Wisdom, Folly, & Sexuality • Beyond The Sermon

Hey, everybody. Pastor Steve here. Just want to let you know that we're going to start the podcast in just a moment, but we're going to be talking about some things that have, well, let's just call them adult themes. So if you are in the car with your kids or listening with an audience that maybe would be a little sensitive to some of this stuff, why don't you push pause on this one, bookmark it and wait and come back and listen to it later. So just fair warning as we get into it.

Well, hello and welcome to beyond the Sermon, a Bethany podcast where we have the privilege of digging deeper into our Sunday messages. I am Tammy Delau, and today I am joined with Tyler Fisher, one of our elders, and Pastor Steve Musto. And I've just got a no tie. We talked about animals last week. Animals.

Yeah. And so you know Aunt Hyrax, Locust. What was the other one? I can't. Lizard.

There we go. Who are you? Who do you want to be? That's been the question everyone's been talking about. When I talk to them about the sermon, I feel like none of those are like, alluring animals.

No, they're not. I always wanted to be like a dolphin. I don't know what the biblical application of that is. I mean, I'm probably an ant in personality the most out of those four, but. Okay.

Well, typically this is the point where I say let's dive in, but we're talking about sex and I'm not sure I want to dive in, but I guess we better do it. Sorry. So here we go. It's not my fault. It's.

It's really Solomon's fault. So there you go.

I'm just going to start with reading the passage if that's okay with you. So our passage. I'm going to read Proverbs 7:1:5. So this is the set up for the passage that we're going to be studying. Right.

It'll help us understand what we're doing. Okay. My son, obey my words and treasure my commands. Keep my commands and live and guard my instructions as you would the pupil of your eye. Tie them to your fingers, write them on the tablet of your heart, say, to wisdom, you are my sister and call understanding your relative.

She will keep you from a forbidden woman, a wayward woman with her flattering talk. So this is the introduction to this whole next section, which is a story, kind of a story. So what we've just learned is we know who's writing. You know, it's credited to Solomon, but There's a writer, an older man is writing wisdom to a younger man, presumably to pass along wonderful bits of wisdom and advice. And what he's been saying from the very beginning of Proverbs is, hold on to wisdom with both hands.

Let her guide you. This is very classically Greek idea, like a goddess who is walking with you through life. She will lead you by the hand to do all of these things and wonderful things. Just listen to her. Stay close to her.

Don't stay close to anybody. EL and so now I turn you over to Wisdom to listen to Wisdom's story. And then the camera sort of pans over and fades into a whole new scene. And then we enter the scene with Wisdom now dictating this. Narrating this story for us, looking down through the lattice of a window and telling a story.

Yeah, it's not a good bedtime story. No. It looks like a love story, though. It starts out like a love story, it doesn't end like a love story. So, yeah, that's what it's about.

And ultimately its core, its foundation, it comes down to this is about sex. And what do we do if we want to honor God? How do we honor God when it comes to sex? Wherever we are, whoever we are, single, married, young, old, doesn't matter. How do we honor that God invented this thing called sex and gave us a sexuality?

So how do we honor God with that? I think it's really interesting that the passage that you just read on the face of feels good. Like you said, it looks like a love story. It looks something that the reader wants to dive into. And then as you get behind the curtain, so to speak, or you look at what's actually happening, it's not as clean or pretty of a story.

And I just think that's interesting because, like, when we. We open, like, no one wants to talk about this. Right. Sex is a weird topic to talk about. It feels taboo.

But I think part of why it's so hard for us to address a. It's incredibly personal. But whether you're talking from the church's perspective. I grew up in purity culture, where there was a very. I helped you grow up.

Yeah. You didn't talk about it. And if you did talk about it, it was just like this super surface level. Divert your eyes. This thing will be down the road.

And then from a worldly. If you look at it from a secular perspective, which progressively, in our world, we are just living in a world where you're confronted with it at younger and younger and younger ages, whether you're talking about engaging in it or just preference or orientation, anything that comes with that. They really only talk about one side of it, too. It's very glorified and glamorized. And I feel like that's really part of what makes this so ugly and so hard for us to talk about is sometimes you just have to pull that curtain back and look at all of it.

