Submitted as an Offering

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from the audio and may contain small errors.

If you want, you can be turning to Ephesians chapter five. We are gonna be concluding our series on the book of Ephesians with, concluding our year on the book of Ephesians with one last series. So we're gonna be moving through, the next couple weeks we're gonna be moving through Ephesians five and six. Today we're just gonna be in the first part of Ephesians five.

And it wouldn't be an Ephesian sermon without a story about my wife, so. One Christmas early in our marriage slash dating, I don't remember if we were engaged in marriage, I think it was marriage, thank you, Kristi. She was like, I know what you're talking about. One Christmas, I was so excited about this. I got my wife a series of presents, okay? And I will tell you right now, I will describe these presents and half of you are gonna be like, that is adorable, and the other half are gonna be like, you are dumb. So the theme of all the gifts was pears. So I got her a pair of pants, a pair of, I think a pair of shoes, maybe a pair of earrings, no, it wasn't that practical. I gave her though a pair of pears, actually decorative pears, okay? I think I Drew something, a pair of vases, right? Yeah, okay, so I gave her all these things and I thought, man, if you'd have quizzed me

before Christmas that year of 2002 or something, I don't remember when it was, if you'd have quizzed me, you're like, is this gonna be great? Like, is Kristi gonna be just floored? I'd be like, man, this is gonna be the best Christmas ever. She's gonna be, she's gonna look at the theme and go, oh, you put so much thought into this, so great, oh, really clever, Drew, good job. It did not go how I thought it would go. And it's not like she shed tears publicly.

What I did not yet know about my wife is that my wife is insanely practical, okay? Insanely practical. My wife's idea of a Christmas present is a stocking full of a bunch of things that I can use, like toenail clippers and like certs and just like little breath mints and just a bunch of just these little things, just all the other, she's like, I'm giving, look at all this practicality I'm just handing to you, Drew, look at all this, look at how great it is.

I am in fact surrounded by these insanely practical people. If you do not know, Pastor Daniel Oster is also very practical. So many of our discussions that I have with him about decisions that we're gonna be making as pastors in the church, it feels like I'm at home talking about Christmas with my wife, so like if you believe that a poem is just an inefficient way to express an idea, then you might be, you might be that kind of practical. You might be the person I'm talking about. Am I pregnant, God bless you. Okay, quick story, quick story.

Pastor Daniel and I are talking about the mission statement, right? This is like three years ago, I don't remember, this is a while back. It's not a quote, it's not exactly where it was close enough. You're like, hey, we already have Matthew 28, you know, 19 through 20, like why do we need a mission statement? Can't we just have the actual Bible verse? And I'm like, well no, we can't have just the actual Bible verse, you know? Yeah, Jesus' words, yeah. So insanely practical. My practical friends, my practical friends, have I got news for you? Because we're gonna turn to Ephesians five and six and we are going to get practical. We're gonna turn practicality up to 11. It's gonna be amazing. Just the actual work is gonna be talking about real situations, we're gonna talk about real temptations, real motivations, what to do when you speak to others, what to do when people act shamefully around you,

what to do when you are caring for your spouse, what to do when you are parenting your children, what to do when you are at work, what to do when you are fighting temptation. Ephesians five and six walks us through these things almost in a handhold, right? Just a real kind of obvious this is what you can do, okay? And this is what we are talking about this submitted life, we're gonna get to that in a second, but this sermon series that we're gonna be talking about for the next, gosh, the next couple of weeks, we're gonna be talking about a submitted life. So a submitted life at work, submitted churches, submitted husbands, submitted wives, submitted parents, submitted relationships. If Ephesians five and six talks about it, we're gonna be preaching on it, okay? The next eight weeks we're gonna be talking about this. And to set the table for this level of practicality,

the first thing we do is actually we get an image, we get a metaphor and it is charged with meaning. Let's look at that first two verses Ephesians five, one and two, it says, therefore, be imitators of God as beloved children and walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God, okay? So these verses are telling us imitate the father by walking in love and here's the picture it gives, it says become a fragrant offering comma a sacrifice

