worlds, that's the lower story, that's the fundamental story. But then you have an upper story. And the upper story is the feelings that you have. It's subjective, it's personal. Not everybody can necessarily agree with it. It's not objective, it's not fact based, it's not science based, it's just how you feel about things. And now the reality is what we did after the Enlightenment is we created these two stories and they're two stories where they never touch.
Mark Clark [00:20:51]:
And so what you have down here, of course is the reality of the body, right? You have the body here and that's just what it is. It's your body, it's flesh, it's the cells, the molecules that make you up. And up here you have the soul, you have the spirit, you have your real personhood. And this distinction is, it's a fact, value dualism, right? You have facts down here and you have values up here. Now, never in history, outside, never in the Christian worldview is this a thing. And never in the Jewish worldview is this a thing. This was a pagan view. This is why Paul's addressing it.
Mark Clark [00:21:29]:
Because what you can do in this view is you can do whatever you want with your body and it'll never affect your soul, right? You can sleep with prostitutes, you can do whatever, you can sleep around, it doesn't matter. This is where the abortion debate actually functions. It's called personhood theory. And what happens is you can be in the world of science, you can have cells growing in somebody, but at some point, because what's the debate? When does that body become a what? A person, right? And there's a distinction between a body and a person. This is personhood theory. This is the debate. If you can prove that this is different than this, then you can take care of this. And all you did was take care of this.
Mark Clark [00:22:08]:
That's the dichotomy. You can do whatever you want with your body because it doesn't affect your value, it doesn't affect who you are as an actual person. Biologically, a human is a scientific fact, but a person is an ethical fact. And all we need to do is make a distinction between those two things and we're good to go. That's why you can do whatever you want with your body and it doesn't matter. Matter doesn't matter. As one philosopher says, it's just matter. There's nothing to it.
Mark Clark [00:22:36]:
So the minute we make that distinction, we can do whatever we want. Now here's what's fascinating about our culture. Our culture on the one hand seems to be obsessed with this. But ironically, as one social critic pointed out, for instance, if you go to the grocery store, you see all the Cosmopolitan magazines, you see all these 19 year old girls and they've got these perfect bodies and they're airbrushed. And some people say, my goodness, we're obsessed with the body. But the reality is this, as one philosopher pointed out, he says, actually we have a philosophy of body hatred because why do we airbrush the body? Why do we only put 19 year old kids on the covers of the magazines?
Mark Clark [00:23:08]:
Why?
Mark Clark [00:23:09]:
Because we actually hate what happens to the real body. What happens to the real body is it never looks like that as you go on in life. And so what we need to do is keep airbrushing it. Why? Because we actually hate the body. We don't love the body. And so as Nancy Pearce, who wrote a book recently called Love Thy Body, that's actually the philosophy of the Bible, that this distinction is not real. This distinction, we made it up in order to separate, that you can do whatever you want with your body and it's never going to affect your actual person. It's never gonna affect who you are, because who you are is your feelings.
Mark Clark [00:23:43]:
It's subjective. No one can ever tell you how you feel about a thing or what your personhood is, or what your identity is, or what you do sexually. It doesn't matter because that's this world here, this world is just some genetics. It's some stuff that I got handed. It's kind of. It's not really all that important. That's where we're at as a culture. And so you have the lower story, my body, and then you have the higher story, which is feelings.
Mark Clark [00:24:07]:
The body gives me no clue to my identity. Our culture says it's irrelevant and insignificant to who I am, but our bodies are a huge part of who we are. Judeo Christian thought, there's integration. That's why you can't just sleep with your mother in law and come back and worship like nothing happened. That's why you can't sleep around with five different women and then be a community group leader. It's talking about because it is who you are. But in our world, this dualism actually exists. You can do whatever you want.
Mark Clark [00:24:37]:
It's por nia. You can have an exchange with someone and the reality is you can just move on with your life. That's the hookup culture of today. You can get on Tinder, you can swipe, you can go meet them in a Wendy's parking lot as my friend used to have sex with them and then go lead worship. It doesn't matter what you do with your body doesn't affect your mind, it doesn't affect your soul, it doesn't affect your personhood. You can go to the club, you can meet up, have a sexual encounter. Doesn't matter to the point where now pornography has such an insidious grasp on the mind of our culture that as this next generation comes up. One philosopher I was reading talked about how she went to a university and she was sharing ideas and, and asked the kids something about a date.
