The Ancients Were Told #3

So this week we're going to be moving on to the second section in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus takes a passage of the Old Testament law and he expounds on it, he opens it up. This section is about another one of the Ten Commandments. Adultery. Last week, the first one, section, we looked at murder. And this week we're going to be moving on to adultery. Now if I were to ask you, last week we talked about murder and I said, you know, I think part of the reason Jesus took up murder is you say, well this is a commandment that... I've never broken. If there was one we could say, I've never broken it, we would say, it's murder. I've never done that. And his whole goal was to say, yes, you have. In many, many ways each day. And now he moves on to adultery. And that's a different type of commandment. That's a different type of commandment. Because that's one that we are familiar with. Maybe we're not familiar with it in our own lives, but we're familiar with it in our families.

Maybe we are familiar with it in our own lives, but this is a sin that we see around us all of the time. We might say, I don't know a murderer. I've never met one. But if we ask the same question, do you know an adulterer? Many of us, I would be surprised if there was someone in the room that said, no, I've never met someone like that. And so this commandment is familiar to us because of the damage that it's caused in our families and the families of people we know. And yet this commandment not to commit adultery doesn't just forbid the fullest expression of the sin, but Jesus goes on to say it forbids every expression of the sin. And so my hope is that as we go through this passage this morning and in the week to come, that God will help each of us to see how we regularly break this commandment. Now that's a weird thing to say, isn't it? I hope that by the end of our time, you'll see that you're an adulterer.

that you've broken this commandment, and that having seen it, my hope is that God will bring you to a thorough and lasting repentance from this sin. Our text is Matthew chapter 5, verses 27 to 30. Would you please stand as we read the word of the Lord? This is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. You have heard that it was said, you shall not commit adultery. But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. As I've been accommodating myself in my mind to this, section of scripture, the Sermon on the Mount, and this section where Jesus is taking these Old Testament commandments and expounding them, I've had this feeling that this is not gospel preaching. But I also know that that's wrong because here Jesus is doing it. And it got me thinking about what preaching is and what good preaching is and what we should desire. And I think that what Jesus does here

And we should not presume that what Matthew's recorded for us is every word that Jesus said. That he probably went on at greater length in person than we have here. We have sort of the distilled down bullet points. That this is one of the best examples in all of scripture of expository preaching. That this is real and what we should look for. Now, as we go through this passage and as we... As we study it, we're going to see that there's no talk of forgiveness. There's no mention of grace. There's lots of warning. There's lots of conviction. Lots of, you've heard that you didn't commit this sin, but I'm here to tell you that you have. And so this passage, if we didn't know that Jesus had been the one to say it, if someone had said, here's my sermon outline, right there.

That's what I'm going to tell the people. I'm going to flesh it out. I think that that sermon, without even a blink of an eye, would be condemned as not gospel-centered, not Christ-centered preaching. And don't make it more than what I'm saying. I can't stand those words and those phrases. Gospel-centered this and Christ-centered that. I don't like them. And I don't think we should think that way or use them. Because what it does is it creates a bar somewhere in the counsel of God or a line and says, this is on one side of it and it's good. And there's this other stuff. It's on the other side of it and it's not good because it's not this. And so Christ-centered or gospel-centered preaching has largely become this idea that in every place and at every time, the whole job of the preacher is to talk about Jesus dying for your sins and you coming to faith.

So what do you do with this passage? You say it's not gospel-centered. Except that Jesus himself is the one preaching it. And so you have this conundrum. And what I think we should do is we should just do away with it. And we can say there's such a thing as good preaching and bad preaching, faithful preaching and unfaithful preaching, expository preaching and just talking. This is good preaching here, what Jesus did. This is what we should want. It's not comfortable. I don't remember if I told you last week, but after my first sermon on murder, we were talking about it in my small group, and one of my small group members, I said, so what did you think? And he said, well, I was an usher this day, and I didn't hear the whole sermon, but I got the part about me being a murderer. You got the point then. You heard it. So now we come to this passage, and it's about adultery. And my goal, I think, and Jesus' goal as well, was not for you to sit there and be like, oh yeah, no big deal.

