There should be moral certainty in it because the will and purpose of God are like iron, not chalk. And I recommend an article by a Christian counselor in this month's Standard for an excellent statement of some of the reasons behind this divine standard of chastity ("The Eroding Effect of Premarital Sex" by P. Roger Hillerstrom). I count it a great privilege and delight to spend the next sixteen weeks with you unfolding what it means to say that our God is a “God of hope”; (Romans 15:13) and that the central exhortation of our church is very simply and very profoundly, Hope in God! You pull your own strings. You would go to the Bible because the Bible gives a true picture of what Satan is about in the world. Another would be whether a husband and wife are physically attractive to each other. That’s why the writer feels so sure of the people: they had served the saints, and they still do. When the word says, “Hope in God!” it does not mean, “Cross your fingers.” It means, to use the words of William Carey, “Expect great things from God.”. For God is not so unjust as to overlook your work and the love which you showed for his sake in serving the saints, as you still do. Pursue hope so that you can be like men of faith. That is why, for example, if you and your fiancé wait until you are alone in a car to decide what is right and wrong about fornication, you will almost surely decide in favor. We had best do our moral reflection when desire is at low ebb, so that when the waves of satanic rationalizations break over our brain at the moment of temptation, we will have an anchor of truth and won't be swept away by the life that seems to feel so good. Instead, biblical hope is a confident expectation and desire for something good in the future. It is the opposite in this sense: ordinarily, when we use the word hope, we express uncertainty rather than certainty. Most of us know that biblical faith is a strong confidence. Why are you cast down, O my soul, That’s the message I want all of us to have in mind every week as we leave Bethlehem and enter another week of work. He called his book The Soul’s Conflict with Itself, because in Psalm 42:5 that is exactly what you have, the soul arguing with itself, preaching to itself. There are evangelicals today who argue that the New Testament word for "immorality" (porneia) refers only to promiscuity but not to premarital sexual intercourse for engaged couples. There is a kind of certainty that comes from knowing the character of a man or of a group of men or a wife. But what about the relationship between full assurance of faith and full assurance of hope? Some of you are hearing a call. And I don’t mean that in Scripture hope is rejection of good (instead of desire for it). It lets you sleep at night. To watch any of these messages online, simply click the sermon title. This is a timeless topic that can and will impact people's lives almost every week. He also does his best to take the pearl of sexual desire and, instead of putting it in the pendant of marriage, feed it to the swine of fornication and adultery and pornography and incest and child abuse and homosexuality. We say, “Our hope is that Jim will arrive safely.” In other words, Jim’s safe arrival is the object of our hope. John Piper is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. (Let me insert a warning. "It is good not to touch a woman," means, "It is good to be single. Learn from the Scripture this morning. This is evidently not well known among all the saints — this preaching to yourself — because in Cameroon I recommended it to several as a way of fighting off discouragement, and it seemed quite a new thought to them. If I am commanded to believe the gospel, is faith something I create, or is it a gift of God? According to verses 32–35 Paul promoted celibacy because he enjoyed serving Christ with as few distractions as possible, and he wanted that for others as well. Besides frequency of sexual relations and attractiveness to each other, satisfaction also depends, in the third place, on the overall quality of the relationship. It is not easy to describe exactly what Paul means in verse 18 when he says, “In hope Abraham believed . There are some of us, in fact, who put far too much emphasis on exterior appearances. When you come to know God fully—that "in his presence is fullness of joy and at his right hand are pleasures forevermore"—then you will have conquered Satan once for all. In fact, the distinctive meaning of hope in Scripture is almost the opposite of our ordinary usage. Pat Repp wrote me a letter after Missions Week and raised the question whether BBC could be a pace-setting church not only in the cause of frontier missions but also for the cause of marriage and family ministries. We are not merely saved by grace through faith. That is mathematical certainty. We don’t say, for example, “We hope that we don’t get divorced.” We speak in terms of confidence and certainty, because the character of a God-centered will is like iron. You can cut it out of the oyster before it matures or you can feed it to the swine. What if God had said, “I’m sorry about you going to hell, but I can’t do anything about it. The best sermon you preach yourself this week may be only three words long: Hope in God! That is logical certainty. This is the closest thing we have to a definition of faith in all the New Testament, I think. It means hope which is fully assured. He describes Abraham as the great example of faith, and in particular, of justification by faith. Doubt is the enemy of biblical faith. Go ahead and sleep together since you are committed to each other and have enjoyed every other form of intimacy? It carries you over rough times. Instead of just telling people the truth of God’s word, show them. Celibacy is not for everybody. Singleness for the Purpose of Slavery to Christ. Please take this very seriously. Don't play with me, Babylon. We say, “A good tailwind is our only hope of arriving on time.” In other words, the tailwind is the reason we may, in fact, achieve the future good