Lust

Series: Sermon on the Mount

Title: God’s Standard for Lust

Author: Brandt

Key: Scripture. Slides. Media. Production. Story/Breath.

INTRODUCTION

Welcome. Happy Wednesday y’all! If we haven’t met, my name’s [Name Slate Slide], if it’s your first time, I’m so glad you’re here! I’d love to meet you after service.

Hook. A little about me, I have three brothers, and my older brother loved to cheat at games. Anybody else have a cheater in the family? They’d steal money from the bank in Monopoly without thinking twice if they’d get away with it haha.

Now my older brother didn’t cheat that way, instead, he would change the rules any time one of my younger brothers started winning haha. Not gonna lie, I totally did that to my little brother too haha. Have you ever played a game with someone who kept changing the rules on you? Eventually you just give up, because there’s really no winning.

TENSION

Pain Points. In the world we live in, it’s hard to know what’s right and wrong when it comes to sexuality. It feels like different groups have different rules, and the rules keep changing.

Health class taught me a set of rules for my sexuality.

The church taught me a different set of rules.

Maybe your parents have taught you a set of rules, or maybe like me, it’s a topic that never came up in your house.

Maybe your friends and peers have shaped what you think is appropriate, inappropriate, good or bad.

Tension Question. In a world with so many different standards, we’re going to try to help get clear tonight on: What is God’s standard for lust?

Context. As a refresher, this whole section of the Sermon on the Mount we’re in comes after Jesus tells the crowd that He came to earth to fulfill God’s Law, to fill it up with all the meaning it was intended to have and to practice it perfectly.

He starts with the commandment “you shall not murder.” That’s usually an easy enough commandment, but Jesus sets a standard for God’s people not just about murder, but about their anger. His next commandment that He takes on, which we’re talking about today, is “you shall not commit adultery.” That means cheating on your husband or wife, or somebody else’s. But just like Jesus traced back murder to anger, he traces back the sin of adultery to lust.

So tonight I think is going to be very helpful, and we’re going to let Jesus show us God’s standard for lust.

TRUTH

Scripture. Here’s what he says on the sermon on the mount: 27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ 28 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. (Matthew 5:27–28 NIV)

Humor. In other words, we’re cooked hahaha. Like, if God’s standard is that we don’t cheat on our wives or our husbands, many of us are like done, I can do that. But God counts it the same if I even look at another person and lust after them?! Impossible, we’re cooked.

Explanation. Now, I want to help you, because I know a lot of you want to do what God says and do what’s right, but specifically in this area of lust and sexual desire, the high school years are a REALLY tough time. When I heard this for the first time I thought Jesus was telling me that I couldn’t have any sexual desires, and if I did I was sinning.

Not only is that a burden, it’s a pretty overwhelming thought if you’re a Jesus follower who wants to do what’s right, because that would mean every time you have a sexual desire you’ve sinned against God, and that is an impossible standard that brings you nothing but shame, guilt, and failure. People don’t end up doing well in that setting, they end up hiding their sin or justifying it. That’s not what Jesus wants for you, and that’s not what we want for you.

So here’s the good news: Jesus IS setting a high standard for what we do with sexual desire, but He IS NOT saying that every sexual desire you feel is sinful. I’m not going to bore you with all the details about translation, but a better translation for Jesus’ words here would be:

But I tell you that anyone who is looking at a woman in order to desire her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. (Matthew 5:28 BST)

BST that’s the Brandt Standard Translation haha. Jesus isn’t saying that our sexual desires are automatically sinful and something to be ashamed of. If you have sexual desires, that’s not just normal, that’s good! Those desires are a good gift from God. The question is how we manage them, and what we direct them towards. In other words, JESUS IS NOT SPEAKING TO THE EXPERIENCE OF LUST (SEXUAL DESIRE), BUT THE INTENT TO LUST AFTER SOMEONE. It is not a sin to be attracted to somebody, it is a sin to look at somebody, strip them of their humanity, and use them as an object to satisfy our desires.

