You Were Made For Love

October 6, 2024 Pastor Chris Oswald

Thesis You were made for covenantal love, not lust, and Christ has paid the price to free you from the lies and brokenness of sexual sin.

Series

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Type

Topical

Tone

propheticdidacticpastoral

Method

redemptive-historicalapplicatory

What's in this sermon

The shape of the argument

15 units across exposition, application, illustration, theological claim, and conclusion. The pastor's argument is built from these moving parts.

Pastoral correction · unit #12

"Applies the berry/apple metaphor directly: if you are stuck in sexual sin, this is your story. You need God to help you trust Him, and you need accountability and community—someone else's faith to bridge the gap where yours is weak. Break out by believing the gospel, reading Scripture, praying, and confessing sin. Get off the berry diet before it kills you."

Doctrinal loci· 12 surfaced

Anthropology · 5 Christology · 4 Hamartiology · 4 Sanctification · 4 Soteriology · 4 Bibliology · 3 Ethics / Moral Theology · 3 Pastoral Theology · 3 Ecclesiology · 2 Theology Proper · 2 Doxology / Worship · 1 Spiritual Warfare · 1

Bible citations· 15

Illustrations· 2

historical example · unit #1 — Provides background on Faraday cages and uses the deathbed testimony of Michael Faraday to establish that great scientists have been Christians with deep assurance of faith—a counter-narrative to the world's framing of Christianity as anti-intellectual.
analogy · unit #11 — Presents the controlling metaphor of the sermon: a man who can reach poisonous berries on the ground (lust, sexual sin—immediately accessible but slowly poisoning) but cannot reach the apples in the tree (covenantal love—harder to reach, time-delayed, but truly satisfying). We settle for the berries because we are impatient, lazy, and faithless.

Theological claims· 8

We are living in a massive propaganda campaign about sexuality, and the task of this sermon is to build biblical protection around your heart and mind. unit #2
The purpose of this sermon is not to make you feel bad but to make you safe by taking captive the lies about sexuality and making them obey Christ. unit #3
If you want sexual sanity, you must think in pre-fall categories: humanity was created for love, not lust, and the materialist worldview inverts this order. unit #5
Christianity says humanity was made for covenantal love, not lust, and every other sexual arrangement is anti-human because it contradicts the pre-fall design. unit #6
The created order itself—sexually transmitted diseases, bonding hormones, the needs of children—confirms that we were made for covenantal love, not lust. unit #7
You were made for covenantal love—love that is both fully committed and fully passionate—and God himself models this in Christ. unit #8
The lie that you can't change is absolutely false—Jesus Christ paid the price for you to change, and you can absolutely change. unit #10
Christ did not die only to forgive you but to make you free—to deliver you from the passions of the flesh and raise you to walk in good works prepared beforehand. unit #13

Quotations· 8

"What are your speculations now?" — Someone at Faraday's deathbed (unit #1)

"Speculations. I have none. No speculations. Now I know whom I have believed and my soul rests on certainties." — Michael Faraday (unit #1)

"People will believe a big lie sooner than a little one. And if you repeat it frequently enough, people will sooner or later believe it." — Walter Langer (unit #2)

"Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone somewhere might be happy." — H.L. Mencken (unit #4)

"On many questions and specifically in their view of the marriage bed, the Puritans were the indulgent party." — C.S. Lewis (unit #4)

"Relief and buoyancy are the characteristic notes of Protestant Christianity. It follows that nearly every association which now clings to the word Puritan has to be eliminated. When we are thinking about the early Protestants, whatever they were, they were not sour, gloomy or severe, nor did their enemies bring any such charge against them. Protestants were not ascetics, but sensualists." — C.S. Lewis (unit #4)

"We need to get better at reading both books." — John Lennox (unit #7)

"God has in fact written two books, not just one, of course we are all familiar with the first book he wrote, namely Scripture, but he has written a second book called Creation." — Francis Bacon (unit #7)

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Full transcript

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0 · Opens the sermon by naming the text (Exodus 20:14) and introducing the image of a Faraday cage, which will serve as the controlling metaphor for protecting the mind from lies about sexuality

Verse 4:14, Exodus 20:14. This week I'll explain why, but I was thinking about Faraday cages.

1 · Provides background on Faraday cages and uses the deathbed testimony of Michael Faraday to establish that great scientists have been Christians with deep assurance of faith—a counter-narrative to the world's framing of Christianity as anti-intellectual

Einstein had the picture of three different scientists on his study wall. He had Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday and James Maxwell on his wall. And Faraday is probably best known for being one of the best experimental scientists of all time. He has fundamentally sort of mapped out the world we live in now. His fingerprints are on all sorts of things that we experience today. But a Faraday cage, in case you haven't heard of that before, is just an object or a thing that he developed essentially to protect an object from electromagnetic fields. Now I'll get into why I was thinking about Faraday cages when I was thinking about adultery here in a minute. But just a little bonus content for you. It's interesting to note that all of the scientists that were on Einstein's wall were all self professing Christians. All three of them were. In fact, Faraday has one of the best deathbed confessions. That's very short and simple. But as he was on his deathbed, someone said to this renowned scientist, What are your speculations now? And Faraday responded, Speculations. I have none. No speculations. Now I know whom I have believed and my soul rests on certainties. What assurance. Not entirely to do with anything today, but I just thought that was encouraging.

