A. Why can’t we talk about it?

Lust is

1) a secret sin

2) a shameful sin

3) a highly-addictive sin

4) a debilitating sin

5) an enslaving sin

6) an isolating sin

All of which is a recipe for denial and deceit.

B. Why might we not be in the fight?

1) We like our sin too much

2) We’ve tried everything and failed

3) We don’t know how to apply the gospel to sexual sin in a way that helps us fight sin

4) We dare not ask for help or speak to others about our sin

C. Is change possible?

Yes,by God’s grace. Change happens when you

1) Face your behaviour honestly

2) Understand the roots of your behaviour

3) Go to God to work true (gospel) change in your behaviour

4) Include others as God’s change-agents in your behaviour

 1) Face up to your behaviour

Flee sexual immorality – 1 Corinthians 6:18

a) What is it doing to God?

• Dishonouring God – 1 Cor. 6:18-20
• Denying Christ – 1 Cor.6:18-20
• Grieving the Spirit – Ephesians 4:30

 b) What is it doing to me?

Short-term

• Robbing you of your joy
• Rendering you ineffective in ministry
• Weighing you down with a guilty conscience
• Creating barriers between you and your wife, girlfriend
• 
  

Long-term

• Our salvation is at stake
• Hebrews 12:14 - Without holiness no one will see the Lord

• Matthew 5:27-30 - “You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’²⁸ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. ²⁹ 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. ³⁰ 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.

• Ephesians 5:3-5 - But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people. Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking, which are out of place, but rather thanksgiving. For of this you can be sure: No immoral, impure or greedy person—such a man is an idolater—has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.
• 
  

c) What is it doing to my spouse (future spouse)?

Porn (or lust more generally) hijacks your brain. One secular author has said:

Countless men have described to me how while using porn, they have lost the ability to relate or be close to women. They have trouble being turned on by “real” women, and their sex lives with their girlfriends or wives collapse.

2) Understand your behaviour

The problem is in your heart and not in your Internet provider – Mark Driscoll

a) Understand and avoid the circumstances in which you are tempted.

David Pawlinson advises asking ourselves to work out the triggers for temptation;

• When does it happen? What is going on? What happened that day?
• What were you thinking about? What was the nature of the temptation?
• What did you do about it? Did you act on it?
• If you didn’t act on it, how did that happen?
• If you did what did you do after you fell?
• How did you recover? What was the after-effect?

Keeping this journal will help you see what is really going on in your struggle with pornography. As you start to grapple with your deeper sin patterns, you’ll see that your problem is much bigger, your need for grace is much deeper, and your goal is much more magnificent than you ever imagined.

b) Understand the underlying causes of sexual temptation

Is it hardship, boredom, hurt, anger, betrayal, loneliness?

Sexual temptation is rarely simply about sex. Sexual temptation is usually much more about idolatry. When we stumble into sexual sin what we are seeking is a form of salvation. In secular language we might say ‘escapism’ but what we are really doing is asking our fantasies to rescue us from a world of insignificance, rejection, loneliness, boredom, etc.

Tim Chester writes:

Our longing for porn is a version of our longing for God.

The following six-points are adapted from Tim Chester’s book and highlight how in six different ways we look to pornography to save us from ourselves. He then goes on to show how the gospel is the real answer to our temptations.

i. Porn says ‘in my world you’re significant’

The fantasy-world of pornography is attractive to people because at least in that world they are not only noticed but they rule! Porn provides a fantasy world in which you’re potent, adored, the centre of attention. Women ‘offer’ themselves to you. That is a very attractive thought to self-centred fallen humanity.

Is that really good news?

Any gospel that put’s you at the centre and through which everyone else exists only to serve you is not good news at all. It’s not only fake reality but a very damaging one! The gospel is the daily lesson of learning not to see yourself as the only one that matters.

God’s gospel also says ‘in my world you’re significant’ but in a true way.

We’re significant because we matter to God. He loves and adores us but not because we are lovely but simply because he has chosen to love us. So we receive God’s love in an undeserved way because of Jesus. The result – God is in his proper place and I am in mine.

ii. Porn says ‘in my world you’ll never be lonely’

Porn promises the relationship we seek and the intimacy we crave. In the world of porn I don’t face rejection and I never need feel  lonely.

As Tim Chester comments; Porn offers a safe alternative to intimacy

‘It seemed like a safe way to be sexually active without getting involved in a real relationship.’

