Staying Sexually Pure

With the weather getting colder, some of you may be thinking about starting to use your fireplace. There’s nothing better than sitting in your family room on a cold winter’s night in front of a roaring fire. It gives you warmth and light and comfort. The snap and hiss of the flames give an aura of shelter and security. The radiant glow of a fire in a fireplace is truly one of life’s beautiful things.

But imagine if that fire somehow managed to escape from the confines of that fireplace. It would race across the rug, and shoot up the drapes. Soon your sofa and furniture would be in flames, and your house would quickly become an inferno. All that would be left the next day would be the charred remnants of a disaster.

Fire can be a wonderful thing, or it can be a devastating thing. It all depends on where it is kept. If you keep it within its proper limits, fire can heat your house, warm your food, and power your automobile.

But if it escapes those limits, fire ceases to be a blessing and becomes instead a curse. Out of control, it burns and kills and destroys.

The same is true of our sexuality as human beings. Our sex drive is like an inner fire that God has given us. Within the proper limits, sex is a great blessing. Outside those limits, it has the power to destroy us.

We come today to the seventh commandment - the one about sex. It is found in Exodus 20:14. It says, very simply, “You shall not commit adultery.” In other words, don’t take sex outside of the boundaries that God has provided for it, namely, the marriage relationship.

But, unfortunately, we live in a society that has done precisely that. There was a revolution back in the 1960’s - the sexual revolution. It was a time of throwing off the old restraints, abandoning God’s absolutes, seeking sexual fulfilment beyond the bounds of marriage. The sexual revolution ushered in an age of unrestrained sexual expression.

What has been the legacy of the sexual revolution? The divorce rate has skyrocketed. Families are breaking up in increasing numbers. Today, we’re struggling with broken homes and dysfunctional marriages. One out of every four children in America is being raised by a single parent.

Sexually transmitted diseases run rampant - things like herpes, syphilis, chlamydia, pelvic inflammatory disease, genital warts, cervical cancer, the human papilloma virus that kills more women each year than AIDS does, strains of gonorrhea that are resistant to antibiotics. AIDS has become a national nightmare. These are the benefits of sexual freedom.

When a society abandons God’s absolutes, that society courts disaster. The Seventh Commandment teaches us that God designed sex for marriage. If you take sex outside of marriage, you’re going to pay a terrible price.

Many people look at the Seventh Commandment and say that God is against sex. God is a prude, a puritan, and so is everybody who believes the Bible. The world thinks that if you are a Christian, you must believe that sex is dirty, that sex is bad, that sex is sinful.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Who invented sex? God did. When he was finished his work of creation, he looked at all that he had created, including the sexual relationship between Adam and Eve, and he said “It is good.” God was talking about good sex long before Dr. Ruth ever was!

Who inspired the writing of the Song of Solomon? God did. Song of Solomon is a torrid love story between a man and a woman that was so hot the Jewish rabbis wouldn’t let a young man read it until he had become an adult.

Let’s get away from this idea that God is against sex. Anybody who says that has obviously not read the Bible. God invented sex. God gave it to us as one of his greatest gifts. And he gave it to us not just as a necessary biological thing for the purpose of having children. That’s not the primary purpose for sex.

God said in Genesis 2:24 “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.” Sex is the highest possible expression of the one-flesh relationship that exists between a husband and a wife. It’s the deepest possible way of saying “I love you. I am committed to you.” It’s the most profound expression of intimacy in all of human experience.

When the Bible talks of a couple having sexual relations, it does so by saying “and the man knew his wife.” He knew her mentally, spiritually, and physically. They knew each other as whole persons - body, soul, and spirit.

But as wonderful and as exhilarating as sex is, God warns us that if we take sex outside of marriage, outside of the context for which He created it, it turns into a monster. What he created to be good and beautiful and honorable becomes base and evil and destructive to us.

That’s why he says “Don’t do it.” We need to realize that God gave us the Seventh Commandment as a gift, as a favor to us. He didn’t give it to us to spoil our fun. He gave it to us to keep us from destroying ourselves.

What does this all mean on the practical level? How does the Seventh Commandment apply to our lives today?

As we have studied the Ten Commandments, we have seen that they are about inner righteousness as much as they are about outer obedience. God says that he desires truth in our inward parts. He wants righteousness to penetrate right down to the heart level. That’s where it begins. If there’s anything that God hates, it is outward conformity without inner reality.

