Dr. Ed Young - From Confusion to Clarity

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TOPICS: Confusion

Let's just take an examination, and let's just look for a moment as what it is like in marriage, in intimacy to live within the boundary of God. What is it like in marriage to live within the boundary of God? And then we are going to see what it's like in marriage to live outside the boundary of God. And then we're gonna take a panoramic view of sexuality as it is being expressed in the United States today. And lemme tell you what's going on, there's a little subset here. We read over in Peter's, 1 Peter, a frightening verse. "Be of sober spirit, be on the alert". In other words, Peter say, Hey, wake up. Sound familiar? Not woke but wake. "Wake up your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour".

Oh, that's one side of the picture, look at the other side of the picture. Turn if you would to 1 Chronicles 16:9, "For the eyes of the Lord move to and fro throughout the earth that He may strongly support, He may applaud those who heart is completely His". So you got God, and you got the devil, and you got the devil looking all over the earth to find somebody they can devour. Know anybody's been devoured by the devil? Has the devil chewed on you and chewed on me? Oh, absolutely. Satan is looking for someone to devour. At the same time, God is looking for someone to bless, for someone He can applaud.

Ladies and gentlemen, when you and I learn to live a life, and we're interested only in the applause of God, you're on your way. You're on your way. So we have these two forces, Almighty God and the devil searching out, and what's the devil looking for? He's looking for someone who's living outside the boundaries of biblical truth of God. What is Satan looking for? Someone living outside those parameters. What is God looking for? Looking for people who lives inside those parameters so He can bless, so He can applaud, so He can use. So we begin with marriage, the basic institution of the family. The institution Satan and the woke culture is most dedicated to destroying is marriage and the family, marriage and the family the first target.

But I've got good news. Those marriages who are living inside biblical truth are growing. More people got married last year ever in the history of our land. The rate of divorce is declining rather rapidly first time in generations. You see men and women discovered, they're finding out particularly in this last generation that living together in purity and harmony, and living together in love and having children, they discovered that in this relationship that sexuality and intimacy and joy and fullness really genuinely works and changes everything about their life. This is a wonderful trend in marriage today.

You see marriage lived according to God's principles inside His parameters, let me tell you what happens. In Ephesians 5, God tells us how marriage soars, and sings and grows, becomes more excited, more creative, and He just gives us, and I'm gonna summarize with two words. He tells the wives, You cheer for your husband. Tells the men, You do one simple thing, you encourage you, you cherish your wife. Women cheer, men cherish, you got that? Hey, look, if you'll just cherish your wife, wife if you'll just cheer for your husband, it'll change everything. And finally it becomes a natural thing that you do. We men, we are so shallow and we're so tempted, and our egos are so big, boy we need a lot of cheering.

Wives your call according to God, Ephesians 5, I'm summarizing, you're to be cheerleaders for your husband. Husband, you are to cherish your wives. They need to be secure, they need to be at home, they need to feel needed and wanted and special, and know that you'll be there no matter what. I can stand here and tell you, it absolutely works. Cheering and cherishing, cherishing and cheering, that's all we have to do, guys. That's all we have to do ladies. Or you can just stay the way you are, always that choice.

Let me tell you what happens when this takes place, there's a beauty in your intimacy, in the intimate part of your relationship that you cannot even imagine. What is a purpose of sex? Procreation, pleasure and it is a symbol of, Ephesians says, the husband loved his wife as Christ loved His church. It is a symbol that relationship that a Christian had with God through the love of Jesus Christ for you and me when we let Him run our life and we don't run our own life, very simple.

There was a book I heard about, it was entitled, "Christianity And Sex". And you opened it, there was nothing on the pages. It was meant as a joke. But it somewhat said, the joke is on the jokester because in Christianity sex is central and vital to the marriage relationship. Central and vital to the marriage relationship. Why is the church so obsessed with sex, says all of those, and all the sexual relationships we see around us. Why is a church so obsessed with sex? I'm gonna tell you why. It's because God is holy, it's because sex is holy, that's why the church is obsessed with sex, because sex itself is holy.

