A quick warning, for parents, I’m going to talk pretty frankly about sex today. Its stuff I’ve talked about with my sons since they were about 6-7 years old, but just wanted to give you the heads up. 

And, by the way, whatever age your kid is, if you’ve made the mistake of giving them unrestricted access to internet, definitely don’t take them out of here. They need to hear this and you need to go home and talk about it TODAY. 

It’s Friday night. You’re gonna watch a movie. You pull up Netflix. Now, you must choose. Documentary. Thriller. Critically acclaimed. Romantic Comedy. TV Drama. TV ACTION. TV documentary. International Movie. Sports. War.
Then, an hour later...you still haven’t chosen a movie...so you just...chill. 

Or how bout this? Your vacuum breaks. So you get on Amazon. and type “Vacuum”. Immediately 37,000 pictures of different vacuums appear before your eyes. You click. You read reviews. You read more reviews. You read reviews on the reviews. But you can’t find a vacuum without some major flaws. So you keep searching. Because you don’t want commit that much money to something that might break. So ...you just chill. 

Or, you are headed out on a date. You search for a place to eat on Yelp. Hours later, because you just aren’t sure anything looks good enough...you find yourself at Applebees’...Just chillin in the neighborhood with those farm-to-table mozzarella sticks. 

Or maybe this one hits home. Except this time, it’s not movies. It’s not Vacuums ,and it’s not restaurants. With Tinder, it’s people. 

Tinder is a dating app that’s used to help you quickly sort through other Tinder users in your area to decide whether or not you want to go on a date with them. 

Here’s how it works. A picture pops on your phone of a person in your area with a few details about them, and you, in a moment, decide whether or not you like them based mainly on how they look in the picture. If you swipe the picture left, that person won’t receive a notification, there won’t be an awkward encounter. They won’t even know you’ve rejected them. Or you can swipe a picture to the right and then, if that other person also swipes you right, you can send a message and set up a date. 

Now, listen very carefully to these next 2 statements because I don’t want to lose you before I really get to the good stuff. 

1) This sermon, just like this series, is not a condemnation of technology. You may very well have met your have met your spouse on an online dating site, or even through Tinder and I think that’s great. This sermon is about wisely navigating technology to the glory of God, not throwing it away altogether. So don’t waste your time defending an app: listen, think, and pray. 

2) If you are checked out because you are happily married and don’t think this really applies to you...this sermon is about way more than just dating. Its about an entire mindset that Apps like Tinder are developing in all of us. And ultimately, as always, its about your relationship with God and with others, so stay with me. 

In a recent article titled “The Tinderization of Feeling”, the authors summed up the danger of the Tinder app and the mindset its creating like this. 

“Tinder’s binary mechanisms (meaning the either/or, yes/no, swipe left/right decision making) can be a template for a whole way of life in which everything is an option and processing beats choosing.” 

In other words, with Tinder, with Netflix, with Amazon, with Yelp, honestly, with the entire Internet, we are losing the ability and the desire to commit to something...because in committing we are afraid we are going miss out on a better option, a better movie, a better vacuum, a better meal, a better party, ...or better spouse....so instead of committing to something, or even making a choice and being satisfied with it...we hover in a constant state of processing...all of the options we didn’t choose. 

The internet age has opened the door to EPIC CHOICE. A virtual buffet of whatever you want to indulge in. The problem is because of the ever-lingering possibility of something better we never learn to delight in what we have. Technology is always whispering, “Don’t commit!” There’s something better. 

So, we end up just scrolling through our options. Watching a movie, I’m 10 minutes in and looking for a better movie based on the Rotten Tomatoes review. Eating a meal, I’m wondering what the Thai restaurant I turned down would have been like. Vacuuming my floor, I’m not appreciating the fact that I have a vacuum, I’m comparing it to the Dyson I didn’t buy. 

