Wisdom For Lust
Sermon Notes
Intro
Welcome to City Awakening! My name is Zack and I’m one the pastors here. I wanted to go ahead and dismiss our kids at this time. Today’s message content is going to be somewhat mature in nature, so we have classrooms open in the back for kids ages 11 and under. This is the second time we’re dealing with some PG-13 material as we walk through Proverbs and that’s because Solomon, as he shared his wisdom, was very familiar with real-life problems. So, he didn’t skip over the uncomfortable stuff, which is good for us because here we are thousands of years later still dealing with the same issues. Proverbs 7 is written as a narrative, so let’s look at the story together.
A Story of Seduction
6 At the window of my house
I looked through my lattice.
7 I saw among the inexperienced,
I noticed among the youths,
a young man lacking sense.
Some of your translations may say a simple man who had no sense. It’s a phrase used throughout Proverbs and comes from a root word that means “an open door.” In other words, there’s no filter. It’s open for anyone or thing to come in. There’s an inherent warning there to not be like the man lacking sense.
8 Crossing the street near her corner,
he strolled down the road to her house
9 at twilight, in the evening,
in the dark of the night.
He shows his ignorance by walking around in the wrong part of town. He may not be intentionally headed toward the harlot’s house, but he’s spending time in her neighborhood. That’s another warning…don’t walk towards temptation.
10 A woman came to meet him
dressed like a prostitute,
having a hidden agenda.
11 She is loud and defiant;
her feet do not stay at home.
12 Now in the street, now in the squares,
she lurks at every corner.
Notice the deceptive behavior, like a snake slithering in the dark, she sneaks around waiting to lure and entice her prey. She can be anywhere and everywhere. There’s a third warning: always have your guard up.
13 She grabs him and kisses him;
she brazenly says to him,
14 “I’ve made fellowship offerings;
today I’ve fulfilled my vows.
15 So I came out to meet you,
to search for you, and I’ve found you.
Now she’s bold and straightforward. Having made her fellowship offering means that she would have had the left-over meat at home and according to Jewish ceremonial law that had to be eaten by the end of the day. So, she needed someone to help her eat it. She is using an appeal to the ceremonial law as a means to break God’s moral law. She is a hypocrite if there ever was one.
16 I’ve spread coverings on my bed—
richly colored linen from Egypt.
17 I’ve perfumed my bed
with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon.
18 Come, let’s drink deeply of lovemaking until morning.
Let’s feast on each other’s love!
Now she paints a picture of the perfect setting: wealthy, clean, fragrant, and while she says they will feast on love, there is nothing loving about what’s happening here. This is lust only.
19 My husband isn’t home;
he went on a long journey.
20 He took a bag of silver with him
and will come home at the time of the full moon.”
21 She seduces him with her persistent pleading;
she lures with her flattering talk.
22 He follows her impulsively
like an ox going to the slaughter,
like a deer bounding toward a trap
23 until an arrow pierces its liver,
like a bird darting into a snare—
he doesn’t know it will cost him his life.
24 Now, sons, listen to me,
and pay attention to the words from my mouth.
25 Don’t let your heart turn aside to her ways;
don’t stray onto her paths.
26 For she has brought many down to death;
her victims are countless.
27 Her house is the road to Sheol,
descending to the chambers of death.
That’s a story of carelessness, ignorance, temptation, lust, and seduction. And it’s a story that I believe is all too relevant for us today. The lure of lust is all around us. Sex and seduction have been glorified and abused for thousands of years. From societies built on the worship of the gods of fertility to the sexual revolution of the 60s, there has been an underlying wave of sexual immorality. Today, that wave may not be any more intense than ever, but I believe it is more widespread than ever thanks to the advances in technology. We’ve moved from prostitution (like in Solomon’s day), to magazines and movies, to now pornography.
