Intro
I need you to think way back to July 23rd we began a series, do you remember what it was? We began a series looking at the seven deadly sins. Allow me to do just a little bit of review for you. The Seven Deadly Sins are not found listed in the Bible, but they are a list of sinful attitudes which some of the early church fathers compiled as those most harmful and deadly to the soul, from which most other sins stemmed from. The list was compiled as a tool for self examination so that a person could confess their sin and ask God for help.
We started by looking at pride, then in week two we examined the dangers of envy, and then we looked at anger. We have four more deadly sins to consider and this week we are looking at the sin of lust. While the word “lust” literally means strong desire, or craving and can be used to describe someone’s lust for power or someone’s lust for life, that’s not what the church fathers had in mind when they listed it.
Lust is an intense or unrestrained sexual craving. Frederick Buechner says, “Lust is the craving for salt by a man who is dying of thirst.” Another writer said, “Lust is the athlete’s foot of the mind.” And friends it should come as no surprise to you that we are increasingly becoming a sex obsessed culture. Allow me to list some statistics:
• The number of porn sites in 1998: 71,831, In 2001: 311,652, In 2003: 1.3 million
• The amount of money the porn industry makes in a year is more than that of the NBA, Major League Baseball, and the NFL combined.
• The average age for a child to see porn is 11 years old.
• 68% of all Prime-time programming and 84% of situation comedies, contain sexual content 10% offer strong suggestions of sexual intercourse
• According to The National Center For Missing and Exploited Children, reported incidents of sexual exploitation have risen dramatically. In 1998, the Center received 4,573 reports. In 2003 the number of incidents rose to 81,987.
• The percentage of female readers of Today’s Christian Woman online newsletter who admitted intentionally accessing Internet porn: 34
• A recent survey conducted by the National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families surveyed students at five Christian colleges. Sixty-eight percent of the male students said they had intentionally looked for pornography on the Internet. Ten percent of those surveyed admitted to frequent use of pornography, and five percent acknowledged having a problem with pornography.
• The Justice Department estimates that 9 of 10 children between the ages of 8 and 16 have been exposed to pornography online. Software company Symantec found that 47 percent of school-age children receive pornographic spam on a daily basis. And representatives from the pornography industry told the Child Online Protection Act Commission that as much as 20 to 30 percent of the traffic to some pornographic websites is children.
Friends the lure of lust is everywhere. There are times driving down the street where I have seen bus shelter posters that I wouldn’t allow on my 12 year old son’s bedroom wall. Within the Canadian culture there is an ever loosening of sexual standards and don’t fool yourself we can’t help but be affected by them. Nobody is immune to its lure and no one is above the danger of falling.
While running for the office of President of the United States, Jimmy Carter received intense scrutiny for admitting to a reporter: “I’ve looked on the lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times…” Buddha said, “Of all the worldly passions, lust is the most intense. All other worldly passions seem to follow in its train. A 13th century Muslim poet revealed the strength of lust’s pull when he wrote, “An enemy to whom you show kindness becomes your friend, excepting lust, the indulgence of which increases its enmity.”
King David
Friend, no one is immune to the lure of this sin. The Bible says that King David was a man after God’s heart. He was a man who was emotionally mature, he new intimately what was going on in his heart and his own self awareness enabled him to write some of the most insightful poetry and songs dealing with human emotion in all of literature and yet he fell. But perhaps we can learn some lessons of how he could have remained strong if we look at his story. (Read 2 Sam. 11:1 – 5)
David fed his habit
Actually the story of David’s falling prey to lust begins earlier than his encounter with Bathsheba. You see David’s fall began by him feeding his habit until it became an addiction. You see David already had several wives he could have called. In fact after he already has seven wives and several more concubines and then we read in 2 Samuel 5:12 “After he left Hebron, David took more concubines and wives in Jerusalem…” Now in that culture and time, having multiple wives was not illegal but friends it was immoral. In Deuteronomy 17:17 God warns that a King of Israel “must not take many wives.” But David ignored that prohibition. What’s legal is not always moral and it can feed lust’s appetite.
