Summer on the Mount: Lust, Divorce, and Oaths | Matthew 5:27-37 | Micah Hales

Pastor Micah continues our series through the Sermon on the Mount, encouraging us to stop trying to earn God's approval, but to yearn for His presence.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:13

Welcome to the Ambassador Church Podcast, a church in the city for the city, on Milwaukee's East Side. We pray this message meets you where you are, challenges your faith, and draws you closer to Jesus.

SPEAKER_00 0:30

Y'all can go ahead and take a seat. I swear I'm not trying to make you deaf. Alex is gonna adjust this. Well, if we haven't had a chance to meet yet, my name is Micah, and I get to serve on staff here with ambassadors, specifically with our college ministry, the Saw Company. And so that's what I do most of the time. Sometimes help lead our security team, keep you guys safe in the mornings. You know, yeah, I don't know why I got picked, but here we are. Uh this summer we have been going through the Sermon on the Mount. All right, and it's the the most the best sermon ever, probably the most famous sermon ever from Jesus. I think this is like our fifth week. I don't know, I didn't count, to be honest with you. Uh, but last week, uh, Jared preached on anger in Matthew 5, 21 through 26. And so what's gonna happen is Jesus is gonna continue on with this sort of list of corrections of common understandings of the Old Testament law. So he's gonna correct some views of the Old Testament law for his audience. And so this morning, we're gonna be continuing in the Sermon on the Mount. We'll be in Matthew 5, uh, verse 27 through 37. So if you have your Bibles, you can go ahead and turn there. Uh, you can also feel free to use the pew Bibles around you if you don't have a physical copy of God's Word, or we would love to give you a Bible for free. So uh as you turn there, what I want to do to start is I want to talk a little bit about my tumultuous dating journey before finally meeting my wife. I didn't tell her I was gonna talk about this. There's a reason. No, I'm just kidding. Um uh but before meeting my wife, my dating life was an absolute dumpster fire. Okay. Um I didn't date much, but when I dated, uh I was the person who tried to be the people pleaser uh or the significant other pleaser. I tried to constantly change like who I was in order for so that the person would be impressed, uh, or the girl would like me or uh that they would approve of me. And I just had this like terrible mindset each time I I went on a handful of dates before meeting my wife. And what happened was when I did actually work up the courage to kind of ask my wife on a date, she kind of initiated a little bit of it too. That's you can ask her about it later. Um started with the DM, like all modern love stories do. And when I started dating Madison, it was like a kind of like this this switch flipped, where I didn't feel like I had to be someone that I was not, and and I didn't feel like I needed to earn my way to be in her presence. I didn't feel like I needed to change anything. I didn't feel like I had to be good enough or or do enough of the right things. I just could be me. I never became the person I thought that the the the girls before wanted. And in the process of trying to earn my way into their love, I sort of kind of lost myself in the process. But with Madison, I was operating from a place of yearning for her presence. Okay, because I loved her very early on. Okay. I bought a ring after a month. That's not prescriptive, that is descriptive in the unique God-ordained circumstance that we are in. We've been married for six years, right? Tell me I'm wrong. You're wrong, okay. But it wasn't about the good things that I did for her. It wasn't about what items I gave her, which were very few. I was very poor when we were dating, but it was about the love that we had for each other that drove me to the place of yearning to be with her like I needed to breathe. And this contrast of earning for approval versus yearning for presence in dating is a lot like the contrast of how we view our pursuit of living a life that honors God, where we're blameless before Him. So we live in a world where whether people know it or not, whether all of you know it or not, most people are operating in the mindset of earning for approval in some way. Whether it's your job or your social media following, money accumulation, or your significant other. We love to earn the approval of others. We live in a world full of earners. And what happens is when we have a world overflowing with these earners, even when those people come to know Jesus, when they have genuine faith in God, they sometimes can't seem to turn off the earning mindset. Maybe that's even some of you in the room right now. Maybe you find yourself earning for approval far more than you would like to admit. And if that's you, I do have good news. There's a way to shake this earning mindset that you might have. