SEXUAL SIN AND ITS POWER

Sin is more than an action, even more than an attraction. It is also a force. It deceives and can take us captive, as Paul had written:

• Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed. (Romans 6:16-17; ESV)

How are we imprisoned? It is not simply that sin become habitual. Even more, sin deceives and takes our minds captive:

• For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. (Romans 7:11)

How does sin deceive? It convinces us that sin is more than okay – that the sinful behavior represents a freedom from the “repressive” church morals. Also, there is the pride that results once we convince  ourselves that we are able to see beyond such an archaic set of morals.

Christian apologist, Josh McDowell, commissioned The Barna Group to research pornography. The study found:

• "Of young adults 18-24 years old, 76 percent actively – and these are Christians – actively seek out porn," he tells OneNewsNow.

However, pornography becomes more than a behavior but a false worldview:

• "Of 13- to 24-year-olds, 96 percent would say that when they talk to someone about porn – their friends, which most of them are Christians now – they do it in either a neutral, positive or encouraging way," he says.

• Another astonishing statistic shows the skewed perception of morality that many have. He reports that while 52 percent of young Christian adults "would say that not recycling is morally wrong, only 32 percent would say watching pornography is morally wrong."

As their behavior changes, so does their faith. And as their faith changes, so too their affiliations! It is, therefore, no surprise that they no longer feel comfortable in church and complain that the church is either irrelevant, boring, or filled with small minded hypocrites.

Sexual sin has taken many young people captive. It is therefore imperative that the church preaches against these sins.

And there is hope that preaching can lead to repentance, and repentance to freedom:

• And the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will. (2 Timothy 2:24-26)

Jesus had also warned that sin enslaves:

• Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. (John 8:34)

However, right before this warning, He offered the ultimate answer:

• So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:31-32)

The Most Lethal Weapon of Mass Destruction: The Secular Variety

A speaker at one secular humanism meeting strenuously advocated for the promotion of evolution. According to him, evolution is the best tool available to dismantle the Christian faith, and, for good reason.

Theistic evolutionist and former co-head of the Biologos Foundation, Karl Giberson, had written that evolution had undermined much of his biblical faith:

• “Acid is an appropriate metaphor for the erosion of my fundamentalism, as I slowly lost confidence in the Genesis story of creation and the scientific creationism that placed this ancient story within the framework of modern science. Dennett’s universal acid dissolved Adam and Eve; it ate through the Garden of Eden; it destroyed the historicity of the events of creation week. It etched holes in those parts of Christianity connected to the stories—the fall, “Christ as the second Adam,” the origins of sin, and nearly everything else that I counted sacred.” (Saving Darwin, 9-10)

However, I think that events have proven that secular humanism has a far more lethal weapon: free sex! How has modern secularism succeeded with this weapon? It has promoted free sex from all of its many and powerful pulpits – the schools, the media, the universities, Hollywood, and the courts. Its sermon is simple and persuasive:

• If you fear to follow your sexual passions, you are puritanical, imprisoned by ancient taboos, and missing out on life! 

And we all have sexual passions. Especially for the youth, these passions are a consuming fire looking for an outlet. They are an open vat of gasoline awaiting a spark or the right encouragement, and secularists are more than ready to provide this encouragement.

Why? For one thing, those who engage in deviant sexual practices know that it is wrong. The one who masturbates before computer porn or commits adultery knows it’s wrong. Therefore, when anyone points an accusing finger, he reacts angrily. Instead, if his wife accuses him of always wearing blue shirts, he will laugh, because he does not feel the slightest degree of guilt for this.

Meanwhile, Jesus was hated for speaking the truth. Why?

• “The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify that what it does is evil.” (John 7:7)

Whenever we live for Christ, we are a reminder to the world that its sexual conduct is evil:

• But thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumphal procession in Christ and through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of him. For we are to God the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. To the one we are the smell of death; to the other, the fragrance of life. (2 Corinthians 2:14-16)

To a world that has violated its own conscience and sexual mores, we are a smell of death, a reminder of their guilt. This is the way we were as teens. When we violated our moral standards and those of our parents, we became distant from them. The presence of our parents was like a light revealing our sins and shame. We, therefore, resented them and tried to distance ourselves, feeling “their disapproval.”

