About 20 years ago, Philip Yancy was writing an article for Christianity Today, and he wrote this, I know of no greater failure among Christians than in presenting a persuasive approach to sexuality. Oftentimes inside the church we are labeled as well inside the church. It’s a lot of do’s and don’ts. Do this, don’t do that. Meanwhile, outside the church, especially if you trace the roots back to the 1960s sexual revolution, it’s all about sexual freedom. It’s not do’s and don’ts, it’s you be you, you do whatever you want to do. And so it raises this question, a challenging question around human sexuality, which is how do we determine what is right and what is wrong? If you ask chat, GPT what is the general sex ethic currently in the United States of America? This is what chat GPT spits out, which I think sounds pretty accurate.

The general sexual ethic in the United States today emphasizes individual autonomy, consent, and mutual respect with a focus on personal choice and sexual freedom. Sexual freedom, yes, there needs to be contempt, but there’s sexual freedom that you can do whatever you want to do. Oftentimes, as a pastor, I get asked a question that looks something like this. Someone will say, is fill in the blank wrong, that they’ll say, is pornography wrong? Is sex outside of marriage wrong? Is living with my boyfriend or my girlfriend wrong? Is homosexuality wrong? And that’s how people want to start the question, I just wanna know your answer. Is this wrong or is it okay? And I never like to start the conversation with answering that question because there’s a lot of foundational things behind that question that you have to unpack first. First you have to start with this idea of, well, what determines your sexual ethic?

How in your life, what’s your compass that is determining for you what is okay and what is not okay? And that sounds culturally like an easy question, and yet it’s not. If you look around the world in histories, in different cultures, there’ve been radically different. Sexual ethics, I’ll, I’ll give two really quickly. It is big, is a island off of near Scotland. Ireland mania is another island near the South Pacific. Radically different sexual cultures, radically different sexual ethics. And in its beg sex is seen as this terrible thing. The the culture abhorred nudity when they would have sex inside of marriage, and there was no such thing as, as sex is outside of marriage. When they would have sex inside of marriage, they would not kiss and they would not take off their clothes. That sex was seen as this terrible thing, but it was a necessity in order to procreate but really was avoided for anything recreational or enjoyment.

Now, you flip it to the other side of the spectrum, mange and Mangia boys were explained about masturbation when they were seven years old. At eight and nine years old, they were encouraged to start trying masturbation. At 13 years old, they would go through a manhood ritual where a male would perform sexual acts on that boy in order for them to become a man. Two weeks later, then they would go have a sexual experience with an experienced female that would give them their first sexual encounter. Now, their culture, by and large, glorified sex glorified the pleasure of sex. Most everybody had multiple sexual partners. It was considered sexual freedom. Now, now under our definition for our culture that we read just a second ago what, what they did as their sexual ethic, we would say, well, well, that’s not okay. We’re only 13.

They didn’t necessarily have consent. And yet when we look around the world, there’s radically different sexual ethics. So here’s the big burning question. Who gets to decide what’s okay and what’s not okay? Is there a transcendent moral authority that defines for us? These things are designed by God, or is it just whatever? I feel like Julie Slaty wrote a book called Rethinking Sexuality. I highly recommend, it’s a fantastic book. I’m gonna quote from her three different times in this message. But at the very beginning of the, of the book, she sets the trajectory of the book by saying this. Although sexuality presents an enormous challenge to Christians and to the world at large, it is not a problem to be solved, but a territory to be reclaimed. The culture has captured the conversation of sexuality with the persuasive, excuse me, narrative. While Christians seem stifled with an outdated list of sexual dos and don’ts, we will never combat the growing confusion and pain of sexuality by swatting at the issues of pornography, premarital sex, same sex attraction, sex trafficking, sexual harassment in the workplace, and abuse.

Each of these problems is a devastating byproduct of a larger tragedy. We don’t understand sexuality within the context of the Christian narrative and the call to follow Jesus. As a result, Christian leaders and parents are at a loss as to how to navigate the growing chorus of sexual pain and chaos. So at least to this question, what is God’s design for sexual intimacy that sometimes inside church, maybe you, you grew up in a church and we avoided talking about sex, and so it, it came up with this idea that sex was evil or sex was bad, or, or it was gross. But that’s not the sexual narrative inside of Scripture at all, that the Bible talks about sex in this beautiful way. Song of Songs is this amazing book about sexual intimacy, but so often inside the church, we, we’ve avoided it. For many of you, probably this is the first time that you’ve heard a pastor from a pulpit talk about sex, especially with some of the words that I’ve used while talking about sex.

