Purity in the Kingdom
Kingdom Living

Transcript

Good morning, church. It’s good to see all of you here this morning. We're in part five of our series, “Kingdom Living.” We're going through the Sermon on the Mount. It's been called “the greatest sermon that's ever been preached by the greatest preacher who ever lived.”

We've been going verse by verse through this. We took a little break last week for Easter Sunday, but we're in part five of this series and it's a description by King Jesus of what it looks like to live in His kingdom as faithful, true kingdom citizens. It describes a culture that's radically different than the world's culture. In fact, John Stott wrote about the Sermon on the Mount, describing it like this.

He says, “The Sermon on the Mount is the most complete description anywhere in the New Testament of the Christian counter-culture. Here is a Christian value system, ethical standard, religious devotion, attitude to money, ambition, lifestyle and network of relationships – all of which are totally at odds with those of the non-Christian world. And this Christian counter-culture is the life of the kingdom of God, a fully human life indeed but lived out under the divine rule.” So, that's what we're talking about.

I just wanted to remind us of that because we did take a little break for Easter, but we are in part five today. Jesus is announcing a new way of life for those who call Him King. People ask, ‘Where is the kingdom of heaven?’ ‘Where is the kingdom of God?’ It's wherever Christ is King.

If you've called Christ King of your heart, of your life, then the kingdom has come to you and the kingdom is breaking out all over the world as people say “yes” to Jesus, as they surrender their lives to King Jesus. This is not a list of laws and rules on how to get saved, how to get in the kingdom. It's not that. It's a description, instead, of those who have already come into the kingdom, calling Jesus King, because there is no earning of salvation.

Christ has earned it. But having received Him, He empowers us to live this kingdom lifestyle that we're talking about. Now, I hope you, as you came in, were offered an opportunity to pick up this little booklet. It’s just a way of keeping up with all the lessons. This is a 16-week series and we want to give you a place where you could keep them all in one place, because we're going very carefully, verse by verse, in this great sermon and through these three chapters in Matthew.

Now today, we'll be picking up at verse 27, and we're in that section of the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus is saying,
“You've heard it said, but I say.” He talks about certain commandments that the Pharisees were interpreting. Then, He offers how He interprets it as the Son of God. Today, He's bringing up the topic of sexual purity, of what it looks like for kingdom citizens to live purity, to live as those that are pure in heart in the kingdom of heaven. Let's be honest, no one escapes this struggle untouched.

We live in a culture today that is permeated by sexuality and innuendo. Lust isn't just a temptation we battle in the world, it's also a battle of the heart. It's something we battle on the inside. If we're going to live as faithful citizens of God's kingdom, we have to recognize this, especially if we want to live as “salt and light” in this world, that Jesus is calling us to sexual purity in our lives. This is more than a pursuit of external behavior.

It's more than just outward effort, but it requires a transformation of the heart. We need a new heart from the Lord Jesus to empower us to have this purity of heart that He calls us to. Today, in this little section of the text, He exposes the root problem of our hearts. He calls us to radical grace-filled purity of heart. In Matthew 5:27-30, He confronted His hearers with the deeper intent of the law.

He exposed the seriousness of lust as adultery of the heart. He called them to a sexual purity in their lifestyles as kingdom citizens. I believe today that we can pursue this, that we can answer this calling that Jesus calls us to purity. As we look at the text, I think we'll see three key areas where Jesus is calling us to live sexually pure lives as His kingdom citizens. So let's “dig in.”

We're in chapter five, verse 27 and following. Matthew 5:27-30 (ESV) 27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ 28 But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 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.

30 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 that your whole body go into hell.” This is God's word. Amen. We're looking for three key areas on answering Christ's call to sexual purity.

1. We can ask God to clean and renew our hearts.

We can ask God to clean and renew our hearts. We can ask God to clean and renew our hearts. I want you to notice that Jesus names three areas: He names the heart,

He names the eyes and He names the hands. These are clearly metaphors that Jesus is using. So it's important for us, when we interpret Scripture, to “unpack” the metaphors and to get at, if you will, the heart of what Jesus is saying. But, He begins with the heart.

