Matthew 5:27-30

Because we're going to be in Matthew 5.

There's just four verses that we're going to be in.

But we're continuing on in our series from the Sermon on the Mount.

And I'm going to read to you from Matthew 5, 27 through 30.

For those of you that are just coming in and new with us, we're studying through the book of Matthew.

This is telling us about Jesus' first coming when Jesus was on earth.

We already read about his birth, we read about his baptism with John the Baptist, and we've seen that Jesus is teaching all around the Sea of Galilee.

And he's proclaiming his kingdom.

He's talking about his kingdom coming on earth, and he's inviting us to participate in it.

And that invitation is extended to you this morning.

And if you're like, yo, I want to be in that kingdom.

Like I've had enough of the kingdoms of this earth.

I want to be a part of that kingdom.

Then the invitation is open to you.

That's what it means to follow Jesus or become a follower of Jesus, is that you're saying, I want you, Jesus, to be the king.

And so we've been looking at this teaching in chapter 5.

It's going to go through chapter 6 and chapter 7.

And there's a lot of material that's here.

Last week we looked at this, Jesus taking the idea of murder and saying, look, anger is just as serious.

Have you ever felt angry in your heart?

Isn't that like everybody's always felt everybody's felt angry at some point?

And Jesus is saying, listen, that anger, that bitterness, and then kind of the language that flows from that, hey, that's synonymous in my kingdom with murder.

And what Jesus is doing is he's elevating the idea of righteousness and saying there's a new ethic in town.

Now, I know for me, when I read that, I'm like, feel convicted, like because I get angry, right?

And I've got stuff going on in my heart that I'm not happy with.

And it's, and then you feel like, oh man, I don't like what's going on in my heart.

And and that's okay, because Jesus' grace comes in, Jesus died for our sins, he gives us his spirit to establish this kingdom in our life and to grow us into his image, right?

So we're it's not a uh none of these things are a message of beat you over the head, but it's like, hey, this is the beautiful thing that we're working towards.

This is what my kingdom looks like.

The one thing I forgot to say last week that I I think um is the case also with this whole conversation around adultery and lust is that don't you want to be in a a part of a society, a part of a kingdom, a part of a culture where these are the ethics?

Because some of us, when it comes to anger, some of us have been on the receiving side of anger and have deep wounds in our life from people who have been angry and acted upon their anger, and you know how destructive it is.

And so when King Jesus comes along and is like, yeah, that is just as bad as murder, that's like, yeah, that's that's who I want to be the king.

I want somebody who cares about that kind of society and really somebody who's powerful enough to enact that I can hope for a society where anger is no longer gonna be the wounding agent in relationships, that I can anticipate an eternal experience where this thing that he's talking about with anger is like, whoop, we're gonna take that away.

So let's talk about um this next section on adultery.

We'll read for these four verses.

Here's what it says.

You have heard that it was said, do not commit adultery, but I tell you, everyone who looks at a woman lustfully already committed adultery with her in his heart.

If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away.

For it is better that you lose one of the parts of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.

And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off, throw it away.

For it's better you do for you to lose one of the parts of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.

Lord, we pray that you would come again as as um just our king.

And Lord, we're grateful that you make us sexual beings, and we ask that you would speak into this theme of our sexuality this morning.

God, we um we pray that just any shaping and forming around sex and what it means for us to have sex and to think about sex and to be sexual beings, that you would be the one that shapes us.

And we ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.

Yeah, so we are gonna talk a lot about sex this morning.

So it's a good thing we have a children's ministry.

And and the wonderful thing is that our sexuality is not outside of the bounds of how God has designed us.

The way that I want to kind of handle this this morning, this um is I don't have a structure that I'm absolutely committed to for my sermon this morning.

I want to go verse by verse through this.

I have a biblical um theology around sex, but then there's just some stuff that's on my heart that I want to share.

So we'll we'll see how this comes, how this comes up.

