The Christian Church – Understanding the Entrapment of Emotional and Sexual Entanglement: Process of Immorality –Step 2 – Lets Talk About Sex – There was no sexual involvement – Part 8 of 15

Subject – The Christian Church – Understanding the Entrapment of Emotional and Sexual Entanglement: Process of Immorality –Step 2 – Lets Talk About Sex – There was no sexual involvement – Part 8 of 15
Startling 6.65 minutes Statistics on Sexual immorality and sexual purity – Five Secrets to Sexual Purity – David D. Ireland, Ph.D via link
This is a highlight moment from the sermon “Five Secrets to Sexual Purity” by David D. Ireland, Ph.D. Watch the full 47 minutes sermon via link on 5 Secrets to sexual purity
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Sunday, 13th of October 2019
Blog link: https://www.otakada.org/no-sexual-involvement
Nuggets of Wisdom –
A person is born with desires of the eyes and ears, and a liking for beautiful sights and sounds. If he gives way to them, they will lead him to immorality and lack of restriction, and any ritual principles and propriety will be abandoned. – Xun Kuang
Immorality, violence, and divorce, with their accompanying sorrows, plague society worldwide. – Joseph B. Wirthlin
However great an evil immorality may be, we must not forget that it is not without its beneficial consequences. It is only through extremes that men can arrive at the middle path of wisdom and virtue. – Wilhelm von Humboldt
Without moral progress, stimulated by faith in God, immorality in all its forms will proliferate and strangle goodness and human decency. Mankind will not be able to fully express the potential nobility of the human soul unless faith in God is strengthened. – James E. Faust
As a pastor, I addressed the sorts of issues I see people struggling with most and the issues talked about most directly and most frequently in the New Testament. That leads us to recurring concerns with sexual immorality, relational sins, and vices associated with the breaking of the Ten Commandments. – Kevin DeYoung
Key verses for Today:
Matthew 5:27-32 Message
Adultery and Divorce
27-28 “You know the next commandment pretty well, too: ‘Don’t go to bed with another’s spouse.’ But don’t think you’ve preserved your virtue simply by staying out of bed. Your heart can be corrupted by lust even quicker than your body. Those leering looks you think nobody notices—they also corrupt.
29-30 “Let’s not pretend this is easier than it really is. If you want to live a morally pure life, here’s what you have to do: You have to blind your right eye the moment you catch it in a lustful leer. You have to choose to live one-eyed or else be dumped on a moral trash pile. And you have to chop off your right hand the moment you notice it raised threateningly. Better a bloody stump than your entire being discarded for good in the dump.
31-32 “Remember the Scripture that says, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him do it legally, giving her divorce papers and her legal rights’? Too many of you are using that as a cover for selfishness and whim, pretending to be righteous just because you are ‘legal.’ Please, no more pretending. If you divorce your wife, you’re responsible for making her an adulteress (unless she has already made herself that by sexual promiscuity). And if you marry such a divorced adulteress, you’re automatically an adulterer yourself. You can’t use legal cover to mask a moral failure.
1 Corinthians 10:12-13 The Message (MSG)
11-12 These are all warning markers—danger!—in our history books, written down so that we don’t repeat their mistakes. Our positions in the story are parallel—they at the beginning, we at the end—and we are just as capable of messing it up as they were. Don’t be so naive and self-confident. You’re not exempt. You could fall flat on your face as easily as anyone else. Forget about self-confidence; it’s useless. Cultivate God-confidence.
13 No test or temptation that comes your way is beyond the course of what others have had to face. All you need to remember is that God will never let you down; he’ll never let you be pushed past your limit; he’ll always be there to help you come through it.
1 Corinthians 15:33-34 Living Bible (TLB)
33 Don’t be fooled by those who say such things. If you listen to them you will start acting like them. 34 Get some sense and quit your sinning. For to your shame I say it; some of you are not even Christians at all and have never really known God
Exodus 20:14 –17
14 No adultery.
15 No stealing.
16 No lies about your neighbor.
17 No lusting after your neighbor’s house—or wife or servant or maid or ox or donkey. Don’t set your heart on anything that is your neighbor’s.
Process of Immorality – Step 2: Emotional, nonphysical involvement – “But There Was No Sexual Involvement”
Read the story of Jummai and Femi
Complete emotional involvement
Jummai had been out of the work force for ten years. She had been working at another kind of job: that old dutiful wife and mother. But suddenly, she was faced with a situation she never imagined would happen. Her husband left her for another woman.
Jummai and her husband were both Christians. They had been very active in the local church. However, because their marriage had lacked good communication, they had tried counseling. It didn’t help much, and finally, things fell apart and her husband left. The final blow was when he said he loved someone else.
Jummai began putting her life back together. She had to take care of her son, and she wanted to get on with her own commitment to the Lord in spite of what had happened. One of the counselors she and her husband had consulted asked her to be his office receptionist. Femi was the head of a small Christian counseling association. He was married, had two children, and was an ordained minister. Jummai knew the other women in the office and looked forward to the job.
Being receptionist allowed her to be in the centre of all the activity of the office. She loved the work and the people. All of the counselors were married, and she had known their wives for a long time. Since Jummai hadn’t started dating since her divorce, she began to throw herself fully into her work. She would stay late whenever her son had athletic practice after school and would volunteer for extra projects just to stay busy.
