Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Um, for those of you who have some young children here today, I want you to know today is Leviticus, chapter 15. It's a bit of a mature topic. It's funny they chose me, but it's a bit of a mature topic. But I'll be using mostly euphemisms and I'll be using a lot of synonym phrases and synonym words. But the message and the meaning, I'm going to go after, after what God has in his holy word. God is not shy about what he says in his word, and so I'm not going to be either. But I believe I can keep it at the PG level. So we've been working our way through Leviticus and we've been in a series called Clean. That's where we've been, a miniseries in Leviticus, chapters eleven through 15, if you recall, I want to put a slide up that gives us some of those themes that we've been seeing. And really they kind of permeate chapters eleven through 15. The first is God wants every part of our lives to be spiritually, clean, holy, and set apart.
[00:01:01] Also, God cares deeply, not just about Sunday morning, but every minute of your life.
[00:01:08] God's laws seem to be intrusive, but really, they're always for our good. And God takes holiness seriously because sin kills. Now, next week, we're starting a new miniseries in Leviticus. It's going to be called Set Apart, and we're going to start with a day of Atonement, chapter 16, and we're going to be there. And each week what we're going to see is identifying a different way in our new Set Apart series in which God sets his nation, his people apart from the world. So that's where we're going. All right, so we're finishing Clean today. Like I said, in any study of literature, especially in ancient Near East literature, we're parachuting into something, into a culture that frankly is very different than ours. But this culture is filled with animal sacrifices, lots and lots of sin and all kinds of sexual rituals. But God shows himself to be different in many ways than the ancient culture. And that's a big part, a big part of what Leviticus is about. So you can turn with me in your Bibles to Leviticus, chapter 15. That's where we're going to be. And if you're new to the Bible, it's the third book in from the beginning. Actually, if you just look at chapters 13 for a moment and chapter 15 for a moment, that's where we were last week. Now I'm using the English Standard version Bible. Lots of good versions out there in English. But chapter 13, if you're looking and able to go to chapter 13, you're going to see a header or a title. This was last week, right, where Pastor Michael was talking about. The title says laws about leprosy or leprosy or other skin diseases. And then in chapter 14, the title says this or the header, there laws for Cleansing Lepers and then a few pages past that, in chapter 14, my title says in my version, laws for Cleansing Houses.
[00:03:00] Okay?
[00:03:02] So today we're in Chapter 15, and the header I see in mine is Laws About Bodily Discharges. There we go. So I looked at the NIV and I was thinking, hey, maybe there's a different title here. And it says chapter 15 leviticus discharges causing uncleanness. So then I went to Tyndale House Publishing, and some of you know them. I have a good friend, used to be pretty high up there, thought I can trust them. The NLT New Living Translation. Great translation. And their title in Leviticus 15 is bodily discharges. So guess what we're talking about today? Yeah. Bodily discharge. You guessed. Aren't you glad you invited your in laws today? What a great time. Actually, we'll be talking about something much bigger today than that. And thank you, Pastor Michael, for the privilege it is to teach on this topic. All right. The book Leviticus should be taken along with the Book of Exodus. We've kind of mentioned this before. God miraculously took his people out of Egypt. He's delivered them. Moses is leading them again, if you recall, in the Book of Exodus. And he taught them. God was teaching them, and he's still teaching them in Leviticus about the priorities of their life and worshipping Him, yahweh God. And he's turning their world, frankly, upside down and what it means to know God, this good God that we just sang about. And then in Exodus, chapter three, moses meets and encounters God for the first time. You might remember that there's this bush, and God is speaking from this flaming bush that's not being consumed. And here's what God says to Moses, do not come near me. He says, Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground. So being near God, even close in his proximity, is holy. And then in Exodus, chapter 40, they build this tabernacle. It's the place called the Tent of Meeting. It's where they're going to worship God, where God will dwell and be with them. And Leviticus, the Book of Leviticus then, is moving into that worship. It's moving. How do we take these next steps to worship God in and at the tabernacle? But it's on God's terms. It's not on their terms. It's always on God's terms because he is holy and frankly, we are sinful people. So chapter 15, or eleven through 15, god is teaching in this series. One thing is that what stands in the way of worship? What stands in the way of worship and how we cannot be consumed by fire like those priests in Leviticus ten, if you were with us, the ones who disregarded God's