Rancho Bernardo Community Presbyterian Church

Hosea 3:1-5, Matthew 5:27-32

Well here we are on the seventh commandment. How do we say something meaningful about the sin of adultery?

Maybe we start by admitting the human tendency toward failure in this moral realm of our lives. It feels almost like we have been “set up” to fail in this realm. God tells us not to do it, but something inside us wants to challenge God’s wisdom.

Mom sends little Johnny outside to play in the yard. She makes it clear that he is to play on the grass. He is not to go over the fence into the neighbor’s yard. He is not to play out on the sidewalk. He is to stay on the grass. Does Johnny understand his boundaries?

Of course he understands them! We know because the very first thing he does is run to the edge of the lawn in order to put one toe over the sidewalk and look back at his mom. When she doesn’t react, he holds his entire foot out over the sidewalk. As soon as he gets “the look” from mom he runs to the fence between their yard and the neighbor’s and climbs up onto it so he can dangle his whole arm into the neighbor’s yard. “Mom, look at me.” When he discovers his mom has turned away, he runs back to the front yard and steps onto the sidewalk with one foot. Then he walks along the edge of the lawn with one foot on the sidewalk and one on the grass. He distributes his weight evenly between the grass and the sidewalk. Why is the sidewalk suddenly so exciting? Someone told him “No,” and he wonders “Why not?”

The man asked if I could meet him at a quiet restaurant. I arrived and ordered a cup of coffee. He barely made eye contact as he began his story. “I met her at a conference.” He rotates his coffee cup around and around nervously as he tells me about this “friend.” “My wife says it is inappropriate for me to keep seeing her. But she’s just a friend.”

Like Johnny at the edge of the front yard, he flirts with the boundaries. Is that the attraction of this sin? God says, “No,” so we feel a need to push the boundaries and see how far is too far? Let’s explore why God’s Conditions, Covenants, and Restrictions (CC and R’s) include a warning that we not commit adultery.

You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery. I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell. 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 marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress, and anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery.

Matthew 5: 27-32

A man of few words went to church one morning while his ill wife remained at home. On returning to the house his wife asked about the church service. “How was the music?” “Fine.” “How was the sermon?” “Fine.” “What did the preacher speak about?” “Adultery.” “What did the preacher say?” “He was against it.”

Let’s start by being absolutely clear: Adultery is a sin. It is not unforgivable, but it is still a sin. Having said that, however, we discover in our Bibles that unlike so many of the other sins, God’s people frequently have fallen into this particular sin. King David was an adulterer. Yet he repented and was still referred to later in the Bible as a “man after God’s own heart.” Gomer, the wife of the prophet Hosea, was an adulteress. Yet Hosea was commanded by God to forgive her, be reconciled and work at their marriage again. When the crowd of men gathered to stone the woman caught in the very act of adultery, Jesus announced that she was forgiven, then he told her to “go and sin no more.”

When it comes to adultery, we are stuck in a conundrum. On the one hand, it is a surprisingly common sin in our modern world as much as in the days of the Bible. On the other hand, the consequences have always been and continue to be incredibly destructive. Again. On the one hand, our biology and interior emotional wiring seem to push us toward it. On the other hand, God says clearly that it is wrong. So why, across the ages and cultures, is this sin such a temptation?

Adultery is a temptation for both genders; it captures married and singles both.

A man, who tends to seek respect, is attracted to a woman at the office who admires his work. She understands his stress. She compliments and affirms him. That evening he gets home to find out that his wife needs him to repair the garbage disposal. “Let’s see, garbage disposal on the one hand, admiration on the other hand. Which do I want?” Are we surprised when he falls into the sin of a divided heart?

A wife feels exhausted when she gets home. Her husband sits in front of the computer while she prepares the meal, gets the children into their pajamas, and reads them their bedtime stories. The next morning, a man at the office compliments her. He has no sexual expectations; he merely respects and understands her work. “Let’s see, on the one hand a husband who doesn’t help me around the house, but still wants marital relations that evening. On the other hand, a man at the office who respects me for my mind, and has no other expectations.” Is it any surprise that her heart becomes divided?

So, how do we avoid something that pulls at us this powerfully?

