Staying Clean in a Dirty World

I want to talk to you today about purity. It’s not a popular subject. In fact, one of the worst names you can call a person today is to call him a Puritan. That’s because we live in a world where purity, especially sexual purity, is about as common as a white rhinoceros. They’re both almost extinct.

Let me give you an example of where we’re at today. Last year, the critics acclaimed a film entitled “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and her Lover” which broke new ground for immorality. The film begins with a scene showing the brutal beating of a naked man while the main character urinates on him. It ends with that same character slicing off a piece of a carefully cooked human corpse in the most vivid and horrifying scene of cannibalism ever portrayed in motion pictures.

In between, we see necrophilia, sex in a toilet, the bloody and sadistic mutilation of a nine year old boy, another victim smeared with feces, a woman whose face is pierced with a fork, and an edifying scene with two naked bodies writhing together in the back of a truck filled with rotting garbage.

Naturally, the critics loved it. Caryn James of the New York Times hailed it as “brilliant”. Siskel and Ebert called the movie “provocative” and gave it a two thumbs up endorsement. Richard Corliss of Time Magazine went even further and described the film as “excellent, exciting, and extraordinary”.

This movie, was released with an X rating. It was not carried by many theaters because of that fact. However, when Hollywood saw that the film was becoming a hit, largely due to the gushing praise of the critics, the motion picture industry decided that it was time to change the ratings system. Now we have a category called NC-17 so that Hollywood can more readily market and distribute such garbage to the general public, without the stigma of the X rating.

We live in a dirty society where moral purity is passé. One of the hottest stars of the moment is Madonna, a young woman who is a good example of what you don’t want your daughter to grow up to become. She makes music videos that not even MTV will show. In a recent interview, Madonna brazenly and in lurid detail revealed her sexual preferences, or lack of same.

Just a few months ago, the rap group 2 Live Crew were acquitted on charges of obscenity. They were on trial because their album, appropriately titled “As Nasty as They Wanna Be”, glorifies things like anal rape and the slashing of female sex organs. But the media and the entertainment industry rallied to their defence, hailing their spontaneity as they pushed us to new frontiers of artistic expression.

One of the expert witnesses who helped to obtain their acquittal was a professor of literature from Duke University named Henry Gates. Under oath, Prof. Gates testified that these poetic young men had created a “refreshing and astonishing” body of work. He compared their achievements to those of Shakespeare, Chaucer, and James Joyce.

As George Orwell once said “There are some ideas so preposterous that only an intellectual could believe them.”

America is sinking into a moral cesspool. Our government has an agency called the National Endowment for the Arts. This agency has used your tax dollars to underwrite and sanction artists who produce the most impure stuff imaginable. Everyone has heard about their sponsorship of Robert Mapplethorpe’s homo-erotic photo exhibit. But did you know that the NEA is awarding your money to artists like Karen Finley, who takes off her clothes on stage and smears chocolate all over herself? Or Annie Sprinkle, who urinates on her audience? Or Holly Hughes, who was recently given a $15,000 grant by the NEA to produce a sexually explicit performance about lesbianism and vampires which will include two 12 year old girls?

We live in a dirty society. Now maybe you’re sitting there thinking “Well that’s pretty extreme stuff, but it’s out on the fringes. It’s not in the mainstream.”

Well, if you want mainstream, let’s talk about Kitty Kelley’s biography of Nancy Reagan. This book is filled, among other things, with gossip and innuendo about the sex-life of the First Lady. In one day, the entire first printing of 600,000 had been sold. Some bookstores in Manhattan were moving 1,000 books an hour. By the end of the week, over a million books had been snatched up by an American public eager for some juicy gossip. Nobody seemed to care whether the book was true or not. We live in a very impure society.

And I haven’t even mentioned television. I challenge you to sit down in front of your TV and watch an evening of prime time television on one of the three major networks. Forget about Cable. Sit and watch from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m., and try to keep track of how many sexual encounters, how many sexually-oriented jokes, how many sexual innuendos, and how many commercials that use sex to sell a product you are exposed to in that three hours. I think you’ll be surprised at the total.

That’s the world we’re living in. We are bombarded on all sides with impure images and impure thoughts. And in the middle of all that, we come to church on Sunday, open our Bibles to the Sermon on the Mount, and hear Jesus telling us that if we’re going to be citizens of the kingdom of heaven, we’ve got to be pure. He’s gotta be kidding! But he’s not. So we’ve got to find out what it means to be pure.

In Jesus’ day, the Pharisees were the people who shaped the values of society. And those values were supposed to be based on the Law of Moses. The Pharisees made it their business to tell the people what the Law said. They built up a code of behavior which they derived from the Law. They had rules for everything. And they said that if you followed their rules, you’d be OK. You’d be righteous in the sight of God.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus challenged their interpretation of the Law. He said “It’s not good enough to follow the teaching of the Pharisees. They claim to lead you to a form of righteousness, but I tell you that unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Pharisees, you’ll never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

You see, the problem with the righteousness of the Pharisees was that it didn’t go deep enough. Their righteousness was concerned with making sure your actions were proper. But their righteousness never even addressed the matter of what was in your heart. And it’s in your heart where sin resides. It’s in your heart where all wickedness and evil and hatred get started.

