Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] A couple of years ago, I got an email from someone that was new around Journey, and they had a question for me.
[00:00:08] It wasn't a question about God. It wasn't a question about the Bible. It was a question about sexuality.
[00:00:16] And I could tell by the way that the question was asked that there was a position that she held around this particular area of sexuality.
[00:00:26] I sat back and I looked at that email, and I thought, you know, I could probably respond to her question, give her the question that she's looking for. I could respond in probably 30 seconds or less.
[00:00:37] I could just explain to her that around Journey, we've always held to the historical biblical definition of the context for our sexuality and the healthy and holy expression of that is one man, one woman, and the covenant relationship of marriage. I assumed that I could probably just say that in 30 seconds or less.
[00:00:59] But as I sat there, I thought, I would love to have a conversation with her. I would want her to know why?
[00:01:09] Why does that matter to me? Why does that matter to God? And so I. I reached out and I just said, would you be willing to meet with me? And she said, yes.
[00:01:19] So we got together. We probably visited for probably an hour or two.
[00:01:25] I had the opportunity to talk with her about what I believe God's heart behind his parameters for marriage, that God desperately wants his creation to flourish.
[00:01:38] And I got to look her in the eye and say, and this is a challenge for. For everyone.
[00:01:45] I don't care who you are. God's standard in and around our sexuality. The bar is so high. It is a challenge for every one of us. After a couple hours, we had common ground.
[00:01:58] Not that we agreed on everything, but there was common ground and understanding.
[00:02:04] I want to have that kind of a conversation with you today because how we view sexuality has become a defining issue in the church. Like, for this woman that emailed me, this was a litmus test for her. Is this gonna be the church that I feel comfortable being a part of?
[00:02:24] And there's lots and lots of questions that we have in and around sexuality.
[00:02:29] What does God have to do with my sexuality and my sexual desires? Some people ask, why does God even care what I do with my body?
[00:02:40] I mean, isn't God about caring for my soul and I get to take care of my body?
[00:02:47] You've heard this in our culture.
[00:02:49] My body, my choice. It's how we think about everything.
[00:02:56] By the way, if you're here for the very first time, you might feel like, did I just walk in on kind of an awkward conversation that y' all are having.
[00:03:05] No, it's.
[00:03:06] It's not an awkward conversation, but it's an honest conversation.
[00:03:11] And that's what this series has been about. What are the honest questions that we have in and around our faith?
[00:03:18] Because we need to wrestle with these friends, we need to wrestle with these issues in this life. We need to wrestle with God, wrestle with the tensions that. That we feel in our culture.
[00:03:30] And to start this off, I want to just let God speak first in terms of his desire and his design in and around our sexuality. Let's start at the very beginning. Genesis chapter 2. In the creation story, it says, but for Adam, no suitable helper was found.
[00:03:49] So the Lord caused the man to fall into a deep sleep. And while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and then closed up the place with flesh.
[00:04:00] Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.
[00:04:09] The man said, this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.
[00:04:16] She shall be called woman, for she was taken out of beautiful picture of God's design.
[00:04:26] And then God says this.
[00:04:28] That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife. And the two will become one flesh. That term, one flesh. Talking about the idea of sexual intimacy in marriage.
[00:04:44] It says, Adam and his wife were both naked and they felt no shame.
[00:04:52] It's God's design that there would be a complimentary companion that would come together, a husband and a wife. This is the pinnacle of God's created order.
[00:05:05] And the Scriptures tells us it was beautiful and it was good.
[00:05:10] Naked and no shame, no brokenness.
[00:05:16] And this concept, this idea of God's design is restated not only by Jesus, but also by the New Testament authors.
[00:05:26] But not long after what I just read to you, we turn the page and we get to Genesis chapter three, what oftentimes we call the fall.
[00:05:36] And friends, that's when everything changed.
