26 What Jesus Means by "Adultery in Your Heart" (Matthew 5:27-30)

Krisan Marotta: Thank you for downloading Wednesday in the Word, my podcast about what the Bible means and how we know. I'm Krisan Marotta. This is the 26th talk in our series on the Gospel of Matthew. Today we're going to study Matthew chapter 5, verses 27 through 30. The lecture notes for today's talk are on the link below this podcast, and you can also find them by going directly to Wednesdayintheword.com slash Matthew 26. And while you're there, you can find all the previous episodes in this series on wednesdayintheword.com. One listener note: this particular talk concerns issues within marriage and may not be appropriate for young listeners. So if you're listening with little ones nearby, you may want to save this podcast for later. Thanks so much for joining me. We are continuing in the Sermon on the Mount. As I outline it, the Sermon on the Mount has four main sections, and we are in the second section. The first section is Matthew 5, verses 1 through 16. That's the Beatitudes, where Jesus describes those who have saving faith and will receive eternal life. The second section, the one we're looking at now, is chapter 5, 17 through 48. And this is where Jesus is correcting the vision of holiness and righteousness that the Pharisees have been teaching. The third section is chapter 6, verse 1, and goes all the way to 7.14. And here I think Jesus is warning his listeners to avoid the self-deception of the Pharisees. And then he concludes at the end of chapter 7 and verses 15 through 29 that it's not enough to claim to believe, you must live out your beliefs. The Pharisees had a reputation of being champions of the Old Testament, and because Jesus is rejecting the way the Pharisees understand the Old Testament, he could be accused of rejecting the Old Testament itself. But he starts this section by saying, No, I did not come to abolish the law. I came to teach and clarify the truths taught in the Old Testament. Everything in the Old Testament finds its fulfillment and consummation in me, the Messiah. Now we're in the second section, which runs through 538, and it's often called the antithesis. It's so called because Jesus quotes the law or he paraphrases a command of Moses, and then he says, but I say and makes an oppositional statement or an antithesis. So we've seen this structure. You have heard X, but I say Y. And in each case, in order to understand the point Jesus is making, we're looking at the nature of his response. Now in the last podcast, we looked at his first example, which was murder and hatred. Today we're going to look at his second example. This is Matthew five verses twenty seven through thirty. 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. Now like last week's passage, Jesus is quoting one of the Ten Commandments, you shall not commit adultery, which is Exodus twenty, verse fourteen. And you'll recall that I have argued that chapter five verse twenty is very important to understanding this section of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus has been arguing, you've heard the Pharisees teach that being a righteous person involves this, but I say to you, it involves that. So the Pharisees have a certain understanding of what it means to be holy, what it means to be blameless before the law, and Jesus is critiquing and correcting that understanding. He started this section of the sermon by saying your righteousness has to surpass that of the scribes and the Pharisees, and now he's giving us examples of what he means by that. The first one he gave was murder and anger, and now he turns to adultery and lust. And he starts this section by saying, You've heard the Pharisees say that in order to be righteous you must not commit adultery because the law forbids the act of adultery. Now, since the Pharisees have not legally committed adultery, they consider themselves righteous, but I say to you, there's more to it than that. Jesus addresses this issue from the point of view of a man, which is not surprising in that culture. He's addressing the teaching of the Pharisees, all of whom were male, and the Old Testament laws concerning adultery tend to address the responsibility of the man. In the next section, Jesus is going to talk about divorce, and in that culture at the time, divorce could only be initiated by the man. Now you'll remember he's speaking to a culture where virtually everyone of adult age was married. In that culture, all men were expected to marry, and typically women needed the cultural support and protection of a husband, so they had to be married. So fundamentally here I think Jesus is talking to married men about how they relate to married women because virtually everyone of adult age was married. For a man to commit adultery is to violate two marriages. By sleeping with a wife that is not his, he adulterates the woman's marriage, he brings impurities into the pure relationship between another man and his wife. This idea of impurities or adulterating the marriage in many cultures even today is tied to the idea that the woman might get pregnant. You're probably aware