And maybe even that makes you feel slightly uncomfortable, but there’s no reason to, because if we can understand sexuality as God presents it through scripture, there’s an intent and there’s a purpose, and it can be beautiful. In Genesis chapter four, the first time we see sex, it says, now Adam and E. Now Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain saying, I have brought forth a man with the help of the Lord. That word new is the first time in scripture that we see a sexual experience new. Now, what’s interesting about this word new is in Hebrew, it’s the word yaah. The word yaah in the Old Testament refers to a married couple. Anytime that we see a married couple having sex, it’s often, most often the word yaah. And now there’s different words that can represent sex. And so anytime we see sex that is that is violent or sex that is unwanted, it’s never the word yaah.

It’s a different word for sex. But anytime we see this covenant form, this intimate sex inside of marriage, it’s always the word yaah to know. Now the word yaah in Hebrew really represents to know intimately. It’s to truly know somebody, but it’s actually used 940 times in the Old Testament, which on the surface would make you think, well, gosh, I’ve been reading the wrong Bible. I clearly the Old Testament is talking about sex nonstop. But it’s because the word yaah is not, although it is specifically used when we see intimacy inside of marriage in that covenant relationship, it’s also used a whole bunch of other ways inside of scripture in the Old Testament. Here’s two really famous verses that you didn’t know that that word was in Psalm 1 39, very famous Psalm of David. He says, oh, Lord, you have searched me and known me. That word known is the Hebrew word yaah, probably proverb three, five, and six. Some of you have on your wall at home. It says, trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. Now all your ways acknowledge him and he will make straight your paths. That word acknowledge is the word yaah. If it is, is on your wall at home. You’re gonna look at it different the next time you look at it. Now, <laugh>.

So, so what’s

The point? Now, why does

God use this word

Yaah interchangeably when it comes to sex inside the covenant relationship of marriage, but

Also

Inside of representing our relationship

With God? Julie Slattery puts it this way. She says, sexuality

Was intentionally

Created by God

To be a metaphor, teaching us about his covenant love

That God created

Each and every one of us with longings,

And that there are

Sexual longings that we have.

But ultimately, what are those people? What are those longings

Pointing us towards?

What’s

The direction of

Our heart that, that it is

Pushing us, it’s pushing us for intimacy,

That

There is something beautiful

That is

Possible inside of marriage.

And this yaah

We’re inside the covenant relationship of marriage where

Two people truly

Experience not just physical love and connection, but an intimacy that there is a knowing between the two people. And the metaphor that

Scripture

Uses more often than any other metaphor when it comes to our relationship with God is the metaphor of

Marriage.

And we are in a covenant relationship

With God, that

God wants us

To

Be intimately known by God,

But also

To intimately know

God. And so

This longing, these desires

That we have, that they are this foreshadowing

Pushing us

Ahead to say that there is

Some long and some desires that only God can fulfill, and he’s placed it in our heart

To help

Us recognize there’s more

Than what just this

World has to offer.

So when we’re talking with culture about human sexuality, where do we start?

This is gonna sound

Odd, but where we start is this. We start

By acknowledging that

We are all sexually broken. And

That that kind of sounds weird.

Some of you would say,

Well, I’m not sexually broken. I don’t know what you’re talking about.

But, but

If you believe the narrative of

Scripture that the fall

That we see in Genesis chapter

Three, the fall

Radically changes

God’s

Creation. That sin enters into the

World as a result

Of sin entering into the world.

Everything

About us changes, everything about us

Is different.

Everything about us

Is broken. We

Have this sin nature. That’s

Why Jesus

Turns this idea

Of sexual ethics

Upside down.

