ECYC 2013: Something Better

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Eastern Canada Youth Conference

Christian Purity

Krystal Williams

Experiencing Biblical Purity: Practical Tips Regarding Sexuality

Alright, in our last session, for those of you that were there, we covered a few different aspects regarding sexual purity and what God's plan or standard is for us, and what His better plan is for us.

In Ephesians chapter 5, verse 3, we read a text that says, let not sexual immorality be named even once among you.

And of course, as Christians in this room, we find that incredibly easy, right?

While researching for this topic, I came across this quotation.

And it says, there is 1 area, sorry, there is 1 area in life where it feels like Satan is winning the battle, it's in the area of sex.

If there is 1 area where our bodies are screaming out for us to disobey God, it's in the area of sex.

So like we mentioned in the last seminar, we find ourselves in a sensual world where our bodies are wanting that which is contrary to what God has planned for us.

The natural human nature that we have been given by God.

We said that sexual desire is given by God, that it's heaven ordained, right?

It's not wrong, it's not evil, but patience and self-control needs to be exercised over those passions and over those desires.

We mentioned that sexual purity involves more than just abstinence from sexual intercourse.

Sexual purity is a lifestyle, transcending to every area of my life.

My emotions, my mental state of being, my social interactions, my spiritual growth.

Sexual purity involves all of those different areas of my life.

And once we came to the end of the presentation, we said, is there any hope?

And we recall the promises of God, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.

Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling.

We can have victory in our sexual temptations in our life through the power of God.

So we're going to go through some tips as to how to maintain sexual purity.

And before we actually even get into those, I'm going to set a certain foundation to start with.

We need God if we're ever going to have victory or sexual rights.

God's help is unquestionably needed, and we need to keep our focus on Christ.

Those of you that were there last night for walking on water, I appreciate what was shared, that we can start off great, but if we keep our eyes, or if we take our eyes off Christ, we're going to sink.

We can have victory in our lives, and maybe in our sexual purity for a time, but if we take our eyes off Christ, we're going to sink.

We have victory in our lives, maybe in our sexual purity for a time, but if we take our eyes off Christ, we're going to sink, we're going to fall.

And Satan well knows that sexuality is an area of weakness in humanity.

Satan well knows that we are not fighting, or we should well know that we're not fighting just against what Paul says, flesh and blood, but against supernatural powers that are seeking our destruction, seeking our downfall.

So a foundational starting point is that we cannot fight the battle of ourselves.

And maybe there are some of you who are struggling in this room with various types of sexual sin in your life, and you have come through cycles of seeing the sin repeated in your life more than once, over and over.

You find yourself falling back into the same habit, and you wonder if you're ever going to break the cycle.

Maybe there are people here that are struggling with pornography.

Maybe there are people struggling with any other type of sexual sin that we mentioned in our last seminar, or whatever the case may be.

We find ourselves falling into habits and hard to rise above them at times.

And for those of you who may not feel that you're struggling with that area, you need God to maintain sexual purity.

So whether it's obtaining it or maintaining it, We need God, period, that's the foundation.

We can look at areas of, or we can think ourselves okay in this area.

1 Corinthians 10 verse 12 reminds us, let him who thinks he stands, take he, lest he fall.

Because if we think of ourselves spiritually proud in some way that we can do this on our own, I think we'll find ourselves flat on our face soon enough.

This is something that David understood, that David adopted after his own fall and sexual sin.

Psalm 51 is his prayer of repentance after his sin with Bathsheba, as we know.

So Psalm chapter 51, here we read David's crying to God for a new heart.

And that's the point I'm gonna address here right now.

We need God to give us a heart transplant.

He says, Have mercy upon me, O God, according to your lovingkindness, according to the multitude of your tender mercies, the blood of my transgression, wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.

For I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.

David acknowledged in verse 4 coming up against you and you only have I sinned and done this evil in your sight.

No, he killed someone, murdered, he arrived for the death because of his sin.

But he acknowledged that God was the primary 1 that he was sinning against.

And we mentioned this is exactly the same attitude that Joseph had, right?

How can I sin and do this great wickedness and sin against God?

David acknowledged that he needed a heart transplant, but ultimately he was sinning against God in whatever he was struggling with.

As he continues here, let's take a look at verse 6.

He says, you desire truth in the inward parts, and in the hidden part, you will make no wisdom.

We talked as well in the last session that sexual purity is not just an issue of externals, but an issue of internals.