But was it their disapproval, or were we merely projecting our own feelings of guilt? We felt guilty and defensive and became convinced that they were the source of our guilt. We therefore ran from their light and preferred the darkness of those who lived and believed as we did.

This is what Jesus taught:

• This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light.” (John 3:19-21)

If we hate the light because it exposes our sins, we also hate the church, “the pillar of truth,” for the same reason. We complain that the church is judgmental, even though it is our own conscience that judges us and eventually separates us from the church.

If we live like Jesus, we will be drawn to Him, as He stated:

• “If anyone chooses to do God's will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own.” (John 7:17)

If we live in opposition to Jesus, we will be drawn away from Him. And the secularist is not ignorant to this fact. If free sex and the allure of exploring one’s sexuality entice our youth, they will then be repelled by the church, no matter how loving the parents or the pastor. I have known numerous such parents who have been rejected by their children who demanded clear and unambiguous affirmations for their sexual lifestyle. In order to “keep” their children, some parents and pastors have tragically acquiesced.

However, they have not acquiesced in accordance with reason but in opposition. It seems that nothing will destroy us quicker than sexual sins. We don’t even have to look at the stats. Scripture tells us all that we need to know:

• Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and RECEIVED IN THEMSELVES THE DUE PENALTY FOR THEIR PERVERSION. (Romans 1:26-27)

• Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins SEXUALLY SINS AGAINST HIS OWN BODY. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body. (1 Corinthians 6:18-20)

While sexuality was given to us as a blessing from God, blessings, wrongly used, can also become agents of self-destruction, also impacting others.

Why Church Attendance has Declined

Why has church attendance declined so drastically in Western Europe?  British writer Kingsley Martin famously boasted that “rationalism has argued the Church out of existence.” However, the stats stubbornly demonstrate the very opposite thing.

Meanwhile, Mary Eberstadt, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C, offers a different explanation:

•  Social science has roundly established that vibrant families and vibrant religion go hand in hand. Conversely, not living in a family means that a given individual is less likely to be found in church. As Wilcox has summarized the data, “The recent history of American religion illuminates what amounts to a sociological law: The fortunes of American religion rise with the fortunes of the intact, married family.” Similarly, the late sociologist Steven L. Nock observed in his 1998 book, Marriage in Men’s Lives, that “changes in the number of children in the married couple’s household have large consequences for men’s church attendance…With each additional child, men increase their attendance at services by 2.5 times per year.”

•  More families and more children, in short, means more God. Similarly, to summarize other statistics, marriage increases the likelihood of belonging to a religious organization—whereas cohabitation, by contrast, has what three researchers have called a “strong, negative effect on the probability of religious activity.” Unmarried people without children are less likely to go to church than are married people, or married people with children. A married man with children, for example, is over twice as likely to go to church as an unmarried man with no children. Once again, where there is more marriage, there is more religion; where there is less.

While children draw families to church, deviant sex also drives many away. The more Westerners have practiced a sexuality that is not accepted by the church, the more they have distanced themselves from the church and affiliate with those who accept their lifestyle.

I have seen this close-up. Several gay friends have distanced themselves from me once they embraced the gay lifestyle, understandably surrounding themselves with those who affirm them. When I had reconnected with one friend after some years, he was astonished with my views. “I didn’t know that people still believed like you!”  He had immersed himself into a community where there were no dissenting opinions.

This same phenomenon pertains to other forms of deviant sexuality. The more indulgence in pornography or adultery, the more we seek a value system or community that will affirm our behavior.

We seek to assuage our conscience. Therefore, we seek to avoid any influence that will make us feel guilty. Consequently, the more that Western values and sexual practice depart from Christian values, the less attractive the church!

Sex and Civilization

With the West massively committed to redefining sex, marriage and the family, it might be fruitful to see if any of these innovations have already been tried and what has been history’s verdict regarding them.

