Making Broken People Whole

“For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you should abstain from sexual immorality; that each of you should know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor, not in passion of lust, like the Gentiles who do not know God; 6 that no one should take advantage of and defraud his brother in this matter, because the Lord is the avenger of all such, as we also forewarned you and testified. For God did not call us to uncleanness, but in holiness. Therefore he who rejects this does not reject man, but God, who has also given us His Holy Spirit.”

(I Thessalonians 4:3-8 NKJV).

First century Thessalonica was saturated with sexual immorality. Pornographic  images, emblems, and customs of idolatrous fornication were everywhere.” A. T. Robertson wrote: “Pagan religion did not demand sexual purity of its devotees, the gods and goddesses being grossly immoral. Prostitute priestesses were in the temples for the service of the men who came.”

The word “fornication” refers broadly to any and all sexual sins in the imagination or the body.  Looks, gestures, thoughts, and sex acts are included.   Fornication is the root word for pornography, and it refers to all sensual, sexual sins including incest, prostitution, pornography, bestiality, homosexuality, lesbianism, pre-marital sex, extra-marital sex. Paul understood that if the new Christians were to be spiritually established, they must be sanctified wholly.  The old life of fornication-laced, sexually-saturated, pagan worship had to be left behind totally and completely.

Sexual sin breaks people. The headlines are filled with news stories that feature that reality. Sexual harassment leaves broken, hurting people in its wake. Affairs, divorce, one-night stands, molestation. Sexual sin breaks people.     

The Bible teaches that fornicators go to Hell!  Fornication must become a blood-cleansed, forgiven, cleansed sin of the past if we are to make Heaven our homes. Jesus says “But the cowardly, unbelieving, abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death” (Revelation 21:8).

I cannot imagine a more relevant message for today’s sex-saturated, immoral, pagan culture than Paul’s message to the Thessalonians.  People are living in gross sexual immorality and pagan fornication.  Deliverance in Christ demands holiness.  Jesus breaks the enslaving chains of sexual sin! He wants to gift us with a holiness that is not man-made. This holiness is not about rules and self-discipline. It is about transformation.

We feel guilty when we sin. God convicts our hearts that we are wrong. He calls us to repentance and faith in Jesus. He forgives, cleanses and gives us His Holy Spirit. He calls us to be holy.

Paul calls the Thessalonians of the first century, and the church of the 21^st century, to experience the Christian transformation of heart holiness through entire sanctification, so that we, too, may be relevant, transformational agents of God’s grace in a hurting, broken, sex saturated culture, much like Thessalonica.

God wants to sanctify us so that we may live sexually pure lives, maritally faithful lives, humanly whole lives, brother-honoring lives, holy lives, and God-worshiping lives.