I don't have that problem. I haven't done that. His goal is actually to say, no, you have. You're actually entangled in this. You're just blind to it. And that was the case at the time when Jesus was speaking. They would have defined adultery very narrowly, very narrowly, very specifically, and said, this one thing over here is adultery. All the things that can go around it that are of a similar style or similar fabric but are not that one thing, those aren't it. You have not broken this commandment. And Jesus' job was to get them to say, yes, you have. There's one other special note I'd like to make before we get into the text specifically. And it's that in the passage, Jesus talks about a man committing adultery. And I think that in our hearts, that resonates with us. We say, well, men are the ones who commit adultery. Women don't commit adultery. And here, even in Jesus' example, it's a man committing adultery. He's lusting after a woman. This is a man's sin. No.

Adultery is not exclusively a man's sin. It's not. There's plenty of ways we can explain this, but I'll leave it at this. For every man who commits adultery, there's a woman he committed adultery with. There are women engaged in this just as much as men. And married women just as much as married men engaged in these sins. And the more that our society cooks up new sorts of sexual... degradation to be infatuated with. All you have is an expanding of adultery and its various expressions. And what we don't find is that men are more guilty of it than women. And so I don't want you to read this text and say, oh, I'm a woman. I don't have to worry about this. You do. You can commit adultery just as easily and probably just as often as the men around you do. You don't get a pass.

And so we'll talk about this a little more in depth later, but I just wanted to note from the beginning that this is not a week off for women, that this commandment doesn't apply to them. I don't want you to think that. It applies just as equally to women as it does to men. So what does the text say? Jesus says, you've heard that it was said, you shall not commit adultery, but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. And so we could read this as the Jews did. They would have read that and say, That means no adultery, no full-blown outward expression of it. And we, like them, often do this very thing. We take a commandment and we say, instead of looking to see it, instead of propagating its definition and trying to see how far it goes, what we do is we put it in a pot and start to boil it down to its most obvious expression.

We work to redefine the boundaries of the sin. And what you'll find in your life, if you're like me or other people, is that you'll end up drawing the line of where that sin was committed just on the other side of you. On that side of the line, that's the sin. But here's a line and I'm just on this side of it. What you'll also find, if you're honest and can look at yourself over time, is that you move that line. You keep it right there on the side of you and wherever you go, Whichever way you move, you always just move the line along with you. So that whatever you're doing, you say, well, I didn't do that. There's this other stuff, I didn't do that. And that's how the Jews would have reasoned, and that's how they would have thought of it. And so we end up having gotten rid of every expression of adultery except for that final singular act where we go, that's adultery. Everything that leads up to it, everything that surrounds it, none of that counts anymore.

I remember one time in counseling, I was with a man, and we were talking, and he was single, and he was fornicating with his girlfriend. And I was trying to convince him that what he was doing was fornicating, and they weren't fornicating, but they were fornicating. And he said, we're not fornicating. It's not sin what we're doing. And I just went to him, I sat in the meeting, and I said, you know what, you see this? I got a wedding ring, okay? Can I do what you're doing? with any other woman and have it not be called adultery can i stay at her house can we spend long nights on the couch in the dark with that so if i said that's not adultery what would my wife say what would my church say he didn't argue anymore he also didn't repent but he stopped arguing because then he understood the point if i did the same things as a married man that you're doing as a single man we would call it adultery so it's fornication when you do it

He had redefined in his mind, he'd done what we all do, which is shrink down the commandment to the thing and say, well, I didn't do that. Everything else, we don't worry about it. One of the problems with this is that we, let's presume that we want to not finally and fully commit adultery. We're fools if we ignore all of the stuff that leads up to that. Because I'll tell you, when adultery is committed, it didn't happen out of nowhere. There was an appetite that was tended to and cultivated and developed for that thing to happen. And so if we don't recognize the sin or the danger until we get right to that point, we are putting ourselves on the road to that point. And when we get there, we'll say, how did this happen? How could you do that? When you start poking around, you find out just exactly how they could do that. They've been cultivating an adulterous heart for a long time. Maybe an example would help.

What would you say to the person who is sick, not with a cold or something that will pass, but something wrong with them, and they don't go to the doctor? They don't figure out what's going on. They don't care. They just say, I'm not sick. I'm not sick. I'm fine. It's okay. It's no big deal. I'll get over it. Whatever it is they say. And they go on, and they go on, and they go on. All the while, their sickness is growing. It's getting worse. It's becoming more detrimental to them, more dangerous, potentially more lethal. They're not doing anything about it. Then it gets so bad, they finally get taken to the doctor or the hospital or whatever. They go in an ambulance because some event, some terrible thing happened. They show up. What goes on in that moment is now they have to admit that they are sick.

