Jesus Unedited: Living without Lust

Two False Ideas:
- The Church - All sexuality and sexual desire is bad
- The World - All sexual desire is good
- We struggle to live in the middle without much help or good, honest discussion.

Jesus in Matthew 5 and the Sermon on the Mount:
- Adultery is bad
- Don't look lustfully
--- Lust is not the same as normal, sexual desire (which is a good thing).
--- This lust is "epithumia," which, in the context of human beings, has to do more with objectification of other people for sexual pleasure. This is turning "you's" into "its." This is DENYING the image of God in people by DEGRADING them into something lesser than a human being for our own gratification and momentary pleasures.
------- Examples: Media and using women's bodies to sell things. Our national epidemic with molestation of children and sexual assault. Strip clubs and prostitution - literally paying for women's bodies. Pornography - 2D depictions of women and men, distorting real sexual intimacy, and objectifying people for our own sexual gratification. Soap operas and Romance Novels to some degree as well. 

Cures for lust (epithumia):
- Take this issue seriously (pluck out eye and chop off hand seriously). We do this by not cherishing and harboring sin and destructive behaviors. Many of us say we don't want to do something again, but we often cherish the same behavior in our hearts as something we can turn to when we are sad, angry, tired, hungry, frustrated, etc. 
- Learn to love the right things rightly -  when we learn to love God with our whole beings and our neighbors as ourselves and the children of God, we can channel our passions into adventurous Kingdom living that doesn't get expressed through epithumia. Essentially, the closer we are to Christ and the more we serve the needs of our neighbors, the less lust we will have to contend with.
- A new heart - Jesus says that this is a heart issue "whoever looks lustfully at a woman, has committed adultery in his heart." Jesus wants us to ultimately have a transformed heart. This isn't the same as seeing a counselor and dealing with issues, this is Jesus stuff. New creation, salvation, new life stuff. Not a better person, but a whole, new, complete, transformed person. This is where we find freedom and victory over perverted desires that we struggle with.