Mark Clark [00:25:26]:
That they went on recently and said. And she started talking about, like, how to date. And one kid put up his hand. He's like, I've never actually been on a date. He was 23 years old. He's what? And she looked to the class, said, how many of you have never been on a date? And 85% of the class raised their hand. These are 24, 25 year old kids. Because our culture doesn't date anymore.
Mark Clark [00:25:50]:
Our culture goes on Tinder, hits pornography and doesn't know relationally what to do. To the point where I remember doing marriage counseling a year or so ago and I was sitting with a couple counseling them in regard to their sex life. And he said, to be honest with you, I've been doing this to myself for so many years that I'm actually better at it than you are. That's where we're at as a culture.
Mark Clark [00:26:16]:
Why?
Mark Clark [00:26:17]:
Because what we do with our body has nothing to do with our person, has nothing to do with our identity. But the reality is the Bible comes along and goes, no, no, no. Your mind, your psychology is connected. We're psychosomatic creatures. Psycho meaning soul, mind. Somatic is a Greek word for body. Psychologists talk about the fact that we are an integration, that these things are always exchanging for one another. Think about it this way.
Mark Clark [00:26:46]:
Use an analogy of food. If we sat our kids down and said, listen, no big deal, you can do whatever you want in regard to food. It's just meant for your pleasure. It's just meant for what tastes good and whatever. So do whatever you want with it. You just. Broccoli, whatever. It's subjective, honey, whatever you like to do, whatever your personal preference.
Mark Clark [00:27:09]:
If a kid did that, my daughter would be like, what? Okay, sweet. It's pizza, it's ice cream, hot dogs. That's it. Done. Because what did I do? I removed food from nutrition. I didn't talk about any form of your body at all. I just said, food is a personal choice. Food is all about you.
Mark Clark [00:27:29]:
Food is subjective. Food is just your identity. It's about you. And I never rooted it in any kind of. But the reality is this. Math is not socially constructed. The laws of science are not socially constructed. We can't pretend that this doesn't exist and simply exist in this world.
Mark Clark [00:27:46]:
And here's fundamentally what had happened in Corinth and what has happened in the modern world. We have prioritized the upper story and left the lower story behind. We have simply said, this is the only story that matters. This is all that matters. And so to me, think about the old debates when people would say, well, you're born that way and you're born this way. All those debates. Why isn't anyone having those debates anymore? Why is anyone talking about that? Because the reality is this. A few things.
Mark Clark [00:28:17]:
First, when we started looking into DNA, scientists realized that our actual sexual orientation is not predetermined by the way we're born. There's predispositions when we looked at DNA, but there's not predetermination about these things. And so the reality is genes aren't actually fixed life events carve out. These events that we experience in life actually carve out how our brain functions and works, our experiences, our habits. You know that if you begin working out, all right, some of you, you said your New Year's resolution was to start working out in January. By January 5th, you were done. You didn't care anymore. But if you would've continued all right, into February, here's what would've happened.
Mark Clark [00:29:03]:
When you get up at five in the morning, the first three times, four times, five times, it's. It sucks. You're like, I hate my life. I hate my wife for making me do this. I hate these shoes. I hate underwear. I hate my teeth brushing. I hate everything at 5 o' clock in the morning.
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You hate it, all right? But the reality is, three months in, the chemicals in your brain, you've started to carve out muscle things and actually stuff is being released in your brain. There was a study done, the New York Times did a study and they showed that in New York City Tactics, Taxi Driver. The navigation section of their brains are far more developed than the regular person. Think about that. That the experiences of a person have carved out the physical matter of how they function through their habits. They've literally started to define how they think. And the physical structure of their brains has changed. It's the same thing with violinists.
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There's a certain section of their brain that deal with the right hand and the left hand. And those things have been nurtured. So much so that it's actually changed. Now, here's a second reason the argument has moved away from people being born one way or the other. There's actually a gay advocate, John Corvino, and he says this. It doesn't matter whether we're born this way. The fact is that there are plenty of genetically influenced traits that are nevertheless undesirable. And so he argues in the gay moralist in August 2004 that we should stop using this conversation about being born One way or the other, because we're born with a lot of traits that are negative.
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Alcoholism, for instance, depression, health issues. And we don't simply say, well, someone's born like this, ergo this. We say, okay, there's more conversation to be had. The third reason is because really, in the gay community, this. This discussion about being born one way or the other victimizes them and puts them in a posture of empathy. And they don't necessarily want that One writer, Donna Minkowitz, says this. Remember that most of the line about us is about it's all being one's nature. And that was a response to brutal repression.
