This morning we’ll wrap up our sermon series on the hard sayings of Jesus. Obviously in 8 weeks we haven’t covered all the hard things Jesus said, but I think we have looked at enough of what Jesus said to get a pretty good feel for why much of what He taught was so hard to understand and apply. Together these hard sayings reveal that becoming a disciple of Jesus and living according to the principles of His kingdom requires a serious commitment to let Jesus radically transform every area of one’s life. So it’s not surprising that both in Jesus’ day and in our present culture not a lot of people are willing to yield the control of their life like that.
As we saw a few weeks ago when Jesus talked about eating His flesh and drinking His blood, Jesus often used metaphors to explain kingdom principles, which made it even more difficult for His audience to understand exactly what He meant. This morning, we’ll see another example of that kind of metaphorical language. Unlike I’ve done in previous weeks, I’m going to begin this morning by reading the surrounding text along with the hard saying itself. So go ahead and turn to Matthew 5 and follow along as I read beginning in verse 27:
“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.
(Matthew 5:27-30 ESV)
Obviously the hard saying here has to do with tearing out one’s eye and throwing it away and cutting off one’s hand and throwing it away. Unfortunately, throughout history there have been Christians who have tried to apply those commands quite literally in order to deal with some sin in their lives. But since they completely missed Jesus’ main point here, in every case they found that those physical actions were totally ineffective in trying to overcome sin in their lives.
That is because the main point Jesus is trying to make here is that…
Overcoming sin in my life
is more a matter of heart work than hard work
Although Jesus is specifically dealing with the sin of adultery here, the principles that we find in His words can be applied to any sin that we are dealing with in our lives. This particular passage is in the midst of a section of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus is pointing out that keeping the law is not merely a matter of what we do externally, but instead is primarily a matter of what is in our heart. Jesus began that portion of His sermon by pointing out that He had not come to abolish the law, but rather to fulfil it. And right before He begins to give some illustrations about the importance of the heart, Jesus sets the table with these important words:
For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
(Matthew 5:20 ESV)
Jesus is confirming here what we have learned as we have examined some of His hard sayings: External religiosity is inadequate as a basis for entering His kingdom. We tend to have a fairly negative view of the scribes and Pharisees because of how Jesus often confronted their external religiosity. But there is little doubt that these were some of the most righteous men in that culture, at least based on their outward behavior. But even that level of human righteousness was inadequate to earn entrance into the kingdom of heaven.
That is why, as we have seen, over the last 8 weeks, the only way to enter the kingdom is to place one’s trust totally and completely in the finished work of Jesus and to receive the righteousness that He offers through faith in Him. And, as we’ve seen, that kind of genuine faith will be evidenced by submitting our lives to the Lordship of Jesus and allowing Him to be in charge of our lives. While that kind of faith consistently results in an outward life that is consistent with Jesus’ teaching, it is still a matter of the heart and not a matter of hard work on our part.
So with that in mind, let me draw your attention to what I believe is the key to understanding what Jesus was teaching here. Look at verse 28 again:
But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
According to Jesus, when did the sin of adultery occur? Is it when the man looks at the woman? A lot of the commentators that I read this week, made a big deal about how the verb “looks” here is a present tense verb which indicates a continuing action. So they conclude that it is not the first glance that is the sin, but rather the continuing gaze after that first glance. While there is certainly some truth in that analysis, that’s not where the sin occurs.
Or is it the “lustful intent” that is the sin? That phrase could literally be translated “with the purpose of lusting.” As one commentator pointed out, seeing a woman and being attracted to her is a “natural part of the God-created appetite and a good indicator that one is alive.” So in his view the sin is not the gaze itself but rather the fact that the purpose of the gaze is to lust.
I think we’re getting really close to determining at what point the sin takes place, but we’re not quite there yet. Notice that Jesus says here that the man who looks at a woman in this way “has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” In other words, the lustful gaze is just the manifestation of the sin that has already taken place in the heart.