‘Fearing rejection, we retreat into the fantasy world of porn in which women adore us and offer themselves to us without risk.’

God’s gospel is one in which he says ‘in my world you’ll never be lonely’.

Rather than retreating in false intimacy because we cannot risk rejection. The gospel offers us the unconditional acceptance that I crave and need. In a relationship with God that will go on for ever.

I may or may not enjoy the intimacy of marriage and of a sexual union in this life but the gospel promise is that human intimacy even between a husband and a wife is just pointing us ahead to the perfection of an intimacy with God that will continue for ever.

iii. Porn says ‘I can make your problems disappear’

Porn for so many is a form of escapism. People leaving their problems far behind as they seek an adrenaline fuelled high. Porn offers to takes you to another place on a legal high.

So when circumstances are too daunting. When you’re facing exams, deadlines, difficulties at home or work the quick fix of porn is the gospel for many.

Is that really good news?

Like any other form of abuse porn creates its own vicious circle. It gives you a brief high but then comes the big low of shame and guilt. And so you repeat it all over again.

God says ‘Do not escape your troubles – know God in your troubles’

Escapism is a failure to come to terms with reality and an unwillingness to face up to life in a fallen world. For the Christian valuable lessons are learnt in the troubles. Lessons that often can’t be learned any other way.

Paul pleaded with the Lord to take away his troubles ‘the thorn in his flesh’ but Jesus said ‘my grace is sufficient’. That is the good news of the gospel.

Paul writes: Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.(Philippians 4:5-6)

iv. Porn says ‘I am your reward for a good life lived’

For some porn is a form of escapism from the pressures of life but at other times it can function as a reward for endurance.  Maybe the temptation comes from the thought that my hard-work goes unrecognised at home or work or in an even more subtle and perverse way my sacrifice for the gospel goes un-thanked then porn says I can compensate you for your labours or I can reward you for…

We might say ‘I’m giving up stuff for Christ, even the chance to be sexually active as an unmarried Christian man and porn is my compensation.’

God gospel promises a reward for obedience that is a good ultimate and lasting joy

Porn may tempt with a quick fix but it is Christ who promises a true reward when we work hard for him. Yes, we may have to wait for our final reward and it is primarily a future one but the promise of blessing now for those who serve him well is given by Jesus too.

Jesus says:  I tell you the truth, Jesus said to them, no-one who has left home or wife or brothers or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God will fail to receive many times as much in this age and, in the age to come, eternal life. (Luke 18:29-30)

Chester comments: The life of obedience is not the bad life or the sad life. It’s the good life. Life with God and for God is the best life you could live. Change is about enjoying the freedom from sin and delight in God that God gives to us through Jesus.

v. Porn says ‘I am the god that always gives you what you want in exactly the way you want it’

The gospel of porn is a call to switch allegiance to a god who is altogether more willing to give us what we want. Why serve a God who does not satisfy your every demand when porn will?

When we turn to the idol of porn Chester notes it ‘can be an expression of anger, revenge, resentment or ingratitude…Porn may even be an act of anger against God, when life hasn’t turned out the way we want.’ It can mean turning to a god who is no god at all out of frustration with our Christian life.

Why go God’s way in life if that involves difficulty and delay? When Satan offers Jesus the kingdoms of this world he is tempting him to take what will one day be rightfully his and grab it now.

God’s gospel says ‘will not God graciously give us all things’

In the gospel of Jesus God has promised us everything we need even if that is not everything that we want. I once heard Tim Keller say in a sermon ‘unless we are willing to let God contradict us haven’t we simply made God in our own image’.

In the gospel of God is a call to recognise and rejoice in the thought that God has withheld no good thing from us for he has given far more than we deserve and he has given us his son.

vi. Porn says ‘I can save you from yourself’

All false gospels are attractive because they promise us a new life. A life in which we can be different people. Porn says I can give you significance, intimacy, freedom from worry, reward and success and all with ease.

Porn offers us a way out of a tough life. It offers us heaven on earth. Well at least for a time. The attraction is in the quick fix, instant result.

‘I just want to feel that I’m OK, I turn to porn instead of God because the gospel doesn’t tell me that I’m OK.’

The biggest lie of all is in this gospel that is no gospel at all. For this gospel of porn is a gospel that takes us far from Christ and from the God who made us and loves us. In choosing this gospel we turn our backs on the only gospel that can save.

God’s gospel says ‘only God can save you from yourself.’

