ADULTERY
I feel I need to begin by saying a little bit about the seventh commandment against adultery. I find anymore that many Christians don’t understand the Biblical view of sexual morality. But first a couple of light notes in a rather heavy subject.

As they were studying the Ten Commandments, a third-grade Sunday School teacher asked her class about this seventh commandment, “Would someone please explain what adultery means?” (By the way, NOT a good idea). One young student answered mater-of-factly, “Adultery is when a kid lies about his age.”

And a fourth-grade Sunday School teacher reported asking his kids which of the Ten Command-ments was hardest to keep. One of them responded, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” This prompted the teacher to ask just what he thought this meant. Without hesitation, he replied, “Thou shalt not sass back to adults.”

The fundamental Biblical rule, which the modern sexual revolution has worked to overthrow, is very simple: Sex is for marriage.  Period. There is to be no adulterating sex and no sex outside of marriage either before, during, or after marriage. Where the KJV used the word “fornication” for sex outside of marriage, the NIV uses the term, “sexual immorality.” One of the clearest prohibitions against sexual immorality is found in 1 Cor. 6:12-20. While it is beyond the scope of this sermon, I encourage you to read this on your own if you have questions about this. Here you’ll notice that God has designed sex to be expressed in a life-union– “The two will become one flesh” (17). And life-union means marriage. Any other sexual activity is sin.

Part of the myth that our age has subscribed to is, if you just remove the problem of a possible pregnancy with the pill or easy abortion and the problem of venereal disease with miracle drugs, there is nothing to stand in the way of total sexual freedom. In the last twenty or so years, AIDS has caused a bit of a hitch. You would think something as serious as AIDS would stop us in our tracks! But, with hardly missing a step, our age has continued on promoting what they now call (in a most untruthful term) "safe sex." No sex outside of marriage is ever safe. We place our souls in mortal peril.

But, not only is the physical sexual union of unmarried people wrong, Jesus extends this sin to include lust– our thoughts, desires, and fantasies. This sounds totally out-of-step with our world today.       When Jesus says, "but I tell you..." the "I" is strongly emphasized in the Gk. sentence.
The all-sufficient reason for keeping this command of sexual purity is Jesus' imperial, "But I tell you.” No other reason is needed for the disciple.
But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. (28)

LUST
Let’s face it, it’s hard to get serious about lust in an age that treats it with a smirk. Do you remember when Jimmy Carter was running for president and he told the interviewer he had often committed adultery in his heart, the media reacted by poking fun at this born again Christian. The notion that lust, that sexual desire that wells up within is, is itself wicked is treated with incredulity. Our society treats lust as inevitable, natural, healthy, and fun. That Jimmy Carter should confess to lust in his heart as a sin was just too much!

What a different picture Jesus gives. He is saying that lust is not just the beginning of a slippery slope that can lead to adultery. Lust, in and of itself, is sin. To make His point, Jesus uses some of the most violent language to ever cross His lips.
If your right eye causes you to sin, 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. And if your right hand causes you to sin, 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. (29-30)
If gouging out eyes and chopping off hands doesn’t get our attention, he warns us of the danger of hell. Jesus is certainly using hyperbole here, and not literally meaning to gouge out our eyes or lop off our limbs that get us into trouble. If we followed it literally, there would not be a male past puberty that had an eye left in his head.  Nevertheless, the radical, violent language is intended so that we won’t miss the seriousness of this seemingly, “little, harmless sin.” It is HUGE and determinative of our eternal destiny.

Lust is a perversion of love– a demonic twisting of love. Like anger (last week), it seeks mastery over another person. Both anger and lust put people down. Lust seeks to use the other person, seeing them as a sex object, not a real person. Lust seeks to gain through fantasy what can only be gained through a loving self-giving relationship. It is not harmless. The more a person lusts, the worse it becomes, until ultimately it drives that person to action. The Bible is not just trying to deny us some innocent fantasizing. Commenting on this passage, Richard Foster writes:
“Lust produces bad sex, because it denies relationship.  Lust turns the other person into an object, a thing, a nonperson.  Jesus condemned lust because it cheapened sex, it made sex less than it was created to be.  According to Jesus, sex was too good, too high, too holy, to be thrown away by cheap thoughts.”
As with all of God's commandments, they are there as fences to keep us from destroying ourselves and one another by a misuse of God's gifts. They are there to set us free, to enable us to reach the highest for which we were created.