holiness. But it also teaches eleven through 15, these chapters, what it really means and what is best in community relations. So there's a lot happening in Leviticus. Here's a question I'm not going to put it on the screen. But if you're taking notes here's, just a question for you to think about as we move through Leviticus 15. It's this what stands in the way of your personal worship of God? What stands in the way of your personal worship of God? All right, the beginning of this series we're in Leviticus eleven. Let me read something here. And he's telling his people not to defile themselves in Leviticus eleven says this God is speaking, for I am the Lord your God. Consecrate yourselves therefore, and be holy, for I am holy. He's reminding his people, remember Exodus? Leviticus so important, he's reminding them he had delivered them out of Egypt. And at the very end of this series that we're finishing today, this miniseries in chapter 15, towards the end, Leviticus 1531 says this God says, thus you shall keep the people of Israel separate from their uncleanness, lest they die in their uncleanness by defiling my tabernacle that is in their midst. To approach the tabernacle of God is to approach the very presence of God who is holy. All right, chapter 15. I'm going to put a slide up here. And in our modern way of linear American thinking, leviticus 15 might not seem to make a lot of sense the way it's laid out. This is how it's laid out. There's an introduction, obviously, and a summary, and then it comes to abnormal male discharges and what's called abnormal female discharges towards the very end of the book. And as we move towards the middle of the book of Leviticus, there's normal male and then normal female discharges. And as we get towards the very middle, then it talks about marital intimacy. So if you were to read Leviticus 15 right now, just read it from beginning to end, it's going to sound really repetitive, but it wouldn't sound like that to the Hebrew people. They understand this kind of structure, they understand this kind of writing. It makes perfect sense to them. But what I'm going to do is approach it a little bit linear. And so when I teach, I'm going to take these corresponding topics like the intro and summary and abnormal and male and female talk about that. And then I'm going to get to the normal male and female together. And then I'm going to end this sermon at verse 18, the regular marital sexual relations. So don't worry so much about the structure, but that's just what you'll run into here's. The big idea. The big idea today is every part, not some, every part of our sexuality belongs under God's authority, everything. Why? Because he cares. He designed it. He knows what's best. Our privates everything about gender, male and female, everything belongs to God, and he doesn't shy away from it. And so today I can't shy away from it either. So maybe what I'm saying next, I guess anybody can listen, since you already are, most of you, if you haven't left already is maybe geared towards teenagers.
[00:08:54] Growing up. I never once had a conversation with my parents that I recall or my church about this.
[00:09:04] Not once.
[00:09:05] So I'm not complaining. I'm just saying it's a reality. So what does a young man do? A young man creates his own ideas. How does he do that? It's by what he thinks. It's about what he sees and it's about what he hears. And that's always a bad idea unless it happens to line up with God's truth. Because God's truth is good. And if we don't follow that, you pay the price.
[00:09:31] So let me start with verse one, Leviticus 15. Here we go. God is speaking. These are literally God's words.
[00:09:40] Verse one, the Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron saying, speak to the people of Israel and say to them, now this is both Moses and Aaron. And God doesn't always do that when he's laying out the law. This time he includes Aaron. It seems like when Aaron the priest, the high priest, is also part of this direct communication, it seems like maybe because it's a really sensitive topic coming up. And so it seems like maybe God wants Aaron the high priest, to also hear exactly what he's saying, the importance of what he's saying and how much God cares for his people. Well, that's the beginning. Remember I said I was going to then talk about not just the beginning, not the very end? Verse 32 and 33, you don't have to go there. But he summarizes. He says this is the law. So this is the law of God. Old Covenant Law, chapter 15 male and female abnormal and normal discharges. I'll talk about that more in a minute. Try to make that a little more understandable. So I won't read this again because we already had it. But this is verse 31. We read it a moment ago. But like the burning bush in the desert that I talked about a minute ago, the tabernacle is like the same thing in a sense that it's holy because God is holy. And so the Israelites are being taught how they can approach God. It's very important. They're being trained, they're being taught. So God says to Hebrew people we see what he says here about male and female discharges. Abnormal. Why do I use that word abnormal? I'm just using the word abnormal discharges because some scholars use that word and it simply means usually that there's a problem. That's what it is. There's a problem.