But but the first thing I want to say as we go through this text is that your sexuality, being you came in this morning um having some form of sexuality.

You're either male or female, you may have strong sexual desires or not strong sexual desires.

You may have a sexual history yourself, you may have been violated sexually in your past.

And so you came in with all kinds of um baggage, somewhat baggage, and ideas around what it means to be a sexual human, a sexual being.

And what I hope is that we can have this conversation without it being something that is too uncomfortable.

It is a sacred aspect to who we are.

It is a often there is a um a privacy around our sexuality, but then there's also there needs to be this ability to comfortably talk about sex and our relationship with God without feeling um condemned or ostracized.

We want to be able to understand that Jesus wants to be king of our life and that nothing about us is outside the bounds of his authority.

So he says right off the bat, you have heard that it was said, do not commit adultery.

Do you know what he's talking, uh what he's referencing here?

Yeah, this is the Ten Commandments.

The seventh, remember last week we looked at the sixth command, which was do not murder.

And this week he's going to the seventh command.

He doesn't keep this going.

He's going to talk about other things.

You've heard this, you've heard that.

There's six in total.

Um, but this one here is happens to be the next command out of the ten.

And it is that you have heard that it was said, do not commit adultery.

Now, at the time of Jesus, there's been um 1,500 years of history where uh the Jewish nation has codified these ten commands.

And what does it mean?

What does it mean to commit adultery?

What does that look like?

And for the Jew, it primarily meant the act of having sex with somebody whom you're not married to.

We would use the language of you're you're violating the marriage covenant and you're going outside of that marriage and your and your marriage partner to have to have sex.

And so Jesus calls this to their remembrance, and he said, and it's a restriction against sex with anyone who is not your marriage partner.

This whole ethic, before we get to his, you know, intensifying this command, this whole ethic acknowledges a limit, right?

That sex is to be done with your marriage partner.

Um that boundary, though, on sexuality comes from this idea of marriage being the place for sex.

Moving the sex out outside of the marriage relationship is what is forbidden.

So then Jesus comes along and he says, but I tell you, and this is what he did with murder as well, he says, but I tell you, everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

So do you see that he's intensifying the uh language about sexuality?

He's saying, Listen, if you treat an adulterer like this, then this whole idea of lust in the heart ought to be equally condemned.

Wow, that's pretty intense, isn't it?

And that's and that's the point.

Because you remember that what Jesus had taught, what we looked at three weeks ago, he had told his followers, he says, Listen, your righteousness, if you want to be in the kingdom and the and the righteousness of my kingdom, the ethical standard, it exceeds the righteous standard of the Pharisees and the scribes.

And the the Pharisees and scribes, those were like the most religious people of the day.

These are the people who were revered as like, oh, those people are really righteous.

And Jesus says, you've got to go beyond that.

And here again, Jesus is taking, um, he's taking the idea of sex and he's saying, listen, what's going on in your heart is it matters before God.

The standard of God applies even to your heart activities, not just your physical activities.

He doesn't just affirm the limits placed on sex by the old covenant, he goes to the heart and says, Lust is a form of adultery.

And then he has these two mirroring statements in 29 and 30.

And he says, if your right eye causes you to sin.

The metaphor illustrates an important point.

He's he's saying this forcibly cast temptation out of your life.

It's better to lose a little than to lose everything.

Now, this verse is the reason why the Catholic Church in the 15th century, 14th, 15th century, as there was the printing press and a conversation around translating the Bible from Latin into the common language of the day, whether it be German or into English, there was a resistance from the Catholic Church because they're like, oh, people are gonna be cutting off their hands and gouging out their eyes, and they were afraid that you wouldn't be able to read this and understand that it's metaphorical language.

And um thank goodness that they're uh that they didn't win, right?

So we ended up with the Bible in our own language.

But it is this strong language to illustrate a point that hey, these things are serious.