I think what He begins with here is the heart attitude. In fact, you could put in your notes that, when He's talking about the heart, He's talking about your attitude, because an attitude always precedes an action. It is not just the action of sin, but it's the attitude that sin begins with. It's an attitude of rebellion against God that's really the heart of sin.

It's this attitude of saying, ‘I want my way rather than your way. I want to do it myself.’ You've heard me say this before, but one of the first complete sentences that my firstborn ever said was, “I do it myself.” “I do it myself.” So, we're all born with this heart attitude that the Bible calls sin.

So, it's what precedes and Jesus gets at the heart of the matter. He says it starts with the heart and that we've got a problem in our heart; we lust after things. We lust after the “forbidden fruit.” We lust after things.

I want you to hear this. God is not trying to make you miserable. He's not trying to steal your joy. What He's doing is He's helping you understand where the right things belong. He gives us a desire for intimacy.

He gives us a desire for love. He gives us a desire for sexuality. But, He has a right place for it to be carried out. It's to be carried out within the married life of a husband and a wife and so, there's great freedom there.

But outside of that, He says it will cause you pain and trouble and it even puts your eternal soul at risk. That's what He's saying here. He says it very powerfully and very convincingly. He doesn't play around. He begins just as He did last time.

We were talking with this antithesis kind of language where He says, “You've heard…” “But I say…” remember the last time He says, “You've heard it said, thou shalt not murder.” You shall not murder, which is the sixth commandment of the ten. Then He says, “But I say,” and remember that earlier He had said, “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you'll never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Well, apparently the scribes and the Pharisees were trying to make the law something you could achieve through your own self effort.

So, they would limit it just to the action. But Jesus is now doing again, if you will recognize, the law came down from Mount Sinai via Moses, right? Now here comes the “second Moses,” if you will; the one Who really is the originator of the Word. Because John says that He is the word made flesh. He's coming down from the mountain with the real, right, correct interpretation of the law.

He says, “You've heard it said…” He's on the seventh commandment now, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” “But I say…” Do you see what He's doing? There's six of these. This is the second one in the Sermon on the Mount where He's saying that this is what the law says and this is how you've been interpreting it, but you've been getting it wrong.

It really starts with the heart. That's where it really starts. It starts with the attitude of rebellion that's in your heart that says, ‘I want to do it my way rather than God's way.’ So, He's nailing that down and He says it with His own authority. He's not quoting somebody else's authority.

He says, 27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ 28 But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Remember that last time I told you that this is the emphatic use in the Greek of the word “I?” What do I mean by “emphatic use?” It means that He emphasizes “I.” You could have interpreted it like this. “I, I say.”

”I, I say.” How does He have such authority? He's the Son of God. As I said a moment ago, as the Gospel of John says, “He's theWord made flesh.” He's the one behind the whole word. He says that you've been misunderstanding. It's not just about the external action, it's about the attitude of the heart. It's not just adultery, it's lust that is the precursor.

It's the attitude behind adultery. It's lust. Now, what is lust? You could interpret it like this. It's an “over desire.”

It's the idea of something being over much; something you want more than God designed for you to want it. The thing about lust is that it can never be satisfied. It can never be satisfied, because when you engage it, it always wants more. He's warning us here about this. Now, we could look at it and say, ‘Well, it sounds like this is for the men.’ The ladies could be sitting here right now saying, ‘It sounds like you got a “man sermon” right here, Pastor Gary.

I think we can check out, because it says “his” heart. It doesn't say, “her” heart. It doesn't say “our” heart. It says “his” heart in verse 28, so we know about those men.’ Ladies, don't check out. Adultery always “takes two to tango,” right? It takes two to commit adultery.

I think Jesus is addressing it to probably a predominantly male audience. I'm not sure. But, it was just the pattern of the scriptures to speak in this way. I think it includes ladies, so I think we all have hearts that lust.

Lust is when we desire something over much; over past what God designed us to desire it. It's always “forbidden fruit.” That thing that is not good for you. This is against My will for you. Now, mothers, you know this.

All you have to do is to tell your child, to tell your toddler, “Don't touch it. It's hot. It will burn you” to activate within the child the heart rebellion that says, “I must touch it.” Now, they didn't even know they wanted to touch it until you said, “Don't touch it.”

