I don't think those who preach the Prosperity version of the Bible have ever really read it. Joel O. you forgot to read the Gospels of Jesus Christ who was born of a virgin, in a manger, poor, from podunk village, mocked, spat on, beaten, nailed to a tree next to thieves. murdered. Jesus said take up your cross and follow Me. He who loses his life finds it! See video Stop sending checks to Joel Osteen.
From JS - Podunk village?! Nazareth had some great foam parties and bustling rave scene during the first century!
September 17 at 11:01pm
From SM - Do people still send checks to preachers? C´mon !!! Bank xfers are so much easier...
September 18 at 1:52pm
From KO - I have always thought there was something fishy about that guy. Not sure I know enough about him. I am with u.
September 18 at 7:34am
From TV - more growth during pain, God talks to me when I am hurting and praying, when things are going along okay i tend to drift and God has to pull me back, right now I am in pain and praising God and it has been amazing, i still hurt but there is a comfort there knowing he is with me
September 23 at 10:18pm
Showing posts with label Sermon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sermon. Show all posts
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Prosperity Christianity Junk
If you think Christianity is about making you a nice guy or good guy then your sick. The truth makes you good not nice because speaking the truth hurts most of the time. Oh and this Prosperity Christianity thing is the devils way of taking you and me out of the battle stripping us of our passion to fight and defend. Here don't listen to me see what Pastor Mark Driscoll says! How pastors should be preaching! Enjoy the expresso shot. Click Here For Short Video
FaceBook Post
From DZ - Hey MP -Thanks for the post. After watching the video, it seems to me that Joel gets some his ideas about victory launched in the right direction, but they aren't targeted, nor refined enough. By trusting Jesus through his grace, he gives us the power over sin through his Spirit. We are new creatures and given a new life (Colossians 3 and Ephesians 4)with the ability to say no to sin because he conquered it through the resurrection. It seems to me this is where Joel's messages need to be strengthened. He needs to bring in more Christ. Another thing that it seems is missing is the idea of God putting trials in our path to test our faith to produce endurance that will lead us to be perfect and complete lacking in nothing. (James 1:2-4) I have yet to find God saying to us in the Bible that he wants to be comfortable, rather he wants us to be holy. That is he wants us to be perfect and complete ... and he will use any means necessary to make that a reality. Blessings.
September 18 at 12:53am
FaceBook Post
From DZ - Hey MP -Thanks for the post. After watching the video, it seems to me that Joel gets some his ideas about victory launched in the right direction, but they aren't targeted, nor refined enough. By trusting Jesus through his grace, he gives us the power over sin through his Spirit. We are new creatures and given a new life (Colossians 3 and Ephesians 4)with the ability to say no to sin because he conquered it through the resurrection. It seems to me this is where Joel's messages need to be strengthened. He needs to bring in more Christ. Another thing that it seems is missing is the idea of God putting trials in our path to test our faith to produce endurance that will lead us to be perfect and complete lacking in nothing. (James 1:2-4) I have yet to find God saying to us in the Bible that he wants to be comfortable, rather he wants us to be holy. That is he wants us to be perfect and complete ... and he will use any means necessary to make that a reality. Blessings.
September 18 at 12:53am
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
Finding Eve, Finding Adam - sermon
What Our Parents Should Of Taught US
What I am about to tell you comes from deep in my heart. It is from years of experience and how if I could do it over I would do it differently. I want you to have an unbelievable life filled with Love. In a way I know you will make a lot of mistakes like I have in trying to find love. I just hope I can make a difference and show you some of the pitfalls to avoid. I hope you know you too can find love. I pray you don’t miss it like some many people have and die without finding your true Adam/Eve. You can choose here to numb up, give into what culture is teaching you or you can embrace a different way of life. One that Jesus came to tell us about living and loving from our heart. This is the life God intended you to have. Here is what I tell my daughters and son. At the end I have written some honesty letters I hope you will use as you purse finding love.
I would do it differently but no one told me these things I am telling you. I think we as parents are afraid if we tell you our mistakes you will want to make the same ones! I doubt that. You will make different ones. I want to equip you with wisdom and tools to help you navigate life. This is really important for most of us the pain in life is from making poor choices about love because no one taught us these relationship skills early on it our lives. We just had to figure this out by trial and error.
(FOR MEN)
Young men you have tremendous power and influence over young women. They seek and want your approval which causes them to want to please you. This wanting to please you sexually is not out of love but out of the need to be accepted by you. So remember when you ask her to have sex with you that you are taking something very precious from her. You are taking part of her heart, her gift and you are trying to fit that missing rib piece. You cannot give it back to her through words or any deeds. You take a small piece of her flesh, her spirit. In my experience I live with the thought of everyone woman I have had intimate relations with and today that does not feel right in my heart.
As men we find ourselves pursuing woman with all sorts of energy and charm. We romance them. We treat them like gifts they are. This courting process is very intense and the women love it. Why do they love it? They soak it up because this is what their hearts dream about to be treated like a princess. The problem comes when we do capture their hearts, we become intimate with them then soon after when the chase is over and thrill of the capture is over we lose interest. We have conquered them got to know them intimately then something in us loses interest so we dump them. The women feel used for they ask why did he pursue me so hard then to have sex with me then he left me. Why I don’t understand I must not be good enough pretty enough, not sexy enough!! Why did we lose interest? I will submit to you all that what drives us to find Eve, to woe her, get to Know her is that innate drive to find our missing piece. I don’t care how old we are 16 or 50 this drive also about us not wanting to be truly alone. We mistakenly call this a sex drive and therefore seek to satisfy it by just a physical act. What I want you to understand that just satisfying the physical desire by using women will cause you and her much harm. You will find out that the physical act done alone with love and commitment creates a bigger need. Lust takes over you will look for more and more experiences to fill this unquenchable desire. This will lead you to high risk sex and porn. Porn will destroy your ability to be truly intimate with a woman. Porn does not require intimacy it doesn’t require you to be a man. It is false sexuality and a sin. Everything around from movies to main stream media to your friends have deceived you by telling you sex is selfish and about gratification. Seriously men this where we get our hearts into lots of trouble, this is not the way to find meaning in life. We are conditioned and rewired to have sex before we develop love and intimacy and commitment. For the most part woman have not be rewired to the extent by culture like we have. They still understand their hearts much better than we do and seek commitment, intimacy and love prior to sex. But they give in to your constant pressure because they fear they will not be like if they don’t and culture is also making them think it’s ok to give in even though their hearts and intuition cry out “NO, I don’t even really know this guy.”
Men you have a huge task in front of you and that is to rewire yourself to control your impulses, to discipline your sexual desire and energies and focus those in other places, hopefully to advance God’s kingdom. You don’t have to conquer women to be a man. You have to be careful with you strength for this ability has been give to use to not find many women but to find that ONE WOMAN your EVE. Save as much as you can for that one. Then when you have found her give her all you got. Give her the Gift of You for a life time, better yet how about for an eternity. I know I know this is a huge sacrifice I struggle with this myself. But I believe and there are men who have done this and the payoff can be more joy than you can believe or you can do it like most of us WRONG be unhappily married, unfulfilled, stressed out and miss out on finding your true EVE. She is out there just don’t settle and don’t give up until you can SAY as Adam said “this is bone of my bone flesh of my flesh”. Her are some signs you found her when your friends all say you are stupid for not marrying her soon. Then you know you have found the right one! J If your friends and family don’t like her beware. Also listen to God he will definitely help primarily through irritations. When you don’t heed the irritations God has shown you then you are doomed for troubles trust me I ignored way to many!
THE HONESTY LETTERS for men – If you could ask each new love interest you encounter after the first date to write you a letter this is what each might say. We’ll put a spell of absolute truth on them so they really tell you their thoughts. I don’t think you will need a spell but a simple pray of discernment might help. These are three letters the first from the HURTING SARA, the second the POPULAR JANE, the third from SWEET HEART let’s call her your Eve. I hope these help you identify the right men to date.
Letter 1
Dear Adam:
I am HURTING SARA. I have a lot of problems and I am depressed most of the time because the mistakes and choices I have made early in my life. I don’t feel safe or right if I am not with a man. I go from one relationship to the next. I hate being alone. I had sex when I was 14 with a guy that was 18. He dumped me after he had sex with me. He said I was too immature. I like to party and drink vodka, it takes away my worries. My parents don’t understand me and pretty much leave me alone. They don’t care when I come home at night. Most of my problems are not my fault. I really don’t enjoy sex, but I will do it to please you, so you will stay around. I wear sexy cloths to get attention. School is a drag. I am not involved in much it just a waste of time. I hope you think I am pretty because my self esteem is really low. You need to tell me I am pretty all the time. Sometimes I think I don’t want to live. Please don’t ever leave me, I don’t know what I would do without you.
