Minimum Daily Requirements?
We return this morning to the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. His words in the part of the text we will be considering concern three issues that stir up a great deal of emotion and controversy. They will be words that touch painful spots in many of your lives this morning! I am not without awareness of that. So, as we work our way through His teaching about sexual purity, marital faithfulness, and keeping covenant - I urge you to stay with me. Before you start to mentally object, or rationalize, or even agree ... finish the message with me, then process the words prayerfully and allow them to shape your mind and heart. Then you will live a life that is pleasing to Him filled with a true holiness.
PRAYER.
Some Believers parse the words of the Scripture looking for the minimum daily requirements, for a way to be sure that they are right with God, while retaining the right to live as they choose. When they treat the Scriptures like a lawyer treats the law, looking for loopholes, trying to extract the finest point of compliance from what they read - they miss the point entirely!
In a moment we will read texts in which Jesus speaks to Adultery, Divorce, and Making Oaths. These texts have been some of the most tortured in the Bible for centuries as people have tried to determine some imaginary line in their sexual behavior that is the limit of God’s tolerance, or as people look for a way to escape their marriage and yet keep a good conscience, or as people seek a way to break a promise and still think of themselves as having integrity. Jesus’ words are binding, but they are not law in the sense that we should look for the minimal way to comply! They are principle that guide us to a radical life of discipleship. They are words that point us in the direction of the best life, the whole life, the life that enjoys God’s favor! As such, the spirit of the what He says, as much as the letter of the words should be what guides.
So, what did He say? Though this passage is broken into three sub-sections in most of your Bibles, I will be reading it as a unit. What Jesus is saying here is best understood when it is heard all together.
Text - Matthew 5:27-37
There is probably no more problematic area of human relationships for Christians than sexuality.
Some Believers are repressed prudes - refusing to acknowledge that sex is a gift of God to be enjoyed. Others are caught up in the flood of sensuality that is overwhelming in our culture. So they worship lust!
Because sexuality is so misused and misunderstood, there are millions of people who are terribly scarred by the sins of others.
∙ People, both men and women, who were sexually abused in their childhood must experience a great deal of healing to be able to accept their sexuality as a gift of God.
∙ People who were indoctrinated by parents against their stirring of sexuality must deal with shame and guilt before they can victoriously wrestle with the temptations to lust and turn those longings into a renewing relationship with a loving spouse.
Why am I saying this?
Because each of reads the words of Jesus through a filter of our experiences. We may make them mean more than they do, or we may dismiss them as hopelessly idealistic, or we might even refuse to accept them because we find them overwhelming and too challenging to even consider as being true!
In order to understand what Jesus is actually saying to us here, let’s review the basic truth of the Word about human sexuality.
(If you desire more information about Christian sexuality, see the sermon page on the website.)
1. Sex is not dirty, nor is it inherently sinful! It is God’s idea and a gift to us.
2. Sex is a powerful part of our humanity.
It has procreative power! Everything else we do in life - writing a poem, building a house, painting a picture... - will eventually be erased with time’s passing.. But, when we have sex there is the potential of creating an eternal being who will exist forever!
It has relational power! Sex connects a man and women for a lifetime. The Bible says that when we have intercourse we become ‘one’ with the other person! That is not just describing the physical union. There is a bonding that is also emotional and spiritual. A promiscuous person seriously damages his ability to form strong, close, and intimate ties to others, for he dilutes the power bonding force of sexuality.
3. Sex is to be kept within the covenant relationship of marriage. The purposes of our sexuality find their
fullness only inside the safety of committed love of marriage!
Remember the standard that Jesus laid down for those of us who are His followers?
"....unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven." His call to us is that we must get beyond putting up a good front. We must be more than religious in appearance. We must have pure hearts by the power of the Holy Spirit. And now He extends that standard to our sexuality.
Many Believers think they are meeting God’s standards of holiness in their sexuality as long they are not actually having intercourse outside of their marriage. We comfort ourselves by maintaining that what goes on behind our eyes in the secret place of our mind is a private matter. Jesus Christ, however, reminds us that is not true.
Who we are flows out of what we think. Whatever fills our minds will eventually make its way into our words and most likely into our actions!
Jesus reminds us that just as murder begins with an attitude of contempt and hatred, so adultery begins with the fantasy of captivating another for the purpose of sexual pleasure. By this definition, virtually none of us in this room this morning who are past the age of adolescence could escape the label adulterer.
If we are absolutely honest there are times when each one of us - regardless of our age, whether we are male or female, young or old- has gone beyond saying, “She’s attractive!” to admiring another too much. By this admission, we are also taken down from our lofty perch of self-righteousness and made to realize how very much we need the Spirit of God to be at work in our lives if we hope to honor God and live pleasing in His sight.
So, Jesus tells us - deal with the thoughts before they begin to form themselves into plans to sin!
A BIG Q- Why do people commit adultery?
Why are we tempted to fantasize about intimacy with a person other than our spouse?
In a simplistic way, we could just pass all temptation to sin sexually off to Satan and his demons, but that would not be helpful. Yes all sin is ultimately traceable back to Satan, but we also know this: Satan uses our unmet needs and our damaged expectations against us. He exploits any weakness to destroy us, including our sexuality! His strategy is to get us to misuse the gifts that God has given to us.
Or we can blame hormones! “Well,” we can rationalize, “this is normal and natural. Everybody has these kinds of thoughts.” That is partially true, as well.
The fact is that sexual sin is fueled by unmet needs - emotional, physical, and relational!
Therefore, the best defense against sexual sin is having a life full of rich friendships that appropriately fill our need for love and significance. A person, man or woman, who has built a strong network of support is much, much less likely to sin sexually.
