Let's pray. Father, we ask that your Holy Spirit would open the eyes of our understanding that we may see and approve things that are excellent. And may that good spirit of Jesus Christ persuade our hearts to receive the truth and to love the truth and to direct our steps to walk in the truth that we may be saved. For Jesus, our Savior's sake, amen. Please be seated and turn in your Bibles with me to Proverbs chapter five, Proverbs chapter five. This message is part of a series on Proverbs when it's my privilege to preach and go on through the first four chapters hitting various highlights and calling this series Portraits in Proverbs. And tonight we're looking at Proverbs 5, which presents a very strong warning to those who would engage in various forms of folly. Proverbs five, verse one. My son, be attentive to my wisdom, incline your ear to my understanding. That you may keep discretion and your lips may guard knowledge. For the lips of a forbidden woman drip honey and her speech is smoother than oil. But in the end, she is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death. Her steps follow the path to Sheol. She does not ponder the path of life. Her ways wander and she does not know it. And now, O sons, listen to me and do not depart from the words of my mouth. Keep your way far from her and do not go near the door of her house. Lest you give your honor to others and your years to the merciless. Lest strangers take their fill of your strength and your labors go to the house of a foreigner. And at the end of your life, you groan when your flesh and body are consumed. And you say how I hated discipline and my heart despised reproof. I did not listen to the voice of my teachers or incline my ear to my instructors. I am at the brink of utter ruin in the assembled congregation. Drink water from your own cistern, flowing water from your own well. Should your springs be scattered abroad, streams of water in the streets, let them be for yourself alone and not for strangers with you. Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely dear, a graceful doe. Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight. Be intoxicated always in her love. Why should you be intoxicated, my son, with a forbidden woman, and embrace the bosom of an adulteress? For a man's ways are before the eyes of the Lord, and he ponders all his paths. The iniquities of the wicked ensnare him, and he is held fast in the cords of his sin. He dies for lack of discipline. And because of his great folly, he is led astray. In 1981, in Winter Park, Florida, the ground in a local neighborhood suddenly opened up. And in a matter of hours, an enormous crater had formed, measuring 350 feet wide and 75 feet deep. So that's over two football fields in length. This giant crater swallowed trees and houses and roads and a car dealership and five Porsches. So this giant sinkhole then attracted global attention, became a tourist attraction with enterprising traders selling food and balloons and commemorative T-shirts to curious onlookers. And once engineers determined that the hole had finished growing, workers then filled it in with dirt and concrete. Now, scientists tell us that sinkholes occur when underground streams or cavities drain away, often in seasons of drought, and that then causes the ground at the surface to lose its underlying support, and suddenly, without warning, everything just collapses in. And a person's spiritual life can resemble a sinkhole. On the outside, they appear to have it all together. It's a long list of personal accomplishments, academic degrees, career advancement, physical strength, financial security, and then, almost overnight, it all just collapses. There's a massive moral meltdown, and maybe they abandon their marriage, or they engage in an adulterous affair, or some secret addiction is uncovered. In an instant, all of their accomplishments are just poured down the drain. So they did an excellent job with their outer public world, they appeared to everyone else, but they neglected their inner private life where we live quorum deo, that is, before the eyes of the Lord, as verse 21 puts it, in His presence, under His authority, under His lordship. They neglected the fear of the Lord. They filled their lives with all kinds of busyness and activity, but neglected the weightier matters of wisdom. And then all of a sudden their private inner world can't hold the weight, and there is a collapse. There was a popular evangelist of the 50s and 60s, Paul Little, who said that when a Christian seems to have a sudden moral rupture, it's because for a while they've had an unobserved slow leak of personal integrity. So that tire that suddenly blows out, may have had a nail in it for some time. And the middle section of our passage here, verses 7 through 14, I think describes for us a kind of moral meltdown, a collapse of personal integrity. It describes the fool who yields to temptation and self-destructs. And just by way of review, the book of Proverbs was written to help us to be wise, to help us to be holy and obedient. Wisdom, we've defined it as the skill in the art of godly living. And it's the ability to apply biblical truth to the nitty-gritty of life, not just what's right and wrong, that's very important, but also what's best, what's good, what's better, what's best. And so, Scripture communicates this through these proverbs. Proverbs are short, concise, memorable statements of general truth. They don't say everything about a particular topic. but it's highly compressed, dense amounts of