Looking around the congregation this morning, I notice
two or three here who've not been able
to be among us for some time, and
it's very good to see you out particularly.
Some of you have been unwell, some of
you have been rendered immobile, and you're out
with us on this, should I say, lovely
summer's morning, summer and midwinter.
It certainly is a lovely day and we're
so glad to have you.
And there are visitors among us, we're delighted
to have you likewise, as Mr. MacLeod has
already indicated.
May I underscore the invitation to the gathering
on Friday evening, the Christmas play entitled, Who
Stole Christmas?
I guess most of us knew that Christmas
had been stolen, didn't you?
Oh yes.
And if you want to know who stole
Christmas, Friday night's the night.
Now I would like to ask you to
come with me again this morning to further
challenging words in the Sermon on the Mount.
We're going to read as the basis of
our meditation verses 27 to 30 in chapter
5, and you will find it helpful, I'm
quite sure, if you have your New Testament
open before you.
Matthew chapter 5, a passage that begins with
verse 27.
You have heard that it was said, do
not commit adultery.
But I tell you that anyone who looks
at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery
with her in his heart.
If your right eye causes you to sin,
gouge it out and throw it away.
It is better for you to lose one
part of your body than for your whole
body to be thrown into hell.
And if your right hand causes you to
sin, cut it off and throw it away.
It is better for you to lose one
part of your body than for your whole
body to go into hell.
Adultery on two levels.
The consistent reading and exposition of Scripture will
involve us sooner or later in every phase
and every aspect of life.
The Word of God is most realistic and
most all embracing.
It covers everything in this life and it
relates to all we need to know about
the next.
So that if we read it carefully and
if we expound it with any reasonable thoroughness
and consistency, over a period of time we
have to deal with every issue under the
sun.
And so we come this morning to something
that we might not normally choose to speak
about, but something which is found in the
Word of God and something which is written
large across the face of society.
Something which needs to be addressed and something
I trust we can with some measure of
delicacy look at prayerfully this morning.
Recognizing the importance of the sexual and emotional
aspects of every normal life, Scripture addresses this
issue too.
Now let's say as we come to this
that there are of course sins of the
spirit as well as sins of the flesh.
And if you have been with us as
we've been moving through the Beatitudes you will
have noticed I'm quite sure that there the
burden of our Lord's teaching has to deal
with the sins of the spirit.
Particularly the spirit of pride, feeling that we
are something very special and that we have
a right in the sight of God and
we can make it on our own.
And right at the beginning of the Beatitudes
our Lord pricks our bubble and he says
no no, blessed are the bankrupt, the poor
in spirit.
And he goes on throughout the Beatitudes to
deal with sins of the spirit.
And he will come back to that again
before we're through in this very chapter 5
and on into chapter 6.
He has much to say about the sins
of the spirit.
Well here this morning we have to take
up the subject of adultery.
And it may be distasteful to some of
you good people here, particularly that we have
to deal with it publicly.
Well now it is in Holy Writ, it
is in the Word of God, it is
expounded by the Son of God.
And so it can be faced and it
can be discussed and it can be considered
in the power of the Spirit to our
eternal profit.
And I ask you inwardly in our hearts
to pray with me that we shall profit
from it rather than otherwise this morning.
One other thing I want to say by
way of introduction is this.
It would be a terrifying thing for a
preacher to have to go into a subject
like this without being reminded right at the
outset that the grace of God meets the
need of every sinner.
That when the Bible exposes our sins it
does not do so in order to delight
in our undoing and our mere exposure.
And part of the wonder of the gospel
of our Lord Jesus Christ to me is
this, that it is a gospel that meets
us right where we are.
Now you may never have committed physical adultery.
I think you will be challenged as we
come to this passage this morning to consider
whether you have been an adulterer in your
heart.
But before we come to that, the gospel
way of salvation is usually enunciated at the
end of a message.
Well I want to do it at the
beginning.
And I want you to know that whatever
the Lord may show you to be your
need today, the grace of God in Jesus
Christ, the blood of Christ shed on the
cross, the mercy of God in his Savior
is sufficient to meet every need and every
exigency.