If I have a mind and a heart that is pure before God, then my behavior will naturally follow suit, right?

And David acknowledges here before God, You desire truth on the inward parts.

You desire purity in my heart and my mind, and therefore I will act in a pure way.

In 2 Christ's Speech 23, Ellen White says these words, repentance includes sorrow for sin and a turning away from it.

But she says, we will not renounce sin unless we see its sinfulness.

Unless we see that sin is actually bad, We're going to keep doing it.

Unless we see that it has an effect on our lives, it has an effect on our relationships, it has an effect on our future, we're going to keep doing it.

Then she says, until we turn away from it in heart, there will be no real change in the life.

Unless I have a heart transplant, I'm going to keep doing the same cycle.

I'm going to fall into the same habits unless I have new desires coming to me from above.

David continues in verse 7, he says, purge me with this off and I will be clean.

Wash me and I will be white as a snow, white as a snow.

Continuing on, he says in verse 10, create in me a clean heart of God.

Create in me a clean heart of God and renew a bright spirit within me.

Defining Biblical Purity: God’s Better Plan

Taking a little bit of an extra couple of minutes to get our minds refocused after I know you've been through 2 sessions.

So hopefully you've been blessed in the things that you have been able to obtain so far this morning.

You guys been enjoying it the seminar so far?

As you know, the seminar is called Christian Purity.

This first session is entitled Defining Biblical Purity.

What is God's better plan for my sexuality?

What is God's better plan for Christian purity in contrast to what the world would offer us, right?

This whole session is basically just that, a contrast between what the world offers and what God offers as a replacement as his something better.

So we're gonna go right into it because I know that we're a little bit a little bit over time from the last session so we'll get started right away.

It's probably going to be a lot of information and right off the bat I want to say that I wish this seminar could almost be 5 sessions long because there's so many things involved in the idea of Christian purity.

There are so many different details and so many different aspects and perspectives in the idea of Christian purity and sexuality and and so many different things that play into it.

So we'll try to hit on a few big things in this seminar and hopefully we'll gain a blessing and something we can apply to our personal lives.

So before we start, I ask that you just bow your heads and we will begin with a word of prayer.

God in heaven, Lord, we are thankful that you have a better plan.

We're thankful that you designed us to be relational beings and you have a plan for our relationships and for our sexuality.

God, I pray that as we look into your word today, I pray that as we look into the ideas regarding Christian purity, that you will guide our minds, that you will help us to see the higher standard that you have for us.

Not 1 where you're taking something from us, but Lord, something where you're putting something even better in its place.

Taylor, make this message to apply to whoever may be here in whatever background they may have come from.

All right, I am a new teacher, so I'm going to start off my seminar with a true and false question, okay?

True or false, we live in a world and society where There is an enormous craze for sexual pleasure.

We live in a world and society where we are surrounded by sexuality.

Oh, that 1 wasn't a true and false, so that's good.

Sensuality and immorality are around us in every kind of a fashion.

Whether it's driving down the road in your car and you see the billboards.

Or maybe it's passing the magazine rack as you buy your groceries.

Or maybe it's on the TV or the internet or in a newspaper as you're simply reading the news.

We're in a sex saturated society and that's a true statement.

All around us we find sex being a prevalent theme everywhere.

Yesteryear, if we were to go back just a few decades into our grandparents time or our great-grandparents time, the early 20th century, we would have found that divorce was hard to get.

We would have found that pornography was illegal.

We would have found that abortion was illegal, expensive and dangerous, right?

We would have found that there was a strong social discouragement for having babies outside of marriage.

There was a strong social discouragement for any type of premarital sexual activity, right?

If we go back just a few decades, we can see that there was a frown upon all of those things.

But we fast forward to today's time, fast forward to today's generation, just a couple of generations really later, and we find that today fornication is rampant.

We find that adultery and marital unfaithfulness is common and excused.

That was unheard of in our grandparents' day.

We find that pornography use and addiction is Absolutely, the statistics are absolutely just through the roof where before it was illegal right here Just a few statistics to to get our minds Going It says over half of all the time spent on the internet, now you know how much time you spend there, and for whatever reasons you may do so, but over half the time spent on the internet is related to sexual activity.

Each day, 30 million people log on to pornographic websites.

Each day 2.5 billion emails are pornographic in nature.

Sex is the number 1 topic researched on the internet.

No, it's not the disease you need for your research paper at school.

The average age of first Internet exposure to pornography.

The average age of first Internet exposure to pornography?

