(Audio and Text)
Title: Deal Ruthlessly With Sin
For any of you who have spent any amount of time under my teaching, today’s passage will be a familiar one. I quote it often, reference it often, and I teach it whenever I get a change to do so.
Many of you are also familiar with this passage’s role in one of my favorite books written in the last 10 years, Victor Kuligan’s “10 Things I Wish Jesus Never Said.” I’ve both taught that book here at Heritage, and also a did a 10 week study based on that book at AU about 2 years ago.
The idea behind Kuligan’s book was quite simple: He took the 10 most difficult teachings of Jesus and did an in-depth exegetical study on them to come away with some very challenging application for our lives.
Without question, my favorite chapter of that book, chapter four, I believe, deals with the passage we are going to be dealing with today, so let’s get started.
Let me offer this warning, I am going to speak plainly about lust, sexuality, and sin. As a pastor of a church with many young people, a generation to which the internet has completely changed the game and rules of lust, I must be direct with you to both show you how severe this issue of lust is, so that you will be motivated to deal as ruthlessly with sin as Christ commands us to.
(read/pray)
- Where does the offense occur?
The first thing we notice in verse 27 is that Jesus again makes a stark comparison between action and intention. He says that the law of the Scribes and Pharisees is concerned with result: did you actually commit adultery. Again, this offense, actual adultery is outward, measurable, and able to be judged by men.
But, just like we looked at last week, Christ’s concern is with the internal. He is worried about motivations and intentions, even if no action results. For Christ, the sin occurs in the heart, internally, long before any outward sin is committed.
Point: If we measure ourselves solely by the outward sign of actions, then we become the Scribes and Pharisees whom Jesus is rebuking.
The Scribes and Pharisees were all about outward, measurable, actions. Christ is about what is happening internally in our hearts and minds.
This is why I plead with you week after week that we must change our prayer. Too often our prayer is “Lord, make me do your will!” And it should be, “Lord make me want to do your will!”
The difference between those two requests is huge. One focuses on the measurement of one’s holiness on the basis of action and discipline, the other focuses on the measurement of holiness based on desire and intention of the heart.
- Is Our Lord Calling Us to Self-Mutilation?
How literally are we to take our Lord’s words here?
Let me ask another question: There is one word in both verses 29 and 30 that gives us a clue as to whether or not our Lord is teaching literally or figuratively, who know’s what that word is?
“If…”
Does our eye cause us to sin? Does our hand cause us to sin? Of course not. So what does?
What causes us to sin?
Our heart.
Our pride.
Our minds.
The temptation in our environments.
The Enemy.
Our flesh.
Now, let me ask a better question: Will our eyes lead us to sin if we don’t guard them?
Can that sin manifest in our hands if we don’t discipline them?
Absolutely!
So, how, then, are we to take what Jesus says? Why does he use such aggressive, visual language here? Because Jesus Christ wants us to be willing to cut off that which causes sin. If it is our hearts, we need new hearts. If it is our pride, we need to get rid of our pride. If it is our minds, we need to have regenerated minds. If it is our environments we need to go west when the evil goes east. If it is the Enemy then we need to resist him and He will flee from us. If it is our flesh then we need to crucify that flesh in the name of Jesus..AND WE DON’T!
Now, before I lose it up here, let me get to the last point.
- The Attitude Which Leads to the Action
In this passage, Jesus is teaching on lust and he specifically calls out two body parts: the eye and the hand. I don’t want us to miss the correlation between these two body parts.
In Jesus’ command for us to cut out the eye and cut off the hand for the sake of wholeness he is saying something profound:
Jesus is saying: We must not only avoid the action (hand), but also control the things that lead to lustful attitudes (our eyes).
Over the years I have met with dozens of men from all age groups, junior high through senior citizens about the issue of lust, pornography, and masturbation. And I have noticed a pattern that fits perfectly with Jesus’ instruction here today.
I often ask the people I work with: when you fall victim to lust, whether that falling is being physical with someone when you shouldn’t, or watching a movie you shouldn’t, or being someone on the internet you shouldn’t be, what time of the day does that happen? When during the day?
What do you think? (Late at night)
At first my theory was that this was because night was secret. Night was when the rest of the family was asleep, or we had the dorm room to ourselves. There were no people around, there were fewer distractions, there was little chance of being “caught”.
But then the more I worked with these situations, the more I read, I started to see something in Jesus’ teaching that was so profound.
Men are visual creatures, and most of us in America spend our day, consciously and subconsciously filling our heads with images. We see a billboard on the way to work with women in bikinis on a beach (whether or not is has anything to do with the product), we allow our eyes to linger too long on the shape of co-worker, we hear and off color sexual joke and an image jumps into our mind, we listen to music that conjures up images, we daydream about girlfriends pasts, perhaps women we knew before we were saved, we come finish work, and the day winds to a close. We are now filled with sexual energy because we did not guard our eyes and our minds and now that energy has to be released in some way, and that’s when it turns to the hand, the action.
That action may involve someone else, it may not, but thought becomes action.
We sin at night because we sin all day long by not guarding our eyes.
If we were more proactive, it would be easier to not sin, simply because there would be less desire to sin.
It’s so simple, and Jesus nails it.
Pluck out your eye: look away from the billboard, look away from the co-worker, don’t partake in the sexual joke, snap out of the daydream, and in so plucking out the eye of sin you are actually also cutting off the hand of sin.
So does your eye cause you sin? No. But left unguarded, your eye can certainly strongly suggest that we sin. Does your hand cause you to sin? No. But left to it’s own desires, your hand will seek and find ways to sin.
Do you deal ruthlessly with sin. What is going on in your life right now that you know is wrong, and the reason it continues to exist is simply because you are allowing it to?
Jesus says, “Cut off that which is wrong.” We are gangrenous hands, and puss filled infected dead eyes and we are saying, “No Lord, I love these things, they are worth saving!”
And what we are really saying is quite tragic: “Lord, I need these things, these eyes and these hands, because I don’t trust that you can give me something better if I should sacrifice them to you.”
You want to show me you are serious about sin? You want to show your Lord you are serious about sin? Be ruthless.