It’s the same today there are many legal ways to feed lust. Many socially acceptable ways to encourage it, seemingly innocent, ways that really aren’t hurting anyone, at least that is how you justify it to your heart; but God is not fooled. And the problem with allowing brief looks at Sunshine girls, or fantasies in the mind, or moral winks while reading romance novels is that lust always craves more. The 18th century French nobleman, Marquis De Sade wrote, “Lust’s passion will be served; it demands, it militates, it tyrannizes.” He ought to know, he was the novelist whose perverse sexual preferences and erotic writings gave rise to the term sadism.
What makes lust so dangerous is the physiological traps that come along side this particular sin. The human body has an internal reward system that creates gratification, but in the extreme can also create addiction. Chemicals in the body encourage us to escalate our experience, whether we’re playing video games, eating, gambling, taking drugs or lusting.
Dopamine is one of these chemicals that is released and research shows that the chemical trigger both precedes and proceeds from the pursuit of gratification. In other words, this drug dopamine is released before we do something potentially gratifying, just thinking about it gives us a chemical high as well as after we satisfy the longing. But like heroin or cocaine the more we are stimulated by dopamine, the more we require increased levels to reach the same level of pleasure as time goes on. Soon the quick look or thought fantasy is not enough, we want a little more. We don’t want Sunshine girls, we want For Him Magazine and then we want Playboy. So while lust is a spiritual problem, it has the added danger of creating a chemical dependence from a substance our own body creates. That is why sexual addiction is a true addiction.
Friends, you can start off by doing nothing illegal, nothing that others can see, nothing that society is embarrassed by. But it’s a slippery slope of compromise which eventually will destroy your life. There are other horrific consequences of lusts addiction and how it destroys a person’s life. Consider these stories. (play "pornNO - Isn’t it great?" free video download from www.xxxchurch.com).
David’s triple threat
David’s fall with Bathsheba reveals several ways in which David acted unwisely and even outright sinfully. But it was set up with a dangerous triple threat. First, we read that while David’s men went out to war in the spring, David stayed home.
While normally, spring was the time in which David’s adrenaline would be pumping due to the rush of conquest, now he had no outlet. No way to use his energy. He had pent up energy. I’m sure that the reports of conquest that had come in about Israel defeating the Ammonites and besieging Rabbah only aroused David’s adrenaline levels more. Secondly, David now had unoccupied time on his hands. He was bored. And finally his comrades and closest friends were gone; there was a social isolation that had taken place. That is the triple threat. David was so fidgety that he wasn’t even able to sleep at night and so in his restlessness David wandered where temptation was present.
Here’s the temptation that faces business men who have no evening meetings when the travel from home, who are out of their daily routine, and away from the companionship of there co-workers and family. Here is the struggle of busy, suburban, overworked families who are two busy for recreation and too exhausted to meet their spouse’s emotional needs. Here is the temptation that comes for students with the pressure of exams that don’t allow for recreation time, the end of classes which allows too much time on their hands, but denies regular social encounters with comrades and the beginning of summer where clothing is shed and skin is barred.
Have you ever found yourself being set up by the triple threat, you can be sure that when those circumstances become aligned Satan is setting a trap, providing you with some bait to allure you to fall into lust.
David Look
Friends, the exposure to a triple threat is just foolishness, when you can foresee those situations you need to create safe guards. But the next act of David crossed the line from foolishness to sin. The text tells us that David saw a woman bathing and the woman was very beautiful. It is between the seeing of the woman and the description of her beauty where David stepped over the line.
It’s when the look becomes a stare, when the glance by accident becomes the look on purpose. One of the base camps from which lust mounts its assault upon your heart is the eyes. That is why Job said in 31:1 “I made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully at a girl.” It’s why in Proverbs the reader is warned “Do not lust in your heart after her beauty or let her captivate you with her eyes…” It’s why Jesus warns in Matthew 5, “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.” Now before you begin reaching for a butter knife to pluck out your eye, we need to realize that Jesus was speaking in Hyperbole; over emphasizing to make a point. But the point Jesus is stressing is clear; don’t entertain a look to the point of sin. Just as an aside I love how C.S. Lewis has paraphrased this verse. He wrote, “He that looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it hath already committed breakfast with it in his heart.”
