Cheating on Yourself, Others and God

[podcast]http://www.revkwon.com/podcast/sermon-adultery.mp3[/podcast] How was everybody’s thanksgiving? A lot to give thanks for? I was so thankful for my last thanksgiving as a single person this year. I got to know the joy of having thanksgiving dinner with more than just one family. I had to eat a lot of food, but somebody had to do it. And I would do it again in the future. Okay, now that we’ve reminisced about the diet that I’m not on let’s go to the Bible. We’re going to pick up where we left off last week. Verse 27, Matthew chapter 5. Turn to it in your Bibles and in your notes or on your phones. Let’s go, we’re only looking at four verses but we have a lot to cover. ²⁷ “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ ²⁸ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. ²⁹ If your right eye causes you to stumble, 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. ³⁰ 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 for your whole body to go into hell. (Matthew 5:27-30) This is the idea that we left you off with last week: Intentions and actions are judged the same. According to God and the way God judges, He doesn’t only look at what you did or didn’t do. He looks at what you thought about doing as well. The reason He does that is not to go, “gotcha!” Even though this is what some people may do by asking probing questions that gets people to flip on themselves and give up the guilt. The reason God does is this is because He sees the wholeness of who we are and the unrighteousness that we harbor both in our actions and in our thoughts. So God is so righteous and pure that even his thoughts are excellent and pure and righteous. Us, on the other hand, it is so clear to Jesus and this is what he’s telling the Pharisees, that we do good on the outside but our insides are rotting away. The example I gave last week is wishing your sibling or parent or your boss to die tragically because they upset you and got you angry and mad. We’ve all done it. We’ve all imagined that. Some of us when we do that, we go as far as erasing them from our contact lists on our phones and then we pretend they don’t exist. Yes, it’s true. That’s what we do and you’re laughing because you did it recently. Keeping that in mind, Jesus switches topics from murder, and wishing somebody didn’t exist, to living a life whereby you deny the existence of the other person in your life. The Bible calls this adultery. People in our day and age call it cheating. But the nature of adultery is simple: it’s acting like the grass is greener on the other side and forgetting that you’re already on green grass. Here’s what I mean. It’s like making plans with somebody to go ice skating. Then because that person got you mad, you go ice skating with another person to replace that person you’re mad at, and this is the best part, you don’t tell that other person. The funniest thing that happens is that you show up ice skating and the person you’re mad at is waiting for you at the ice rink but you’ve ditched that person to be in the same ice rink as this person you replaced the other person with. There are a lot of hurt feelings. Guess what, you may feel like you’re justified because you’re mad at the first person because whatever he or she did got you so mad that you replaced him or her. But now you have to deal with the second person and their hurt feelings and the hurt feelings of the first person. You’re no longer the victim—you’re the perpetrator. Do you see how this works? Pretending that the first person doesn’t exist by replacing him or her with a second person doesn’t make things right, it is just more wrong. Even thinking about it, Jesus says, is wrong because now you don’t see person one or two in the same way or the right way, as you should. This is why Jesus is talking about it. He is trying to tell the people who are listening to his sermon that the reason we don’t replace people in our lives with other people is not because it’s against the ten commandments, but more than that, it’s because we’re so dumb that we don’t realize that the grass on the other side is always the same brown color as the grass you’re standing on now. It’s a true story. Ask anybody who’s ever done this. It doesn’t ever work out the way you want it to. More than that, you realize that you’re getting into what you just tried getting out of. The grass is the same brown color regardless of where you stand, so don’t pretend it’s not brown. But I know that’s a really hard thing because most of you are too young to understand what’s going on in Jesus’ sermon. So let me tell you how this applies because people don’t only replace other people with other people. People replace themselves with another version of themselves because they don’t want to honor who they were created to be. Jesus says that anyone who looks lustfully has already committed adultery. Did you know that you can cheat on yourself? And people do it all the time. It drives me crazy. You see, they look at these magazines that are in the supermarket checkout aisles and they fantasize about being the person in the photos or having the kitchen that are in the photos, and being in the places where these photos are shot. Then they sacrifice everything they’ve worked so hard to obtain to get a shortcut and get there. Have you ever heard of people dying because they wanted to lose weight and they have plastic surgery and diet by starving themselves? Yes, it happens all the time. What about the people who get caught because they were trying to get money fast by robbing a bank and instagramming the whole thing on their personal Instagram account? First of all, that’s stupid, second of all, that’s really stupid. We forget sometimes that when we are busy fantasizing about who you’re not will only drive you further from who you need to be. Not only are you walking away form who God created you to be, by replacing yourself with an idea of yourself that’s imaginary and stupid, you are saying that you don’t really like who you are and rather be something else. You’re cheating on yourself. People do this all the time. Jesus says, it’s one thing to actually do it, but it’s the same exact thing as pretending to do it. I want to wrap up the sermon here because here’s the thing that we all need to know and remember. This is Jesus’ point: Cut off anything derailing you from loving God as you are. Biblical adultery and modern day cheating comes from one thing: Not loving people and not loving God as you God or other people deserve. It comes from being so selfishly self-absorbed that you don’t understand that you’re condemning yourself to hell by trying to use God and people like toilet paper, something that is used to wipe your hind side and flush down the toilet. Nobody wants to be toilet paper. Nobody deserves to be toilet paper. Not you, not other people, definitely not God. You’re going to talk more about this subject in Bible study and in small groups after service, but as you walk away from service today, I want you to think about the memory verse for this week, it’s the same as it was last week, and it comes from Romans 13:9. “The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,” and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” (Romans 13:9) How can you love your neighbor on the outside as well as on the inside? Let’s pray.