wisdom in fun-sized bites, if you want to put it that way. So, in Proverbs 5, we hear a father's urgent warning to his son about the dangers of sexual foolishness. And so, we're going to look at three things here tonight. Number one is the deceitfulness of sin. And then there's the disaster of adultery or any kind of sexual sin or folly, and then finally the delight of marital intimacy. So number one, the deceitfulness of sin. I got the title of the message from Augustine's Confessions when he said that when he was just 15 years of age, he was tormented by lunatic lusts, that his heart became a boiling cauldron of desire that pushed him beyond God's loving and lawful limits. The Puritan Thomas Brooks famously said that Satan's first tactic to draw the soul away from God is to present the bait but to hide the hook. So here's the bait, what appears to be sweet and pleasurable and profitable, but then he hides the hook, the shame and the wrath and the loss that will certainly follow. And what the Father is doing here is trying to expose the hook to His Son. Here's what happens if you will follow this path. Apparently his son is now old enough to encounter temptation, sexual temptation. He may be contemplating marriage or he is married already. This is the eighth of ten fatherly talks. We might call them discourses or lectures in chapters one through nine where the father is coaching his son in the wisdom of biblical discipleship, helping him to avoid the path of foolishness. And here the father is using every ounce of rhetorical power at his disposal. Because of the alluring nature of this particular temptation, because of its power, because of its attractiveness, the potential for an adulterous relationship with a woman promises, you'd say over-promises, great pleasure, but it hides the hook of tremendous pain. And that's what he wants his son to see, the pain, the utter agony that follows. committing sexual folly. And so the best defense against committed adultery is a strong offense to revel in the joys of marital intimacy. And you hear the father's appeal here in verse one. He says, my son, be attentive to my wisdom. So take these words, lock them up in your heart, internalize these words, hide them deep within your soul. This is the only time that the Father refers to wisdom as specifically His wisdom, my wisdom. He is a channel of God's wisdom to His Son. Who are the people that God has put in your life that are channels of God's wisdom? People who have experience, people who have biblical knowledge and insight. The father is a channel of God's wisdom to the son. And so he continues, incline your ear to my understanding that you may keep discretion and your lips may guard knowledge. So he's contrasting the lips of knowledge in verse two with the lips of the forbidden woman in verse three. So this is what the son is in danger of. He's in danger of being lured away from wisdom's true words by this woman's enticing words. In other words, this son is no match for this temptress, unless he speaks the truth, unless he soaks himself in the truth. This is what Joseph did with Potiphar's wife. She's this forbidden woman here. This is a sexual predator. And so he must counter her evil, buttery speech with the truth. Look at verse 3, for the lips of a forbidden woman drip honey and her speech is smoother than oil. The forbidden woman is literally the strange woman, the strange woman. Strange just means unauthorized. Do you remember the story of Nadab and Abihu, Aaron's sons? They offered strange fire to the Lord, unauthorized fire and they were put to death. So, strange has the idea of unauthorized. Sexual sin is strange. Now, that's completely counter-cultural, isn't it? You walk outside these doors, you listen to any voice from our culture, it's going to say that we're the strange ones, we're the weird ones, because we're upholding biblical purity and biblical fidelity. But here it's saying that this particular sin is alien to your true nature. This is not the way God made you to be. If you were to jump in your space vessel and travel to the planet Venus, When you disembark from your space vessel and breathe in the toxic atmosphere there, you would die because the poisonous gases on the planet Venus are alien to the nature of your lungs. So when the Lord says here very clearly, to steer clear of the forbidden woman, He's saying the only permissible safe expression of your God-given sexual desires is within the lifelong covenant of marriage between a man and a woman. This is who you are. This is who I've made you to be. Anything else is folly. Anything else is foolishness. Anything else is destructive. Anything else will tear your soul apart. Everything else is strange. So the strange woman here is operating outside the bounds of moral restraint, and she represents for us sin's enticement. Isn't this how sin works? She stands for all manner of sin and uncleanness, and I know some of you might be thinking, You know, I know some men who are a lot worse sexual predators than women. Why is the Bible picking on women here? Well, part of it is that the book of Proverbs is really a training manual for young men, especially those who want to be wise. You wouldn't open a Boy Scout manual expecting to find protocols about selling Girl Scout cookies. You would find a lot of things about being a Boy Scout. And so you open the book of Proverbs. It's originally intended for a school of young men who are being taught, and so there's going to be a lot of a lot of teaching and instruction for young men. So this