that throughout history, many, many cultures have had double standards for men and women. So in many cultures it's never right for a wife to sleep with someone other than her husband because she might compromise the bloodline. But in those same cultures, a man can have a mistress or sleep with prostitutes without fear of social reprisal because he is not going to get pregnant. Now given how common that double standard view is across cultures, I think it's significant that Jesus is focusing the issue here on the heart of the man. He says, Everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. And notice we're not talking about compromised bloodlines. We're not even talking about undesirable practical consequences like unplanned pregnancies, broken relationships, and so forth. In fact, Jesus makes it clear we're not talking about any overt, socially undesirable action at all. We're talking about something going on inside the man's heart unknown to any other person other than himself and God. Now Jesus is speaking to the kind of self-righteousness a man could gain from never having committed the act of adultery under the law. And I think it's really important to note that Jesus is not saying anything new here. Sometimes scholars understand Jesus to be adding to or correcting the Old Testament law in these but I say to you statements. They say that the Ten Commandments, the Old Testament law dealt primarily with outward behavior, and now Jesus is adding something new. He's saying there's something more important, there's this aspect of what's happening on the inside. But I would argue that Jesus is not correcting the law or the Ten Commandments, rather he's relying on them. You'll notice the seventh commandment is you shall not commit adultery, but the tenth commandment is you shall not covet. Exodus twenty seventeen says, You shall not covet your neighbor's house, you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor's. Now taking the Ten Commandments as a whole, a lot of scholars agree that Jesus is not adding some new emphasis to the law that wasn't already there because this tenth commandment already emphasizes the importance of your inward heart attitude. It's not just what you do on the outside, what you're thinking and feeling and wishing and desiring on the inside also matters. Paul reflects on this idea in Romans seven. I'm going to start at Romans seven seven. What then shall we say that the law is sin? By no means. Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin, for I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said you shall not covet. But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness, for apart from the law sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. The very commandment that promised a life proved to be death to me, for sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. So then the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good. Now there's a lot we could talk about in that passage, but for our purposes today I want to focus on the fact that Paul is saying it was the tenth commandment that made his own sin clear to him. Prior to his conversion to Christianity, Paul was a devout Pharisee. As a devout Pharisee, I think we could safely say that Paul never committed the act of adultery. As a Pharisee, the seventh commandment would not have troubled him. He could go through and say, check, kept that one, kept that one, kept that one. But then you get to the tenth commandment, the one that focuses on the state of your heart and mind, and that one strikes him to the core. And in trying to understand the tenth commandment, Paul discovered that he was in fact sinful. As a Pharisee, he thought himself holy and blameless before the law, but now he comes to this tenth commandment and he realizes he's in trouble. The first nine commandments can be obeyed outwardly, but the tenth commandment is very clearly an internal matter. Coveting is something we do on the inside. Coveting is loving what you don't have, greedily wanting what is not yours and resenting people who have more than you do. And you can be very outwardly religious and still inwardly coveting and longing for things that belong to another person that you have no right to claim. And Paul says this law about coveting finally made clear to him who he was on the inside. He began to see things that had been there the whole time but he had never acknowledged. And it was the law about coveting that made this clear to him as it had never been before. Now notice Paul is not describing the kind of rebellion that children do when they deliberately cross a line their parents say don't cross. Paul is describing a kind of problem or rebellion of a child who sincerely wants to be obedient but finds out he doesn't have what it takes. Now my basic point here is that Jesus is not adding to the Old Testament. As Paul discovered, Jesus is bringing out the implications of what was already there. So let's talk about what does it mean to look at a woman with lustful intent. To answer that, let's go back to the tenth commandment. This is Exodus twenty seventeen. You shall not covet your