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It is easy to read “You shall not commit adultery” and decide that command belongs to someone else. But in Matthew 5, Jesus carries it beyond the outward act into the hidden life of our looks, desires, and thoughts—so where does that leave any of us, and why does God care so deeply about our purity?
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The pastor uses the Steak and Shake slogan “In sight, it must be right” as an analogy for public witness versus hidden corruption. How does this analogy challenge you to think about the difference between what people see in your life and what’s happening in your private thoughts and actions?
Jesus extends the commandment against adultery from outward behavior to internal thoughts and desires (Matthew 5:28). How should this broader definition change the way Christians approach issues like entertainment, social media, and online content?
The sermon emphasizes that God’s commands come from a place of love and care rather than arbitrary judgment. Where in your own life do you struggle to believe that God’s restrictions are actually for your good, and how does the sermon’s emphasis on His care shape how you respond to conviction in this area?
The pastor discusses how broken marriages and unfaithful relationships obscure God’s metaphor of himself as a faithful bridegroom to His people. What responsibility do individual Christians have to live with integrity in their relationships for the sake of witness to non-believers, and what does that look like practically?
The sermon notes that this commandment applies to everyone regardless of marital status. How can single, widowed, and married believers each live with integrity in this area, and what specific ways can they support and encourage one another?
How does the story of the woman caught in adultery (John
balance the seriousness of sexual sin with God’s offer of grace and forgiveness? What does “go and sin no more” mean practically in your own struggle with purity, and how do we avoid both despair and complacency in response to that call?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Let’s go ahead and prepare our hearts to hear from God’s word.
So, if you’re keeping track, you know where we are, and you know that this is going to be a fun one. This is a challenging one. We are moving into the subject of adultery tonight. Yeah, that’s just a feel-good topic, right? And I can’t say that this is the message I’ve been really looking forward to in this series.
But sort of like I was talking about the annual meeting and how we need to change how we think about it. And not be thinking so much in, ah, the last time I had to think about anything with accounting was when I had to take that class years ago in school, and I don’t want to think about it again. We’re not going to go through that many numbers. Don’t worry. Not trying to scare you off the annual meeting.
But when you think of how God’s working here, we’re also talking about how God is working and how He’s working through His people, and the reason He cares about these things we’re going to think about tonight is because He cares about you. He cares about me. He cares about our witness to the world, and that’s really where this comes down to.
Anyone able to identify this slogan? “In sight, must be right.” Steak and shake. Steak and shake, yes, yeah. And you say that and you see the china plate with the checker on it and the little steak and shake logo, right? And you can taste that steak burger.
It’s been years since they were as good as I remember, but maybe they are now. I haven’t been there in a while. But the idea was, talking with someone reminiscing about steak and shake not that long ago, the idea was that you had this slogan, and the point of the slogan was that they were going to prepare your food right in front of you. You could sit at the counter and you’d see the food being prepared.
You could see the hot griddle. I think even if they, I haven’t been in a brand new steak and shake, but I think even as they build them now, there’s still a little bar around the kitchen area. And so you can see, and maybe that ended with COVID, but you could see the griddle, and you could see what they were doing with your food.
“In sight, it must be right.” You knew they weren’t going to do something with your food if you were staring at them, or you’d hope they wouldn’t at least.
So when we think about, for example, food preparation, one of the things that we care about is, are they doing something I can’t see that would bother me? So let’s bring it out. Now I can see it. Now there’s the public witness, so to speak.
Here is the testimony of steak and shake: You can see the hot burgers grilling, the cheese melting, the bun being toasted. Okay, everything looks good. I’ll go ahead and eat my burger.
But there’s the hidden things. This week, I read that steak and shake is switching from seed oils to fry their French fries over to beef tallow. And this is something that’s come up over the last number of years that we’ve gone to all these processed, heavily processed oils that are thought probably aren’t the best for us. But maybe things that aren’t anything resembling oil when they start out that turn out to then become oil, probably maybe that’s not the most healthy thing in the world.
And what do you know, just like we found over and over again? If you rewind the clock and go back to what we used to do, it might be better for us than what we’ve come up with afterwards.
Some people say they can tell the difference with the French fries. Some people say they can’t. I don’t know. I haven’t done a taste test. But if they were in front of me, and even if I couldn’t tell, I know that one was good for me, or better for me at least. And one was not.
