Lust of the Eye

All right, remain standing. I'm going to read from Matthew chapter 5. So this is the rearrangement I spoke of, of the order of worship. Matthew chapter 5, starting in verse 27. You have heard that it was said, you shall not commit adultery. But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

But if your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out and throw it from you. For it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand makes you stumble, cut it off and throw it from you. For it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.

It's a reading of God's Word. You may be seated. In the book of Matthew, chapter 5, Jesus starts to explain God's law to us. And the initial temptation we have when Jesus says something like, Give me a moment, I'm sorry. The temptation we have when Jesus says, You have heard that it was said, You shall not commit adultery, but I say to you, anything else whatsoever.

The temptation we have, and it's logical based on the grammar Jesus used, is to think that Jesus is saying something different from what the law originally said. and if the only five verses in the entire Bible were Matthew 5 27 to 31 I guess that would be the best case we could make but Jesus in the very same chapter in the very same sermon he's giving says do not think, this is verse 17 for those of you following along do not think that I came to abolish the law or the prophets he says I did not come to abolish them but to fulfill them for truly I say to you until heaven and earth pass away not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the law until all is accomplished he says whoever then annuls one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven but whoever does them and teaches them he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven for unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees you will never enter the kingdom of heaven and so Jesus Christ when he preaches Matthew 5 is in no way whatsoever annulling the commands of God he isn't changing the commands of God and I would dare say he's not elevating the commands of God, which are unchangeable and hadn't changed. What he's doing is he is explaining the commands of God in particular, in contradistinction to the days that he was in, what they interpreted the commands of God to be. So he was making it apparent how far short from actually following what God intended with his laws the people were.

Now that sounds harsh in a way until you realize that the whole purpose of this is to explain to people that the righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees was standing right in front of them and was going to sacrifice his life that they may have eternal life. So when somebody comes and says, wow, God's laws are very harsh. Well, they're harsh because we're evil. and I might agree they were harsh if God was disposed to simply send everyone to hell but the fact that he sent his son to mercifully pay the penalty sinners deserve after having obeyed the laws himself and earning the reward deserved from that and dying and raising again three days later that's mercy and grace and so explaining God's law to people is in a sense an act of mercy.

It is an act of grace to give people that gift. But the law itself cannot save them. And so while we, I think, are happy to stand with guys like Martin Luther and say the law is not the gospel and the gospel is not the law. And we are happy to say the law can't save. It was powerless to save. We also say with Paul, the law is not evil, though.

The law is simply designed to do something other than save you. And so the law does what it's designed to do, in fact, perfectly, because it's from God. So you do not judge something by what it's not designed to do. Don't tell me your screwdriver doesn't work because you tried to pound a nail in with it, and it didn't work so well and you probably even hurt yourself.

Don't try to save yourself or others by the works of the law and you will not see the law as deficient in any way. What you will see is the beauty of God's law reflecting for you the sinfulness of your own heart. And this is what Jesus is getting to. So last week, we looked at the first marriage and the perfection of the first marriage, created before the fall, in fact. we looked at the picture that marriage is of the gospel of Jesus Christ loving his bride and from heaven he came and sought her right That the line from the song So this week, what I want to do is investigate Jesus' claim in Matthew chapter 5 and then two weeks from today, Lord willing, when I'm here again, we're going to continue this section in Matthew chapter 5 and look at Jesus' teaching about marriage, adultery, and divorce.

Today we're going to look at just what he's defining with adultery. So he begins by saying, you have heard that it was said, you shall not commit adultery. And in this case, he quotes the commandment verbatim. In some of the cases when he says, you've heard that it was said, he actually says something slightly different from what the command said in the Old Testament.

