Giving and Prayer

Series: Sermon on the Mount
July 11, 2021 - Jeff Gokee

Hey, hey! Morning! Today is the day the that Lord has made, let’s rejoice and be glad in it! Are you with me?

I was reminded in the first service, and even right now as I was listening to worship, how special it is that we’re together. You know, it wasn’t so long ago that we weren’t together and we felt the desire to be together and worship together. Now we’re here and so here’s what I want to say: let us not ever forget there was a time that we couldn’t gather. So when we gather, it’s just really exciting.

For those of you who are watching online, if you’re in proximity, come on! Now, I know there’s some health stuff. I get it. But if you’re in proximity to this church, this body, come. Be a part of the local church. It’s special. And I don’t ever want to forget how good it is to be together. Are you with me? Good.

My name is Jeff. I’m the Executive Director of Phoenix One. At Phoenix One our job is really just to care for the local church both internally and externally. We just want to serve the local body. We believe in not just this church — and this happens to be my church, my family’s church — but we believe in the Church as a whole, that when we come together as one that people are going to come together and see Jesus through the way we love one another. 

Isn’t that a beautiful vision that Jesus gave to us, that we would be one so people will see Jesus— so people will see Jesus through the way we love and care for one another. So I love to do that. But today I love that I’m here. I love that I’m at my church and I get to teach here and I’m so excited to walk through what we’re going to go through. 

So if you have your bibles, we’re going to be in Matthew 6 today. 

I got married when I was 21 years old, my junior year in college, which I suggest for everyone because it was so easy. I got married at 21, my second semester of my junior year. In the brochure they said that there was something called the honeymoon period and I bought into it hook, line and sinker. I was like, “Oh, man, give me the honeymoon period. Give me all the ‘I love yous’ and all the stuff that comes on the brochure.” I’m sure you know what all that stuff is on the brochure. 

So I was like fully into whatever that was. So I was like, “I love you,” all over the place. “I love you, I love you, I love you.” And my wife would always say, “Okay.” Or, “Thank you.” And I’m like, ‘Wait a second. That’s not what the brochure says. You’re supposed to reciprocate that.” Right?

So every time I talked to her on the phone, “I love you,” and she’d say, “Thank you. See you later tonight.” And I’m like, “Man, what is going on?”

Like most men, I came up with a strategy. I decided one night I’m going to just dial it in really good. I’m going do a really good I love you, because we’re in our honeymoon period. It’s in the brochure. So we’re ready to go to sleep and I go, “Hey, listen, you’re the moon to my ocean.” No, I never said that. But I was like, “I love you so much and I’m so glad that God gave you to me. He saw you and he saw me and he put us together. It’s so beautiful. I’m so grateful for you and I love you so much.”

And she said, “Thank you. Good night.” And I was like, “What’s your deal? Honestly! What’s your deal? Why won’t you reciprocate this? What is going on? Am I doing something wrong? I’m putting a lot of stuff out there. I’m putting a lot of ‘I love you’ out there and not getting a lot back.”

She said, “Yeah. That’s the problem. Because your ‘I love you’ is not for me. It’s for you. Your ‘I love you’ is for you because you’re insecure because your mom left when you were twelve years old and you’re worried that I’m going to do the same thing. So you’re going to try to manipulate the system to manufacture some form of love to try to tamper down some deep   level of insecurity in your life. And I won’t have it.”

She was pointing me to Jesus. She was saying, “I can’t be Jesus in your life and you want me to be Jesus in your life. You want me to fill up all that love bucket and I won’t do it and I can’t do it.”

That’s why I said it’s good to not be alone. Man, thank goodness that God created a wife and that wife convicted my heart and showed me there’s something deeper going on inside of me. I wonder for you, I wonder if there’s something deeper going on inside of you. David’s been taking us through the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus is exposing these things in us. We all tend to deal with the Christian life on the outside and Jesus is trying to get deep on the inside. What is really going on inside of us? 

That’s why I think one of the great passages in Scripture is Proverbs 4:23. It’s an umbrella passage over all of our lives. Solomon’s writing Proverbs and there’s so much wisdom. It’s the book of wisdom. There’s so much wisdom in there and yet he says this:

Above all else…

Which means this. I’m about to tell you a bunch of really good, wise, wisdom things that you can go live your life for the Lord. But above all else…

guard your heart,
    for everything you do flows from it.

There is something inside of us, deep inside of us, that is impacting the way we relate with the Lord and relate with the world that’s around us. And Jesus is coming after our hearts because he loves you. He loves me. He wants to go, “No, can we just be honest? Can we just be real?”

So this is my encouragement this morning. Can we just be honest? Can we just be real? Can we deal with the conviction that the Spirit of God is going to bring to the teaching of Jesus? He’s going to do a much better job of teaching than I am. The Spirit of God is the Helper, so he’s going to open your hearts to what Jesus is about to take us through. 

It’s really important, I would say this morning, it’s really important to feel the feels. Allow yourself to deal with the weight of what’s going on. Because what you do in secret will impact who you are in public. And what you do in public will impact how you connect with God in the secret. This is what this passage is coming after. This is what Jesus has been doing all throughout the Sermon on the Mount. This is a vision of the righteousness of God to the people that are supposed to be righteously following after him.

What Pastor David’s been taking us through the last few months is the vision of the righteousness of God. He’s challenging us to shift the way we think. The upside down reality of the way that the God of the Universe, Emmanuel With Us, is living and acting. To the point like as radical — as David brought to us last week — love your enemies. Love your enemies. I know the world says to hate them. But love them. That’s radical. And what he’s going to invite us into in this next section is no less radical.

He’s starting to get into the disciplines that maybe you and I as Christians have followed. And he’s going to come after those because there’s something deeper that’s going on inside of you and me. 

Matthew 6:1-18 is where we’re going to go. 

Before I move on, I want to say this. Today we’re going to talk a little bit about what the problem is. Why is it that we struggle to connect with God through these things that he’s talking to us about? Next week the worship team is putting on a time of prayer and worship. It’s just going to be prayer and worship. You’re going to love it. It’s going to convict you. It’s going to bless you. It’s going to be a beautiful time next week. 

Then on the 25th I’m going to come back and teach on the Lord’s Prayer. I’m going to teach the Lord’s Prayer, which is essentially what we do. But today is going to be what the problem is, what the struggle is. I want to help you understand that. Then, as we go through this passage, I want you to start looking for the common themes that you see all throughout this passage.

Matthew 6:1 says this: 

“Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven…”

If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. If you practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. I want you to feel the weight of that as we go into this. I want you to feel the weight of that. And now he goes on…

“…So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray…

Listen to the personal pronouns. 

“…go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”

So the question is, what do we need? Well, Jesus is like, “Let me tell you what you need. You need to learn how to pray. And this is how you pray.”

“This, then, is how you should pray:
‘Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done,
    on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts,
    as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
    but deliver us from the evil one.’

For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.

“When you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites do, for they disfigure their faces to show others they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that it will not be obvious to others that you are fasting, but only to your Father, who is unseen; and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

This is the word of the Lord. And everybody said – Amen! 

When I was a kid, I grew up in the church my whole life. In the tradition that I grew up in, they would bring the children up front and they would pray over them and then kind of dismiss them to Sunday school. Anybody grow up in a tradition like that or experience anything like that? Okay. That’s how I grew up. And every once in a while, the pastor would invite one of the kids up to like pray. 

And I was the kid that was like, “Put me in, Coach. I am ready. I am a warrior. I’m ready to pray this house down.” I was always waiting for my opportunity to pray, because I was going to crush, okay? So one day I was sitting there and Pastor Roger Curson (sp), he was my pastor, I grew up in the same church my whole life. He said, “Jeff Gokee is going to come up and pray for us.” And I was like, “Whew! Now it’s time! Let’s go! I’ve been waiting for this. I’ve been preparing for this. I’m ready to go.” 

I don’t know what happened, but my seven-year-old self turned into a sixteen hundreds English preacher. I started talking about eschatology, ecclesiology, soteriology, right? I’m talking about the propitiation of Jesus’ death and resurrection in the name of the Father, the Son and Spirit, amen. And I sat down next to my mom and I looked at her and I said, “That was a good prayer.”

She smacked me. Whack! She said, “Don’t you ever talk about prayer that way. You are praying to God Almighty. He gets all the glory. Not you.”

And I thought, “Wow!” 

But isn’t that true? No different than what Patty was trying to teach me. I take a long time to learn lessons. You with me? It took a long time to understand there’s a deep rooted thing inside of us, a deep rooted insecurity. We just want to be known. We just want to be known for the wrong things. We don’t want to be known by the King of kings and the Lord of lords who knit us together in our mother’s womb. We want to be known by the masses. We want to be affirmed by them to make sure that we feel okay.

What I find really interesting is that Jesus is talking about three really good things here. These aren’t bad things. These are good things. Right? These were the pillars of what it meant to be a good Jew in that time. He talks about alms giving. A lot of times when we think about alms giving, we think about doling out cash to really poor people. That’s what we think. But actually, in the Greek, the way it’s translated is mercy mindedness. It’s this right here: In the secret place I know how merciful God has been to me and I find this deep level of gratitude in my soul so that when I awaken and open my eyes and go out in the public place I can’t help but be giving mercy wherever I go. Which means, sometimes there’s people who have financial needs. I can’t wait to meet that need because I just sense the mercy of God in my own life and it has changed my perspective on the world. The mercy mindedness is what alms giving really meant.

