Eyes Full of Adultery

[mick75]

Eyes Full of Adultery

“1But there were also false prophets among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you. They will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the sovereign Lord who bought them--bringing swift destruction on themselves. 2Many will follow their shameful ways and will bring the way of truth into disrepute. 3In their greed these teachers will exploit you with stories they have made up. Their condemnation has long been hanging over them, and their destruction has not been sleeping.
14With eyes full of adultery, they never stop sinning; they seduce the unstable; they are experts in greed--an accursed brood! 15They have left the straight way and wandered off to follow the way of Balaam son of Beor, who loved the wages of wickedness. 16But he was rebuked for his wrongdoing by a donkey--a beast without speech--who spoke with a man's voice and restrained the prophet's madness.
17These men are springs without water and mists driven by a storm. Blackest darkness is reserved for them. 18For they mouth empty, boastful words and, by appealing to the lustful desires of sinful human nature, they entice people who are just escaping from those who live in error. 19They promise them freedom, while they themselves are slaves of depravity--for a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him. 20If they have escaped the corruption of the world by knowing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and are again entangled in it and overcome, they are worse off at the end than they were at the beginning. 21It would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than to have known it and then to turn their backs on the sacred command that was passed on to them. 22Of them the proverbs are true: "A dog returns to its vomit," and, "A sow that is washed goes back to her wallowing in the mud." 2 Peter 2:1-3,14-22 NIV

This section of scripture addresses the false religious teachers who were leading Christians astray in the early church. Greed and sexual sin were two of the primary sins that these corrupt leaders practiced. They “loved the wages of wickedness†and had “eyes full of adultery.†They were “slaves of depravity,†and were actively seducing people into sin in various ways.

As I read through the passage I saw some parallels between the corrupt leaders’ condition and the condition that pornography addiction can lead to. Most notably is how pornography fills the eyes with adultery. Our eyes are the gateways to our souls, i.e. whatever we allow to fill our eyes will fill our thoughts. Jesus said, "The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!" (Matthew 6:22-23 NIV). Just one look at a porn picture can ignite the fire of lust in our minds. If we continue to feed that fire with porn, it can quickly burn out of control and our thoughts will likely be permeated with sexual fantasy. Curiously, our eyes will also reflect what we’ve been thinking about. It’s not too hard to spot a person who is “checking people out†in public with a lustful eye.

Porn addiction can truly be slavery to depravity. It often leads people into increasingly graphic and perverted forms of sexual entertainment. It can even inspire people to commit violent sexual crimes, as they seek to act out the fantasies they’ve been viewing in porn. The added problem is that people who half-heartedly try to break free from the addiction may find themselves worse off than before.

If you have gotten involved in pornography addiction, God offers you hope of complete recovery through your faith in Jesus Christ. The road to freedom may be challenging, but it is possible if you keep your eyes on Jesus. His miracle-working power can restore the unrestorable and change the unchangeable. The steps may vary depending on circumstances, but generally will start with confession of sin, repentance and surrender to God through obedience. Please see our online course, Freedom Journey I for more details.

Questions for further thought:

Peter wrote that a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him. Have you allowed anything to master you?

What were some of the other notable characteristics of the false teachers Peter described?

How can his “character profile†of the false teachers help us in the church today?

Prayer:

“Lord God, I desire to have pure eyes and a pure heart. Please forgive me for viewing any evil things for entertainment. Lord, I plead the blood of Jesus over the memories of sin and the corrupt thought patterns that I’ve practiced. Please cleanse and restore my mind. I have the mind of Christ and I will think pure thoughts. Help me to walk this walk of purity faithfully with you, without turning back to my former way. Please fill me with your joy and peace today. Thank you, Lord! In Jesus’ name I pray, Amen.â€Â

 

[mick75]

Adultery a Social Cancer

Adultery a Social Cancer


February 17, 1996 * Exodus 20:14 * S96\EX2014T.012
What would be the response If I went on a radio open line show and said, "Good people, you shall not commit adultery?" I would receive many irate phone calls telling me to mind my own business and stop moralizing. Some callers would say, "What people do in their own bedrooms is not the business of self- righteous preachers."