neighbor's house, you shall not covet your neighbor's wife or his male servant or his female servant or his ox or his donkey or anything that is your neighbor's. So let's start with a distinction between desire and coveting. The tenth commandment says we are not to lust after our neighbor's house. If my neighbor has a nice house, there's nothing wrong, there's nothing evil with expressing a simple desire. Wow, that's a great house. I'd love to have one like it. It's not wrong to admire or appreciate what someone else has, to look at it with a sense of admiration and appreciation of wow, that's a great thing you've got. Now in my example, God has decreed that my neighbor gets that house and not me. What if I rebel against God's plan in my mind? What if I resent the boundaries God has given me? Maybe I don't act on that resentment. I don't go over and kill my neighbor and steal his house. But inside I resent him for having what I do not. I nurse a grudge against him and anger against God, and I resist submitting to the plan that God has for me. That's coveting. It's not just the fact that I desire a nice house, it's my insistence that I will not be content before God without it. So to covet or to lust after something is to cling in my mind to that which God has forbidden me. Now this gets even more powerful when we talk about lusting after someone else's spouse, which the Tenth Commandment also forbids. There's nothing evil about sexual desire. There's nothing inherently wrong with it. God made us sexual beings. We can't help noticing that another person is attractive. We might even appreciate that a sexual relationship with that person might be nice. That's the way God designed us. But if that man is not my husband, God has decreed that he and I should be nothing more than friends. It's wrong to indulge in and encourage feelings and desires that would only be appropriate if he were my husband. It's not just that such a relationship is not meant to be, God has forbidden me such a relationship. It is the refusal to live within the will of God that is the problem. God has forbidden sexual relationships outside of marriage, and yet if I pursue them in my mind, that is coveting, that is wrong. God has given me one man to love and cherish, and I am trying in my mind to pursue another instead. That's what I understand the Tenth Commandment to mean when it forbids lusting after your neighbor's wife. To covet or to lust after something is to cling in my mind to that which God has forbidden me. And I think Jesus means exactly the same thing here in Matthew five. Let's go back to Matthew five twenty-seven and twenty eight. 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. Looking at a woman with lustful intent is to commit in our hearts the adultery that God has forbidden with the real person. Because sexuality is such a powerful phenomenon involving both our body and our minds, our imaginations can take us very far into having that imaginary encounter. And Jesus is saying, You Pharisees consider yourself righteous because you've refrained from committing the act of adultery. But righteousness requires more than outward obedience. Righteousness requires an inward submission to the will of God. If on the inside you're rejecting God's boundaries and pursuing a fantasy relationship that God has forbidden, that's just as wrong. Righteousness requires bowing your will to God's will, repenting of your sinful desires and humbly accepting and seeking whatever God has for you. Being a hypocrite, acting one way on the outside, but inside pursuing the opposite does not make you righteous. Yes, of course it's better for everyone involved if you don't actually physically commit the act of adultery, but that inner rebellious fantasy is still sin. Now Jesus goes on to drive this point home in five twenty nine through thirty. 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. That's the English Standard Version. The New American Standard has if your right eye makes you stumble, and then if your right hand makes you stumble. And stumbling is a very important concept in the New Testament. This idea is much stronger than I happen to fall into a temptation. Stumbling does refer to tripping and falling, but most often in the context, stumbling is talking about falling away from God to your own destruction. Something that causes me to stumble causes me to turn away from God and fall headlong to my peril. It's not that I make a mistake or that I fail to be obedient now and then. It's not that I'm enticed to turn away from God once but I quickly return to Him. And it's not tripping and falling on the sidewalk. This is turning away from God and falling into sin such that it leads to my destruction. And we can tell that Jesus has something serious in mind because the result of stumbling is not getting a skinned knee in his examples. The result of stumbling is having your whole body thrown into hell. And he makes that point twice. It is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. Hell being the place of judgment and condemnation. Hell is the outcome of rejecting God. It's the outcome of never repenting