Praying. The Jews were prayers. In fact to be Jewish was to be a prayer. They prayed a pray called the Shema that roots all the way back to Moses. The Shema. They prayed it every day. They also had a section of eighteen prayers that they would pray every single day. The Jewish culture was a praying culture. So they were known for their prayers. They were known to be a praying people. To connect with the God of the Universe, to connect with Yahweh they would pray. 

And they would also fast. Fasting was interesting because these people were used to going to the temple and making a sacrifice. Fasting was very much a very personal sacrifice. It was sacrificing some aspect of their life to focus in on God. So it became a personal sacrifice. It was a good thing. It was what they were known for.

What Jesus is saying is these are good things that you’ve turned bad, that are now, instead of allowing you to connect with the God of the Universe, it’s creating a disonnance between you and him because it’s no longer about God. It’s about everybody else. 

It’s interesting. Sometimes good things can be really bad. Did you know this? Did you know that drinking too much water can kill you? That’s why I drink coffee, okay? I’m going to avoid that altogether and go straight to coffee. No, but water, if you drink too much water, it can kill you. Now, we all know that if you don’t drink water it will kill you. But did you know that drinking too much water can kill you? 

If your intentions around alms giving, around prayer and fasting is wrong, it can kill you, spiritually speaking. And it can kill others. This is what Jesus is trying to get at. He’s trying to get to the heart of things and going, “The things I’ve given you to connect with me are there to bring you life and life to the full. To allow you to be a light unto the nations for the world” to see, who? Me? No! To see God. To bring glory to him! We’ve come up against those good things and we’ve made them me things. When it’s all about him. This is where the problem starts. 

Psalm 51 has been a really important Psalm to me. Verses 16 and 17. I want you to hear this. It’s so important.

You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it;
    you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings.
My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit;
    a broken and contrite heart
    you, God, will not despise.

See we’re all in the marketplace going, “Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!” And he’s going, “I don’t need you to do that. I just want you to be broken. I want a broken and contrite heart that goes, ‘I just want you. I just want to bring you bring you glory. I just want to know you intimately in the innermost being of my life.’”

Jesus, knowing this, is saying, “We have a problem and we need to talk about it.” 

The thing we need to talk about is this thing he repeats over and over and over, which is this, “Do not be like the hypocrites. Do not be like the hypocrites.” And what are the hypocrites? Well, in the Greek, the word literally means actors. The actors. 

You know, I’ve grown up in the church my whole life. I went to church. I went to Christian school. I went to Bible college. In high school, I won the Best Christian in the school. That’s a real thing. I have a plaque. I have two of them. I have two plaques that said… do you know what that does for a teenager’s heart? Right? It’s no different than pouring fuel on the fire of that seven-year-old that got in front of that church and said, “I’m a somebody!” So I know the game. I played the game. 

In fact, let me just tell you this — maybe you don’t know this about people who come up here and teach. It’s hard because I’m doing everything I can not to get your affirmation, that you would think of me as a good teacher. Now, I’m going to serve the Lord to the best of my ability, that he gets all the glory. But it’s painful for me. I have to pray and ask for God to sanctify my heart as I come up here and bring his word. Because I feel unworthy. That I might receive something from you that he wants to give me. It’s hard and it’s heavy. 

Because, what I find so often in the local churches is that I’ve got to come into these spaces and places where it feels at times like we’re just acting. Like we’re playing the part that you play in the church. Do you know the local church is the easiest place to fake it. You say the right words and do the right things and everyone assumes that you are just a solid believer in Jesus Christ. It’s easy to fake it here.

Jesus knows it. He’s exposing that in you and me. He’s like, “Stop acting. Stop pretending to be something. Come before me. Repent before me but don’t act.”

I’ve realized in my own life, would I give? Would I be generous if I didn’t get a writeoff from the government? We get rewarded from our government for giving money away. Would I do it if I did not get that reward? Man! 

I think one of the prayers that I feel are some of the most sacrilegious prayers are mealtime prayers. Because we’re not thinking about God. We’re thinking about, “How do I get into this burrito as fast I can? I’ve got to get through this Christian pageantry so I can get to the good stuff.” He’s the good stuff! He’s provided this. He’s given us the provision. And all we can think about is, “Let’s get through the routine so I can get to my burrito.” When in reality, we should be like, “Oh my gosh! I have a burrito. Oh my gosh! You love me and you care for me and you see me. And there’s people all around the world that don’t have — and I do.” But we’re trying to rush through that because it’s a part of the pageantry that we’ve become accustomed to. 

We have Christian idioms like, “I’ll pray for you.” Think of how often we say that to people or that’s being said to us. Are we really praying for people? Do we not wear the weight of what those words mean? Are we just acting and pretending here and playing a game? Like in a Christian drama? Like it’s like church as a theater, Christianity as a theater. And Jesus is like, “Don’t do it. It’s killing you. Not only that, but it’s killing your witness in this world.”

Here’s the scary thing. Here’s the real scary thing. The consequences, we receive the fullness of that reward in other people’s view of us, not Jesus, which means we don’t get Jesus. We don’t sense his pleasure. We don’t sense his peace. We don’t sense his joy. No, because we’re doling out all of this stuff and hoping to get something in return that only he can give us, and it’s killing us. That should feel weighty. Like Romans 1 says, He releases us, listen to this. It’s so heavy. He releases us to the desires of our hearts.

If the desire of your heart is to be known by the masses, he will release you to that desire and you miss out on the presence of God that is nearer to you than your own heartbeat. And he desperately wants to connect with you in that way. 

So often what we’re trying to look for is an ROI on our righteousness. ROI on our righteous deeds, right? “Oh, God, I’m going to pray to you, but you’d better answer that prayer.” 

“Oh, God, I’m going to give, but you’d better hook a brother up if I give. Right? I want an ROI on that righteousness.”

“I’ll fast. I’ll lay something down. But you’d better honor me and reward me for that.”

And it’s killing us. Do you know this generation is the most depressed, medicated generation of all time? Suicide is at an all-time high. Why? Because we’re trying to get filled up in all the wrong places. We’re trying and begging and hoping that something else will feed us up. 

I find this so interesting. You see this right here? (Indicates taking a selfie.) You ever see this? Maybe you’re one of these people. I’m sorry, but I’m going to go after it a little bit. Just hang with me, all right? You’re one of these people, and God’s like this, “Stop it!” You’re trying to put something out there that’s not real in hopes that you get a Like or a Comment back that will affirm you, when he’s like, “I want to do that for you. I want to fill that desire in you. I want you to sense my presence. I want you to feel my love, but you’re so busy getting it from others.” You get your reward there and it’s crushing you. 

Remember the story in the scriptures of the Pharisee and the tax collector? The Pharisee stands in the temple like so many of us do. “Thank you that I’m not like them. Thank you I’m not a sinner like them. I give my money. I pray. I’m faithful. I stick by all 613 laws and follow the sacrificial system to the 9’s. God you’re so blessed to have me in your kingdom.” And he points to the tax collector and says, “Thank you I’m not like him.” 

Then all of a sudden it transitions to the tax collector and he says, “Have mercy on me, oh God. I’m a sinner.” That’s soul talk. That’s heart talk. That’s conviction talk. This is what Jesus is trying to get after with you and me. But we’ve got to listen to the word of God, to the teaching of Jesus that he has given to don’t be like the hypocrites. Don’t get your reward from the world, from the kingdom of the world, get it from the kingdom of God. Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be added unto you. All these things will be added to you.

Ten years ago I started Phoenix One. The reason why we started it is because the largest generation of our time, the Millennials, all the research was coming out and they were called Nones. It means they grew up around the church and they got tired of the drama. They got tired of the acting. Because moms and dads would come to church and raise their hands and pray and then come home and fake it. And the kids of that generation said, “I’m out. I’m done.” 

So we were doing everything we could to reconnect them back to the local church, reconnect them back to Jesus. What I want to say is this has to stop. We are at a crossroads in Church history, where we need to stop faking it. What we do in here matters. But what you do out there, it matters. We have got to stop faking it. We have got to stop being a part of this drama and allow the Lord to meet us and convict us and to use us once again. He will if we allow ourselves to slow down to meet him in the secret place. That’s the solution. It runs contrary to the way we process through things. He wants to meet you in that secret place. 

This quote has been so helpful for me. It says this:

I must turn my attention away from a group-consciousness as a ruling norm of my actions and fasten my glance on the source, rather than the impact, of my actions, and this in the sight of God, who is in heaven.” –Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis

It’s going like this, “It’s all about Jesus.” Let him do the ministry. He will. And he will use you as a result of you coming to rest in the secret place with him. All throughout this place. It’s in the secret in your heart. Why? Because it runs your whole life. That’s why you need to guard your heart. It affects everything you do. It directs your life and he wants to meet you there and minister to you there. Why? So you can go out and be a ministry to other people. 

This is what he’s inviting us into. He wants you to come in the secret place. He wants you to be silent. He wants you to be ministered to by him because he loves you. That’s why he sent the Helper. That’s why his death and resurrection made possible the release of the Spirit of God. You are the temple of God. And the Spirit of God — if you’ve made a commitment to follow after Jesus is in you. He’s nearer to you than your own heartbeat. But do you know him? Where is God? God is in the secret and he’s meeting you there, maybe right now he is meeting you there. And the weight of conviction you’re feeling, I hope you are. I am. I am.

