Sex in a Broken World (eBook)

How Christ Redeems What Sin Distorts

Paul David Tripp (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2018 | 1. Auflage
192 Seiten
Crossway (Verlag)
978-1-4335-5668-5 (ISBN)

Infos

We live in a deeply broken world . . . but there is hope. Sexuality is a fundamental part of what it means to be human-part of God's beautiful design when he created all things. And yet, sex in our world today looks nothing like the way that God intended it to be. Sexual brokenness surrounds us and, in one way or another, affects us all. This sexual brokenness reveals our deep need for redemption- something quick fixes, mere behavior modification, or a set of rules can't provide. Honest and direct yet kind and caring, this book points us to the only place we can find help for sexual brokenness-the transforming grace of Jesus Christ. Only this grace offers hope for a life of freedom, purity, and joy as God intended.

Paul David Tripp (DMin, Westminster Theological Seminary) is a pastor, an award-winning author, and an international conference speaker. He has written numerous books, including Lead; Parenting; and the bestselling devotional New Morning Mercies. His not-for-profit ministry exists to connect the transforming power of Jesus Christ to everyday life. Tripp lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Luella, and they have four grown children.

Textauszug

2

Sorry, but We’ve Gone Crazy

She’s thirteen, and the thing she can’t stop thinking and talking about is her impending breast development. For her, being a woman is all about the size of one’s breasts.

She’s fifteen and is quite the self-appointed expert when it comes to oral sex. She doesn’t see herself as just knowledgeable but as a bit experienced as well. What she likes about oral sex is that it’s a way of having sex that “isn’t really sex.”

I’ve told my wife that during the summer months it’s hard to walk down the street in Center City Philadelphia, where we live, and to know where to look, because there are so many women in various stages of undress.

Tim is seventeen, and in ways he doesn’t recognize, he’s already been trained to view women as objects whose value is attached to physical beauty and body shape.

George is married with three children; he seems to have a good marriage, but he masturbates at least once a day. His wife doesn’t know it, but he’s done it for years.

They came to me after a conference, carrying with them a combination of heartbreak and anger. They wanted to know what to do about their son who seemed hopelessly addicted to Internet pornography. I asked how old he was, thinking I would hear teens or early twenties. To my shock, and speaking through his shame, the father said to me, “Eight.” Eight! Let it sink in. Eight!

At a conference in South Africa they asked if they could have lunch with me. After the meal they told me their story. Their son, a newly married intern pastor, had been having sex with a college girl from the student ministry over which he was responsible.

In the big cities around the world, you are considered a hopelessly old-fashioned bigot if you don’t think same-sex marriage is not only a wonderful idea but also a civil right.

We’re now being told by powerful cultural influencers that gender is not a fixed biological reality but rather a cultural construct.

You can barely watch a video, look at a car ad, or hear a popular song without having your morals assaulted.

Sandra is twenty, and her definition of cool, fashionable clothes is those that are designed to reveal the body. Her clothes tend to be tight, short, and often low-cut. Sandra is a Christian who in many ways takes her faith seriously.

He asked to counsel with me because he knew he was in trouble. He was literally stalking women in the evenings after his seminary classes. He would hang around Starbucks and follow the most attractive women home, of course never letting them know what he was doing.

How many teachers, how many coaches, have been arrested for having sex with the students entrusted to their care?

There are websites that connect people who want to be unfaithful to others who are desirous of the same.

An inner-city high school opens up a day care next to the school building because so many of its female students have children.

So many people are texting sexually explicit pictures from their cell phones that the word sexting has become part of the modern vocabulary.

Internet pornography is the most powerful economic engine of the World Wide Web.

– – –

Sex—you don’t have to look very far to see that we’re in big trouble. The news is littered daily with sex scandals. The content of the tabloids is enough to alert us to the fact that something has gone terribly wrong. It’s hard to listen to any cultural discussion of sex that isn’t infected with either self-deception or distortion of reality. Sex can’t deliver the promise that we think it makes, and it’s more dangerous than we tend to think. Sadly, today this beautiful creation of God functions in the surrounding culture like a spiritual solvent eating away at the very fabric of the human community. It has perverse power to master your heart and, in so doing, determine the direction of your life. It gives the buzz that you’re in control while, at the very same time, becoming the master that progressively chains you to its control. It offers you an inner sense of well-being while having no capacity whatsoever to satisfy your heart. It seduces you with the prospect of contentment-producing pleasure but leaves you empty and craving more. Sex holds out the possibility that you will finally be satisfied but instead causes you to envy whoever has more and better than you do. It sells you the lie that physical pleasure is the pathway to spiritual peace. Sex is the work of the Creator’s hands but tends to promise you what only the Creator can deliver. It is beautiful in itself but has become distorted and dangerous by means of the fall.

