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Upland Indonesian SDA Church

Eric Walsh: Road Map to Heaven

Eric Walsh

God’s Word as our Guiding Light

Staying on the Path to a Healthy Lifestyle

The Road Less Traveled

How to Avoid Pit Falls

Beware of Hitchhikers

Focusing on the Finish Line

Sex Lies and the Fight for Purity

We're told by the inspired pen that we should guard well the edges of the Sabbath.

So it's always good when we have programs to bring in the Sabbath and to usher the Sabbath out.

So we praise God that we're together here now as day is dying in the West as it were.

We have a very serious topic to deal with tonight with visual images and Bible texts and all kinds of things.

So I just ask that you be prayerful as we go through this talk and that the spirit of God would lead and that he would have full reign in what happens.

Father God, we thank you for this opportunity to deal with key issues in these last days.

Lord, I ask for your Holy Spirit to fill this place, to fill me.

Bless us, Father God, that we would be enlightened by your word, and Lord, that we would be changed by your spirit.

All right, our talk tonight is the first in the series I call Mind Games, which I deal with music and television and the effects of modern culture on our young people.

I do these all over the country and even outside of the country and really target young people and try to address issues that young people are dealing with such as sex, drugs, violence, and other things, gang violence, spiritualism.

And so this talk is the talk that I do on sex and sexuality, I must say you should hold on to your seat belts is maybe the way I ought to say it.

Because some of this stuff is pretty heavy stuff.

And I wrestle almost with some of this stuff, even with what images to put on the screen.

But then, being that I work at Loma Linda and I've been out in the world, I know that our young people actually are often exposed to much harsher images and much harsher words than you're going to see tonight.

And so this is a way for the church to become more aware of what's going on and to be much more prayerful over our young people.

This first slide, just to kind of introduce, I have sex lies in the fight for purity, because I believe that purity is something worth fighting for for young people.

And the image there is a group, anybody know what group that is?

And of course Beyonce has gone into being a huge star in the world today, in the secular world.

She claims to be a Christian, but her music often denies her Christianity for her.

And this group has sold millions and millions of albums between the 3 of them.

But they represent this new sexuality that is pervasive in the world today.

And this is a text from Genesis chapter 19 where the Bible says then the Lord God then the Lord reigned upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven and he overthrew those cities and all the plain and all the inhabitants of the cities and that which grew upon the ground.

But his wife looked back from behind him and she became a pillar of salt." I was fortunate enough when I was in the 11th grade to go to Israel for 2 months and live in a town called Netanya, which is just outside of Tel Aviv, and take Jewish history classes for 2 months.

In that time, there was some time, actually it took like a weekend and just did Christian sites and history, but I went with a Jewish group into a Jewish school and so I really learned Old Testament things primarily and some history even beyond of the Maccabees and so forth.

1 of our excursions was to the southern end of the Dead Sea And when you get to the southern end of the Dead Sea, we got into the water.

It was actually chilly at that time of the year, but we jumped into the water, and everybody, everything floated.

There were no fish, no animals, nothing in the water.

And after we did this, our Jewish teacher, his name was Yoshi, he took us to that end of the sea and we kind of set up a little camp like we did almost every night and debriefed and talked about what happened in Jewish history or in the biblical history in that area.

And he pointed over to a lump of what looked like just a lump of dirt.

And he said, that we call Jebel Ustam, the Mount of Sodom.

He said, this is where the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were.

Here is where the Bible story of fire and brimstone took place, where the cities were destroyed because of their sinfulness.

When you do the research and you look at the words in the old Hebrew for fire and brimstone, brimstone is better translated like sulfur or sulfuric acid.

So when you really look at what happened, it was fire, heat, and sulfuric acid that fell on those cities.

And anyone who's taken organic chemistry class, or any chemistry class, you know that when you mix heat with acid and organic materials, almost always 1 of the byproducts is salt.

Anywhere you dug on the ground around that area you reach salt.