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It's not our fault. Gay activists began to say decades ago, we didn't choose this, so don't punish us for it. It's time for us, she says, to abandon this defensive posture and walk upright on the earth. Maybe you didn't choose to be gay. That's fine, but I did. The reality is, is of course, now this is a nuanced conversation about nature and nurture and how it all connects. And that's for a different time. The point is, is the biblical challenge is, look, we have to get away from thinking that the body is irrelevant.
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That's Gnosticism. The reality of what we've started to do is saying, hey, listen, if I want to change my gender, I'm gonna do so how I'm gonna do so, not through thinking things. I'm gonna just go to the body and change my gender and let my body change. Let the hormones and the surgery, instead of changing my feelings. We are changing our bodies to match our feelings rather than the opposite. And so biological sex isn't a thing anymore. My authentic self, my private self, the lower level is irrelevant to now how I understand myself and my self worth and my identity. And the only thing that matters is the top level.
Mark Clark [00:32:21]:
And here's what the apostle Paul says. Here's the biblical challenge to us. In Genesis, God made the world, the physical world, and he called it good. He said, I made bodies and bodies matter. They're not irrelevant. They define so much. You are a psychosomatic person. So much so do not believe in a kind of dualism that separates, that prioritizes only how you feel in a given moment and literally ignore the physical realities of your life.
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What we've done philosophically is we've said the body gives me no hints toward meaning at all. The only meaning is here. The only meaning is this. The only. There's. This is just irrelevant. I can do whatever I want with this, because this is all that matters. And the Bible comes in and says, no, no, no.
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Love thy body. You gotta understand how connected these two things are. So much so that in chapter six, he says this in verse 16, do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For as it is written, the two will become one flesh. But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body. But the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. It's the disaster of dualism that gets us into a position where we start to defy the body so much that we think it doesn't even matter, which actually defies science.
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There's a very famous TED talk by Paula Johnson, who's a cardiologist. Here's what she says. Every cell in our body has a sex. And what that means is that men and women are different down to the cellular and molecular level. We are different across all of our organs, from our brains to our lungs to our joints. In other words, no matter what your gender philosophy is, when you're ill and the doctor needs to put you on the table, they need to know your biological sex. And the problem is we aren't giving any respect and honor to the intrinsic good of the human body. The unique capabilities of femaleness and maleness.
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And we have to. I never thought one of the most dangerous texts, one of the most controversial texts in the Bible for a generation.
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Would be he made them male and female. But the reality is it now is.
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And what we need to understand is Paul is saying all of this. He's saying, don't shuck this. Understand that the body is giving you cues, not just your soul, about who you are. And what you do with it matters immensely. Who you join it with matters immensely. Because if you join it, what starts to happen is you connect emotionally, psychologically, spiritually with different people. And then you bring those experiences in those worlds into the church. And the reality is, here's the thing.
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The Bible in Genesis 2 said, here's.
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What happens in regard to sexuality.
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You think you can separate these. Every time you join your body with someone, you become what? One What? One flesh with them. That's why it's only in the context of marriage. He says it. A male and female come together in the context of marriage, and they become one flesh. Think about how beautiful that is. And even modern science tells us this actually happens. Here's the way the Lord set it up.
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It's Fascinating. I was reading this week an article on a drug that actually gets released in the male brain, the female brain. The female brain is called oxytocin. It's called the love hormone. It's a chemical that gets released in the brain during sex and childbirth, which creates bonding. It creates bonding between the wife and her husband. That literally a thing is going off in your brain every time you're having sex with someone. That's saying, I'm bonding myself to them.
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This is the scientific evidence of what God said in Genesis 2. You become one flesh with whoever you sleep with. Your body actually has an emotional reality that a physical chemical starts going off in your brain that says, I'm bonded to this person in a deeper way than just my physical body being trash that I can do whatever I want with because it doesn't affect my personhood. That's fundamentally flawed, even in regard to science. It says, literally, a drug goes off that says, I'm connected to this person. It's fascinating because they've done studies on males, and they've said, what motivation. You know, it's very costly for a male to live in a monogamous relationship. Even from an evolutionary standpoint, for a male to say, I'm only gonna be with one person.
