Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Foreign church. We are thrilled you decided to listen to our teaching on your favorite podcast app. If you made a decision to follow Christ today, would you let us know by visiting? Yes.newlife gillette.com Here is this week's teaching.
[00:00:26] Yeah. Good morning.
[00:00:29] It is a good morning.
[00:00:31] Let's try to get out of here so we can go hang out outside. Wouldn't that be awesome? Hey, let me say welcome to those of you who are watching online, maybe outside, to the guys over at the prison, to our friends at the jail, and those of you who are here in the room. I need to start with a little bit of a PG13 warning today.
[00:00:47] You know that we are in a series called Four Loves, and we're talking about four different Greek words for love. And the Greek word we're talking about today is the word eros. And eros is the romantic love or uniting love. So that's just your little bit of a. It's down there, guys, but it's not up here. So I don't know what it is, but romantic love. Hint, hint, hint. So this is the word that we use when we talk about the love between a husband and a wife. We're talking about the love that makes moms today, right? Happy Mother's Day. So that's your PG13 warning.
[00:01:29] So we're talking about sex, but I want to make the case that Christian sex is about much more than just a physical act.
[00:01:39] Christian sex is about more than just making babies, and it's more than just physical pleasure.
[00:01:48] Sex brings bodies together for a moment, but it ties souls together for life.
[00:01:57] And here's why I believe that God created sex as an analogy of spiritual unity. It is why the church is called to be the bride of Christ.
[00:02:12] We are meant to be completely united, never divided. There's nothing between us as the church.
[00:02:20] We have come together in unity. And that's really hard to pull off. It's hard to pull off in marriage, isn't it? I mean, in marriage, we're tempted to hide things from each other, not to be vulnerable, not to be honest. It's also very hard to pull off in the church. We're tempted to pretend. We're tempted to pretend that we're better than we are, that we don't have issues, so we're not vulnerable. This is what creates country club church.
[00:02:47] And today I want to reflect on the truth of our vulnerability, the truth of how honest are we, how united are we as a church? We're going to reflect on a passage of scripture that I think is one of the more difficult passages to read. It can be a little bit unsettling. It's something that Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount. It goes like this.
[00:03:13] Not everyone who says to me, lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven, not everyone who says to me, lord, Lord, will enter into heaven.
[00:03:32] And on the surface, this verse seems like it's contradicting everything that we believe about salvation. Right?
[00:03:40] Didn't we just come through Easter and say that salvation is a free gift?
[00:03:45] What do you mean, not everyone who says, lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven? Well, salvation is a free gift. But what are you saying yes to when you say yes to Jesus? You are saying yes to a relationship.
[00:04:01] And a relationship involves this unity, this love.
[00:04:07] When it comes to our relationship with God, it requires following. We are. He is the leader. We are the follower. When I say yes to Jesus, I'm saying yes to making him the Lord of my life.
[00:04:20] Some people say yes to Jesus, but it's just kind of going through the motions. They're just playing lip service. They're just saying the words. Some people say that they said yes to Jesus just because they want to make people around them happy. But they're not actually saying yes to Jesus. They're just going through the motions. He's saying, it's not enough to just say yes. You've got to mean it. It's kind of like marriage vows, right?
[00:04:44] If you go through your wedding and you say the marriage vows, but you don't mean the marriage vows, what is it doing?
[00:04:54] If you say that you will do certain things and you will stay faithful to your spouse, but you don't actually stay faithful to your spouse, then did you really mean the vows that you made when you said yes to Jesus? Were you really saying yes to making him the Lord of your life?
[00:05:12] He goes on. He says, on that day, many will say to me, lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and cast out demons in your name and do many mighty works? And in your name.
[00:05:28] Next slide.
[00:05:30] And then will I declare to them, I never knew you? That's scary.
[00:05:37] Depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.
[00:05:43] Jesus, look at all these great things I did in your name.
[00:05:47] To which he says, no, you were doing. You were using my name in vain.
[00:05:51] That was for your glory, to bring attention to you.
[00:05:57] And he says, depart from me.
[00:05:59] I never knew you.
[00:06:02] Which seems a little bit weird. You'd say, wait a second, doesn't God Know everyone?
[00:06:07] Doesn't he knit us all together in our mother's wombs?
[00:06:12] Well, I think this is a little bit of a difficulty with translation.
[00:06:16] You have to know what it means when it says, I never knew you. This is not the awareness type of. No. There's different levels of knowing, right?