Pastor John MacArthur puts it like this:
It is not lustful looking that causes the sin in the heart, but the sin in the heart that causes lustful looking. The lustful looking is but the expression of a heart that is already immoral and adulterous. The heart is the soil where the seeds of sin are imbedded and begin to grow.
Jesus confirms this truth again a little later in His ministry:
And he said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”
(Mark 7:20-23 ESV)
It is not merely the external actions that constitute sin in our lives. Sin always begins in the heart. That is why…
Overcoming sin in my life
is more a matter of heart work than hard work
So when Jesus starts talking about tearing out eyes and cutting off hands, He is obviously not claiming that there is a physical solution to the problem of sin. He is not saying that we deal with the sin in our lives by chopping whatever body parts that are used to commit that sin.
So what is He saying then? We can summarize His teaching here like this:
Sin is a serious matter…
with eternal consequences…
that must be dealt with radically
Let’s look at each of these elements briefly:
Sin is a serious matter…
Jesus is clearly commanding His followers to take definitive action to deal with their sin. The underlying grammar of the verbs “tear it out”, “cut it off” and “throw it away” indicate that these are all emphatic commands that call for urgent action. Essentially Jesus is saying they need to do this right now because it is critically important.
Sin is a serious matter to God and until we come to see our sin the same way God sees it, it is going to be really difficult for us to deal with that sin in our lives.
with eternal consequences…
Twice in this passage, Jesus makes it clear that those who don’t take sin seriously and deal with it accordingly are in danger of having their bodies thrown into hell. Jesus confirms here that hell is a real, physical place and that those who won’t accept the righteousness that He promises to give them if they will trust Him completely, will live eternally in a place of physical torment.
that must be dealt with radically
As we’ve pointed out already, Jesus wasn’t talking here about physical surgery. After all, just removing one eye and cutting off one hand wouldn’t solve the problem with lustful gazing since that person would still have another eye and another hand.
But it is significant here that Jesus specifically mentions the right eye and the right hand. In Hebrew thought, the right eye, the right arm and the right leg were viewed as the best parts of a man. So when Jesus specifically speaks of the right eye and the right hand, His audience would have understood that He was saying that if there was anything in one’s life that would cause him to sin, even if it was the best he had, that needed to be removed from his life.
Jesus is teaching that sin must be dealt with immediately and decisively. It needs to be cut off, not tapered off. That’s why Paul wrote these words:
Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.
(Colossians 3:5 ESV)
Sometimes that means taking some action to remove ourselves from a place where we might be tempted. I’m reminded of a guy who was on a diet so he no longer stopped by his favorite donut shop on the way to work every morning. But one morning he showed up for work with a dozen donuts. One of his co-workers said, “I thought you were on a diet and quit going to the donut shop.” The guy said, “I did. But this morning I just happened to be driving by there and I prayed to God and said, ‘God, if you want me to have some donuts this morning, let there be a parking place right in front.’ And don’t you know it, on the 7th time around the block there it was.”
Or there was the man who decided to quit smoking. So he took all his cigarettes, lighters, ash trays and everything else associated with his smoking and buried it all in his back yard. And then he put a large rock over the top to mark the spot.
Neither eating donuts nor smoking is automatically a sin for everyone. But in both of these cases neither of those guys used very good judgment since they were just putting themselves in a place where they would be tempted to go back to what was sin for them.
So if there is some action we can take that is going to lessen the possibility of us getting caught up in some sin, we ought to take it. But ultimately, as we’ve seen this morning, overcoming sin in my life is more dependent on my heart than any work I can do. As we concluded earlier…
Overcoming sin in my life
is more a matter of heart work than hard work
But the question we still need to answer this morning is: How do I do that? We need to see if we can’t get a better handle on what we mean by “heart work” and what that should look like in our lives.
The good news is that we don’t have to do that heart work alone. In fact, the kind of heart work that is required is actually God’s work, rather than ours. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have an important role to play in that work.
