Lesson 48

Swinger or Swindler 1 Cor. 6:13-7:7

We’ve worked into that section that is concerned with the details of life, with man’s relationship to man and man’s relationship to wife, with relationship between citizen and government, etc. And we’ve come in particular to Deut. 22 which we still have not moved into. We’ve been two weeks introducing Deut. 22. The reason for this is because Deut. 22 deals with the sexual rights of man and since this is a contemporary issue and under a lot of discussion I’ve decided to go back into the rest of God’s Word to show you why the Bible lays down certain ground rules in sex. Not because God is an old fogy that doesn’t like us to enjoy ourselves, but that He is simply laying these things down so that we will not be injured and so that actually we can have true happiness. We have dealt with the doctrine of man’s nature, we’ve worked through the seven points on the doctrine of man’s nature, the immaterial part of man, the material part of man, the human spirit, the human soul, the human body and the interrelationships that these three elements of man’s nature have.

Last time we went to the four points on the doctrine of man’s sexuality. We started with the fact that man was created for two reasons, to finish the master plan of God and to resolve the angelic conflict. The second thing we said was that man was given a test; the test was don’t eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Man was engaged in two jobs, one job was to defend, a defensive operation, to defend the Garden of Eden, and the second was an offensive operation, to conquer the whole earth. We said, therefore, that the third point was that sex was given to man to help him in this testing situation. So the origin of sexuality in Scripture proceeds directly out of man’s spiritual role in history and it’s not some afterthought, it’s not a hangover from man’s animal background or anything of the sort. It is there because of man’s spiritual role in history.

We said that the woman in the Bible is called an hazar, from which we get words like Eliezer, and hazar is a person who is a help. The odd thing about the word “help” as it is applied to the woman in the Bible is that this is the only time, basically, that you ever have a clear definition of hazar applied to a human being. In all other cases in God’s Word hazar is a label for God. If you have done some Scripture memory you recall many verses in the Psalms where it says “God is My help and My shield.” Every time you see that it’s hazar, so it’s using the same word for God that woman has as a label for herself in Gen. 2, again showing her relationship to man.

The last point we made last time was that sexuality has a specific design and the design behind it is to provide man with a soulish experience parallel to his spiritual experience with God. So we have the case of parallel relationship, and it is upon this parallel that sex can be understood and only understood. So those of you who have had courses in sex education you can forget what you learned because you didn’t learn it Biblically. Sex can only be understood when it is understood as a parallelism between the soul and the spirit. God has given man a spiritual relationship with Himself and therefore to illustrate, underscore and edify this spiritual relationship between God and man He has given to man the sexual relationship. We have the spiritual, God and man and we have the male/female. That does not make male the god of the relationship, but it shows you certain parallel elements in the relationship. We went through many Scriptures and concluded last time with the passage before us, 1 Cor. 6.

I start here tonight because I presume that many of you, by the time we got through an hour or teaching were a little slow on the pickup and may not have understood some of the points that we concluded with, so I will go back to 1 Cor. 6 and briefly review that so we can move on to the problems of why promiscuity is ruinous of the sexual relationship.

I Cor. 6:13; in verse 13 we have a proverb cited by the Corinthians. They said, “Foods for the belly, and the belly for foods.” Those of you who have King James, the authors of the King James evidently thought all food was protein so every time you have the word “food” they put “meat.” That is not the word; it is actually just simply food. And this citation up to the colon in the Scripture, the first phrase ends in a colon, “Meats for the belly and the belly for meats:” that ends right there. That is a proverb that the Corinthians were quoting. Paraphrased as to the real meaning behind it they were simply saying look, we have over here food; we have a stomach, the stomach desires food and so therefore what do you do, you fill it with food. The parallel is obvious. Man has sex and he has a sex drive and so what do you do with a sex drive? You fill it with sex and satiate the lust. And they were saying that there’s parallel between the lust for food and the lust for sex.

So Paul answers them by saying, “God shall destroy both it [stomach] and them [foods].” In other words, it’s of no real relevance as far as eternity is concerned as to what happens with the food situation and your stomach. The resurrection body has no stomach; the resurrection body is independent of the physical environment. However, with the body Paul says it’s an entirely different thing. The sex drive looked upon Biblically is not of the same type of drive as the normal survival instincts of man for food and everything else. Sex is not a mere survival lust or a survival drive in Scripture. There’s an entirely different nature about it and Paul goes into it in detail. He says, “God shall destroy both it and them.” In other words, when this life is over the natural body goes to the grave and decays and later on in time believers receive a resurrection body and the resurrection body has absolutely no continuity food wise with the present body.

However, he says, “Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body.” He takes the proverb that the Corinthians quoted at him, turns it around and uses it back upon them. He says look, I want you Corinthians to see something; it’s not the issue of you simply satisfying a bodily desire in the area of sex. You have to look upon it first of all as your body in the Lord; the Lord wants to use your body, so therefore how He wants to use your entire body is the issue. He also introduces, by way of implication in verse 13 that sex involves your total body, it’s not like food where you have an organ, stomach, that’s involve and that organ alone is involved and so the resurrection body doesn’t have the organ so it’s of little consequence. So in verse 13 he intimates there’s something different about this problem of sex.

In verse 14 he goes on and says “And God hath both raised up the Lord, and will also raise up us by His own power.” So while gluttony and so on are sins, they are incidental in the eternal destiny of your body, sex is not. There is something that occurs in sex that has carryover implications. And here it immediately raises the issue about the continuity between the natural body that you now have and your resurrection body. He will give you your resurrection body in due time but the body itself is important. The bodily identity is carried over in the resurrection. In the resurrection, your resurrection body has very similar characteristics to your present body, minus the things in the present body that have to do with decay, etc. Therefore, since the body is so important that is raised, verse 14, this changes our perspective on sex if sex involves the whole body.

Now verse 15, “Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? Shall I, then take the members of Christ, and make them the members of an harlot? God forbid. [16] What? Know ye not that he who is joined to an harlot is one body? For two, saith He, shall be one flesh.” He goes back and quotes Gen. 2:24, the basis of sexuality and at this point he clearly intimates, as Gen. 2 did and if you didn’t catch it in Gen. 2 you certainly have to catch it here, that at the point of sexual relationship you have two souls, here’s the male, here’s the female: volition, conscience, personal affections, mentality, and the soul has bodily affections. So now you have two souls and what happens according to Gen. 2:24 and 1 Cor. 7:16 is that at the point of the sex act these two souls take on one body and so you have as it were, one body. There is an exchange that goes on; the nature of that exchange is not too well understood. We have people studying it and we are going to go into some of the details tonight, but the exchange is not well understood. Nevertheless the Bible says that at the point of the sex act we have one body created that was not there before. And of course, manifestation of children precede out of this, they have [can’t understand words] male nor the female, they share their natures.