or and sacrifice to God, okay? There is deep imagery here, I'm gonna point out two things only. This imagery means that we play an integral part in other people coming to God, okay? I'll show you that in a minute. We, it means that we play an integral part and people come to God, it also means that the things in our, we have things in our lives that need to burn away. It means both of those things. When it's talking about us becoming a fragrant offering, a sacrifice to God, it means both of those things. And I wanna show you how, let's get into it, let's see how they work together. So the phrase fragrant offering, sacrifice to God, it is only used twice in the New Testament, it's here in Philippians 4:18 and it's supposed to be, it's actually kinda obvious if you know the Old Testament like a lot of the readers in Ephesians probably did, it's kinda obvious, it should throw you all the way back

to the first couple of books in the Bible, Genesis through Deuteronomy, where that phrase is, I mean it's used a lot. This idea of a fragrant offering, a sacrifice to God, is a callback to the Old Testament. The word sacrifice, even in the New Testament wording here, it literally means sacrifice by fire, okay? Literally, so when you are thinking, you and I, we think of the word sacrifice, we're like, we got like wood like teepee'd up and there's an animal on the top and that thing is blazing, that's exactly what it's talking about here, sacrifice. Okay, so that's sacrifice by fire. This phrase in the Old Testament, and this will just kinda help us understand what it is, fragrant offering. The phrase in the Old Testament is that it is a pleasing aroma to the Lord, okay? So a lot of times it said, okay, they did an offering, it was sacrificed by fire, and it was an aroma pleasing to the Lord.

That phrase, an aroma pleasing to the Lord, occurs like 30 times in the first couple of books of the Bible, okay? That's not an exact number, it's a lot, it's more than 25, how about that? And it really helps us kinda see what that fragrant offering is talking about, like that it's an aroma that is pleasing to the Lord. When we build a campfire and we are roasting marshmallows over it, that is an aroma pleasing to me, okay? Anybody, Holler, for the, okay, yeah, I see a lot of nods going on, yeah, yeah. When my wife is cooking my favorite meal, okay, and I can smell, well, man, even if it's not my favorite, I mean, if I can smell shepherd's pie coming from the kitchen, bro, I am there, I'm just excited because that is an aroma pleasing to me. I'm excited because, not because it smells good, but because I know what's coming, right? I know I'm going to eat shepherd's pie.

I know I will experience community around the campfire and eat marshmallows. That's why it's good, okay? However, however, in this, I don't know if you've caught it, in these first two verses, we're the marshmallows, okay? We're the ones burning, okay? So here we go, live your life so that in burning, you smell nice to God. Let's go home. Let's, we've listened to the word of the Lord today. How is this pleasing to God, right? If we're the ones burning, how is that pleasing to God? And I want you to just consider Jesus' sacrifice because it actually says, like, walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us at a frequent offering and sacrifice to God. So Jesus was the first one, right? And we're supposed to follow in that.

When Jesus, Jesus had a sacrifice, he went through it whenever he went through his sacrifice, that sacrifice actually made people right with God. Does that make sense? So like, when that sacrifice happened and that aroma went up to the Lord, it was the aroma of people being reconciled to himself. It was the aroma of our debt being canceled. It was the aroma of a birth of a people that were his. They were gonna be his people, he was gonna be their God, right? That's why that sacrifice, that's why that's pleasing to the Lord. And whenever we sacrifice, that's why it's pleasing to the Lord, not just because it smells good, but not potpourri, spiritually speaking. It's that the aroma is signaling something that is coming. When we walk in love as a fragrant offering, as a sacrifice to God, our sacrifice is something that God actually uses to make people right with himself.