Mark Clark [00:36:36]:
So it's very interesting. They said a drug literally goes off in the male brain that connects himself to his spouse. There was a study done in Germany recently. They sat all these guys down, and they gave them pictures of their wives, pictures of other girls that they knew that were not necessarily any more attractive than their wife. About the same level. Cars, houses, pictures. And they wired their brains up, and they started going through these pictures, and they would look at their wife, and their brain would start to go bing, ding, ding. Start to go off in regard to bonding and connecting.
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And then they would look at a woman who was like a friend or something and not. And here's what's fascinating. The cars and the houses, they wouldn't bond. But every time a picture of their wife came up, they would dig, dig, dig, dig, dig. Cause they'd been having sex with them for 20 years, and this drug had gone in their brain and carved this out. Now, here's the reality, they said, here's the two things that were fascinating. Not only did their brains fire off when their wives were shown. Here's a quote.
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But what really fascinated the researchers was what happened inside the men's brains under the influence of oxytocin in a nasal spray. Two areas of the brain responsible for feelings of reward and Pleasure lit up when the men saw their partner's faces. That's great. Here's the other thing. But the sight of other women had the opposite effect. Suppressing feelings of pleasure. That's fascinating. So his brain went lit up in regard to sexuality with his wife.
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And then when he saw other women, he actually suppressed feelings of pleasure. That's how much she tricked him to being attached to her. And in the natural world, that is literally the only motivation for a man. Take God out of the equation. Just from an evolutionary perspective, the only reason a man would stay with their in a monogamous relationship is because of that firing off in the brain versus them just going out. It was a reward for an actual action benefit. And reward is actually the strongest motivation underlying human behavior. And God built it into us as people to be able to say, look what happens when you sleep with someone.
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Something fires off in the physical realm of your life that affects the upper story of your life so much so that if you divorce these, there will be disaster, not only philosophically, but in the present and in the future. Don't do it. That's what the apostle Paul is pleading. You can't just live your life in regard to your body. Do whatever you want and then bring it into the church and think it.
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Doesn'T affect your relationship with Jesus Christ.
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That's his point.
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First Corinthians 6. Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body. Do you not know verse 19 that your body is a temple? Think about that. That is the exact opposite to the modern story. Your body is nothing. It doesn't matter what you do with it. Just shuffle off this mortal coil and bring me to a spirit world.
Mark Clark [00:39:49]:
This is literally Platonic dualism and Gnosticism playing itself out in the modern world. They are two things Paul was fighting. And I'll end with this. Two thoughts. The first one is, I can't believe I'm gonna quote Justin Bieber.
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But I.
Mark Clark [00:40:09]:
Was reading an article with Justin Bieber this week where he was sharing, I think it was Vanity Fair or something.
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And he was sharing the fact that.
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He, you know, obviously slept with everything that walked for a lot of his life. And he was trying to figure out how to be a Christian and wrestling.
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With all of that.
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And then he met his now wife. They just got married a few months ago. And he said he took a year off and was just celibate before the Lord so he could marry her. And he says, you know, in thinking about sexuality, he said the first thing Is sometimes people have sex but because they don't feel good enough. And I thought it was very interesting if we just slowed down. The reason that we'll throw the body around is because maybe we don't have.
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Enough pleasure in our life in other.
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Ways, that it's a very easy, quick way.
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So those of you who are dating or those of you who are even married and you go, listen, I deal.
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With enough guys in the business world.
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Where they're not necessarily monogamous, they're not actually attached to their wife in regard to bonding.
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They love to play the game, they like to have fun outside. The reality is, he says, Justin Bieber again, maybe it's because they don't feel good enough.
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In other, there's not contentment. Now think about you if you're single and you're just sleeping around and you're.
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Here at Village and awesome, we're glad you're here. This isn't condemnation. This is the apostle Paul going, come on, you just gotta realize, man, you gotta wake up.
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You cannot just do whatever you want with your body and think. It doesn't affect your soul, it does. And it affects the way you do community. And it affects the way you relate to your friends and your parents and the world around you. It affects the witness and the glory of God. It affects the story of Jesus and the church in the world. Understand, this is the greatest non verbal signal that God has given to you. So be careful with it.
