You Shall Not Commit Adultery

Well, good morning. Our sermon series in the Ten Commandments is going to continue. Ten Commandments, the Ten Words from God. And we have made it all the way up to the Seventh Commandment. And our text for today, if you saw in your bulletin, we're actually, I have two texts. I want to give us the passage in Exodus, but we're also going to read Jesus' further exposition of it in Matthew 5. As with the other commandments, we see that there is both a positive and a negative, that the commandment is more than just the ten words, as I've said before, they're concentrated form. They are to help us understand God's will, but they're not limited.

in the way that we might think with just the two or three words that some of them are. But they're short. You can assign a commandment to each finger in your hand and help you to remember all of God's law succinctly and easily, right? But there is much more that could be said. If you're able, please stand for the reading of God's word. You shall not commit adultery. 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. Thanks be to God. You may be seated. All the commandments have the narrow and the broader meaning, and they all reach into the furthest corners of our lives. This commandment is calling us to be exclusive.

in our hearts, in our minds, and in our bodies. This command is not simply for married people. It's for all of us. On the positive side of this command, we are called to keep ourselves pure, to be chaste in our words, in our thoughts, and in our actions. That we are to be modest in the way that we dress and in our demeanor. It means that we should get married if God has not given us the gift of singleness. And if you are married, you and your husband or your wife should be making love together and living together. It means that you should be on guard against all sexual temptation. Negatively, this means that we must flee all sexual encounters that are outside the bounds of marriage.

Within marriage, sex is exclusive between the husband and the wife, and bringing anyone else into that relationship is forbidden. It's a commandment against all sexual perversions. It forbids us from masturbation, from incest, rape, homosexuality, prostitution, brothels, and other sexual perversions. It prohibits immodesty in dress and in behavior. It prohibits listening to sexual explicit songs. It commands against sexual jokes, making innuendos from watching sexual TikToks, YouTube, Facebook reels, scrolling on Instagram, and what other social media that goes towards sexual perversion. In this commandment, we are... commanded to control our sexual desires. The desires are good, but we are to fight sexual lust, which is wicked. All of these, and there's more that we could suss out, would fall under the command that we're given here to not commit adultery. What we see in this command is that God desires for us to control our desires.

That we should not allow our desires or the lusts that we have to control us. In the Westminster Larger Catechism, it condemns gluttony and drunkenness under the seventh commandment. Because at the heart of it, it's this rampant desires that are out of control. Adultery is letting lust control what you do and think. It's a desire controlling the person. It's the tail wagging the dog. Sexual desire is good. It's given by God. Lust is sinful. Lust is inordinate desire. It is wanting good things in a wrong way or desiring them in sinful ways. So as we go through this sermon, there are two things that you must not forget. Of all the Ten Commandments, This commandment is the one that is most likely to destroy your life. We break all the commandments, but this commandment is the one that is most likely to cause mayhem and destruction and distrust that will haunt you all of your life. It is a dangerous sin. Secondly, in our culture, we think this is a male sin. There are many reasons that we would think this, but it's simply not true.

All of us struggle to keep the seventh commandment, both men and women. Being different in our proclivities, that means that our desires are different. And so the outworking of the transgression of the seventh commandment will often look different in men and women. Or the route by which we go will look different, though the end point is often the same. What would probably be truer for us to say is that we live in an effeminate age, and because of the culture that we live in, we're more comfortable with the feminine side of the destruction of this commandment than the more masculine perversions of this commandment. It seems safer to us. So, keep those points in mind. The two main points of the sermon...

that we're going to go through as one, marriage and sexual desire, biblical sex, biblical sex being appropriate sex between the husband and the wife, are unapologetically good and great gifts from God that we should cherish and enjoy. And second, lasting satisfaction, joy, and happiness can only be found in God and in our union with Christ. Any searching outside of that will lead to a temporary fulfillment, but nothing lasting or truly satisfying. Ultimately, all of the sexual perversions that we see are telegraphing to us some sort of unfulfilled need, some sort of unfulfilled desire, and we try to fill that with sex, with drugs, with fantasies, with relationships, but it can never be met by a mere Object or by another person? By a mere man, I should say. What is needed is Christ. Now, so what I want us to start with then is what is a biblical view of marriage and sex? And to get what a biblical view would be, we must go back to the garden, naturally, where we see the first marriage. And what we have there is this really incredible, beautiful picture.