2 · Establishes the sermon's controlling thesis: we are living in a propaganda campaign (a psyop) about sexuality, and the sermon's task is to build biblical protection around the congregation's minds

The reason why I was thinking about Faraday cages is because I began to realize as I worked on this sermon about adultery or about our text in Exodus 20:14, you shall not commit adultery. I begin to realize just how much misinformation on the subject of sexuality is buzzing around us at all times. I'm really concerned. I think today the main task is simply to build some kind of wall of biblical protection around your heart and minds so that they would be guarded in Christ Jesus against all of the lies buzzing around, buzzing around you and me every single day. Back in 1943, an American academic named Walter Langer was tasked with a pretty interesting and historic assignment. They asked him to write a psychological profile of Adolf Hitler. Incidentally, in this psychological profile he said that the most likely outcome for a man like Adolf Hitler is suicide. So he nailed that part. But in that document where he's sort of outlining the psychology of Hitler. He writes a phrase that has become somewhat well known in popular culture. And that phrase is, people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one. And if you repeat it frequently enough, people will sooner or later believe it. That has been, you know, condensed over time into something like, if you tell a lie frequently enough, people will eventually believe it. And that's where we are on the subject of human sexuality. The world is full of big, bold lies about sex. The truth is, friends. I mean, we really are living in a psyop. There is propaganda buzzing all around us. And that's why I started thinking about old Michael Faraday and his cage. I thought, how can we as a people protect ourselves from this incredible propaganda campaign that has been going on for a very long time about the issue of sexuality? So that's what we're going to do today. And as a fair warning, I remembered a verse as I was thinking through all this. And as a fair warning to you, if you were to decide to build a Faraday cage around your sexuality, I promise you this. The world will call it a tinfoil hat. There's a verse for that. There's a verse for when you actually decide to be careful with this great human capacity. The world will think you're stupid, pessimistic and oppressed first. Peter 4:4 predicts this. With respect to this, Peter writes, they are surprised when you do not join them in the same flood of debauchery and they malign you, but they will give an account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead. It's just one of these things where in a world of insanity, the same person looks crazy. And what we're really pursuing today in this message is just some sense of sanity around the issue of sexual just understanding that we are, in fact, in this massive psyop and that we really do need to straighten things out a bit.

3 · Reframes the purpose of the sermon: not to condemn individuals but to make the congregation safe by exposing lies and establishing truth

So the point of this message is not really to hammer any one person in any particular way. The main purpose is just to have one of these kinds of messages where the lies are exposed as lies and the truth is presented as truth. People forget that a function of preaching sometimes isn't to make anyone in the congregation feel bad, but rather just to make someone in the congregation be safe. We hear that phrase that we use often to refer to our own thought life that comes from 2 Corinthians. We take every thought captive to obey Christ. But that passage, while it does work for your personal thought life, isn't about that. It's actually about the preaching ministry of Paul. Let me read the text to you. 2 Corinthians 10, 4, 5. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God and take every thought captive to obey Christ. Here we're not talking about individuals getting a handle on their thought life, although the verse works for that. We're talking about a style of ministry that stands up to the lies being told to the people of God and says, I'm storming that castle and I'm going to take some of those thoughts captive and I'm going to make them obey Jesus. And that's an important aspect of a pulpit ministry. So that's what we're going to do today. We're just going to look at some of the lies that we're being told by the world and just set them true, set them straight with truth.

4 · Exposes the moral inversion in the sexual revolution: figures like Alfred Kinsey, Margaret Sanger, and Margaret Mead are presented as heroes but are actually frauds and purveyors of darkness, while Puritans and Protestants—who had a joyful, God-honoring view of sexuality—are slandered as prudes