At first glance we're prone to agree with that logic. I find myself saying, "True, its none of my business what people do in private. If its none of my business what people do in their own bedrooms, then why should I preach a sermon on the seventh commandment? Is there any compelling reason to preach this message other than the fact that God gave the ten commandments and He expects me to tell you how He expects us to behave."

I am compelled to preach this message because adultery has become a social cancer that's attacking the vital organs of our society. Contrary to public opinion, most personal morality is in reality public morality. What we do in the secret of our bedrooms is played out in public on the streets of our cities.

In Leviticus 18:25-27 God says that sexual immorality defiles the land. God says that what Eugene Harder does in his bedroom impacts the health and security of our nation. God says that I must hold up a standard of rightness so that our land would not be defiled. That is one reason why Moses gave such harsh penalties to those who were guilty of breaking this commandment.

I have to preach this message because we are our brother's keepers. We are duty bound to warn one another of the dangerous consequences of disobeying God's laws. I must preach this message because Jesus said that we are the light of the world and the salt of the earth.

The statement, "Eugene, mind your own business," seems like conventional wisdom. But I'm not sure that conventional wisdom is always godly wisdom.

My goal this morning is twofold, first I want to give you God's perspective of sexual sin. Second, I want to help you understand how sexual sin defiles our land and why it is not a personal sin that only has personal consequences.

I believe that it could be demonstrated that over 50% of the income tax we pay is the indirect result of sexual sin. There's a big part of our health, welfare and policing costs that have their geneses in adultery. The damage done to children when father's walk out the door is staggering. This is a curse on our land that's the consequence of parental abandonment.

Malachi the prophet said, "Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD: And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse." (Malachi 4:5-6 KJV) If you expect me to pay for the consequences of what happens in your bedroom, then I have a right to talk about the consequences of what goes on behind those closed doors.

This message is difficult for me to give because there is great opportunity for many who read and hear it to feel a sense of condemnation because of their past. There is also the danger that this message will generate self-righteous smugness in people like me.

To those of you who carry the scars of adultery I remind you that Jesus specializes in turning those scars into beauty marks. The same is also true for those of us who carry the scars of self-righteousness smugness which are just as ugly as scars of adultery. Whether or not our scars become beauty marks depends upon how we process our guilt.

My last disclaimer is this, "Please don't take anything that I say as a specific reference to your particular situation. Its my intention to talk about adultery in broad general terms that will help you appreciate God's passion for purity.

God Says No to the Social Cancer of Adultery.
"You shall not commit adultery." (Exodus 20:14 NIV) What do the words commit adultery mean? In it's simplest terms, adultery is sexual intercourse by a married person with someone other than his/her spouse. The word adultery comes from the Hebrew word apostatize which means to forsake. Thus adultery is a forsaking of your sacred marriage vows and of your soul mate.
From the English word adultery, we get the word adulterate which means to add an impure or improper substance to; to lower the purity or quality without changing the appearance. That's what happens when one spouse is unfaithful to the other.

Adultery lowers the quality and purity of the relationship even though the appearance does not change. Seeds of corruption are sown in the relationship that will grow and bring forth a harvest of pain, misery and sorrow.

People have said to me, "Eugene, adultery is unfaithfulness within the marriage bond. This commandment does not forbid two people who are in love from having sexual intercourse."

My response is, "That's true this commandment deals first with fidelity within the marriage bond. But Jesus expanded the application of this commandment when He said,

"But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart." (Matthew 5:28 NIV) Let's not forget that Moses holds up the ideal of virginity. In Deuteronomy. 22 Moses says that if a new bride cannot produce the evidence of virginity on her marriage night, she is to be taken out and stoned." If that old Mosaic law were put into effect today, approximately 70% of all weddings would be followed by funerals. Why is sexual purity such a big deal with God?

Let's look at sex through the word picture of fire. When fire is controlled it provides life giving warmth. My ultimate picture of peace and security is a log cabin in the mountains surrounded with three feet of fresh fallen snow. Inside the cabin is a large natural stone fireplace with a robust fire licking away at the logs. There you are, curled up on a lazy boy recliner with a good book in your hands and the phone is disconnected.

