Spur On Others

There is a young lady I work with that is on the fence about believing. She struggles with anxiety as a result of her home life. As I was talking to her about God and Jesus, not wanting to push to much I let her know that God loves her and wants her to be at peace and would love for her to get to know more about him.

Giving and receiving support is so essential in our lives. Just reminded a friend how much God loves us and that we are chosen. It makes a difference when someone else reminds you of that love.

I have loved the Lord since I was a little girl. In my teens, I wouldn’t even dare a non-Christian because I didn’t want to take the chance of falling in love and being unequally yoked. I thought my boyfriend was a Christian. He went to church every Wed and twice on Sundays. We got married and I realized he had the head knowledge but not the true heart relationship with God. It was 40 years of living with alcoholism and bring unequally yoked. But I never stopped praying. And lately due to the One at a Time challenge to pray on our knees, my prayers became more earnest. Then to my surprise, my husbands eyes were open and the compassion of Christ filled his heart! He has been witnessing to anyone he runs into about the love of God!!! So don’t give up praying! God is listening! Don’t give up!

so I thought that God gave up on me and I gave up on him and let me tell you that was the dumbest thing I ever did but if you pray to him and you let him do what he wants you to do he will come back when the time is right because he is never done with you he will never stop working and his plan is what he wants so you can hold on until he needs you again

  As we study Genesis 2:24, it says, “For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and they will become one flesh.” And so, God creates humankind. He invents marriage, he creates sex, and verse 25 says, “Adam and his wife were both naked and they felt no shame.” In Genesis chapters one and two, God is laying out his blueprint for humanity and sexuality. But in chapter three, we see sin and the fall. The chronology of this is important because you have sexuality before you have sin. Sex was a part of this world before sin was a part of this world. Sex was part of God's good design; it's designed here for husband and wife to be united as one creating a sacred union and a supernatural intimacy. Scripture describes and lay outs what God's design is. And if sexuality is a divine design, then it isn't just physical, it's spiritual. Society has tried to separate sexuality and spirituality, and it's left us so broken because sexuality is inseparably linked to spirituality. When you try to tear those things apart from each other, you get wounded. We've all seen this, that when people go against God's way, when they try to separate it, it just gets broken and messy.

When Jesus is questioned about marriage in divorce in Matthew 19, he points the Pharisees, who are trying to trap him with the question, back to Genesis chapter one. He points them back to the very first story before sin entered the world to understand God's plan and design. And so how you understand sexuality really comes down to the first verse of the Bible. Do you believe in the beginning, God created, or do you believe in the beginning there was an accident?  We believe God created, and there's a design in this universe. If you also believe that God has a purpose and plan, then the conclusions you reach about sexuality are going to be totally different than the person who thinks we're here by accident. But if you believe, God created, Jesus is returning in the future, and we have all of eternity where we are eternal souls, then suddenly you're paying much closer attention to God's design.  It's his design, not your desires that you're paying attention to it. It's his purpose, not your pleasure. It's his truth rather than your feelings that really matter. Believing what we read in the beginning of Genesis means you're made in the image of God. This means every person has intrinsic worth and value. It doesn't matter where they are, where they're from or what they look like or what their belief system is or where they stand politically. Every person is an image bearer of God.

Some of us have put up a wall when it comes to discussing this topic with others or in church, so we pray that God that would break that wall down so we can have softened eyes and hearts to truly hear what we need to. We need to have a biblical foundation that God speaks into, because every day we are being sexually discipled by the world we live in. Discipleship is a word we typically use exclusively in a Christian context to describe growing as a follower of Jesus. But discipleship can be used in really any kind of context. It's this idea that what you're exposed to, begins to shape your beliefs, determine your perspective, and guide your decisions. And more than ever, we're overwhelmed in our culture with content that is focused on discipling us with a certain sexual idea. While we're more exposed to it than we've ever been before, but it’s not something new. That's why Paul writes in Romans 12 to Christians living in Rome: “Do not be conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.” The word conformed literally means to form according to a mold. You have to be intentional to pay attention to what you're being taught and how you're being disciplined by the world, because it is happening constantly without us even realizing it. In this verse, Paul is reminding these first century believers that if they are disciples of Jesus, then they have stop being discipled by their culture around this area of their lives, just as we need to be reminded today.

All of us need to hear some good news from God in the area of sexuality, because we are all sexually broken. That's true of all of us. We're all sexually broken either directly or indirectly. We have all been impacted by sexual sin, and we've all experienced brokenness. Our foundational understanding in this conversation is that God created sex to be a good. We believe that our beliefs, our attitudes, our actions are all rooted in this one foundational truth; that sex was God's idea. He is the creator designer of our sexuality. He knows how it works. And so, some may think that conversations like this don’t belong in church, but just understand that we believe this is exactly where they belong, because God is the one who created it. He's the one who designed it. Dr. Howard Hendricks puts it this way: “We should not be ashamed to discuss what God was not ashamed to create.”