What Jesus was getting at really, is that God cares just as much about what we think in our head as what we do with our body. The Jewish people of His time were so focused on not breaking the Law, that they thought that was all that God wanted for them.

[Communicator Note: Share a BRIEF story where you or somebody else “obeyed the rules” but missed the heart/intent. Keep it light.] I was a babysitter when I was in high school, and when you babysit, typically the parents will leave you a set of rules for the kids to follow. One family I babysat for left me with the rule, “the kids aren’t allowed to have sweets.” Simple enough, “you shall not eat sweets” haha.

There were cookies on the counter, they asked for the cookies and I told them, “you can’t have any cookies.” What I didn’t know is there was ice cream in the freezer, and when I went to sit down to watch some iCarly with one sibling, the other went and snuck ice cream from the freezer! I was like, why are you eating ice cream! You know you’re not supposed to have any sweets! You know what she told me? Ohhhh, “you told me I couldn’t have cookies, I thought ice cream was fine” haha, kids are sneaky!

Just like that little girl, we tend to miss the point of rules, we focus more on what we can get away with than why the rule is there. I think Romans 3:20 is one of THE most important verses in the Bible, because it gives us God’s heart behind the rules He gives us:

20 Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin. (Romans 3:20 NIV)

In their world the problem was, they were so focused on the Law they weren’t even conscious of their sin in this area. They would have said, I’m not committing adultery, so I’m doing what God wants! I might be eating ice cream, but I’m not eating cookies! Chances are VERY FEW of them were out there committing adultery, so they thought they were doing what God wanted, even if they were looking at other people and objectifying them in their heads, because “it didn’t break the rules,” and so they missed God’s intent.

In our world today in Christian circles, I think FEW students are out there sleeping around, hooking up, cheating on their girlfriend or boyfriend, but I think A LOT of Christian young men and young women are LOOKING AT PORN, and they justify it because they don’t think it’s hurting anybody. I’m not ACTUALLY DOING anything with somebody, so it’s okay. According to God’s standard, it’s not.

I think A LOT of Christian young men and young women are DRAWING LINES IN THEIR DATING RELATIONSHIPS AND FRIENDSHIPS saying, “we might be doing everything else, but at least we’re not having sex.” That’s missing the intent of God’s word. “I was just told not to eat cookies, ice cream is fine.”

I think a lot of Christian young men and women are REQUESTING, SENDING, AND RECEIVING INAPPROPRIATE IMAGES of themselves or others in order to desire or be desired by somebody. It’s not harmless, it is bringing hurt into our lives and into our relationship with God..

The reason Jesus gave this teaching is to make people aware of the sin in their life, but more importantly, aware of the sin in their heart. In our culture, sexual sin is so normalized, that unless we seek God’s wisdom and have honest conversations, we’re not even conscious of the fact that we’re living in sin until the consequences hit.

Bottom Line. What Jesus wants us to know is that God’s standard for lust is holiness in our thoughts and in our actions. And the reason He sets the standard the way He does is to make us aware of our sin, acknowledge that we can’t fulfill God’s Law on our own, and we need Jesus who fulfilled it in our place. Now what does that actually look like? How can we think about holiness in our thoughts? Here’s a way to think about drawing that line for yourself.

ILLUSTRATION. [Communicator note: Recommend having a Backscratcher/Tool on stage with you. Describe what the tool is used for, illustration is mainly to set up the point, we can use tools, we can’t use people.]

This is a backscratcher. I’m a simple man, and I love a clear name, and you don’t get clearer than that haha. It’s used for scratching your back. It’s a tool, and it’s a great one to use for scratching itches.

Now nobody would bat an eye if I said “I use tools to solve problems in my life,” like scratching itches. I don’t think we even need to be Christians to agree that it would be wrong to say “I use people to solve problems in my life.” It’s okay to use tools, it’s not okay to use people.

What Jesus is saying here is that, when we look at somebody in order to “solve the problem” of our sexual desires, of our stress relief, of our boredom, of our procrastination, we’ve started to use them. We’ve made them less than a person. We’ve made them less than God made them to be, and we’ve actually made our sexual desires less than God made them to be.

