Lust

This morning’s message will likely raise more questions than we can cover. Any time your passage covers lust, adultery, hell, and cutting off hands and eyes you just can’t hit it all. At least I can’t.

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But here’s my understanding of what Jesus is doing in his sermon. He is offering us to take his teaching and like a mint put them in your mouth or your heart or your mind and chew on them. Soak in them. Marinate in them as we think about what it means for you to embrace that teaching and it’s implications for our lives. ‌

‌Pray.

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Desire in the human heart is one of the most complex qualities about us. *Desire: To long for, crave, or demand something

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It is this all encompassing web inside of us that is connected with all kinds of stories that we believe and things we think will make us happy. I desire a krispy kreme because I believe the story that it will make me happy.

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Desire can be a beautiful and pure thing. It can make you fall in love, get married. Desire can make you think the vols will actually win this year. Desire can be so good when you desire good things and that desire is in a controlled state where the desire informs you but does not control you.

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Desire can also be the most destructive thing in your life. Desire can make you be unfaithful to your spouse. Desire can make you be hateful towards your family. Desires can be damaging to you and others. I mean can you not think of instances in your own life that when you desired something good but didn’t get it you were tempted to be bitter and when you desired something that was unhealthy for you?

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Our desires are always informing what we should do if we feed them and they get out of control sometimes they become ravenous and begin to control what we do.

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And to make it more complex, can you change your desires? You might have an opinion on that, but have you ever had a desire you wish you didn’t and tried to change it? It is not easy, it might just be some of the most difficult innerwork of the heart and soul.

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Desire is complex and it’s at the core of who we are as humans. It is in this conversation of desire that jesus enters into with his teaching.

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‌Read text:

Today we are going to look at a few thoughts:

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1- God’s laws and commands are not meant to rob you of joy and pleasure, but to lead you into them at their fullest.

2- Lust is an unhealthy feeding of sexual desire in the heart and it trains us to treat others as mere objects to be used for sexual gratification, rather than as image bearers of God.

3- Jesus teaches that the way we fight sexual lust in our hearts is by cutting off what we feed it and one of the primary ways we stop feeding lustful desire is through confession.

4- Then at the end well look at how Jesus responds to sexual sinners.‌

1- God’s laws and commands are not meant to rob you of joy and pleasure but to lead you into them at their fullest.

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That can feel so counter to us when what God commands us seems to be contrary to our desires. Sex can be fun and obviously pleasurable and so why would God give his disciples all these parameters around how and when you engage in it that seem responsive to our modern ears? Does Jesus not want us to have fun and enjoy this good gift?

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We need to remember what larger story Jesus is entering into and that will give us a helpful framework for understanding how Jesus understand sex and lust and desire and why his teaching us to use it in a certain way is not trying to rob us of pleasure but lead us into it in its fullest.

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V27 points back to Gen design

Let’s look at verse 27 - “You have heard that it was said ‘You shall not commit adultery.” Jesus here is quoting from Exodus 20:14. One of the 10 commandments. The law. This is something all of them would be familiar with. If they are Jewish they would have been raised from a young age hearing the old testament scriptures, for them just the scriptures. Many of them would have had large portions of it memorized. The law was important to them, it played a huge role in the life of the Jewish nation. Why did God give Israel the law? Because he was making a new people. He adopted them as a people, and he was giving them instructions to be distinct from the surrounding nations. That’s what was happening back on that mountain as God gave them the law in Exodus 20.

One pastor said that God got Israel out of Egypt and now in giving the law he was getting Egypt out of Israel. So when Jesus quotes from Exodus 20 this is where their mind would have gone. This isn’t just some random law God gave for no reason, He is trying to lead people back to his original design for their good and joy. Let me show you briefly.

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Turn in your bible to Genesis, we’ll show it on the screen. The first page of your bible.

English Standard Version (Chapter 1)

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

27 So God created man in his own image,

in the image of God he created him;

male and female he created them.

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Notice how in the garden of Eden, when all is right and at peace, in shalom, man and woman relate to one another. God tells them to work together in v26 to have dominion over the earth. That word dominion can mean rule or authority. Both male and females have that, they are equal value and work together.

And then what happens when sin enters into the garden? This co-working where they are equals and rule the earth shifts from them standing shoulder to shoulder together and looking out and having dominion over the earth…and they turn face to face and begin to desire to rule and have authority over the other, as if they are no longer equal value.

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One of the curses and infections of sin is that in Gen 3 “Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you.” Do you see this reversal? How sin has fractured the man and the women's relations with one another and now deep within all of us is the desire to be selfish and use, rule, or exercise unhealthy authority over other human beings. To not see or value the image of God in another.