[00:11:19] A disease probably. There's probably a disease here that's being talked about, a contagion of some sort, something that's not normal, not right. Verse two says this when any man has a discharge from his body, his discharge is unclean and this is the law of his uncleanness. Remember, we're talking about some type of disease probably here. Whether his body runs with the discharge or his body is blocked up by his discharge, it is his uncleanness. Now that's the male, the female is down. In verse 25, same things talked about, but this time it's for the female. Says if a woman has a discharge of blood for many days not the time of her menstrual impurity, or if she has a discharge beyond the time of her impurity, all the days of discharge shall continue in uncleanness. So both the man and the woman, the men in about verse four to twelve, the women, about verses 25 through 27 are unclean under the old Covenant law.
[00:12:19] Perhaps there's continued bleeding or something else. And so the facts are we don't really know exactly what they were dealing with back then. Could be some similar diseases today, might be different. There's debate about that. Doesn't really matter. It could have been something, it was a parasitical urinary tract infection. It's not fun. Whatever it is, it's not fun. I know most of you are like, where's the hand sanitizer? It's not fun. The condition here doesn't matter as much, but it's unclean is what God is telling us. And so if you're just joining us, maybe and you haven't heard much about what it means to be unclean or impure or clean or pure, it was not sin to be unclean, it was not immoral to be unclean. And here's a quick little summary chart on unclean.
[00:13:11] It just means that you could not go to the sanctuary to worship. You were in an unclean state. Why? I'll unpack that a little bit later. But you often had to be careful about who or what you touched because it could make other things unclean. But here's something that maybe would help a little bit if you were living in these days. This is just a normal part of life if you're an Israelite, I mean, you'd be unclean on some days and clean on other days and the cycle would repeat itself. It wasn't weird for anybody. It's weird for us, weird for me to talk about it, but it wasn't weird.
[00:13:43] So anything or anyone that was touched by this man or this woman in subsequent verses, you can go down a little bit. What you'll see is some of these things become defiled or unclean. We have a slide on that. The bed, chair, saddle, clay or wooden vessels. I'll read verse four. Verse four said, every bed on which the one with the discharge lies shall be unclean, and everything on which he sits shall be unclean. Verse nine is about a saddle. If you're actually on a saddle, someone who has this condition, if you're on a saddle on which the one with the discharge rides shall be unclean. And so what do they do? What they do is they wash themselves. God doesn't leave them hanging, he gives them something to do. Here's what God told Moses and Aaron.
[00:14:27] Verse five. Anyone who touches his bed, the person who had that their bed, they shall wash their clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until evening. Now, obviously there's some hygiene going on here, which is the good thing. God is helping these ancient people. There's more, we're going to get to that. But this washing clothes and bathing in water, many, many times in Leviticus 15 you go through and count it up. I don't know how many times it's there a lot. But do you remember last week we talked about those skin diseases, chapter 13, chapter 13 and 14 about leprosy or other skin diseases, and the people had to go do you remember where they had to go when they had it? They had to go outside the camp.
[00:15:08] That's not true today for Leviticus 15, it seems that it was less severe as far as the purification rights go, perhaps because of this uncleanness or this today, Leviticus 15, this impurity was less public. And so that could be the reason why they didn't have to go outside the camp. But there's good news, and we get to verse 13. Yay, there's good news here. It's verse 13 for men, but then verse 28 for women, because when their discharge, abnormal discharge or abnormal blood flow stopped, when it stopped, they could then wait for seven more days. And after the seven more days, if they were still not having these problems, they were called clean. They were declared clean.
