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Man is a creature made for God: God is both the source and fulfillment of man’s greatest longings. But because man is estranged from God due to sin, he looks for the fulfillment of his deepest soul’s needs in the creature and the creation (nature), instead in the Creator (Romans 1:25). Man’s whole purpose on earth is bound up in God, but when sinful man lives alienated from God, Who is the source of all life, death is the result Romans 6:23). By reason of sin, the human condition is one of ruin and confusion -- man seeks theBYPRODUCTS of a love relationship with God while rejecting God who is the only true source of peace and joy. According to Scripture, to take God-ordained longings (which only God can fulfill), to finite sources is self-destructive and tantamount to idolatry (see Colossians 3:5,6). Man by reason of sin is cut off from God who is the source of all life, love and good. The conviction that man may have his deepest needs met apart from a right relationship with God is the great delusion of every age. Man lives in a moral universe because God is holy: God’s character is excellent, righteous, wise and loving. God’s law is the perfect expression of His righteous character. If God were on earth as a man, He would keep the 10 commandments perfectly. This is precisely what Jesus did. God’s law is therefore NOT AN ARBITRARY STANDARD. By way of example, if God were to people a planet in a distant galaxy, He would not have a different set of moral laws than on earth, He would not even have the option! The reason being, His laws are the perfect manifestation of His immutable righteousness – He cannot and will not deny Himself. God is both love and holiness. Man is to be a moral reflection of this union of love and holiness. The two are necessarily joined -- genuine love must operate within a fixed ethical framework (emotion is not a reliable guide). When God gave the 10 commandments, He organized the moral code into two tablets. The first tablet (commandments one through four), addresses man’s relationship to God – “the vertical.”The second tablet (commandments five through ten), addresses man’s relationship to man – “the horizontal.” Have you ever wondered why even atheists agree that if everyone kept the 10 commandments it would be “heaven on earth?” The reason for this sentiment is that they recognize that the 10 commandments are the perfect safeguard of love. God’s Decalogue is the protective hedge around love and trust. Here is where man’s ruined condition and God’s standard come into mortal conflict. God says in effect, “As your Creator, I have an absolute claim upon your life. I know what is best for you. My laws are the path of life. When you disregard my laws, you abuse My good gifts and bring destruction upon yourselves.” Man in his rebellion, is trying to get his needs met apart from God and His holy law. Man in effect says, “I will fulfill my longings, even if my effort to do so violates your laws. My effort to satisfy my desires and needs my way is so important to me, I choose to decide what is right and wrong for myself.” When that rebellious direction is followed, man’s longings become ruling lusts and God’s gifts are perverted into idols. The reign of moral relativism: The terrorist attack of 9-11 caused our sleeping nation to roll over, but not to awaken from its slumber on the bed of moral decadence. Our nation’s sleep is deep – its narcosis is induced by the drug of moral relativism. In these post-modern times, Americans seem oblivious to history’s next ineluctable lesson. History is a consistent teacher, but a harsh one when her lessons are repeatedly ignored. Consider the regimes that have tried to construct utopian societies apart from God’s law and authority. Though the word “utopia” was written above the gates to those new societies, those who entered found them to be a slaughterhouse of human souls. Marx was wrong about God and human nature – the result was the death of 100 million individuals. Consider just how powerful a philosophical lie can be, for it is the marketing of a lie that fuels revolutions that are heinous. As the popular NRA saying goes, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” So also it could be said, “Dictators don’t produce holocausts, lying ideologies do.” America is perched upon the precipice of its own demise because it has ingested a lying ideology. The deadly philosophy she has swallowed is dulling the moral sensibility of America’s citizens. The “toxins” from this ideology are traveling through her system and landing in the minds public school students. Like the disgusting creature in the movie Alien, whose offspring fed upon the internal organs of its host, so also moral relativism is consuming the moral consciousness of this nation. The relativism of post-modernism is eating away at the conscience of its host. The lie seems at times to be unopposed by bulk of corporate America – the fashion industry recasts the lie in its latest ad campaigns. A new generation of pre-teens is exposed to the lie by way of videos, music, magazines and fashion. The content of the lie is as follows: “Freedom is only possible when there are no moral absolutes. Those who make moral judgments rob others of their freedom.” To those untrained in morality who have yet to develop critical thinking skills, the lie sounds like the Magna Charta of personal liberty. Now, accompany the lie with