Femi was a wonderful boss. He encouraged her to keep busy. He praised her work, relieving her fears about being back in the work force after so many years. She respected and admired him.
Femi and Jummai occasionally had lunch together, spending long hours discussing the counseling practice and how to expand it to help more people. One day, after a particularly long lunch, one of Jummai’s girlfriend asked a surprising question: “Is anything going on between you and Femi?”
“What!” was Jummai’s shocked response.
“Well, you spend lots of time with him, and I just wondered if something was developing that shouldn’t.”
“Of course not! I like him as a friend, but that’s it. There is absolutely nothing going on!”
Jummai continued the long conversations with Femi, not only about work, but about a wide range of subjects. She remained “uninvolved” with him.
Femi had become her best friend. She called him with every decision she had to make and cried with him over every frustration. She was grateful God had given her such a wonderful confidant. Femi, too, began to share his deepest feelings with her. She enjoyed having the friendship go both ways. She felt needed and secure in Femi’s attention toward her.
Because nothing “sexual” was happening, Jummai continued her relationship with him. She denied that anything was wrong with seeing him and could honestly say that they were not having an “affair.”
Then Femi was in an automobile accident. Jummai took the call from the emergency room notifying his office of the accident. He was not badly injured, but would be in the hospital a few days. She dashed out of the office, leaving her responsibilities to a startled secretary. As she rushed into his hospital room, she came to a screeching halt. Femi’s wife was by his side. They both looked up somewhat surprised at her emotional entrance. Jummai felt her face redden, and was aware of an anger building inside of her.
“Is something wrong at the office?” Femi asked.
“No,” Jummai stammered as she struggled to regain her compo sure. “I just wanted to see if there was anything you needed or wanted me to do.” “Jummai, that is sweet of you, but I’ll take care of whatever Femi needs while he’s here,” his wife said.
The words cut like a hot knife. After a short chat, Jummai left, feeling hurt and cheated. She sat in her car and fought the tears of anger and humiliation. Instead of returning to work, she went home and collapsed. For the first time she honestly analyzed her relation ship with Femi.
True, there had been no affair, but she had been completely involved emotionally with someone else’s husband She had grown to have needs for love and acceptance met by a man who could never be more than a friend.
The painful scene in the hospital room had shown her that while Femi had become the center of her life, she was only a part of his. The part Jummai thought she had been playing was being filled by his wife of many years. Jummai had no place next to his hospital bed, no place in meeting his deeper needs, no place beyond being a friend and sister in the lord.
She had centered much of her behavior around pleasing Femi. He didn’t know, of course, that she bought clothes in colors he liked, wore her hair in ways he complimented, brought desserts to the office that were his favorites. She had done it all with the justification that her behavior was okay because there was no sexual relationship.
Intensity without touching
As Christians, we have often confused the words “sexual” and “physical.” We say that nothing sexual is going on in a relationship when we really mean that nothing physical is going on. We are sexual beings and something “involving the sexes” is going on all the time when we relate to the opposite sex, even when no physical contact is made.
The Bible says that God “made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man” (Genesis 2:22). God created men and women to be companions, but He meant for them to function differently. Though the unisex philosophy of today denies it, normal men do relate as men and normal women do relate as women. So “sex” is involved. This obviously does not mean that they are relating in an act of sexual intercourse. When we say nothing “sexual” is going on, we really are implying that a couple is not engaged in sexual intercourse or the sexual activities that lead up to it. We would be naive not to think that a great deal of “sexual” activity goes on between male and female believers. To assume that all is well because a man and woman are not touching each other physically can be overly simplistic.
A man and woman can touch each other in very meaningful ways without ever being physically close. In fact, sometimes the absence of touching can intensify feelings of attraction. Often, something that we cannot have or touch is all the more tantalizing.
Consider the relationship between Ruth and Boaz in the book of Ruth. Their encounter ends in a godly marriage, but there was a profound intensity of feeling between them that was experienced without a single touch.
We certainly don’t want to become less masculine or less feminine in the way we relate to others. We do, however, want to be aware that our behavior doesn’t give off the wrong signals, which could lead the other person to think something he shouldn’t.
This kind of behavior falls into a gray area that can be very confusing. A long list of prohibitions is an inadequate answer. To say, for example, “One should never be alone with a married man,” is unrealistic.
What if your work requires you to spend legitimate time with married male colleagues? If you have to travel, you can’t avoid meeting married men also away from home. No, there’s more to it than a list of what not to do.
It isn’t the behavior that makes it ungodly. What is ungodly are the motives for the behavior, what needs you are trying to meet by that behavior, what the behavior is doing to other parties, and where it all can lead if feelings go unchecked.
When people in the world fall into immorality, there maybe very little time spent in the gray area of behavior before the physical contact begins. The leap from mental to physical is usually just a tiny step.
With believers, however, the gray area is where much game playing occurs. Because we tend to say that nothing is going on when there is no physical contact, we may feel safe because we think we are still walking the road of obedience—when we are really not walking obediently at all.
If we play around with our motives, tease a little, meet needs or have needs met with unavailable people, pretty soon we will fall all the way off the road of obedience into total immoral involvement and disobedience. This innocent “playing around” can lead to the next step in the process: physical contact.
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Originally posted on October 12, 2019 @ 5:17 pm