Gender and Sexuality

Part 1
Charles Price

Now if you have got your Bible I am going to read from the very beginning of the Bible
Genesis Chapter 1. I am going to read from Verse 26 down to Verse 28. And I am going to read
a couple of verses in Chapter 2 as well.

Genesis 1 gives us the account of creation, and Verse 26 brings us to the creation of human
beings.

Then God said, Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over
the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over
all the creatures that move along the ground.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and
female he created them.

God blessed them and said to them, Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth
and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living
creature that moves on the ground.

Then if you go to Chapter 2 and Verse 7, we now have a more detailed account of the creation of
man.

The LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his
nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

Down to Verse 15:

The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take
care of it.

And the LORD God commanded the man, You are free to eat from any tree in the
garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when
you eat of it you will surely die.

The LORD God said, It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper
suitable for him.

Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the
birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and
whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.

So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the
field.
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But for Adam no suitable helper was found.

So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping,
he took one of the mans ribs and closed up the place with flesh.

Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man and he
brought her to the man.

The man said, This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called
woman for she was taken out of man.

For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be untied to his wife, and
they will become one flesh.

The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.

I want to begin this morning a series on the issue of gender and sexuality. By gender I mean the
interplay of male and female in our roles and relationships. And by sexuality, I mean our sexual
behavior in our relationships.

And I want to address these issues realistically and honestly, compassionately, but biblically.

The sexual ethic of the western world has changed dramatically in the last 50 years. It really has
been changing for the last century, but it gained momentum around 50 years ago.

And an ethic that had been built around moral structure and discipline has moved to an ethic
characterized primarily by consent and by freedom.

We of course have legal protection against child abuse. We have a legal age of consent below
which it is not legally permissible to engage in sexual activity. We have laws against incest,
against polygamy, against prostitution and against the non-consensual sexual activity that may
take place if one is not a willing partner.

But otherwise, in the context of being consensual, most sexual activity is fine and acceptable
culturally within that context.

Now as we consider these issues over several weeks, I want to look into Scripture, which is both
authoritative, but also true. You can have authority which may not be true and that really just
locks us up into things which are unhelpful.

But we come with the assumption this is both true and authoritative.

But the Bible actually is helpful and at the same time unhelpful in seeking to understand these
issues of gender and of sexuality.

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The reason why I say it is unhelpful is that when we look back to both the Old Testament and the
New Testament Scriptures, it presents no golden age of gender harmony and sexual fidelity and
what we might call today traditional family values.

There arent great models of this in Scripture. In fact, it is hard to find a good marriage in the
whole of Scripture and a good family life. There are a few we dont know very much about and
we might presume they are good.

Ruth and Boaz; we have got a wonderful romance and they get married and the story ends and
we are not sure what happened after that.

Elizabeth and Zachariah, the parents of J ohn the Baptist; a little bit we know about them.

J oseph and Mary; the very little bit we know about them, we might say, well they were in a good
relationship.

And I am sure there were good relationships, but where we have any details about family life, it
is very difficult to find a model of good family life in the Bible.

The New Testament opens in Matthew 1 and Verse 1 with these words:

A record of the genealogy of J esus Christ the son of David, the son of Abraham.

And mentioning those two names would immediately commend this book to the J ewish readers
to whom Matthew was writing because Abraham and David were some of the heroes and the
aristocracy of J ewish history - probably along with Moses who doesnt get mentioned here. But
there is a specific reason why He is the son of Abraham and the son of David.

But these would be some of the aristocracy of Israel. They are men of faith, they are men of
courage, they are men of character, but dont look to any of them as models of sexual behavior.

Abraham is called the father of faith. He is a model of trust in God and yet he fathered an
illicit child through his wifes maid. He had three wives altogether, two of them at the same
time. He married his third after Sarah, his first wife, died.

But he also had a few concubines. It doesnt tell us how many, but he had some concubines with
him as well.

Now we might say of Abraham, Well it was culturally acceptable in those days, but that
doesnt make it right any more than it was would be say, Well, its culturally acceptable in our
day to do certain things, so its okay.