music, film, starlets and fashion and it is even more irresistible. The lie is insidious in nature – it functions like a deadly parasite, gradually desensitizing moral perception. Situation ethics – a fruit of moral relativism: Without a point of moral fixity, ethics flow from the dictates of self. This sounds reasonable at first blush, but it opens the door to both anarchy and oppression. Ethics that flow from self are subject to the passions of the person. Monstrous crimes have been committed by those who in their own minds were simply evening the score. The example of a disgruntled postal worker who guns down a coworker may sound extreme at first, but it effectively illustrates the following principle: Situation ethics allow a person to make up his own “morals” as he goes. This is a totally tenuous arrangement – one person’s standards of decency may be viewed as discriminatory by another who regards sexual license to be a protected right. By that test of fairness, the lowest common “moral” denominator sets a standard that permits and protects sexual license. This is precisely the morass in which America is mired. Without a fixed moral rudder America founders on a sea of moral relativism. Sex has been yanked from its moral context. Smut, perversion and indecency are defended as “free speech.” God’s gifts have the potential of being perverted and misused: God’s moral commands form the context that protects His gifts from perversion. When God’s gifts are removed from their moral contexts, corruption takes place. The phrase, “sex is beautiful” is an unqualified statement. It has not been qualified by its God-given context. Without the divine qualifier, the statement is too inclusive. A Filipino teenager selling her body to help feed her family is the polar opposite of beautiful. To those with a conscience informed by God’s commands, the account of the teenage prostitute evokes moral outrage. An example from the natural world can help illustrate the principle of moral context: It’s not a crime to ignite the logs in one’s cabin fireplace, but it is a crime to place a lit match in the dry chaparral thirty feet away. The warm, comforting fire in the fireplace becomes an unbelievably destructive force when moved into the context of the nearby forest. Context is the difference between a legal and an illegal fire. Context is the difference between sexual fidelity and sexual immorality. When God’s gift of sex is removed from its protective context, great damage takes place. God, the Giver of the gift of sex knows its potential for good or evil: Humanism views morals as merely social mores that reflect statistical analysis (belief about good and evil is seen as nothing more than the prevailing moral opinion of the day). Humanism regards man, not God, to be the source of morals. Social Darwinism has a low view of morality, considering it to be a pragmatic function of society’s survival. By contrast, the Christian worldview espouses a self-evident moral consciousness in man that evinces the righteous nature of the Creator. God’s laws resonate with the moral dictates He has written upon the conscience of man. God’s moral mark is stamped upon the human race. Therefore, morals and ethics are anchored in the moral authority of God. Though humans labor to suppress it, God’s moral absolutes are written upon their hearts (See Romans 2:11-16). God is the “inventor” of human sexual relations. He alone knows exhaustively its potential for good or evil. For mankind’s protection, God commands that sex remain within the context of marriage. Within that God-ordained context, it retains its beauty, power and sanctity, guarded by the bonds of marital fidelity. Sex is a powerful force because it touches the physical, the emotional and the spiritual. By God’s design, the “act of marriage” is intended to reinforce the bond of marriage. It functions as a kind of “glue” that deepens experientially the “one flesh” description of marriage given by God in His Word (Matthew 19:4-6). During the act of marriage, the husband and wife are reminded of their bond in a beautiful way. Soul, body, spirit and emotions are involved in the affections of the marriage bed. Mutual trust and surrender are hallowed and blessed with pleasure that is mutual, not narcissistic. Herein resides its power for bonding two people. God regards it sacred for this reason as well as for its procreative purpose. Illicit sexual relations also touch all three areas of our human unity – this is the very reason that sexual immorality is destructive. Because the spiritual, the emotional and the physical are involved even in sexual immorality, a kind of “bonding” takes place, however fleeting. Sexual sin therefore, is antagonistic to the bonding principle that is built into the act of marriage. Promiscuous relationships fly in the face of God’s design for lifelong marital fidelity. Sexual immorality is the misuse of God’s good gift: The perversion of a God-given virtue or gift entails the wanton use of it – wanton because it is used outside of the context prescribed by God. God regards the perversion of a virtue to be an “idol.” By the use of the word “idol” is not meant graven image. The term has reference to where a person goes with his whole being in search of fulfillment. The biblical use of idol, when not referring to a graven image, has more to do with a false integration point (an integration point – what a person regards to be a source of unity, purpose, satisfaction