Desperate Times, Desperate Measures - The Mortification of Sin

Introduction

Desperate times call for what? Desperate measures. This is a pretty old saying. Does anyone want to take a crack at how old this saying is? Without looking it up, what era do you think it is from, or how old is the saying? This saying originates about the fifth century B.C. making it about 2,500 years old.

The first person to be recorded using in actually wrote it in a book of medical wisdom. The book Aphorisms, written by a man known as the "Father of Medicine," ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, contains the earliest known version of this saying. What Hippocrates wrote was, "For extreme diseases, extreme methods of cure... are most suitable." He shortened this phrase to "Desperate diseases must have desperate remedies."

Over the the centuries, we have taken this saying from the medical field and worded it in a way that can be applied to any desperate situation with the phrase, "Desperate times call for desperate measures." This phrase is meant to reflect that the problem is so unique or so big, that un unconventional approach is necessary. It can also imply that a situation must be solved so quickly and definitely that conventional approaches that would take to long would not be good.

There is a bit of a negative connotation in this phrase, an understanding that caution is thrown to the wind or that the desperate measure may even fail and make things worse, or that there will be a high price to pay even if the desperate measure succeeds.

There is an example of this phrase, Desperate times call for desperate measures, I like to give.

NASA has had some interesting problems and even more interesting solutions to these problems. In 1990, a communications satellite was launched from Cape Canaveral. One of the rockets that launched it did not separate and the satellite was stuck in a low-earth orbit. It was determined that for the time being, the satellite would be left alone.

In 1992, the space shuttle Endeavour was launched with a retrieval arm for the Intelsat 603 satellite. The specially designed arm would grab on to the satellite, bring it into the shuttle's bay to be refitted with a new rocket to get it up to proper orbiting height. The engineers at NASA had come up with this plan and had designed the arm and couplings necessary to attach to the satellite. The astronauts trained and trained for months on this mission, going through hundreds of training runs. They knew how to operate the retrieval arm and knew how to swap out the rockets on the satellite, and on launch day, they were ready to go.

However, when they reached the satellite, the retrieval arm proved to be useless for that operation. The satellite had no attachment points that the arm could grab onto. One of the astronauts came up with a solution: three astronauts would go on an unplanned space walk and captured the satellite with their bare hands. Well, their hands weren't bare, they were in space suits, but you understand. But, it worked!

Keep in mind that they would have been moving around 17,450 miles per hour!

Nowhere in NASA's instruction manuals would you find this to be the proper procedure to recapture a satellite, but the situation was desperate. A lot of money was on the line, for both NASA and the company that owned the satellite. Every day that satellite was not up and running, the company lost money. Had NASA abandoned the mission, they would have wasted a launch that had cost them a lot of money, $94M to be exact.

The measure was risky and dangerous, it was untried, never before had a satellite been captured and brought into the space shuttle bay by hand, and the results were unknowable. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and the three astronauts that participated in that space walk and the pilot of the shuttle were successful in their endeavor.

Recap from part 1 - The Magnitude of Sin

Last week, we began to look at Matthew 5:27-30. We looked at Jesus' views on adultery vs. how the Pharisees viewed adultery. They considered only the act, but Jesus considered the heart, the desires, the covetousness that leads to adultery to be a sinful action. We looked at passages in both the Old Testament and the New that talk about the spirit of the commandment that says, "Thou shalt not commit adultery."

Again, we remember that the rest of chapter 5 is an exposition of the difference between what the Pharisees taught and what Jesus was teaching. The Pharisees taught, "Follow the letter of the law, and all will be well," but Jesus taught, "Following the letter of the law is only good if we are observing the spirit of the law."

Last week we started to dive into the doctrine of sin. We saw that understanding the Bible's teaching on sin is something that is absolutely important to understanding the Old and New Testaments and also to understanding the doctrine of salvation.

Because of sin and how it corrupts everything, we went on to study see something we call the "Doctrine of Regeneration." This is the teaching that the Bible gives that says that to be saved, to be free from sin and the curse of sin, man must be born again, made into a new creature. Upon salvation, the Bile teaches us that we have a new nature and a new heart given to us.

We are washed and regenerated by the blood of Jesus that was shed when He died on the cross to pay for our sins.