Brian Fitzpatrick suggests that the most “definitive work on the rise and fall of civilizations, was published in 1934 by Oxford anthropologist J.D. Unwin”:

• In Sex and Culture, Unwin studied 86 human civilizations ranging from tiny South Sea island principalities to mighty Rome. He found that a society’s destiny is linked inseparably to the limits it imposes on sexual expression and that those sexual constraints correlate directly to its theological sophistication and religious commitment.

• Unwin noted that the most primitive societies had only rudimentary spiritual beliefs and virtually no restrictions on sexual expression, whereas societies with more sophisticated theologies placed greater restrictions on sexual expression and achieved greater social development.

• In particular, cultures that adopt what Unwin dubbed “absolute monogamy” proved to be the most vigorous, economically productive, artistically creative, scientifically innovative, and geographically expansive societies on earth. Absolute monogamy is a very strict moral code. Under absolute monogamy, sex can occur only within one-man/ one-woman marriage. Premarital and extramarital sex are not tolerated and divorce is prohibited.

Why should sexual prohibitions cause social flourishing? Perhaps for the same reason that tobacco prohibitions might cause health to flourish! There are things that are pleasurable for a season, whose final bill might prove unaffordable.

There are other things or institutions that tend to tame the beast within. For one thing, there is nothing comparable to a committed and trusting relationship. Only within such an institution can a couple make the necessary sacrifices for the sake of family well-being.

I had worked for the New York City Department of Probation for 15 years. Countless times, I’ve had probationers tell me:

• Mr. Mann, I have a wife and child now. I really need to settle down and find a job!

They were committed to taming the beast within with a commitment to something more glorious. However, society is now telling these probationers:

• “Families” can take many different forms, and no one can say that one is better than another.

Perhaps he doesn’t need that job after all. However, In This Present Age, sociologist Robert Nisbet writes:

• “What sociologists are prone to call social disintegration is really nothing more than the spectacle of a rising number of individuals playing fast and loose with other individuals in relationships of trust and responsibility.”

Without trust, commitment cannot survive, and without commitment, we are left with nothing more than social disintegration and children who believe that life is just about taking care of #1!

Our behaviors can undermine our families and the future welfare of our children, and our ideas and beliefs will undermine our behaviors. If sexual freedom is pushed as a virtue or as a “human right,” it will become increasingly difficult to resist those momentary, powerful urges. And when our sexual conduct undermines the stability of our families, it also undermines society.

Fitzpatrick refers to the work of Harvard historian Carle Zimmerman:

• [He] concludes that “the creative periods in civilization have been based upon” the strongest form of family, which he terms the “domestic” type: “The domestic family affords a comparatively stable social structure and yet frees the individual sufficiently from family influence to perform the creative work necessary for a great civilization.” (Family and Civilization) 

• In other words, in an amoral, hedonistic society, you can’t trust the people you need to trust, not even your spouse. Moreover, if people can make and break relationships at will, with no legal repercussions or social stigma, they are much more likely to abandon their marriages—at their children’s expense—when the going gets tough. Husbands with roving eyes are much more likely to trade in their wives for new models. (Whistleblower, Nov. 2010, pp. 38f)

It is no surprise, therefore, that social commentator, Michael Novak, concludes:

• One unforgettable law has been learned through all the disasters and injustices of the last thousand years: If things go well with the family, life is worth living; when the family falters, life falls apart.

The new family configurations are not only a violation of traditional values; they are also a violation of our own nature. We are not made for sexual gluttony. While we can choose to live gluttonously, there is another part of our nature – a deeper core - that rebels against it.

Much of Israel had been settled by radical socialistic communities – kibbutzim. The ideal shared by many of these communities was to have everything in common. This included their clothing, sexual partners, and even their children. Anything else constituted ownership – a dirty word in their thinking.

However, over the years, they succumbed to the pull of their deepest human desires/needs. Consequently, each gravitated to a single mate, forming committed monogamous unions. Even though, in many instances, the children are still raised communally, they return to their own parents in the evenings, thereby proclaiming afresh that there is no place like home, and home is with one’s own committed parents.

Richard Dawkins, Atheism and Sexual Faithfulness

Can we be good without God? Certainly not sexually!