God speaks in the stars and the heavens and the whole world's brought into being by the word and the power of God. And then God gets really intimate and he crafts man from the dust of the ground. And then he breathes life into Adam, the first man. And then he tells Adam, I've got a job for you. I want you to name all the creatures. So Adam goes to work and God in his kindness, brings them to Adam, right? Adam doesn't have to go out searching. So he brings all the creatures to him. And Adam goes, well, there's Mr. and Mrs. Rabbit, Peter Rabbit. And then he goes, I think you're an elephant. There's Mr. and Mrs. Mongoose, and so on and so forth. The male and female animal, they come to him, and he names them, and he calls them according to what they were.

But think about the realization that's coming to Adam as he's doing that. There's two of every kind. There's a male and a female. And as he names them and categorizes them, he realizes there's no Mrs. Adam. There's no companion for him. There's no female. And so it's as if God brought all these animals to impress upon Adam that It is not good for man to be alone. So he sees all of this beauty and this creation and these animals together, and he realizes none of them work for me, and they all have a companion, and I don't. It's an overwhelming lesson. He gets it. And then God doesn't make him wait. He puts him to sleep. And then...

We all know the story, right? He cuts open his side and he pulls out a rib. And it's really important that he pulls out a rib. We can learn things from thinking about what Scripture tells us, like the woman was created from man's rib, not his head, because man is the head. She does not rule over man. She wasn't taken from his foot, though. He's not to trample her or be hard on her or treat her like the ground he walks on. She's taken from his rib, from beside him. She is protected by him, and yet she is his companion to stand next to him, shoulder to shoulder. So Adam then wakes up, right? He was sleeping, he was out, and then God wakes him up. And Adam stands up, and he looks, and he sees Eve. And we have the first song, the first poetry. It bursts from his lips when he sees her.

The man said, this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman for she was taken out of man. And you just see Adam's great joy that he now has someone. The scripture goes on and says, for this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and he shall be joined to his wife and they shall become one flesh. These verses teach us, So much. It's incredible what we're taught in these verses. Think about it. And to know all of this is pre-fall. All of this is pre-fall, pre-corruption. First thing to know is that it is not good for man to be alone. The context of this passage is marriage, but it is generally true as well. We've all been called to singleness at some point in our lives. From the point we were born to the point we were married, we were single. And?

Reality is, at some point we'll be single again, right? One of us, you know, our husband or wife will die and we'll be single again. That doesn't change the fact that singleness is not good for us. One of the worst punishments that we have conceived of is solitary confinement, right? People absolutely go crazy when they're in solitary confinement. Aloneness is not good. So, we must seek to be in communion with others. We need the church. We need the fellowship that comes from being together with other believers. Because we were not made to do life by ourselves. We need our families. We need spouses. We need the church. We need friends. We need felt. We need to be in a community with others. We also learn of the created order, that man was created first. It is his job to lead and to be head of the family.

The command to subdue the earth was given to Adam. That's his responsibility. And he's to bring his wife and his children along in that work. But the commands were given to Adam because he is the leader of his family. But we also see that men and women are not different creatures. They're made of the same substance. They have the same breath of God. One's not lesser than the other. They're both in God's image. The next thing we see is that men and women, when they get married, are to leave and to cleave. This is not a sexual union per se. Rather, this means living together in unity and with love for one another. The same thing is said of Ruth, that she cleaved to Naomi. King David's men cleaved to King David.