There are things that are culturally acceptable that may make it more understandable that people
get swept in the current of the culture but they are still wrong.

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David is called a man after Gods own heart. But he is famous for his adultery with
Bathsheba. And not only committing adultery with her but he got her pregnant as a result.

She had a husband and David got Uriah, Bathshebas husband, sent into the most dangerous
place on the battlefront in order to get him killed so that he would never find out that Bathsheba
was pregnant with Davids child. His adultery led him to be a murderer and a liar.

And by the way, this is after he wrote the beautiful Psalm 23, The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall
not want. You would think butter wouldnt melt in Davids mouth, would you?

Fortunately his repentance is also famous. And Psalm 51 is a wonderful portrayal of a repentant
man when he realized his sin against Bathsheba.

But it didnt seem to tame his sexual appetites even then because he went on to have 8 wives,
concurrently. Plus, he had at least 10 concubines, and likely more. (These are women on the
side.)

His son Solomon took the biscuit really. He had 700 wives and 300 concubines rounded up to a
nice tidy figure 1000 women available to him.

Now some of his marriages were political arrangements. You know, in those days if you wanted
a good relationship with your neighbors, well, he married the daughter of the king of Egypt
because that was a useful thing. Then your mother-in-law is the queen of Egypt and you can get
around her and the king because you are related now. And the king of Moabs daughter, and so
on.

So there may have been some tactic in all of this. But nevertheless he had all these women
around him and he is presented to us as the epitome of wisdom.

He wrote a beautiful romantic love poem; we call it the Song of Solomon.

Yet it tells us in the book of 1 Kings that it was his wives who took him away from God.

Now we are going to consult Solomon several times over the next few weeks because he writes a
lot about sexuality, especially in the book of Proverbs.

But it is interesting what he has to say about sexuality is always warning of the dangers of
adultery and the dangers of promiscuity and the poison that you suck into your life if you play
around with women to whom you are not committed. He writes very graphically about that,
probably because he knew.

But you would have thought because he was a product of adultery; you see he was a child born
to Bathsheba from David not the initial pregnancy, when she was still married to Uriah - that
baby died. But when Uriah was killed, David took Bathsheba as wife and she conceived another
child; it was Solomon.

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And you would think Solomon would be sympathetic towards adultery because, I wouldnt be
here without adultery, but actually he is extremely strong on the dangers and damage of
adultery. And we will look at what he says on other occasions.

Moses, I mentioned, was the other of the big three of the Old Testament (Abraham, Moses and
David). And Moses was the law giver. He married a Midianite wife called Zipporah; we know a
little bit about her.

But when he began to lead Israel through the wilderness, he married another woman early in the
journey. She is described as a Cushite, which would mean she was Ethiopian or Sudanese. And
his brother Aaron and his sister Miriam criticized him for taking this wife. Maybe they criticized
him because he shouldnt have taken another wife; maybe they were racist in their criticism
because she was not a J ew, not an Israelite; she was from Africa.

But my point is he did take another wife and he gives the law and talks about adultery and sexual
faithfulness.

So the Bible isnt always helpful to us in practice, though I am so glad the Bible tells the truth
about its heroes.

But it is helpful to us in its precepts that is, in its teaching. And it is the teaching of the Word of
God to which we must go for our instruction.

And against that background we can look at the real life situations of the day, but this is the
grounds on which we understand these issues of gender and these issues of how to live with our
sexuality in a way that is not only appropriate but which is fulfilling and satisfying and good as
God intended that it would be.

Now today I want to start at the beginning. And we cannot have a doctrine of sexuality without a
doctrine of gender. And we cannot have a doctrine of gender without going back to the
beginning.

And in Genesis 1:27, I read just now, it says,

God created man in his own image male and female he created them.

Now notice that begins with a singular statement:

God created man in his own image.

And the word man there means humanity, not the male species, but the human species.

And God created man, a singular unit, the human race, as one thing.

But then it becomes plural because having said,

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God created man in his own imagemale and female he created them.

So there is one humanity made up of two genders male and female.