And some people have argued that Jesus is arguing against things that people were saying. in this case he says you've heard that was said you should not commit adultery nobody would argue with that if we walked out on the street right now and we asked people should someone commit adultery and they said no i don't think we would argue and say no you're wrong so why does Jesus bring up committing of adultery and then say but I say to you and then like I said earlier sounds like something slightly different and the reason is that we have a tendency both in the church and outside the people of God to reduce the commands of God to that which is absolutely carnal we are carnal we think carnally our nature is carnal and i mean that even in just the the truest sense not not necessarily evil carnality i just mean we're of the flesh we're not as spiritual as we ought to be and so when someone says you shall not commit adultery we think it's good enough that we just avoid the outward act now this should come as no shock to any of us because the first four commandments were chock full of what's a matter with your heart it's not like the first four commandments we looked at outward actions and then we got to the fifth and we started talking about kids sassing their parents okay it's not like i shocked anybody when we looked at the sixth commandment and said you know you can murder someone without physically murdering them that shouldn't be a shock in here and actually anybody who's been a Christian, sorry, any amount of time recently, if you've ever heard of Ray Comfort, that's the big thing he's brought out that people were ignoring was how we can sin even in our hearts. So when we talk about adultery, we have the same issue. You have the obvious implication of this command, which is that by definition if you are a married person you have only one person in this world that you ought to be engaging in sexual conduct with and that is your spouse.

I like the old, it's not old I guess, I like when John Piper said how do you know if you married the right person? And he said look at your marriage certificate. The person's name on there is the right person. providentially God told you who to marry. Or even tell you, but you know what I mean. He directed it. So now let me qualify.

Don't go listen to John Piper. I don't recommend him. But he said a lot of good things more than ten years ago that were worth quoting. Now, Jesus wanting people to understand the extent of this command and realizing that they are exercising this command as strictly and letterally as they can, by the letter of the law rather than by the spirit of the law.

Jesus realizes that when he says you shall not commit adultery, what these people hear is, oh, I can do anything I want as long as I'm not married. That's what some people hear. or as long as I don't go all the way with another person, I've now not actually committed adultery. Or hey, as long as I don't touch somebody else, I haven't committed adultery.

And in some way, those things are true if we take the letter of the law. If I tell you you shall not steal, and all my stuff's still here at the end of the day. You didn't steal from me. We understand that. So what ends up being criminal is not necessarily what is God's standard for what will inherit you a lake of fire. So Jesus wants us to understand there's a depth and an expansiveness to these commands that helps us to see that this affects all of our life, including our thought life. there are going to be a lot of people who on the day of judgment will stand before God and will have committed outwardly far less sins than I did in my first 20 years and they will be cast into hell and it was actually an unfortunate judgment on many people that God granted them the self-control to not give in to their fleshly desires as much as they actually entertained just in their own minds and hearts now I'll remind you that I'm very sensitive to the idea that simply talking about some of these things can incite in a wicked person the wrong things and I don't want to do that in a room with people who I know to be unregenerate I also don't want to offend people unnecessarily and so if I do I asking you to be forgiving and come talk to me about it after and just be open and honest a lot of people came from different backgrounds and there may be certain words or language that we use that somebody finds offensive that somebody else wouldn't.

As much as possible, I simply try to say things the Bible says in the translation I have, which in this case is the LSB. So blame John MacArthur if I say something you don't like, right? As long as it's out of here. why not everybody else is blaming him for everything now right I don't know if you pay attention to the news like he's he's like the worst guy in the world now to to all the fake Christians out there anyway faithful man we look up to John MacArthur Jesus says you've heard the you shall not commit adultery verse 28 he says but I say to you he says that everyone who looks that a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

So Jesus just took their understanding of the command, which was, okay, if I'm married and I go and do something I'm not supposed to do with somebody that's not my wife, I've committed adultery. And Jesus explains to them in a single sentence that if for only a moment you have an impure thought about somebody who is not your spouse, you've now committed adultery in your heart. And I'll tell you what, you don't have righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees if you've done that.

I think in some ways this is an indictment against the scribes and Pharisees where Jesus is letting us know that's what they were doing. These guys that were walking around making a big show of their religiosity and their holiness and their outward obedience to the law, Jesus knew what they were really doing inside. He knew what they were doing when they were in secret.

And if statistics are correct, we also know what most Christian men who say they're Christian in the United States are doing when they're in secret. And we can now do, when we're actually all alone by ourselves, what those guys couldn't do back then. So there's a few layers to this. And one of the layers is, is this stuff all the same, right? If a guy is walking somewhere and an improperly dressed woman crosses his sight and he has impure thoughts about her, is that literally no different than if he had fornicated with her?

So we need to try to figure out some of these questions. I would say, according to whether or not you're going to make it to heaven or hell because of your righteousness, no. You are an adulterer in the eyes of God if you've done that. It is a way that God reveals to us how sinful we really are. so that those who, again, have the control outwardly to avoid some of the manifestations of their inward lust will realize, I need a Savior as bad as the guy that is what the King James would describe as a whoremonger.

