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Behold, It Was Very Good!

8/20/2019

by Pastor Christian Andrews

Sex! Now that I have your attention…let’s talk about sex. No, this is not a conversation about the birds and the bees. It is an unfortunate but needed invitation to reclaim a Biblical world view of human sexuality. God designed marriage and in it limited our carnal desires but also freed us to enjoy His design.
            The first relationship God revealed to us is the one between Him and us. We are created in His image. The second relationship God showed us is that of marriage. “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth…’” (Genesis 1:27, 28a NASB) and “For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). From the beginning is was God’s intent that the man and his wife be physically joined. The command to be fruitful and multiply cannot be obeyed without a man and woman physical union. The promise of one flesh cannot be fulfilled without a man and woman physical union. Sex is part of God’s design for us and a powerful drive within us so that we will accomplish God’s will for the filling of the earth through the husband / wife union.
            Just as sin destroyed our relationship with God, so sin also destroyed the relationship between wife and husband. We perverted God’s design and quickly chose to use the power of the sexual drive selfishly and to control and manipulate instead of to live sacrificially as husband and wife. God, then, made it clear to us that His plan has protective limits. Most specifically He gave us this commandment: “You shall not commit adultery” (Exodus 20:14). He also gave us whole lists explaining what this commandment means (see Leviticus 18 for example). In essence, the boundaries God set for our celebration of sexuality can be summarized as follows: the practice of sexual intercourse is proper only within the confines of a one-man-one-woman marriage. All other sexual expressions are sin. These include but are not limited to premarital sex (fornication), adultery, incest, homosexuality, bisexuality, bestiality, prostitution, and pornography. It’s astounding that we even have to make this list, but God’s plan for marriage and the family is being destroyed by both the world’s practice and many within the so called “church.”
            The right Christian response to the attack on Biblical marriage and the family ought to be two-fold: we must repent, we must uphold God’s design. The call to repentance is broad, that is, it applies to everyone. Whether we practice sex contrary to God’s will or condone it even if we don’t practice it or only remain silent in the face of the challenges, we need to repent. God’s gracious promise is that He is faithful and just and will forgive us and cleanse us from our unrighteousness (1 John 1:9). Then, because the voices in the world are so strong, ours must be stronger as we champion and defend God’s design. God designed the husband / wife relationship, marriage, and the family as the building blocks and foundation of society. We need to be bold to live out and teach the Biblical standards for both our relationship with God and our relationships with each other. We need to celebrate and defend boldly the one-man-one-woman institution of marriage.
            The promotion of a non-Biblical sexual ethic is destroying the very foundations of society. Biblical marriage and Biblical family are under attack. God designed marriage. God gave us the boundaries for marriage. God invites us to repent when we violate the boundaries and then celebrate His beautiful design. All this because “God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31a).

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Helping Us Live a God Pleasing Life

8/13/2019

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by Pastor Christian Andrews

I don’t like being wrong. I don’t like being told that I’m wrong. I don’t like being told that I’ve done something wrong. I suspect we are all alike in this way. This feeling is so strong that I’ve even started this article with three sentences beginning with “I.” As far as I know, there are no languages other than English where the middle letter of both “sin” and “pride” is the letter “i.” Sin and pride are problems to which God’s law speaks. Because we don’t like being reminded that we’ve done wrong, that we’ve sinned, we tend to also not like God’s law. We would rather hear mostly about love and mercy and grace. However, as we read in Romans 7:12, “the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good” (ESV). To help us understand the goodness of God’s Law, we have said it has three uses or purposes. We find these listed in the Explanation to Luther’s Small Catechism by Harald Sverdrup. The benefits of the law are to “point out to us our sins and the wrath of God toward sin,” to “make us anxious to seek Christ,” and to “point out to the believer what fruits his faith must bear.” *
The first benefit of God’s law is the unpleasant one and the one we might most resist. It is however a necessary first step if we are to understand the mercy of God. The unfortunate reality of life is that it begins in slavery to sin. We call this condition “original sin.” We are reminded in Romans 3:23 that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” and in Romans 5:19 that “by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners.” Sin separates us from God. Its consequence is eternal separation from God. We all know what sin is because as we read in Romans 3:20 “by the works of the law no human being will be justified in [God’s] sight since through the law comes knowledge of sin.” It is God’s law that tells us we have not loved God with our whole mind, being, and strength (Deuteronomy 6:5). It is the law that reminds us that we have not loved our neighbor as ourselves (Matthew 22:39). And, if we are still having trouble figuring out how our failure to love can be true, we can take a quick look through the Ten Commandments and realize how impossible they are to keep.
We have a problem. Our sin has separated us from God--we fall short of His glory. Or, as we read in Romans 6:23, “The wages of sin is death…” After the law confronts us with our sin, we can next experience the second benefit of the law. When we admit our desperate problem, God shows us the solution. The law causes us to be “anxious to seek Christ.” The promise is in the second part of Romans 6:23, “…but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” The exact benefit of the law in leading us to Christ is in Galatians 3:24, “So then the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith.” We are not declared “not guilty” of our sins—justified—by the law, but it is the law that leads us as a guardian or tutor to Christ. When we know our sin and the desperate condition that is ours because of our sin, it is God’s desire that we look to Jesus the “founder and perfecter of our faith” (Hebrews 12:2). By faith we then receive justification “by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:24).
Romans 6 is a beautiful explanation of what happens to us when God gives us the gift of salvation. “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life…We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin…Do not present your members to sin as instruments of unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments of righteousness” (4, 6, 13). The third benefit of the law is to help us as we present ourselves to God as instruments of righteousness. The law “points out to the believer what fruits his faith must bear.” As Psalm 119:105 confesses, “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” We must be clear that it is not our obedience that produces faith. Rather it is our faith and the transformation God has worked in our hearts that produces obedience. The law helps us know what to do and not to do because the new self wants to do what is right.
When we are truly in God’s Word, we will hear the law. When we hear God’s law, we might ask ourselves, “What benefit does God want me to have from His law?” Is God calling me to repentance because I have sinned? Is God pointing me to Jesus where He lavishes on me mercy and grace? Is God encouraging me to live out my love for Him and for my neighbor? We cannot obey the law enough to be saved, but that does not mean God’s law is not of great benefit as it shows us our sin, drives us to Jesus, and helps us live a God pleasing life.