over your sins. Now Jesus is not speaking literally here when he talks about tearing out your eye and cutting off your hand. He's using hyperbole. And some people in the history of the church have taken these statements to mean that Jesus is literally recommending self-mutilation as a means of solving our problem with sin and lust. I do not think that's what Jesus means at all. Let's think about the imagery he's using. The last thing I want to do is tear out my eye or cut off my hand. In this life now, my eyes and my hands are precious to me. I need them. What could I possibly gain by cutting off my hand or tearing out my eye? I don't want to live in this world without them. Jesus is saying, What if the choice is between losing your hand and losing your whole body? In other words, losing everything. True, your hand and your eye are very precious to you, but is keeping your eye today worth losing your entire body forever tomorrow? That's the nature of the choice he's describing. Literally, tearing out my eye or cutting off my hand is not going to solve anything. He's speaking metaphorically. He's making a comparison to make a point. Which is worse losing your eye now or losing eternal life, losing your hand now or losing your soul? And he expects you to say, of course, it's better to lose an eye or a hand now. And the point he's making is in the same way it is better to submit to God's plan for me in this life than to forfeit my soul to eternal destruction. What is forgoing some sexual gratification now compared to eternal judgment? There's no comparison. In this life we're all going to be confronted every day with circumstances and situations that test how much we want to follow God. Every single day we're going to face situations which tempt us to To step over the boundaries that God has put in our lives. Now, as we talked about when we looked at Blessed are the meek, God has a plan for our lives, and that plan gives us boundaries. Some boundaries are universal, they apply to everyone in all cultures and all times, for example, the Ten Commandments. And other boundaries are unique to our specific situation. If I'm married, my boundaries are different than if I'm single. If I'm a parent, my boundaries are different than someone who is childless. If I'm a child, my boundaries are different than if I'm an adult. Outside of the boundaries are things which I cannot do without being unfaithful to God. Within those boundaries, I can be faithful to God. Now each and every one of us is going to have days when we stand at the border of our boundaries and we gaze longingly at the other side. We're going to look over that boundary and say, gosh, it sure would be nice to have that. It looks good over there. But to go over there means to stop trusting God and to grab and take what I want instead. As people of faith, we have to learn to resist stepping over the boundaries. We are learning to say, it sure looks good over there, but my eyes deceive me. What God says is best, no matter how much greener the grass appears to be on the other side of the fence. It is better to wait on him now and receive that future inheritance than rebel and lose my soul forever. Now, at some point in our lives, all of us cross a boundary we shouldn't. Faith is a journey, it's a process that we grow in. And Jesus is not saying one strike and you're out, one step over any boundary and you're no longer in my kingdom. That's not what he's saying. He's asking us to consider what is it that we ultimately want? What is most important to us? The temptation to cross the boundaries are going to seem really enticing. At times my neighbor's house and my neighbor's spouse are going to seem non negotiable to me. I'm going to think that I have to have them, and it is unfair and wrong of God to withhold them from me. This area of sexual morality of being chaste before marriage and faithful after is one of those places that are going to tempt us and they're going to seem non negotiable to us. It's going to seem at times like I absolutely must have what I want sexually when and with whom I want it. After all, we love each other, it feels right, it feels wrong of God to forbid it. Why would God withhold something pleasurable? I will feel that I have to have it on my terms and not God's, and I can find all kinds of ways to justify the behavior in my own mind. And Jesus is saying if those sexual desires are causing you to stumble, that is, they are drawing you away from God, then they are no longer precious, they're your enemy. What good will it do you to have what you want now if it leads to your eternal destruction in the end? Just like it's better to lose a hand or an eye, it is better to do without illicit sexual encounters now than to fall headlong into the wrath of God. Now Jesus is calling us to take very seriously not only how we handle our sexuality on the outside, but how we handle it on the inside where no one knows but us. We have to be willing to submit even the choices we're making in our own minds to the plan of God. The call to follow Him includes being content with whatever plan God has for us. We have to come to the place