[00:15:59] And here's what's kind of interesting, very interesting on the 8th day, if you keep reading in Leviticus 15, on the 8th day, they had to offer both men and women had to go and offer sacrifices, sacrifices and bring sacrifices to bring atonement for their uncleanness. Verse 14 says this, and I'll just read the man's part. You can go down later and read about the women. It's the same thing. Both men and women had to do this. Both. Verse 14 says and on the 8th day, remember, he's clean. Now, on the 8th day he shall take two turtle doves and two pigeons, and come before the Lord to the entrance of the tent of Meeting, which is the tabernacle, and give them to the priest. Verse 15 and the priest shall use them one for a sin offering and the other for a burnt offering. And the priest shall make atonement for him before the Lord for his discharge. And you say, really?
[00:16:56] Say? Yeah. Really?
[00:16:59] Why sacrifices for that?
[00:17:05] Well, first is these sacrifices removed any remaining impurities? Remember, these are still sinful people before a holy God. There's a period of days here no sacrifices were given. So they are going to make atonement with sacrifices. The sin offering, sin offering is where they go and they receive forgiveness by faith. Remember that back in chapter four, by the substitutionary sacrifice, where death is exchanged for life, this is the forgiveness part, but also the other sacrifice talked about burnt offering. That's chapter one. The burnt offering was where the whole animal was burnt up. What's the point of that? It's to show complete dedication and consecration to God. So both of those are true. That's why these sacrifices were given. Verse 31. You might remember verse 31. We had it up there a couple of times already in the screen. But he said, God wants his people separate from their uncleanness. Remember, God is teaching his people right, what it means to be holy and who they are before Him. He wants people separate from their uncleanness, and he wants nothing. Defiling my tabernacle.
[00:18:12] All right, so God is teaching them what it means to be holy, what it means to be defiled and impure or unclean. But in my modern mind, I will admit it doesn't quite sit right. It doesn't feel right in our new covenant and modern American way of thinking about things. But we want to be careful because God is emphasizing what he needs to as he's training his people in holiness to be pure before Him in all things. And it is right.
[00:18:41] All right, we can agree on this. I hope that just because somebody has a disease, that doesn't mean that their sin caused their disease. Right? Can we agree on that? Okay, we can agree on that. But something else is true at the same time, and that is that disease is a result of sin.
[00:19:00] So let me explain that a little bit. And if you've studied the Bible for a long time, you probably know what I'm getting at. Because of the fall, because of the first sin of Adam and Eve, the first time when sin came into the world, the chaos, the craziness, the curse, all of that. And disease came in with sin. And so, you and me, god is showing his people, his ancient people.
[00:19:22] We sit under the contamination of sin. And frankly, I think we forget that sometimes, maybe even in our churches, we do sit under the contamination of sin. God is holy. He is not contaminated. We are in our sin.
[00:19:36] It's like going to La. I have nothing against La. Have you ever been to La. Okay, nothing against La at all. But there's smog there. Does anybody know that?
[00:19:46] There's smog there. And sometimes you get used to it, depending on where you are in La. And so you're covered in it. You don't even know it. You're breathing it sometimes, Penny, and maybe you don't even know it, but it is there. You may not be aware, but sin is like the smog god is teaching his people. They really are contaminated by sin. It's hard for modern ears to hear it, but it's true. And therefore they are in need of restoration. They need God.
[00:20:18] All right, how about we move now from the abnormal to the normal discharges? And you don't have to count how many times I say discharges, because I can just check it out and find it later. A couple of people, I think, were in the last service. All right, so these are non diseased. You might talk about normal discharges. These are nondeseased discharges. Remember the big idea, every part of our sexuality belongs under God's authority. Every part. And that's good.