They loved them. They were with them. They followed them. This cleaving means a living together in unity, of being together, of putting each other's needs before anyone else. So this means that if you're married, when you have a bad day, the person you turn to for comfort and stability is first your spouse. It's not your mom. It's not your dad. You are to be leaved and cleaved from them. This applies to your best friends, right? The most stable relationship in your life should be your husband or your wife. Because that's who God's given you to be with forever, for the length of your days. Your trust and devotion should be given to your husband or your wife. That your spouse gets your attention, your time, and your money. And you need to be jealous of that. You may need to set boundaries for your spouse.

with their family or help them. But you are to be one flesh and you must diligently cultivate this. Many of the difficulties in your marriage will be because you have not left and cleft. You've not leaved and cleaved, right? You're not living together as one. You're still trying to farm out your affections to other people. And it's not, remember, I'm not saying that we don't love our families and we don't spend time with them, but You are to be united with your wife, to be leaving and cleaving for that. The insecurity your wife feels is probably because you're not sufficiently cleaving to her, and she feels like your affections are elsewhere. Your husband's frustrations may stem from the fact that he feels your time and your energy are given to everything else but him. It then goes on to say what? That they were one flesh, and that does mean sex.

Adam and Eve in the garden had sexual desires. They were given sex as a gift from God. In fact, God requires sex. God requires it because he says what? To be fruitful and multiply. And he's calling them to be one, to be united, to not be separate. Being fruitful and multiplying requires a sexual union. Now, one way that some Christians in the past have dealt with this is to say that sex is only for procreation, but this is not a biblical view of sex. Sex is given for procreation, but sex is not simply for procreation. One of the primary reasons that God gave sex to a husband and to his wife is because it cements the relationship together. In that act, they become one. They become united.

And it's not merely physical. There is a spiritual component to this. In some mysterious way, it makes you one flesh. This is most radically portrayed in a child who is literally 50-50, the mom and the dad. However, that is just a truth borne out of a spiritual reality that is there, whether there's children involved or not. Husbands and wives need to be using this amazing gift that God has given to help you to be united and connected to one another. In the confines of marriage, sex is wonderful. It's beautiful. It's powerful. Think of the destruction that results from the perversion of sex. That speaks to the power of it when it is rightly used in the context of marriage. The Bible is far less prudish than we are.

Proverbs chapter 5, 15 through 19. Drink water from your own cistern and fresh water from your own well. Should your springs be dispersed abroad, streams of water in the streets? Let them be yours alone and not for strangers with you. Let your fountain be blessed and rejoice in the wife of your youth. As a loving hind in a graceful doe, let her breasts satisfy you at all times. Be exhilarated. Do you know what this word is, exhilaration here? Intoxicate it. Be drunk with love in the context of your marriage. This is incredible. What a positive, beautiful picture of marital love. When you teach your kids about marriage, love, and sex, does this come through at all? Is that picture that we see in Proverbs 5?

how you feel about your wife and your husband. If you're married, write this down. This is homework for you. You have to do this. Read through the Song of Solomon together as a couple, not separately. Do it together more than once and use your imagination and talk about the metaphors that are in there. Figure out what Solomon is saying. It might scandalize you. And you should be thinking, does our marriage look like this? It should. Now, this is ideal, right? We have to work towards this. It doesn't happen overnight. But the Bible is not shy of speaking about sex. And it's not shy of talking about the joy of intimacy with your wife and of using pretty graphic analogies if you just take a minute to think about them. Listen.

If you want to inoculate your sons and your daughters against pornography and masturbation and all the other sexual perversions, then do not hide from them the reality of this joy in marriage, of the joy that comes from a husband who loves his wife and a wife who loves her husband and who can barely keep their hands off each other. When you come home, the first thing you should do is go kiss your spouse. You should touch each other. You shouldn't be gross. about it. Don't be weird about it. But love each other. Give each other kisses in front of your kids. Big kisses. Touch your wife's bottom. Give her a little slap. Let your kids see the joy that you have with your spouse. And guess what? If you show them the true picture of what love is, they're not going to want the cheap substitutes that the world's offering. But if you hide it from them and act like it's shameful, How will they know better? If marriage to you is a drag and sex is shameful, then the temptations out there will be far more tempting for your children. Now, sadly, we live in a very perverted age. We live in a culture that is sexually confused and debauched. You can't go anywhere without it being thrown in your face, shoved in your face. It's on our billboards. It's on our signs. It's in every ad you listen to.

