Context and the centrality of the gospel

My son, pay attention to my wisdom, turn your ear to my words of insight, that you may maintain discretion and your lips may preserve knowledge. For the lips of the adulterous woman drip honey, and her speech is smoother than oil; but in the end she is bitter as gall, sharp as a double-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps lead straight to the grave. She gives no thought to the way of life; her paths wander aimlessly, but she does not know it. (Proverbs 5:1–6)

Let’s get a couple of things established right from the start so that we stay on the right path.

First, let’s be clear on we are talking about tonight and what we are not talking about. This passage is written from the perspective of a father instructing his son. And as we’ll see throughout the chapter, this son is apparently married. Right off the bat then, we’ve got a couple of challenges. First is that, to the best of my knowledge, none of you are married. So, strictly speaking, the sin of adultery per se isn’t really in play. But we can abstract that to the issue of lust. Jesus taught that “big sins” like adultery and murder are ultimately heart issues. He said,

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Matthew 5:27-28)

That’s really going to be our focus then tonight. That’s the first issue to contextualize.

The second is this is a son who is receiving the instruction and so this passage frames the female as the tempter / the adulteress; and the male as the one being tempted and falling into sin. But let’s recognize that these things cut both ways. Lust is not uniquely a man’s vice; it is an issue that women struggle with as well. And temptation is initiated by both females and males. So, recognize that this passage is coming from one point of view, but let’s get beyond stereotypes and do the hard work of seeing how this applies to our lives personally.

Final foundational issue before we get started into the text, and this one is really important, so please listen. If you hear nothing else tonight, this is the part I want you to hear.

I am looking at a room full of broken people—students and leaders, myself included. And that brokenness for many of us involves issues regarding our sexuality. We’ve messed up the past. We’re messing up right now. Listen to me: Jesus said that he came “to seek and save the lost.” That’s us: the lost. He knows your past, and he knows your present, and he loves you. “While we were still sinners Christ died for us.” Let’s not lose sight of the gospel as we go through this passage.

Here’s the tension we’re wrestling with as we go through this. Broadly speaking, we have two types of people in this room today. Some of you think none of this is a big deal. Lust, pornography, sending inappropriate photos, sexual experimentation … no big deal. Your inclination is to hear what I just said and conclude, “See, it doesn’t really matter. I’m forgiven anyway.” That’s called cheap grace and it’s the coward’s way out.

The Bible calls out sin, and—in this passage specifically—sexual sin. And there are consequences for sin—this passage will focus on that as well. And so it would be irresponsible not to press into that as we’re studying through.

Others, however, already feel a sense of shame and regret when we come to topics like this and your inclination might be to hear only more guilt and shame and hopelessness. And if so, then I have completely failed at what I’m trying to communicate tonight.

So everyone needs to be a little honest with themselves at this point and hear the full picture, especially that angle that you might not be inclined to hear. I want us to feel the weight of what this passage is teaching, and how it applies to current culture. But feeling that weight that should cause us to run towards Christ not away from him.

The allure of lust

So our first point is the allure of lust. Verse 3 notes that “the lips of the adulterous woman drip honey and her speech is smoother than oil”. We sin because sin is pleasurable, at least in the short term. Lust promises that pleasure, but it’s an empty promise. It’s a short-term play, indulging a moment of passion and emotion rather than what is in our best interests in the long term.

I don’t think this is necessarily intentional, but it made me chuckle how this passage starts with an implore for the son to pay attention! And then in verse 7 again, “Now then, my sons, listen to me!” That struck me as funny because I can imagine Solomon having this conversation with his son, talking about lust, when an attractive woman walks by, and Solomon’s like, “Hey! Eyes up here boy! Pay attention to my wisdom! Listen to me!” Sexual attraction can be very distracting. One of those things where, yeah, we know in our heads maybe what the right thing is, but then we lose our minds a little around certain people.

And can I say this right now? That’s not necessarily a bad thing. There’s a God-designed aspect to attraction. All of that biology, hormones, and stuff—that’s designed by our creator. We’ll read a little later in this chapter some things that might make us blush. That’s not what the Bible is warning against.

What God is warning us about is where those natural impulses are taken in a direction that takes us away from love of God and/or love of others, or when they are awakened outside of their proper time. And that might be a helpful, if simplistic way of discerning the difference between lust and love. Lust is always self-focused. What am I going to get out of this? How does this fulfill my wants? It leads to the objectification of other people. Love is concerned with the well-being, the wholeness, and flourishing of the other person.

I want us to be real about the pressure of temptation here. This has always been a struggle, but I think I can say without risk of contradiction that the temptation is higher now because of the availability of pornography and the way it is marketed to our culture. I mean, back in this day, this was literally a prostitute on the corner. There was a certain amount of public risk that one took meeting up and, if I can put it this way, inconvenience. Now it’s available 24/7 in at least the illusion of privacy—we’ll talk about that a bit later.