Now there are those who think it is too simplistic to speak only of two genders. I understand
there are those who have come up with seven genders.

And quite commonly people speak of those who are trans-gender. That is, they do not fit well in
their sense of who they are with either category of male or female; they are trans-gender,
androgynous.

We speak of those who are cross-gender. That is usually those who are born male or female but
through hormonal and surgical intervention, they change their gender, usually a male becoming a
female, very occasionally the other way as well. And you may know one or two people in that
situation, as I do, otherwise known as gender blenders (the trans-genders) or gender benders (the
crossgenders).

Homosexuality is not normally categorized as gender that is, people who are emotionally and
sexually attracted to their own sex and we will talk about that in a few weeks time.

But these are all variations on the two genders which everybody does fit into male and female.

And in these opening statements of Genesis, they are created and defined first as one humanity
- and then only secondarily as male and female.

So in the beginning, men and women together are equal in creation (male and female He
created them), equal in consideration by that I mean they have the exact same status together.
God created them in His own image (them together). And thirdly, equal in commission
because

God blessed them (in Genesis 1:28) and said to them, Be fruitful and increase in
number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air
and over every living creature that moves on the ground.

This is a joint responsibility He gives to them both. So they are equal in creation, in
consideration and in commission. Thats in Chapter 1.

Then in Chapter 2 in Genesis we have a more detailed version of the creation of man, the male
first and then the female second.

And it is interesting and important when we read how it describes this. In Verse 7 of Chapter 2 it
says,

The LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his
nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

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Now here he is created from the dust of the ground in common with the animal kingdom, but
then He breathes into him the breath of life.

This is not physical life, but spiritual life the breath of God. The word for breath equally
translates the Spirit of God. We could read it quite legitimately as a legitimate translation of
the original text that God breathed the Spirit of God into him.

And we know from other parts of Scripture that is what we are intended to understand, that the
Spirit of God inhabits the human soul.

And in this sense man is unique amongst all of Gods creation.

God then put him to work in the Garden of Eden. He was given two responsibilities: to provide
and to protect. That is, that he was to look after it, with one provision. The provision was that
he must not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because to eat of that tree would be
to die.

Then in Verse 18 God says this:

The LORD God said, It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper
suitable for him.

Now you remember from Chapter 1, I am sure, that on each day of creation God expressed His
opinion God saw what He had made and it was good. God saw that it was good. God saw
that it was good. God saw that it was good. God saw that it was good. God saw that it was
good. On the sixth day God saw all that He had made and it was very good.

But now in Chapter 2 and Verse 18, something is not good. It is not good for man to be alone.

But what was not good was already declared as being very good. Therefore it was very good
that it was not good for man to be alone. Does that make sense?

It wasnt God saying, Oh there is something not good. Oh goodness me!

It is not good for man to be alone and that is very good that it is not good for man to be alone.

By the way, your incompleteness, my incompleteness, is very good. If you pride yourself on
being self-sufficient, you are priding yourself on something that is not good.

It is not good for man to be alone for three reasons.

He was made a spiritual being; he needed the life of God. Thats why God breathed into him His
Spirit. He needed a relationship with God.

He is a spiritual being; he is a social being. He needed fellowship and relationship with other
people, other living things. He is a social being.
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And thirdly he is a sexual being. As male he needed female. And it is not good for man to be
alone because he is created a sexual being.

Now before I go any further let me just acknowledge for a moment that many of us here this
morning are single and we are single for various reasons. Some may be because you simply
prefer it that way. Many others because we have just never met the person we would like to
spend our lives with.

If you are only 18, relax about that that may come. If you are 40, you will have thought many
times, is this the way it is going to be?

Some of you are single because somebody has walked out on you or because your spouse has
died.

Some of us may be single because we are not particularly attracted to the opposite sex and we
simply live with the fact that we dont get excited about that.

I am going to spend one morning talking about singleness. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 7, talks about
the advantages of being single. There are also advantages in being married. There are
advantages in both, but the advantages of one dont outweigh the advantages of the other. There
are advantages.

And I am going to talk one Sunday on the theme of being single and sexual, and how does the
Bible tell us to cope with that? And its not easy. But we will look and see what it has to say.