* Luther's Small Catechism and Explanation. The Board of Parish Education, The Association of Free Lutheran Congregations, Minneapolis, 1993. p. 35-36.

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Male and Female: Forgiven and Refreshed

8/6/2019

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by Pastor Christian Andrews

It may seem mind boggling how quickly society’s perspective on sex and gender has shifted. The progressive gender ideology itself is only a few decades old. The foundations on which this ideology is built, however, is much older and can be traced back to the Garden of Eden. God’s words are clear from the beginning from where we confess, “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27 NASB). The Fall corrupted God’s creation, a corruption that has grown to its present form, but a corruption God corrects with redemption.
            In a conversation Jesus had with some religious leaders of His time regarding marriage, Jesus affirmed the Genesis confession: “And He answered and said, ‘Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female…’” (Matthew 19:4). The very need for Jesus to remind the Jewish religious leaders of the original design in creation shows that God’s design had been broken. The break happened at an event we call The Fall. “When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings” (Genesis 3:6, 7). Adam and Eve did not trust God’s plan for them. They broke trust with God by eating of the tree from which He had forbidden them to eat. With that eating came sin and its consequences.
“To the woman He said,
'I will greatly multiply
Your pain in childbirth,
In pain you will bring forth children;
Yet your desire will be for your husband,
And he will rule over you” (Genesis 3:16).
Not only was the relationship between God and humanity broken, the relationship between the man and the woman was also broken. God’s order for male and female was defiled.
            Today, we can trace the effects of this brokenness through Charles Darwin to the contemporary denial of God’s intended created order. Darwin’s writing did not occur in a vacuum, but his notion that life is the result of an evolutionary process has greatly influenced progressive gender ideology. The world view that flows from an evolutionary creation is centered on the proposition that there is no God who has given order to creation. Without God and the order He designed, society and its architects can develop all sorts of attempts to find its own order. The proposal that has recently become vogue is that, while there may be only two biological sexes, it is not biology that determines one’s gender. In essence the concepts of sex and gender have been divorced from each other. This divorce is an attempt to create a new world order. Each individual is free to deny his or her God given reality in exchange for a lie. The Holy Spirit wrote though the Apostle Paul, “Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen” (Romans 1:24, 25).
            The response from God’s people needs to be a return to God’s created order. “Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness;...’ God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:26-27). God created two sexes, only two. So, God also created only two genders. Sex and gender in God’s plan are not to be separated. We are male or we are female. Male by sex is male by gender. Female by sex is female by gender. To hold any other position is to be part of the brokenness of sin, and there is only one solution to the brokenness and the consequences of sin. “…for there is no distinction; for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus; whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith” (Romans 3:22b-25a). With the crowd at the Temple who heard Peter’s sermon, we, too, need to hear, “Therefore repent and return, so that your sins may be wiped away, in order that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord…” (Acts 3:19).
            When God made us in His image, He made us male and female. God’s created order was corrupted by sin. The corruption has continued and grown since sin came into our world. Only the blood of Jesus can free us from our slavery to sin and its consequences. God’s law will drive us to the good news. When we hear God’s call to repent, to turn away from our sin and our desire to create our own order, God will forgive and refresh our spirits.

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Behold, It Was Very Good!

Helping Us Live a God Pleasing Life

Male and Female: Forgiven and Refreshed

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