Now, he says, um, for it's better that you lose one of the parts of your body, your eye or your hand, it's better that you lose that one part of your body than the whole be thrown into hell.

Now, before you uh start thinking about an eternal existence separated from God, which is what we talk about with hell, here as Jesus is teaching this, this is the word gehenna, there's a place right outside of Jerusalem that became the trash dump.

And it was where you would go and you would just take your trash and you'd throw it over the wall, and the fire would just kind of, it was like a trash burning place.

And it smelled horrible, and it became a metaphor for just a place separated from society, where the worst of society and the refuse of society was just dumped.

And so there is an aspect where Jesus is saying, like, you are you, if if you don't resist forcibly temptation, you're making your own hell for yourself.

You're you're baking it in, and your existence, while you may live eternally in hell, your existence on earth is going to be a hellish one as well.

This metaphor pushes back on those who would minimize sin in their life.

In um, if we go to Galatians chapter three, or you go to um you read through Paul's teaching in Romans chapter six, it talks about this, the profound grace of God.

When when we when we celebrate communion in a few minutes, one of the things that the cup represents is a new covenant, which is this covenant of forgiveness of sins.

And so there is this temptation as a follower of Jesus to not see sin as all that severe because the eternal ramifications and this and the um spiritual ramifications have been um are being resolved.

And so the kind of the implication is to go, well, you know what, sin isn't really that big of a deal.

Yeah, you know, who you have sex with, and you know, whether you have sex with, you know, multiple people before you get married or or you don't, you know, there's grace, there's grace that exists.

Or, you know, if you're angry, yeah, you know, people get angry, right?

We have all kinds of ways to justify uh our the things that you know are our pet uh sins.

And what Jesus is showing here is that no, this is serious.

These things are um your sexuality is um precious, and the temptation to use your sexuality outside of its intended use is a serious miscalculation.

Again, forcibly cast temptation out of your life.

Forcibly cast it out of your life.

Now, as we have explored Jesus' teaching, and we see that he's taking and bringing this to a heart level, um it's clear that he's calling his followers to a higher standard of purity and righteousness.

But to fully grasp this, right, um, this idea of our sexuality, what I want to do is just spend a minute looking through the Old Testament to see why Jesus is saying, hey, lust is on the same level as adultery.

The narrative of sex in the Bible is not a tale of negativity and prohibition as much as we might assume.

Instead, it's a story of divine intention, human failure, and redemptive possibilities.

And so let's look kind of kind of go back to the beginning.

We'll look here, first of all, at um the creation account.

This is really important because you were probably you were familiar with your own sexuality before you were familiar with the sc with scripture.

So it's it's important.

Here's so when you go to the world, the world's gonna tell you, first of all, that you're biological.

It's not gonna talk about that you are designed, it's gonna say you're the result of an evolutionary process.

That's like a secular view of who you are, and you're biological, and so the sexual desire that you have is the result of chemicals firing in your brain.

Instead, what Jesus teaches or what the Bible teaches is that God designed humans from the very beginning to be um sexual creatures.

In Genesis 1 and 2, sex is created as a good part of God's design for humans made in his image.

So we have Genesis 1.28.

God blessed them.

This is the man and the woman being created, and God said to them, Be fruitful, multiply.

This literally means have babies, right?

Use your procreative capacity to have children, fill the earth, subdue it, rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth.

So sex is in the Bible from the very beginning.

Like you and I were created for the with the capacity, or humans were designed with the capacity to women were how can generate life within themselves, men can participate in the generation of life.

In Genesis 2, 24 and 25, it says this this is why a man leaves his father and mother.

So this is the end of chapter two, the narrative about the man and the woman, the woman being created out of the dust, uh, or the man being created out of the dust, the woman created out of the uh side of the man.

And it says, this is why a man leaves his father and mother, bonds with his wife, and they become one flesh.

Both the man and his wife were naked and yet felt no shame.

So this is the description of God's created order before sin comes and breaks up everything.