One night, the creosote buildup in the chimney ignites. All of a sudden you have a roaring chimney fire. The flames lick through a crack in the mortar and the tinder dry rafters begin to burn. The fire has become a monster that threatens your life. Your cozy little cabin has become a raging inferno and you have to flee into the cold dark night.

Sexual purity is a big deal with God because anything less releases a raging inferno that is capable of damaging three or four generations of your descendants. Some of you sitting here today have seen your dreams incinerated all because that wonderful creation of God called sex, jumped the fireguard of marriage. The fire that once warmed you became a ruthless killer that burned with selfish passion. Love turned to lust, selfishness became the governor and today and generational brokenness liters your highway of life.

When God created us, He elevated us above the animal kingdom by giving sex the power to create a metaphysical oneness between a man and woman. In the animal kingdom, sex is purely for procreation. To insure pro-creation, sex needs to be powerful. In any system where there is power, there is the potential for destruction and disaster.

Notice what Paul says to the Corinthians. "Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body." (1 Corinthians 6:18 NIV) What do you think those words mean? Paul is telling us that sexual sin is in a category all by itself because of it's potential to inflict great harm upon our own physical body. Gonorrhea and syphilis were present in Paul's day. I don't know if he had any idea of the psychological damage that sex outside of marriage can cause.

Listen to the appeal of Paul the Apostle. "It is God's will that you should . . . . avoid sexual immorality; that each of you should learn to control his own body in a way that is holy and honorable, not in passionate lust like the heathen, who do not know God; and that in this matter no one should wrong his brother or take advantage of him. The Lord will punish men for all such sins, as we have already told you and warned you. For God did not call us to be impure, but to live a holy life." (1Thessalonians 4:3-7 NIV)

The Consequences of Adultery Impact Our Entire Nation.
Today we live in a brave new world. Its a world that says, "The fire can never burn out of control." Armed with this false feeling of security, we teach our school children about the fire long before they have the maturity to control it. In the majority of our TV programs we present the fire as something that is harmless and that will never burn you. Hundreds of times a day through visual images we are reminded of the excitement and desire of the fire.
Today the fire is burning out of control. Women no longer are safe on our streets. It's not safe to let our children play in their yards. An inferno of lust is sweeping North America. God told us that the fire was safe as long as it remained within the bounds of marriage, but we don't believe Him.

The 60's and 70's dawned and our social engineers said, "God doesn't know what He's talking about, let the fire burn freely. Don't keep it confined to the archaic prison of marriage? Express yourself, do whatever your heart tells you to do. Don't hold back, let it all hang out, go for broke, let the good times roll."

People went for broke and adultery led to divorce and children got pushed into the background and today we have a massive juvenile delinquency problem that's costing our nation hundreds of millions of dollars. That's the high cost of two generations of children being abandoned by fathers who loved the fire more than their family. In the 1940s a book on divorce tersely asserted, "Children are entitled to the affection and associations of two parents, not one." Thirty years later a popular book stated, "A two-parent home is not the only emotional structure within which a child can be happy and healthy . . . . The parents who take care of themselves first will best be able to take care of their children."

Once the social pendulum swings from child well-being to adult well-being, it is hard to see divorce and non-marital birth in anything but a positive light. Up to 1960 parents said, "The happiness of my child is more important than my own happiness." Thus for the sake of the children, parents worked things out until the children left home.

I remember when Murphy Brown had her baby and Vice President Dan Quale made the remark about the importance of fathers to children. The news media excoriated Dan Quale for his dinosaur approach to family life. There is an element in our society that treats married two-parent families as a sickness in our society. Our sexual revolution has caused our intellectuals to normalize what was once considered deviant behavior and to call traditional values deviant. Next society discovers that adultery is a primary cause of the breakdown of our social order.

Adultery turns millions of father's hearts from their children. These children experience the intense pain of abandonment and become prime candidates of juvenile delinquency.

Today we have legions of disillusioned youth not knowing how to deal with the anger they have been repressing for years.