[00:06:27] I know who Donald Trump is, but I do not know Donald Trump. Now, I've heard enough gossip about him that I feel like I know him, right?
[00:06:39] I've heard enough things said about him and all. Everybody's got opinions about him. So I know a lot about Donald Trump. Some's probably true and some's not true, but do I know Donald Trump?
[00:06:50] No. Why? Because I do not have a relationship with Donald Trump.
[00:06:55] This is what Jesus is saying. Not, I didn't know who you were.
[00:06:59] Depart from me. We didn't have a relationship.
[00:07:02] Maybe you said yes one time or you went through the motions, or you. Maybe you prayed some prayer that you thought were some magic words, that if you put the magic words together in the right order, then boom, now you get a. A get out of hell free card. He's like, no.
[00:07:15] When you said yes to me, what you were saying yes to was a relationship with me.
[00:07:21] Where did that take you? There's different levels of knowing. Do you know Jesus?
[00:07:28] Do you have an intimate relationship with Jesus? Do you spend time with him? Do you talk to him? Do you learn from him? Are you following him?
[00:07:38] This is the good news, that we get the gift of living a life in relationship with Jesus.
[00:07:46] And it's not just some cursory, on the surface relationship. He wants to be unified with you.
[00:07:52] He wants to become one with you. He wants you to be his bride.
[00:07:59] He wants to know you.
[00:08:01] Here's an example of scripture, of what scripture uses this word no to mean.
[00:08:08] He says, now, Adam and Eve, this is Genesis back in the beginning. Now, Adam and Eve, or Adam knew Eve his wife, and the result of knowing Eve was what? And she conceived and bore Cain. She had a baby.
[00:08:23] How did Adam know Eve? Was this just a social knowing?
[00:08:28] They got drinks one time and Adam knew Eve? No, Adam knew Eve intimately and she became pregnant. Actually, the Greek word that we translate to the word sex in the New Testament, the actual literal translation of that Greek word is to know.
[00:08:47] That is what the idea that we get from reading about sex in Scripture is that if you have sex with somebody, you know them, you intimately know them. Jesus says that he wants to know us intimately.
[00:09:03] It's much more of an intimate knowing than just the I believe, okay? I'll accept the fact that you're God now. I'm in your club.
[00:09:12] No, it's much more than just, I'm accepting that you're God. I'm doing life with you. I'm united to you.
[00:09:20] Jesus wants to have a lifelong intimate relationship with you. In other words, this might seem a little bit weird. God has Eros for us.
[00:09:33] And this might seem gross to us when we think about Eros as the sexual version of love.
[00:09:39] Because when we think about Eros, we think about the word erotic, right? And they do share the same roots.
[00:09:49] But that's because we have this as. As.
[00:09:52] Especially in the Western culture, we have this really warped understanding of what romantic love is.
[00:10:00] Eros does imply sex, but there are really two types of sex, right?
[00:10:07] In a marriage, you can use sex for purely physical gratification.
[00:10:13] It's just totally surface level.
[00:10:16] Or you can use sex in your marriage to bring you together, to build unity in your relationship.
[00:10:24] In other words, sex can be like fast food or sex can be like a steak dinner. I got two. This is what my family ate last night for dinner. Does that look great or what? Yeah. Can you get that on the camera? Yeah.
[00:10:40] Mashed potatoes, broccoli.
[00:10:44] Actually, we had the grilled broccoli, but Darcy said it doesn't look grilled.
[00:10:49] I put some ungrilled broccoli on here.
[00:10:53] Nice steak.
[00:10:56] Or sex can be like a Hardee's. This is what they call the double bacon, double monster cheeseburger.
[00:11:12] There's.
[00:11:13] There's about 1200 calories in this ball of grease right here.
[00:11:21] This is a large fry. I'll be honest. I've not eaten Hardee's in a really long time because the last time I ate it, it was so greasy. I was, like, throwing it up as it was going down.
[00:11:33] I moved on past.
[00:11:36] There's two different types of sex.
[00:11:39] There's the type of sex that can, like, sustain, fulfill.
[00:11:44] It can build you up, right?
[00:11:47] But then there's another type of sex that maybe feels good, Right? Does. Somebody moaning while I was talking about this food was a little weird. I'm not gonna.
[00:12:01] It obviously makes you feel good, but this type of sex does not fulfill you.
[00:12:13] It does not build you up. It might build you out, but it's not going to build you up.
