“Family Values”

Exodus 20:14

Eugene Peterson: Marriage is sacred and invioble. The intimacies of a vowed life together are protected [by the 7^th Commandment] against sexual predation. Sexual desire is not allowed a life of its own.

Walter J. Harrelson: Do not suppose, the Bible may be implying, that there is such a thing as sex without consequences… perhaps only emotional, but perhaps moral, economic, and spiritual consequences.

Matthew 5:27-30 (The Message): You know the next commandment pretty well, too: “Don’t go to bed with another’s spouse.” But don’t think you’ve preserved your virtue by staying out of bed. Your heart can be corrupted by lust even quicker than your body. Those leering looks you think nobody notices – they also corrupt.

[prayer]

Over the thirty years since my ordination I have preached on or taught about the 7^th Commandment several times. I have done so each time with a bit of totally irrational trepidation. This goes back to something my intern year supervising pastor shared with me. According to him Billy Graham once said that any pastor who preaches about adultery on a regular basis is either committing it or wants to.

Maybe that’s true; maybe it’s not. I’m taking no chances. I’m preaching this sermon because when one preaches a series of sermons on the Ten Commandments, the 7^th Commandment should naturally follow the 6^th.

With that being said, I want to share an old story about President Calvin Coolidge. As he returned from church one morning his wife asked what the preacher’s topic had been. “Sin,” said the President. “Well what did he say about it,” his wife asked. Answered the President, “He’s against it.” If tomorrow somebody asks you what today’s sermon was about I want you to remember two things. The topic was adultery, and your pastor is against it.

Why? Because Scripture, the very Word of God, is against it. Why? Adultery has consequences: emotional, moral, economic, and spiritual. When sexual desire is given a life of its own, it more often than not results in heartache and disaster.

The basic commandment as it was handed down to Moses had a very limited definition. Adultery was committed when a married woman had sex with anyone other than her husband, or whenever a married man had sex with someone else’s wife. We will only note in passing the double standard. Why? A double standard no longer exists. Jesus took care of that. More than that, he gave adultery a definition that sets an almost impossible standard for everybody: husbands and wives, men and women, married and single. Lusting after another person, no matter what their marital status or yours might be, is a sin – period. No ifs, ands, or buts. No extenuating circumstances. No ethical quibbling. It is what it is.

Back to early Israel. As has been noted in previous sermons, Israel was surrounded by pagan cultures. In many of those cultures illicit sex was part and parcel of pagan worship. One had sex to appease the gods. Sex was in itself a god. People used it as a means of worship, and in the process it became the object of worship.

The moral code handed down by the Lord at Sinai did not allow that. If the children of Israel were going to survive in a hostile environment, they had to differentiate their culture from those of their neighbors. One way they did that was by way of their sexual ethic.

And a major part of that ethic was the 7^th Commandment: no adultery allowed. There could be no family stability without marital stability. There could be no social or cultural stability without stable families. There could be no national stability if that nation’s culture was unstable. An unstable nation could not survive. Eventually the cultural instability brought on by gross disobedience divided and then later destroyed Israel.

William Barclay made an interesting observation: no sin was more horrible than adultery in ancient Israel, and no sin was more common. Adultery was so awful that the prophets who spoke God’s Word of judgment often used it as a metaphor for national apostasy. Israel, said God through the prophets, had gone whoring after the false gods of their neighbors. The closest comparison to the Lord’s sense of betrayal by his people that the prophets could make was the marital betrayal that is adultery.

Bringing us back to our own day and age, adultery doesn’t occur in a vacuum. It doesn’t just happen one day, coming as it were out of the clear, blue sky. It is sin, like every sin, that grows from a seed of immorality that’s planted in our hearts. Adultery is an unhealthy sexual desire for someone other than one’s spouse. The sinful seed in adultery’s case is the lust that Jesus described.

Lust is a form of sexual coveting. Lust is a seed that grows into adultery because we choose to let it. We often encourage it to grow by way of our fantasies. Living in a time when sex has once again achieved god-like status – surrounded by a culture that directly and indirectly markets sex – we are constantly bombarded with sexually vivid images. Our hearts are vulnerable to invasion from the seeds of lust that are directed at us night and day. We cannot totally avoid the images and the attitudes that surround us. We can avoid encouraging them to take root in our hearts.

We don’t have to look at pornography. Nobody forces us to watch dirty movies or read racy novels. When some scantily clad woman or hunk of a man walks by it’s okay to notice them. What’s not okay is following them down the street with our eyes, or worse carrying their images around in our hearts and minds for the rest of the day.

That’s exactly what Jesus was talking about when he defined adultery as lusting after someone in our hearts. This lust is defined by one commentary as a matter of deliberate and intentional use of our hearts and minds to stimulate unhealthy sexual desires. Referring to my earlier image, it’s a matter of consciously bringing to maturation those sinful seeds that infiltrate every human heart at one level or another, those sinful seeds that grow up to be adulterous acts.

As I said adultery does not occur in a vacuum. That’s because we don’t live in a vacuum. Not only are we surrounded by sexual images that feed sinful fantasies, we also live out our lives in an imperfect world. No marriage is perfect. No spouse is perfect. Family life isn’t always warm and fuzzy. Add to that imperfect mix all the other stresses of life in our time and what’s created is a very nice little playground for the devil.

Satan uses our anxieties, angers, and insecurities as a means by which to plant and nurture all kinds of sinful seeds in our hearts, including lust. All marriages go through rough patches. Some marriages do not survive these difficult times. And it is during such times that we are most in danger of letting lust grow in our hearts. And all too often men and women use these times as an excuse for an affair.

The rationalizations for such affairs are many and various. But there are no valid excuses. Your spouse can be the meanest, coldest, and most dysfunctional person in the world, but that doesn’t make adultery okay. Your spouse may be cheating on you, but it’s still not okay for you to do likewise. Divorce is a horrible thing, but it’s better than living in a relationship in which one or both partners is engaged in ongoing adulterous behavior. If you’re going to stay married, your only Christian option is to remain faithful.

Every one of us, if we choose to make ourselves aware of them, has opportunities to commit adultery, if not physically then in our hearts. Every one of us is susceptible to periods of personal and vocational unhappiness that leave us vulnerable to the attractions of lust. Not only is each of us immersed in a culture that celebrates inappropriate sexual behavior, some of us have grown up in families where we were taught that physical attractiveness and sexual prowess were the only things that mattered. All of us are wounded, imperfect creatures. While any or all of that may be used to rationalize or explain inappropriate behaviors, none of it gives us an excuse to engage in them.

When God says no he means no. God’s law, God’s Word, and God’s will forbid adulterous behavior and lustful fantasies. But we’re all capable of breaking any and all of the Commandments including the 7^th. That’s the bad news.

Now hear the Good News. In Christ all sins can be forgiven. In Christ even the most broken marriage can be preserved. In Christ even our most devastating sexual wounds can be healed. In Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we can resist temptation. More than that those deadly seeds of lust can be rooted out of our hearts. In Christ we can rise above our culture’s unhealthy fixation on sex. In Christ we can keep God’s 7^th Commandment. Amen.