He loves you and he sees you and he wants you to know him intimately the way he knows you. I’ll tell you where he’s not. God is not on the street corners blowing trumpets and trying to get all the attention. He’s not in the contorted face in fasting. He’s not in hypocrisy. He’s not in self-promotion. He’s not in religious devotion who steals for himself or herself the glory of God. He’s not in glory thieving. That’s what a lot of us are. We’re glory thieves. 

He’s in the place that he see you. In the secret place. In the place where you first met him and you felt the conviction that allowed you to make your life right before the God of the Universe as a result of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

I was trying to think, “How do we move forward from here?” The best passage I can give you is John 12:25:

Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.

That is a paradox. The paradox is a part of what it means to follow after Jesus. A paradox is like two illogical turns that come together and we’re like, “That doesn’t make sense.” Welcome to the Christian life. If you lost your life, if you lay it down, if you lay down all this public affirmation, all this stuff that we’re putting out there, if you lay that down you get Jesus. You sense his presence. You move forward in holiness and righteousness. You receive peace and joy. Not in the things of this world but in him. This is what Jesus is getting after.

And the Christian life is a paradox. I want you to listen to this: 

As Christians we see unseen things. We conquer by yielding. We find rest under a yoke. We reign by serving. We are made great by becoming small. We are exalted when we are humble. We become wise by being fools for Christ’s sake. We are made free by becoming bond servants. We gain strength when we are weak. We triumph through defeat. We find victory by glorifying God in our infirmities. We live by dying.  

This is what it means to be a Christian. This is what it means to follow after Jesus. We live in these paradoxical, upside down, kingdom-come-will-be-done realities here on earth. The problem for so many of us is we’re resisting that. We’ve created a counter strategy that’s not only killing us but it’s killing the gospel message that we’re called to give in his world. 

Jesus is like, “Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop faking. Stop acting. Stop it. Repent. Return to the Lord.”

Hosea 6:1 says this: 

Come, let us return to the Lord.
He has torn us to pieces
    but he will heal us;
he has injured us
    but he will bind up our wounds.

Right now some of us need some wounded-ness so that we can be healed by the Spirit of God and remind us who we are in him so we can go out in this world and be the presentation that only he can give. We’re just clay. He’s the one who molds us and puts us together. 

I’ve spent a good portion of my life in India. I love India. India is kind of like my home away from home. I love it there. Twelve years ago I got to lead a pastors conference for seven hundred Indian pastors. I thought I was just going to go there and bless their socks off. They rocked me. You know why? Because those paradoxical statements I just read you, they live those out. That’s who they are. That’s what they were doing. It was costly for them to follow after Jesus. 

Here I was, this American pastor, and it really hasn’t cost me much to follow Jesus. And they taught me and I was humbled. And I was convicted. And I repented because I was like, “Oh my gosh. I’ve just gone astray.” 

There’s a picture that’s going to come up. This is Pastor Abraham. I was in his village a couple of years ago, in a village outside of Padafrom (sp), which is in Southern India. It’s the second largest red light district in the country. I was meeting with him and I asked him some simple questions. “Why? Why did you choose to be a pastor?” Because if you choose to be a pastor in India, you’re choosing to be abused. You’re choosing abject poverty. You’re choosing to be mocked. You’re choosing to be flogged. Not only you, but your wife and your children. You’re choosing to have your house be burnt to the ground. You’re choosing that. And I said, “Why? Why would you do that? Why would you pick that?” 

And he says, “Because Jesus loves me. Because Jesus loves me.”

And I wanted to argue with him. “No, no. It’s far more complex than that. There’s way more to it than that.”

And he was like, “I love Jesus. I want other people to see Jesus.”

We need to learn to love Jesus. We need to learn to live for Jesus. This is what it means to be a body of Christ, coming together as one. We’ve got to stop faking it and start sacrificing in order that others may see this gospel, this good news that Jesus loves them and died for them and cares for them. But we’re glory thieves. We’re trying to rob that to fill our own insecurities. We need to stop.

I’m telling you, I stand before you the chief of all sinners. I feel so unworthy to preach this. I’m so unworthy, as I’ve gone through this week, I’m going to tell you, it’s been heavy. I’ve been excited to bring God’s word. I’ve been really excited to bring this word from Jesus. But I feel so unworthy. I feel so challenged by this passage, so convicted by it because what I realize is this. The statement that I made:

What you do in secret will impact who you are in public, and what you do in public will impact how you connect with God in secret. 

I want us to wear that. I want us to feel that. I want us to be convicted by Jesus’ word, the best teacher of all time. He says this in 6:1: 

“Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven…

That’s weighty. I feel convicted by that. I don’t know about you. But I hope this morning you’re convicted by the word of God; but I hope that conviction doesn’t leave you in despair, but pushes you toward the hope that we find in the resurrected Jesus. He didn’t leave us in hopelessness. He became that hope for us, so that we can bring hope into the spaces and places that he’s called us to. This is what it means to be the Church. This is what Jesus was trying to help people understand what it meant to be a part of the kingdom. 

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Unless otherwise marked, scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 Biblica. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.The "NIV" and "New International Version" trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica. Use of either trademark requires the permission of Biblica.

Divorce

Series: Sermon on the Mount
June 6, 2021 - Beth Coker

This morning it is my joy to be with you and to share from the word of God. 

About a month ago, the media and newspaper headlines blew up with the announcement of one of America’s most influential, affluential, philanthropic, visible couples, that they were divorcing. Now they had always appeared to be the Mazda automobile version of the American couple — not very glamorous but really reliable and very unlikely to break down. 

Photos hit the internet immediately of them standing together on stages, smiling, looking at each other with adoring eyes. This was Hollywood’s attempt to glamorize the brokenness of a marriage and home once again.

When the news about Bill and Melinda Gates getting divorced hit the news, everyone was stunned, like, what happened? They had been married for twenty-seven years. They raised three children together. They built foundations that are impacting millions of lives and they’re now saying that they can no longer grow together. 

We say the same thing when we hear about couples in the church divorcing. What happened?

My heart grieves whenever I hear about a divorce or a family breaking up. It’s difficult to hear about the death of a marriage and the brokenness and the breakup of a family. May we never get desensitized to hearing about the pain of a divorce.

Divorce has reached epidemic proportions in our land. Like a plague, divorce has swept through and brought death to the heart of our society: the home. We must stand and fight the enemy who wants nothing more than to destroy and dismantle the family institution. The view on divorce in our society today is multifaceted. 

Some people view it this way: Why marry at all? Just live together. Avoid divorce. Just don’t get married. 

Other people have this mindset: Well, divorce, but you can never get remarried. It’s unbiblical.

Other feel people this very strongly: You stay married no matter what. Abuse, not safe in the home, doesn’t matter. You stay married. It’s the unpardonable sin to get divorced.

Other people have this mindset: You know what? Stay married only if you’re fulfilled. When it’s no longer fun or meeting your needs, call it quits and get out. They kind of have this escape lever mindset, like in an escape room that, if you just can’t handle it, get out. Or maybe they see it as an exit sign off the freeway “You know, this just isn’t working for me. I think I’m going to take another route.” It’s all about self-fulfillment in those kind of views.

None of these, none of these are God’s view of divorce. He said strongly in Malachi 2:16, “I hate divorce.” It grieves his heart. 

This morning we are studying a passage that some consider the most controversial in all the Sermon on the Mount. Thank you, David, for giving me this assignment. In Matthew 5:31,32, it’s a passage in which Jesus addresses divorce and remarriage. It’s a very sensitive subject because divorce has affected so many people in the church and in our families. Just the mere mention of the word divorce feels like I’m ripping a scab off of an old wound, and it hurts. Emotions bubble up in us when we hear that word divorce. Some emotions of hurt, some of sorrow, some of loss. Emotions of anger, regret, and shame. And for many, this passage brings up painful memories and deep, personal losses.

Some of you sitting in here have walked through a divorce yourself. Some of you are walking through a divorce right now. Some of you heard David mention last week that we would be talking about divorce this morning and you chose not to come and you’re watching online. For that, I’m grateful you’re watching online. I’ve been there. To talk about divorce when you’re divorced or in the midst of one, it’s a painful thing.

Many of you have watched your parents walk through a divorce and it has left deep scars on your life. For others of you, the mere mention of a teaching on divorce elicits a response of fear and apprehension, because it raises questions of a situation you’re in right now. And I want to remind us, before we got to the worlds in Matthew 5:31,32 that Jesus is teaching here on marriage and divorce, and he is our loving, forgiving, redeeming Savior. He teaches the subject with grace and gentleness and truth. 

We serve a God of unlimited grace and he offers hope to those who put their trust in him. He offers hope to those of us who have suffered the personal devastation of divorce, even to those who are guilty of ending their marriages illegitimately, not according to biblical premises, or prematurely. 

I’m hear to tell you that divorce is not the unpardonable sin. It is not the unforgivable sin. I stand before you this morning as a woman who has walked through a divorce. It was one of the most painful times in my life and something I never would have dreamed would happen to me. I certainly never thought it would be an area of ministry I would be a subject matter in. But here I am, forgiven, redeemed, and being used again in the kingdom of God. And today I can say I am more in love with my Jesus than I ever have been in my life, and it’s largely in part due to walking through the crucible of divorce.