[00:12:18] Right?
[00:12:20] This does not sustain. Right?
[00:12:23] In fact, this can become an addiction.
[00:12:28] Like, scientifically, you can become addicted to this. That's how unhealthy it is, because it releases endorphins and it creates this situation where you feel like well, it didn't sustain me, so maybe I need more of it. That's where addictions come from. It's like it kind of like, mimicked something that would sustain me. It mimicked something that would give me nutrients, but it's not actually gonna give me the nutrients that I need. What you need is this.
[00:12:57] But what feels good.
[00:13:01] So when we talk about biblical Eros, we're talking about a version of sex that actually builds you up, that gives you life.
[00:13:13] But there's another version of Eros that is a much more unhealthy version of Eros that the Bible actually describes with another word, another Greek word that is porneia.
[00:13:26] And porneia is mentioned all throughout scripture, but it's a very unhealthy version of Eros. If Eros is romantic love or uniting love, porneia is what scripture usually we translate when we're translating from Greek to English as sexual immorality.
[00:13:47] Porneia is twisted love that consumes people instead of connecting with people.
[00:13:56] It's all about physical pleasure.
[00:13:59] It's all about me getting what I want. Me getting what feels good.
[00:14:05] God has arrows for us. God does not have porneia for us.
[00:14:10] God wants to give us what will make us healthy, what will build us up, what will strengthen us.
[00:14:17] God does not have porneia for us.
[00:14:21] God wants to lavish his love on us.
[00:14:25] But he asks for our consent.
[00:14:31] Will you receive me?
[00:14:34] Will you receive the gift that I have to give to you?
[00:14:38] He asks you for your consent.
[00:14:41] He doesn't hunt you down to take something from you. He doesn't flip, force you into a relationship. That's porneia.
[00:14:49] What does God have for us? He has Eros, generous love that unites us to him. He gives himself to us.
[00:14:58] He does not lure us close so that he can use us as his tools and then leave us empty.
[00:15:08] He has erosion. God's Eros, godly Eros is not porneia.
[00:15:16] But because we have turned godly Eros into the idea of porneia, we have a really hard time of thinking about God having Eros for us.
[00:15:27] We think of Eros as a lustful act.
[00:15:31] But Eros is the glorious act of two identities becoming one identity. It's two individuals becoming one individual, a married couple.
[00:15:43] It's people uniting. It's a bunch of individuals becoming the church, the ecclesia of God, the gathering, the community, the fellowship.
[00:15:58] So what does that mean for us?
[00:16:00] We don't use each other. We.
[00:16:03] I don't show up at church. I've matured to the point where I no longer show up at church just for what I can get out of it.
[00:16:10] I've decided I'm going to show up at church so that I can give, so that I can sacrifice, I can receive and I can give. That's godly eros.
[00:16:22] I'll give you an example of porneia used in scripture.
[00:16:28] It's here. It says it is God's will that you should be sanctified with sanctification at new life. We call it becoming who you were created to be. This is the maturing process. This is the growth process. It's God's will that you should mature.
[00:16:46] Why that you. And how do we do that? The first example he gives is he says that you should avoid sexual immorality.
[00:16:55] In Greek, this is one word. What's that one word?
[00:17:00] Porneia.
[00:17:03] We translate porneia just as well. We jumped forward, go back, we went nuts. There we go.
[00:17:11] We translate the word porneia as sexual immorality.
[00:17:17] What other English word do you think of when you think of the Greek word porneia?
[00:17:25] What English word comes to mind?
[00:17:27] Porn. Pornography.
[00:17:30] This is a literal translation of what porneia is.
[00:17:34] And what is pornography?
[00:17:36] It is a fake version, an imitation of sex.
[00:17:42] And it is a version, an imitation of sex that is completely selfish.
[00:17:47] It just uses other people for personal pleasure.
[00:17:52] No matter what harm it causes in this world, I'm going to use their physical bodies to pleasure my physical bodies.
[00:18:02] Sexual immorality, lustful pleasure.
[00:18:06] That is not godly eros. God wants us to learn how to use romantic love to, to build each other up, to invest in a relationship that allows two people to be completely united, nothing between them, totally vulnerable, naked together.
[00:18:25] This is godly eros because porneia is love that devours. But godly eros is love that is generous, that gives.
[00:18:36] And have you noticed that the world's version of sex, that the pleasures of the world's version of sex is so short lived, it's like you can never have enough of it.