Sincerely, HURTING SARA
Letter 2
Dear Adam:
My name is POPULAR JANE. I am so busy that I may not have much time to spend with you. I am captain of the dance team. I play soccer on two teams and I take piano and I am in honors everything. Forgot to tell you I am in two after school clubs. I have lots of friends who admire me for how beautiful I am and that I have a new convertible. I want to be upfront, life is about me and what you can do for me. So you need to be the perfect boyfriend and make me look good at all times. I expect you to be romantic especially in how you ask me to parties. I want all the others girls to be jealous of me, how you show me you like me. I love gifts especially jewelry. I don’t like your friends their stupid, so don’t expect me to hang out with you and them all together. I go to church with my parents and church is cool, but I just don’t get it, however it's great place to hang out with friends and be seen.
If we are to someday get married, I will be very expensive to take care, so you should want to make a lot of money. You know I am my daddy’s little princess. I really don’t want to work that is for other people. And one of my pet peeves is that you are not to roll down the windows in your car when I am with you because it will mess my hair up that took me 2 hours to straighten this morning. Oh, I almost forgot I love to talk on the phone, but don’t go deep with me I hate that and that is not what life’s about anyway. Got to go, lots to do, people to see and talk to!
Lots of Love, POPULAR JANE
Letter 3
Dear Adam:
My name is Eve. Our first date was amazing I have never talked to man like you. You are so honest and open. It was so cool you took me to that lookout tower to see the city lights and just to talk to me and get to know me. It was nice on the 2nd date you asked to hold my hand. I just wanted you to know, I really want to wait until I am married to have sex. If that bothers you I understand most boys dump me when they hear that. I kind of think that’s all young men want these days. I hope you’re different. I am very active at church and volunteering my free time at the homeless shelter once a month. I want to study psychology in college so I can work with kids who have mental disorders. My parents are pretty cool and are proud of whom I am. My Dad is really protective so beware. Also, my brother’s look out for me, but I asked them about you and they said you were ok to date. Trust is a big deal for me in a relationship. I will always tell you the truth. I have a lot to give to the man I love. I want to make sure we are friends even if this doesn’t work out between us. I look forward to getting to know you. Thanks for the great first two dates.
Love, Eve
(FOR WOMEN)
I need you to be careful for you hold a power over men you might not understand today. Most of you know this already. God created you as the crowning touch of His creation giving you beauty not only physically but in your whole being. You can stir in men a deep desire for union, for sex. Be careful how you stir them. The clothes you wear the things you say and the touches you give them. These are all signals men process without you knowing it. I don’t think you realize they want more from you than I think most of you want to give. You are equipped differently than men. You are much more in tune with your heart. You sense the Holy Spirit presence in you. Some call it intuition. It is that knowing at a different level than that of the mind. Your inner wisdom and life experiences are just not enough to deal with the longing and desires of your heart. This is what makes your young age so dangerous to your heart. I have seen the most deep and life altering wounds come to women when they are in their teens and early twenties. This is the time when you need to seriously guard your hearts. Most often than not these wounds come because your hearts lead you to what you thought was love and commitment and it wasn’t it.
When love is new it is intoxicating. It feels like nothing could ever go wrong with this. Your right it is beautiful, it is freeing, it is how God wants us to love him and the way He loves us. He gave it to you for a reason to draw you closer to your Adam. However, to develop real love and intimacy it takes time not 2 weeks 2 month but most often years. Not only does it take time, it takes work to know someone intimately. Trust is core and we can only trust another completely as we see how they act, how talk, how these men treat you. A woman friend said to me something that is so true, “everything will be found out sooner or later.” Meaning we need time to know someone deeply before we commit our secrets to them.
Let’s talk about what a good man is about. Let’s set the standards high, for the quest is for your Adam. No halfway, no substitute, no giving in! First a man is about the truth. No half truths no white lies. He is only as good as his word. If he can’t keep his word to you or others get rid of him. This you should not budge on. This is the basis for trust in a relationship. Next is loyalty. He is with you completely or no relationship. If he constantly looking around at other women and not focused on you then this one has to go. Hear this YOU CANNOT CHANGE A MAN OR DOMESTICATE HIM. NOT your job let a half dozen other women take a try at. Let them realized whose really in control that is God. Advice: A man’s mission in life is not to make your life easier. He and you will need his mission in life to be something bigger. He needs the freedom and encouragement to give and make this a better world and push the Kingdom forward. Let him go fight the war then come back to your love. Give him a safe place to rest from his mission. Encourage him and he will prosper and provide you more love if let him do this.
Why we like bad boys!!!
God will communicate and guide you in this adventure to find your Adam. God’s communications will always be there to assist you. You just have to learn to listen. He loves to help primarily with irritating you. When something bugs you, causes pain your heart or just doesn’t feel right this is Him telling to open your eyes and act. If you ignore His help then for sure you will suffer. Sometimes you might have to suffer in the short term to avoid a major heart break later on. I can tell you I missed countless communications from God and rationalized those irritations away pushed them down to only have them re-appear later as catastrophes.
God has given you beauty, given you the ability to give life, He has given you a heart to share with the world. The world needs you in your full capacity. God made our bodies for one other person to give as a gift to each other as way of expressing love. Sex is the means by which we ultimately express that love. It is a giving up of our most inner secret and gift. It is the total expression of who we are. It is a tying of our spirit to another person. It is an act of rejoining not only with a man but with God. It is a place where you reveal your heart totally. Sex without love wounds our hearts it reduces this love act to physical release robbing your heart of its true need and that is being so connected to another man it creates a temporary heaven on earth, a safe place that no one else can enter no one else can destroy that no one else can understand but you two. It is truly life’s meaning and secret. Please contemplate in your heart before you give this gift to a man. Before you give him your gift for it is not much of a gift you have given the same thing to a handful of other men. I know deep in your hearts that you want to save and protect this for your Adam, your last lover.
THE HONESTY LETTERS for women – If you could ask each new love interest you encounter after the first date to write you a letter this is what each might say. We’ll put a spell of absolute truth on them so they really tell you their thoughts. I don’t think you will need a spell but a simple pray of discernment might help. These are three letters the first from the BAD BOY, the second the SELFISH JOCK, the third from GOOD YOUNG MAN let’s call him your Adam. I hope these help you identify the right men to date.
Letter 1
Dear Eve:
My name is BAD BOY. I graduated last year and I am not sure college is right for me. I am a lot of fun. I like to push life to max. I am dangerous. I take risks I probably shouldn’t. I really can’t stand my parents they don’t understand me. I like to get drunk and sometimes smoke pot. Again I like to live life to the fullest. Sex is important to me because its fun and feels good. I hope you like sex because I expect it and the sooner the better. I have had lots of girlfriends some call me a player. I am popular and good looking as you know. Life is about what I can get from it. I have a fast car in which I like to push to the limits, probably not so safe at times. I really don’t want to meet your dad but if you make me I will. My friends will say bad things about you if you try to make me no fun. I will tell you what I what you want to hear so I can get what I want. I don’t like your friends, they talk too much. Why do you like your parents? You’re too emotional. So it’s really about me you should know that and as long as I get what I want I will keep you around. Love who needs love lets just have fun and not be serious.
See you Saturday night, meet me a Ben’s party. I will get some alcohol for you. See if you can spend the night at a friend’s where you can stay out late! Your parents are too strict. Got to go!
Bad Boy
Letter 2
Dear Eve:
My name is SELFISH JOCK. I am the stud running back on the football team and I lettered when I was a sophomore. I live in that real expensive neighborhood just down the street from the school. You should come over to check it out. I got a new porche for my birthday last year because I got better than a “C” average on my report card. Let’s get things started right in this relationship. I want you to look good when you’re with me. That’s right I have an image to up hold. I only date the pretty most popular girls. Don’t be embarrassed if I tell all my buddies about our relationship and especially the sex part. Man they love to hear how good I am. My parents think I hung the moon and that I do nothing wrong. I like to drink but not during football can’t risk a MIP, coach would bench me for sure. I will meet your dad and act like a gentleman so you can be rest assured too that your mom will love my charm, my nice guy approach always works. Why do you talk so much? That bugs me a lot. I don’t like prudes are you one? Why do you spend so much time at church? Isn’t it boring? Do your parents make you go? Don’t ask me to go I will feel uncomfortable. I don’t want to get to serious, just serious enough to have sex with you. My friends are more important than you. If I start blowing you off and not paying attention to you then that’s a sign I don’t want to date you anymore. I am trying to let you down easy so you will not be hurt. I have a hard time being honest and I am not sure what I want in a woman, so if I change my mind you will have to guess.
See ya soon, SELFISH JOCK
Letter 3
Dear Eve:
My name is Adam and I had a great time with you over the past two dates. Our conversations were amazing. I love that you go to church and are passionate about helping people. I like your smile it lights up the room. I can listen to you talk all night, sorry about the late night calls but it so nice to go to bed knowing that I met a really cool girl. I have to be honest having sex is really risky you know with pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases! If any of that happened it would really change my life. I really hope you want to wait too. I really want to give you a kiss so when you’re ready please let me know. It was nice that your dad is so worried about you when he talked to me before our first date. What a good dad you have that is awesome and makes me feel better about who you are. Your mom invited me to dinner next week that sounds like fun to get to know them better. I hope your brother likes me. I am looking forward to getting to know you. If I ever make you feel upset or something goes wrong between us I hope you know that you can tell me anything and I will not judge you.