He says, you’ve heard it said that adultery is

A sin. But

Jesus says, I tell to you that

If you even look

At a person lustfully,

You’ve committed adultery in your

Heart. He,

He’s trying to get us to understand that everybody has some amount of

Sexual

Brokenness, and we also live in a world that is very sexually broken, that all around us, through media, through movies and tv shows, through commercials, through magazines, there’s a sexual ethic that is being pressed up against us and towards us that the the world is trying to get us to affirm and to accept and to to live underneath. And as a result of that, there is sexual brokenness everywhere. Maybe some of you don’t think that you’re sexually broken, but you really are. And maybe if you, maybe some of you feel really sexually broken, may maybe you are great shame is because of some type of sexual experience that you’ve had or a sexual experience that you did not want to have, but you had. So what do we do with that? There’s hope. If you’ve got a Bible, turn with me to Luke chapter four.

Luke chapter four. We will obviously have it on the screen. It’ll be in the Cherry Hills mobile app. But if you do have a physical copy, I would encourage you to turn your Bible to Luke chapter four. We’re gonna start in verse 16. It says, Jesus is describing Jesus. And it says, it went and he came to Nazareth where he had been brought up. And as was his custom, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read. And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written. The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down and the eyes of all and the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. And now we can read past that and not really understand that the meaning of what has taken place. Now, the way that a synagogue would work is that they would come together on a Saturday, which which was their Sabbath. And first, someone would get up and read. So they would take a scroll and they would get up in front of the audience, kinda like church. And they would read from the scroll. And then after reading from the scroll, they would sit down and then a rabbi would teach from the seated position. So the rabbi would sit down, everybody would listen, pay attention to what the rabbi has to say, and from a seated position, then they would be begin to explain what the text means. And so Jesus chooses a very famous passage out of Isaiah, a passage that to us, we don’t think anything of. But in the first century, it was a really big deal. Why? Because it was a passage about the Messiah that this Messiah would come and, and listen to what it said, listen to how it unpacked it. So this Messiah would come and, and that he would proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind to set at liberty those who are

Oppressed. It’s this picture

Of the Messiah’s going to come fix the brokenness of this world. And then Jesus sits down and it says that they’re all paying attention. And what does Jesus say?

He says, this

Has been fulfilled

Today. What’s

Jesus proclaim? Jesus proclaim, I am the Messiah.

Jesus is saying, I

Have come to set the captives free. I’ve come to heal

The

Oppressed. Now, that word oppressed,

That

Can be translated a few different

Ways, but

Here’s what it means in Greek, a person who has been

Shattered or fractured by life.

If you wanna really unpack human sexuality in our culture right now, I, I would say

That this is a really good way to describe it.

It’s a culture that has

Been shattered

And

Fractured

When it comes to human

Sexuality. You see, there’s

Three different narratives. This is something that comes from Julie Slattery, although as she unpacks it, it’s kind of been been taken over by a lot of people in the Christian space when they talk about

Sexual

Narratives

That she, she

Drags down three different narratives. She talks about a cultural narrative, a purity narrative, and then a biblical narrative that the cultural narrative is all around us. And that cultural narrative is

This idea

That that came coming out of the sexual revolution of the 1960s. And that is, sex

Is all about your pleasure, and it’s all about your

Experience and about you feeling whatever you want to

Feel.

And although that sounds on the surface, beautiful and wonderful, it’s been really

Deadly. If you look at

Just the stats around human sexuality,

That

Pornography is at this massive epidemic level that even secularists who, who are not in any way shape or form, Christians secularists would look at the data and say that pornography is incredibly, incredibly harmful,

Specifically

To young people that are looking at. And yet, there’s never been more pornography in the history of the world. And not even

If you took

All the pornography for all time and compared it to the amount of pornography that was made in just the last 12 months. There’s more pornography in the last 12 months that has been made than the rest of human history combined.

There

Are more sex workers in the world today, more sex slaves in the world today than at any other point in human history that one third of females in college will have an unwanted sexual

Experience

In a culture that, that really tries to push forth. This idea of

Sexual liberty

And sexual freedom underneath it

All is sexual

You compare that to the purity narrative, the purity narrative. Maybe you grew up in the purity narrative. I grew up in the purity narrative. I went to a true love weights. I had the ring, and there was some good intentions behind the purity narrative, and yet there was some really major flaws. There was a lot of damage that was done as a result of the purity narrative. Maybe you are one of those people that you set in the class. And, and really what the purity narrative did is it held up virginity, it held up not having sex before marriage as this ultimate pass fail test that the goal of any Christian is to not have sex until you are married. And then once you’re married, you can have sex. And what happened as a result of that I is that oftentimes people that went through true love weights and the studies would, would look back and say, well, it just didn’t work.