So whatever has formed your opinion about divorce this morning — maybe it’s something somebody taught you — maybe you formed your opinion by a book you read on divorce — maybe you formed your opinion about divorce in walking through it in your own family — we must base our opinions solely on the truth of God’s word and what Jesus taught us.

So turn with me, if you would please, to Matthew 5:31, 32, two short verses Jesus addresses in the Sermon on the Mount on divorce and remarriage, but they’re packed with a lot of power. In Matthew 5:31, Jesus starts and he says:

“It has been said, ‘Anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce.’ But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, makes her the victim of adultery, and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

Now, I want to set the scene a little bit. Matthew 5, chapter 1 opens with Jesus. He’s up on a hillside and he sees the crowd before him. Now, when Jesus sees a crowd, it’s different than the way you or I see a crowd. Jesus can look into the hearts and the minds of the people there. That’s how he sees us this morning. He could look around that crowd and he could see someone and say, “Oh, that one’s had too many affairs.” “This one over here, unforgiveness in their heart.” “Oh, that one, lusting after his secretary.” “This one down in front of me, broken beyond repair. In need of having their head lifted in hope.” “This one over here, hatred in their heart, therefore, committing the act of murder.” “This one just doesn’t like his wife’s cooking Wants to divorce her.”

That’s how Jesus sees the crowd. And as he looks t that crowd, he goes sup farther on the mountain. And he calls his disciples to him, and he begins to teach them the way of righteous living. Not more laws or rules. He’s contrasting the way of the old teaching of the Scribes and Pharisees. When Jesus said, “You have heard it said,” he’s referring to what the Scribes and Pharisees had taught. “You have heard it said.” 

But he is saying, “But I say…I bring to you a new teaching of the life in the Spirit. A life of repentance. Living by the Spirit of the law.” The Sermon on the Mount addresses issues of the heart. Tough subject. It addresses murder. It addresses anger. Jesus addresses forgiveness in the Sermon on the Mount. Last week you heard him address the issue of lust in the heart. And now, in these scriptures this morning, we’re looking at the issue of the heart surrounding divorce. 

Now, as we read these two verses, so many people get hung up on the exception clause, when Jesus says, “Except on the grounds of sexual immorality.” They think that’s the main point to the passage. But it’s not. Jesus expounds a little bit more on the subject in Matthew 19 and in Mark 10. And we see that what Jesus is saying here in these two verses is so much deeper than the exception clause. He’s teaching us to imitate God’s own example of commitment in a covenant bond of love.

Jesus is teaching in these passages to love and act toward our spouses just as God acts and loves toward us. He is a God of covenant relationship. How do I know that? He tells us in an Old Testament story how committed God is to those he loves. 

In the Old Testament there’s a story of God’s love for his covenant people, Israel, his chosen nation. A love that is faithful and committed, even though his people were not, in the story as recorded in the book of Hosea chapters 1 through 3. Now, Hosea is a prophet. The book in the Old Testament, Hosea, is a minor prophet. Hosea is a man of God. And this book opens, right in verse 2 of chapter 1, “And God commanded Hosea, go out and marry a woman named Gomer.” Now, marrying a woman named Gomer would be hard enough, but God also says — sorry if anyone is named Gomer in here — my bad — but God also tells Hosea she will prove to be a prostitute. So God tells Hosea, “Go take yourself a wife inclined to harlotry. And children of harlotry. For the land commits a flagrant harlotry abandoning the Lord.”

Hosea had to be thinking, “What? Did I hear you right? I’ve never been married and you’re commanding me to go marry this woman named Gomer and she’s going to be a prostitute? That’s what you’re asking me to do, Lord?”

God says, “Uh-huh. Because Gomer is going to prove to be an illustration of the nation of Israel and God’s covenant relationship with her.”

So Hosea marries her. And during the time that Gomer is married to Hosea, she has two sons and one daughter. And God tells Hosea, “Name that first born son God Scatters. Name your daughter No Mercy. And name your second son Not Mine.”

What a heartbreak it must have been. Poor, godly Hosea, who was a prophet in Israel. Can you imagine him introducing someone to his prostitute wife and his children who he wasn’t even sure were his, and saying their names. 

Gomer continues to wander again and again, away into the arms of other men. But Hosea continued to care for her and provide for her. And he brought her back home. But there was a time when she was away for a long, long time. And she eventually became auctioned off as a cheap slave. She was so abused, used and thrown out. Any other husband would have said, “Serves her right. She didn’t love me anyway. Let some other man have her.”

But God commanded Hosea, “Go buy her back. Go buy her back.” And Hosea did. Hosea went and paid the price to redeem her and he brought her back home again. This is our covenant-keeping, committed God. Through this story, God wanted to show his own commitment to his people Israel in spite of her unfaithfulness. He has done the same with us. When we have wandered off, he has sought us out, even in our sinful state. He has redeemed us back to himself and he affirms his unchanging love for us.

Now, in Matthew 5:31,32, God is asking the same of us toward our spouses. Jesus is teaching about faithful love in the bond of marriage. He’s not just teaching about when divorce can happen and when it cannot happen. He’s not just teaching who can marry afterward and who can’t. It’s about a covenant commitment.

You see, in Jesus’ day, the Pharisees were focused on the letter of the law. Their righteousness, their puffed up personalities was based on observing the letter of the law alone. They tried to catch Jesus on the letter of the law.

Turn with me over just a couple of chapters to Matthew 19. We’re going to read what the Pharisees tried to catch Jesus in here. 

When Jesus had finished saying these things, he left Galilee and went into the region of Judea to the other side of the Jordan. Large crowds followed him, and he healed them there.

Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?”

“Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

“Why then,” they asked, “did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?”

Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.”

So the Pharisees come to Jesus and they say to him, “Jesus, is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?”

Jesus doesn’t even engage in what they’re trying to do. He goes right back to the beginning in Genesis. He says, “God created them and said ‘The two shall be one flesh.’ What God has joined together let not men separate.”

The Pharisees didn’t quit. They just kept coming after Jesus. “Well, why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and send her away?” 

The Pharisees, you can just see them standing there quite smug and saying, “Well, Jesus, you’re saying we shouldn’t get divorced, but Moses said we could. Gotcha.”

You see, in that day, there were two different schools of thought taught by the rabbis. The first was the conservative Shammai school. Those rabbis taught that Moses was saying if a man discovered his wife had been caught in adultery, he could divorce her. But remember the cultural setting at that time in the Old Testament. There was much pressure to stay married because of financial complications. You see, if a man wanted to divorce his wife, the dowry had to be given back to the bride. At the marriage ceremony there would have been large sums of money exchanged to the husband and he would have to give all of that back also. So, in that day, men thought twice about divorcing their wives, because they had to give a lot of money back to the people who gave it to them. I think maybe they were onto something in that day.

There was a second school of rabbinical teaching. It was the liberal Hillel school. And this thought was, “Anything you don’t like about that wife of yours, give her a certificate of divorce. She spoils your food. She burns the toast. Certificate of divorce. She twirls in the street. She talks with a male stranger. She let her hair down in public. Give her a certificate of divorce. She has any physical defect. She has any physical defect and you just fall out of love with her. You’ve found someone more beautiful. Give her a certificate of divorce. It’s okay. That was the mindset the Pharisees wanted to embrace.

And Jesus looks at these men and he says to them, “Because of the hardness of your heart, Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.” It’s always an issue of the heart. There was a hardness in these men. A hardness seeps in when we seek for a divorce. Our hearts of flesh have been turned to hearts of stone. And Jesus is teaching here in the Sermon on the Mount it is always an issue of the heart.

The Pharisees were trying to test Jesus. They just wanted to trap him. Their objective was to maintain a permissive, liberal divorce policy. Because divorce was relatively easy in those days, as it is today. And the Pharisees intended to keep it that way. But Jesus is telling them, “Marriage his not a consumer relationship or a contract that you can just walk away from. Marriage is a covenant and it was established that way from the beginning of time.”

Divorce should be as radical as amputating an arm or a leg. No doctor would amputate your arm for a hangnail. No doctor would amputate your leg if you had a sprained ankle or ugly freckles or a varicose vein. Amputation should be the last thing you do. And that’s what Jesus is pointing out. You can’t divorce your wife for these silly reasons. Twirling in the street. Burning the toast. You found another woman. No. Divorce was never commanded by God. It was permitted in the case of sexual immorality or adultery. 

The Greek word that Jesus uses here in chapter 19 verse 9, of immorality, adultery, is the Greek word porneia. It’s the word we get our modern word pornography from. It refers to any immoral or adulterous act. 

Adultery kills the covenant of marriage. Hence the exemption clause in Matthew 5:31, 32, “except in the case of adultery.” Divorce was permitted when the covenant was killed through adultery or through abandonment. The Apostle Paul deals with the issues of abandonment in 1 Corinthians 7, when an unbelieving spouse leaves the marriage. 

Jesus permitted divorce on these grounds. He did not command it. God’s heart is always that of restoration. Always. And I know so many marriages that have been restored, even after an adulterous affair. Oh, it takes hard work. The trust has been broken. But it can be done. God’s heart is always to restore.