It's on the radio. It's in the music. It's in the TV shows. It's in the movies. It's on TikTok. It's on Instagram. It's on Facebook. It's on YouTube. They're all filled with immodest and sexually alluring people. Whether you're being drawn by the physical body parts or the allure, or where you're being drawn by this carefully curated perfection of their lives, it's a fantasy. But you think that maybe you could be like that. And it's a sexual perversion. And it's filling your minds with lies. Our bookstores are filled with trashy romance novels and sexual games. Our cities are filled with escorts. The news is filled with sexual perversion. Many are out there trying to corrupt our children. They're trying to normalize sexual sin in every form you can think of. You can't even go into a restaurant without seeing women walking around in...

What barely qualifies is something other than undergarments. We live in a world that's full of sexual perversion and violations of the second commandment are everywhere. The world celebrates and works to normalize sexual perversions like homosexuality and transgenderism. And as Christians, we know what 1 Corinthians 6.18 says, right? Flee immorality. Every other sin that a man commits is outside his body, but the immoral man sins. against his own body. So if we consider today where sex is overtly shoved in our faces, whether we want it to be or not, we know that sex is incredibly destructive. And we also know that sex is a gift from God. It's a good desire, but it's to be private and kept between a husband and wife. So we're trying to figure out, what do we do with all this? Often I think what we hear is you shall not commit adultery. And we hear all these prohibitions on sex when we read the book of Leviticus, and it can often give us a very negative view of it. So then many parents fail their kids when it comes to imparting a biblical view of sex and marriage. We present it as almost a negative. Sex is bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad for the first 20-some years, 30 years of your life.

until you get married. And then maybe sort of it's okay. You know, it's something that women have to give into for their husbands, but it's kind of a chore and kind of... Many of us, I'm afraid, have that view. Or maybe we have a more positive view, but we aren't going to talk about it with our kids. Well, then guess who's going to teach your kids? It's going to be the world. Now, do remember what Solomon says, that you do not want to awaken love before it's time. That is a hopeful principle to remember in talking with our children. But you do not want the world to shape your view of sex and marriage or your children's. And even if you have a positive view, if when you speak of it to your children and you're super awkward and you're embarrassed and you're shy, then the impression you're going to give them of sex is that it's shameful, dirty, and perhaps a necessity, but overall negative.

And a negative approach to this, to sex and marriage, will lead to bad results. Because we cannot call bad and evil what God has called good. What will happen is our daughters will not want to have sex with their husbands and they'll feel dirty and ashamed by it. If you squish it and you don't talk about it and you hide it or you're shameful about it, then what's going to happen is your kids will become curious. Because it's a desire that they will have. Because it's given by God for a man. It will breed curiosity. And then your children will go looking. And they'll end up in awful places, addicted to things like pornography, as they try to satiate this curiosity and just figure things out. They can easily learn that perversions are normal because of the way that they've learned about it from people other than you.

from the friends in their private Christian schools who have phones and show pictures and talk about things. And in public school, any school, you can't hide from it. The thing is, we all have the desire, and if we do not teach our children about it and give them a biblical worldview and ways of expressing it, it will come out in sinful ways. Marriage is a beautiful gift from God. Sex is a beautiful gift from God. And we need to be the ones who mediate that knowledge to our kids, not the world. We need to teach them of the joys of it and the beauty of it and the sanctity of it within the proscribed way that God has given it to us. And here's the thing. That will give our kids a healthy view of sex. But if you abdicate here, they will grow up.