Do you realize that when a husband and wife comes together, God in expressing love in marriage combines two things, power and pleasure. Pleasure in procreation and power in creation because when two come together and there is a new birth that is created, think about it clearly, plainly, there is created a life made in the image of God that will last forever. Nobody will ever be a part of a bigger miracle than that as long as we live. Sex is holy. Sex is sacred. So we live our marriage out of the boundaries that God has given us, biblically as to how marriage functions. Does it sound like a bad thing to anybody? Oh, oh man, I've got a cherish, I've got a cheer. Oh, that's the way God designed it, that's the way it's to operate.

Now let's look at a marriage that is living outside of God's boundaries. Two people that do not know God and have not received Jesus Christ, and are getting married without having the same playbook, the Bible, without operating on the same principles, I don't see how that marriage lasts for 30 seconds, it really doesn't. Because of infidelity, because of neglect, because of so many infinite number of reasons, because I don't see how they can work, certainly not as God designed them with cheering and cherishing because you operating on different principles. you seek life. You're saying, Well, I'll stay in love as long as I get what I want from my wife or I get what I want from my husband.

We think love is just a noun and it's something you do, it's an action. Till death do you part, man it grows in intensity and joy and confidentiality, it just continues to explode before us. Marriage, even a heterosexual marriage is not functioning properly outside the boundaries that God has given us, clearly in biblical truth. Homosexual marriage, first of all I think that's a misnomer. I don't think there's such a thing as a homosexual marriage. God defined marriage, man, a woman, a man, a woman. He didn't stutter, He didn't back up, He just said that is the definition of marriage and any other relationship there, even though it's been legitimized by the law of the land is not really marriage itself. It cannot function because once same sex marriage came into law, why not have two wives, three husbands? You know why?

You see the purpose of all of our woke philosophy is to do away with marriage and to flatten it out where all kind of sexual promiscuity is open and legal, and don't bother me it's what God has made me like, they even blame God for all the evil disparities under there. Now, let's look at the general sweep of sexuality in America today. Do you remember about a month ago I told you that we looked up on the internet and discovered there were 68 different expressions of gender and sexuality, remember that? That was on Monday and I looked it up again on Thursday and it became 72. Now, that's been a month ago. But I looked it up this past week, this past Thursday, and there have been four more additions.

Now folks, this is a tragic idea, it is a tragic situation in our culture today, and it breaks my heart. And I say to every person whatever your confusion is, whether it's adultery or fornication, or one of these multiplicity of sexual relationships that we see abroad today, I love you. God loves you. God cares. He loved all of us when we ventured into the foreign country and His love is unchanging, it is eternal. And He wants to love us all the way back to sinless so we can learn how to live inside of God's boundaries. In all of this, we saw these beautiful children here, we see teenagers in our choir, we have kids, thousands of them are part of our church, and we see how in public education so many times there are those who are absolutely voicing the words of Satan as they try to confuse our children in the classroom and in every other arena of life, and that is a great tragedy in our culture. It must stop.

And let me tell you, the thing that perhaps is most discouraging to me, let me read a little bit of passages that most of us are familiar with about this confusion of sexuality and gender. Read no better in Romans 1, "For this reason, God gave them over to degrading passions. For their women exchange natural function for that which is unnatural, in the same way also the man abandoned the natural function with the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error. And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved reprobate mind".

One other passage. I think is important to this. 1 Corinthians 6, "But the one who joins himself to the Lord is one agent with Him. Flee immorality, run. Every other sin that a individual commits is committed outside the body but the immoral man sins against his own body. Do you not know your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is within you"? This moves me to particularly where we are, our children are today. It's the transgender movement, you may or may not be aware of. It is the, it's hard to rate the deadliest one but you have to rate sin in some degree because sexual sin is outside the body but it reflects inside the body.

So it is way up there in the harm that it gives, particularly for young girls. This whole idea, we went through a lot with our children. You go back a few years ago, anorexia, bulimia that was a big thing. Then they went through cutting which was so hard to understand. And now you have this belief that among many teenage girls especially, and even young children, when they go and express some idea that, I'm a girl but I was supposed to be a boy, and they go through this wanting to transition and the great immorality of our day, is it doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors say, Well, it's relatively an easy step. And now a large income to the medical practices of this world today comes from taking a girl and seeing a double mastectomy, giving steroids, testosterone shots, saying, Well, you can be that which you were designed to be only your body was mistaken by the creator.