[00:05:39] The deceiver, he came to that first married couple and began to question their trust in God. Did God really say, can you really trust him? Is he holding out on you in some way?
[00:05:56] If you don't take authority of your own life, you're gonna miss out.
[00:06:03] Fomo, fear of missing out. It's one of the evil ones greatest tools.
[00:06:11] And so he told them, you need to take authority of your own life. You can't trust God.
[00:06:16] And they did.
[00:06:18] In that picture of beauty and unity and intimacy, it was broken forever. Genesis 3. 7 says, Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they realized they were naked, so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
[00:06:41] It went from naked and no shame to naked and full of shame.
[00:06:51] Hiding.
[00:06:52] If you read the story, they hide from each other.
[00:06:55] That's what the fig leaves are about. They try to hide from God when God approaches them, the evil one, his story is always the same. He takes something that God made as good, and he wants to try to twist it, and he wants to try to distort it. And he lies to us about it.
[00:07:16] Friends, the enemy, our deceiver. He doesn't have a long playbook. He has a very short playbook.
[00:07:24] But he's really, really good at it.
[00:07:29] He takes what God designs as good and he twists it.
[00:07:33] And so from that day on, when the fall entered the world, our sexuality has become a battleground between God and the evil one and our enemy. And we're asking some of those exact same questions.
[00:07:51] Can we trust God?
[00:07:53] Can we trust God's authority as it relates to our sexuality?
[00:07:59] Or is God holding out on me?
[00:08:03] Do I have a fear of missing out?
[00:08:07] And, friends, that's the story that we live in. This great tension between the story that God tells and the story that our culture around us often tells, that's the battle that we live in.
[00:08:22] What story are we going to believe?
[00:08:25] What story are we going to live into?
[00:08:28] And here's how I would define the culture's story in and around sexuality.
[00:08:34] It doesn't put God as the authority. It puts us as the authority.
[00:08:40] It's all about you.
[00:08:42] It's what you think.
[00:08:44] You are the highest authority. I follow my story.
[00:08:49] I follow my desires.
[00:08:52] That's the culture story.
[00:08:55] But, friends, it's deeper than that in our culture, isn't it?
[00:09:00] It's deeper because it's not just a belief that people hold. You know, we can have differing beliefs about something, but people in and around our sexuality, my sexual expression, my right to my sexual expression is my right as a human being.
[00:09:21] That's why when we step into conversations like this, and I'm not naive, I know that there are people that are saying, you disagreeing with me. It's not just that we have a difference of opinion. You are actually oppressing me.
[00:09:36] You are keeping me from flourishing the way that I think that I need to flourish. You're keeping me from being my true self.
[00:09:46] And people find that offensive.
[00:09:49] People find that divisive.
[00:09:51] And sometimes they'll even point the finger and say the things that you're saying are hateful.
[00:09:56] And friends, that's what makes Any conversation about the things that we're talking about today, extremely.
[00:10:05] It is a minefield, and I know that. And we need to recognize that we're naive if we try to ignore that there's two different stories.
[00:10:15] And I just want to make it as clear as I can. I'm not trying to just say, this is what Bob thinks.
[00:10:21] I'm trying to say this is what I believe is the Jesus story around our sexuality versus what is the cultural story around our. Our sexuality. Because the Jesus story says this, that salvation, salvation in this life is about being transformed by God into the image of Jesus.
[00:10:42] That means our sexuality is something that is a discipleship question.
[00:10:47] Are we willing to follow Jesus? Are we willing to submit our desires to him? Do we trust him?
[00:10:55] Do we believe that he is good?
[00:10:58] That the reason that there is some parameters around our sexual expression is because Jesus wants to protect us and he wants to provide for us? Do we believe that that story is true?
[00:11:09] Or do we believe the culture story, that salvation in this life is about becoming my true self, and that true self is about the full expression of. Of all of my desires, any and every desire, especially sexual desires.
[00:11:32] Friends, that's the tension that we live in in this world between the Jesus story and the culture story.