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And what is one of the most glaring places this plays itself out? Where we degrade others value, where we are tempted to use and in the most severe cases abuse for the sake of our pleasure?

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**In our sexual desire.

This is why when God gives us laws and rules around how sex is to be stewarded, he isn’t trying to rob us of pleasure or be prudish. He knows how destructive and consuming uncontrolled sexual desire can be. Read your bible, it’s all throughout how a good thing, sexual desire, is so often turned bad and ruins people.

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You see this paradigm in how Eve takes the fruit. Gen 3:6

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

See, desire, take. This same paradigm, if our passions and sexual desires are not controlled, plays itself out. We see, we desire, and we take as an object to use.

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And so what God was doing with the 10 commandments was taking his people and saying I’m going to get you back to that original design where you don’t use people sexually anymore like all of humanity, I’m going to get you back to that peace, that shalom, to my original design. And so Moses goes up on a mountain and receives the law and gives it to the people and calls them to repentance for their own good and joy attempting to create a new people.

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And astute Jewish scholars would have seen the connection with Jesus. Jesus calls people to repentance, and then goes up on a mountain and gives the law and says the new kingdom of heaven is on its way.

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This is how Jesus in this sermon is connecting with the larger story of the Bible. With the law of old and his teachings on those laws, He is trying to line us up with the way God originally designed it to be and how it will be in the new heavens and new earth. And that design is not against your pleasure or joy, but totally for it in the most full and complete sense. Because that design, in terms of sexual desire, helps you control your sexual desires, not be controlled by them to the point where you hurt and use others.

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Does this help you understand that Jesus isn’t trying to repress you here, but protect and lead you to fullness of life? The law gives proper boundaries to keep sexual desire good and pure and in control.

And I can hear our modern ears liking that Jesus is trying to protect us with his law but not liking that Jesus is telling us what we can and cannot do sexually. And I would just say, really chew on this and on God’s design. That he is trying not to repress, but protect you from how unhinged your sexual desires can actually get to damaging you and others.

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OK, so we have this framework of God’s laws and rules meant to point us back to God’s original good design which lead us to flourishing and joy. This is foundational to know because sexual sin tempts you that god does not have your best interest at heart and gods laws are actually just trying to protect you.

Does that make sense?

Read v27-28.

‌And why does Jesus then expand on those boundaries to include something called lustful intent of the heart rather than just trying to police the action of adultery? Because, and this is our 2nd thought,

2- Lust is an unhealthy feeding of sexual desire in the heart and it trains us to treat others as objects to be used for sexual gratification, rather than as image bearers of God.

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V28

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See, desire, take in the heart

What is lustful intent? Jesus is saying that the see, desire, take paradigm is happening in your heart when you lust after someone who is not your spouse. When you are in public and you see someone who is attractive, and instead of moving on with your day, you continue to look. That feeds something in you, desire. And that desire, once stoked begins to feed your mental fantasy that you engage in. And that trickle effect of see, desire, take Jesus is saying is actually happening not in a bed, but in your heart.

Jesus is taking an action, adultery, and going way upstream. He is making a connection between that action and your heart, what takes place within you. Jesus is saying there is a type of looking at another with your eyes or your minds eye, fantasy, that is done with lustful intent and the heart of adultery is happening even if the action never does.

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Lust always spills out

It gets at deep things within us. Where does the adultery occur for this person? In the heart. Do people wake up one day and decide to commit adultery, most do not. Do people wake up and decide I’m going to get addicted to porn to satisfy my sexual desire that will blow my life up and ruin my families hearts? No. Most do not.

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Because this full blown forest fire of adultery and taking and using and objectifying starts as a little ember in our hearts. And that ember of sexual desire, if used in the proper place and channeled with my spouse is good and beautiful and life giving, metaphorically and maybe literally. But if I add fuel to that ember, and that fuel is lust, lustful looks and fantasizes about those who God has not given me, that ember grows into a forest fire I cannot control and will harm others.

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Do you see why Jesus takes this so seriously? This isn’t just a private thing in your heart or on your screen that doesn’t have implications for your whole life and how you view people, it does. It trains you. When we engage in lust, in looking and staring at another human being to fuel our sexual desire outside of the marriage covenant, or maybe even inside of it if we only see our spouse as a sexual object, it begins to wire our hearts and our brains to reinforce that behavior, the other only exists for me and my pleasure. It spills out into our relationships.

We begin to play out what lewis says:

“We use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man prowling the streets, that he "wants a woman". Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude for her five minutes after fruition. (one does not keep the carton after one has smoked the cigarettes).”

― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

When we lust after someone, it reveals what we believe about their value. So Jesus really looks at us here, and he asks a question. And I’m going to ask it and then be silent for a moment and let it settle.