He is the one who atones for our sin and he is the one making us new. His spirit is able to transform us into the likeness of Christ with ever-increasing glory.

You might say he should have had the sense to have not been there in the first place, but nevertheless someone should have been protecting him. He was put in a dangerous place that he had no right to be in — unprepared for the dangers that awaited him, he nearly lost his life.

I tell the tale because I have recently been reminded that I have a job that involves protecting people from entering dangerous places. The pastor-shepherd protects the flock and the way we protect, at least in part, is by saying ‘don’t go there’ when we see or sense danger.

That charge to protect is a call to ‘preach the negatives’. Our preaching needs to challenge wrong living but it also needs to warn of dangerous theology. In a talk I heard last week I was reminded that false teaching doesn’t even necessarily have to affirm that which is false. False teachers often start by promoting dangerous ideas in an altogether more subtle and invasive way. Rob Bell’s book Love Wins is a case in point. When you turn deadly ideas into open questions, you invite God’s people to enter dangerous places.

Hugh Palmer, Rector at All Souls Church, London (the home of John Stott’s ministry for over 50 years) warned in a recent talk that Bell’s book ‘opens the door to tragic places and never closes them’. You don’t have to walk through the door yourself to be a false teacher, you merely have to open one after another and invite others to explore for themselves where they would like to go.

Our ministry has to have some negatives. We protect the flock by preaching the truth but also by locking and double-locking the doors of dangerous and deadly ideas and then we stand in the way of anyone reaching for the handle.

Paul writes in Acts 20 in his farewell message to the Ephesian elders;

Even from your own number men will arise and distort the truth in order to draw away disciples after them. So be on your guard!

The preacher must know the truth, preach the truth and warn against those ideas that oppose the truth.

It’s desperately sad to see Steve Chalke walk away from evangelical truth in his recent statements in support of practising homosexuality, arguing that it is consistent with Biblical Christianity. But what is also culpable is the decision of those at Christianity magazine to promote his ideas in the most public way by letting him open doors in people’s minds, many of whom are vulnerable to dangerous ideas. True, the magazine also presents the biblical evangelical position alongside Chalke’s ideas but in effect, that is to leave two doors open and invite people to decide for themselves.

The defence the editor of the magazine makes is, first, that Steve Chalke has written for the magazine for a number of years
(so it’s the least they could do to give his ideas such a prominent place in this month’s edition?) and secondly

opening up the issues is what this magazine does. We’re evangelical in conviction, but our approach has never been to suppress what others think, whether within or outside of evangelicalism.

I hope you notice the emotive choice of words. If it is an act of ‘suppression’ to silence false teaching then the same charge applies to Jesus and the apostles who spend considerable time not only refusing to promote dangerous ideas but actively speaking out against them.

Christianity magazine has decided to leave open the door that Chalke has walked through, and their rationale is that they have opened another door in an alternative and more traditional point of view presented by Greg Downes. What this all amounts to is opening two doors and inviting people to decide for themselves which they will walk through. One door leads to life and the other, death. One must be closed and locked, but that will only happen if you are prepared to preach the negatives.

Mark McLane, Managing Director and Head of Global Diversity and Inclusion at Barclays, said: “I have recently been made aware of the inclusion of a ‘Bigot of the Year’ category in the awards.

“Let me be absolutely clear that Barclays does not support that award category either financially, or in principle and have informed Stonewall that should they decide to continue with this category we will not support this event in the future.

“To label any individual so subjectively and pejoratively runs contrary to our view on fair treatment, and detracts from what should be a wholly positively focused event.”

How many Christians struggle in silence with this same issue? Vaughan’s words will offer comfort that they are not alone and renewed confidence that with God’s enabling power Christians can live for Christ.

I hope too that his example will lead to a greater degree of openness in our churches as we support and encourage one another in the daily fight against sin. In the interview he comments: There does need to be more openness in this area among evangelical Christians, given the rapidly changing culture we live in — and the resulting increased pressure on believers who face this battle.

Section D: Keeping the 7^th commandment

Perhaps the greatest danger to us at the end of a sermon on sexual sin is that my preaching leaves you feeling simply guilty and hopeless. Many Christians have given up the fight because they have lost hope.  Matt Chandler pastor of the Village church in Texas described his own experience when he said;

I found myself running from God. I ran because if there was shame to begin with, there was double shame at the moment when I said I wasn’t going to do it anymore but then I did it. I was caught..I was stuck in shame …

Maybe the appropriate question to ask yourself when you fall into sin, as a Christian and you are truly repentant, is this one ‘How do you think God thinks of you?’ Thomas Goodwin the great puritan preacher said this:

Your very sin moves Christ to pity & compassion more than anger.

