Renewal: The Family… Valued
July 11th, 2010 (AM). By: Rod Earnshaw
Let’s talk about sex. Lets talk about sex baby, let’s talk about all the good things and the bad things that may be, let’s talk about sex.
Some of you might be singing along in your head to a dimly remembered tune – that was the chorus of the hit 1990 song ‘let’s talk about sex’ by Salt n’ Pepper. Remember it? It was one of those ridiculously catchy tunes that you resented the radio for playing, and all the more so because of the lyrics. When I first heard it I thought it was a pretty cynical attempt to get on the radio by using the ‘s’ word. But I heard later they were Christians – could that be right? Could they really be Christians and sing about sex?
Well I don’t know if they are or not; but I do know that God isn’t afraid of talking about sex. In fact in a world that is very confused about sex, God has some very clear things to say about it. And I suspect that we Chrsitians need to be a bit more prepared to speak about it, because plenty of others are talking about it.
But that’s not what we’re supposed to think about this morning is it – aren’t we supposed to be thinking about the family? Yes we are, but there is a connection.
And that’s the first point I want to make this morning.
Point 1: Sex is for families.
We saw that in the first bible reading this morning. Have a look at Genesis 2 with me, page 4, we’ll pick it up at verse 24:
24 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.
There’s a very clear order here – the man first leaves his parents. Second, he gets united to his wife, that is, he get’s married. And third the man and his wife become one flesh – that, they have sex.
Men and women were made for relationship, and sex was made for men and women. But sex is reserved for one special relationship – for a totally exclusive, life long relationship – for marriage. And from that relationship comes children, family life.
I don’t think I need to tell you this is one of the things that our world is very confused about. Ever since the invention of the pill we’ve been trying to pretend that there’s no real connection at all. Having broken the biological link we’ve tried our hardest to break the emotional and spiritual links too.
So we’re told that sex is a necessary expression of our personality. If we repress our sexual urges then we’ll do emotional damage, we’ll wither and die if we don’t have it. So we make sex into a need, in fact into a kind of god. Sex is the thing that makes life worth living. If we’re unlucky enough, or stupid enough to miss out, then our lives are empty and meaningless. So don’t restrict sex to marriage – that’s far too restrictive.
And, in a kind of pincer movement sex is reduced to a mere physical act. Apart from expressing our selves, we’re told, sex doesn’t have any deep significance. It can be a nice way of sharing love, or it can be a way of entertaining yourself. It’s nothing particularly special in and of itself, it just happens to be very enjoyable – like riding a rollercoaster or buying an iphone 4.
So society has severed sex from marriage and reproduction, and from any deeper significance than a physical urge. And that leaves society free to pretend that any sex is good sex – married or unmarried, male and female, male and male, female and female, young and old, young and young, oral, anal – they’re all just choices on the sexual smorgasbord, to be tasted and experienced like so many flavours of ice cream.
And if that’s what you’ve heard and been taught then you need to hear that that is not God’s design for sex. In God’s design for sex is within marriage. Sex is God’s design for a man and his wife – for their enjoyment, to cement the bond of their marriage, and to produce children. Or to put it another way marriage – the union of a husband and a wife – is an institution designed by God to produce and protect families. And within that marriage sex is the way that children are produced.
Marriage is the context for sex and families because marriage best protects the vulnerable in our society.
And no matter how often we hear that undermined or denied, research continues to show that marriage is actually the best way to bring up children, and that there are serious downsides to all the alternatives – for the children, and even for the parents. If you want to read some of those studies the Christian Institute website would be a good place to start www.christian.org.uk.
To summarise: study after study shows that the sexual revolution hasn’t liberated us from marriage and into a wonderful new world of sexual bliss. In fact sexual liberation has led to far more teenage mums, far more single mums, and to far more families with men who aren’t the father of the children – and all of those situations are worse, on average, for children and for mums, and even for dads.
And many of us will know first hand the pain that statistics can only hint at.
Now I don’t say any of that to cast judgement. But we heard last week that the gospel has a lot to say to our society. And the gospel comes clothed with compassion – and since marriage is so central to God’s design for stable societies, compassion demands that we help people to see it’s benefits.
