Not in Lust

In this part of the sermon: Martin contrasts God's answer to impurity with hedonism and asceticism, presenting marriage as the God-ordained way to legitimately express sexual capacity within boundaries, and…

Martin uses the analogy of a basketball court to illustrate the difference between hedonism (erase boundary lines), asceticism (kill the player), and God's way (know legitimate expression within boundaries) regarding sexual desire.

Live like beasts and then convince yourself there's nothing wrong with it. The answer of asceticism is, just seek to kill your sexual desire. We use the illustration of the boundaries of this basketball court in which we meet. Hedonism says erase the boundary lines.

5:04 - 5:21 Read in full sermon

Driving home: Lust is exclusively concerned with what it can get, and it will use or abuse anything to get what it wants. Now, you let that sink in. What is lust concerned with? What it can get, and it will use or abuse anything to be…

He quotes a Lutheran pastor, Mr. Trowbysh, who corrected a young man's confession 'I loved a girl' to 'I loved myself and I used a girl,' to illustrate that lust is self-centered and uses others.

There's an excellent book that I trust eventually will be able to circulate amongst our high school students and college students by a Lutheran pastor, a collection of letters that he wrote to a young African with whom he established contact in the mission field. And then this young man wrote back to this Mr. Trowbysh something of his problem of moral involvement, and the title of the book is I Loved a Girl. And in the first letter, this fellow writes to the missionary and confesses that he had an illicit sexual experience with this girl.

14:55 - 15:30 Read in full sermon

The point: Husbands are to look upon their wives as objects of love, whom they are to seek to please in all things, not as objects of lust.

Martin uses the analogy of throwing away a used face towel, paper towel, or old shoes to illustrate how people driven by lust treat their partners as disposable objects once their self-serving desires are met.

People are entering marriage driven by what? The lust of concupiscence. Evil passion drives them into marriage so that they're concerned with how they can use the person and when they're done using it, you drop it. When you're done using a face towel, paper towel, throw it away.

16:58 - 17:15 Read in full sermon

Driving home: What a testimony of human depravity. Paul has to write to Christians and after telling them to avoid sexual impurity by marriage then he must caution them that even within the boundaries of marriage you must not be motiv…

He uses the mental image of a blackboard to illustrate the pre-Fall order (God, mind, will, affections/appetites) and the post-Fall inversion (passions/appetites, will, mind, God pushed aside), explaining how sin disrupts the proper hierarchy of human faculties.

I submit to you that unless we read into this passage what Paul assumed in it namely the biblical doctrine of the fall and how it has upset everyone we can understand his exhortation. You see before the fall God stood above man as his creator his benefactor his provider. Man stood beneath God as his subject as his worshipper and as man was rightly related to God God expressed his will to man man received that will with his mind and understanding and then his will and his affections and appetites were subject to the dictates of his mind as they were subject to God. So if we had a blackboard we'...

20:20 - 21:34 Read in full sermon