Coming Together Live 2023: Jesus and Wholistic Sexuality

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Coming Out Ministries

Ron Kelly

Earth’s Final Addiction: Can’t, Shouldn’t, Won’t Change

Lord, we want to live free and happy and fruitful for You.

You've set us free, and yet the devil dogs us, Lord.

And depending on how long and early established some of our challenges are and are besetting sins, we fight them still today.

We fight in the courage, the presence, the power of the resurrected Christ.

And now, Lord, I'm praying for the different facets of this topic that we will cover now over the next 8 days, that You will give us divine grace, beauty, a message that is both protective and educational and redemptive and invitational.

And I ask, Lord, that we would go to higher ground in loving a lost world, protecting our children, protecting our own relationship with You, and being receivers of the Holy Spirit.

Teach and touch, I pray in Jesus' name, amen.

So good to have you all with us here this morning as we begin a week entitled Jesus and Holistic Sexuality, Ministering with Biblical Love and Confidence in an LGBTQ World.

I've entitled my message this morning, Earth's Final Addiction.

Pretty sober message, I have to admit It's not exactly What I was intending on speaking about but as I make a prayer journey to this pulpit, Sabbath by Sabbath.

I want to assure you that the message that I bring to you, I believe, is relevant to our time.

It will also hopefully be a bit of education and encouragement.

You know, there's things through the years that they've said can't change.

I once visited with a physician who said he was in the room in California when some of the latest understanding of the ability to reverse heart disease and arterial disease was being discussed.

Unfortunately, some in the room were skeptics.

We know now over the last 20 plus years that indeed God designed the ability of the body to respond to change in a powerfully redemptive way and you can reverse heart disease.

However, just 30 years ago, this was considered medical heresy.

But with a little persistence, with a lot of research, it's been discovered to be true.

Now, we know that you can reverse other diseases as well.

What's on the table this week is, can diseases of the mind and the soul be reversed?

Now, I want to introduce to you a couple of competing ideas.

1 is the latest science, although it's not really that late, it's just well-developed as of late, of neuroplasticity of the mind.

Neuroplasticity, also known as neuroplasticity or brain plasticity, is the ability of neural networks in the brain to change through growth and reorganization.

The brain can change through the growth and reorganization of these networks.

It's when the brain is rewired to function in some way that differs from how it was previously functioning.

And I won't go into all the detail today.

Psychology today explains it this way, neuroplasticity.

Neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to continue growing and evolving in response to life's experiences.

Plasticity is the capacity of the brain to be shaped, molded, or altered.

Neuroplasticity then is the ability for the brain to adapt to change over time by creating new neurons and building new networks.

This science is in direct contradiction at the present moment with the laws and the culture of our land, which suggests there's a certain type of problem that cannot be changed.

That problem relates to the dynamics of human sexuality.

Now, years ago, I did not see this movie, but years ago, there was a movie based on a true story called Fly Away Home.

Maybe some of you can see in your mind the picture of the ultralight leading a flock of geese from 1 part of the country to another part of the country.

Now Hollywood always embellishes just a little bit but nonetheless these geese were bonded with their owner and they had to be taught how to make the journey from north to south.

And actually, in that film, most of the geese were real animals.

Occasionally, they were computer generated, like when 1 of the animals flies into the plane and hurts itself into the ultralight.

I want to talk with you a little bit this morning about imprinting.

It was discovered in the 1930s by an ethologist, Conrad Lorenz.

He popularized the imprinting process of newborn animals, and his mentor, Oscar Heinroth, took the concept and called it imprinting.

Now, Lorenz demonstrated this with his famous goslings, which had spent their first hours of life with Him, and subsequently followed Him everywhere.

And as adults, they preferred the company of humans over fellow avians." This is a phenomenon you've seen, a little cat that's being nurtured by a dog or something else like that.

We're living in an age where through premature exposure, be it through inappropriate activities by adults or the vicarious, which means out of body.

In other words, it wasn't experienced by another individual personally, but I'll call it the vicarious inappropriateness of exposing our young people to things through media that they shouldn't be exposed to.

And consequently, what we have going on is a form of human sexualization of people, a type of imprinting which creates a desire for things that are out of order according to God's divine plan.

This imprinting is recognized by different counselors.

You have a traumatic, wrong, or bad experience.