You know, the ugly, the good, the bad, like all the pieces of this. And then what is God asking us to do? But it's a very interesting analogy to lay over the context of the conversation. Yeah. I mean, we know in order to have good news, we need to know that there was bad news that we have, and that's what's going on here.

This is such an interesting way of talking about this topic, too. And it would be easy to just give us a teaching or just some little maxim about, here's what you do about with sex or with your body or something like that. But instead, it's this whole story. And really the way it's presented, we're going to see in Proverbs chapter 7. And then into Proverbs 8, it continues.

Wisdom personified as a woman. But the opposite of wisdom is folly. Folly also personified as a woman. They're both women, and it's the angel on each angel on one shoulder, the devil on the other, trying to talk to you and tell you what to do, whispering in each ear. And folly sounds, Looks a lot like wisdom.

And wisdom looks. Sounds a lot like folly. And so you have to be very careful. You have to practice discernment as you navigate this. And that's part of what the text is trying to tell us.

It's a trap. It feels like it. Yeah. I mean, and I wrestle when it talks. I'm so excited that wisdom is personified female, because as you read these verses, it sounds like the woman is the problem.

Right. And the woman is not the problem. No. And so it's been hard to be a woman growing up. Like, somehow it's our response.

We're the temperses, we're the ones. And so I'm glad we get some wisdom. We've talked about this before, and we've talked about this. Just like personally, you and I have talked about this a lot. And this is culture we grew up in.

But yes. And it's important to underscore in the Bible, the vast majority of sin, and especially sexual sin, is perpetrated by men. It's not even close.

Women don't even make a dent in the numbers of men who are committing terrible atrocities in the Bible. So this is not about women. This is about, you know, women being personified as wisdom or godly wisdom or Satan's folly. Yep. Yeah.

So as we read this and we're hearing that it's a story, what godly wisdom are we getting when it comes to our view of what sex and sexuality should be? So because God is the originator of the inventor of this thing called sex, and because he made us sexual creatures, this is not something that we should be ashamed of, and it's not something that we should push away. It is something that we need to handle carefully, but it's not something that we should be embarrassed about or anything. Like, this is how God made us. So that's the deal.

What we need to do is be able to talk about it and talk about what God's word says about it. And we've talked about sex before and messages. One of the things. The definition that I always use is this. If we want to have a.

If we want to begin a conversation about a biblical view of sex, before we start talking about things are different in our day than it was in the Bible. Before we even have that, let's define. What does the Bible hold up as the ideal? Because the Bible holds up as the idea the only thing that we can really defend is one man, one woman, marriage, relationship. That is where sexuality is to be practiced.

That is where it is to be discovered. That's where it is to be celebrated and enjoyed. If we want to have a conversation beyond that of. Well, that was for that time. And maybe it's different for.

Okay, we can go into those discussions, but we have to own what the Bible is telling us, which is anything outside of that definition every time, without exception, ends in disaster. And God does this for a reason. So it's one man, one woman, marriage, relationship. That's where it begins. But we understand that we live in a very different culture, and I think we've got to talk about and deal with, okay, we have kids or grandkids at different places in their lives.

As we look at those kids and grandkids and whatever, sometimes it feels a little hopeless when it comes to sexuality. I mean, I just feel that way sometimes. I. I'm praying for my grandson, and I just, ooh, what is the world that he's gonna inherit? What is it gonna look like? What is he gonna be being taught?

So I know the prayers that I pray for my grandchildren. My grandmother never prayed for me. Oh, yeah. You know, never had to. Probably never had to.

Never entered her mind. Right. That's a good point. Never. I'm sure she did not pray that I would step into being a woman because I was born a biological woman.

That was not a prayer, you know. So you've got little kids. I do. Public school. Our kids went to public school.

How do you equip them to help navigate this world that is giving them a very different message than a biblical message? Honestly, a big part of why we chose to put our kids into public school is because of how rapidly the world is changing and how to the forefront so many of these. These things that as I grew up, more or less was like, just avoid it. Like, just try and cloister and stay away from it. You really can't avoid it anymore.

