Love Over Lust

Hey everyone, this is Josh from Encounter Church Henley and thanks so much for tuning

into our podcast.

Our prayer is that through this podcast you can have an encounter with Jesus that'll

change your life.

And now get ready for an inspiring message from our preaching team.

Hey, for those who don't know me, my name is Jenny.

I am a pastor at Encounter.

So my husband and I, Mike, we oversee Encounter Prospect and Encounter Henley and it's a

lot of fun.

I love it.

Thanks.

Thanks old intern Jordan.

So if you haven't met Mike, he'll be here actually in two weeks time so you get to meet

him then but he's pretty great.

But one of the blessings I have with overseeing both Henley and Prospect in particular is

I get a bit of a bird's eye view about what's going on in the life of this church and to

say that I am proud of you is an understatement.

I am so proud of what God is doing here through you guys, your faithfulness, your willingness

to serve week in, week out and to welcome new people and just to create a home for people

in this great Henley area to come to know Jesus.

So if you don't know Encounter exists to help everybody have an encounter with Jesus.

And so before I begin, let me just pray for that.

Heavenly Father, I thank you that you are here in our midst.

Lord, I thank you that you are moving and that Lord, do you want to speak to us?

Lord, I pray that the word that I speak now, Lord God, will it be your words or anything

that's of me, will it fall away?

Lord, will people not even be able to hear it, Lord Jesus?

May we hear what you are saying to us today.

Lord, I pray that we can lay down our week's sword, anything that we've got coming up

after the service, Lord, and we can just hear what it is that you have to say because nobody

is here by accident.

Lord, you have called us here and you want to speak and minister to us.

So Heavenly Father, we just ask for you to move and to transform our lives today.

In Jesus' name, amen.

Amen.

Hey, so you guys are in the last, we're in the last week of a series called Jesus Over

Everything.

And I listened to a couple of the sermons and they were great.

We, I think, text preached last week on contentment over gluttony.

Yes, great sermon.

And Tim preached on zeal over something.

It was really good.

You know what though?

I remember the zeal beer, which is the bit that you want to remember.

So I'd call that a win.

A couple of years ago, we did a similar series at Prospect, different name, but similar series.

And I talked to one of my sermons about faith over fear.

And it kind of stuck and hung around.

And so my good friend Cara, who's in the room here today, made me this jacket, which is very

cool.

And it says, faith over fear.

So you can see, a little symbol here.

Today, I'm preaching on love over lust.

And I'd like to declare at the start of this sermon that I do not want a jacket that says

love over lust.

I would get some weird looks.

All right, I wore this just for this.

I'm going to have to take it off though, because I got given it five years ago and it doesn't

have five years of give.

So.

All right.

Looking forward to it.

A couple of weeks ago, when Tim did preach on zeal, he did talk into, he spoke about

Phineas and Phineas's zeal.

And we are, so tonight I'm going to preach from the whole book of numbers 25.

And I'm hoping that what you learned from that will really press in, in helping you

learn and grow in this sermon here.

And we're going to get back to the zeal.

There's lots that came before that, which we're going to press into today.

So before we get there, love over lust.

Well, what is lust?

I have always thought that lust was simply a man or a woman looking at another man or

a woman who wasn't their husband and wife and kind of wanting them in their life, sexually,

usually.

I'm so glad Emma's not in kids today.

I'm just going to say the word sex.

It's going to happen, everyone.

It's going to be okay.

You're all going to roll with it.

But as I, as I started to look into the word lust, I realized it's actually bigger than

just that.

Lust is an intense desire for something.

It could be sex, but it also could be money, power, or even things like food or attention.

Simply put, sinful lust is to desire something that we believe to be good outside of what

God has called good.

It is to put our own will and pleasure above God's.

One John 2, verse 16 says, for all that is in the world, the desires of the flesh and

John 2:16

the desires of the eyes and pride of life is not from the Father, but it is from the

world.

And the world is passing away along with its desires.

But whoever does the will of God abides forever.

Now if you're a believer in the room, there's likely that you hear that and you think, yep,

okay, that's good.

I can grasp that.

I understand that.

But if you're not a Christian in the room, you might be thinking, why can't I fulfill

my pleasure?

Who is God to say what is good?

Well being a pastor, I unfortunately get to see the damage of lust.

I see men and women who have affairs with other men or women outside of their relationships

and I see marriage breaking down families that break down over this.

