Text: Matthew 5:27–30
Preacher: Pastor Brian Sauvé
Hot Coals, High Glory, Hellfire
It is almost certain that there are elements of your life—elements you consider to be totally normal, uncontroversial, and maybe even helpful—that are as dangerous to your soul as as rat poison.
Today, my prayer is that we would be crushed, if need be, by the Rock of Ages, so that he could restore us to health, life, and glory. Our text this morning has maybe never found a people more needy for its teaching than us—than the citizens of the United States of America in 2020.
Our text is about hell, it’s about grace, it’s about the very bones of human life and culture—because it is about sex. This morning, the Lord Jesus would have us think about sex as we continue in his great Sermon on the Mount. Let’s get his words in front of us together; Matthew 5:27. This is the Word of the Living God:
“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
Thus ends the reading of God’s Word; may he write it on our hearts by faith. Let’s pray.
We’ll handle this text very straightforwardly this morning, because I don’t want to blunt either the force or the practicality of it. This is a deeply practical instruction to us.
First, we will simply make sure we understand the teaching—what it is that Jesus is warning us against, and what he prescribes for us in light of the warning. Then, I’ll give you 11 principles in the fight against lust that follow from the text and other relevant passages.
This passage is very frank about adulterous lust, and so I am going to be very frank. I know there are kids in the room. I won’t be inappropriate, but I will be direct. They need to hear about these things from behind pulpits and from mom and dad—because they are being bombarded with sexual deviancy, and likely will be their whole lives. We need to strengthen them to stand, and stand firm, against the adulterous spirit of the age.
A Word on the Seventh Word
So first, let’s walk through Jesus’ teaching. If you were with us last week, you remember that the previous section dealt with Jesus’ teaching on the sixth commandment, the commandment against murder, where Jesus taught us that the command against murder also forbids ungodly anger.
Now, Jesus moves very cleanly into the next commandment in the Ten Words, the seventh commandment. There are two basic components of the teaching, and it’s very straightforward:
1. Rightly Understanding the 7th Commandment
First, he teaches us how to rightly understand the seventh commandment. That’s 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.”
-Matthew 5:27–28
So just as sinning in anger and hatred against your brother is to violate the demands of the sixth commandment against murder, so lust in the heart is a violation of the seventh commandment against adultery.
What does he mean in verse 28 by “lustful intent?” He says,“…everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
What is “lustful intent?” Lustful intent is not merely being aware of a woman’s beauty. The Bible refers to certain women, like Rachel in Genesis, as beautiful. To notice this is not to look with lustful intent, but simply to have eyes in your head. We always need to be careful not to make the commands of God impossibilities by trying to feel as “spiritual” as possible. This is not a command to kind of walk around squinting your eyes so that everyone appears as kind of fuzzy, blurry shapes moving around.
No, lustful intent is to gaze at a women with the purpose of arousing and nurturing and cultivating and inflaming sexual desire. If you do that, and the woman is not your wife, you are committing adultery in your heart. It’s that simple, and both we and the Lord know the difference between the look of lust and the innocent look.
2. Therefore, wage radical war with adulterous lust.
The second part of the teaching is the implication: If lust in the heart is a violation against the command against adultery, then radical war is called for in the fight against lust. That’s verses 29–30,
“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
It would be better for you to be maimed than to be cast out of God’s presence into Hell in the final judgment. The implication, of course, is that a man marked by unrepentant lust will not inherit the Kingdom of God. Lust can send you to hell. More on that in a few minutes.
This passage is an example of a rhetorical tool Jesus deploys many times, something called “hyperbole.” It’s very common in the Jewish idiom of the Bible, and it’s basically an intentional overstatement for rhetorical effect.
As with Jesus’ teaching in Luke 14:26, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” Jesus doesn’t actually want us to hate our parents—that would be to violate the fifth commandment.
But our love for God is to be the controlling love, such that we would rather hate our parents than hate God. Compared to our obedience and commitment to Christ, no family tie matters.
Similarly here in Matthew 5, we aren’t actually to chop our hands off—or, as Origen reportedly did, castrate ourselves—to avoid lust. The hyperbolic nature of the teaching is rather supposed to show us the seriousness with which we are to wage war against adulterous lust.
A Word on Locks & Keys
Let me make a quick note, here, before I go on—because you may be wondering why I keep saying “If you look at a woman who is not your wife,” and not also, “and if you look at a man who is not your husband.”