[00:18:50] If you consume a little bit of the world's version of sex, it just makes you want more and you feel like you're never satisfied. It just, it needs to get darker and more violent or more harmful or more selfish. It just gets harder and worse to try to fulfill yourself in any way. So it just gets deeper and deeper and darker and darker. That is not God's version of sex.
[00:19:15] God's version of sex is something that actually builds you up.
[00:19:20] It's not this short lived, no nutrient version.
[00:19:26] It is something that gives, that builds, that sustains, that gives health, the World's version of sex will leave you miserable.
[00:19:40] We end up with fat stomachs, empty hearts and aching souls because what we're consuming is totally unhealthy. It feels good for a minute, but it's just totally unhealthy.
[00:19:56] Fat fast food feels good going down, but it will make you miserable.
[00:20:01] So let's talk about God's version. God's love is more balanced than that.
[00:20:06] It's not total abstinence. This is not what we're preaching. But it's also not total overindulgence.
[00:20:14] It's fun, but it's not overconsumption.
[00:20:20] It's not a double bacon monster double cheeseburger, whatever it's called.
[00:20:30] But it's also not sardines, but it's also not just kale and spinach.
[00:20:36] There's something good about. I mean, this is good. Have you eaten this lately?
[00:20:41] This is good.
[00:20:43] Maybe not good in the same way that this is good, but it's not. It's also not miserable. I think of relationship with God is that it can be fun, it can be life giving. Chad Sheehan calls it the good life.
[00:20:58] The good stuff.
[00:21:00] That's what I've experienced when my relationship with God is healthy and growing.
[00:21:06] Following Jesus is the good life. It's a good gift.
[00:21:11] You know, right after Jesus got baptized, he started his ministry. And sometimes we think that Jesus started his ministry and he went out and started preaching this really heavy handed, angry version of, you gotta obey or else you're going to hell. No, that's not what Jesus started preaching. In fact, if you look at the first words that Jesus said right after he starts his ministry, it says he got baptized. Then Jesus looked around and saw that some people were following him.
[00:21:36] What did he ask them?
[00:21:38] He said, what do you want?
[00:21:42] He asked them. They replied, rabbi, which means, teacher, where are you staying?
[00:21:49] What does Jesus say?
[00:21:52] Come. Come and see.
[00:21:53] Follow me. What do you want? In other words, he's asking them, tell me what you want. I'm going to offer you something.
[00:22:01] Jesus is asking you, what do you want in your life?
[00:22:04] He does not start with a list of demands. He doesn't force you into feelings of conviction and fear that make you follow him just because you're scared of him. Hell.
[00:22:15] And then he offers them. He's like, come and see.
[00:22:19] This doesn't mean that the Christian life is easy, but it's good, it's fulfilling. This is what a good marriage is like. Good marriages are not easy, but they're good, they're fulfilling.
[00:22:33] And here's what you'll notice if you look at any relationship.
[00:22:37] Jesus knows this when he says, what do you want?
[00:22:40] Healthy relationships start selfish, but they become selfless. Every one of us entered into all of our relationships because we thought we could get something out of it.
[00:22:52] You started coming to church because you liked the music, or you felt guilty, or you felt hopeless, or you wanted something from the church.
[00:23:01] You did this with your spouse.
[00:23:04] God made girls attractive purpose, right? This was not an accident. Or guys, it depends your preference or whatever.
[00:23:17] He knew that our relationships start because we want to get something.
[00:23:22] But eventually, if it is a healthy relationship, it matures past that selfish stage and it becomes something. A relationship in which you can give.
[00:23:32] Jesus starts the relationship with these disciples by offering them something because he knows that they have an agenda.
[00:23:41] But it's not porneia.
[00:23:44] And let's be honest, this is really hard. We are all tempted. Our flesh tempts us to turn eros into porneia.
[00:23:54] But God's picture of heaven is a picture where. Where that battle between the flesh and the spirit, this godly eros in porneia, the picture of heaven is a picture of when that battle ends and godly eros wins, where unity is just a reality of life.
[00:24:15] For when the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage.
[00:24:23] In this respect, they will be like the angels in heaven. Why here does Jesus go out of his way to say that there's no marriage in heaven?
[00:24:32] Is he trying to say heaven's going to be miserable? You don't get to have your spouse with you? No, it's the exact opposite.
[00:24:39] There won't be marriage in heaven because in heaven we will all be completely united in the perfect sense.