I see young men who have a distorted view of women because of porn.

I see people who engage in sex outside of marriage and then when everything is fulfilled

for them in that moment, they throw it away like it was nothing and the damage that it

causes to women and men.

I have seen people lust after money.

Like they cannot live without it.

That they cannot live without having the latest car or they cannot live without having the

biggest house or just being so secure that there's no way that anything could ever happen.

But we know how that ends.

Or I've seen people who lust after attention.

This is one that I think goes under the radar a little bit.

I think there's actually in churches sometimes we find a lot of those people that will lust.

You need attention.

They need someone else other than God to tell them how good they are.

What a great job they're doing.

Now I'm all for encouragement but our ultimate encouragement has to go to God and when we

lust after that, when we need that more than we need God, it becomes a sin.

So I have seen the damage of lust friends and it is not good.

The thing about lust is that lust takes from us.

So we're going to dive into the scripture today.

It's quite an interesting one.

I love numbers, not the Mascine.

Don't love the Mascine.

But I love the book of numbers.

So in the book of numbers, we see the Israelites.

The Israelites were God's chosen people.

They were pretty special.

They had been led out of slavery, out of Egypt.

If you know the story, the Israelites were in slavery for a really long time and God

through Moses led them out of Egypt and they were given everything.

They had a promise of a beautiful land, a land full of milk and honey, essentially a

land that you would want to be in.

Imagine somewhere where you could go where the ground was fertile, particularly in that

day because of their farmers.

Imagine somewhere where there was going to be no war, that they were going to own the

land.

You know that desire we all have to own that piece of land?

That was theirs.

It was given to them.

But as they walked through the desert, they let sin enter into their lives.

And again and again and again, the Israelites kept sinning.

They were given everything, but they decided that they knew better and they were willing

to do whatever they needed to do to satisfy the desires of their flesh, rather than satisfying

the God that had just saved them.

And so that meant, unfortunately, that God, there had to be a consequence for that.

And so the consequence was that God said that all those that are adults will not make it

into that promised land and that they would wander the desert for 40 years.

And so, but pretty much by adult, by the way, I was reading this week, it means from about

the age of about 20 up.

So we're not talking, you know, the 40 year olds that eventually just died out at 80 or

whatever.

We are talking the 20 year olds.

And so they lost the promised land.

They kept taking for themselves what God didn't have for them.

So here we see, we get to the Israelites have made it to Shetom and they had been in the

desert for a really long time.

So I've been wondering for many years to get to here.

And then they say they stay in Shetom for a long time.

It's here where we hear that a donkey talks.

You can read about that a few chapters back.

In two chapters before this one, the prophet speaks blessing, not curses on them, much

to the king's disgust.

But it's also here where they start to worship the God of the Moabites.

Why do you do this?

If you are a chosen people, you have every promise before you.

Why would you go and worship these other gods, these false gods?

I'll tell you why.

Good looking women.

That's why.

These Israelite men were lusting after these women and they wanted these women.

And when you have a strong desire for something, you're likely to do anything to get it.

That's normal.

That's who we are.

And so they would worship the Moabite gods because it meant that the Moabites women would

be more interested in them, that they would be more likely to sleep with them or to marry

them.

When you last after something, you desire it strongly.

And I think in that moment when they were lusting after those women, they probably would

have thought that maybe worshiping these other gods wasn't that bad.

So it's going to get them what their flesh desires.

Maybe it actually wasn't all that bad.

So as you can imagine, they start worshiping these other gods and God's righteous anger

wells up.

The fact that the Israelites were taking what didn't belong to them and it was causing them

to worship other gods, it angered the heart of God.

Now friends, I don't think the Israelites set out of Egypt deciding that they were going

to go and sleep with the Moabite women, that they were going to have affairs.

That is not how this stuff works.

Okay, I don't think anybody gets married thinking that they're going to get divorced or I hope

not.

We actually say that in marriage counseling because it's really true.

Like I don't think anyone starts that way, but it sometimes it just happens slowly, by

slowly, by slowly.

People don't start out and go out and hire a prostitute.

They start by lingering in spaces that they shouldn't have been in.

The thing that the Israelites had is they were lingering in the desert.

They were not meant to be in the desert at this point.

They were meant to be in the Promised Land already, but they weren't there because of

their sin.

