You are listening to a sermon from River Community Church in Prairieville, Louisiana. Here are the readings of the Lord's Word from Matthew 5, 27-30. You have heard that it was said, You shall not commit adultery. But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go in to hell. This is the word of the Lord. Amen, be seated please. So yeah, today we're going to talk about lust. That is sinful sexual desire. Now, it needs to be said here at the beginning, not all sexual desire is sinful. In fact, if you are married, you ought to have sexual desire for your spouse. That's a good thing. Likewise, if you're single, sexual desire for someone of the opposite sex is God's primary driver for marriage. A young man and a young woman weren't sexually desirable to one another, there wouldn't be very many marriages. And that's by God's design. Unfortunately, as with everything else in this world, sin has taken this very good thing of sexual desire and corrupted it, twisted it, tangled it up, so that for a lot of us, it's very hard to disentangle sinful sexual desire from healthy sexual desire. And the world wants to take all sexual desire, including sinful sexual desire, and say it's healthy, normal, natural, and good. But that's not what the Bible says either. Now, we're not gonna be able to disentangle everything today, but we are gonna be able to look at what Jesus says about lust, and then I'll let the Holy Spirit use that in your heart, and maybe you and the privacy of your own spiritual walk with the Lord can disentangle some of these things for yourself. As we dive in, let me say first, this will be an explicit sermon in the sense of being it direct. I'm not gonna beat around the bushes. We live in a sex craze culture that's lost the plot when it comes to sexuality. And as we dive in, I want you to notice that this paragraph is formally, structurally identical to what we've just seen with murder and anger. Jesus says, first, you have heard that it was said, and then, but I say to you, and then he gives some practical applications because of this. Now with this similarity of structure, Jesus is almost certainly addressing a similar reduction of the seventh commandment to the physical act of adultery itself. Just as the Pharisees had reduced the sin of murder to physically killing somebody, discounting all the other ways that we can murder people with our lips and our hearts, even so they've done the same thing with the Seventh Commandment, with the commandment of adultery. Leon Morris notes that in the Jewish mind, adultery itself was not so much evidence of moral depravity as the violation of a husband's right to have sole sexual possession of his wife and to have the assurance that his children were his own. It was not seen as adultery, for example, for an Israelite to have intercourse with a female slave or with a Gentile woman. Adultery only involved infringing the rights of another Israelite male. We do this sort of thing all the time. In fact, sexual sin may be the sin that we are most driven to hedge around and redefine to get ourselves off. For instance, in the broader world, we see this move. We know that the Bible clearly defines homosexuality and homosexual sexual practices as sin. And yet there are many people who reject this idea in this statement and say that the Bible's prohibitions about homosexuality are really about pederasty. That is grooming young boys and sexually abusing younger people without consent. It's claimed that the Bible says nothing about a loving, committed relationship between two consenting adults, even if it's homosexual. Now to you and me, that should sound ludicrous because it is. But there are many people out there who genuinely believe this. They deny the clear teaching of scripture about homosexuality and lesbianism to excuse their lusts and their preferences. And us straight folks aren't any better on this regard. We do all sorts of mental gymnastics to excuse our sexual lusts and our sexual behaviors. The biggest way that we do this is to reduce sex to vaginal intercourse. I said it would be direct. You know, it's not sex if it's over the clothes, or if it's oral, or if you just rub one another off. As long as the penis doesn't enter vagina, you're good. Or so the logic goes. We know, we know what the scriptures say. We know that God's prohibition against fornication, against sexual immorality, against all these things, that it's comprehensive and that none of us can get off. None of us can get out of the Bible's extreme restrictions on sexual activity and sexual behavior. But we always are tempted to redefine what sex is so that we can have the sexual and romantic interactions with people that we desire without feeling guilty about it. But Jesus confronts all these little gymnastic routines and says, no, I don't think so. That's not the way this is going to work. You may be able to convince yourself or even your significant other that these things are not sin, but you can't convince God. He wrote the book on sex. He wrote the book on healthy sexuality. He wrote the book on what's appropriate and what's forbidden. And so we had better learn from Jesus if we want to orient our sexual compass the right direction. We'll have three points here. First, adultery begins in the heart. Second, pornography is a problem. And