You can be very upright and proper in your behavior on the outside, but inside - in your heart - you can be seething with anger, and bitterness. On the outside, you can do lots of good works, but on the inside - in your heart - you can have completely wrong motives for doing them.

Suppose you had a car with a broken crankshaft. A car with a broken crankshaft is utterly useless. It’s not going to go anywhere. Imagine if you washed that car every week and polished it. You waxed it every month, and put chrome protector on it, and you put Armor All on the tires and on all the vinyl trim. Then you stand back and say “Look at my beautiful car. Isn’t it gorgeous?”

That would be ridiculous. The thing to do with a car like that isn’t to polish it up on the outside, it’s to fix it on the inside.

That’s the problem that Jesus addresses in the Sermon on the Mount. He says that if you want to be right with God, you’ve got to do something about the sin in your heart. That’s where the real problem is. The Pharisees were just polishing up the outside of their lives. Jesus came to fix the inside.

In Matthew chapter 5, Jesus says a number of times “You have heard that it was said…” and then he goes on to say “but I say unto you…” Whenever he does this, he is contrasting his teaching about God’s righteousness with that of the Pharisees’.

He takes several areas of everyday life, and he shows how God’s righteousness exceeds the Pharisees’. He did it with the subject of anger and relationships in verses 21-26. Now, in verses 27-32, he comes to the subject of sexual purity. Let’s look at those verses again…

Matthew 5:27-32 “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.

“It has been said, ‘Anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce.’ But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress, and anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery.

Jesus gives us three important principles here in the area of sexual purity.

1. Sin dwells in the intentions of our heart, not in our outward actions.

2. To have a pure heart, we’re going to have to deal ruthlessly with sin.

3. Our personal commitment to being faithful to our marriage partner will prevent the spread of sexual impurity in our society.

1. Sin dwells in the intentions of our heart, not in our outward actions.

A long time ago, there lived a man named Anthony. He was an earnest Christian, who desired to follow the Lord. He decided that the best way to do that was to withdraw from society. He was so distressed by the sin that he saw all around him, that he decided to get away from it all by becoming a hermit. So, at the age of 18, he withdrew into the wilderness of Egypt. He only took with him a hair shirt, a sheepskin skirt, and a belt. He only came into town twice a year to get food, which consisted of bread and salt, and a few dates. He drank only water. He slept on the ground. He lived in strict solitude for the next 87 years until he died at the age of 105.

But he continued to struggle with sin, and particularly sexual sin, because when St. Anthony went into the wilderness, where there were no people of either sex, he took his heart with him.

The desire that we have for sex is a desire that has been built into us by God. It is a good and beautiful and profound gift that God has given to us. Now Jesus does not tell us that in order to follow Him, we have to deny our sexuality. But he does warn us that our sexuality can be easily corrupted and spoiled by the enemy. We can be tempted to allow our sexual desire to flow outside the channel that was intended for it. And that process begins in the heart.

A little while ago, I was driving in Manhattan and looking for a place to park. I saw lots of “No Parking” signs. But then I happened to see a very original sign. It said “Don’t even think of parking here.” Well, I got the message!

The Pharisees said “Don’t commit adultery.” Jesus said “Don’t even think about committing adultery.” There’s a big difference! Because when you begin to think about committing adultery, you begin to mull over it and dwell on it. You begin to imagine what it would be like to sleep with a certain person - whether that person is an good-looking actor on a soap opera, or a woman in the pages of Playboy magazine, or someone you know at work or at school or at church. You begin to think about possessing that person sexually. You begin to fantasize about what it would be like.

And as far as God is concerned, when you’ve reached that point, you’ve already committed adultery in your heart. That’s what Jesus means when he uses the expression “to look at a woman lustfully.” I think he addresses it that way toward men because we men are more prone to do that. We become sexually aroused by physical appearance, so we are more susceptible to “looking lustfully”. Jesus says “That’s where sin begins. It begins with the lustful look.”

You have to admit that we live in a society that encourages us to look lustfully. From the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, to the afternoon soaps, to almost every movie out of Hollywood, to the “Hunk of the Month” calendars, to popular advertising that uses sex to sell products, to fashion trends that reveal rather than conceal, everywhere we turn, we are encouraged to look lustfully at the human body for the purpose of exciting our sexual desires. Our culture places a tremendous emphasis on sexiness.

So what are we supposed to do? Go around with our eyes closed? Become like St. Anthony and build a cabin somewhere up in the Adirondacks? No. That wouldn’t solve anything, would it? That wouldn’t give us a pure heart.