[00:11:41] What is the story that you are going to believe?
[00:11:47] What is the story that you are going to live out?
[00:11:53] I don't mean that as a rhetorical question. I think every one of us needs to answer it. And I believe if every one of us answers that question honestly, our story is a subconscious mixture of both of those stories. There's ways that we gravitate toward the Jesus story, but there's ways that the culture has influenced our story as well.
[00:12:18] And here's my fear, as someone that loves you and wants to speak into that, I believe that it's true that we've allowed the cultural story to speak way too much into our story. We've allowed the culture to disciple our sexuality more than we've allowed Jesus.
[00:12:39] But I'm going to say this right up front.
[00:12:43] There's two different stories. But this message with my people, my friends, it is not about us thinking about how do we change the culture.
[00:12:52] That's a different question.
[00:12:54] The question that I'm gonna address today is, how do we change you?
[00:12:59] How do we change me? How do we change us?
[00:13:04] That's the question that we're gonna address today.
[00:13:07] I like how the Apostle Paul said it in 1st Corinthians 5.
[00:13:11] He said it this way.
[00:13:13] He said, what business is it of Mine to judge those outside the church.
[00:13:18] Are you not to judge those inside.
[00:13:21] God will judge those outside the church.
[00:13:26] That's our focus today.
[00:13:28] This is a family conversation. Friends, we're among friends today.
[00:13:33] Jesus shared this same kind of principle when he talked about a log and a speck. You remember that.
[00:13:39] You remember that in the Sermon on the Mount, he says, first take the log out of your own eye. What is your place of sexual brokenness? How is that affecting you? Deal with that. First take that log out and then you'll be able to deal with the speck in someone else's eye.
[00:13:56] Namely, even the culture today is about our collective brokenness.
[00:14:05] So I'm going to keep saying it over and over and over again. We are all, every one of us have been broken sexually.
[00:14:13] And here's where I feel like the church has missed it in so many ways. The church takes hot topics in and around our culture and points at those like, that's the problem. That's the issue of brokenness. We don't deal with the things that are happening in our own house, in our own un.
[00:14:30] And it's easy to keep those things at a distance when they're not the things that we struggle with.
[00:14:36] They're not the issues that we have. We make it about somebody else. No, no, no.
[00:14:41] Today we're going to talk about dealing with our brokenness, the way that we are living outside of God's plan and provision for our sexuality. I'm talking about our sex that we are having outside of the covenant of marriage.
[00:15:00] I'm talking about our lack of sex, little or no sex that we're having inside of our covenant of marriage.
[00:15:10] I'm talking about ways that we have broken our marriage covenant.
[00:15:17] Maybe physically, maybe emotionally, maybe even just mentally. I shouldn't say just. It's not a just, it is mentally. Jesus raised the bar of holiness and healthiness like thought life matters.
[00:15:33] How we think about things, how we think about things that are in our mind and our heart matter and cross the threshold outside of God's bounds. I'm talking about our us, our dabbling or addiction to pornography, talking about our same sex attractions.
[00:15:54] I'm talking about our gender dysphoria and confusion.
[00:16:00] I'm talking about our sexual pasts that haunt us to our present day.
[00:16:10] And the next thing I'm going to say, I want to say it really carefully.
[00:16:19] I'm talking about our experience of abuse sexually at the hands of someone else.
[00:16:30] I know I have friends.
[00:16:34] The seeds of your brokenness weren't necessarily always about decisions that you made. They were decisions that other people made that brought brokenness into your life that you never chose. And there's scars on your life.
[00:16:48] How do we deal with that kind of brokenness? That is what we're experiencing.
[00:16:53] That is our topic today. How do we do this? Because, friends, our hands are full if we're just thinking about the sexual brokenness just in this room.
[00:17:04] But here's what you need to know.
[00:17:07] Jesus came to redeem all of our brokenness.