As you know my work, school and my passion for soccer are important to me. But I want you to know you are important too. I would really enjoy you watching me play and I so want to see you dance. As I told you on the first date I am a pretty private and trust is important. You are amazing thanks for giving me a chance to get to know you.
Sincerely, Adam
Can you tell the different perspective on life each of these young men have? See how the focus should be on you? Do you feel the heart of the Adam letter? I pray that God gives you the ability to discern with your heart the truth. Let us remember the words Paul used in letter to the Corinthians about Love. If there is a passage ever to keep with you it is this:
1 If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don't love, I'm nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. 2If I speak God's Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, "Jump," and it jumps, but I don't love, I'm nothing. 3-7If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don't love, I've gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I'm bankrupt without love.
Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn't want what it doesn't have.
Love doesn't strut,
Doesn't have a swelled head,
Doesn't force itself on others,
Isn't always "me first,"
Doesn't fly off the handle,
Doesn't keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn't revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.
8-10Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.
13But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love. (1 Corinthians 12 The Message)
It is also important to know what love and life is not so we turn to Galatians 5:
16 So I say, let the Holy Spirit guide your lives. Then you won’t be doing what your sinful nature craves. 17 The sinful nature wants to do evil, which is just the opposite of what the Spirit wants. And the Spirit gives us desires that are the opposite of what the sinful nature desires. These two forces are constantly fighting each other, so you are not free to carry out your good intentions. 18 But when you are directed by the Spirit, you are not under obligation to the law of Moses.
19 When you follow the desires of your sinful nature, the results are very clear: sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, 20 idolatry, sorcery, hostility, quarreling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division, 21 envy, drunkenness, wild parties, and other sins like these. Let me tell you again, as I have before, that anyone living that sort of life will not inherit the Kingdom of God.
22 But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things!
I want to leave you with a challenge. Your parents have been through all this themselves. Maybe not the exactly the same way you are going through things but I bet if you seek their knowledge and wisdom they will open up a wealth of wisdom that you can surely use. I know it’s difficult to talk to them about these things it may be tough to start but be persistant and keeping an open heart will help you develop a new rapport with them. Remember something in them doesn’t want to tell you the mistakes and bad decisions they made because they think it will be a license for you to make those same ones. Because they drank at an early age doesn’t give you the right either. They probably don’t want to tell you all the icky details of their mistakes either just don’t judge them for their own mistakes it has made them who they are and that’s why you love them. Most young people I know don’t want to make the mistakes of their parents. They want to be better people to have more joy and love and less pain.
We all learn best from Story. It is why the bible is a collection of thousands of stories otherwise called parables. We all have a story to tell even at your age. In the end the choices you make are yours to live with forever. The ones you make now will affect you the rest of your story. The question is what story do you want to tell your kids in the future good ones or bad ones?
What I am about to tell you comes from deep in my heart. It is from years of experience and how if I could do it over I would do it differently. I want you to have an unbelievable life filled with Love. In a way I know you will make a lot of mistakes like I have in trying to find love. I just hope I can make a difference and show you some of the pitfalls to avoid. I hope you know you too can find love. I pray you don’t miss it like some many people have and die without finding your true Adam/Eve. You can choose here to numb up, give into what culture is teaching you or you can embrace a different way of life. One that Jesus came to tell us about living and loving from our heart. This is the life God intended you to have. Here is what I tell my daughters and son. At the end I have written some honesty letters I hope you will use as you purse finding love.
I would do it differently but no one told me these things I am telling you. I think we as parents are afraid if we tell you our mistakes you will want to make the same ones! I doubt that. You will make different ones. I want to equip you with wisdom and tools to help you navigate life. This is really important for most of us the pain in life is from making poor choices about love because no one taught us these relationship skills early on it our lives. We just had to figure this out by trial and error.
(FOR MEN)
Young men you have tremendous power and influence over young women. They seek and want your approval which causes them to want to please you. This wanting to please you sexually is not out of love but out of the need to be accepted by you. So remember when you ask her to have sex with you that you are taking something very precious from her. You are taking part of her heart, her gift and you are trying to fit that missing rib piece. You cannot give it back to her through words or any deeds. You take a small piece of her flesh, her spirit. In my experience I live with the thought of everyone woman I have had intimate relations with and today that does not feel right in my heart.
As men we find ourselves pursuing woman with all sorts of energy and charm. We romance them. We treat them like gifts they are. This courting process is very intense and the women love it. Why do they love it? They soak it up because this is what their hearts dream about to be treated like a princess. The problem comes when we do capture their hearts, we become intimate with them then soon after when the chase is over and thrill of the capture is over we lose interest. We have conquered them got to know them intimately then something in us loses interest so we dump them. The women feel used for they ask why did he pursue me so hard then to have sex with me then he left me. Why I don’t understand I must not be good enough pretty enough, not sexy enough!! Why did we lose interest? I will submit to you all that what drives us to find Eve, to woe her, get to Know her is that innate drive to find our missing piece. I don’t care how old we are 16 or 50 this drive also about us not wanting to be truly alone. We mistakenly call this a sex drive and therefore seek to satisfy it by just a physical act. What I want you to understand that just satisfying the physical desire by using women will cause you and her much harm. You will find out that the physical act done alone with love and commitment creates a bigger need. Lust takes over you will look for more and more experiences to fill this unquenchable desire. This will lead you to high risk sex and porn. Porn will destroy your ability to be truly intimate with a woman. Porn does not require intimacy it doesn’t require you to be a man. It is false sexuality and a sin. Everything around from movies to main stream media to your friends have deceived you by telling you sex is selfish and about gratification. Seriously men this where we get our hearts into lots of trouble, this is not the way to find meaning in life. We are conditioned and rewired to have sex before we develop love and intimacy and commitment. For the most part woman have not be rewired to the extent by culture like we have. They still understand their hearts much better than we do and seek commitment, intimacy and love prior to sex. But they give in to your constant pressure because they fear they will not be like if they don’t and culture is also making them think it’s ok to give in even though their hearts and intuition cry out “NO, I don’t even really know this guy.”
Men you have a huge task in front of you and that is to rewire yourself to control your impulses, to discipline your sexual desire and energies and focus those in other places, hopefully to advance God’s kingdom. You don’t have to conquer women to be a man. You have to be careful with you strength for this ability has been give to use to not find many women but to find that ONE WOMAN your EVE. Save as much as you can for that one. Then when you have found her give her all you got. Give her the Gift of You for a life time, better yet how about for an eternity. I know I know this is a huge sacrifice I struggle with this myself. But I believe and there are men who have done this and the payoff can be more joy than you can believe or you can do it like most of us WRONG be unhappily married, unfulfilled, stressed out and miss out on finding your true EVE. She is out there just don’t settle and don’t give up until you can SAY as Adam said “this is bone of my bone flesh of my flesh”. Her are some signs you found her when your friends all say you are stupid for not marrying her soon. Then you know you have found the right one! J If your friends and family don’t like her beware. Also listen to God he will definitely help primarily through irritations. When you don’t heed the irritations God has shown you then you are doomed for troubles trust me I ignored way to many!
THE HONESTY LETTERS for men – If you could ask each new love interest you encounter after the first date to write you a letter this is what each might say. We’ll put a spell of absolute truth on them so they really tell you their thoughts. I don’t think you will need a spell but a simple pray of discernment might help. These are three letters the first from the HURTING SARA, the second the POPULAR JANE, the third from SWEET HEART let’s call her your Eve. I hope these help you identify the right men to date.
Letter 1
Dear Adam:
I am HURTING SARA. I have a lot of problems and I am depressed most of the time because the mistakes and choices I have made early in my life. I don’t feel safe or right if I am not with a man. I go from one relationship to the next. I hate being alone. I had sex when I was 14 with a guy that was 18. He dumped me after he had sex with me. He said I was too immature. I like to party and drink vodka, it takes away my worries. My parents don’t understand me and pretty much leave me alone. They don’t care when I come home at night. Most of my problems are not my fault. I really don’t enjoy sex, but I will do it to please you, so you will stay around. I wear sexy cloths to get attention. School is a drag. I am not involved in much it just a waste of time. I hope you think I am pretty because my self esteem is really low. You need to tell me I am pretty all the time. Sometimes I think I don’t want to live. Please don’t ever leave me, I don’t know what I would do without you.
Sincerely, HURTING SARA
Letter 2
Dear Adam:
My name is POPULAR JANE. I am so busy that I may not have much time to spend with you. I am captain of the dance team. I play soccer on two teams and I take piano and I am in honors everything. Forgot to tell you I am in two after school clubs. I have lots of friends who admire me for how beautiful I am and that I have a new convertible. I want to be upfront, life is about me and what you can do for me. So you need to be the perfect boyfriend and make me look good at all times. I expect you to be romantic especially in how you ask me to parties. I want all the others girls to be jealous of me, how you show me you like me. I love gifts especially jewelry. I don’t like your friends their stupid, so don’t expect me to hang out with you and them all together. I go to church with my parents and church is cool, but I just don’t get it, however it's great place to hang out with friends and be seen.
