Staying Clean in a Dirty World

On Dec. 7, 1941—53 years ago this Wednesday—hundreds of aircraft from the Japanese Navy launched an attack on Pearl Harbor. That attack was carried out with the element of complete surprise. It marked the beginning of America’s involvement in World War 2, a devastating struggle which would end up costing over 400,000 American lives.

In the spiritual realm, an equally destructive conflict is going on every day in the lives of millions of people around the world. It is a silent war that is waged in the mind and in the heart. It is a guerrilla war, complete with sudden ambushes in the least expected places. And it is a lonely war, because those who are fighting it seldom feel free to talk about it with others, or to enlist help in their struggle.

The church has too often been silent about this war that is going on. Preachers and parishioners prefer sermons about other, more “polite” or safer subjects. But the Head of the church, Jesus Christ, tackled this issue head on. We find his teaching in Matthew chapter 5.

The battle is for personal sexual purity. The war is fought in the heart and in the mind. And the enemy is lust. Let’s read what the Master had to say about it in 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.

In this section of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is drawing a contrast between the righteousness of men and the righteousness of God. The righteousness of men focuses on outward conduct. But God’s righteousness focuses on what’s going on in a person’s heart.

In this area of personal sexual purity, all that the Pharisees required was that you not commit adultery. Don’t cheat on your marriage partner. But Jesus said “You can be completely faithful to your marriage partner in your outward conduct, but still have a heart that is full of lust. And God is concerned with what is going on in your heart.”

God’s righteousness is more than skin-deep. It penetrates to the very core of your being; to your secret thought life, to your heart attitudes.

Let’s take a closer look at what Jesus said. He said “Anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” In other words, as far as God’s righteousness is concerned, that man has broken the seventh commandment, even though he has not committed the act of adultery. He’s lost the battle for personal sexual purity when he allows lust to take hold in his heart.

What does it mean to “look lustfully”? The Greek word for lust means to have a strong desire for something—something that you are not supposed to have; not entitled to have. Lust is when our physical desires drive us to want to have something that we are not supposed to have.

We have all been created with physical appetites - the appetite for food, the appetite for security, the appetite for sex. Those natural, physical appetites in themselves are good. God gave them to us.

But they can drive us to want things and do things that are outside of God’s will for us. And lust describes that process. When you lust after something, it means that you have a strong inner compulsion—a desire, a craving—for something that God does not want you to have.

Now how does this apply to the area of personal sexual purity? Well, God gave us the seventh commandment “Thou shalt not commit adultery”. It is His will that our sexual appetite find its expression and fulfilment with one partner and one partner only—our marriage partner.

If you carry sex outside of the marriage relationship—even if you only do it mentally in your imagination—you are breaking God’s standard. You’re going against His will.

Jesus talked about “looking lustfully”. Jesus is talking here primarily to men. We need to understand that men and women are wired totally differently when it comes to our sexuality.

A woman’s sexual appetite is awakened through relationship. A woman needs to achieve personal and emotional intimacy with a man before she is ready to consider entering into a sexual relationship with him.

But a man’s sexual appetite is different. A man is turned on sexually by the visual stimulus of a woman’s body. There is no need for relationship. There is no need for intimacy. There is no need for emotional connection. A man can become sexually aroused by the mere sight of an attractive woman. Any woman.

Now if that woman doesn’t happen to be his wife, he’s got a decision to make. What is he going to do about this sexual attraction that he’s beginning to feel? How’s he going to deal with it? How’s he going to process it?

Well, he’s got a decision to make. He can give himself permission to follow those sexual thoughts wherever they lead. He can let those thoughts run their course. He can basically surrender to his sexual appetite.

He can start thinking with his glands instead of his brain. He can start fantasizing about that woman; about what it would be like to possess her sexually. And when he does that, he is “looking lustfully” at her.

It is so easy for a man to give in to the temptation to fantasize sexually. To open the door to those lustful thoughts. Because it is all done in secret. Nobody needs to know what you are thinking. And it can be so enjoyable, and gratifying, and exciting.

