FAR more startling times ahead

“It’s a fascinating thing how much on the front burner the Apostle Paul puts the issue of sexual purity among the saints,” says Jordan. “Now, I say that to say this: The culture our country is shifting into is a world like Paul lived in.

"Paul lived in a much more belligerent culture to scriptural marriage than we live in, so when he says these things in I Thessalonians, you got to understand he’s talking to a culture of people who don’t have a biblical thinking process about marriage—not even the remnants of one like we still have in our culture today.

“Paul lived in a totally paganized culture, and for him to say ‘the husband of one wife,’ the response would have been, ‘You mean I can’t have as many wives as I can afford?' In a polygamist culture you could have as many wives as you could afford to have and keep up. Paul said, ‘No, no. Just one.’ And they said, ‘Huh?’

“So, these things are startling to the people he talked to. They’re rather startling to the world we’re going into and the world our little girls  and boys are going into--7-8 year-old kids. The world they’re going to come into as adults is going to be FAR more startling.

*****

“Our culture has always had sex stuff going on. You know, if you want to advertise a car you put some half-naked gal on the hood and men are attracted to the car.

“The psychology of that is in I Corinthians 11:7: ‘For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man.’

“When a culture glorifies a naked woman as a sex goddess, what are they really glorifying, according to the verse? They’re glorifying themselves and that’s why that stuff works that way.

“The point is with ‘the husband of one wife’ (I Timothy 3) here’s a man who has a married relationship in which he’s faithful, his spouse is faithful and they’ve built a home based upon that marriage that demonstrates this is the way God intends to live in marriage.

“In Titus 1, this issue is between the two things about ‘being blameless.’ Again, Paul puts this thing right out front.

*****

“Years ago I used to be on (preacher) ordination committees for men outside our assembly, but very few times did I ever do it for someone I didn’t know really well.

“The times that I did, one of the things I wanted to know about was, ‘How about your marriage? How about your family? Where’s your wife in this? Where are your children? Let me come and spend the day with you.’

“I found immediate resistance to that, not just from the candidate but from the committee . . . it’s like, ‘We don’t want to ask too many questions.’

“Someone told me just yesterday about going to this church where their pastor of 50 years finally retired and they got a new pastor, and on the first Sunday this new pastor gets up to preach, he says, ‘Now, I just want to be very clear to everybody here that I believe Israel has been replaced by the church.’

“This couple, her lady and her husband, told me, ‘We knew right then we couldn’t stay there,’ and, of course, my question was, ‘How come the (church) didn’t find that out about him until they gave him the job?’

“She said, ‘Well, there wasn’t anybody in the leadership of the church who knew that question to ask.’ Which means they had a pastor for 50 years who was a nice guy, visited hospitals, patted people on the head and took care of their ‘felt needs,’ but didn’t teach them enough about the Bible to get them out of a wet paper sack.

*****

“Paul writes in I Thessalonians 4:3, ‘For this is the will of God, even your sanctification, that ye should abstain from fornication.'

“The very first thing he talks about in relationship to the Thessalonians being set apart for the purpose God created them is that they would redirect their affections from an incorrect sphere of self-gratification to the truth of God.

"And the reason that fornication is there is because it’s as, I Corinthians 6:18 says, ‘Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body; but he that commiteth fornication sinneth against his own body.’

“That’s a sin that functions down in your inner man. Proverbs 6:32 says, ‘But whoso committeth adultery with a woman lacketh understanding: he that doeth it destroyeth his own soul.’

"Can you understand, if you’re going to be in a position of leadership where your main function is the edification of the souls of believers, the issue of not destroying your own soul is got to be front and center?

“When he says he destroys his own soul, that’s like over in Romans 14:20: ‘For meat destroy not the work of God. All things indeed are pure; but it is evil for that man who eateth with offence.’

“You completely dismantle all of the edification in your inner man. You make yourself unable to function. Why? You just become totally lascivious. Totally a slave to your flesh.

*****

“Don’t take that thing about sexual purity lightly. God doesn’t. The culture we live in, until the last 60-70 years, marriage was a rather understood thing.

“Actually, until Ronald Reagan was president, the idea of a person who had been divorced becoming president was abhorrent. The only two reasons Ronald Reagan got elected in spite of that is one, he had such an openly committed relationship to Nancy Reagan that it kind of took away the specter of the divorce he’d gone through previous to that.

“Two, he was an effective enough politician to parlay his positives into the office. Prior to that, the great scandal was Kennedy: ‘How could you have a Roman Catholic be president?’ Those things were scandalous things. Now they’re just sort of, ‘Were we ever worried about that? What were we worried about?’

“Now it’s a commonly accepted thing. I remember a missionary from Brazil coming up here back in the ‘80s talking about how in the culture he lived in, if you wanted to get married you just went down to the courthouse and filled out a paper and nobody had ceremonies and it was a real secular kind of a thing.

“I remember him saying that to us and some folks got to shaking their heads, saying, ‘How in the world can that be?’ Well, now you see it happening all around you all of the time.

“I saw a thing the other day where a dog-catcher married a couple right here in Illinois. A dog-catcher? You can just get anybody to do this stuff. Why? Because the culture has shifted.”

*****

“Just this morning you saw all those kids up here getting their graduation for Sunday School, and you see the privilege of teaching scripture to those children and what a bright group of them it is, and you hear about them learning hundreds of verses of scripture, and you see the motivation and the real genuine interest and hunger and it’s their parents; it’s families that do that. A lone Sunday School teacher can’t do that.

“You know what kind of oddballs those kids are going to be when they get out into the world and the community out there? It’s easier to be an oddball for the Lord Jesus Christ today than it ever has been in our world; our culture.

“Now, I think that’s a good thing. I like being an oddball. I’ve always liked kind of standing apart from the crowd. It used to be you had to stand on the street corner, shout and preach and hand out tracts. Now you don’t have to be quite so loud about it.”