Okay? But, I'm going to say this. I don't think that adultery of the heart, as Jesus described, is necessarily going to be cause for divorce, like real adultery, we would call it, could be. And so there is some distinctions we make, and so we're happy if people are making improvements in their sin life. If you know somebody who has what we often call a struggle with pornography, what Elizabeth Elliot said, struggle is just the Christian fancy word for delayed obedience.

So struggle is what we say when we just don't want to repent. But we know it's wrong. But if you know somebody who's having difficulty because sin is pervasive, and I don't like psychology words, but sin can be addictive. And the eyes of men are never satisfied. And if you have a guy that got saved and he was not a Christian for a while, he's got some remnants of sin that still are in him, and the memories he has of evil that he had done before may live with him for a very long time and it may be very difficult to shed some of the sin that he once indulged in that has a snare on him.

And so we recognize when we're counseling men in particular that we're glad for improvement in some of those areas. We're glad for longer periods of time between what we'll call relapses in some of these areas. but we do call for repentance and we call for people to try to live pure lives. The goal is not how close can I get to doing the stuff the world calls fun without technically sinning.

The goal is purity. Do you understand me? And when you can get your mind wrapped around that you're seeking purity and you're heading toward Christ and it's not about what can I do or not do, you're going to live a much happier and holier life. And if you're a Christian, holiness equals happiness. If holiness isn't appealing to you, you're going to hate heaven.

And chances are you're not going there. Now, when we start to think about what is adultery then, what are the different sins that are encompassed by this command, some of the words scripture uses are fornication. fornication is a different word that basically means doing the things that are reserved for marriage when you're not married and they're not married alright adultery is more of a specific one of the people happen to be married kind of deal What interesting about fornication is think about this for a minute in the Old Testament when God taught us the severity of our sin, if a married man copulated with another woman, they were adulterers and they were commanded to be stoned to death, right? if a married woman was an adulteress she could be stoned to death but most certainly put away but what did God do if a couple of young people that thought they were in love fornicated I'll give you a second to try to remember even just think about the distinction here he said you get married right so the very same act of of having sex with someone who is not your spouse depending on whether you had previously committed to a spouse or not ended up having very different consequences so god has an understanding for our weakness and i think when people are pre-marital okay so like engaged people people who are dating I'm not saying that it's okay to fornicate it's wrong but God has an understanding and so did Paul in first Corinthians that we may burn with passion and it and it's such a strong desire particularly when you when you are planning to marry someone you know maybe the date's four weeks away and they fail and they sin. But repentance is called for and we don't stone them for that.

And in the New Testament, we'd have to think some of these things through. And we'll talk more about some of these details with divorce next week. But in some cases, I'm hesitant to make proclamations like, well, here's what we would do in this situation. I think a lot of this is, hey, don't commit adultery, all right? Don't fornicate. Don't look at porn.

Don't even get close to some of the things. And if we have to deal with the situation like somebody got a divorce or wants to get a divorce or fornicated or committed adultery, then we'll deal with some of those on a case by case basis. And in some cases, the church might have to do some research and find out what other churches have said about similar situations.

But what I want you to understand is that God desires our purity and Jesus Christ is perfectly pure. This means that you cannot even look upon someone to lust after them. In Jesus' day, he said, if a man should look on a woman to lust after her, he's committed adultery with her in his heart. And so if any woman in here thinks, okay, so we can do it, but the men can't, you're misunderstanding the point of the passage.

What Jesus observes and knows better than any of us even, because he knows us, is that men are the ones that are more likely to be lustful toward women. It's just the way we tend to be. One of the ways you know you have a society that is terribly backwards and spiraling is when the women start to, I'll say two things, start to have dirty mouths and start to be very sexually lustful themselves. if you talk to anybody over 60 years old ask them if women acted the way publicly that they act today men have pretty much always just been dirty dogs women seem to be slower at turning so evil outwardly but women fail in these ways too but think of it this way if you're a woman maybe you're not so inclined to the your eyes never being satisfied like a man's maybe you're not so driven to the desire for someone to please you in a in an exciting way like the gift of sex is for married couples which causes people to go outside marriage but for women oftentimes, what's more common is the desire to feel desired.

It's generally speaking, not men who are walking around in skimpy bikinis and stuff, okay? And thank God for this, right? But we don't want to see women wearing that stuff either, no matter how beautiful they are. What did we see last week? A beautiful woman without discretion, right? Like a gold ring in a pig's snout.