and peace). Man was made for God – Scripture declares that He alone is man’s source of life, unity and integration. God’s gifts, when used as integration points, have the potential to become idols. (Man’s faculties of soul could be described as comprising the will, the intellect, the emotions and the conscience. Only God can integrate man so that these faculties experience a unity designed by the Creator. Illicit sex is an extremely potent idol because it touches the areas of man’s unity, therefore it is a most convincing pseudo integration point. It appears to deliver unity – the emotional, spiritual and physical are all engaged during an encounter. Illicit sex is more powerful and addictive than a drug because its offer of integration is such a compelling counterfeit. (Scripture makes reference to sexual sins as the “lusts of deceit” – Ephesians 4:22.) When man the sinner attempts to write his own ethics, he fails to arrive at God’s immutable standard: It’s a fairytale to think that love is capable of coming up with its own viable ethics. The best it can do is situational ethics. In situation ethics, every case is considered upon its own merits apart from a universal absolute. When love and mercy are the only values out of which to construct one’s ethics, justice suffers in the process. Where laws are the most dogmatic in defending sexual immorality, the defense of the unborn is the weakest. (When ancient Israel became enmeshed in an orgiastic fertility cult, the sacrifice of living infants was the accompanying the result – see Jeremiah 32:35). In modern America, millions of unborn babies are “sacrificed” to the god of immoral sexual pleasure. Since the unborn child was not planned or wanted, permission is granted by the state to take its life. How did our nation arrive at the point where the innocent unborn are legally killed and murderers are spared the death penalty? The answer is that sinful man attempted to write his own ethics without God’s help. Without God’s moral authority, righteousness is trampled. Moral relativism does not seek to know what is universally right or wrong in God’s sight, it must invent its own basis for ethics. Ridiculous foundations for ethics have been suggested from that camp. Consider the following suggestions that have been proffered as a basis for ethical decisions: 1.) What will bring the most pleasure to the most people? If tested by that question, the blood sport of the Roman coliseum could be justified. 2.) Can it be done by the consent of those who participate? Sex between an adult and a child could be justified by the first two questions. 3.) Will it hurt anyone? Without God’s Word, the answer to number three can never rise above conjecture. The truth of Scripture is that the 10 commandments are the only immutable safeguard of love to God and neighbor. Break a commandment and love suffers. Violate a command and human dignity is invaded and diminished. Love and trust are injured in the process of violating God’s commands. Without accountability to God and His moral authority, man’s ethics will be distorted by self-love: There are no solitary infractions of God’s law. When one commandment is flagrantly transgressed, others are violated in the process. The person who feeds hate will find expression for it somewhere on the continuum of gossip, slander or violence. Breaking a commandment with impunity unleashes a mudslide of further egregious behavior. Without the first tablet of God’s law, which governs man’s love to God (the vertical), man is left with only his own passions and desires from which to construct his ethics. Once God’s moral authority is removed from the ethical process, there is an infinite void in authority that abhors a vacuum. Rushing in to fill that void is either the self or the state. In time, anarchy or oppression is the inevitable result. No amount of social engineering can tame the sin nature of man. For that very reason, ideal environments fail to produce perfect harmony among humans. Scripture asserts the reason why this is true – sinful man will not find within himself the motives or ethical will power to love his neighbor as himself. The necessary change must come from outside of the man. Only a divinely produced change in the man’s nature can cause a man to willingly come under the righteous government of God. (Scripture refers to this change as regeneration – Titus 3:1-7; Ezekiel 36:26,27.) Though God is transcendent from His creation, He is omnipresent at every point in His creation. When speaking of God’s power and knowledge, Scripture affirms that God is omnipotent and omniscient. For this reason, GOD IS MAN’S ENVIRONMENT. All that a man does is in the presence of God. All of our ethical behavior is first God-ward, then man-ward. Scripture asserts that violations on the horizontal plane (man-ward) are first and foremost against God Himself (Psalm 51:4) Without the first tablet of the law, with its reverential fear of God’s moral majesty, human ethics are only man-ward. Sinful man becomes accountable only to sinful man, not to God. The man whose conscience is informed by Scripture recognizes God as “reader” of his heart motives, thoughts and intentions. This is by design a powerful incentive to curb one’s lusts and to bring one’s desires into conformity with the immutable truth of God’s Word. Ethics that are solely man-ward fail to provide this immense dimension of moral accountability before the presence of God. Ethics