If we are to someday get married, I will be very expensive to take care, so you should want to make a lot of money. You know I am my daddy’s little princess. I really don’t want to work that is for other people. And one of my pet peeves is that you are not to roll down the windows in your car when I am with you because it will mess my hair up that took me 2 hours to straighten this morning. Oh, I almost forgot I love to talk on the phone, but don’t go deep with me I hate that and that is not what life’s about anyway. Got to go, lots to do, people to see and talk to!
Lots of Love, POPULAR JANE
Letter 3
Dear Adam:
My name is Eve. Our first date was amazing I have never talked to man like you. You are so honest and open. It was so cool you took me to that lookout tower to see the city lights and just to talk to me and get to know me. It was nice on the 2nd date you asked to hold my hand. I just wanted you to know, I really want to wait until I am married to have sex. If that bothers you I understand most boys dump me when they hear that. I kind of think that’s all young men want these days. I hope you’re different. I am very active at church and volunteering my free time at the homeless shelter once a month. I want to study psychology in college so I can work with kids who have mental disorders. My parents are pretty cool and are proud of whom I am. My Dad is really protective so beware. Also, my brother’s look out for me, but I asked them about you and they said you were ok to date. Trust is a big deal for me in a relationship. I will always tell you the truth. I have a lot to give to the man I love. I want to make sure we are friends even if this doesn’t work out between us. I look forward to getting to know you. Thanks for the great first two dates.
Love, Eve
(FOR WOMEN)
I need you to be careful for you hold a power over men you might not understand today. Most of you know this already. God created you as the crowning touch of His creation giving you beauty not only physically but in your whole being. You can stir in men a deep desire for union, for sex. Be careful how you stir them. The clothes you wear the things you say and the touches you give them. These are all signals men process without you knowing it. I don’t think you realize they want more from you than I think most of you want to give. You are equipped differently than men. You are much more in tune with your heart. You sense the Holy Spirit presence in you. Some call it intuition. It is that knowing at a different level than that of the mind. Your inner wisdom and life experiences are just not enough to deal with the longing and desires of your heart. This is what makes your young age so dangerous to your heart. I have seen the most deep and life altering wounds come to women when they are in their teens and early twenties. This is the time when you need to seriously guard your hearts. Most often than not these wounds come because your hearts lead you to what you thought was love and commitment and it wasn’t it.
When love is new it is intoxicating. It feels like nothing could ever go wrong with this. Your right it is beautiful, it is freeing, it is how God wants us to love him and the way He loves us. He gave it to you for a reason to draw you closer to your Adam. However, to develop real love and intimacy it takes time not 2 weeks 2 month but most often years. Not only does it take time, it takes work to know someone intimately. Trust is core and we can only trust another completely as we see how they act, how talk, how these men treat you. A woman friend said to me something that is so true, “everything will be found out sooner or later.” Meaning we need time to know someone deeply before we commit our secrets to them.
Let’s talk about what a good man is about. Let’s set the standards high, for the quest is for your Adam. No halfway, no substitute, no giving in! First a man is about the truth. No half truths no white lies. He is only as good as his word. If he can’t keep his word to you or others get rid of him. This you should not budge on. This is the basis for trust in a relationship. Next is loyalty. He is with you completely or no relationship. If he constantly looking around at other women and not focused on you then this one has to go. Hear this YOU CANNOT CHANGE A MAN OR DOMESTICATE HIM. NOT your job let a half dozen other women take a try at. Let them realized whose really in control that is God. Advice: A man’s mission in life is not to make your life easier. He and you will need his mission in life to be something bigger. He needs the freedom and encouragement to give and make this a better world and push the Kingdom forward. Let him go fight the war then come back to your love. Give him a safe place to rest from his mission. Encourage him and he will prosper and provide you more love if let him do this.
Why we like bad boys!!!
God will communicate and guide you in this adventure to find your Adam. God’s communications will always be there to assist you. You just have to learn to listen. He loves to help primarily with irritating you. When something bugs you, causes pain your heart or just doesn’t feel right this is Him telling to open your eyes and act. If you ignore His help then for sure you will suffer. Sometimes you might have to suffer in the short term to avoid a major heart break later on. I can tell you I missed countless communications from God and rationalized those irritations away pushed them down to only have them re-appear later as catastrophes.
God has given you beauty, given you the ability to give life, He has given you a heart to share with the world. The world needs you in your full capacity. God made our bodies for one other person to give as a gift to each other as way of expressing love. Sex is the means by which we ultimately express that love. It is a giving up of our most inner secret and gift. It is the total expression of who we are. It is a tying of our spirit to another person. It is an act of rejoining not only with a man but with God. It is a place where you reveal your heart totally. Sex without love wounds our hearts it reduces this love act to physical release robbing your heart of its true need and that is being so connected to another man it creates a temporary heaven on earth, a safe place that no one else can enter no one else can destroy that no one else can understand but you two. It is truly life’s meaning and secret. Please contemplate in your heart before you give this gift to a man. Before you give him your gift for it is not much of a gift you have given the same thing to a handful of other men. I know deep in your hearts that you want to save and protect this for your Adam, your last lover.
THE HONESTY LETTERS for women – If you could ask each new love interest you encounter after the first date to write you a letter this is what each might say. We’ll put a spell of absolute truth on them so they really tell you their thoughts. I don’t think you will need a spell but a simple pray of discernment might help. These are three letters the first from the BAD BOY, the second the SELFISH JOCK, the third from GOOD YOUNG MAN let’s call him your Adam. I hope these help you identify the right men to date.
Letter 1
Dear Eve:
My name is BAD BOY. I graduated last year and I am not sure college is right for me. I am a lot of fun. I like to push life to max. I am dangerous. I take risks I probably shouldn’t. I really can’t stand my parents they don’t understand me. I like to get drunk and sometimes smoke pot. Again I like to live life to the fullest. Sex is important to me because its fun and feels good. I hope you like sex because I expect it and the sooner the better. I have had lots of girlfriends some call me a player. I am popular and good looking as you know. Life is about what I can get from it. I have a fast car in which I like to push to the limits, probably not so safe at times. I really don’t want to meet your dad but if you make me I will. My friends will say bad things about you if you try to make me no fun. I will tell you what I what you want to hear so I can get what I want. I don’t like your friends, they talk too much. Why do you like your parents? You’re too emotional. So it’s really about me you should know that and as long as I get what I want I will keep you around. Love who needs love lets just have fun and not be serious.
See you Saturday night, meet me a Ben’s party. I will get some alcohol for you. See if you can spend the night at a friend’s where you can stay out late! Your parents are too strict. Got to go!
Bad Boy
Letter 2
Dear Eve:
My name is SELFISH JOCK. I am the stud running back on the football team and I lettered when I was a sophomore. I live in that real expensive neighborhood just down the street from the school. You should come over to check it out. I got a new porche for my birthday last year because I got better than a “C” average on my report card. Let’s get things started right in this relationship. I want you to look good when you’re with me. That’s right I have an image to up hold. I only date the pretty most popular girls. Don’t be embarrassed if I tell all my buddies about our relationship and especially the sex part. Man they love to hear how good I am. My parents think I hung the moon and that I do nothing wrong. I like to drink but not during football can’t risk a MIP, coach would bench me for sure. I will meet your dad and act like a gentleman so you can be rest assured too that your mom will love my charm, my nice guy approach always works. Why do you talk so much? That bugs me a lot. I don’t like prudes are you one? Why do you spend so much time at church? Isn’t it boring? Do your parents make you go? Don’t ask me to go I will feel uncomfortable. I don’t want to get to serious, just serious enough to have sex with you. My friends are more important than you. If I start blowing you off and not paying attention to you then that’s a sign I don’t want to date you anymore. I am trying to let you down easy so you will not be hurt. I have a hard time being honest and I am not sure what I want in a woman, so if I change my mind you will have to guess.
See ya soon, SELFISH JOCK
Letter 3
Dear Eve:
My name is Adam and I had a great time with you over the past two dates. Our conversations were amazing. I love that you go to church and are passionate about helping people. I like your smile it lights up the room. I can listen to you talk all night, sorry about the late night calls but it so nice to go to bed knowing that I met a really cool girl. I have to be honest having sex is really risky you know with pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases! If any of that happened it would really change my life. I really hope you want to wait too. I really want to give you a kiss so when you’re ready please let me know. It was nice that your dad is so worried about you when he talked to me before our first date. What a good dad you have that is awesome and makes me feel better about who you are. Your mom invited me to dinner next week that sounds like fun to get to know them better. I hope your brother likes me. I am looking forward to getting to know you. If I ever make you feel upset or something goes wrong between us I hope you know that you can tell me anything and I will not judge you.
As you know my work, school and my passion for soccer are important to me. But I want you to know you are important too. I would really enjoy you watching me play and I so want to see you dance. As I told you on the first date I am a pretty private and trust is important. You are amazing thanks for giving me a chance to get to know you.