And so similarly then we have this one body concept that from this point on you have, as it were, two souls living out through one body. Now, he says, this is an analogy. He says it’s the same thing, he goes on as we showed last time in Eph. 5 and he intimates back in verse 15 that you are also members of Christ. How do we get the parallel? We showed last time that the parallel relationship between you and the Lord. Here’s your soul: volition, conscience, personal affections, mentality, and bodily affections. Here’s your human spirit and the human spirit, you might say there’s an exchange going on, it keeps ups life. If you want to translate the word “soul” the best word to translate “soul” to give it the purest connotation from the Hebrew and the Greek is the word “life.” That will probably give you the most accurate concept. The way I draw this diagram it looks like soul and human spirit are two separate entities but it’s the best thing I can do to illustrate it. The human spirit, at the point of regeneration is born again, is recreated after the image of God and the Holy Spirit comes to dwell inside that human spirit. This establishes a unity, it establishes a unity between your human spirit and Christ’s giving of the Holy Spirit. Notice too you have volition, the Holy Spirit has volition; so you have two personalities working out through the same spirit. And so similarly in the Bible, in the soulish area, in the realm of sex, you have two souls living out through one body and this is what sex is all about.

He says therefore it’s very serious to have a situation, in verse 15 and 16 as these Corinthians did, because after all, as we’ve said again and again Corinth was the place of the swingers, and if you wanted a church where you have everything going you went to Corinth. The word “Corinthian” meant swinger in the ancient world. That’s just the word, you’d call a person that we would a swinger; you’d call him a Corinthian, he acts like a Corinthian. And that’s exactly… isn’t it interesting, God chose Corinth as a place of a testimony for His Word.

Therefore we have these Corinthians engaging in sex acts with unbelievers, whores, etc. and so what he says is look, here you are as a Christian, your human spirit is in union with the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ is living in and through you, now look what you’ve done. You’ve taken Him, here’s the Christian, say the man is a Corinthian believer, and suppose the woman in this case is an unbeliever, and so now you’ve got this person in whom the Lord Jesus Christ is living and he establishes one body with this prostitute. Now what happens? Now you’ve got a real mess on your hands because you’ve got the Lord Jesus Christ actually having to live out through a body which has as it’s identity that of a prostitute.

And he says that’s what you’ve done here. And the only way you can interpret this section of the New Testament is to fully and honestly recognize that something is happening through his sexuality at this point. There’s something brought into existence that did not exist before and it is this “one flesh” mentioned in verse 16.

Verse 17, “But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit. [18] Flee fornication,” see, verse 17 gives you the other side of the analogy. Verse 16, it’s the one body; verse 17 deals with the spiritual unity that you have with Jesus Christ. “Flee fornication. Every sin that a man does is outside the body,” now the point that he’s making here is that the sins that a man does is basically from his old sin nature operating and you have this lust pattern working into the soul, etc., the mentality of the soul becomes obsessed with human viewpoint, lust, etc. and you have this cycle going on, but the man has not submitted his soul to another person’s body and he has not, in turn, allowed his body to intermingle with someone else. In other words, he’s kept independent; he’s sinned, but he hasn’t given up the power of [can’t understand word] of over his own body.

The rest of verse 18 says, “But he that commits fornication sins against his own body.” And at this point what he’s saying is going back to this concept is that when you commit fornication you are submitting your body to someone else to live out their life through it and at this point you have given up control of this body and you are using the body that God gave you to live out your soul to someone else and it’s a fornication type relationship and therefore it is sin, and you’ve involved your whole body, it is not just a case of fulfilling one desire like eating and drinking or something like that, it is far, far more serious as far as the Word of God is concerned than simply satisfying some little desire. In verses 19-20, the cornerstone and summary of this point, your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. Last time we went into verses 1-7, we’ll save that for later.

Let’s summarize our parallel so that we clearly see it so that when we deal with fornication we can study and understand why it is that promiscuity destroys sex. Let’s draw a parallel. Here you have your salvation relationship with the Lord. Here you have your sex relationship. Let’s draw the parallel as we summarize what we’ve learned from the Word of God. The first thing that we’ve learned, spiritual relationship is that you have a need and salvation always exists because of a need that you have.

What is the need involved in the spiritual relationship? The need involved in the spiritual relationship is salvation from sin, the penalty of sin and the lack of righteousness. Those are three basic problems every unbeliever has. If you are not a Christian you have three problems that cannot be solved apart from Jesus Christ, and that is that you have guilt before God and I don’t talk about guilt feelings, you may or may not feel guilty, that’s not the point. The point is that legally you have real guilt before God. Secondly you have the problem that God in His justice always must punish that which comes short of His righteousness, so you have the problem of inheriting His judgment. Thirdly you have the problem that you lack perfect obedience to His will. So this is your need, your need for salvation.

Similarly in the sex relationship there is a bona fide and legitimate need that is legitimate because God put it there. This is why we always have to be so touch on this subject; we’ve got to keep the balance. People always go from one extreme to the other. Either they go to the extreme of denying sex and saying it’s naughty, naughty, we can’t talk about it and all the rest of it, which is a bunch of bologna because you can see how much this epistle to Corinth is devoted to it, and it was read to a mixed congregation, just as Deut. 22 was read to a mixed congregation, children included. So therefore Biblically there’s no reason for the lack of discussion of sex. But the other tendency we find in our society is to talk about it in non-Biblical terms to the point so where instead of becoming sensitized, as the so-called sensitivity training is supposed to do, you become desensitized and you ruin the whole thing.

So let’s look at the need. First you have the need of the man, then you have the need in the female; the male and the female in the human race. First the male: the male, according to the Word of God has needs. First of all, he has a need that God has given for him to understand what love means, to understand the responsibility of love, the fact that this can only be learned through the college of hard knocks. You have to go through life and learn what it means to love someone under pressure, when that someone may be dying, when that someone may not be so nice to love, and you still have to go on loving, loving, loving, because God is training you to love so that you in eternity will understand what it means to love. And you will understand if you really love someone, you’re going to understand why God loves you when you’re such a stinker, and when you go off the line, and when you do things that annoy Him, and it’s going to be very vivid in eternity how you loved other people and they spit in your face and they did all sorts of things, etc. You are going to have to go through the process of loving and through this process, through discipline, to understand what love means. So man has a need that God has assigned him, a role in history to understand what love means.

The second need that man has is that he needs a help, or a hazer, and that’s the woman’s label in Scripture. A help for what? A help that the man may do God’s plan for his life. Adam needed a help to perform the role that he was asked to do by God in the Garden of Eden and God created the woman to help him. The woman, therefore, is needed for a help; man needs a help. So therefore the male has another need for a woman, he needs someone that is going to help him fulfill God’s plan for his life.