And so important to the Lord is the marriage bond, that to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the Lord directed the Apostle Paul to address divorce even further in 1 Corinthians 7:10-11. Paul writes in that chapter that maybe a time of separation might be wise counsel, purposely and solely for the goal of reconciliation. Paul writes this:

To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord): A wife must not separate from her husband. But if she does, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband. And a husband must not divorce his wife.

The issues surrounding divorce are so complex, and those who are looking for a divorce will look for any loophole they can to say, “See? I have biblical grounds for divorce.”

But maybe in some situations, a time of separation might be the best course of action if both spouses sincerely want to do a work in their own hearts and in their marriage and they seek godly counsel. 

My mom and dad needed this after forty plus years of marriage. They got to a point in their marriage that was so ugly and so hostile in their home that they could not be in the same house together. And so they decided to separate for a time to seek the Lord, to search their hearts, to seek godly counsel. And the Lord works when we humble ourselves before him. And after that time of separation, they came back together and their marriage was more beautiful than we had ever seen it the last eight to ten years of my dad’s life. God is in the business of restoring marriages. In the business of restoring relationships.

Not only is the marriage covenant killed through adultery, it is killed also through abuse. Because we are precious to God, we are not required to stay in a marriage when we have been betrayed through abuse. To abuse your spouse is to violate the “one flesh” union of marriage that God established from the beginning. 

The Apostle Paul wrote in Titus 2:15, “Do not let anyone despise you.” And the idea there is, “Don’t let anyone abuse you.” If abuse is happening in the home, it’s no longer safe for an abused spouse or the children to stay in that environment. Run. Seek help. Seek shelter. Seek safety. Don’t stay in that unsafe situation. Run from that continual exposure of family members to destroying addictions and perversions that will ruin the lives of innocent children. Get out of that situation.

I’m grieved if you have been taught that you must stay in an abusive or perverted marriage no matter what. Protect yourself and your children from danger. Do not submit to abuse. 

God’s heart must weep as he sees the brokenness of our world, our society, our church. Sin has destroyed so much of the beauty of marriage and the family he created. I don’t know how a teaching on divorce touches your life this morning. But divorce is a part of my story. It’s very personal. 

I was raised in a pastor’s home. Yes, my parents who needed to separate for a while after forty years. My dad was a pastor. The word divorce was never, ever mentioned in our home. Even if your marriage was unhealthy — and my mom and dad’s was for many, many years — you u just toughed it out. You stayed in it no matter what. We were raised to think that divorce is the unthinkable, unforgivable sin. It was the one thing you couldn’t come back from. You were branded with a scarlet D on the front of you that you would carry for the rest of your life.

So, in my own marriage, we were a family very involved in the church. I served in women’s ministry. I taught Bible studies, I taught Sunday school, we were involved in home fellowships, we hosted a home fellowship, I was on worship teams, my husband at that time was in leadership in the church. From all outward appearances, we were seen as a solid family in the church. No one had any idea that things were slowly eroding from the inside. Our marriage was crumbling and our three precious girls were suffering from it. You see, they keep the pain, the hurt, the confusion all bottled up and suppressed inside of them. We just plastered on our Sunday smiles and we kept up this persona of having it all together when we were in public. But the enemy, the enemy was dismantling our home brick by brick, and the walls just came tumbling down.

As I faced the reality of an impending divorce, it was humiliating and deeply hurtful. My extended family didn’t know how to handle it. They just didn’t know what to say to us, didn’t know how to minister to us. My name was slandered and rumors flew around the church and in our small valley. It was a very scary time for myself and for my girls. I had no idea how to walk through the valley of the shadow of death of a divorce. I had to go back into the work force I hadn’t been in for about twenty years. I had to sell our home. I had to change schools for my girls. They were in private, they had to go to public. I had to fill both roles of mom and dad. I had to try to keep my girls’ lives as normal as possible.

Through that time I chose to model the life of Joseph in the Old Testament, that, when he was accused of wrongdoing by Potiphar’s wife, Joseph did not fight back with words. When Potiphar’s wife accused Joseph of attempted sexual assault, he ran from her, but he never fought back with words. He didn’t even defend himself when Potiphar sent him to jail. Joseph let God be his defense lawyer. 

So I wanted to trust God to do that for me, too. I clung to my heavenly Father during that time like I never had before in my life. I let him defend me and he did. He fought for me. He was my keeper. He was my protector. I was in a place of needing his strength to guide me daily, just to be able to get up in the morning and to be strong for my girls and figure out how we were going to walk this road. This was the first time in my life I just couldn’t pull myself up by my boot straps and keep pushing through. I had always been able to do that, but not through a divorce. I needed my God more than ever before.

I pressed into his arms and I let him carry me so many times when I couldn’t walk on my own. I didn’t know where to go, I didn’t know where to turn. But I drew so close to the Lord during that time that, as I just turned my face to the side, my God was right there. He was with me in the fire. He never let go of me. He was my Father to my girls. He was our Provider. The Head of our household. My Comfort and my Shield. In the days and months that followed the divorce, I experienced the grace and forgiveness from my loving heavenly Father that disproved the legalistic view of being branded as a failure in God’s eyes because of divorce.

In time, I learned that I was not branded with this flaming D and defined as a divorced woman. Rather, I wore a blood-stained F as a woman forgiven. Forgiven. My marriage had failed by I was not a failure in God’s eyes. He wrapped his loving arms around me and he held me safe in his arms. It’s a beautiful thing to feel that depth of love from him.

My three girls needed to see me press into my heavenly Father for strength, guidance as we walked a very painful road. The divorce was damaging for them. It is never without cards. One daughter built walls so high no one could penetrate them. She was not going to get hurt like that again. One daughter longed for a father’s love to teach her to hunt, to fish, to rock climb, how to throw a football. My other daughter looked for approval from men and just longed to be accepted by one. 

Divorce leaves deep emotional scars. And as the years went on, people would watch my life and they’d think, “Beth, your life is like a divorce success story. How did you do it?”

And they’d want to come to me when they were contemplating divorce and ask me, “How did you do it? How did you do this life?”

And I’m just honest with them. And I’ll look at them and I’ll say, “Well, friends will feel bad when they hear that you’re going to get a divorce. But they’ll quickly say, ‘Ah, you’ll be okay. You’ll make it through.’ No. You won’t. Not without pain. Not without deep sadness of heart. Brokenness. Not without anger or hatred or deep wounds. Divorce is a death. It is death of a marriage.”

But those who come to me, who have been divorced and feel broken and like they’re worthless. I can look at them and say, “But God will bring beauty from your ashes.” But my God. 

My life and the lives of my girls are testimony of his power and his grace. How did we do it? It came from being able to forgive and let go of any bitterness that I had in my heart, and to teach my girls to do the same. 

This morning, by asking God to change your heart, you can be whole again. You can feel his love, his forgiveness. You can trust God with your future. You can count on his love forever. You have come to the place for healing this morning. If you’re here this morning and you’re divorced and you still harbor a hardness or a hatred in your heart, may today be the day that you repent and let God give you a new heart, a heart of flesh. As God this morning to change your heart and he will.

“Father, give me a heart of flesh. Take away this heart of stone.” Oh, I hear so many divorced men and women still slandering their ex-spouses. They put the blame on the other person. They’re hard hearted. Bitterness spews from them. They’ve never had the heart surgery it takes to turn their heart back into a heart of flesh. They take that same hardness into their new marriage, their new home, their new circle of friends. 

Don’t look to a new mate to change you or to complete you or turn you around. A different spouse won’t produce a new you. Only God can. If you’re divorced and single here this morning, you’ve never been married, embrace the singleness. Paul exhorts us to remain as he was, as single. You have no idea how God can use you for the kingdom. That’s where my life is a success story, to have stayed single after divorce and let God use me for his kingdom. 

Maybe you’re here this morning and you’re contemplating divorce. Search your heart. Maybe you just can’t stand your spouse anymore and you want out. Oh, humble your heart. Remember the power of the gospel. God can change us. Consider the hard work of reconciliation. Hosea did with Gomer again and again and again. God’s heart is always reconciliation, always restoration.

Consider the hard work of reconciliation before you do that knee-jerk reaction of “I have grounds for divorce and I’m not stopping until I get it.” I hear so many believers in that boat. Filling out those divorce papers will only trade one heartache for an even deeper one. 

Maybe you’re at the point this morning where a time of separation would be what God would speak to you. Ask him. Seek him. 

If you’re sitting here this morning and you’re abusing your spouse in any way, get down on your knees and ask God to forgive you and give you the strength to change. Get counseling. Get an accountability partner. Get help. Abuse breaks the covenant of marriage. 

And if you hear this teaching this morning and you’re thinking, “God can never love me again. I’ve been divorced a few times and I’ve been divorced for unbiblical reasons and I feel guilty.” Repent of that. God forgives. He restores. All he asks us to do is repent and ask forgiveness.

If you’re sitting here this morning and you feel tossed out like a soiled rag, you’ve been replaced by someone else in your marriage, you don’t even seem as if God sees you. Oh, our God sees you. Hagar felt like that when she was dumped in the wilderness. And God said, “Hagar I see you. Open your eyes. There’s a well of refreshing, living water right next to you.” El Roi sees you. 