I would like you to come to this
text with me remembering the words of the
hymn, or rather the truth behind the words
of the hymn.
You know it very well.
There is a fountain filled with blood, drawn
from Emmanuel's veins, and sinners plunged beneath that
flood lose all their guilty stains.
Now let's look at it.
What have we before us in this amazing
passage?
There are three things I want to look
at.
The first, rather briefly, and the last two
with a little more time I trust.
First of all we're going to look at
the conception of the seventh commandment that was
popular among the Jews of our Lord's day.
Secondly, we shall look at the correction of
that inadequate understanding of the commandment, the correction
of it by Jesus.
And thirdly, we shall look at some consequences
accruing from that correction, consequences that we ourselves
have to face.
Now first of all then, the conception of
the seventh commandment popularly abroad among the Jews
of our Lord's day.
You have heard that it was said, says
Jesus, do not commit adultery.
Now Jesus is here quoting of course, as
you will be quite aware, he is quoting
directly from the seventh commandment.
And you will find a record of that
in Exodus chapter 20 and verse 14, or
in Deuteronomy chapter 5 and verse 18.
Thou shalt not commit adultery.
That is a word of God that has
not changed, that has not been modified over
the years.
It is a word of God to his
human creatures and to his people.
Jesus then is here quoting from the Decalogue,
from the Ten Commandments.
The New American Webster Dictionary defines adultery in
these words, illicit relations between a married person
and another than his lawful spouse.
Illicit relations between a married person and another
than his lawful spouse.
Now apart from making it clear that the
adulterer may be male or female, that definition
seems quite adequate, it seems to me.
Another word is used sometimes in Scripture with
regards to sexual sins, the word fornication.
And if you are trying to understand what
the Scriptures have to say about this subject,
you will sooner or later come across that
word.
That sometimes includes adultery.
There are a number of passages, I think
over a dozen of them, where it includes
adultery.
Though fornication usually refers to illicit sexual relations
between unmarried people outside a wedlock, where intercourse
is prohibited according to Scripture.
Adultery, however, let me repeat, implies that at
least one of the parties involved in physical
intercourse is married, whilst the other person is
not his or her rightful spouse.
That is what makes it adultery.
Now whereas many of our contemporaries see no
wrong whatsoever in adultery, and some even believe
that it's a mark of adulthood.
You've probably heard the play on the words.
They say that the one belongs to the
other.
If you're an adult, you've grown up, you
don't confine yourselves to the limits set by
the Old Testament or the New.
You don't need these anymore, you've grown up,
you've become an adult.
Well, God has forbidden it from the beginning
of time.
And our Lord Jesus Christ ratified that in
day and for his day and age, and
assured his disciples that the word still holds,
or still held, and it still does today.
The Christian Church has always considered God's revealed
order to involve an exclusive relationship between one
man and one wife, and no one must
intrude.
No one has power to break that relationship.
If he or she does intrude where he
or she shouldn't, adultery is the consequence.
For either party in a marriage to break
that bond by having sexual relations with someone
else is to commit adultery.
And God clearly prohibits it.
Now in the Old Testament you will remember
this was a capital offense.
It was, it was, it was meted with
death.
It was treated like the most serious thing
you could do in society.
And that was because, of course, the consciousness
of God was more real among his people
in those days.
In Jesus' day, the teachers of the law
and the Pharisees were not backward when it
pleased them.
Mind you, they didn't regularly do it.
But when it pleased them, as in John
chapter 8 verses 1 to 11, they would
bring a woman who had ostensibly been caught
in the very act of adultery, they would
bring her even into the temple and into
the presence of the Savior and say, we've
caught her in the act.
And with great glee they required that he
carry out the law of Moses and stone
her.
He agreed with her, of course, with them,
of course, that the act, if she had
been thus found guilty, was reprehensible.
And he turned to them and he says,
now whoever is without sin among you, be
the first to cast the first stone.
I know, I know, he says, this is
what the Old Testament says.
And whoever is among sin, without sin among
you, start off the business.
And do you remember what happened, of course?
The light of the world shone into the
darkness of their souls, and they went out
sneakily, one after the other.
For he had brought into their consciousness the
awareness of the fact that they had no
right to stone her, even though the Old
Testament required it.