Pornography is lust gone wild. People no longer have to slip into the back rooms of magazine shops to view porn magazines. It is just a click away on the internet in the privacy of their home. U. S . News and World Report says that in 1973, Americans spent $10 million on pornography. In 1999, we spent $10 billion– a 1000-fold increase. And, that amount in 1999, was far more than Hollywood’s box office receipts and larger than all the rock and country music recordings combined! And that was seven years ago. I’ve read that 100 new porn sites go up every week. In 2003 there were 1.3 million internet porn sites. The Justice Department estimates that 9 out of 10 children between the ages of 8 and 16 have been exposed to pornography online. As much as 20-30% of the traffic to some porn sites is children.

Pornography is terribly addicting. Many Christians have fallen into it’s clutches and in spite of prayer and resolutions keep being drawn back. If some of you are there, you need help. You can’t fight this alone. You need someone to be accountable to and help you work through this. I’m always available for such help.

Even the tragic murder of five Amish children in their one-room school house this last week had a sexual component. According to his suicide note, it apparently began many years ago when the murderer molested some children, and in some twisted way, the guilt of that was tied into this horrible deed.
                                                                             
Lust wreaks terrible havoc in our lives. Ask former President Bill Clinton who faced impeachment because of it and Representative Mark Foley who just resigned, leaving the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives in disarray. And, how about former Spokane mayor, Jim West? When it is exposed it all seems so incredibly stupid. This last summer, world-famous geneticist William French Anderson was convicted of child molestation. In a press conference, his attorney said, “Nothing about having a 176 I.Q. means you have good judgment.”

What we see may affect us more than our other senses. One-third of our cerebral cortex, the highest part of the brain, is given to visual processing. Research shows that sight has powerful affects upon our motivation and wills.

While men are most vulnerable, at least to the visual stimulation, women are not immune either. While women are more naturally relationally oriented, so sex without relationship doesn’t have the same attraction as it does for men, you ladies can lust as well in fantasizing about a relationship and being in the arms of a man you desire. Aren’t many of our TV soaps oriented that way?

OVERCOMING LUST
There are two important ways we conquer this sin. First is to flee the temptation. The second is to be proactive, filling the vacuum.

First, flee, get away from the object of lust, whatever is tempting you. Paul’s advice to Timothy in 2 Tim. 2:22 is to “Flee youthful lusts.”  And, 1 Cor. 6:13 says, Flee from sexual immorality. In the gouging out the eye, Jesus is telling us to do whatever drastic measures it takes to prevent this sin. Joseph is a great Old Testament model for us when his master Potipher’s wife day after day works at seducing Joseph. Now, we can imagine her as very beautiful since Potipher was a high official in Egypt and that would give him a choice of the finest women. And we can imagine Joseph in his teens with those raging hormones. Yet, Joseph ignores her overtures, until finally she grabs this handsome young man and demands he have sex with her. Joseph chooses to keep himself pure and flees, slipping out of his tunic to escape her clutches and fleeing the house.

 

Is there a place or situations you need to run from in your life? Run from TV and movies that stir lust in your heart. Put safeguards in place for your computer use. Perhaps there are people you need to stay away from. There’s some good writers whose books I’ve quit reading because of the sexual scenes they’ve begun putting in their books. Flee! Get away any way you can. You may not have the strength to run, only enough to limp away, but you must get away at any cost.

One of the subtle deceptions of sin is that “a tiny bit” of lust won’t hurt. And the rationalizations go from there. “After all, I’m only human. I just enjoy the beauty of the human body– a kind of celebration of God’s creation.” “Does just noticing the attractiveness of a woman in a skimpy bikini qualify as lust?” Then, “if it’s okay to notice, just how many seconds can I “notice” before it becomes lust?” Martin Luther gave the best advice when he observed that we can’t keep the birds from flying over our head, but we can keep them from building a nest in our hair. In other words, sexual thoughts will come, and we will feel desires because we are human. But we need to keep them moving on through, not take up residence, even briefly, in our minds and hearts. Once we give them place and begin to entertain them, it becomes sin.

And, I hear this rationalization too, “It really doesn’t affect me. I just get Playboy for the articles, not the pictures.” Or, “Yes, that movie had some pretty sexually explicit scenes, but I can handle that. It was a good movie.” I don’t buy it, and I don’t think Jesus does either. Would you take Jesus to that movie?