Now, I'm not telling you, obviously, our sacrifice is not the same as Jesus' sacrifice. It's different, okay? Categorically, it is a different thing. However, what the text is saying is that God uses it in the same way, that our sacrifice helps people see God. It helps people be drawn to God. God uses sacrifices that we make to show people what he looks like. You have the same imagery found in Romans 12:1. It says, I appeal to you, brothers, by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. This adds a layer to what we are reading here, because the thing about sacrifices is that they're not exactly living. If you've got something on the fire, and it's burning, it's usually not alive, okay? However, what the imagery is supposed to conjure up here in Romans 12:1, and also what we're reading

in Ephesians 5:1 and 2 is that this idea of a living sacrifice, it is continually dying to yourself, submitting and resubmitting your life and will to God's good pleasure, right? Whenever we are reading Ephesians 5:1 and 2, we need to understand that that sacrifice that is talking about, a fragrant offering before the Lord, is a situation where we are submitting and resubmitting and resubmitting our lives before the Lord in all these different situations, in all these different ways, in ways we don't want to, in ways that are frustrating, in ways that bump up against our cultural worldview. It bumps up against us, it messes, but when we submit and resubmit, that is going to be what Ephesians 5 and 6 is practically pointing out. So this isn't like how to make your favorite loaf of bread. This is gonna be how to die. This is gonna be how to burn up. And so this, I promised practicality

and I did so with a clear conscience, it is practical, but it is practically painful. It's practically difficult. It's practically, it's impossible without a loving relationship with the Lord. It's impossible with that. It's impossible to do what Ephesians is talking about with this submitted life, a life submitted in all areas, relationship, family, work, where our number one concern is to please our creator and be submitted to his will only. That is practically impossible.

And yet we still have Ephesians 5 and 6. So let's look at it practically. Our sacrifices actually help people see God. It involves doing things. This is kind of an obvious point. I just wanna make it. If you were gonna sacrifice on behalf of somebody, it requires you to do something sometimes. So if you have a coworker and you are asking about their day and you listen intently, that is a small form of sacrifice. You are kind of sacrificing for them. When you pray for somebody for weeks without telling them, like you're not keeping them posted, you're not keeping your Instagram followers apprised of all your prayers that you're praying, but you pray for somebody in quiet for weeks. You are sacrificing for them. When you take time off to have lunch with somebody, when you have a, you take a two hour lunch to make sure that the time you spend with this person is gonna be kind of set aside

and you're gonna love them in the moment. That is sacrifice. When you lose sleep because you are caring for another person, either because you can't sleep because you're worried about them, or because you're actually tending to them, so you are sacrificing sleep. We had a mom who was sacrificing some sleep last night. She had a boy with a birthday party. And so if you see Mindy falling asleep over there, it's fine, she didn't get to bed till like four in the morning, it's okay.

You lose sleep because you are sacrificing for people. You are doing things for other people and you are sacrificing. So sometimes it involves doing something. When you do those things, it makes God clearer to people. It's not because you're trying to, it's not because you've got this plan. You're like, oh, when I do this, they're definitely gonna see this about the Lord and I'm gonna take them through. No, you're just loving somebody in a moment and God's gonna use that to reveal himself to them. Okay, you don't need to bust out the Bible and show them where it applies exactly. Just listen, right? I'm not saying there's no time for Bible study. You know what I'm saying, okay. Our sacrifices also involve avoiding things.

That's where the hard left turn of verse three takes us. So verses three through seven is not, we're not talking about, we're not in the metaphor anymore, okay, we're right onto what you should avoid. Let's read. Ephesians five, three through four. But sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you as is proper among the saints. Let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking which are out of place, but instead let there be thanksgiving, okay. It lists three things here, sexual immorality, impurity and then it says covetousness. Your translations might say other things there, but it has the idea of eyeing somebody else's spouse, okay. It's not coveting their car. It's coveting their marriage or their spouse, right. So all three of these are kind of sexual in nature. We can put them kind of in this general category

of just sexual perversion, right. Sexual immorality, impurity and then coveting somebody else's spouse. It's this category of sexual perversion and it really is a big left turn from verses one and two, but it gets very practical. Included in the practicality is let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking. So if you are prone to throw out that's what she said, joke. That's crude jesting, right. Like you are making a joke about sexual intercourse, right.

It kind of sounds vulgar when I say it that way. It's a lot funnier when somebody says that's what she said. But that's exactly what it is. And when you make that joke, and look I'm not picking on that joke in particular, there's a thousand ways to be crude. You know, I mean let the conviction wander. When you do that you not only corrupt your own mind, but also anyone who hears you, right. And if you cannot hear certain words and just supply this kind of sexual innuendo without your mind going into a bad place, then you are doing damage to yourself and others on a level that I would say you can't comprehend. You don't understand what you're doing truly. You don't grasp the depths of kind of what you're doing because sexual perversion in all those categories it says here in these two verses says it's so worth avoiding that you should not even talk about it, you shouldn't even name it, okay.

