[Machine transcription]
Jesus says,
You have heard that it was said, You shall not commit adultery. But I say to you, You may be seated.
Dear Saints,
What if, what if you have not heard it said, You shall not commit adultery? I’m afraid that this is probably where we are in our culture. We are living in the throes of a sexual revolution. It started a couple of generations ago, but it is well advanced. And we’ve lived through now the birth control revolution, the divorce revolution, the hookup culture, the homosexual revolution, and we are now in the midst of the gender or the transgender revolution.
And what our world offers, what the culture now offers us is a completely different picture, a completely different vision of human sexuality. Now the picture that the Bible puts before us is very clear. I mean it’s in those words in the command—in the Ten Commandments, the words that Jesus quoted, you shall not commit adultery. And with those words, the Lord protects the great institution of marriage.
In fact, the biblical picture of human sexuality is really quite wonderful and beautiful. It’s simply chastity and marriage. And marriage, by the way, is understood to be the lifelong union of a man and a woman for the purpose chiefly of having and raising children, and also that husband and wife would help and bless and enjoy one another. The Bible then, just to kind of state all this very clearly, expects virginity before marriage and faithfulness in marriage. The Bible expects, till death us do part. That’s all wrapped up in the command, you shall not commit adultery.
But this we can contrast with an entirely different picture, an entirely different vision of human sexuality that is taking shape in our own culture. Now it’s hard to exactly understand what that vision is in the world, but it can be recognized with words like consensuality, freedom, choice, love, and what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, and doesn’t God want me to be happy?
The basic idea of the cultural sexual ethic is this: your sexual desires and impulses are such a critical part of you that you have the right to fulfill those desires as part of your pursuit of your authentic self-expression. Now maybe it’s not explicitly spoken of in those terms; normally we hear something like, you can’t tell me that I can’t do what I want to do.
In other words, I think we’ve got to come to grips with this. There are a lot of people in the world, there are a lot of people in our culture, there are a lot of people that we’re neighbors with who have never heard, you shall not commit adultery. They’ve never heard it. Or if they had heard it, they never have believed it. In fact, they have heard and believed almost the exact opposite.
Our culture is preaching an ethic of sexual freedom and self-expression, not marriage, certainly not chastity. And these two visions for human sexuality are in conflict with one another—a radical conflict with one another—and the conflict is escalating. It has been rapid and extreme, and I think maybe even more than we know, more than I realize.
Here’s how I’ve seen this change. I mean, I’ve been a pastor for fifteen years, and I’ve seen it happen just right in front of me. It used to be when I was a baby pastor that couples would come to me, and they would want pre-marriage counseling. They’d want to get married. Maybe they’re living together, maybe not. Maybe they’re intimate with one another, but they knew that they weren’t supposed to be. They kind of tried to hide the fact that they had the same address. There’s some shame still in it. They at least knew, even though they were breaking God’s law, that the law stood there. They had the biblical picture of what marriage was supposed to be still in their moral imagination, and they were convicted by it.
They knew that they were supposed to be abstinent before marriage, but things changed really quickly. I mean, I can almost put my finger on the date, right around 2009 or 2010, and all of a sudden when the couples showed up, they were living together, and they didn’t know really—they didn’t know that it was wrong. They didn’t know that something bad was happening there. In fact, they thought that that was what was right, that that’s what you’re supposed to do, that that’s the responsible thing; that you should move in together to make sure that things are going to work, to make sure that you’re compatible.
You would never buy a car, one guy told me; you would never buy a car without taking it for a test drive. Oh. But I don’t want to miss this. I don’t want us to miss this. It’s important. The idea—the Christian idea, the biblical idea—that marriage is two virgins getting married is, to our culture, not only a crazy and outdated idea, it is to our culture an immoral idea.
It used to be that the culture and the Christian church shared a roughly similar vision of human sexuality. Now, maybe not quite as similar as we thought, but it was at least in the same ballpark. We had about the same idea of what was right and wrong, but those two visions have been drifting apart, and now they stand at opposite poles from one another, so much so that the culture that we live in considers our vision—the Christian vision of marriage and human sexuality—to be immoral. They consider the teaching of Jesus about adultery to be wrong. The culture considers it a sin to believe what the Bible says about marriage.
Abstinence, for example, is understood to be repressive. The prohibition of divorce is understood to be abusive. The limitation of a marriage to a man and a woman is considered by the culture to be hateful and bigoted and homophobic. The idea that sexuality and children and childbirth are bound up together is understood to be sexist. And all of this put together means that Christians, when it comes to our understanding of human sexuality, are considered haters.
Now this happens so quickly, this switch, that it’s almost disorienting, at least for me. It’s almost dizzying to see it, and we just got to know that this is the change that we have lived through. And I want to ask the question, what do we do about it?