And yet that's what we have a demand for in our society. And the women are happy to oftentimes give into that. And I'll tell you what, they're getting something out of it. And you as a woman in this church, you need to think about the way you dress. You need to think about the way you act. When Peter told you to adorn yourself, he said, adorn yourself, not with outward apparel, but with the inward heart.

That's what Peter said in 1 Peter 3. We told women how to act outwardly. So I want you to understand that sexual sin is devious. It's pernicious. It doesn't give up. All right?

My understanding from the reading of the Scripture, my understanding from listening to other people who've been Christians is that this is something that can, that you need to be vigilant about all the time. There's not a point in time when a man says, okay, well, I'm done with that one. I'm not worried about it anymore. There are sins that seem to be a little, that we have less inclinations for.

Some of us have stronger discernment about certain things. So we're less inclined to even idolatry and some of other things. But our flesh is weak. And if your flesh is weak, and it is because you're in, you're not in Adam, but because you are a descendant of Adam, you still have this weak flesh, you need to be on guard against the fact that you can actually unintentionally, without desiring it, become titillated by something external to you that you beforehand had even committed that you wouldn't let happen to you.

This is why we have things like the Billy Graham rule, for example. One of the reasons for the Billy Graham rule, which is that men should not be alone with a woman that's not their own wife and probably daughter. There's probably all sorts of permutations of rules. We love rules as people. We just don't love God's rules. But anyway, one of the reasons for that is that we know our own inability to control ourselves if the right opportunity came to our flesh.

And anybody here that's ever tried to say, I'm going to lose weight this year, January 1st, we're going to start eating right? Anybody here that ever tried that probably knows well enough that the ability to simply do what you will to do is not really in your power. And so you take the strength and the power of sexual desire and you combine that with sinful flesh. and you should be healthily afraid of the damage you can do.

Not crawl in a hole though, healthily afraid, but run to the Lord for strength. Do you know that you men who've looked at pornography, do you know that God can actually erase those images from your minds? Do you also know that generally He doesn't do it if you don't ask Him to? he does his own will that's for sure but he mostly doesn't zap us wholly he actually allows us to experience the depth of our own sins sometimes that we might seek his mercy so you ask him take away these thoughts take away these images and i said that to men i know there's women as well have had difficulty with these sins in their lives and God can heal us.

And I said the thing to men earlier too, but women too, you need to stay vigilant about really all the commandments. But the minute you start thinking, well, this is the one I'm not so worried about, praise be to God, He might knock you down with that one, that you might stop having so much pride in yourself. Even if you say, well, that's just not the way I was built.

I've never really been that way. Well, it's in you. Praise God he never let it come out maybe. But be vigilant about these things. So, one of the questions that people might ask, let's make sure all the young people are listening. I know you guys all heard me say the word sex, and so you decided, I'm not going to listen, it's too awkward, and I get it.

I was Catholic when I grew up, and when the priest said that word, it was even weirder. especially now that you know what most of them are doing but anyway, I'm Protestant so I'm always going to be ragging on Catholics anyway one of the questions people might ask then is okay, well, I'm an unmarried person I'm speaking to a room full of mostly married people that are members and then the rest are the people's kids but as an unmarried person, what can I do? it's a reasonable question I don't think it's crazy If you're a little guy, well, if you're a little guy, you probably shouldn't be courting anyone yet. But if you're a young man or if you're a young woman and you're starting to get to the point where you think marriage is for you and you have a desire to be married and you find the person that you want to start talking to about that, it's a logical question. Well, how close can we sit to each other?

You know what I mean? It's not crazy to ask that question. Now, sometimes when people ask that question, what they're really asking is, how much can I get away with and still technically be considered to be doing the right thing? If that's your attitude, then again, I'm just going to warn you, you're probably headed to hell. All right. And you should repent.

But if your attitude is, I want to be pure in the eyes of God, but I also want to know how to be pure. I want to know how I can still interact with my beloved before the actual consummation is allowed to occur. I would give you a couple things to think about. One of them is recognize that even especially with that particular person, that's going to be the biggest temptation for you.

So never be alone with that person. Or don't ever be alone where you're not just in the next room maybe from someone who could walk in at any time, where you probably wouldn't start doing something that you wouldn't want them to walk in on. Again, these aren't hard and fast rules. These are some suggestions. I'm sure people have better ones, that's okay.