with the world's view because it is ubiquitous. It is everywhere you go. Every ad you see is sending you a message about sex and what you should find attractive and what you should desire. Now, why is this such a big deal? It's such a big deal because our marriages are not just our marriages. Our marriages and the unity between a man and a woman are actually a picture of something far more beautiful and far greater than any one single marriage. Ephesians says, Husbands, love your wives just as Christ also loved the church and gave himself up for her, so that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing with the word, that he might present to himself the church in all of her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing.

but that she would be holy and blameless. So husbands also to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church. Because we are members of his body. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is great. You ready for a great mystery? This mystery is great, but I am speaking with reference to Christ in the church. Nevertheless, each individual among you also is to love his own wife even as himself, and his wife must see to it that she respects her husband. Our marriages and the unity that we have in being one flesh is a picture of Christ and his love for the church, of the union and the fellowship.

that we ought to have with Christ. Our marriages are to be a reflection of the love of Christ for the church, of Christ's care for the church, of his protection of the church, of his defense of the church, of his giving his life to the church. 1 Corinthians 6, 15-19 says, Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take away the members of Christ and make them members? with a prostitute? May it never be. Or do you not know that the one who joins himself to a prostitute is one with her? For he says, the two shall become one flesh. But the one who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with him. Flee immorality.

Every other sin that a man commits is outside of his body, but the immoral man sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? If you're a Christian and you sin sexually, it is as if you have united Jesus with a prostitute. Have you thought about that? That sounds blasphemous to say, but that's what Paul says. Do you see how mind-bendingly wicked and awful sexual perversion is? If you're a Christian and the Holy Spirit dwells in you, and then you corrupt your soul with that, if you're united with Christ and you try to unite him with that sin through your actions, it's incomprehensible. All spiritual sin is adultery. All sin is spiritual adultery. All sin...

is spiritual adultery. This is the consistent theme of the prophets. And if you're uncomfortable with some of the things I've said today, go read through the prophets and the analogies that they draw for Israel's idolatry. Your sin, if you're a Christian, is adultery. You've left the unity of Christ and you've joined yourself with sin. You see God's holiness in our sin and you try to reconcile the two and think how, and the best picture that God could come up with to help us understand the weight and the seriousness of sin is to say it's divorce, it's adultery, it's destroying the closest union that a person can have, and that is the husband and wife relationship where you've become one flesh. You must take lust seriously. It's not a light thing to commit sexual sins.

And so if our marriages are, as Paul says, a reflection of Christ in the church, what a poor reflection we often have. Because we're so rude to each other. We snub each other. We weaponize the things that we know about each other. And it's like, would Christ ever do that? Well, why are we drawn to sexual temptations? We're unsatisfied with our lives and the situations we find ourselves in. And we go and we look everywhere, but where we're supposed to. Men will look for physical fleeting fulfillments. And then they have a hard time being satisfied with the real woman because they've been lied to and they think porn is real. Husbands, men, you husbands.

You should love the stretch marks and the scars on your wives from childbirth. They should be precious to you. What more could your wife have given you? Don't pursue fake, false, wicked things. You are called to be one with the woman God's given you. Wives. Don't give yourselves over to the fantasy world of your imaginations, of fictitious men and lifestyles, of the settings that you find appealing, of the houses, whatever it is. If you give yourself over to fantasy, you'll be unable to appreciate the man and the life that God's given you. Your husband's tired because he's given himself to working all day to provide for you and your children. And that should be sweet to you because he loves you enough to spend his time.

working hard, his short life to provide for you. You shouldn't despise the children's dependence on you or the sacrifice you have to give of your life in caring and nurturing for them. See, we're all sinners, and we're all deceived by sexual perversions. They lie to us. On your social media, they present a reality exclusive of sin. They say, this is what real life looks like. Your life should look like ours, and we buy into it. and then our joy is stolen away because we can never attain to the promises that they sell. You know, if you spend your time reading books, and even really good books, right? Maybe Jane Austen. You have to be careful that the vision that you get there doesn't become what you think reality should be, and then you grow weary of your own life and discontent with the husband that God's given you. Your lust lies to you. It perverts you and it destroys you. So delete your social media and live in the real world where you see people's real sins and where people smell bad sometimes. Not this perfection that you see because it's a lie and it will sap your joy. And what it will do is it will no longer allow you to live in unity with the people that God has given you to have union with.