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna unpack that this morning. So hopefully that was enough time for you to turn in your Bibles to our passage this morning. Again, it's Matthew 5, verses 27 through 37. If you got it, say got it. Okay, I'm gonna read it for us this morning. Verse 27, it says this You have heard that it was said, do not commit adultery. But I tell you, everyone 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, for it is better that you lose one of the parts 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. For it is better that you lose one of the parts of your body than for your whole body to go into hell. And it was also said, whoever divorces his wife must give her a written notice of divorce or a certificate. But I tell you, everyone who divorces his wife, except in a case of sexual immorality, causes her to commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery. Again, you have heard that it was said to our ancestors, You must not break your oath, but you must keep your oaths to the Lord. But I tell you, don't take an oath at all, either by heaven, because it is God's throne, or by the earth, because it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, because it is the city of the great king. Do not swear by your head because you cannot make a single hair white or black, but let your yes mean yes, and your no mean yo. No, anything more than this is from the evil one. So Jesus is going to cover three different topics in our passage this morning: lust, divorce, and swearing an oath. And they're all super fun to talk about in church. So that's great. Thanks, Jared. You'll notice he's not up here preaching this one, okay? Stuck it with me. You can email him, Jared at ambassador MKE, if you have any questions. But Jesus is going to address these topics as part of his sermon, and what he's going to do is he's going to take a commonly known statement about each topic from the Old Testament law, and he's not going to condemn it, but he's going to correct it. Okay, and when Jesus corrects these statements from the law, what he's doing is he's causing the audience to check their mindset when they're following each law. Okay, so let's dive into our first topic this morning, and that is everyone's favorite topic, the topic of lust. Okay, verse 27 says this You have heard that it was said, do not commit adultery. Okay, so Jesus is going to start with talking about something that the Jews would know very well, and most of them would have abided by. Okay, and that is the Old Testament law that says, Do not commit adultery. Right? Don't cheat on your spouse. Seems easy enough, right? His audience would have been like, check, not doing that. My cousin on my mother's side did that. Very bad for him, but not me. Blameless in this area, for sure. Okay, he continues on in verse 28 and he says, But I tell you, everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. Jesus from the top rope with the people's elbow on the people who are confident in their ability to earn. Okay, Jesus looks at the people who think they're doing great on the adultery front and says, Not so fast, my friend. Adultery doesn't just begin with the physical action, but it starts with the mental action. This would have been a bombshell for the audience. Maybe it's a bombshell for you right now. They knew you shouldn't physically commit adultery, and they were thinking, I've been doing great, not cheating on my spouse. I've earned my blamelessness in this way. God would not find any fault in me. But Jesus is telling them that it goes so much deeper than the physical action. Like Jesus is saying, even if you look at the girl next door with lust, you are an adulterer. Jesus wants to leave no survivors who think they can earn approval from God in this category of lust. See, even in Jesus' time, the sin struggle of lust is rampant in this ancient group of people. And you know something? It hasn't gotten any better today. Don't believe me? In a statistical study this past year of United States citizens, here's some of the statistics that they found. 61% of the general population reported viewing pornography. 44% of women watch pornography. 11 years old is the average age of first exposure to porn. For me, it was 10, 21 years ago. 54% of practicing Christians reported viewing pornography. 22% of Christians view pornography at least once a week compared to 31% of non-Christians who view porn at least weekly. When either spouse in the marriage is viewing porn regularly, the couple is twice as likely to separate and divorce compared to a couple who doesn't. And these are just the people who were honest in a report in a study. What's happening in the world today is that non-Christians and Christians alike are not taking the words of Jesus here seriously enough. People think they can look at their life and say, Well, I haven't had sex outside of marriage. I must be good with God, right? Like I'm not that bad. But Jesus has raised the standard. It isn't just about not cheating on your spouse, but it's about checking your heart. Because if it's not a physical act, most people in the world would be blameless in this area of lust. Like most people would be able to have an earning mindset before God and get away with it if it was about the physical act. But that's not what Jesus is calling his followers to. Whoa, Jesus. We're talking like self-mutilation here. Like what's happening, my guy? This took a turn. To most of us, this may be confusing when we read it for the first time. Like I have to chop off my hand to like not go to hell. Like that seems like pretty extreme, even for Christianity, right? That's crazy. Like, why