Now admittedly, admittedly, this is very, very difficult to do. We'll talk about that in a second. Let's look at the next verse, Ephesians 5-5. We're gonna come back to all this. It says for you may be sure of this that everyone who is sexually immoral or impure or who is covetous, that is an idolater, has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. This is a heavy, heavy warning against sexual perversion, okay.

Why? Why pick on this? Why at the beginning of being practical with the church and he's talking to the church here, he's talking to the Ephesian church, how you relate to one another, how you talk in your home. He's relating to the church here. Why is that the first stop? Why such a heavy weight on don't do that? And here's why. Because sexual perversion will eventually demand your total allegiance. Sexual perversion will totally, or will demand eventually, will demand your total allegiance. And that's why there's kind of this mention of idolatry here, because sexual perversion, what it does is it takes over your mind like a fungus, like rot, just growing and growing and growing until you can't, really, you can't see something and not have a sexual temptation happen. You can't see someone of the opposite sex and go, okay, and not wonder what they look like without clothes on.

You can't do it. You are so far gone that you cannot see or hear anything that doesn't corrupt your mind. If you would actually fight it, it would be a full-time job. You'd have to, every five seconds, you'd be having to stop down and just saying, Lord, I don't wanna do that, I repent of that, I repent. But it's so running in the back of your mind nonstop.

That's what happens whenever you let sexual perversion run wild. It eventually takes over your mind, your heart, your relationships, it will demand total allegiance. It takes normal thoughts and pollutes them. It takes normal words and turns them into sexual jokes. It adds sleaze to every encounter. What you view, what you consume, is what you become. What you think about is what your life will be.

It says in Galatians that God will not be mocked, a man will reap what he sows. If you read books about people having affairs, if you watch pornography, mark my words, and I'm not happy about it, you will begin to see that play out in your actual life. You will begin to see something happen to you where you begin to normalize things that you normally wouldn't, and you will be changed slowly if you don't do anything about it. If you just give yourself to sexual perversion in any of those encounters, if you give yourself to that, you will become that. It will demand your total allegiance. There are two barriers to addressing this, to speaking openly about this. There's two barriers to you hearing what I'm saying right now. Okay, two barriers in our culture. I wanna call them out quickly. Number one is shame. Some of you may be feeling that right now. God bless you if you are.

I would only remind you that our hope in Christ is that we are not our past. Our hope in Christ is that we have been delivered, and although we are not finally there yet, we are not finally standing in our deliverance and totally made pure or made clean yet, we are on the way, and if so, if you are feeling shame, I really wanna help you understand. There is hope, and there are tools for you to fight. We're gonna talk about some of those. There's hope and there's tools for you to fight. You are not some lost case. If you are sitting here right now, and your every thought or every second thought is something sexual, if you've made sexual jokes in your head like three times after I started preaching, you might have a problem. There might be something going on with you. You might need to start thinking through what you're thinking through. Sexual perversion is what Jesus,

it's part of what Jesus came to set us free from. None of us in here, none of us in here could stand up and tell you that they are sexually pure. I don't care if you were a virgin on your wedding night. You're not sexually pure. Nobody, and so we don't need to start, you know, tearing off, you know, who's more sexually pure than the other, well, you know what, Jesus is in first place and we're all in last place. How about that? If we're gonna rank everybody, we all get last place. Congratulations. Nobody's more sexually pure than the Lord, and so then no one achieves sexual purity, done, okay. The call in these verses is to not give yourself to it. It's warning people away from diving all the way in. Warning people away from, well, this is just who I am now. I'm just gonna give myself over to this, right. This is just gonna be my identity. That's a big barrier, shame.

And it causes some people to just, instead of facing the shame and guilt, instead of admitting anything, instead of walking before the Lord, instead of coming clean, instead of any of that, they will just give themselves to it and just not deal with it and just let it just, it's just like sinking into the void and becoming a different person, rather than facing that shame and guilt. The second barrier to addressing this is a big fat eye roll, a big fat eye roll. Drew, you are making a huge deal out of nothing.