And it’s big, big business. One study estimates that the pornography industry is a $12 billion (with a “b”) a year industry. That’s $380 every second. Or, to put it another way, from the time we started youth group tonight until we are done, nearly $2.75 million in revenue. That kind of money attracts a lot of marketing experts. So if you are struggling with pornography and you feel like everything is conspiring against you—the advertisements you see, and the messaging you hear, and the feeds you get and the way innocent searches often lead you down a path to something more questionable, the feeling is real. There’s a strategy behind a lot of that that has been devised by middle-aged executives in a boardroom using PowerPoint slides, figuring out the most effective ways to monetize your lust. And a lot of that is keeping this promise reinforced—the messages that drip honey and are smooth as oil.

The consequences of lust

Let’s keep reading verses 7 through 14:

Now then, my sons, listen to me; do not turn aside from what I say. Keep to a path far from her, do not go near the door of her house, lest you lose your honor to others and your dignity to one who is cruel, lest strangers feast on your wealth and your toil enrich the house of another. At the end of your life you will groan, when your flesh and body are spent. You will say, “How I hated discipline! How my heart spurned correction! I would not obey my teachers or turn my ear to my instructors. And I was soon in serious trouble in the assembly of God’s people.”

This passage warns that there are consequences to indulging our lust. Now, I’ll be honest, when I first read this I thought, “This is a bit dramatic, isn’t it?” I mean, loss of honor and dignity? Financial ruin? Note from verse 14 that this is all public—in the assembly of the people is where this humiliation is taking place.

But then I thought, “No, this happens today too.” Every year or so it makes big news because it concerns some scandal with a famous celebrity or politician. A few years ago, it was Bill Cosby. Now, that name might not mean anything to most of you, or if you do know that name it’s associated with him being a sexual predator. And that’s kind of my point. To my generation, Bill Cosby was the epitome of wholesomeness. Brilliant comedian. But all of that is essentially wiped away because of sexual deviance of his that was exposed.

The whole “me too” movement exposed a lot of the sexual abuse in Hollywood and elsewhere and brought a lot of people the type of loss of honor and dignity and ruin that these verses describe. And this isn’t a problem “out there”. The list of pastors and youth leaders and church volunteers who have been exposed in inappropriate relationships or pornography addictions is horrific.

“Yeah,” you might say, “but those are extreme examples. Nothing like that is going to happen to me just from experimenting sexually as a teen or by consuming pornography.”

Maybe. But two things I’d caution us to consider.

The first is that things which we intend to be private have a way of becoming public. There was this website, several years back, the purpose of which was to connect people together who were interested in having an extramarital affair. In 2015 that site was hacked, and all of their user profile information posted publicly on the internet. As you can imagine, that led to a lot of broken marriages, children who were caught in the middle of this, people getting fired from their jobs; there were several suicides linked to that data leak. I think we all can think of examples where someone sent a sexually explicit photo to someone, supposedly “securely and privately”, that ended up getting shared. Or a decision to “go too far” in a moment of passion that later you regret, but people are whispering. The word got out. And that can bring a lot of shame and hurt. So that’s the first warning: things which we intend to be private have a way of becoming public. If you wouldn’t want something to be broadcast to the world, don’t do it. Don’t share it. Don’t post it. The privacy you think you have on the internet is largely an illusion. But that’s a discussion for another time.

The second caution is that patterns we establish now have a way of changing us and making certain things easier and harder for us later in life. I’m certainly no psychology expert, but they have been able to demonstrate fairly conclusively, for example, that regular consumption of pornography rewires the brain. It essentially makes those paths “easier to travel” if you will, which in turn makes it harder to find joy and satisfaction in the things that we are intended to. Now, am I saying that everyone who views porn or experiments sexually as a teen is destined to grow up to be an adulterer or sexual predator? No. I am NOT saying that. But what I am saying is it can have long-term effects that rob us of future joy.

Maybe this is a better way of putting this: When we talk about issues of sexuality and the Bible, I think we often perceive of it as God is just imposing these arbitrary rules that are there to make us miserable. That’s not the case. God is for your flourishing; he just knows better than you do. And he knows that the path of lust is not going to help us live the abundant life he intends for us.

God’s better plan

Which leads into the next section. Let’s read verses 15 through 20 and keep in mind this is written to the teacher’s son, who is married:

Drink water from your own cistern, running water from your own well. Should your springs overflow in the streets, your streams of water in the public squares? Let them be yours alone, never to be shared with strangers. May your fountain be blessed, and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth. A loving doe, a graceful deer—may her breasts satisfy you always, may you ever be intoxicated with her love. Why, my son, be intoxicated with another man’s wife? Why embrace the bosom of a wayward woman?

The Bible, ladies and gentlemen…

Ok, so this isn’t “that talk” tonight. We’ll leave that for another evening. When someone else is teaching. So what do we do with this?