Let me tell you something folks, there's a lot of evil in this world, abortion being number one, but right there is the mutilating of these children when they're not prepared to make that kind of decision. And worse than that, they hide it from their parents and the school. They change their pronouns and say, we'll keep this confidential thing between you and me. It is a deadly blight upon our culture. And then they turn around and there's a destruction and the destroying of female sports. Here's boys and men who are competing as a transgender personality, and now all of a sudden all the records in female sports are being broken. And that is the result of stepping outside of how God wants a human to function, that's where we are.

And the good news, there's a little bit of it, some are waking up and being bold enough to speak the truth and love and say, this is nonsense, it's not according to God, and it's destroying the culture in which we live. I am encouraged, the CEOs, university chancellors and presidents, board members, a few churches even if that's possible, though most have already sold out to the devil, when you move out from under the authority of the word of God, I don't care, that's what happens, that's what's happened to our churches. And on top of this, which is, if a child comes with dysphoria, teachers, counselors are taught, don't try to correct them, just go home. The prefrontal cortex of your mind has not been developed until you are an adult.

If a teenage girl comes with anorexia and they look in the mirror and say, I'm too fat, anorexia kills a lot of kids we know that, statistically. We say, Well you're not too fat, it's ridiculous, how you see yourself is wrong. And we wait for a while, and most of them come through this, and it's true with dysphoria if they wait just a few years, they will come through this. And then you see young girls, particularly are vulnerable to this. Any female here knows how awkward it is to go through those transitional ages from 12 to 13 when everything change with your body. You feel so awkward, you feel so clumsy, you feel so ugly. Egocentricity, know that word?

A child gets to be two years old, they are a victim of egocentricity, it's all about them. They don't think there's anybody in the world. You don't believe that, a child will say, Look you can't see me now. Why? Egocentricity, it's all about them. But when they get to be about four, they move, they recognize other people and they grow up, and the egocentricity, it diminishes until they get to be about 12 or 13, it comes back. Physiologically true. And that's when these young children are so, so vulnerable. The problem we have to communicate is, it's not the body that's mixed up, they just have to grow up.

And we know that 85% of them who go through this they go back to normality but in the mean times, mom and dads you had better be alert, it can come and strike out of the clear blue because the internet, because influence in the schools, and all of a sudden we're a awkward age of transition here between a girl is so tough anyway, but then they say, you know, a friend would say, I may have supposed to been a boy maybe we should transition. And there are all kinds of demonic cheerleaders there grooming kids to fall into this deadly trap.

And they hear that and all of a sudden they are love bombed, love bomb. All of a sudden where they weren't invited, they weren't improved, they weren't in the right group, I wasn't accepted, he doesn't like me, I don't have any boyfriends, I'm struggling in school. They say, Well, I may be trans. Oh, oh, oh, that is great. And they're bombed, they have a new group, they have assurers, they have applause, and therefore they're caught up in this demonic thing that we're going through right now in epidemic proportions in our society.

You see how it works? And we say, well, what's the matter mom and dad, if that happened to me? Let me tell you what your therapist would probably tell you, well, you know your daughter, it seems like she is supposed to be a boy and if you don't go along with this she may take her own life. Oh yes, that's the line. I could document this a hundred times. And therefore they ask you as a parent, do you want to have a dead girl or maybe a transitioned boy? And this is somebody who is an authority on sexuality and has 15 different degrees. Folks, that's what we are up against and it is the demonic strategy of the devil who loves to kill and destroy. But let me tell you the good news, it's really fabulous news for all of us.

"Do you not know," Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6, "Do you not know that the righteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? 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 will inherit the king 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, in the spirit of our God".

That is the message we much bring. Now, let me put a little parenthesis down here. Did you know if you were certified as a counselor and someone came to you with dysphoria, that you as a counselor cannot help them? Oh yeah, absolutely, you cannot help. You'll lose your license, you'll not be affirmed by the state of Texas. Yeah, oh yeah, I'm not... This is true. Oh, oh, oh, well what do you do? And then on on the other side of this, if anybody puts up a warning sign and say, here's a boundary there, you also will be in trouble.

In other words, they've got both ends. Don't say no up front, let them follow their heart. Don't try to help afterwards or you're breaking the law, and it'll be called hate speech. There's a lot of place, most of the rest of the world, what I have said today hopefully is biblical truth, if I would say this, it would be called hate speech and it's love speech. It's love. Because God can change and heal and restore, and make anybody brand new, and that's the power of the gospel. And we must proclaim that gospel in a broken sexual society.