And that’s really where we’re going to explore tonight. We have two different issues to deal with when we’re talking about the commandment against adultery. One of them is public witness. What are we showing to the world? The second one, though, is what are we internalizing and absorbing that we don’t even realize we’re absorbing because we’re taking in those oils and we don’t even really know. And both of those tie into the fact that God cares for us. He actually cares.
When we’re talking about the commandments, sometimes we think, oh, here’s the angry judge coming down to condemn us. What we need to understand is no, God is calling us to these things because they’re what’s healthy for us.
If you’re getting ready to consume something that has some kind of chemical in it or impurity in it and someone stops you, it’s not because they’re angry at you, it’s because they don’t want you to poison yourself. And God doesn’t want us to poison ourselves either. And yet it feels like it; we don’t like God meddling. And this is an area of life that people really don’t like God meddling. Would you just leave me alone?
And yet, God says, but you don’t actually understand what’s good for you. You think you do. French fries taste pretty good. But what are you really putting in your body? What are you really doing to yourself?
God cares about us. As we prepare our hearts to hear from his word tonight, let’s go ahead and pray to Him.
Father, we do pray that you would help us as we look at this commandment and everything around it and the way that you are calling us to a pure life that we would understand that you are not looking to just make us miserable. You’re not looking to make us feel worthless. What you are doing is calling us to the life that is intended for us, the life that is healthy for us, and the life that ultimately draws us closer to you. We pray this in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
I just did that big preface and maybe you’re thinking, well, I can read that on the page. I actually bring it up. Exodus 20:14: This is not that hard, Tim. You shall not commit adultery. I have never committed adultery. Okay, done, right? Well, not so fast.
Let’s go ahead and jump to Matthew chapter five. Jesus helps us to understand exactly what God has in view here. He says, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away, for it is better for you to lose one of your members than your whole body be thrown into hell.”
It was also said, “Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.” But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the grounds of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries the divorced woman commits adultery.
It’s a little more complicated than we’d like, right? And here’s something I think we need to hear from the gate. There is no status that we can place ourselves in life where we’re completely immune to this. You can’t say, well, I’m not married, so I don’t have to worry about this commandment. You can’t say, I am a widow or widower. I don’t have to worry about this commandment.
No, all of us, according to Jesus, should feel conviction. This is not a commandment, unlike all the others, some special commandment that only applies to a very certain subset of people doing one thing.
God wants us to understand that as we look at the commandment, “You shall not commit adultery,” what you are saying is you shall be pure. That’s a much taller order, a much more difficult order, but adultery stands there as the pointer to everything that God cares about that he wants us to do here in this area of life. It’s not one little contained thing.
And he wants us to care about this with Him because He knows what’s best for us. He cares about us. When we think about this category of sins, so to speak, what we’re really talking about are sins that are selfish sins. And you might say, well, all sins are selfish. That’s true, but here especially, it’s really focused entirely on us.
Sometimes we sin by lying because we’re trying to be people pleasers and we say something or do something because we’re trying to earn favor. And yes, it’s for us, but we’re also somehow convincing ourselves we’re doing it for other people.
But what we need to face is stark reality here. When God is calling us to purity, the challenge is that what we really want to do is just focus on ourselves. As this care about more than yourself because I care about you, if you’re all focused internally on what is going to make me fulfilled and happy in the moment, and that’s a lie, incidentally—it’s not going to—but what’s going to make me happy? What we’re really doing is we’re building up a bomb of self-destruction.
And so God’s saying, yes, you think you want to eat that, but you’re going to get food poisoning if you do. Or worse, eternal food poisoning.
So He calls us to understand two things. One, even when—and we don’t want to ignore the actual thing itself, adultery—that that, you know, the fact that it points to more doesn’t mean that it points to anything less.
But the big point is that God is calling us to purity, and then any place, wherever it happens to touch us, wherever we happen to struggle, what God wants us to understand is that is utterly corrosive to us. And while it feels like it’s going to help, it’s going to make us feel better, going to take our mind off of things that’s going to be better than where we are right now in the moment, it is going to destroy us.
And that, according to Jesus, it isn’t just some physical act that will be the thing. What’s going on in our heads? What are we thinking?