For all of us this morning, look to Jesus in your marriages. He can bring beauty out of brokenness. Nothing can ever separate you from God’s love. He will bring beauty from the ash heap of destruction of divorce.

Would you bow your heads with me this morning as we have a time of silence? I pray that you would listen right now to what Holy Spirit is saying to you, to each individual heart. May your prayer be, “Create in me a clean heart, O God. Renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence and take not your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation.”

If you’re thinking of divorce, soften your heart. If you need to repent of harboring unforgiveness, do that this morning.

Father in heaven, help us. We’re living in a culture that has forgotten your pattern for marriage. Your word is being ignored. Forgive us. Give us strength to believe in the power of the gospel to change lives, to change marriages this morning. We trust you, God, to heal our marriages, heal our hearts, restore broken relationships. May we be Christ followers who walk alongside those whose marriages are struggling, loving them, speaking the truth of your word over them. Holy Spirit, blow through this sanctuary this morning with a mighty rushing wind. Begin a new work in the lives of your people in our hearts this morning. We surrender marriages to you this morning, Lord, be a miracle wonder-working God in the marriages in this church. Thank you for loving us, for being a God of restoration and brining beauty from ashes.

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Unless otherwise marked, scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 Biblica. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.The "NIV" and "New International Version" trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica. Use of either trademark requires the permission of Biblica.

Lust and Shame

Series: The Sermon on the Mount
May 30, 2021 - Alec Seekins

We’re just going to dive right into things. I’m kind of hoping that you guys will be willing to follow me to a place that will be pretty uncomfortable but ends someplace pretty awesome. I’m kind of hoping that, at some point of time during the service or during the course of your day, that each of us will allow ourselves and our heart to kind of sink into a place where we’re willing to feel some of the weight of our sin and our shame, whether present or past.

Please don’t be confused. What I don’t mean is that we would camp out there. I don’t think that Jesus wants us to live in a place where we’re rolling around in our sin and shame. I absolutely don’t mean that I think Jesus wants us to go back to something that he’s already set us free from. But I suspect that there is probably quite a few of us that think we’ve really dealt with our sin, but all we’ve done is managed our shame effectively.

Jesus doesn’t want us to just manage our shame. He wants us to actually move past that. He wants us to end up in a place of transformation. I think that, in order to end up in a place of transformation, we have to experience it at his feet, by his blood. I think in order to do that, we have to be moved to repentance. I think in order to be moved to repentance, for many of us it can be really helpful to feel some of the weight of our sin and our shame. To allow ourselves to be re-sensitized to that, so that again we would repent and let the Lord actually deal with the root of the shame, which is our sin. Because he is absolutely able to do that.

Without Jesus, I don’t think we have hope in this area. But with Jesus wee have hope to get through this on our knees, by his blood. I’m not asking you to follow me into this difficult and painful place to find hopelessness. I’m asking you to follow me there so we can follow Jesus out of there for good. 

A lot of you guys know, because I got to share this a few months ago, that last year my wife and I spent the year in southeast Asia, working with an anti-trafficking ministry. When we had been there for a little while, I was asked if I could teach English for these two women who not too long ago had left their lives as prostitutes. They had subsequently come to Jesus and now they were engaged in this year-long discipleship program. So me and a woman from our team would teach that class twice a week for a couple of hours each class and we would just go over English stuff. 

Before too long, we decided, you know, why don’t we kill two birds with one stone, because these women are brand new in their faith, they’ve never really been exposed to very much of the Bible, let’s kill two birds with one stone and start reading through stories in the book of Genesis.

What I was thinking of when we made that decision was like how the book of Genesis is all these cute, fun little children’s stories that are so great for learning English, right? Like Noah and the fluffy animals and Joseph and his really cool coat and all that kind of stuff. But if you’ve ever read that book as an adult —I don’t know why this didn’t click for me because I’ve read it many times as an adult — you realize really quickly this is not fluffy animals and cool, colorful coat. This book is full of scandal and sexual brokenness. It’s rated TV-MA if it was going to be on Netflix, for sure. It’s not PG, I promise you. 

So we started reading these stories. And every time we would read one of these stories that had to do with sexual brokenness and depravity and this wickedness, I would start to feel super awkward. I’m the only guy in the room. Two of the women in the room, not too long ago were prostitutes. I am profoundly and acutely aware of the fact that my very presence might make them feel threatened. And now we’re reading stories like, you know, Noah passed out naked and drunk. Abraham’s got tons of them, right? Multiple occasions Abraham takes his wife and passes her on to another man and says, “Nah, she’s not my wife. Go for it.”

Then some years down the road in his relationship with Sarah, his wife, they’re having a hard time getting pregnant, so Sarah comes up with a brilliant idea and says, “Why don’t you take my servant, Hagar, and why don’t you sleep with her and she’ll get pregnant and she’ll have a kid and the kid will kind of be our kid a little bit.” 

And then they do that. Then, surprise, surprise. Sarah ends up really angry and frustrated and bitter and jealous of Hagar. So she goes to her husband and says, “Why don’t you take the servant, the slave woman and her son and dump them in the desert?”

And he does that. Father Abraham had many sons, and one of them he left in the desert. It’s kind of messed up. And it continues from there. It doesn’t stop. It goes on and on and on. We look at Lot and his daughters and Judah and his daughter-in-law. And it just continues from there. And it’s usually at the hands of the protagonists, or the man characters or the heroes of the faith that this wickedness is being done.

I had these moments when we would read these stories. It kind of felt like, if you remember being a teenager and you’d watch a raunchy comedy with your friends, and you think it’s so  funny because you’re all teenagers. And, gosh, it’s so funny how gross that is. Then a few months later you go to Blockbuster if you’re old enough, or whatever, and you rent the DVD and then you bring it home. And what you don’t think about is how raunchy that comedy was. It was so funny, but now you’re watching the movie and Mom or Grandma are in the room. And Will Ferrell’s not so funny anymore, is he?

And we have these experiences where we’re reading these children’s stories and they don’t really feel like children’s stories. And I’m acutely aware of that. And as we would read these, I started to get concerned that my friends, who were so new in their faith, that they might hear the stories of the depravity of the heroes of the faith and it might confuse them. And they might think, Do I really want to follow a God whose holy book is full of these broken people?

So every time we would get to the end of one of these stories, I would start explaining it away. I’d say, “Before we move on to talk about grammar, let me just talk about this a little bit. Just because the main characters are doing this, doesn’t mean that God or the Bible wants us to emulate what they’re doing. They’re not the cartoons that we grew up watching, where the main character, the protagonist ends up in a moral quandary and they wrestle with it a little bit, but ultimately they end up deciding to the right thing and if we emulate their behavior then we’re doing pretty good too. That’s not how the Old Testament is written. It’s very different from that. 

So I would explain this away out of fear that my friends would see themselves in the shoes of the victims of the heroes of the faith. And one of these times, maybe the fourth or fifth time I had done this, I think we were talking about how Abraham had abandoned Hagar and her son in the desert place at the tail end of tons of wickedness. And I’m explaining it away, one of my friends stops me and says, “Alec, I don’t think you understand what the story means to us.” I said, “What do you mean?” She said, “Well, it’s really good news for me that Abraham did this.” I said, “What?” She said, “Yeah, because God still used him, right?” I said, “Yeah.” And she said, “So, he’ll still use me, won’t he?” And I said, “Yeah, he will. He absolutely will.”

That was the beginning for her of realizing how far Jesus was going to take her. That Abraham was so messed up and God still used him. Because, for her, the shame of the things that she had done and the shame of the things that had been done to her, in her heart they were inextricably interwoven. You couldn’t pull them apart. It didn’t really  matter to her if Jesus was going to pull the things apart and define them  and put them in their own nice, neat, tidy little boxes before he took her sin along with her shame and cast it as far from her as the east is from the west. For her, all that mattered is that Jesus was going to get her clean, and that Jesus used horrible people like Abraham, and that we look back and call them righteous. And that God was going to use a person who had done the things that she had done and that we could look back and certainly God could, and call her righteous.

A few weeks later this same woman came to me and said, “I’ve been going on this treasure hunt through the Old Testament to find all the stories of the women who have been sexually broken and have done some sexual breaking of their own. And it’s a pretty good treasure hunt.”

The moment she said that, I don’t think I was able to see the Bible the same way and I don’t think I ever will be, after realizing all of a sudden that, yeah, this thing is full of these stories. The tip of the iceberg is pointing out the fact that there are at least two women in the line of King David, and ultimately Jesus, who played the prostitute. That holy lineage that we trace painstakingly throughout the Bible. There’s even an entire book that’s all about a man pursuing a woman who was a prostitute and setting her free. And then her coming and finding some freedom and then abandoning him and leaving, and then him going back and chasing after her again. And God wants us to know that we are that woman. 

I started to wonder. Man, was this book written primarily for an audience of prostitutes? That’s confusing for me. Because I know so many people who have never been prostitutes who have experienced so much freedom in these words, who have encountered the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit through the words of the Bible. And they weren’t prostitutes. So how could that be? 

And as I’ve chewed on this question for about a year now, where I’m starting to land is I think perhaps the Bible was really not necessarily exclusively written for prostitutes, but the Bible was written for people who are willing to sit in the same seat that prostitutes do when they look at themselves. For people who are willing to look at themselves from the same perspective that a prostitute was when they compared themselves to everyone else in the room.