where we can say following God means more to me than having a sexual fling now, real or imagined. In that sense, your righteousness has to surpass the Pharisees. They've taught you that you are righteous if you refrain from physically committing the act of adultery, but the issue goes much deeper. You are righteous if you are truly content with the boundaries God has put on your sexuality, not just in your outward actions, but also in your mind. I don't think many people would argue with the fact that most modern cultures have abandoned God's view of sexuality. Modern American culture is profoundly lost. By and large, we have ceased listening to what God has to say about sexuality. And sooner or later, if we're following God, we're going to have to choose between what our culture says about sexuality and what God says. The ultimate challenge behind what Jesus is saying is do you want to follow God's way or not? The real moral issue behind adultery and lust is how we relate to God. The fundamental choice each and every one of us must make is will I live in truth or not? Will I listen to what God has to say about sexuality and will I seek to live by what He says is right? Will I seek the truth about God, about ourselves and our neighbors, and will I try to live like it or not? If I want to live in truth, then God has something to say about sexuality. He created it. It's a powerful force and a wonderful gift. And it's one of those places where we must confront the question, am I willing to learn the truth and live it or not? If sexual gratification on my terms is so important to me that I turn from God and live a lie, then I am lost. I really don't know how to understand Jesus in this section any other way. He says if I will not turn away from anything that takes me away from God, the alternative is the whole body being thrown into hell. Now I'm not saying that external behavior is irrelevant. It is better that I refuse to act on my sinful desires for everyone involved. It's better to hate in my own heart where no one sees than commit murder, and it's better to lust in my own heart where no one sees than to actually break up a marriage. External behavior matters, but it's not the only thing that matters. Jesus is saying there's a fundamental choice behind righteousness that each of us must make, and that choice matters a great deal. And fundamentally that choice is am I willing to follow God? Am I willing to listen to what He says is true and right and seek to live in light of that truth? So I would paraphrase this section like this When the Pharisees talk about what it means to be a righteous person, you have heard them say that you shall not commit the act of adultery. They say this as if righteousness consists only of not legally or physically committing adultery. But I'm telling you that if you've imagined committing adultery with another man's wife and resent the sexual boundaries God has placed on you, then you're an adulterer. If you understand what I'm saying, be more concerned with submitting to God's will for you than with seeking sexual gratification outside of God's will. It is better to follow God even if it means going through this life without something precious than to face eternal destruction. Now what does Jesus want us to take away from this passage? At least one thing is to take the tenth commandment seriously. Coveting is lusting after something that God has forbidden me. Coveting is not about external behavior. Real adultery hurts other people, murder hurts other people, robbery hurts other people, but coveting is an offense against God. It is a refusal to live in truth, to accept God's right to put boundaries on our lives. Jesus wants us to see that morality is not just about external behavior and bad consequences, it also involves a willingness to accept God's boundaries. And the fundamental issue is do I accept God's right to put wise boundaries on my life? Do I humbly bow to him inside where it counts? Now just to be clear, none of us are perfectly, courageously, and consistently obedient, especially in the area of sexuality. The problem is not that we find these sins in ourselves, because we will find them. The question is when we find these sins in ourselves, how do we respond? Do we grieve over those sins? Do we throw ourselves on the mercy of God and ask His forgiveness and beg Him to take the sin and guilt away? Or do we justify our sin, explain it as acceptable, or even worse, defiantly claim our actions are without fault and we don't care what God says about sexuality anyway? The real issue is are we willing to be corrected? Are we willing to turn from our ways and strive to see life the way God sees it? Are we willing to try to change and seek change? Now ultimately none of us can free ourselves from any particular sin. God promises to free us, but it can take a lifetime. You may not be able to change your sexual desires, but at some deep level you have to want to change. I don't know of any promise in Scripture that says we're going to have an easy road when it comes to sexuality, or anything else for that matter. I don't know of any promise that says