[00:20:47] Everything about it theologically and practically for Christians, we should never have a disconnect between theological and the practical because frankly, there isn't, and I say this to encourage us, not, by the way, to condemn me or to condemn you or anybody. But my prayer for us really is to seriously think today. God wants his people to think, think. And maybe it's rethink about whether or not my life and what I think about what's on the screen here, have I really given God full authority? I mean, really given him full authority over my private lives?
[00:21:28] All right, let's keep going through the passage. I'll put a few more verses up again, this is not the disease discharge, this is just normal discharge. Verse 16 says, if a man has a normal emission now this is not diseased, right? That's what we're talking about, normal. And this is not the normal marital intimacy that's going to be in verse 18. So I'll talk about this more in verse 18, but here it's just verse 17 says, what is a man to do?
[00:21:58] He's to wash himself. Okay, so he has to wash himself and he's unclean until the evening and he can't go back. What does that mean? He can't go back to the tabernacle to offer sacrifices until he is clean again. That's the man. The verse 19 is for the women. Again, we're kind of remember we're moving towards the middle, verse 19, when a woman has normal non diseased discharge, meaning menstruation under the old Covenant law, some things are true.
[00:22:28] Verse 19 is on the screen right there. Number one, she's unclean for seven days. But if you keep reading in Leviticus 15, here's what you're going to find. Anyone who touches her or something she has touched is unclean until evening. And then it says in verse 24, if her husband lies with her, he's also unclean for seven days as well. Now, here's where most people say, okay, keep moving, keep moving. No, we're going to stop at verse 1617 and 19 just for a moment. This is important because again, the theological and the practical come together. They're important in every way.
[00:23:05] God is training, God is teaching, and God is caring for this young nation.
[00:23:12] Now, a lot of what I'm going to say here next, some of it anyways, was in the sermon on Leviticus, chapter twelve a little bit ago, so I'm probably going to go a little faster. But first, theologically, let me address this theologically.
[00:23:23] Why are these fluid discharges unclean?
[00:23:27] Well, because they're common things, but the intimate, the sensual, the sexual things are not to be a part of the tabernacle worship. It's just not. They're not part of that. Remember, unclean needs don't bring that to the tabernacle. You're not going to the tabernacle. They are not holy. I'm going to expand on that when I get to verse 18 in a moment. So let me get to number two here. Discharges involve the here's what some theologians call it loss of life liquids. Discharges involve the loss of life liquids. Leviticus twelve, leviticus 15, leviticus 17. We're going to be there in a week or two.
[00:24:05] So if you've been in Leviticus chapter 17, you've seen this idea of life is in the blood. Now, losing blood are human discharges, and they symbolize something for the people of Israel. And what it symbolizes is death. Blood symbolizes death. And God is a god of death. No, he's a God of life. So this symbolizes death to the Israelites. So that's one reason it's unclean, it seems, theologically. The other is they're also a symbol or symbolic of what comes out of the most inner part of the human heart. And so this is hard. I had to talk to somebody about this afterwards. And still, frankly, I don't get all of this either. Okay, let's just be frank here. But in the mind of the Israelites, what's happening is whatever comes out of the body comes out of the human heart. And what's in the human heart, it's sin.
[00:25:09] So sin and death is what this symbolized for them. It's how they understood this. What is God doing? He's carrying his training, his people to what it means to be holy. And so these are things that are unclean. So that's a theological look at it. Let's look practically both for men and for women. They could be unclean in this for up to seven days. We saw that, right? That's very possible. Let's see how God cares. Number one, God is the practicality of uncleanness. Now, God is teaching them priorities of restraint, meaning intimacy. Intimacy, marriage. Intimacy is not the most important thing in the world. It really isn't. I know our culture thinks it is, but it's not. It's not the most important thing. Worship is. So why does our culture keep saying it is, keep wanting us to believe that sexuality and sensuality is above all? It's our idol. I mean, look at half the pop stars. It seems like, or maybe don't, right? What are they? Elevating?