And that’s where it’s like those oils, because unless you’re going to do a lab test, if you look at French fries and they’ve been fried in two different oils, you don’t necessarily know which one it is. Yeah, the chemicals would be on there, but if I’m just looking at it, I don’t know what’s on here.
And yet something’s happening. And someone can look at us and say, look at him, look at her. She’s so pure. He’s so pure. You know, a pillar of the community, never does anything wrong, certainly doesn’t need to worry about this commandment.
And what God wants us to hear is, we need to care about what’s going on in our heads. It doesn’t matter if everyone thinks that we’re people of integrity. What’s happening in here? What do we think?
Jesus is speaking to the people that were probably listening to Jesus speak about the law. I thought, yeah, you know, sometimes I’ll confess, I walk 10 more footsteps than I should on the Sabbath. And so maybe I’m kind of scraping by there on whether I’m doing work on the Sabbath or not because they had this all figured out, right? You can walk a certain number of steps on the Sabbath. You can’t light a fire. But if the fire’s already going and your food happens to cook, that’s okay.
They came up with all those sorts of things, right? And so they say, well, you know, one time the fire was kind of going out and I blew on it a little to get it to go again and maybe I am scraping by that. But I can say one thing. He’s talking to these teachers of law. They typically be married.
I’ve never been unfaithful to my spouse. I haven’t. So I don’t have to worry about that one. It’s only nine commandments for me. Or it’s like the freebie commandment, right? I get one bonus. Yeah, at times, I really have one to kill my neighbor, but I’m good on this one.
And Jesus says, But have you ever thought anything? Have you ever let your gaze linger a little too long? What’s going on in your head?
Now, the other danger when we say this though, and I’ve seen people do this, and it’s tempting to do this, okay, everyone does it, right? We can’t avoid it. We’re human beings.
Okay. So, well, someday God will make me perfect. Till then. Jesus didn’t tell us that the measure was much higher than what we think it is when we first see the commandment so we could say, okay, I can’t get it right every moment, every day, every second of my life, so therefore, I just don’t worry about it.
He said it, so we keep drawing closer to him. He wants us to keep coming back to the cross and saying, God, I need strength. I need help in this.
The point is that we want to move closer to him with the help of his Holy Spirit. We may not get there in this lifetime, but that’s not an excuse to quit trying.
When we say, I can’t get this right, so I just won’t worry about it, that’s when we start getting ourselves into that danger territory.
That’s when we have to say, is the Holy Spirit actually working in my life? Because if the Holy Spirit isn’t convicting me at all, if the Holy Spirit isn’t speaking to me, hey, maybe you need to try a little harder here, that’s when we need to say, well, where is my spiritual health?
It’s not that we get all right. We don’t earn our salvation. The thing that should concern us is when we don’t care if we get it right.
God wants us to actually care enough that we’re pained and we come back to them and we say, God, I need strength. I need help. I don’t want to be this person. I want to be the person you intended me to be.
And true at different points in life, at different times, we may have different areas that we’re most tempted, and it’s true in this area too.
For example, Paul has a series of instructions when we look at 1 Corinthians, and one of the things he says, if someone is widowed and you just might be better if you just don’t marry, just be like him. Don’t add any complication to life. Just plow along and serve the Lord. But if you feel temptation, then get married (1 Corinthians 7). Why? Because what God doesn’t want us to do is say, well, I can’t get it right. Who cares? But I’m going to keep doing good things for God. It doesn’t matter.
God wants us to actually care about drawing closer to them and pick the path—the God-pleasing path, singleness, marriage, etc.—throughout life. We can find different categories, but certainly in this area, the area that allows us to deal with where we are in our walk.
Sometimes it is self-denial, self-control. Take a look at Titus 2, verse 12. Paul writes that God is training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age.
It’s good if we’re self-controlled. And it’s good when we want something, we want to do something, we want to see something, we want to say something, and we say, “But I’m not because I’m serving the Lord.”
When we come to him at that point and we say, I know the things that the path of the ways my head are going down right now are not pleasing to you. They’re not pleasing to you, Lord. And I want your strength.
That is where God grows us. That’s a good place to go. He wants us there.
What do we focus on? Or what do we not focus on? When we’re focused on ourselves?
Well, when we’re focusing on ourselves, we’re not focused on God.
We focus on ourselves a lot. And certainly here in this area that God is confronting us on tonight is an area where we focus on ourselves a lot. What do I want? What will make me happy? What will make me feel fulfilled? And God says, look to me.