that are merely horizontal are subject to wholesale corruption -- men conceal the contents of their hearts from one another. Deception, exploitation, manipulation and prevarication abound where sinful man is accountable only to himself or to another sinner. Pornography “promises” it users the fruits of intimacy without the risks of a relationship: Man the sinner, alienated from God, seeks the byproducts of a relationship with God while remaining estranged from Him. In that condition, man is an inveterate idolater. Pornography offers its viewers the byproducts of a committed, caring relationship without any relationship at all. Pornography is eros without phileo. It is the quest for erotic intimacy, without a personal relationship. Herein resides its power to degrade and corrupt. It pushes its users further into narcissism, idolatry, isolation and selfishness. The context God has ordained for sexual relations are a protection from the narcissistic use of pleasure. God has placed His good gifts within moral boundaries that safeguard them from decadent self-indulgence. The good feelings that accompany sexual relations are designed by God to be a pleasure that is experienced within the context of a committed relationship. The temporary high that drives the addiction factor: The media has given us shocking stories of husbands and fathers who after experimenting with cocaine became addicted. Their addiction did more than compromise their health, it radically corrupted their morals. They found that their addiction made them willing to lie, cheat and steal in order to supply their habit. What was it about the cocaine that could so quickly degrade the ethics of a married businessman? Insight into the answer is found in the drug-induced production of endorphins. Endorphins occur naturally in the brain in very small amounts – they are essential to a sense of well-being. Certain activities such as strenuous exercise increase the production of endorphins. Drug-induced production temporarily increases endorphins to the point where the user of cocaine experiences a strong sense of well-being, elation and confidence. Addiction takes place in part because the drug-induced increase in endorphins is not the result of work, rest or exercise – instead it is an instant high “for free,” not as a result of order, discipline or exertion. Cocaine addiction greatly impairs the normal production of endorphins. When the user is not under the influence of the drug, he is assaulted with negative emotions. While off of the cocaine, he feels far worse than before he ever started using the drug. The easiest and quickest “relief” from withdrawal is to get high again, no matter the cost (therein is the formula for rapid corruption of morals). Like the drug cocaine, pornography offers its users a deceptive reward – deceptive because the pleasure appears to be “free.” But there are hidden costs. Pornography is a symptom of masculinity in crisis: When sensual pleasure becomes its own end, it becomes destructive. God’s intent for males is that they pursue the redemptive ideal of steward, provider, hero, leader, caretaker and initiator. Men throw away this dignity when they descend the staircase of illicit sensual pleasure. When narcissistic eroticism replaces the redemptive ideal of a relationship of romance, manhood suffers in the process. Pornography functions as a two-dimensional idol that enslaves its worshippers through deceptive pleasure: Pornography is about VICARIOUS sex. Thus, it is an escape from reality. The user engages his imagination in such a way that he rejects his own adequacy, his own station in life and his own sexuality. Pornography offers an IDEALIZED sexuality with an IDEAL partner.
When a man fantasizes about relations with a woman on the printed page or the screen, there is no relationship but with the self. By feeding lust and coveting the fruits of a relationship to the point of sexual arousal, the man is attempting to find fulfillment by way of auto-eroticism with a two-dimensional image. There is a price that comes with this escapism. Seeking the fruits of intimacy without actual intimacy produces guilt, shame and self-recrimination. Humanism would suggest that any guilt feelings that occur are the result of childhood conditioning. God’s Word declares that the guilt is real legal guilt before God (Romans 3:9-23). For man was made to be in relationship. Narcissistic passion is lust turned back upon the self, it is anti-relational – it is a rejection of God’s purpose for men. Manhood atrophies when self is the primary object of love. The use of pornography degrades a man’s character: Pornography sows to cowardice because it permits a man to grasp for what is not his. In his mind he can have it without risk, without commitment, without cost, without failure and without giving himself. When that is done habitually while reinforced with temporary pleasure, subtle changes take place in a man’s character. The female increasingly becomes an object that exists for one’s erotic pleasure. The world of sexual fantasy claims more and more of a man’s “mental geography.” Since the fulfillment that is implicitly promised is not really delivered, greater quantities of higher “potency” porn are often consumed. Many men become increasingly enslaved because of this principle of diminishing return. The comparison of porn to an addictive drug is not inaccurate. While a man is under the brief influence of porn’s pleasure