Why? Because he loves you and he never loved you because you were good. Our greatest danger is to think when you sin you think God can’t love me any more and so even as you flee your sin you don’t think you can flee to Christ.

When you struggle with sin there is only one thing and one thing alone that you need to know because of the cross God treats you as a son and not a sinner. God accepts you as a son…loves you as a son…because he has never accepted you on the basis of your behaviour but on Christ’s perfect life and his sacrificial death.

Matt Chandler says:

The marker of those who understand the gospel of Jesus Christ is that, when they stumble and fall, when they screw up, they run to God and not from him.

The power to keep the 7^th commandment comes not from your faithfulness to God but God’s faithfulness to you.

1. God’s faithfulness – Read 1 John 1:8-9

We very much want to end the study by reminding ourselves that God has dealt with our past failures and promised to write the commandments on our hearts by his Spirit.

Whatever your sin there is full forgiveness because of Jesus. Whatever your struggle with your sin there is a final victory because of Jesus

Our hope comes from the knowledge that God forgives and that God will change us. Even when we are unfaithful to him.

If our danger is not that we feel like giving up the flip-side, the other danger, is that  we think this sermon is a call to pull yourself by your shoe laces…

You probably can control yourself not to sleep with your boyfriend, you could put the software on your computer…but what God wants to do is not give you a few practical tips but drive you to Jesus as your only hope…

2. Jesus’ faithfulness  - Read Hebrews 4:14-16

The battle with sexual sin is won through a closer walk with Christ.

You might think that Jesus is the last person who can help you now and yet we are reminded in the Bible that he was made like us in every way and in Hebrews 4 we learn that he experienced every temptation common to man.  Stuart Olyott writes ‘Do not think of him as unfeeling; everything you are facing, he has already faced.’

So the writer to the Hebrews urges us to go to him and ask for help and because it is Christ’s Spirit that is at work in us he is able to show mercy and offer grace to strengthen us in the battle against sin and for purity.

C: How we all break the 7^th commandment

We saw last Sunday in Jesus’ sermon on the mount that God is as concerned with how we think as much as how we act.  You shouldn’t measure obedience to God’s word by what you do or don’t do but by what we would like to do or not do.

We saw that ‘You shall not murder’ is not an excuse to hate because hate is really murder in the heart. So in that second reading we had this evening (Matthew 5:27-30) we saw that ‘You shall not commit adultery’ speaks to our hearts that are full of lust. And that really matters because Jesus won’t allow us to divide the room this evening into two categories of people; the sexually pure and the impure. No, for the reality is that when it is the attitude of our hearts that are held to account surely we are all sexual failures.

Kevin DeYoung writes: The 7^th commandment doesn’t just forbid adultery and pornography. It forbids every action, look, conversation, thought, or desire that incites lust and uncleanness.

To lust is to look at a person in a way that leads to sexual arousal and so again we find God’s purpose in the commandment to reveal to us that we are all adulterers in the heart.

1. Be radical

Jesus warns us what a serious sin lust is when he says ‘ 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.’

Jesus wants you to know that there is a difference between being sorry and being repentant.

Being sorry means regretting sin, being repentant means running from sin. Joseph when seduced into bed by Potiphar’s wife ran for his life. He fled the house. A friend of mine I met with to read the bible each week left his job because of a growing attachment to someone at work.

Maybe we would run from an inappropriate relationship but the bigger challenge for some of us is that we naturally have a pretty forgiving attitude to inward sins, we’re just much less concerned about the sins of the heart not least because no-one else knows about them.

The pastor who looks at pornography then preaches on purity is a dangerous person.

Not only do we sometimes simply forgive ourselves for our sin but  we even use the gospel as an excuse to sin. We say well God has already forgiven me so I can sin anyway. Well it is true that the gospel does forgive sin but it is a dangerous thing to turn a truth into a half-truth because as Jim Packer has said ‘a half-truth, masquerading as the whole truth becomes a complete untruth.’

The same gospel that forgives our sin also teaches us (Titus says) to say ‘no’ to ungodliness so if there is no fight for purity in our hearts is there evidence of grace in our lives?