When we do that, we say, okay, God, help me to figure out how I walk in integrity here.
God grows us in that place. And we see in God’s word, sometimes that’s going to be into a life of marriage. Sometimes it’s going to be into a life of singleness, but the key thing is that we live a life of purity and integrity in whatever place we are.
Anything else is trying to short circuit, and anything else is focused on what we want because it’s never what’s best for us. It’s never what’s best for anyone else. It’s what we want.
You know, something that struck me as I was praying over this passage, I heard someone say a comment about something entirely different. I don’t want to go down too much of a rabbit trail, but the same basic axiom applies here.
It’s easy to follow God if we just do what we want. The problem is we have to put quotes around “follow” because a lot of times that’s what we want to do.
We say, I’m going to follow the Lord. I’ll read my Bible. I’ll tell other people about Jesus. I won’t steal. I won’t murder. I’ll even honor my parents and keep the Sabbath. But maybe not this one. Maybe this is the one I’m not going to do. Or maybe I’m going to covet a little. Okay, I won’t commit. I’m not going to violate this commandment, but I might just covet my neighbor’s car.
It’s really easy if we take things out, the things, whatever we’re struggling with at the moment. We say, well, I don’t have to worry about that area because I think it’s just fine for me right now. And if later on God wants to work on me on that, then I’ll deal with it then.
It’s easy then. Where it gets hard to follow God but the path He calls us to is to work with Him to follow Him in the place that I’m struggling with right now, that you’re struggling with right now—the place where you say, God, that is meddling. I really wish you wouldn’t.
There’s lots of other areas you can work on me on, God. I don’t want to work on that one. You know, when we have that reaction, that’s usually the sign of one of two things: One, we’re being stubborn and we don’t want to hear what God’s saying. Or two, that’s really where the conviction’s coming and we’re kind of having this reflex of action because God’s saying, you know what? This is not what I want for your life, and I want you to hear it.
Say, oh, boy. It hurts, God. Can’t we move on to something else?
That’s exactly where God wants us to dwell. Not so we beat ourselves up and feel worthless, but we remember that we are loved children of God. If you’ve turned to Jesus, if you trust in Him, He loves you. He just wants you to escape the things that are actually detrimental to you because He loves you.
Let’s take that poison food away from you. Because He wants you to thrive. He wants me to thrive. He wants that for us. Deteriorates us. That’s the starting point.
I flipped this sermon. I was going to start on our next point first. It just didn’t feel right. I kept praying, How should the sermon go, Lord? And I felt like He said, you need to flip it.
And here’s why I think. Because if we’re going to talk about places where God’s convicting us and pointing out sin and saying we need to grow, we need to start with the fact that He cares. Because what we’re going to talk about next is that God is calling us to be witnesses to others, and we’ll get there in a moment.
But what we need to understand first is that God cares about us. We can’t witness to others. We can’t show God’s love to others. We can’t give a good public testimony to others if we don’t understand first what God’s doing in our own hearts.
So we need to be there first. And we need to be willing to wrestle when it’s painful.
One of the things that’s been sad to see, and I’m not sure, I don’t know if I can say whether it’s happening more because it’s actually occurring more or because in our very connected world of social media and such today, it gets revealed more.
But it seems like you can’t go more than a week or two without seeing some big-name pastor who has to resign from a ministry because of this very area of life and failures in it, the failure to live with integrity and purity.
It just seems like it happens over and over again. You think, oh, this is awful. What are people seeing about the church and about pastors?
They get up here and they preach and yes, we should be saying we’re sinners, and that’s true. But then they go and they blow up their marriage and their family and there’s this huge scandal in the church and other marriages blow up in the church, and you think, this is sickening.
And in that place, there’s a question about what is the pastor going to do? And especially when we’re talking about celebrity pastors, you know what happens most of the time?
Well, you know, they leave that church. They disappear for a few months and meet with some other pastors. They can write a book while they’re meeting with the other pastors about the experience. And then all of a sudden, there’s another giant church that’s called them. And they give a course on how they have understood the error of their ways and “Here, buy my book.”
And I don’t want to be overly judgmental. There may be some people that have actually made that rapid process, and it’s sincere, and it’s genuine, and it’s healing.
