Steven Furtick - Sex is a Good Thing (10/30/2018)
In this sermon on managing sexual passion biblically, Pastor Steven Furtick teaches that sex and passion are good gifts from God meant for intimacy in marriage, but without proper parameters, they destroy instead of build. Using fire as an illustration, he shows how misplaced passion burns out of control, while the right context (marriage) contains and warms—calling for shameless solutions through self-control and God's design rather than shame.
Passion Is Good, But Needs Parameters
You can do a good thing in the wrong way, and it becomes a bad thing. Sex is a good thing. We don't teach that in the church. We teach, you know, sex is dirty. Sex is gross. Sex is disgusting. So save it for your husband. But the passion is pure. However, the passion needs parameters if it is to serve the correct purpose. And what's gotten a lot of us in trouble in our lives is we had a good passion, but no parameters. So rather than building purpose, it destroyed purpose.
And that's what happened to Moses. He had the right passion, but he put it in the wrong place and acted on it in the wrong way. Right passion, wrong expression. Bring me my sermon illustration. So, like, I was just thinking of a way that I could show you this, a simple way to show you this. And it's like, imagine right now that at this point in my sermon, I know this is simple. Just go with me. Like, hey, I got an idea. I got an idea. Let's build a fire on the stage.
I just think it'd be cool to build a fire on the stage. I'm stacking wood to build a fire on the stage. I actually thought about how far should I take this sermon illustration. And I thought about gasoline. And I thought I would see how far I could go before people started leaving, exiting the building. But I think suffice it just to say that everybody in the room understands the problem with this proposition.
And the problem isn't building a fire. The problem is building a fire in a place where there's nothing to contain the fire. It's fine if you want to build a fire. But building a fire without any parameters would be to unleash... See, the same substance that warms your home when it's in a fireplace is the same substance that burns a forest in Colorado in the summer. The difference is whether it's contained.
The Danger of Misplaced Passion
And when you release passions that were intended for marriage outside of marriage, you're building a fire with nothing to contain it. And God says the fire is a good thing. Fire purifies. Fire brings warmth. Fire is a source of life. There's nothing wrong with fire. But if you build the fire in the wrong place, if you put the passion in the wrong place, it will burn your home to the ground.
It's a misplaced passion. It's a good thing in a bad place. And I wonder how many of you would have avoided some serious pain in your life if somebody would have showed you before you build a fire, you need somewhere to put it. And the only human relationship that can sustain this force of passion is a covenant relationship called marriage.
And if you go building fires in other relationships that aren't built to contain the power of passion, it's going to spread to places you don't intend for it to spread. And it's going to destroy things that God gave you as a gift. And so Paul is not saying, put the fire out. He's saying, find the right place to build the fire. Make sure you have the right place for the passion or you'll get burned.
And I'm seeing so many people and so many families get burned because they were trying to get warm. Because it's cold out there and because I need relationship and because I need somebody. So I think I'll stand up next to this fire.
Intimacy vs. Infatuation
I did a word study this week. I studied the word intimacy, which is what we're all truly longing for. That's really what we all want. That's what all of our sexual expression, emotional expression is about. We want intimacy. That's what we want. That's what we desire from God and from others. We want to be known. We want to be accepted. We want intimacy.
But then I studied the word infatuation, and I was fascinated to find out that in Latin—this will make you sound so smart at lunch this week—in Latin, infatuation literally means false fire. It looks like fire, but really can't warm you. It looks like fire, but really can't empower you. It looks like fire, and that's what the world offers, is an infatuation with images of sexuality, but it won't really warm you.
In fact, it can actually run away from you and burn your house down. And some preacher needs to get up in front of you and just have the guts to care two cents' worth of nothing what you think about it and say, if you're building these fires in the wrong place, it's going to burn you. It's going to burn you.
So it's mismanaged passions. Passion is pure. However, the enemy wants to pervert it and use what God wanted to use to develop intimacy in your life to destroy your capacity for intimacy, so that he gets a boy looking at pornography at age 10, so he can begin to rewire his brain and his standard of beauty, so that when he's having sex with his wife one day, he won't be able to do it without conjuring up images that he saw before he even knew what was developing in his life and in his heart, because a fire got built, but there was nothing to contain it.
I say this not to condemn you. I say this not to bring all your mistakes up before you, but there are some of you that are building fires in bad places right now, sending text messages to the wrong person right now, visiting some of the wrong sites right now, filling your minds with the wrong kinds of images, indulging in the wrong conversations. There's nothing wrong with the fire. It's just where you put it.
Shameless Solutions: The Right Order
And let's close talking about something positive. Let's talk about shameless solutions. Shameless solutions. So when me and Holly were building our home last year, there were all these selections that you have to make, and for the most part, I never got involved, but she would bring certain things to me that she thought I might want to weigh in on, and one of them was what kind of fireplace we would have in the house.
