Month: September 2020

‘Jesus replied, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ ‘ Matthew 22:37-39(NLT)

In the middle of the last century, Dorothy Sayers observed, “The mournful and medical aspect of twentieth-century pornography and promiscuity strongly suggests that we have reached one of these periods of spiritual depression where people go to bed because they have nothing better to do.” According to her diagnosis, in some cases, sexual lust may be a symptom of another of the cardinal sins. It is the one that the ancients used to call acedia or sloth, a condition that sophisticates of another generation once called ennui. Indeed, all these sins are connected. It is a mistake to see them as distinct from one another. All the capital sins and the myriad of expressions of transgression that flow from them all flow from the same root.

But what is opposite of lust? What is the virtue that answers the sin of lust and is its antidote? If the essence of righteousness is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself, then the essence of sin must be the opposite (Matthew 22:37, 39). To sin is to love yourself at the expense of your neighbor. More than that, it is to love yourself at the expense of God. Sin-shaped love expresses itself primarily in the form of narcissism. It is self-absorbed love. This affection is a distortion of love that, once it has achieved its full effect, actually proves to be an exercise in self-loathing. It is hate masquerading as love, compelling us to engage in self-destructive behavior. Sin promises freedom and delivers slavery. It speaks the language of friendship while treating us like enemies. Sin is a cruel master who promises good wages only to reward our loyalty with hard service, disappointment, and death. For some reason, we return again and again to this false lover and expect a different result.

The answer to sinful lust is love—God’s love, which comes to us from the outside, like the righteousness of Christ. Adopting the language that Martin Luther used to speak of Christ’s righteousness, we might call it “alien love” because it does not originate with us. It is a love that begins with God and can come to us only as a gift. For the Christian, this greater love is the organizing force for all our other desires. In this regard, love is not so much an emotion as it is a disposition. We might call it a divinely empowered direction for our lives.

Our natural love is limited. The impediment of sin skews our interests in the direction of self. Jesus implies this in the second of the two great commandments, the command to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39; Mark 12:31, see also Leviticus 19:18, 34). We are by nature self-protective and self-interested. We are able, even in our natural state, to show some concern for others. We may inquire about the health of others when they are sick, or express sympathy when they are grieving. We might even sacrifice ourselves for someone else, offering what Abraham Lincoln called “the last full measure of devotion,” if we feel the cause is good enough (Romans 5:7). But the ability to love others to the same degree that we love ourselves is not natural. Our default orientation is skewed toward our desires. We will easily sacrifice the desires of others on the altar of our self-interest unless something more powerful moves those interests in a different direction.

What is true of lust is true of all the capital sins. Change may require discipline, but it does not begin with discipline. What is required is a miracle of grace. Redirection is necessary if we are to love others in the way that Jesus describes, but there is only one force powerful enough to turn the tide of our desire so that we are as interested in others as we are in ourselves. It is the power of God effected by His love for us. That is why the love that Jesus describes begins not with us but with God. We love others because we love God (1 John 4:21). We love God because God first loved us (1 John 4:10–11, 19).

from Love Restored by Dr. John Koessler

‘Temptation comes from our own desires, which entice us and drag us away. These desires give birth to sinful actions. And when sin is allowed to grow, it gives birth to death.’ James 1:14-15(NLT)

‘“You must not commit adultery. “You must not steal. “You must not testify falsely against your neighbor. “You must not covet your neighbor’s house. You must not covet your neighbor’s wife, male or female servant, ox or donkey, or anything else that belongs to your neighbor.”’ Exodus 20:14-17(NLT)