The Pharisees were proud of the fact that they had their lives together - they had dotted all their “i’s” and crossed all their “t’s” when it came to observing the Law. But Jesus said “You guys are a bunch of hypocrites. You’re like whitewashed sepulchers. On the outside, you look good, but on the inside, you’re rotten, because your hearts aren’t right.”

We need to realize that God wants to do business with us on the level of our attitudes, our motives, our thought life. He wants to do open heart surgery on us. He wants to get down deep inside and root out sin where it begins. So let’s keep that perspective as we look at this seventh commandment.

The greatest commentator on the Ten Commandments was our Lord Jesus Christ. Let’s see what he had to say about this Seventh Commandment.

Matthew 5:27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.

Hearing Jesus say that is like being rolled into the operating room where God wants to do open heart surgery on us. Jesus says that sexual sin starts in your heart. It starts with your thoughts and your attitudes.

Jesus said that if you look at someone to lust after that person, you’re committing mental adultery. If you look at somebody and fantasize what it would be like to have sex with them, that’s lust. When you do that, you are mentally carrying sex outside of the boundaries of marriage. And God calls that sin.

This is a problem that every one of us wrestles with. Many of you, who would never dream of actually cheating on your mate, or having an affair, are struggling with sexual thoughts and fantasies. I am convinced that this area is one of the biggest stumbling blocks to spiritual growth in our lives, yet nobody seems to be talking about it.

Sex is such a personal and private thing. Perhaps you feel that it is inappropriate for me to deal with it in a Sunday morning sermon. But it’s in the Bible. I think we have to deal with it. We have to let the searchlight of God’s Word penetrate our lives in this area if we ever want to know the blessing of God.

We live in a culture that glorifies extra-marital sex. It’s all around us. It’s on TV, in the movies, on billboards, in newspapers and magazines, and in the music we listen to on the radio. It’s everywhere. And the insistent message is that sex outside of marriage is fun. It’s exciting. It’s fun to do, but if you’re too chicken to actually go out and do it, it’s even more fun to think about. In fact, thinking about sex outside of marriage has become the national pastime.

The allure of mental adultery affects men and women differently. You cannot deny that sin promises certain benefits. It looks good; it looks attractive. If it didn’t, then nobody would be tempted to do it. Sin promises to meet our basic inner needs, but to meet them by taking us outside the will of God. Sexual fantasy promises to meet those needs. But those needs are different in men than they are in women.

Sex, for a woman, is an emotional as well as a physical experience. The physical act of sex is only part of a much larger package which we call romance. It is a package which involves communication, intimacy, tenderness, warmth, a sense of being loved and appreciated, a sense of belonging.

Women are relational beings, they need to feel a sense of deep interpersonal connection before they are ready for a physical relationship.

Now suppose you are a woman who is not finding those needs met in her life. Perhaps you are single, or perhaps your husband is simply not meeting those needs. Maybe he doesn’t even understand that you have those needs.

Romantic fantasies can promise you the illusion of intimacy. You may find yourself dreaming about some Prince Charming, who will sweep you off your feet. Perhaps your fantasies will focus upon some man who may not even know that you are thinking about him. He may be an acquaintance - a man you know at church, or at the office. Maybe he is a movie actor, someone you have seen on TV.

Who do you think watch soap operas? Women. The plot of a soap opera moves slowly enough to give the women who watch them a chance to get to know those handsome hunks on the screen.

You begin to think that you really know a certain character. Pretty soon, you begin to visualize yourself in his arms, or perhaps in bed with him. Women have an insatiable appetite for intimacy - and they’ll go for it even if it is only a vicarious intimacy.

If you are a woman, romantic fantasies promise you the illusion of intimacy. But they never deliver. They take you outside of God’s will for your life and they leave you feeling empty and all the more lonely and depressed.

If you are a man, you are wired differently. We men are much more narrow and immediate in our sexual needs. Someone has said that, sexually speaking, women are like crock pots, men are like microwaves. That pretty much captures it.

God has wired men to be sexually turned on by the physical appearance of a woman. A man does not need a romantic candlelight dinner for two, with heart-to heart conversation, to be ready for sex.

Most men can be turned on instantaneously. A man can begin to fantasize sexually about a woman just because she looks good. He doesn’t need to have a relationship with her. He doesn’t need to know her name, or what her personality is like.