I mention that now because for our purposes this morning we are talking about the beginning, the
beginning of gender relationships and that involved it not being good for man to being alone and
becoming one flesh with the female Adam with Eve.

And so it was not good for man to be alone. Here is the solution in Verse 18.

The LORD God said, It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper
suitable for him.

Next verse it says that all of the animals were brought before Adam and he named them. Now it
looks as though (it doesnt mean this); it looks as though it means God said, Ill find somebody
suitable for him. Weve been going over the animals but the elephant was too big, you know,
and the monkey never sat still and the giraffe gave him a stiff neck and the cow was moody, and
the dog was the best. And the cat was a bit more boring but at least it sat around and slept and
you at least felt you had company, though you really dont. And rabbits were boring and goldfish
were especially boring.

And so at the end of that it looks as though God said, Well thats not enough.

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But actually, actually I mentioned we have spiritual and social and sexual needs. Its actually
lovely to relate to animals socially. A dog can be a very good friend. A cat can be okay.

Our kids had animals, you know, guinea pigs and rabbits and boy wein fact my daughter Laura
won a prize for her guinea pig, who was male, in an agricultural show that we went to because
she was able to list all the babies he had fathered they all had names.

It was a long, long, dozens and dozens and dozens, this little guinea pig. And so she had him in
the cage. And the judge came by, was very impressed and so gave her the first prize. And they
were walking around with the prize bull and the prize horse and the prize everything else and
theres Laura walking around with the prize guinea pig, you know, the father I think it was 46
guinea piglets (what do you call them?).

But they were great friends to our children and you learn a lot about life from animals too. You
learn to deal with mourning and grief and sadness when they die. You learn the facts of life if
you have a male and female. Stick them in the same cage; you work out what happens and why.

Spiritual being, social being, but he was also a sexual being. So He put Adam into a deep sleep
and took one of his ribs and made a woman from his rib.

Now we ask, Uh oh, this now is making distinction. Why didnt He make Eve from the dust of
the earth in the way He had made Adam from the dust of the earth? That would demonstrate
their equality. But instead He makes her from his rib.

And I suggest to you there is a very important reason for that, because that demonstrates their
unity. They were created from one flesh into two separate individuals, separate genders. In fact
Adam is so surprised by this; when he woke up, having been in a deep sleep, and there was Eve,
he said,

This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.

So he immediately recognizes she is part of me.

And then God gives an instruction.

A man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become
one flesh.

Notice that one flesh becomes two individuals and those two individuals then become one
flesh.

And therefore a doctrine of marriage and of gender relationships here in marriage is that this is a
reunion of two persons into one, made one flesh male and female two equal parts of one
whole. And as one flesh they will procreate, they will create new life. And those new lives will
themselves be united to another person and they will become another unit. And so the building
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block of society is the man leaves his father and mother and he cleaves to his wife. They become
one flesh. They procreate.

The first command, by the way, is be fruitful and multiply. The first command God gave to
them was have sex, produce babies. And as you produce children, they in turn will leave their
father and mother and this becomes the way in which society and the human race was to
function. This was to be the bedrock of human society.

Now let me take you back to Verse 18 because there is a kind of awkward word here.

The LORD God said, It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper
suitable for him.

Now the awkward word there is the word helper. Eve is called his helper. Some have used
this word to argue for a subordinate position. You know, Adam is the man, supreme; Eve is his
helper, supportive, like his PA.

But that is a misreading of the significance of this word helper. This word is used 8 times in
the Old Testament. Six times is it used of God. It is used here of Eve and then, for instance, in
Exodus 18:4 Moses named his second son Eliezer,

for he said, My fathers God was my helper.

I will give him a name that declares God is my helper.

Deuteronomy 33:29 says,

The LORD is your shield and your helper.

Psalm 10:14, speaking to God,

You are the helper of the fatherless.

Psalm 27:9, again speaking to God,

You have been my helper.

Psalm 118:7:

The LORD is with me; he is my helper.