I want to add a word here to girls and women about the way they dress, because that too is part of this culture of lust. Here I will use the counsel of super-model Kim Alexis who, before her conversion, appeared on over 500 magazine covers, including Vogue and Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. Now, she counsels women to avoid her mistakes. She says,
“Many women are playing with fire in the way they dress. [They tell] the world, ‘Look at me, want me, lust after me.’ Dressing modestly tells the world, ‘I respect myself and I insist on being treated with respect.’ It is possible to be stylish and attractive without wearing something that is too short, low-cut, or see-through.”
We must not let the fashions of the day dictate what we wear when it comes to immodest clothing. I’ve been told it is a challenge to find appropriate clothes. And, if you’re parents of teenage girls, teach them modesty in behavior and dress.

Second, fill your mind with the right things. Saying no is the first step. But just trying to eliminate lust from our hearts isn’t enough. We need to replace that desire with pure, right desire. Paul tells us to “Set your hearts on things above...” (Col. 3:1). And, in Gal. 5:16 he tells us to,
Live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature.
Replacing prurient lustful desire with wholesome desires for God and His purposes is the important next step.    
                                                                                                                                                           
To get a feel of this, let’s return to my opening illustration of standing in the beauty of Zion National Park and reflecting back on the sexually charged fog of Las Vegas. To a soul filled with the beauty and majesty of God, knowing the joy of His presence, the lure of lust seems tawdry, sordid, and repulsive. It is to the empty heart that lust and cheap sex offer the illusion of that it will be satisfying.

CONCLUSION
As last with week’s commandment, again Jesus is revealing the depth of our sin and the need for repentance and heart-transformation. But that is why Jesus came. If even our thoughts constitute sin, who can be sinless? None of us can hope to be saved by perfectly following all of God’s commands.

But, praise God, Jesus came to save us from all our sins and cleanse our hearts. While we continually need His forgiveness and cleansing, through the Holy Spirit, God goes to work at the deepest levels of our hearts changing and purifying our thoughts, imaginations, and inner desires.
However, we can only know that if we quit denying our sinfulness– quit covering over things like lust as not a big deal. Facing our sin and repenting of it opens the door for His forgiveness and cleansing. With that, as we trust Him in the midst of our temptations, we begin to experience the power to overcome.

And remember, lest any fall into condemnation, no matter how you may have sinned sexually or how deeply you may have been hurt or scarred, Jesus is here to forgive, mend, and heal what is broken. His grace is more than sufficient.

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For Biblical Application Study Groups

                                              JESUS’ SERMON ON THE MOUNT
                                                   V. “Jesus’ Teaching on Sex”
                              For Further Study and Reflection on Sermon for 10-8-06
                                                                    Mtt. 5:27-30

1.      Read 2 Samuel 11 (the story of David and Bathsheba)
                  What conditions made David vulnerable to sin?
        
                  Trace the growing involvement of sin in this story.

 

2.      Read 2 Samuel 12:1-14. Apparently David had rationalized his behavior so he didn’t see his sin. How did God reveal it to him?
                  What was David’s response?

                  Psalm 51 is the Psalm of repentance David wrote, you may want to read this.

3.      Can you think of examples from your experience where the destruction that lust creates is seen?

4.      Talk about what kind of standards we ought to set for ourselves to stem the tide of “lust-inducing” exposure.
                  TV
                  Movies
                  Other...

        
5.      Discuss ways we can work in our culture to turn back the flood of sexual messages?

 

6.      What have you found helpful in keeping your thoughts pure?

7.      Read and discuss 1 Cor. 6:12-20.
                  What argument does Paul make from the “one flesh” principle?

More Scriptures on Sexual Immorality
Eph 5:3
But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God's holy people.

Heb 13:4
Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral.

1 Cor 6:9
Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders

1 Thess 4:3-8
It is God's will that you should be sanctified: that you should avoid sexual immorality; that each of you should learn to control his own body in a way that is holy and honorable, not in passionate lust like the heathen, who do not know God;  and that in this matter no one should wrong his brother or take advantage of him. The Lord will punish men for all such sins, as we have already told you and warned you. For God did not call us to be impure, but to live a holy life. Therefore, he who rejects this instruction does not reject man but God, who gives you his Holy Spirit.

Gal 5:19-21
The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.