For many people, after the date, sometimes when their date goes to the bathroom during dinner, they pick the phone up to see if they can find someone better. We’re in a vicious cycle. Search. Consume. Dispose. Search. Consume. Dispose. And we’ll keep going as long as the search is easy, the consuming feels good in the moment, and I’m not the one who feels disposed of. 

Today, I want you to not only be able to recognize the danger of Tinderization and its presence in your life. I want to show you the better alternative, the one you’ll never regret. 

Here we go: 

Gen 2:5-9
When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground—then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the LORD God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. 

Gen. 2:15-18; 21-25 

The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” ... So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, 

“This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” 

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. 

Gen 3:1-7
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made. 

He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. 

Today, I want to show you what God calls you to as a human being, and how some of our technology is helping us ignore that calling. 

1) You’re created to cultivate, not chill with your choices. 

Every elementary school kid over the last 100 years has been asked this one question. Let’s see you if you guys know the answer. “If a genie gave you ONE WISH, what would you wish for?” UNLIMITED WISHES. Isn’t it always better to have unlimited choices? Why should you tie your self down to ONE THING when you could have EVERYTHING? Why order just one dish when you could have an all you can eat buffet? Why commit to one woman for the rest of your life when you could sleep with so many different women? Why limit yourself by having children when you could travel the world and have so many different experiences? 

Lets start by looking at this account in Genesis 2 to see what God created us to DO and then we’ll work from there. If you read the account of creation in Genesis 1, you’ll notice that as God creates the world, he moves from Chaos to order. Then in Genesis 2, which is like a zoomed in look at creation that centers on the creation of humans, we get this inside look at the most ordered, most perfect place that God created. This Garden of Eden. 

Look again at how its described. The man and, eventually, the woman are in this garden that has both stunning beauty, and delicious food. And look at their task. In Genesis 2, we get their task in the Garden, it says God put them there to work and Keep it. 

One of the ideas behind that word “work” is the word “cultivate” To cultivate means help something grow. It’s to keep up an environment that is conducive to flourishing. 

So the task of the man and the woman who is given as a helper to the man, on one hand, is to enjoy this garden while they contribute to its flourishing. That's the immediate task.
But, notice in Genesis 1, there is a bigger task. You see in verse 28? They aren’t just given a local task in the garden, they are given a role in a global mission, to be fruitful, to multiply, and to FILL THE EARTH and subdue it. 

Now, think about this for a second. God, right off the bat has put a naked man and a naked woman, with no shame, nothing to hide, in a beautiful and fruitful garden, with an ultimate goal, all in the context of having a close personal relationship with God. 

He has created a template in the garden and then told them essentially, to start having babies that will go out into all the earth and move all of the untamed wilderness outside the garden from chaos to order. Kind of like he did when he created the world from nothing. 

Now, in order to do this, the man and the woman are going to have to start somewhere. If it was me, I know exactly where I’d start. I’d get busy on that filling the earth thing, but Eve apparently has a headache and so she decides to get something to eat. 

ANYWAY.... My point is the man and the woman have everything they need, they just have to choose what they are going to do.Do you want to work on starting a fire? Do you want to make a plow, a canoe, a cool hut? Do you want to have some babies and plant a new garden on the West Side of Eden. 

They have unlimited options, so many ways to obey God’s command to create culture with him but they still have to commit to DOING SOMETHING. Instead, they just chill. 

Here’s what I mean by that. Everything that happens before Adam and Eve take a bite of the forbidden fruit is all about their passivity. Its all about them “just chilling”. Remember, their job is to and actively GO OUT into the fields outside of the garden to make the world like the garden. To bring chaos into order. They have a job to protect the garden. 

Instead the untamed snake comes into the garden from the field to bring order into chaos. The man and woman were supposed to actively have dominion over the creatures, while they obeyed God and now they are passively obeying a creature while they try to put God under their feet. 

See, they are keeping their options open. They want to see if there is something better than what God has offered them. 