Hosea 13:9 God says,

You are destroyed, O Israel, because you are against me, against your helper.

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Now what is the meaning of God being our helper? Does that put God into some subordinate
role? Well of course not.

What that speaks of is the indispensability of God to human beings. You are my helper;
without You I do not have the resources, I do not have the ability, I do not have the enabling.

This word helper is a very high word that means to be indispensable and to be interdependent,
the one on the other. To be made one flesh is to become indispensable, not discardable, but
indispensable, the one to the other and interdependent, where Adam, given his commission to
provide and to protect, creates the environment in which she is nourished and flourishes.

One of the things a wife needs to know most about her husband is that he will protect her and
provide for her. But if that sense of protection is undermined, everything else is undermined.
But they are indispensable and interdependent to each other.

This is part of what it means to be made in the image of God. There are facets to what that
means, but God, the Deity, who is Trinity, one God but Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Thats why
in the beginning, Let us make man in our image says God.

Not, Let Me make man in My image. There is a plurality to this image and that plurality is one
of interdependence upon one another.

It is through the Son that the Father makes Himself known. It is the only way a person can come
to the Father is through the Son. The Holy Spirit is sent by the Father at the request of the Son.
(These are all things from Scripture.) The Spirit brings glory to the Son. They are individual
within the Trinity, yet they are one, they are indispensable to one another, they are
interdependent upon one another.

Let us, this interdependent unit of relationship Let us make man in our image the man
there being humanity, where they too are not adequate on their own and are interdependent and
indispensable one to another.

Paul takes this further when he talks about husbands loving their wives as Christ loved the
church. He says this is what it means; its what J esus Christ does with His church.

And then he gives four things in Ephesians 5 (we may look at this on another occasion) where he
says loving her as his own body thats no selfishness loving her as your own body.

Loving her sacrificially as Christ loved the church. Thats a good question for us husbands
what sacrificially do I do to make way for my wife? Or am I the fixed point and shes the
adjustable one?

Giving himself up for her is how Paul goes on to say that. Feeding and caring for her. In other
words providing, feeding and protecting; caring - providing and protecting for her.

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And so as helper this is actually a beautiful word that speaks of their indispensability to one
another and their interdependence upon one another.

Now if we could stay in Genesis Chapter 2, everything in the Garden would be lovely. But in
Genesis Chapter 3 something in the Garden turns ugly.

And what happens in Genesis Chapter 3 is that when sin entered and the fall took place, there
came a destructive effect on the relationship of men to women.

In Genesis 3:12, when they ate of the tree God asked Adam what happened and do you see what
Adam said? Genesis 3:12:

The man said, The woman you put here with me she gave me some fruit from the
tree, and I ate it.

So what did Adam say? Dont ask me. She, who You gave me; if its not her fault, its Yours
for giving her to me in the first place.

This is Adam She gave me. No, no, I ate because, you know, what could I do?

Now this was unjustifiable for two reasons. Adam had been told that he must not eat of the tree.
God did not tell Eve that, though Adam had told Eve that. We know that early in Chapter 3 that
she knew that.

But it was Adam God told that to. His task was to provide for her and to protect. And he stood
by passively. He was present in the Garden but passive and then he became a participant and
took and ate of the fruit himself.

And then he has the audacity to say, Its not my fault; she took it.

The second reason why this was unjustifiable on Adams part is because Eve had been deceived
by Satan. God had given to Adam that responsibility to not eat of that tree. Eve had been
deceived.

Now if you look at the dialogue between them he fiddled around and told her half-truths and part
truths and blatant lies and then a little bit of the truth mixed with it to make it sound as though he
is talking sense. And she was deceived.

Now I am not excusing Eve at all. But Adam refuses to take his responsibility and he abuses her
by blaming her and her alone and passing his guilt on to her.

J ohn Piper writes of this. Here you have the beginning of all domestic violence, of all wife
abuse, of all sexual slurs, of all rape, of all the ways of men belittling women whom God created
equally in His own image.

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And the result of this is going to be that man, or the male, is going to take the position of
domination of the female. God tells Eve that in Genesis 3:16. He pronounces a curse on the
serpent, a curse on Adam and a curse on Eve.

