This Weekend's Message: Love Protected

Car alarms. Back-up files. Guard dogs. What do they all have in common? They all protect things. And what do we protect? Things upon which we place great value. If you were only able to protect one possession, what would you choose? And to what lengths would you be willing to go in order to ensure that protection?

Dan

How to Eliminate Guilt

By Dan Franklin, Pastor of Teaching 

Our study through Song of Songs focuses on love, sex, marriage, commitment, and a number of other significant themes. For many, these themes are exciting, instructive, and life-giving. For others, these themes can be painful sources of guilt. For those who are divorced, hearing about God’s value on marriage and commitment can bring guilt and regret. For those who have had extra-marital sex, hearing about God’s sex ethic may feel condemning. This series – which we hope will bring joy and healing – has the potential to bring pain.

Certainly, this is not the only series that has the potential to bring shame and guilt to people. There are certain things that God calls “sin.” If we proclaim and teach God’s Word, people’s sins will be exposed (at least to themselves). Does the church, then, become a place of guilt and shame and condemnation? Are we destined to walk out of church services feeling devastated and defeated? I certainly hope not. When we face guilt, we universally want to get rid of it. Every human being is passionate about guilt elimination. This desire to remove guilt has resulted in two main paths that we take when we experience guilt.

Path #1: We ignore our guilt. We pretend that it does not exist. We stuff it down deep inside of us. No one else learns of it and we do our best to forget it. Whether we have had an affair, looked at pornography, stolen from our employer, lied on our taxes, or committed any other offense, we pretend that our sin never happened. And, as we do this, we hope that one day our guilt will no longer plague us. We hope that ignoring our guilt will lead us to forgetting that our sin ever happened.

Path #2: We explain our guilt away. We tell ourselves that we didn’t do anything wrong at all. And if it was wrong, it certainly was no worse than what others do. Why should we be plagued with guilt and shame when we aren’t serial killers or sex traffickers? We attempt to justify our actions and ourselves so that we can rest assured that the guilt we feel is not valid.

The Bible does not ignore our guilt problem. In fact, the Bible tells us that our guilt is real and it is valid. There is certainly false guilt (when another person makes us feel bad for not living up to their expectations), but every human being has real guilt before God. Romans 3:23 tells us, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Ephesians 2:3 says that we deserve God’s wrath because of our sin. Through the Bible God does not tell us, “Don’t worry about your guilt.” Instead He tells us, “You have guilt. Your guilt is a real problem and something needs to be done to take your guilt away.”

And then we arrive at God’s solution to our guilt: The cross of Jesus Christ. Our guilt leads to punishment, but when Jesus died for our sins, He took upon Himself the weight of our guilt. Far from ignoring or explaining away our guilt, God takes it seriously enough that He places it upon His Son. And when He did this, as Romans 3:26 says, God was both “just and the one who justifies.” God took our guilt seriously, but also removed our guilt from us. It had to go somewhere. And it went to Jesus. Now, as Romans 8:1 says, “There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” We are free from guilt.

When you experience guilt because of your past actions, don’t ignore that guilt. And don’t explain that guilt away. Those are cheap and inadequate solutions to a much bigger problem. God alone justified. And thank God that He has justified us through Jesus. When you experience guilt, cling to the cross. You are free from it because Jesus took it. You are now free to admit your sin, and to admit that your sin is a big deal. You are free because you are also free from condemnation. You have been set free by Jesus, the one and only guilt-eliminator.

This Weekend's Message: Love Aroused

Does God want you to have pleasure? This can seem like a tricky question. On the one hand, we might think that God wants us to have pleasure because He loves us. On the other hand, we might think that pleasure is not high on God’s priorities for us, since He gives us all kinds of commands and limitations. Are our desires for pleasure good or dangerous?

The section of Song of Songs that we will cover on Sunday is all about pleasure. And, through this section, we will not be called upon to suppress pleasure. Instead, we will be invited to arouse it.

Dan

This Weekend's Message: Love Interrupted

An older married couple offered these words of advice one day to a young newly married couple just starting out:

Your love is priceless and needs to be guarded. Selfishness, pride, lack of forgiveness, and inattentiveness are but some of the many thieves capable of stealing away your love. In a sense, your marriage is like a treasure chest forming a protective case around your love – preventing it from being stolen. 