We noted also, very importantly, that salvation, being born again, is not a process, it is an occurrence. It happens the moment a person that recognizes their sinful state and their inability to save themselves places their trust in Jesus as the Son of God and asks Him to forgive them and save them. This is receiving Jesus. And, as the Bible says, as many as receive Him, he gives them the power to be called the sons of God.

We then took a look at the magnitude of God's love for us as we considered the doctrine of sin. This understanding of the doctrine of sin helps us to understand the profound love of God toward us.

We studied a portion of Scripture in Luke 7 where Jesus goes to eat with a Pharisee. This man denies Jesus all the common courtesies of the day as he has no real regard for who Jesus is. However, a woman, a sinful woman, a woman who was known in that town to just be an awful and morally degenerate person, comes to Jesus and pours out the most expensive thing she owns, which was itself a guarantee of her future, she weeps and covers Jesus' feet with tears, and wipes Jesus' feet with the hairs on her head.

This woman knew that Jesus was the Messiah. She knew, that despite all her sin, He was the only one that could forgive her. Simon the Pharisee, however, does not think he is a sinner. He views himself as being perfect according to the law of Moses, for as a Pharisee, he follows the letter of the law. But as a Pharisee, he has missed the most important aspect of the spirit of the law.

Jesus tells a short parable to illustrate the condition of the woman and the Pharisee, and tells Simon that the reason this woman loves so much is that she knows that she has been forgiven so much. The takeaway, that we never know if Simon ever grasped or not, was that Simon was in need of the same forgiveness, but he never realized it.

This brought us to analyzing a verse in James 2:10 For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all. If all my life I were to keep all the commandments and break just one of them, I become guilty and liable for ALL of them.

I think we often forget the magnitude of our sins. We get sucked into the trap of comparing ourselves with others. "Well, I have never beat my wife or kids, so I'm not as bad as my neighbor. I've never drank so much that I passed out and couldn't remember the events of the weekend, so I'm not as bad as my friend. I've never done drugs so I'm not as bad as the people living on the street, selling their bodies for another hit of their drug of choice."

We get sucked into that mentality as Christians sometimes, and we forget that our eternal soul, if it were not for Jesus Christ, would still be on the same road to the same lake of fire that those without Jesus are on!

When we understand the MAGNITUDE of our sin, then we can begin to comprehend the magnitude of God's love for us, which will help us to then love God back with all of our heart, soul, and might.

So what should we do about the pervasiveness of sin and its magnitude in our lives as Christians (because we still struggle with sin even though we are saved)?

Well I'm glad you asked. We find that in of our passage today.

Matthew 5:29-30 And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. 30 And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.

The Mortification of Sin

There is a famous book by the 17th century minister titled Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers. I take the name of this sermon from the title of his book, which he takes from the passage of scripture found in Romans 8:13 ...but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.

To mortify means "to put to death." Jesus talks about how we should deal with sin in our lives. As we mentioned at the beginning of the sermon,about 450 years before Jesus was born, Hippocrates coined the phrase which has evolved into the well known phrase, "desperate times call for desperate measures.

Jesus, in the passage of Matthew we just read, definitely calls for desperate measures. But what exactly does it mean that "if your right eye offends you, pluck it out; and, if your right hand offends you, cut it off: for it is more profitable for the that one of your members should perish than the whole body be cast into hell"?

We have to understand context. Remember that we learned of the Pharisees that they sought to justify themselves before men. One of the ways that they would justify sin in themselves was to blame it on God. It's crazy to blame sin in our lives of God, right. But people do it all the time, and perhaps you have been guilty of it as well. Have you ever justified angry outbursts with the phrase, "Well, that is just how God made me"?

This is what the Pharisees would do as well. "I have bad thoughts because I saw something that introduced those bad thoughts into my mind. God made me with eyes, so I can't help that I saw such and such. So ultimately, God is at fault."

The trouble with the Pharisees was they would try to evade the issue by saying that the trouble is not so much their own hearts as it was the fact that they had eyesight. That eyesight leads to temptation, and temptation leads to sin. It is an attempt to avoid the matters of the heart. So Jesus responds to this ideology with the phrase, "If you're going to blame your sin on your right eye, then pluck it out so there is no excuse." This is a response to their "letter of the law" thinking.

But there is also something else going on here, something much deeper. Jesus is teaching the real and horrible nature of sin and the real and horrible danger in which sin places man.