The dividing line between what is prohibited and what is allowed in this particular commandment has to do with ownership. It is fine to want a spouse or a servant or an ox or donkey. But anything that already belongs to someone else is forbidden. You cannot treat them as your own. You cannot take them by force. Indeed, the language of the commandment is much stronger. You must not even want them. This command strikes at the heart of all the sins associated with the commandments that precede it because it aims at desire itself. Sin always begins with desire. Our desires, even the desire for what is ordinary and allowable in other contexts, can make us captives. We find sexual lust the most interesting of the seven sins that the church has traditionally considered to be capital. Sexual lust is the besetting sin of the books, television shows, and movies that entertain us. But desire can be expressed in many different ways and shows up in the other capital sins as well. It is a mistake to dismiss sexual lust as a moral anachronism. But limiting lust to sex is too narrow. Dorothy Sayers notes, “A man may be greedy and selfish; spiteful; cruel, jealous, and unjust; violent and brutal, grasping, unscrupulous, and a liar; stubborn and arrogant; stupid, morose, and dead to every noble instinct—and still we are ready to say of him that he is not an immoral man.”

A one-sided view of lust causes the church to send mixed messages regarding lust. Many biblical conservatives are deeply concerned about the normalization of homosexuality. They rightly consider this particular form of immorality to be a threat, not only to the individual’s soul but to the future of society as a whole. They do not, however, seem nearly as troubled by heterosexual immorality, which many in their circles have practiced for some time. They emphasize the Bible’s explicit condemnation of homosexuality while ignoring its equally explicit condemnation of divorce. Furthermore, the public failure of notable leaders among some of the most conservative churches in other areas of lust, a lust for power, money, and sometimes sex, has exposed not only a lack of self-awareness but an accompanying moral blindness. This has prompted proponents of homosexuality and same-sex marriage to accuse biblical conservatives of hypocrisy, perhaps with good reason.

Others consider homosexual behavior sinful but say that it is no worse than any other sin. Those who take this softer view urge us to stop focusing on the particular sin and instead concentrate on God’s loving acceptance. Unfortunately, this supposed grace-oriented approach is often interpreted as a dismissal of sin altogether. If we all lust and every lust is the same, why worry about any of it? Not only does this view ignore the seriousness of sexual sin, but it also minimizes the sin of lust. Neither approach offers practical help to the person who is struggling with lust. They draw the boundaries, either narrowly or broadly, but they do not tell those who are struggling with sexual lust what to do when they find themselves out of bounds.

Ironically, neither does Jesus when he addresses the subject of lust in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus does not offer four steps for dealing with the problem of lust. Instead of talking about preventive measures, Jesus limits Himself to definition. Jesus’ teaching actually intensifies the problem by making it clear that lustful intent is as wrong as the act itself. Jesus’ teaching exposes the true boundaries of what constitutes sin in God’s eyes and condemns us all. According to Jesus, there is more to sin than the deed. It is possible to avoid the action and yet not escape the sin that prompts the act. Martyn Lloyd-Jones uses a medical analogy to explain Jesus’ intent: “Sins are nothing but the symptoms of a disease called sin and it is not the symptoms that matter but the disease, for it is the disease that kills and not the symptoms.” It’s important to understand that our struggle with lust is much larger than the desire for sex. In the New Testament, the Greek term that is translated “lust” refers to desire. It can speak of both legitimate and illegitimate desires. In its sinful form, we may fix our desire on many things. It is just as likely to be focused on someone else’s possessions or on their success as it is to be an illicit desire for sex. John hints at the full scope of this cardinal sin in 1 John 2:16: “For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world.” As far as John is concerned, when it comes to lust, everything in the world is a potential target. Lust is such a common feature of our culture that it is hard to find a dimension of our experience that is not somehow shaped by it. Sexual lust is the point of appeal for many of the products that marketers try to sell to us. If lust is not the direct focus of most of the entertainment we consume, it is at least the garnish that its creators use to hold our attention. But this biblical sin has become so commonplace in our culture that it is almost a cliché. Lust’s commonplace status does not make it less dangerous to us. If anything, overfamiliarity increases our vulnerability. We have become desensitized and are therefore too tolerant of it, both in our environment and in our own experience. But the biblical sin of lust has many faces, and sometimes its sexual form is only a symptom of something else.

from Love Restored by Dr. John Koessler

‘And he said, “‘This explains why a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one.’ Since they are no longer two but one, let no one split apart what God has joined together.”’ Matthew 19:5-6(NLT)