Do you see the insanity of this? God has offered them EVERYTHING THE HUMAN HEART COULD WANT. Perfection in a garden, intimate relationship with each other, and an active mission that allows them to image God in their work. THEY JUST HAVE TO CHOOSE TO DO IT. They just have to commit to one of a million ways to fulfill God’s call on their life. 

But they see the serpent coming and think, “Maybe, there’s something better.” At that point, all the serpent needs is an interesting conspiracy theory...and he’s real good at that. 

Now lets talk about this in our context. We’re not in a perfect garden but we are surrounded by thousands of options that market themselves as the key to get back into Eden. 

From movies, to vacuums, to hamburgers, to cars, in every medium, Television, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, there is someone promising you “the good life”. If you could just taste this, if you would just do this, drive this, use this, you’d find the peace, the happiness, the comfort, the purpose you’re looking for. 

And in the middle of all those promises of a better life. We are paralyzed. Afraid to commit. Because as soon as you spend the money, invest the time, you’ve just cut off all your options and maybe doomed yourself to a lifetime of dissatisfaction. 

Isn’t that what the serpent said? The serpent took all of the wonderful options God had given the man and woman to flourish and live in peace, to worship and obey him and simplified them all down to a category of “God just doesn’t want you to be happy” and then he offered them Godhood. He offered them the chance to have unlimited wishes. Make your own rules. Be your own Gods. 

Our personal technology is constantly offering you a better life. A better mate. A better career. A better party. A better major. A better way to parent. A better book. And it’s keeping us from ever fully committing ourselves to anything. 

Let me give you a couple of examples. One, is the Facebook maybe. Ever get an invitation to an event on Facebook? If you invite 100 people, 98 people are going to respond “Maybe”. Why? Because they want to keep their options open. They don’t want to commit to your party, or get together, or cookout, or girls night, or guys night because once they commit, if something they think is better comes along, they’ll be stuck. 

College students. It’s what 75% of the people are doing at the parties you go to. They are looking at their phones, scrolling through pictures of other parties, texting friends to see if they are doing something better so even when you commit to showing up somewhere, you rarely enjoy it because you spend the whole time trying to figure out if you should be somewhere else. 

You know what the christianized version of this is? Stressing over God’s will for your life. See, somehow you think God’s will is the secret thing he’s hidden somewhere and you have to try to find it to be happy. And if you don’t discover it, you’ll be relegated to some secondary career, or spouse, or life in the suburbs (God forbid) where you never really make a difference in the world, you just kind of exist. 

I see so many millennials never committing to a church, or a school, or a career, or a marriage because they are afraid of losing all their other options. But you don’t need more options. You need to commit. To give yourself to something You KNOW GOD wants you to do, to create culture that glorifies him and go at it knowing he is with you every step of the way. God didn’t make you to work FOR HIM. He wants you to work WITH HIM. 

He isn’t worried about you choosing the wrong job...he’s concerned about you choosing the wrong god. 

See, Tinder isn’t just an APP, it's a entirely new way of life. In the words of the article I quoted earlier “The Tinderization of Everything lures you into Epic Chill, the point of constant ignore.” 

To remain “Chill” is to ignore commitment in the face of SO MANY GOOD OPTIONS. It is to strive to make the perfect choice by never making a choice at all, but when you decide not to decide to just chill you are denying the fact that God has created you to cultivate. To bring chaos into order...to work to make the world a place where beauty and truth and love can flourish in the context of a close relationship with God. 

So you may be asking, what’s wrong with chill, Trev? Doesn’t seem like chill folks are doing much harm, right? Well, that’s because you may not have yet thought through what where Epic Chill ends up. See you either, 

2) Commit to cultivate or you’re just a consumer. 

Here’s the ironic thing about the Consumer culture we live in. The things that offer you salvation, hope, promise, a feeling of being new...the things that are advertised to you as the way to find “the good life”...in 2 weeks, 6 months, a year...they’re in your garage gathering dust. Then your selling them in a yard sale. 