First thing I want you to see this morning is that we have been told a story in which all of the heroes presented to us are are really villains. And many of the villains presented to us are really heroes. We've been presented a story that has been morally inverted so that many of the heroes presented to us are actually some of the darkest and most terrible people. And many of the villains presented to us on this subject are actually the people who are the heroes. This week I was scanning through a book called Hoodwinked How Intellectual Hucksters have Hijacked American Culture. And the book is essentially about all of the ways that Pseudo intellectual movements have basically perpetuated con jobs on the west in all sorts of different areas. The summary of the book goes like this. In the worldwide culture war, our progressive friends honor no conventions unchecked by God or tradition, largely unedited by their peers in the academy or the media. They fall back promiscuously on the one weapon that their opponents are loath to use, fraud. As weapons go, however, it is no match for the truth. At the end of the day, one prays, it is the latter that goes marching on. So the idea of this book is just, we are being lied to about lots of things, and we're being lied to at a fundamental level. So this is just a message that's saying, guys, it's worse than you think. You really are being told a bill of lies. This idea that we are being actively lied to by our superiors comes straight from God's word. Jesus says to the Pharisees In John 8, 44, you are of the father, the devil, your father, the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies. So what we're doing today is also a bit of spiritual warfare. We're attacking a particular set of strongholds that have to do with human sexuality, and we're setting them straight. Now, what I said about this idea, like we're being sold a story in which the people presented to us as heroes are actually villains. And I want you to see that really, when it comes to the area of sexuality, you are presented with role models that are dark and evil, presented as free and loving. In that book, the, the book about the intellectual scams, he has a whole chapter on a sexual revolution. And he goes from Margaret Sanger to Margaret Mead, and you see all of these kind of front end of the, of the feminist movement perpetuating just extraordinarily damaging lies that still affect our world to this day. Margaret Mead, by the way, a piece of work. Just an absolute scandalous, fraudulent. That's the other thing. When you start looking at their writings, you start just applying basic academic standards. You'll find fraud everywhere. So it was with Mead. You know, this all got me thinking as I read this chapter. Like back in the Salem witch trials, you know, people made the mistake of calling women witches that were not witches. And reading about Margaret Mead made me realize we sometimes make the opposite mistake. But he terminates on a guy named Alfred Kinsey. Alfred Kinsey is presented to us to this day as a hero. The same actor who played Jesus in the Narnia movies did a movie in which he was Kinsey and starred as a hero, Liam Neeson. He's presented to us as the man at the headwaters of all sexual progress and the throwing off of oppression and repression and so on and so forth. His essential idea was that there is no sex act which is unnatural. As long as you can do it, it's natural. That was his sort of operative worldview. And I'm telling you, I'm trying to persuade you that this has had more of an effect on you than you realize. His main sort of motive for what I would call his ministry was to overthrow the Christian ethic of sexuality. And that, my friends, is the reason he's championed. Make no mistake about it, he was indeed a fraud at every possible level and was indeed an avid champion of and participant in pedophilia amongst many other things. And he is presented today by the culture as a hero. Friends, so many of these people that are presented to us as champions of rights or the overthrowers of repression are actually single handedly responsible for as much suffering as any one individual could be. So some of the people that are presented to you as heroes are actually terrible villains. And some of the people presented to you as villains are actually heroes. Kinsey made so much hay on a movement that had already begun prior to him, and that was this movement to cast Protestants in particular and Puritans in particular as prudes. H.L. mencken, the famous atheist, said Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone somewhere might be happy. That's what people thought of Puritanism when Kinsey started kicking around. Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone somewhere might be happy. Mencken's a truly funny man. That's a great quote. It's just wrong. You see, this is going to sound academic. I promise you there will be a personal payoff in the way you think about things in a moment. But well before any of us were born, true heroes of the faith who had much to instruct us on this issue in particular, were taken out by the enemy via slander and painted as prudes and people interested in destroying your happiness. I said that some of the heroes presented to us in the story of the world are actually deep, dark villains. And also some of the villains presented to us are actually heroes. CS Lewis was attempting his best to handle some of this. He would write frequently about the Puritans in one way or another, and he, an expert on 16th century literature, would know what he was talking about. He said this relief and buoyancy are the characteristic notes of Protestant Christianity. It follows that nearly every association which now clings to the word Puritan has to be eliminated. When we are thinking about the early Protestants, whatever they were, they were not sour, gloomy or severe, nor did their enemies bring any such charge against them. Protestants were not ascetics, but sensualists. Protestant enemies, namely Catholicism, thought of the Protestants as too sensual. Lewis writes elsewhere on many questions and specifically in their view of the marriage bed, the Puritans were the indulgent party. Now why am I telling you this? I'm telling you this because I want you to recognize a larger pattern, a pattern that goes all the way back to the garden. And that is when the one who is acting in your best interest is cast as the one who's trying to keep you from something good and the one who is acting for your destruction is cast as your liberator. This is just a pattern we see time and time again. And you will see this in your own life at some level or another. You will be convinced in the moments, in the quiet moments of your life, whether it's on the sexual front or some other, that God is holding out on you. Friends, that story always ends in death. So that's one thing and just one lie to clear up. You're living in a psyop. And part of that psyop is to paint some people who are really terrible as good and some people who are really good as terrible as. And all of that sort of goes back to the garden in which the devil did the very same thing related to God.

