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Do You Look With Lust In Your Heart?

In the short scope of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus could only cover the most important of subjects. One which he selected was adultery. In our day adultery is rampant. Some estimate that half of husbands commit adultery sometime in their marriage, along with a third of wives. But the problem begins, Jesus teaches us, in the heart.

Legalistic Righteousness

The Pharisees felt secure in observing the Seventh Commandment (Exodus 20:14), and Jesus states their sentiment: "You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery'" (5:27). In our day this attitude is expressed in a wife's careless permission, "I don't care how much you look, just don't touch."

Lust in the Heart

However, Jesus goes beyond the letter to the spirit of the law: "But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (5:28). Is that really what the Law had in mind, you wonder? Yes, indeed. The Tenth Commandment is pretty specific:

"You shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor" (Exodus 20:17).

The word translated "covet" is Hebrew hamad, "desire, delight in," and when used negatively means "inordinate, ungoverned selfish desire (BDB, 326; also TWBOT, 295).

The heart of man is the problem according to Jesus. Lust is a thing of the heart. He teaches: "For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander" (Matthew 15:19). Indeed, he echoes the words of the prophet Jeremiah: "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? (KJV, Jeremiah 17:9)

If the woman isn't married and the man isn't married, and they lust for one another, is it still wrong? Technically, it can't be adultery if neither is married. Here we are with technicalities again. The self-righteous Pharisees were the fathers of such technicalities. But Jesus also uses the Greek word porne (Matthew 15:19; Mark 7:21) translated "fornications" (KJV) or "sexual immorality" (NIV), and this word applies to all kinds of illicit sexual conduct outside of marriage. We can't get off that easily.

Natural Sexual Desire vs. Lust

Is there any hope for a man? From the first stirrings of adolescence hormones begin to surge through boys turning into men. Sex is one of the strongest drives we have. Is this natural sexual desire wrong?

No, natural desire for the opposite sex is normal and necessary. Men desire women and visa versa, families are formed and children produced. That is what God intended.

Like any good gift, however, Satan is quick to pervert or twist it into something God didn't intend. Food is good, but it can lead to ill health when eaten in overabundance. Wine is God's good gift, but can cause drunkenness when taken to excess. Money is good, but can corrupt the soul when worshipped. And so on.

Now, I've heard some argue that man is an animal, and a desire to mate with any and every female is entirely natural and should not be censured. Common sense tells us, however, that unrestrained sex leads to broken families, fatherless children, and general chaos. If unrestrained sex were man's destiny, why should it turn out so badly for all concerned?

We don't see that view in God. We read in Genesis 2 about a man and a woman. "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife [literally, "woman"], and they will become one flesh" (Genesis 2:24). This unity of husband and wife is the basic unit. Society has sometimes allowed polygamy (and in those societies God allowed men of faith to have more than one wife, e.g. Jacob and David). But when we examine the family life of these polygamous unions, we see envy, strife, and competition rather than peace. In the New Testament, leaders of the church are to reflect the ancient and holy ideal that God instituted in the Garden: "Now the overseer must be above reproach, the husband of but one wife..." (1 Timothy 3:2; see also Titus 1:6; 1 Timothy 5:9).

The sex drive is a good thing, but only good when it is exercised within the boundaries God has set, namely, marriage. Outside of marriage, sex may "feel so right" but bring a harvest of bad fruit. Inside marriage it bonds husbands to wives and wives to husbands, and, God willing, children that can grow up within a stable family environment.

Pornography, the "Victimless" Crime

Along with the "free sex" movement that began in the 60s has come a loosening of restrictions on pornography. If "looking on a woman to commit adultery with her in your heart" is Jesus' definition of the spirit of adultery, then pornography fits the description precisely.

Where pornography was once available only in sleazy porno shops, today it has become common in our society. Last Fall, Time Magazine carried a story entitled, "Porn Goes Mainstream" (September 7, 1998). Pornography is easily found in libraries, bookshops, and video stores in every city and town in the country. The Internet is spilling over with it.

There are no victims here, argue the pornographers and their allies. An increasing body of evidence disagrees. While a portion of the feminist movement supports pornography as a free speech issue, a significant slice opposes pornography as degrading and dangerous to women. Here are some of the arguments against pornography:

1. Pornography helps men view women as mere sex objects.
2. Pornography lowers moral values and leads to active practice of prostitution, fornication, adultery, and other perversions.
3. Pornography creates unrealistic expectations of sex and sexual practices that wives may be unable or unwilling to fulfill.
4. Pornography isolates sexual fulfillment from a caring relationship with another human being, and makes it essentially selfish.
5. Pornography exploits young women's naiveté and need for money, and prostitutes images of their bodies to fulfill men's lusts.
6. Pornography is linked to crimes of rape, incest, and sexual abuse of children.
7. The pornographic industry is increasingly controlled by organized crime.
8. Pornography can become psychologically addictive, and lead men to crave more and more bizarre sexual fantasies to stimulate them.

As our society embraces pornography as a harmless outlet, it can't help but increase problems of individuals and society as a whole.

