Who Is an Adulterer? Part 2 A

God has always been concerned about the heart.

Always in the Old Testament, not just the New.

God was concerned about a heart relationship,

that the issue was always loving the Lord, your God,

and your neighbor as yourself,

and that the Ten Commandments and the Mosaic Law

was only a means for regulating a love relationship.

Welcome to Grace To You, the Bible Teaching Ministry of John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson.

These days, for something to be labeled as wrong,

the loudest and most influential voices in society need to declare it as such.

At least, that's how it seems, and rest assured,

a subjective standard like that, which is always prone to change.

It doesn't come close to the biblical standard of what it means to do wrong,

what it means to commit sin.

So for us as Christians,

what is the best strategy for confronting people about sin?

If you notice a person's sin and bring it up,

you're probably going to create some friction.

So should you always stir the pot, so to speak,

or are there times when you ought to keep silent?

What are the right steps to take?

What is the biblical approach?

John MacArthur helps answer those questions today

as he continues his study, the sinfulness of sin.

And here is John with the lesson.

Matthew, chapter 5, verses 27 through 30.

Let me read them as you follow.

You have heard that it was said,

thou shalt not commit adultery.

But I say unto you that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her

hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.

And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out,

and cast it from thee, for it is profitable for thee

that one of thy members should perish

and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.

And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off,

and cast it from thee for it is profitable for thee,

that one of thy members should perish

and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.

Obviously, our Lord is talking here about sin, and this is really the topic of His message

from verse 21 through verse 48 of chapter 5.

It is a message on the divine definition of sin.

In numbers 32 and 23, it says, be sure your sin will find you out.

Sometime back the New York Times ran the following article.

The thief was sure that the church was a safe hideout.

Just inside, he spied a rope up to the garret, up he climbed only to hear the church bell

ringing his whereabouts.

A Mexico City man snatched a woman's purse and ran into a doorway to hide.

It turned out to be the doorway of the police station where he was questioned and later

identified by his victim.

Shoplifting in a department store in Rochester, New York, a man picked up an alarm clock and

headed for the nearest exit.

The clock concealed under his coat went off before he could get out of the store and brought

the detectives running.

A Canadian who had a custom built radio stolen from his automobile advertised in the local

paper for a custom built radio.

The first person to contact him about the advertisement was the thief.

A Glasgow pickpocket got a 60-day prison term after trying his luck on an excursion boat

carrying 20 police officers and their wives.

Police in Palo Alto seized a suspect as he stood in a post office admiring his wanted poster.

Be sure your sin will find you out.

Sin devastates life.

In this particular place in Matthew chapter 5, the sin of the Jewish leaders and the sin

of the people listening to Christ finds them out.

Jesus unmasks their hypocrisy, their caught, their trapped, their unmasked, their revealed,

they're shown to be exactly what they are, sinful people.

And precisely what our Lord is doing in this passage is giving them a true picture of

their sinfulness.

The things that they had so well concealed, he reveals.

The righteousness which they had felt was theirs.

He tears down and leaves them stark naked and sinful.

In fact, what he does is to reveal the truth about the sinful heart of man going deep inside

to the real problem.

As we've been seeing in our study of Matthew, men inevitably and invariably try to invent

religions of human achievement.

Men try to invent self-righteous systems based on their own standards.

They try to invent systems that justify themselves.

And that is precisely what the Judaism of Jesus' time had done.

They had substituted their own system for the truth of God's revelation.

And their own system was a system of external rules, a system of external ritual, a system

of behavior with no thought for attitude or motive or the heart.

And because they kept certain external rules, because they managed to fulfill certain external

ritual, they convinced themselves that thereby they were righteous.

But this was inadequate, and that's why chapter 5 verse 20 is the key, unless your righteousness

exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees you'll never enter the kingdom.

True righteousness is beyond anything you now have.

And so Jesus, in verses 21 through 48 of the Sermon on the Mount, destroys the self-righteous

system by tearing down their supposed holiness and revealing the fact that in their hearts

they were wretched, vile, evil sinners, and the heart is the issue with God.

No matter how religious they looked on the outside, the fact is they were sinful on the inside.

He presents the standard they can't keep, and thus faces them with a sin problem for

which they have no remedy.

At the end of chapter 5 and verse 48, he says, be there for perfect even as your father

who is in heaven is perfect.

That is the righteousness, my kingdom demands.

And obviously they couldn't keep it.

Therein lies the frustration.

There is no remedy for their sin situation.

And of course from there they are driven to a righteousness, not their own, a righteousness

in fact offered to them in Jesus Christ.

And so what he's really doing here as he presents a definition of sin is forcing them to

see the need of a Savior, knowing full well he will offer himself as that Savior.