And Jesus told her, go and sin no
more.
The marriage bond between two people is not
to be desecrated by the invasion of any
third party into it.
Those of you who are married, I suggest
to you that the moment you see any
third party more than reasonably interested in you,
cut it short.
Nevertheless, that view of adultery was inadequate, says
Jesus.
And so we come to the second point,
Jesus' correction of that inadequate view.
That was all right as far as it
went, but listen to his words.
But I tell you that anyone who looks
at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery
with her in his heart.
Our Lord now introduces into the picture a
still more serious and far-reaching factor, and
a very challenging one.
He says that adultery can take place on
another level altogether than the physical.
You see, the Pharisees prided themselves.
They'd not committed physical adultery.
They'd not invaded the precincts of marriage at
any given time, and come between a man
and his wife.
And so they said, we're innocent.
No one can point the finger at us.
We've never committed adultery.
And so they felt so proud about it.
They'd achieved something.
But here is something that completely disturbs them.
Jesus says, to look at a woman lustfully,
you've already committed adultery in your heart, and
it is no less culpable and reprehensible on
that account.
True, of course, the damage done by committing
adultery in your heart rather than physically, the
damage done is less.
Socially, imaginary excursions into the realms of sexual
fantasy and gratification do not add to the
number of fatherless children roaming our streets, or
lonely single parents.
Commit adultery in your imagination, and you don't
have that kind of consequence to deal with.
Nevertheless, in the sight of God, we're on
the same level.
Adultery in the heart is as serious as
adultery physically.
And here our Lord brings us all down
into the place of real self-examination, and
bids us look at ourselves in the light
of His Word, and of the standard set
for us.
In the words of verse 28, and the
rest of the passage now before us then,
the King of the realm, let's get this
clear, let's get the context, let's get the
backdrop.
The King of the kingdom, He's come to
establish the kingdom of God.
His servants are His subjects.
He is now telling us something about the
mandate, the manifesto of that kingdom.
And He's writing into the manifesto of His
kingdom the fact that not only is adultery
wrong on the physical level, it is wrong
on this other level too.
The righteousness that exceeds the righteousness of the
scribes and the Pharisees requires of us, as
David says it in Psalm 51, Anyone, says
Jesus, who looks at a woman lustfully has
already committed adultery with her in his heart.
Now Jesus' correction was in line with the
tenth commandment, the tenth commandment.
Those of ancient times, as well as their
scribal and pharisaic successors in Jesus' day, were
quite right about adultery as far as they
went.
It is wrong to commit adultery, the physical
act.
The physical act of intercourse between a married
person and anyone other than his or her
lawful spouse is wrong in the sight of
God.
I'm repeating it.
I hope you'll bear with me.
God has gone on record as warning us
against it.
That is wrong.
Nevertheless, to confine adultery to the physical act
alone does not do justice to the law
of God.
Even the ten commandments, if we read them
through and studied them carefully, requires more.
For the tenth commandment says that we shouldn't
covet our neighbor's wife, not covet her.
You shouldn't in your heart of hearts allow
your emotions to fix on a man or
a woman betrothed to another.
You have no right as a creature to
fall in love, as we say, as if
we couldn't.
We couldn't avoid it.
With anyone who is wedded to another person,
a married person is out of bounds for
any one of us.
The tenth commandment said that even to covet
a wife, the wife of another, is wrong.
Moreover, you know, the prophets had something to
say about this and many other things that
come into this larger category.
When they often stressed to the Jewish people
that it was not enough to be circumcised
physically to bear the physical mark of circumcision
in the flesh.
And if you remember the prophets, if you
read them, as I hope you do, you
will discover that over and over again they
were telling Israel, look, they would say, you
must be circumcised of heart, heart circumcision, so
that your heart is turned toward the Lord
and your heart marks you out as a
man or a woman of God.
And not just the fact that you have
circumcision in the body.
In verse 28, therefore, Jesus corrects that inadequate
representation of the divine intent as expressed in
the law as a whole.
And with all his profound personal authority, he
assures his followers that it was all too
possible to commit adultery in the imagination, in
the mind, in the heart.