[00:17:12] Everything.
[00:17:14] Our soul.
[00:17:16] Yes.
[00:17:17] Our body, just as much.
[00:17:21] That's why Jesus came.
[00:17:23] That's why Jesus chose to take on a body himself.
[00:17:29] He came to us as pursuing love.
[00:17:33] He came for us.
[00:17:37] Jesus didn't just come as a rule book.
[00:17:40] It's hard to feel love from a doctrinal statement. Am I wrong?
[00:17:44] Jesus came in the flesh more than just information. He came as pursuing love to redeem everything in us, even to the deepest places of our guilt and our shame that we carry.
[00:17:59] Here's my question for us, though.
[00:18:02] Are you willing to go as deeply into the areas of sexuality in your life that Jesus is willing to go because his love, his redeeming grace, knows no limit. Are you willing to go there with him?
[00:18:20] If you are, it's going to take some things.
[00:18:25] And here's again where I want you to make this deeply personal. I don't want you to think about someone else that needs to hear this that you're going to send this message to. I want you to think about, this is what it's gonna take for you to experience the redemption of Jesus in your area of sexuality.
[00:18:43] Every one of us has countless desires that both align and misalign with the story of Jesus.
[00:18:52] And here's what's true.
[00:18:54] I understand that your story is absolutely unique.
[00:18:59] Your story is absolutely sacred.
[00:19:03] You have your own unique questions and struggles based on your past, based on your history.
[00:19:12] Here's what I know to be true.
[00:19:17] You are God's design.
[00:19:21] God did not make a mistake in designing you.
[00:19:26] Your body and your soul were designed by him, and for him.
[00:19:34] You are fearfully and wonderfully made.
[00:19:39] Very good.
[00:19:41] And you have a uniquely fallen sexuality.
[00:19:48] A uniquely fallen story.
[00:19:53] But hear this, friends.
[00:19:55] All those things are true. And this is true. Your presence and your belonging in this place, in this church is always welcome.
[00:20:10] Because God, he is not afraid of your story, friends. We are not afraid of your story.
[00:20:19] And if we're going to surrender our desires to Jesus and receive his redemption, it's going to take at least three things.
[00:20:27] The first one is trust you're going to have to learn to trust God's design, his intention, his motivation, his heart.
[00:20:40] Do you believe that the way that God made us and the parameters that he puts around our sexuality are for your flourishing, for your good, that he wants to protect, he wants to provide for you? His goal isn't just to try to police you and take away all your fun and all of your pleasure.
[00:20:57] That is not the heart of God. Can you trust him with all of your desires?
[00:21:06] I want us to think about it this way.
[00:21:09] And I think this has the potential to be really powerful.
[00:21:14] Around here we talk about being all in followers of Jesus, that we disciple ourselves, we apprentice ourselves to Jesus, that he is our North Star. We want to become like him and live the kind of life that he lived.
[00:21:29] Let me just ask you this rhetorical question.
[00:21:33] Do you believe that Jesus lived a full and fulfilling life?
[00:21:40] Was his life full and abundant?
[00:21:45] If your answer is yes, then I want you to think about this.
[00:21:52] Apply it to the sexuality of Jesus and apply it to your own sexuality. In the life of Jesus, Jesus never once had sex.
[00:22:04] Jesus was never married.
[00:22:08] Jesus never had children.
[00:22:13] Jesus in his humanity had sexual desires.
[00:22:19] But Jesus never expressed his sexual desires.
[00:22:27] And yet we believe Jesus lived a full and abundant life.
[00:22:35] What does that say?
[00:22:37] It says that you can be fulfilled without fulfilling every desire that you have.
[00:22:47] We don't have to fulfill every desire.
[00:22:51] And Jesus understands this.
[00:22:55] The writer of Hebrews chapter four, starting in verse 15, says this, speaking of Jesus. It says, for we do not have a high priest in reference to Jesus. We do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses. He gets it. He understands those unfulfilled desires. But we have one who has been tempted in every way.