third, radical amputation is the solution. First, adultery begins in the heart. Jesus says, you've heard that it was said, you shall not commit adultery. But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. And just as sinful anger leads to murder, even so, without lust, there would be no adultery and no sexual sin. Again, Jesus is not just speaking of technical adultery. He's using adultery as the capstone of all sexual sin. If there was no lust, there would be no adultery, there would be no fornication, there would be no homosexuality, and there would be far less divorce. So if we want to prevent sexual sin, if we want to resist sexual temptation, if we want to secure our homes and a healthy marriage and lower the risk of divorce, then we have to deal with the problem of lust. because it's at the root of all sexual sin. And likewise, as with anger, the problem is not merely that lust leads to sin, lust is sin. If you listen carefully to what Jesus says here, he's telling us that what goes on in your head, what goes on in your imagination, that's sin too. Or I should say, it can be sin too. You don't actually have to act on your desires to sin against God. All you have to do is entertain the idea. All you have to do is engage your imagination towards sinful activities, towards sinful desires. This means that sin is not just the bad things that you do. Sin is not just doing bad things. Sin is wanting the bad things. Sin is even wanting good things, but in a bad way, in an unhealthy way, or an unrestrained way. When we want sinful things, they always seem right and good to us. If they didn't, we wouldn't do them. This is the real biblical definition of sin. Your sinful actions do not happen by accident. You sin when you are lured and enticed by your sinful desires. Sin's not on the surface, it goes deep down. That brings us to the idea of lustful intent. The ESV reads, everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. Jesus is speaking here of a purposeful, intentional gaze. More literally, he says, everyone who looks at a woman in order to desire her, in order to lust after her. in order to fantasize, in order to visualize, in order to become aroused. Now prior to the fall, there was no such thing as lust. If it weren't for Adam's sin, it would have been possible to look at another human being of the opposite sex and admire their beauty, to admire their form, to be amazed by their personality and charm, even to desire a relationship with them without the faintest trace of sin. There would have been a good, righteous, sexual impulse that would drive a man and woman to be married without sin. Again, even today, there is and ought to be a desire of a husband for his wife that is wholly righteous and good. But on this side of the fall, when we desire people we are not married to or engaged to, it's often impossible for us to disentangle sin from proper attraction. Caution is always in order. And this is where I think Jesus's approach and words are particularly helpful. Because he seems to allow for a line to be drawn between what we might call the intrusive lustful thought and the entertained lustful thought. The intrusive lustful thought and the entertained. I think given what we've just said about sin, even the intrusive lustful thought is sinful. Even the unasked for one is sinful as an evidence of our corruption, but that's not what Jesus is talking about here. You can't stop certain thoughts from passing through your head, but you can choose whether or not you entertain them. You can choose not to step on board the train and you could let it go by. Or you can choose to step up, step on board, and let your sexual fantasy carry you away. That's the entertained, lustful thought. Jesus is here speaking, I think, primarily about that. It's the thought that you cherish, the one that you play with, the one that you devote some mental attention and time to. Such lust that you enjoy in the privacy of your own mind and imagination is very sinful. It's not just a passing sinfulness. It's an entertained sin. It's an enjoyed sin. It's adultery or fornication or homosexuality in your heart. Whenever you do this and you allow yourself to engage in these brief moments of fantasy, that's sin. Even though you may not act on it in an external manner, you're still accountable to God for your thoughts and your imaginations. And let it be said, this is not just a men's problem. Women struggle, you deal with lust too. It just is not as visual all the time It's more romantic. It's more relationally oriented than it is physical and visual, the way it is for men. Second point, pornography is a problem. Now, since the world is, again, totally unmoored from any proper definition of any of this, let me take a moment here to define pornography for you. No pictures. Pornography is any material that is intended to feed sexual arousal. Pornography is any material that is intended to feed sexual arousal, especially as it contains nudity or sexual activity. Therefore, what defines pornography is primarily the intent of the creator. However, We must recognize that there are things that are pornographic that are not pornography. This would be any material that includes gratuitous sexual content or sexualized advertising. Even if these things are not created to be used as pornography, they still rely on sexual titillation to solicit viewers, to hold interest, and to create interest, as in the old marketing slogan, sex sells. Not all movies with sex scenes are pornography, but they're often pornographic. Furthermore, Given the cleverness of the human heart, it's entirely possible to use decidedly non-pornographic material in a pornographic manner. Consider here the teenage boy who grabs a hold of the Land's End catalog and takes the lingerie section to his bedroom. It doesn't have to be lurid or explicit to be useful for lust. Now, let's discuss some of the statistics. According to the 2024 Barna report entitled, Beyond the Porn Phenomenon, 61% of Americans use pornography regularly. 