and adrenaline rush, he does not feel the pain of his inadequacy, loneliness and self-hate. Like a drug, the titillation has taken him above the negative feelings for the moment. The trouble is his sensual self-indulgence is deepening his problem instead of relieving it. Dependency upon a quick fix is taking him further into a false peace, a cowardly lifestyle, and an escapist’s way of coping. This cannot help but stab at his relational failures and paralyzing inadequacies. In the realm of manhood, sacrificial love is power. Self-absorbed narcissism is radical weakness – this explains one of the reasons why porn fills a man with a sense of shame and impotence. Pornography frequently plays a role in sexual crimes: Dr. Victor B. Cline, who received his PhD. from Berkeley, is a marriage and family counselor. He makes the following observations about pornography use: 1.) 93% of sex addicts and sexual deviants had pornography as a contributor to their lifestyle. 2.) Men who are more intelligent are the most susceptible – it is due to their greater capacity for fantasy and imagination. 3.) Frequent use produced desensitization, loss of inhibition s and a seared conscience. 4.) Regular users experienced an increasing desire to act out the fantasies. 5.) The more deviant users precipitated to violent imagery depicting victimization and sexual crimes (Pornography’s Effects on Adults & Children, Morality in Media, Inc., New York, N.Y.).
Because there is a stifling of conscience that repeatedly takes place during porn use, the corrupted conscience may cease to be an internal deterrent to crime. The desire to ACT OUT may override the function of the conscience. Criminal investigators know first hand what humanists often deny – namely that heavy porn use is a common denominator among pedophiles and rapists. Habitual porn use manifests a desire to live for eros pleasure WITHOUT LOVE. The person depicted in porn imagery is viewed as an object to be used, perhaps abused and then discarded. The sensual cravings of the user are commonly accompanied by enraged male impotence that is prone to violence (the aggression continuum runs all the way from verbal abuse to domestic violence, to rape, pedophilia and murder). Sex, when taken out of God’s protective context, has the potential for great destructiveness:Feeding upon wanton illicit sensuality contributes to the wholesale erosion of a man’s character. Men were created by God to be protectors – protracted illicit sensual indulgence can play a part in slowly changing a man from protector to predator. A passage in the Old Testament gives an account of a rape that took place during the reign of King David (2 Samuel 13:1-19). The account powerfully illustrates how the “glue principle” produces a tormenting, hateful reminder of sexual immorality. Amnon, a son of David, raped his half-sister Tamar after lusting for her day and night. Amnon pretended to be sick. He requested that everyone leave him and that Tamar alone enter his bedroom with food. When she entered his bedroom, he sexually violated her (he later paid for the wicked deed with his life when Tamar’s brother avenged the crime). Amnon’s lust for Tamar drove him to frustration and agitation UNTIL he could ACT OUT his fantasies. Then something remarkable happened. The Scripture says, “Then Amnon hated her with a very great hatred; for the hatred with which he hated her was greater than the love with which he had loved her. And Amnon said, to her, ‘Get up, go away,’ (and to his attendants,) ‘Throw this woman out of my presence’” (2 Samuel 13:15, 17). This is the “glue principle” in full backfire mode! Amnon is at war with the glue principle – he seeks to extinguish the reminder of the bond that resulted from his violent lust. Tamar’s presence and existence reminds him of the animal he is. When sexual pleasure is divorced from the discipline of love, the “discard principle” also kicks in with a vengeance. Amnon craved Tamar like some tasty cuisine to be consumed. After seizing her and violating her, she has become as undesirable as refuse. Amnon’s cowardly act involved using his male strength to prey upon another who was weaker. The shame, guilt, debauchery and self-contempt associated with this act will not go away – the memory of the illicit bond keeps producing “fallout.” What was once uncontrollable appetite is now revulsion. Amnon cannot rid himself of these internal recriminations – the sight and memory of Tamar only exacerbates the problem. This is one of the main reasons why many predators take the lives of their victims! When the glue principle is ripped out of context, the bond keeps kicking out new fallout that the perpetrator would like expunge. The New Testament also warns about the bond formed in sexual immorality: “Or do you not know that the one who joins himself to a harlot is one body with her? For He says, ‘The two will become one flesh.’ But the one who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with Him. Flee immorality. Every other sin that a man commits is outside the body, but the immoral man sins against his own body” (1 Corinthians 6:16-18). The media’s naiveté concerning sexual sin is truly astounding: The press, educators and the ACLU take pride in the fact that they are willing to face disturbing facts head on. The last thing they would dream of admitting is that they are sheltered, squeamish or naïve. This author would assert that when it comes to sexual immorality, they have no stomach for the truth. Because sexual immorality has been dignified, defended, legalized, protected and deemed a “human right,” the media is willingly blind to the moral principle of sowing and reaping. With the recent spate of child abductions, the issue of sexual predation has reemerged with intense interest. Why would a citizen who is a good neighbor with no criminal record abduct a child and murder her? The blindness of humanistic reason is pathetic. They cannot admit that man is a morally accountable being by divine design. They refuse to acknowledge that a man is responsible before God for indulging in sinful thoughts of sexual violence. They become tight-lipped when they hear that wicked fantasies can produce an overwhelming urge to act out the sins. When God’s moral absolutes are declared, they cry “That’s religion! Keep church and state separate! Do not judge!” In actuality they fear that someone’s ox will be gored if specific sexual sins are named. By surrendering to that fear, they have sacrificed all objectivity in the area of sexual immorality. By contrast, the Scriptures deal exhaustively with the activity of sin in the heart of man. The Bible shows us how sin is germinated, nurtured and birthed – Scripture “connects the dots” between a man’s thoughts and deeds (James 1:13-15). Here is where humanism is furthest from reality. The humanist worldview cannot explain the origin of morals or of evil, yet it proposes its worthless “solution” to human wickedness – behavioral psychology. By contrast, the Scriptures speak boldly about the transgressions that tear the human soul. The Bible can clearly trace the downward spiral to deviancy and bestiality (Romans 1:18-32). The Scriptures speak with comprehensive authority concerning the machinations of sin in the human mind and heart. Men reject God’s testimony, NOT because it does not correspond to reality, but because they themselves fear exposure by the light of God’s Word (John 3:19-21). Pornography is an “index” sin that marks the level of our nation’s descent into greater sexual permissiveness: In our land, the floodgates of sexual license have been opened because God’s protective context has been slighted. Sex has been made into a toy, an amusement, an indiscriminate pastime without boundaries. The sacredness of giving oneself solely within the context of marital bonds is considered outdated and passé. Instead, sexual expression runs like stagnant water in a barnyard ditch. Its beauty and spirituality are destroyed when its context is destroyed. Visual promiscuity has become a multi-billion dollar business that enslaves, corrupts and debauches its users. As pornography is devoured by consumers, the degrading cycle is furthered – lewdness for dollars. Every year more of America’s sons and daughters fall to the seduction of income in exchange for acts of lewdness in front of a camera lens. Houses of prostitution flourish next to outlets of pornography for the simple reason that lust stimulated by the visual demands physical expression. Without the consumer of pornography, the cycle of smut production could not continue to grow. The lies inherent in pornography enslave, degrade and deceive: Porn contains lies about sex, women and the masculine self. As Scripture teaches, truth sets free, but lies enslave – Jesus taught this ineffable principle in the gospel of John (John 8:32-36). The lies inherent in pornography make it a cruel hoax. Instead of bringing fulfillment, porn erodes a man’s moral courage. It leaves a man less disciplined and less noble – it increases weakness, discontentment and guilt. Porn use eats away at a man’s boldness for the cause righteousness – it leaves him craven, hypocritical and morally unstable, less able to take an ethical stand. (The man who yields to this ruling lust becomes a sensual opportunist without backbone.) A man’s real search is for completeness and fulfillment of soul: While a man is wed to the idol of sensuality, he is blind to his true need. The immaterial, eternal soul of man CANNOT attempt to feed itself upon sensual pleasure without an enslavement factor. The eternal soul of man must have an immaterial, personal and infinite source in order to truly satisfy its longing. The selfish pleasures of illicit sensuality only mask the painful deprivation of soul – they steer a man away from God, the only true Source of completeness and fulfillment. Only God in Christ can love and comfort the soul and speak peace to it. Only the redemption that is in Christ can restore fallen man’s true humanity: The good news of the gospel is that even the worst sinner is not beyond the reach of God’s power and mercy. The Corinthians of the first century world were notorious fornicators, yet by God’s grace a church was planted in their midst. Many of the Corinthian believers who trusted Christ had a past of sexual degradation: “Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, shall inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Spirit of our God” (1 Corinthians 6:9b-11). Christ has compassion for those who are weighed down with guilt and hopelessly entangled in sin. As the “Friend of sinners,” He calls the broken and ensnared to Himself and grants them forgiveness and repentance (Matthew 11:28-30). God’s moral mark is upon us. The only true freedom and dignity is found in Christ Who restores sinners to their created purpose of knowing God.
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