[00:23:24] How many ways? All the ways. You think about ways that you're tempted. He was tempted in all of those same ways, just as we are. Yet he did not sin.
[00:23:37] He gets it.
[00:23:40] The Bible's trying to say Jesus gets it.
[00:23:44] But what is our response with these unfulfilled desires that we have? Just like Jesus had, verse 16, Let us then approach God's throne of grace with confidence.
[00:23:59] Come to God, bring our desires to him so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need, our move with our desires. It's not about fulfilling everything. It's about coming to to God with those desires, acknowledging that desperate need. God gets it. Jesus gets it.
[00:24:27] If we apply our culture's story around sexuality to the life of Jesus, the culture would look at this life that didn't express these desires and say Jesus didn't live an authentic life. He was completely inauthentic. He didn't live out his true self.
[00:24:46] Jesus was repressed.
[00:24:50] His life was unfulfilled.
[00:24:55] Here's the if that's true, and maybe you think that that's true, if Jesus did not live a fulfilled life while saying no to those desires, can he give you a full life?
[00:25:10] No matter what desires does Jesus have the capacity to give us, to shape us into a life that is full and meaningful for us?
[00:25:21] Here's the subtle claim. The subtle claim in the life of Jesus is that you can live a single, sexless, childless life and live in fullness.
[00:25:35] Live in fullness in the love of God and in the love of a community of people.
[00:25:44] Do you believe that because we have those desires, do we not?
[00:25:50] These are not. They're not bad desires. They're unfulfilled. They're not bad. Sexual desire comes from God. Desire to be married comes from God. Desire to have children comes from God. But not every one of our desires has the ability to be able to fulfill, to be fulfilled in this life.
[00:26:11] Are we willing then, friends, to actually trust Jesus with our eternal soul and not be willing to trust him with our temporary body?
[00:26:26] And that is hard.
[00:26:29] It's difficult, my friends. I'm not. That's why I said I wanted to sit across from that woman and say, this is difficult to not live with every one of our desires fulfilled because our eternity is forever. This life in light of eternity is very short. But it doesn't feel that way. Does.
[00:26:49] Does not feel that way. It feels like this life is short. And if I. And if I don't take everything out of this life, I'm gonna miss out that fear of missing out. It takes an incredible amount of trust to surrender our desire for sex, for marriage, for children, when it may not be a desire that God has for us to fulfill.
[00:27:14] Can we trust God in the boundaries that he puts in our life? Can we trust that he really does want to protect us, that he really does want to provide for us, that he wants our life to flourish, that he's not just some kind of purposelessly removing pleasure from our life? We've got to learn to trust.
[00:27:36] A second thing is we've got to learn transparency.
[00:27:41] During the Fall shared it earlier, there was brokenness.
[00:27:46] And immediately the brokenness led to hiding.
[00:27:50] Hiding from God and trying to hide from each other.
[00:27:56] If we're going to experience the redemption that Jesus brings, we've got to reverse that.
[00:28:03] We've got to open up our life to God, to his spirit working in our life, honesty with God about the issues in our life. And friends, we need to take the fig leafs off and we need to open up to people around us. We need to bring our story into the light with God and with other people.
[00:28:26] How comfortable is that to talk about the deep places of your sexuality with other people?
[00:28:37] It's not very comfortable.
[00:28:41] I said this earlier and I'm gonna say it again. God is not threatened by your questions.
[00:28:46] God is not shocked by your desires.
[00:28:50] He is not shocked by the challenge that it is to learn to trust him with all of our desires.
[00:28:59] God's not shocked.
[00:29:01] And I want you to hear this, friends, we are not shocked.
[00:29:05] I am not shocked. We can't be a place that would cause people to try to hide, that they can't feel like they can talk about that. They can bring their questions, they can bring their challenges into the light with God and with people. Why?