The minute you said, “Don't touch it,” it activated that rebellious heart that we're all born with. The Bible says that we all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, that we're born apart from God in rebellion. We were born with Adam's nature, with the sin nature. We want to do the opposite of what God says. Now, when we think about adultery, “You shall not commit adultery.”

That’s the seventh commandment. You might think of the commandments like they're chapter headings for where God's word is going, because there are 618 laws in the first five books, in the Torah, in the Decalogue, in the books of Moses that he brought down, okay, from Mount Sinai, there's 618 of them

under the header. Let's call number seven God's “top ten.” Adultery is a chapter heading for all the types of sexual sins that the book later lists. If you read through it, you'll begin to see these categories: certainly adultery, which is unlawful intercourse with another person's spouse other than your own. That's adultery.

Under that, I think it includes all sexual sin, which, for instance, would be fornication, which is sex with someone who's not your spouse. If you're single, that's having sex with someone you're not married to. Incest is

with a family member and it gets very specific when you read the scripture about what He means by that. Homosexuality is a sexual sin. Prostitution, bestiality, rape, gender dysphoria and confusion, pornography… I could go on. God's Word outlines these, but you might consider them all under that category of adultery.

It's important to recognize that, because what Jesus is really calling us to is what He opened up with in the Beatitudes when He says to us, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” He's calling us to purity of heart when He says, “You shall not commit adultery.” He's also talking about adultery of the heart, for the one who is looking at pornography. It's really hard to get away from pornography today. It used to be you had to go somewhere and buy a magazine.

Now, you carry it around in your pocket. It's called your “smartphone.” Young men and young women are being enslaved by wrong imagery of what God really intended for sexuality. It's “shipwrecking” many young people today with this imagery.

He says that it starts in the heart. You have a lustful intent, an “over passion,” literally. The Greek word is “epithumeō.”

“epi” means “over,” like epicenter. We use it like that, but it intensifies with “thumeō.” “thumeō”means to boil, to boil over, to have this lustful intent that you lose control. It's an “over desire.”

When He talks about the heart, I've already said it's about the attitude, but for the Jewish mind, the heart was the center of the will. The place where you “drive the car.” It's the “driver's seat of your life.”

What we need is a new heart. What we need is a transformed heart. This is why the prophet Ezekiel prophesied this. He spoke of a day when the Messiah would come and the Lord would give us a new heart. He said in Ezekiel 36:26-27 (NLT) 26 “And I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit in you.

I will take out your stony, stubborn heart and give you a tender, responsive heart. 27 And I will put my Spirit in you so that you will follow my decrees and be careful to obey my regulations.”

So, instead of having this outward law that's on stone tablets that really just produces stone hearts, He will write His law on our hearts in this new, transformed heart that has a new “want to,” a new desire that I want to love God and I want to love others as I love myself.

When I lust after someone or something, I'm treating them like an object of my selfish desire, rather than loving them truly as brothers and sisters, as mothers and fathers, as sons and daughters. To think of them like that is a new way. Give me a new heart to think about it. The thing about the law is the law cannot enable you to keep it.

If you're driving down the interstate and you see a law that's written on a metal sign and it says, “Speed Limit 70,” there's nothing there in the sign that engages your right foot. The sign says,

”Speed Limit 70,” and your right foot automatically slows down. No, it's not how that works. It has to go through your heart. Your eyes see it,

but your heart thinks, I don't want to. I like to go 78. Somebody told me if you go eight over, they won't pull you.

I've been pulled before. Try telling that to the trooper, ‘Somebody told me if you go eight over…’ ‘I don't know who told you that,

but driver's license and registration, please.’ Here's what I'm saying is the speed limit sign. The law does not empower you to keep it. The law doesn't have the power to do that.

It has the power to condemn you so that, when the blue light's coming, then you get the condemnation. What we need is a new heart. We need a new willpower. When David committed adultery with a woman named Bathsheba, he thought he got away with it. Here's the thing about adultery.

Here's the thing about lust. Whenever you're going to have a wedding, you have it in the daytime and you send out invitations. In fact, you send them out in advance and send them a card that says, “Save the date.” When you get married, you send out invitations.

You want everybody to bear witness. But, when you're committing adultery, you do it in the dark and you do it in secret. The only way people find out is through the “rumor mill.” See, we know it's sin; that's why we do it in the dark.