The woman has two needs; she has been given a lesson to learn in history known as submission, and basically to translate it, respond, to submit. And God has assigned her this role in life and so therefore she is going to learn a little bit so that in eternity she will understand what it means to obey the Lord in all of the details, etc. Submission, and that’s one of the things the Bible assigns a woman’s role in sex as a learning experience, to learn… it’s true, this also shows you something else about sex, it’s not a one-shot deal, it’s a process of time that goes on and on and on and on and on, it is a process. And that is why we have so misconstrued this whole thing in our day, where it’s looked upon as a one-shot experience, we’ll just go for the thrill of it and forget all the details, when sex was designed for the long-term disciplined training that comes out of it. This is why we have young people that marry in their teens, etc. and other people that marry when they are older and they are still teenagers mentally and they go through their marriage for two or three years and then fall apart and you get divorces all over the place. And it’s all over the fundamental circles, divorces all over the place due to the fact that they have never been taught what sex means, they have never been taught what it means when you pledge your troth to someone else and what you’ve entered into. So because of this people have this crybaby attitude, oh I got stuck with the wrong person and I want out. Well it was your fault for getting into it, you made your decision and don’t blame anyone else but yourself. So that’s the role and the need for male and female.

The woman has another need and that is also given to her by God and that is the need to compliment some man. In other words, she has to look around and become the help of someone who is performing the will of God. Notice in Scripture, the plan of God is very much identified with the male side, not the female side. That’s why I’m interested in all my Sunday School teachers from 6^th grade up being men because of the fact that children get this feminine image of Christianity and they never should have this. This is one of the most dangerous things that fundamentalism is doing today is to have women teach young men and the result is that they carry over this effeminate image and so all the rest of their life they’ve got the idea that going to church and the rest of it is for the women. We’ve got men in this congregation that have the same idea because I’ve talked to some of them. This is all over the place, identification of Bible Christianity with women and it’s exactly opposite—exactly opposite in the Word of God. The woman is a fifth wheel without the man, according to the Word of God. And she exists to help him perform God’s will in his life.

Now we have a problem at this point, right here, and this first parallel breaks down at one point, the fall of man. Turn to Gen. 3 and we will study this detail. Something happened with the fall to frustrate this need. Gen. 3:16, here we have the curse placed upon the first man and woman, who by the way, were not at this point called “Adam and Eve;” they’re called ish and isha, male and female. Adam did not name his wife Eve until after the Lord Jesus Christ preached the gospel to him, and his response and the sign that he was saved was when he said I believe the promise that my wife is going to be the one who is going to set in motion the Messiah coming into the world, and at this time he called her Evah because she was the mother of all living.

In verse 16 you have the problem for the woman. She has this need to compliment a man who is doing the will of God, but when the fall occurred and the curse came in, the woman’s role now suddenly becomes distasteful and for the rest of the time in history, and all you women will probably says amen, this role of complimenting and submitting to a man has become very aggravating and frustrating, and it irritates you. And all this is given in Gen. 3:16, “Unto the woman he said, I will increase [greatly multiply] your sorrow,” now it doesn’t mean that she didn’t have sorrow before, it means that I will make your sorrow great, literally, “I will make your sorrow great and your conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children,” this refers to… one of the roles she had was to compliment the man in carrying out the plan of God. What was the plan of God? That he have children and those children would move out and reign over the animal kingdom according to the command of Gen. 1:26 and 28. So there’s one way she was to compliment man but when she goes to compliment man she finds her physical body gives her pain, she finds that bearing children involves pain and suffering and sorrow and heartache. So there one of her roles becomes frustrating. And all women from the point of Eve all the way down through history have experienced this.

The second part of her role complimenting man is also frustrated in the rest of verse 16, “and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over you.” What this means, it is not exactly that in the original, what it means is that you can’t help it but that your desire is at the mercy of this man and now you’re stuck with him; that’s the thrust of the text. If we had time we’d go into the details of it. So therefore you have the two ways in which woman is to fulfill man’s role and they become frustrating, they become antagonistic, they become irritating to the woman. And this irritation that you experience is due to the fall according to Gen. 3:16.

Now the man is not without problems either because the fall messes him up. His role is to do the will of God, his role is to work, his role is to work in the Garden, to defend it, and to move outside of the Garden and he finds himself also frustrated by the fall. Verse 17, “And unto Adam God said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.” Now this curse is not work; there are some people that are just fat and lazy and dumb and think that work is the curse that God put on the human race. If you think that, my pardon, but that just shows you are a lazy person. So the curse in the Garden is not work. The curse in the Garden is work that is unproductive, that’s what the curse is. The curse is this business of putting everything you’ve got into a job and then watching it go down the drain. That’s what the problem is, putting in your effort to do this thing and struggle and it still doesn’t come the way you want it. That is what God predicts in verse 17, “in sorrow shall thou eat of it all the days of thy life.”

Verse 18, “Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field,” etc. You see right away from this analysis, Christians if they realized what the Word of God says it would solve half their problems in sex. So realize that these problems are going to occur, so you have some of the young men and some young girls just graduating and they’re going to trip down to the altar and get married and they’re married for two weeks and they suddenly discover, the man that his job is aggravating, and he comes home with his mouth down to his shoes and she feels hurt because he’s prepared this nice supper and he comes walking in and he’s growling, he’s grumpy, and all the rest of it, and she doesn’t understand and she thinks it’s because she didn’t cook the food right or something. It has nothing to do with it; it’s due to this problem in Gen. 3:17-19. He’s gone out and tried to work in a fallen world and that’s what happens. So he comes home and then she gets to be a bear and he wonders what’s the matter with her, what turned her off recently, so he looks around and can’t figure that out. Actually all he has to do is turn back to Gen. 3:16 and he finds out that what’s turned her off is the fact that she’s got an old sin nature and he’s got an old sin nature. He’s out of fellowship so his old sin nature looks over there and sees her, her sin nature sees him, there’s a big smoky crash and that’s what’s going on because she’s simply responding to his sin nature. He is aggravating to her and she just takes it out, and this is what goes on. And all this is explained by God’s Word.

Now we have a second parallel. Not only do we have a need in salvation and a need in sex but we go to a second parallel. Again, spiritual and sex, the need is a solution. In salvation we have need of a solution; the solution is presented by the initiative of divine grace. God does the initiating, He solved the problem so therefore the solution to spiritual death and all these things is by God’s grace. What is the solution for sex need? The solution for sex need is the right person, and this is something that you can see again and again in Scripture, I don’t have time to go any further than we have but I could take you from Scripture to Scripture to Scripture to Scripture to show you that God has a person specifically in mind for you; if you are a young lady, single, God has a man picked out for you and your job is to exercise divine guidance and you will be led to him. And if you are a young man, then God has a young woman picked out for you and it’s all there in the plan of God. This is the solution; we find it in Gen. 2:22-24 in principle. And it’s still valid this side of the fall.

What happens? Look carefully at how it works out. Verse 22, “And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her to the man.” Now we usually think of the dating process of the male looking around. Well that’s true to a certain degree and yet the Word of God indicates that since it is the male on whom the great burden falls to perform the will of God, he is the one that is going to be called on through the rest of his life to be the center of the family, to be the director of the family, to exercise the plan of God, etc. that he needs the help and so the plan, he has this right person, the right person is the woman, she comes to him in the circumstances of life. Now obviously this doesn’t mean he sits around and waits for her to drop in his lap. The point there is that he takes advantages of all these social situations, etc. but the woman is drawn to the man, just like Eve was drawn to the man. You have this drawing occur according to Gen. 2:22.