When we become Jesus’ disciple our entire way of thinking should be transformed since, as Paul reminds us, we have been given the mind of Christ:
“For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.
(1 Corinthians 2:16 ESV)
Not only that, but once we become Jesus’s disciple, the Holy Spirit comes to dwell permanently in our lives.
Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you?
(1 Corinthians 3:16 ESV)
Having the mind of Christ and having the Holy Spirit dwelling in our lives means it is possible to develop a heart that will help me overcome sin in my life. But that doesn’t mean that kind of heart will be developed automatically. I have to be actively involved in that process by cooperating with the work God is doing in my life.
So while I don’t want to discount or diminish in any way the fact that this is God’s work, I am going focus on our role in the process because that is the thing over which we have control.
In his letter to the churches in Rome, Paul gives us some instruction about our role in the process of heart work:
Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness.
(Romans 6:12-13 ESV)
Notice that Paul give a number of commands to the disciples of Jesus who comprise his audience. These are things that they must do in order to cooperate with God as He does the work of changing their hearts. Two of those commands are worded negatively – they are not to let sin reign in their bodies or to present their body parts as instruments for unrighteousness. The third command is worded positively and it communicates the way that they are to carry out those first two negative commands. They are to do that by developing a mindset in which they constantly and consistently present their entire lives to God, remembering that He has brought them from death to life.
Paul communicates that same idea in a slightly different way later in that same letter:
But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.
(Romans 13:14 ESV)
This time he starts with the positively worded command – put on the Lord Jesus Christ – and then concludes with what we are not to do – make provision for the flesh. The command to put on the Lord Jesus indicates that there is something we must do. But obviously Paul is not commanding us to engage in some physical action in which we put on Jesus. Clearly he is encouraging us to develop a mindset in which we put Jesus in control of everything in our lives.
I’m going to close this morning with a video that I hope will demonstrate how this process is to work in a very practical way. So as you watch this video I want you to think about how it applies to the kind of heart work we’ve been talking about this morning.
[Show “The Backwards Brain Bicycle” video]
At the end of his video, Destin rightly concludes that that all of us are looking at the world with a bias. That is essentially what we’ve learned over the last 8 weeks. Every person has to choose whether he or she is going to approach life as a citizen of this world or as a citizen of the kingdom of heaven. And I think the video did a great job of reminding us about some of the important contrasts between those two kingdoms.
The kingdom of God is a lot like that backwards bicycle. Things tend to operate in a way that is completely contrary to the way they operate in this world. So operating in God’s kingdom is often just as difficult as trying to ride a backward bicycle. At least in part, that is because this world has programmed our minds to operate in a certain way that soon becomes as natural to us as riding a bike. And trying to change that mindset is not easy. As Destin said in the video, “Once you have a rigid way of thinking in your head, sometimes you cannot change that even if you want to.”
But as we also saw in the video, with the proper training, it is possible to eventually change the way we think. During that process, people may make fun of us and we may have some wrecks, but eventually a new pathway in our brain gets unlocked. But, especially early in that process, it is easy to get sidetracked by distractions and easily go back to our old way of thinking. That reminds us that being a disciple of Jesus is a process and we’ll have some setbacks in that journey, but the key is to make sure that we’re making consistent progress.
And, as we saw with Destin’s son, the longer we have been living according to our old way of thinking, the harder it is for us to unlearn that old way of thinking and begin thinking in concert with the thoughts of Jesus. That is why it is so important that we not wait to commit our lives to Jesus and become His disciple.
Finally, we saw that it is always possible to revert to our old way of thinking, but the longer and more consistently we are immersed in a new way of thinking, the less likely that will occur.
More than anything this video reminds us that doing the heart work that is required to overcome sin is primarily a matter of carefully guarding what we allow to go into our minds. That is not merely a matter of filtering out those things which might develop sinful thoughts, as important as that is. But as Paul reminds us, it also means filling our minds with the things that are consistent with the kingdom of heaven. Let’s close by reading this verse out loud together:
Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.
(Philippians 4:8 ESV)