See, for my friends the gospel was so obvious and so powerful and so clear, that they saw it in the story of Abraham abandoning the woman that he had abused. Because, for them, the story of the gospel was, “I am filthy. Jesus makes me clean. Then he sets me free. Then we move forward from there, as he makes me holy.” It was that simple and that powerful, that they can see it in the most broken stories of the Bible. 

But for you and me, I think we lack this advantage of a prostitute when it comes to looking at the gospel. I think we lack perhaps what Jesus was pointing to a few verses before the ones we’ll read today, where he said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Because for you and me, we get so stuck on step one. We start to complicate and convolute the gospel when we say, not “I’m filthy.” But we say, “I’m okay and I’m not the worst person in the room. I’m a pretty decent human being. Yeah, there are people that are better than me, but I’m not the worst.”

So we have to do all these weird aerobics and gymnastics and strange things as we contort ourselves to fit into the gospel. Why? Because we’ve deceived ourselves into thinking that we are somewhere where we’re not. We’ve deceived ourselves into thinking that God is grading holiness on a curve. And that’s not how it works. And Jesus wants to make it clear to us, “No, actually, if you want the gospel to come alive, you’re going to have to realize that you don’t live up here in this better space than everyone else, than anyone else.” Jesus is saying, “I want you to come down here.” Because the people who are going to get this message understand that they cannot look around the room and say, “I’m any better than anyone else.”

My friends didn’t need to hear this message. When Jesus clarifies to a group of people that they’re probably guilty of adultery even if they don’t think so. Why? Because there were mornings when my friends would wake up and they would eat breakfast with the money they had made committing adultery the night before. You and I have these useless veils that enable us to pretend that we’re not guilty and full of sin and shame without Jesus. 

So Jesus wants to make that point clear and so in Matthew chapter 5:27-28, he says this:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” 

And then he’ll go on to talk about how, if your eye is causing you to sin, cut it out. If your hand is causing you to sin, chop it off. It’s better that you would do that than that you would be cast into hell. There’s something more serious that you don’t understand about the depths and the weight of your sin and of your shame. And you may be able to tell yourself, “I have never cheated on my spouse, therefore I’m not an adulterer.” And Jesus is saying, “No, you missed it. If there’s lust in your heart, it’s that serious.”

Righteousness is not graded on the curve. It’s pass/fail and chances are most of us, if not all of us in the room, have failed. Why does Jesus want me to feel so bad? I think because he wants us to understand the good news. 

For me, the place in my life that I can look back to and say, “Yeah, that was complete and total failure,” that’s the place in my life where I began to be able to sit down next to my friends that I didn’t know yet, that I wouldn’t know for years to come, where I could sit down with them and say, “I’m absolutely the same as you. It’s good news to me that Abraham would do those things.”

That time of life for me was when I was nine years old. I started looking at pornography and I entered into a season of four or five years of my life where my heart and my mind were completely wrapped up and intertwined with lust and brokenness. Where I couldn’t even look at my friends without being ashamed of the things that were happening in my mind and in my heart. 

In that season of life I began to become really acquainted with some of the different strategies that we can employ to manage our shame. I want to walk you through three of those today. Then there’s a fourth one that’s very different from the first three.

The first of those strategies that I started to encounter, what I would consider the most base of those strategies, the most primitive of them. It’s what I would call self-pity. Or a better way to put it maybe is just wallowing in your shame. And that’s the most base because it’s just what you do. You feel shame and what are you going to do? You’re going to feel the shame so you roll around in it and you stick with it and you carry it with you in the back of your mind and the back of your heart and you don’t know what to do with it. And you try to figure out What can I do with this shame? Then, all of a sudden, you slip back into the same sin that precipitated the shame in the first place. And you find a little bit of relief from the shame. It changes your mood and you feel better for just a little bit.

For me, in that season of life, it was pornography. But I think that’s probably a good example, because it’s really good at conjuring up shame for us. But you could probably plug in any different sin that you want to. Right? So you go back to the sin and you find some relief from your shame and it feels good for a little bit, for a few seconds, a few moments, or at best until the next morning. But then the shame snaps back stronger than it ever was before. So you carry it again until the next private moment when you fall into this sin again and find some momentary relief. But every time you do this, the relief you get is not as strong, and the shame becomes stronger. 

Those of us who use this as our primary strategy of shame management, the same thing happens by two different avenues. We continue to walk deeper and deeper into more and more and darker and darker sins, because lust will fill any space you give it. And once it’s filled that space it will begin to fill the next spaces. We find ourselves needing to do more sin, more frequent and more dark sin, just to find the same amount of relief that we got int he beginning, like any other addiction. 

At the same time that’s happening, we’re starting to actually grow an addiction, not just to the sin, but to the shame itself. We start to like that feeling. We start to love what we do. We start to love that we hate ourselves. Eventually, people who stick with this long enough, they’ll need to hop into a whole different kind of sin that’s probably more public. Because they need the thoughts and words and condemnations of other people to magnify their own shame, because they love to hate themselves. Because we love to hate ourselves when we’re wrapped up in this self-pity strategy of shame management.

For me, this wasn’t good enough. I didn’t like the feeling. I didn’t want to revel in my shame very long. So, before too long, I had to move on to another strategy. Had to move on to what I’m going to call self-justification. Convincing myself that what I was doing wasn’t wrong. I think for most of us this strategy begins with the very same question that greased the wheels to for sin to enter the world in the first place. “Did God really say? Did he really say that that was wrong?” And I would start to ask myself, “Could this really be wrong? I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to be hurting anyone. It doesn’t seem to be unhealthy. Everything seems to be find. What could be wrong with this?”

For those of us who stick in this strategy, we start to convince ourselves of that, and eventually maybe it’s not good enough. Maybe we need to move past, “Did God really say” and we start saying, “Does God really even have the authority to say…” Right? “Does God even have any moral authority or claim over my life?” Or “Does God even exist at all?” 

If we’re honest with ourselves, we’re doing this why? Because we’re managing our shame. We’re tired of feeling ashamed and feeling like someone gets to tell that what we’re doing is wrong. So we start to convince ourselves that it’s not. This is very dangerous because this is perhaps the most effective of these strategies of shame management. Because with this strategy you can turn down the volume on your shame. And I think you can effectively mute it. Once you figure out you can mute it with one sin and the following shame, you realize you can do that to any sin and the shame that comes.

Then, at some point in time in the process, you’ll start to buttress up your opinions and your beliefs that, no, this isn’t wrong, by gathering other people around you that you can convince no, that’s not wrong. And help you convince yourself that, no, this isn’t wrong. And eventually you’ll have a little community, a little bubble of men and women who are just yes men and yes women. Eventually that can grow into a philosophy, a theology, into an ideology, even into a religion of people who are simply saying, “You do you. Do whatever makes you happy, as long as it feels good.”

I would ask you to pause just for a second right there, because I think there are some people here who are like me, who are already hearing this and starting to take it and use it to do strategy number three, self-righteousness. I think we’re hearing this and thinking, “Yeah, that’s what that person does. I don’t do that. Yeah, that’s what that group of people, that’s where that ideology, that’s where that thought process came from. And I don’t do that.” And I don’t think that’s the most fruitful use of this classification. I think the most fruitful us of this information is for us to look and say, “Am I doing this? Have I been convincing myself that, no, this isn’t wrong because it helps me dampen the volume on my shame.”

Again, for me, this strategy didn’t work for too long because I couldn’t convince myself that God was saying that what I was falling into was okay. It was clear to me in verses like the one we just read that God was saying, “No, this is wrong.” Then I wasn’t willing to abandon Jesus, to walk away from him, to throw out his word in my journey to mute my shame. So I had to move on to a new strategy that I will call self-righteousness. Really self-righteousness is just a sub-strategy under hiding.

There are so many different ways to hide, but some of us literally will go into this little corner and we’ll hide in that corner where “No one can see me, where no one can find me. I stopped going to church because I feel so bad about what I’m doing and I don’t want to talk to anybody and I don’t want anybody to know what I’m doing.” 

Some people stop having friends, they stop engaging. Some people just really stay very quiet so that no one can see their shame. I couldn’t do that for very long, because I’m way too extroverted for that. So I needed to find another strategy, another way of getting out into the open where I could hide. I realized that I had these very convenient personality traits that were true of me, that I could hide behind in front of everybody else. Yeah, I was someone who really usually does follow the rules. I was someone who really did have a relationship with Jesus. I was someone who really was plugging into church and into   youth group. I could hide behind those things and a little bit of vulnerability, a little bit of transparency, and no one would ever know. No one would ever suspect. No one would ever ask me if there was anything below the surface. 

Growing up I was a really bad liar. So I knew that if I was going to get away with anything with my parents, I had to hide any suspicion from them. Because the moment they asked me a question, I was either going to accidentally straight up just going to tell them truth before I had the opportunity to decide to lie; or I was going to muster up the courage to lie and they were going to see right through it immediately. 

So, the result of that, of me revelling in really what was my favorite, probably still is my favorite strategy of shame management, is that I hid my shame and my sin so much that, even though it started at nine years old, I was fourteen years old and almost on the other side of it before either of my parents — who are good parents, who cared about these things, who talked about these things with me — before either of them ever asked me directly, “Have you ever looked at pornography?” And the answer that I was honestly able to give my mom when she asked me that question was, “Yes, I have. But I’m not really doing it anymore.” I hid it so well. I even hid it when I was finding freedom from it.