Everybody's doing it. Everybody's doing it, Clint. Everybody's doing it. Everybody's talking that way. Everybody's doing it. It's not a big deal. This is why we get verses six and seven in Ephesians five. Ephesians five, six, and seven says, let no one deceive you with empty words. Let's take a second and just, let's just take a logical kind of observation here. Three through five has just said, avoid sexual perversion.

It gave the heaviest warning it possibly could to say don't do this, don't let this be a part of your life, don't sink into this, don't let this be your identity. Verse six, let no one deceive you with empty words. Meaning, meaning, there's plenty of people that are gonna try to deceive you with empty words concerning this. Let's keep reading. Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things, the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience, therefore do not become partners with them. It's saying don't let them deceive you. These things, sexual perversion, under that umbrella, these things, because of them, the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. In other words, it's part of why Jesus came to die. It's part of what the cross satisfies the wrath of God for. You wonder why God's so mad? Sexual perversion is on that list. Why is God so vehemently against sexual perversion

of any kind, because it will take your life, and it's more culturally acceptable than drugs, barely. It'll take your life. Those trying to deceive with empty words, they're trying to convince you that there is no consequence for doing that. It comes in three forms. These are the three sentences, right? Wrath is not real, God is not real, or God is not paying attention. I'll take all three. Wrath is not real. You know, listen, we talked about this in our summer series, that there's no hell, right, universalism, if you wanna go back and look, eight lies that we still believe, that was one of them, is that lie. That wrath isn't real, that God isn't mad anymore, right? That he was mad in the Old Testament, but he's not mad now in the New Testament, but look, I tell you, in the New Testament, God still struck people dead for lying about how much money they got from a piece of property they sold.

That sound wrathful to you? That was New Testament, that is acts. Wrath is real. Wrath is real. Jesus came to pay for God's wrath, right? He came as a propitiation to stay God's wrath, okay? But whenever people are giving themselves to sexual perversion, whenever they are abandoning their whole lives and they are identifying into their sexual perversion, this is why scripture calls it idolatry or likens it to idolatry here and a lot of other places, the reason that's true is because it's eventually gonna be something that you bow down to. It's eventually gonna be something that you sacrifice for instead of God. Person can't serve two masters, although we try. Wrath is not, God's not really like that, wrath isn't real, God is love, only love. That's not true. Actually it is true, God is love and only love, but love includes wrath. If you don't believe me, then try to take a mother's

children away from her and you will see that love turned to wrath pretty fast. Okay, that's love, that is, that's love. Tell me it's not love to see the mom. Like, absolutely take off all her nails and go right after whoever's trying to take off with her kids, that's totally love, right? Like, that's, come on. And if you say that's not love, then here's what you're convinced of, that love is like this sentimental, sappy thing that you just see in Hallmark movies. Love's a lot thicker than that. It's a lot different than that. It's a lot better than that. Hallmark movies are great, but they're not giving you some full picture of love for sure. And there's no way in that conception of love in the sappy, sentimentality version of love that you're going to have any room for wrath. Wrath is gonna sound big and scary and weird. But we do understand wrath on a fundamental level

as a part of love. God is love, and love includes wrath. I feel like that's a whole other sermon. I'm gonna move on. God is not real. Look, when all else fails, you know, like, hey, just, there's this logical fallacy that, you know, if God's all powerful and God's all loving, then why is there evil and pain and why is the world broken and all of that? Part of the answer to that is that you don't understand who God is. You've got two attributes kind of nailed down, but you don't understand how that works together. You don't understand that God has given us free will. You don't understand that God has given us the ability to make real choices in real time with real consequences that really hurt other people. You don't understand that. You just want, in that little kind of tidy, logical fallacy, you just wanna say, well, God's not real. Because evil exists in the world, God's not real.