5 · Establishes the worldview divide: materialists believe lust is natural and fundamental (we are animals driven by chemicals), while love is rare and secondary

But here is, I think, even more important, and that is that what I would call a worldview divide. That I want you to understand. I want you to understand this. I want you to see it instinctively. I don't think I can overstate how important this particular point is. If you want to have sexual sanity or sanity on any issue, you have to think in a pre lapsarian way. Like what's pre lapserian? How was the world before the fall? That's what that means. Why do you have to think that way? First of all, Jesus teaches us to think that way. He says, in the beginning it was this way, in the beginning it was that way. There's a reason why there's been an attack on Genesis in particular, because if you can think clearly about how the world was before sin, you suddenly have a model for what your life should look like. I want to show you sort of the two competing worldviews around. Just so the two competing worldviews. I will use the phrase Christianity and I will use materialism as my other phrase. Now, what I mean by materialism is not loving stuff. I'm using it as a worldview label. Materialism is someone who believes there is only stuff they don't believe in, any transcendent spirituality and so forth. These would be your atheists, your Darwinian materialists, and so forth. Okay, so what I'm going to do, these are two competing worldviews on this subject. And I think it's important that you understand where they're both coming from. I suggest you ask this fundamental question of both worldviews. Christians, which came first, lust or love? Darwinian materialists, which came first, lust or love? Why am I asking that question? I'm asking, what is the most natural state for a human being? What were we created for now you ask the Darwinian, and they will say that lust is undeniably more natural than. Than love. We are, after all, animals. Let's do it like they do it on the Discovery Channel, right? The Darwinian sees lust as fundamental. It doesn't really have a clean explanation for what love is because as materialists, everything is just chemicals, right? So this is very important that you understand. Psalm 1 says that your life will not go well if you hang out with scoffers, if you hang out with the wicked. This is important. Fundamental to the materialist worldview is that lust is the more natural of the two things and that really lust is what has advanced the species from slug to scientist, I guess indiscriminate seed sowing based purely on the reaction of various chemicals and hormones. What is most fundamental for Darwinian lust? It is the most real thing. Love for them is like, I don't quite know what it is and I don't quite know how you would talk about it, but if it's real, it's the rarer of the two. Love is something that might possibly happen, but first you have to go through, you know, dozens of lusty relationships and then maybe you'll hit on love, whatever love is.

6 · Articulates the Christian worldview: humanity's natural state is covenantal love—Adam's sleep (a mini-death) to purchase his bride, whom he awakes to receive as bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh

On the other hand, Christianity thinking prelapsarian, how was life before the fall? Christianity says, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Man's natural state is a romantic poet who falls asleep, dies a mini death so that he can lay down his life to purchase a bride whom then he can wake up and see and say, this is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. Fundamentally, if you're wanting to understand the sexual lies being told to you, you need to understand that as a Darwinian and all the worldviews that stem from that, by the way, pagan. Paganism thinks this way too. Lust comes first. It is the most natural. Love is weird for the Christian, we would say, of course we believe in lust. We believe it's a thing, but we were not made for it. We were made for love. We were made for romantic, covenantal, steadfast, faithful, I love my wife, I. I love my husband. Love that is most fundamentally natural in the Christian story. Yes, we are fallen. Yes, sin has entered the world, but we see lust as an unwelcome intruder into a story that, well, predated the existence of lust. We see love as the starting point. Every other sexual arrangement, hookup, culture, self pleasure, polygamy, we would say is fundamentally anti human because we know how our story begins. Begins with a man and a woman in A one flesh relationship. Everything else comes after that is a consequence of sin entering the world. So this is big. We as Christians believe that love is fundamental, that you as a human being were made to experience love, and that lust is a uninvited intruder that actually threatens your basic humanity. So when Paul in First Corinthians 6 says things like this, the body was not made for sexual immorality or flee from sexual immorality. For every other sin a person commits is outside the body. But the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. What he is saying there is what I'm saying. You were made for a monogamous, covenantal, full commitment, full passing relationship with another person of the opposite sex. You were made for love, not for lust. And all the Darwinian messaging you're hearing every single day is telling you exactly the opposite. And I want you to know that. I want you to know what the truth is, but I also want you to know how much you're being lied to.

7 · Argues that the Christian claim about sexuality is confirmed not only by Scripture but by creation itself—the 'second book' God has written