But an awful lot of times what it ends up looking like is that the pastor, he ends up getting divorced. He marries the person he was unfaithful with. He says he’s repented of his past sin. And then he goes back and starts speaking as the in the position of authority again.
And you wonder, have you actually confronted your sin?
And again, I don’t want to be overly judgmental. I’m not trying to do that. But what I am saying is that when that happens over and over again, what the people in the world see is it looks like we don’t really take any of this seriously. We have a certain charade we do that makes it look like, okay, we’ve done that. Now we’ve slapped the wrist and we’ve said this was bad, and what do you know, we made an extra million on the book deal.
And the world says, okay, you talk about grace and all being sinners, but if you also say that we should actually live differently, and it doesn’t look like you do.
And certainly if you look at the church in its statistics, it’s a dismal figure across the board when we’re talking about purity—that Christians don’t really live that differently than anyone else in society.
You would be hard pressed to know where the Christian communities were based on how we live with the purity that God calls us to.
God wants us to do something better than that. We need to understand that He cares. He loves us, and it’s for our own good.
But then we need to take the next step and say, I want to do something different because what I want when I, when my friends and my family and my coworkers and the community at large, and maybe someday we find ourselves where we actually have a platform that’s larger, and you never know why that might happen, maybe it happens completely out of the blue.
Whenever I have any chance, big or small, to testify to the Lord, what I want is for people to look and to see someone who isn’t perfect, but someone who is trying, and by God’s grace is moving towards Him.
I think that’s the key.
Again, a whole discussion in the category of pastors who’ve fallen: Is it possible to restore them and how long should it take? And that could be like a multi-week Sunday school class or something. We could do that and probably not come to a complete agreement and settled understanding on that. It’s a hard, hard area.
But the key point is people need to see one, that we take these things seriously, and two, that when we are convicted, that we come at it humbly.
Not that it’s like, okay, I need to say certain things, but that I genuinely want to be transformed and move towards where God wants me.
Now, for most of us, praise God, it isn’t that big stark, put it on the newspaper’s giant breach.
But are we representing God in our relationships? Can we say, “I’m not perfect. But if people look at me, they see a sinner who, by God’s grace, is drawing closer.” Not so they praise me, but they praise God.
Is that the direction? Is that the trajectory? Or do they see a picture that looks like the world, or maybe even worse in the world, because unlike the world we actually say we’re ascribing the value of purity to our lives—that Jesus actually died for us and we care about why He died for us.
What would it look like if I cared more about God being pleased with me and my life and my actions and my thoughts? And what I thought was going to make me happy in a moment.
I think there we see the point where we take this from what’s happening inside of me to how do I show it to the world? Because God does care about how we represent Him.
You shall not commit adultery isn’t merely some legal thing.
There could be convictions of people that did.
It’s about God wanting us to be those who represent Him in this world, and to look differently, and to understand why this is so important to the Lord. Why did He pick this out as one of the ten things He put on the Ten Commandments?
It’s because the marriage relationship is one that actually is the chosen metaphor that God uses over and over and over again to represent Himself and how He relates to us.
Take a look at Ephesians 5, verse one.
Paul writes, “Therefore be imitators of God as beloved children, and walk in love as Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”
But sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you, as is proper among saints.
Let there be no filthiness, nor foolish talk, nor crude joking which are out of place, but instead let there be thanksgiving.
You may be sure of this, that everyone who is sexually immoral or impure, or who is covetous—that is an idolater—has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God.
Paul goes on to list more examples and talks about this further.
And then he gets to something that I think is really crucial in understanding where this plays into the heart of our Lord.
Take a look at verse 31.
It says, “Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”
This mystery is profound, and I’m saying that it refers to Christ and the church.
You see, when God gave Eve to Adam, He wondered in that human relationship for them and for all the generations thereafter for them to see a picture of how God cares for us.
And over and over again in scripture, we see this over and over again in the prophets, we see it time and again in the New Testament.
We see it over and over that God represents Himself as the bridegroom and His people are the bride.
And He loves us, and He wants that to be what’s conveyed in that metaphor.
The problem is when we start to mess with it.
If that’s His chosen vehicle for how He explains because while it’s not perfect and it doesn’t fully encompass the love that God has for us in an imperfect, broken world, it’s the thing that He knows will convey most closely the deep and abiding and sincere and faithful love that He has for us.
