Description
No one is exempt from Jesus’s observation in Matthew 5:28. What does it mean for you?
Matthew 5:28
But I say to you tha… (visit YouTube for more)
Transcript
Our Lord Jesus can be hard hitting, can’t he? Matthew 5: 28. But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
What a shock that must have been to the audience listening to Jesus saying this. No, it’s not all about what you’ve done right and done wrong. It’s about what you’ve thought, what you’ve felt, what you’ve desired.
He says, if you have lustful intent, if you’ve looked at this person and thought, oh, I want to do this, that with her, that is sufficient for you to be guilty of the charge of adultery.
The charge against the Israelite nation was so often that they had committed adultery. They had followed after other gods, they had abandoned the love of their one true God.
So how do we avoid this? We must bring our hearts, our desires, our feelings, our passions into submission to God, to His Word. We understand that it is not simply good enough to have a clean slate with respect to what we do. We also need to be pure and holy in our thought life and in our hearts. And yes, I admit my own many failings in this respect.
This is such a high, high standard that we can’t meet it in our own efforts. There’s no point trying. We need to ask the Holy Spirit to transform us, to purify us, to take away these sinful desires and lay them all at the foot of the cross where our flesh dies.
Thank you, God, that you are a holy God and that you want holiness for us. And knowing that we could not achieve that ourselves, you sent your son to die to pay the price for sin to bring us the purification that his blood offers. Thank you for leaving us with the Holy Spirit to transform us and to grow his fruit in us. Amen.