Verse 23, “And Adam said,” now notice something else that happens with this solution, the man recognizes it. Take note of this because when we get into promiscuity these factors begin to break down and here’s why if you’re messing around in promiscuity you’re going to be in trouble because verse 23 says, baring promiscuity, that the man will recognize the right woman when she comes along. “And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh,” this is actually a hymn in the Hebrew, “she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” What happens? Look at what the man does. First he recognizes her and then he makes love, he initiates, and it’s to that that the woman responds.

Verse 24, he shall cleave unto his wife, etc. So you have the man who recognizes the right woman and he initiates the love and she responds to it. So then we have the solution, just as in the solution, parallel, when we are unbelievers what happens? If the Holy Spirit is working in our life some Christian comes along and shares Christ with us, it may be on the campus, in the home, reading literature that a Christian has written. Somehow the gospel news comes to you. What do you do with it? The gospel news comes to you and you respond, God brings you to the point of gospel hearing and you respond to this so similarly with the area of sex.

The third parallel is close to this and that is the parallel between volition. In the realm of spirituality you have the problem of volition. In volition you have the believer responding toward the truth. If the Holy Spirit is the spirit of truth He sees to it that the unbeliever as well as the believer will respond to the truth that he needs. For example, you have an unbeliever; what is the truth the unbeliever needs? He needs to know information, the gospel. So if you’ve witnessed to the unbeliever the Holy Spirit makes that real on the inside of the unbeliever. Here you have a believer. Some believers haven’t caught on to this but they’re supposed to be taking in the Word of God regularly. So we have the believer and the believer has been given what? I John 2:27 says we have received an anointing, and that anointing is being identified with the Holy Spirit and that anointing is to cause us to respond to true doctrine. So you have positive response.

It’s the same thing in the realm of sex, you have two things happen, you have the man recognize the woman and begin to initiate love toward her and you have the woman respond to him because she recognizes he is the right man. Now that’s the way it should work in theory and every time you get involved in promiscuity you begin to break this system down and that’s what is happening in promiscuity. 1 John 1:9 or no 1 John 1:9 it still works, that promiscuity begins to tear this relationship apart and you begin to have sorrow and heartache and all the rest of it involved here because we are not following the commands of God.

Now we have the fourth factor that is parallel here. Just as you have an act of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ that causes you to be born again and this act of faith is of two parts, you have an initial act of faith and you have repeated faith, so in sex you have an initial act and you have repeated acts, and you have the same thing, parallel.

And notice something else, and this is the fifth parallel between the two, is that the initial act of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ does what? It allows the Holy Spirit to make you one spirit with the Lord. So as a result of the initial act of faith you have the Holy Spirit regenerating the human spirit. The human spirit is regenerated; you are not in one spirit with the Lord. His Holy Spirit dwells with you and so you have the Holy Spirit and yourself working together, you have a union that’s created at that point, doctrine of regeneration. Now in the realm of sex it’s the same thing except instead of making one spirit you make one body. And here you have the initial act of sex plus additional acts of sex, 1 Cor. 7, and there you have something created, you have a one body created. This is why promiscuity, again, is not to be taken lightly because you’re building something. Every time you engage in it you are building something. And the horrible thing about promiscuity is that you never can finish the building. That’s what’s wrong with our society, we have unfinished buildings all over the place and it’s tearing up homes, it’s tearing up people and causing psychological problems and all the rest of it. And you can’t engage in promiscuity without doing this because this is the mechanics of the Word of God, any more than you can believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and be born again.

Now we have a sixth parallel between the spiritual relationship of the believer and the realm of sex. We have growth, we have a factor of growth, and this factor of growth leads to what Paul says in Gal. 4:19 as “Christ formed in you,” and so as a result of growth we have this concept, “Christ formed in you.” And Paul says to those Galatians that are in trouble, he says I am nervous, in fact, it comes the closest in all the New Testament to Paul worrying, he said I have led you to the Lord and I am worried until you grow up to the point where Christ is formed in you. What does that mean? That means, apparently, that in the human spirit as you act on Bible doctrines and you’re in fellowship, the filling of the Holy Spirit there is formed inside the human spirit something that… Ephesians 1 and 3 says there’s a building there, there’s an actual building built; whatever it is we don’t know but there’s something built there and Paul says I want this thing structured in you and this is Christ in you that is built up over a time period, or an interval of time. And it is only built up on the inside as you walk in the filling of the Holy Spirit. Every moment that you are filled with the Spirit this building is being structured; you find the details in Eph. 3.

Now we have the same thing in the sex relationship. A sex relationship is designed to grow, not stagnate, so therefore we have another parallel in sex. We have the fact that the man and the woman who become one body, in theory, at the point of their marriage, you have this man and woman actually grow closer and closer together with time so that they almost literally become one person. And you have this tremendous growth over a time period, but again notice, it’s growth, growth, growth, it takes time, it’s not something that happens overnight.

The seventh parallel that we can see in the New Testament between point of salvation and sexuality is a very interesting one and it goes back to this concept of need. You have the parallel between Jesus Christ, the plan of God and the Church. You have a parallel with man, plan of God and the woman, in that order. Notice, Jesus Christ was given a role and a job to perform by God the Father. This is the doctrine of the Trinity. Jesus Christ was given this plan. The plan pre-existed the Church; the Church was brought into the picture to help complete the pre-existing plan, so the job, you might say, preceded the employee; the job was there before the employee came around, the job or purpose was there before the instrument to do it was there, so therefore Jesus Christ, obviously from all eternity existed, the Church did not, and the Church is one part of the plan, but the Church’s meaning hinges on the plan; the plan precedes the Church.

Now take it over to the realm of sex, man as a male has been given a responsible role by God and he is to find out that plan of God and stick with it. And when he does that he will find a woman that compliments that plan of God in his life. How it is that people insist… and you see, this is where Christians have got it all backwards, Christians say oh I need somebody to get married to and then all my problems are solved. You should hear what the married people are saying, if I could just get single. So some of you single people, just take it from me, I listen to both sides of the story. So we have man and then we have man given a plan and a purpose. Woman comes along to fulfill the plan, not change the plan. The Church is not ordered… like the social gospel people come along and they start changing the plan, I don’t like this job of witness and evangelizing, it’s too slow, this one by one business, we’ve got to win a whole society, never mind talking to individuals, so the tendency in the social gospel is to erase the plan and the Church begins to dictates the plan.