That’s right, I said the P word in church. We don’t like to talk about it. It makes us uncomfortable. But, it is a reality that we need to address with a Biblical approach. As we just read, it is the woman in the street enticing the men (and women) who walk by. While the Bible doesn’t speak directly to pornography, it says plenty of things that can inform our view and give us wisdom for how to deal with the issue, not just of porn but of lust in general. As a note, this message will obviously be pointed more at men, but is just as relevant to women. One study showed that 87% of Christian women say they have watched porn. So, ladies, stayed tuned.
Pornography is hard to define. Even the Supreme Court has had a hard time landing on an agreeable definition. Websters says it is “the depiction of erotic behavior (as in pictures or writing) intended to cause sexual excitement.” I think that last part is important. It’s less about what the material actually is and more about what it is intended to do. In the Bible we see phrases like fornication or sexual immorality. These are the translations of the Greek word porneia, which comes from the word pornaō which means “a selling off.” This is obviously where we get our word for pornography and even prostitute, and it literally means “a selling off of one’s purity.” So, in Bible terms, pornography is anything that leads us to give up our sexual purity. That could include the content found on websites, social media, movies, magazines, pictures, books, tv shows, and, I think, even music…. certainly, we can point to examples of all those things that have images and words that are subtly or brazenly “intended to cause sexual excitement,” and can lead us to give away our purity.
We really don’t have to look very hard at all. That content is everywhere around us, even if we aren’t looking for it! Kent Hughes says we are living in a “porn-atopia.” And the result is that we are increasingly becoming desensitized to sexuality. Like the proverbial frog in the kettle, it’s easy for us to become too accustomed to the rising danger/evil around us and before long the tepid bath water soon becomes a boiling caldron.
So, my goal for today is threefold. 1) I want to help you recapture God’s vision for purity and holiness. 2) I want you (men, women, teens, parents, spouses) to understand what the Bible says about the issue of lust and sexual immorality so that you can be aware of the “woman in the street.” 3) I want to give you hope for freedom and righteousness, especially if you’ve already found yourself in hot water.
Vision for Purity
Let’s start with a vision for purity.
Gen 2:24-25, “This is why a man leaves his father and mother and bonds with his wife, and they become one flesh. 25 Both the man and his wife were naked, yet felt no shame.”
I think it’s important that we start here because it goes back to the beginning of time, but also it shows us that God is not anti-sex. If you missed Pastor Louis’s message on sex a few weeks ago, I would encourage you to go back and listen to that. But we see here that God created man and woman and put them together naked….and it was a good thing. That doesn’t sound very prudish. Sex and nudity are not a problem for God. It only becomes a problem when it’s taken out of its original design and twisted into a commodity.
Unfortunately, in the fight for purity, the Church in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s left out the good part of sex and tried to swing the pendulum too far away from what the Bible teaches. Even though the intentions were good, the result was that it pushed people further away from a Biblical understanding of sex, which in turn brought about a lot of sexual rebellion. We can’t blame the Church for anyone’s sexual sin. It’s not that easy, but I do think many people grew up with a confused understanding of sex, lust, and purity. Maybe that was your experience, maybe it wasn’t, but either way I believe we are at a crossroads as the Church. Right now, our habits and way of living when it comes to sexual purity, don’t look much different than the rest of the world, and if we don’t began to recapture a vision for Biblical purity than we are in danger of being sucked down a black hole of perversion that will destroy the family as we know it, damage the Church, and, like the Israelites at various times in the Old Testament, our sexual sin will pull us and the generations after us further and further away from the God we worship.
For some context here’s a few statistics: 64% of Christian men and 15% of Christian women say they watch porn at least once a month. 1 in 5 youth pastors and 1 in 7 senior pastors use porn on a regular basis and are currently struggling. 90% of teens and 96% of young adults are either encouraging, accepting, or neutral when they talk about porn with their friends. 71% of teens hide online behavior from their parents. And perhaps the most disturbing of all is that the average age a child is first exposed to pornography is age 12!