Naked people, right?

Naked man and wife, called to be together as one flesh.

Two, so it started as one, he splits them apart to become man and woman, and then they're called back together to become one flesh.

And this leads to the fruitful and the multiplying that is there.

Beautiful.

It's a beautiful picture.

There's nothing screwed up or messed up about the picture yet.

That's the image that we have.

But we get to the fall.

We see in Genesis 3, it shows the entrance of sin, which corrupts all aspects of creation, including human sexuality.

One of the early feelings that comes from that sinful state, was Adam and Eve see their nakedness and they feel ashamed.

They want to go and cover themselves up, right?

They're like, let's go and get some fig leaves and cover up our naked bodies.

This leads to shame, broken relationships, and distortion of God's original design for sex.

So from this point on, from Genesis 3 on, they're cast out of the garden and relationships are messed up, and sexual relationships are messed up.

The regulation of sexuality, we find that in the law, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, it provides specific regulations about sexual conduct, emphasizing purity and setting boundaries.

When Israel was going into the land, all so the surrounding nations did not, they uh did not have a fidelity within marriage.

There was um some expressions of sexuality was around in homosexuality.

Uh, we see that in Sodom and Gomorrah's story.

When we go to um, we see uh this these texts from Leviticus and Deuteronomy.

We see him saying, hey, don't go take foreign wives, because um of some of the practices in these pagan um nations.

And the interesting thing about some of these foreign um uh pagan surrounding nations is that spirituality was paired with sexuality.

And so some of the cult practices was like, hey, if you want to worship God, go to this temple and have um have sex with this prostitute, and that is your sexual expression and spiritual expression simultaneously.

And so, God, as he's establishing a nation, he's saying, No, we're gonna maintain these boundaries around marriage, and we're gonna say sex is still a good thing inside and with your marriage partner.

What you need to, you and I need to recognize as we go along is that sex is warned about so much, and the um uh it's talked about so much in scripture and given such limits because it's so fundamental to who we are and has such profound effects upon us, and marriage is so good and has such a fundamental piece of the fabric of society.

So God is protecting the marriage um institution by putting these parameters around sex.

God is not stingy or a prude when it comes to it, he loved it, he created sex, like it's good because he's good, right?

But he's uh putting these boundaries around it because he's like, I want a good society.

And what do you find in these societies that are not having the law?

Well, we find is that oftentimes women are abused.

Women are horribly treated within society where there are not these parameters put on sex.

So we get through the law and then we get to the narrative.

The Bible tells stories about the kings and the prophets and the judges all throughout there.

We have David in Bathsheba.

The fascinating thing, okay, this is kind of blows my mind around David, right?

And I was talking with the boys about this.

So David, how many, how many wives did David have?

Five, four, five, six?

He had a lot.

David had a lot of wives, right?

And David was a man after God's own heart, which is weird, right?

He doesn't seem to get in trouble.

It like keeps telling stories.

Oh, he married this woman, he married this woman, he married this woman.

He doesn't get in trouble with God for that.

What does he get in trouble for?

Yeah.

Of taking Bathsheba, taking another man's.

All of a sudden, David is in deep, deep trouble because he took somebody else's wife.

It's fascinating.

Because what that tells me is that this whole idea of sex is paired with marriage.

It's fundamental to the fidelity and the marriage structure.

Now, the as we go into the New Testament, the Bible clearly, and New Testament Christianity reigns back in the sexual ethic and says you need to have a partner, a single partner, because that reflects Genesis chapter one.

But like even to this day, like when you go and you do missions, this is in my family.

We went and we, my dad was a uh Bible teacher for uh in Africa of nationals, men and women that would go back and lead churches in their tribes.

And these men would be in the in the class and they would say, Okay, when we go and we pastor in the tribe, and a man comes and wants to follow Jesus and he has three wives, what do we tell him?

What do you do?