Sexual desire is pleasurable by nature, but it is also dangerous because it is pleasurable and therefore easily misdirected. Sex is dangerous because its effects always stretch beyond the individual. Sex is a public as well as a private concern. Sexual practice affects the community as a whole. “Sex, like any other necessary, precious, and volatile power that is commonly held, is everybody’s business,” Wendell Berry observes. However, although sex is “everybody’s business,” it does not automatically follow from this that sex is public property. According to Scripture, our sexual desires are to be gratified within a landscape whose limits have been established by God. This is His right as our Creator. Many treat sex as if it were only a human concern, with limits that can be changed at will or eliminated by majority vote. The Bible paints a very different picture. Sexual desire is a sacred pleasure, one that can be enjoyed safely only within the clear boundaries God has established for it.

In a culture whose notions of sex have been shaped by the sexual revolution, talk of boundaries is unpopular. We are more interested in freedom. The changed values of the sexual revolution were enacted under the flag of personal freedom. This is even truer today in the post-sexual revolution era when sexual desire is more than a matter of pleasure. It is now an identity marker. However, when it comes to the Bible’s view of human sexuality, there can be no question that real boundaries exist. In these verses, Jesus teaches that sex is legitimate only within the marriage context, and marriage is defined by God as the union of male and female. Jesus also warned that the act of adultery has its root in the heart. According to Jesus, those whose sexual desire falls outside the boundaries of God’s permission have already committed adultery in their hearts. Our culture has radically redrawn its moral boundaries so that what once was considered lust is now called love, and sexual preference is regarded by many to be malleable. This is more than a minor difference over sexual preference. It amounts to a complete inversion of Christ’s intent for sexuality and marriage. What culture used to regard as vice is now virtue. But such a shift involves far more than change in cultural tastes. It is ultimately an inversion of God’s idea of what is good. Those things that the Bible defines as vices have become today’s dangerous virtues. Not just dangerous but deadly. Jesus says that our sexual desires are limited by boundaries that God has established. This is equally true for anything upon which we might set our heart. As sinners, it is not only possible for our desires to move outside those boundaries, but inevitable. When they do, we must deny those desires, no matter what their focus may be. Lust is more than sexual desire, and there is more to love than lust. We are promiscuous in the way we speak of what we love using the term to describe our desires without discriminating between them. Sometimes what we say we love is only a passing fancy. At others, we use the same word to describe something even more basic, merely a bodily response to stimuli. An unmarried couple on a date might declare undying love for one another during dinner and then in the next breath say that they “love” the food that is on their plates. Neither of them thinks this is strange. Afterward, they might decide to “make love,” using the same term in a third sense that is more in line with what the Bible calls lust.

Not every affection we feel necessarily qualifies as love, and not all desires are lust in the sinful sense of the word. However, the general tenor of the Bible’s teaching about desire is cautionary. Human desire is easily seduced. This note of warning is reflected in the Ten Commandments, which forbids both adultery and coveting in general (Ex. 20:14, 17). The prohibition against adultery implies sexual sin, but in Moses’s day, where wives were also categorized as property, it had an economic dimension, too. We can lust for things as well as people and lust may cause us to treat people as things.

The commandment forbidding coveting is broad in its scope. Our neighbor’s house, wife, manservant, maidservant, ox, donkey, “or anything that belongs to your neighbor” are all off-limits to our desire. The Hebrew word that is translated “house” in this verse didn’t refer to the dwelling so much as those who inhabited it. It might be better translated “household.” All of the things mentioned in this verse were marks of personal wealth in the ancient world. It was not wrong to desire or even obtain them, but it is all too easy for our ordinary desires to become illicit.