Now this is all evidence, not only in scripture, but in the created world as well. If you pay attention to what's happening in the world of human sexuality, you can conclude that not only is this true because God says it's true, but you can conclude that indeed this is actually the way the world was designed. Francis Bacon, I guess this is Christian Scientist day. Francis Bacon, another scientist who was a Christian, said this. God has in fact written two books, not just one, of course we are all familiar with the first book he wrote, namely Scripture, but he has written a second book called Creation. And the reason why I've got so many scientists on my brain right now is I was just reading a John Lennox book and John Lennox love, love him to death. And the great thing about John Lennox books is he does his own audible books and he has the best old Irish guy accent ever. So listen to John Lennox books, don't read them. And as he is talking about these two books of creation, Lennox is just very humble, assertive way says we need to get better at reading both books. Right? Like that's every one of us. We need to get better at reading both books. Well, if we read the book of Creation, I believe we will still see what I have asserted already, that we were not made for all of this sexual craziness. We were made for covenantal relationships with one other person. And I'm just going to go through just some evidences. I won't expand on the reality of sexually transmitted diseases which we see existed even in Bible times. Paul references, for instance, in Romans 1, that those who committed sexual immorality received in themselves their due reward. The reality of sexually transmitted diseases is an evidence for the strangeness fundamentally of sexual promiscuity. Many of you probably know that human sexuality is not a, is not careful. It's not a one organ activity. It's a whole body, soul, mind thing. And I think many of you probably know that there's actually tons of research that shows that oxytocin is an essential hormone, especially for women, to create feelings of bonding and associatedness, connection. And sexual promiscuity destroys that. So that whether it's through self pleasure or through hookup culture or whatever, we're sowing seeds in our population where people have very difficult times feeling connected to one another. Because some of the fundamental hormones and chemicals necessary to create those bonds that God and his good purposes created are being hijacked and played around with so that people are actually finding themselves even after coming to their senses and saying, I don't want to live this way anymore. They're finding it hard to feel connected to the person they've chosen. They've just wreaked havoc on their fundamentals that God built in them chemically. And then of course, we see just by the state of nature that a human being, a baby, takes a very long time to develop and that their brain takes a long time to develop. And we're seeing just evidence after evidence after evidence that these little beings need a stable life with a mom and a dad for a long period of time. And so what we can say, whether we look at scripture or we can look at this other book called nature, what we can just say is this. You were made for love as a human being. You were made for love. You were not made for lust.

8 · Defines covenantal love as 100% commitment plus 100% passion and refutes the lie that you must choose between commitment and passion

People are going to tell you the opposite, or they're going to tell you stories that are rooted in the opposite idea. This is not true. Listen to me. You were made for love. You were not made for lust. You were made specifically for covenantal love. What is covenantal love? It is love that has 100% commitment and 100% passion. That's the standard. There is no necessary division between those. That's another lie you're told that you can have commitment or passion, but not both. False. You were made to experience covenantal love. And we can trace that idea all the way up to God himself, who is both fully committed to us in Christ and also fully in love with us in Christ. There is no discordance there at all. You and I were made to be Loved that way. And we were made to participate in relationships like that. We are fundamentally at the hormonal level, at the mental level, at the spiritual level, we are fundamentally a lot like tape. Stick it one spot. Leave it alone. You're good. You keep doing this. Pull it off. Apply it. Pull it off. Apply it. Pull it off. Apply it. You want. Were not made that way, friends. We were made for a covenantal love.

9 · Shifts to direct pastoral address: many in the congregation are sexually wounded—by their own hand or by others

And for many of us, we are also sinners, sexual sinners, sexually wounded people, people who were wounded by our own hand or by the hand of someone else. We are wounded people on this area. And I just want to tell you something that's like, undeniably true, and that is, is that for 2000 years, Christianity has specialized in applying the steadfast love of God to wounded people, specifically in the area of sex. We see this emerge in John chapter 4, where Jesus sits with the Samaritan woman at the well and addresses her whole lifestyle of tape, on and off. Christianity for 2000 years, it is built for this, my friends. It is built for salving and calming and healing the sexually wounded person with the steadfast love of the Lord. So whether you've done it to yourself or someone else has done it to you, or there's a combination of both, you need to understand something. Christianity Excelsior at repairing this particular kind of damage. We see that in the ministry of Paul in 1 Corinthians 6. He says this to the people in Corinth who would have been engrossed with all the lies we're talking about. He says, do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. Look at verse 11. And such were some of you. Every local church, just about worth its salt, will have as part of its membership people who believed these lies and broke themselves upon the rock of reality. And we have very good news for some of those, for those people. Paul says, and such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the spirit of our God. God has healed countless sexual sinners and he can heal you. He could pull you out of the psyop. He can purge you of the propaganda because he paid the price to redeem you fully and completely.

10 · Directly refutes the lie that people can't change—one of the most dangerous lies in the cultural psyop

I do enjoy. I must Admit I do enjoy being a bit of a troll to the world's lies. I kind of enjoy telling you, showing you that the emperor has no clothes. Like, it's fun for me, and I enjoy that. So let me do that one more time off script, because I've told you some of the world's lies, but here's the one that really gets most people, and that is you can't change. False. Such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of Jesus Christ. So all the world's lies, let me point out the one that you definitely need to not believe, people don't change. Absolutely false. Again, another lie that leads to death. You can change. Jesus Christ paid the price for you to change. You can absolutely change. And there are many people whom God has healed.

