Friday, June 20, 2008

Sex and Spirituality

In our series titled Confessions of a Pastor at Good Shepherd, I'm preaching this Sunday and my confession is: "I have to work hard to stay sexually pure." For preparation, I stole ideas from several different books. Mainly Rob Bell's Sex God and Gary Thomas's chapter on sex in his book called Sacred Marriage. I highlyl recommend both books.

The sermon would've looked quite different if I would've read the sex chapters in Richard Foster's Money, Sex and Power before I had written the sermon out. His chapter titled Sex and Spirituality is really what I wanted the sermon to look like. In three chapters, Foster writes a Biblical theology on sex and he does an excellent job. I highly recommend his book as well.

Anyway, I've been amazed at how difficult it is to put the connection between sex and spirituality into words. I'm still praying that God would bring clarity to my understanding and verbage so that the sermon will be clear to those who hear it.

I don't want to give anything away before I preach, so I will write more about the connection after the sermon. I hope many of you will come this Sunday and explore the connection with me.

2 comments:

MJ said...

Rich,
I just wanted let you know that you did a great job today! I know that we didn't laugh exactly like you'd expected at times (@ 10am), but your delivery on such a tough topic(especially at church) was perfect!
Thank you,
Marla & Dennis Frambes

Brenda Emmons said...

Rich,

Great job on a difficult subject as you "took one for the team"! I am sending Bruce over to your house for the week - he has a unique way of turning things to HIS gain!

In Christ,

Brenda (& Bruce)