They were lingering in the place that they were not meant to be in.

And what I find is sin happens when we linger in the places that we're not meant to be in.

The thing I have found with lust is it usually kind of works a little bit like this.

And I am going to get past this in a second, but just stay with me for a minute.

It starts with just a quick peek.

Just a small, harmless conversation with another woman or man who we know we like, but it's

not, it's harmless.

It's just a conversation.

We're just looking.

And then it moves or can move if we continue to go down that path.

It can move to more intimate conversations, more time looking at the other person.

And then it leads to things that we do behind closed doors.

So most sin isn't really obvious.

I mean, there are some sins that are really obvious, but most of these kinds of sins,

they're usually done behind closed doors.

Now I would ask the question if you have to do it behind closed doors, that perhaps there's

something there.

And then eventually it comes out and it hurts all those involved.

At very least it hurts you.

That's how I find it usually journeys.

Doesn't just start, you don't just wake up one morning and you go on off and have an

affair.

It doesn't, it does not how it works.

It works slowly.

The thing is, friends, the Israelites were warned about these women.

They were warned about the Moabite people in general.

They were meant to go and kill all the Moabites and not take them for their wives.

The Lord was really clear about that.

Friends, we're warned about this thing.

We're told to flee from temptation.

We are also made aware of that.

But just like the Israelites, we don't always listen.

Now sometimes we think, oh, once we, you know, leaders would never do that.

Or once I get myself together and it'll all be good, I'll walk away from that sin.

Well, let me be very clear.

The Israelite man who bought the Midianite woman into the tent, he was a leader.

So his dad was Salul, the prince or leader of the Simeonite family.

This was not a new Christian who was still trying to juggle and work out what the heck

to do.

He was like, how does God want me to live and why does he want me to live there?

This was someone who knew exactly what he was doing.

He thought that he knew better than God.

This is where lust starts.

When we think we know better than God.

Lust leads them into sin, which then leads to a plague of death for all those yokes to

the false God they were worshiping.

It's horrible because friends, lust takes so much from us.

Then we get to the bit that Tim shared about a few weeks back, the zeal of Phineas.

So he's a man who sees this Israelite with a Midianite woman.

And by the way, I know I was just talking about Moulbat women before, but the Midianite

women would have fallen into the same category.

So the Midianite people were actually traveling people, so they would wander around and visit

different cities and join in with their worshiping the same God.

So the Midianites would have been worshiping the same God as the Moulbats and would have

fallen into the same area of, hey, let's not go there.

And Phineas says his anger burns inside him and he stops them both by putting a spear

through their bodies and killing them, which when you actually picture it is pretty gross.

Right?

But the thing is, lust must be put to death.

This is a thing about lust.

It must be put to death.

You cannot go easy on lust.

It has to be put to death at the first sign.

That first look, don't go back for that second one.

Run towards God, run far.

Because lust is a dangerous game.

It bleeds into so much of your life if you don't put it to death.

Now that's been a full on start to my sermon.

Welcome.

Hello, I am Jenny again.

Hey, there is lust, but there's another side to what I want to talk to you about today.

And that's love.

Where lust takes love gives.

Right before the Israelites decided to follow their lust, God was actually showing them

how much he loved them.

He was actually blessing them.

There was a prophet, Balaam.

I also may have put to that.

You know what?

I do the pronunciation thing on the internet and it does work sometimes, but not always.

There was a prophet called Balaam and he essentially was bought in by another king.

You can read this about two chapters, I think before 23.

And he was bought in by another king to curse the Israelites.

The king's like, come here, I'm going to tell you what to say.

You're going to say this.

And then this prophet, he goes away and he comes back and he says, I cannot curse him.

Let me bless him.

And then he just blesses the Israelites over and over and over again.

So the Lord is loving them.

If only they would have chosen God's love.

Now friends, when we think of love, we mostly think of the earthly love.

Right?

I love my husband.

I love my kids.

I love my sister.

It's a pure kind of love, but it's not as pure as God's love because God's love is so great

that we actually can't use the English word to describe it.

The Greek word for God's love is agape.

It's a beautiful word.

Even the word is beautiful, agape.

In the Bible, in the Greek, there are actually four different kinds of love.

And I'm not going to go through the other three today, but I would encourage you to

have a look at the Greek and the way the Greek tries to explain the four different kinds

of love.

But God's love is agape.

