Why God Wills Purity

A little warning now to any of you who have a cynical mindset because you walked in here and you weren't at the last two messages, and you hear this, "Oh, they're gonna talk about sexual purity.

Christians hung up again with sex." Not quite.

We like our sex just fine.

[laughs]

Those roses don't come from nowhere.

[laughs]

So here we are at sexual purity, and I am aware that both downtown and here, there are a lot of kids in the house.

Children.

My Talitha is in San Diego, or she'd be here, and I'd be talking right to her on the front row there.

So I've got a seven-year-old.

She just turned seven on Saturday, and I know how I think about talking about sex to six-year-olds.

So if you're in that category, listen up for a minute because I don't want all of this to be unintelligible, though some of it might be.

Look at verse three, and then I'm gonna try to put some definitions here that six-year-olds can understand.

Verse three: "This is the will of God, your sanctification," that is your holiness, your purity you could say.

"That is that you abstain from sexual immorality." Now, let's take that phrase, sexual immorality.

The Greek word is porneia, from which we get pornography.

[sighs] What is sexual immorality in this text? It's several things.

Let me use some words.

It's fornication, first of all.

Porneia usually means fornication.

Now, a good seven-year-old definition of fornication is when a man and a woman live together as if they were married when they're not married.

That's what I would say to Talitha, and I do say it.

She asks me kinds of questions all the time.

So it's when a man and a woman sleep together or touch each other or live together in ways that God only designed for a mommy and a daddy to do.

This is not something you should do with just any other person of the opposite sex.