Good morning church!  I have been in prayer all week about this message because anytime you talk about sexuality, love, lust, adultery and broken relationships, there are going to be guilty feelings and self-condemnation.  Remember what Jesus said, “I did not come to condemn the world but that the world may be saved and healed through me.”  When we feel unworthy, we tend to close ourselves off from what God wants to do in our lives and forget that God wants to give us so much more than what we’re experiencing.  Do you remember what Jesus said to the woman who was caught in adultery?  “Neither do I condemn you, but go and sin no more.”  Experience healing so that you can know the intimacy I have created you for.  Before we get into the word, take some time for a quiet prayer and say the words silently to yourself.

I am a friend of God.  I am a friend of God.  I am beautiful.  I am fearfully and wonderfully made.  I have a future and a hope, and God is preparing and restoring me so that I can fully live into that future.  Jesus, our redeemer and our healer, it is in your name we pray.  Amen.

Open your Bibles to Matthew 5.  The book of Matthew comprises five of Jesus’ sermons; the most famous is the Sermon on the Mount, which is in chapters 5-7. In Matthew 5 Jesus is unpacking the 10 Commandments at a deeper level.  What we see in the 10 Commandments is all about relationships, and you can’t be healthy in your relationship with God if you’re not healthy in your relationships with people.  You can’t be right with God if you’re not right in your relationships with people.  So, we have been looking at the 6^th Commandment, “Thou Shalt Not Murder.”  Jesus always takes us to a deeper place to get to the root of the fruit for that kind of behavior.  What Jesus showed us in that commandment is that anger is a powerful human emotion and it has destructive potential in our relationships.  Quite often, we have failed in our bonding of intimacy and relationships because we don’t know how to handle the passion of anger.  Now, we move to the 7^th Commandment, “Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery.”  Again, Jesus gets below the physical action of adultery to the spiritual root, which is the passion of lust.  The potent passion of lust has the power to destroy the most basic element of culture, which is family. Now, all of us tend to focus on external behavior sometimes.  Jesus is breaking it down for religious leaders who mistakenly believe: “It’s okay as long as I don’t murder.  It’s okay that anger is screwing me up as long as I don’t murder.  It’s okay if I don’t commit the physical act of adultery; it doesn’t matter that my spouse and I don’t have any kind of really deep intimate kind of relationship….”  Jesus says the problem is this whole area of lust.  So, when our culture talks about safe sex, what are they talking about?  Physical protection.  But, Jesus is getting much deeper here.  For God, it’s not just about physical protection; it’s about protecting the bond of intimacy that God has created you for and to be able to sustain it for a lifetime with one other human being.  So, if you are a teenager sitting here, the thoughts that you have about sexuality and the practices will really determine your ability to sustain a life-long bond of intimacy with one other person.  It’s the same for any of us here, whether we’re married or single. The thoughts and practices we have about sexuality will really protect our ability to sustain that life-long bond. It’s why the failure rate in marriage is so great in America.  Do you know what the divorce rate is in the church?  It’s 50%.  Half of you in this room have either come from divorced homes or have experienced divorce yourself.  Jesus is getting to the root of the fruit - the problem is our inability to form life-long bonds of intimacy. 

Go to Matthew 5:27. You have heard it said you shall not commit adultery, but let me get down to the root of what Jesus is saying.  “Let me 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 stumble, gouge it out and throw it away.” I’d call that pretty radical therapy!  Obviously, it doesn’t mean to do it literally, because you can be blind and still lust.  It’s not your eye; it’s your mind, right?  But, he’s talking about the severity of what breaks down relationships. “It’s better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into Hell, and if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away.  It is better for you to lose one part of your body than your whole body go to Hell.” 