Wow, you guys are even lower than I would have guessed myself.

Do you guys mind if I ask how old you guys are?

Like just putting it in perspective, right?

The largest consumer age group of internet pornography is what age group?

12 to 17 is the highest age group that is involved in internet pornography.

We live in a world that's gone mad over sexual pleasure.

Actually, I'm going to go back on this 1 here first.

So age 12 to 17, we live in a society that sensuality is affecting our adults, it's affecting our youth, and it's affecting our children.

And we as Christians find ourselves in the midst of such a society.

But we would be naive to think that these types of things do not affect Christian homes.

In fact, 1 of the statistics that I researched said that 47% of Christian homes said that pornography was a major problem in their home.

47% and that's only the ones that admitted it, right?

So this is a problem not only in society, not only in the world around us, but it's 1 that's very much affecting us and our churches.

1 that's very much affecting real people, and it's a real issue that needs to be addressed.

Fornication, adultery, pornography, all of these different things, homosexuality is on the rise, right?

It continues to broaden in our society and unfortunately even becoming accepted in some of our churches.

Daniel Cho

Manhood and Womanhood

Eternal Father, we're down to our last 45 minutes, and Father, I pray that you will help us, Lord, as we must be all tired mentally, maybe physically as well, help us to concentrate so we can focus on this important topic.

And Lord, spiritual things are spiritually discerned, So may your Holy Spirit come and teach us all your truth on this matter.

All right so So my first question is why talk about masculinity and femininity It's question So I talk about it?

Why talk here 45 minutes about masculinity and femininity?

It's not even just becoming an issue, it's been an issue for a long time.

And we are late on the boat in talking about it.

Because most people are confused to what is the role of being a male and female.

We're going to talk a little bit about that.

When it gets to marriage, it causes a lot of problems if you don't know what male and female mean.

And also, it's representative of God's relationship with His church, right?

So if we understand the meaning amongst humans, we can understand better how we relate to Christ.

And in marriage, I was talking to a marriage counselor.

And I'm not in a relationship with a gay man or anything.

What do you think is the number 1 way to fix most of the marriage problems?

And she said, you have to teach them the roles of man and woman.

Of course you know there's a character and stuff like that in Jesus, right?

But practically speaking, it's knowing the roles of man and woman.

If people understand that, lots of marriage problems will be solved.

So like some of the things that we said, our gender is an important aspect of who we are as humans.

So if you look at little boys and girls, they start to act differently, yes?

The way they interact and play, it's different.

You know, like, oh, girls have cooties, and stuff like that.

And it's like guys kind of identify themselves as guys and girls as girls.

And so it's like to understand our gender, our sex, is to understand humanity.

Another thing, society is talking about it.

So have you guys heard about Sheryl Sandberg recently?

She's the COO, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook.

And basically, it's like another manifesto for feminism.

And she's saying, the women in the business world are not cracking the glass ceiling.

The glass ceiling is basically this concept that you know, climb the corporate ladder, right?

You start off like a frontline worker like I am right now, and then you climb the ladder, manager, and then director, and then you go to the executive leadership.

So women right now are underrepresented in executive leadership positions in companies and corporate world.

They want to go through it, but they can't because there's a glass ceiling.

So she's like, we have to break this glass ceiling.

And What she basically does is that the problem that women are not going to those positions is because of women, their characteristics.

A lot of feminists were upset at her, saying, oh, you're blaming us women for our own problems.

DOMA, Defense of Marriage Act, and Proposition 8.

Yeah, so as you may or may not know, who's familiar here with DOMA and Proposition 8?

Basically, it's these, Bill Clinton signed a law defining marriage as between man and woman, then in California, the California voters voted some time ago to define marriage as being a man and woman.

But recently, just this past June, I think, the Supreme Court of the United States of America, they shut down DOMA and Proposition 8, basically opened the door for wholesale same-sex marriage across the states.

It is a gender issue, because they're saying, our gender does not in any way affect how we should be married.

You open the newspaper, you read the newspaper, there's gonna be some gender issue.

CNN, CTV, there's always talking about some gender issue.

Feminism has drastically changed our understanding of gender.

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Series

Christian Purity

Experiencing Biblical Purity: Practical Tips Regarding Sexuality

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Parts

Experiencing Biblical Purity: Practical Tips Regarding Sexuality

54m

Defining Biblical Purity: God’s Better Plan

1h

Manhood and Womanhood

46m

Sound Doctrine