Transcript

Shelby Abbott [00:00:00]: Welcome to The Connecting Podcast with Paul Tripp. My name is Shelby Abbott and this podcast exists to connect the transforming power of Jesus Christ to everyday life, right here, right now. We're working our way through the Sermon on the Mount.

Paul Tripp [00:00:14]: Yes, and the reason we're doing that is because we live in a culture that is, in so many ways, gone insane, where you're seldom going to have your faith, your commitments, your love for Jesus reinforced by anything in the culture.

Paul [00:00:33]: So how do I live in this culture with a life that's God-honoring, that's hopeful, joyful, productive, courageous? And Jesus took His disciples away from the big crowds just to give them sort of their marching orders. "This is how you live as one of My disciples." And we have been noticing that although this is ancient teaching, that it just feels so current and addresses the kinds of things that we're all facing. So why don't you read [Matthew] 5:27-30?

Shelby [00:01:16]: ²⁷“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ ²⁸But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. ²⁹If 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. ³⁰And 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.

Pretty strong language.

Paul [00:01:48]: Yes, so we want to look at the first two verses and I would title this episode of our podcast "What Lust Lusts For".

Shelby [00:01:59]: What lust lusts for, got it.

Paul [00:02:03]: Now, I'm going to say this, although it should be obvious. This next section is so incredibly important because we live in such a highly sexualized culture. The other night, Luella and I were going to watch a series on a streaming service that looked interesting and we'd heard about.

Paul [00:02:35]: And we got about ten minutes in and I said to Luella, "We shouldn't be watching this." It's just needlessly sexually provocative and neither one of us need to spend the evening doing this with our hearts. And you could argue that if there's one thing that current Western culture is good at, it's lust.

Paul [00:03:10]: We are lust experts and we know how to encourage your lust and what is lust? Well, lust is the desire in your heart for something that God has clearly forbidden. Most often, in a biblical sense, it's sexual things. Now, we have to step back as we often do in these conversations because the entire passage teaches us something important about God's law.

Paul [00:04:03]: Jesus is not in this moment rewriting God's law and saying, "No, those laws in the Old Testament are not right. I got better laws for you." What He's doing is giving the best interpretation ever of God's law and let me put it in tribalistic language.

Shelby [00:04:29]: Which is a tribalistic word.

Paul [00:04:31]: Yes, Jesus says the guardrails of God's law are not at behavior.

Shelby [00:04:41]: Okay, what does that mean?

Paul [00:04:42]: So I can do anything I want with my heart as long as I don't jump over God's behavioral guardrails. Jesus says, "No, the fences in God's original intent are erected at your heart because if you give away your heart, you're going to end up giving away behavior." That's why I entitled this "What Lust Lusts For". This may sound stupid, but I'm going to say it. Lust doesn't lust for more lust because lust is dissatisfying. Lust is desire unrequited. It's desire unfulfilled.

Shelby [00:05:24]: It's pointing somewhere.

Paul [00:05:25]: The fact of the matter is lust lusts for "the thing" and so, when I allow myself to lust, I'm opening my heart up to deepening my desire to actually touch, experience the thing that God has forbidden. So, let me give you an example.

Paul [00:05:51]: Let's say I'm with Luella and we're out and about in Center City Philadelphia, and there's a woman walking before me that I'm lusting after. It's not okay because Luella doesn't know that. It's not okay because it's just something quiet in my heart, because that actually is a desire for that woman, to experience something with her that I should only ever experience with the woman walking next to me. That thought, Jesus says is adultery. It's adulterous. I am, in my heart, replacing the woman who's walking next to me with the woman who's ahead of me.

Shelby [00:06:43]: Right, and you've made this point before that you're losing that battle in that moment and if you're losing that battle right there with your heart, you're going to lose the battle eventually with your behavior, which is why we see so many people falling and making a spectacle of Christianity in so many different ways.

Paul [00:07:01]: Let's be embarrassingly honest here. I'm not lusting, in that moment when that woman is in front of me, for more lust. I'm wanting her. I'm wanting physically to experience things with her. I'm wanting that body in my possession. That's what I'm doing.

Paul [00:07:32]: That's why you have to understand lust is wanting to step over the behavioral boundaries. That's why you can't put the boundaries just to behavior. If you keep giving away your heart, giving away your heart, giving away your heart, you're going to give away your body. The logic is so apparent here.

Paul [00:08:01]: So, second thing, that's God's law. God's law is addressing the heart. Every commandment is addressing sins of the heart because if you give away sins of the heart, you're going to give away sins of behavior. That's why the Bible says, "To the pure, all things are pure." If I had a completely pure heart, temptation would be tempting to me because it's the sin inside of me that is what hooks me to the evil outside of me. Does that make sense?

Shelby [00:08:39]: Yes, totally.

Paul [00:08:43]: And so, I want to look at Mark 7 because, whoa, does Jesus make it clear here. It's such a helpful but deeply convicting passage. It just silences all the rationalization, all the excuses, all the blame-shifting. Well, let me read [Mark] 7.

Paul [00:09:13]: ¹⁴And He called the people to Him again and said to them, “Hear Me, all of you, and understand: ¹⁵There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.”

Paul [00:09:30]: So He's with a big crowd of people, He gives this principle. What defiles me is not what is outside of me. What defiles me is inside of me. That's the scene. It's a big crowd scene. Then He goes into a house. This becomes a private moment with His disciples and the disciples ask Him about this little parable, the statement He made.