But if you were the physician attending to them, would you think this person just got sick 30 minutes ago? If you knew the sickness, you'd say no. This sickness has been growing for months and maybe years ahead of time. They ignored the signs. They ignored the symptoms. They bypassed the time when they might have been able to turn it around. And now it's late. Now it's full-blown. And what I find with people that are inclined that way is that while they'll do nothing about their sickness, if they were honest, they would say, I do know there's something wrong. My body's not working just how it used to work. And I think it's not just because I've gotten a little older. But they won't admit it to anybody else. And they'll expect everyone else to go along with their deception, which is that they're fine and nothing's wrong.

And so everyone conspires together to maintain the lie until the lie bursts over and then we all go, what happened? How could that be? And then it's too late. We shouldn't want that to happen with our bodies, with our health. We also shouldn't want that to happen with our sins. That we would get to the point where we have committed some awful sin and went, why did I do that? How did that happen? Where did that come from? Instead, we should be searching out smaller expressions of the sin in our lives. Because we're aware of where they lead to. If we were to change out the sin and I was to ask, have you been in a conversation with somebody or had some sort of a tense thing and you had this impulse to say something, something mean, something hurtful, and you knew that if you said that thing, then the fight was really going to break. I mean, then we were just going to be off to the races. You knew that that thing was going to knock the dominoes over, that we're going to lead to a much worse situation.

If you haven't experienced that, you really should ask God to help you see how you get to that point. How did we get into this terrible fight? How did we get our children behaving like this? How did we end up in this financial situation? How did we end up not having a principal to go to church or whatever? How did we get here? If you'll ask and you'll go looking, you'll find the answer. You'll find the answer. And so we should be in the habit of searching out the smallest expressions of the sin. we're warned against because we know that they lead to fuller expressions of it. So what is adultery? How do you define it? Jesus defines it as any man who look, everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. The Jews had already trimmed this command down to its most obvious external action. We've done the same. Jesus readdresses the question and reframes it in such a way as to show that even a desire to do the thing is a violation of this commandment itself. Where we were tracking with the act of adultery, he goes back and says, your desires for those things are violations. You broke the command way back there. Lust in our hearts leads to greater expressions of the sin.

In our day and age, it often leads to pornography use, pornography addictions. And times gone by before we could have had images and movies of fornication and adultery, it would have been replaced by going to see prostitutes. In the Westminster Confession, there's a phrase in there, the keeping of stews. And no one knows what that means. And what it means is being a regular at a brothel. Keeping of a stew is like keeping a prostitute on hand. On retainer. Making a habit of it. And that those things lead to adultery, finally. Here's the problem with sin of every kind, but especially sexual sin because it's so prevalent. You think you can control it. You think, I'll go this far and no further. Every dating couple has this thought. How far can we go? What can we do? What's okay? Where's the line? We're going to walk right up to the line. We're going to get our toes curled right over the edge of it. And we're just going to stay right here for about six, eight months.

No, you're not. You're not. And you're not special when you fall into sin because you've walked right up to the edge of it, right up to wherever you drew the line, so you might move the line a little bit. What I tell couples at that time is I say, you need to stop asking what you're allowed to do and start asking what purity would require of you. Wherever we're at in our violation of this commandment, we've settled in and made it seem normal to us. But here's the thing. You know somewhere in your mind that it's not normal. Do you know how you know? Because you don't tell anybody else about it. That's how you know. Because whatever your struggle is, you won't have anyone else know because you're ashamed of it. And so somewhere in your head, you know it's a problem. And you say, and no one can know about it because it's a problem. But you tell yourself, I can handle it. I can manage it. It's not that big of a deal. You lie to yourself. You say, I have it under control. Proverbs warns us with regard to lust that,

The man who goes, you know, the young man who's a naive man, he goes into the house of the adulterous woman. He says, she doesn't know that her path leads to Sheol, leads to hell, leads to death. He doesn't know. And so they both go down there together. We don't take into account our own stupidity when it comes to our ability to know ourselves and to know our temptations. We can look out in the distance and say, I would never, no, that's no, and I would never, uh-uh. And what I'll tell you is if that's your disposition toward sexual sin or any other sort of sin, give it a few years. It'll be a lot closer to you than it was before. And then you'll just look further out and say, well, I would never do it. And then you get to where you commit adultery, and then what will the guy who's committed adultery say? I'll never do that again. But how many times have you said to yourself, having committed some sort of sin, I'll never do that again, only to find that in a matter of days, you do.