if you come to faith in Jesus, all biblically inappropriate desires are going to vanish overnight or even in your lifetime. What am I to do when I'm in the middle of temptation and I want to throw up my hands and say, but I can't change? And I know many genuine believers who are in exactly that spot where they take an honest look and say, I can't change this about myself. And there's a sense in which I agree. None of us can remove the sin in our lives. That's why we need a savior. Whether the sin involves sexuality, lust, greed, pride, selfishness, arrogance, whatever, none of us can change it by ourselves. We need the blood of Christ, the grace of God, and the work of the Holy Spirit. God's timeline is God's timeline. If He wants me to face a particular struggle for ten days or ten years or the rest of my life, then I must face it. Sometimes when we say I can't change, what we're really saying is I don't want to change. And that's a problem because the bottom line is we have to want to want to change. We have to start with at least the acknowledgement that God is right and I am not handling things the way I should. There may be many failures along the way, but I have to see them as failures. I shouldn't have been there, I should have walked away, I shouldn't have done that. And the struggle to walk away is not saying I don't want to stop, it's saying I want to stop, but I keep messing up. That's where we go back to Romans 7. Paul argues that very problem in Romans 7. The thing that I want to do is not what I'm doing, and the thing that I'm doing is not what I want to do. Wretched sinner that I am, who's going to save me from this wretched trap? And his answer is thanks be to God because Jesus will save me. Ultimately, in his way and in his timing. But there has to be that bottom line of I want to change at some level, and I agree at some level God is right and I am wrong. Now that's a really hard thing to know for sure in ourselves, and it's impossible to know in others. And Jesus is not asking us to judge other people here. He's only asking us to be honest with ourselves. When I try to sort out any temptation for myself, I always come back to what does the Bible have to say about this situation, and am I willing to face into it? Let me go to one of Paul's other letters, and I think this will help give us some perspective on what I'm saying here and on this struggle to choose to follow God. This is Titus three, I'm going to read verses three through seven. For we also once were foolish ourselves, disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures, spending our life in malice and envy, hateful and hating one another. But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by His grace we would be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life. Paul makes some very definitive statements here about what God is doing for his people, and Paul is talking about believers. He said, We used to be foolish, we used to be disobedient, we were deceived, and we were enslaved, but we are no longer. We were these things once, but we're not anymore. One of the things that was true about us is that we were guilty and without hope. We had no right to make any claim on God or to expect to receive eternal life, but because of what Jesus has done, we have been justified. That is, we have been made right with God because our debt to justice has been paid, and we now stand to inherit eternal life. Because of the blood of Christ, I now hope to receive forgiveness and mercy and a place in the kingdom of God. And what caused the change? Nothing that I did. That change in my status of moving from no hope to hope, of moving from guilty to justified, came because of God's mercy, the work of Jesus Christ, and the pouring out of the Holy Spirit, not because of deeds I have done in righteousness, as Paul says. But notice he says something else in 3.5. He says, He saved us not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to his mercy by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit. He describes believers as more than people who have been forgiven. Those who stand to inherit eternal life have gone through this washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit. We were not just guilty, we were foolish, rebellious, disobedient people who were set against God. God reached out to rescue us from that foolish rebellion, and we are no longer foolish, disobedient, enslaved, rebellious people. We no longer reject the truth. We are no longer unwilling and stubbornly resistant to the truth. Our hearts have been washed from hardness to God, and we have been reborn so that we are no longer hostile to God. I think this is the same idea that we see in Jesus' conversation with Nicodemus, where he told him, You must be born again. Something so significant about us needs to change. It's as if we have come into the world again. It's as if we were born again. We were lost, we were set against God, we were headed for destruction. We need to be changed, washed, and born again such that we are no longer against God. We seek Him instead. We no longer rebel against God. We want to obey Him