Now we owe it to Jesus, of course.
And we owe it to ourselves not to
misconstrue his words.
It'd be very easy to do that.
You need to read carefully here.
Note very carefully that Jesus did not say,
and he did not suggest, that looking at
a woman, or a man for that matter,
is necessarily evil.
He did not say that looking at the
human body, the male or the female, is
necessarily evil.
To the pure, says Paul, all things are
pure.
It is not impossible to admire the beauty
of the marvelously made human body, male or
female, and remain pure in the act.
It is not impossible by the grace of
God.
If it were not for that, then you
and I would virtually have to go out
of this world, if we wanted to be
pure.
The sin is not in the looking, but
in the lusting.
You say, what's the difference?
Well, the difference is this.
If you know something about the power of
the grace of God in your soul, you
can admire the physical frame of male or
female, and that can be legitimate, and that
can be pure.
But if you allow the vision of that
body to entice you, and you seek, and
you desire in your soul to use that
body to gratify your lust, and in your
imagination you go through these acts, that is
sin in the sight of God.
That is sin in the sight of God.
You've already committed it.
It's gone on.
Dr. D.
A.
Carson, who once, more than once probably, but
at least once in recent times, spoke at
our summer fellowship gathering here.
He writes as follows.
This is not a prohibition of the normal
attraction which exists between men and women, but
of the deep-seated lust which consumes and
devours, which in imagination attacks and rapes, which
mentally contemplates and then commits adultery.
If our society is easing off from the
prohibition of adultery, how much more does it
cater to our sexual lusts?
Our advertisements sell by sexual titillation.
Our bookstores fill their racks with both the
salacious and the perverted.
The vast majority of pop songs focus on
man-woman relations, usually in terms of satisfying
sex, physical desire, infidelity, and the like.
Into this society, Jesus speaks his piercing word.
Anyone who looks after a woman to lust
after her has already committed adultery in his
heart.
Now, Jesus' correction became the basis of the
whole New Testament teaching about sexual morality.
The apostles of Christ taught an ethic and
a gospel which was in principle altogether unlike
anything taught by the scribes and the Pharisees.
And it was altogether different in many ways,
but specifically now in this respect.
It required heart purity and not just behavioral
consistency on the levels of decency.
Of course, it required behavior that was consistent,
but it required something deeper.
It required heart purity.
It wasn't adequate just to do the right
thing, and be in the right place, and
say the right shibboleths.
Something deeper, something greater was required.
Holiness in the heart.
The Pharisees taught that we should be content
with external adherence to the law.
Jesus requires something different, something beyond that.
To the Pharisees, if you tithe your belongings,
if you said your set prayers, if you
kept the feasts and the Sabbath day regularly
from sunset, from sunrise to sunset, I nearly
put it the other way around, but if
you kept the set feasts and you did
the right things and you were in the
right places, then all's well.
No one expects any more of you.
Jesus said, don't you believe it.
God looks at the heart.
Man judges with the eyes.
God looks at the heart.
There is no holiness in scripture which is
not holiness of heart.
And Jesus wrote this, his correction, let me
repeat, into the manifesto of his kingdom and
under the reign of Jesus to this very
day, this is the normative principle.
Just therefore as he previously taught that anger
was incipient murder, murder in the bud, so
now does Jesus teach that a lustful look
is incipient adultery.
As far as the inner person of the
heart is concerned, he or she can commit
the act in imagination.
Indeed, I think we ought to go beyond
that and say there would be few if
any physical acts of adultery had they not
been already practiced, gone through in the heart.
That's what Jesus said, out of the heart
of man comes forth adultery.
Adultery has generally taken place in the heart
before it becomes a physical reality.
It's been practiced in the imagination.
It's been thought of.
It's been decided.
I'm going to gratify myself.
Then comes the act.
Out of the heart of man proceed evil
thoughts, adulteries, fornication, and the rest of them.
Mark 7, 20 to 23.
Now these words, brothers and sisters, I don't
need to tell you, these words are terribly
challenging.
See, if I was reading from the newspaper
this morning, which of course couldn't be possible.
Newspaper wouldn't have anything like this, anything of
this order for us to read from it
anyway.