People didn’t do it. That, that actually, it was counterproductive because people would have an unhealthy sexual experience or, or they would have sex or, or they would do something that they felt ashamed of. And they said, well, I, I was trying not to have sex and now I did well, so I failed. And so then they just throw their, their sexuality out the window and they say, well, I guess it doesn’t matter now. Now I can just do whatever I want because I was trying to save myself for marriage and I didn’t, and I failed the test. And so now it doesn’t matter anymore. It, it created a false idol out of sex. It’s different than the biblical narrative. You see the biblical narrative, it’s about intimacy. It’s about God’s design from the beginning of scripture all the way through the end of scripture that we have a desire in us that God put there and God designed it for a purpose and for a reason.

And ultimately that purpose and that reason should point us towards our relationship with God and our need for God. God put boundaries around marriage not to stifle sexual freedom, but because God said that the way that you can truly experience intimacy, that knowing of someone back and forth is inside of a covenant relationship. And inside that covenant relationship, there is something beautiful that you gain as a result of that, that cannot be found in any other sexual activity. There’s this idea of holiness inside of scripture, and oftentimes we misunderstand or misrepresent what it means to be holy. And the nine different times inside of scripture, it’s some version of be holy, most of the time. It’s a phrase like this, you shall be holy for I am holy. What we tend to think of as holiness is righteousness is doing the right thing. And there are times where the Old Testament is talking about righteousness in that type of a manner, but not always.

That really, if you unpack the word holiness in Hebrew it’s this word haos. Haos means the likeness of nature with the Lord. That’s where you get the righteousness. But it also means because of being different from the world you could also define haos holiness as set apart or weird. In the Old Testament, when we see the temple, you see all these inanimate objects that are defined as holy. So like there would be a lamp in the temple that is holy. What makes that lamp holy? It’s not holy because the the lamp itself is righteous. It’s not holy because the lamp itself is sexually pure. That’s not what the word holy means. The the word holy when it is describing the lamp means that it is set aside, set apart for a divine purpose. And so when scripture is telling us to be holy, it means that we should be set apart.

We should have a divine purpose in how we act and what we do. That if you are a Christian, that when you’re trying to figure out is blank, okay? Is this sexual activity okay? Either I look at the world’s definition of sexual ethic, or as a Christian, I say, I’m gonna recognize that there is a transcendent moral authority that God has placed over my life, and that is the Bible. And if I’m going to be set apart, be different, it means that I’m going to do my best to pursue that sexual holiness. Now, here’s what you need to understand. I I think the challenge with the purity movement is it was this pass fail, and there was such this intense focus on that word purity, that that word purity came to mean things that that really it shouldn’t have meant. And as a result of that, there was so much shame and brokenness and pain associated with that.

But, but here’s the idea. When scripture talks about holiness, holiness from our perspective is that, hey, we we’re all broken. We’re all sinners, we’re all at the same bottom level, and there’s nothing that we do to achieve holiness. It’s because of what Jesus did for us on the cross. And then holiness is a pursuit for the rest of my life pursuing the design that God has for me. So, so sexual holiness is not perfection. It’s not purity. It means I take all that baggage, all that brokenness, all that shame. I lay it at the feet of Jesus and I pursue holiness each and every day. And guess what? I’m gonna fail and I’m gonna mess up. I’m gonna have bad experiences. I’m gonna see things that I shouldn’t see, and what do I do with that? I I don’t stop the pursuit of holiness. It’s not a past fail, it’s a lifelong pursuit.