Now, by the way, I’m meditating on the commandment, you shall not commit adultery. We want to, in a minute, get to what Jesus says, “I say to you,” so we’re going to get there, but still we want to think about what it means to live in a culture that just hasn’t even heard the commandment. How do we live in such a place?
I’d like to offer three suggestions. The first is this: we have to know what we believe. We have to not be ashamed of it. We have to have a robust vision of Christian marriage and human sexuality, and we should show forth that vision—that understanding of what God has given—we should show forth in our lives. We should support especially the youth and singles in their noble pursuit of a chaste and decent life. We have to come along to help that. Nothing else in the world does.
We have to support marriages. We have to encourage husbands and wives to love and cherish each other and to stick with it even through the difficult stuff, and we’ve got to be there for them. In fact, probably we have to start telling each other about the troubles we have so we know we’re not going through all of these things by ourselves. We need to support families, especially children in families that are broken and families that are breaking, and provide the support that’s there for them.
We want to remember that the Lord has created us male and female, that He’s given particular gifts to men and other particular gifts to women, and we want to celebrate those differences in the church and in our families. I mean, maybe now more than ever that’s important when those distinctions are being blurred.
We want to demonstrate in every way that we can in our lives the beauty of the commandment, you shall not commit adultery, perhaps by meditating on Ephesians 5. Remember when Paul’s talking about its table of duties stuff, and Paul’s talking about how it is with wives and how it is with husbands, and he can’t help but mix it all up with how it is with Jesus and the church. He says, “Wives, be subject to your husbands as unto the Lord, as the church submits to Christ. Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave Himself for her that He might cleanse her to present to Himself a glorious church without spot or wrinkle through the washing of the water and the Word.”
So that we try to extol the beauty of the biblical picture of human sexuality for all the world to see. That’s the first thing.
The second thing is this: we have to know that there is and that there will be conflict between the church and the culture when it comes to this question, and especially we should be aware that there’s a new legalism that’s building up in the culture to support the new sexual freedoms and to fight against, to ostracize, and to throw out anyone who would stand against them. There will be persecution for the dissenters, for the losers on the sexual revolution, and that will come to the church.
Now we should just know that that’s going to happen. The church will face backlash for teaching clearly about what the Bible says about marriage. It has and it will, and that backlash will grow stronger. Now Jesus tells us that this will happen. He says, “In the world, you will have trouble,” so we’re not surprised by it; we expect it, and we want to pray that the Holy Spirit would give us strength to hold firm to what we believe and to rejoice in persecution.
So we want to know what we believe; that’s the first thing. We want to know that there’s going to be conflict between the culture and the church; we want to be ready for it. And the third thing is this: we have to know that just like in every war, just like in every revolution, there are injuries and there are casualties, and that the world is now full of people who have been wounded and broken and hurt by the sexual revolution.
There are millions of people who sought some sort of meaning in pleasure, who spent their life chasing after what they thought were the joys at the end of the promises of the sexual revolution, and they have come up empty. We know perhaps better than anyone else that while every sin has effects, that sexual sin has perhaps more profound effects than others. St. Paul says it like this: He says that “every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but sexual immorality is committed inside the body,” which means at least—I mean, it probably means a lot more than this—but it means at least that breaking the sixth commandment does more damage than breaking the other commandments to your conscience and even to your body.
So that there are people who have been wounded by immorality, wounded by adultery, wounded by abuse, wounded by promiscuity, wounded by fornication, wounded by pornography, wounded by sexual addictions, wounded by chasing after the broken picture of pleasure that the culture has put before us. Now those people are outside the church, and those people are sitting next to you.
And we should know that there are casualties and more casualties coming, and we as a church should be ready because the only hope for this kind of brokenness is Jesus. I mean, the only way to heal these kind of wounds is the blood of Christ. The only prescription that gives life is the forgiveness of sins.
And so we ought to be ready for our homes and especially for this room right here—to be an emergency room for those who have been wounded by the sexual revolution. And we should be welcoming and kind and as gentle as possible to those who have been hurt and afflicted, and we should speak to them and to one another with the kindness of Jesus.
Remember how Jesus, the woman caught in adultery, and Jesus says, “‘Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.'” This kind of welcome—when Jesus finds Mary Magdalene, the prostitute with seven demons, and He welcomes her and brings her into His friendship and has this great love and affection for her.
We don’t dare go and point fingers at people out there who are trapped and afflicted and who are sinning all sorts of different ways as if somehow we’ve achieved a purity that sets us apart from them. No, no. We have to be ready to welcome and to bless and to serve one another and to bring the healing word of Christ, to speak it to one another and to speak it to our neighbors and to our friends.
