Sex, Lust and Adultery

Jesus contrasts externally focused righteousness, not committing adultery, with inner righteousness, not lusting. Lust is a sustained, intentional reduction of another person to an object for your consumption. It would be worth self-mutilation to escape this soul crushing sin… but that won’t work. It requires Jesus’ righteousness, and the Holy Spirit producing the fruits of righteousness in us. Confession helps us crucify the practice and habits of lust. Love for others is the ultimate antidote to lust.

Intro - Straight Into It

Let’s talk about sex, lust, and pornography, shall we? And a little tiny bit self-mutilation.

I’m sorry, did I need a softer intro than that? Kind of warm up to it.

I don’t think so, you should have seen the

Aren’t you glad you came this week?

Recap

Jesus gives two powerful illustrations of love for our brother, free from anger and scorn. These are not new unrealistic laws for the believer. Instead they indicate the incredible importance of love in the Kingdom... and only possible as God frees us from self-righteous anger and contempt.

Empowered by the Holy Spirit, you have a new super power. You have the power of reconciliation. The inhuman power to set aside your own pride, your own anger, your own contempt and make peace possible.

Jesus begins with the cause of so much strife in human relationships, on the small personal scale and on the large global scale.

Anger and contempt.

So much of what we talked about last week, the brutal mess in Israel… we see anger and contempt run amok and being used on a massive scale by the devil.

Now Jesus confronts a second MAJOR cause of sin and strife among us.

Sex

That’s a bold slide right there.

I read this ridiculous thing in a “Christian” subreddit. “Jesus had almost nothing to say about sex and sexuality.”

That’s… ridiculous. What he does have to say here is definitive and all encompassing.

Matthew 5:27 ESV

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’

From the sixth command, don’t murder, to the seventh. No adultery. Literally that is a married person having sex with someone besides their spouse.

In Jesus’ day, this was a universally excepted moral standard. Even the Greek philosophers like Aristotle held that adultery was ALWAYS wrong, inherently, morally.

No such universal agreement today. “Anything between consenting adults” is the new moral sexual ethic. More about that later, but at this point, everyone in his audience is nodding along.

But… Jesus continues the pattern of contrasting a greater righteousness, deeper than the externally focused righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees that adhered to the outward limits of the law itself… an inward righteousness that deals with the heart.

Matthew 5:28 ESV

But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

Like the one before, at first glance, we read this and think “this is an impossible standard.” Who hasn’t experienced some form of sexual attraction, and everyone has at least at some point not been married, so everyone has inherent biological impulses and at some level experiences sexual attraction. Nothing we can do.

Is that what Jesus is saying?

In fact, Hebrews tells us that Jesus was tempted in every way we are… he was a teenager at one point, went through puberty,, now a young 30 year old man… if he was tempted in “every” way wouldn’t that include sexual temptation? And can one be tempted without sinning?

What is Jesus saying here?

Pay attention to the phrasing here, ESV does a great job here.

The phrase “with lust” uses a preposition “pros” and an infinitive verb, like we would say “to run”… so together that construction is “with to run.” or better in English, “in order to run.”

So here, “with to lust” is “for the purpose of lusting.”

That is, this is not the passing look, the involuntary arousal, the flash of attraction, the acknowledgement that someone is beautiful and even sparks desire.

Like the first spark or flash of anger, that appears to be natural. It is possible to see and be aware that a woman is beautiful and not sin. The Song of Solomon is a celebration of beauty and desire enshrined in Scripture, lover to the beloved.

It is looking, and that is again the present participle, ongoing sustained action… and with the purpose, with the intention of lust.

So… what is lust?

It is “desire” or “craving.” To “covet.”

It’s primary uses is for food and for sex. That says something right there.

When I want food, I want to own it, I want to consume it, and I will dispose of what is left after I am done. That is a natural and appropriate response to food. And we see this word used of people who are “greatly hungry” all over the NT. Not sinful.

That same approach, applied now to a human being… that’s demonic.

Lust reduces the person to an object of desire, a target for consumption.

We sometimes use this word, kind of jokingly in marriage, to “lust” for one’s wife. We mean great sexual desire, a surge of attraction. If that’s what it is, that is a beautiful thing in marriage, to be nurtured and encouraged.

But lust can happen in marriage to, and where it is this, reducing the person to an object of desire, a target for consumption… that’s still deeply wrong.