61%. That includes 44% of women. Almost half of all American women are using pornography in some form. And 80% of men, four out of five, That's not a have you ever number. That's at least a couple times a year. Among Christians, the numbers aren't much better. A simple majority of Christians, 51%, report using pornography with some regularity, with a third of all Christians looking at pornography at least once a month. Comparing men and women, 75% of Christian men use pornography regularly, three out of four. Compared to 40% of women. Now, that only compares five points better than the general public. Encouragingly, the younger generation has a more negative view of pornography than the older generation, and they are less likely to come across pornography accidentally, even online, thanks to some of the legislative and commercial actions that have been taken. Nevertheless, the average age of first exposure to pornography is 12 years old, with a sizable minority being exposed to pornography as young as 10. And often that 10-year-old exposure, as they hear a word, they decide to use Google to look up the word, and they're exposed. Now, the practical consequences of pornography use are not to be ignored either. By nearly every metric, the mental health of porn users is in a worse place than those who never use pornography. They are less happy and satisfied with life overall, and they are more anxious, lonely, and depressed than their peers. And while many married couples, even among Christians, use pornography to spice up their sex life, many studies show that it leads to lower satisfaction in the relationship in the long run. It hinders open communication and intimacy. It contributes to negative body image, especially women. And it doubles the likelihood for divorce. I'll say that again. Using pornography to spice up your marriage doubles the likelihood of divorce. I don't think that's the type of spicing up you want. Pornography is not going to help your marriage. Men who use pornography without the consent of their wives are in an even worse place. They're frequently doing it in hiding, with a lot of shame and guilt. And when women find that their husbands are using pornography, they suffer from what the experts are calling betrayal trauma. It often bears the same symptoms as post-traumatic stress disorder. Such wives feel betrayed by their husbands for good reason and are often at a loss for what to do. They suffer in silence, they feel unloved and unlovely, under the pressure of unrealistic expectations, especially in bed, and feeling emotionally abandoned by their husbands. Furthermore, It is of the nature of lust and porn use to suffer from the law of diminishing returns. As pornography grabs a hold of the sexual imagination, more and more extreme forms of pornography are needed to achieve the same level of arousal or titillation. The habit gets worse over time. This is very much the same thing that happens with drug use. Over time, you grow acclimated to a certain dosage, and you need a more potent fix to experience the same high. This is because pornography releases the same chemicals into the brain as narcotic drugs, as things like crystal meth. It's dopamine, oxytocin, norepinephrine. The consequence of this is that a pornography habit that is not addressed will become a true addiction, a chemical addiction. And then it will grow more extreme. Softcore pornography is eventually replaced by hardcore porn. Hardcore porn is replaced by abusive porn, S&M material, bestial porn, gay porn. Child porn. There's a railroad track that if the train is not stopped, it will become terrible. Over time, the porn addict will find themselves watching more and more extreme content over time. And that will grip them only deeper into shame. into the chains of addiction, and for a significant portion of the population, it cannot stay a porn habit. Eventually it will be acted out in some way, shape, or form. As James writes, desire when it is conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death. even the transgender phenomenon, has been shown to relate to an unrestrained pornography addiction. However, the real issue here is not what porn will do to you or to your marriage. The real issue is that porn is sin against God. It is an entertainment of the lust The negative effects that come from porn use are a consequence of lust being sinful, of porn use being sinful. And as all things sinful, it's like a time bomb. It's like a hand grenade that the pin has been pulled. Eventually it will explode and it will send shrapnel throughout your