And really, in a way, that’s what Jesus is getting after. When Jesus says, “You’ve heard it said before, you shall not commit adultery, but I say to you…” I mean, Jesus is making sure that we just don’t sit here in the church and point to how bad things are out there, like we’re happy that it’s stained glass so we don’t have to look at our neighbors, something like that.
No. I mean, Jesus is saying that, “Hey, you also cannot escape this condemning word of the law.” You, He says this to the Pharisees, you have the sixth commandment. You have, you shall not commit adultery. You have a biblical sexual ethic, but here’s the problem: you think that you are righteous according to it, and this is wrong.
Jesus is blowing up the game that the Pharisees were playing; He’s blowing it up for us too. And here’s how the Pharisee game worked. You know, we think of the Pharisees as those who made the law even more intense, like God gave ten commandments, but the Pharisees made it 623 or whatever, so that’s a lot harder to keep. But in fact, their extra laws were—it was a trick.
Okay, so here’s the example: this is the parable of the adjustable basketball hoop and the slam dunk contest. There was once a boy named Brian, who had two younger and shorter brothers. And his parents got him a basketball hoop that was adjustable. You know, one of those things; you could raise it to the different heights.
And so this particular wicked child, Brian, went outside with the basketball and lowered the basketball so that he could dunk it. And he raised the hoop a little bit more, a little bit more, so that he could dunk it, but just barely. He knew that he could dunk the basketball, but that his younger and shorter brothers could not. And then Brian went in and told his brothers, “It’s time for a slam dunk contest.”
Now this is the Pharisee game. It’s exactly what they’re doing. They were raising the bar of righteousness just so high so that they could keep it and that nobody else could—high enough so that they could declare themselves righteous and they could declare everyone else a sinner. This is the fourth use of the law—the pointing the big finger at your other guy, you know, those guys.
And Jesus comes to them and He says this: “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’s better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell.”
Now look what Jesus does—two things mainly. He shifts the examination of righteousness from the outside to the inside. Do you think you’ve kept the law by what you’ve done and by what you’ve said and how you’ve acted? Jesus says, “Check your heart.”
Check your emotions. Check your thoughts. Check there to see if you’ve truly kept the law. Now this move from the outside to the inside makes a pretty important shift because now I can see my own sin, but the other thing is that I can’t see yours. I can see my own lust. I can see my own anger; I can see my own rebellion; I can see my own blasphemy; I can see my own greed and my own discontent, but I can’t see yours.
And that’s the point, at least the first point. Jesus says, “If you want to be a judge, just go inside and judge yourself. Don’t sit around judging your neighbor; go and judge yourself.” And find first in yourself your own sin. Find, first in yourself, your own breaking of the law, and let me deal with your neighbor.
That’s the first thing. And the second thing that Jesus does is that He takes the standard of God’s law and He raises it so high that no one can meet it. I mean, He doesn’t just raise the hoop up to ten feet and say “Dunk it.” He puts the hoop on the moon, so that when we are dealing with the Ten Commandments—in our own flesh—the commandments do not serve as a checklist of all the things that we have done right, but rather the commandments show us that we’re sinners, that we are guilty, that we stand condemned, that we are liable—to use the language that Jesus did in the text—liable for the hell of fire, that we—and this is the point—that we need a Savior—all of us.
Paul says in Romans 3, “Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and that the whole world may be held accountable to God, for by the works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes the knowledge of sin.”
So we have the Ten Commandments, and with them we ask ourselves, “Have I looked with lust? Have I been angry with my brother? Have I told a lie? Have I been greedy? Have I been discontent? Have I been rebellious against my parents or other authorities? Have I neglected the Lord’s Word and prayer? Have I feared or loved or trusted anything more than God?
Am I an unholy, idolatrous, rebellious, murdering, adulterous, greedy, discontent, blasphemous thief? Am I guilty? Yes. Am I in desperate need of a Savior? Yes. Is there any hope for a sinner like me, for sinners like us? Yes. Because all of our sin—all of it—I mean not only the things that we’ve done and the things that we’ve said, but even the things that we’ve thought and the wrong things that we’ve wanted—all of that is on Jesus— all of it.
Every breaking of every commandment He has taken on Himself, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world— all your guilt is on Him, all your shame is on Him, all of your iniquities are on Him, all of your transgressions are on Him, and that’s why He’s died—to forgive you all of your sins, to heal you with His blood, to rescue you with His resurrection, and He has done it.
Jesus is the faithful husband who has washed His bride with the washing of the water and the Word, so that you are presented to Him as holy, perfect, righteous, without spot or blemish. His blood—dear saints, listen—His blood washes away your sin. God be praised, amen.
Amen. And the peace of God that passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