Maybe you’re shocked by those numbers, or maybe you’re in those numbers. Either way statistics don’t fix the problem. They can raise an awareness for all of us, and they can help you see that if you are struggling with this issue, then you are not alone. But we don’t want to just know about the issue, we want to do something about it. The Apostle Peter wrote in 1 Peter 4:2-3, “to live the remaining time in the flesh no longer for human desires, but for God’s will. For there has already been enough time spent in doing what the Gentiles choose to do: carrying on in unrestrained behavior, evil desires, drunkenness, orgies, carousing, and lawless idolatry.”
We should live differently than the world around us. We don’t want to just claim the Christian title, we need to be actual followers of Jesus. We can’t serve two masters. We can’t follow Jesus and follow the world. John said in 1 John 3:9, “No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God's seed abides in him; and he cannot keep on sinning, because he has been born of God.”
We will not be perfect and stop sinning. We know that. But John’s point is that Jesus followers will not be OK with sinning…. we won’t make a practice of it. We work towards victory from our sin rather than living in the comfort of it. That’s possible because of Christ’s victory over sin and death. It no longer holds the power over us, which we’ll talk more about later. But first we need to understand this sin itself because to have victory over something we have to better understand what we’re fighting against.
Theology of Lust
It’s important for us to examine what the Bible says about sexual sin, so we’re going to build a brief theology of lust.
Even if you don’t really know the Bible that well, you’ve probably heard that one of the Ten Commandments, given in Exodus 20, is “thou shall not commit adultery.” In the simplest terms this means to not have any sexual relation with someone other than your spouse. Now we can take the Bill Clinton approach and plead ignorant to what all that entails, but just in case that would be our approach, Jesus spoke to the issue to give us some clarity.
He said is Matthew 5:27-28, “You have heard that it was said, Do not commit adultery. 28 But I tell you, everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
Sorry Bill, you’re guilty. But so am I and so are most of you in the room I would guess? Jesus didn’t leave a lot of room for argument here. All sex outside of your marriage (on the TV screen, computer screen, radio, pages of a book, or in your imagination) goes against God’s design and breeds a sinful longing. Adultery and covetousness (another one of the Big 10), go hand in hand. Adultery always starts by wanting someone that’s not yours. It’s not a sin to see and to recognize their beauty and worth, but once it goes past that you are coveting, and that coveting can quickly become adultery. Ladies, you know the danger of window shopping. You see a nice dress, and then you want to try it on just to see how it feels. It’s nice and then you must have it. You know you shouldn’t buy it but… you can always take it back, right? Next thing you know you’re adding it to the pile of dresses in your closet. You may think, “I’m not married.” And I would say, “exactly.” Sex outside of marriage (actual or imagined) is sin.
This should bring into question some things you might not label as wrong or certainly not as pornography, but that may need to be re-evaluated…. like TV-MA shows on Netflix or HBOmax, or a steamy novel, or the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated. Every one of those things can and does promotes sex outside of marriage, they breed a sinful longing, and they inevitably lead to sinful action. It doesn’t take much to whet our appetites, and then covetousness tells us we want it, which turns to lust that tells us we won’t be satisfied until we have it. Proverbs 27:20 says, “Sheol and Abaddon are never satisfied, and people’s eyes are never satisfied.”
