Exodus: Adultery, Lust, and God-Given Sexuality

So, first a quick review before we get to the seventh commandment.

So, we've been going through the book of Exodus and eventually going through the book of Exodus, the Ten Commandments, which I think probably all of us have heard of, whether you're in church all the time or church is new to you.

So the Ten Commandments, our first response, or at least a lot of our responses, definitely my response, is to get to the Ten Commandments and go, oh great, here we go.

Because it's so easy to hear a list of rules, and the reaction is to see how clearly you fall short of this list of rules, and just to feel beaten down by the list of rules.

And so what we've been saying, and what we've been seeing these past few weeks, is we've been seeing how the law, so the standard, so the law is the standard, what we should be and what we should do.

The law, it crushes us.

It crushes us because we don't live up to it.

So it crushes us, it guides us, it crushes us, and we have to let it send us on.

So it guides our behavior, what we should do, what we should be, and it crushes us because we're imperfect to it, and then we have to let it send us on to the grace of God.

And that's what we've been saying.

If we don't let it send us on, then we're what the New Testament talks about being under the law.

And this is the exhaustion.

Maybe you've read a book or you heard a friend talking about the Christian faith, or you you went to a particular church or event or something, and you just left, and you're like, oh my gosh, that just feels exhausting.

Like that way of Christian spirituality just seems exhausting.

And most likely, not I can't guarantee it, most likely, that's the Christian faith disguised under the law.

And what we've been saying when it comes to this Ten Commandments in Exodus 20, we see verses in what verses 1 and 2, how before we get into the commandments, there's the reminder.

Remember what I did for you as this reminder.

Then he's reminding the people of the saving, the rescuing that was done.

Like, hey, remember I brought you out of Egypt.

Remember, I have redeemed you, I have rescued you.

Now let's talk about these commandments.

And what this means is huge for us because it means the grace of God precedes the law or the demand of God.

And we've got to get that.

That's a frame where we have to understand that the grace of God precedes the law of God because what it means is, is it means obedience or what you should do or should be or what the Christian faith and the life should be.

It comes out of a response and out of gratitude for what God has already done for you.

You're already secure.

You're already rescued.

In Jesus, he's everything you need to be.

There's nothing else to add.

Now, out of response comes life.

All right, there's the review for you.

So this morning's a little bit, I maybe not a normal sermon in that there's no stories, no sex stories can be shared.

Thank you very much.

Um, no sex stories.

No illustrations, mind you, no illustrations this morning.

No puppets gonna happen this morning.

I had puppets last week, no puppets this week.

Um so I'm gonna lead you through uh some passages and also some different quotes.

Uh, there's a handout for you, but we're gonna work our way through that.

It's sort of a thinking Sunday.

You're gonna have to work with me, kind of think through some of this stuff, but I'm so incredibly excited to talk about this some more.

I studied it this week, um, just to talk about adultery, but then to talk about lust and talk about sexuality, because I think what's so possible is for some of us, there could be incredible relief from shame.

There could be incredible relief from an affair you had.

It could be incredible relief from an addiction you had or have.

There could be incredible relief of shame that you've put on your sexuality and on your sex that was put actually created out of like a legalistic belief years ago.

And it doesn't need to be there.

There might be a conviction that is needed and it happens.

So there's incredible possibilities for this morning.

That's why I'm so excited about it.

So Exodus 20, verse 14.

Exodus 20:14

This is uh the seventh commandment.

You shall not commit adultery.

And I think we will all agree.

Good rule.

I mean, this is a good rule for families, this is a good rule in law for our children, this is a good rule for societies to be healthy.

Uh I just, nobody can walk away from an affair and go, you know what, that was just a clean one.

That was just a clean, healthy, emotionally healthy affair.

Nobody was hurt, nobody felt rejected, the kids were good with it.

They were so good with it.

Nobody's saying that.

It doesn't, if they're saying it, they're not even, they're not even meaning it.