The flesh behaves in the dark and the broken attitude of the heart is engaged in the darkness. So, David had committed sin. He thought that he got away with it. He did it in secret,

but God saw it. God sent the prophet, Nathan, to go and say to David, ‘God saw what you did’ and David repented. It cost him a lot, but he repented. He wrote this Psalm, Psalm 51, as his prayer to God, his prayer of repentance.

Psalm 51:10 (ESV) “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” Oh, he was broken. Lord, I need You; I just need You to get out the Brillo pad. Get down in there and dig it out.

Get it out of me.

Clean my heart. Have you ever prayed that prayer, ‘Lord, clean me up?’ I don't care where you're at today. I don't care that the word is causing you now to reflect on your own sinfulness. The Word doesn't leave you there.

The word invites you to come to Jesus and say, ‘Clean me up,’ because only He can clean the heart. Only He can see the heart. Only He can clean the heart. The thing that I'm seeing that's so worrisome in our world today, and I talked about smartphones, but the fact that we're giving smartphones to 8 year olds.

We have middle schoolers taking smartphones. You might think, Well, it's convenient, okay? But smartphones are not smart.

They just pipe in whatever the world's dishing out. One of the chief causes that we're seeing among young, teenage girls, preteens and young girls, is more problems with dysphoria, gender dysphoria, because they see all this stuff, right? They begin to engage material that they're not mature enough to engage, and it begins to confuse them. It's also leading to suicidal ideation among young people; there is a great increase, because what will happen is, they'll show a picture of themselves on Instagram, they'll take a selfie or something, and then someone else will share it. Then, they'll get shamed for it.

Then, they'll feel like, Oh, my secrets are out and now I must die. I can't face it. So they're facing all these things. So parents, you're giving your children these, because first of all, they tell you, ‘Everyone's got one.’ That's one of the things that I used to say to my parents about whatever I wanted. If you're doing it without really checking in on them without putting limitations on them,

you have just given them a gateway to the world. Every piece of garbage just gets piped in right there. There's young men today that are becoming addicted to porn that's beyond belief of how far away from God it is. I mean, young men used to go buy a magazine and had a fold out that they would look at. Well, now it just gushes out of your phone into your eyes and it's destroying young Christian men and young Christian women that believe in Jesus.

It is entangling their hearts like weeds. Speaking of weeds (hard shift here), it sure is hard to grow grass in Wilson, North Carolina. I'm not from here. I moved down here from the Appalachians of Virginia; I moved from Roanoke, Virginia.

It's called the Star City, up there in the Blue Ridge. You could buy Kentucky 31 grass seed and throw it on your concrete driveway and grow grass. It was easy growing grass. I got down here. I've been working at this thirty, almost 40 years.

It's like a science, an art and you still lose. So, here's a picture of my yard.

Not really. I'm doing better. I've been working at it for a long time. But here's what I've noticed:

if I don't work at it constantly, I don't have to work at that happening (pic of crabgrass). This happens on its own. The soil just grows weeds. When I'm out working and I'm digging up one of those pieces of crabgrass, I'm trying to spray it with something, or I'm trying to get rid of it, I'll often talk to God about Adam. I'll say, ‘Lord, when I get to heaven, I'm going to have a talk with Adam about that whole thing about how it's going to produce thorns and thistles and we have to work by the sweat of our brow.’

That's the curse of sin right there. There's another curse of sin right over there; it comes upon its own. It's hard to grow grass in Wilson.

You have to work, cultivate and do all kinds of things to the soil. The soil is like your heart;

you have to put good things in there, you have to put God's word in there, you have to pray and you have to have the discipline of really getting before the Lord to sow good seed. But, you don't have to plant weeds;they're just in there and they just come up. I need a new heart. I need a clean heart. Don't you need a clean heart? Lord, come and clean my heart out

and get these unholy desires out of me and give me a new desire and a new spirit. Where's your thought life taking you? It's easy to grow weeds. They grow on their own. Where are your thoughts?

Are you nurturing hidden desires that, left unchecked, will shape your actions? Are the TV shows you watch, the books you read or the social feeds that you follow causing you to be discontent as a single person, so that you feel like, why wait for marriage? Or as a married person, do you feel like there's something better for me out there? Maybe, it’s this man that's speaking nice to me at work.