You see the Scripture’s advice for avoiding lust can be summarized in one word “Run.” You are not strong enough to just take a look, you are in danger, something is coming that will over power you, don’t wait run now!
But here is the lure of lust, it deceives you into thinking that one more small foray into sin really won’t hurt, certainly no more than whatever damage you’ve already done. To summarize a prayer that the famous early church father Augustine once wrote, “Lord, make me sexually pure, but not just yet.” Friends, here is the deceptiveness of lust, it gives you the false impression that we can control it, besides we like to tempted, “just a peek” we say to ourselves.
Friends, when an image comes into you sight and you know that you shouldn’t see it. Flee! Turn off the computer, change the channel, close the magazine, look out the window, close your eyes and pray, block your view, don’t allow your eyes to lead you into sin
David entertained thoughts
Well sure enough, that look played on David’s mind, he couldn’t erase that tape of the woman he saw and he kept playing it over and over in his mind and finally he begins to entertain some of the thoughts he was having, “Hey, you servant, go find out some stuff about that woman next door. What are you looking at, I’m not doing anything wrong, I just want to be a good neighbour, you know maybe she’s a single mom and I might be able to help her out or something. You know me.”
And friends, I’m afraid that David’s request does nothing to conceal what is taking place in his mind as he entertains his lustful thoughts. In 2 Corinthians 10:5 it says, “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” Friends, thoughts don’t just happen to us; we aren’t victims of our imaginations running wild with sexual fantasies without our will’s consent. We need to intentionally dictate to our mind what we will choose to focus upon. This is true in every aspect of our thought life. When you allow your mind to think about yourself in ways contrary to what the Bible say; as unattractive or unappreciated and some person treats you with tenderness, kindness, listens to you and appreciates you, this is where the mind begins to build an attachment and takes you where you do not want to go. And while we think but it feels good and it’s such an innocent sin. Remember the consequences are deadly.
Once you allow your imagination to begin, once you innocently calculate how something might be done, or could be gotten away with, even while you say to yourself, “not that I would ever act on it.” Once that thought is planted it begins to grow in the mind until the plant bares forbidden fruit. And no amount of sound reasoning or wise counsel will prevent you from following through with acting out. Notice in the passage how the person comes back to David and says “The lady you wanted to know about, whose name is Bathsheba is married, to one of your own soldiers.” In other words “keep away David.”
Several years ago a family in Northern California had kept as a pet a mountain lion. They got it as a cub. It had lived with their family for years, and they treated it as a pet. They walked into their room from another part of the house one day to discover this mountain lion had attacked, killed and partially devoured their child. Why would they have allowed such a thing to happen? Because they thought the lion was domesticated. They refused to believe it was still a wild animal. Lust is just like that cub, it may seem cute and innocent but friends it will grow and it will not be domesticated and it will end up devouring you.
Action steps
Friends, while the biblical warning with regard to lust can be summarized by the word “run” there is still a whole sermon’s worth of application with regard to what running from lust looks like. Allow me to quickly list a few others that you will want to put in practice.
Accountability – enter into an accountable relationship with someone to whom you can be honest and who loves you enough to ask hard, awkward and embarrassing questions. Besides my wife, I have a buddy I phone once a week and no question is out of bounds are lives are open books to be scrutinized because we both recognize that no one is above falling.
Cut off sources – if you have magazines you need to destroy, destroy them. If you have a fantasy you keep replaying de-mythologize it. If your computer is a source of temptation, confess it to another who will hold you accountable, put on software that will make access more difficult or consider canceling your internet service.
Identify your triggers – know what sets you up, identify the “triple threats” of you life and plan for those time where you know you’ll face temptation.
Keep your walk with God deep – friends God’s power is at work in us, but we can quench His Spirit. Make sure that your Christianity is not simply going through the motions.
Conclusion
I don’t want to give the impression that lust is an unconquerable sin. Christ died so that we might have power. But we live in a society that is flaunting sexual images, and misguided sexual advice in massive doses. If you think you may be struggling with sexual addiction or feel like you have no strength against lust you may want to consider meeting with a Christian counselor but whatever you do don’t continue to allow this deadly sin to ravage your heart and brutalize your soul.
Let’s pray.