They must recognize that in themselves there is no resource to solve the sin problem.

They are desperately in need of someone who can, and he is just that someone.

Now the key to the way he handles this is in the twofold phrase that he uses, ye have

heard but I say.

And in that he is contrasting their system with truth.

He is contrasting their definition of sin with God's definition of sin.

He is contrasting their standard with a divine standard.

The traditional rabbinic system said only the external matters.

If you don't murder and you don't commit adultery, you're all right.

Jesus said, but I say unto you, if you're angry or if you even think about it, you're

just as guilty because God is interested in the inside.

And thus does he contrast himself and the view that God laid down with the system that existed

in their minds.

Always in the Old Testament, not just the New, God was concerned about a heart relationship

that the issue was always loving the Lord, your God and your neighbor as yourself, that

there was always the relationship and that the Ten Commandments and the Mosaic Law was

only a means for regulating a love relationship.

God has always been concerned about the heart.

And that is the case in this particular sermon, as Jesus goes right to their hearts and

unbears the evil, vile sinfulness that is there behind the facade of their religious

activity.

Psalm 19.96 says, thy commandment is very broad.

And the commandment of God was a lot broader than they thought.

They had narrowed it down only to the external and our Lord drives it into the internal.

Now, let me remind you of this.

Jesus in his sermon began with a message about blessedness.

Blessed, blessed, blessed, blessed from verses 3 to 12.

But in order for one to know that blessedness, and by the way, this is a good format for

presenting the gospel, you start with the promise of blessedness.

But in order to know that blessedness, you must know the proper definition of sin because

sin stands in the way of blessing.

And sin has to be dealt with and removed.

And so from blessedness to a doctrine of sin, the Lord makes a transition.

And as I said in verse 21, he begins to talk about sin.

And let me just say in general before we look at the passage itself that we learned from

this that it's essential to deal with sin.

You cannot preach Christ, you cannot present the gospel unless you deal with sin, unless

you give a definition of sin because that is the barrier, that is the issue.

And if we do not properly understand sin, mark this, we will not understand anything else

that God does.

For example, I'll give you three illustrations of that.

Unless one understands the truth about sin, he can never understand the truth about salvation.

You cannot understand the meaning of salvation unless you understand the meaning of sin.

You see, the Pharisees described, now mark this, had such a superficial view of sin that

they were able to accommodate it with a superficial view of salvation.

They saw sin as simply a matter of what we do, therefore salvation was a matter of what

we do.

So in their minimal definition of sin, they were left with a minimal requirement for salvation

which they then assumed they themselves could accomplish.

Now had they seen sin as a deep, down heart problem, they would have known that that was

far beyond theirs to change.

They couldn't do it if they'd understood that.

And so it is that the more we comprehend the heinousness of sin, the more we understand the

meaning of salvation, the deeper the disease, the greater the remedy, that's the point.

And as long as people think of sin superficially, as long as they think of sin minimally, as

long as they make light of sin, then salvation is a minor thing too.

But when you understand as our Lord is saying that sin is something heinous, sin is something

deep, sin is something so penetrating that it reaches down into the warp and woofer

of a man's being so deeply that it's absolutely unchangeable except by the miracle of God,

then you'll understand that only God can bring salvation.

And that is what our Lord wants them to understand.

You will never understand the meaning of the cross.

You will never understand why Jesus had to die.

You will never understand why when He had legions of angels who could have come to His

aid.

He never used them.

You will never understand why He said, I must fulfill all righteousness.

You will never understand what His death means until you understand how evil sin is and

how deeply stained is the heart of every man that He would have to go to that extreme

to accomplish salvation.

When He was written, there was no other good enough to pay the price of sin He only could

unlock the gate of heaven and let us in.

Sin is so powerful and so deep that only Jesus Christ can change it.

Only Jesus Christ can offer it.

That in fact is the message of Romans chapter 3 through chapter 6.

A second thought, unless you understand the truth about sin, you will never understand

the right approach to proclamation, not only salvation, but proclamation.

Now, what I mean by that is this.

And this is a great concern to me and I've preached on this off and on.

But if you do not understand the depth of sin, then you do not know how to proclaim the

gospel.

Now, what we have in our Christian culture today is we have very superficial gospel presentations.

It's almost methodological.

It's almost pie in the sky.

It's almost how would you like to have a happy time?

It's so very shallow in many cases, not always, but in many cases.

Some call it easy believeism, others call it cheap grace.

People running around saying, come to Jesus, get born again, self-centered appeals, emotional

appeals, all kinds of superficial approaches to evangelism.

And I really feel that behind this is a failure to grapple with the reality of the heinousness

of sin.