Julie Slattery, towards the end of her book, she describes this. She says, when we believe love wins without also holding firmly to the truth of the Bible, we compromise God’s holiness and fail to be distinctive as Christ followers. She’s saying, if we live a sexual ethic that looks no different than the world around us, and the world is currently headed towards a trajectory that that seems a little bit crazy, if you compare it to, to 20, 30 years ago. I I mean you, you have open marriages and throuple and all these weird things that, that the world is gonna more and more say, Hey, this is normalized. This is okay, this is sexual freedom. But she’s saying that, that if we are pursuing holiness, what does it mean? That means that we are gonna have a life that is distinctive, it’s set apart. It’s weird compared to the world around us.

But she goes on to say, on the other hand, clinging to biblical truth without also showing love. And grace is just plain offensive, or Francis Schaeffer, he put it this way, Francis Schaeffer says, there is nothing more ugly than a Christian orthodoxy without understanding or compassion. What is the ministry that God has given us as Christians and believers? I think sometimes we think that the ministry that God has given us is the ministry of Stop it. You see that inside the church a lot. The message from the church is to look at people doing things that, that are incongruent with scripture and to say, Hey, you need to stop it. They stop doing that. Stop that. Don’t do that. Do this instead. And in a lot of ways, the way the world looks at the Capital C Church that they look at us as the ministry is stop it.

But that’s not the ministry that Jesus has given us. Actually, he’s very clear. The ministry that has given us in Second Corinthians chapter five start in verse 17 that says, therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he’s a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold the new has come. All this is from God who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. That is when Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us that message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ to be reconciled to God. You see, the way that we change the sexual ethic of our culture is not by looking at him and saying, stop doing that. You need to do it like we are doing.

No, no, no. That’s, that’s not what the gospel says. You see, our goal as Christians is to live a life that is set apart and different, but then love people to the cross. I cannot expect someone to change their sexual ethic if God hasn’t first transformed their heart that it’s the Holy Spirit who convicts. It’s the Holy Spirit who transforms. And so we need to uphold a life of holiness that is set apart and different, but we also need to do it in a way that is not looking with shame on people around us. And I know if we come from a position that represents the gospel, it is to understand, Hey, I was broken. I was just as sexually broken as you. I was sexually broken and my life was broken, and I was unable to ever save my foot myself, except what Jesus did for me on the cross.

And if we can love people to the cross, we don’t need to worry about changing their sexuality. Jesus will do that. Jesus can change people’s life. Here’s, here’s my heartache when it comes to the conversation that if you think about where we are in the conversation, if you specifically think about the L-G-B-T-Q community, when they think of the church, the capital C Church, it tends to not be very positive. It tends to be if you were to ask people in that community, Hey, what do you think of Jesus or the church? It’ll be some combination of, well, they’re judgemental and they’re bigots and they’re hateful. And if you ask yourself why, what, where does that narrative come from? Well, it comes from largely, in my opinion, the wrong response to the church, from the church in the 1980s to, to remind us what happened in the 1980s.

April 1st, 1980 was the first AIDS case at that point. It’s not called AIDS yet. July of 1981, an LGBT newspaper in San Francisco called the Bay Area Reporter, writes about gay men’s pneumonia. The New York Times article that same month says, rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals leads to the coining of the term gay cancer. 1981, later that year the New York Times publishes the phrase gay related immune deficiency or grid contributing to the widespread misconception that AIDS only affects gay men. September of that same year, the CDC uses the term AIDS for the first time later that year, the CDC publishes an article saying that AIDS is most prevalent among gay men with multiple sexual partners, people who inject drugs, Haitians, and people with hemophilia. A few years later, five years later, in 1986, the AIDS epidemic starts to grow drastically. The CDC reports that the year 1985 saw an 89% increase in AIDS diagnosises. They predicted that number would double in the next 12 months. By 1992, AIDS becomes the leading cause of death for American men age 25 to 44. By 1994, AIDS becomes a leading cause of Death

For all Americans age 25 to 44. The total number of AIDS cases in the United States in November of 1994 surpasses 500,000.

So you had this epidemic that is largely at first experience inside

The Gay men’s community. And so what was the Church’s response to that? I won’t tell you who, but a very prominent, famous televangelist in 1993 said this. He said, AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals. To oppose it would be like an Israelite jumping in the Red Sea to save one of Pharaoh’s Chariot tears. AIDS is not just punishment for homosexuals.