Richard Dawkins has been termed “the world’s most famous atheist.” He also insists that we don’t need God to be good. However, he makes some interesting admissions:

• Why are we so obsessed with monogamous fidelity in the first place? The underlying presumption — that a human being has some kind of property rights over another human being’s body — is unspoken because it is assumed to be obvious. But with what justification?   

• And why don’t we all admire — as I increasingly do — those rare free spirits confident enough to rise above jealousy, stop fretting about who is “cheating on” whom. (Banishing the Green eyed Monster)

What does Dawkins admit? He admits that monogamous marriage is a matter of “property rights” and cheating is admirable. Of course, this must also include lying. If you’re a cheat, you must also be a good liar:

• Bill Clinton was impeached not for sexual misconduct but for lying about it. But he was entitled to lie about his private life: one could even make a case that he had a positive duty to do so

If cheating requires a “positive duty” to lie in order to cover it up, perhaps that says something about the nature of cheating. If a couple can’t handle the truth that one party is cheating, perhaps self-control is more in order. And perhaps true love requires faithfulness!

However, Dawkins might be right that the cheater can’t be honest about the cheating. His partner might not be able to handle it. When I returned to college, I wanted to try what had become a rage – a sensitivity (therapy) group. I wanted to stay close to “home,” so I decided to join a group sponsored through the United Campus Ministry. However, before long, it became apparent that the “minister” was putting-the-make on two attractive females in the group. They confronted him about this, and he responded that he and his wife had an “open marriage.”

However, he later admitted that they had to carry out this “openness” in secret. Once he came home early to find his wife entering their home with her cheating-prey. The minister admitted that this sight so disturbed him that he had to be committed to the mental hospital for two weeks.

However, these are precisely the “free spirits” that Dawkins “admires.” But are they really free spirits? Is it freedom to jump from a 12-story building or to drink lye? Dawkins think so and therefore rhetorically asks,

• Why should you deny your loved one the pleasure of sexual encounters with others, if he or she is that way inclined?

There seems to be many good reasons – mental breakdown, divorce, disease, damage to children and even to society. John J. Davis (Evangelical Ethics) wrote of the work of British Anthropologist, J.D. Unwin:

• After a comprehensive study of both Western and non-Western cultures throughout human history, Unwin concluded that the record of mankind “does not contain a single instance of a group becoming civilized unless it had been absolutely [heterosexually] monogamous, nor is there any example of a group retaining its culture after it has adopted less rigorous customs.” Unwin observed that a society’s adoption and maintenance of heterosexual monogamy as a social standard “has preceded all manifestations of social energy, whether that energy be reflected in conquest, in art and sciences, in extension of the social vision, or in the substitution of monotheism for polytheism.” (p. 116)

Why wasn’t Dawkins cognizant of the various costs of “open” marriages? Perhaps his own lusts clouded his thinking. However, it seems that this has clouded the thinking of many non-theists.

Psychiatrist G. Brock Chisholm, president of the World Federation for Mental Health, had stated in 1945:

• The re-interpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong which has been the basis of child training, the substitution of intelligent and rational thinking with faith in the certainties of the old people, these are the belated objectives of practically all effective psychotherapy.

• The fact is that most psychiatrists and psychologists and other respectable people have escaped from these moral chains and are able to observe and think freely.

• If the race is to be free from the crippling burden of good and evil, it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility.”

How widespread was this thinking “In a 1976 survey of members of the APA, 95% reportedly admitted to being atheists or agnostics.” Were these philosophical commitments the product of evidence or lifestyle choices? According to Al Parides, Prof. of Psychiatry, UCLA:

• If you look at the personal lives of all Freud’s followers—his initial disciples—these people certainly have an unbelievable amount of particular problems in the sexual area…The amount of deviancy as far as their sexual behavior and so forth is enormous. If you are saying that psychiatry promotes a certain form of morality that is a deviant morality in regard to many areas including sexual behavior—yes, I would agree. (Psychiatry: The Ultimate Betrayal, Bruce Wiseman, 12-14)

Perhaps God is necessary for the well-being of the family!