The Doorway To The Heart
Perhaps one of God’s most amazing creations is the human mind.
This verse vividly declares how vulnerable the mind can be to temptations that turn its power in ungodly directions. What a person can imagine can impact his or her heart.
Our culture is full of lustful ploys that taunt and tease. Modest dress is an idea that seems provincial in a day and age when exposing a lot of skin is the norm. “Low-cut” and “short” describe many of the clothing options for women of all ages.
Why would Jesus consider lusting after a sexy woman on television or relishing a long look at an attractive woman walking down the street adultery in the heart?
I think it is because the mind, the heart, and the soul are connected. What we think impacts how we feel and that impacts how we act.
A mere glance can turn the wonder of sex as God intended it into a damaging force if the person glancing isn’t aware of the mind’s power.
People with good intentions can find themselves in the middle of illicit relationships and wonder how they got there.
How did something God wonderfully created become an instrument of pain, confusion, disappointment, and distrust? People don’t generally fall into sexually immoral situations easily.
There is a process that begins in the mind and ends in physical entanglement. The first part of that process is mental. When a man looks lustfully at a woman he has a choice to make.
Will he entertain that thought and keep that image in his mind, or will he replace it with a pure thought? If the lustful thought lingers, it can soon turn into an emotional attachment.
Thoughts can become feelings that have a powerful pull on him. He can become emotionally dependent on the woman without any physical touch.
And if the emotions grow, the man may finally express them to the woman. If she is vulnerable and chooses unwisely, a relationship may develop that leads to physical adultery, with all its damage, pain, and broken trust.
In the passage from Matthew, we can also see Jesus making it clear that he did not come to earth to do away with God’s law. If anything, he emphasized God’s law in new and even more demanding ways.
When Jesus told his disciples that there was more to lust than sexual behavior, he wasn’t downplaying the sinful destructiveness of adultery. Rather, he was showing that if we focus on sin when it has already been committed, we are starting too late.
Each of the acts prohibited in the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20) starts with an offense of the heart. Idolatry begins with a lack of faith in God and a desire to turn elsewhere for supernatural help.
Murder begins with anger. Robbery begins with greed and jealousy for other people’s possessions.
Jesus isn’t telling us to ignore sin. What he’s trying to do is get us to look within our hearts, examine our souls, and be sensitive to the roots of sinful attitudes that, if permitted to grow unhindered, will undoubtedly blossom into future sinful acts.
He’s also trying to challenge us to discipline our minds so that they think godly thoughts. For it is with our thoughts that we often sow the seeds of future sins.
Father, help me to clean out the roots of sin before they grow into sinful acts.