by Grace Thornton/The Alabama Baptist, posted Wednesday, July 10, 2013 (11 years ago)
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (BP) -- Be careful about shaking your head at same-sex marriage, warned David Platt, senior pastor of The Church at Brook Hills in Birmingham, Ala., and author of the best-selling book "Radical."
Christians should grieve the Supreme Court's decision to strike down the federal ban on same-sex marriage, but believers should also be "careful not to be guilty of selective moral outrage when it comes to the issue of homosexuality," Platt said.
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Everyone, each individual, is bent toward sexual sin, Platt said.
"This is something that every sinful heart is prone to struggle with in some way or another," said Platt, who preached in late June on the subject of the cross and sexuality. His two-part sermon series on 1 Corinthians 6 book-ended the week of the Supreme Court's two rulings June 26 supporting gay marriage.
"If we roll our eyes and shake our heads when we see the Supreme Court ruling on this case, yet we turn the channels on our TVs to watch the trivialization of sex on shows and advertisements, to surf the Internet to find images in order to satisfy our lusts, to go to movies that glamorize sex ... and entertain sexual thoughts and desires outside of our own marriage, then we have missed the entire point," Platt said.
Sins shouldn't be acceptable just because they are the sins of the majority, he said. The church needs to declare war on every sexual sin that plagues Christians in order to show the world sexual purity and godly marriage.
"All throughout the Bible from cover to cover, sex is only celebrated ... in the context of exclusive covenant relationship between a husband and wife. Period. There are no exceptions to that," Platt said.
There's no exception for homosexuality but there's also no exception for adultery, promiscuity, pornography or masturbation, he said.
What's happening in "our sex-crazed culture" today is essentially sex worship -- the idea that "I would be happy if I had the freedom to express myself sexually," Platt said.
"According to [secular culture], we're not human if we can't please our bodies however we desire, so any attempts to limit sexual expression are seen as oppressive and inhumane," he said. "We set our minds on the things of the flesh, which is hostile to God, and we exchange God's Word for our experience."
So often the Bible is twisted to fit preference -- as with the argument for homosexuality -- or its supposed silence is interpreted as liberty, Platt said. For instance, he said, when he was a teenager he and others would ask the question, "How far is too far?"
"I never once heard a well-reasoned, objective answer based on Scripture," he said, explaining that instead leaders would tell youth to pray, set boundaries and decide what they thought was right, because the Bible didn't spell it out. So when he and other guys would talk about it, they would "do what teenage boys do" -- set the standards as low as they could. Read More
