This isn’t uh I I didn’t share this during the prayer time, but um uh in keeping with our Ukrainian theme this morning uh through family connection after my mom passed away, my dad uh married a woman uh from of Ukrainian descent and they have helped one of her relatives, a 19-year-old girl named Marta, come over to Edmonton. Um, in a in a random or not so random coincidence, Cat ended up interviewing her for her job at Indigo. And and you hired her, right, Cat? So, she’s going to be starting at uh at Indigo. Her English is very good. Uh, she would love a bike. Like a true European. If anyone has a bike lying around that um they don’t have you or don’t have need of for the next while, she would probably love to have a bike. I don’t know, one of those European ones with a basket on front and I don’t know, but uh yeah, if you have it. So, last week we began looking at these six uh files or topics that Jesus opens up in his sermon on the mount after telling his listeners that to enter the kingdom of heaven, their righteousness was going to have to exceed that of their religious leaders. And Jesus knows that there is a type of religion that looks at God’s law, his commands, and assumes that with a little bit of effort, I can be 100% successful. They’re not that hard. But Jesus knows that that kind of religion is very naive. It quickly disintegrates into hypocrisy. It’s very reductive in terms of understanding God’s law. So Jesus opens these files to confront that kind of religion. Last week we saw the seamless connection that Jesus makes between actual murder killing someone and all the seeds of anger and contempt that are upstream of murder. Being angry contemptuous toward others means all the organic components of murder already inside us. So feeling good about ourselves for obeying the commandment thou shalt not kill just ignores the other stuff that’s going on in our hearts and our heads that dishonor God’s desire for us. particularly in dealing with difficult people where God says he wants us to to initiate radical reconciliation whenever our relationships have gone sour. So Jesus addressed that murder file to everyone. But the next two files concerning sexuality and marriage are really directed specifically to the men in the crowd. Jesus reveals the expectations he has for the men of his kingdom in the way that they should honor and relate to women. Now, we’ll get to more of that in a moment, but uh first let’s listen to what Jesus has to say in this adultery file. He 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. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out, throw it away. It’s better you lose one of your members, your whole body be thrown into hell. If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it’s better you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell. So adultery, lust, hell. This is an evangelical preacher’s dream message. Really, it’s got it all. It’s like hitting the trifecta. So, here we go. I think there’s great depth, great help for us in this little passage. talks to us about our sexuality, our relationships, our marriages. Let’s think for a minute. Why is Jesus addressing this specifically to men? Because I have no doubt that women can lust sexually. The use of pornography by women has been creeping up in recent years, still exponentially dwarfed by the consumption of pornography by men. But even though Jesus addresses this to men, I think there’s a great deal for women in this passage this morning. But it may not be exactly what you think it is. Author Louise Perry in a recent book concerning sexuality doesn’t come at her subject from a Christian perspective from any faith commitment at all. She writes as a self-described feminist millennial liberal. And as a background for her book, she has studied all the peer-reviewed data. She’s worked extensively with women who have suffered violence uh at the hands of men. She’s considered modern sexuality from a lot of different angles. draws the conclusion that the sexual revolution, which we normally think of as having had its genesis in the 1960s, has been utterly disastrous for women. It has tipped the sexual scales dramatically in favor of men. And as as a as a feminist and as a generally liberal person herself, she knows that those she categorizes, for lack of a better term, as liberal feminists will disagree with her. But nonetheless, she offers a cleareyed datadriven evaluation of the sexual revolution where men have been the winners, women have been the losers, everything has tilted toward the pleasure of men. She notes how sex has become disenchanted. It’s now considered a leisure activity that has no special meaning attached. And she says, “Such sexual disenchantment is a natural consequence of the liberal privileging of freedom over all other values. Because if you want to be utterly free, you have to take aim at any kind of so social restrictions that limit you. Particularly the belief that sex has some unique intangible value, some specialness that’s difficult to rationalize. But she says, when we attempt to disenchant sex and so pretend that this particular act is neither uniquely wonderful nor uniquely violating, there’s another kind of cost and that cost falls disproportionately on women. So we she asked her fellow women questions like why do so many women desire a kind of sexual freedom that so ob obviously serves male interests? What if our bodies and our minds aren’t as malleable as we might like to think? What do we lose when we prioritize freedom over everything else? She sees how women are told a story they can now enjoy casual sex just like a man consequence free and learn to like it because the technologies of of um contraception and abortion have set women free. So it tells women