Agape love is a holy love.

It's not selfish at all.

Let me read from 1 Corinthians 13.

Love is not on the screen, sorry, but love is patient.

Love is kind.

It does not envy.

You may have heard this at weddings.

It does not boast.

It is not proud.

It does not dishonour others.

It is not self-seeking.

It is not easily angered.

It keeps no record of wrongs.

Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices in the truth.

It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

The best way, friends, that we can understand agape love is by looking at God sending Jesus

to us.

Greater love has no one than this to lay down one's life for one's friends, John 15.

Jesus was showing us that the best way to love was the way he loved us.

Most of us will not die for somebody else in our lifetime.

We probably won't.

But we can understand the hugeness of that, right?

Like the idea of dying for somebody else.

The closest I have ever come to understanding this, I think, is with my children.

So, sorry, Danielle, if you also fell into a bus, I would also push you out.

This is my sister, Danielle.

But with my children, I have such a deep love that if they were to get hit by a bus, I would

get in front of that bus and push them out of it.

Love's love is greater than that.

True love, friends, gives.

True love gives everything.

Last is full of taking.

We take what our body has a desire for, or our mind says is best for us.

But love gives.

It says, what is best for others?

Love is selfless.

Now I know many of us know this.

We know that lust is not something we want in our lives, and we know that love is something

that we want.

But we actually don't live that out as much as we think we do.

We put ourselves and our wants before God, before what God wants all the time.

I know I know I do.

So I'm assuming you're all human like me.

Last week, Tex talked about Sabbath.

And the best thing about Sabbath is it puts your focus back on God and his desires for

you, which may add are so much better than our desires that are inside of us that are

sinful.

His desires for us are so good, we can trust him with that.

Our world says, what do you want?

I'll give you a better life.

You can get it.

But let me ask the question, how is that going for us as a society?

This depression is higher than it's ever been, lowliness is an epidemic.

And I talk to people all the time who don't even want to live anymore.

That's sad.

That's not the life that God had for us.

The truth is, if we start to look outside our selfish desires and see what God wants,

we get to understand that what God wants for us is good.

He has good things for each and every one of you.

Not the person next to you, but you.

We have a God who loves us more than we can completely understand.

Phineas had a great zeal for the Lord.

But friends, you don't get this kind of zeal without a deep understanding of God's love.

Phineas had a deep zeal, he had a deep understanding of God's love.

Now Phineas was a Levite.

What do you think of when you hear the word Levite?

Levite?

Okay, anything else?

Worship.

Who said worship?

Worship, text.

Thank you, Pastor Text.

Yes, we think of worshipers.

We think of the Levites being the worshipers, friends.

But they were actually more than that.

They were actually the gatekeepers and they were the judges.

They don't mess with the Levites.

I like to sometimes, when I look around a room, think about who might be a Levite in

the room.

Who would be a worshiper, but also a gatekeeper and a judge?

Don't say that out loud.

Come tell me later.

All right.

But friends, the Levites knew the power of God.

They knew that God loved them.

They had less distractions in their life.

One of the things about being the worshippers, and I said to our worship team before, is

you go first.

They had to prepare themselves before the Lord, before they went into being a judge,

before they went in to do any kind of worshipping God.

They had a lot of less distractions.

Essentially, it was their job.

It's like Jared, right?

Creative Pastor.

If you haven't met Jared, you'll have met him in a few weeks, I think.

They had less distractions.

They followed what God wanted first.

Because they had their eyes on God, they knew his love.

You don't plunge a spear into someone's stomach while they're having sex.

If you don't have a real zeal and a love for God, you just don't do that.

I don't even know how you get the strength, you don't get the strength to do that unless

you are full of the Holy Spirit, right?

Imagine it.

Don't imagine it.

So Phineas, he had a love for God that turned into a zeal and it created a strength that

was deep, from a deep well of love for God.

Friends, lust got Israel into trouble, but love got them out of it.

Lust got them into trouble, but love got them out of it.

Love is your comfort, it is your peace, it is your weapon.

You fight lust with love.

And if you struggle with lust of any kind, it's not your strong will that's going to

get you out of that.

Just knowing how loved you are and living out of that overflow of the love of God that

will get you there.

When you get an understanding of how much God loves you through the Holy Spirit, it

changes the way we live.