I’m going to teach this passage with the language Jesus uses, which means I am going to apply it to men. I do not do this, nor do I think Jesus meant to say, that women are not capable of sinning in this way. But it would be a special kind of modernist folly to pretend that men and women are sinning in exactly the same way when they lust, or that men are not particularly prone to this sin.
Sin is parasitic, even in sexual sin—meaning it latches onto some good thing and perverts it. Men were made to leave their father’s house, to go out into the world, and win a bride. And so when men sin sexually, they don’t stop taking the initiative—men tend to sin sexually in their sinful desiring.
And just as it is in the nature of masculinity to win a woman, so it is in the nature of a woman to be won—which is why women tend to sin sexually in the longing to be sinfully desired.
Another way to put it would be to point out that women sin by parading their bottoms around in skintight leggings—as if they adequately covered their nakedness—and the men sin by sinfully desiring those bottoms. The women are saying, “Don’t you want this?” to every passerby—when it was made to be given away only to one. And the men are happy to look at all of them—when they were made to look at only one.
Often you’ll hear ladies respond to this kind of teaching by saying, “Yeah, if I can’t wear leggings, then men can’t wear nice suits, because those make me stumble.”
Wrong. The sin of immodestly is the sin of inadequately covering your nakedness, not looking nice. There is a difference. The Law forbids us from uncovering the nakedness of those to whom we are not married. So modesty requires us to keep our nakedness private, save before our spouse.
What this means, very practically, is that men and women alike generally ought to be covered from the collarbones to the knees, and to avoid wearing clothing that is so tight as to reveal nakedness. Now, I’m not talking about promptly driving into the ditch on the other side of the road and forcing women to dress like nuns, in clothing that totally obscures her femininity.
That’s what the androgynous culture of feminism—which hates authentic, glorious femininity—wants. That’s why they promote shaved head hairstyles and boxy, unflattering clothes that look like they were made for men.
So that is why this text—and many like it—are addressed primarily to males. It’s interesting that the Lord puts the onus for obedience on the men, here. He says, “Men, don’t sinfully gaze,” and he doesn’t leave us any outs or excuses based on what anyone else is wearing. This stands in direct contradiction to many ancient cultures, even through the medieval period, where the woman was thought to have some kind of mystical power of seduction, and the men were basically helpless before her sinful allure. Jesus doesn’t let that stand. He says, “Men, take responsibility.”
11 Principles In The War Against Lust
So let’s do that. Let’s take responsibility. And towards that end, I’d like to draw out 11 principles we need to know in the fight against lust. These are not necessarily in any particularly important order. The first principle is that...
1. Sex is radically good.
The Bible is sometimes forced into the mold of a kind of Victorian prudishness. This is an utter caricature of the biblical teaching.
Passages like this one, that warn against the dangers of sexual sin, are sometimes misunderstood as teaching that sex is dirty, as base, as bad, as wicked—so of course, save it for the one you love.
But the opposite is actually true: This whole passage, Jesus’ whole approach to his teaching on sex, presupposes the radical goodness of sex. Sex is an unbridled glory. It is a magnificent display of God’s kindness, goodness, and beauty.
We start our fight against adulterous lust by seeing the goodness of what is being guarded, the goodness of what we are aiming to protect and keep unspoiled.
Sex is wonderful. It is such a powerful good, that it would be better to lop your hand off than to mar it. You have to start there—otherwise you may be tempted to fight sexual sin with the blunt butterknife of asceticism or self-flagellation, rather than with the keen edge of God’s Word, the strength of his Spirit, and the glory of a self-controlled man who makes his sexuality serve God’s glory.
So principle number one: Sex is radically good. But #2…
2. Sex can send you to Hell.
Don’t be mistaken: Sex can send you to hell.
“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 5:29–30
But I thought we weren’t saved by our works! You’re not. You’re saved by the resurrecting, regenerating, new-heart-implanting, supernatural work of God’s grace in Christ. It is the record of perfection credited to us in the justifying work of Christ that saves us, not our works.
But there is a difference between living faith and dead faith, between dead profession and living profession. And one thing that we can know for certain is that unrepentant adulterers—that is, adulterers who don’t mourn for their sin, turn from it to Christ, and walk by faith in newness of life—don’t inherit the Kingdom of God.
That’s just what Christ warns us of here. It is what Paul likewise warns us against in 1 Corinthians 6:9–12,
“Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.”
-1 Corinthians 6:9–11
Sex is a worthless god. Worship it, and it will damn you to hell. Refuse to repent at God’s rebuke—as maybe this very sermon might function for you this morning—and you may prove to be a sex-worshiper, not a Christ-worshiper.
