Poor Jimmy Carter.  You just know there’ll be trouble when you get interviewed for Playboy magazine.  Why would anyone agree to that interview?  Back in 1976, Carter mentioned—confessed—to the reporters that he had lusted in his heart, many times: that became one of the most memorable lines of the year.  I guess women can lust, too, but lust mainly seems to be a guy thing: that reptilian brain.  It’s a problem.  It’s not a problem with which we need to become preoccupied—obsessed; neither should we make too many allowances.  Don’t find it in everyone everywhere; don’t make excuses or think it doesn’t really matter.

Jesus has been telling us that merely refraining from hurtful behaviors isn’t the goal.  Well, at least I don’t beat up anybody!  At least I’m not hopping from one bed to another!  Such self-restraint could be a starting point, but Jesus wants us to aim for more.  Not being a murderer doesn’t make me righteous.  Not being a liar doesn’t make me a hero in God’s sight.  Not being an adulterer doesn’t get me any medals.  What is the disposition of the heart?  Let’s make the Spirit-assisted effort to discipline our inclinations as well as govern our actions.  What the heart’s yearning is trained upon matters.

So, yes, I raise my hand with our hapless, faithful thirty-ninth president.  Over the course of my life, I’ve lusted in my heart plenty.  Men, how about the rest of you?  I’ve also been at work directing my heart along God’s way.  One of the usual counterarguments is that we can’t control our thoughts—our actions, maybe—our words, when we really try, but the imagination does its thing without consulting us.  Even so, we can still respond.  We can think a God-honoring thought in response to a less than good thought, a God-honoring imagining in response to a less than good imagining.  Don’t indulge what you should not indulge.  We’re all quite guilty enough as it is, that we should then add to our guilt!  Christ’s atoning sacrifice for us, the forgiveness we have in him, is not carte blanche for the darker impulses in our psyches, the desires that lead to hurt, sorrow, and destruction.  Name them, confess them, and by grace continue to walk this journey with Christ, hearts and eyes trained upon him.

This leads to the larger issue of what Jesus teaches about those temptations that can plague us.  Lust isn’t the only one.  There’s jealousy, anger, bitterness, resentment—the things that poison the well of human relationships as well as our relationship with God.  We remember the very vivid teaching: “If your right eye causes you to stumble, 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 stumble, 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” (Mt 5:29-30).  No one in my experience has ever walked into worship some Sunday with an eye patch, or a bandaged stump where a hand or foot used to be.  We get that Jesus isn’t giving us a literal command here.  He is putting the case in the strongest possible terms, using the most vivid imagery.  We can feel it.  Wow!  We have to take seriously the things that ruin human life, and not ever tell ourselves that we are immune, or that could never happen to us.  We know people who have gone off the rails, willingly pursued to their ruin the desire that feels as if it is torturing them until it’s pursued, indulged—ah, helpless surrender.  We mustn’t dismiss these traps, thinking they aren’t along our path nor have any way of harming us.  We’re all vulnerable; we also have Christ.

When we’re forced to handle harmful things, we need to do so with proper safety precautions, personal safety measures and equipment: that PPE everyone was so eager to get their hands on three years ago (and the way things seem to be going, maybe again this year).  We bankrupt ourselves for masks and face shields yet expend comparatively little of our personal resources upon protecting our souls.  Well, how often do we expose our souls to what’s harmful?  How often does anybody willingly do that?

Have you noticed the anger just trembling under the surface of our society?  Have you noticed that our culture seems to be mass-marketing lust rather than love, insanity rather than sanity?  It has been, for a long time.  At the end of the ‘60s it was free love—whatever that was supposed to mean.  Today, it’s free lust—whoever, however, whenever, wherever.  The ideal.  No God to say no.  No Bible or Christians to get in the way.  The lust and the blood.  The old gods.  They haven’t gone away.  They’ve just been awaiting an opportune time.  The undercurrent we’re seeing and sensing is lawlessness, the religion of Do as Thou Wilt.  Adam and Eve took a great notion that way, and ate.