Because you'll have this ideal that is a lie. And no one will hold up well to an ideal that isn't even real. You must learn to love the wife or the husband that God has given you, not the image that you think you should have or that you think you want. How do we fight these things? Well, one is to flee. It's to flee. All of these sexual perversions are monsters. waiting to devour you. Think about it. You walk up to a pond and you see the two little bumps poking out of the water of the crocodile, the alligator, sitting just below the surface. What do you do? Well, it's really hot. I'm just going to put my feet in the water. No, you run away. You don't get in that water, right? You don't play footsie with the...

monster lurking in the dark water. It's like, why don't we feel that way about sexual perversions? It's every bit as dangerous. It's every bit as ready to burst out and to lock its jaws on you and pull you under the water and never let go. If we ask how close we can get to sin without sinning, you're sinning. Part of fleeing is not being alone, whether it's a phone call, whether it's going to a friend's house. whether it's just crashing on someone's couch because you can't trust yourself to be alone. Don't be alone. Flee the temptations in this sense. Find satisfaction in Christ. See, when it comes to the world and all the things they're trying to sell us, should you have ad blockers on your phone and covenant eyes and things like that? Yeah, yeah, you should. Have guardrails. They're helpful. They're guardrails.

You have to deal with the underlying dissatisfaction. You have to turn to Christ and find your joy in him. Otherwise, you're going to keep searching, and you're going to keep casting out the net, searching for something to fill the void. So serve in the church. Notice Paul in Corinthians commends singleness as a way to have more time to serve God, which we can say, okay, that means... that a good way to fight sexual temptations is to spend our time serving God. So when Timothy comes and asks you to help in Awana, jump at the opportunity. If the church doors are open, be there. Being united with Christ and with his people is a way to find joy and satisfaction to where you don't want the fake substitutes.

You don't want, because when you see the beauty of union with Christ, of being one with Christ, why would you want to be joined with a prostitute? Like, and think about again and again, what does the New Testament constantly talk about? The wedding feast, the consummation. Christ coming back is spoken as the consummation. These are all marriage, sexual-esque. terms. You want to fight sexual temptation? Get married. It's a great way. That's what Paul prescribes. Better to marry than to birth. Pray about it, right? Pray for a spouse. You should be praying every single day diligently if that is your desire. You should be putting God first. Marriage and sex are good gifts of God within the context of marriage.

And we ought not to be ashamed of them. Do not be ashamed of that which God has called good. Enjoy them. Take pleasure in it. And set a beautiful vision for your children. Not that sex is bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, until you reach this magical point where you get married and then all of a sudden it's supposed to be good and you're supposed to undo. 20 years or 30 years of being told bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, and now all of a sudden you're supposed to think it's good and be happy with it? Teach them of its goodness, but within the bounds of how God has given it to be used. Set a glorious vision to work towards, but even more so, we ought to pursue God and find satisfaction. Because here's the thing, it's sort of like the...

internet blockers and stuff. If you still want it, you'll find a way for it, right? If you're unhappy going into marriage, you'll be unhappy in marriage because you cannot put your happiness on your spouse. Your spouse cannot satisfy you the way you need to be satisfied because we're made for a better world, one without sin. And we need the forgiveness of Christ. But if you and your spouse together pursue God, and find satisfaction in him. There will be no greater joy. Marriage and sex are good gifts from God in the context of marriage, and we ought not to be ashamed of them. We ought to teach them, not let the world teach our children of them. We ought to flee sexual immorality in any way that we can, and we ought to get married. Let's pray.