You're discontent with your marriage. Are you feeding romantic fantasies about what you watch, read and look at? Are you allowing the weeds to come up? Emotional affairs often start in the mind. God gave us this gift called “imagination.”

I don't think animals have imagination. We can imagine things that don't even exist yet. We can imagine things that are good, and we can imagine things that are evil. Ask yourself, What am I really craving? Intimacy?

Control?

Where do your thoughts drift on your own? What emotional states make you vulnerable to lust?

Is it loneliness? Is it fatigue? What makes you more vulnerable? Is it boredom? Is it, I deserve this kind of way of thinking?

What makes you vulnerable? Have you asked God to purify your heart? Would you pray like David today? “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” It starts with the heart.

2. We can look to God to help guard our eyes.

Now, we're coming to verse 29. We see that we can look to God to help guard our eyes. It goes from the heart to the eyes. If the heart represents an attitude, the eyes represent what allures, what tempts and what attracts. As Shakespeare said, “The eyes are the

windows to the soul.” The eyes represent that which is visually stimulating and stirs up the “weeds” in our heart, unless we've been asking God to pluck them out and replace them with good seed. Jesus doesn't play here. He's using “hyperbole.”

Do you know that word? It means “to overstate a thing in order to make a point.” He says this verse 29, “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away.”

I didn't hear a single person in the room say, ‘I didn't hear that,” but I bet the people on that mount that day, when Jesus said that, I bet the men and the women

said, ‘No one ever taught like this man.’ He does what's called a “lesser to greater” comparison. He says, “For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell.” He says that this whole sin problem we have, this whole lust problem that starts in the heart, is triggered by the eyes.

The eyes see things in the world and then an over desire “weed” says, ‘I want this even though it's not mine. I want it now, even though it's not time.’ He says that this has eternal consequence.

This will affect me forever, the way I respond. Some of the early believers in the first couple of centuries were trying to take God's Word as literally as possible. I think that's a good thing on the face of it. You have to understand when you're reading something that's using hyperbole. Some of them took it too far.

There was a church father named Origen who took it too far and emasculated himself, thinking he would rid himself of lust. He found out it didn't work because lust is not about the members of your body, it's about your heart. So I think if Jesus meant this literally; we would all be blind and handless and we would still lust. So that's my key here, of understanding. He doesn't mean it literally.

He's using hyperbole here. He's overstating it in order to get our attention. Don't play with this. You're playing with dynamite. You're playing with fire.

Here we are in the culture today; we are immersed, we are bathed in a constant flow of advertising and through every TV show. Sexuality is constantly coming our way through the eye gate, through the ear gate, everywhere. But we are called as kingdom citizens to a counterculture, to a life of purity. This is His calling to us. So he says to guard your eyes

if something causes you to sin. In other words, it causes you to literally stumble.

He says, don't play with it. Pluck it out and throw it away. Notice, He says “right eye” and then later He says “right hand.”

We talk about how Jesus has ascended. Where's Jesus at; He is ascended to the right hand of the Father. Whenever in Hebrew culture, when you say something is at the right hand or at the right, we're saying it's the position of primacy, authority

or importance. So, no matter how much you love a thing, no matter how important it is, no matter how much you desire it, if it's not from God, if it's causing you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away. Don't play with it. Don't just walk up to the edge of the cliff. No, put guardrails up and stay way back.

He said that it would be better for you to get rid of something worldly that you love. You know, this TV show I watch, I'm into this TV series, and it's got nudity in it and it's got some bad language, but it's a great storyline.

It's my favorite show on tv.

I just really need this. It helps me keep in touch and helps me. I really need this smartphone.

What will it take? How serious would you get about getting rid of something and throwing it away if every time you took hold of it, it caused you to sin?

Do we look any different than the world or do we look just like the world? Church, come on. He's calling us to be kingdom citizens, so that we're to live a life of modesty and of purity.

I'm Facebook friends with a lot of you. What's up with the “kissy” photos? Who are you kissing?

Who are you trying to be sexy for? What is that? What are these things we're doing?

What are we advertising? I sometimes see a husband post a photo of his wife, and he will say, ‘Here's my hot wife.’ Well, keep your hot wife to yourself, bro.