11 · Presents the controlling metaphor of the sermon: a man who can reach poisonous berries on the ground (lust, sexual sin—immediately accessible but slowly poisoning) but cannot reach the apples in the tree (covenantal love—harder to reach, time-delayed, but truly satisfying)

So I want to show you a picture. And I, you know, I'm not, like, good at making art, so I had to use AI. It didn't turn out exactly like I wanted it to, but I want to show you a picture and give you an illustration. So what I'm going for here, and I think maybe you kind of half pulled it off, is first of all, there's a man there. I wanted that. What I was really going for here was I wanted you to see fruit at two layers, okay? So I had to figure out how to do that. I basically kind of half got there. But I want you to see you've got berries on the ground, and then you've got apples or whatever in the tree. Here's why I want you to see this picture, this man. Let's just pretend I know the picture didn't turn out quite right, but that he can't reach the stuff up there. He can't reach the apples, he can reach the berries, he can't reach the apples. Okay, that's work with me here. The berries are slightly poisonous, but not enough to kill him. And they will fill him up and he can reach them. The apples, he can't reach. If you want to understand the story for why you sin sexually, this picture, I think, represents some of the basics. The apples are covenantal love. They're the fruit you get from feeding your. From getting married, from feeding your marriage, from doing all the maintenance on the relationship, from working it the right way. And it's all like time delayed, and it takes a lot of effort. And it's not just immediately accessible, but it's what will give you. It's. It's good and you can eat as much of it as you want, but you got to work the garden. You know, you got to work the. You got to work the orchard. Okay, so there are those, but they're not easy. In fact, sometimes for various reasons, they're just not reachable. And you just have to wait on the Lord. Meanwhile, there are these berries that you kind of know. This is not ideal, but you're hungry. And worse than that, you have low faith and you're lazy. And so you stoop down another day, really beneath your own dignity as a human being created in the image of God, by the way, and you scrounge for some more berries to satisfy the appetite for another day, whatever. And you are slowly poisoning yourself. And you probably recognize that to some degree, again, you are not created to eat these berries. You weren't. But we are impatient and we're broken and we don't trust God. And so in all sorts of areas of our lives, not just sex, this is kind of the story when God says, why do you buy these things that don't satisfy? Why do you spend money on these things that don't satisfy when I will give you the things that do satisfy, free and without charge? The answer to that is because we don't trust God, and we're not good at waiting on him, and we just don't have faith.

12 · Applies the berry/apple metaphor directly: if you are stuck in sexual sin, this is your story

You know? So if you want to understand, if you're stuck in some sin related to sexuality, if you want to understand what's going on, friends, this is what's going on. This is your story. And what you need is God to just step in and just say, hey, you can trust me. And to get there, you need accountability and community. Because one of the things you need is you need someone else's faith to bridge the gap where you don't have it. And because you've sinned in this way, you have poisoned yourself. You've diminished your own capacity to do hard things. You've trained yourself to be lazier than you should be. You've trained yourself to give up quicker than you should. You know, you've just trained yourself in all the wrong directions. And the way you break out of this is you believe the gospel of Jesus Christ when he says, I will help you. And you just do the things that Christians do. You read your Bible, you pray, you confess your sins to other people. Get off of this berry diet before it kills you. It's already weakened you considerably. You just don't know that. You will know that when you stop eating berries, you'll be like, man, those things were really Messing with me.

13 · Establishes the full scope of Christ's work: He died not only to forgive but to make us free—to deliver us from the passions of the flesh

Christ didn't. This is the. The other lie. I think it's important. Christ did not only die to give you forgiveness. You know that right? He died to make you free. Not just to forgive you when you fail, but to make you free. Like to get you off of the subsistence and self poisoning diet of lust. That's what Ephesians 2 says. You were dead in the trespasses of sin in which you once walked, following the course of this world. Following. Following the prince of the power of the air. It's just all this mindless, thoughtless engagement. The spirit that is now working. The sons of disobedience amongst whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh. This is why you shouldn't be ashamed to confess this so anybody that has good theology will understand. Well, we all once lived this way. We all once lived in the passions of our flesh in some way or another carrying out the desires of the body and the mind and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind. What is it going to take to change this for you? But God. That's the only hope. But God, being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. By grace you have been saved and raised us up with him, and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages. In the coming ages Christ might show his immeasurable riches in grace. For by grace you've been saved through faith. And this is not of your own doing. It's the gift of God, not a result of works that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. Friends, there's a whole other life available to each one of us. A life paid for by the very blood of the God of the universe. It offers not only forgiveness, but ultimately freedom.

14 · Concludes the sermon by pointing to the Lord's Table as the demonstration that God will help the sexually broken

As we transition to this table, I just want you to remember that that was all made possible to you because Jesus Christ offered himself in complete submission to God all the way to death, even death on a cross. So I want to end by inviting you to this table of life, this demonstration that God will help you. I want to end by reading two passages very short from Isaiah. Isaiah 1. Hear this, O berry eater. Come now, let us reason together, saith the Lord. Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. Though they be red like crimson, they shall be wool. In Isaiah 55. 2. Why do you spend money? Why do you spend your life for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen diligently to me and eat what is good and delight yourself in rich food. Incline your ear and come to me. Hear that your soul may live. And here's that covenant. And I will make with you an everlasting covenant. My steadfast sure love for David.

Where this fits

Recent preaching context

The three sermons immediately preceding this one in the preaching schedule.