Now, to understand our sexuality, you have to understand creation and God’s purpose for relationships.  So, I’m going to go back to Genesis 2. God created human beings; the first was Adam.  The Hebrew word Adam means human.  And God gave Adam all kinds of things to do. Adam had to create categories of names for all of the animal and plant kingdoms.  He had a fulfilling kind of work. But, work is not enough to sustain human beings.  So, in Genesis 2:18, God says it is not good for man to remain alone.  Not only did God create man, God created woman.  God created male and female for the purpose of this intimate bonding with one person for life.  We’re both spiritual and sexual beings, but you can’t separate the sexual from the spiritual.  That is how we are unique from the rest of the animal kingdom. When God created aardvarks, elephants and hippopotamuses, that was a good idea, but when he created human beings, he said let’s create a man in our image. So, we are different than the rest of the animal kingdom.  We are spiritual, created in the image of God, and we’re sexual…and you can’t do sexual, like our culture would make you believe, apart from spiritual. It’s why the Bible says in1 Corinthians 6:15-17, “How can you think that you can have sex with a prostitute? You’re a fool because anyone who has sex with another person, you can’t separate flesh from spirit, you become one with that person.”  There is a part of that person inside of you.  For a lot of us, we have legions of people inside of us, and then wonder why we can’t form a bond of intimacy with one other person.  God created us as spiritual and sexual beings, but he didn’t have to do the sexual thing, right?  It’s the sexual thing that cements this life-long bond of intimacy. With this creation, he created us with moral boundaries. The moral boundaries aren’t to frustrate us; they are to protect us and to provide for us, to ensure that we’ll be able to make this strong, affair-proof bond in our life.  A lot of us don’t like boundaries.  But think about it, stinky, smelly swamps don’t have well-defined boundaries. But clear running streams have well-defined boundaries.  There is a boundary in Genesis 2:23 where Adam now realizes the precious nature of this gift.  These were Adam’s words to his wife, “This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, she shall be called woman for she was taken out of man.”  She is part of me, that’s how sacred she is, and I’ll do anything to protect this bond.” Now, to have this kind of bond, look at what it says in Genesis 2:24. This is what God is saying to you teenagers and students. God has this incredible future relationship for you, and it is spiritual, and it is sexual, and he wants you to have this relationship for life. But here’s what will have to happen for you to have this affair-proof bond, “For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother.”  You should never have sexual intimacy with another person until you are emotionally mature enough to live separately from your parents, both emotionally and financially.  And until you are emotionally and financially mature enough to be separate from your parents, you’re not ready for a sexual bond of intimacy.  And, I know too many 50 year olds who are still too connected to Mama!  That is a part of what prevents you from creating a deep bond of sexual intimacy in your marriage. 

Genesis 2:24 continues with, “Then, be united to his wife.”  This means that you are old enough and mature enough to make a covenant commitment, and an exclusive commitment, to one person for the rest of your life.  I had to date several people, up to five or six, before I ever found the one person that I was ready to make an exclusive commitment to for the rest of my life.  While dating a woman before Carolyn, I thought that relationship was going to end up as an exclusive commitment, because we dated for three years.  Boy, I’m glad God had a better idea! This is why you should never, ever have sexual intimacy before marriage.  Remember, it’s not to frustrate you.  It’s to protect you and provide for you. Jesus said “I came that you may have life and have it abundantly.”  He is not trying to take it away from you, Jesus is trying to give you the whole deal. It’s why you should never have sexual intimacy until you have found that one person you’re ready to commit yourself to exclusively for life. Then he says. ”The two become one flesh.”  When you follow the boundaries in Genesis 2:25, it says, “The man and his wife were both naked and they felt no shame.”  When you follow the boundaries and because you are developing an exclusive, intimate bond you feel no shame naked in front of each other. Being together with Carolyn is the best gift I have, but I have to work continually at it. The most important thing in my life is protecting the intimate bond that God has given me and strengthening the bond to create a strong, affair-proof marriage.  That’s what God planned for us, not to frustrate us, but to protect us and provide for us. 

Our sexual connections are designed to operate in a higher dimension than animal appetites.  Animals will act sexually irrational out of the passions of heat. But, humans are designed to create deep bonds with another human being through commitment of heart.  In Genesis 3, lust is a deceptive force that prevents life-long bonding, because it always regresses to a self-focus.  Intimacy is based on other-serving, not self-serving.  Anytime you make a sexual decision based on physical appetite - if it looks good or tastes good - it’s always going to end destructively in relationships.  Look at Genesis 3:6. “When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, she took some and ate it.”  So, when we make a sexual decision based on what looks good or tastes good, we step outside of God’s design, and that decision ends in the destruction of relationships.  When we go from relationship to relationship and divorce to divorce, we fail to bond intimately with another human being.  And, we all have to deal with lust. I read the other day that a healthy 26 year old man thinks of sex about every 6 seconds. But, what we have to realize is that forbidden fruit is exciting, it’s captivating, but it’s deceiving!  Listen to what it says in Proverbs, “Stolen water is sweet, food eaten in secret is delicious, but little do they know that the dead are there and her guest are deep in the realm of the dead.”  Lust is irrational, it defies reason, and it blinds us. 

We’re only a month away from the run-away Beavercreek, Ohio mom story.  That story made it all over the world. I have friends in Korea who emailed me and asked if that lady lived in my area!  That story was all over the place.  I am not condemning this woman at all, but look at how blinding that was.  She comes from a great church, her dad is a pastor, her in-laws are missionaries (Bible translators in Indonesia).Where is the sense?  We call it love, but love would never walk out on a one-year-old baby.