This is the strategy that is so deadly because it grows and festers when we keep it in the darkness. Right? This is the strategy that leads to headlines: Pastor. Clergyman. Politician. Celebrity. Secret affair. Secret substance abuse. Money laundering. Insert the blank. Right?

As I’ve been prepping for this message I’ve been thinking, I doubt that those men and women start off thinking My life is going to be a scam. That’s where I’m going. I think they start off as kids who have something they really want to hide and they can just never figure out how to bring it out. And in that process, you begin to kind of split into two different people. There’s this public person, this person that everyone else sees that is righteous, that is better, that is successful, that is honest. And then there’s this other person that carries all the shame in private. This person grows and grows and grows the more this person looks better and better and better. 

At some point in time, I just couldn’t deal with the fact that I felt so two-faced. I felt there were two different human beings growing inside of me. And one of them was so disgusting and the other one just felt like such a lie, even there was some truth to him. So I started going to my youth pastors, to David Stockton, to Mike Phifer, and I said, “This is what’s happening in secret.” And they gave me a lot of really good, practical advise. We could give a whole message on practical advice, trying to get over this, trying to conquer it, trying to access the freedom that Jesus is offering you. 

But the best advice that they both gave me was “Repent. Go from this place of feeling the weight of your sin and shame to Jesus and lay it down at his feet and acknowledge how wrong this is, and repent and let him restore you and make you clean. Begin the years long process of allowing him to renew your mind, to transform you by the renewal of your mind, rather than being conformed to the patterns of the world.”

That’s what I did and that’s where I landed. That Jesus really transformed me to the place where I felt comfortable with my own mind and heart. Where Jesus didn’t just manage my shame. The moment I stopped managing my shame, I let him manage my sin and cast it away from me, and slowly heal and renew me to the point where none of that baggage that I was so terrified was going to follow me the rest of my life, none of that baggage really followed me into my marriage.

One of my primary love languages is words of affirmation. My wife knows this about me. Her primary love language is gifts. This last Valentine’s Day, we were kind of between jobs and spaces and really between life, and we didn’t know what to do. She wanted to give me a good gift. So she sat down to make a gift and she ended up making the best gift she’s ever given me. She sat down for an hour or two and wrote down like a hundred and one or even more really kind things to me on little pieces of paper that she hole-punched and tied together with a ribbon and gave it to me. It looked like something your kids might take home from Sunday school today. 

She thought I was going to open it up and tear through it read everything she wrote. But instead, I decided that I was going to savor it and just flip it every so often to the next page and read it. Last week, when I was starting to get ready to prep for this message, I flipped the page on my nightstand and I saw a page that said, “I trust you fully.” There’s no one in this world who knows my heart better than my wife, outside of the Lord. 

And this is words written from a woman who’s had her own struggle with insecurity. Words written to a husband who, at nine years old, couldn’t walk in public without feeling the shame of his brokenness and the weight of adultery in my heart. And this is on the tail end of a year spending time in brothels and red light districts and befriending prostitutes, when all the work that the Lord had done was really put to the est. And she looks at me and she says, “I trust you fully.” And she writes it down. 

Because the hope that Jesus has for you this morning — as you stop managing your shame and you let him manage your sin — it’s not just hope. I mean, hope is a beautiful and a great thing. But it’s not just  hope it’s tangible. Right? It’s a real thing that you actually have access to. 

I don’t just hope that I’m going to have a bowl of ice cream tonight. I know that there’s ice cream in my freezer. And I’m going to go home and I’m going to eat the ice cream. And I expect it, and I’m excited for it, and I have evidence of it. 

In the same way, we don’t just hope for what the Lord can do with us. Expect it. Know that it’s there, sitting in the fridge, waiting for you. Jesus can take you and heal you. It comes through repentance. 

David’s going to come up and wrap us up as we just do some business with the Lord along these lines.

DAVID:

Thanks, Alec. One of the things we wanted to make sure we did as we were going through this stuff, and especially the intensity of it, is we figure out how to move from a classroom to a hospital as a church. So we wanted to make sure there wasn’t just like a message that kind of had some good thoughts and we could all think a little better, but that we’d leave room for the Spirit of God to do the next part. Let this stuff work into our heart and actually maybe bring some transformation. 

So that’s what we’re going to do now. I didn’t do a lot of sermon prep this Sunday, obviously. But I did a lot of prayer prep. I’m going to read some things that I feel like the Spirit was saying about today. Some of these might connect with you. If they do, then you can trust it’s for you, and you and the Lord can talk about that and figure out where to go from there.

We have this number that we’ll put up and we’ll put it up at the end of the service, too. If you want to text anonymously, or you can put your name, whatever, and get in contact with a pastor that can help you navigate some of what you might be going through. A safe space for all of that, so that will pop up at the end of the service and you can text that number. We’ll also close and have some people up here that would love to pray for you. If you can muster the courage to come and do that, it would be wonderful. You’ll leave feeling lighter, I’ll tell you that much. 

But we also know that some of those things are hard. So I just want to share some things that the Lord was saying and see if these land.

I really felt as I was praying that the Lord was saying that, because of this message and because of some of the people hearing this message today, they were going to understand the dangers of lust and they were not ever going to fall prey to addiction to porn or anything else because of this message. I was very excited about that. Because by God’s grace that’s been my story. 

Early on, for whatever reason, I felt like the Lord helped me build the walls. So anytime something was like, Woosh, I’ve just good wall reflex. Walls up. I feel like the Lord’s wanting to do that for some people here. So, young people, please hear this message and trust the Lord. Trust the Lord. 

Then I felt like there was a message for some people who are overcome with lust. You don’t think you could ever get free. Maybe you’ve even tried and you’re still stuck. I felt like there were some people that the Lord was actually wanting to give one of those miracles, one of those supernatural manifestations of his Spirit, that come from time to time and completely set you free instantaneously. 

If you feel some of that stirring in your heart, whether you’re online or here, he really does want to set you free. He really can set you free. Brand new neuro-pathways and everything, the whole package. And if you feel the Lord stirring that in you, I would respond. If he’s knocking in that way, I would open the door and let him come in. Get some prayer.

Then there’s some who have gotten really good at all of those shame management strategies, sin management strategies, and today, though, you’ve been found out. Pride would keep you from doing this. Deception would keep you from doing this. Some of you, the intensity of it is very different than a nine to fourteen year old and the ramifications that that would bring. Because you are married. You do have a family. You are older and the stakes seem too big. And though that might be true, Jesus is telling you, he’s telling you he can set you free. That’s why you’re here hearing this message. It’s not so you can go further away, or feel more condemned or ashamed. It’s because he really does have a plan purchased by his blood and empowered by his Spirit to get you to a place of wholeness and freedom. 

I didn’t say this last service, but I felt like the Lord told me while I was sitting there. Some of you need to do this because, if you can do this now, your kids won’t have to deal with this like you’ve had to deal with it. You can break this in your family. But you can’t do it alone and you can’t do it with hiding. You’ve got to tell somebody.

Then, the last one is the person whose heart is bitterly, bitterly broken, not because of their own lust, but because of a loved one or maybe a spouse’s lust. And even hearing this today is like drinking a whole glass of bitterness. You have your own shame, not because of your lust, but because of the person you’re connected to’s lust. I fell like what Jesus wanted me to tell you was it’s not always going to be this way. That he really is going to come back and he’s going to do away with the sinful nature forevermore. It might seem very far away, but it’s not. 

Also, he wants you to know that you’re not supposed to carry this alone either. You kind of feel like you carrying it is honoring the person or something like that, but actually you’re hiding your shame too. It’s super-scary but he wants you tell someone. Now tell someone that you can trust, and even try and tell someone that you think the loved one can trust. But you’re not supposed to carry this alone. It’s too heavy. But it is time for you to invite someone in to walk with you, because you need to be able to discern. 

I’m going to say this and please, please be very careful with this. Please email me before you do anything crazy. Because, in the Scriptures, there are caveats in the marriage relationship that can help in times of real, real pain and agony. I mean, the Bible says at times there is an okay reality of divorce with sexual immorality. Now, again, I’m saying don’t unpack that on your own. We have people that would really love to help you, that have been through this, that can help you with that discernment. But you have some really good options that you might not be aware of that are totally in line with the scriptures. 

Now, again, nobody get divorced between now and next Sunday. Next Sunday that’s what we’re talking about. Please come back next Sunday, because we’re going to have some ladies speak to us in a way that’s going to be really, really powerful and beautiful. And it’s going to allow the Spirit of God to come in way more fully than right now because of the work that will be done next week. 

That’s ultimately what all this is. Jesus is trying to get some of the junk out so more fullness of the Spirit can come in.

And so we’re going to have a little time of prayer. I’ve said these things. If one of those lands or one of those struck your heart, this is your time to be silent before the Lord or confess to the Lord or cry out to the Lord. But we do want to make sure we don’t move on too fast from this. 

They’re going to start playing a song and all of that a, and that’s fine, but this is for you and the Lord. 

Father, we do just ask that you’ll be with us in this moment, that your Spirit would be so close and so present and so powerful that it would overcome our fears, our pride, our confusion and we’d receive what you have for us this morning.  

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