Take a walk through the mall. Look in the windows. You’ll see mannequins dressed in the clothes that promise they are going to change the way people look at you. But give it a month, you’ll find those same clothes buried in the back on a clearance rack. 

When you run from a commitment to cultivate, when you decide to chill, you end up just consuming. You aren’t contributing to the world, you aren’t creating a space for people grow and flourish, instead, you just view everything, including people, as things for you to consume. 

And you’ll notice a very frustrating pattern develops. You’ll obsessively search for the perfect life, the perfect spouse, the perfect car, the perfect wardrobe, then you’ll consume. But when it doesn’t live up to your expectations...you’ll leave. You’ll divorce, you’ll trade it in, throw it away...you’ll go shopping...and the search starts all over again. 

Here’s the pattern. Search. Consume. Dispose. Search. Consume. Dispose. 

I love the way Jonathan Grant captures the irony of Consumerism in his book “Divine Sex” which is a fantastic book. 

“We are trained by consumer culture to desire things but also to remain aloof from the very products and services that promise fulfillment. continually seek the option that offers most features at lowest cost.” - Jonathan Grant, Divine Sex 

In other words, once you’ve been trained by a consumer culture, once you get used to the pattern, Search. Consume. Dispose. You learn to never really attach to anything, even if you think it's the best thing in the world for you, because you expect its going to disappoint and you’ll have to go looking for something else. 

So we just kind of chill in the middle. We go halfway. We consume and dispose. We binge and purge, and the great tragedy, is our technology is helping us do this with people on a whole new level. 

Lets just look at dating, marriage, sex and relationships for example. Online dating sites and apps like Tinder, though they can be used well, offer you a world of options at your fingertips. Many folks who use them, don’t delete their profiles once they begin dating because they want to keep their options open in case it doesn’t work out. 

But just that act in itself keeps you from committing. It keeps you from attaching, because well, there might be someone better out there. Listen very carefully. You do not have a soul mate. There is no “Special One” for you to marry, and your obsessing to find him/her is the very thing that maybe keeping you from finding someone at all. 

It very well could be you are trapped in a “Search—Consume—Dispose” cycle, never committing, never attaching, and therefore, in a constant state of chilling. People ask me sometimes, “How did you know Keva was the one.” And I say, “She said I do.” 

I’m about to say the most un-romantic anti-valentine’s day statement you’ve ever heard. I could have married any one of a thousand different women...and still lived a life that glorified God. My wife could have married any one of a thousand different men and still been very happily married. What made us “soul mates” was not the search. It was the promise. The commitment. 

Don’t get me wrong. I’m ecstatic that I’m married to her but it’s not because I lucked out. It’s because we committed to each other, and we did the hard work of cultivating a relationship and a family and we did it all, well most of it, while walking closely with the LORD. Commitment, promise, is what made it sweet. Not sexual compatibility or any other lie you are being sold as the ingredients to happiness. Take a look at the consumer mindset happening right here in the Garden. 

Did you notice that the serpent offers the woman the good life, but he recasts everything in consumer terms? The serpent says, ‘You can be like God’...in other words...you can call the shots for yourself...you can have what God has. Then when the woman evaluates the tree and the fruit, she sees it entirely through a superficial consumer’s eyes. It looks good to eat, its nice to look at sure I’ll take a bite. 

But see these are already things God had given to the man and woman. They were already made in God’s image to look like him in the way that cultivated and created. They were already given thousands of beautiful trees with good food that would fuel them to go out and cultivate. Everything the serpent offered, God had already given them. God offered it in the spirit of commitment and cultivation. But the serpents temptation was to offer the same thing through a self-centered consumer’s lens. Eat up, get your fill, consume. You do you. The serpent promised that consumption would bring the good life. But it didn’t. It brought a curse. 