Well, there’s a good and bad part to that.
When people live with integrity and you see a godly marriage and a husband and wife who genuinely love each other and serve each other and go through everything together and you see that picture, what do you see?
Well, you see a beautiful picture of what God does for us. Not perfect. But good.
But we’re sinful, falling human beings. We mess it up.
And every time we mess it up, and all the more we mess it up, the ways that we mess it up obscures the representation.
I was thinking about a challenge that we have. Anyone who served in a church over time probably, I’ll start to say this, and you’re going to know exactly what I’m going to talk about.
We have Mother’s Day and Father’s Day every year here, right? Those are basically holy days in the American calendar. And especially Mother’s Day.
Far be it from us to ever overlook it. You better mention it, right? You better do something for it. You have to remember it.
But it’s gotten more and more difficult because we say, well, there are people who were trying to have children and were unable to. There are people who came into the church and their mother or their fathers were awful people who treated them terribly.
And it brings back pain when you talk about it.
And so we try the best we can to balance the—you have to mention it with the—it brings pain and suffering and hardship to people and try to figure out how to balance all this.
But one of the things that’s so notable about that is, for example, God speaks to us as our heavenly Father.
How sad it is when earthly fathers obscure what God’s saying.
And likewise, when we live as people, fallen human beings, and we obscure what marriage looks like and God’s intent for human relationship, what are we doing?
We’re making it harder for people to understand these metaphors.
They say, well, God’s like a husband and his people are like a bride.
And I’ve seen a lot of abusive husbands and they beat their wives, and they hate their wives, and they’re cruel to their wives, and they’re unfaithful to their wives.
That’s true.
I can go the other way as well.
And here’s the thing we need to hear. This is something that should break our hearts as Christians.
And if you’ve been in a horrible marriage, if you’ve had a horrible set of parents, I’m not saying this to say somehow you need to pretend otherwise.
The point is, we need to understand that in our sin, what we do is we take these metaphors of how God shows his love to us, and we’re covering it with more and more layers that prevent people from understanding that witness to the world.
Are we thinking about that? Especially when we’re chasing after what we think is going to make us happy.
Are we thinking about, I want to do whatever it is, God, use my life so that when people look at me, they see you wherever I am.
Again, if you’re single, it doesn’t let us off the hook on this, right?
If you’re unmarried and you’re preparing for marriage, it doesn’t let you off the hook.
If you are widowed or a widow or it doesn’t let you off the hook.
At every point in life, are we living with integrity where we are so that people are getting a taste of that integrity in whatever place you happen to be, what I happen to be?
Am I living with integrity? That’s the real question.
Because here’s the thing that we know about God: He always lives with integrity towards us. And so are we living faithfully?
When God called the people not to commit adultery and then Jesus extends it, here are the things He wants us to be thinking about.
That human relationship, the institution of marriage, was given by God to show love; to exemplify in human relationship the love that God has for us; and every time that we chase after things that are outside of those bounds of marriage that God intended for us, what are we doing?
Well, being unloving to the person who is the object of our affection is not really good for them.
And here’s the thing: If you were cooking and you knew that the food was poisoned, would it be loving to hand that food over to somebody else?
No.
So we’re being unloving to the person we claim to love when we don’t act as God has called us to with integrity at whatever station of life we’re in.
That can be even in our thoughts, certainly in this world where there’s so much stuff online.
It can be where people think that something is harmless and yet they’re funding a whole evil industry. I guess that’s an exclamation point there. A terrible evil industry that does what? It exploits people. Traffics human beings.
Certainly hurts the spouses that are involved when we’re actually talking about literal adultery.
You see this so often where, again, I mentioned when it happens in the church, it’s so heartbreaking because you see multiple families often broken up at the same time because of this. And it certainly leaves a trail of victims: the spouse, the children.
That’s been loving to the people around us that are bystanders, so to speak.
Because, I mean, well, it’s my life. What problem is it to them?
But here’s the thing that we’re doing. We’re not showing Jesus’ love.
You know what? Those people around that we say, “Why are they meddling in my life?” They’re the people that need to hear about Jesus’ love. And sometimes as a fellow believer who’s just really struggling and needs to actually see an example of love happening, of care.
Sometimes it’s that person who’s kind of curious about the church because the Christians are just a bunch of hypocrites.