don't I see more people with like severed limbs in here? Let's be clear. Jesus is not a self-mutilation advocate, but Jesus is a sin mutilation advocate. Jesus wants the people to know not only that they can't be blameless in this area of lust on their own, not only should they flee from lust, but he wants them to be actively killing their sin. He wants his audience to be so willing to kill their sin habit of lust that they are willing to literally chop off their limbs so that they can become more holy and to kill their lust. Now I don't want to get a bunch of emails, calls, and texts this week from you guys saying you chopped your limbs off, all right? Don't do any of that. I don't even know if the church has a lawyer, maybe Alex Engle, our default lawyer, even though he's a prosecutor. Just don't do anything crazy, okay, guys? I legally don't know how we're gonna cut it. That's not what Jesus is talking about. But the point of Jesus going to the extreme that he goes to, in a metaphorical sense, is so his followers would see that if they really love him, that they would be willing to do anything to get closer to him. Jesus doesn't expect people to actually be able to do what he's describing to them on their own. He doesn't expect people to have the sheer willpower to combat sin, to be willing to do things like cut off their hand and gouge out their eyes in order to fight sin on their own. He does not expect that of his followers. But with Jesus, they can defeat their sin. And when you defeat your sin more and more through the power of the Holy Spirit, you can be closer and closer to Jesus as we find more victory over our sin. But Jesus doesn't want you to simply try and earn proximity to him through killing your sin. He wants you to turn to him first so that you can kill your sin. And when we turn to him first, instead of trying to earn our way, we aren't displaying an earning mindset anymore. We're displaying a yearning mindset. Okay, and yearning isn't a word we use a ton today in our everyday speech. Uh Jared told me I need to play a 90s RB song so we could give an example, but I had to say no and decline. Might have been fun, but we'll never know. But I want to define this for us. Okay, a definition is going to pop up on the screen for you here for yearning. Yearning is a deep, intense longing for God's presence that reflects the human soul's desire for undeserved communion with the Creator. Okay, yearning is this beautiful thing that happens once you've actually placed your faith in Jesus, where you start to realize that you can never earn the right to be with God, but because of what Jesus has done for you, you're given the right anyways. Even though you don't deserve it. So with our first topic, Jesus is trying to get this crowd out of their earner's mindset with lust, which says, no adultery, no problem, and get them into the yearner's mindset, which says, I love Jesus so much because of what he has done for me that I want to be with him and be more like him so bad that I will cut off my limbs to kill the lust in my life. You see the difference there? Earners want to give themselves the credit, and yearners want to give Christ the credit. We want to be people who are yearners, not earners when it comes to defeating lust. But this first topic isn't all Jesus is going to address in our passage. Yeah, we got more. Come on. Next up, he's going to tackle everybody's favorite topic, divorce. Come on, let's get into it. Verse 21. It was also said, whoever divorces his wife must give her a written certificate of divorce or notice of divorce. Okay, so Jesus again starts off with a familiar statement for the audience, quoting the Old Testament law. Okay, the audience would have been like, Yes, of course. You give them a written note, you give them a dear John letter of divorce, and that and that's how you're able to do it. Like everybody gives those out so they can be divorced legally according to the law. Of course, Jesus. Again, the people would have heard this statement and immediately went to, I have been blameless in this way. No doubt about it. I've earned it because I've followed the legal law. And once again, Jesus comes in not with a condemnation of the law, but with a correction of people's mindset about the law and says this in verse 32. But I tell you, everyone who divorces his wife, and except in a case of sexual immorality, causes her to commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery. There it is. There's the correction. Jesus knows that they're thinking that they have earned their way to blamelessness in the area of divorce by simply giving a piece of paper to their former spouse and calling it a day. But Jesus wants to call them to an even higher standard than what the law reads at face value. And this issue actually goes deeper than just divorce itself, but it gets to people's view of biblical marriage as a whole. Okay, so yesterday I actually got to officiate a wedding of a couple here at Ambassador. They're not here, believe it or not. Um, they're enjoying marriage as they should. But during the message of the ceremony, we talked about the very first marriage. Okay, do you know what that is, the very first marriage? It's Adam and Eve. It's the first created humans. They get married in the second chapter of Genesis. Okay, in Genesis 2, God created Adam, the first human being, and he gave Adam instructions on how to live according to what God desired of him. He gave him all the ways to be closer to him and to thrive in this life. But God looked at Adam in his loneliness and said, He needs some help. Can I get an Amen, ladies? So he creates Eve, and through Eve, Adam finally has a companion that God created just for him. At the end of Genesis 2 and verse 24, we see the first marriage where Adam and Eve become one flesh. This is the picture of what it means to be married in this life. God could have used so many word pictures to describe what it means to be married. He could have said, When you're married, you can enjoy lots of great financial benefits, guys. The tax benefits are awesome. 