Jesus talks about precious things - the eye and the hand. Moreover, he talks about the right eye and the right hand. At that time, view was that the right eye was more important than the left eye, and the same was thought about the right hand.

In a sense, what Jesus is saying here is, "If the most precious thing you have is causing you to sin, sin is so dangerous to you that it is better to get rid of your most precious thing." However valuable a thing is, even your own body part, if it causes you to fall into the trap of sin, it is better to get rid of it.

Jesus, with this phrase is teaching 6 important principles. We cannot just deal with the sin of adultery, or whatever individual sins we may think of. Sin is a matter of the heart, and Jesus is concerned with the state of our hearts. So he teaches these six principles.

1. We must realize the nature of our sin and its consequences.

Man is sinful even before he commits his first sin. You and I were born sinners. It is important that we make a distinction between "sin" and "sins." We commit sins because we have sin. Sin in you and in me is that 'something' that causes us to commit sins. We do not "become sinners" once we commit sins, but we commit sins because we are born with sin in us.

The consequence of sin is that Jesus agonized and sweat great drops of blood in the Garden of Gethsemane. Sin caused Jesus to endure torture, and ultimately, sin caused Him to die on the cross. In His example to his disciples, Jesus is not emphasizing the sin of adultery; He is emphasizing the terribleness of sin.

2. We must realize the importance of the soul and its destiny.

We are all born with a soul. It is eternal, and we see its importance as Jesus referenced the soul twice. It is so important that if our right eye offends us, we should pluck it out, but not in physical sense. So make sure you stay on board here and don't turn me off. I would hate for somebody to come next week wearing an eye patch because they pulled their eyeball out.

There are many things in this world that are good and profitable for us, like our eyes and our hands. But sometimes even those things can trap us and ensnare us into sinful habits and we must put those things aside.

Jesus also said the following words, `If any man... hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple' (Luke 14:26).

This does not meant that if someone comes between us and God, or if they are harmful to the soul, they must be hated and put aside; that would go against the command to love others, even our enemies.

What Jesus is expressing through these sayings is that anything that fights against our soul, anything that tries to introduce sin into our lives or make its presence more powerful and influential is an enemy and needs to be dealt with as such. If there is something that is negatively affecting your discipleship, your following of the Lord, it must be dealt with as an enemy of the soul. Nothing must come between the good of our soul, not even our own body.

It is better to be a cripple in this world, literally or figuratively, than to lose everything in the next. It was Jesus who said, after all, "What good does it do a man to gain the whole world, yet lose his soul?"

3. We must hate sin and do all we can to destroy in within ourselves.

Psalm 97:10 says Ye that love the Lord, hate evil...

We must train ourselves to hate sin. Naturally, our sinful nature loves sin. But we must train ourselves to hate sin. We all have probably hated someone in our lives. For all of us here there has been someone that when someone speaks their name, we cringe or even rage. We have all had that person at some point or another that we don't even want to see pictures of. Now the Bible is clear bout those attitudes in our lives toward people, but this is the type of hatred we should have toward sin.

We should hate sin so much that when it is talked about by others it makes us cringe. That when we hear about sinful acts being committed, it makes us mourn and weep and even rage against sin.

4. We must desire and seek to have a pure heart.

The idea of Jesus' teachings is not to be free from certain actions, but for us to have a pure heart from which pure actions will come. Our ambition should be to have a heart that never knows bitterness, jealousy, envy, or hate, but instead is full of love toward God and love toward others.

We can commit sin in our hearts and nobody ever knows of it, but God sees it all, and in His sight it is ugly and awful.

5. We must mortify sin in our lives.

"If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off and cast it from thee."

The false conception of this is to think that we should literally cut off our hands and pluck out our eyes. There were many early Christians that believed this way, and it has been written in accounts that there were many one-eyed, one-handed Christians walking around and attending church gatherings. Origen of Alexandria, a second-century Christian scholar and church leader believed this as well and even castrated himself, believing he was carrying out the message of this verse.

But what is the true view of this Scripture? The best commentary on the Bible is the Bible, so lets look at some verses very quickly.

Romans 8:13 For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.

Romans 13:14 But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof.

