Sexual by Design - Creation Sexuality

Click to get to the video

Not sure you want to watch this? Well, check out the advert: 

Now,  you decide what you want to do. 

Not his normal Sunday morning crowd! 

;) 

All of us are addicts

If anything threatens your identity you will not just be anxious but paralyzed with fear. If you lose your identity through the failings of someone else you will not just be resentful, but locked into bitterness. If you lose it through your own failings, you will hate or despise yourself as a failure as long as you live. Only if your identity is built on God and his love can you have a self that can venture anything, face anything. . . . An identity not based on God also leads inevitably to deep forms of addiction. When we turn good things into ultimate things, we are, as it were, spiritually addicted. If we take our meaning in life from our family, our work, a cause, or some achievement other than God, they enslave us. We have to have them.

The sin of doing good

taken from theresurgence 

Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God. Sin is seeking to become oneself, to get an identity apart from him. . . . Most people think of sin primarily as “breaking divine rules,” but .... the very first of the Ten Commandments is to “have no other gods before me.” So, according to the Bible, the primary way to define sin is not just the doing of bad things, but the making of good things into ultimate things. It is seeking to establish a sense of self by making something else more central to your significance, purpose, and happiness than your relationship to God.

I live for & I really want ... what?

Dr. David Powlison - Is idolatry a problem in my life? from CCEF on Vimeo.

the most loving act

God is the one being in the universe for whom self-exaltation is the most loving act.   

(p36 Don't Waste Your Life )

What fools we are

How wise the wisdom of God:


(1 Corinthians 1:22-24).

We can't turn back the clock

'We can't turn back the clock.' 

'The progressive connotations of this saying are wholly illusory. It actually looks back and says that the trend of which the present moment is only the most visible manifestation is the inevitable one, that anyone who disagrees with it is trying to squeeze the whole world into a time machine and return to an earlier era. But in refusing to believe that an identified historical trend may be challenged, the historicists have divinized history. In any given case, they have absolutized this trend and thereby put history's seal of approval on this status quo, one, no doubt, that is moving their way*. 

As a matter of simple historical observation, it would be hard to find a common saying as implausible as this .... The reason intelligent observers of the past found the cycle theory of history persuasive is precisely because it seemed as it the clock had been turned back.'  e.g. alternations between democracy and authoritarianism, high and low hemlines, moral permissiveness and prudery, war and peace, and so on.

* To continue the 'time' metaphor ... their values are 'up-to-date' and their opponents are not.

But we should not dismiss the 'space' metaphor of the way as well as the 'time' metaphor of the clock: Where are we going? What is the destination or the place we are going to? 

In discussion about history very often our assumptions and beliefs about what is an acceptable or ideal destination (and why that is the case) come to the fore: 

The conflicts to which historicist polemics are applied often center on the identity of the desirable destination. 

Idols for destruction: Christian faith and its confrontation with American society, Ch 1 Idols of History, p15-17

No windows looking out into eternity

The idolatries of history exalt an age (past, present, future), or a process, or an institution, or a class, or a trend and make it normative. They place the entire meaning of life within the historical process or some part of it, allowing nothing extrinsic to it. Historical events in their relationships exhaust the whole meaning of history.  

Idols for destruction: Christian faith and its confrontation with American society, Ch1 Idols of History, p13

Substitution

All idols belong either to nature or history. The whole creation falls into those two categories, and there is no other place to which man can turn to find a substitute for God. Any idol that is not an artifact of the natural world is an artifact of the social world. 

Idols for destruction: Christian faith and its confrontation with American society, Ch 1, p11