If avoiding sin and sexual sin was so easy that you could look at it and say, I will never do that again. If you could put to death an addiction that easily, then you should come up here and tell us how. Because I have not found in my life that there's any sin that I can simply go, I shouldn't do that, and then that's the end of the fight. Ever. That has not been my own experience. Personally, that has not been my experience as a pastor. talking to other people, saying, I won't do that again. I shouldn't do that. That was wrong. I'm crying. I feel really bad. People come and they cry and they're torn up because their family or whatever has just been ripped to shreds by their sin. And everyone wants to say, he would never do that again because of the pain that it caused. And I'm sitting there in my head thinking, yes, you will. Because you knew that this is the pain that it would cause when you did it the first time. And it didn't stop you then. Why should you think it will stop you in the future?

The sorrow and the grief that we feel over our sin when it's found out, whatever sin it is, it will fade. It will fade. And if there's no good, if there's no profit turned by the pain that's been inflicted, the sin that's been committed, you just got it, you were in line to get on the roller coaster and you got on the roller coaster and what do you do as soon as you get off the line of a really fun roller coaster? You go right back, get right back in line. It's cyclical. Our sins, we repeat them. We're committed to them. And to think that we can just step out of them after years of bondage is just foolish and damning. So adultery, as Jesus defines it, is to look at a woman with lust in her heart, in your heart for her. He says you've already committed adultery with her in your heart. If you read the Westminster Larger Catechism on this commandment, Question 139 is, what are the sins forbidden in the seventh commandment? Listen to the list. The sins forbidden in the seventh commandment, besides the neglect of the duties required, which is what's outlined in the question before, these are all the things you're supposed to do to keep your marriage bed pure and holy. Besides the neglect of the duties required are adultery, fornication, rape, incest, sodomy, and all unnatural lusts.

all unclean imaginations, thoughts, purposes, and affections, all corrupt or filthy communications. So you're listening to this. You should be thinking, the things I think about, the things I text, the memes I text in jokes, all corrupt and not filthy communications, or listening thereunto, you violate this commandment, not if you send it, but if you look at it and receive it and go, ha, ha, ha, yeah. Wanton looks. impudent or light behavior, immodest apparel, immodest apparel, prohibiting or lawful or dispensing with unlawful marriages, allowing, tolerating, keeping of stews, this is prostitution, and resorting to them, entangling vows of the single life. Did you know that if you're not called to be single and you refuse marriage, you're committing adultery? You're refusing to have pure sexual interactions within marriage and you're violating the seventh commandment.

Having more wives or husbands than one at the same time, unjust divorce or desertion, idleness, gluttony, drunkenness, unchaste company, lascivious songs, books, pictures, dancings, stage plays, and all other provocations too, or acts of uncleanness, either in ourselves or in others. I was guilty. Early on in the list, and then it just kept going on. You've sinned, you've failed. Nope, nope, bad, no good. Are those only sins that men commit? Immodest apparel. They had men in mind when they wrote that. Men can certainly dress immodestly. If I had to summarize what the Westminster Confession says here, I would say adultery is anything at all that is not absolutely pure with regard to all of your thoughts.

desires, or actions. Even the smallest expression of these things is a violation of the commandment. You see, when God made Adam, he said, it's not good for the man to be alone. I'm going to make a helper suitable for him. And when he made that helper suitable, you may say there's three purposes of marriage. One of them is protection from sin. Another is procreation. And the other one is a relationship. I'm struggling with the word for it. Companions, that's the word. You see how good I am at it. And we can just rattle off those three things and say that's what marriage is for. But adultery is a violation, is a sin against your spouse.