forbidden woman here, so there's going to be multiple ways that you can apply this. Don't be put off by the manly language of it. The forbidden woman here is a picture of the deceitfulness of sin. You see her lips drip honey, her speech is like oil. She's going to tell you what you want to hear in order to get what she wants. So sin, like honey, is sweet to the mouth but bitter in the stomach. Honey can be sweet and pleasurable and delightful, but you can't survive on honey. Too much honey will make you ill. And so intimacy, sexual intimacy, outside of a lifelong covenant of marriage is like trying to live on honey alone. And verse 4 tells us what the end result is. In the end, she is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. There's always an end. There's always an afterward. Proverbs won't let us forget that there's always an end result of sin, because we're more interested in the bait. We can't see the hook. And so we're drawn in. And yet the end result of sin, it's bitter as wormwood. It's like a drop of poison on the tongue. Leaves a horrible aftertaste in the conscience. This forbidden woman is associated with death. Verse 5 says, her feet go down to death. So, you're very familiar with the way that our culture presents all kinds of uncleanness, moral uncleanness. It presents it to us as something that's electrifying, as something that will bring great pleasure and satisfaction to our lives. And you'd hear the Scripture says, no, you follow that path. That is the path to death. That is the path to self-destruction. take heed. This forbidden woman's ways, they wander, and she doesn't even know it. She has clearly not listened to wisdom. She plunges recklessly into ruin. And so the wise father says to the son, and I think there are lessons here for those of you who have sons. This is a good way to speak to your son, frankly, directly. Soberly, this wise father says to his son, you are walking into a world that is full of sexual folly, and you're going to be tempted. And it will be offered to you as honey, and it will be powerfully attractive, but this honey will poison you. This honey will kill you, so be on your guard. Maintaining moral purity is a matter of life and death. Everything you care about is on the line. That's what this father is saying to the son. So first of all, the deceitfulness of sin. But then secondly, we see the disaster of adultery. And you see the father's plea here intensifies as he catalogs for his son the high cost of impurity, the lunacy that drives lust, the madness behind the moral meltdown. Look again at verse 7. He says, sons, listen to me. Do not depart from the words of my mouth. Keep your way far from her. and all that she represents. Do not even go near the door of her house. So steer clear, stay as far away as you can from any form of sexual folly or deviancy, or you will stumble into this sinkhole of economic and social and psychological ruin. Keep away. If you have to change your job, Take another route to work. Eat at a different restaurant. If there's somebody there who is drawing you into sin, eat at a different restaurant. Cancel that Netflix or Prime subscription. Remove yourself from the company of those friends who associate with immorality. Otherwise, you are at the risk of self-destruction. What steps are you taking to keep yourself pure? In an impure, ungodly world, you know, we tend to overestimate our strength. We tend to overestimate our strength. We tend to think that we are stronger than we really are. I could never do that. I would never fall into that sin. I would never allow myself to go down that path. 1 Corinthians 10, verse 12, therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall. Or the next chapter in Proverbs, Proverbs 6, 27, can a man carry fire next to his chest and his clothes not be burned? We think, can I indulge just a little? I've been working so hard, and I deserve it, and no one will ever know, and God will forgive me. If I just sample a little bit of sin, it's like someone put sugar on the rim of a glass of poison. The great Welsh preacher, Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones, says it like this. He tells us like it is. He says, be very careful how you treat God. You may say to yourself, I can sin against God, and then I can repent, and I can go back, and I can find God whenever I want Him. And Lloyd-Jones says, just try it. Just try it, and you will find sometimes, you will sometimes find that not only can you not find God, but that you do not even want to. You will be aware of a terrible hardness in your heart and you can do nothing about it. And then you suddenly realize that it is God punishing you in order to reveal your sinfulness and your vileness. And there's only one thing to do. You turn back to him and say, God, do not go on dealing with me judicially, though I deserve it. Soften my heart, melt my heart. And you cast yourself utterly upon his mercy and upon his compassion. Father says, keep away. Keep away. Steer clear. Stay away from the door of her house." And he lists for us several disastrous consequences that accompany sexual folly. Is this something you want to dabble in? Is this something you want to just ever so lightly indulge because you think you deserve it, because you think you've earned it? Look at the personal consequences in verse 9. He says, lest, that's a consequence word, lest you give your honor to others in your years to the merciless. You see how if you go down this path of folly, your life will take on a merciless tone. Now this word honor