It is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals. Now. Now let me pause for a second and say what, what that person said is abhorrent and wrong, but that largely was what the Capital C Church responded with. This is a punishment from God on this community. and so as a result of it, so much of what we face today in culture and any conversation about human sexuality goes back to a bad response from the church. Well, what should the church have done? Jesus, in John chapter 13, he says, A new command I give you love one another as I have loved you. So you must love one another. By this, all men will know that you are my disciples. If you love one another. In the year two 60 ad, the plague of Cyprian hits Rome.

When the plague hit a city, it wiped out half of the people that caught the plague. The official edict of Rome was that if someone in your family got the plague, that you should kick them out because it was too dangerous for you to be around them. So at a time where there is an epidemic where people are dying, how did the church, the Capital C Church respond? Well, they could have said, well, this is God’s judgment on you, Rome. You persecuted us. You were evil to us as a result of that, as a result of that persecution, God is giving his wrath. But that’s not what the church did. Di of Corinth in the year 2 60 80 wrote this. He wrote, most of our Christians, most of our brother christians, showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of one another,

Heedless of danger. They took charge of the sick, attending to their very need and ministering to them in Christ, and with them departed

This life serenely happy for they were infected by

Others with the disease, drawing on themselves, the sickness of their neighbors, and cheerfully accepting their pains.

When the aids epidemic first started spreading, no one was sure how it spread. And so there was a fear of that community, a fear that, well, if I come in contact with him, if I touch him, if they sweat on me, maybe it’s airborne. And so as a result, what what happened is people inside that community became outcasts. People didn’t wanna be around them. Even medical professionals were hesitant to support and be around them in some cases. What if in that moment, the Capital C Church Christians step into that space and say, Hey, listen, I know that this could infect me, but I love you and Jesus loves you, and so I’m going to care for you as a result of that. What would it look like now in 2024, that would’ve been our response. I I would submit that it would probably be very different than the narrative that exists today.

And, and so what do we do with it as Christians? How should we live that? There’s these two parts that, one, that we should pursue holiness. That we should recognize that God designed sex in such a way that the best way for me to pursue and live my life sexually is underneath the transcendent moral authority of God’s work. And that’s hard, and that’s challenging. But if I’m going to pursue holiness, that’s what that means. But simultaneous to that, we wanna be a community that that lifts up the standard of, of God’s work, but we wanna do it in a way that loves people exceedingly well. And and I would imagine in a room this large, there are plenty of you that disagree with what our church or our denomination would hold up as a biblical sexual ethic. And that’s okay. We still want you to be here.

I want our church to have every different person and every different lifestyle to feel welcomed and loved when they walk in these doors. That’s the way that we are going to love them to the cross. But it starts by us recognizing that God did not give us a ministry of stop it. God gave us a ministry of reconciliation. And so we wanna love people exceedingly well so that they might encounter Jesus and through the power of the Holy Spirit, they would become people that submit their lives to the transcendent moral authority of God. It’s not my job to do that. It’s my job to be an ambassador. It’s our job to love people extremely well. Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, God, I I recognize that this is one of those challenging subjects, challenging topics, God, that our culture would look at us and say that everything about the way that we look at sex is weird.

And that’s okay. God, help us to be a church that is pursuing you every single day and pursuing your holiness. Lord, I pray for all the, each and every one of us in this room that is sexually broken in one way, shape or another. And I know that comes with it so much baggage and so much shame and so many different issues. And God, we pray that just as Jesus proclaimed that he came to set the free, he came to, to free the oppressed, those fractured, those broken God. We claim that promise that Jesus can make whole inside of us with the world has broken, that Jesus can make whole inside of us. That shame that we carry from long ago, Jesus can make whole inside of us all the things that we look inwardly and don’t like. And so, God, I pray for healing in this room, God, that we would turn back to you, that we would offer our lives up and say, God, heal me. God, that, that you would help us to know that you’ve given us these desires in our life to pursue intimacy ultimately because you want us to know you. You want us to be known by you. And there’s an intimacy that we can have in our relationship with you that no one and nothing in this world could ever offer. Help us to be a church that loves exceedingly well, live out a ministry of reconciliation. So the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, we pray. Amen.