Aug 1, 2024

Insider & Outsider Status. AKA: How to Trick a Feminist

We must maintain dual identification with both our insider privileges and outsider disadvantages, for over-identifying with either produces spiritual disaster—revolutionary destruction when we fixate on victimhood, or idolatrous hoarding when we fixate on possession.

Aug 4, 2024

The Lord is a Man of War, Part 2

The God who destroys His enemies in Exodus 15 is the same God throughout Scripture, and the cross reveals His preferred means of destroying enemies by destroying them in salvation through identification with Christ's death and resurrection.

Aug 18, 2024

Two Mountains: One Mandate

Christians have moved from Mount Sinai (terror under the Law with Moses as mediator) to Mount Zion (peace in the Gospel with Jesus as mediator), but the mandate to worship God alone has not changed — only now we are empowered by the Holy Spirit who writes the Law on our hearts and fuels obedience through remembrance and gratitude.

October 6 · This sermon

You Were Made For Love

You were made for covenantal love, not lust, and Christ has paid the price to free you from the lies and brokenness of sexual sin.

Take it further

Discuss · apply · pray

Small groups

6 discussion questions

Chris spoke about living in a 'massive propaganda campaign about sexuality.' What specific lies about sex and love have you noticed shaping…

Daily readings

5-day reading plan

This week we trace the arc of truth about sexuality from creation design through the gospel's power to transform: we were made for covenantal love, the world lies about it, Christ paid the price for our freedom, and the Spirit enables us to walk in that freedom together.

Prayer

Prayer for Freedom and True Love

Father, we come before you in wonder at the truth that we were made for love—covenantal, fully committed, fully passionate love that reflect…

Family table

Made for Love, Not Lies

This prompt invites your family to think about the difference between what the world says love and sexuality are, versus what God designed t…

Couples

Made for Covenantal Love

What lie about sexuality or desire did you hear most clearly exposed in this sermon, and how has that lie shaped your thinking?…

Memorize

Matthew 19:4-6

This verse captures the sermon's central claim that humanity was made for covenantal love, not lust, by grounding sexual design in God's creative order and the permanence of marital covenant. It directly refutes the materialist lies about sexuality by presenting Christ's own teaching on what sex was designed for—lifelong, committed, covenantal union.

Small-group discussion

6 questions for your group this week

Chris spoke about living in a 'massive propaganda campaign about sexuality.' What specific lies about sex and love have you noticed shaping the conversations around you—whether in media, friendships, or your own thinking—and how do those lies differ from what Scripture teaches?

2 Corinthians 10:4-5

→ Can you identify one particular lie that has personally tempted you to doubt God's design?
The sermon distinguishes between lust and covenantal love by pointing to the created order itself—STIs, bonding hormones, the needs of children. Why do you think God embedded these realities into our physical and emotional makeup, and what does that tell us about His intention for sex?

Matthew 19:4-6
Chris emphasized that we were made for love, not lust—and that this distinction is rooted in pre-fall categories. What's the practical difference between pursuing covenantal love and pursuing lust, and how would that difference reshape the way you approach relationships?

→ What would it look like, concretely, to choose covenantal love in your current season of life?
The sermon names a fallen condition: the belief that we can't change sexually, that our passions are too strong to resist. How have you experienced or witnessed this lie, and what does the gospel say is actually possible for us?

1 Corinthians 6:9-11
Christ paid the price not just to forgive us but to make us free and to raise us to walk in good works (Ephesians 2:10). If you believe that—really believe it—how should that reshape the way you fight sexual temptation this week?

Ephesians 2:1-10

→ What's one specific 'good work' that Christ is calling you toward as an alternative to sexual sin?
Chris mentioned that breaking free from sexual sin requires God's help, accountability, community, and gospel disciplines like Scripture reading, prayer, and confession. Which of these are you currently practicing, and where might you need to invite our church family in to help you pursue freedom?

1 Corinthians 6:18

Draft · pending review

Daily readings · Monday–Friday

5-day reading plan

Monday Matthew 19:4-6

Jesus returns us to the beginning—to God's design before the fall corrupted our desires. In covenantal love, we see the blueprint: two become one flesh in a binding commitment that is both fully passionate and fully faithful. This is not restriction but liberation—the design that makes us most fully human, most fully ourselves.

Tuesday 2 Corinthians 10:4-5

The propaganda campaign is relentless, but our weapons are not of flesh and blood—they are the mighty truths of God's Word. Every lie the culture whispers about sexuality, every distortion of desire, must be examined in the light of Christ's authority and brought into submission to Him. We are not passive victims of cultural messaging; by grace, we actively dismantle falsehoods and rebuild our minds on truth.

Wednesday Ephesians 2:1-10

We were dead, enslaved to desires that destroy us. But Christ's resurrection power reaches into our deadness and raises us to new life—not merely pardoned, but *transformed*. The gospel is not a get-out-of-jail card; it is the explosive force that breaks our chains and repositions us to walk in the good works God prepared beforehand. Our freedom is real, earned by His sacrifice, and daily available to us.