In fact, our society has made quite an industry out of sexual fantasy. In case you haven’t noticed—and you’d have to be an ostrich not to—our culture is obsessed with sex. All around us is the open invitation to think sexual thoughts, to encourage our sexual fantasies, to enjoy the phenomenon of lust. So it is easy to go that route. But where does it lead?

Well lust leads you through 5 stages:

1. Rationalization.

This is when you start telling yourself rational lies. You say to yourself “Well, I’m not about to go out and actually commit adultery. So surely it won’t matter if I just look? Who’s going to get hurt.” Rationalization leads to…

2. Indulgence.

This is where you give in to those lustful thoughts. You basically wave the surrender flag. You stop fighting the battle for purity. You indulge those fantasies. You begin to cultivate a secret thought life, where God is not welcome. And you tell yourself that it doesn’t really matter because there’s no outward sin going on. Outwardly speaking, you’re still living a pure life.

But the cancer of lust has invaded your heart. And it begins to metastasize. And that leads you to…

3. Obsession

This is where your sexual fantasies begin to dominate your life. You find yourself increasingly living in an unreal world. Lust takes over more and more of your conscious thoughts.

You begin to find it difficult to put those thoughts out of your mind. They invade your relationships and spread into other areas of your life. They sneak up and preoccupy you when you are trying to do other things.

Your marriage becomes dull and stale in comparison with your fantasies. Your relationship with God becomes distant as your heart grows spiritually cold.

Men who become involved with pornography find that it begins to dominate their thought life. And the more they indulge it, the less it seems to satisfy. The more stimulation they seem to need. So they get into more extreme forms of it. This is because they have reached…

4. Desensitization

The trouble with lust is that it keeps demanding more. Your sexual craving becomes insatiable. It’s like a drug addiction; you have to keep upping the dosage in order to maintain the thrill.

Last week, Jeffrey Dahmer was murdered in prison. Dahmer was serving a 957-year sentence because he had killed, dismembered, and had sex with the corpses of 17 people. Now when we hear of such a thing, we recoil with horror. But how do you think Jeffrey Dahmer became such a monster? Lust took him there.

You never heard it reported in the media, but at his 1992 trial, the prosecution established a conclusive link between Dahmer’s violent crimes and his use of pornography. In fact, at the time of his death, Focus on the Family was seeking to set up an interview with Dahmer to document his addiction to pornography.

A few years ago, a man named Ted Bundy was executed in Florida for having raped and murdered several young women. Before he died, he confessed that his obsession with pornography was what got him started down the road to what he ultimately became.

Never underestimate the power of lust. If you give it an inch, it’ll take a mile. And it will lead you to…

5. Total bondage

At this point, lust has you trapped. You want to escape, but you can’t. You’re in a snare. You hate what you have become, but you can’t seem to change because you’ve given in too many times. Your sexual appetite has become a compulsion that drives every facet of your life. It rules you, and you are its slave.

Someone has described lust as the craving for salt by a man who is dying of thirst. In the beginning it looks so attractive, so beguiling, but in the end it kills you.

When an Eskimo wants to kill a wolf, here’s what he does: First he coats his knife blade with animal blood and allows it to freeze. Then, he adds another layer of blood, and another, until the blade is completely concealed by frozen blood.

Next, the hunter plants his knife into the ground with the blade sticking up. That night, a wolf picks up the smell of blood, and follows his nose to the source. He discovers the knife, starts licking it, and tastes the fresh-frozen blood. The wolf begins to lick the knife blade faster and more vigorously. The taste of blood fills all his senses.

So great is his appetite that he does not realize that he has licked the blade right down to its razor sharp edge. He doesn’t notice the pain as it cuts into his own tongue and he doesn’t realize that the blood he is now tasting is his own. His overwhelming appetite for blood drives him on and on until at daybreak, the wolf lies dead in the snow.

That’s what lust does to you. It gives you the illusion of satisfying you, while all the while it is bleeding you to death.

That is why Jesus said that we must perform radical surgery to cut lust out of our lives. Look at verses 29–30

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.

There were some people in the early church who took this saying of Jesus 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. He’s not talking about physical mutilation. If you cut off parts of your body, that’s not going to give you a pure heart. Jesus is speaking figuratively here.