[00:29:23] Because we need each other.
[00:29:27] We need each other in this, friends, to take the fig leaves off, to stop the hiding, not allowing the deception of the enemy to have its way in the hiddenness of our life that is his playground. He wants us to stay hidden.
[00:29:47] We need each other because it's in those kind of relationships that we can actually point. We can point each other to a better story.
[00:29:57] We can encourage one another toward a better story.
[00:30:02] Is it going to be uncomfortable to talk about this stuff? Yes.
[00:30:07] Yes, it will be.
[00:30:09] But if the reality holds true, and I believe that it is, that every one of us has misdirected sexual desires. And I don't keep saying, by the way, I don't keep saying that to try to make you feel better about your brokenness.
[00:30:26] I say that because we all are in the same boat and we need each other.
[00:30:32] We need a hand from someone else to point to a better story and to pull us out. Sometimes the guilt and the shame and the hiding that can sometimes surround our sexuality.
[00:30:46] If you look at the life of Jesus, just a casual reading of the Gospels. In the New Testament, Jesus invited people's brokenness around their sexuality out into the open, and what did they receive? Grace and mercy.
[00:31:02] Jesus wasn't afraid of it. We can't be afraid of it either. We've got to trust that bringing out into the open with God and with other people will allow God's spirit to move into our heart and to shape our mind and our thinking and in a different way toward a different story that's very different from the culture around us.
[00:31:24] And lastly, we're gonna have to embrace transformation.
[00:31:30] It's gonna take transformation. And when I say transformation, here's what I want you to understand.
[00:31:38] Dealing with this, dealing with our desires, dealing with our brokenness. It is not a one and done type of a thing. It is a lifelong process of allowing God's spirit to shape and to mold our life into the image of Jesus. It is surrendering every desire, every decision, moment by moment, to the story of Jesus and trusting his authority in our life. It's one decision at a time.
[00:32:08] Because you're going to have to learn to say no to some desires and you're gonna have to learn to say yes to some other desires.
[00:32:17] We understand this. We understand this process in life. Let me try to put this idea into another context.
[00:32:26] Think about it this way.
[00:32:28] If you want to transform your physical body, if you wanna make change the way we might say it is, you wanna get in shape, what's it gonna take?
[00:32:42] It's gonna take you living a life where you learn to say no to some things, some things that actually your body really wants.
[00:32:52] And you're gonna have to learn to say yes to some other things that naturally your body just doesn't want to do on its own.
[00:33:03] You get that? You're gonna have to say, and when we think about getting in shape, there's usually two variables.
[00:33:09] Diet and exercise.
[00:33:13] Diet, there are things we're gonna have to say no to, and there's gonna be some other things that are good for us that we need to say yes to.
[00:33:25] And you know what happens over time when we learn to say no to some things and yes to some things that are good for our body actually starts to crave the things that are good for us.
[00:33:36] That's what people tell me happens someday. I'm gonna get there.
[00:33:40] Theoretically, I believe that it's true.
[00:33:44] Exercise.
[00:33:46] Do we want to exercise?
[00:33:49] The hardest time for my day is driving to the gym. Because I just think I would love to just drive right on by and go home and just sit on the couch.
[00:34:01] But you say yes to some things because you have something else that you need to say no to.
[00:34:08] Things that you want to see happen in your life. You get the point.
[00:34:12] The same is true around our sexuality.
[00:34:16] Fulfilling every desire is not going to bring about the transformation that Jesus wants in our life. And it's going to be uncomfortable.
[00:34:25] Our body naturally opposes saying no to some of our natural desires.
[00:34:31] But you know, when we exercise and we get in shape, you know what the world does? They applaud that Way to go.
[00:34:40] Good job.
[00:34:42] When we say no to things around sexuality in our culture, they don't applaud.
[00:34:48] It's like you're repressed.