Because if we know the power of sin, then we know it isn't enough to tell somebody, well,

why don't you just accept Jesus and he'll make your life happy?

It isn't enough to say to somebody, wouldn't you like to go to heaven and wouldn't you like

to be happy and have peace and joy and everything just sign on the dotted line and say you believe

in Jesus and pray a little prayer.

You see, if we really understood how deep and stained men's hearts are with sin, if we

understood how powerful the hold of sin is, so powerful that it casts men into an eternal

hell, if we understood that, then our evangelism would be more directed at the damning character

of sin, first of all, before it comes to the point of inviting them to make a decision.

They must understand the problem.

That's why Biblically speaking, and Mark this, Biblically speaking, evangelism always

begins by presenting the law before grace.

You must preach law, you must preach judgment, you must preach condemnation.

And so Romans begins this way, for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness

and ungodliness of men.

Paul starts out by condemning, chapter 2 condemns again, chapter 3 condemns again so that every

mouth is stopped, and then he says the righteousness of Christ is available to you.

And so there must be a preaching of the divine standard.

There must be preaching of the holy law.

There must be preaching of that which God says is right.

And then there can be the message of how we come to know the relationship that makes

that possible.

I believe our evangelism must confront people with the holiness of God.

It must reveal His demands for an inner heart righteousness.

I believe our evangelism must focus on man's inability to meet God's standard.

And we must make men desperate like Jesus wanted to make the Pharisees, the scribes, and

the multitude desperate so that they stand in fear of the doom of judgment ready to be

cast into hell, and they cry out for a savior who can deliver them from a problem too deep

for them to handle.

Now that was Jesus' approach.

And as I said, it was basically designed to drive men to desperation.

More than anybody else in the whole Bible, Jesus preached hell.

He preached hell.

People don't like to even talk about it.

He preached that sin sends people to an eternal hell where the worm never dies and the fire

is not quenched, where there is gnashing of teeth and weeping and wailing.

Jesus preached it because that's where it all had to begin.

So evangelism and proclamation must start with the holiness of God as over against the

sinfulness of man and then the demands of that holy God and the hopeless and helpless man

who can't fulfill them is then driven to the inevitability of punishment, the ultimate

reality of hell and the only escape is someone else to come along and change his vile heart.

And at that point, Jesus Christ moves in to offer the deliverance that He alone can give.

Lord Jones, the great preacher of England, said, you can have a psychological belief in

the Lord Jesus Christ, but a true belief sees Him in Him, one who delivers us from the curse

of the law.

True evangelism starts like that and obviously is primarily a call to repentance, end quote.

The Apostle Paul said that we are to call men to repentance toward God and then faith toward

our Lord Jesus Christ and what Jesus is saying to these people is, you may not have killed

anybody and you may not have committed adultery, but in your hearts you have been angry and

in your heart you have hated and in your heart you have lusted and you are as vile as

a murderer and as an adulterer and in desperation they are driven to the need of an outside

savior who can change their evil hearts.

Men can modify their behavior, believe it, they can.

Peer pressure, pride, all of those things, piosity, a fear of rejection can force people

to behave in a certain way, but only God can change your heart.

There's a third thought I had on this.

Unless we understand the truth about sin, we can never really understand salvation, we

can never really understand proclamation and we can never really understand sanctification.

Unless we understand the meaning of sin, we don't know what it is to be made holy in

Christ, do we?

We don't understand the magnanimity of the change.

You don't understand what God has made you in Christ unless you know what you were.

You can't be thanking and praising Him for the glory of the transformation unless you

know what it involved.

We've not only suffered from superficial evangelism and such, but we've suffered from

very, very shallow concepts of holiness and sanctification.

Usually it goes like this.

We think we're holy because of the things we do or don't do.

And we don't go to certain places.

We don't say certain things.

We don't do the things the world does.

And we feel that because we don't say or do things or go places, they were all right.

And really it's the ugly head of self-righteousness because God has always concerned not so much

with what we do and what we say and where we go, though we is concerned with that, but

we need more concern with what's behind it, what we think in our minds and hearts.

There are the pious and the self-satisfied and the smug who think that because they don't

do certain things and they do other things that they're justified, and that's because

they never really examine the evil of their hearts.

And that's what the Lord Jesus is forcing men to do is He preaches this great sermon.

Holiness, listen, for God is always a matter of the heart.

Inverbs 23.7 as a man, thinketh in his heart, what?

So is he.

That's where the divine evaluation takes place.

In Matthew's gospel further on in chapter 15 and verse 16, we read this.

And Jesus said, are you also yet without understanding?

You haven't figured it out.

You don't know God's standard yet.

You don't know where the real problem is.

Do not ye yet understand, Matthew 15, 17, that whatsoever entereth in at the mouth, go

with into the stomach and is cast out into the draft.