I am very sad for those who are in marriages where deep emotional needs are left unmet. There are all kinds of reasons for this. Left-over guilt, psychological damage, religious hang-ups, unnecessary shame... and a hundred other factors conspire to keep husbands and wives alone even while they are married. Those lonely people are tempted to look outside the marriage for what they have not found in it.
Most of us would assume that physical sex is the great attraction in adulterous affairs. The fact is, most of the time, sex is being used to cover another problem or need in the life of the adulterer. People turn to sex to try to eliminate loneliness, feelings of worthlessness, feelings of powerlessness, among other things.
That is why Jesus wants us to become whole, healed people from the inside out. As we face our fears, as we speak honestly about our longings, as we admit to our temptations; as we allow the Spirit of God to teach us about ourselves - we are then able to find the answers that we really need. Those answers, by the way , are not "faster horses, younger women, and more money" to quote the lyrics of an old Country Western song. What we really want is intimacy, closeness, and long-lasting love.
That kind of intimacy cannot be found in an affair with a co-worker or in fantasy relationships with women posed in pornography on your computer.. Those who live a lie will ultimately feel the corrosion of their dishonesty at the depth of their soul. They may feel a passing physical thrill in the arms of their illicit lover, but the intimacy will not last. A gnawing guilt, an anguishing shame, a sense of cheap lust will overtake the adulterous man or woman. Don’t be deceived.
Jesus used some exaggeration to help us to understand how vigorously we must resist the lie of temptation.
"So if your eye—even your good eye—causes you to lust, 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." (Matthew 5:29, NLT)
In powerfully symbolic language His message is this, "a limited but morally healthy life is better than a wider life which is depraved.... If certain books, places, activities, or people cause us to sin they must be rejected at any cost."
1 Tyndale Commentary, The Gospel of Matthew, pg. 69
Close
DIVORCE
In vv. 31 and 32, Jesus relates this to the subject of divorce. Basically, what He says is this - “You can make it legal, but that doesn’t make it right!”
Some men in that day, just as some today, felt that they could avoid offending God and still have their roving eye. If they fancied another woman other than the one to whom they were married, they took care of that by giving their wife a legal ‘any cause’ divorce, but they did not consider the awful cost to the divorced nor to themselves. For the sake of convenience they were breaking covenant legally, but God was not going along with it.
Despite have their paperwork all in order, they became - in God’s eyes - adulterers when they married again!
Jesus tells us clearly, God knows the heart. It may look and be legal and still be morally offensive. Again His call to His followers is to a higher standard of life-long commitment under covenant before God.
There are complicating factors about which I will not preach today. The essential point is that we cannot simply think that we can make our lusting and leering legal and figure that God has been fooled. Our righteousness must be genuine, not merely in appearance.
To try to find grounds for divorce in this passage, misses the point entirely! There are limited reasons given in the Word for which a marriage can be ended. But, the truth is – ask any person whose been through a divorce - it is always painful, always difficult, and almost always creates as many problems as it solves.
I do have time to treat that subject in depth today.
Do take these thoughts away-
Care for your marriage!
Work on fidelity of the heart as much as fidelity of the body!
Tend your love, forgive much.....
And if you’re not yet married, marry carefully for the person that you give yourself to is yours for life!
And finally, Jesus speaks to the integrity of His followers. I believe He did so, because the two issues He just discussed are - first and foremost - issues of integrity.
Read vv.33-37
The most solemn promise you have ever made or will ever make, is the promise to become the spouse of another. Did you make it from the heart before God and man?
Is your word trustworthy in all areas of life?
Jesus says here that as His followers our words should be absolutely honest. Our lives, He says, should be so transparent that no one has to walk away asking themselves, "what does he really mean?"
Sadly we live in a time when words are cheap, when we care more for what is legal than what is right. So, we devise complex contracts to try to cover every anticipated contingency. In business, the simplest tasks now require long, detailed contracts that spell out how everyone must perform. When one party fails to fulfil the contract, the weight of the law can be invoked to bring about compliance.
Increasingly people are entering into legal contracts before they are married called pre-nuptial agreements. That says a lot about how much men and women trust each other.
Jesus says that for you and me, as His followers, none of this should be necessary.
We should do what we say we will do.
We should pay our bills on time and in full.
We should show up for work ready to give a full day’s work.
We should speak honestly about one another without playing games of meaning.
Friend, give careful attention to this matter of honesty. Don’t try to imitate the clever, but deceptive double meanings that are so often characteristic of the world. Say exactly what you mean. Let your "yes" mean "yes" and your "no" mean "no" with no reservation.
A wonderful place to start this practice is in your home! Be direct, loving, and honest.
Close:
Are you feeling alone today?
Has Satan exploited those feelings this week by making sure you took note of the curvature of that woman’s body and planted the thought that she seems interested and would really make you happy?
Has that star on the TV seem so much more appealing and understanding than the insensitive clod that you’re married to so much so that you find yourself wondering what it would be like to have a romantic fling?
Are you tempted to be guided by the urge for pleasure?
Are you feeding fantasies with movies and magazines that don’t really encourage healthy intimacy with real human beings?
Hear the words of Jesus this morning.
Ask God to show you His love. Ask Him to begin to heal your inner person so that you can understand and give genuine intimacy to another person. Tell yourself the truth about your needs and your thoughts, your fantasies.
Don’t hide behind double meanings or even legalities. Remind yourself that the God who knows your heart is the silent listener to every conversation.
Be changed to a genuinely holy person from the inside out by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Amen
Jerry D. Scott, copyright 2007
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