He’s saying “In this matter of sexual purity, you’re going to have to deal ever so severely with your tendency to lust. You are going to have to cut off your desire to look or to touch, just as though you were gouging out your eye or cutting off your hand.”

Now that’s an unnatural thing to do. We don’t go around cutting off parts of our own body! No, we protect it and nurture it.

And we tend to do that with our sinful desires as well, especially in this area of lust. We tend to shelter our secret thoughts, to protect our fantasies, to nurture our imaginations in this area. That’s our natural tendency.

But Jesus said “No, you can’t do that. You’ve got to amputate.”

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 a 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 indulge your desires and go to hell.

The trouble with us is that we don’t take Jesus seriously here. We try to play around the edge of the chasm without actually falling in. We think we can trifle with lust—tease the tiger and not get hurt.

There once was 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.

How can we combat lust in our lives? Here are four biblical suggestions:

1. Run.

When Joseph was presented with an opportunity to commit adultery with Potiphar’s wife, he didn’t stand around and discuss it with her. He ran away. You’ll never win an argument with Satan.

2 Timothy 2:22 Flee the evil desires of youth, and pursue righteousness…

2. Take responsibility

A man walked down a street and fell into a deep hole in the sidewalk. He rubbed his head and said “I never saw that hole.” It took him a long time to climb out.

The next day, he walked down the same street, and fell into the hole again. He rubbed his head and said “Stupid me, I fell into the same hole.” It took him a long time to climb out.

The third day, he walked down the same street, and fell into the hole again. This time, he rubbed his head and said “I’ve got to stop falling into this hole.” He climbed right out.

The fourth day, he walked down the same street, and this time, he slowly and carefully walked around the hole.

The fifth day, he walked down a different street.

So often, when it comes to sexual temptation, we put ourselves in harm’s way. We keep walking down the same street. We’ve got to take responsibility for intentionally avoiding situations which would cause us to fall into the hole.

For example, you are on a business trip. You are alone and far from home and you’re feeling lonely. There’s a TV in your hotel room that is equipped with one or more channels of “adult” entertainment. There’s a placard on top of the TV advertising the ready availability of lust. What do you do?

1. Don’t book yourself into a hotel like that. Find out ahead of time which ones carry that stuff and which ones don’t.

2. Pull the plug on the TV or put a blanket over it as soon as you check into the room and leave it there. Bring along a good book instead.

3. Call your wife. Make yourself accountable to her. Let her know what you’re doing.

4. Make yourself accountable to other men. Give them permission to check up on you and ask you some tough questions about your personal life. James 5:16 says “Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other.”

We have to take responsibility for ourselves in this area of personal sexual purity. We can’t leave ourselves at the mercy of our hormones and our circumstances. And we cannot hide behind a wall of privacy.

3. Determine to honor God by staying sexually pure

We’re hearing a lot these days about the Why Wait? campaign and the teen abstinence campaign. A lot of Christian parents are doing a good job of getting the message across to their kids about the value of remaining a virgin until marriage.

But I wonder how many of those parents are also taking active steps to remain sexually pure themselves, in their inner thought life? You see, sexual purity is not just an issue before marriage, but during marriage as well.

One day an elderly man and his teenage grandson were watching TV together. An ad for condoms and safe sex came on. When the ad was finished, the teenager asked “Hey, Grandpa. What did you wear for safe sex?” And Grandpa said “A wedding ring.”

Sexual purity is not just a matter of practical consequences—of avoiding unwanted pregnancies, or AIDS, or some other sexually transmitted disease. Sexual purity is primarily a matter of pleasing God.

A man who is committed to being true to his wife in his thought life as well as in his outer conduct, is a man who is committed to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

Sexual faithfulness in marriage—both outwardly and inwardly—is not a chore that God has given us to do. It’s not a cross we have to bear. It is a tremendous blessing. His will for us is good. And if we desire to honor him in this area, He’ll give us the strength to do it.

That’s the key: you cannot do it on your own. You need God’s Spirit to enable you to be sexually pure at the heart level.