They're lying.

They're they're not meaning it.

They don't even see it, they don't see what's going on.

It doesn't happen.

Now, maybe you can hear all of this and you just feel a rush from your past mistakes.

I mean, that's very possible.

And I know that's real.

I mean, I hear this, I hear the stories, I know the stories.

I I I I've heard stories of how it happens.

Now, maybe, maybe you're the flip side, and and you've always sat in incredible judgment and self-righteousness toward people who have affairs.

You're just like, just keep your pants on.

Just get your act together.

And so before any of us settle into our shame or settle into our self-righteousness, we we've got to see what Jesus says about this because I think he levels all of us.

In Matthew 5, 27 through 30, it's in your handout.

You have heard that it was said you shall not commit adultery, so there's the seventh commandment.

But I say to you, so he's taking it somewhere else, but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

Now, I I don't think this principle of Jesus is saying is just for men toward women.

I think we can definitely apply it to a woman toward a man.

And maybe a woman toward a man is not as physical and visual, perhaps it is.

Maybe it's more like, oh, if I could only have his acceptance.

I mean, maybe that's more how it feels and works its way out.

29.

If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away, for it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell, and if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away, for it is better that you lose one of your members than your whole body go into hell.

So verse 29 and 30, pretty intense verses.

Um, I don't think they're saying if you have an affair, or if you lust, you're going to hell.

I mean, I don't think it's saying that at all.

We would all be in really big trouble if that was true.

And I have friends, I have Christian friends.

I know lots of, I know lots of Christians, I actually know lots of Christians who have affairs.

I've heard their stories.

They're not good stories, mind you.

They're really sad, destructive stories that they have to process out of.

I don't think they're going to hell.

They're not going to hell, not if they're Christians.

But it's a commentary on the intensity of this issue.

And the amount of shame it can produce, the amount of destruction it can produce.

And Jesus just levels us here.

He says, Oh, you think you're so you're so great, you're so self-righteous.

Okay, hey, even if you've lusted, you're the same.

You're the same.

And so Jesus takes it into the inner life.

That's what he keeps doing for us.

And this is point number one.

Point number one is to understand adultery and lust, we have to go to the heart.

We said it last week with murder and anger, and this week we're saying it with to understand adultery and lust, we have to go to the heart.

Lust is the inner desire to have that person, to be with that person, and that person is not your spouse.

Now, here's good news.

This is really good news.

Sexual urges are different than lust.

And we we we have to get this and we've got to distinguish this because sexual urges are interested in sex, and you are a sexual being.

You are created that way.

Now, sexual urges are private and they're personal, but they're not they're not shameful.

And you've got to distinguish and learn between lust and sexual urges.

See, Adam and Eve were naked and they were together, and it was good.

And from the scriptures, we know that sex is good in the context of marriage.

It's real good, really, really, really good.

And God didn't have to create it this good.

Like he could have created it about as exciting as loading the dishwasher, but for some reason he didn't.

He wanted us to know something about the intensity of pleasure.

Now, for some of you, your sex is as exciting as loading the dishwasher, and that's something to talk about, right?

That's something that probably has something to do with attaching shame to sex.

And that's wrong.

Just as lust is wrong, attaching shame to sexuality or sex inside of marriage is wrong.

Can I get an amen?

Anybody want to amen that one?

The Christian faith is incredibly pro-sex and pro-body and pro-pleasure.

The Song of Solomon's entire book of love poetry.

We're gonna read a little bit.

It's gonna warm you up a little bit.

I'm just I'm just warning you.

Chapter 4, verses 5, 13, 15, and 16.

Your breasts are like two fawns.

I read this to Christy one time.

It didn't work.

It did not.

She just told me to leave.

I'm kidding, sorry.

Bad joke.

Like twin fawns of a gazelle that browse among the lilies.

Whew! You are a garden locked up, my sister, my bride.

You are a spring enclosed, a sealed fountain.

