“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit
adultery: but I say to you, that every one that looks on a woman to lust after
her has committed adultery with her already in his heart.”
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Adherence to Jesus allows no free rein to desire unless it
be accompanied by love.
To follow Jesus means self-renunciation and absolute
adherence to him and therefore a will contaminated by lust can never be allowed
to do what it likes… Instead of trusting to the unseen we prefer the tangible
fruits of desire, and so we fall from the path of discipleship and lose touch
with Jesus. Lust is impure because it is
unbelief, and therefore it is to be shunned.
No sacrifice is too great if it enables us to conquer a lust which cuts
us off from Jeus. Both eye and hand are
less than Christ, and when they are used as the instruments of lust and hinder
the whole body from the purity of discipleship, they must be sacrificed for the
sake of him. The gains of lust are
trivial compared with the loss it brings—you forfeit your body eternally for
the momentary pleasure of eye or hand.
When you have made your eye the instrument of impurity, you cannot see
God with it.
Surely, at this point
we must make up our minds once and for all whether Jesus means his precepts to
be taken literally or only figuratively, for here it is a matter of life or
death... If we decided to not take it literally, we should be evading the
seriousness of the commandment, and if on the other hand we decided we decided
it was to be taken literally, we should at once reveal the absurdity of the
Christian position, and thereby invalidate the commandment.
Jesus does not impose intolerable restrictions on the
disciples, he does not forbid them to look at anything, but bids them to look
at Him. If they do that he knows that
their gaze will always be pure, even when they look upon a woman. So far from imposing on them an intolerable
yoke of legalism, he succours them with the grace of the gospel.
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