It’s easy to get caught up in the emotional sin flavor of the day. Recently Christians including me really got up in arms over the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriages and have flooded the airwaves with indignation.
Pew research estimates that there may be as many as 170,000 homosexual marriages in America, (36 states legalized it prior to the recent Supreme Court ruling). Just for the sake of comparison let’s take a look at some other sex sins in America.
The sin of divorce in America?
- There is one divorce approximately every 36 seconds.
- That’s nearly 2,400 divorces per day
- 16,800 divorces per week
- 876,000 divorces a year.
What about the sin of sex out of wedlock?
- Premarital sex research shows by age 44 – 95% of Americans have had unmarried sex
- There are approximately 13.7 million single parents in the United States today
- 22 million children live in single parent homes. This number represents approximately 26% of children under 21 in the U.S and nearly half (45%) live below the poverty line
So what about the sin of pornography?
- Every second 28,258 users are watching pornography on the internet
- 40 million American people regularly visit porn sites
- 25% of all search engine queries are related to pornography, or about 68 million search queries a day
- One third of porn viewers are women
- Nearly two-thirds (64%) of American men look at pornography at least monthly. The rate for Christian men looking at porn is nearly identical.
So what about the sin of adultery?
- Over a third of married men will cheat on their wives
- Nearly a quarter of all married women will cheat on their husbands
- And more than 50% of all marriages will be impacted by one of the spouses being unfaithful
So which of the foregoing sins should we focus on? I’m only addressing some sex sins, there are plenty of other sins we could discuss but it would take reams of paper. I wonder if we should focus on any of them.
I often ask myself what I think Jesus would do. I don’t presume to know the mind of Christ, but I have studied Him for some 44 years now. Jesus said in John 3:17 – For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn or judge the world, but to save the world through Him.
Would we be better off concentrating our energy on His message? When you think about it God has already condemned us for the dark sins that defile us. The grace of God is our only hope for redemption. God doesn’t need us to condemn sin.
Jesus did not exhibit His righteous anger too many times when confronted with the sins of His day, even when He was being crucified. But He did angrily lash out one time when referring to the religious leaders of the day, the Pharisees.
Matt. 12:34 – “You brood of vipers, how can you, being evil, speak what is good? For the mouth speaks out of that which fills the heart. “The good man brings out of his good treasure what is good; and the evil man brings out of his evil treasure what is evil . . .
Matt. 23:13 – But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in.
Why was God so angry at the Pharisees? They spent much of their time condemning virtually everyone with whom they came in contact, (except for themselves of course). They ignored their sins and railed about the sins of everyone else.
We would do well to remember Romans 5:8 But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners. God’s grace is shown through His love for us regardless of our tremendous shortcomings in virtually every area. I think we should focus on the love of Christ and serving Him and others and not the sins that we all commit.
John 3:16
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
July 20, 2015 – Click here to listen