Marriage is God’s design for sex and families. It’s a safeguard for us, because outside of marriage there are all kinds of dangers we may well be unaware of. In that regard you could compare marriage to one of those play pens parents use with their toddlers. You know the ones? Why do we put our kids in little cages like that? Isn’t that a bit restrictive – shouldn’t they be allowed to roam free and experience the world for themselves? No, because once a toddler’s up and walking they’re a constant threat to themselves. They’ve no idea the danger they’re in – they’d happily pull scalding liquid off the hob on themselves, or trip into the corner of the coffee table, or wander off the top of the stairs. So if you want to put a child down you find a way to do it so that they’re protected from themselves and all the risks they can’t see. You pen them in, and inside that pen you create a safe space for play and exploration and flourishing. And that’s what God did for us with sex. He’s aware of the dangers when we cut sex free from marriage, so he’s created a safe environment for it. A society where marriage is valued is a society where families are valued. If we want to see the gospel renew Gateshead then we’ll have to model and teach this truth about marriage.
So this has some immediate implications for us. Sex isn’t just a bit of fun, and it’s not god either. We’re fools to take sex out of it’s safe zone and indulge in it as if it doesn’t mean anything. We’re fools to think that it’s not doing any harm if we do. And waiting for marriage doesn’t condemn us to some sort of purgatory of unsatisfied life. If we never have sex we’ve not missed out on the meaning of life – Jesus never had sex. So if you’re single wait till your married. You can trust God, even if you never get married, he’ll look after you. If you are married, sex is good and you’re supposed to enjoy it – with your wife or husband, and no one else.
But there’s a bigger theological point that stands behind God’s institution of marriage. Families are very close to God’s heart. God loves families; in fact God based families on his own relationship.
And that’s my second point.
Point 2: God is the model for family life.
Take a look with me at Ephesians chapter 3 verse 15.
14 For this reason I kneel before the Father,15 from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name.
Follow the little a to the footnote at the bottom of the page and you’ll see that the original says literally ‘from whom all Fatherhood derives its name’. Fatherhood and family were virtually the same concept in Greek, the same word used for both. God designed marriage to reflect something intensely personal – Himself.
This is one of the greatest things that we learn about God from Jesus. God is not a simple unity – not like ‘Allah’ . Jesus is God, and the Father is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. And they’re united in such a way that there is only one God. The one God is eternally made up of there distinct persons – Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Think about what that means. It means God is love. Before creation, through all eternity, God loved. But you can’t love nothing and before the creation that’s all there was, God, and nothing. God was able to love because God is three in one, Father Son and Holy Spirit, the three united in love. Before the creation there was love, there was relationship. There was a family, Father and Son.
So when Genesis one verse 27 says ‘God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.’ It’s telling us something about our relationships – our relationships are modelled on God’s.
See what that teaches us about families – families are God’s idea and they’re modelled on God himself. The way we do family is important because our families are supposed to reflect God’s likeness.
Sadly, the fall has distorted the reality so that families aren’t a perfect reflection of God. But we need to realize that that is what they were created to do – to reflect God.
And what is God like in himself? God is love. What does that mean? Well among other things the Bible tells us it means that God is faithful, consistent, and other-person centred. And that is precisely what our families are supposed to be like too. That’s why God invented marriage – to direct us towards loving, other person centred relationships that are permanent, life-long unions that reflect his faithful commitment.
Marriage and family life was designed by God to be like a sort of self portrait, so that by looking at family life we could understand how God loves. But now, after the fall, we’re like a Picasso self portrait. Disordered, but if you look closely all the bits are there. The problem with a Picasso is you sort of need to know what the original looked like to make sense of it. You can’t look at a Picasso and know what the real thing looks like. But if you’ve seen the real thing and then you look at the Picasso, you can see how he got there.
We’re like that, in ourselves, and in our families we’re all messed up, all the bits might be there, but they’re all distorted and they’re weirdly arranged. Looking at us we would never get an accurate picture of God. But when we go the other way we can see what we were supposed to be like, and then we can understand what the bits mean and how they should be arranged.
So I hope you can see we need to look to God to find out what families are supposed to be like. Families were designed for a purpose, and it turns out that the purpose is important in the design. We’ll never get family relationships right if we ignore the one who made them.
This raises the question, what should our families look like? And the answer is my third point:
Third: Godly Families love and serve one another, as Christ loved and served the Church.