And a big part of why we chose to do that was because we wanted to be able to engage with our kids and have honest conversations and help them walk through situations that they encounter with teachers or with friends or those things at an age when they still wanted to have a conversation with us and not just hope that whatever we can protect them for, for 18 years when they are released into the world and they're confronted with a whole different reality than what we told them was the only reality that what we did worked and it doesn't bounce back on us. I think if you boil it down going back to the fact that in Christianity, for a long time, we only have ever talked about one side of it or kept it at surface level. And the world really does the same thing. The world really, for the most part, just defines it as a purely physical act. What we're trying to do is not overly aggressively or expose them to things earlier than they need to, but be open and in communication.

And as those things come up, and they already have in, you know, we have kids in from 4k up through 8th grade this year already have been confronted with some of these conversations. Let's talk about it, and let's talk about why your friends believe that and why they're saying what they say. But then let's have a conversation about what we see in scripture. What does God say? And more importantly than anything, how do we still love and exist and walk beside those people?

Well, believing two different things and practicing two different things. So I think authenticity and openness about this God goes so, so far to having this, because even the world, only the world, really tries to define sexuality as a really just physical experience. And it's not like it's not a physical experience. It has physical aspects to it. But there is a much, much, much deeper emotional and even below that spiritual reality to this.

And those are the pieces that don't get talked about a of lot. A lot. As you're talking, Tyler, what I was thinking about was, I think my frustration coming out of the purity culture movement in those days was there didn't seem to be an answer to what happened. It was like, don't do this. But what if you did?

Then what? There was no answer beyond. It was like just this vacuous space beyond that. And we did that about a lot of things. We did that about abortion, where it was, well, just don't do that.

Well, what happens if you got that message late? Or what happens if we made that decision? Then what do you do? And there was never an answer given to that. We didn't extend grace in those areas.

Yeah, it was almost like the unpardonable sin. Well, and I think the fear was if we taught the rest of it, which was that there's God's graces available to you, it almost made an excuse to go out and, oh, as long as God's grace is available, then I can go do cheapened. I think we were afraid it would cheapen grace. Yeah. Yeah.

Which is. Yep. Which is super interesting that we did that because. So I've been. Recently, I've been in the Old Testament with my son.

We finished the Bible, so we started back in Genesis. So I've been reading through Abraham lotion, and there's some of the most egregious. And like, how can this even be in the Bible? Examples of sexual sin in those chapters. I mean, between Abraham essentially telling a white lie that Sarah was his sister and allowing Pharaoh to take her, and then everything you have with Lot and how people in Sodom and Gomorrah were coming and demanding what.

And you. And then even with Lot's daughters and. And that situation, I was reading through these, and those are things that a lot of the secular world want to look at too, and say, how can this even be in your Bible? How can. Cause some of them.

Sometimes people even go, how could your God allow that to happen? But going back to what you were saying, what happens when we do that? And as I was reading these, I was thinking about that, and I just got overwhelmed with, like, the flipped reality of this has nothing to do about what the people are doing and everything to do about the grace of God redeeming what they're doing. Like, they are making bad decisions and God is using that and redeeming it. It's his grace.

It's his goodness. And so it's just hearing you say that, I 100% agree, because there was no message of that. There was no message. And if you did cross the line, then you came to youth group going like, oh, shoot, like, you know, I have a lot of friends who either were not Christians and then became saved. And it's almost like this.

Well, I just don't want anyone to know. I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to say it because I'm to be the bad person. They were Christians with an asterisk. Yeah, exactly.

Oh, I'm not one of the good ones. Or if you were a Christian and you did sin sexually in some way, then the only answer was to push away from God. Because if there wasn't grace available, if there wasn't, there's no acceptance, then what am I supposed to do? Because now I've completely blown it. And now I. I don't.

There's no way back. And that's. We don't say that about anything. And so, yeah, that's part of. That was part of the frustration, I think, of those.

I felt that very heavily. And it wasn't even. My. My parents were not really into the purity culture thing necessarily. I mean, they reinforced the message.

But we got. I was a youth group kid, man. I mean, we got that at youth group. Heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy all the time and never really talked about the other side of it. It took me a long time to understand grace.

And I think it's really interesting because the secular world in some ways is now starting to bounce back from the sexual revolution of the 70s, 80s and 90s. And so these issues that we have started to see from how Christians have mishandled it, the secular world is even starting to respond to some of those same things for how they've mishandled it, almost. On the other side, I was listening to Holy Post was talking about an article between. And I apologize, I don't remember any of the names, but two New York Times authors. One who.