not to mix sex up with love, stay fairly disconnected and emotionless from their partners. But she knows that’s not how things work out in the real world. She quotes a woman named Leah Fesler who has written of her time as a student at Mbury College and her participation in the campus hookup culture. And it wasn’t what she really wanted to do at college, but she decided that uh participating in somewhat emotionless sex was the feminist thing to do, ignoring her own unhappiness in the process. Beser and her friends, they admitted to each other when they they were together that what they really wanted was true intimacy. an arm around the waist, a hand held in daylight, but they weren’t receiving that. So, she wrote her senior thesis on the hookup culture at Middbury, and of the women who participated in her research, of all that she interviewed, 100% uh gave a clear preference for a committed relationship. So, Luis Perry’s not not afraid to write about the great differences, both physical and psychological, between men and women, noting fairly obvious things. Men in general prefer to have more sex with a greater number of partners. Men are better suited to have emotionless sex. They find it much easier to regard their partners as disposable, borne out by the fact that those who pay for sex are almost exclusively male. And she notes the existence of a depressing pop culture genre of articles and publications like Women’s Health magazines that offer advice to women on how they can overcome their perfectly normal and healthy preference for intimacy and commitment in relationships. Guides with titles such as here’s what to do if you start catching feelings. How to biohack your brain to have sex without getting emotionally attached. How to have casual sex without getting emotionally attached. Readers are advised, for instance, to avoid making eye contact during sex, so there’s no intimate connection made. Who exactly does advice like that favor? It certainly doesn’t favor the women. She says that the basic principle of consent, which is really the only blunt instrument that liberal feminists have in their arsenal to defend what they call sexual freedom, ignores the fact that something can be technically consensual yet leave women feeling terrible because they’re being asked to treat as meaningful or as meaningless something that they know to be meaningful. So, the sexual narrative being forced on women is that in the name of freedom, they ought to be uh able to have and enjoy casual sex just like the boys do, despite the damage it does to them on the inside. She writes, “The sexual playing field is not even, but it suits the interests of the powerful to pretend that it is. Hookup culture is a terrible deal for women, yet has been presented by liberal feminism as a form of liberation. A truly feminist project would demand that in the straight dating world, it should be men, not women, who adjust their sexual pre appetites. The end of that sentence is important because that’s really where Jesus begins in addressing men concerning their sexuality. Where Louise Perry is imploring women to stop playing a man’s game when it comes to sex, Jesus is telling the men to stop playing their game as well. So just because Jesus is addressing men in this passage, don’t interpret that as just part of a tired old biblical patriarchy, give Jesus a little more credit here and observe how beautiful and honoring it is for women when men follow the self-restrictions that Jesus exhorts them to follow. There’s a good book written by author uh named Glenn Scriber, Christian historian, writes how 19 centuries before the 1960s summer of love, another sexual revolution was taking place in the world, a first century revolution. And really, it’s the mirror image of the 1960s sexual revolution. He says in the 1960s there was a concern for gender equality and so social taboos around female sexuality were relaxed. In the early church, there was a similar concern for gender equality, but the double standard was attacked from the other side. The church imposed restrictions on men, the same restrictions that had always limited women. If the revolution of the 20th century said women can be as free as men, the Jesus revolution had said men must be as restricted as women. And given the complete sexual dominance of men in the ancient world, that coup was as audacious as it was transformative. And that first century sexual revolution just changed the world. Our early Christian brothers and sisters, they had no legislative power and no access to government and no ability to coersse people and no bullhorn or cable news channels to impose their sexual ethics on others. They just lived lives of sexual purity, quiet monogous marriage. And those were ideas that captivated a world where those ideas didn’t exist. that radical new flavor of sexuality that Christians exhibited as salt and light. It just captured the hearts in the imaginations of the ancient world. Christian marriage relationships were so curious. They were monogamous. They were mutual. They were exclusive. Who’d have ever thought that marriage could ever look like that? And as more and more people came to faith in Christ, they also experienced a delightful new stability sexually and relationally. So Jesus calling men away from adultery and lust, calling them to grow up and stop playing their sexual games. That was like the first salvo of a Jesus movement that was going to radically restructure the world. So Jesus begins with the seventh commandment against committing adultery. Commandment that many men I suppose that were listening to him, particularly the religious men were probably in behavioral compliance with. But then just as he did with the connections between murder and anger, Jesus