There's a woman in my old church journey and beautiful older woman and she just prays

every day for me and for Mike and for all the pastors that she knows and prays for hours.

She has an understanding of God's love.

I actually don't think I've experienced it in anyone else in my whole life.

She understands how much God loves her.

If you ask her to articulate God, she will talk about the love of God.

She will talk about the goodness, the way he loves her.

And out of that, you can see the way she lives.

When love is number one, lust doesn't just fall down to number two, it falls way, way

away.

So do you want your life to change to look more like Jesus?

Then start to understand how loved you are.

Start to hear God's words over you from one John.

How great is the love the Father has, how great is the love the Father has lavished upon

us, that we should be called children of God and that is what you are.

You are children of God.

Set apart from your old ways, able to step into his love, able to be filled with the

Spirit.

Now I know at Henley that you get Henley homework.

I love this.

I feel like I've been giving homework to Prospect for six years but I've never been game enough

to say that's what it is.

It's fantastic.

And so I was thinking this week, what is something that I would love you guys to do outside of

Sunday to essentially be able to put love above lust?

Well, I'd love you to allow God to start to show you how much he loves you.

It's really simple this week, right?

I want you to learn how much God loves you.

I'd love you to look at your life and say this is where I'm lusting after things.

Maybe for some of you it's really obvious, maybe for some of you you've got to stop and

think about it a little bit more.

And then I'd love you to ask God how he's going to show you and reveal his love to you

so that you can run far from lust.

Maybe you could go into the YouVersion Bible app if you don't have that on your phone.

It's really great Bible app, it's YouVersion.

And there's some studies on God's love.

Why don't you start a study this week?

It could be a two-day study and start to study how much God loves you.

Maybe you could simply go and Google Bible verses on God's love.

All pastors, no open Bible.

And on there is all the Bible verses.

If you type in love, it'll come up with all the Bible verses about love, right?

So do that.

So that's what God's love and into Google and see all the scriptures about how he loves

you.

So how do we get rid of lust in our lives and band he can come on up?

How do we get lust, get rid of lust in our lives?

Well, firstly, confession is step number one, confession.

So if you have found yourself living in lust, maybe it's an obvious thing like porn or looking

at someone lustfully.

Maybe it's one of those things that are not, those things of lust that are not necessarily

so obvious.

Maybe you're lust for money or you're lust for people's attention or other things like

that.

Or you're lust for what other people have.

I see that one a lot.

I would encourage you to confess, to find somebody to confess to.

It's really powerful.

You know, what I find is that some people, they'll live in their sin in shame.

Shame is not your friend.

Shame is not what you are called to do.

We are all sinners saved by great friends.

So do not be ashamed of admitting where you're at to.

There is so much freedom in that.

And that is the first step if you want to defeat lust within your life.

Those things are good things, but they're not right for you right now or perhaps ever

for some people.

And you need to go to God and you need to come before Him in confession and repentance

and to turn away.

Friends do not let shame hide you in your sin.

Is doing the opposite, well not the opposite of confession, but the opposite of the sin.

You need, or maybe you need to give away money until money becomes something that you don't

lust for anymore.

Maybe it's putting around rules around where you use your computer, or maybe you need to

go as far as cutting ties with someone.

Because lust takes, but love gives, and we have been given all that we need to live without

lust in our lives.

There is so much freedom when we choose to turn to God, to let Him love us with His perfect

agape love.

I was reading in Galatians 2 this morning, friends we cannot earn God's love, we cannot

work hard for our salvation.

It was already given to us.

It is a free gift of God.

And I think there are lots of people in this room who get that up here, but they don't

really get that in here.

They're still working really hard to earn God's love, rather than receiving that love,

letting it fill us, letting it shape our whole lives, so that we work out of the overflow,

we serve God out of the overflow of His love, not because we're trying to earn His love,

but because He has already loved us.

We're going to come back into a time of worship, but I want to pray for some people before

I do that.

Friends it's really easy to stay in sin, because a lot of the time it's hidden, but let me

remind you it always comes to light.

It always comes to light.

And it is so much better if you put it before the cross, and you allow God to take that

from your life, and to replace it with His love.

Thanks so much for tuning into this week's message.

If you felt challenged or need prayer, would love to hear from you on Instagram, at EncounterHenry.

Or if you're interested in how you can support this ministry, please go to our website, EncounterAdelaide.com.au.

Thanks again for listening.

God bless you.