You are a garden fountain, a well of flowing water streaming down from Lebanon.

And the wife replies, Awake, north wind, and come, south wind, blow on my garden that its fragrance may spread everywhere.

Let my beloved come into his garden and taste its choice fruits.

Ooh.

I mean, this is this is hot.

This is biblical hot stuff.

This is stuff you find in middle school, and you're like, have you seen this?

Chapter 5, verses 10 through 16.

My beloved is radiant.

This is from the wife.

My beloved is radiant and ruddy, outstanding among 10,000.

His head is pure as gold, his hair is wavy and black as a raven, his eyes are like doves by the water's streams, washed in milk, mounted like jewels, his cheeks are like beds of spices yielding perfume, his lips are like lilies dripping with myrrh, his arms are rods of gold set with topaz, his body is like polished ivory decorated with lapis lazule.

His legs are pillars of marble set on bases of pure gold, his appearance is like Lebanon, choice as its cedars, his mouth is is sweetness itself, he is all together lovely.

I mean, she's giving her garden to him.

I mean, this is explicit sexuality.

I mean, God clearly wants us to know and understand that to be sexual and to enjoy sex inside of the marriage covenant is to be as he created you to be.

And this isn't dirty.

Sexuality is not dirty.

And even a sexual urge is not dirty, it is not shameful.

Now, lust is sinful.

And lust is not interested in the good of the other person.

Lust is interested in what that person can give you.

It is cheap.

It is all about getting that acceptance or getting that body.

Here's how Carl Olsen, a former president of North Park Theological Seminary, I thought it was a great quote about lust and lusting for the other.

I really love myself.

See, it's it's just it's just selfishness, it's just greed.

Um here's what he says the other becomes an instrument of my satisfaction, a bright plaything which finally grows shabby and unwanted.

You see how lust is just a hard issue of selfishness and greed.

It's just a monster that always has to be fed and is never happy.

Many of us know this dark cycle.

You think you can feed your lust to satisfy it, and it won't work.

And affairs don't work either for the same reason.

So it's some boundaries I think are helpful.

I I have two sort of principles that have been helpful in my life.

Uh I picked them up along the way, I didn't make them up.

The two that have helped me, um, the first is you starve lust, you don't feed it.

I mean, like if if you start to pick up on the thing that's kind of feeding your lust, you know, the imagery or the show or or whatever, you just just starve it.

Just go the other way on that one.

Just don't feed it.

Feeding it's feeding it's not gonna help.

You starve it, you don't feed it.

And number two is, and I stole this from Andy Stanley, it's so great.

Set boundaries more conservatively than you actually believe.

I think he calls it maybe the principle of hedging or something.

That that if the cliff is is over there, I'm gonna set a boundary like in terms of adultery and affairs.

I'm setting a boundary way back here.

Like in terms of emotional connection or physical connection or physical like space and who I'm with and where and how many people are around me.

I'm setting a boundary way back here so that I don't get near the cliff.

And I just want that boundary back here, more conservatively than I actually be.

So I actually believe I could probably be over there.

I actually believe I could be over there and be fine and never fall off the cliff, but I'm gonna set the boundary over here.

And that's just a safe thing.

So even then though, right?

Even then, those rules won't help you unless you understand what creates a heart that would want to participate in those rules.

And all that comes around this point number one, to understand adultery unless we have to go to the heart, which gets us to point number two, which is sort of long, so that's just a long sentence.

I couldn't shorten it.

As we go into the heart, we discover God is giving us something in our sexuality.

And God is also telling us something about ourselves.

So here whether you're here and you're single and you live in abstinence and restraint, you're maybe you're single, you're divorced and single, you're older and single, you're you're young and single, or maybe you're here and you're married, you're young, you're old.

It doesn't matter.

God is telling you something in your sexuality.

Like in that sexual urge, if you don't let it turn into lust, in the sexual urge, God is actually telling you something.