Do you know what the curse was? It was futility. It was purposelessness. It was pain. It was death. It was where consumption always ends up. Disposal. Junkyard. Trashcan. Just to wake up on Monday and start the search all over again. 

Big Promise!!!! Epic Letdown. 

Sounds kind of like the way we market sex. On one hand, we talk about sex like you can’t live without it. Like it's the most important thing in the world and you are barely a person if you aren’t doing it...often. 

On the other hand, it’s no big deal. You can do it whenever, with whoever you want, it’s just instinct. It's the classic consumer line “BUY THIS DO THIS ITS AMAZING...but it doesn’t really mean anything” 

But listen, if sex is just a thing to be consumed, if romantic relationships are just things you cycle in and out of until you finally feel like settling down and meanwhile, YOU GOT NEEDS THAT HAVE TO BE MET 

If sex is not that big of a deal, answer these questions for me. 

If sex is just physical, why is rape so much more harmful to a woman than physical abuse alone? Women will report physical abuse much more often than they will rape. 

Why is it that when a child is sexually abused, when they are an adult and connect the dots, it is so difficult to shake off? 

Why is adultery so devastating to a relationship?
Why is it that men with the deepest sexual issues often had uninvolved or missing 

fathers?

Why is it that most people’s greatest regrets are usually sexual? 

When somebody comes to me and says, “Pastor, I have to tell you something I have never told anybody else...” It’s almost always something sexual. 

Everything in just in our human experience tells us that sex is not just physical. That its much deeper than that. 

See, God gave sex as an exclamation point to go on the end of a sentence that is expressing deep, unwavering commitment. The Cycle that God intends for your romantic relationship is not Search, Consume, Dispose. It’s Commit, Cultivate, Consummate. 

First you promise. You give yourself completely to a person in every way. Financially, legally, emotionally, mentally...that’s what marriage is. 

Then, you cultivate. You do the hard work of learning how to love and serve the other person. And its very hard work. Lots of conflict...that cannot be avoided with a swipe to the left, because you have already made a promise. So you press on together not believing the lie that there is someone else out there to make you happy. 

Then you consummate. Instead of consuming, you consummate.
Do you know what that word means? It means to complete. To finish. To make perfect. 

We often think of this word in terms of a wedding night...where a couple consummates their marriage vows in a sexual union. But obviously, well, I hope obviously, that’s not the only time a married couple is supposed to have sex. 

See, as you continue cultivating a place of safety and flourishing for each other in your marriage, sex becomes the way you re-commit to each other. It becomes the way you not only enjoy one another, but you make all those promises over again. 

Sex, both literally and figuratively, is the way you stand naked in front of each other, entrusting your whole lives to one another and eventually bearing fruit. Having children. 

But we’ve turned into consumers. Now sex isn’t an exclamation point on the end of a sentence of commitment...it’s now everywhere. It accompanies hamburger and car advertisements. It's the way your are baited into opening up an article. It’s not a way we serve another person we are totally committed to, it's a way we fulfill our personal needs. 

So you look at porn, consuming the women and men who are barely human to you because they are just actors on a screen. But what you don’t see is the abuse and devaluing going on behind the camera. You don’t think about the fact that you are feeding the sex-slave trade, that women are being abducted and forced to perform because you need to consume. 

You hook up with the person you met on Tinder, and you are completely willing to have sex with them, but you aren’t so sure you’re ready to settle down. 

People are disposable to you. So You search. Consume. And dispose....with a thousand options still lined up waiting to serve you. 

But you are called to Commit. Cultivate. Consummate. 

And maybe, today you’re finally starting to see that you aren’t only wrecking your own life, but you’ve left a trail of disposable people that you’ve swiped left And you don’t know what to do next. 

Well, you need to know, 

3) Jesus made a way for you to be naked and unashamed. 