that we desire. If all men are mortal and if Plato was a man, then we may be “logically” certain that Plato was mortal. I love the way the psalmists wrestle and fight and struggle to maintain their hope in God. After saying in verse 1 that it's a good calling not to be sexually involved at all (that is, celibacy is good), Paul says in verse 2: "But because of the temptation to immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. Let me close by directing your attention to a passage in 1 Thessalonians 4, namely, verses 3–5. But each has his own special gift from God, one of one kind and one of another." Pursue an ever-expanding vision of God. Jesus commands the church not only to make disciples, but also to baptize them. When we speak of our future, we do not speak in the ordinary terms of hope. However, there it is “full assurance of faith” instead of “full assurance of hope.” It says, “Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith.” Then in the next verse, it says, “Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful.” Notice, hope is something that should not waver, because it is rooted in the faithfulness of God. This is a clear prohibition of premarital sexual intercourse. My answer is, I hope so! He was called “the sweet dropper” because of how much confidence and joy his sermons caused. There is no mathematical or logical certainty that they won’t happen. Verse 5 says, "Do not refuse one another except perhaps by agreement for a season, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, lest Satan tempt you through lack of self-control." that he should become the father of many nations.” But from the whole context I think it is fair to say that Abraham’s faith was his strong confidence in the reliability of God’s word, and Abraham’s hope was his strong confidence in the fulfillment of God’s promise. “Against hope” means that from the ordinary human standpoint there was no hope: Abraham was too old to have a child, and his wife was barren. Look, for example, at 1 Corinthians 7:36–37. Notice the connection: verse 11 says, go hard after full assurance of hope; verse 12 says the result of that pursuit of hope is that you will be like those who through faith and patience inherit the promises. There is a very simple truth at work here: the more strongly we feel sexual desire, the more susceptible we are to being deceived that it is not wrong to satisfy it through fornication or adultery or masturbation. I do not say Satan creates sexual desire. But whoever is firmly established in his heart, being under no necessity but having his desire under control, and has determined this in his heart, to keep her as his betrothed (i.e., to keep her a virgin), he will do well." I heard from one of our people yesterday of a person who turned down a meal on an airline flight, and when asked why, he said that he was fasting and praying to Satan. It is the opposite in this sense: ordinarily, when we use the word hope, we express uncertainty rather than certainty. It is sensitive because there are many things about ourselves that we can't change and others that are hard to change. “I hope daddy gets home early,” means, “I don’t have any certainty that daddy will get home on time, I only desire that he does.”, “Our hope is that Jim will arrive safely,” means, “We don’t know if he will or not, but that is our desire.”, “A good tailwind is our only hope of arriving on time,” means, “A good tailwind would bring us to our desired goal, but we can’t be sure we will get one.”. Now let us go to the Scripture to see where I get this understanding of biblical hope. The children might say, “I hope daddy gets home early tonight so we can play kickball after supper before his meeting.” In other words, they desire for him to get home early so that they can experience this good thing, namely, playing together after supper. We begin today with the most basic question of all: What is hope? 91% of women pray, as do 85% of men. It is also the “conviction of things not seen,” and some of these are not future. It’s our only hope. And we desire each one of you to show the same earnestness in realizing the full assurance of hope until the end, so that you may not be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises. Do unto others as God has done unto you. None of us can compete with the sex symbols of our day. And whenever hope rests on the word of God, it can be called faith. Satan does not create sexual desire. My prayer is that as we focus our attention on our Christian hope over the next sixteen weeks, God will fill your reservoir to overflowing, and that deep down in the Hoover Dam of your soul the great hydro-electric generators of joy and love and boldness and endurance will churn with new power for the glory of God. One of the questions she asked was something like this: “What are some of your feelings when you forgive someone?” One of my first thoughts was that I have to have the feeling of hope in order to forgive instead of retaliating. It is clear from this text that good sexual relations in marriage are intended as a dam against the flood of adultery. . Hope is the desire for something good in the future. And the main thing I want to do this morning is show you from Scripture that biblical hope is not just a desire for something good in the future, but rather, biblical hope is a confident expectation and desire for something good in the future. Satan does not create sexual desire; he uses it—or more accurately, he abuses it. what? This same truth holds in all the areas of our lives: the stronger our desire for some satisfaction, the more vulnerable we are to being deceived about what is right and wrong in the way we try to satisfy that desire. But if hope is faith in the future tense, then we can see more clearly that hope, too, is a strong confidence and not just wishful thinking. For the wife does not rule over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not rule over his own body, but the wife does. Why, then, do we have such strong confidence that they will not happen?