So you begin to have problems in the marriage when the woman begins dictating the purpose and plan, etc. That’s why I say men should be leaders, why it is not New Testament precedent to have a lady pastor. Can you imagine a woman pastor? They have them now, it’s the latest thing. It completely violates the whole area of sex in the Bible, completely violates it and this is not saying that man is superior to woman; it’s simply saying that in the administration of the plan it works this way and you break it and you’re going to pay the penalty. And of course it’s broken two ways in our day; it either breaks because you have some woman that likes to run everything and she’s not happy unless she can run totally everything that she gets her hands on. You find them every once in a while coming into the church and they want to take over and run this and run that, etc. You have this problem and that’s due to the woman’s fault, but unfortunately a far greater percent of the problem is due to the man. The man refuses to assume his spiritual responsibility so the woman is left doing it and this is what’s happening all over the board. You can go into fundamentalist church after fundamentalist church, why is it on Sunday night and Wednesday night you always see the women, obviously some men have business commitments but in many cases it’s because a lot of men are forsaking their spiritual responsibility and this always leads to one or tow things. Either he fills up with human viewpoint and ruins the family or the woman tries to save this thing and then you begin to have controversy, etc. That’s just the way it is; it confirms the Word of God to the letter. All you have to do is just sit back and study people and that is the greatest proof for the inspiration of Scripture I have ever come across. People behave exactly like the Word of God predicts they will behave.

Now, let’s apply this before we go to Eph. 4. What can men and women do about this situation? Men—the best thing that a man can do is put the will of God first; he is going to find the will of God for his life and stick with it and don’t worry about the woman, she’ll come along but you’ve got to find the will of God and stick with it. The woman—you are to know God’s leading and take every advantage to perceive that leading in the man and compliment it and stop fighting it and resisting, etc. So that’s the two roles cut out for the men and the women.

Now we deal with the problem of promiscuity and we’re going to study very briefly Eph. 4, then we’re going to go back to these parallels and watch what happens when promiscuity enters. Eph. 4:17, the mechanics. The Word of God tells us what leads to promiscuity. I will very hurriedly go over this. “This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, [18] Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart; [19] Who, being past feeling, have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.” In verses 17-19 you have a sequence that you can ascertain by study of the original language.

The sentence begins logically in verse 18, not verse 17. In verse 18 you have two things, you have “the ignorance that is in them,” and the “blindness of their heart.” This is what is meant. Here you have the soul, volition, conscience, personal affections, and mentality. Now you have the volition, speaking of an unbeliever here, goes negative. The word “ignorance” in the Greek means willful ignorance or deliberate ignorance. So here you have negative volition plus mentality equals willful ignorance. That’s the first thing that happens. This happens to believers, they trust the Lord and get going for about two months and then they stall out and they think they can rock along in life by wading around in human viewpoint, they don’t bother to come when the Word of God is taught, and haven’t opened the Bible and there they are. They’re supposed to be feeding on the Word of God, so you have negative volition plus mentality equals willful ignorance.

The second factor in verse 18 is the “blindness of their heart.” The word “blindness” here means callousness and has reference in Scripture to the function of conscience. So you have negative volition plus conscience. That’s the second factor in verse 18, you have willful ignorance and you have callousness of their heart. So you have these two areas of the soul that begin to have problems. The conscience gets calloused to divine standards; mentality becomes confused through its willful ignorance. Therefore, backing up in verse 18 you see what happens, “having the understanding darkened,” the word “understanding” is the products of the mind, so the second step is that once you have willful ignorance you begin to have the thinking process disturbed; the thinking process becomes hazy and disturbed, the word is like a blind man groping around. [Blank spot]

The word “vanity” is the word matiotes which means vapor, it means that what happens, evidently is this, you have the soul and you have the human spirit and once it goes negative and all these things begin to happen, the soul begins to fill up with human viewpoint, the life is being run with human viewpoint, human viewpoint, human viewpoint, lie, lie, lie, falsehood, falsehood, falsehood, and the whole thing is one very delicate structure that’s going to come tumbling down. It’s like a scientific theory that has no validity whatever, it just falls apart and that’s the point here, this is vanity, the vanity of their mind. This is what happens and this is the process that leads to verse 19 because verse 19 is the final result of all this. “Who being past feeling,” the Greek here is a perfective tense which means they have gone past feeling at a point of time and continue going past feeling, so you have this kind of an action. They went beyond feeling at that point and they remain beyond feeling and the result is that they have gone beyond sensitivity, this is the word for sensitivity, it means sensitiveness so spiritual phenomenon, sensitivity to the leading of the Lord, sensitivity to spiritual things, they’ve gone beyond that and therefore they “have given themselves over unto lasciviousness.” The word “lasciviousness” is simply going out and raising hell, and the reason for it is to find happiness, and that is the reason behind this last phrase that’s added in verse 19, “to work all uncleanness with greediness.” The word “greediness” really means here the idea of the fact that they want to covet, they’ve got to get something, get it and get it and get it.

You see what’s happened here is that they’ve gone on negative volition, they fill up with human viewpoint which annihilates all chances of being happy. So all the happiness, you might as well just forget it, right at that point. So therefore since they aren’t happy spiritually they’re going to seek happiness by some other experience. And they’re craving happiness and this gets to be a vicious circle because the more they seek happiness out of the will of God the more insensitive they get, the more insensitive they get the less chance they have of enjoying happiness and it just goes in a vicious cycle. And we have Christians doing that all the time; the frantic search for happiness, if I can just have this I’ll happy, if I can just have that I’ll be happy, if I can get the right woman, the right man I’ll be happy, if I can have a sex experience I’ll be happy, and all the rest of it. This is what is happening here and these are the dynamics in verses 17-19 and the horrible thing about it all is that happiness never, never comes. There is absolutely no fulfillment here and that’s why Paul says the way to happiness, verse 20, “But you have not so learned Christ,” and he comments in verse 23, “be renewed in the spirit of your mind,” that’s the filling of the Holy Spirit, when the Holy Spirit gets control he charges the human spirit and the human spirit works in your mind to produce happiness, joy, peace, power, the fruits of the Holy Spirit.

That’s the way happiness is produced in the believer’s life, not by going out and seeking it in somebody or some thing or something else. As long as you think that you can get happiness this way you are never going to get it, I can guarantee it. You’ll get a few charges here and there and a thrill in this moment and that moment but you’ll never have anything that’s real happiness, you’ll never have anything sustaining in your life until you recognize that the only place is the filling of the Holy Spirit. You can have all the possessions in the world and still be miserable. Some of the most miserable people I have ever met are people that are wealthy. Do you know why? Because it just adds, you think you have problems, and to top it all off, April 15^th IRS so that’s their problems. You think you’ve got it bad, wait until you get wealthy and see what kind of problems you have. I know, you say you’d like to have those problems. But you don’t have any happiness seeking it in this way and that’s the point in the New Testament.