Because all of those things that are listed here, all of the things that the Westminster outlines for us, those are all things that strike at the vitals of your marriage. Those are all things that can cause destruction. Those are all the things that you're supposed to be disciplined. If it's wicked, you're to discipline the thought, the desire, and repent of it. But there are things that you may only get from your spouse. Only ever for your whole life. And that applies to you before you're married. There are things in marriage that... A husband ought only to get from his wife. And there are things in marriage that a wife ought only to get from her husband. And I'm not speaking only about physical intimacy. I am speaking about that, but I don't think anyone would argue with me about that unless you're really in favor of something wicked. We would all agree and say, yes, it's yes. Physical intimacy, that's marriage, that's husband, that's wife. Whenever a husband wants something that he should get from his wife, relationally, and he goes and gets it somewhere else,

He's breaking his marriage bond. The same is true of a woman. She should get something from her husband, relationally. And she says, no, no, no. He's not good at that. He doesn't do that. He's mean to me. I don't like him. Whatever the thing is. And she says, I'm going to go get it somewhere else. She's committing adultery. She's saying, there's something I need that I should get from my husband, and I'm not going to get it from him. I'm going to get it somewhere else. Now, we might say, that's not adultery. It may not even be sexual in nature. Does it strike at the root of your marriage?

How would you husbands feel if your wife was cultivating a real close friendship with some other guy? He just gets me and understands me so well. I bet the hair on the back of your neck should stand up and you'd say no. No. That's what she'd say if you were doing it with a woman. Anything that strikes at the union between a husband and wife and their relationship and their representation of Christ's relationship with his bride, the church. Anything that tells a lie about that. is a violation of this commandment. It's not simply sexual, though often that's what it leads to. Then the question gets asked, and we should at least for a moment acknowledge, is that there's a difference, or what is the difference between adultery and adultery in your heart? Is there a difference between adultery and adultery in your heart? Maybe, sort of, it depends. Can you give me an example? Well, first, what I tell you is, in God's sight, no.

Is adultery in your heart, is a lust in your heart a sin in God's sight? Yes. And so from the very beginning, we have to start out and say, okay, we're going to set aside our own assessment of things and we're going to look at the way God views these things and say, is lust a sin in God's sight? The answer is absolutely yes, it is. It's a violation of the seventh commandment. It's adultery. The one who lusts in his heart is an adulterer, even if he's not married yet. The circumstances of his sin might change, moving from being single to being married, but the name of the sin and its nature is exactly the same. And so if you've discovered lust in your heart for someone that's not your spouse, you violated this commandment, even if you didn't act on it, even if you couldn't act on it. And yet that's not a full answer for us. We want to go, isn't there some difference between adultery and just things I lust and desire?

Isn't there a line somewhere in there where sin's on one side and there's safety on the other? Isn't actual adultery worse than lust? And in some sense, you have to acknowledge, yes, it is. Yes, it actually is. It's more devastating. It's a more putrid expression of the sin. There is a difference. But if you were to ask the people that you sinned against, your spouse primarily, What does it feel like when they find out about your pornography habit? They won't be sitting there going, well, at least you didn't do it worse. They will be devastated. They won't be like, well, it wasn't that bad. They won't say, it could be worse. Because it's devastating. It's awful. It's a violation of your marriage bond. The question that often comes up in reference to this question is, is lust or pornography used grounds for divorce? Well, I'll tell you this. Divorce is the next thing that comes up in our passage in the Sermon on the Mount. And I think there's wisdom in Jesus ordering it this way. The first he says, you shall not commit adultery. And then he says, you've heard that it was said, you know, talks about a certificate of divorce. It's hard, hard work to sort out. And there's not a clear, obvious answer. What I can say with regard to divorce now before we get into it in depth is God hates divorce.

And doesn't desire that we would go around and destroy our marriages with our sins and then refuse to mend them, fix them. Years ago, I had a man ask me. He was married at the time. We were talking about this sin. Older than me. And he was talking about going to the gym. And I said, you know, it's a hard place. It's really not a great place for men to be. And I said, why? And I said, well, because there's all these women in there that are... wearing next to no clothes, so it's not a good place to be. And he looked at me with a strange look on his face, and he's like, what do you mean? And then he asked me this question. He says, can't I admire the physical beauty of a woman without lusting after her? What am I supposed to say to him? No, you can't. No. No, no, you can't. You might wish you could. He's a very intelligent man. You might want to draw, make some little...