Do you know what “hot” means? It means sexy. She's yours. Keep that at home.

I've gone from preaching to meddling.

I need to back off. Let's be different. Let's behave differently.

We're called to modesty in our dress and our behavior, and we're to look different so that the world looks at us and thinks, They're not like us. We become attractive; they want what we have. God's not saying no to these things because He's trying to limit your joy. He's saying no to these things because they'll destroy your joy and they'll enslave you.

He's trying to set you free from sin. He says that eternity's at risk. Wouldn't it be better to lose that one thing that you love? Wouldn't it be better to pluck that out and throw it away than to go to hell than to have you, your whole self thrown into hell?

The Greek word there for hell is actually from the Hebrew word, “Gehenna,” which is the valley of Hinnom, which was a dump in the south part of Jerusalem where they would carry carcasses and their trash. Mark 9:44-48 (KJV) “Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched,” Jesus says in another place. He's not playing here. The desires of the eyes are not from the Father.

Here's what John says in his first epistle,1 John 2:16 (ESV) “For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world.”

If you think about what really got poor Eve, there's Eve in the garden, and it says that she looked at the fruit and she saw that it looked good. It always looks good. The forbidden fruit always looks good. It looked good

and so in her heart, there was already a thing that she was starting to feel, because she heard the temptation of the evil one who said, “Did God really say…” that's where it always begins. It begins with questioning God's word. “Did God really mean that? Did God really say?”

Then she sees that it looks good. It moves from the heart, to the eyes, to the hands that reach for it.

I want to be like Job. Men and women, especially young men and young women, Job 31:1 (NIV) “I made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully at a young woman.” I made a covenant with my eyes. He says, I made an agreement with my eyes not to look lustfully at a young woman. Now I've heard men say, ‘Well, I couldn't help it. She walked right in front of me.

I was already looking that way when she walked by.’ Well, you knew when you did this; that part you could have controlled.

Okay, so this idea of looking with lustful intent has the idea not of the first accidental look, but of the long glance, of the long following look. If she crosses your line of sight and she starts going that way, turn away. Especially if your wife's sitting next to you or your girlfriend,

because those ladies don't miss a thing. They see that. You're at the beach, you're sitting there in your beach chair.You might have gotten up early and had a quiet time; you talked to Jesus. You're sitting there and you might be reading something from the Bible. You’re sitting under your beach umbrella and here comes somebody wearing something.

Well, not wearing much of anything, let's just be honest. They come walking along. You look up and you see her. Out of the corner of your eye, first of all, you start feeling a burning sensation on this side of your face. Your wife, she ain't looking over there because she already saw her way down there. She's looking at you to see what you're gonna do.

So, if you're smart, you just go back to your book; you just go right back to your book. That's what he means by looking; it's that long look. Make a covenant with your eyes that you won't take that long look.

That you'll take your eyes away. That you'll take your eyes away from those things that trigger you. You know, in computers, we have something that's important that we call “cyber security.” People are always trying to steal your id.

Wherever there's a weak point of access in your network, in your laptop or in your smartphone, it can compromise the entire system. That's why firewalls exist; they have computer firewalls. What we need is “spiritual firewalls.”

Something that would guard our eyes. An alarm that says, ‘You got to stop looking at that.” For ladies, I wonder if this is true: Ladies, you'll have to think about this;

maybe, it's not the eyes, because I know guys are triggered visually. Sometimes, with ladies, what I hear is that it is the ears. It’s some guy at work. Your husband hasn't been saying nice things to you lately. He's just working, you know, and it's just the drudgery of being married and you are just

“going through the motions.” But, there's a guy at work who's saying nice things in your ears. So, an emotional kind of affair starts like that; it turns into text messages. So, sometimes it's the ears for ladies. Be careful.

Get your “spiritual firewalls” up. What needs to go? A late night habit. Sitting up past looking at stuff when nobody can catch you; an unhealthy friendship. Don't negotiate with sin; eliminate what's poisoning your soul. Ask Jesus to help you pull up the “weeds” out of your heart.

Tear it out and throw it away. Maybe it's time to “unfollow” that person who stirs up your obsessions. Maybe it's time to stop flirting with sin, even if it feels innocent. It's crossing boundaries in your heart. It's time to step back.