[00:34:52] You need to fulfill your sexual destiny. You are unfulfilled.
[00:34:59] That's what the culture tells us.
[00:35:02] If we're going to be transformed, I'm going to say it again. It's going to take trust.
[00:35:07] We've got to believe that God's heart is for us.
[00:35:11] He wants to protect, he wants to provide. He wants us to flourish.
[00:35:16] We're going to need to learn to be transparent with God and with other people.
[00:35:23] And we're going to have to take upon our life a mindset of transformation. One decision at a time, one desire submitted to the authority of Jesus at a time, and our life will change.
[00:35:40] Here's the promise I can make you.
[00:35:43] I said it earlier.
[00:35:45] Are you willing to go as deep into your sexuality and your brokenness as Jesus is willing to go?
[00:35:53] Because he will go to the very depths. He wants to enter your story.
[00:35:58] He wants to redeem your story.
[00:36:02] What needs to be redeemed by Jesus today?
[00:36:07] Is it something from your past that haunts you?
[00:36:13] Just even having this conversation, talking about it? There's this thing that's been in your mind that you did or was done to you, and you can't shake it. Jesus needs to meet you in that.
[00:36:26] For some of you, there might be something that in the present, it's like right now, you know where your area of brokenness is.
[00:36:34] Either I named it or. Or God's spirit has named it in you. You know that something needs to change in your present. You need to go in a different direction. Maybe that's where Jesus needs to meet you.
[00:36:45] Maybe for you, it's about your future.
[00:36:49] Am I willing going forward to submit every desire to the will and to the word of a savior that loves me?
[00:37:02] Am I willing to do that one decision at a time? What is your decision today?
[00:37:11] And I'm really thankful that we get the opportunity to celebrate communion today.
[00:37:19] Because communion is this tangible reminder that Jesus gave to us, his church to remind us over and over again that he came into this world to meet us in our brokenness.
[00:37:35] In fact, he came into this world and allowed his body to be broken, his blood to be shed, so that he could bring life, life to the full. To us. It's a reminder. When we look at the cross, we can trust him.
[00:37:54] Do you have questions on whether you can trust Jesus with your sexuality? Look at the cross.
[00:38:00] You can't look at the cross. And not think that Jesus doesn't have your best interest in mind in everything.
[00:38:06] The cross proves to us. We can trust him.
[00:38:11] Here's what I want you to do.
[00:38:14] Make communion personal.
[00:38:16] Today, I want you to think about where in the brokenness of your sexuality do you need Jesus to meet you today again. Maybe it's something from your past.
[00:38:31] Maybe it's something that you're dealing with right now in the present.
[00:38:35] Maybe it has to do with these longings, these desires that have gone unfulfilled that you need to trust him with in the future, whatever it is. Come to the table today.
[00:38:46] Take the bread, the reminder of Jesus broken body. Dip it into the cup, the reminder of his shed blood.
[00:38:56] And remember, Jesus came to redeem everything about you, including your sexuality.
[00:39:07] Let's pray.
[00:39:16] Jesus, we come before you and we just acknowledge that we're broken in lots and lots of ways.
[00:39:28] But Jesus, the brokenness at the fall, the brokenness of sexuality affects all of us.
[00:39:35] Jesus, would you help us to see your story more clearly?
[00:39:40] Jesus, would you help us see the culture story more clearly?
[00:39:44] Jesus, would you give us the strength and the courage that it takes to say no to the things that the world around us causes us to clamor toward and say yes to you and your story?
[00:39:59] Jesus, thank you for the cross.
[00:40:02] Thank you for the reminder that you came to redeem every everything about us.
[00:40:07] And as we come to your table today, Jesus, we say thank you, thank you for the reminder that you meet us here today.
[00:40:17] Jesus, we love you, we trust you, we give our life to you so that we can live this life in a full and meaningful way, in every way.
[00:40:30] And it's in your powerful name that we pray. And all God's people said amen.