opens up the whole Pandora’s box of male sexual fantasies by stating, “I say that everyone who’s looked at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” And to see what Jesus is saying here, we need to make the distinction between sexual desire and lust. They’re two different things. At least uh they’re intended by God to be two different things in our lives. Sexual desire is part of the natural attraction between men and women that bring us together. It was God who created and gave men and women that gift of sexual desire. Very beginning of the Bible, you have God creating a man and a woman, setting them in the garden where they stand naked before one another and they’re told to be fruitful and multiply. We go on in the Bible, ask yourself, is there any other religion in the world that says sex positive and sex and body positive is Christianity? And if you dare go to the song of book of Song of Solomon, it’s remarkable. You have a man and a woman love one another. They’re looking at the nakedness of their partner with poetic awe and longing. The woman looks longingly at the man’s, let’s say, abdominal region, and the man looks at the woman’s thighs and her breasts, and it’s highly erotic. The Old Testament scholar Ter Longman notes that our English translations are actually pretty shy in stating what is obvious in the original Hebrew. It says, “The two stand before each other aroused, feeling no shame, only joy in each other’s sexuality.” Proverbs 5 exhorts a man to drink water from his own sistern, that his spring should not be scattered abroad or spilled in the street. Instead, his fountain should be blessed. He should rejoice in the wife of his youth. A lovely deer, a graceful doe. Let her breasts fill you with delight. Be intoxicated always in her love. In the New Testament, 1 Corinthians 7, this is a passage that encourages couple married couples to remain sexually intimate. With great cander, the apostle Paul writes, “The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife and likewise the wife to her husband. wife’s body doesn’t belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the husband’s body doesn’t belong to him alone, but also to his wife. Don’t deprive each other except by mutual consent and for a time. Jim Keller notes that this was a major blow to the traditional double standards, namely that men were expected and allowed to have multiple sexual partners, but if a woman did, she was despised. Paul was teaching that each partner, male and female, had the right to mutual sexual relations. Nothing like this had ever been said before. So, we observed from all this just a very rich, nuanced, God-given gift of sexual desire. It’s part of the natural attraction we have for one another, intended to lead people into depth of relationship. Now, obviously, the lust that Jesus is talking about here must be something else because it’s not looking for a deepening relationship. It’s a cheap substitute for legitimate sexual intimacy. Lust really isn’t much more than an appetite looking for a meal. Last week, we thought about how the technology of the internet monetizes and manipulates our anger and contempt. And every time we get a little riled up on the internet, some advertiser makes a little more money off us. Well, the obvious connection between internet technology and lust hardly needs any mention at all because the most popular pornographic website is the 10th most visited website in the world which is pretty astronomical. It consumes more bandwidth than Twitter, Amazon or Facebook. And although an increasing number of women are are participating in pornography, again, it’s primarily a man’s game. surveys that gather information about it uh are very sobering. That 2020 survey of men across a range of Western European countries, the respondents reported watching an average of about 70 minutes of online porn a week with smaller percentages consuming far far more. And the porn that the men are watching is far more aggressive and demeaning and loveless. Many of the women involved are trafficked. They’re participating against their will. And again, on that most popular pornographic website, there’s a group called the Internet Watch Foundation, and they have confirmed 118 cases of children being sexually abused. So, if you’re watching porn, you’re likely watching someone else’s life being destroyed for your entertainment. Luis Perry notes the impact this has on men. Porn trains the mind to regard sex as a spectator sport to be enjoyed alone in front of a screen results in men who are so stupified by what they’re watching that they are sometimes permanently impaired from having real sexual relationships with real people. Each click of the mouse leaves men more exhausted and less capable of having a real relationship. So with all the damage that pornography causes particularly to women, Louise Perry marvels that it’s somehow been able to list enlist feminists as its cheerleaders from her own secular vantage point. She sounds pretty biblical when she says there’s no good reason to use porn. Giving it up costs the consumer nothing. It’s easier by far than giving up factory farmed meat or products made by sweat shop labor. Because though we all need to eat and clothe ourselves, not a single one of us needs to watch porn ever again. The sexual liberation narrative tells you to keep going. I’m telling you that you have an obligation to stop. Her exhortation is very similar to that of 1 Thessalonians chapter 4 where Paul writes, “It’s God’s will that you should be sanctified. You should avoid sexual immorality. Each of you should learn to control his own body in a way that’s holy and honorable and not in the passion of lust. So I don’t think Jesus is just aiming for shock value here when he