Now let’s take a look at promiscuity and see what happens. Let’s go back through these seven things again and notice how each of the seven is destroyed and warped when people engage in promiscuity. First, let’s go to need. The man has a need to know God’s plan and somebody to compliment the plan. How is the man going to recognize the right woman if he doesn’t know the plan that he’s supposed to do that she’s supposed to compliment? He just can’t answer the question, it’s absolutely impossible, putting the wrong thing first. And some men have always done that, they always put the woman before God and that’s what’s happened. Adam learned it early. You see, this is what always happens. You’ve got to put God’s plan first and the woman second and that’s just the way it has to work. And strangely enough, it always works best that way because that’s the way God wants it to work. So the fact is then that a person engaging in promiscuity gradually… let’s take the man for example, obviously engaging in promiscuity he’s out of fellowship with the Lord, therefore he develops this insensitivity to God’s plan; he develops insensitivity to God’s plan and what happens? He can’t recognize the right woman when she does come along, she could be standing right in front of him and he’d never recognize it. So he disturbs his analysis of his true need.

The second thing it does, it leaves him a very weak kind of person because he never can develop the concept of love. He just flits, love ‘em and leave ‘em and that’s the motto of his life, except they ought to leave out the word “love” because all they do is leave them; there’s not love there and the sooner some women catch onto that the happier they’ll be. Love ‘em and leave ‘em is a wrong formula, there is no love in that kind of a relationship, that’s just fantasy on someone’s part. So the man winds up with two negatives, negative on the plan of God therefore he has no perspective of his life and negative on his need to learn what love means.

Then we have the female and she has problems and she engages in promiscuity. How does it hurt her? It hurts her because she was built to complete some man and she has given herself to another man and she has tried to help satisfy some man, pay him back for a date or something and she’s got herself in trouble and every time she begins to get focusing on other men she misses out on the one man that’s going to come along that can possibly make her happy. So she starts to go down. Secondly, she does not learn what submit means; she’ll never learn what submit means. She’s out after the sexual thrill and that’s it. And she has no concept whatever of submitting in a permanent maturing relationship; she never will as long as she has this mental attitude toward promiscuity. So it fails right there, you see the need begin go break down.

Then the solution, what happens to the solution to the problem? We find that endangered and destroyed. First of all we find that God has provided a right partner and you’re running from that partner every time you get in an act of promiscuity. Here’s the man, here’s the woman; this woman was built to complete this man. Go back to the model in the Garden of Eden. That model is not there in Gen. 2-3 just to furnish you with a sweet little story for Sunday School. That’s given to give you a pattern, a model of how this thing is supposed to operate, so this woman has been designed to compliment this man; he begins to louse up because of his lack of divine guidance and he can’t recognize her when she comes along, she can’t recognize him because she can’t respond right.

One of our graduate students did a paper on this problem of premarital sex and I’m going to read you a section from this paper and back it up with a Scriptural example, which underscores the truth of this thing, and it’s the concept that the woman was made to submit to the man and compliment him. Now every time she engages, or he engages in some promiscuous relationship, do you know what is happening? They are beginning unconsciously sometimes, it’s totally beside their conscious mind, they are beginning to get themselves programmed to respond to this person in this promiscuous relationship. So let’s make a new example here, a clinical example. Here you have A and A prime. A is the right man, A prime is the right woman. Now watch what happens. A sees B prime and B over here and so he starts a relationship with B prime and B starts a relationship with A prime, and they’re mismatched. Now watch what happens? They’re engaged in some promiscuous relationship and activity and B prime begins to get programmed to respond to A, and she begins to… she can’t help it, she’s built this way, she begins to get so that she will respond to A, A begins to match with her, B begins to respond to A prime, A prime begins to submit to B and you’ve got this mismatch that occurs and it has to occur, that’s the way you’re built. And so what happens?

Now we break out of the relationship, that’s a “love it and leave it” relationship. So now we have A and A prime, B and B prime. A comes to meet A prime and now A, because he was messing around with the wrong people has got all programmed for B prime. The concept here is that A, to start things off was given by God, you might say he’s been given certain assets, a certain range, adaptation. Here you have a little range of adaptation, and A has got this range that he has been given by God. Now he gets in a promiscuous relationship with B prime and that flattens out the range; now he is beginning to give up the flexibility that he had as a virgin, or she had as a virgin and so this relationship begins to pinch down and so now he finds in his desire to have a relationship with B prime he has programmed himself to respond to B prime so when he comes to meet A prime, now he can’t fully respond to her and she can’t to him. Do you see what’s happened? God had set it up so there would be a perfect match, there would be a total submission, there would be a perfect love. And every time there’s a promiscuous act it decreases this flexibility of response.

So the response, even after this has happened, will never be as great as it originally could have been. You’re always working, in other words, off of plan B and C, and you can find happiness that way but you’ll never have anything near the happiness that God ordained for you. Let me read a section of this paper:

“Throughout the sexual relationship each partner tends to be condition to the response pattern of the other. Reduction of sexual response variance and learning appropriate responses are gradual processes, subject to trial and error. Sexual activity with different partners results in the conditioning of response patterns for each partner. The next experiences do not necessarily extinguish previous behavior patterns but tend to modify them. Promiscuity may eventually result in the individual being conditioned to a composite that does not even exist.”

In other words you have lover boy here and he’s running around and he’s had everything from B to Z and there he is. Now he comes along and all of a sudden he gets with it and meets A prime. Where does that leave him? That leaves him all programmed to this program, just blobs together; that’s all it is, totally impersonal thing that he’s learned to respond to, one pattern superimposed upon another and now he comes to A prime. God had designed the sex relationship so they could have a wonderful time together and now they can’t because they’ve loused it up. And this is what promiscuity is doing; it is destroying God’s design. He has designed sex for happiness and this is why the concept that I want to get across to you, that these rules in the Bible aren’t there to restrict happiness, they’re there to increase it. That’s why it’s totally wrong for the world to get this image that Christians are a bunch of prudes that don’t enjoy sex. That’s absolutely wrong. The reason why we have strict requirements is to protect it so that when sex is exercised within the marriage relationship it can fully blossom to what God intended it to blossom to. That’s the name of the game as far as the Word of God is concerned. Continuing reading:

“Even if the individual has had only two or three sexual experiences with two or three different partners the sexual relationship with a lifetime partner may be hindered. Men and women who have been permissive sexually before marriage cannot be expected to change miraculously when they marry. Not only are their response patterns pretty well set, but also their attitude toward sexual behavior. Promiscuity before marriage has an effect on others within a later family unit.” This is another thing that happens and I want to give you a Biblical example of this. I want to read it again, “Promiscuity before marriage has effects on others within a later family unit. It may be increasing difficult for many parents to hold their children to a sort of conservative values which they, as parents, did not hold to when they were younger.”

Turn to 1 Sam. 13 for a case in point. I’ll read selectively through this section so you can get the point. I recommend this for all young people, read this chapter and read it again and again and again and study it, because this tells you all about promiscuity by example. Verse 1, “And it came to pass after this, that Absalom, the son of David, had a fair sister,” the word “fair” here is beautiful, this sister was “Miss Israel,” “whose name was Tamar; and Amnon, the son of David, loved her. [2] And Amnon was so vexed [distressed] that he fell sick for his sister, Tamar; for she was a virgin. And Amnon thought it hard for him to do anything to her.” The story goes on, to make a long story short, he worked it around, big phony, thought he loved this girl and actually he didn’t, he was infatuated with her and he got himself involved in a promiscuous relationship and I want you to see something very interesting.