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Q: Is your sexual desire motivated and kept in check by love for the other and God? Or is your sexual desire motivated most deeply by selfishness?

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Timothy Keller said, "Lust says, 'What can you do for me?' Love says, 'What can I do for you?'". I really challenge you, if you are not married to consider how you are training yourself to view sex because that will follow you into marriage. And If you are married, how do you view sex? Through the lens of lust? Or love?

And so the question remains, how on earth do we control our desires? Because anyone who has felt a desire you wish you could change knows… this is not easy. Does Jesus offer anything that helps us know how do we bring our desires back into a place of health if we’ve fed it lust and it’s turned sinful? Or are we just jacked up without hope? Look at verse 29 and 30 with me.

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What? haha. If the problem is the heart, why is jesus now saying cut off your hand?

3- We recalibrate our sexual desires to be healthy by cutting off what feeds it sin and offering our heart to God.

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I think what Jesus is getting at here is that there are things in our lives that feel indispensable. Our hands, our eyes. We need them in life. And Jesus’ point here is that if you have something that feels indispensable, that you need it, but it causes you to sin. It’s better to go through life without what you feel you need than to let the damage of sin ruin you and lead you away from Jesus into judgment.

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Jesus is not threatening you with hell in this section of his teaching, as if to say you will burn so stop. Because that isn’t heart level change motivated by love, that is simply fear. Jesus is saying if you keep something in your life that makes you stumble, which is what “causing you to sin” literally means. If you have something that leads you To stop following Jesus because this sexual desire has been fed and fed and fed with lust so much that it controls you now and you would rather satisfy it than follow Jesus, the end result of that will lead you away from Christ.

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The longer down the path of sin you go the more of the eternal reality of hell you bring into your world. The more darkness, and chaos, and destruction you bring to yourself and to those around you. He is saying if you don’t take sin seriously in this life, you will begin to live in the reality of what your eternal state will be anyway, chaos and brokenness and separation from God. Sin always leads you away from God.

Dual process

His call‌ to those listening to the sermon, before he began was to repent, to turn away from our sin towards God. Some of us think about fighting sin in one of two ways, only with our hearts or only by cutting off access. Need both.

One of the frustrations with fighting sexual sin is we often just mow over the weeds and never do the heart work that the weeds sprouted from. And I’m going to argue that one of the applications of this text is confession because in confession we open our heart to God for healing and we open our heart to others for help in doing what we cannot do alone. Repentance isn’t only pleading for mercy before a judge; it is opening your wounding to a physician. Jesus said he call to call the sick. You can cut off things that feed your soul sin but you cannot reverse the illness it has caused alone.

Turn from sin by cutting off what it feeds you and turn towards God in repentance.

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How do we work on controlling our sexual desires and having them be motivated by love? Jesus says your sexual desire will become what you feed it with the hand and with the eye. He is saying to cut off the root that is providing the energy for the weed of sexual sin to grow. And whatever pain is involved in cutting that root is worth it. You may not see results immediately but calibration takes time. Lust and porn and affairs rewire your brain and heart and to untangle those takes time, but cutting off what leads to sin is like a cast for a broken bone, it provides an environment of stability that fosters growth while you offer up your heart to Jesus and others. Jesus said cut off your eye to stop seeing, cut off your hand to stop taking, what does that leave? The heart.

Repent upstream - before it gets too late into darker things.

So get rid of your phone, change your internet access, but you cannot do those things and not offer your heart to be worked on.

Story: You cannot be your own doctor

Everyone thinks they can cut their own arm off and gouge their own eye out until the scalpel is at hand, you can’t. You need help. That help is called confession. As I worked through deep heart work with God and with others, I began to see that what led me to a lot of lust in my life was because I did not trust God with my loneliness. And my way of running from that pain was lust.

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And so what it looked liked for me to cut that off, was to confess and share that with a friend of mine.

You will know you are truly repenting if it costs you something. So if your phone is causing you to feed lust, if your selfishness and your desire for pleasure over anything is causing you to feed lust, or your discontentment with what God has given you is causing you to feed lust, examine what the root cause of your sexual sin is to God, and then cut it off.

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How? Confession.

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We cannot heal what we hide. Tell someone, confession to someone is spiritual surrender and God works in that. Jesus’ brother said: Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.

4- how we end John 8:1-11

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but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him, and he sat down and taught them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst they said to him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. Now in the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?” This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” And once more he bent down and wrote on the ground. But when they heard it, they went away one by one, beginning with the older ones, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus stood up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.”

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Put yourself in the story here, Jesus does not condemn you. He does not turn his back on you.

So I leave us with this tension of Jesus’ compassion for sexual sinners and challenge for us to turn from our sins To him and offer our hearts for him to work on.