“Sex Mystery” // First Love 6 (NEW: Season Finale) // Ephesians 5:21–32 Happy Mother’s Day, Summit Church. My friend David Nasser (the Iranian who spoke here last year), gave me this: • To those who gave birth this year to their first child, we celebrate with you. • To those who lost a child this year, we mourn with you. • To those who are in the trenches with little ones every day and wear the badge of food stains, we appreciate you. • To those who experienced loss this year through miscarriage, failed adoptions, or a child that ran away, we grieve with you. • To those who walk the hard path of infertility, fraught with pokes, prods, tears, and disappointment, we walk with you. (Forgive us when we say foolish things. We don't mean to make this harder than it is.) • To foster moms, mentor moms, and spiritual moms, we need you. • To those who have warm and close relationships with your children, we celebrate with you. • To those who have disappointment, heartache, and distance from your children, we wait with you. • To those who lost their mothers this year, we grieve with you. • To those who were encouraged to have an abortion, we cry with you. • To those who lived through driving tests, medical tests, and the overall testing of motherhood, thank you. • To those who will have emptier nests in the upcoming year, we rejoice and grieve with you. • And to those who are pregnant with new life, we anticipate with you. • We have in our midst perhaps the greatest warriors in our culture—women in whom God has placed the spirit of motherhood. To all of you, we honor you. Elyse Fitzpatrick says, “Many women feel like this is the one day when they are forced to look at either their own shortcomings (resulting in guilt) or the shortcomings of others who fail to appreciate them properly (resulting in discontent). It’s the one day you're told over and over that our identity as women is not rooted in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but in your ability to be the source of life and goodness for all.” But the gospel is not about your accomplishments as a mother; it’s about your position as God’s daughter. You are honored and received not because of what you have or haven’t done as a mother, but because of what God did to make you his own. His commendation and presence is better than 1000 beautiful children or a million bouquets of flowers. Veronica reads: 21 …submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. 22 Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. 25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her bythe washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. 28 In the same wayhusbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, 30 because we are members of his body. 31 “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. The main point Paul makes in this passage is that marriage is a divine mystery, pointing us beyond itself to Christ and the church. • Most people get fixated on the sign. Do I have the perfect marriage? Did I marry the right person? Am I ever going to get married and find true love? • They end up putting a weight on marriage it was not designed to hold. The first week I compared it to one of those old bridges… most people put the weight of their soul on marriage. Getting married, or being the right marriage, is the essential key to happiness and a good life. But that’s because you are confusing the sign with the thing the sign points to. • Imagine you were on your way to hike and camp out in the Grand Canyon and about 200 miles from the Grand Canyon you saw a sign that said, “Grand Canyon, 200 miles” that way and you said, “Oh great, there it is.” And you camped out underneath the sign! • You’ve got to look past the sign to the thing the sign points to. Marriage and family are echoes of something greater; something more eternal and ultimate. • Marriage is gospel reenactment. We are learning about the love of God and learning to love like God. That’s Paul’s main point in Eph 5:21–32, and we’ve been considering that point from 6 different angles in this series. • On the first week we talked about what God was doing in your marriage or singleness in light of that. • The second week I gave you a question based off that principle that you could ask in your marriage that, if you did, would change everything. That question: “How can I serve you?” If marriage is gospel re-enactment, that’s the most fundamental thing we can ask in our decisions. • The third week we saw that based on what Paul is saying in Eph 5, friendship is the core of marriage. Marriage is not romance spiced with a little friendship; I told you, it is friendship spiced with a little romance. • The fourth week we considered how this new understanding of marriage should change how we respond in conflict. • The fifth week we talked about the roles we each play in marriage, and how we put the gospel on display in marriage. • This week, our final week, we are going to bring all these things together and think about intimacy and sex in light of this central truth—that the primary point of marriage is to point beyond itself to something eternal. The word ‘sex’ is not in Ephesians 5, but Paul is talking about coming together in one flesh in marriage, the ultimate expression of which is sex. So I am going to give you 3 principles about sex gleaned from this passage. And I was in a particularly Southern Baptist mood this week, so they all start with “S”… 1. Sex is… Symbolic • A signpost, pointing beyond itself, Paul says, to Christ and the church. • The relationship between husband and wife, Paul has said, is like the relationship between Christ and church. A couple of ways: • Genesis 2 says that the man and woman in marriage see each other naked, and they are not ashamed… Known and loved. o The ecstasy and joy of sex was invented by God to give us a foretaste of the intimacy and closeness we will experience when we finally see God face to face and enter into full union with him, and into union with everyone else that loves him. Tim Keller • “Fruit” is brought into the world through intimacy (The woman puts herself in the arms of the husband and fruit (children) are born through her body; when you put yourself in arms of Christ, fruit is born into your body and into the world through you from that intimacy.) • Sex is only able to partially show us what we are really after. o McDowell: sex is not the answer, it’s is the question. o Chesterton: every man that knocks on door of brothel is seeking God! • CS Lewis did a series of radio talks in the 1940’s on sexuality: o Imagine visiting a country where when the young men go off to college and get out of home for the first time, they put up life size big colored posters, full-color vivid pictures of… food. Hamburgers, bacon, ice cream sundaes. And all the guys go around to each other’s room and say oh, wow! o Guys go off on the weekend to a club with low lights and bumpin’ and grindin’ music and everyone is drooling over something on stage that is covered and slowly the cover is pulled off, bit by bit, in rhythm with the music, and as it is pulled off you see a bloomin’ onion. Everyone screams and starts to tuck dollar bills around the plate. o Late at night, men search the internet for pictures of food and then they just stare at them and as soon as someone walks in they flip off the screen… o What do you conclude? Lewis said. They must be starving, right? Then you find out that that’s not true. For last 40 years, he said, people have been glutted with food. They have been eating like crazy. The only conclusion would be that there is something deeply disordered about this people’s appetite for food. o There is a reason for that. The deeper something goes in us, the greater the chance to mess things up.1 Myth: “Sex is just physical.” We all intuitively know that sex is not merely physical. Andy Stanley asks the following questions to prove that:2 • Why is it that when a child is sexually abused, when they are an adult and connect the dots, it is so difficult to shake off? o It’s not Just that “an authority figure betrayed them.” No, it’s deeper than that.