Your eyes are the windows to your soul. What you look at eventually influences what you long for. What you look at eventually influences what you long for. This leads to our third one, to our hands. We've talked about heart, we've talked about eyes, now we're talking about hands.

3. We can rely on God for power to discipline our hands.

We can rely on God for power to discipline our hands. We're in verse 30. The third key area is our hands. Jesus moves from heart to eyes to hands, from attitude to allurement to action. Now, it's that which takes action.

Lust unchecked leads to sinful action. Jesus says to be radical. He uses parallel advice here to what he said to the eyes. He says, 30 “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 that your whole body go into hell.”

So now, He's moved to action, it's better to cut it off. It says in the book of Romans 6:12-14 (ESV) 12 “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. 13 Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. 14 For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.” We're under grace, so we're fully forgiven.

Then, we “walk out” that forgiveness by continually walking in grace to empower our hands, our actions, to follow our hearts, which have been renewed in Jesus. Jesus says, ‘Don't play with it.’ If there's an action in your life, if there's something you're pursuing or doing that's continually causing you to fall into temptation, cut it off, throw it out. Don't play with it, get rid of it. Perhaps you remember this story

back in 2003, experienced climber and outdoorsman Aron Ralston, went hiking alone down at the Utah's Bluejohn Canyon. He was an experienced climber. As he climbed over a boulder, the boulder shifted. This boulder probably weighed 1,000 pounds. It shifted and trapped his right arm and it pinned it there.

For five days, he tried to move back and forth on the boulder to get his arm loose, but to no avail. Finally, on the fifth day, having fruitlessly tried to budge his arm loose, he broke the bones in his forearm, took a dull pocket knife and amputated his arm below the elbow. The operation took him over an hour.Then, he rappelled down a 60 foot cliff to get off the cliff face and walked over five miles to get help. Here's what Aaron decided after five days of meditating on it;

it was better to live missing his right arm and live than to keep his right arm and die. He made a decision. It took him a while to think about it and then it took great courage to do it. Are you in a relationship right now and you're saying, ‘But I love him.’ You're not married.

He's not God's man for you; you know it in your heart. The Bible warns against being “unequally yoked,” single person. You're thinking, ‘Well, maybe he'll change.’ No, he won't.

He'll get worse after you get married. He'll be more of the same. Cut it off, throw it away. Break off the relationship. Ask God to give you a godly man.

Ask God the same way, men; the same thing. What are you doing? Come on. Yeah, but they seem like the right one. No, they're not.

No, they're not. He's warning us here about affairs of the heart. He wants us to have Jesus first place in our heart. Jesus exaggerates here for effect. Sin left unchecked will destroy your life.

It will grow until it owns you. But in Christ, freedom is possible. This isn't just a call to purity, it's a call to freedom. It isn't Jesus trying to rob you of joy, it's Him trying to set you free. It isn't about legalism, it's about loyalty to King Jesus.

It isn't just pardon for our sin, but it's power over sin. Look at your heart. Look at your eyes. Consider your hands. Run to Jesus.

He died, not only to forgive your lust, but to give you a new heart and power over it, so that you can live free lives of purity, in Jesus. You can surrender to the One who calls you to this counter cultural lifestyle. Let's pray. Lord, thank You for Your word. Thank You that, as God's people, we submit to the King's word, Lord, even though some of us are here today and we came in far from God today. Many of us have said, ‘I want to call Jesus King.’

Is that you, my friend? I want to come to Jesus. I come in saying, ‘I repent of my sin. I confess that I have sinned and I believe that Jesus died on the cross for me, that He was raised from the grave and that He lives today. I believe that.

Come and live in me, Jesus. By Your spirit, I surrender my life to You and I want You to be the Lord, the Savior, the King of my life.’ If you're praying that prayer of faith, believing, He'll save you. Others are here and you're a Christ follower, but you've stumbled into an affair or an addiction to pornography or some other sexual struggle and you're ashamed. You don't have to wallow in hurt and shame and be enslaved to it right now.

Confess it to Jesus. Say, ‘Forgive me. I know You've already forgiven me. I confess it to You. Clean me up and set me free.

Lord, create in me a clean heart, a pure heart. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.’