3. Our culture hates sex.
You might think, “Hang on, millions of people worship sex in our culture. So obviously they don’t hate it.”
I tweeted this exact sentence once, or something very similar to it—that pagans hate sex—and for some reason it went somewhat viral, and so I had just thousands of people descending on my to mock me and call me stupid and say, basically, “Brian apparently thinks none of us non-Christians are having sex.” Which of course totally missed the point.
Our culture hates sex, precisely because it worships sex. You hate anything you worship that is not truly God. If you worship food, you hate it, because you are crushing it under a weight it can’t bear. The very word “worship” in English comes into our language from the Old English “worth-ship,” meaning worship is to ascribe great, or even ultimate, worth to a thing.
To worship something is to ascribe glory to it, and “glory” comes from a word that has the connotation of “weight” or “weightiness.” So to ascribe glory to a thing in worship is to consider it of highest worth, to consider it of ultimate weight.
When you take a created thing and worship it, you crush it to powder. You destroy it. It can’t hold up.
So yes, our culture worships sex, and so it hates sex. And it shows. It shows as the massively glorious thing that is human sexuality is degraded, manipulated, and destroyed.. Sex becomes a gas can and acetylene torch used to burn civilization to the ground.
Our culture hates sex, and in its hatred of sex, it pours out a universal cultural acid into its own lap. Principle #4:
4. Our culture hates itself—adulterous lust is a universal cultural acid.
Lust can send you to Hell. It can also destroy a man, a house, a city, and a civilization. Proverbs 6:27–29,
“Can a man carry fire next to his chest
and his clothes not be burned?
Or can one walk on hot coals
and his feet not be scorched?
So is he who goes in to his neighbor’s wife;
none who touches her will go unpunished.”-Proverbs 6:27–29
If a man can’t carry around adulterous lust without burning himself down, how much more a civilization? A nation?
This verse explains much of our culture. In its worship of sex as a god, we have heaped hot coals in our own lap. We have poured acid on ourselves. It is eating us alive.
We will talk more specifically about this next week, Lord willing, as we take up Jesus’ teaching on marriage and divorce, but the worship of sex is one of the most potent instruments of cultural destruction in our nation today. It has devastated homes, children, legacies, businesses, cities, and more.
Like all good things, sex has tremendous, world-shaping power.
It has great power for good. Sex is fruitfulness. It is children. It is legacy, if you can keep your kids, train them up, and send them out as arrows into enemy territory.
But when it is worshiped and turned to evil, it doesn’t cease to be powerful. No, it retains its power, just turned towards destruction.
And so, particularizing this to you and to me, adulterous lust will destroy your legacy. It won’t just rot out the bones of Western civilization, as it has been doing, it will rot out your bones. It will eat you alive like leprosy.
Make no peace with it. Men looking at porn, make no peace with it. Number 5…
5. Adulterous lust is a bribe meant to pacify you in your imprisonment to sin.
G.K. Chesterton wrote, “Free love is the direct enemy of freedom. It is the most obvious of all the bribes that can be offered by slavery.”
When you worship idols, they imprison you, enslave you, master you, and destroy you. So called “free love” is one of the most pernicious of prison guards in the prison of secularist idolatry. But we are Christians, and that means we are to be free men and women, not slaves.
“Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God.” -1 Peter 2:16
“For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.” -Galatians 5:13
One of the most common ways in history that ruling classes have kept their slaves pacified and peaceful is by giving them the opiate of free sex in their chains.
Our culture is no different, except it is willingly enslaved to this master. Pornography is an opiate. It keeps you shackled to the serotonin hits of simulated lovers on glowing screens. It keeps you shackled to guilt and shame that won’t let you up. Adulterous lust is a slaver, and it is the obvious bribe to give a slave to keep him pacified. Don’t fall for it.
Christians are free. We are free because we are mastered by the Lord Jesus, who adopts his slaves as sons, who doesn’t degrade us, but restores us to be true men again. Confess your sin and turn to Christ. Be free. Don’t hide. Don’t be bribed.
6. Adulterous lust teaches men to be passive, passionless, losers—men without the capacity for godly jealousy.
One of the greatest glories of godly masculinity—and make no mistake, godly masculinity is a glorious thing (1 Cor. 11)—is its initiative-taking bent towards killing dragons to get the girl.