Sincerely, Adam
Can you tell the different perspective on life each of these young men have? See how the focus should be on you? Do you feel the heart of the Adam letter? I pray that God gives you the ability to discern with your heart the truth. Let us remember the words Paul used in letter to the Corinthians about Love. If there is a passage ever to keep with you it is this:
1 If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don't love, I'm nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. 2If I speak God's Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, "Jump," and it jumps, but I don't love, I'm nothing. 3-7If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don't love, I've gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I'm bankrupt without love.
Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn't want what it doesn't have.
Love doesn't strut,
Doesn't have a swelled head,
Doesn't force itself on others,
Isn't always "me first,"
Doesn't fly off the handle,
Doesn't keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn't revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.
8-10Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.
13But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love. (1 Corinthians 12 The Message)
It is also important to know what love and life is not so we turn to Galatians 5:
16 So I say, let the Holy Spirit guide your lives. Then you won’t be doing what your sinful nature craves. 17 The sinful nature wants to do evil, which is just the opposite of what the Spirit wants. And the Spirit gives us desires that are the opposite of what the sinful nature desires. These two forces are constantly fighting each other, so you are not free to carry out your good intentions. 18 But when you are directed by the Spirit, you are not under obligation to the law of Moses.
19 When you follow the desires of your sinful nature, the results are very clear: sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, 20 idolatry, sorcery, hostility, quarreling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division, 21 envy, drunkenness, wild parties, and other sins like these. Let me tell you again, as I have before, that anyone living that sort of life will not inherit the Kingdom of God.
22 But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things!
I want to leave you with a challenge. Your parents have been through all this themselves. Maybe not the exactly the same way you are going through things but I bet if you seek their knowledge and wisdom they will open up a wealth of wisdom that you can surely use. I know it’s difficult to talk to them about these things it may be tough to start but be persistant and keeping an open heart will help you develop a new rapport with them. Remember something in them doesn’t want to tell you the mistakes and bad decisions they made because they think it will be a license for you to make those same ones. Because they drank at an early age doesn’t give you the right either. They probably don’t want to tell you all the icky details of their mistakes either just don’t judge them for their own mistakes it has made them who they are and that’s why you love them. Most young people I know don’t want to make the mistakes of their parents. They want to be better people to have more joy and love and less pain.
We all learn best from Story. It is why the bible is a collection of thousands of stories otherwise called parables. We all have a story to tell even at your age. In the end the choices you make are yours to live with forever. The ones you make now will affect you the rest of your story. The question is what story do you want to tell your kids in the future good ones or bad ones?
Friday, February 06, 2009
A Gift of My Self - sermon
Introduction
I want to take you on an adventure of our hearts. This great adventure is about discovering how we can as both physical and spiritual beings find the meaning in our lives. We will look at the origins of our sexuality driven by our strong desire to be know and become one with another person. We’ll see that love and serving each other is at the foundation to finding our meaning. This is not a “don’t do it” speech on sex, it is at its core, a rediscovery of the language and longings of our hearts. When we submit in service to each others heart, God's gift of intimacy appears. A gift God wants us to make to others and in particular our spouse. If we learn to make ourselves a gift of love, we may just find the true meaning to life in a very special way.
Open your hearts, free your mind of what culture has or is telling you. Let the Lord Jesus speak to you in this talk for where you are at today and for what you need. In this brief time with you I hope I can re-tell a story of God’s romance. The beauty of his original plan for us is truly his most special gift to us. It is up to you to discover what this looks like for your life. This romantic adventure will take trust, it will take solitude, and it will take much suffering of the heart. It will for sure ask you to die in some respects to things you thought you needed and understood about your physicality. I do promise you this for I have experienced it myself, there is no greater joy than loving someone with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength (paraphrased Luke 10:27). For this is the love God has for us. He wants us to know what 100% surrendered in love feels like, so we will love him in the same way. He gave us the gift of our body as a means to express his love.
You will find not all the answers, but a starting point to look at your own desires to be in relations with another. I give this as a gift from my own experiences and with a lot of help from Lord, who has put a fire in my heart to tell a different story. A radically different story, totally opposite from the story of the world around us which teaches us to be consumers/takers of that sex and intimacy for our own selfishness.
Much of what I contemplate comes out of reflections on marriage and my diligent search for meaning in my past marriages. It also comes out of the many wounds I gave woman with my selfishness pursuit of satisfying my own needs. But it is joy which I have felt that really drives me to show you the truth of God’s gift. I want you to know what true love is and how it works into our sexuality. This sexuality when combined with love is the closest thing we can know of what heaven will be like. It is one of the greatest forms of worship we can offer Jesus. In this talk I will totally depend upon God’s word in the Bible, along with a lot of help and direction from Pope John II sermons on the Theology of the Body. His sermons on this subject are a beautiful analysis of Genesis and Jesus’ Gospel about male and female relationships. I want to thank Christopher West for his summaries of John Paul’s work. It is revolutionary in its message. I encourage to read more of Mr. West's work. It will deepen and change your marriage.
The Fall – The Case for Sex Gone Wrong
The teachings of our culture and times tell us that sex is a selfish act made just for our own pleasure. It tells us we don’t need love to have great sex, we just need perfect bodies, the right perfume/cologne, a beer or the best clothes and you will get more sex. They also beat into us that sexual performance makes us who we are it defines our worth to society. Men are condition to be like race horses expected to give women unbelievable mountain top sexual experiences. For women it is being the perfect sex toy, with the perfect body, the best clothes to attract a man.
Men are ranked by other men on how many women they can conquer. Sex becomes a sport to use women for our own pleasures. Women are forced into pleasing men to be accepted or to keep a boyfriend by how well sexually they perform. Sex is everywhere because our culture instinctively knows its power. It has made sex into a selfish act far from the selfless act of giving our bodies as a gift to that special person we love. Evil twisted our inner most prized gift from God. God wants us to have it back not by controlling us to do so but out of loving us, giving us the freedom to reclaim his gift. For it is out of choice that love can be found. We must choose to be a gift to each other once again if we are ever to experience the original unity and deep connected love again.
When we have sex with another person before the establishment of love and commitments or any emotional depth, our heart senses the emptiness and lack of the all important foundation of love. We become confused about love because sex and nakedness of our souls and hearts came before love. Repeated like this sex becomes mechanical and purely a physical release and not the way God intended it to be. Our intuition tells us even when we are young for sex in this capacity never lives up to what culture or our friends tell us. So we search for better ways to experience sex like using sex toys, pornography, different sexual positions, and multiple partners to find that ecstasy that is so promised.
Making love (sex) is not about sex toys, positions, pornography, or whatever aberrations we can dream up. When we invite God into this place we have no need for all those tricks and gimmicks. Wrapped in each other’s arms, skin to skin, face to face, breath to breath, warm lips together, peering into each other’s eyes finding that complete intimacy and making a place for God and praising and loving him for this gift. Now that is making love. Sex any other way is letting satan use you for his pleasure which will lead to heart ache and dysfunction.
Researchers have known for a long time that teenage sexual activity and depression are linked. In a publication by (Smith and Denton pg21) Teenagers get depressed when they cannot understand the physical, emotional and spiritual loss that happens when the act of intimacy(sex) is not done out of love.
We use sex like a drug to make us feel good for a period of time but like alcohol we do experience not only physical hangovers but also spiritual and emotional ones to. Sex is a temporary escape from this world and like any other escape mechanism some become addicted to it just like drugs and alcohol. This is why we are seeing pornography become so destructive for it gives us sex without love and without another person. It requires nothing of us, it is an illusion and will lead to addiction.
“Addiction is the most powerful psychic enemy of humanity’s desire for God,” says Gerald May in Addiction and Grace, which is no doubt why it is one of our adversary’s favorite ways to imprison us. Once taken captive, trying to free ourselves through willpower is futile. Only God’s Spirit himself can free us or even bring us to our senses.
The "heart" has become a battlefield between love and lust, habitually threatening the meaning of the body. As John Paul says, because of man's disordered passions, "The human body in its masculinity and femininity has almost lost the capacity of expressing this love in which the person becomes a gift…" (General Audience 7/23/80).
How did sex get so twisted? Let us know look at what sin did to our original state of the male female union. How has evil and culture misdirected God’s original design. This starts back in the Garden of Eden in Chapter 3 of Genesis
2 The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.' "
4 "You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. 5 "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."
6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the LORD God called to the man, "Where are you?"
10 He answered, "I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid."
Here the evil serpent convinces us not to trust God that we too can know good and evil. We can know what God knows but this taught us to grasp after God’s likeness instead of receiving it as a gift. All of a sudden we now see our nakedness, our flaws or inadequacies. We hide from God, we hide from each other. God looks for us, we are ashamed and this begins our fall from our original creation. This falling away continues we now grasp on to our original unity and nakedness. Out of this grasping the roots of lust come forward. We try to control and posses the opposite sex for out of fear of losing him/her of being alone and in some respects being found out. We find it really difficult to be totally naked again with each other. This is meant by the fall. The falling away from who we really are. Let us now try to find our way back.