disclaimer over here. Put a little asterisk next to it and say, as long as you're just admiring her physical beauty, the way God made her. This is what he was arguing to me. And I said, no, that's just not possible. How would your wife feel if she saw you looking at that woman that way? Honey, I was just admiring her physical beauty. I'm sure your wife would say, oh, okay. Right after she slapped you in the face. Because it's sin. Now what happened to that man? He ended up divorced. Is it because he looked at immodestly dressed women at the gym? No, actually. That's not the primary reason he was divorced. But I can tell you that he was divorced, then he was a fornicator, then he was married, and then he was divorced again. Does it surprise you that if you zoom out of the question and you say, okay, let's look at your life, that that's the story of it? It wasn't surprising to me. The second divorce that he was going through,

After having married the woman that we had told him, you know, you really shouldn't marry this woman. He went ahead and married her. Then I was having lunch with him after they were divorced. And he says, you know, my being married to her was a detriment to my spiritual health. I didn't want to read my Bible as much when I was married to her because she tempted me to sin so much. And he said it with a straight face. He meant it. He had believed that, that that was the truth. And I just looked at him and I said, you should never think that being unfaithful to your wife is pleasing to God. That being faithful to the marriage vows that you've made against counsel, that breaking those is somehow better for you spiritually. You're just wrong. Now if you were to ask that man or one like him that you know, is your life going the way you wanted it to go? Is it the way you hoped it would be? He'd say, no, I never intended for this and that and the other thing to happen.

And what I would say then is, why did you cultivate it? That's what you were doing at the gym. You were cultivating it. That's what you're doing on your computer screen. You're cultivating it. Or your phone. That's what you're doing. You're cultivating it. And then you'd be surprised when it happens. I don't want you to be surprised when it happens because I don't want it to happen. You might think, well, if I have to deal with it in these terms, then I'm just going to be fighting with these temptations every minute of every day. And I say, well, If you don't fight with them every minute of every day, you'll just be violating the seventh commandment every minute of every day. Those are the choices. You can do battle with your sin or you can be in bondage to it. That's it. That's all there is. There is no magic. You're done with it now. It's not a problem anymore. It won't be a struggle.

And if you feel like, well, I'm going to be pressed in on every side, oppressed, constantly struggling, and you just want me to, I'm just going to feel terrible about myself all of the time. And I'd say, if that's what it takes to lead you to repentance, then good. Come to Jesus. I remember when I became a Christian, the thought that I could not commit sin, like I didn't have to commit sin, was the most freeing feeling I ever had in my life. Because up to that point, I didn't believe that life could be any different. And I'll tell you, it can be different. You actually can be free from these sins. And by free, I don't mean never struggling. I mean free in the sense that you have the will and the desire and the strength from the Spirit to resist those sins. That's freedom in this life. That's freedom. The ability to fight and to repent and to get back up and to repent again and to walk through it and not quit. That's freedom from sexual sin. That's fighting against adultery. And you will do it your whole life.

The man that I was talking to you about earlier, he's old enough to be my dad. He's still struggling with it, still losing the fight, because he wanted an easy path instead of a faithful one. So don't be intimidated by the fact that the battle will be constant. Don't you think Jesus knew that when he was warning them? Don't you think that the people that heard him would have felt something similar to what you're feeling right now, which is, this is constant in my life. That should drive us to the cross. That should bend our knees to the ground. You have to confess these sins. You have to admit them to the people that you've sinned against. It will hurt them. A lot. This is life in this world. And it's not just life for 21st century Americans. This was life at Jesus' time. The people had hard hearts. They weren't concerned about sin. They weren't concerned about following after God. We should be. They should have been. We should be. Do you tell your spouse when you're tempted?

That'd be awkward. They might get angry at you. I'll tell you, you'd rather have a spouse angry at you because you told them that you were tempted to sin and that you needed some attention from them than to actually not tell them that and then to fall into the sin. If your spouse tells you, I'm tempted and I need your help. If your wife comes to you and says, I need you to talk to me. I need you to engage with me. I need this thing in my chest. I need you to engage with that heart in there. Because when you don't, it makes me wander. My mind, my thoughts, my desires, they wander. Don't be upset at her when she tells you that. She's asking you to help her not fight against sin. I'm sorry, I said that very wrong. She's asking you to help her fight against sin. She's asking you to help her not fall into sin. And the same is true the other way around. You should not despise being asked for help. That's one of the purposes of marriage.