life. There's no such thing as a harmless sin. because sin corrupts and corrodes and destroys. It starts by warping your soul and then it warps everything around you. There's no escaping this fact. So what are we to do? That brings us to the third point. Radical amputation is the solution. Jesus says, if your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away, for it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away, for it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell. Now, what exactly is Jesus saying here? Does Jesus mean that you should literally gouge out your eye or cut off your hand? or castrate yourself? Plenty of well-intentioned men, both in the distant past and in the more modern era, have taken this text over literally. I know of at least one church, I think it was a Catholic church, where the priest came to church one day to find a certain severed body part on the church grounds. That's not what Jesus wants. That's definitely not what I want to come to church to find. Jesus is using a concrete example to make a spiritual point. How do we know that? Well, Jesus has just told us that lust is adultery of the heart. It takes place in the heart and in the imagination. So if you gouge out your eye or cut off your hand, what is that going to do to your heart? You could gouge out both of your eyes and you're still gonna have the memory of all the pornography you've ever looked at. You could cut off both of your hands and you're still gonna live with the shame of all the sexual partners you've had in your past. Physical mutilation is not going to fix your heart. The problem is not your eye, but what directs your eye. The problem is not your hand, but what directs your hand. The problem is not your body, but your heart and soul. The problem is that your desires want what God has forbidden. And so in order to address them, Jesus is saying, in order to address your lusts, you have to stop feeding them. You have to stop throwing fuel on the fire of your lust. This is what Jesus is getting at. When Jesus says, you should gouge out your eye if it causes you to sin, he means you should stop looking at things that feed your lust. When He says you should cut off your hand, He means you should stop acting on your sinful desires. You should cut off your access to sin, your opportunities to sin. Jesus means to say that if you want to conquer your lust, you must cut off whatever feeds it. And this cutting off must be radical. It must be amputated, whatever the cost, whatever the pain, whatever the inconvenience that causes. Friends, in our struggle with lust, we often fight in the most ineffective and foolish way possible. We wrestle with the lust itself. If you are losing in your battle to lust, it's bigger than you. It's stronger than you. You can't take it head on. But that's what many of us do. We pray and we weep and we fast and we do this and we do that. We go to counseling in the hope that we can grow strong enough to resist temptation. We wanna resist temptation without making any hard changes. That's why we lose. If you're in a constant battle with sin that's always beating you, it's because you're trying to be strong enough to resist temptation without changing anything. That's a fool's errand. It's ineffective in our battle with sin. It's the wrong track. Listen to what Jesus says again. If your right hand causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. Jesus means get rid of the source of temptation. Get rid of it. Stop being an idiot. Trying to resist temptation to sin in your own strength. Cut yourself off from access. Cut yourself off from the opportunity. This is how you achieve victory. You've got to go into recovery and heal before you can grow strong enough to fight. You are wounded. You are maimed spiritually. And until you heal that injury, you're not going to be strong enough to resist temptation. So just cut it off. As somebody who's battled with this demon of lust, including a season in pornography myself, and with lasting victory, all praise to God, The desire to resist temptation is little more than pride. I'll say it again. The desire to resist temptation is little more than pride. We want victory over sin without having to sacrifice anything. We want to be able to say no to sin in our own strength without needing God's help. We want God to make us strong. I want God to make me strong so I don't have to rely on him. That's pride. I don't wanna have to change anything. I don't want any inconvenience. I don't want any cost to my battle with sin. I wanna be strong in my own strength. And because it's pride, it doesn't work. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. In order to achieve victory over any sin, you first have to admit your inability. In order to achieve victory over any sin, you first have to admit your inability. You have to acknowledge you can't overcome this sin by yourself. You can't overcome this sin by doing the same thing you've been doing. That means you have to change the way that you operate based on your inability. To put a fine tooth on it, if you're currently struggling with pornography and lust or a compromising relationship, and you really want to be done with the sin, then you have to begin with self-denial. You have to begin with amputation, and you've got to accept the painful inconvenience it causes. You may need to install a web filter or an accountability software on your computer, and don't give yourself the administrator password. If you can get around the filter, you can get around the filter. You need to give control of your account to somebody else. Somebody who loves you, who'll support you, and who will hold you accountable. You may need to cut off your internet access at home if you're too computer savvy. You may need to get a dumb phone rather than a smartphone. Look, it'd be very inconvenient to not have internet access at your home. But if your marriage and your heart needs it, that's the right thing to do. It may be very inconvenient. You may not be able to do your job if you drop down to a dumb phone and you don't have text messaging and email and to-do lists on your phone. Okay, what's worth more? That facility and utility of having that smart device or your marriage, your heart, your eternal soul, that's what Jesus is getting at. What's more important to you? You may need to think about your relationships that may facilitate your lust. Maybe you have a group of friends that stirs up your lust. The conversation leads in a lustful and sexual direction. You may need to avoid a certain coworker, maybe just because they're flirtatious and hot. You may need to cut off a certain friend, leave a certain circle. You may need to find new hobbies and favorite places. You may need a new job or a new office, or you may need to find a new way home. What's more important? The pain and inconvenience of making these social changes and changes in your habits or your marriage, your soul, your walk with Christ. That's the choice that's before you. Doing any of these things will be very inconvenient. They might earn you some hostility. They might cost you your job. But what's more important? As we close, this is one of those sermons where no one gets off. We're all guilty somewhere in this regard. Everyone in this room falls short. We're all lustful to some degree once you get to a certain age, and it never really goes away. It just morphs and shifts. But take comfort, friends, because there's grace in the Lord Jesus Christ. Whatever your sexual past, whatever you're dealing with today, there is more grace in the Lord Jesus Christ than there is sin in you. There is more healing power and transforming power in the Holy Spirit than there is stuckness in you. After all, Jesus came for sinners like you and me, for sexually broken people, for lustful people like you and me. There's literally no other kind. If Jesus wanted brothers and sisters, if he wanted friends, if he wanted people to save, he had no other choice but for lustful, sinful people like you and me. And he loves us. He gave himself willingly for us. And he comes to us where we are with the brokenness and the baggage that we bring into the church. And he says, here, let me take that, it's mine. He accepts us, receives us where we are, but he never leaves us where we are. His blood washes all away all of our sin, all of our sexual brokenness, all of our sexual history, all of our sexual abuse that we may have suffered. even abuse we may have perpetrated, all the porn you've ever seen. His blood washes it all away and he clothes us in the righteousness of Christ as with pure white robes. The purity you have in Christ is greater than any impurity that you feel in yourself. What's more, He's given the Holy Spirit to you, who indwells you, and who will enable you to please Him sexually from this day forward. He'll enable you to live a life of chastity. And by the way, I prefer the term chastity to purity. Because chastity is about what I'm doing today and moving forward. Are you a chaste person? Purity is something, especially in the last 20 years and sexual purity conversations is something that like if you lose it, you can't get it back. And there may be some truth to that, but I'm more interested in the chastity you have today than the purity of your past. And so is Jesus. But the Holy Spirit can give you the grace of real repentance. He can equip you to walk in chastity today. He can give you real victory over sin and He can change you. Finally, if any of you are dealing with sexual sin, please come speak to me. Come speak to my wife. Come to speak to any of our elders or any of their wives. We are no strangers to sin and we're no strangers to sexual sin. We may not have sinned exactly like you have. You may not have sinned exactly like we have, but we're no strangers. I guarantee you, you can't shock us. We've lived old enough to see it all and hear it all. We've probably dealt with it in our families to some degree. You're our family in Christ. You can't disappoint us. We're no different from you. So you will find in us, if you come to us to confess these things, you will find sexually broken sinners just like you who have found the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. His grace is sufficient for you. His grace is sufficient for me. Let's pray. Thank you for listening to this sermon from River Community Church in Prairieville, Louisiana, where you will always find biblical preaching, meaningful worship, and the equipping of disciples. For more information on River Community Church and its ministries, please visit rivercommunity.org.