He simply responds to her appearance. He feels a rising sexual tension in him. It is actually like a pressure valve that needs to find release. And pursuing sexual fantasies offers him one way to find that release.

This is what leads many men into pornography. If you boil pornography down to its basics, it offers visual stimulation in order to provide sexual release. There are no messy relationships involved, no entanglements with these anonymous women you are committing mental adultery with. It is based on the illusion of satisfaction.

But the problem is that pornographic sex becomes an addiction. Like any addiction, the more pornography a man consumes, the more he needs. And the less he is satisfied by it.

And fantasy sex begins to cut him off from the real world. He begins to find that he cannot enjoy a real sexual relationship with his wife, because he has all these fantasy women dancing around in his head.

So for men, mental adultery offers the illusion of satisfaction. For women, mental adultery offers the illusion of intimacy. But for both men and women, mental adultery leads you into bondage and despair.

The most devastating thing about mentally taking sex outside of marriage is that it brings leanness to your soul. It saps the power of God in your life. It quenches the Spirit. It cuts you off from the flow of God’s blessing. It ruins your effectiveness for God.

It actually makes you numb toward God. The prophet Hosea said that the people in his day who gave themselves to sexual sin had no understanding. They couldn’t hear God’s voice calling to them. A spirit of prostitution led them astray; they were unfaithful to their God. As their sensuality increased, their sensitivity to God decreased.

This is why many Christians aren’t experiencing the fulness of God in their lives today. They are committing sexual sin mentally, and it’s deadening their spirit toward the Lord.

Well, how can you gain victory? I don’t want to preach you down into a hole without giving you a rope.

If God has been speaking to you today about a problem you have in this area of adultery, the first thing he wants you to do is stop. Flee, get away, run! Do what Joseph did.

Remember what Jesus said “Cut it off, gouge it out of your life.” Throw away those magazines. Trash those video tapes. Turn off the soap operas which glorify this garbage.

If you’re ever going to be free of the sin of mental adultery, you’re going to have to want to be free. So many of us give lip service to this, but we don’t really want to be free. We want to keep thinking those thoughts. We want to keep reading those books, and watching those videos. We want to hang on to our fantasies. And that’s why God can’t help us - cause we really don’t want him to.

But if you really want to be free, God can make you free. God will give you his power to overcome sin. That’s the key: it’s God’s power that’s going to overcome it, not yours. We’re not talking about New Year’s resolutions. We’re not talking about determining to be stronger or try harder. You can’t. You’ve already proved that! Only God can overcome sin in our lives.

But we’ve got to take our place on his side of the line of scrimmage. We’ve got to be willing to let him do a work in our lives. We’ve got to co-operate with that work. There are three things that you need to do if you want to be free from sexual sin:

1. Guard your feet. We need to stay away from the things or the people that tempt us. Imagine if you went on a diet and then you sat every evening for two hours in front of an open refrigerator. If you’re on a diet, you’d better stay away from the fridge. Better yet, don’t even go into the kitchen!

Proverbs 5:8 Keep to a path far from her, do not go near the door of her house

2. Guard your eyes. Men, if looking might lead you to lust, then don’t look. Well, you say, what am I going to do? Walk around with blinders on? No. Just do as Job did.

Job 31:1 “I made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully at a girl.”

It’s hard not to see things by accident that will arouse you sexually, but you don’t have to look twice.

3. Guard your thoughts. Martin Luther had a saying “I cannot stop the birds from flying over my head. But I can stop them from making a nest in my hair.” Be careful what you allow into your mind. It’ll affect you. You sleep with dogs long enough, you’ll get fleas.

Your mind is influenced by TV, videos, movies, music, books, magazines, the friends you keep.

1 Corinthians 15:33 Do not be misled: “Bad company corrupts good character.”

Several months ago, I spoke to a group of junior high kids. We had a discussion about TV. I asked the kids if they thought that television influenced the behavior of people. They said “Yes. Definitely.” Later on in the evening, I asked them if they thought that television influenced their behavior. They said “No. Definitely not.”

We may laugh at those kids for being so naive, but most of us are just like them. We somehow think that we will not be affected by the things we allow to enter our minds. We are wrong.

The key to getting victory in this area of sexual purity is “Do you really want to? Are you serious about it? Or do you think that God is just trying to scare you away from having a good time with your secret thoughts and fantasies?” How you answer that question will say a lot about how much you really love God.