The Franciscan friar Richard Rohr, a great contemplative writer, um, he wrote this God's passion created ours.

Our deep desiring is a relentless returning to that place where all things are one.

If we are afraid of our sexuality, we are afraid of God.

All right, these are like deep thought type stuff here.

Here he goes again.

We seem to need to give ourselves to the other, or at least we are fascinated or attracted by it.

God seemingly had to take all sorts of risks in order that we would not miss the one thing necessary.

We had to be called and even driven out of ourselves by an almost insatiable appetite so that we could never presume that we were self-sufficient.

It is so important that we know that we are incomplete, needy, and essentially social, that God had to create a life force within us that would not be silenced.

See, your sexuality is telling you something about your neediness.

God's telling us that you long to be accepted.

You long for relationship, you need and you long for a love outside of yourselves.

And this is where it all comes together for us, whether it's sexual urges in a good moment or lust in a bad moment.

But the reality that God created you as a sexual being, I mean, this is this is something that's very deep to the core of our inner selves.

And it's and it's not as shallow as an appetite.

In counterfeit gods, Tim Keller, he writes about how C.S.

Lewis was writing in the 40s in response to the kind of academics in Britain who were saying, well, sex is just an appetite.

That's all it is.

Here's how Keller comments on all of this.

He says, there is more sex available than ever before.

Yet pornography, the equivalent of strip teas axe, is now a trillion-dollar industry.

Sex and romantic love are therefore not just an appetite like food.

They are far more meaningful to us than that.

Evolutionary biologists explain that this is hardwired into our brains.

Christians explain that our capacity for romantic love stems from our being in the image of God.

Perhaps it can be said that both are true.

C.S.

Lewis is famous for saying, if I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, no experience can satisfy the desire.

The most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

So if we go back to Exodus and think about these people, we think about these Hebrew people and then what unfolds throughout the Old Testament.

Over time, the prophets in the Old Testament they begin to call these people out for their faithlessness, their fickleness.

They're all over the place.

Sometimes they're so, you know, toward God and they're following the law and they're faithful, and then in other moments they're just way off and they've rebelled and they're doing crazy stuff.

I mean, does it sound familiar at all to anything?

I mean, and what the Old Testament prophets start, they start to use language like you're prostituting yourself.

They start to use sexual language.

They start to use language like you're the bride and you're going and prostituting yourself.

I mean, we went through the book of Hosea a couple years ago, and this is the whole, this is the book of Hosea.

This is the imagery.

It's the image of a people trying to save themselves, prostituting themselves, going to another lover to try to be loved when actually the only love that can satisfy and redeem and justify you is by the Creator God.

So I read an article this week, and the quote just knocked me over.

It's Dr.

Esther Peller, who's a researcher and sexual therapist, and she was writing about, the quote is about how affairs actually happen.

And she wrote this very often we don't go elsewhere because we are looking for another person.

We go elsewhere because we are looking for another self.

It isn't so much that we want to leave the person we are with as we want to leave the person we have become.

See, we're all looking for ourselves.

And what sin is, is sin is us looking for ourselves outside of God and outside of his grace toward us.

So I'm gonna be righteous on my own by my behavior.

I'm gonna go justify myself by achievement, career, by what I look like.

That's sin.

That's what sin is.

And when it comes to affairs, this is what we're doing.

We're looking for ourselves somewhere else, and then what happens is you get there, and then you realize you're, oh, you're still you.

You're still there.

And so it becomes so easy that first we can actually try to find ourselves entirely inside of our marriage, and that doesn't work because you're using your marriage as your own God instead of God, and then you come into your marriage after that, and then you get disillusioned within your marriage, and then you go outside of your marriage and try it there, and you can see how you're just prostituting your heart away from the Lord.

And it's because we're not understanding something about the heart, Paul Zal talks about in his book, Grace and Practice, is in your handout as well.

Need fulfillment is a law that has no possible satisfaction.

Human need is limitless on its own terms.