said that adultery and lust spring from the same source and they’re equally deserving of judgment. I think it’s interesting in in our modern world. I don’t think you would bump into too many people who would um be worried about lust in their lives. That sounds pretty puritanical. and uh pretty antiquated, pretty churchy. You probably don’t know too many people who talk about a concern they have with their lusts. But with all the sexual taboss that have been overthrown uh in the past 60 years or so, that that one taboo of adultery is still pretty tenacious, at least for the time being. It’s considered very below average to cheat on your spouse. Now, that may change someday because 2,000 years ago, Jesus certainly saw the connection between adultery and lust, their fruit from the same tree. Jesus goes on and says, “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It’s better that you lose one of your members, your whole body be thrown into hell. If your right hand caused you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It’s better that you lose one of your members, your whole body go to hell.” And I don’t think he’s just reaching for effect with that statement. Nor do I think that physical amputations would do anything at all in stamping out the lusts and the imaginations in our hearts. Surely though, Jesus is telling us, you have to be deadly serious about this this matter. These are things that are threatening your soul. Not amputating our eyes and our hands, but cutting the Ethernet cable, disabling the Wi-Fi, having some accountability with browsing history. None of those would seem like very exceptional moves. uh concerning what in light of what Jesus is saying here, it’s about self-regulation and self-control. And even ancient Joel in the Bible, listen, the married man, he had lots of kids. He said, “I had to make a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully at a girl.” So if lust is merely an appetite in search of a meal, we just can’t look to the food trucks of internet porn to provide anything of lasting satisfaction. So we’ve said the Bible is very much in favor of sexual desire. God’s the inventor of sexual desire. So it can’t be equated with lust. Bible doesn’t tell us to squelch our passions, to become prudes, and to view sex as dirty and unseemly. Nor does the Bible tell us just to blindly follow our passions and stay with the modern cultural narrative of sexual freedom. So rather than squelch or just follow our passions, we’re told to channel them correctly. And the correct channel is always one of committed, covenantal, monogous marriage. It’s the only safe place where sex can shine. Prudes have a low view of sex. Libertarians also have really a low view of sex. Only those with a high view of sex will respect its power and just the astonishing connective uh ability it has in a marriage relationship. 1 Corinthians 6, we read, “Don’t you know that a person who’s united in intimacy with a prostitute is one body with her? For it is said that two shall become one flesh.” Radically, he’s saying a one night stand with a prostitute has this uh this uniting force equivalent to the two becoming one flesh. Keep away from sexual immorality, for you don’t belong to yourselves. You are bought with a price. Show forth God’s glory then in how you live your bodily life. Paul says sex is like a kind of superlue that assists a married couple as they seek to unite their lives. It’s powerful. If you open the cap and you use it improperly, you’ll glue your fingers together, your eyelids shut. He’s saying that any act of sex which takes place outside of marriage, wrong things get stuck together and getting them unstuck is going to be virtually impossible. It’s like saying to another person, I enjoy sex with you. I enjoy being glued to you in that way. I want your product, but I don’t necessarily want all of you. I’ll glue myself to you sexually, but I’m not willing to glue myself to you emotionally or financially or legally or maritally. I’ll receive your sex, but that doesn’t mean I want your moods and your flaws and your problems and your needs. And I’m certainly not committing to raising children with you. I’ll get naked with you physically, but I’m not going to get naked with you in all those other areas of life. That’s just a a basic exchange of consumer goods. And even if both parties agree with to it, they’re okay with it, they’re still mutually exploiting one another, and they’re still sabotaging their future relationships and marriages. Sex has a power in it that needs to be respected. If it’s channeled into a covenant marriage, can do wonderful things to help bring a couple together. Proverbs 2:17 says that to commit adultery is to forsake the companion of our youth and forget the covenant of our God. Our spouses are our covenant partners. And to help us rekindle and renew our commitments, we have this gift of sex. As Tim Keller puts it, according to the Bible, a covenant is necessary for sex. It creates a place of security for vulnerability and intimacy. But though a marriage covenant is necessary for sex, sex is also necessary for the maintenance of the covenant. It’s your covenant renewal service. He says marital sex is built to last. It should be sustained for the long haul. Late Christian psychiatrist guy named John White in his uh book that was very well known many years ago defiled writes that the bodily exposure that arouses and accompanies the erotic thrill of sex can be both profoundly symbolic and powerfully healing. It’s the healing concrete sign of what’s happening in the whole relationship. The uncovering of our inner selves, our deepest fears and yearnings. As I look tenderly on the body of another, as I experience what it is to feel the tenderness of another’s