That is much often used as an excuse to do whatever you want and not submit to a real God. Last one is that God's not paying attention. If God is not paying attention, you know, he was really involved in the world in making it, but he's gone. That's not really what you see in all of scripture. That's not what you see, it's not what I see in my own life, it's not what I hear about what's happening in people's lives. So we got testimonies, we got scriptural truth, we got all these things kinda adding up and you wanna tell me that God's not involved in the day-to-day. Well, I think the burden of proof is on you, man. People wanna convince other people of this because when you are in sexual perversion, you want company. Because when you have company, then you are less miserable and you are more justified in your head. Do not think that you can escape it.

There's a skateboarder named Ryker Schellings. You might not know his name, it's okay. Ryker Schellings was skateboarding without a helmet and just at a park, not like, you know, he wasn't like coming down a 22-story building like that guy just did. Like it was just at a skate park and he wasn't wearing a helmet and he kinda fell the wrong way and it totally, he almost died. He had to have part of his brain removed. He had to learn how to walk again. He had to learn how to, and so like he actually has a picture of himself and I just thought it'd be weird to show it, but he has a picture of himself with part of his head missing. Like it's caved in like right here. It's pretty hard to look at, honestly. He carries that picture around with a bunch of helmets and he goes to skate parks and he says, this happened to me because I wasn't wearing a helmet. Here's a helmet.

How many people do you think take helmets? Oh my gosh. You know, and he wears a prosthetic actually and a hat so that you can't see that his head's caved in, but upon inspection and a little bit of conversation and Ryker Schellings probably has the mental capacity of like a, I don't know, like an eight-year-old, right? He's just not, he's 25, 26, but he's lost a lot. Still lives with his parents, never gonna live on his own, never gonna have kind of a, you know, like a full adult life, really. He'll take off his hat, you know, take off the prosthetic and he'll show kids to so that they wear a helmet.

I wear a helmet. Like I know that's a pretty gruesome story, but man, if there were some kind of spiritual equivalent to show you, I would show you that picture. I just would. And it's not to scare you. It's not, I mean, I hope that you're not, you know, like running in fear on this. It's not that, it's not to be scared. It's to help you understand that whenever you live a life submitted, you're gonna, that's some of that that needs to burn away. That's the part that needs to burn away. And it starts with that, honestly. If there's a, you know, if there's a young man, you know, over whom I am discipling and, you know, one of the first conversations we are having is about porn. So it's the first conversation. If you are the mother of a young teenage boy, first of all, God bless you.

Whew, I mean, I just got tired thinking about your life. But, man, if he doesn't have anybody in his life who's asking him about pornography or what he's watching or the things he's feeling or, there's a book written by Donald Miller and the name of the book is To Own a Dragon, which is an interesting title. That title is to describe coming into manhood. To own a dragon.

What he means by that is that there is a level of drive and rage and fierceness and energy that gets heightened whenever you become a man. And if you are not willing to acknowledge that, have that conversation, talk that through, talk through sexual impulses that your sons are dealing with, then, man, just get used to them being Ryker Schellings. I mean, it's gonna be awful for them. It's gonna be terrible. If they don't have anybody to talk to about it, oh, it's horrible because you think you're the only one as a guy. You think you're the only one dealing with it. Let me just tell you, brothers, you are not. Not even close, not by a long shot. Every guy that I talk to that has a conversation with me, right, pastorally, like we start talking about stuff that's real, I mean, look, we're into sexual perversion like first, maybe second, like maybe we talk about football first, but that's it.

I'm just, I'm serious. And I don't mean, look, I'm not trying to make all you guys pigs right now, like that's not, I'm not coding for like, hey, worry about men all the time. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying men, you own a dragon, whether you know it or not, and you gotta deal with that. And in talking about sexual perversion, sure, there's ways that women deal with that, but God bless you, ladies. I don't understand it, I don't have to. I can just point to the scripture, right? But for brothers, look, I feel you, right? It is not easy to talk about, and this, in one way, this is why this is a sacrifice. So let's talk about that real quick. Why is this a sacrifice?

It's a sacrifice because, number one, I mean, I think it's most obvious, because you are battling against your own impulses here. You are battling against temptation to do things, look at things, think about things, fantasize about things that you should not, okay? So that's, number one, it is a battle. Is it just right there in your heart's battle? So there's sacrifice there. It takes time.