here refers to a person's strength or vitality. You will surrender your hard-won advancements, loose living, dissipates a person's ability to love and help others. Life takes on this merciless tone. So imagine taking your most productive years and your peak energy and fitness and the vigor of your life and your hard-fought, hard-won gains and labors and you just pour them down the drain. Those are the personal consequences. How about the material and monetary consequences? That's in verse 10. Less strangers take their fill of your strength and your labors go to the house of a foreigner. So instead of all of your wealth and energies going to help those that you love and cherish the most, they're going to go to strangers, lawyers, therapists, social workers. In the ancient world, it was the custom to allow the offended husband, who was the the one sinned against, the one offended, to actually take the adulterer and subjugate him to slavery. Now, today, fornication will not result in slavery, most likely, but it will lead to other forms of enslavement, alimony, child support, broken homes, deep pain, jealousy, loneliness, venereal disease, yes, even murder. Back in 2009, the former quarterback for the Tennessee Titans, Steve McNair, was shot to death by the girl with whom he was having an affair. The woman discovered that he had multiple mistresses. She flew into a rage, shot him. Just a couple of weeks ago, there was a tragic story in Queens, New York, where a married woman had been carrying on a torrid affair with a handyman. For two and a half years, finally she'd had enough. She called it off. He showed up at her home, confronted her. It was a violent encounter. He wound up brutally murdering this woman and dumping her body in a park. There are still laws in some states that deal with alienation of affection or criminal conversation. So these are statutes that are allowed that allow a jilted party to sue the illicit lover of one's spouse. The recent North Carolina case, the husband was awarded nearly $9 million against the man who carried on an affair with his wife. The legal argument being he had a happy marriage until someone came along and lured away his wife. So there's a whole spectrum of personal consequences and material and monetary consequences. That's what the father is trying to do here, trying to pull back, pull away the bait and expose the hook. There are physical, emotional, psychological consequences. In verse 11 he says, at the end of your life you groan when your flesh and body are consumed and you say how I hated discipline. Here the physical body, once vibrant and energetic Wasted away, exhausted, tormented by regret and guilt and shame. Lord Byron was, George Gordon, Lord Byron was the bad boy poet of the 19th century. He was the envy of many. And he was in Greece on his 36th birthday, 36 years old, all alone. And here's what he wrote. My days are in the yellow leaf. The flowers and fruits of love are gone. The worm, the canker, and the grief are mine alone. In other words, I'm 36. I have no prospects. I've aged significantly. I've wasted my vitality on riotous living. All I have left is VD and depression. Where are my drinking buddies now when I need them?" And he would die just a few months later after he wrote that. the physical, emotional, psychological consequences, the social consequences. In verse 14, I'm at the brink of utter ruin in the assembled congregation. So, he says, I'm at the brink. That refers to the speed at which his sin has found him out, brought to public shame and ruin before the assembled congregation, that is, the assembled family of believers. And so, the potential for disaster is real. It is a warning, steer clear. There's a graveyard of fools outside the house of a forbidden woman, the forbidden woman's house. Don't overestimate your strength to resist. So number one is the deceitfulness of sin. Number two is the disaster of adultery or any kind of sexual sin or folly. And then finally, there is the delight of marital intimacy, the delight of marital intimacy. And here the father switches strategies. He moves from warning against wicked behavior to encouraging proper behavior. The best defense is a good offense. Delighting in the love of one's wife is a concrete way to avoid the temptations of the flesh. As he says in verse 15, drink water from your own cistern, flowing water from your own well. Should your springs be scattered abroad, streams of water in the streets, let them be for yourself alone and not for strangers with you. You might be thinking, is he saying what I think he's saying? Yes, he's saying what you think he's saying. The language is intentionally erotic. The metaphors are vivid, very, very similar to the Song of Solomon. So instead of satisfying one's thirst with gutter water, which is diseased and infected and putrid. He says, drink water from the private wellspring that God has provided for you. The theologian Frederick Buechner says, sex is like nitroglycerin. It can blow up bridges, it can heal hearts. So here the wife is pictured as the thirst quenching water source. These images of the cistern, the well, the springs, the streams, the fountain, the call is clear. Rejoice in the wife of your youth. The language being unabashed, unembarrassed, unashamed. It's a summons to be intoxicated with her love. And you think about this, this is a father. This is what a father is praying for his son. This is what a father is praying for his son, that his son would participate fully in the joys of marital intimacy. The word that's