2026, you guys are gonna love it. Okay, he could have said, when you're married, you have sex with the proper cut in the proper covenant of marriage with your spouse, and let me tell you it's awesome when you follow the rules. He could have said that. But instead, he says, When you're married, you become one flesh. He says, You're not two people anymore, you're one. God doesn't choose this wording on accident, guys. His intention from the very beginning was for people who got married to not be separated, but to become one flesh until death do you part. That was the intention. And Jesus himself even echoes this later on in the book of Matthew in Matthew 19, verses 1 through 9. It's not going to be up on the screen, but if you want to flip there, you can, where the Pharisees tried to figure out if Jesus was a team learn team earner when it comes to being blameless with divorce. So they ask him in verse 3 of chapter 19, they say, Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife on any grounds? Okay, if you're familiar with the Pharisees at all, notice their trap of a question. They didn't say, Is it what God wants for a man to divorce his wife on any grounds? No. They said, Is it lawful? Kind of sounds like they're trying to see where the line was so they could teach people how to tow it. Okay, not only that, they use the term on any grounds, knowing full well what Moses said about divorce. And Jesus fights back at their Old Testament Bible by quoting Genesis 2. He says, Haven't you read, like, have you guys not read this? He replied, That he who created him in the beginning made them male and female, and he also said, For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, here it is, what God has joined together, let no one separate.

unknown 21:59

But the

SPEAKER_00 22:00

Pharisees yet again tried to chap trap Jesus with the Old Testament law. They said this, Why then, they asked him, did Moses command us to give divorce papers and send her away? Jesus tells them, Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because of the hardness of your hearts, but it was not like that from the beginning. I tell you, whoever divorces his wife except for sexual immorality and marries another commits adultery. So Jesus like hammers down on his correction of the view of this law of divorce and explains it to the Pharisees that the original design of marriage was never divorce, and it still isn't. But notice what Jesus also doesn't say. He also doesn't say that nobody can ever divorce. Like, no, divorce is not the plan. It's not the ideal, it's not the goal, but we live in a sinful, broken world, and we are married to sinful, broken people. So there are times when divorce is permitted. And notice how the Pharisees tried to say to that Moses commanded them to give divorce papers, but Jesus says, nah, he permitted you to give divorce papers. Jesus actually gives permission to divorce on the grounds of sexual immorality, aka if your spouse is having sex with someone else that's not you, okay, that's grounds. You're permitted to divorce. Now, I want to address two things here as we get to this part of the passage. First, I realize that even within this room, there are people who are likely have been divorced, okay, or are currently going through a divorce. Even within Christianity as a whole, over 25%, sometimes people recorded up to 40% of marriages in Christianity end in divorce. At least one in four in the Christian faith. Some of you I've even talked to and prayed with as you're walking through a divorce. So that's not lost on me. I realize that some of you may have not gotten divorced for the reason of sexual immorality, like Jesus says. Okay, some of you may have gotten divorced because your spouse has verbally or physically abused you, or you know someone who that has happened to them. Okay, and if that is you or if that's someone you know, first of all, you don't have to stay with someone who vowed to love and protect you and is actually hating and harming you. And second of all, we as a church family want to love you well and to pray for you and to help you however we can. Jesus doesn't want anyone, not just spouses, to be beaten or harmed by someone else. But Jesus desires for marriage to reflect his sacrificial and unconditional love for us and nothing less. Jesus is the standard. Second, I realize within this room there could be people who are divorced, and their spouse actually didn't cheat on them. Like their spouse did not commit adultery in the literal sense. Their spouse didn't physically or emotionally