We'll talk about it after. But being alone with someone is the opportunity that your flesh will need. And your flesh will take it. And it will hurt you. Even if you end up marrying that person, you have hurt yourself through sexual sin. So that's one suggestion.

Along with that suggestion is the idea, always have a chaperone. Always have someone that you're accountable to. Someone who is not afraid to look at you and ask you, what are you doing? What did you do? Someone who cares about you enough that desires your purity also. Not because they want to keep you from having fun, but because they want you to have the most joy.

And I'll say this. How many of you have been to a wedding? Raise your hand if you've been to a wedding. All right, Jace. What does the guy say after they get married? what's the first thing he says to the groom? Do you remember?

Mary, do you remember? What does he tell the groom he can do Now let me ask you this If you been spending the entire courtship kissing a person what's the significance of after you're officially married, what's the significance of after you're officially married, somebody finally giving you permission to do so? It's a meaningless act at this point. Now thank God we still have carried over some of these traditions that we find totally irrelevant in the 21st century in a non-Christian country.

So we can understand things. The idea is this, when the person marrying the husband to the bride, who was just given away by her parents to him, and we call it holy matrimony. When he's told you may kiss the bride, ideally it's the first time he's kissed anyone, especially her. And it's special. and it's a public display suddenly that they're married.

And now they can go and they can start with kissing and do what comes later, and that's what married couples are supposed to do. And that's a gift from God. And it's a joy. And all of the days that you told your flesh no are thus rewarded. and if you're someone who God keeps single your whole life then you stay pure for the Lord Jesus Christ and he's worth it so my recommendation would be that you be very very careful and always think of yourself as capable of far more evil than you have ever even experienced and protect yourself so if you want to sit in church you want to hold hands with your beloved I'm not going to say I think you're committing some act of adultery here there may be somebody in here whose father does think so or says I don't think it's a good idea or whatever and I'll tell you this you ladies may not understand how little it takes to incite the fire in a man And it's not only incited by love.

The biggest industry, probably in the entire world? Pornography. The biggest industry on the internet? Pornography. the amount of money that flows into people paying to watch other people do things unclothed whether it's on a screen or live is amazing there are entire organizations that are organizations a horrible word to use but there are entire organizations designed simply to kidnap people so that other people can do what they want with them and they don't ask for their birth certificate to make sure they're 18 first.

Do you understand me? There are evil people that want to do things to children too. And so you children, you stay by your parents. And you don't trust people necessarily. Do you know that there's never been a pedophile that wore a t-shirt that said pedophile on it? You know what a pedophile is?

A pedophile literally comes from the term lover of children, right? It's a horrible word. It's amazing. Somebody has a spouse for 15 years, they go and they start fornicating and committing adultery with someone who's not their spouse and having basically crimes of passion here and doing these horrible things they're not supposed to do, and we call the person their lover.

They're a hater. That's what they are. They hate the person, they hate themselves, they hate marriage, they hate God. But pedophiles, they don't wear a t-shirt that says, warning, weirdo, I want to touch you in places I shouldn't. They show up with candy, video games, fun things, sad stories about their puppy that make you feel compassion for them and want to help them.

There's a lot of very evil people out there and I wish I didn't have to say it to you. I wish I could say, hey, the world's safe, go have fun. But you know what? Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and come to heaven with me and it will be like that there. There will be no dogs or liars or thieves or sorcerers or anything that's evil. So up there I can preach a real nice message about, hey, just go pick flowers and don't worry about anything, okay?

But down here you've got to be careful. People do not love you. They don't care about you. They want to use and abuse you. Jesus says in 29, Now if your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out and throw it from you. for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell alright I'm just going to tell you I'm not going to explain it, it's not literal don't tear your eye out there's people that have said this there's people that have done these kinds of foolish things, guess what your right eye doesn't actually make you sin understand that your right eye may be the avenue through which sin started you sin because you're evil Your sin because your heart loves sin.

Your sin because you're tempted by the lust that's within you. That's why you sin. You tear both eyes out, cut both hands off, and guess what you're going to do? You're going to sit and you're going to lust. Jesus expects us to be willing to cut off whatever it is in our life that is that instrument through which sin enters. he expects us to be willing to turn off the internet in your house if you have to find another way to do the things you think you have to do he expects you to go a different route to church during the spring when the pools open if that something that you don want to deal with or you don want your children to have to look at he expects you to maybe wear something uncomfortable if you a woman who finds out that there things you wear that reveal things that you didn even realize people could see We went over modesty when we did 1 Peter, and you can listen to that one.

