Casual sex between consenting adults is cool and doesn’t hurt anyone is a phrase one hears frequently from those who practice it, but it hurts, at least it has hurt America in a big way, Pastor Greg Laurie said at a mega crusade in Southern California Saturday night.
“Think of what kind of a world we would live in today if this was not committed, think of how many divorces would have been avoided, think of how many families would still be together, think of how many children would still have a daddy to come home to, and in some cases a mom,” Laurie said at the Harvest Crusade at the Angel Stadium in Anaheim.
“I am not speaking from an ivory tower,” the lead pastor at Harvest Church in Riverside, Calif., told the thousands of people who came to listen to him on the second day of the three-day event that began Friday night.
“I was conceived out of wedlock. My mom, married and divorced seven times with lots of boyfriends in between, had a little fling down a long beach and I was conceived. I was not planned. I was, what you call, an illegitimate child.”
Laurie said thankfully his mom did not abort him. “But I was planned… by God, as is every child.” He added that there could be illegitimate parents, but there were no illegitimate children.
Greg Laurie added that due to sexual immorality America had the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the developed world. “Each year, more than one million teens become pregnant and many of these babies never make it to term. One out of every five abortions is performed on a woman under the age of 20. It doesn’t hurt anyone? What about the baby who is aborted? That’s taking an innocent life.”
That’s not all. What about AIDS? “Do you know AIDS is a leading killer of Americans between the ages of 25 and 44?” he asked. “Twenty five percent of all HIV infections are found in people under the age of 22. Twenty percent of those who have HIV in America don’t know it. There are 236,000 people in America who have the disease and don’t know it… and are spreading it.”
Above all, it is sin, that’s what the Bible says. Adultery and fornication are sin, he stressed. “Adultery is having sex with someone besides your wife. Let’s say you are married and you have sex with someone else, that’s adultery… It’s such a serious sin… it’s in the Ten Commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’”
Sex is not evil, Greg Laurie clarified. “God created sex. It was His idea and there’s a right place for sex, and it’s in a relationship between a man and a woman who have committed themselves to one another in marriage.”
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