The conflicting dynamics that go along with that, the guilt, the shame, the pleasure, all of it mixed up together creates a real problem for people in the rest of their life.

They're trying to battle their way out of what I would call sexual imprinting, and much of the trauma that we're experiencing now in our society is a function of abuse, molestation, and vicarious exposure to things that create an initial sexual encounter that is out of order, unnatural, and warring against the lifelong happiness and joy.

Some of you listening to me here today are functionaries of this.

There can be no doubt in a group this big that there are not primarily women, but also potentially men who are inappropriately taken advantage of in their youth and the rest of their life.

They battle for a sense of self-worth and against conflicting ideas about what that initial experience was like for them.

Of course, we've had science that suggests that that type can't change.

Michigan, in the last month or so, has enacted a law signed by the governor that should you have a young person, that you would actually like to have some kind of rehabilitation in reorganizing those neural pathways and having a different experience with a counselor.

So that you could not, in this county, in this great state of Michigan, help reorganize the way your child thinks it is now illegal for a professional counselor to actually engage in reworking a new experience for your child.

This is pretty serious times we're living in.

Now, when it comes to this subject matter, some would just as soon leave us alone.

2 generations ago, the very subject matter was taboo.

It wasn't discussed in polite places, especially at church.

It's too bad at some level that it's not properly- hasn't been properly discussed in some realm because running under the radar, all kinds of deviancies and challenges have developed which have left people vulnerable, which have allowed perpetrators to go unexposed when they should be exposed.

But I'm here to suggest to you this morning that our subject matter, while delicate and difficult, is absolutely necessary because the devil has had a plan.

I'm going to show you from the experience of Israel, and I'm going to let you make your own evaluation from the experience of God's people in a world that has Babylonia sh ideas Egyptian like culture.

I'm gonna let you make your own mind up if he's not using the same playbook again But what we need to understand going into this subject this morning is that God has deliverance.

The power that Paul would write about in the book of 1 Corinthians where he lists off a whole host of terrible problems that the congregants of the Corinth Church had experienced were now past history.

And by the way, thank you for the 12 steps.

Alcohol's anonymous, but 1 of the main mistakes is that with alcoholic anonymous, once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic.

That's not a biblical definition of new life in Christ.

It is a proper understanding of propensity or likeliness or proclivity, but it is not the way Christians who approach life.

So this morning, as we make this journey together, I want you to understand that God has the power to remake our minds, our relationships, our culture, and our society.

When we begin to look at a storyline like this, there's 3 reasons we're holding a week like this.

Number 1 is that God destined that His law should provide happiness and holiness and joy in life.

I'm here to tell you there are many, even some, in our own churches, some even in leadership, who have Completely lost their way in regards to the simplest statements of the inspired Word of God And 1 of the reasons we're holding a summit like this is to reestablish the fact that God did say it he said it's simple enough and clear enough and powerfully enough and pointedly enough to where anybody with an ordinary level of intelligence Could understand it This is what the whole Protestant Reformation is based on is the belief that If you were given the word of God in your own language, you have sufficient understanding by comparing scripture with scripture and praying for the Holy Spirit and fellowshipping together to hear the voice of God saying, this is the way, walk ye in it.

Now we're living in a day and age where supposedly you can read the word of God for what it says, and some expert with some kind of advanced education can make it mean exactly the opposite of what it says.

We're holding a seminar like this to establish the inspired dynamic of the word of God.

We're holding a seminar like this for education, because you are assaulted continually with wrong ideas and sometimes even from inside the precincts and departments of our own denomination.

And while I do believe that most of our leaders are still solid on the biblical constructs of human sexuality and relationships.

There is a orthodontic continual re-figuring of the supposed gospel smile.

The other reason we're holding a week like this is that we have in our lives various generations, our young people.

There's nobody that's been under a constant assault for the innocence, the purity, the future ability to bind and commit and promise and keep.

As the father of a daughter who is not yet married and reflecting on this sermon, I have wondered myself how many eligible young bachelors who are out there have not already been corrupted and bound at the altar of lust, whether it is vicariously or in the freewheeling experiences that are no longer frowned upon by the church, or at least hardly talked about.

We're so worried about extending grace that we've forgotten to create the communities of grace that said, this is a firewall in which you should not extend the reach of your experience, lest you come away scalded and burned for the rest of your life.

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Earth’s Final Addiction: Can’t, Shouldn’t, Won’t Change

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