Here’s the truth about Tinder and our culture of Epic Chill. We’re afraid to make choices, to commit ourselves to another person, to do the hard work of cultivating because we’re afraid that another option would have been better. That one more swipe to the left and you would have uncovered your soul mate. But, there’s another side to that. 

Tinder has also allowed us to mute the pain of rejection. You never know if you’ve been swiped left, and there’s the irony of our Tinder hearts. We want find someone that’s perfect, but we don’t want to be rejected for our own imperfections. While we search and consume, we want to someone to commit and cultivate our hearts. Our deepest fear is that someone will dispose of us. That if someone really sees who we are, they will reject us. Swipe left. Do you know what your heart is looking for? You want to be naked and unashamed. The most perfect, whole, complete, state of humanity is found in Genesis 2:24-25. 

The man and his wife were naked and unashamed. It doesn’t mean that they had a great Tinder profile pic. It’s not talking about a porn-star body. That’s all superficial. This is deeper. It means they were completely known by God. Nothing hidden. Nothing covered. No spin. No camera angle. No touch ups. All the way down to their soul, they were KNOWN. Intimately, Totally Known. 

That’s what it means to be naked. 

Yet, at the same time, they were unashamed. They were not rejected. No one was consuming and disposing of them. They were loved, accepted. Wanted. 

That’s what it means to be Unashamed. Fully known, Fully loved. 

In fact, that's what marriage is all about. You see it in verse 24. Someone commits themselves to you in love, despite all of your flaws, because they have a vision of what God wants to do with you, and they promise themselves to being a tool in God’s cultivation and consummation of you...finishing the work he started. 

But we fear that when we are seen for who we really are, we’ll be rejected. For our flaws, for our sins, for the foolishness of falling for the serpents lie, that if we just try to keep our options open, if we just consume a little more, just click on more link, swipe one more time, we’ll finally find the love we’re looking for. 

But it always ends in our covering up. In our shame. And so, just like Adam & Eve, we hide from each other...but even worse we hide from God. It doesn't work. 

Because God came searching for Adam and Eve but he didn’t do it to consume and dispose of them. He came looking for them in the garden to make them a promise. To commit to them. 

In Genesis 3:15 in the middle of the curse of death and despair that came into the world because of the Man & Woman’s sin, God doesn’t reject them...he makes them a promise. 

He says to the serpent, “The woman will bear fruit. In this marriage, there will be a son. And you will strike him, hurt him, but you will not finish him. Instead, when you bite him... He will crush your head.” 

Can you imagine? They had just rejected God, now they cowered in shame, but instead of disposing of them, God committed to them. God made good on this promise thousands of years later, When Jesus Christ hung on a cross, naked and shamed. Jesus, God himself in the flesh, was taking all of your shaming and dying for it, to take it away from you. He was dying for his bride, the church. But remember, it was only a bite on the heel. 

On the third day, he resurrected, proving that the serpents head was crushed. That all the shame and condemnation that the Serpent invited us into, was done away with. 

And now, because of Jesus, God looks at us, and he doesn’t reject us, he sees us, all of us, everything ugly, totally naked, and he still loves us. In fact, his love has becoming our covering. And because he’s loved this much, we can be sure that a consummation will happen. One day, Christ is going to return. And there will be a wedding feast. It's the consummation of all things. The finishing. The final step in God moving Chaos to Order. 

Where peace, and wholeness, PERFECTION...will return, but until then, as we wait, he’s cultivating us. His Spirit, his love, his grace, his mercy...is changing us. Moving us individually from Chaos to Order. Though we’re still broken, when we look at the way he’s forgiven us, the way he’s covered us, the way he loves us, we commit to loving others, we before they do anything for us. We risk being rejected, because we’ve already got the acceptance of the only one that matters. 

So what are you afraid of? Jesus IS the refuge of your weary soul. The one that’s tired of searching for a soul mate. Jesus IS THE way for you to be fully known and fully loved...He’s committed to you. Will you commit to him?