Healing the Wounds of Adultery
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I am going to be reading 1 Thessalonians 4:1-6 from the New King James Version. As I read note that I have highlighted the word “defraud”. In our pew Bibles, the translators of the ESV chose to translate this Greek word “wrong”. The primary meaning of this Greek word is “defraud”; that is to take from someone else what is rightfully theirs or to fail to provide to someone else what is rightfully theirs. As we will see, sexual immorality does not merely “wrong” others, it “defrauds” them! With that brief introduction, let us hear God’s Word to us today.
Finally then, brethren, we urge and exhort in the Lord Jesus that you should abound more and more, just as you received from us how you ought to walk and to please God; for you know what commandments we gave you through the Lord Jesus.
For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you should abstain from sexual immorality; that each of you should know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor, not in passion of lust, like the Gentiles who do not know God; that no one should take advantage of and defraud his brother in this matter, because the Lord is the avenger of all such, as we also forewarned you and testified.
Our second reading is from 1 Peter 2:24:
He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.
I chose this passage because I want to keep this message positive. The devastation caused by sexual immorality is so great and so widespread that it is easy to lose hope. Sadly, most non-Christians and many professing Christians assume that we have to except sexual immorality as the norm and that there is not much that can or should be done about it. Both our text this morning boldly declare that is not the case, the power of Christ Jesus’ blood is greater than our sin and shame!
This does not mean the problem is not great. In fact, sexual immorality has wounded everyone here. Either by the sin of others, by our own sin or a combination of the two.
The Wounds of Sexual Immorality
The Wounds of Sexual Immorality
Sexual immorality always defrauds someone. To illustrate this, I would like to begin with a personal example—my maternal grandfather defrauded me just prior to my conception. It was the Christmas season of 1960 and my parents were at my paternal grandparent’s home to celebrate the holidays. It should have been the happiest time of year for my mother and her siblings, but it was the time my maternal grandfather announced that he was leaving my grandmother for another woman. In the grief of those days, I was conceived. As a small child I could never understand why I had two grandmothers, but only one grandfather. It was not until shortly before his death that I met him, but by that point he was a stranger to me and still is. He is nothing more than a name and photograph. He and the woman he ran off with defrauded me.
My story is mild, but it makes the point. Sexual immorality is not a private matter. There is no such thing as “safe-sex”; it always defrauds and wounds someone else. Not only are grandchildren defrauded from enjoying a relationship with their grandparents, but grandparents are defrauded as well. The offended spouse is defrauded, as well as any future spouse. I could go on listing one example after another, but I think you get the idea.
This is why we see God so offended by sexual immorality. He is a God of love and justice, and all the hurt caused by sexual immorality both saddens and angers His heart. All sexual immorality will have to be accounted for someday before His Judgement Seat. God, as our text says, “is the avenger of all such”. However, that is not the whole story; at the cross to demands of both God’s justice and love are fully satisfied. That is why we can have hope.
By His Wounds You Can be Healed
By His Wounds You Can be Healed
When Paul “exhorts in the Lord Jesus Christ” and speaks of “the commandment we gave you in Jesus Christ”, do not imagine He does not have the salvation through Jesus Christ in mind as well. The same Lord Jesus who commands, is the same Lord Jesus who saves. This is reflected in Paul’s opening prayer for the Thessalonians:
We give thanks to God always for all of you, constantly mentioning you in our prayers, remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.
Our Scripture lesson from 1 Peter, is a summery of Isaiah 53:
Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his wounds we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—every one—to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
As our confession of faith from the Westminster Short Catechism reminded us, true obedience to all of God’s commandments is not a mere conformity to the external demands, but the internal demands as will. Anyone can be a “white washed tomb” as Jesus calls them; clean on the outside, but full of death and decay on the inside. We have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God. All of us have fallen to meet God’s standard not just for the Seventh Commandment, [PL1] but all of them!
This is why we need a Savior. On the cross Jesus met both the demands of perfect obedience and satisfied the demands of justice for all who believe in Him! He offers to us a perfect Salvation. Truly, by His wounds we can be healed! It does not matter how scandalous your past has been, in Him you can be whiter than snow! Not only this, you can be made whole again. You can have a fresh start. In regards to the Seventh Commandment, you can be a virgin again! One of my favor verses in the Bible is 2 Cor 5:17:
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.
When it comes to sexual immorality, too many Christians are trapped in the past. Too many think they would be a hypocrite to renounce sexual immorality, because they are guilty of it themselves in the past. The Good News of Christ is this: Not only is the past the past, but your are now a new creation!
As a new creation, as a new person in Christ Jesus, how then do we live in regards to sex? We live and abide by the example and teaching of Christ:
By His Example and Teaching You Can Be Transformed
By His Example and Teaching You Can Be Transformed
Jesus is a married man!
By this I do not mean to suggest, that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene as some suggest. No, Jesus is married to His Church. Paul writes:
Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.
Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.
In the way that He loved the church, Jesus set the standard of how we are to relate to everyone. On the night he was betrayed, He left the church with this commandment:
A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.
The Christian sexual ethic is one of covenant, not consent. As I said before, there is no “safe sex” outside of the marriage covenant. Anything less than “For better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part” is an abusive relationship. It is not Christlike love.
As I close this message, I want to say that God offers us a better ethical standard than “consent”. This better way if the ethic of “covenant faithfulness”. We are created by God to be in a loving relationship with each other as God is in a loving relationship with us. Let us stop defrauding one another.