from Love Restored by Dr. John Koessler

‘Don’t you realize that your bodies are actually parts of Christ? Should a man take his body, which is part of Christ, and join it to a prostitute? Never! And don’t you realize that if a man joins himself to a prostitute, he becomes one body with her? For the Scriptures say, “The two are united into one.” But the person who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with him. Run from sexual sin! No other sin so clearly affects the body as this one does. For sexual immorality is a sin against your own body. Don’t you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God? You do not belong to yourself, for God bought you with a high price. So you must honor God with your body.’ 1 Corinthians 6:15-20(NLT)

Desire can be dangerous, and few desires are more dangerous than this one. Sexual lust is quickly ignited, and once inflamed is not easily extinguished. The fact that sexual desire is ordinary does not mean that it is safe. My father’s inept explanation of how sex works might not have been age-appropriate, but he was right to sound a note of warning. When we treat sex frivolously, it can be destructive to both body and soul. Perhaps the most damaging effect of the sexual revolution was the way it trivialized sexual desire, removing sexual intercourse from the realm of the sacred and treating it as little more than a pleasurable bodily function. Sex is pleasurable, and it does involve the body. But sex is also more than this. Indeed, it is the fact that sex involves the body that makes it sacred because it means that sex involves the whole person. When we engage in sexual intercourse, we not only join our body with another, we join our whole self with another whole self. We unite with another person in such a way that the two become one. The language the apostle uses when speaking of fornication in these verses implies a spiritual as well as a physical reality.

Pornography objectifies the person whose image incites our lust. Similarly, when we yield to sexual lust, we objectify ourselves. When we indulge in sexual lust in its various forms, we relate to ourselves as if we were only a body and nothing more. Sexual desire is normal and holy. Sexual lust happens when normal sexual desire moves in a selfish and self-destructive direction.

According to theologian Helmut Thielicke, before the Renaissance, the boundaries that defined both sex and marriage were public rather than private. As he puts it, “they were a matter for the family and clan.” Individual love was a factor, but Thielicke observes that love was treated more as a consequence than a pre-supposition. The modern era flipped this. Instead of expecting love to develop within the confines of marriage, people married based on an attraction they already experienced. This does not mean that attraction was not a factor before the sexual revolution. The dramatic tension in the Old Testament love story between Jacob and Rachel revolves around the fact that Jacob loved Rachel and not her sister Leah. The Scriptures make it clear that this love story began with a powerful physical attraction. The difference in the perspective of the ancients is seen in Jacob’s reaction after he discovers that he has been tricked into marrying Leah instead of Rachel. He does not demand a divorce, nor does he fail to regard Leah as his wife.

The point here is not that attraction is irrelevant in marriage but that there is more to marriage than sexual attraction. “It would be stupid to think that Christian ethics wants selfless, ministering love of neighbor to replace eros,” Thielicke rightly observes. “The one who marries with no erotic feeling but simply out of neighborly love and because of the other’s need will bring unhappiness to them both, as we have noted in another context.” The seduction of human love by the ethos of lust has only intensified since Thielicke made his observation in the mid-1970s. But the sensualism of the sexual revolution, epitomized by the popular slogan “if it feels good, do it,” took a new turn as the twentieth century came to a close. Sexual practice is no longer only a matter of pleasure or preference. Many today regard sex as the essence of one’s personhood. The old sexual revolution of the twentieth century taught everyone to enjoy sex regardless of whether they were married or not. The new sexual revolution of the twenty-first century says that we cannot be truly fulfilled humans without sex. According to Kuehne, “Relationships of obligation have been replaced with relationships of choice, and sexual intercourse has been transformed from being valued primarily for its role in procreation and in cementing a marriage relationship to being a pleasurable and typically essential component of intimate adult romantic relationships.”