This is a common theme throughout the NT letters, and it’s very clear in our passage from Ephesians chapter five, so won’t you have a look at that with me, reading from verse 21:
21 Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. 22 Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Saviour. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. 25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her
… down to verse 28…
28 In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 After all, no-one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church–
Now there’s some things in there that we might prefer not to hear. But if we understand this passage rightly it offers great freedom and security for families.
Submission is a concept we don’t much like these days. And the idea that wives should submit to their husbands might well be getting some of us a bit hot under the collar at the moment. But submission is simply a right response to authority. God calls us all to submit to him – in sin we reject God’s authority, in repentance we recognise God’s authority and learn to submit to him. So for Christians submission can never be a dirty word – rebellion is the problem, not submission.
And one of the most remarkable things about Jesus’ relationship to his Father is that Jesus, who is God and equal with the Father, nonetheless submits to the Father. In the garden Jesus prayed ‘not my will, but your will be done’. And that was his consistent behaviour throughout his life – he obeyed the Father’s will. And that is characteristic of the Son, he submits to his Father – not just on earth, but in their eternal relationship of Father and Son. So submission doesn’t imply inferiority Jesus submits to his Father.
So Jesus is the model for both wives and husbands. Jesus submits to his Father, and wives are to submit to their husbands. Not blind obedience, and not laying down as a door mat to be walked all over, but allowing her husband to lead, as God designed their relationship.
And Jesus is the model for husbands too – husbands have a think about what these words mean ‘Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her … husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies’. Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her – that’s not a metaphorical expression, Jesus laid down his life, he died for the sake of his bride.
If husbands love their wives as Christ did, what sort of implications will that have for our marriages? Surely husbands will be willing to put themselves out in order to look after their wives and families! Husbands won’t be demanding, or demeaning, but will honour and serve their wives. Married men, does that describe your marriage? Is that how you treat your wife? If not, you need to go back to the drawing board and consider God’s design – and train yourself to love your wife in the same way that Christ loved us – putting aside what he wanted so that he could serve and meet our needs.
And reading on in Ephesians chapter 6 extends the same thinking to children – look at verse one:
1 Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. 2 “Honour your father and mother”–which is the first commandment with a promise– 3 “that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.” 4 Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.
Godly families feature mutual love and service, mutual submission and honour. Children obey their parents – and parents teach the children about God.
Obedient children and God honouring parents bring blessing to the whole nation, under God. That’s what verse 3 is about – it’s not just an individual blessing to the obedient child, but a blessing to the society, a society with lots of families like that will be blessed by them.
That’s why we want to promote marriage and family life in our society. That’s why the studies show that in marginalising marriage we’ve done deep damage to the very fabric of our society. Statistically – Children from broken families do worse, on average, on almost every measure of achievement and happiness, including, on average, being far less likely to marry and stay married.
All of this reminds me of a motivational speech I saw in a movie recently – it was called ‘the backpack’. The speaker asked us to imagine we’re wearing a back pack and to fill it with all the things we owned – and to feel the weight of all that stuff. He says it’s weighing you down – you don’t need all that, take it off, burn it. Don’t you feel lighter, freer. Now take up the back pack, fill it with all the people you love, all your relationships. Heavy isn’t it? You don’t need to carry all that weight. Some animals were made for symbiotic relationships, but not us – we’re sharks.
Now let me tell you that is a terrible model for a society – who wants to live in a world full of sharks. But that is the alternative to God’s design for families. If we don’t want to live in a world full of sharks we need to embody and to promote godly families.
And more than that, we heard last week that the best thing we can do for Gateshead is preach the gospel. And the authentic gospel is clothed in compassion, just as Jesus came with compassion. Family breakdown is one of the biggest causes of economic hardship in this country. Teenage pregnancies and unmarried mothers with multiple partners produce the worst possible conditions for children to grow up in – one of the best ways to protect those vulnerable children, and those vulnerable mothers, is to promote and encourage marriage.
If we’re going to bring the gospel to Gateshead we need to live it out in our families – they should reflect God and his character. And we need to act out of compassion as Jesus did. When it comes to the family that includes promoting marriage, not just for us, but for everyone. We promote marriage because we want to look after the poor and the needy, the weakest and most vulnerable.
If this church is successful at preaching the gospel, clothed in compassion, then we expect Gateshead to change. We want Gateshead to recognise that marriage is good for society. We want to see the family valued.