I don't care what you're doing. You know, there's not like a modesty thing for people that God gave, and then like a special provision for when you're working out. Okay? So I know you work out and you want to wear different clothing and it feels more comfortable. Like literally, you watch the Olympics or whatever, right? Well, I mean, I don't.

But you watch the runners. And the girls are wearing bikinis to run 100-meter sprints in. Okay? If it was better for them, wouldn't the men wear it too? I mean, you want to break a world record and you find out that wearing a bikini bottom is going to make you run faster, I guarantee every man would do it. They don't.

It's just the pornographic, pornographicification of our society is what it is. And people want to objectify others and they make them wear a different uniform that shows more of their body. Why? Nobody wants to see the guy's legs. It's that simple. But everybody wants to see the women's legs.

Because like I taught you last week, were the only species where the woman's more beautiful than the man. Just that simple. Don't tear your eye out. But you know what? If you find yourself struggling, where you realize, well, I look at things I shouldn't. I've conquered some of the other stuff maybe, but every once in a while I still find myself wishing that I wasn't so inclined to look at things I ought not.

There's a couple ideas. One is this. Dan Phillips said, never let your eyes rest somewhere your hands shouldn't. Never let your eyes rest somewhere your hands shouldn't. Well, that's an easy one, right? Now, my hand shouldn't be on Lindsay's nose either, so let's not be crazy.

You know exactly what I mean by that, right, and what Dan meant. Another one is this, pray. pray that God would either take away your lust or strike you blind. And I'll tell you what, you'll start thinking every time you look at something you shouldn't, wow, I don't want to be struck blind. I like my eyesight for the 97% of other things I am allowed to look at.

The beautiful gifts God's given us of pretty sunrises and sunsets and even looking at your beautiful spouse and seeing your children and looking at videos of Kevin's baby. I hope it doesn't ruin anything for him now. But you can see how beautiful that was, right? You don't want to lose your eyesight, so don't let your eye be figuratively torn out. Don't make your eye so worthless to you that the only thing it's good for is to pluck out because you use it for sin.

Jesus says if your right hand makes you stumble, cut it off and throw it from you. For it's better for you to lose one of the parts of your body than for your whole body to go into hell. He uses two analogies here, the eye and the hand. The eye and the hand are two very useful parts to everyone. If Jesus said, cut off your appendix, you'd be like, okay, who cares?

What he's saying is you need to be willing to part with anything. that is causing you to be impure in the eyes of God. Recognizing that it's actually you that is. But you want to be willing to separate yourself from that which is maybe even tempting to you. Now you can go to churches where people will give you all sorts of rules to follow that are supposedly meant to prevent these things.

Then they will teach those rules as the commandments of men. So I'm not going to do that. I can give you practical suggestions. Jason, Jeremy, Elijah can too. The women in here can give. But we can all give practical suggestions sometimes.

Okay, maybe you shouldn't go to the beach. But if somebody tells you you can't go to the beach, I'm not sure that's a law that God gave. So we have to be very careful when we give people other laws to follow. but depending on where a person happens to be in their walk there may be some suggestions for them that are meant to help them that get them in an environment where they can heal drunkenness is a sin inside your heart as well but we certainly keep people away from the drink while we're trying to get them sobered up and thinking straight You may need to go a period of time with some changes.

Your right hand is very valuable. I would dare say that for a lot of people when they sin in this way, that's one of the main culprits that's part of it. I'll leave that at that. We want to be willing to realize that everything that we do has the possibility Of leading us into sin because the sin comes from within us. So don't think of yourself as safe.

I also want you to celebrate victory. If you have been a person who lives in 21st century America. And you've had to deal with the things that we deal. I was driving to Chipotle last night. And I drove by a store that had an 8 foot tall woman standing there. in their underwear. A story I'd never seen anything like that in front of me.

It's crazy. They weren't real women. Lindsay's like, wait, eight feet tall women? It looks like basketball. No, this was a billboard, okay? I can even drive somewhere and keep my eyes open while I driving which is the safe way to drive without worrying about a billboard that going to pop up in front of me if someone in a bikini And then I've got to worry about my kids seeing it, and I've got to worry about myself seeing it.