Verse 12, here it’s down to the climactic point, he’s got her alone, “And she answered him, Nay, my brother, do not force me; for no such thing out to be done in Israel. Do not thou this folly. [13] And I, where shall I cause my shame to go? As for thee, thou shalt be as one of the fools in Israel. Now, therefore, I pray thee, speak unto the king; for he will not withhold me from thee,” in other words, marriage. [14] Howbeit, he would not hearken unto her voice; but, being stronger than she, forced her, and lay with her.” Now watch, people, you think that promiscuity is so great, I want you to watch the next verse, verse 15, “Then Amnon hated her exceedingly, so that the hatred with which he hated her was greater than the love with which he had loved her. And Amnon said unto her, Arise and get out of here.”

That’s where promiscuity winds up. And there’s a beautiful example of it, but now to the last point, we haven’t got to the climactic point yet. Verse 21, remember who we are talking about here, this is the family of David. Do you know a little bit about David’s background? Seems like it repeats a little bit, doesn’t it? One generation repeats the sins of another. David got involved with this woman called Bathsheba, she was taking a shower on the roof and she didn’t have any shower curtain. So David became involved with her and messed up his life. So what happened? David did what this boy had just done, his own son, and now his son does it right in front of his eyes and as a father, as what a stern military leader, watch his response in verse 21, “But when King David heard of all these things, he was very angry.” He didn’t do a thing about it. And you can study 2 Samuel, and chapter 13, 14, and 15 and right in front of David’s eyes his sons do the same thing he does and he’s powerless to do anything about. And it almost tears the nation up; the nation has a revolt, people are killed and murdered, people are raped all over the place because David doesn’t have the power to enforce on his own sons and daughters the standards that he himself violated when he was their age. So this is not just an A/B relationship, it carries on to the next generation and the proof of it is just the careful study of David’s life.

Now we come to the third factor in promiscuity. That involves the problem of volition. The woman cannot claim divine guidance, she’s out of fellowship, she’s dropped the ball, she’s on plan B and C so she’s out of the will of God. How is she going to respond when God is trying to lead her to Mr. Right, she’s so far out of the will of God she’s never going to get straightened out unless certain things happen. It’s the same thing with a man; if the man is on a frantic search for happiness and he’s willing to go from one woman to the next, he could care less what she as a person is involved with, all he’s interested in is this body so that’s what his major occupation is so when Miss Right comes along he can’t respond, absolutely no response here, same kind of thing, very paramount to the previous factor.

The fourth thing, the initial and subsequent response; remember we said there is a parallel here. We said that when the gospel is preached what happens? The Holy Spirit takes the gospel and puts it on the inside of a person and when you respond to the gospel you respond to what God the Holy Spirit has put on the inside and that’s the same way in the sex/love relationship. Here you have a man and a woman and the response has to be to what the image that person has of the other person. Here you have the man and you have the woman, and the woman gets in her mind a concept of Mr. Right so she begins to respond to him like the believer when he finally hears the gospel he begins to respond, it’s just automatic. Now what happens? Her soul is so filled up with human viewpoint, it’s calloused over according to Eph. 4, she’s gone beyond sensitivity, she’s on a frantic search for happiness and so she finds herself unable to respond. The same concept, it goes back to this response in every factor.

The fifth thing, the problem of union. Remember we said the spiritual relationship is one spirit, the sex relationship is one body, and we come down to the physical union of one flesh and here we’ve had people engage in promiscuity and when they come down to a relationship of all relationships, the thing that God has designed to bring great pleasure in their life they find something less than the original plan of God; they find plan B and C and D but they never can get back to plan A because they’ve damaged the operation.

Then we find later growth; we find the problem of growth hurt in promiscuity because the growth has to wait in marriage until all this garbage can background gets out of the way so you have to postpone the growth together as a couple because each one of you has to get rid of all the carnal patterns that you’ve inherited and brought into the marriage relationship. It takes time to dump out all of this stuff and your growth is hindered that much, again showing that you cannot develop the relationship that God had originally designed for you.

Finally, the seventh factor, the problem of the dynamics. The mechanics of a successful relationship depend on the order of man, plan and woman. The factors go both ways; the woman is designed to respond to a man who has direction in his life. And some of you men wonder what’s the matter? Well, it’s probably because you have no direction in your life. The last time you thought about doing the will of God was when you were born again, when you trusted the Lord, and that’s really tragic, and then you wonder why. Because the woman on the inside is built this way, God has structured her like Eve to respond to a man with a plan, a man that’s going in God’s will. And it’s the same thing with a woman, she is made to respond to him, but the man is also made to love a woman as one who compliments the plan and a man who is not interested in the plan of God find himself unable to properly love the person. He has no base on which to love a woman. What base is possible besides selfishness? But yet the Word of God gives you a tremendous base to love a woman because she is what you need to accomplish the plan of God in your life. What better base can you have for loving a woman than that? And that is a base, notice, that doesn’t vary from one day to the next, not up one day and down the next, it’s always constant, constant, constant, constant. God has a plan for your life and it doesn’t change day after day after day, it’s steady. And so your love for the woman doesn’t change day after day, it’s steady too because the plan of God for your life is steady, you know that God has led her to you and her job is to help you in this plan so therefore your love to her has a stable platform. And it’s not shot and rocked around and ruined by certain things that happen in day to day relationship.

Now I’ve given you a lot of bad news about what promiscuity does to damage. I don’t want to leave you there, for in the last few minutes I want to show you what happens, the solution to promiscuity, for the gospel never leaves a person without a solution. Now we have the solution to unmarried promiscuity. The first solution is 1 John 1:9, that’s the first thing you ought to do immediately, “If we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and cleanse us from all unrighteousness,” this at least solves the instantaneous problem of getting back into fellowship with God. If you acknowledge the fact that you are personally responsible for going out of the bottom circle, the will of God for you, filling of the Holy Spirit or whatever you want to call it, and you’re out, by using 1 John 1:9 properly which means you acknowledge responsibility and you tell God that your life is going this way and you don’t want it to, etc. He puts you back in fellowship; filling of the Holy Spirit. You believe 1 John 1:9, it’s a by faith transaction again of submitting once again to the will of God for you. And you submit to the will of God and now you’re back in fellowship and now God can begin to solve the problem but God can’t solve the problem while you’re still floating in the toulies somewhere, so the first problem that you have is to get back in fellowship.

The second thing that you can do and this involves a crash program, a crash program of taking in the Word of God because if you’ve been in promiscuity the chances are your thought patterns have been slightly damaged, to say the least. So you have conscience, personal affections and mentality and those things are fouled up as explained in Eph. 4:17-19 and you’re going to have to straighten the way you think out before you get involved with some other person. So you’d better get straightened out and the only way you can get straightened out, in fellowship with the Lord, is to take in the Word of God at every opportunity, you take it in at every opportunity to straighten out your thinking, straighten out your responses and this involves a plan and a program and it takes time. But out of this crash program can come a gradual removing of this callousness.