But assuming that it did, or I was
reading from a Christian journal, well now, you
and I could shake our heads and say,
well that's so-and-so's view.
And I hope none of you will dare
say this is the view of a man
in the pulpit this morning.
It happens to be my view, but that's
not the important thing.
This is the king speaking.
This is your lord speaking.
This is the savior talking.
This is the incarnate lord addressing the subjects
of his kingdom.
And you can't quarrel with this, my brother
or sister, without quarreling with a king.
This is serious.
The prevailing conception of the seventh commandment, the
personal correction of it by Jesus.
Some considerations of this correction.
Verses 29 to 30.
If your right eye causes you to sin,
what?
Did I get that right?
If your right eye causes you to sin,
gouge it out and throw it away.
And if your right hand causes you to
sin, cut it off and throw it away.
And in each case, it is better for
you to lose one part of your body
than for your whole body to go into
hell.
Now that's not me speaking, that's my lord
and yours, Christian.
Our lord makes it very clear that his
correction of the pharisaic view of adultery has
enormous consequences.
The language of these verses is terribly strong.
Jesus speaks out of a sense of peril.
He is in dead earnest here, you know.
And he's in dead earnest because he sees
where it leads.
And he doesn't want us to face the
danger to which he refers.
Now there are two things I want to
say.
Under this last heading.
The first, it is really to take up
something to which we've already referred.
Not because of lack of other material, there's
much more that could be said.
But I think this is the most important
thing to say.
The need for heart purity is paramount.
The need for purity of heart is paramount.
An impeccable life does not really count for
anything in the sight of God unless it
is the expression of a purity of soul
within.
Men may be content with visible adherence to
the law.
God who reads our hearts requires the heart
in the action and consistent with the action.
Now we see the genius and uniqueness of
the Christian faith in this, as in other
areas.
Not only are its demands greater you notice,
I have to stress this again today.
Some people tell us that the law was
terrifying in its demands and when you come
to the New Testament it's much easier.
Well they've never read the Sermon on the
Mount, that's all I know.
This is far more demanding than anything you
read or hear on Sinai slopes.
It is more demanding because it is repeated.
It is a repetition by the God incarnate
of what was implicit in the 10th commandment,
thou shalt not covet.
But now he makes it explicit and he
applies it and he drives it home and
it becomes part of the manifesto of his
kingdom.
And so it has all the weight of
God the Father and God the Son behind
it and it applies to our Christian era
and age without any question whatsoever.
But we see the genius and the uniqueness
of the Christian faith here.
Its demands are greater, but you see, part
of the glory of our gospel is this,
though its demands are greater, its provisions are
adequate.
There is provision in the gospel promised in
the New Testament and prefigured, fulfilled in Christ
and declared by the Apostle.
There is sufficiency in the gospel to meet
all the requirements of God.
There are certain features you know inbuilt into
the predictions of the Old Testament which underline
what I am feebly trying to say now.
You and I are fairly familiar with the
habit of going back to the Old Testament
and seeing how a savior was promised, a
messiah, the messiah.
And then we trace the messianic passages through
and we say they were fulfilled in our
Lord Jesus Christ.
That's fine.
I hope we do more of it at
Christmas time.
But now listen, there's a slight variation of
that.
Not only is that so, but in the
Old Testament we are told what kind of
salvation to expect from the promised savior.
And unless the gospel preached by men in
the New Testament era comes up to that
which is prophesied about the gospel that was
to come, then it is short of the
reality.
What were the characteristics of the gospel promised
in the Old Testament?
Now for brevity's sake I'm going to confine
myself to a nutshell.
I just want to refer to two or
three main things made very, very clear, for
example, by the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel.
Both of them announced that the new covenant
that God would eventually make with men would
consist of certain things very specifically, very specifically.
Now if you want the record it's found
in Jeremiah 31 verses 31 to 34 and
in Ezekiel 36 verses 25 to 27.
Let me read the Ezekiel passage to you.
I will sprinkle clean water upon you, says
God, and you will be clean.
And I will cleanse you from all your
impurities and from all your idols.