People are hungry and as you know, and just because you eat doesn’t mean you’re satisfied. We want just one more bite, or we want dessert. That is the great lie of lust - “this bite will be satisfying.” It’s like a mirage in the desert. We’re so parched that we believe there’s something there to quench our thirst. In the moment it seems like an escape from reality, a shot of numbing medicine from the pain of life, a boost of confidence or adrenaline, or that it will just feel good, but like the lady in the street in Proverbs 7, lust is full of seductive lies. And the more we buy into those lies it begins to rewire our brains and our beliefs. Even non-Christian psychology agrees that the chemical release when viewing pornography reroutes the neuropathways in the brain. It quickly creates an addiction and the belief that fulfillment can only be achieved by viewing more pornography. This is such a problem that many people can longer be intimate with their spouse without the presence of pornography. It shows us that lust, as harmless as it may seem, can destroy your life. Studies have shown that in many divorce cases, regularly use of pornography is cited as a contributing problem. There are many instances where a pornography addiction leads to job loss, debt, mental health issues (like depression), and even sexual violence like abuse and rape. In an interview with James Dobson the day before he was executed, Ted Bundy admitted that seeing pornography as an adolescent was one of the biggest contributing factors to his violent behavior.
So, when it comes to “fleeing sexual immorality” as it says in 1 Corinthians 6:18, then it only makes sense to take as many precautions as possible. Jesus taught that “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of the parts of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. 30 And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of the parts of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.” That’s strong language that shows how serious of an issue this is. We’re not literally going to cut off our hand or gouge out our eyes, but we maybe we do need to take drastic steps to stay away from the harlot. I’m not saying this is prescriptive for you, but in our house every device and computer has filtering software on it. (There is some great software available that can help protect you and your family). There are certain social media apps that we do not use because it’s impossible to filter the content well. We try to be very careful about shows and movies that we watch, and we use sites like Plugged-In to get insight on those we aren’t sure about. And for my own accountability and protection I know that Brittany always has full access to my phone and computer. She can check my browsing history, my text messages, whatever… To me that accountability is the most important. I’m no longer foolish enough to think I can survive as completely independent. I love the way Paul Tripp puts it, “independence promises life but always leads to death of some kind in some way.” Without honest accountability our sin will continue to plague us as it hides out in the shadows. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said that “Sin demands to have a man by himself. It withdraws him from the community. The more isolated a person is, the more destructive will be the power of sin over him, and the more deeply he becomes involved in it, the more disastrous is his isolation. Sin wants to remain unknown. It shuns the light. In the darkness of the unexpressed it poisons the whole being of a person. This can happen even in the midst of a pious community. In confession the light of the Gospel breaks into darkness and seclusion of the heart. The sin must be brought into the light. The unexpressed must be openly spoken and acknowledged. All that is secret and hidden is made manifest. It is a hard struggle until the sin is openly admitted.”
One thing I pray that will come from this message is conversation. We need to be ok talking about these struggles. Parents, be proactive in talking with your kids. It’s worth the awkward moments. Men, find another man you can be honest with, but also be honest with your wife. Women, it’s ok to be offended… but then be forgiving and understanding. A condemning partner (male or female) is never helpful. Whoever you choose to be transparent with needs to remember their own sin and bring a humble burden into the conversation. Professional help might even be needed, and that’s OK. Sexual sin is serious, but it’s no more unforgivable than our pride, anger, or gossip. I pray that we can be a church that doesn’t pretend we don’t struggle with sin or hold certain sins as especially taboo, but that as a part of our discipleship culture, we can confess our sins to one another and work towards putting off the old way of life. We are all a work in progress.
This leads to the last piece of theology we need to pull into this conversation for today, and that is the personal responsibility we have in this battle. It’s easy for us to blame outside sources. We do live in a sex-saturated culture, but Jesus said in Matthew 15:19, “For from the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, sexual immoralities, thefts, false testimonies, slander.” While there are very real dangers and temptations all around us, the real problem lies within us. Knowing that is crucial to the fight because otherwise we’re always looking to shift the blame to someone else (that’s been happening since the Garden of Eden). We can put all the precautions and safeguards in place but that doesn’t change our hearts. It means this is not just about not seeing or hearing things we shouldn’t, it’s about rooting out the sin in our hearts. Don’t just put on a band aid when surgery is needed! Often times our sexual sin is only the fruit of a bigger problem deep down. All our sin comes from a distorted belief or unbelief about who God is and the work He has done through Jesus. To find victory, we have to dig down to the root of our sin. It could be that you’re looking to sex to meet a need and fill a void that it will never be able to fill…even within a healthy marriage relationship. That leads us to the last purpose of today’s message - to give you hope for freedom.