You're supposed to help each other, not sin. Well, how are you supposed to help each other, not sin, if you don't know particularly what the problem is, what the danger is? Don't have a marriage. You don't want a marriage where you've agreed with your spouse in silence to never tell each other what the problem is. That's an awful marriage. And at some point, it'll blow out. There'll be a problem, and then the sin will be there, and no one will know how or why or what to do about it. Pastor, are you telling me that my wife and my husband and I should regularly know what our temptations are and when they're being tempted and in what circumstances are worse for them? Yes. Yes. Absolutely. That's absolutely the case. With regard to adultery, your spouse is the one who's supposed to help you. If you're single and you're like, man, it really sucks being single, get married. It's really hard to get married. There's no good men. There's no good women. Getting married has always been hard and taken faith.

It really has. The difficulties may change from season to season, but it's always been hard, and you've always needed God's help. Are you the kind of man that a woman would want to marry? Are you the kind of woman that a man would want to marry, would notice? Or are you bringing baggage, you know, like you're going on an overseas trip, baggage full of sexual sin with you? I'll tell you, that's very unattractive to a potential spouse. They don't want that stuff. Whether it's the man with the baggage or the woman with the baggage, they don't want that stuff. They say, I don't want someone who's given their life to adultery. They don't say it with those words, but they're just like, you've got problems. So if you've got problems, then what they need to see is that you're dealing with your problems, that you're fighting against it. And if you find a spouse who's appalled at that idea, probably not a good one to marry. Because if they won't help you before marriage, bear the burden, they are not going to help you afterwards. They're not going to hear about it. You're supposed to be perfect.

So in closing, this is a sin that we all commit all the time. The men, the women, the young, the old, the married, the single. You have to discipline your knee-jerk reaction to say, no, that's not true of me. Because there's no help to be found for the person who won't admit that they've sinned in this way. There's no help for them. Because they've declared themselves healthy. Just like the person who's got diabetes that's going out of control and says, I won't go to the doctor and have it dealt with. I won't deal with my diet. I won't do anything. Nothing at all. Until it finally comes to a head. Acknowledge your sins. Ask your spouse to help you. Help them when they ask you so that you can have a pure and undefiled marriage bed that's not full of adultery and lust. It's hard for me to imagine that there'd be someone sitting here that has no idea what I'm talking about personally who hasn't experienced it. But if you feel like you have a small knowledge, you're like, I don't quite know what he's talking about. Ask God to help you see it.

Ask your spouse to help you see it. Ask people of the same sex in your small group to help you see it. And let them tell you, that thing right there that is a very normal part of your life, that's it. That's the thing. Now you might think, that's a very regular part of my life, and we'll talk more about this next time. That's a very normal part of my life. Is it any surprise then that Jesus goes in and says, if your eye, if your hand causes you to stumble, throw it out. Repenting of the sin and fighting against sin is going to mean some very common, useful thing, you know, familiar things to us are going to have to change for our repentance to be meaningful. It should be no surprise to you that if a man was struggling with pornography and is on his phone all the time, that one of the things we tell him to do is get rid of his smartphone. Not because it fixes the problem, but because you go, this is the scene of the crime. Get rid of it. How am I supposed to like...

Live normal life. You're not. Look what you're doing with normal life. You're destroying your soul. You're not. You're not supposed to. What will my friends think? They will either say, see you in hell, because they'll be there with you, or they'll understand. I know as well as anybody, if I see a guy who doesn't have a smartphone, I know why he doesn't have a smartphone. It's not like they're more expensive than dumb phones. It's not cost prohibitive is what I mean. I'm sure smartphones are more expensive than dumb phones, but it's not like, oh, it's cost prohibitive. It's because he's trying to make some defense against the sin. And I say, praise God and keep fighting and do more. Next time we'll pick up in verse 28 about what it means to cast out your eye or your hand if it makes you stumble. Again, I'll note just before I end that Jesus doesn't say, it's no big deal. It'll all be fine.

he escalates and says, you have to do something. You have to repent, and it's going to hurt. It's going to be costly. It's going to be significant. This is what it's going to take. And so as we ask God to help us to show us these sins, and as we search out what repentance means, I don't want you to think it'll be easy and familiar and comfortable. No, it'll be painful. It'll be a little difficult. But it'll be good. Because what he promises here is, he says, it would be better for you to lose those parts of your body than for you to go into hell. Heaven and hell hang in the balance. There can be good or there can be bad. And your repentance is what demonstrates which you want. So we'll talk about that next time. Let's pray.