I will give you a new heart and
I will put a new spirit in you
and I will remove from you your heart
of stone and give you a heart of
flesh.
And I will put my spirit in you
and move you to follow my decrees and
to be careful to keep my laws.
Now my friends listen.
On the night in which he was betrayed,
Jesus when he had taken the bread took
the cup.
Do you remember what he said?
This is the new covenant in my blood.
What did you say Jesus?
This is it.
This is what?
This is the gospel that was promised.
This is the salvation that was covenanted.
This is the day of the new covenant
in my blood, what the prophets promised, the
kind of salvation that was to come, as
well as the kind of Savior.
The kind of salvation that was to come
is here in me.
Well you say what is that kind of
salvation?
It's the kind of salvation that gives men
a cleansed heart.
The kind of salvation that takes away the
old carnal heart that we've had from Adam,
that takes us down to sin and shame,
takes away the heart of stone that is
hard towards God, and gives us a new
heart of flesh, sensitive towards God.
Over and above that, that gives us the
spirit of God to indwell our new hearts
and constrains us to walk in his law.
That's the gospel.
So that whenever God commands anything, you see,
he gives us a heart inclined to do
it, and the spirit to enable us to
do it.
And this is the gospel.
And if the gospel does not do that,
then my friends, it's not the gospel.
And any experience that knows nothing of this
is not Christian experience.
Now this is serious.
Someone told me only yesterday on the telephone,
that he'd walked to the front to the
altar, as he put it, at least nine
times, but he still isn't sure what it's
all about.
And he says, I don't know what it
was for.
Oh my dear people, we're living in a
terrible day, when men and women are sometimes
going through the motions of what they deem
constitutes becoming a Christian, but they've not got
down to the realities of it.
And there are those who are leading them
astray.
This is the gospel promised.
He breaks the power of cancelled sin.
He sets the prisoner free.
Time was when people said that education can
do everything you need.
I don't say that anymore.
At least I don't meet them.
Education can do much for us.
But we find today that some of our
most educated people are the greatest of rebels,
morally.
Masters within their own field, but in their
own hearts, lost, degraded, and degrading.
No, no, no, no.
Listen, not even having the truth of God
in our minds, educating our minds, even that
does not save us.
It's got to get deeper.
It's got to reach the heart.
It's got to transform the inner man.
He must be born again.
If any man be in Christ, there is
a new creation.
Old things are passed away.
Behold, everything has become new.
We must not therefore be content with any
head knowledge even of the truth.
Now the other thing I wanted to say,
and with this I shall be closing.
Having been inwardly cleansed and renewed by the
Spirit of God, after that we shall still
have to guard ourselves against the entrance of
polluting influence or influences reaching inwards into our
souls via the sight of the eye, or
the hearing of the ear, or the taste
of the mouth, or the touch of the
hand, or whatever.
See that's what Jesus had in mind when
he said, if your right eye causes you
to sin, cut it out, cut it away.
If your right hand causes you to sin,
cut it off, throw it away.
What's he getting at?
Well now, mark the hypothetical considerations there.
Notice please, it's very important to get this
rightly.
If, that's hypothetical.
This is not a general statement addressed to
everybody.
Christian, you've got to get rid of your
right hand, or your left hand, or your
right eye, or your left eye.
That's not what he's saying.
It all hangs on an if, a hypothetical
case.
If your right eye causes you to sin,
do your eyes cause you to sin?
Do you sin because of what you're looking
at?
Do you find sin invading your soul through
your eyes?
Is your soul impure because of what you
look at or read?
That's the kind of thing he's got in
mind.
If your right eye causes you to sin,
if your right hand causes you to sin,
that's the hypothetical consideration here.
The same principle would hold, of course, if
it were your right ear, or your left
ear for that matter, or your mouth, or
whatever.
Now, the Greek verb for cause you to
sin is a very, very graphic one.
I've been reading again the different expositions of
this in order to try and make it
clear, and I have concluded that so much
is involved in this.
I just want to give it to you
as best I can, very briefly.
The Greek verb for cause you to sin
is, in both verses, comes from a root,
meaning stick of a bait, the stick of
a bait.
Now, we're in the same environment as we
were in when I was talking to the
kids this morning.