Paul [00:09:56]: And He, Jesus says, "¹⁸... Then are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, ¹⁹since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?" (Thus He declared all foods clean.)

Paul [00:10:14]: The reason this whole thing took place is the Pharisees were arguing that disciples ate with unclean hands and they ate unclean foods, and Jesus said, "That's not the big spiritual problem we're dealing with." Then He says, “²⁰... What comes out of a person is what defiles him. [Now, fasten your seatbelt.] ²¹... From within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, ²²coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. ²³All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

Paul [00:11:07]: God help us. Where does sexual immorality come from? It doesn't come from my culture. It doesn't come from my culture. It doesn't come because I have a phone. It doesn't come because there are streaming services. It comes from within. Listen, you and I don't own that, we will never become sexually pure because we'll always blame the wrong things.

Shelby [00:11:40]: Yes, we got to start in the right place.

Paul [00:11:43]: And it's so important that we admit personally what Jesus says is true. We have a problem with lust, not just because of the culture and the technology that we're living in, because lust goes way, way, way back. Literally, thousands and thousands of years, way before any of this kind of cultural setting existed.

Shelby [00:12:25]: Yes, and this is something also that is kind of on the heels of "He's connecting anger with murder and now, He's connecting the lust inside your heart with adultery". I mean, it obviously surprised the disciples. They were like, "Can You explain this to us because this seems pretty intense."

Shelby [00:12:48]: Well, it's also something that's pretty intense for us today, thousands of years later. We still need to hear that what's going on is the problem inside of us. That's what's defiling us. That's what needs to be fixed and that's what should make us cry out for the help of God.

Paul [00:13:06]: So I want to say this. You can have a marriage of ten, twenty, thirty, forty years where you've been unfaithful to your wife, maybe several times a week and in your mind, think that you've never committed adultery and again and again, you replace her. You literally replace her physical body. You bring yourself sexual satisfaction that doesn't include her and you pride yourself that you've never committed adultery.

Shelby [00:14:02]: Yes, it's so crazy.

Paul [00:14:05]: When you have and there are deep, significant things that are missing in your marriage that you may not know are missing because you've been an adulterer and you've never named it as adultery. And how can you be salt and light, fight the corruption in the world around you if you're a regular adulterer. I mean, how convicting is that?

Shelby [00:15:03]: Yes, incredibly because we think behavior equals who we are, but if our hearts are in the wrong place, we are our hearts. Everything comes out of that.

Paul [00:15:17]: I want to say, make another application if you're a parent. Don't teach your children do this and please Jesus because that's a false gospel. It'll either defeat them, it'll turn them into wonderful little self-righteous Pharisees. Tell them that God wants their hearts. Tell your children that God will settle for nothing less than the thoughts and motives, intentions, choices, loves, desires of the heart.

Shelby [00:16:33]: Yes, and when you speak honestly with your kids about that kind of stuff, it helps them to have an accurate understanding of what it means to follow Jesus and I, being in college ministry, have seen over and over and over again, like you said before, of people who turn eighteen and they want to get out of the house; and then, they decide to do a left turn and we wonder why so many young people are deconstructing. It's because we've taught them to be Pharisees. We have not taught them to actually follow Jesus in their hearts, which is what counts. We get their behavior right, but their hearts are wrong.

Paul [00:17:02]: So when you make confession to your children, don't just confess your behavior. Confess your heart.

Shelby [00:17:08]: Yes, that's really good.

Paul [00:17:10]: Go back to your example with your daughter. That's an opportunity to say, "Although I think what you did was wrong, my problem was not what you did. My problem was me. My problem is I don't want any hassles in my life. I want to be sovereign. I want a world that does my bidding and that's wrong. And I've confessed that to God, but I want to confess that to you, too."

Shelby [00:17:36]: Do you know how far that goes with your kids?

Paul [00:17:39]: "I have a heart problem."

Shelby [00:17:40]: Yes, I've seen that over and over again. So many kids talk about the fact that their parents never apologize for stuff, not just for the things that they're motivated by, but there are even the actions that they're doing, they don't apologize for anything; and they think, "If that's Christianity, no, thank you. That's not what I want to be a part of."

Shelby [00:17:59]: So it goes a huge distance when we confess and apologize, ask for forgiveness for, not only the things that we do, but what's going on in our hearts. That will show our kids that we need grace just as much as they do, which is exactly what the gospel is.

Paul [00:18:15]: And Matthew 5, applying what we've just talked about to lust and Mark 7 just clearly says it's a heart problem. It's a heart problem. Now, here's where this leads us. You do not deal with this subtle form of adultery, with systems of self-reformation.

Paul [00:18:52]: I'm going to say this is controversial. It's not solved by putting a limiter on your computer. That's not a bad thing to do, but that doesn't solve the problem because you can go out of your house and be filled with lust. We know that the law does a good job of exposing sin. The law is a wonderful guide for your living, but it has no power whatsoever to rescue and transform your heart. That's the work of God's grace.

Paul [00:19:26]: Cry out for grace. Confess to people that you trust and say, "Pray God's grace into my life." We just can't allow ourselves to not give lust the moral value that Jesus gives it and, again, if all of this has been covered by the person and work of Jesus, we shouldn't be afraid to say, "I got a problem and there's help for me."

Shelby [00:20:05]: Lord, have mercy.