Title: Just a second rate playmate
Text: 1 Cor 13:3-6
MP: While the passion of lust and love can feel the same, the difference is it’s ultimate direction. Love is outward-focused, lust is focused on itself
FCF: We all want to be loved, and we have been.
Outline:
1. Malcolm Muggeridge & the Leper
2. This week, Anna Nicole Smith
3. Her “mentor” Marilyn Monroe
4. Lust fails because it is not love
a. Literally is looking to itself
b. The desire is the desire to be loved, not to love
c. Ultimate act of love: “The Cross”
5. Mother Teresa
a. Father died at 7
b. Something Beautiful for God – the lighting
c. Loved because she loved.
Malcolm Muggeridge was looking to feel love. He had been traveling the world as a reporter, many months away from his wife and children, and was now stuck in a 3rd world country, desperate to be held.
He tells of the time he decided to bathing out in a river in this country. As he waded into the water, he noticed a bit up the river, a woman bathing alone. From the back, her curves were alluring, but she was obviously poor.
He had made up his mind that he was going to act like one of the locals. It was not uncommon for a man, seeing a woman undressed, to take advantage of her, and simply pay her for her services after. He rationalized it: He was lonely, and she was available. Who hasn’t felt this way?
But Muggeridge was a lesson that he never forgot. He got to see the true emptiness of his lust unadorned. As he made his way up the stream to the naked woman in the distance, she turned around. Half of her face had rotted away from leprosy. She had been bathing alone because of the disease which forced her out of the company of mankind.
Looking into her face, he wanted to rail against her for enticing her so. Looking into the cavity at this unclean woman, he stopped and he realized who was the more unclean of the two. She had been consumed by a disease that ate at her flesh to be sure, but he had had given full throttle to a cancer that consumed his heart. He repented mightily.
As we continue in our series on the Seven Deadly Sins this week, I want to look at lust. It’s the easiest sin to identify. We all know that it’s wrong to go to those stores that sell those magazines or look at those websites. And yet, we do it anyway.
Advocates of pornography want to say “lust is natural,” and it is. But deserts are all natural too. It doesn’t mean I should live there.
Understand that lust is nothing less than a manifestation of love that has gone awry. It is the cry of a desperate heart to be loved. And who could argue with that? The only problem is, love was never meant to gratify itself. It may have that effect, but when we seek love strictly with the motive of gratifying ourselves, we turn around and find what had been beautiful from the back is hideous in its face.
Not all of us regularly hit the porn, but we all face the temptation to seek to be loved more so than to love. This morning, I want to suggest to you that if you struggle with lust to your last ounce of energy, or if it is just another sin among many, there is a solution. As the Beatles said, All you need is Love.
But Love, properly understood, isn’t something out of a love song. If you want to know what love is, there is no better place to find out than 1 Cor 13. Hear what Paul has to say about love.
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Who wouldn’t want that? But, how we go about getting that makes all the difference.
The news is finally beginning to focus on something other than Anna Nicole Smith, but in the last few weeks, we have been treated (and I use that word advisedly) to what is perhaps the most in-your-face object lesson on lust I’ve seen in a long time.
Ms. Smith’s father had left the family by the time she was 2.
Seeking the approval of men, she rose to a certain notoriety of sorts as Playboy’s 1993 Playmate of the Year. Not to be outdone, she continued to parlay her lust to win the heart of a geriatric millionaire, J. Howard Marshall.
In 2004, she arrived at the American Music Awards, probably drunk, her voice slurred. As she stepped forward to accept an award, she stroked her curves and managed to say, “Like my body?” You’d think that a woman finally receiving a national honor would have been able to enjoy it more – but she was so taken by lust she couldn’t even recognize love anymore.
It should come then, as no surprise, what happens to a woman who makes a name for herself by selling by her body. When she died, the body was still there, even if she wasn’t. Three different men are claiming to be the father of her 5 month old, and two parties are fighting for the right to her remains.
It’s an ugly, sordid affair that speaks volumes about lust, and just highlights how little love is there. Ask me if the words ‘patient’ or ‘kind’ apply? Ask yourself if words like ‘rude’ or ‘seeking its own way’ might describe it better.
I’m always sad when a person dies, but I have to tell you, this is one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen. For a woman who just wanted some love, there is clearly none to be found. But that’s how lust works.
Don’t be deceived, God is not mocked. That which you sow, so shall you reap.
And Anna Nicole Smith should have known better. Her idol was Marilyn Monroe. Like Smith, she grew up in a broken home. Eighty years after her death, there is no clear consensus on who her father was. Ms. Monroe was married just after her 16th birthday, not because she was so in love with a man, but rather to avoid going into yet another foster home, as she had been bounced around so many times. Her first husband, James Dougherty says he loved her, but she loved her modeling career more. That’s what she chose
By all accounts, Marilyn Monroe was desperate for love. But because she kept confusing love with lust, she was never able to accept it when it came.