I had a man in my office recently, a guy I have known for years; he is a strong, Christian man, involved in Little League sports with his children and with the youth in our church. He made an appointment to speak to me, and the last thing I would’ve expected from this man was what he said, “Mike, I want to tell you I’m leaving my wife and kids, because I discovered I never really loved her, and for the first time I’m really in love.”  He has kids aged 16, 12 and 8.  So I sat there and looked at this guy and said, “Now forget about you, forget about your wife, but look at the risk are you putting your children in?  You have a 16 year old, who is going to college in a couple years.  What economic risk are you placing upon these children?”  I wanted to smack him!  He said, “I can’t help it, I’ve never felt this way before.”  Do you see the danger?  How lust is blinding?  What is the most important sexual organ you have?  Your brain.  And here is the question we need to ask ourselves every day, because all of us deal with lust. Who defines your sexual values?  Who is defining your sexual values right now?  Colossians tells us that we shouldn’t become products of our culture.  Listen to this word, “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of the world rather than Christ.” 

Sisters and brothers, the elemental spiritual forces of the world are cultural mindsets.  We have to realize the power of group-think and how the mindsets and traditions of society become ingrained into our understanding of our sexuality.  Carolyn and I were watching Grey’s Anatomy the other night, and I thought that it was against everything I am teaching this week in my message. I went home last night after worship and Parenthood was on TV, and everybody was messing around with everybody!  I told Carolyn that it was amazing how culture is forever changing. Today sexual intimacy is so different than it was for me. I remember exactly when I had the nerve to put my hand on Carolyn’s hand, and we were adults? Do you see what I’m trying to say?  Who defines our sexual values?  We have to understand how our beliefs about our sexuality have been impacted by the traditions and values of society.

Prior to World War II, Hitler had built this cultural mindset of “Aryan superiority,” and I remember hearing about it as a kid, watching 20^th Century on Sunday nights. Nazi Germany had the highest percentage of college graduates in the world in the 1930’s and 40’s.  When you think how intelligent this nation was, American and Russia built our space programs by splitting up the Nazi scientists after the war.  What Hitler did was to build this mindset of Aryan superiority. When you have that kind of mindset, you really think racial superiority has been a cultural mindset throughout centuries in the minds of human beings.  This demonic mindset infiltrated the minds of believers so that we participated in slavery while we professed biblical faith! We were professing biblical faith, but we had acculturated the values of society. We professed biblical faith, but we participated in segregation.  There were a lot of founders of this country who professed biblical faith, but how did they come up with the idea that African-Americans were only three-fifths a human being?  Do you see how this corrupts us?  Now, I may be naïve, and I guess I’m glad I am, but how is it that when I go on Facebook I see Christians, people who love God, who profess faith in Christ, who lead Bible studies but then who show pictures of a romantic weekend away with a friend?  Who defines our cultural values?  Or how about when Christians, who have professed faith in Jesus Christ, move in and live with one another, without ever making the exclusive covenant of commitment before witnesses, before God?  Hello?!?  Who is defining our cultural values?  Listen to 2 Corinthians 10:5. ”We must demolish arguments in every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we must take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”  Not just some thoughts, EVERY thought.  Jesus isn’t trying to frustrate us, sisters and brothers; he is trying to give us everything God created for us so we can know the intimate bonding with one other person for life. 

Intimacy comes down to one thing; it is a daily commitment to be pure in heart. It’s what Jesus is talking about in Matthew 5:8 at the introduction of a sermon. ”Bessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”  We are going to be reading the Sermon on the Mount all summer long.  The key to the Sermon on the Mount, the one verse that everything else hinges on, is Matthew 5:48. ”Be therefore perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect.”  Now, that is not talking about a legalistic, external commitment to follow rules.  It’s talking about embodying the very moral character of God, embodying the moral values of God.  There is an important word in Matthew 5:29, the word “eye.”  What is the radical therapy?  If your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out. Why is “eye” so important?  To get the context of that, continue on in the sermon to Matthew 6:22. “The eye is the lamp of the body.”  It’s not the light. When I hear the word lamp I think of light, but a better translation would be window.  Have you ever seen an old oil lamp?  I have one that my grandfather gave me and we get out when the electricity goes off.  It is a glass lamp with red fuel in the bottom of it. You can turn that little wheel on it, and the wick goes up and down.  The lamp has a glass cover that goes over it.  I’ve discovered that when you turn it up, the wick can get kind of funky and it creates black smoke. The lamp then gets all black, and it doesn’t give light like it’s supposed to.  But, if you have it right, then the lamp remains clear and gives light.  Your eye is the window to your body…and it says if your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. 