Turn back to Eph. 4 and I will show you how it happens, back to the problem of callousness. Here you have the human spirit, also called the human heart in many instances in Scripture. What has happened? Here’s a Christian, here’s a believer and he’s gotten off in this promiscuity thing, and so he’s filled up his human spirit with human viewpoint, human viewpoint, human viewpoint, his conscience has become desensitized, his mentality has become groping around and yet Paul says there’s a solution for you and the solution is in verses 21-24.

You’ve been taught that when you were born again God restructured you so that you could function on divine viewpoint. He says, and verse 22 is not a command, verse 22, 23 and 24 are nor commands in the original text, they are contents of teaching. One, that you have learned that “you have put off concerning the former conversation [behavior pattern] the old man which is corrupt according to its deceitful lusts,” and this means that you have the old sin nature down here and as an unbeliever or Christian out of fellowship, your sin nature controls this whole operation, just floods it, just absolutely controls it. And God says you put that off positionally; positionally when you trusted in the Lord this has been removed because verse 24 says “you have put on the new man which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.” So positionally at the point of salvation this all has been changed, your human spirit, although it may be buried under a pile of human viewpoint has been built and structured to operate on divine viewpoint and you now, in the filling of the Holy Spirit, as the Holy Spirit charges your human spirit, can flush out that human viewpoint and replace it with divine viewpoint. It’s going to take time but that’s what the human spirit has been regenerated for, and that can be possible.

It can be possible because it was true in the New Testament. Do you think these people came into Bible Christianity in the first century with lily white backgrounds? Not on your life they did; they walked into Christianity from all patterns of life. If you think we have promiscuity in our society you ought to have lived in Corinth for a while. We had helpless cases and if they walked into the average American church they’d be thrown out, and yet these people came from all sorts of horrible situations. Talk about swapping around, well that was the normal operation in these cases. You had in Corinth, you have a temple and you have paid prostitution going on and it was an act of worship. You see they had religions for all kinds of people and you can understand why they had a tremendous revival in Corinth. The whole thing was grounded on sex and so that is the behavior pattern that these people as unbelievers came to the gospel and these people trusted in God’s Word and they sat at the apostle’s feet and took in doctrine; they studied the Old Testament that they had and the scrolls and they studied and studied and finally out of these churches came the saints that we read about in the second generation of church history. It is possible to climb out of the cesspool and it is possible not because you are so great or I am so great; it is possible because at the point of salvation God has given the assets for use.

The third thing that we can do about this is to continually live in the Word and by this I mean apply it. Deut. 6 says talk in terms of these things that I have commanded you in the daytime, in the nighttime, at home and on the job. What does it mean to talk in terms of the Word? It means first of all you’ve taken in the Word—intake. It means second of all you just haven’t left it sitting in your mentality but you have begun to digest it, you have meditated. The Psalmist says the delight of the godly man is in the law of the Lord and in His Law does he meditate day and night. It is a continual process of circulating the truth of the Word of God in your mind. I give you enough doctrine to last for a week, and the third thing you can do is begin to use this is in your mentality by criticizing, and that’s not people, but criticizing human viewpoint, you learn to spot human viewpoint in yourself. You begin to read books and you all of a sudden understand and say wait a minute, this isn’t right, this doesn’t fit with the Word of God, something is wrong here. Gradually you watch young believers improve and they begin to spot human viewpoint and throw it out because the first thing you can do is to spot it, you’ve got to be able to spot it to fight it. You’ve got to know your enemy to kill him. Therefore you begin sensitivity to human viewpoint and you begin to junk it.

The fourth thing that’s involved in living in the Word Biblically is that you continually claim the promises. When you come across and adverse situation you don’t let that situation throw you; you may see that situation as greater than your own human resources but it should throw you back in God’s grace. God’s grace promised us that “all things work together for good to them that love God, to them that are the called according to His purpose.” Phil. 4:6-7, “Be careful, worry not for anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God,” and what does it say, “the peace of God that passes all understanding shall guard your heart,” that’s the thinking part of your soul, “the heart” it will guard, “and your thoughts.” Now that is the result of Phil. 4:6-7, a tremendous promise in the Word of God.

Finally living in the Word involves maturity and living out God’s plan for you and that is a process of time, etc. That’s what it takes as a single person if you hope ever to have happiness in sex. You can call it a religious solution, you can call it what you want to but I’m here to say that as far as the Word of God is concerned you can go on in your promiscuity and still never attain happiness and you never will until you get straightened around in this point.

One final conclusion, 1 Cor. 7:1-7 for the married people. This solution will shock some of you but nevertheless… if it does then you need it. I want you to notice what the solution the Word of God gives in this situation. It’s not play down sex, it’s exactly the opposite, play it up. Verse 1, “Now concerning the things about which ye wrote unto me, it is good for a man not to touch a woman,” that is he’s talking there in terms about… they asked him is it all right for celibacy, and he said yes, celibacy is okay but, verse 2, “nevertheless, to avoid fornication” or on account of fornication in this city, it’s gotten to be such a tremendous problem I want you to remember something, “let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband.” In other words, you’d better get married. Celibacy is fine but you’re under tremendous pressure, Corinthians, from your society, it smashes you right across the face with this sex thing. So therefore the solution is go to the place where sex is legitimate, marriage.

Verse 3, “Let the husband continually render unto the wife due benevolence; and likewise also, the wife unto the husband.” As I pointed out the word “due benevolence means a legal right, this is sexual rights which we’ll amplify later in Deut. 22, both a man and a woman have sexual rights addressed to the other partner in the marriage.

Verse 4 explains it, “The wife hath not authority over her own body, but the husband; and likewise also the husband has not authority over his own body, but the wife.” There you have the divine institution of marriage functioning the way it should in the Word of God. Here’s the one body concept, you have this one body, two souls, and what it’s saying here is that’s one body that has been created and in order to function it requires the sexual activities of marriage.

Verse 5, “Defraud ye,” look at that, that’s a strong word, it means steal, “Defraud ye not one the other, unless it be with consent for a time, that ye may give yourselves to fasting and to prayer; and come together again, that Satan tempt you not for your incontinency. [6] But I speak this by permission,” etc. and he says verse 7, “I would that all men were even as I myself. But every man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner, and another after that.” That means there is a spiritual gift of celibacy and under certain situations in the Christian life God gives the gift of celibacy so that people can perform a special plan of God. Paul was a man who had the gift of celibacy. God had given him a divine removal of his sexual desires so that he could perform the will of God throughout the Mediterranean world. It was unsafe for Paul to marry and carry a woman with him involved in all the dangerous things that he was involved with and so God took up the slack on this particular area.

Verses 1-7 give you the solution inside marriage and we’ve covered the solution outside marriage. The solution inside marriage is to use sex for what it was designed for and to use it, it’s there, and 1 Cor. 7 authorizes its continual use.