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Aug 28, 2022

Wisdom and Grace for our Bodies

Wisdom and Grace for our Bodies

Passage: Deuteronomy 5:18

Speaker: Patrick Lafferty

Series: Life in Ten Words

After years of trying to live the empowered life by casting off all constraint concerning bodily intimacy, one author recently lamented, “The saddest realization is how low I set the bar.” What came to be widely considered puritanical, impossible, or repressive now suggests wisdom discarded too haphazardly. What theory of life does not include some guidance for how we think of the most vulnerable, intimate interactions we can have with another human? The 7th commandment offers terse guidance, but has a host of implied truths behind it–and, with help from other complementary voices, some reasonable implications that follow from it.

Readings & Scripture

PREPARATION: Psalm 139:13-15
LEADER: For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.

ALL: I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

LEADER: Wonderful are your works;
my soul knows it very well.

ALL: My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

CENTRAL TEXT: Deuteronomy 5:18, Matthew 5:27-30
Deut. 5:18 “ ‘And you shall not commit adultery.

Matt. 5:27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ 28 But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29 If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. 30 And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH/SCRIPTURE READING/CORPORATE PRAYER:) 1 Corinthians 6:12-20
LEADER: “All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be dominated by anything. “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food”—and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, “The two will become one flesh.” But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.

CONFESSION OF SIN: From Psalm 139, 1 Corinthians 4:7

ALL: For all of its frailty, for all of its vulnerability to weakness and sickness, for all the ways we wish it might be different, this body we have is a gift–fashioned and formed in the dark, though not hidden from you. But how often we seek its pleasure as if we made ourselves, as if we owed nothing for our being. In how many ways have we exploited this gift for what is fleeting and foolish? In how many ways do we need your help to see the grace of life itself, and the grace of forgiveness in your Son.

ASSURANCE OF PARDON: 1 John 1:8-9
LEADER: If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

BENEDICTION: 1 Thessalonians 5:23
LEADER: Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

ALL: Amen!

RELATED SCRIPTURES:

  • Genesis 2:18-25
  • Psalm 32:3-5
  • Proverbs 5:1-23
  • Matthew 19
  • Luke 7:36-50
  • Luke 15:30-32
  • John 7:53-8:11
  • Romans 13:9-14
  • James 2:11
  • Hebrews 13:4
  • James 5:16

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

  1. What if anything would you change about your body right now? Why?
  2. From what you know of the bible, is the body good or bad? Discuss.
  3. Answer this common charge made against Christians: “Why do you all care so much about what happens behind closed doors? Why do you refuse to accept that sex is a perfectly natura,l and sometimes unmanageable, appetite?” How would you try to answer in a respectful, clear way?
  4. Why might Jesus speak of a lustful (read: objectifying) impulse as if indistinguishable from the act of adultery itself?
  5. Why must any discussion about intimate relations begin with a discussion about the Lord? What goes missing or gets lost if you don’t begin there? How are both wisdom and grace essential to the conversation?
  6. If you were offering counsel to a younger person about these intimate matters, what wisdom would you share, either from your own experience or observation?

QUOTES: 

  • The idea that the body dies and the soul doesn't is an idea that implies that the body is something rather gross and embarrassing, like a case of hemorrhoids. The Greeks spoke of it as the prison house of the soul. The suggestion was that to escape it altogether was something less than a disaster. The Bible, on the other hand, sees the body in particular and the material world in general as a good and glorious invention. How could it be otherwise when it was invented by a good and glorious God? Frederick Buechner
  • Tell me, do you get much response to the old, old story these days?” --all that poppycock about baptism, and purity and the Virgin Birth…[you know] it’s against all modern science and obstetrics.. . . .how do you get along without us [since] religion is just a substitute for [you know what]”
  • I still prefer to believe that sex is a substitute for religion and that the young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God. Bruce Marshall, The World, the Flesh, and Father Smith
  • “Let us treat sex just as we treat all our other impulses”…I realized that when [people] said this, they actually meant the exact opposite of what they said because they were asking us to treat sex in a fashion as no other impulse in the history of civilization has ever been treated. All other impulses had to be bridled. C.S. Lewis
  • No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true. The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • I can only think of a handful I don’t regret. The rest I would put in the category of “casual,” which I would define as . . . either meaningless or mediocre (or both). If I get really honest with myself, I’d say most of these usually drunken encounters left me feeling empty and demoralized. And worthless. . . . The lie I told myself for decades was: I’m not in pain—I’m empowered. Bridget Phetasy
  • If you want to say that sex is no different from shaking someone’s hand, and shouldn’t have any kind of special status, you also can’t say that rape has any special status. You can’t say that sexual harassment has any special status, or like revenge porn has a special status, or all this stuff which we know ruins people’s lives. Louise Perry
  • When the force of a person's sexuality is centrifugal, pushing further and further away as psyches the very ones being embraced as somas, this sexuality is of the Devil. When it is centripetal, it is of God. Frederick Buechner
  • Lust is the ape that [chatters] in our loins. Tame him as we will by day, he rages all the wilder in our dreams by night. Just when we think we're safe from him, he raises up his ugly head and smirks, and there's no river in the world flows cold and strong enough to strike him down. Almighty God, why dost thou deck men out with such a loathsome toy? Frederick Buechner

    When [Henry Beecher] stood there looking into the hotel mirror with soap on his face and a razor in his hand, part of what he saw was his own shame and horror, the sight of his own folly, the judgment one can imagine he found even harder to bear than God’s, which was his own judgment on himself, because whereas God is merciful, we are none of us very good at showing mercy on ourselves.  Henry Ward Beecher cut himself with his razor and wrote out notes for that first Beecher Lecture in blood because, whatever else he was or aspired to be or was famous for being, he was a man of flesh and blood…Frederick Buechner

  • We are our secrets. They are the essence of what makes us ourselves. . . .If we are ever to be free and whole, we must be free from their darkness and have their spell over us broken. Frederick Buechner
  • God knows; and He is merciful! He hath proved his mercy, most of all, in my afflictions. . . .Praised be His name! His will be done! Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter

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