This is what He says to Eve. And the curse, by the way, is simply, This is the fruit of your sin.
It is not that He superimposed something that wasnt there. He is simply exposing it and saying,
This is what is there as a result of what has taken place.

He says in Verse 16,

Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.

That is going to be the result.

In other words, you have now become vulnerable to your husband and this is going to become
the pattern of fallen and broken humanity where the law of the jungle is going to operate and in
his sin, man is going to dominate women and she is going to acquiesce to that because she has
been broken.

Now this is not their role in Genesis 1 and 2. They begin individually with the same dignity,
created together as one humanity and then becoming two individuals from one flesh in order that
they might now be united as two individuals as one flesh, but two individual people now but
made one.

And that is a lot deeper than simply a sexual oneness of course. But they take together an
identity and a mutual love and a mutual respect and a mutual trust and a mutual provision and a
mutual protection, the one of the other.

Thats what you find in Genesis 1 and 2, or Genesis 2 in particular. But now in Genesis 3 they
will not flourish in that way. Instead the woman will be in danger of being abused emotionally,
physically, verbally and sexually. And the rest of the story simply reiterates that.

Now I am speaking in general terms but this is the general picture and we can see it in the history
of the human race.

However, if the Bible stopped at Genesis Chapter 3 we would of course, of all people be the
most miserable.

But to the serpent God said this: You are going to bruise the heel of the woman, you are going
to damage her, but the seed of the woman is going to crush your head and its going to be fatal.

And in 1 J ohn 3:8 we read this:

For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the
devil. (That he might crush the head of the devil).

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And He does so firstly in reconciling us to God. That is of course the first note of the gospel.
But then He does so in reconciling us to each other. Our salvation is about being reconciled to
God. Our sanctification, by and large, is about how we live in the world and our relationships in
the world.

And the gospel restores the oneness of the male and female that has been destroyed here in the
Garden of Eden. So in Galatians 3:27 Paul says,

For all of you who were baptized into Christ

Thats the first point of reconciliation. You are in Christ.

you have clothed yourselves with Christ.

You are now united with Him.

There is to you neither J ew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all
one in Christ J esus.

And because you have been reconciled to God and made one in Christ, the brokenness of our
relationships now has the possibility of being restored. And these relationships are restored
racially. There is no J ew, nor Greek; you are all one.

They are restored socially and economically. There is no slave nor free. In Christ you are level.

And genderly (if there is such a word I dont think there is) there is neither male nor female.

Those distinctions are distinctions for celebration, not distinctions for exploitation, as they
became in Genesis 3. Of course we are different, male and female. Of course we bring different
things to each other. But we rejoice in one another and we celebrate, not exploit.

And interesting, where the gospel has spread through history around the world, where the gospel
has brought about the undercurrent of culture (and that is still true in the western world even
though we are moving away from it, and there will be consequences to that) but wherever the
gospel has formed any sense of undercurrent of the contemporary culture, women are freer than
where the gospel has not gone. Women have dignity they do not have where the gospel has not
gone.

Because the purpose of the Son of God was to destroy the works of the devil, and this is one of
his works.

And if the fall broke the gender relationship as God intended it, and if the fall broke much of our
sexuality as God intended it, part of the salvation and sanctification process is restoring
relationships in marriage, in family, in society. Which is why Paul says if you are going to be an
elder in a church, you have a good marriage, because that is a mark of your sanctification.

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Now I know there are all kinds of reasons why marriages break up. We will talk about that on
another occasion. We will talk about that.

But this is where it works out. You can have a head full of the Bible; you can quote it every day
of your life, but if you do not treat your wife well, it means nothing. This is where it works out.

My time is gone. Let me finish with a story. A few years ago I received an invitation to go and
speak at a conference that was supposed to be held in Belgium in Europe.

And it was a conference of gay Christians from all over Europe. They were all connected in
some way with national bodies, a bit like Exodus here in Toronto in Canada.

And they had this umbrella organization and they were bringing them all together for a
conference to be held in a monastery in Belgium.