I love sitting by a fireplace. I don't know why. But I like the gas log fireplace, because this is about as much work as I want to do to start the fire. To me, that's my version of roughing it. That's my outdoorsmanship right there. Just flip that little switch, and the fire comes on. She said, no, no, for this house, we need to have a real fireplace with real logs and stuff. And I'm like, oh, God, no. I mean, we're going to have to go chop wood, and I'm going to go buy a flannel shirt from Old Navy, and I'm going to have one in the closet.
And she's like, no, no, it'll be great. It'll be a gas start fireplace, but it'll have real wood. And so I'm thinking, like, you know, I trust you, whatever. And she said, trust me, you'll love it. I said, go ahead, we can do it. But nobody showed me how to use it.
So the first time I went to go build a fire in the gas start fireplace, which, let me see, I'm going to give you the technical explanation for this. There's a little thingy that you put in the hole on, there's a thing on the side of the fireplace, and you turn that on, and then it opens the gas valves. And so then you can light the fire. At least that's what I thought you were supposed to do, is turn on the gas and then light the fire in the fireplace.
So I was so excited to have our first fire of the year last year, and so I turned on the gas to give it plenty of time. Like, you know, if you're turning on your car in the cold, so you give it some time to warm up, right? And so I went to go get my kids, because I wanted them to see the first fire, and I bring them in, because it's like getting close to Christmas time, and their stockings up, and I thought this was going to be a picture-perfect scene.
And so I went, I go and get a drink and get the kids, and I gathered them around, and I went and got the wood, not the wood that I chopped, but the wood that the man who sold the wood to me on the side of the road chopped at some point. And I took that wood, and I stacked it up high, because I wanted it to be a good fire. I wanted to make sure our first fire was a good fire, and now I figure we're warmed up.
And so what happened when I put the match in... So, like, now, when I give an invitation for people to receive Christ, I give it with so much more passion, because I feel like I have seen what hell is going to be like. Because when the flames came out, it was traumatic. It was traumatic for Graham. Graham was crying. I was calling on Jesus Christ. I was calling on Smokey the Bear. I was stopping and dropping and rolling. It was everything. I was checking for eyebrows in the mirror.
Lesson learned. Start the fire in the fireplace and then turn on the gas. Not the other way around. The difference between a fire that will warm your house and a fire that will burn off your face has to do with the order in which you turn on the gas and like the flame.
The Right Order: Marriage First, Then Fire
And that's what Paul is saying, church. And that's what God is saying. He's saying some of you are running the gas valve wide open in your thought life. And you're running the gas valve wide open in your conversations. And you're running the gas valve wide open, and so you're getting hit by all these flames that are consuming you and burning you alive. What do you expect when you turn the gas on and leave it on and let it build up and just think what you want and say what you want and you don't control any of this? Like, how did you think this was going to end?
When you let the gas build up and you never got any help with those issues and you never found any place to discuss them and... well, where did you think this was gonna end? He said, first marriage, then fire. Context is everything. And some of you, I'm not trying to be hateful, I'm just trying to be helpful. You're sitting here feeding the fire of lust and discontentment and wondering why the flames are burning so high.
You say, well, I just can't control myself. That's kind of what Paul says in the passage. He says, for those who can't control themselves, you should get married. That's actually a poor interpretation of the original language in Greek. He didn't actually say, for those who can't control themselves. He said, for those who are not controlling themselves.
Because he said that the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. So you have self-control, but when you feed the wrong fires all the time, some of you are just throwing logs on the fire all the time, and you're miserable because you're watching The Bachelor. No man will ever be able to live up to your standard because you're watching a guy take girls on dates on a network budget.
Your man might drive a Hyundai. It may be a good car, but you're feeding the fire of all of these ideals. Some of you men have gotten your standard of beauty from people who are airbrushed. No wonder your wife can't satisfy you. You're feeding the wrong fire. It's flaming up and blazing up, and you're running the gas, and you talk how you want to talk and do what you want to do and say what you want to say, and now you're wondering, why can't I control this? Because you didn't control it.
Shameless Solutions Over Shame
So what do we need? We need a big old ice bucket. You know what the church does and what I used to do a lot of times when I would preach about these topics, I would think that the solution for sexual sin is a big old bucket of shame. You know, so we just, you know, something like that. And all the sermons are based around shame. It's like, and that, that's effective for like three days, but then it flares right back up.
Most of the time in our sexuality, shame is the source of our problem, so it can't be our solution. Paul doesn't shame the Corinthian church. He doesn't shame. God doesn't shame you for your struggles, for your passions. He simply wants you to get them in the right place.