[00:24:49] Marriage is meant to get us closer to that reality, but it can't fully get us there because we're all still battling with our flesh.
[00:24:56] We're all still battling with selfishness. In heaven, we will all be completely united.
[00:25:03] Marriage was created to show us what it would be to be completely united with someone or to be completely united with God. But we won't need that in heaven because our sinful natures will be gone.
[00:25:16] And we will all have this perfect love for each other. The reality is we are the bride of Christ. We have been married to him, united to him.
[00:25:27] I'm trying not to be weird here, but God has arrows for us and we can have arrows for each other.
[00:25:37] If the church were perfect.
[00:25:39] And is not. And it is not.
[00:25:42] But if the church were perfect, we would experience this perfect unifying love all the time.
[00:25:49] We would Sacrifice for each other. We would look like the Acts 2 church in which we were giving to each other.
[00:25:56] So let's do everything we can to give ourselves to God and to give ourselves to his church. Let's fall more in love with God and let's fall more in love with each other.
[00:26:09] So before I end, I want to get really practical. What are some ways that we can actually put this into practice?
[00:26:15] How do we do this one? How do I get Eros, like God, pray for greater passion. And I mean this in your marriages and in the church. Maybe you've been coming to church for a while and you don't feel the excitement that you used to feel when you first became a Christian. And that excitement has started to fade. Maybe you just started following Jesus in the beginning. It felt so exciting, but it's just kind of become routine. Maybe you're following Jesus out of obligation. Would you start to ask God to give you a renewed excitement, a renewed passion for being a member of his church?
[00:26:52] Ask him to give that back to you and then start doing the actions that that type of love would personify.
[00:27:01] Number two, be known, be vulnerable, be transparent.
[00:27:09] We should know each other.
[00:27:13] If you're married, I think you do this in the Adam and Eve way.
[00:27:17] I think married couples need to spend more time naked.
[00:27:21] Like, nothing hidden, totally vulnerable.
[00:27:25] I just. I've got nothing hidden in my life.
[00:27:30] And transparent, honest in the way we communicate with each other. I just saw, like, 10 husbands lean over and say something to their wives.
[00:27:37] I don't know what it was.
[00:27:43] Yes, I do know what it was.
[00:27:47] And I think we need to do this in our church. Not that, but we need to be more honest and transparent and. And vulnerable with your life group. Get rid of the secrets.
[00:27:59] Tell them your full story.
[00:28:01] Tell them all of it.
[00:28:04] And when somebody in your life group gets that honest with you, you got to protect that vulnerability.
[00:28:09] You got to fight for it. You got to protect them. You got to forgive them. We got to love each other with Eros. Love the way God loves us.
[00:28:21] And the third one is this.
[00:28:23] Affirm each other.
[00:28:25] When our love is selfish, we do everything we can to be affirmed, to build ourselves up. It's all about me. But healthy Eros goes out of its way to affirm others, to build others up.
[00:28:42] We're going to take communion today, and we call this ceremony Communion.
[00:28:48] We commune with each other or fellowship with each other when we do this.
[00:28:53] Yet also we fellowship with God.
[00:28:56] The whole imagery of communion is that we are receiving God into ourselves.
[00:29:02] We consume his body and his blood.
[00:29:06] His body that was broken for us because ours deserved to be broken. He did it for us.
[00:29:14] We dip the bread in the juice to represent his blood that was shed so that our sins can be forgiven.
[00:29:22] And we don't do this in isolation. We do this together.
[00:29:25] All of this is meant to be a ceremony in which we remember the Eros love of God and our Eros love for each other. We are his bride together. As we take communion today, there's a gluten free, allergy friendly option over there on the far side. There's two tables up there and four down front. They're going to sing a song. And when they sing the song, you're going to come down, the volunteer is going to hand you a piece of bread. You take the piece of bread, you dip it in the juice and then you can eat it there before you return to your seat. And all of this, I think maybe, maybe while you're standing in line waiting for communion or while we're singing a song, look around or look bit and think about what it means for us together to be the bride of Christ, to have that kind of passionate love for God and for each other.
[00:30:18] God, I thank you that you fully gave yourself to us.
[00:30:24] I pray that today you would remind us just how sacrificial your love is that you died, that you gave your life for us.
[00:30:34] Help us to reflect that sacrificial love in the way we give to each other, sacrifice for each other and are vulnerable to each other.
[00:30:43] Make us more like you.
[00:30:45] Thank you. In Jesus name, amen.