In 1952, she married the baseball star Joe DiMaggio. He wanted a private honeymoon, but she still went out and sought the paparazzi. He wanted to quietly love her, she was determined to get love from as many places as she could find it. A year later, a “businessman” launched his magazine by publishing pictures of his wife.
That marriage couldn’t last because she wasn’t willing to accept that she could be loved. So caught up in lust, she had forgotten what love is.
It is perhaps ironic, that when she died, Monroe’s first husband, a police officer, simply replied “I’m sorry to hear that.” DiMaggio, on the other hand, started the tradition that added to her mystique. Every year, a rose appeared. For years, nobody knew it was DiMaggio, but it was.
Love is like that. It’s quiet and unassuming. Frankly, the noise and bustle around lust makes it incompatible with love. We all know that we want love, so, why do we settle for lust?
Because it gives us a false sense of control. It’s as simple as that.
Love and lust may both share the same passion, but it’s obvious when it’s seeking after itself and when its not.
Love is risky because you can’t be in control. You can’t demand love. It’s something that is given freely.
If, like many men and even women, you are snared by lust, you know the need to be loved. It’s easy to presume the market mentality that says, ‘if you need something, go out and get it.’
But, at the risk of sounding like a cliché, can I suggest to you that giving love is far more likely to succeed.
No one would confuse Agnes Bojaxhiu with either Anna Nicole Smith or Marilyn Monroe, but she shared in the broken family. Born in 1910 in an obscure little town in the even more obscure little country of Macedonia, Agnes lost her father at the age of 7.
Looking for love, she never found it a mere man, but by the age of 18, she knew could find it in her Saviour. That year, she decided to become a nun, and devote her life to Jesus. Twenty years later, she convinced the Vatican and the City of Calcutta to let her start a hospice in an old abandoned Hindu Temple.
There, amongst thousands of abandoned and thrown off people, she was committed to giving them love before they died.
In 1968, our journalist, Mr. Muggeridge, found out about this “Blessed Teresa” and decided to make a movie. It was called Something Beautiful for God. He says that as they were filming, the camera crew warned him that the darkness of the rooms and the alleyways in which she worked would make for film that was too dark to see. But when they got back to the editing room, they found it was fine. Muggeridge later said, “It was probably the glow of her love that lit the film.”
My brothers and sisters, I won’t lie to you. The bright intense heat of lust easily overpowers the light of love that we seek. But the heat is temporary, whereas the light is forever.
If you are set on getting love for yourself, you will never find it. And when you think you have, it may turn around and expose its leprosy-like hideousness. But if you seek to give love instead, you will find a Savior right behind you, who will never be out-loved. You can be loved, if only you’ll choose to give it away.
Long Branch Baptist Church
Halfway, Virginia; est. 1786
Sunday, March 04, 2007
Enter to Worship
Prelude David Witt
Meditation Psalm 100
Invocation Michael Hollinger
*Opening Hymn #508
“Love Lifted Me”
Welcome & Announcements
Morning Prayer [See Insert]
*Hymn #643
“O Lord, You’re Beautiful”
*Responsive Lesson [See Right]
*Hymn #708
“Behold, What Manner of Love”
Offertory Mr. Witt
*Doxology
Praise God from whom all blessings flow / Praise Him all creatures here below
Praise him above, ye heavenly host / Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Amen.
*Scripture
Sermon
Lust: Just a Second-Rate Playmate
Invitation Hymn #648
“Love Divine, All Love Excelling”
*Benediction
*Congregational Response
May the grace of Christ our Savior / And the Father’s boundless love
With the Holy Spirit’s favor / Rest upon us from above. Amen.
* Congregation, please stand.
Depart To Serve
RESPONSIVE LESSON
“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 that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away.
For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.
I have made a covenant with my eyes; how then could I gaze at a virgin?
We all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.
So put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires,
The time that is past suffices for doing what the Gentiles do,
living in sensuality, passions, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties, and lawless idolatry.
Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, evil passions and evil desires.
Renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age.
For all that is in the world— the desires of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and pride in possessions—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.
Do not desire her beauty in your heart, and do not let her capture you with her eyelashes. But now let me show you a more excellent way:
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.
Mt 5:27-30; Job 31:1; Eph 2:3; Na 3:4; Eph 4:22; 1 Pe 4:3; Col 3:5; Tit 2:12; 1 Jn 2:16-17; Pr 6:25; 1 Co 13:4-8
ANNOUNCEMENTS
DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME begins next week, Sunday, March 11th. By act of Congress, it’s early this year as an energy saving measure. Be sure to set your clocks forward one hour. After that, be sure to come an hour earlier for Sunday School at 9am!
Our after-church fellowship is coming up soon. Please mark your calendars.
I will be in class this week in Lanham, MD. My cell phone (703) 307-0065 will actually be on. Please don’t hesitate call if something comes up.
PRAYER LIST
- Lillian & Natalie’s Schulz’s sister
- Corey Keely
- Andy Phelps
- Majorie Taylor
- Irene Griffith
- Martha Puryear
- Warren Lee
- Susan Schulz
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things