So are you ready to take urgent and radical action in battling sexual  temptation in our lives. That might mean not having a TV license or having accountability software on our computers or changing gym membership or even job. It would certainly mean stopping sleeping with your boyfriend or girlfriend.

If you are here this evening as a non-Christian I want you to know how totally amazing is the grace of God through his Son’s death on the cross he has dealt with our sin whatever our sexual sins, however we have lived, no-one is too far from God.  Grace is always amazing but it is never cheap.

The sign that God is at work is real repentance.

2. Be honest

We do need each other in the battle.  Married couples we need to help one another think through how to keep investing in our marriages.  To help us in the battle with sexual sin we should seek support and we should make ourselves accountable. DeYoung comments ‘No one fights a war by himself, and no one will get victory over sexual sin on his own.’

3. Be real

About your own vulnerability. Recognise that if a man like King David, a man after God’s own heart, could fall into scandalous sin then why not me or you?

I don’t know why guys wouldn’t want to put some kind of software on their computers to take away temptation. Maybe you need to honestly face up to the fact that you are not ready for a relationship because you know that you could not control yourself physically and would only damage the person you were dating. Maybe you need to recognise that you are flirting in a dangerous way with a housemate.

Being real means recognising that you and I are weak and that the sexual impulse is very strong. And being real means recognising that sexual temptation sometimes comes from an unexpected direction at a time when we least expect it and in a way we’ve not  gone looking for it.

King David’s adultery with Bathsheba began with David simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was at home when he should have been with his army he was on the roof of his palace when he stumbled across beautiful Bathsheba bathing on the top of a near-by building. The results of a man with time on his hands was scandal.

What is the 7th commandment?

The seventh commandment reads ‘You shall not commit adultery’.  Pretty much every Jewish adult who first heard those words of God would either have been married or engaged to be married. Every adult could expect to be married by the age of 20. So in that culture the biggest challenge to honouring God with your body was remaining faithful to your spouse.  But the commandment clearly speaks against all kinds of sexual sin.

Paul in Ephesians says ‘ Among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality or any kind of impurity.’ The word there for sexual immorality is porneia and refers really to any sex outside of marriage.

So why is faithfulness in your marriage so important to God?

We’ve been learning over again in this series is that each of the commandments that call on us to ‘love our neighbour’ depends upon a more fundamental  commitment to ‘love God’.  There is a right and necessary ordering of the commandments.  It is the nature of our relationship with God that compels us to remain faithful to our spouse.

Covenant faithfulness in marriage is an expression of our covenant faithfulness to God.  As God is faithful to us and as we are to be faithful to him so we are to exhibit the character of faithfulness in all our relationships, especially marriage. As his people so we want to be like him, to say to the world how great it is to have God as our God and so being faithful to our promises is part of saying thank you to God for being faithful to his.

I was at a wedding a while back, chatting to a non-Christian couple. They asked how long my wife and I had been married and at the time it was something like 10 or 11 years.  One of them was surprised that having married so young we had lasted so long and then the other commented ‘it’s only the Christians who stay married.’ Sadly, in a fallen world marked by sin that is not always the case but it often is.

Our faithfulness in marriage is a reflection of God’s faithfulness we reflect God’s character as the faithful one who loves us with a never-breaking love. A husband and a wife are in their marriage to model the exclusive relationship between God and his people.

What makes adultery so serious it is both one and the same time a betrayal of a spouse and a denial of our God.

In Genesis  39:9-10 Joseph refuses to betray Potiphar by sucombing to the advances of Potiphar’s wife. He refuses out of loyalty to an earthly master. But more fundamentally he recognises that to break a human marriage is to ‘do a wicked thing and sin against God.’

The 7^th commandment is given by God to protect marriages, to protect children in marriages and to protect God’s own name and reputation in the world.

Jesus and marriage

No wonder then that Jesus in Matthew 19:3-6  issues a solemn warning that it is God who joins a couple together in marriage. Through marriage they are now to be considered as one person (v.6) and therefore Jesus issues a command ‘let not man separate.’ It is not that it is impossible but rather that it is should not happen.

And the consequences for those who do break this commandment are serious. In the book of Hebrews Christians are reminded of the seriousness of honouring God with their marriages. 13:4

Marriage should be honoured by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral.

Yesterday we saw that sex outside of marriage damages ourselves. Today that it dishonour’s God and we are warned judgement awaits those who dishonour God through adultery or sexual immorality.

Tomorrow’s post looks at how we all break the 7th commandment and how through Jesus we can keep the 7th commandment.