Would I come and speak? It would begin on a Monday night and finish on a Friday morning.
And I wrote back and said, I appreciate your invitation but I dont think I have the expertise to
address a group like this.

And they wrote back to me and said, We dont need to talk about sexual issues at all. That is
not why we are inviting you. They said one of their groups in Amsterdam had been using one
of my books, Christ for Real, which is published in Dutch as well.

They had been using that as a basis of the Bible study and they had recommended that I be
invited to come and teach the principles of that book at this conference.

And I said I would love to do that. What it means to be in Christ, what it means for Christ to be
in us, what it means to live under the lordship of Christ and the enabling of the Holy Spirit, what
it means to live in true repentance all that is what that book is about.

And I went and it was a very wonderful experience for me on many grounds. I learned so much.
They came from all over Europe, from Latvia in the east, Ireland in the west, from Norway in the
north, to Spain in the south and everywhere in between. 80% were male; 20% were female,
roughly.

On the first night the leader of the conference, a Dutch guy, got up, welcomed people, and then
he said this (and I am paraphrasing from memory I wrote some notes at the time of what he
said).

He said, We are all here together because we share something in common. We are broken
people. Now he said, We share that in common with the whole of the human race, but we are
broken in a particular way; we are broken sexually.

But brokenness is a gift from God. It is in our brokenness that we meet with God. The
sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. A broken and contrite heart, O God, You will not despise.
God has nothing for the all-together people but He has everything for the broken people. We
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want to live holy lives, he said. We want to live fruitful lives. Yet we are living with a
conflict, with a struggle. We are living in a battle. Some of you are doing well. Some of you
are doing terribly. Some of you know victory. Some of you know defeat, utter defeat, utter
defeat. But lets at the outset of this conference say, God, my broken sexuality is Yours and
lets see what He will do.

Most of us here this morning are broken sexually in some way, in relationships. We come from
backgrounds. Maybe our parents split up. Maybe our own marriages have run into difficulty and
maybe we are divorced, separated. Maybe our kids are living a way sexually that we would
never have wanted them to. Maybe we are caught up and attracted to our own sex, and do I just
run with that, or is there some other way?

Some of us here are victims of abuse. Some of us may have ourselves been abusers of others.
Some of us are perhaps very frustrated sexually. Some of us are caught up in habits and thoughts
and practices that our conscience screams against.

Some of us here will be captivated by pornography and you have lost the ability to switch it off.

We are going to address all these issues in the next few weeks in some way or another.

I want to finish with an invitation of J esus. Matthew 11:28:

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.

Not Come to Me if you have sorted these things out come to Me in your burdens, in your
weariness and I will give you rest.

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me.

That is not a flash bang thing; that is a process taking His yoke, learning learning from Him.

for I am gentle

Thats His guarantee for the way He will treat you.

I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

In other words, He says, Come to Me. I dont care what your burden is. I can give you hope. It
involves some work, learning, taking My yoke, but I will be gentle with you. I am humble at
heart and you will find rest.

My prayer, as I felt it on my heart to speak about this issue, that we dont just churn things up,
we dont just send people home feeling wretched or guilty or, well, what do I do about it?

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We want in the course of these next weeks to provide ways in which we can help people too, and
help you.

But we have to understand the biblical doctrine of gender and the biblical doctrine of sexuality
and we need to come from the position, this is the Word of God. This therefore is true. This
therefore is good. This therefore is possible. And we will find rest for our souls.

Lets pray.

Father we thank You this morning that You understand everything about us. Nothing shocks
You. No secret locked away in the dark recesses of our hearts shocks You and You love us. You
love us enough to not leave us there. As Your Word says, if someone is overcome in a sin,
restore them gently. We want to restore one another gently, with clarity, but with compassion.

And we pray that some hearts here this morning in these areas we have talked about, in some
marriages where maybe there is tension, where maybe there is exploitation the one by the other,
we pray, Lord J esus, that You will turn our hearts towards home, because to be at home is to be
one. And I pray You will bring healing and a new vision of what we can be as completed people
in You, holy, acceptable and fruitful.










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