Sermon Tone Analysis

Married couples fight.

I know that is no shocker to anyone who is married here.

Hopefully, it is not a shocker to know that Maggie and I have disagreements too.

Thankfully, we don’t have as many as we used to, but we are only human and I am still learning how to be married.

Does anyone want to guess what the top three items that couples fight about?

Sex

Money

Children

Well, today, I am going to talk about what couples fight about, but I am not going to talk about money or children.

So, what does that leave me with?

Exactly.

We are studying 1 Corinthians chapter 7. The chapter brings up huge issues.

We will actually be spending the month of September in this chapter.

This week, we are going to talk about sex.

Next week, we are going to discuss divorce and remarriage.

The third week, we are going to talk about being content where God has placed us.

Finally, we will discuss singleness.

Each topic is important, because instead of creating a set of beliefs based upon what the Bible says, often we create a set of beliefs based upon what the culture says, or even based upon what our church says.

Unfortunately, the church throughout history has built teachings that are not Biblical because they were trying to react against culture instead of standing firm on truth.

Today, we will talk about sex.

Let’s read the passage.

Will you pray with me?

Pray

So, as any good sermon about sex, we must define our terms.

We are going to ask three questions today: What is sex?

Where is sex to be enjoyed?

How is sex to be enjoyed?

What is sex?

First, we must ask: what is sex?

I am not here to give a medical definition.

We all know what this is.

We’ve learned about it in school.

We’ve had whispered conversations with friends when we were young.

Perhaps we talked about it with our folks, though we might not have had enough of a conversation with our folks, nor had enough of a conversation with our kids.

We know what sex is, medically and biologically.

That’s not what I am going to talk about.

Some of you were beginning to squirm, because you thought I was going to get deeper into this.

I have a session on sex during my premarital counseling talks, and I really enjoy seeing the couples squirm.

I want to talk about sex theologically.

Sex is a gift

The Bible says that sex is a gift.

It is given by God to be enjoyed.

Sometime, over the next few years, we will be studying Song of Solomon together.

The church is either going to die or grow by leaps and bounds during that time.

Song of Solomon talks about a lot of things, relationally.

One of the things it dwells on substantially is sex, and it uses some crazy imagery for it.

Song of Solomon 5:1 is one of such passages.

The author speaks of having sex with his wife.

The terms he uses, and I won’t explain them to you, you can figure them out yourself, speaks of enjoyment of the thing which God created.

Sex is a gift which was designed to be good.

Think about when God created the heavens and the earth.

He created everything.

Then he created Adam and Eve.

This command can only be fulfilled through sex, which was created by God as a reflection of his creative acts.

Then,

God created sex and said: it was very good.

Sex, as God’s gift, does many things.

It is essential to making babies.

God designed it to bring enjoyment.

But it also glorifies God.

I bet those of you who are married do not think about how you are glorifying God when you are with your spouse intimately.

In fact, most couples that I talk to about this look pretty shocked when I talk about how sex glorifies God.

But it does.

How do I know?

Well, there is 1 Corinthians 10:31

But, theologically, sex deeply glorifies God, because of it’s symbolism.

Consider what Tim Keller wrote in Meaning of Marriage:

Sex is glorious.

We would know that even if we didn’t have the Bible.

Sex leads us to words of adoration—It literally evokes shouts of joy and praise.

Through the Bible, we know why this is true.

John 17 tells us that from all eternity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit have been adoring and glorifying each other, living in high devotion to each other, pouring love and joy into one another’s hearts continually (cf.

John 1:18; 17:5, 21, 24-25).

Sex between a man and a woman points to the love between the Father and the Son (1 Corinthians 11:3).

It is a reflection of the joyous self-giving and pleasure of love within the very life of the triune God.

Sex is glorious not only because it reflects the joy of the Trinity but also because it points to the eternal delight of soul that we will have in heaven, in our loving relationships with God and one another.

Romans 7:1ff tells us that the best marriages are pointers to the deep, infinitely fulfilling, and final union we will have with Christ in love.

No wonder, as some have said, that sex between a man and a woman can be a sort of embodied out-of-body experience.

It’s the most ecstatic, breathtaking, daring, scarcely-to-be-imagined look at the glory that is our future.

I bet they didn’t teach you that in school.

Sex is a gift

Sex is distorted

While God designed sex as a gift, it has been distorted by our culture, and the cultures throughout the centuries.

Last week, Tim explored ways that we have distorted sex, through so many different ways of sexual immorality—premarital sex, homosexuality, pornography.

And the list could continue.

All those ways of sexual immorality boils down to the fact that we have turned sex into a God.

God designed sex to be a way of glorifying him, and instead we have turned the creation into the god we serve, as Pauls hints at in Romans:

We worship the passion and the pleasure, and we pursue the passion and the pleasure wherever we can.

We can turn on the TV and see it in the shows and the commercials.

We watch it in the movies.

We read about it in magazines and books.

We could go to school and sit on the buses and in the classrooms, how kids are being taught that sex is something to be pursued outside how God designed it.

If it feels good, do it.

Pursue it.

Worship it.

At least that’s what the culture tells us.

Unfortunately, the church in the last three hundred years has pushed back against that culture.

Instead of saying that sex is God, they have said that sex is gross.

It is taboo.

Not something one talks about.