What Jesus is saying in Matthew 6:22 is that sexual intimacy has a whole lot to do with what you are looking at.  That means, for me, some “always” and “nevers.”  If I’m going to guard and grow in this intimate relationship with one person all my life, then I have to really work to strengthen that. So, one of the “always” and “nevers” for me is that I never open, click on or download a pornographic site.  Didn’t say I wouldn’t want to…all that stuff is just a “never” that I am promising to God, and I’m promising to you, because I don’t want that in my eye.  What goes into my eye goes into my mind.  The Bible gives us some very practical actions, and here is the first thing that we want to realize when we’re building this life-long bond of intimacy; I need to align my thinking with God.  Who defines your sexual intimacy?  Align your thinking with God.  Some of you, I know, are sitting here today and you feel great pain because of failure; whether you are single or married.  Great people have failed. David was a man after God’s own heart but, boy, did he have a moral downfall!  II Samuel 11 says that in the spring of the year when kings go out to war, David stayed at home - that’s where the problem began; he wasn’t doing what he was supposed to do.  In other words, stay at work; don’t go out on business lunches with women who aren’t your wife.  And then David went up on the rooftop of the palace and was looking around, he saw a beautiful lady over on another rooftop, down in the garden. The second mistake was that he looked too long.  Your eyes are the lamp of your body.  So, he had this incredible moral downfall, but David had a great comeback, and the comeback is what matters, sisters and brothers.  God does resurrections.  God can resurrect your marriage.  God can resurrect your life.  God can create all things new.  And David wrote Psalm 51 as his prayer of repentance. Repent means to agree with God.  And this is what he said, “Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.”  Steadfast means unwavering and uncompromising.  So, align your thinking with God. 

The second thing the Bible tells us to do is flee from lust in 2 Timothy 2:22.  Flee means to cut and run!  Another hero of mine in the Bible is Joseph and he is a hero because he didn’t make David’s mistake.  Joseph ended up a slave in Egypt, but God was with him.  Joseph never wavered, even when bad things happened to him, so he rose all the way to manage one of the Egyptian official’s households. So, picture a big mansion for a Hollywood kind of star - you know how some of those people have life managers?  They even have an office in their homes.  That is what Joseph did.  Potiphar, his boss, was on a business trip, but Potiphar’s wife took a liking to Joseph, who was a good-looking guy.  She grabbed him and said, “let’s - you know…”  And he immediately turned and ran.  Can you imagine a big guy like this high-tailing it so quickly that he lost his coat because she held on to it?  I would say that was a pretty quick escape!  He gets outside the house and realized that his coat was stripped off of him. The coat would also be the evidence that she would use against him to claim that he raped her, and it would send him to prison for a long time.  So, I can see him standing outside the house saying “Go back and get the Versace?  Or go to jail?”  Nope, I’m not going to tempt myself a second time, I’d rather go to jail than sin against God.  That is the fear of God. 

Do you know what it means to flee youthful lust?  If there is any unbiblical behavior in your life, or if you are involved in an unbiblical relationship, cut it off right now.  Run. Don’t wait until tomorrow, don’t sleep on it tonight; make that decision before you leave this room. That is exactly what Jesus meant when he said gouge it out, cut if off, stop it now.  Not to frustrate you, but so you can have a solid, strong, life-long commitment, Christ-centered, intimate bond with another person for life.  One final thing he said is to proactively pursue godliness.  That means to be proactive, and that means if you are a young person and culture is telling you what teenagers do, just say NO!  I want to be proactive and do the hard things to ensure a healthy marriage, a Christ-centered bond with a person all of my life.  And right now I am sacrificing for that right person who may come into my life at age 24 or 25.  I think my son was 25 when he met the right person and 27 when he married the right person.  Or if you are a married person, when you leave this room today, commit to working harder at strengthening that bond and working harder at doing the right things, and be much more cautious in the boundaries of what you let in.  Some of you may be sitting here in great pain because you’ve experienced failure or broken trust, but you have made a commitment to stay together, which means you are going to leave this room today and quit throwing stuff in each other’s face. You are going to work on the future.  Actions speak louder than words.  Or, are you are a single or divorced person sitting here wondering what life holds for you?  God holds your future.  Right now, make the sacrifices for the gift that God may have in your future for a life-long, lasting bond.  Define concrete boundaries, the “always” and “nevers.”  Go to personal prayer with the Lord and make some of those commitments.  Ask for God’s strength.  You may be a person who has never asked Jesus Christ into your life.  Invite Jesus into your life, who can give you strength.  All of us fail in many ways because of lust, but hear the words of Jesus, “Go and sin no more.” 

Jesus, we thank You for the gift of life, the gift of relationships, and we hold other people as sacred.  And we treat them as Your children, Your sons and daughters.  Give us the strength to go and do and to be whom You have created us to be.  In Jesus’ name we pray.  Amen.