[00:26:12] It's idolatry. It's everything about the sensuality seems to be above God, because Satan wants to destroy our relationship with God, who is good and who made all this and knows it's good. We need to keep it in its proper place. Sexuality is powerful, especially here in the fallen world. And we're tempted, really, frankly, by this power. We're tempted all of us, not just the Israelites, but we're tempted to put this above God.
[00:26:42] Two more points on this, practically second and third, we'll put them up there about uncleanness, the practicality in this. It gives a woman a break and a time of rest, and it shows the care of our God. So many people write about this. This is so good. It's likely just a side note, it's likely that ancient Israelite women had menstruation less often. There's a lot of reasons for that. I'm not going to spend time going into that right now. But here's what one author wrote about concerning this time for a woman's uncleanness under Old Covenant Law. Here's what he wrote the laws, meaning the laws we just talked about, also provide the woman a break from housework caring for children and marital relations.
[00:27:26] Amen to that. Yeah, okay, but were the women of that day weaker somehow than the wonder women of Village Church? No, of course they weren't. But God just he sees them and he's training them and he's teaching them. He sees the demands of their life and he's giving them rest.
[00:27:48] Review question does being unclean necessarily indicate sin or immorality? And the answer is no. Of course not. Of course not. Being unclean simply means that you're not going to the sanctuary to offer sacrifices, which is a big deal, of course.
[00:28:05] All right, our final verse, verse 18.
[00:28:10] Remember, we moved out and in and in, and now we're at verse 18, the very middle of the book.
[00:28:19] Verse 18 says, if a man lies with a woman and now that's a euphemism, right? Marital intimacy is what's being talked about here. Normal man and women intimacy. But what do they both need to do? Then the verse says they need to wash and they are in a state of uncleanness. Again, this is something I had to get back to. I have to talk about this a little more. God's telling the story. He's telling the good story of what he has done, that he has created male and female, that he has created this whole idea of sexuality. It's beautiful to be expressed in its context of marriage. God made man, god made woman. God said, be fruitful and multiply. God said it was very good. And God said to become one flesh, all of that good.
[00:29:08] God's idea beautiful.
[00:29:12] But in the old covenant law, it is unclean. So let me try to help us a little more in all of this.
[00:29:23] Again, unclean meant just no place to come to the sanctuary and worship right in that state. So marital intimacy being unclean, let's talk about that for a moment. Number one gave marital intimacy its proper context. Why? Again, why is it unclean for the marital intimacy, this kind of relationship to be unclean in Old Covenant Law? Because it gave it its proper context. Now, maybe this is a little easier to explain. It's not to be corporate like what the ancient Near East cultures did in their worship. This was all corporate. No, this is private. Man, woman by design. Anything else will destroy the soul.
[00:30:11] Maybe that's a little easier to understand. Number two, let me talk more about the second one. Kept tabernacle worship holy. And not sexualized, because worship, for worship to be in all holiness and undefiled god is a God who says no to the ancient Near East pagan religions around them, because the religions around them elevated sensual and sexual things and acts into the worship space always at the temples.
[00:30:45] Let me add a few more things to that. So a couple more bullets here.
[00:30:50] The temptation for the Israelites was and will be with the power behind sex to want to incorporate this into their worship in Egypt. They had come out of Egypt, right? And there's Egyptian fertility goddess. They knew about that. They also knew well, soon they will learn a lot more about this when they move into land of Canaan, because the Canaanites were under this same idea of corrupt sexualized worship, their version of worship. And these Israelites, where they are in the region here of Mount Sinai, remember what happened in Exodus?