Perhaps we need to remind ourselves regularly of the terrible consequences of adultery. Contrary to what Hollywood may portray, adultery is not a victimless sin. The world around us conveys the lie that as long as the participants are consenting adults, it is a private matter. As long as nobody gets hurt, so the argument goes, then adultery is not really wrong. Here is the truth that is announced boldly by experience as well as scripture: Adultery always hurts somebody!

Adultery creates terrible consequences. It pollutes our marriages and destroys our families. Just a few statistics make this point. Let me quote a scholar on the consequences of adultery. “Of those who break up their marriage to marry someone else, eighty percent are sorry later. Of those who do marry their lover, which is only about ten percent, about seventy percent of them get another divorce. Of that, twenty-five to thirty percent that stay married, only half of them are happy. Having an affair is an invitation to an awful lot of pain and tragedy.”1

I could spend our entire time in this message making this important point: adultery hurts us as individuals and hurts our community. The consequences negate any pleasures. However, I suspect that I would be preaching to the choir. Most of us already know it is wrong and the consequences are not worth it. We don’t need to hear this after the fact; we need help before we find ourselves standing on the border between the grass and the sidewalk.

Prevention starts with truth. As long as we allow ourselves to be lured into the lies of adultery, we will fall to this temptation. The best stand against the lures of this sin is to recognize the truth.

Years ago, a friend of Kate called her on the phone. This friend was excited about her most recent purchase. She told Kate about an amazing deal that she had seen advertised on television. It involved an astonishingly low price for a pearl necklace. I don’t recall the specific cost, but it was an incredible deal for a pearl necklace. Kate responded with some skepticism. It sounded too good to be true. Besides, this friend has a habit of spending money she can’t afford on things she does not need. Kate asked if they were flawed, cultured, or what kind of pearls. The friend was quick with her response; “They are genuine faux pearls!” Kate did not have the heart to tell her that faux is the French word for fake.

Here is the truth about affairs: they have little to do with sex. Rather, the attraction is faux intimacy. Like any youthful crush, infatuation feels good at first. We can call it merely puppy love, but remember puppy love is real for the puppy!

No wonder Jesus spoke of this commandment as involving our minds and emotions more than our bodies. Jesus warned that what starts as a seemingly harmless action, could destroy us if we let down our guard. Did you hear about those boys who were attacked by the tiger at the zoo? Some reports say they climbed up on a fence and were teasing the tiger, when it attacked them. Let’s use this recent news story to think about adultery.

This sin of the divided heart is like a cute tiger cub. It wanders lost through our yard. We notice it out the window and remark, “Look at the cute little cub.” We feed it and make a bed for it. We pet it and play with it. Instead of reminding ourselves of the truth that this cute cub is a wild animal, we give it the run of the house.

Then one day we wake up to realize that this cute cub has grown into a mean tiger. It snarls at us. It demands the food off our plates and refuses to wear a collar. It tears up our house. Pretty soon, the whole house stinks with a feral cat smell. Its instincts to attack are out of control. What once seemed so cute and innocent has become a danger to the ones we love and ourselves.

God warns us: “Don’t tease the tiger.” In my own life, not teasing the tiger, means more than not climbing on the fence and seeing how close I can get to the tiger. It involves constantly tending the home fires of my own heart.

More than ten years ago, Kate and I hit a really rocky time in our marriage. Over a period of nearly two years, we became deeply disconnected. Our teenagers knew something was wrong. “Dad, why do you always sleep over by the window and not in bed with mom?” “Oh, I get too hot at night and I like the breeze on my face.”

It felt to each of us that our home life had become nothing but demands and expectations with little sense of love. We each recognized that we were approaching a divorce, if we didn’t do something about it. As we approached this juncture, we each became genuinely prayerful about what our future would be like as two single parents no longer sharing the struggle of rearing teenagers, but each separately doing our own thing. Neither of us liked what that would mean. So we finally sat down and through tears of honesty, we committed ourselves to work on healing our relationship.

Kate described it well. Why would each of us want to put the effort into seeking a new relationship with all the intermediate steps of getting to know another person, when we could put that same level of energy back into healing our wounded marriage? We agreed more than anything else to be gentle and kind to each other. We purposely disciplined our thoughts to think the best about the other one and avoid taking offense. None of this was easy. We almost did not make it to our twenty-second anniversary. Instead of ending up divorced, this week we celebrate our thirty-third anniversary.

You want to know the best way to avoid the temptation of the sidewalk? Build a swing set in the middle of the lawn. What does your swing set need?