Lust is a sustained, intentional reduction of another person to an object for your consumption. Yes, that is sinful. Shocking.

It is ALWAYS harmful. Sometimes to the person you are looking at. This is obvious and illegal in the case of sexual harassment. This is subtler, but that link you clicked contributes to the economic forces that drive the sex-entertainment and advertisement machine… and that leads to further sexual exploitation.

But lust ALWAYS harms you. You are intentionally practicing seeing others as objects for consumption. That is directly counter to seeing, knowing, and truly loving others.

How To Lust 101

Okay, so how do we do this? You laugh… because you already know how. But let’s get super clear.

If you are going to pornhub.com, or any url with the word “porn” in it… this is what you are doing. You are going with intention of objectifying other human beings for your own pleasure. That one’s easy.

Jesus was not unaware of pornography, some of the oldest records and drawings we have are pornographic. As long as humans have been sinful, they have excelled at objectifying and sexualizing one another for their pleasure. For their consumption.

But, this doesn’t stop at things that are obviously and explicitly pornographic. Pornography is in the eye of the beholder.

Soapbox: if you are scrolling through Instagram, going thumbs up or thumbs down based on attraction, this is lust repetition training. Tinder, swipe left, swipe right… that is intentional power training in developing the “lust” muscle. Quick, size up people as sexual objects as fast as you can, do it often and you’ll be rewarded. That muscle carries into every other human relationship you have: you are training yourself to see people as sexual objects first.

But we aren’t done.

If you are choosing that particular show on Netflix… or HBO… because you want to watch so and so dance around… that’s lust. The amount of on-screen sex or nudity is actually irrelevant. The rating is irrelevant… though both of those things are useful warnings ahead of time. But the sin is in your heart… and God sees your heart.

He isn’t fooled, he knows why you’re reading that particular book again, or that particular author again. And yes, you can lust after book characters too.

Walking down the street… why are you looking? What are you looking for?

The phrase I heard and never forgot “It’s the 2nd look that gets you in trouble.” (So make the first look a good one). That’s terrible.

Job, a righteous man before God, said this about his strategy:

Job 31:1–2 ESV

“I have made a covenant with my eyes; how then could I gaze at a virgin? What would be my portion from God above and my heritage from the Almighty on high?

We used to call that “bouncing the eyes.” I see something that does or might spur sexual attraction in me… look away. Don’t prolong the look, don’t take the second look.

The truth is it is in the intent. As Jesus says, it is in the heart.

But so very often we do the exact opposite. Our “covenant with the eyes” is searching and seeking opportunities to lust, to feed and stoke desire, ultimately for our own pleasure. Consumption.

So… how many people have you committed adultery with?

How do we fix this?

Gospel of Sin Management

Let’s try one of my favorites, the gospel of sin management.

Matthew 5:29–30 ESV

If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.

The message in “purity culture” I heard growing up:

Do absolutely anything and everything you can do to keep yourselves pure!!!

Such that we considered things like this. Like obviously Jesus is being extreme… but how extreme?

Cut off your arms so you can’t murder, cut off your legs so you can’t chase women, cut off your parts so you can’t commit adultery… and make it into heaven a blind and deaf stump but righteous.

Origen

Someone had to try this, right? The story goes that Origen, a church father, struggled with lust towards his students. He was tutoring them, and was honest with the things he was feeling… and wanted freedom from that.

So… he castrated himself. Cut e’ry’thing. Off.

Did this solve his lust? “NO!” he writes with great regret. He still lusted, just he was also injured for life now.

And, perhaps he should have known, that is Jesus’ actual point, here. It is absolutely better to lose body parts than to sin… but that doesn’t help.

His first hearers knew that Jesus was using a common literary device here, reductio ad absurd-um, show how ridiculous the Pharisitical legalism is by pushing it to its extreme. But NONE of his disciples then went and cut off body parts or put out their eyes. Because the point is that it won’t keep you from sin.

It isn’t your eye.

It isn’t your hand causing you to sin.

It is your heart… and who can help with that?

Jesus is teaching a righteousness that surpasses that of the Scribes and Pharisees. The dismembering actually would work according to that externally focused righteousness. Literally cannot technically commit adultery now.

However, it does nothing for the heart.

The only true righteousness is Jesus’ righteousness. His blood has cleansed you, behold you are a new creation, the Holy Spirit in you producing fruits of righteousness.