Instead of being an expression of love, sex is love and perhaps even something more. Sex and identity are conflated. Sexual practice isn’t just about freedom anymore. These days sex is no longer an appetite or even a practice. Sex is treated as a human right becoming the defining factor in human identity.

from Love Restored by Dr. John Koessler

‘The woman was convinced. She saw that the tree was beautiful and its fruit looked delicious, and she wanted the wisdom it would give her. So she took some of the fruit and ate it. Then she gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it, too. ‘ Genesis 3:6(NLT)

 I first learned about sex from my father. The lesson came in the form of a brief hallway conversation as he was in transit from his bedroom to the bathroom. I don’t think my age was even in double digits at the time. I don’t recall who initiated the conversation, though I suspect it was in response to a question I had asked. My father compared sex to a loaded gun and emphasized the need to be careful. “It’s like a pistol,” he said. “When it goes off, you can’t stop it.” I didn’t understand much of what he said. The whole thing sounded pretty unappealing to me at the time. I was sure I would never want to have sex with anyone. I was wrong, of course. I didn’t know it then, but the sexual revolution was just getting started. I turned sixteen in 1969, the summer that Woodstock happened. At the time, I was just a kid growing up in the rust belt of the Midwest, too young and too far away to attend the event whose posters promised “three days of peace and music.” It turned out to be three days of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Woodstock was the watershed event that showed how far the counterculture of the ’60s had edged its way into the mainstream of popular consciousness. Staid newscasters in white shirts and ties covered it on the national news and pondered its cultural significance. Singer Joni Mitchell, who had been unable to attend because of a scheduled appearance on the Dick Cavett Show, wrote a hymn of praise that compared the music festival to Eden. More than a concert, Woodstock turned out to be the iconic moment of my generation. Boomers have been talking about it ever since.

Woodstock was the capstone of the movement that began two years earlier on the opposite coast when thousands of young people moved to San Francisco during the “summer of love.” Forty-five years later, Country Joe McDonald would characterize the values of the era with these words: “They all want sex. They all want to have fun. Everyone wants hope. We opened the door, and everybody went through it, and everything changed after that.” During the summer of love, sex and love were synonymous. The sexual revolution changed not only the shape of sexual morals for a large part of the culture, but also our view of the place of sexual desire in human experience. Dale Kuehne, professor of ethics, economics, and the common good at Saint Anselm College observes, “There was no assumption until the 20th century that in order to lead the best, deepest, most fulfilling relational life, you needed to be in a sexual relationship.” Kuehne notes that this false assumption has caused some Christians today to question whether the Bible’s teaching about sexuality and sexual practice is “good news.”

But the sexual revolution, which was such a feature of the summer of love, did not usher in an age of fun and hope. Twenty-seven years after Woodstock, Joni Mitchell’s song “Sex Kills” lamented injustice, greed, and the spread of the AIDS epidemic. Those who participated in the sexual revolution went looking for love and found death instead.

In Mitchell’s song, sex is not the problem; it is a victim. She portrays sex as a tool that marketers use to exploit others. She is right when she says that sex sells. We are surrounded by sexual images that are used to sell everything from soap to shoes. What is more, the intended audience for these sexualized images has gotten younger with each passing decade. Author and activist Jean Kilbourne notes that images that would have once been considered pornographic are now commonly found in family magazines, on television, on billboards, and on non-pornographic internet sites. “Today’s children are bombarded with graphic sexual content that they cannot fully process or understand and that can even frighten them.” The aim of these ads is to arouse a different kind of lust in children. “These sexual images aren’t intended to sell our children on sex—they are intended to sell them on shopping,” Kilbourne explains. “This is the intent of the marketers—but an unintended consequence is the effect these images have on real sexual desire and real lives.”

Joni Mitchell was right in another respect. Sex isn’t the problem. The problem is desire and the unrealistic expectations that are born of our desire. The biblical word for this is lust. Sin entered human experience through common desire.  The appetites mentioned in Genesis 3:6 are commonplace. The forbidden fruit was “good for food.” In other words, the tree was edible. The tree was also appealing to the eye. The tree appeared to be “desirable for gaining wisdom.” Like the original temptation, sexual lust is rooted in legitimate desire. Sexual desire is not wrong in itself. It is part of our biological and psychological design. But like all other appetites, this hunger can and must be controlled. Appetites can be misdirected or abused. We can be selfish and even perverse in our attempts to gratify them.

from Love Restored by Dr. John Koessler