What is so serious about sexual sin?

This last week has been stacked. Trying to clear up after the Ultimate Event always is a bit mad but everything put to bed almost. Start the planning for 2008.

Then straight into preaching the latest message in our current Sunday series at church - We've got mail. Based on the letters to 7 churches from Jesus at the start of the last book in the Bible, Revelation.

My task was a church at Thyatira. Some great things going on there but they had a serious problem with a false prophet who were leading the people to sin - particularly sexual sin. It seems that the leaders let her continue unabated and even forgave her.

Maybe it was because it was the easy way out for them. There was a need to belong to a Union in that town to be able to work. No union no work. However being part of a union had serious consequences - it meant idol worship, idol rituals and all sorts of sexual practices.

This presented the opportunity to talk about Sex in church. I have never heard anyone speak about Sex in church apart from my old pastor Roger Blackmore in a youth meeting many years ago. I was quite nervous about the whole thing but knew that we had to talk about it. Why well look at these statistics from Tim Stevens in Leading Smart:

# 12 percent of all Web sites are porn.
# 25 percent of all search engine requests are for porn.
# 35 percent of all Internet downloads are pornographic.
# Every second, 28,258 Internet users are viewing porn.
# 89 percent of porn is created in the U.S.
# $2.84 billion in revenue was generated from U.S. porn sites in 2006.
# 70 percent of the Internet porn traffic occurs during the nine to five workday.
# 260 new porn sites go online daily.

Somebody is speaking so its time the church spoke up.

It really seemed to touch peoples lives. I would have to say I have had more feedback from people on that message than any other I have given. I am so glad that we have actually started to talk about serious life issues in church.