Hope for Freedom
Mark Driscoll has short book on this topic and in it he says, “Clearly, while no man of God can become perfect in this life, God does promise that Christian men have the ability to walk away from habitual sins of all kinds, including sexual sins, which are commonly accepted as undefeatable foes. Practically, this means that sexual sin should not be managed, but rather put to death because Jesus died for it.”
So often we want to just manage our sin, but our sin must be put to death. We can’t just try harder when it comes to seeking purity. Stricter rules and more legalism breed more failure, guilt, and condemnation, which creates a never-ending cycle. We can’t just keep it hidden and pretend that it doesn’t affect us. All perpetual sin eats away at us, but there is hope.
Titus 2:11-12 says, “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, 12 instructing us to deny godlessness and worldly lusts and to live in a sensible, righteous, and godly way in the present age,”
Paul is saying that the way to overcome sin is through the grace of God. This grace comes to us in our most dirty, shameful, unholy moments and says, “I see you, but I still love you.” This grace comes to us not to condemn us but to free us from the grip of sin. Because of God’s grace through Jesus Christ, we don’t have to pretend our sin isn’t a problem, we don’t have to justify our sin as if it’s ok or accept our sin as something we just have to live with. When Jesus was nailed to the cross every one of our sins was nailed to the cross with him. That means that when Jesus died, the power of sin died with him. So, we don’t fight for victory, we fight from victory. We don’t rely on our own power and ability; we believe in his power and ability. And every time we mess up and fall back into our sin, we have to preach this same message of hope and salvation to ourselves again.
The enemy loves to whisper lies in our ears that tell us none of this is true, that we’re worthless and a hopeless case. But, as Paul says in Galatians 6, we must arm ourselves with the belt of truth and the helmet of salvation. This is not a battle fought with physical force, but with the shield of faith and the sword of the Spirit. When lust comes knocking at the door, when the lady of the night shows up on the corner, you are not obligated to answer. Here’s a big idea for you today: Lust says you have to have what’s in front of you, but grace says you are free to have something much better. That temporary satisfaction is nothing compared to the eternal peace and joy that Jesus gives us. So, when you are faced with temptation (of any kind) ask yourself if you will submit to that fleshly desire or will you submit to the Spirit. Will you give in for a cheap thrill and let the sin live on or will you take the thought captive and put that sin to death?
Conclusion
The goal for us is not just to put an end to our lust, but it is to turn our hearts from lust for someone or something into worship of Jesus. All sin stems from the worship of false gods. Paul Tripp says that “Sin causes us to assign to ourselves the wisdom, strength, and righteousness we do not have. Sin causes us to dethrone God and enthrone ourselves.” We take Jesus off the throne and put ourselves, someone else, or something else in his place. That’s why Solomon said at the end of Ch. 7 in verse 25, “Don’t let your heart turn aside to her ways.
don’t stray onto her paths.”
Today I want to invite you to turn your heart back to Jesus. You don’t need to just stop looking at pornography or lusting after someone you can’t have. You need to start looking more at Jesus. Only he can fill that longing in your soul, only he can give you everlasting satisfaction, only Jesus is worthy of our worship, and he has made himself available. Lust says you have to have what’s in front of you, but the grace that comes through Jesus says you are free to have something much better…and that is Jesus himself.
My assumption is there are people in the room that need to repent. Do that now, and feel the embrace of the Father, who sees you and loves you. There are difficult conversations that need to be had. Let the grace of Jesus fill your words. Maybe you need to gouge out some eyes or cut off some hands. Do that remembering the sin ultimately lies in your heart. Let us all look to Jesus this morning for our salvation, for our hope, for our satisfaction.