People trying to catch something or other in
a trap or in a cage.
It refers to that part of a trap,
the stick or the arm, whatever you call
it, on which you put the bait to
entice a little creature into a cage or
into a trap, okay?
And it's the same little lever that sets
go the mechanism that closes the trap when
once the little creatures come in.
Scandalon, that's the word.
It sets off the mechanism that closes the
door of the trap or the cage once
the animal is inside, you see.
Now, says one of our great Greek scholars
of the last number of years, he says,
behind the use of that language by our
Lord, there are two important pictures dominating his
mind of necessity, if he used this word
meaningfully and deliberately, as we believe he did.
The first is of a hidden stone on
a path.
You can't see it, but you're going on
the path and there's a hidden stone there,
and if you go on the way you're
going to do, you're going to kick against
it and you're going to trip.
Or a variant of that is this.
Somebody has put a string across your path
and has deliberately put it there, and if
you go on the way you're going, you're
going to trip again, you're going to catch
in the cord, and you're going to tumble
over.
That's one picture.
Something on the path against which you're going
to trip.
But now notice a second dominant picture in
the mind, as it were, when you thoughtfully
use this word is this.
It's that of a pit dug a little
bit ahead of you.
It may have been covered by some branches
or some turf or other, you don't see
it, you're walking down the path, you trip
and you throw yourself, you go hurtling into
the pit.
The scandal on is what trips a man
and sends him crashing into the pit, crashing
into destruction.
In the words of Jesus, brothers and sisters,
let me say it to be honest, it
is going crashing to hell.
Jesus says that we must be prepared to
cut off any limb that could cause us
to trip and send us hurtling to hell.
Better a mutilated body in this world, he
says, than a scarless one in hell.
The cost of such mutilation is not excessive,
whether it's gouging out the eye or cutting
off the right hand.
The cost, the pain, is not excessive when
you consider what you're saving yourself from, says
Jesus.
Now, did our Lord mean that we should
literally do that?
Did he mean that we should literally cut
off our right hand or gouge out our
right eyes or right ear or whatever you
have?
Well, there are those who've understood it like
that.
Or again, of Alexandria, living towards the end
of the second century and into the third,
he believed that literally, and he practiced it,
and he practiced it.
He became an extreme ascetic.
He went for months and months and hardly
slept more than a couple of hours, maybe
half an hour a night, sometimes more.
On long stretches, he wouldn't sleep, and he
wouldn't eat, and he wouldn't drink, and people
didn't know how he was alive.
What kept him alive?
He was an extreme ascetic, denying himself not
only possessions but all comforts of the body,
and he finally got himself castrated so that
he would not be sexually tempted.
He cut everything off.
Now, whatever you say about him, his heart
was right with God, for he was prepared
to pay any price not to sin.
Oh, for that spirit in my heart and
yours.
But to return to our Lord's words, gouging
out one's right eye still leaves me with
a left one, doesn't it?
And cutting off my right hand still leaves
me with another one, a left one.
And you see, I can as well lust
with my one left eye as I could
with the right one, or the two of
them.
And I can touch the illicit thing.
I can put my hand on a woman
who is wedded to another man, and I
can tantalize her.
I know exactly what to do.
And my left hand can do it just
as my right can.
So actually, tearing away the right eye or
the right hand doesn't really deal with it
ultimately.
So we conclude, and particularly from a passage
in Matthew chapter 18, I can't go there
now, that probably Jesus did not mean us
to take it literally, but he did mean
us to take it realistically.
And what he was really saying is this.
Look here.
In order to get rid of sin from
your lives, you must cut away every conceivable
thing.
You must break from every conceivable avenue whereby
sin from the outside comes, or temptation comes
from the outside, and entices the sin of
your soul, and you dishonor your Lord.
Whatever causes us to stumble morally should be
tackled with urgency and determination.
I believe that is what our Lord is
saying.
Let me quote to you from William Hendrickson,
who has got a very pungent word here.
He says, Dilly dallying is deadly.
Halfway measures work havoc.
The surgery must be radical.
Right at this very moment, he says, and
without any vacillation, that obscene book needs to
be burned.