We are to kill the deeds of our flesh, the sin in our lives via strangulation and starvation. Make no provision for the flesh so that we don't fulfill the lust of the flesh means that we do not feed the flesh.

Martin Lloyd-Jones said it this way: "There is a fire within you; never bring any oil anywhere near it, because if you do there will be a flame, and there will be trouble." (Don't hang around the people that draw the bad things out of you; don't watch the shows that make you have bad thoughts; don't go to a bar where you will be tempted to engage in things that you shouldn't; don't invite a boyfriend/girlfriend to spend the night at your house, even if you are planning to sleep separately.)

If there is music that causes you to think on certain things, don't listen to it. If there are shows that invite lustful imaginations into your mind, don't watch them. Don't feed the sinful nature that you still posses. Reject those things, even if they may be good things. And if it offends someone, so be it; let them be offended. Watch out for the welfare of your soul and your walk with God above all.

To many people take another well known verse, especially for Christians, out of context and that is 1 Corinthians 10:13 There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.

(Siegfried and Roy October 2003 - Roy gets attacked by a white tiger named Mantecore. Roy survived, but would have never gotten injured had he never stepped into the cage with the tiger.)

Too often, Christians are flirting with sin, and then they wonder how they ever fell for something they never thought they would do. They claim the verse above, and say, "Well, God didn't give me an escape! It's God's fault!"

But this verse promises escape for temptations that overtake us, not temptations that we stick our heads into.

Jumping into a tempting situation and thinking we have the willpower to resist it without consequence is prideful. It is foolish. Read what 1 Corinthians 10:12 says: Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.

What does Proverbs 16:18 say? 18 Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.

The Bible tells us to abstain from every form of evil. No matter what form it takes, if it introduces or threatens to introduce sin into your life, it is evil; abstain from it, avoid it. Know that avoiding sin and temptation will not always work, so the positive thing to do here is to be primarily concerned with glorifying God. If we keep this in the foreground, then when temptations that we cannot avoid overtake us, we do not need to worry about them causing us to fall.

We must also deliberately restrain our fleshly nature, what the Bible refers to as the flesh. How? We must watch and pray. "Watch and pray," Jesus told his disciples, "that you enter not into temptation." Watch and pray because the spirit is willing but our flesh is weak.

"Be sober and be vigilant," the Bible says, "because your adversary, your enemy, the devil, is walking about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour."

6. We must realize our absolute need of the Holy Spirit.

There are actions to take on our part. You and I have to do certain things. But we cannot keep them up and do them all if we are not dependent on the power of the Holy Spirit.

Paul said, "If you through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body..." We cannot do this in our own power. This is why someone who is not a Christian could never live like this, because they do not have the Holy Spirit living in them.

God works within us, the Bible says, both the will and the power to do his good pleasure.

If we try to mortify the deeds of sin on our own, we will end up like the Pharisees, but if we will realize the true power and grip of sin and its awful effects on us, then we will realize that we indeed are poor in spirit, we will pray constantly for the Power that only the Holy Spirit can give, and with this power we will be able to "pluck the eye and cut off the hand" that offends us. We will be able to bring our physical body under the subjection of the heart as it seeks to be pure and as it thirsts and hungers after righteousness.

In the meantime, God is still working on us, and one day we will stand before him face to face "faultless, blameless, without spot and without rebuke."

Home Groups

What stood out to you or spoke to you?

Interpretation of Adultery: What does Jesus mean when he says that looking at someone lustfully is equivalent to committing adultery in one's heart?

Inner vs. Outer Actions: How does this passage challenge the distinction between inner thoughts and outward actions in terms of moral accountability?

The Nature of Sin: How does Jesus' teaching in this passage deepen our understanding of sin beyond just external actions to include internal desires and thoughts?

Radical Measures: Why does Jesus use such extreme language (e.g., gouging out an eye, cutting off a hand) to address the issue of lust? What is the significance of these hyperbolic statements?

Personal Responsibility: What does this passage say about personal responsibility in managing one's thoughts and desires?

Role of Accountability: How does accountability play a role in addressing issues of lust and adultery, both within oneself and within communities of faith?

Holiness and Perfection: How does this passage relate to the broader Sermon on the Mount themes of holiness and the call to be perfect?

Cultural Critique: In what ways does Jesus' teaching confront the cultural narratives surrounding sexuality, pleasure, and fulfillment?