Song of Songs 1:4-7; 2:2; 2:14; 4:1-7; Psalm 139:13-14 Wonderfully Made

This is a difficult message for me because I have a wonderful wife and great kids and grandkids, some of whom have wrestled hard with images of self-worth and respect because of how they’ve been treated. The message this morning is about brokenness and hurt: how we’re hurt and how we hurt each other. We have all been impacted by what we are going to be talking about this morning. We live in a good country, but there are areas where our culture fails us. Companies hi-light all our flaws and then offer their solutions to our failure to not be beautiful or cool enough. They have hyper-sexualized our youth and women and this creates low self images as the images of women and girls online and on tv are so photoshopped they never even come close to showing a real woman or girl.

When we are told we aren’t beautiful enough or good enough, when we’re told that we need to value ourselves by what we look like or by what we have, we need to remember who we are: deeply loved children of God. I know it can be hard to remember that when you look into the mirror and all you see are your faults, when you look at your accomplishments and wonder if that outfit, that car, that boat or house might make you feel like you’re somebody, remember that none of that is important to your heavenly father; all that’s important to God is that you know you’re loved and valued by him.

Today we’re looking at a couple of issues that the church has always found it hard to talk about, pornography and gender issues. Yet if we don’t become comfortable talking about these things from a Biblical approach, our youth are left to learn from media and impressionable friends who want to be loving and not say that any kind of lifestyle is wrong because they might offend someone. It doesn’t matter if you’re a grandparent or parent or unmarried, our youth need us to become comfortable talking about these things. They are being exposed to these things already as young as 9 or 10 outside the home. They need us.

Pornography tears us down, especially women, making them into objects to serve our lusts rather than as beautiful and precious people created in the image of God. Our kids are encountering it earlier and earlier. Porn hurts people. It promises easy relationships with no ties, but then wraps our hearts and minds in powerful chains of lust and shame. It destroys our relationships, taking away the image of God in each of us. Porn turns our real people relationships into things to be used and thrown away. If you no longer please. I’ll swipe left.

The Song of Songs is a love poem in the Bible. It’s part of the wisdom literature that tells us how to live wisely in our relationships as men and women. Because we’re being conditioned to see others simply as objects for our own desire, the Song shows us how a man and woman should show and express love and respect to each other. In the Song of Songs, the woman feels down about herself, her skin is too dark, she works at a common job, she’s not pretty. She turns to one she loves, calling him to tell her where he grazes his flocks so she can come to him in the daylight as a respectable woman, one with honour and pride in herself, even though her looks may not measure up to the daughters of Jerusalem. She knows she’s precious. She respects herself, refusing to be like a veiled woman beside the flocks of his friends, a reference to prostitutes and an echo to the story of Ruth and Boaz and how Ruth trusted that Boaz would treat her with respect and honour when she came to him at the threshing floor in the evening.

The man responds to her and builds her up, encouraging her. This is how we are supposed to respond to each other, building up and encouraging them to be whom God has created them to be, showing respect. Pornography takes our dignity away from us; the ability to really get to see and know the other person and the image of God in the person. As you read through the poem, the woman speaks highly of the man, expressing her admiration for him, showing him respect and honour. The man responds with words of admiration, expressing his love with beautiful words, using the beauty of creation to describe her beauty. He proclaims it to the world. Last week we touched on how men and women are created equal but different; men needing respect and women needing love. This is expressed in the Song of Songs.

The discussions on gender and homosexuality are tied to the porn epidemic because it all revolves around our image of ourselves and how our identity is rooted in our sexuality. We live in a so-called tolerant culture that says you have to accept everyone, that we have to embrace and endorse the other person, even if we disagree with their values. This is especially true about moral issues. If you disagree with someone over the moral values, you are declared wrong, intolerant, and then shamed. The tolerant quickly become intolerant of those they disagree with. This is what our youth face when they say they hold onto a historical Biblical interpretation of sexuality. They’re told they don’t fit in today’s tolerant society. There are a lot of our youth and adults today who are walking wounded, wanting to fit in, tempted to change what they believe and accept what our culture says is right because they’ve been rejected and even shunned.

I’ve been wrestling with our culture’s definition of tolerance. This is where the Bible comes in. I believe a healthier approach to working through moral issues is not tolerance, but love. It begins with knowing where our identity comes from. Our culture tells us that our sexuality, ethnic roots, and gender are our core identities. When I turn to Scripture, God reminds us of who we are: we are people created in the image of God, fearfully and wonderfully made, masterpieces in the eyes of God, precious to him, valued greatly by Jesus, loved enough to die for as King David reminds us, “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful; I know that full well.” We’ve been adopted into God’s family: beloved daughters and sons of God, princesses and princes in the kingdom of heaven. This is our first and primary identity, this is where we find our strength and life direction. As children of God, we choose to trust him and what he teaches us in the Bible.

It’s important to learn to see ourselves and each other through the eyes of God. Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 3:16–17, “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person; for God’s temple is sacred, and you together are that temple.” Paul carries on this same theme in Ephesians 2:22, “And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.” God has made us his home! When we hear the Bible with ears of love, we can engage our critical culture and keep our hearts and lives strong when meeting people who believe differently than we do about homosexuality and the other gender issues our culture and church are wrestling with. But it begins with us being clear on what we believe, talking about what we believe, and basing it on God’s word. Culture keeps changing while God’s Word has remained a strong firm foundation for thousands of years.

It’s not about convincing others that what we believe is right and what they believe is wrong, that seldom makes a difference. When we root ourselves in loving God and loving our neighbour, we engage our culture best by being determined to see the image of God in each other, engaging them with respect and honour while sharing with them God’s love. I always seem to come back to Jesus, to the people he encountered and how he treated them. Jesus meets a Samaritan woman at a well. He knows that she’s been married 5 times before and now is simply living with a man, but he treats her with respect and honour and she becomes his first missionary; all because he treated her with basic love. then there is the woman that is thrown down into the dirt before Jesus because she was caught in an adulterous situation. Jesus gets down in the dirt with her and starts writing in the dirt, and when her accusers slink away, Jesus asks her where her accusers are and she tells them they’re gone. Jesus then tells her that he’s not going to judge her either, but he also adds, “Go and sin no more.” Jesus shows compassionate love to her and he wants what is best for her, which is why he told her to go sin no more. We need to be talking with each other and with our youth and children about sexuality, as uncomfortable as it may be at times for us. We study the Bible, we study science, and we humbly engage in conversations with each and our culture about who God calls us to be as his children.

People are changed when they see what we are for, rather than what we’re against. As we trust in God’s love for us, we trust that what God has revealed in the Bible about what healthy relationships and identity are, is what’s best for us. We also acknowledge the brokenness that sin has brought into the world.

We, without apology to our culture, shape our lives and loves on how God has called us to live, based on love rather than the intolerant tolerance we encounter today. One thing we do need to remember is that we are called to love those who believe differently than we do, we need to treat them with respect as people who are wonderfully made as they work through who they are.

We are wonderfully created, loved by God, and challenged by God to live as his people in the way of Jesus. Through Jesus’ love flowing through us, we show it looks like to be free to be who God calls us to be. Being a follower of Jesus is not about what we are against, but about who we are and what we do as Jesus’ followers: love each other and all our neighbours in active ways, serve our community in love in real practical ways, and sharing with them who Jesus is and how much he loves them, and how Jesus is calling them to follow his way: to trust his truth so they can experience and full blessed life.