It is a bottomless well, a pale with a hole in the bottom.

Grace nullifies this.

The need for personal fulfillment is not met in Christianity, it's destroyed.

In Christianity, grace assumes a bottomless need on the part of every single man and woman.

It is the self-serving expression of original sin or selfishness.

This unfillable need is worse than it sounds, for there is a scorpion at the bottom of the bucket.

The original sin of the unattainable need is made worse by sadism that bonds with it in practice.

So here's what it's saying.

You have a need, here's what we do.

Have a need, drop a bucket.

Have a need, drop a bucket.

Have a need, drop a bucket.

I mean, you can see the merit based way of this.

I have a need, I need, I'm gonna drop a bucket over here, I'm gonna drop a bucket over there, I'm gonna drop a bucket over there, but there's never enough.

There's never enough sex, there's never enough lust, there's never enough uh images, there's there's never enough.

So you just keep dropping buckets, but the bucket has a hole in it, and not only that, there's a scorpion in the bucket as well.

It just keeps going, and what grace says is it says, hey, I understand there it is bottomless for you, but I'm wiping away the whole system of you having to drop buckets.

Like the whole idea of meriting your way into justification and fulfillment, I'm wiping it away.

Because grace is unlimited love toward you, so you don't have to keep dropping buckets.

So the Old Testament prophets they build this imagery for us of the prostitution of the people toward their loving God.

And the most amazing thing happens as the New Testament unfolds, and it's this that God doesn't double down on the people.

He doesn't increase the law to get faithfulness out of his bride.

Right?

He knew it wouldn't work.

He knew if he just increased the law, that they're just gonna rebel all the more.

Our sinful egos, they're just gonna respond that way.

That's how we're gonna respond.

So he doesn't increase the law.

Instead, he does the unthinkable.

And this is what the book of Hosea tells us, and it's what the person of Jesus shows us.

He loves the lustful whore.

He loves us.

But whether it's adultery and affairs, I mean, or whether it's lust, he loves us in that.

While we are still sinners, Christ died for us.

Jesus' words on lust, they're telling us that our only hope for escape from the crushing law of get your act together or the law of fulfill all your needs is to find relief in a love given to you himself.

And so the incarnate grace of God, Jesus Himself, He takes on all the shame of this area that is so filled with so much shame.

And like I talked about, some of the shame resulting from actual sin, some of the shame getting put on sexuality that was never meant to be there.

And he takes it all on.

So we're free of the weight of shame and also free from the need to keep going back to those sources that are never, ever going to fulfill you.

Only the outside gift of grace, the person and the work of Christ can relieve you from all of this self-justification and self-righteousness and escapism and need fulfillment that's in lust and affairs and in pornography.

Only his redeeming love can rescue you.

And what it does is it deems you perfect.

And don't we need that when it comes to this?

That you need to be deemed perfect and beloved even while you're not.

So, my brothers and sisters, God loves you as is.

He loves you.

And in that relief, you can find the self you've been looking for the entire time.

Who God created you to be his beloved child.

Let's pray together.

God, we thank you that you give us a great law.

We need to hear the law.

We need to hear that this is destruction.

We need to hear that adultery and affairs and lust will ruin our families and will take great time to repair.

We need to hear it.

And God, we also need to hear that you are a God of restoration and grace that does not end, that comes into the worst of mistakes, and the worst of addictions, and the worst of uh relational despair, and you heal and you love and you deem us perfect, and you see us and regard us as your perfect children.

And whether we sit here in judgment and self-righteousness, which we should repent of, or whether we sit here having had an affair and adultery, and we have such guilt, or whether we sit here with lust and an addiction to pornography, would you help us to see that we're just dropping buckets?

Would you help us to see that only your grace, only the person in the work of Jesus, can wipe away that whole system of life.

And would you help us to live in the truth and the grace that Jesus brings to us?

We thank you for the work of Jesus that we can rest in his work and not ours.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.