2. To have a pure heart, we’re going to have to deal ruthlessly with sin.

When Jesus said this stuff about “if your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out” and “if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off” many people in the early church took him literally. They actually cut off parts of their bodies. An early church father named Origen actually had himself castrated so that he wouldn’t have to fight sexual temptation.

But this isn’t what Jesus is talking about at all. If you cut off parts of your body, it’s still not going to give you a pure heart. He’s speaking figuratively. He’s saying “In this area of sexual purity, you’re going to have to deal very severely with your tendency to sin. Your going to have to cut off your desire to look at someone or touch someone, just as though you were gouging out your eye or cutting off your hand.”

Now that’s an unnatural thing to want to do. It’s just like with our physical body. We don’t go around cutting off parts of our own body! No, we protect our body and we nurture it. And we tend to do that with our sinful desires as well, especially in this area of sex. We tend to shelter our secret thoughts, protect our fantasies, nurture our imagination in this area. That’s our natural tendency.

Jesus says if you want to be pure, you can’t do that. You’ve got to amputate. When, in the course of daily living, you see someone or something that awakens the desire for sexual fantasies, don’t look twice. Don’t dwell on it. Put it out of your mind. Don’t try to see how close you can get without sinning.

And in your deliberate choices of what to watch, and what to read, and what to allow into your home, take care. You may have to cut off your favorite TV show. You may have to gouge out the Cable. You may have to cut off your subscription to that particular magazine. Jesus says you’ll have to be ruthless if you want victory in this area. Better to be ruthless and go to heaven, than to indulge your desires and go to hell.

The story is told of a very wealthy woman who wanted to hire a chauffeur to drive her Rolls Royce. Four applicants showed up for the job. She pointed to a brick wall beside her driveway and she asked each of them “How close do you think you could drive my Rolls Royce alongside that brick wall without scratching it?” The first man said three feet. The second man said one foot. The third man said six inches. The fourth man said “I don’t know how close I could come to that brick wall without scratching your car, ma’am, because I’d be trying to stay as far away from it as I could.” He got the job.

The temptation to impure thoughts and sexual sin is all around us. Let’s try to stay as far away from it as possible.

One of the main reasons that our culture is so obsessed with sex is because over the last fifty years, we have abandoned the third principle that Jesus gives us in this passage.

3. Our personal commitment to being faithful to our marriage partner will prevent the spread of sexual impurity in our society.

Jesus talks about this in verses 31-32

It has been said, ‘Anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce.’ But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress, and anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery.

You may be surprised to know that in Jesus’ day, there was an epidemic of divorce. It stemmed from the fact that one of the Pharisaic schools allowed for very liberal grounds for divorce. The law of Moses provided that a husband could divorce his wife if he discovered some uncleanness about her, meaning, that she had been sexually unfaithful. However, the school of Rabbi Hillel interpreted that word “uncleanness” with the broadest possible meaning. He taught that a man could divorce his wife if he didn’t like her cooking, or if he found another woman who was more attractive. All he had to do in such a case was to draw up a bill of divorce and hand it to his wife before two witnesses, and the deed was done. They didn’t even need lawyers. The marriage was over.

So it’s no wonder, under those conditions, that a lot of divorces were taking place. And it’s the same today. With the liberal divorce laws we have today, there’s no incentive for marriage partners to stick with it, to hang in there and work out their problems. And the more divorce that takes place, the more common and acceptable it becomes, to the point where our culture begins to regard divorce as normal, rather than long-term marital faithfulness.

Again, look at television, which is a barometer of what’s going on in our culture. How many TV shows feature normal two-parent families raising children? Not very many. You’ve got single parent homes, and multi-adult homes, and the weirdest, kookiest living arrangements. Those set-ups are portrayed as normal.

Jesus is saying here “Look. There is only one ground for divorce that God recognizes, and that is marital unfaithfulness. Any divorce outside of that simply creates more marital unfaithfulness.” When you have a lot of divorced people looking to get back into a marriage, and when you have a lot of married people looking to get divorced, you have created in that society a hothouse environment for the spread of sexual sin. The widespread practice of divorce has the effect of raising the sexual temperature of a society to fever levels. And when you have a fever, it’s because you are sick. That’s where our society is today. Our society is sick, because we’re trying to express our sexuality outside of the bounds of marriage.

Sex is a lot like fire. Fire, in its proper place, is a very useful, good thing. There’s nothing better than a good fire in a fireplace. But if that fire gets out of the fireplace into the rest of the house, it becomes very destructive. That is how it is with sex. If it gets outside of marriage, it destroys you.

In order to have an impact on our society, we Christians are going to have to say “No.” to this trend toward marital unfaithfulness. We’re going to have to reject divorce as a solution to marital problems. And we’re going to have to commit ourselves to being faithful in heart, in thought, and in action to our marriage partners. And in order to do that, we’re going to have to recognize that sexual sin and marital unfaithfulness begins in the heart. In order to have a pure heart, we’re going to have to deal with temptation ruthlessly. All the more so given the sex-crazed culture we live in. But with God’s help we can do it.