In other words, it goes through the process of elimination.

But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart and they defile

the man.

In other words, and it isn't what you take in that defiles you, it's what comes up and

goes out.

For out of the heart, proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false

witness, and blasphemies.

Where do those all originate in the heart?

Listen, before you ever murder, you think it in your heart, before you ever commit a

adulterer, you think it in your heart, before you ever fornicate, you think it in your heart,

before you ever steal, you think it in your heart.

It is the heart that spews out the garbage that defiles man because the heart is deceitful

above all things and desperately wicked and who can know it, said Jeremiah.

And so it isn't the external, our Lord is saying it's the heart and He unbears the heart.

He rips off the facade of the super religious who would glorify themselves as if they stand

absolved and shows that the only thing that He's concerned about is the heart.

So both the Old Testament and the New Testament preach the same good news.

Man is a sinner, that sin is deep down in his heart, in his nature.

Man is powerless to change that.

God comes along and offers a relationship by which He and He alone will change that man's heart.

It was clear back in Ezekiel, wasn't it, that God said, I will give you a new heart.

I will take away the stony heart and give you a heart of flesh.

A new heart is what a man needs.

That's what Jesus wants, those who listen to hear.

No amount of self reform can put you in a right relationship with God.

Only a new heart can do that.

A critical truth from John MacArthur's message today on Grace to You.

His study is titled The Sinfulness of Sin.

Now the unflinching look at sin, John has been taking.

This isn't exactly an easy study to listen to.

I mean, does anyone like being told that he's empty, spiritually bankrupt, responsible

for his own guilty condition?

Here's what John had to say about that.

No, and that is the offense of the gospel.

The gospel announces to the sinner that not only has the sinner willfully, purposefully

violated the law of God, but he has nothing in himself that can remedy that.

He can't alter his own nature.

He can't pull himself up by his own bootstraps.

He can't do anything, even religiously morally, to put himself in a better position with

God.

The gospel is the most offensive message the world has ever heard initially.

Therein lies the rejection of the gospel.

The sinner's basic self-defense is pride and a sense of goodness.

That is the illusion.

That is the deception which sinners deal with.

So the gospel comes at the self-deceived, proud sinner and attempts to crush him under

the weight of his own sin and guilt.

That is so hard for people to be able to accept.

But that is what our Lord did in the Beatitudes.

That was the nature of his ministry, but that also came from the Old Testament.

In our Lord's announcing, his arrival as the Messiah, he said, he came to the poor prisoners

who were blind and oppressed.

The despondent and disastrous condition of the human heart, as regards its sinfulness

and its inevitable judgment, was the opening salvo in the preaching of the gospel.

So the Beatitudes did just that.

That was fired at the most religiously self-satisfied, ferrecyical hypocrites on the planet.

And therein lies the conflict that ultimately caused them to execute the Son of God.

So this is where the gospel has to start.

And the brilliance of the Beatitudes is that at the same time they unmasks in, they offer

the kingdom.

They offer the kingdom.

And there's a beauty and a grace in these Beatitudes as well as an unmasking.

I would just encourage people that written a book that deals with this issue of sin and

confronting the sinner.

It's called The Vanishing Conscience.

It unmasks the sinner at the very basic level and then brings to him the good news of

the gospel.

Here's something that's good news.

We'll send you a free copy of The Vanishing Conscience if you've never contacted us before.

It's over 250 pages requested today.

That's right, friend.

This is one of my favorite John MacArthur books, The Vanishing Conscience.

It will help you recognize sin even more clearly and find victory over it.

To pick up The Vanishing Conscience again, it's free if you've never contacted us before.

Get in touch today.

Our number here, 855 grace, and our website, gty.org.

The Vanishing Conscience has chapters on how to handle temptation, how to keep your mind

pure, how to kill sin at its roots.

It's an ideal resource for a new believer and it's going to be helpful to you even

if you've been a believer for a long time.

Again, The Vanishing Conscience is our gift to you if you've never contacted us before.

Just call us at 855 grace or visit our website gty.org.

When you visit the website, you will also find thousands of free resources.

You can download more than 3600 messages free of charge in MP3 format.

That includes John's current series, The Sinfulness of Sin, and you'll also find daily devotional

grace to you television, blog articles, all these resources that can help deepen your

understanding of scripture and help you worship more biblically.

If you're not sure what to try, click on grace stream.

That's a continuous loop of John's teaching through the entire New Testament.

Our website again, gty.org.

Now for the entire Grace to You staff, I'm Phil Johnson.

Thanks for joining us today.

Be back tomorrow as John helps you see the sinfulness of sin by looking at it through God's

eyes.

It's another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.