With all of this swirling around us and inside us, the church of Jesus Christ has been strangely silent and reticent. We seem to approach sex with a timidity, reserve, and embarrassment that does not make personal, cultural, or biblical sense. Pastors are often all too hesitant to teach and preach about the topic of sex. Meanwhile, the world around us seems to never stop talking about it.

Christian parents often fail to do a good job of discipling their children in what it means to be God-honoring sexual beings. How many parents do more than conduct one creepy, quasi-embarrassing talk about sex and have joy once it’s over and a determination never to talk about it again? How many young people from Christian homes are struggling with questions, confusion, and temptation but wouldn’t think of seeking the help and wisdom of their embarrassed and silent parents? How many parents provide a long-term, safe, gracious, and nonjudgmental place for their teens to talk about sex, knowing that the questions and temptations of a thirteen-year-old differ from those of a fifteen-year-old, which differ from those of an eighteen-year-old? Meanwhile, the obsessions and distortions of an addicted culture are powerfully brought to the eyes, ears, and hearts of even the most conservative Christians by pervasive and intrusive media that is almost impossible to escape.

Yet God in his great wisdom, for his glory and our good, has chosen to place us in a world where sex is a significant part of the human experience. The issue of sex is important and unavoidable because God, in wisdom and love, chose it to be. Because sex is the creation of God’s hand and exists under the control of his sovereignty, we should approach it with reverence and awe, not with embarrassment and timidity. Sex came from him, belongs to him, and continues to exist through him—to him be the glory.

God has also chosen us to live in a world where the lies, deceptions, distortions, and temptations of sex are many. Your address is not a divine mistake. Your exposure to the variegated difficulties of life in this fallen world, with all of its delusions and temptations, is not in the way of God’s plan; it is his plan. He—right here, right now—has you exactly where he wants you to be. He knows exactly what you’re facing. He isn’t trying to cope with or cover up a grand divine mistake. He isn’t wringing his hands in celestial anxiety. He has carefully and wisely chosen you to live right where you live, knowing full well what you will face. All this is done with divine knowledge and purpose.

So we can’t act with regard to sex as if we’re powerless, or it will be impossible to prepare for what we will all inevitably face. We can’t allow ourselves to think we’re alone in the struggle. We can’t allow ourselves to live as modern evangelical monastics, as if separation from the world is the key to true righteousness. And we can’t be lulled or intimidated into silence in a crucial area of the human existence where the Creator has powerfully and clearly spoken. And we mustn’t forget the lie-exposing, freedom-granting truths of the gospel of Jesus Christ. It’s vital that we remember that the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ addresses not just our need for past forgiveness or for future hope but also everything we face right here, right now. This gospel is what provides the only reliable diagnostic when it comes to sex, and because it does, the gospel also graces us with the only truly effective cure. The gospel has the power to make us sex-wise, to keep us sex-protected and sex-bold, no longer willing to be sidelined by timidity and fear. The gospel graces us with everything we need to celebrate and participate in human sexuality in a way that honors God and fully enjoys the good things he’s given us to enjoy.

Why This Book Now?

People ask me all the time what I am working on or what I intend to write next. They always follow the first question with a second: “Why that now?” And they’ve surely been intrigued when I’ve told them I am working on a book about sex. They’ve been interested in why I’ve chosen this topic from all the topics I could be addressing, and they ask what I see that motivates me to write about it now. As I’ve thought about this over the last several months, three words have come to mind again and again, and they are my best answer to the question. The words are...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 16.1.2018
• Verlagsort: Wheaton
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Religion / Theologie ► Christentum ► Kirchengeschichte
• Themenwelt: Religion / Theologie ► Christentum ► Pastoraltheologie
• Schlagworte: bad christian sex • beautiful design for sex • Christian marriages • Christian Restoration • Christian Sexuality • Conservative Christians • gods plan for sex • guilt and shame • insight and wisdom • jesus and sex • marital sex • pornography addiction • post christian culture • power of gospel • purity and joy • roots of sin • sex out of wedlock • Sexual brokenness • sexual design • Sexual Purity • Sexual shame • sex within marriage • transforming grace • true hope • wise counselor
• ISBN-10: 1-4335-5668-5 / 1433556685
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4335-5668-5 / 9781433556685