And they both publish books. One who is, I believe, some. He's orthodox Christian, but writes from a very conservative mindset. And then one who is a very progressive feminist, has written multiple books on feminism. And they were engaging in a conversation because she's recently gotten a lot of flack because she wrote a book recently basically arguing that the sexual revolution of the 70s, 80s and 90s was more harmful to women than it has been good or liberating.

And this is coming from a feminist, a strongly feminist perspective. But the thing she would. She cites is in all of her research, as she's interviewed women, women who were in that time period, women who are now existing in that mind space and asking them about how they actually feel about sex, how they actually feel about these topics. She's finding that more and more and more, they're like, we don't want this. We don't want to be engaging in.

You know, there's always outliers, obviously, but the data she's getting back is like this painting that we've put over sexuality that it's like this free thing and it's empowerment and it's take control of yourself, take control of your body has been significantly harmful to a generation or multiple generations of everyone, but specifically of women. And they don't really want it. And that is a fascinating thing because it's very counter what the world still tells us about sexuality. Yeah. And we've.

We've seen, you know, churches have been saying this for decades, and we've seen this coming out of the adult film industry. There have been a number of former adult stars who have said. Been saying after they're out of that life, they have said, you don't realize what this. You don't realize what's going on there. You don't realize how bad things are there.

And we sell you a fantasy about, it's wonderful. And women are able to do this, they're able to do that. And I control my own life, and I don't control anything. And the proof of this for me has always been that when it comes to these adult entertainers, women are paid exorbitantly more than men are. They would say that industry would say, see, we're paying women so much more.

Isn't that wonderful of us? It's the only industry in the world where women are paid far more. No, they're paid more because they have to be in order to degrade themselves to that level in order to be. To be injured to that level, they have to be compensated so much greater to be willing to do it. And so their male counterparts.

Sorry. Than their male counterparts. Than their male counterparts. So they're paid way, way more because it's the only way they can get it. For exactly the reason you're saying it's destructive to our souls.

It's like the least feminist thing that we can participate in. And somehow we've convinced ourselves, you know, just what a great trick of the evil one. We've convinced ourselves that what Is true is false, and what is false is true. So if the world, from what the research that you've done or that woman has done, is saying God's perfect design is good, and we tried to communicate that design to our children in the 80s and didn't do it, well, how do we communicate God's good and perfect design better than it's been done before? Yeah.

Does that question make sense to you guys? It does. It's hard. Yeah, I think it is. And I think it starts with.

There's a tone. You say sometimes that what you're saying. I can't hear what you're saying because the way you're saying it is shouting louder than what you're saying. There's a tone to this. There's a way of.

Let me tell you about this horrible evil that will disfigure you and take your life away. And. Okay, whoa, that's heavy. There's a different way, which is God has given you this beautiful gift, little one. Son, daughter.

God has given you a beautiful gift, and this is just. This gift is your sexuality. This is something that he gave to you. He wants you to have this, and he wants you to use this. But like every good gift, it's got to be used correctly.

It's the old hammer analogy. A hammer in the hand of a craftsman can build a table, a house, whatever, in the hand of a madman can kill people. And so here's the same thing can do great things in the hands of different people. Yeah. I always think about it as.

And I do this with all things, both Tiffany and I with our kids is I want to take the. I want to take the mystery, but take the, like, I guess the weirdness or the. The gravity out of it. And that again, that doesn't mean expose them to stuff too early or have conversations too early about things. But I always think back to my childhood and, like, you know, a lot of kids growing up experiment with drinking or smoking younger than they should.

They go to parties even. Even in church circles. Sure. Like, I. A lot of my friends, you know, were drinking before 21 or at least tried it out.

I never had that desire. And I pin it to. My parents always looked at me and said, if you want to drink, tell us. We'll buy you a 12 pack. You can sit on our porch and drink it and see how you feel afterwards.

We just would rather you do it here than at a party without. And because I had the trust in them, but also because that offer was always there, I was like, okay, well, I don't really need to engage in that. And again, different context about sexuality, but the, the concept behind it of going back to. I want my kids to know that this is an honest conversation we can have and we can engage in it, and it doesn't need to be something that we're ashamed of or that we shouldn't talk about. And allowing them to have that space, safe place to process it and come to their own realization of what God is saying.