Original Man before the Fall (How we were meant to be)
We have to go way back when God created Adam and Eve to understand God’s original plan for us as man and woman. Here we will find some clues how we were originally created and what life was like for the first couple. We will also see what God asked of them and what gifts he gave them.
There are two accounts of our creation in Genesis. It is important to note the first two accounts describe man and woman before sin. This is very important to the story because we have fallen away from the pure goodness of God’s original plan which is perfect unity of man and woman. Also I want to point out that Jesus who is the only man both of Divine and Flesh whose words offer us a direct understanding on how God wants us to live. Lets us begin with Jesus pointing us back to “THE BEGINNING” in Matthew 19 where we hear Jesus being questioned by Pharisees when they asked him about divorce. He refers them back to man and woman’s perfect unity “that in the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female,' God’s intention for us was to be in pure relationship or to have a perfect union
26 Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."
27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
28 God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground."
Genesis 1:26-28 NIV
So we read here that God created us IN HIS IMAGE and in His Likeness. So we are physical but yet more than physical. We have a likeness to God who is spirit and who is love 1 John 4:18 8Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. NIV
He gave us rule over all the animals. He also created us male and female. He did not describe the animals in this manner. We know ourselves that we are much different than the animals, we posses His image therefore the image of Love. Also if we have his image our bodies must reflect Him in some way. So we must conclude that we can come to know God through our physical body. He also blessed us and not the animals. Again God differentiates us from the animals by blessing us. So this gave us a spiritual quality and creates a great mystery for we know we are more than just physical matter but like God in what way?
We can look further into how we are different than the animals by what God tells us next in Genesis 2:7
7 the LORD God formed the man [a] from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
Here God gives us the breath of life. The Hebrew word (nÿshamah, “breath”) is used for God and for the life imparted to humans, not animals. Its usage in the Bible conveys more than a breathing living organism. Whatever is given this breath of life becomes animated with the life from God, has spiritual understanding.(from the NETBible)
God’s breathes life into us. In some early traditions people did not speak name of God. To utter his name was too holy. God’s name in Hebrew was Y H V H which we would pronounce Yod, Heh, Vav, Hah which when we say it, it sounds like the rhythm of our own breathing. Is the name of God the sound of our breathing? (Rob Bell in Nooma: Breathe) So God is our breath without it we die without God we die.
Now that we have a foundation of being spiritual beings made in the image of God we can start to dive into the origins of our sexuality by further examining the next details that follow in this 2nd account of the creation.
18 The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him." 19 Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 20 So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field.
But for Adam no suitable helper was found.
So Adam named all the animals and realizes he was alone in the world as a person different from the animals. He knew he couldn’t love the animals so he felt alone in complete solitude. This alone feeling is something we all feel. We fear it, we hate this feeling, we cannot live without being in communion with others to find another to love and be loved back drives our inner most desires. To not be alone means to be in communion with another to be in love and be loved in return. This brings us back to what we identified early that God is Love. John Paul II concludes “Love is, therefore, man's origin, vocation, and end.”
So God says “it is not good for the man” to not have someone to Love and to have Love in, so God’s solution is create someone who he can love, so he creates someone that embodies His beauty and is the final touch on His creation this He called woman.
21 So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and closed up the place with flesh. 22 Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.
John Paul II points out in a footnote that the word "rib" in the original biblical language is a play on the word "life" (General Audience 11/7/79). Woman comes from the life of a man. The man now has a missing a piece that rib that God removed to make woman holds a very special role. So a man longs to replace his missing piece and a woman longs to find a man to give her piece back to; the man she came from. This desire to find each other to replace the piece is our deepest desire. It is so strong and at our core that it drives almost everything we do in life. Next we hear Adam cry out what we all would love to say when we find our missing piece.
"This is now bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called 'woman,'
for she was taken out of man." Genesis 2:23
As the Pope explains, "there is no doubt that man falls into that 'sleep' with the desire of finding a being like himself. In this way, the circle of the solitude of the man-person is broken, because the first 'man' awakens from his sleep as 'male and female'" (General Audience 11/7/79). Immediately the man declares: "At last this one is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh." That is to say, "Finally, a person with whom I can share the gift of life. Finally, a person I can love!"
So we see here that God has given us the Gift of Life and in that he provided everything we need to know Him and to love and be loved by another person. Now that we have another to love how are we to Love? How are we to find it? How are we to know what love really is? When are we ready to do this? Let us try to answer these by looking into this Gift of Love and this ultimate reunion.
24 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. (NIV)
For God tells us that we are to leave our parents. Are you ready to leave your parents? This is when God and most traditions tell us we are ready to be married to take a spouse in marriage to be reunited in one flesh. This God says signals our readiness for becoming one in flesh with our Adam or our Eve a reuniting of the flesh in holy sex and nakedness.
What does becoming one flesh mean? Is this not a better word for sex “one flesh”? As we unite our flesh in this holy reunion, God lets us go back to how he created us “in the beginning” pure in heart the world disappears around us for a brief amount of time bringing us to the place where we feel as one. This is total relief from our feeling of solitude and it must be the ultimate expression of love. For God made it so enjoyable nothing else in our physical life can match this experience for this is not sex as talked about by culture but it is the true act of making love. So special it is only here that God lets us co-create another human being with His help. In the act of making love we come face to face with each other naked bringing only our bodies to each other as a gift.
The Second Vatican Council teaches us, "man can only find himself by making a sincere gift of himself" (Gaudium et Spes n. 24). So with our bodies, in and through our sexuality, that we realize we are called to give ourselves to one another as a gift. Thus, John Paul can say, "we are convinced of the fact that the awareness of the body’s capacity to show love is the fundamental element of human existence in the world" (General Audience 1/16/80).
In this brief encounter of the flesh and spirit we replace the missing piece within us, thus completing what was once lost long ago. We get to relive part of God’s creation story in the intimate act of making love. Do you not see the power, the awesomeness of it? Is it no wonder that God makes our sex drive the most powerful thing in the universe? Can anyone name something we all think about more in common or more often than sex? The missing piece may be the root of our internal sexual drive not only to create new life but to replace this missing piece. How else do we describe where this urge or need comes from? We don’t know what drives us so passionately and strongly but this need/urge does not go away until we have been reunited with our own Adam or Eve, who holds our missing piece. Our hearts long for each other to dive deeply into the purely intimate act of rejoining and becoming one again with each other. For God wants this union to be a special one, one out of His love.
When this rejoining is wrapped in Love, it brings with it a filling up of our hearts. We feel gratitude, amazement, and joy or better put ecstasy that something so wonderful could feel this good. Webster’s dictionary defines ecstasy as “rapture from the contemplation of divine things”. Don’t you think our divine creator God wants us to have a divine contemplation of the eternal life with Him? Maybe it’s through this uniting of our hearts in the act of sex that God whispers into our hearts this secret that so many of us fail to hear. Once you have really listened to Him and have heard the secret you so would love to tell everyone, but you just cannot find the human words to express it. It is such a big secret God wants us to keep it safe within the context of marriage and not to share it with just a random person. It is so deep and profound, to share it with an acquaintance or friend would be reducing sex to a physical act of pleasure much like drinking a glass of water when you’re thirsty or eating your favorite food. Is not sex so much more than just satisfying a bodily function or controlling a selfish need?
We see that in our original sexuality that at the end of Genesis 2 25 The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.
When we find that true love, that piece, and become the truest gift to each other we feel no shame being completely naked knowing each other so intimately that we have nothing to hide from each other. Trust each other with each other’s Gift of Life.
Let’s look at how Moses describes sex in Genesis 4:25 using a few different translation of the Bible.
NKJV - And Adam knew his wife again, and she bore
NIV – And Adam lay with his wife again, and she gave birth
NLT - Adam had sexual relations with his wife again, and she gave birth
NET- And Adam had marital relations with his wife again, and she gave
In the Hebrew language the word for sexual relations was the word YADA defined as TO KNOW. Is this the first man and woman knew each other thus not feeling any shame. Can you imagine having a friend someone so close to you that you are ashamed of anything to tell them or show them? I find this at the core of why I don’t just have sex and intimacy with just any woman. For me and for most of my life even in my teens and twenties when I was single I knew I did not want to share my gift with just anyone. Does anyone feel that too? You don’t have t answer that out loud but answer that in your heart sometime.
Conclusion and Benediction
If we are to live according to the original capacity of our body’s ability to express love and thus "fulfill the very meaning of his being and existence," we must win the battle in our hearts over lust. We must come to see the body, once again, as the revelation of the eternal mystery of God (cf. General Audience 3/18/81).
I hope this truth of the Bible sets your hearts free from what culture and evil are trying to tell you about sex. You have been duped no longer. God created our bodies so we could show our spouses the sacrificial gift of Love through the union our bodies becoming “one flesh.” We must look at our body as a temple to God for we were made in His image. Our sexuality is so strong and powerful that God made it this way so we wouldn’t miss the purpose of it. The Bible is a guide to a great romance that God invites us to. It’s for sure not a legal document. The Bible uses marital love as analogy more than any other example to help us understand God’s eternal plan for us.