The water was filled with salt so that nothing could live in it and this mound when you chipped at it was salt and I remember Yossi pointing to 1 of those little mounds and saying there are those that believe that that is a lot wife I say all of that to say that the Bible is accurate it is true just as the Bible says that happened the evidence of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah still exists on the southern end of the Dead Sea today.

So when the Bible talks about the wickedness and the sexual perversion that went on in Sodom and Gomorrah, I believe the Bible was true that those things happened in those cities but I also believe that the Bible is true that God's cup of indignation was filled against those cities and God sent warning and destroyed those cities well look at some other texts that kind of back that up When you look at the book of Jude, the seventh verse, the Bible says, even as the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah giving themselves over to fornication and going after strange flesh are set forth as an example suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.

What does the Bible says happened in Sodom and Gomorrah?

There are those who say, well, that was an Old Testament thing.

God doesn't function like that in the New Testament.

Actually, I had a student from La Sierra say that his teacher taught him at La Sierra that Sodom and Gomorrah was just a natural disaster.

But the scripture in Jude 7 makes it clear that they gave themselves over to fornication, which we normally connotate as premarital sex, and going after strange flesh, which if you carry the analogies all the way out, would mean homosexuality.

The Bible says that when they did this, God caused them to suffer the vengeance of eternal fire.

No, when the Bible speaks of eternal fire just like when it speaks of hell it's not saying you're going to go to hell and burn forever but the consequences, the effects of the fire are eternal.

The destruction caused by the fire is going to last forever.

The Bible says here that they suffered the vengeance of eternal fire.

In Ezekiel 16 49 the Bible says, Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom.

Pride, fullness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters.

Neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and the needy.

Verse 50 says, and they were haughty and committed abomination before me.

I want you to know that God still reserves.

If it's, if it pleases God, he can step in and wipe out whole cities if that's what pleases him especially when God's cup of wrath of his indignation when he is so disgusted with what is going on God reserves the right to step in and destroy.

It is the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and for those who don't know it is the fate of this entire planet.

And the only escape from this planet is the same escape that was offered to Lot and his family.

That is that when the angels of God come and offer you a chance to escape, to repent, to be removed from this place, when God gives you an opportunity at salvation, you need to take it.

Because the day will come when all of those opportunities will be finished.

When the preachers can close their Bibles and lay them down.

When probation will have closed and who he that is righteous will be righteous still.

But he that is filthy, the Scripture says, he will be filthy still.

Lot's wife was foolish she was more concerned with what she was leaving behind in the city she was more concerned with the social friends and and and and all that was going on in the city.

She was more concerned with her Prada shoes and her Louis bag.

She was more concerned with what she left in her closet in Sodom than in the freedom God offered her by giving her a chance to escape.

She was more concerned with her DVD collection or her music collection.

She left her iPod on the dresser and wanted to run back.

But instead of Lot's wife accepting the free offer of salvation, of being redeemed out of Sodom and Gomorrah, she chose to look back.

Deep down inside of Lot's wife, she chose to gaze, to long for what she was leaving behind her.

And God knew that if she went with Lot out of the city, Sodom and Gomorrah would have simply followed them.

We now live in a time when we are over-sexualized.

Our children watch commercials like this commercial.

I don't know how many of you remember this.

I don't think they still show it anymore, but who is that in that picture?

Now, Paris Hilton weighs about 89 pounds soaking wet.

And there are a lot of issues right now with anorexia and bulimia in American girls because of the images of these quote-unquote superstars.

The women are so skinny and the girls now want to be like that and their image of beauty is to be skinny, skinny, skinny.

And so a lot of girls are suffering from eating disorders because they want to look like these women, but this isn't reality.

As a matter of fact, just look at the picture for a moment.

That hamburger couldn't even fit in her mouth, quite frankly.

And in the commercial, she's half-dressed, washing a car, holding a hamburger.

Series

Eric Walsh: Road Map to Heaven

Sex Lies and the Fight for Purity

Transcript

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Sponsor

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