Right. And me helping them walk them there, because that ultimately is the foundation that's gonna last. Right. With my kids, I can tell them everything I want. If they don't internalize it and truthfully believe it, it's gonna go out the window as soon as I stop being the authority over them.

Right. So they need to take that and understand it and truly start to believe it. And I really feel like the best way to do that is to engage with them in honest conversations and allow them to feel safe to have the conversation with us. My advice, just piggybacking on that. My advice is if you have the luxury and the ability in a two parent home to have a two parent home and don't outsource that conversation with one gender to that parent of that same gender.

And I don't know that we did this well because we had a daughter and a son and we kind of like, well, your turn with Hannah. Well, your turn with Josh. And the mistake of that. There's a piece of that that I need to have a conversation with Josh about certain things that I understand as a guy. And so we'll talk about that.

But I want. I also believe he would have benefited from getting a woman's perspective on some pieces of that too, to make it. That's really good. Yeah. More of a joint discussion.

And I wish I had engaged more on the. When Kathy was talking to Hannah about that stuff, it would have opened up doors to. For those conversations for both. And it would have just would have really helped us and I think given our kids an advantage. So I don't outsource that just to one parent.

And that's part of painting the whole picture of what God shows us about sexuality. Right. Because it's not just physical. This isn't just about how does my body react as a man when I, you know, see something or how does, you know, those biological. Sure, that's a piece of it.

But there's emotional and then spiritual layers to this. And no one's sexual experience or sex life is individual. Right. That's something that is inherent between a man. Again, going back to God's definition, between a man and woman.

It is shared. Yeah. And this goes back to First Corinthians when Paul says, you're, you know, the husband does not. His body does not belong to himself, but to his wife and his wife belong. There's an instinctive unity that cannot be separated.

And again, if we don't. If we don't talk to or show the whole picture of what that truthfully looks like in a healthy way, how are our kids, how are the people that we're talking to supposed to have a full picture or understand what they should be looking for? Especially when you're engaging into a world that doesn't have that same picture. And, you know, most people will probably engage with people or end up dating people or marrying people who have had some kind of sexual past. Maybe they weren't, you know, variety of reasons.

That's totally fine. But we need to at least give them a picture of what to look for and what to not. That's the only thing you should. You should discount every person that's ever had. It's not what I'm saying.

You got to help them see what is possible and paint the picture of what God is painting, or they're going to be lost. That's good. And know that there's. That there's redemption and there's healing. That I think.

I mean, I have heard about youth conferences where they would take a piece of gum and open it up and pass it along and then say, and who would want this gum? And that's what children are left with if they don't understand that God is a God of redemption. What they come away with is, no one wants me. Right. Yeah.

And that, unfortunately, I think, is the message a lot of kids that grew up in my generation came away with was, I'm unlovable. Yeah. And it goes farther than no one wants me in the bedroom. No one wants me anywhere. The wound is so deep, and we don't want to inflict that.

I mean, there's grace. So, yeah, I think it's worth saying, as we bring this to a close, we have people who are part of Bethany, listen to the podcast, who believe differently a variety of different things about sexuality. And once again, let me underscore, we are a church, that we are going to teach the word of God. We are so glad people are here and that we're engaging together and we're a stronger church when we have a variety of different opinions and when we can interact on those opinions and talk about them in godly ways. And so if you disagree, that's okay.

Just find places where you can discuss that and talk about that and let's talk about why we disagree, engage on that. That's just one of the things that Jesus often did with his disciples was talk those things through. And so let's talk those things through. It's okay. There's a place for you at Bethany and there's a place for you in the kingdom of God.

If you believe differently on issues like this and just remain open handed and continue to walk towards, you know, God, how would you have me believe this? Just over the last, I don't know, few years, there are little subtle pieces of this discussion that have changed in me. The way I would approach things, what advice I would have given to parents about something. Now I give different advice. Like, I don't think I would do that the same way I think I'd do this differently now.

So I, I think we all just have to remain open to our God's continued revelation of, you know, what he wants us to know about him. None of us owns the corner on that. So anyway, as we're saying. Yep, that's good. All right, thanks guys.

This wasn't as painful as I thought it was going to be. Yeah, good. So there you go and thank you for joining us. Have a great week. Bye.

Bye.