Mark Clark [00:41:52]:
That's his point. He says, and when you're not, it might be because you don't feel good enough in certain areas of your life. And so it becomes like a drug. Yeah, you might be somebody who goes, I don't use drugs. But sex becomes that as the thing gets released in your brain. You're doing it to mask over the fact that you have deeper questions in your life. And instead of searching those out and becoming a better human being, a more healthier person before the Lord and yourself, you mask it with just going to the quick thing where you can just have sex with whomever you want. And the second thing he said is maybe they lack self worth.
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He said, I know, I did. And so you give it away to feel wanted. You give it away to feel desired.
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You see, when you posture it that.
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Way.
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It means you're weak when you do it. Which is why our culture will tell you, as a man, here's the greatness of your power. Just go sleep with however many you want and you're powerful. And all through history, Christianity has said, no the measure of power isn't being able to sleep with whomever you want. The measure of power is self mastery. It's easy to sleep with whomever. Do you know, you know how easy it is? Do you know how I travel places? Oh, my wife and I love, I went to. So my wife traveled.
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So the church makes me travel with people. Whenever I travel anywhere, there's a rule.
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If I'm going to speak somewhere, they have to pay for someone to fly with me.
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Why is that?
Mark Clark [00:43:20]:
Because I'm so good looking. Partly. It's funny, one of our staff members, he came up to me and he's like, hey, so do I have to travel somewhere? I'm like, no, you're fine. He's like, what, I'm not good looking enough? I'm like, that's not why. It's for accountability. And so my wife travels with me and we were in Edmonton last year. I was speaking at this thing, 3,000 people in the room and Zondervan had gone, oh, let's get him to sign books. And so, you know, I'm there and just signing books and my wife traveling with me.
Mark Clark [00:43:48]:
And there's a lineup of, of people that wanted you to sign the books. And it was pretty funny. Cause as we went along, there's all these 20 year old girls and they're coming up, they're like, ah, can you sign my book? You know, and they're like, we need someone to take a picture. And I get their camera, I hand it to my wife, I'm like, here.
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Take this picture, right? And my wife's like, you know, 20.
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Year old after 20 year old, after 20 year old coming up.
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Yeah, you can take a picture. This girl right here, she'll take it, she'll take it.
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Hey, honey.
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All right.
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So once in a while I remind my wife, you know, when she's being mean to me or something, it'd be so easy, you travel, you know how easy it is? It'd be so easy. People throw themselves at people all the time. Self mastery, now that's a thing. The ability through the power of the spirit to be able to look at my great grandkids and say, of course there's temptation in the world, but I held it together for the glory of God and the good of you. You know what the other beautiful thing is? Christianity is so unique in this way in Greek thought, because you separate the body from the soul. You just give ideas, just give philosophy.
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But Jesus.
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Is so unique. He came and gave his what his body. Think about the Symbol he gives us. You know, in Buddhism, the idea that Jesus wouldn't just give his soul and.
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Give his ideas and give his philosophy and give his ways of enlightenment, no, Jesus came in and came into meat, literally, is what the word incarnate means. He came into a body. And not only that, the body got broken. And then he said, I'm gonna give you a symbol through which I want you to gather.
Mark Clark [00:45:56]:
And here's what it is, my broken body. That's what communion is. Love thy body. The church is the one philosophy in the world that stands out and goes, this still matters. This still points toward meaning, and not just this. Father, I pray in the midst of the realities that we live in, the temptations, the desires for self worth and pleasure that come together in our lives, the opportunities to fail you over and over again, that we would be a people who are strong.
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That we would.
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Understand the beauty of the body and the physical world that you have given to us, and we would steward it well and not make the tragic error that the Corinthians made and that the modern culture makes to separate out these worlds. And ultimately, Jesus, we take that cue from you, who didn't stay up in heaven and send ideas down, but you came down in a body which then was beaten and broken on a cross. And why that's beautiful is because every one of us, including me, who is sexually broken and struggles with sexual temptation and sin, I understand across all of our sites that there are people in this room that feel burdened and guilt and shame, maybe from a text like this, and that you would help them understand the beauty of the gospel, that because you actually came and your body was broken, that they can be free, that you took all of that sin on you when you died on the cross and took the wrath of God on yourself so that we never have to feel it even in this area.
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And that we would then get up because the power of the resurrection and.
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Be the church in a way that is sexually a witness to the world around us that we are so content in Jesus Christ.
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This is how we have had self mastery.
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Do that among us. Let us actually have a witness in our personal life and in the context of the social constructs that cause people to come to know you, because the beauty of this reality. In Jesus, great name we pray. Amen.