Not coincidentally, at the outset of this lust-fest, the abortion rate climbed dramatically, levelling off in about 1980 and remaining fairly constant, and high, for the next decade.  Since that time, abortion has been on a gradual decrease.  Maybe that’s because of a change of heart: I hope so.  It may also be attributable to more effective contraception.  Since 2000, suicide rates have been going up; I read that 2022 was a record year for suicide, at around 49,000.  That also is a sure indicator of wounded souls.  From time to time, my stridently atheist, Jesus-mocking cousin will post to facebook about the sickness of American society.  He has his own thoughts about the cure, thoughts I don’t share, but we do share the same assessment: our society is sick.  It isn’t American society only.  Modern society has increasingly sought to cut away traditional notions of religion, with its expectations, requirements, and standards.  The insanity of the old gods is reasserting itself at least in part because the church has relinquished the sanity of the Word.

William Barclay points to a quote he attributes to the Irish playwright of the last century, George Bernard Shaw: “no nation has ever outlived the loss of its gods.”[1]  That bears deeper thought than we can give it, this morning.  A people cuts off God and turns from God’s clear Word at its own peril.  The majority of Americans still claim belief in God, but the details aren’t always remarkably clear, let alone any expectations God may have for those who claim belief.  The modern ethos leaves it to the freedom of individuals to say what God’s expectations, requirements, and standards are.  Likewise, whatever alibi or excuse people invent for failing to meet these self-decided standards are to be taken as fully exonerating them.  God, at best, is some vague notion wavering in the mists beyond thought and interest: like that fire extinguisher that’s been in the kitchen forever but never been used, thank God!

If we saw someone with a serious injury, needing immediate care, we might stop and try to help, or at least call 911.  Beloved, it’s the injuries we aren’t as easily able to see, the soul injuries, that cry out for our care.  And this isn’t just the soul injuries of others.  Yes, let us be sensitive to those, train ourselves to look for them.  Let us also acknowledge our own wounds.  There is healing; there is balm, here.  God is a healer.  He won’t force His healing upon anyone.  His healing is perfect and perfectly effective; it is also healing on His terms, in His time.  To be healed, we must put ourselves under God’s care, which is the care of the Spirit-animated Word of God.  So long as we want God’s Word on our terms, we will not have all God’s healing.  I put it to you that half-healed isn’t enough.

We know there are things from which we should be turning, things that aren’t doing us any good, that are, in point of fact, clearly causing us real harm—this applies both personally and socially.  We can get to thinking that it is impossible to turn away from these things.  We’ve tried and failed, so often!  We’ve reinforced our resolve, coached ourselves, reasoned, argued, pleaded with ourselves.  We’ve failed.  We’ve prayed and begged God, knowing God hears, knowing God is at work in us for salvation and healing, and still we’ve failed to expel what harms our souls.  We know the struggle is real, difficult!  We’re not expecting instantaneous results, like the spectacular assurances in those hair growth and weight loss commercials.  A-ma-zing!  Society would have us preoccupied with our physical appearance.  God would have us occupied alongside Him with the state of our heart.

Keep learning to trust God, God’s Word, God’s way.  Expect stumbling and backsliding, but don’t let this ruin your expectation for the years to come, the life to come.  What disciple ever did walk perfectly?  The Heidelberg Catechism that we’re just about to finish, says something terribly candid and wonderfully hopeful: “even the holiest [of us] make only a small beginning in obedience in this life.”  We don’t get to experience our perfection in this life, but we do get to experience Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit at work in us.  You and I, we aren’t doing this by our own strength.  We aren’t doing this by our own light along our own path.  That’s what the lost try to do.  We know where that leads; so do some of them.  Not my strength, but God’s strength sufficient for me.  Not my wisdom, but God’s wisdom sufficient for me.  Not by my resolve or force of will, but God’s grace sufficient for me.

Don’t sin.  Yes, we know!  Be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect.  Yes, we know!  Only cherish here that perfect, in this case, does not mean faultless or flawless.  Perfect, here, means fulfilling given purpose.  To know whether or not purpose is being fulfilled, we must know our purpose.  Our purpose is not work, eat, repeat.  Our purpose is not drink, play, repeat.  Our purpose is to love and serve God and neighbor, to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.  In this life, we keep growing into our purpose.  John, who had the better part of a century to reflect on all these matters, writes, “My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin.  But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One” (1 Jn 2:1).  Oh, there’s failure, often enough.  And there’s also Jesus Christ, so there is also always hope because there is also always help, highest help, holy help.

And to Jesus Christ, who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests of his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever.

               [1] Quoted in William Barclay, Gospel of John.  Vol. 1.  1955.  Daily Study Bible.  Philadelphia: Westminster P, 1975.  58.