And sometimes it’s our choice to sin in this moment. This is the thing that keeps them away.
Now, God can overcome that.
I don’t want to say that God can’t. I’m not trying to take away His ability; He has power.
But here’s what God says. He wants us to care enough that when we think about what’s going to make us happy, what we’re really thinking of is what’s going to make other people feel the love of God.
When God gave Eve to Adam and established the institution of marriage, the point was to build up society, to provide a stable foundation for society, to provide a stable foundation later, as all the laws and regulations are provided to Moses—a stable foundation on which to build the people of God.
And that’s true still today.
We can see the benefit of strong marriages, and certainly the ones we have here in this church. We see the benefit of those marriages in the church.
We need to understand that when we mess with this, we’re breaking down something God gave to strengthen.
And here’s the thing, even if we’re the single person around the married couple, here’s the opportunity that we can encourage them when they’re discouraged.
It’s not just for certain people this applies. It’s for every one of us. We have a part to play in building each other up; building up this institution that we see—people mutually committed.
And more broadly, it’s the body of Christ that we love each other with integrity and faithfulness and purity. And we say, I don’t want anything to do with you in a way that wouldn’t please God.
I don’t want to do anything that’s impure about myself, and I don’t want to encourage you to it either.
It’s easier said than done, but that’s what God’s calling us to.
When it did break down, God had strict laws in the Old Testament. And it makes us a little uncomfortable now.
Adultery, what was the punishment?
Death.
That sounds kind of harsh, doesn’t it? Why?
Because this was a fundamental building block to hold together the people of God.
If people couldn’t even be faithful to their spouse, then what was going to happen to the rest of the culture? How could they claim to be faithful to the God they can’t see if they can’t be faithful to the person who’s right in front of them?
Likewise, God has laws in Deuteronomy 20, Leviticus 20:10 if you want to look up the death penalty.
I don’t recommend that today. That’s not for us. That’s for the people, that’s for the nation of Israel. We’re not going to start doing stoning in the parking lot.
But the point, the seriousness of it remains.
And likewise, what was required if a couple acted with impurity towards each other before marriage? What were they to do?
They were to get married.
And according to Deuteronomy 23:28-29, if they weren’t restrained themselves before marriage, they wouldn’t be eligible for divorce.
I said, I want you to take this seriously. And that’s the part we really need to hold on to.
Okay, that is speaking of the law that applied then, and we know you can’t go to court today. That’s not how it works in the United States. But what we can say is it’s speaking to God’s heart and his concern.
And it comes right back to if we’re all guilty, then what do we do? We don’t stay there.
I hesitate to go here as we close tonight, but I think probably this—I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s even come up in the chat—and I think probably we can’t help but think about it—the woman caught in adultery.
Right? Everyone’s favorite story from the Gospel of John.
And if you have studied it closely, you know the reason I hesitate to bring it up is that there’s some doubt on whether it was actually originally part of the Gospel of John.
A lot of very faithful, serious biblical scholars who treat the Word of God as true and holy aren’t sure about whether that story is there because they’re not in the earliest manuscripts.
Wait a second on that.
All that as a preface though, it is thought that probably it did happen. It just wasn’t maybe there in that particular part of the Gospel of John.
It fits completely in line with how Jesus did his ministry. It sounds like Jesus’ ministry.
And incidentally, and this is why I wanted to bring it up because I talked about French fries, which surely can talk about the woman caught in adultery, it certainly demonstrates the truth that we find elsewhere in scripture.
So we’re going to talk about that to close because I think this is important.
Notice what Jesus says.
All the people lined up, they’re ready to stone her for committing adultery.
And then Jesus said, “He is without sin, cast the first stone.”
And they all leave.
John 8, verses 9 and 11.
She said, Jesus said, “Well, who’s there to condemn you?”
And she says, “No one, Lord.”
And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go and from now on sin no more.”
Here’s the other side of those penalties and the seriousness of what God declared as He calls His people to purity.
He calls us to purity. He calls us to receive His mercy and respond to it.
Go and sin no more.
Paul, we looked at that during the confession time.
He lists almost every way we could play this out in that list we had during the confession time—all the different ways we might live with impurity.
And what does he say? That was true of you.
And here’s the thing we need to hear. The point of this isn’t to say if you have a past where things aren’t perfectly pure, God wants nothing to do with you.