I would take a minute to recommend to you, and there are many good ones. There are many good apps that you can put on phones and iPads, and there's a couple of really good ones. They change all the time, they adapt. They have to kind of stay on whatever technology is doing to get around those things, to keep putting patches, to make sure that they're still putting a safeguard on your phone. And for that reason, I'm not gonna recommend one in particular, because they really do all change, and they all change very quickly. In fact, right now, they are all changing very, very quickly.

I would recommend, there's a few, I would recommend that give a report to somebody else. Okay? I have one that does that. I have a friend whose report I receive, okay? And every time I'm looking, right, it sends me what he looks at. It blurs it, and it gives me a rank of like, okay, like, is this pornography or not? Okay. That's not something he can get around. That's something that reports to me. Every time he looks at anything on his phone, that it sends me a weekly report. And if it's ever, ever anything to call him about, I do, immediately.

I'd recommend an app like that, not just something that you keep to yourself, but that you kind of have in community. Here's the other reason it's a sacrifice. It's a sacrifice because avoiding those things, avoiding sexual perversion does bring inspection upon your life, okay? I would be crazy to think that 85% of you, at the very least, are wondering what kind of skeletons I have in my own closet because I'm standing up here speaking against sexual perversion.

Okay? It brings inspection. If I were ashamed to say anything that I'm saying right now, I probably wouldn't even be preaching this sermon. I probably would have just, I don't know, I would have done something pretty horrible, like skip over the verses or something. I'm not doing that, but I stand up for you. I'm not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but I am submitted. I'm submitted to other guys. I'm submitted to the Lord. I'm not looking at porn, right? But the only reason I need to say that is because I'm talking about it now. And when you start avoiding things like that, it will bring inspection upon your own life, right? People will accuse you or at least think that you are self-righteous. It's gonna happen. Almost guarantee it. Unless they know you really, really well. If people are making a sexual joke and you walk away, people are gonna wonder.

If you stop the discussion because it is inappropriate, people will wonder, probably actively, why you just did that. Why you think you're better than them, okay? It's a very quick skip, hop, and jump away. Let me say this one thing about sexual perversion because there's a phenomena that happens on this and I wanna be really clear. It ceases to be a sacrifice. So avoiding sexual perversion, that is a sacrifice. It disqualifies itself as a sacrifice. It ceases to attain to sacrifice status when you do that for the purpose of moral superiority. Let me say that a different way. If the only reason you avoid sexual things is so that you can be better than your peers, that's not what Scripture's talking about. Okay, if you're simply trying to be better than other people, it's not going to work. You're only building yourself up and then your work won't stand, okay?

So if someone is stepping into sexual perversion, if somebody is making that joke, if somebody's, my encouragement is to walk away. And if it's somebody that you don't know, okay? I'm being real practical here. If it's somebody that you don't know, just walk away. Be content to walk away. You don't need to teach them a lesson. You don't need to, it's not gonna work anyway, I promise, okay? Because you're dealing with a level of shame and identity that you really aren't gonna handle right there at Walmart when somebody's making a sexual joke behind you in line, okay? You're not gonna solve their problem, okay? Walk away from it. If it's somebody that you don't know, walk away from it. If it's somebody that you do know, my encouragement, just as a default, would be to walk away and then approach them privately. Walk away from them then. So be clear that you're not taking part in this.

They can wonder whatever they wanna wonder. If anybody knows, nobody knows it doesn't matter, but then you talk with them privately. If they know the Lord. Now if they don't know the Lord, you can have a conversation with them. If they're like a coworker that you're talking about all the time and every time you're talking with them, they're just making some kind of sexual joke or innuendo or something, then yeah, talk to them and just say like, first of all, that's not HR friendly, second of all,

some IHR people are like, yes. Second of all though, this isn't me being high and mighty. It's a real temptation for me. Please don't do it. That is gonna bring inspection, but that's our call. Lastly, if somebody is being belligerent with them, with you, excuse me, somebody's just belligerently just making sexual jokes and you can't walk away if they work right next to you, if they're whatever, if you're working on the same job together, and if they're just talking about a sexual escapade, if they're just kind of, if they're doing all, they're just incessant, they're belligerent with them, then confront them in the moment lovingly and just say, hey, hey, I don't need that today. I don't, you're causing me to think and consider things that I don't wanna think and consider. And so can we just talk about something else? Can we talk about the Cowboys and how they're terrible or great