Who are the victims? The women who pose; the men who view and become addicted despite their shame; the wives who suffer isolation, shame, and assault; the children who are abused; the women who are raped; and the society that bears the cumulative pain of divorce, crime, and disorder. Victims? We all are victims.

Cutting off Your Hand -- or Worse (5:29-30)

"If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is 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 sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell" (5:29-30).

So what are we to do when we find ourselves looking at women wrongly? Grasp our eyeball and yank it out of its socket? Is that what Jesus intended?

Back in the early years of Christianity, an influential Alexandrian Christian teacher, Origin (187-254 AD), was so plagued by sexual temptations that he castrated himself. Is self-mutilation Jesus' intent?

I don't think so. Jesus, like all of us, sometimes uses hyperbole -- overstatement -- to make a point. When Jesus spoke of a camel going through the eye of a needle (Matthew 19:24), for example, it was hyperbole, an indication of impossibility. When he says a man should hate his father and mother, wife and children (Luke 14:26), he is employing hyperbole. When we say, "I'll swear on a stack of Bibles," or "I wouldn't do that in a million years," we are using hyperbole to make a point.

When Jesus speaks about cutting off a hand or gouging out an eye, he is speaking in hyperbole. If we were intended to take it literally, we should expect to find other examples in the Word as the apostles sought to expound on and teach it. We don't find anything of the sort. The closest is Paul's statement, "I beat my body and make it my slave" (1 Corinthians 9:27).

While Origin's heart may have been right, he misinterpreted Jesus' words. Saints and hermits throughout the ages have discovered that while you can blind yourself or isolate yourselves from women, you cannot isolate yourself from your own mind and heart.

Jesus' words meant to convey to us that we are to take sexual lust with utmost seriousness. He intended us to understand that lust can lead us down the road to hell itself. (See my essay "Did Jesus Believe in Hell?") Rather than pass off lust as a common denominator of men, he intended that we flee from lust with as much determination as we flee from adultery or fornication (1 Corinthians 6:18). Make no mistake, lust can damn us. We must repent or be damned -- or try to explain away Jesus' own words.

Breaking Free from Lust and Lure

So if you have been captured by a lifelong habit of lust or pornography, how do you break free? This is difficult. If you have practiced a habit over a period of years, you will not break it in a moment. It will take determination and a healthy dose of God's grace to cleanse you when you fail. But it is possible to break free from lust.

1. First, you need to understand something of the nature of the addiction. What is the love hunger it feeds and the triggers for the behavior. You'll find some help from Dennis Rupert's "Weapons for the War Against Lust and Sexual Immorality".
2. Next, come to a firm conviction that lust is wrong. Deal with each of the rationalizations for your sin and write them down to look at when you are tempted.
3. Stop feeding your lust. Get rid of anything in your house that triggers this lust. Throw out pornography, cut off the cable capability that pipes pornography into your home, ask the phone company block all 900 number calls, get Internet access that screens out pornographic materials.
4. Share with someone close to you your struggle with this sin and become accountable to them. Ask for their prayer support and confess your sins to them.
5. Seek counsel for your problem from a pastor or Christian counselor.
6. Use the weapons of scripture reading, prayer, and fasting.
7. Accept God's grace and complete forgiveness toward you as his child, even if you fall and sin again. The woman taken in adultery didn't hear condemnation from Jesus, but love and encouragement: "Neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more" (John 8:11).

Looking without Lust

God wants us to be able to look on members of the opposite sex with love rather than lust. (Or, if we are struggling with homosexual temptations, he wants us to be able to look on the members of our own sex with a pure love and without lust.) This is his plan.

If lust and adultery are the negatives, what is the positive? If the law tells us what not to do; what does it direct us to practice? "Teacher," Jesus' enemies asked him to trick him, "which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus replied:

" 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments" (Matthew 22:36-40)

Jesus calls us to look with love. Men in a church are to "treat ... younger women as sisters, with absolute purity" (1 Timothy 5:2). The reason brothers don't usually lust for their sisters is because they care for them as people. Their relationship goes beyond the physical exterior to the real person who has longings and disappointments, a girl with potential and hope and pain. We love our sisters as people. That is what it is all about.

Job said, "I made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully at a girl" (Job 31:1). How then can I look at her? As a sister. As a wonderful and fragile human being. As a person whom God loves. If I can train my eyes to see as God sees with the love with which God loves, it is hard to look with lust.

Can you train your eyes? Can you train yourself to substitute your prurient gaze for one that sees the inner person whom God loves? Yes, with the Spirit of God in you to fulfill the spirit of the law you can indeed. You'll need to break the habit of lust, perhaps, and that is difficult. But you can learn to look with love. And that, my friends, is how Jesus looks.

Lord Jesus. Train our eyes to look with your love. Forgive us our lust and selfishness and shame. And remake us in the image of our Master. In your power we pray. Amen.

Copyright © 1996-2001, Ralph F. Wilson. All rights reserved. JesusWalkis a registered trademark and Joyful Heart is trademark of Joyful Heart Ministries. Unless otherwise stated, scripture quotations are from the New International Version (NIV) of the Bible (copyright © 1973, 1978, 1983, by International Bible Society).