instead. Yes, we're still sinners, but there is a fundamental bottom line heart attitude change. And that's what I'm saying is essential. At some level you have to want to change. You may still be trapped in sexual sin, but at some level you have to want to change. The key idea here in Titus is that those who stand to inherit eternal life are not just those who've been forgiven, they have also been reborn and regenerated by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is now at work in our lives teaching us, maturing us, and changing us and giving us the desire to follow God. Now, this is not to suggest that believers are sinless and perfect people. We're not. If you've been listening to any of my teaching, you know that I really do not agree with any kind of victorious Christian living theology. I disagree with higher life philosophy or any theology that says we believers have all the tools we need to be perfect now. I think experience and scripture teach that every believer is going to still seriously struggle with sin and evil impulses. But now when we sin, we will eventually repent. Now when we fall into temptation or leap into sin, we regret it. We mourn over it and we seek God's grace and forgiveness. Ultimately, over time, we admit we were wrong because our fundamental attitude towards sin has changed. Sin just doesn't look or feel that attractive anymore. Why? Why do we repent? Why do we believe the promises of God about eternal life? Why do we cling to the hope of the gospel when the world dangles all these other options in front of us? Because something very big has changed. We have been washed by the Holy Spirit so that we don't view sin the same way anymore. We don't enjoy it the way we used to. We don't justify it the way we used to. We're not enslaved to it in the way we once were. Eventually we will repent and admit we were wrong because of the activity of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Now Jesus is not saying, if you have ever failed in this area of sexuality, you are not believers. The issue is not how perfectly obedient can you be? The issue is will you respond to the truth of the gospel? It's not a question of have you earned your salvation by being sinless and perfect, rather the question is is your heart open to the things of God and are you willing to be taught and corrected and learn from Him? Will you admit your error or not? We all have a choice to make, pursue God and seek first His kingdom, or pursue our sinful desires. And how we respond to these issues matters a great deal because it reveals whether or not the Holy Spirit is at work in our lives. It reveals who we're truly following. If we're pursuing a lifestyle of sexual immorality and we don't care what God thinks about it, that's a big red flag that we have stumbled and sexuality is drawing us away from God. If that's true of you, this verse should be a wake-up call. If we failed in our sexuality, but have genuinely repented and are genuinely actively seeking to follow God, then we can be comforted. The blood of Jesus covers our sins and the Holy Spirit is at work to change us. Admitting our sinfulness and wanting to change is a crucial part of living in the truth and accepting God's boundaries. While this warning, this section could lead us to despair, because all of us, if we're honest, know that we are not what we ought to be on the inside, I think it is also a positive exhortation. Jesus means to show us the way we should go. God wants our hearts and we must strive to give them to Him. Yes, we're going to fail often, but sometimes we won't. We are to live gratefully in the truth, knowing that God is merciful and gracious. It's not enough to say I can't do it, I need mercy. I must still make the choice to want to live in God's truth. We want to avoid telling ourselves that we've got it made because we've refrained from murder, robbery, and adultery. On the other hand, we can't tell ourselves, hey, I'm forgiven, so it doesn't matter what I do or what I think. We are called to seek the truth and to act on it. We are called to be willing to be taught by the truth and let it change our behavior, our thoughts, our values, and our goals. God is good and he calls us to follow him in goodness. And God is merciful and forgives us our many failures. And it's our job to live in the light of both of those truths. Thank you for listening to Wednesday in the Word, the podcast that explains not only what a passage means, but also shows you how to figure that out. You can find all previous episodes in this series on my website, wednesdayintheword.com. No charge, no spam, and no ad. It's all free to help you improve your study skills and your understanding of scripture. If you've been blessed by this podcast, please subscribe, leave a positive rating or review wherever you listen, and most importantly, tell a friend what you learned and what you learned. A big thank you to Reggie Coast for the use of his beautiful song Tenacious. You can hear more from Reggie Coast at heartfeltmusic.org. Thank you for joining me today. I'm Krisan Marotta, and I'll see you next week at Wednesday in the Word.