used here for, to be intoxicated, it's used elsewhere for a man staggering down the street in drunkenness. So the point is to be crazy in love. This is the good and wise will of God. To those who have been given the gift of marriage, God is giving you your own personal garden of Eden with your wife. And so he says, why would you be intoxicated with anything else? In view of the delights of marital intimacy, adultery is absurd. See, the father saves his most powerful argument for last. Yes, that is a compelling argument. But then he says, Let me go one step further. The ultimate motivation for not entering into an illicit relationship, for not clamping down on the bait and being hooked by the sin, the ultimate motivation is in verse 21. A man's ways are before the eyes of the Lord and he ponders all his paths. You see, God is always watching. It's never just me and this other person in this consensual relationship as the world defines it. It's never just me and my computer screen and my phone screen. God is always there and he sees everything and he knows everything. This is another way of saying the fear of the Lord. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. We're told that Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. Psalm 34, 15 says, the eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous. So whose eyes matter the most to you? Who gets the last word in my life? From whom do I take my cues? Really, it's the father calling the son to decision time. It's decision time. Will you choose the way of wisdom and joy and obedience and flourishing? The path that is in most alignment with the way that God has made you to be? Or will you choose the harsh, merciless path of folly? And as verse 22 puts it, will you become ensnared in your iniquities? Or verse 23, will you be held fast in the cords of your sin? So for those of you who are struggling with lunatic lust, And I think the key word is struggling. You're not complacently indifferent, you're not surrendering. Without any knock of conscience, there's a struggle. May I encourage you to flee all forms of sexual foolishness. Sexual sin can be forgiven. forgiven through the blood of Jesus Christ, through repentance and forgiveness. It is not the unpardonable sin. It can be cleansed. As 1 Corinthians 6 verse 11, Paul says, such were some of you, and he's included in that list, the sexually immoral, the idolaters, the adulterers. But he says you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. So the preferred path is to never go down that path to begin with, to heed these warnings, to lock them up in your heart so that you will not sin against God. But realistically, I know that many have gone down that path because of the culture in which we live, the pornified culture in which we live, where you might never darken the door of the forbidden woman, but on the internet, you can waltz right into her chamber, so to speak. Let me leave you with this. In Christ, you can be made clean. Grace covers your sins. I love the way that Martin Luther, we're going to sing his great Reformation hymn in just a minute, but Martin Luther, a very sinful and imperfect man who often was plagued with guilt, but sought relief in Christ through repentance, through forgiveness. Luther said this, he says, don't look upon your sins as insignificant trifles. I think that's what the devil tries to make us do. It's nothing. It's nothing. Everybody's doing it. Don't look at your sin as insignificant trifles, but on the other hand, don't regard those sins as so terrible that we must despair. Learn to believe that Christ was given not for trivial and imaginary transgressions, but for mountainous sins, for sins that are stubbornly ingrained in your heart. And say with confidence that Christ, the Son of God, was given not for the righteous, but for sinners. And if I had no sin, I should not need Christ. Prophet Micah says, rejoice not over me, O my enemy. Doesn't the devil love to do that? He's caught us, we took the bait, we're hooked, and now we're overcome with guilt and regret and shame. And the prophet Micah says, rejoice not over me, O my enemy. When I fall, I shall rise. When I sit in darkness, the Lord will be a light to me." That's how the light gets in, through our brokenness, through our confession, through our repentance. Christ is the mighty friend of the sexual sinner. You know, I think that one reason that lust, these lunatic lusts reign so strongly in our hearts is that Christ has so little appeal. Christ has so little appeal. So what steps have you taken to awaken your affections for Jesus? Do you long for his word? Are you enjoying the superior satisfaction that is found in Christ? The psalmist says in Psalm 90, satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Look at the most magnificent person in the universe. until you see him the way he is, and if you are in Christ, then lunatic lust does not have to have the final word. You can be washed and cleansed and restored and forgiven, so it is decision time. What will you do? Will you follow the path of folly, or will you pursue what is right and holy and clean and good for Jesus' sake as we pray together? Father, we pray that you would Bless this word to our hearts. Help us never to lose sight of the sinfulness of sin, the wonders of grace, and the beauties of the gospel. Help us to pursue purity and joy and grace and holiness in the gospel. We ask it in Jesus' name, amen. Let's sing that wonderful Reformation hymn number 92, Mighty Fortress is Our God. Let's stand as we sing.