I would say the principle we can take out of this context and generalize is the necessity of replacing lust with finding fulfillment in something else, something good. Now, to someone who is married, part of that is going to be loving your spouse. Keep the home fires burning. If this were a marriage conference, we could spend quite a long time on verses like this. But that’s not your context, so tuck that away for a future day if you like, but that’s not going to help right now.

We can direct our energy to other passions—hobbies, sports, community service, relationships that are built around something other than physical contact. Those can certainly help. Few things are more dangerous for temptation than boredom. So you know, get a job, work out, set some goals.

But the most effective way, and the one that is going to be constant, is a deep relationship with Jesus Christ. I read one author once who put it “fight lust with lust”. Not another worldly lust, but a drive to know Jesus. To hunger and thirst for righteousness, as another passage would put it. That most effectively is where you will find fulfillment. Whether you are married or not. He changes our very desires themselves so that our ambition looks towards more meaningful and eternal things rather than our focus being consumed with temporary passions that are without meaning.

Practical strategies

Last section is verses 21 through 23:

For your ways are in full view of the Lord, and he examines all your paths. The evil deeds of the wicked ensnare them; the cords of their sins hold them fast. For lack of discipline they will die, led astray by their own great folly.

Last thing to mention here, is how do we battle the temptation towards lust? And this passage lays out two primary ways which I’ll just mention briefly here and then this would be a good thing to tease out in small group.

First strategy is to have a big view of God. Notice in verse 21 the reminder that everything we do is in full view of the Lord. It’s not secret, even if we are successful at hiding it from others. And flouting our sexual sins before the eyes of a holy God is not a wise thing. Violating his design for our lives has a way of bringing pain upon ourselves. These verses talk about our evil deeds ensnaring us and hold us fast, leading us down paths that lead to sorrow not flourishing.

The second strategy is back in verse 8. Want to avoid being tempted by the prostitute on the corner? Don’t go near that corner! Now that’s going to look a lot different in our contexts but if you know you are struggling in this area, what are some practical actions you can take? Apps to uninstall? Accountability to pursue? Leaving your phone to charge overnight in the living room instead of having it with you overnight? What might that look like? We all have feet of clay here, guys.

I want to finish with a reminder of something I said in the beginning. We need to take these things seriously, but the gospel is bigger.

So, this is not my illustration, I read it somewhere else and maybe you’ve seen it before, but I think it is helpful to think about as we close. I have here a $10 bill. Straight from the bank. Crisp and clean. Now who would want this?

(Rub in dirt, step on it, wrinkle it up, etc.)

OK, now who would want this!? Yeah, we would all still want it, because the value of the $10 bill is inherent in its design and backed by the authority of the US Government. The condition of the bill is quite irrelevant. Just based on raw statistics alone, I am confident that there is a lot of brokenness in this room in the area of our sexuality and lust. We’re dirty, we’re crumpled. “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Our value is based on our identity as being made in the image of God. Nothing changes that. Christ died to heal us from our brokenness. He knows us urges us to come to him, all of us who are weary and heavy-burdened, to find rest for our souls. If we are feeling the Spirit’s conviction of sin, let us not feel shame, but run to him.

Discussion questions for leaders

In light of what this chapter is about, what do you think it means in verse 2 that wisdom enables us to “maintain discretion” and “preserve knowledge”?
This passage warns against “the adulterous woman” and avoiding “the door of her house”. What are the sources of sexual temptation that we and our students face today? What are some of the “outlets” in which youth sinfully indulge their sexual lust? (Ex. “sexting”)
What are some of the consequences of adultery listed in this passage? Why do you think these warnings are so severe?
What are the metaphors in verses 15-19 referring to? How would you contextualize this when teaching students?
How would you explain to a young adult the difference between physical attraction and lust?
Please watch this short clip (4 minutes): Matt Chandler - Jesus Wants the Rose. How does the truth emphasized in that clip play into the conversations we might be having in small group?
What are some practical steps we can take to honor God in our relationships and avoid lust and temptation?

Discussion questions for students

In what ways is lust described in the passage tonight as deceptive and destructive?
What would it look like in our culture to “keep to a path far from [the adulterous woman], do not go near the door of her house”? In other words, what are some practical steps we can take to minimize temptation?
Read Matthew 5:27-30. Are these words to be taken literally? If not, what do they mean, and what would that look like in our lives?
Some who are married follow what has come to be known as “the Billy Graham rule” which seeks to avoid any situation that would have even the appearance of compromise or suspicion. This includes refusing to travel, meet, or eat alone with a person of the opposite sex other than his or her spouse. Some view this as wise, while others criticize the rule as being sexist and legalistic. What do you think?
Do you know of peers who wrap up their sense of worth and identity in having a dating relationship? What problems can that cause?
What are some practical steps we can take to honor God in our relationships?
Many in our culture would say that sexual intimacy isn’t necessarily something that has to be reserved until marriage. Do you agree or disagree? Why? If you disagree, how would you support your position with Scripture?
Read 1 Corinthians 13:4-6. Based on that definition, what would it look like to “love” someone in whom you are romantically interested?