Thursday 1 Corinthians 6:9-11

Paul names the sexually immoral, the adulterers, those caught in homosexual sin—and then announces the gospel's reversal: 'And that is what some of you *were*.' Change is not a theory or a distant possibility; it is the lived testimony of those who encountered Christ's power. We are washed, sanctified, justified in His name and by His Spirit. The trajectory of your life does not end in your current struggle—it ends in freedom.

Friday 1 Peter 4:4

The world mocks our restraint, calls us prudish or repressed; the unbelievers think it strange that we no longer plunge with them into the same heap of debauchery. But we are not alone in our convictions—we stand together in the body of Christ, accountable to one another, strengthened by Scripture and prayer, confessing our sins to brothers and sisters. This community is not a burden but a gift, the very means by which the gospel disciplines reshape our desires toward the covenantal love we were made for.

Draft · pending review

Pray together this week

Prayer for Freedom and True Love

Father, we come before you in wonder at the truth that we were made for love—covenantal, fully committed, fully passionate love that reflects your own character revealed in Christ (Matthew 19:4-6). We confess that we live in a massive propaganda campaign about sexuality, one that inverts your design and teaches us to pursue lust rather than love. We acknowledge the weight of these lies that surround us daily, and we confess our own susceptibility to them. Forgive us for the ways we have believed the enemy's whispers that sexuality exists primarily for pleasure divorced from covenant, and that we cannot change (John 8:44).

We rejoice that Jesus Christ did not die merely to forgive our sexual sin but to make us truly free—to deliver us from the passions of the flesh and raise us to walk in good works prepared beforehand (Ephesians 2:1-10). In the gospel we have the power to take captive every lie about sexuality and make it obey Christ (2 Corinthians 10:4-5). We are not slaves to our desires; we are ransomed, purchased at infinite cost, and empowered by the Spirit to live in the reality of our created design.

Give us grace, we pray, to protect our hearts and minds by dwelling on truth rather than on the world's empty promises (Isaiah 55:2-3). For those among us caught in sexual sin, grant them courage to seek help, accountability, and community, and give them the gospel disciplines of Scripture reading, prayer, and confession to break free. Strengthen all of us to live in the glad reality that we were made for covenantal love, reflecting the love of Christ for his church. We commit ourselves, by your grace, to pursue sexual sanity grounded in your pre-fall design, knowing that you are faithful to complete what you have begun in us.

Draft · pending review

Sunday-evening family table

Made for Love, Not Lies

For the parent

This prompt invites your family to think about the difference between what the world says love and sexuality are, versus what God designed them to be. Listen for how your children understand God's design—and be ready to affirm that following Jesus' way isn't about shame, but about real freedom and real love.

Chris talked about how we're surrounded by lies about love and sex, and how God made us for something different—covenantal love that's both fully committed and fully passionate. If you could describe to an alien what real, covenanted love looks like (the kind God designed), what would you say? What makes it different from what movies and social media show us?

works for ages 10+ — younger kids (7-9) can listen and offer observations about what 'commitment' means; older teens will engage with the tension between cultural messaging and biblical design

Draft · pending review

Couples · three questions over coffee

Made for Covenantal Love

What lie about sexuality or desire did you hear most clearly exposed in this sermon, and how has that lie shaped your thinking?
In what ways do we, as a couple, need to more deliberately choose covenantal love over the pull of lust—and where do we need to invite Christ's freedom into our marriage?
What is one specific way you want to pray for your spouse this week as they resist the world's distortions and pursue the design God made them for?

Draft · pending review

Memory verse this week

Matthew 19:4-6

He answered, 'Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh"? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.'

Why this verse: This verse captures the sermon's central claim that humanity was made for covenantal love, not lust, by grounding sexual design in God's creative order and the permanence of marital covenant. It directly refutes the materialist lies about sexuality by presenting Christ's own teaching on what sex was designed for—lifelong, committed, covenantal union.

Draft · pending review

Where this was preached

About the church

Providence Community Church

Lenexa, KS
Sundays · 10:00 AM
About us · What we believe

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# Providence Community Church

A church preaching expository sermons through the books of the Bible.

## Sermons
- [Insider & Outsider Status. AKA: How to Trick a Feminist (2024-08-01)](/ProvidenceLenexa/sermons/2024/08/insider-outsider-status-aka-how-to-trick-a-feminist)
- [The Lord is a Man of War, Part 2 (2024-08-04)](/ProvidenceLenexa/sermons/2024/08/the-lord-is-a-man-of-war-part-2)
- [Two Mountains: One Mandate (2024-08-18)](/ProvidenceLenexa/sermons/2024/08/two-mountains-one-mandate)
- [You Were Made For Love (2024-10-06)](/ProvidenceLenexa/sermons/2024/10/you-were-made-for-love)

## About
- [About the church](/about)
- [Plan a visit](/visit)

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