[00:31:24] They worshiped a golden calf. They made a golden calf. They made an image, they made an idol. They worshiped it, this golden calf. And scripture says that when they did this, they rose up to play. And what does that mean? When they rose up to play? Means they were drunk. It means that they were indulging in all kinds of sensual and carnal and immoral behavior before their idol, the golden calf. So the apostle Paul writes about this. He writes to the church about this one corinthians, chapter ten, apostle Paul says. Now, these things, he's talking about what the Israelites did at Mount Sinai with the golden calf and how they incorporated these things into their worship. Now, these things took place, Apostle Paul says, as examples for us, meaning the Church, that we might not desire evil as they did, do not be idolaters, as some of them were, as it is written. And now he's going back to what was said in Exodus. The people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play as they worshiped the golden calf. We must not indulge, he says, in sexual immorality, as some of them did, and 23,000 fell in a single day. And God says, that's not me.
[00:32:33] That's for you in your marriage bed. It's good I made that, but that is not worshipping me. That is not worshipping me, not like the rest of the world does at all. So I pray that God will save us today from this, from that.
[00:32:49] Our culture elevating all of this to be number one for some reason. No.
[00:32:56] Have fun in your community groups with this.
[00:32:59] I'll be praying for you, community group leaders in your discussion. Remember the big idea. Okay, just going back to that. Every part of our sexuality belongs under God's authority. Every part.
[00:33:14] So what can we do?
[00:33:16] Well, first let's take our cues on sexuality from God and not our culture.
[00:33:26] We are tempted today just like the Israelites. We have not evolved, we've not progressed, we've not become in some way more modernized, and therefore we're past this. Not at all. They had the Egyptian gods and god. They had the Canaan eventually the Canaanite influence, of course, idolatry and all of that in their worship, all sexualized. It's a huge mistake to think we've somehow progressed beyond this because the human race really hasn't it's. The same old stuff is here in our culture. The same demonic influences are here in our culture. It's repackaged. It might look a little different. Maybe the packaging on the present is different with a different bow that might be different.
[00:34:07] But let's not look to that at all. Let's learn instead what the Bible says because it's all good, God's way in his context, and lean into God because he is good. Second, worship is primary over everything else in life. Look at the sentiment, and this is a sentiment from the Apostle Paul. He's writing the churches one Corinthians, chapter seven, verse five. He's putting marriage, intimacy or things even related to really anything related kind of in its proper place. And it's a general principle. You can apply this really to anybody whether you're married or not. He says this do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time. Look at the devotion to prayer and the importance of prayer here that you may devote yourselves to prayer. He says, then come together again so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self control. That's the New Testament Church he's teaching. But in Leviticus 15, we see that also this old Covenant law, the clean, the unclean, all of this. He's training his people into what's important and to restraint and to self control and what is good, because worship is primary.
[00:35:23] All right, last, so what?
[00:35:26] Jesus offers freedom and cleansing to anyone who asks. So today we're not under the mosaic. Old covenant law. Not today. Today there is not this uncleanness and clean. Today is there? Is this sin or not sin? Today we are under the law of Christ, as some call it. And today anyone can be cleansed. Or to put it better, so we can understand it, we can be completely forgiven for all of our past, current and future sins by trusting in what Christ has done on the cross, his death, death in exchange for life, his resurrection. When we believe in his death and resurrection for the forgiveness of our sins, we are cleansed. Or maybe better put, forgiven of our sins. And right, we move from death to life for all eternity with Christ. That is for everyone, any nation, any tribe under the sun. This is for everybody.
[00:36:29] It's the gospel. There is only Christ today, and only he gives freedom from sin and salvation. So let's pray. Lord, thank you. Some of this feels a little weird. Some of this feels a little awkward because we sit so many years later. But God, you have told us the truth, because the ancient truths are true today, that worship is primary, that You've made things good, and sometimes we take it the wrong way, God. But, God, I just pray that we would come to you and understand you, Jesus, as the Savior who has given his blood and has exchanged his death for our eternal life, God. And maybe there's someone here right now who still needs to make that decision to say yes. God, I'm a sinner before you. Cleanse me, make me new. Forgive my sins. And I believe in you, Lord, your death and your resurrection from the grave. And the Bible says you will be saved today if you take that move. So, God, thank you for being here, for moving among us, for changing our hearts. God, we pray that we would give you glory above all, and it's in Jesus name we pray. Amen.
