Thoughts for the Day

Out of the heart come evil thoughts – … sexual immorality ..                       Matthew 15:19

I said I would come back to the matter of sexual immorality.  So, with the promised level of trepidation, here we are for a couple of days.

It may seem curious that the judgment of the Council of Jerusalem singled out abstaining from sexual immorality in its instructions to Gentile converts.  After all, Jesus said relatively little on the subject.  Beyond what we considered yesterday there is essentially just today’s scripture which includes sexual immorality in his list of evils that emanate from the heart.  The simplest explanation is that he had nothing radically new to add to or subtract from traditional views, but still evidently considered it important enough to mention.  

There are around a dozen further warnings or condemnations of sexual immorality in the rest of the New Testament.  Yet for something that occurs as prominently as this, I recall almost no sermonising on the subject.  Do churches intentionally back off teaching about this to adults?  I certainly sense they increasingly struggle to engage with young people exposed as they are from very early on to a very different cultural morality.  Such a grave pity.

Our prevailing culture seems to take an increasingly simple view: morality is personal, the only social constraint on sexual morality is the matter of consent (within which ‘age of consent’ is somewhat of a grey area) and pleasure is reason enough to deem it OK.  The contrast with a biblical view could hardly be greater.  For Christians, morality is absolute, the constraints around sexual morality are God-given and pleasure is no measure of whether things are OK.  What, with whom and under what conditions are prescribed for us not to be prudish nor to be kill-joys but for good reasons, albeit we may not fully appreciate them.

To be continued tomorrow!