If we live in accordance to what God is telling us and has revealed through our bodies we will fulfill the very meaning of our lives and that is to Love. Jesus primary commandment was and is “Love one another as I have loved you” John 15:12. Jesus gave his physical body up for us for the forgiveness of Sin from our falling away from real union. On the cross he died a physical death as the ultimate gift to us. He showed us the power of giving ourselves as a gift, for his gift was to all of us. In his Resurrection he defeated evil and showed us a way back to “THE BEGINNING”. His way of life will restore our sexuality to the way it was meant to be before the Fall. It is why He came.
I challenge you to find your Adam or Eve when you are ready to embrace God’s will for marriage and sexuality as a gift. Be careful it is not much of a gift to the one you want to spend eternity with if you have given it to 10 others prior. Go out from here knowing that God wants you to have His gift all you have to do is open your hearts and wait. I leave you with this promise from God in 1 Corinthians 2:9-10
No one's ever seen or heard anything like this,
Never so much as imagined anything quite like it—
What God has arranged for those who love him.
References:
Man and Women He Created Theology of the Body by John Paul II (translated by Michael Waldstein)
The Pope’s Theology of the Body by Christopher West 2001
Nooma – Breathe by Rob Bell
Biblical verses from the New Internal Version
I want to take you on an adventure of our hearts. This great adventure is about discovering how we can as both physical and spiritual beings find the meaning in our lives. We will look at the origins of our sexuality driven by our strong desire to be know and become one with another person. We’ll see that love and serving each other is at the foundation to finding our meaning. This is not a “don’t do it” speech on sex, it is at its core, a rediscovery of the language and longings of our hearts. When we submit in service to each others heart, God's gift of intimacy appears. A gift God wants us to make to others and in particular our spouse. If we learn to make ourselves a gift of love, we may just find the true meaning to life in a very special way.
Open your hearts, free your mind of what culture has or is telling you. Let the Lord Jesus speak to you in this talk for where you are at today and for what you need. In this brief time with you I hope I can re-tell a story of God’s romance. The beauty of his original plan for us is truly his most special gift to us. It is up to you to discover what this looks like for your life. This romantic adventure will take trust, it will take solitude, and it will take much suffering of the heart. It will for sure ask you to die in some respects to things you thought you needed and understood about your physicality. I do promise you this for I have experienced it myself, there is no greater joy than loving someone with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength (paraphrased Luke 10:27). For this is the love God has for us. He wants us to know what 100% surrendered in love feels like, so we will love him in the same way. He gave us the gift of our body as a means to express his love.
You will find not all the answers, but a starting point to look at your own desires to be in relations with another. I give this as a gift from my own experiences and with a lot of help from Lord, who has put a fire in my heart to tell a different story. A radically different story, totally opposite from the story of the world around us which teaches us to be consumers/takers of that sex and intimacy for our own selfishness.
Much of what I contemplate comes out of reflections on marriage and my diligent search for meaning in my past marriages. It also comes out of the many wounds I gave woman with my selfishness pursuit of satisfying my own needs. But it is joy which I have felt that really drives me to show you the truth of God’s gift. I want you to know what true love is and how it works into our sexuality. This sexuality when combined with love is the closest thing we can know of what heaven will be like. It is one of the greatest forms of worship we can offer Jesus. In this talk I will totally depend upon God’s word in the Bible, along with a lot of help and direction from Pope John II sermons on the Theology of the Body. His sermons on this subject are a beautiful analysis of Genesis and Jesus’ Gospel about male and female relationships. I want to thank Christopher West for his summaries of John Paul’s work. It is revolutionary in its message. I encourage to read more of Mr. West's work. It will deepen and change your marriage.
The Fall – The Case for Sex Gone Wrong
The teachings of our culture and times tell us that sex is a selfish act made just for our own pleasure. It tells us we don’t need love to have great sex, we just need perfect bodies, the right perfume/cologne, a beer or the best clothes and you will get more sex. They also beat into us that sexual performance makes us who we are it defines our worth to society. Men are condition to be like race horses expected to give women unbelievable mountain top sexual experiences. For women it is being the perfect sex toy, with the perfect body, the best clothes to attract a man.
Men are ranked by other men on how many women they can conquer. Sex becomes a sport to use women for our own pleasures. Women are forced into pleasing men to be accepted or to keep a boyfriend by how well sexually they perform. Sex is everywhere because our culture instinctively knows its power. It has made sex into a selfish act far from the selfless act of giving our bodies as a gift to that special person we love. Evil twisted our inner most prized gift from God. God wants us to have it back not by controlling us to do so but out of loving us, giving us the freedom to reclaim his gift. For it is out of choice that love can be found. We must choose to be a gift to each other once again if we are ever to experience the original unity and deep connected love again.
When we have sex with another person before the establishment of love and commitments or any emotional depth, our heart senses the emptiness and lack of the all important foundation of love. We become confused about love because sex and nakedness of our souls and hearts came before love. Repeated like this sex becomes mechanical and purely a physical release and not the way God intended it to be. Our intuition tells us even when we are young for sex in this capacity never lives up to what culture or our friends tell us. So we search for better ways to experience sex like using sex toys, pornography, different sexual positions, and multiple partners to find that ecstasy that is so promised.
Making love (sex) is not about sex toys, positions, pornography, or whatever aberrations we can dream up. When we invite God into this place we have no need for all those tricks and gimmicks. Wrapped in each other’s arms, skin to skin, face to face, breath to breath, warm lips together, peering into each other’s eyes finding that complete intimacy and making a place for God and praising and loving him for this gift. Now that is making love. Sex any other way is letting satan use you for his pleasure which will lead to heart ache and dysfunction.
Researchers have known for a long time that teenage sexual activity and depression are linked. In a publication by (Smith and Denton pg21) Teenagers get depressed when they cannot understand the physical, emotional and spiritual loss that happens when the act of intimacy(sex) is not done out of love.
We use sex like a drug to make us feel good for a period of time but like alcohol we do experience not only physical hangovers but also spiritual and emotional ones to. Sex is a temporary escape from this world and like any other escape mechanism some become addicted to it just like drugs and alcohol. This is why we are seeing pornography become so destructive for it gives us sex without love and without another person. It requires nothing of us, it is an illusion and will lead to addiction.
“Addiction is the most powerful psychic enemy of humanity’s desire for God,” says Gerald May in Addiction and Grace, which is no doubt why it is one of our adversary’s favorite ways to imprison us. Once taken captive, trying to free ourselves through willpower is futile. Only God’s Spirit himself can free us or even bring us to our senses.
The "heart" has become a battlefield between love and lust, habitually threatening the meaning of the body. As John Paul says, because of man's disordered passions, "The human body in its masculinity and femininity has almost lost the capacity of expressing this love in which the person becomes a gift…" (General Audience 7/23/80).
How did sex get so twisted? Let us know look at what sin did to our original state of the male female union. How has evil and culture misdirected God’s original design. This starts back in the Garden of Eden in Chapter 3 of Genesis
2 The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.' "
4 "You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. 5 "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."
6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the LORD God called to the man, "Where are you?"
10 He answered, "I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid."
Here the evil serpent convinces us not to trust God that we too can know good and evil. We can know what God knows but this taught us to grasp after God’s likeness instead of receiving it as a gift. All of a sudden we now see our nakedness, our flaws or inadequacies. We hide from God, we hide from each other. God looks for us, we are ashamed and this begins our fall from our original creation. This falling away continues we now grasp on to our original unity and nakedness. Out of this grasping the roots of lust come forward. We try to control and posses the opposite sex for out of fear of losing him/her of being alone and in some respects being found out. We find it really difficult to be totally naked again with each other. This is meant by the fall. The falling away from who we really are. Let us now try to find our way back.
Original Man before the Fall (How we were meant to be)
We have to go way back when God created Adam and Eve to understand God’s original plan for us as man and woman. Here we will find some clues how we were originally created and what life was like for the first couple. We will also see what God asked of them and what gifts he gave them.
There are two accounts of our creation in Genesis. It is important to note the first two accounts describe man and woman before sin. This is very important to the story because we have fallen away from the pure goodness of God’s original plan which is perfect unity of man and woman. Also I want to point out that Jesus who is the only man both of Divine and Flesh whose words offer us a direct understanding on how God wants us to live. Lets us begin with Jesus pointing us back to “THE BEGINNING” in Matthew 19 where we hear Jesus being questioned by Pharisees when they asked him about divorce. He refers them back to man and woman’s perfect unity “that in the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female,' God’s intention for us was to be in pure relationship or to have a perfect union
26 Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."
27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
28 God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground."
Genesis 1:26-28 NIV
So we read here that God created us IN HIS IMAGE and in His Likeness. So we are physical but yet more than physical. We have a likeness to God who is spirit and who is love 1 John 4:18 8Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. NIV
He gave us rule over all the animals. He also created us male and female. He did not describe the animals in this manner. We know ourselves that we are much different than the animals, we posses His image therefore the image of Love. Also if we have his image our bodies must reflect Him in some way. So we must conclude that we can come to know God through our physical body. He also blessed us and not the animals. Again God differentiates us from the animals by blessing us. So this gave us a spiritual quality and creates a great mystery for we know we are more than just physical matter but like God in what way?