Our sexual desires aren’t an itch to be scratched by people that we use physically or mentally, they are avenues for connection and deep relationship with the person God made us to love protected by the covenant commitment of marriage. Lust uses bodies, but God made us to love and be loved by people, and when we objectify others we diminish their value as well as our own.

The line we need to draw isn’t just in our actions, it’s before the pattern of thinking that makes the person we’re looking at, in person or on a screen, into an object instead of a person made in the image of God.

APPLICATION

Now the next part of this teaching is pretty hard to receive. Jesus raises the bar on what our response should be when we see this pattern of sin in our life, this is what Jesus says after clarifying God’s standard:

29 If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. 30 And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell. (Matthew 5:29–30 NIV)

Jesus advocates for a ruthless and kind of extreme response to sin, and the question is why? He says it’s better for you to lose something that’s a part of you than to lose your whole self. Things like your right hand and your right eye, things that it feels like YOU CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT. In other words:

It would be better for you to never watch YouTube again than to allow that as an access point for sin to hurt your relationship with God and others. Even it feels like you couldn’t live without YouTube. How would I learn anything?

It would be better for you to not be on social media than to allow what you see or post to be an access point for sin in your life. Even if it feels like you couldn’t live without social media.

It would be better for you to end a dating relationship no matter how much you care about the person than to stay in it and let your desire for that person block your relationship with God. Even if it feels like you couldn’t live without them.

I think Jesus’ language is intended to shock us into seeing sin for what it is. Lust isn’t just a bummer that we wish was better, it is something that destroys our life and relationships. It’s an emergency! We can put up with an annoyance, but you PUT OUT an emergency. Jesus is saying, lust isn’t harmless, if you put up with the entry points for sin in your life, they will wreck things. So what should you do? Ruthlessly eliminate sin AND its access points from your life.

For some that’s admitting: I need Jesus to deal with my sin so I have a chance at healing. The main point of this section of Jesus’ sermon is that we can’t actually deal with sin ourselves, we need to follow Jesus so that He can work in our life through the Holy Spirit.

For others it’s admitting: I need to become aware of sexual sin in my life. Maybe you’re a follower of Jesus, but you’ve been viewing lust through the lens of your peers’ “rules”, or your health class’s “rules,” and you need to acknowledge the sin that’s going on in your life.

For others, you’re well aware of the sin in your life, and you’ve been working on it, but not Finding Freedom. Today maybe you need to remove certain access points for sin in your life.

Tools. If you’re ready for a change today, I want to give you a couple tools to help. The first is for those who would say that the access point for this sin in your life is mostly online, whether that’s porn, pictures, social media, whatever. If you want to get serious about this, I want to challenge you to make a Family Technology Use Plan. This would involve you identifying all of the devices you use, and the loopholes or wide-open access points you’ve been using to access sexual content. It would also involve you sharing what those appropriate boundaries would look like with your family.

Some of you immediately decided that you weren’t going to do this haha. Let me push back here. You will not find freedom in isolation, and without accountability. If you’re not willing to have those hard conversations, then you’re not ready to remove those access points from your life. Either way, I’d recommend filling out a family technology use plan, and consider sharing it with your family.

The second tool is an Accountability Plan. That’s a written plan for how YOU WILL HOLD YOURSELF ACCOUNTABLE TO SOMEONE ELSE, not how they’ll stop you from sin. Get as detailed as when you’re usually most tempted during the week, when you want to call them for a check in, giving them the password to your phone and screentime, letting them know when you’ll be alone with your girlfriend or your boyfriend. An accountability partner is somebody who knows my whole story so I can hold myself accountable to them without shame.

The reality is that we can’t live up to God’s standards on our own. We need the Holy Spirit to make us new, and we need our church family to help us walk in the freedom Jesus purchased for us. Tonight God is calling you to take the next step in ruthlessly eliminating sin from your life, so that you can experience the freedom that God has for you. Let’s Pray.