That scandalous picture needs to be destroyed.
That soul-destroying film needs to be condemned.
That sinister yet intimate social tie has to
be broken, and the baneful habit discarded.
Cut off the avenues into your soul that
become the agents of the devil, and stir
sin in your innermost being.
Cut them off.
Jesus therefore warns us twice over of this
danger.
Elsewhere we read that even parents, even children,
who stand between us and our Lord Jesus
Christ and obedience to him, we should be
prepared to leave them, to forsake them.
Even children, even parents.
No one, nothing is to be allowed to
pollute the heart and turn it away from
living acceptably to God.
Now I close.
I believe that this is the right interpretation
of this, and you'll find it in Paul's
teaching on the mortification of the flesh.
You can follow it through in Romans chapter
8, verse 13 for example.
If you live according to the sinful nature,
says Paul, you will die.
But if by the spirit you put to
death the misdeeds of the body, you will
live.
That's right.
Do not think about how to gratify the
desires of your sinful nature, or as the
King James puts it, make no provision for
the flesh to satisfy the lust thereof.
Make no provision for it.
Or as he puts it in writing to
the Colossians, put to death therefore whatever belongs
to your earthly nature, sexual immorality, impurity, lust,
evil desires, and greed, which is idolatry.
Put them all to death, says Paul.
Treat them as if they were dead and
don't live for them.
Don't respond to them.
Close your life to them.
Don't let them bring their influences into your
soul.
And yet my friends, we must say, all
this negative side requires the positive.
You and I need, according to the whole
picture of the Sermon on the Mount, not
only to tear things away from us and
to get rid of those things that bring
impurity into our souls and dishonor into our
lives, but we need the power of the
Spirit of God in our hearts, flooding us,
empowering us, ennobling us, bringing the graces of
heaven to glow and to grow within us,
and bringing the grace of God over and
over again, daily renewing us after His image.
We need the power of the Spirit.
We need the love of God in our
hearts.
We need the spiritual positives to complement this
very challenging negative.
As I conclude, I must ask these questions.
Why should I deal thus ruthlessly with occasions
to sin, with the things that cause me
to sin?
One, because if you're a Christian, you live
not for time but for eternity.
This is part and parcel of the Christian
teaching and the Christian conviction that this present
time is only the vestibule of eternity, and
that's where you're going to live.
All this is but the beginning of it,
and as a man or a woman who
means to live with God forever and ever
and ever, you mustn't let this little bit
of time and its transient oddities and beliefs
and aberrations of mind and of principle, you
mustn't be dominated by this.
You're going to live for eternity with God,
and you and I have always got to
remember that.
I've got eternity in my heart.
Therefore, I don't need to finish the sentence.
Neither must we live for ourselves alone.
We must live for others and for the
glory of God in this world, and because
of that, we have to be prepared to
pay the price.
Says Paul to the Corinthians, you are not
your own.
You were bought with a price.
Therefore, glorify God in your body and in
your spirit, both of which belong to him.
Brothers and sisters, I know you have come
under the power of this word as I
have.
Has he been pointing out to you what's
hanging on the walls of your imagination?
The things you indulge in quietly and nobody
else knows, only you and he.
See, we're all on common ground here.
Some of us may never have committed physical
adultery, but on this level, heaven only knows.
But the grace of God, the grace of
God, the pardoning mercy of Christ, the empowering
of the Holy Spirit, God brings to us
into another morning service and says, receive it
from me.
Come now and let us reason together, says
the Lord.
For your sins be as scarlet, they shall
be as snow.
Though they be red like crimson, they shall
be as wool.
God says that, and he who has begun
a good work in you will continue it
until the day of Jesus Christ.
Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift
and his unrivaled grace.
Let us pray.
Father, you alone know where we are, and
we ask that by your infinite grace, you
will make clear to us that you can
come just where we are and lift our
burdens, cleanse our sins, pardon our transgressions, renew
your Spirit's work within us, and grant us
yet again a new beginning.
O Lord, who makest all things new, breathe
on us today.
Breathe on us breath of God, fill us
with life anew, that we may love what
thou dost love, and do what thou wouldst
do.
For Jesus' sake, amen.