That is not the point.
That is not what He wants us to hear.
What He wants us to hear is God does have a plan for you.
He wants you to repent and turn to Him and go and sin no more.
He wants all of us. He wants me to repent and sin no more.
He wants each and every person here to repent of the places where we’re convicted and say no more.
He wants us to turn to Him.
Where am I impure? Remember, do my thoughts go places? I know they shouldn’t. Where do yours?
Where have you, if in thought, if not in action and detectable deed, not acted with this sort of integrity God chose us?
And that message for that woman, the message that Paul then tells to the Corinthians, is the message for us.
God doesn’t tell us all this to have us feel hopelessly condemned. He tells us this and we realize we need Him and we follow Him.
And today is a great day to start or to restart that.
Because a lot of times we get beaten down and we just say, okay, enough of that.
Where am I impure? Where are you impure? Where am I unfaithful? Where are you unfaithful? And how do we make today the day that we start being more faithful?
Because God meddles, yes, He’s meddling here.
But God meddles because He wants everyone. He wants us. He wants everyone around us.
He wants everyone to understand this—that His love’s true and trustworthy.
So He wants us to know that and internalize that, and hear that message of forgiveness, and He wants us to live according to it so everyone else around us sees it as well.
Would you pray with me, please?
Father, we do pray that you would help us. That indeed you would meddle in our lives.
We want your Spirit to convict us.
As I say that, then I think, do I—how much did I really mean that, Lord?
But Lord, in those places where I don’t really mean it, where I’m wanting to hold back, would you help each and every one of us to be people who say, no, Lord, I really do want that.
I want you to come in.
I want you to convict me.
I want you to remind me and not let me write off those places where I’m out of line with your Word, but rather to start following them even today.
Not because I’m afraid that I am not doing enough to earn my salvation, but because I know that you give that salvation as a free and wonderful gift.
Because of that, I want to look more like you.
I want to respond to your love.
And I want others to see your love working in my life.
Would you help each and every one of us to live in that way?
We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Thank you, Chris.
We have gluten-free in the middle and regular non-gluten-free wafers on the sides.
Every week when we come and we come to the Lord’s table, we do say, please don’t take this if you have not yet—just a double negative, I’m sorry—if you haven’t yet trusted in Jesus, please don’t take this.
And I’ve talked over the years with various people who have gone a very long time without taking communion because they realize there was some point of sin in their lives. Maybe something they were deeply convicted of, and they kept trying to overcome and they couldn’t, and they couldn’t, and they couldn’t.
And so what did they do? They walked away from the table.
And sometimes when I say that, I think that might be how it can be heard as what I’m saying is, if you don’t have everything perfect and straight in your life, then don’t come to the table.
That is not what we’re saying at all.
When we say don’t come if you haven’t yet trusted in Jesus, we mean exactly what it sounds like.
The key reason we get to come to this table is because Jesus loves us.
And if you haven’t yet trusted in Jesus, well, if you haven’t trusted in Jesus, you aren’t yet experiencing His love and His mercy.
And my hope, my prayer, all of our hopes and prayers here is that you would tonight make tonight the night.
This is the last time you can ever say that Jesus wasn’t your Lord, that from this day on that he is your Lord.
And you can do that simply by praying to Him.
If you’re in person, we’d love to pray with you.
If you’re online, one of our church family members, just say something in the chat, they’ll pray with you.
Make tonight the night, and then come back here next week and partake, not because you solved every problem in your life and it’s all set since last week.
Because you’re following the one who sets everything right in our lives.
We come to this table not because we have everything right and we’ve earned it, but because we know we need the strength to do the things that God’s called us to do.
And I remember one time talking to someone who was really struggling with this and had been passing over it for some time.
And I felt so bad for her because she was just crying, weeping over it. She felt the distance that here’s this thing that God had given to His people and she didn’t have it.
And she wanted to be closer.
And if that’s you tonight, then come to this table.
If you’re trusting in Jesus but you don’t have everything right, then join the rest of us that don’t have everything right, and come to this table for strength.
This isn’t for those who are already righteous. This is for those who are made righteous by Him.
So it was on the night He was betrayed Jesus took the bread and he gave it to them saying, “This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”
And likewise, after supper, He took the cup. He said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood poured out for you under the remission of sins. Do this as often as you drink of it.”
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