As I read this quote I quickly thought, “How true!” Up to this point in our series called “Pure Pleasure,” the couple has experienced many good things about love. No doubt it has been pure pleasure. But this week something creeps in to interrupt their love for each other. We can all learn from their experience, whether we are married or not. Come this week to see how we can guard our love like a precious treasure.

Gary

This Weekend's Message: Love Fulfilled

Last Summer, I had been strongly anticipating the theatrical release of The Dark Knight Rises, the third installment of Christopher Nolan’s amazing Batman movies. Expectations were high. After two fantastic movies about Batman, how would this third one complete the story, wrap it up, put a bow on top, and blow us all away? The answer is...it didn’t. The movie was not bad, but to many of us it felt like a major letdown. It just didn’t live up to the hype. While I did not leave the theater wanting my money back, by no means did I leave with my expectations fulfilled.

That said, how rare is it for us to feel fulfilled? Product after product, experience after experience, promises us fulfillment, but leaves us still wanting. It is an empty and disappointing feeling when we are unfulfilled. But it is a wonderful and exhilarating feeling when we are fulfilled.

In the first two scenes in Song of Songs, we saw a man and a woman longing for each other. There has been anticipation, excitement, pursuit, affirmation...but not fulfillment. This week, we will finally see their love come to be fulfilled. And as we do, we will get powerful, biblical insight into how we are invited to Love Fulfilled.

Dan

This Weekend's Message: Love Pursued

Too many times, the pursuit of love between a man and a woman ends at the wedding. While it is wonderful when this pursuit results in marriage, it is sad when the pursuit ceases upon the exchange of vows. What was once passionate and exciting often becomes routine and mundane.

How do we avoid growing cold and distant? How do we keep the pursuit alive? And what does the growing and sustaining love pictured in Song of Songs tell us about the love of Jesus, the ultimate bridegroom?

Dan

This Weekend's Message: Love Requited

There is a good reason why so many of the most famous love songs are about heartbreak. These songs resonate with many of us because they reflect our personal experience. Each of us can think of a time when we expressed our love to someone and ended up feeling rejected. Love can be risky and the pain of heartbreak can be intense. Sometimes the rejection we experience can paralyze us from taking the risk to trust another person with our heart. We end up holding others at arms-length because we don’t want to repeat the pain of our broken hearts.

As we begin our journey through Song of Songs we will be invited to take the risk to love. And we’ll be told that, while love is risky, requited love is worth the risk.

Dan

God-given Sexuality: A Lost Conversation

By Dan Franklin, Pastor of Teaching 

Sex permeates our culture. It shows up in advertising, on TV shows, in the lyrics of mainstream songs, on the Internet, in locker room conversations, and in women’s magazines. Our culture has become entirely casual about the subject of sex. It is no big deal to talk about it, and it is no big deal if everyone is experiencing it. Sex outside of marriage is no big deal, pornography is no big deal, and one-night stands are no big deal. Sex in our culture is casual and personal. Our bodies, our choices, our business.

Sex is so casual in our culture that it is a topic of conversation just about everywhere. Except church. 

Somehow it seems impolite or inappropriate for Christians to talk about sex. Perhaps we avoid it because we think that if we talk about it, then people will think about it. And if people think about it, then they will be more likely to want to do it. This might be fine for married couples, but we know that the biblical ethic is that sex is reserved for marriage. So our solution is to talk about it less.

The solution, however, is not working. From this past year, statistics showed that only 3% of Americans wait until they are married to engage in sexual intercourse. The statistics are better amongst evangelical Christians, but it is still only around 20%.

This Weekend's Message: Love Celebrated

Sex permeates our culture. It shows up in advertising, on TV shows, in the lyrics of mainstream songs, on the Internet, in locker room conversations, and in women’s magazines. Our culture has become entirely casual about the subject of sex. It is no big deal to talk about it, and it is no big deal if everyone is experiencing it. Sex outside of marriage is no big deal, pornography is no big deal, and one-night stands are no big deal. Our bodies, our choices, our business.

 Sex is so casual in our culture that it is a topic of conversation just about everywhere. Except church. Far from being casual about sex, the subject is normally off-limits in Christian circles. This leads to perceptions, both inside and outside the church, that sex is vulgar. It may be okay within marriage, but it certainly is not something to be celebrated.

The subject is avoided whenever possible, and the only exceptions tend to be when we tell people not to do it. The Bible critiques both of these views of sex. Sex is not casual, but it is also certainly not vulgar. It is a wonderful gift of God. And Song of Songs is going to show us that, in its appropriate context, sex is to be celebrated.

Dan