abuse them, but their spouse simply didn't fulfill their marriage vows. Or maybe you know someone that that's happened to. So many marriages that end in divorce are because someone fell out of love, changed who they were, or they started to feel more like a roommate than a soulmate. And if you were the one who got divorced in that case, just know that if you fulfilled the vows that you made, that it was not your fault. And if you were the one that filed for divorce in that scenario, what I want to say to you is that even though it was not the biblical design for marriage, even though that Jesus desires for all married couples not just to stay married, but to thrive in their marriages, that Jesus can offer grace to you even when you go against the biblical design for marriage. How do I know that? Well, because Jesus gives grace to the believer for all sins, all mistakes, all the ways that we go against him, even when we don't deserve it, because that's who he is. We don't have to have the perfect example of a marriage and never divorce in order to be close to Jesus and be blameless in God's sight. Jesus looks at us within all of our mess and all of our marriages and divorce and otherwise and says, I have forgiven you. This is a freely given grace that should cause anybody and everybody to get out of their earner's mindset and into a yearner's mindset when it comes into divorce and marriage. When we look at marriage through an earner's mindset, what we do is we treat our marriage like a scorecard that we need to win. We think if I just keep my vows perfectly, then God is satisfied with me. Okay, and that's not a covenant, that's a transaction. But when we move into a yearner's mindset, we stop trying to earn the perfect marriage badge, and instead we yearn for our marriage to reflect the beauty of Christ's love for the church. And when we stumble, and we will stumble, the earner hides in shame, terrified that they've lost their standing, but the yearner runs straight to the feet of the one who restores what is broken. You don't need to perform to gain approval. You pursue a savior that makes you whole, regardless of your past, your past divorce, or your past mistakes. And Jesus isn't waiting for you to fix your marriage before he loves you. He's waiting for you to let him fix your marriage because he loves you. So Jesus, he's already addressed lust, adultery, divorce, and now he moves on to this topic of oaths. Verse 33, it says this Again, you have heard it said to our ancestors, you must not break your oath, but you must keep your oaths to the Lord. So Jesus is going to correct another commonly known part of the law. You must not break your oath, but you must keep your oaths to the Lord. And this statement would have caused the audience to think about how oftentimes in ancient Israel an oath would have involved using God's name to guarantee the truth of what you were about to say. This comes from Numbers 30, verse 2, if you want to look it up later. It was intended to be a way of showing people that what they were swearing by was incredibly serious, and that they guaranteed that they would carry it out. By the way, people were using these oaths, it was starting to feel like they needed to swear an oath to the Lord in order to tell the truth at all. Again, the people of God were trying to add on to what was necessary, trying to earn approval and blamelessness before God by distorting a statement that was intended to mean one thing, but they twisted it into a way to earn their blamelessness and give themselves credit. So Jesus has to correct that. Verse 34. But I tell you, don't take an oath at all, either by heaven because it is God's God's throne, or by the earth because it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem because it is the city of the great king. Do not swear by your head, because you cannot make a single hair white or black, but let your yes mean yes, and your no mean no. Anything more than this is from the evil one. Jesus says, You shouldn't take an oath like that at all. Why? Because we have words that we can speak that can confirm or deny whether we're going to do something. They're called yes and no. Every language has some version of them, and they mean the same thing. Jesus is trying to get his audience to not add anything onto the God-given dynamic duo of yes and no when it comes to saying whether you're going to actually do something or not. He's trying to get them to do what they say and say what they mean and leave it at that. Like Jesus' disciples should be so honest that their words can be believed without adding anything on top. That you should be able to trust what a disciple of Jesus says without any added extras. And Jesus doesn't want the extra effort, he just wants honesty. We tend to use oaths and big promises because we're desperate for people to believe us sometimes. This is an earner's mindset. Okay, you use big words, dramatic swears, or religious phrases because you're trying to add on extra good stuff to what you really need to say. But the yearner's mindset changes everything. When you're truly yearning for Jesus, you become so secure in what you need to say that you stop worrying about what other people think of your words because you're anchored to the one who is the word. You don't need the extra religious theatrics