Last week, we left off with the holiness-creating power of beholding the glory of God. Now, may I ask you to picture that in your mind? Go ahead and picture yourself standing, or sitting, or kneeling before the glory of God. The glory could be the cross, or an open Bible with glowing letters, or a great light, or anything you find beautiful and mighty. Sometimes it helps to see a truth. Often in Biblical imagery the Word of God, comes in speech and then the recipient sees a vision (Revelation 5:5-6). 

This vision of you and me before the glory of God is important for our upcoming topic this Sunday, namely, what do we do with the broken parts of our humanity? 

Our humanity is one of the most powerful and beautiful parts of creation and so it makes sense that Satan and our sin attack the core of it. 

We feel the fall out. For example, we wrestle with sexual temptation, sexual brokenness, and even sexual and gender misappropriation and confusion. And, in all of that, we are often tempted to be ‘Creator’, re-eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So, we try to name ourselves. We try to define ourselves. We will rename sexual reality. We will try and rename sexual design. We will try and rename gender identity and meaning. But that will never work. The bargain that the sexual revolution has made, the revolution in our hearts and the one employed by culture, is a sham. It makes promises it cannot keep and in fact the sexual revolution lies in wait to destroy us once we make irreparable decisions. And that is why as a pastor my aim is to fervently call us to the better story… sexual renewal in light of the glory of God. 

This Sunday we will get into specifics but two quick thoughts for now.

One, we must reject the siren song of the sexual revolution that exists in our own soul and in culture by listening to the True and Infinitely Better song of the gospel, as revealed in Scripture. Put the volume on high. Eventually, your heart is trained by the gospel song and will only have taste for this true song. That song will enable you to persevere. It may heal you, but regardless of a total reversal of sexual brokenness or not, it will enable you to endure and grow in your humanity.

Two, all sexual brokenness is a warping of God-created, and thus good, passions. 

The key to sexual purity is not the ridding of passions, but the purification of passions. 

How do we do that? We redirect our passions by means of sublimating our passions to their ultimate end – intimacy with God. All of us need to do this, by the way – married folk, single folk, people struggling with same-sex attraction or gender confusion, or any other misdirected passion. We need to do this with all passions – those of ambition, parenthood, safety, creativity, and even justice. The kernel of the idea is that we take our lower-order passions, which are under the weight of sin, and we put them in the higher register of worship and delight in God. That is what it means to be humans before the glory of God, in fact. 

Some Quick Applications:

If you are tempted today to express your sexual or gender aspects of humanity in a twisted form, then take a moment and pause. The next thing is not to buckle down. The next thing is to get your passions in front of God’s glory. Take those feelings and leanings and prayerfully engage God with them. They are rooted in God-created good things. Ask God to render them back to that place. Then ask God to take them to a higher place. Ask God to take your passions and move them into praise. Ask God to take your cross-bearing obedience and to bless you in return with a sense of His pleasure over you. Now repeat this, every day. And watch as your humanity is returned to you as you enter His courts with praise.