This isn’t a sociological or psychological or evolutionary accident—some sort of random side effect of testosterone. It’s creational, because it’s parable. The masculine urge to go and save the damsel in distress and win her love and respect is a sermon—it preaches, over and over, that the Son of God left the house of his Father, crushed the head of a dragon-serpent, and won a bride to himself.
Kill the dragon. Get the girl. That’s how one pastor summarized the entire Bible.
So one of the worst features of adulterous lust is that it mars this glory, even as it teaches men to be passive, passionless losers—men without the capacity for godly jealousy.
It mars this glory as it makes men who look on a thousand women, but fail to win the one in front of them. It mars this glory as it makes men who become dragons—hoarding digital women like a dragon’s pile of stolen treasure—rather than killing dragons.
And when it comes to the most pernicious forms of adulterous lust in our day, pornography, it teaches men to look as another man pretends to win a woman. Rather than jealously guarding the woman, he learns to look on from a distance as another man has her.
This trains men to be passive onlookers.
It trains men that his woman isn’t to be jealously guarded.
Some think that pornography is an essentially masculine thing, because lots of men do it. The opposite is true. Pornography is the least masculine thing ever. It is the admission of defeat. It is the admission that I can’t win the respect of a woman, love her well, earn her trust, and enjoy nakedness without shame in the guarded, walled garden of my marriage bed. It is the admission that I have to watch other men if I am to be satisfied. It is soft to the core, it is malakoi, as Paul would say—effeminate.
7. Only radicals will win the fight against adulterous lust today.
One of the most obvious features of Jesus’ teaching in this passage is that adulterous lust is a sin to be dealt with in total, radical war.
No peace.
No patience.
No quarter.
Radical war.
So very simply, if what you are doing doesn’t seem radical in today’s culture, it’s likely not enough. How are you thinking about TV? Movies? Smartphone access? The internet? Keeping a private computer?
If you are caught and ensnared in pornographic, adulterous lust, then cut off your hand today. Cut off your digital hand. I don’t care how inconvenient it is. Hell is more inconvenient. Repent, today.
In our day of radical sexual folly, only measures that will make you look radically weird will work.
On the other side of the fight, one of the radical measures the Scriptures teach us to embrace in the fight against adulterous lust is good sex in covenant safety. Principle #8:
8. We are to fight bad sex is with good sex.
Listen to this command in Proverbs 5,
“Drink water from your own cistern,
flowing water from your own well.
Should your springs be scattered abroad,
streams of water in the streets?
Let them be for yourself alone,
and not for strangers with you.
Let your fountain be blessed,
and rejoice in the wife of your youth,
a lovely deer, a graceful doe.
Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight;
be intoxicated always in her love.”-Proverbs 5:15–19
It is a duty of a husband to delight in his wife’s breasts. It is a duty of a husband to be intoxicated in her love. It is a duty of a husband to regularly pursue good sex with his wife, and not to deprive her, as Paul teaches the Corinthians.
And it is a duty of a wife to be delighted in. It is a duty of a wife to be intoxicating to her husband. It is a duty of a wife to be responsive to his advances, to his love. It is a duty of a wife to regularly ensure that her marriage bed is a place of joy and open invitation for her husband, lest she deprive him.
And people say that God’s commands are burdensome? Sheesh. Do you have repenting to do? Do you need to apologize to your wife or husband for failing to pursue a joyful marriage bed? Number 9:
9. The normal means of grace are radical.
The normal means of grace are the powerful means by which God loves to help us slay our sin and walk in joyful holiness. Do you want victory over sexual sin?
Worship weekly at church on the Lord’s Day.
Sing loud and in faith. Lift your hands.
Eagerly confess your sin as the Lord corrects through his Word.
Repent quickly and often and fully and Christ-rememberingly.
Saturate yourself daily in the Scriptures and meditate thereon.
Be clean. Go to the throne of grace for help and mercy.
Believe the gospel, that you are clean when he says you are.
10. Sexual shame is a potent and good gift.
When you feel the shame of sin, know that you are receiving a gift. Respond in repentance and faith and you will find that it is one of the most powerfully good gifts God gives, this gift of shame.
11. Sexual shame is burned up on the altar where Christ offered himself.
There is not a single particle of shame for sexual sin that cannot be burned up on the altar with Christ’s sacrifice of himself.
Not adultery.
Not sodomy.
Not pornography.
Nothing.
No penance required.
No repayment possible.
Just 100-proof grace.
It all burns up in the white hot fire of God’s grace in Christ. Believe it, even now. Even now, as we confess and respond to the Lord Jesus, believe it.