If you're prudish about sex and sex is like the taboo thing, it's like, oh, you know, you gotta kill this is what sex is really bad.

If that's your understanding, rather rather than having an ethic that says um marriage is so good it needs to be protected, then um I think you're gonna give bad counsel.

Again, the c the conversation with those men who have the three wives, they need to hear from the Bible that marriage is this beautiful protective thing where fruitful and multiply is happening, and it gets worked, it needs to get worked out in some way.

So oftentimes it would be like, hey, you're gonna have sex with one, but you're gonna take care of the other two.

But but that's kind of not fair to the sexuality of those other two women.

It's nuanced.

But again, if you're hung up on sex and you're not seeing that sexual ethics is a subcategory of the marriage ethic, uh, man, you're gonna end up in trouble.

And this is where I think in the 90s with the purity culture where um we ended up with problems because we made sex the ethic rather than marriage the ethic.

Okay, so that's a little bit of a tangent, but we have these historical stories from the Old Testament.

Then we get into Proverbs with the wisdom literature.

So in Proverbs, there's these warnings about the um woman who is the seductress, right?

Who's in contrast to lady wisdom who's crying out in the streets.

It's interesting that wisdom is sexualized because it's put in this mare of this pairing between the seductress, like prostitute, who's trying to lure you in and get you to ruin your life.

And then you have Lady Wisdom who's awesome, and she's like, Come to me.

But it but it's almost like there's this romantic, like going after and being attracted to Lady Wisdom in a good way that you want to run after her.

Happens to be in the same section where you have Song of Solomon, which is this beautiful poetic language all around um this man and woman's um sexual drive and longing to be sexually intimate and together.

All of that is in the Old Testament.

And then we get into the prophets.

The prophets use sex as a metaphor for unfaithfulness, the whole picture of adultery.

Jeremiah in particular, as well as Hosea, but Jeremiah over and over again is talking about adultery as a metaphor for spiritual unfaithfulness.

Um, then we get over to the New Testament.

This is Jesus' teaching.

Jesus reaffirms the sacredness of marriage and speaks against lust and adultery, elevating the standard to include the heart's intentions, not just outward actions.

And then Paul's teaching.

Paul discusses sexual ethics extensively, emphasizing sexual morality as integral to the Christian living.

He also presents marriage as a profound mystery, reflecting Christ's relationship with the church.

So the Bible speaks of sex all the way throughout, but my wife and I were talking about, I was telling her, the one of the mysteries to me is like, what's the future of sex?

This one, that one is completely mysterious.

And if you understand it, let me know, because I don't.

Usually everything you can find in Genesis 1 and 2, you can see restored in Revelation 21 and 22.

It's not, it's kind of missing.

So I just um I'm usually like to be transparent in my teaching.

There's parts of this where I don't I don't understand that part of it, but this is um this is kind of getting up through Paul's teachings.

Okay, where does where does this land us?

Um marriage is designed as a good thing by God.

Do you hear that?

Marriage is a good thing designed by God, and sex is a central expression of the goodness of marriage.

It's interesting that sex is the act that happens in marriage.

You can do all kinds of things with other people that are not your spouse, and it doesn't violate your marriage covenant.

But that act of sex is this whole idea of adultery, and it's interesting, it just shows how central the sex act is to marriage.

Jesus elevates the conversation from mere rules to a matter of our hearts, aligning our inner desires with God's will.

I would say just practically, whether you're married or not married, whether you face great sexual temptation or um that's not really an issue for you.

Maybe, maybe your desires are uh your same-sex attracted.

Wherever you're at, here's one of the things I would pray regularly is God, thank you for making me a sexual being.

Shape my sexuality so it aligns with your kingdom.

Let God be a part of the conversation.

Know that Jesus offers grace to all, regardless of their past or their present structural struggles, with a sexual ethic.

And understand the role of confession, repentance, and reliance on God's strength to overcome temptation.