or whatever they are this year, right? I don't know, honestly. Can we talk about the Rangers? Can we talk about, can we talk about something else, please? Can we talk about your vacation? Can we talk about something you found on Amazon? Can we doom scroll together? Can we do something besides whatever we're doing right now? Okay, like anything, literally anything, instead of what we're talking about right now. If somebody's being belligerent, then you might need to be belligerent back to insist upon a change of topic. It's not your first move, but it might be your last. It might be your second move, third move, okay? A life submitted to God, it means that we are turning away from the things that displease God. And let me just say, this is not God keeping you from having fun. It's not, actually. It's God keeping you from things that will kill you.

It seems fun, because we're dumb. It just does, man. It seems fun initially, right? It seems, it quickens your heartbeat to do something you know that might be a little risky, right? It does. Ultimately, it's gonna kill you. It's gonna wreck your marriage. It's gonna wreck your relationship with your kids. It's gonna wreck your job. It's gonna wreck your mind. It's gonna wreck your life. It will demand total allegiance. You will fight it at some point, or you will die to it. And again, this is also what God uses to bring redemption in other people. When you walk away from a sexually perverse conversation, the Lord is faithful to use that. You don't need to make sure that you're leveraging that. You don't need to run your campaign. You don't need to get on Instagram right then and be like, I just walked away from a sexually perverse conversation. I think I'm okay for that.

Okay, no, don't do that. Just walk away and trust that the Lord is gonna do what the Lord's gonna do in their life. You be obedient. You let the Lord worry about the lecture. Lord's way better at lecturing than you are, okay? We discussed this a few weeks ago. I wanna kinda end on this. That walking with God is a process whereby we put off the old self and we put on the new self. We talked about that in Ephesians 3 and then Ephesians 4. It also talks about that. So putting off the old self, putting on the new self. I think that when we begin to kind of mix it in with this sacrifice, fragrant offering metaphor, we begin to see what it's talking about that putting off the old self is like lighting it on fire. It's like burning it away. In fact, that a life submitted to God is like being in the oven, right? Where things that need to be burned away can be, but also in the oven, new things can rise, right?

So being a life submitted to God, it's not this life of like comfort and ease and all of these things. It is a difficult life. It's a life in the oven, but it's worth it. And so my question I wanna leave you with today, and I'm gonna pray and we'll be done, but here's the question I wanna leave you with today. What goes in the fire for you? What goes in the fire for you? It might not be sexual perversion. It might be something different, totally different. I don't know. I don't need to know. But I think it's worth you considering like what needs to go in the fire. What's your next step either to get help, to know what's going on, to something, okay? And if you're new to our church, blessings. I'm glad that you're here. Welcome. We don't do an altar call. We don't do, we don't have like a decision time where you come and you kneel and you pray here. That's not really our jam.

It's not really what we do. Part of the reason that we don't do that is because we want decisions that you make here to last until tomorrow. And so if you wanna make a decision here, that's great. If you wanna talk to somebody about that here, that's great. I'm available, Pastor Daniel's available. We get deacons available. Just grab us, just start talking to us. It's fine. It's totally normal to do that. It's not conspicuous or anything. It's totally normal. If you need to make a decision about that, then make a decision about it and we'll help you do it. We'll give you some tools. We'll help you kinda walk in some freedom. If you want an app recommendation from me, then we can talk through a few of them

to help you kind of get secured from looking at porn on your phone. What needs to go in the fire? What do you need to let go of? What do you need to let burn? Let's pray. Lord, thank you for, just calling us into, giving things up, calling us into a life submitted to you and a life that is just in the oven. We know that you, that the things that you have for us are way better than any of the temptation that is staring us down. We know that what you are doing in our lives

is better than anything, any quickened heartbeat or any flash of emotion. You're better and we trust you. Lord, we know that you call us into this life and I pray that you would help us to have the strength to walk in it. It's in your name that we pray, amen.