of a sworn oath to prove your honesty. Your heart is tethered to the truth, your yes and your no are more than enough. And we're starting to see like kind of a theme here. Right? The people of God taking a statement from the law and attempting to distort it and make it into a way of earning their approval before God. Responses from Jesus are showing us that God doesn't need us to earn anything. We don't need to tack anything on to what God has asked us to do. All he asks us to do, and this is our key takeaway this morning, is to stop trying to earn his approval and yearn for his presence. Because the reality is, is that if you're in Christ, you can't earn more approval. Because we already have infinite approval from God because of what Jesus has already done. You can't add to the finished work of Jesus. What's done is done. The Savior has already saved. He's already done the work. But what you can do is you can yearn to be in the presence of the one who saved you. That's what he wants. He wants to be around his people, who he loves, who he died for, and have them yearn to be around him too. He wants it to be reciprocal, this relationship and this love. So this begs the question. Are you earning for his approval? Or are you yearning for his presence? This morning we've looked at these three heavy topics, but what I want to do is I want to end by looking at two types of people in the room. If you've been listening, you've likely identified which of these categories you're living in right now. Or maybe you haven't. Maybe you need to think about it. It's the earner or the yearner. To the earner. If you feel tired, it's because you're carrying a weight you weren't designed to hold. You're operating under a transactional view of God. Like if I act right, God will accept me. You're trying to subtly or not so subtly bribe God with your behavior. You think that if you just stop the lust, if you just stay married, if you just keep your word, if you've successfully done that, then you've paid for your seat at the table with Jesus. But listen closely. The gospel is not a reward for your good behavior. It's the gift that empowers it. Like if you're an earner, the implications of the gospel are this you are exhausted because you're trying to finish a work that Jesus has already declared finished on the cross. You cannot earn approval from a father who already gave you his son. Stop performing and start repenting. Start yearning for Jesus because the freedom you're looking for isn't found in better performance. It's found in surrendering your need to be the hero of your own story. And to the yearner. You've looked at your lust, you've looked at your past, you've looked at all your failures and your sins, and you know that you have nothing to offer. Like you aren't earning anything, but you are yearning. You are hungry for him. And if that's you, the implications of the gospel are glorious. You realize that you don't have to be perfect to be in his presence. You just have to be present. You don't pursue purity so that God will love you. You pursue purity because you love the God who loved you while you were still a sinner. Like the yearner isn't someone who has it all together. The yearner is someone who knows that they're desperate for Jesus and they're not chasing him for approval, but because they love him and what he has done for him. So, church, look at your life this week. Are you living your life trying to keep God happy with your performance? Are you earning? Or are you living your life trying to keep God close to your heart and yearning? Jesus isn't asking you to go home and try harder to be a better person. That's not the message today. He's asking you to come to him and be who he's made you to be. One who stops trying to earn their way to him and starts enjoying him as he is and as they are. Now I want us to imagine for a minute what would happen if each one of us in this room made a commitment to not only follow Jesus, not follow Jesus from an earner's mindset, but commit to following Jesus from a yearner's mindset. How would our city change? How would our campuses change? How would our workplaces change? How would our neighborhoods change? Like I imagine there would be a lot of people that would see our yearning for Christ and say, I want what they have. And that people around you would have their eternities changed because of it. So let's pray that this would be true of our city this morning. God, I pray that we would be yearners and not earners for your presence. I pray that we would stop being driven by working to get near you, and that we would rest in the finished work of the cross of Christ. I pray that as we go from this place, that we would rest, knowing that because of Jesus, we don't have to earn our way into your present, but we can be in your presence. God, we're begging you to transform our city because of a group of believers committing to yearn for your presence and see a city changed because of it. I pray this will be true of all of us. It's in your name we pray. Amen.

SPEAKER_01 38:29

Thanks for listening to the Ambassador Church Podcast. To learn more, visit ambassadormke.org or follow us on Instagram at Ambassador MKE. And if you're in the Milwaukee area, we'd love to see you this Sunday at 9 or 11 a.m. at 2308 East Bellevue Place. Grace and peace.