caress, then the one who accepts and touches my most intimate body and caresses it with tenderness caresses also my inmost being. Or so it seems when all is right. So it only makes sense that sexual relations be confined to marriage. For the mutual disclosure and tender acceptance is not the activity of a moment. It’s the delicate fabric of a lifetime’s weaving. What John White’s really saying there is that someday you’re old and you’re wrinkled and now you’re down to being 12 to 15% as attractive as you once were or as as you thought you were and someone will still touch you and will mean it. That’s a pretty priceless gift. So Jesus says to men, not only refrain from adultery, he says, “Every time you look at a woman with lustful intent, you’ve in effect, you’ve already committed adultery with with her in your heart.” Jesus tells men, “Stop playing your sexual games. Grow up. Respect the power of sex. Honor women in the way that you maintain and channel your sexuality. And women, don’t put up with men who won’t adhere to that. Don’t buy the line that that your freedom means putting up with meaningless sex. maintain your sexual boundaries that align with who you are and how God has made you. And don’t look for men who won’t maintain their sexual boundaries as well in order to honor you. So, we we could leave things there. We’d stop there this morning with that challenge to be sexually righteous. But I think it’d be very wrong for us to leave out the gospel here because the demands of Jesus concerning righteousness in our lives, it is unfailingly high. He gives us the gift of the Holy Spirit so that we can grow in practical day-to-day righteousness. But the gospel is given to people like us who have failed, who see the good in the standards of Jesus, but we haven’t achieved those standards. Jesus calls men to sexual purity. I don’t talk to many women about these things, but every guy I’ve ever talked to has failed in this area. And what if that ship has has already sailed for you long time ago when it comes to obeying these words? Through pornography or lusting or premarital sex or extrammarital sex or mutual exploitation, treating sex as a commodity, your ship has run ground. Maybe it’s run ground repeatedly. What do you do then? Is there any way to get back into the story that God has for you sexually? We’ve all fallen short of the standards of Jesus here. But Jesus doesn’t just leave us with impossible standards and tell us that we’d better pull up our moral socks. Instead, what Jesus does is he gives us his standard. He offers us the solution on the cross. And when we fail fail sexually, we need need to use the gospel of grace on our consciences. Again, Tim Keller says that gospel will neither take the sin lightly nor lead you to flagagillate yourself and wallow in guilt indefinitely. It’s important to get the gospel’s pardon and cleansing for wrongdoing. Often, it’s unresolved shame for past offenses that stir up present obsessive fantasies. George Fer was the founder and the international director of the Christian organization Operation Mobilization. He was really burdened by the scores of young people he saw who at one point dreamed of a radical life serving Christ, but then were derailed by sexual sin. Every radical dream they ever had was laid aside. They found themselves feeling like they were on the shelf in the Christian life, never to be used by God again. Satan would love to exploit that in all of our lives, try to crush us in despair. Colossians 2 tells us that Satan though has been disarmed of that weapon if we pay attention to the gospel. And you who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses by cancelelling the record of debt that stood against us with legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross, he disarmed the rulers and authorities, and put them to open shame by triumphing over them in him. So no matter what you’ve done, because of Jesus, you can be forgiven when you put your faith and hope in him. He took all the sexual sin any of us have ever committed to the cross with him. Forsaken by his heavenly father, died and was buried, rose again so that he could give us a fresh, forgiven, new beginning if we put our trust in him. So now if Satan is still trying to use that foul weapon of sexual failure and guilt against you, live in the words of the cross and let your comeback to your accuser be the words of Micah 7:es 8 and N where it says, “Do not gloat over me, my enemy. Though I have fallen, I will rise. Though I sit in darkness, the Lord will be my light. Because I’ve sinned against him, I will bear the Lord’s wrath until he pleads my case and establishes my right. He will bring me out into the light. I will see his righteousness. Jesus has pleaded your case. He has brought you into the light. Don’t allow past sexual sin to destroy you. lean again a new into the high purposes, the high respect for sexual desire and sexual relationship and commit to using it for God’s purposes and for his glory. Let’s pray together. Father, thank you for the great gift that you have given us in drawing men and women together, giving us sexual desires, giving us an appropriate way to express those sexual desires in marriage. Thank you just for uh the way uh we have taken that gift and we have perverted it and we have uh abused it in so many ways and pray that you would call us back to the original vision and your original plan and purposes for our lives sexually. And for any here that just feel in despair because of having fallen so many times. I pray that you’d give that hope of a new beginning. they would not let their enemy gloat over them, but they would know that Jesus has pleaded their case and they can have a new beginning today. We thank you in Jesus name. Yes.