How do we find freedom from lust? To use, again, Paul’s language: recognize and nurture the fruits of the Holy Spirit and crucify the world of the flesh, recognize them as dead and buried.

Freedom From Lust

First, we recognize that you can be free from lust. I’m not saying you won’t recognize attraction anymore, even sexual attraction, that is something God has worked into the human experience. It has a purpose, it’s been twisted.

But you can be free from indulging lust, free from viewing those around you as sexual objects for your consumption.

God has given us practices, spiritual disciplines, to help us here. Prayer, absolutely, seeking and asking God to change our hearts, to covenant with our eyes, as Job did.

And we are going to go through all the disciplines in detail together in January. Studying them and practicing them together.

But there is one that was absolutely crucial to me as a young man. I was a teenager right as pornography was becoming ubiquitous, easily and freely available on the Internet… and that was a trap for me. That was a cycle of sin… and then shame and guilt… and then escaping back into sin...

The biggest

James 5:16 ESV

Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.

Long before any 12 step program, God knew how this works.

Admitting our sin, and that we can’t fix it.

We need a higher power, turning our lives over to him.

Recognizing the real ourselves and then??? Bringing the real to another human being.

You need the power of God, yes, honesty before Him. And He gave us each other, and commanded us to be honest in confession and accountability with one another.

The power of secret sin and secret shame… shine a light in the darkness. It doesn’t mean standing up here and narrating your lust to everyone, that’s inappropriate, to be honest. But you should look across the room in here, identify someone you trust to show you the love and grace and forgiveness of Christ… and then bring the real.

Confess your sins to one another. Let God use the people in your life to help break those chains and set you free.

Free to what? Free to LOVE!

The Antidote to Lust: Love

If you love someone, you aren’t seeking to reduce them to an object of desire and self-satisfaction. You seek their good, you desire their fulfillment, true and full fulfillment.

This is why God created marriage.

Marriage at its very best, in its ideal, is two people, man and woman, husband and wife, committed in life-long covenant love, fully vulnerable and trustworthy with that vulnerability… and sex and all the associated passions and pleasures of sexuality are an outpouring and multiplying and celebration of that intimacy.

In our brokenness, marriages are a reflection of that, a pale reflection, with glimpses of that ideal and cycles of hard and hurt and trying to find and rebuild that intimacy and trust again and again.

You think you can develop that with more than one person??? False. You can’t pull it off with one. And God knows your limitations better than you. Leave and Cleave, one for one, husband and wife. That’s it.

If you are called to marriage, that is the one place where God created sex to be a part of the relationship.

EVERYWHERE else, in absolutely every other circumstance, without exception, you are called and commanded to LOVE… and sex isn’t part of that. Lust isn’t part of that.

God, let me see with your eyes. Everyone, every person you have ever met are created and crafted in the image of God. They are someone’s daughter, son, grew up with a story, shaped by their environment with their challenges and dreams, failures and wounds, and their very own purpose in the Will of God… and God has been pursuing them to rescue them from sin and darkness.

This isn’t an excuse for getting closer to your crush. You’re struggling with lust for him or her… so you get even closer and try hard to love them with the love of Jesus. Let’s see how close I can get to the line and then complain to God “Why is this sooooo hard?!!”

You don’t lean into temptation as hard as you can and then act surprised when you fall into it. Like an alcoholic should stay out of bars, there is a time and season to simply flee from temptation. That’s appropriate.

I had books as a teenager, I just ripped the pages out. Those pages “caused me to stumble.” I threw them away. Then they didn’t. That wasn’t a forever solution, Jesus is the solution, and God producing fruit in my life… but it was wisdom in that season to remove the present temptation.

And then, here’s another spiritual discipline for us… how do I learn to know and love folks as God loves them? Lots of answers here, fellowship, service… but the one at the top of my list: Pray for them.

Not focused on your crush, the most tempting object of your lust probably. That’s hard mode, maybe you’ll get there. Start with your family, your friends, maybe the least attractive person you know. (Why am I getting all these offers to pray for me all of a sudden?)

The purpose is to nurture love and care for them as a person, made in the image of God, beloved by God, and see God work and answer their needs.

No matter how many times we fall, His mercy remains.

May he reverse our “desires” and gives us His eyes to see, His heart to love. To love, first Him, and then His children.