There is a growing body of evidence that is totaling the real cost of the last thirty years of permissiveness. In the April 93 issue of "The Atlantic Monthly" a liberal East Coast news magazine, Barbara DaFoe Whitehead wrote an in-depth article titled, "Dan Quale Was Right." She stated that in the 70s, most experts believed that divorce was like a bad cold. There was a phase of acute discomfort, and then a short recovery phase. According to conventional wisdom, kids would be back on their feet in no time at all.

Judith Wallerstein is a pioneer in research on the long term psychological impact of family disruption on children. Her cautionary words are, "Divorce is deceptive. Legally it is a single event, but psychologically it is a chain sometimes a never-ending chain­of events, relocations, and radically shifting relationships strung through time, a process that forever changes the lives of the people involved."

Judith Wallerstein discovered that five years after divorce more than a third of the children experienced moderate or severe depression. At ten years a significant number of now young men and women appeared to be troubled, drifting and under achieving. At fifteen years many of the thirtyish adults were struggling to establish strong love relationships of their own. In short, far from recovering from their parents' divorce, a significant percentage of these grownups were still suffering from its effects. Adultery is a social cancer that lies at the root of a majority of divorces. Sociologist Alice Rossi has studied intergenerational patterns of help-giving and she says that, "Children from disrupted families may be less likely to help their aging parents. She says that adult obligation has its roots in early-childhood experience. Children who grow up in intact families experience higher levels of obligation to kin than children from broken families."

Is it natural justice that parents of the new morality who put their interests ahead of their children should suffer from children who put their own interests ahead of their parents? It reminds us of the words of Paul to the Galatian believers, "Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows." (Galations 6:7 NIV)

70 percent of all juveniles in state reform institutions come from fatherless homes. Boys from single mother homes are significantly more likely than others to commit crimes and to wind up in the juvenile justice systems.

The great educational tragedy of our time is that many children are failing in school not because they are intellectually or physically impaired but because they are emotionally incapacitated by broken homes.

The discipline problems in today's suburban schools assaults on teachers, unprovoked attacks on other students, screaming outbursts in class outstrip the problems that were evident in the toughest city schools a generation ago. Teachers find many children emotionally distracted, so upset and preoccupied by the explosive drama of their own family lives that they are unable to concentrate on such mundane matters as multiplication tables. Friends, adultery is a social cancer that's costing us dearly in ruined lives and wasted tax dollars. God knew what He was talking about when He said, "Thou shalt not commit adultery." The advice that Solomon gave nearly 3000 years ago is up-to-date and good, "Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life." (Proverbs 4:23 NIV)

CONCLUSION:
100 years ago, Howard Walter wrote the following words that make a fitting response to the challenge of today's message. I would be true, for there are those who trust me;


I would be pure, for there are those who care;
I would be strong, for there is much to suffer;
I would be brave, for there is much to dare.
I would be prayerful through each busy moment;
I would be constantly in touch with God;
I would be tuned to hear His slightest whisper;
I would have faith to keep the path Christ trod.

 

[MrVersatile48]

Mick

When they say 'it's none of your business', I'd say, "I didn't write the Bible: it's the Word of God & all aspects of human welfare are the business of the Almighty, All-knowing Creator"

The Greek word translated 'adultery' in the NT is porneia & it's sometimes translated as fornication

The porn root is obvious & porn is poison, not just to human relationships but to the nervous system, sapping strength as Proverbs puts it

Must be an online Greek/English lexicon

Right back..

A Greek-English Lexicon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A version of this lexicon can be searched online via The Perseus Project. ... into An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon, containing the essential vocabulary ...

http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Gree ... sh_Lexicon - 23k - Cached - More pages from this site

Search concordance @ http://www.BibleGateway.org

http://www.thenGodsaid.com - The Net's online Bible Handbook based on classical Christian writings.

http://www.thenGodsaid.com presents the online Bible Handbook.

Learn more about the Bible, Bible authors, read Bible commentaries on every chapter of the Bible. ... In our Bible Handbook section we have several different Bible translations, several commentaries and ... about each Book of the Bible. We also ... set up an Online Bible reading plan to ...

http://www.thengodsaid.com - 5k - Cached - More pages from this site - Save


God bless!

Ian