We can look further into how we are different than the animals by what God tells us next in Genesis 2:7
7 the LORD God formed the man [a] from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
Here God gives us the breath of life. The Hebrew word (nÿshamah, “breath”) is used for God and for the life imparted to humans, not animals. Its usage in the Bible conveys more than a breathing living organism. Whatever is given this breath of life becomes animated with the life from God, has spiritual understanding.(from the NETBible)
God’s breathes life into us. In some early traditions people did not speak name of God. To utter his name was too holy. God’s name in Hebrew was Y H V H which we would pronounce Yod, Heh, Vav, Hah which when we say it, it sounds like the rhythm of our own breathing. Is the name of God the sound of our breathing? (Rob Bell in Nooma: Breathe) So God is our breath without it we die without God we die.
Now that we have a foundation of being spiritual beings made in the image of God we can start to dive into the origins of our sexuality by further examining the next details that follow in this 2nd account of the creation.
18 The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him." 19 Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 20 So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field.
But for Adam no suitable helper was found.
So Adam named all the animals and realizes he was alone in the world as a person different from the animals. He knew he couldn’t love the animals so he felt alone in complete solitude. This alone feeling is something we all feel. We fear it, we hate this feeling, we cannot live without being in communion with others to find another to love and be loved back drives our inner most desires. To not be alone means to be in communion with another to be in love and be loved in return. This brings us back to what we identified early that God is Love. John Paul II concludes “Love is, therefore, man's origin, vocation, and end.”
So God says “it is not good for the man” to not have someone to Love and to have Love in, so God’s solution is create someone who he can love, so he creates someone that embodies His beauty and is the final touch on His creation this He called woman.
21 So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and closed up the place with flesh. 22 Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.
John Paul II points out in a footnote that the word "rib" in the original biblical language is a play on the word "life" (General Audience 11/7/79). Woman comes from the life of a man. The man now has a missing a piece that rib that God removed to make woman holds a very special role. So a man longs to replace his missing piece and a woman longs to find a man to give her piece back to; the man she came from. This desire to find each other to replace the piece is our deepest desire. It is so strong and at our core that it drives almost everything we do in life. Next we hear Adam cry out what we all would love to say when we find our missing piece.
"This is now bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called 'woman,'
for she was taken out of man." Genesis 2:23
As the Pope explains, "there is no doubt that man falls into that 'sleep' with the desire of finding a being like himself. In this way, the circle of the solitude of the man-person is broken, because the first 'man' awakens from his sleep as 'male and female'" (General Audience 11/7/79). Immediately the man declares: "At last this one is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh." That is to say, "Finally, a person with whom I can share the gift of life. Finally, a person I can love!"
So we see here that God has given us the Gift of Life and in that he provided everything we need to know Him and to love and be loved by another person. Now that we have another to love how are we to Love? How are we to find it? How are we to know what love really is? When are we ready to do this? Let us try to answer these by looking into this Gift of Love and this ultimate reunion.
24 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. (NIV)
For God tells us that we are to leave our parents. Are you ready to leave your parents? This is when God and most traditions tell us we are ready to be married to take a spouse in marriage to be reunited in one flesh. This God says signals our readiness for becoming one in flesh with our Adam or our Eve a reuniting of the flesh in holy sex and nakedness.
What does becoming one flesh mean? Is this not a better word for sex “one flesh”? As we unite our flesh in this holy reunion, God lets us go back to how he created us “in the beginning” pure in heart the world disappears around us for a brief amount of time bringing us to the place where we feel as one. This is total relief from our feeling of solitude and it must be the ultimate expression of love. For God made it so enjoyable nothing else in our physical life can match this experience for this is not sex as talked about by culture but it is the true act of making love. So special it is only here that God lets us co-create another human being with His help. In the act of making love we come face to face with each other naked bringing only our bodies to each other as a gift.
The Second Vatican Council teaches us, "man can only find himself by making a sincere gift of himself" (Gaudium et Spes n. 24). So with our bodies, in and through our sexuality, that we realize we are called to give ourselves to one another as a gift. Thus, John Paul can say, "we are convinced of the fact that the awareness of the body’s capacity to show love is the fundamental element of human existence in the world" (General Audience 1/16/80).
In this brief encounter of the flesh and spirit we replace the missing piece within us, thus completing what was once lost long ago. We get to relive part of God’s creation story in the intimate act of making love. Do you not see the power, the awesomeness of it? Is it no wonder that God makes our sex drive the most powerful thing in the universe? Can anyone name something we all think about more in common or more often than sex? The missing piece may be the root of our internal sexual drive not only to create new life but to replace this missing piece. How else do we describe where this urge or need comes from? We don’t know what drives us so passionately and strongly but this need/urge does not go away until we have been reunited with our own Adam or Eve, who holds our missing piece. Our hearts long for each other to dive deeply into the purely intimate act of rejoining and becoming one again with each other. For God wants this union to be a special one, one out of His love.
When this rejoining is wrapped in Love, it brings with it a filling up of our hearts. We feel gratitude, amazement, and joy or better put ecstasy that something so wonderful could feel this good. Webster’s dictionary defines ecstasy as “rapture from the contemplation of divine things”. Don’t you think our divine creator God wants us to have a divine contemplation of the eternal life with Him? Maybe it’s through this uniting of our hearts in the act of sex that God whispers into our hearts this secret that so many of us fail to hear. Once you have really listened to Him and have heard the secret you so would love to tell everyone, but you just cannot find the human words to express it. It is such a big secret God wants us to keep it safe within the context of marriage and not to share it with just a random person. It is so deep and profound, to share it with an acquaintance or friend would be reducing sex to a physical act of pleasure much like drinking a glass of water when you’re thirsty or eating your favorite food. Is not sex so much more than just satisfying a bodily function or controlling a selfish need?
We see that in our original sexuality that at the end of Genesis 2 25 The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.
When we find that true love, that piece, and become the truest gift to each other we feel no shame being completely naked knowing each other so intimately that we have nothing to hide from each other. Trust each other with each other’s Gift of Life.
Let’s look at how Moses describes sex in Genesis 4:25 using a few different translation of the Bible.
NKJV - And Adam knew his wife again, and she bore
NIV – And Adam lay with his wife again, and she gave birth
NLT - Adam had sexual relations with his wife again, and she gave birth
NET- And Adam had marital relations with his wife again, and she gave
In the Hebrew language the word for sexual relations was the word YADA defined as TO KNOW. Is this the first man and woman knew each other thus not feeling any shame. Can you imagine having a friend someone so close to you that you are ashamed of anything to tell them or show them? I find this at the core of why I don’t just have sex and intimacy with just any woman. For me and for most of my life even in my teens and twenties when I was single I knew I did not want to share my gift with just anyone. Does anyone feel that too? You don’t have t answer that out loud but answer that in your heart sometime.
Conclusion and Benediction
If we are to live according to the original capacity of our body’s ability to express love and thus "fulfill the very meaning of his being and existence," we must win the battle in our hearts over lust. We must come to see the body, once again, as the revelation of the eternal mystery of God (cf. General Audience 3/18/81).
I hope this truth of the Bible sets your hearts free from what culture and evil are trying to tell you about sex. You have been duped no longer. God created our bodies so we could show our spouses the sacrificial gift of Love through the union our bodies becoming “one flesh.” We must look at our body as a temple to God for we were made in His image. Our sexuality is so strong and powerful that God made it this way so we wouldn’t miss the purpose of it. The Bible is a guide to a great romance that God invites us to. It’s for sure not a legal document. The Bible uses marital love as analogy more than any other example to help us understand God’s eternal plan for us.
If we live in accordance to what God is telling us and has revealed through our bodies we will fulfill the very meaning of our lives and that is to Love. Jesus primary commandment was and is “Love one another as I have loved you” John 15:12. Jesus gave his physical body up for us for the forgiveness of Sin from our falling away from real union. On the cross he died a physical death as the ultimate gift to us. He showed us the power of giving ourselves as a gift, for his gift was to all of us. In his Resurrection he defeated evil and showed us a way back to “THE BEGINNING”. His way of life will restore our sexuality to the way it was meant to be before the Fall. It is why He came.
I challenge you to find your Adam or Eve when you are ready to embrace God’s will for marriage and sexuality as a gift. Be careful it is not much of a gift to the one you want to spend eternity with if you have given it to 10 others prior. Go out from here knowing that God wants you to have His gift all you have to do is open your hearts and wait. I leave you with this promise from God in 1 Corinthians 2:9-10
No one's ever seen or heard anything like this,
Never so much as imagined anything quite like it—
What God has arranged for those who love him.
References:
Man and Women He Created Theology of the Body by John Paul II (translated by Michael Waldstein)
The Pope’s Theology of the Body by Christopher West 2001
Nooma – Breathe by Rob Bell
Biblical verses from the New Internal Version
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