If you are single, and I'm assuming if you're single, you're not actively having sex, at least as a follower of Jesus, that would be that's what Jesus is teaching.

And not only is there an absence of sex in your life, but there's a loneliness that comes that may come with that as well.

And so again, this is where your faith comes out.

It's a part of um if you desire to be married and desire to have sex, this is where it's like, God, you created me with these desires, I offer these things to you.

You have to write the rest of my story.

Maybe you're still looking for that person that you can be married to and enjoy a good marriage.

Some of you have been through marriage and it was incredibly difficult because you live after Genesis 3.

And while all these things are so beautifully designed by God, it ended up being a place of incredible hurt and pain.

Again, all of this is in bounds for God.

None of this is gonna freak out God.

Your desire for sex, your wrestling with porn, your desire to look at and lust in the heart, none of that is freaking out God.

He's completely aware of all of it.

You might as well have an open conversation with him about it and just say, God, I failed again.

I messed up again.

Please wash me, shape me.

And if you are a person that struggles with intense sexual desire, pray, God, allow me to be, prepare me to be a good spouse, somebody that can honor the marriage well and shape me well in my sexuality for that moment.

I want to encourage you to have a holistic review review of relationships that both value the emotional side of sexuality, who you are spiritually, the intellectual connections, and it that it you would not allow the world to just tell you that sex is a physical act.

It's like the people who buy a car and they're like, Yeah, I don't ever need to put oil in my car.

That's just like for those people who are really into cars, right?

Like that's not gonna work out for you very well.

If you treat sex as just this isolated biological chemical drive thing and don't realize that it's intrinsic to who God's designed you, then you're gonna break down.

And you can pretend that sex is like, you know, you can do it with whoever you want, whenever you want, and it's just kind of a release, a chemical release, but that's as dumb as leaving the oil out of your car or not filing your taxes every year, or some other thing that's like fundamental to who you are.

I would challenge you to reflect on your attitudes and actions regarding sexuality.

Ask God to align your heart with his.

And then know this that Jesus loves you and has designed this part, this part of who you are.

And he is the one that authors in us a capacity to live as his followers in his kingdom.

So if you feel like, man, I've failed, like I've had sex with people I shouldn't have sex with, this morning you need to know that today we're gonna have communion together.

This table represents a place of forgiveness, of newness, of God's working, active working in your life to make you just awesome, to make you and grow you in the direction of where he wants you to be at.

I love studying these things.

I love looking at what Jesus, how he's blowing stuff up, because what it shows me and it shows you is that he cares deeply for you.

He doesn't want your spouse committing adultery in their heart or physically.

He's got your back, he cares about your marriage relationship in a beautiful way.

And he's saying, hey, listen, in my kingdom, hearts and bodies are really, really important.

That's where we want to be.

We want to be in that kingdom.

We want a king that's saying these kinds of things, even though sometimes it's hard to obey, sometimes it's convict.

We really do want to be in this kingdom.

We really want a king who stands for these kinds of things.

Amen.

Lord, we thank you for your word.

Thank you for coming and speaking with such authority and giving us this text.

And God, we just bring before you our sexuality.

And and maybe it's really twisted and broken, and there's things that happen secretly behind closed door or in privacy that we have we're bearing shame about.

And God, we just confess that before you.

We ask that you would wash us and that you'd cleanse us and that just the blood of Jesus would wash us, like that psalm we we read last week and this week, that you're the good God that forgives.

And Lord, I just pray for anyone that here that has been um abused sexually and their sexuality has been misused.

And I we were singing earlier about healing, and I ask God for just your healing touch on um each one of us, that you would just just where there's pain associated with sexuality, God, that you would heal that, that you would take away that pain, and that you be gracious.

Lord, for those that have a desire to be married, um, and have not yet found that person uh to make that covenant with, God, direct their steps, guide them, God.

We want to glorify you.

We want to be um just eating the the good things in the garden of this kingdom, and we thank you for this text.

We pray these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.