Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast! Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW. This year, we're going to talk about God sets us free to live wisely, beautifully in his world, redeeming all of our relationships. 

As we wrap up this series we’re looking at the Song of Songs (also Song of Solomon)—a whole book of the Bible dedicated to love poetry. The Song speaks about the delight, duties, and dangers of sexual love in this life, and hints at the future satisfaction of all of our longings when we finally see God face to face. In this week’s sermon, we see how God’s loving commands serve to guard, direct and transform our experience of sexual desire. 

Thanks to Dan Allender and Tremper Longman III for their amazing work on this topic! 

Links: 

https://gospelinlife.com/manual-paper/the-gospel-and-sex/

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevin-wax/consent-not-enough/

Quotes: 

“I am sure that unless we are confident that the Scriptures tell the truth about sexuality, about being bodies, about being full of sexual longings and desires, unless it does all this, it is hard to believe that they are true when they speak to the rest of life.” -Steve Garber

“Society tells us, simultaneously, that sex is no big deal and that it’s the most important thing in the universe. Sex is so meaningless that we can have random, casual sex with our next-door neighbor, yet sex is so hugely significant that we can’t possibly live without it.”—Lauren Winner

“To be holy is to be without flaw, stain, or blemish. Evil desires for us to be sexually used and then discarded. It also works to make us feel dirty, fouled, and ruined. God's gift of holiness is the promise that he will clothe us in his most beautiful righteousness so that we are dressed to be stunning and arrayed in his beauty. What God increases in us through the gift of holiness is the desire for our sexuality to be caught up in wonder and joy. We are meant to long for our experience of nakedness and pleasure, to be freed from shame and made holy, good, and innocent … No one is sexually perfect, and our stains, flaws, and failures are used by God to intensify our surprise and wonder and to increase our gratitude for how his perfect love cannot be thwarted by our imperfection.”- Dan Allender

“God loves sex. He conceived, created, and blessed the process by which our bodies know and are known through desire, arousal, foreplay, intercourse, orgasm, and rest.

Sex is meant by Gad to be one of the bridge experiences between earth and heaven. It awakens and intersects our deepest physical and spiritual desires. Sex, like music, fills us simultaneously with notes of an intense immanent bodily pleasure and with the sonorous reverberations of another world that is transcendent and holy.

It is no wonder that the enemy of God is relentlessly committed to fouling both immanent pleasure and transcendent joy. Evil hates sex and is ruthlessly committed to tearing down the bridge between desire and holiness.” - Dan Allender

“We need an embodied experience of grace. God knows we cannot experience reality in our mind, but it must be experienced in our flesh. That is why the word became flesh and dwelt among us.” - Chuck Askew.