It's just horrible. And if you've had to deal with these kinds of things, I want you to remember that there's victory as well. Christian history is littered with men and women who by the blood of Christ have been completely and utterly forgiven of all of these kinds of gross evils. It's from the grossest ones, the ones we... We have to have laws about bestiality.

Do you realize that? We have to have laws against people touching children. Don't you think a reasonable society wouldn't even need to mention that stuff? We need to make laws about killing children. But if you've had to deal with those things and you've been damaged by them, now, yeah, it's your fault. I'm not saying you've been damaged like you were some victim.

But you damage yourself with sexual immorality. If you've had to deal with those things, I want you to know there's victory. Men and women for centuries have been forgiven completely of these sins because Jesus Christ suffered as if he had committed them. The guy who could never have even had a dream where he had an impure thought during it suffered as if he had done all the things you did.

And he didn't do that so that you could continue in it and so that you'd have no power over it in this life. Do you understand me? And some of you know this. You know that he didn't do it so you continue. You know now he expects you to do the right thing, but you don't feel the power. You don't experience the power of it.

And I want you to know that it's there. And I can't give it to you, and you can't muster it up yourself, and it's not about pulling up your bootstraps, and it's not about you getting saved and then suddenly working hard to live a good life. It's about, by the power of the Holy Spirit, walking in step with the Spirit. Putting away the deeds of the flesh, actively allowing your mind to be renewed by the Spirit of God and providing your body to God as a living sacrifice to Him, holy and acceptable.

And then the Spirit assists you. So you wake up every morning and you read the Bible. My kid comes downstairs and I'm sitting there. I thought about this this week. If my kid walks in the room and I'm sitting there and he starts playing a game, I'm offended. why didn't you say hi to me you know how many of you wake up and the first thing you do is you look at your phone right maybe you do Wordle the daily Wordle right if you don't it's a fun game I recommend it but wake up in the morning and pray wake up in the morning and commune with God some of you don't experience the power of victory over sin practically speaking in your life because you're really not asking for help with it and you're not doing any of the basic disciplines that have been proven to cause us to have some of that power available to us.

But here you are. And on this, this is what, the second to last Sabbath before spring? I don't know, maybe spring is the Sabbath. I don't know. I don't pay attention to all the dates anymore, but here you are and you're going to have the means of grace. you're going to have communion with the saints. You're going to be reminded that Jesus died because you did all these horrible things, some of them in the body, some of them only in your mind and heart.

And you'll be reminded that the same power that raised Jesus from the dead rests in you and will cause you to rise one day. And that power is powerful enough to keep you from any temptation. There is no temptation that has overtaken you. That's not common to man, right? But with every temptation, God provides the means of escape. If you are struggling, which means if you are delaying your obedience in this area, that's what the church is for.

Confess. Maybe the reason you are not overcoming some of the sin in your life is you don't tell others about it that they might pray for you because you're scared of what they'll think of you. You're afraid they won't think as highly of you anymore. So rather than think highly of the facade you've created than actually know who you really are that you might be healed.

Can you imagine a sick person not asking for help and just dying of sickness because they didn't want people to know that they were sick. and that's how we are as sinners but there's forgiveness there's forgiveness at the cross of Christ there's forgiveness from brothers and sisters and I dare say there's forgiveness between spouses for these kinds of things as well and I've seen it and I know spouses who have forgiven this I know a young lady right now whose husband has treated her horribly and she's actually still praying for his return. And so I want you to be able to recognize sin when it's at your door, when it wants to rule over you. I want you to be able to understand, even you young children, that these things are coming.

It won't be 10 years from now and every kid in this church, except probably the one in your belly, will have had at least some brush with all this difficulty. some of you might be married by then, 10 years from now I'm not saying you'll sin this way, I hope not but the temptations will come and they will come before you think you are ready So try to prepare yourself. Spiritual disciplines will help you. You've heard that it was said to those of old, or you've heard that it was said you should not commit adultery.

But Jesus says, if you even lust in your heart, you've already committed adultery. But that same Jesus never did it, not even once. So we'll praise him together. Father, thank you. Thank you for the purity of Jesus Christ. Help us to recognize our need of him.

Not that we may work harder to be pure, but that we may let him purify us from within, yielding our lives to your spirit. Amen.