Sermon on lust, love, and sexual ethics from Latimer Church
Tim Capill, Associate Pastor at Latimer Church, delivers the final sermon in a series on acceptable sins, addressing lust and its relationship to love.
Summary
Tim Capill closes a four-part sermon series on socially acceptable sins — greed, selfishness, envy, and lust — by arguing that much of what contemporary culture calls love is, in fact, lust in disguise. He draws on 1 Thessalonians 4 to frame sexual immorality as a spiritual problem rooted in distrust of God, not merely a physical or moral failing. Capill contends that pornography, romantic fantasy literature, and mainstream media have normalised lust to the point where it is actively encouraged, and that the solution is not willpower or guilt but a greater love — specifically, the love of Jesus Christ — that displaces lust by outcompeting it. He closes with three practical exhortations: confess sin to God and to a trusted friend, watch out for one another in love, and trust Jesus rather than trying harder.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction: The Series and the Disguise of Lust
Tim Capill: Keep a Bible open there and we'll have a look at those verses together. This is the last in a series of sermons where we've been thinking about acceptable sins — the kind of sins that are not going to get you kicked out of anywhere because they're generally accepted in our culture. We've looked at four, and this is our last one.
The first week we thought about greed, and what we often do to excuse greed is we just disguise it as something else. We talked about how we disguise it so often as success — that's really what we're after. We then thought about self-care, and how that disguises a sin that is sometimes actually selfishness. Last week we thought about envy, which we maybe disguise as just being observant, noticing what other people have. It's not that bad, we think, but actually it fills us with a kind of bitterness.
And then tonight we're thinking about lust. I think lust disguises itself in the most beautiful way out of all of them. It disguises itself as love. As we come to this last one, what we're going to talk about is this idea that what we often think of as love is actually so often lust. And I want to persuade you that that's the case.
Think for a moment about some of the language we use. We talk about falling in love, as though love is some kind of pothole in the footpath that you just — whoops — fell into. We talk about love at first sight, as though it's just this feeling you have. As though love is like a weather system — it kind of moves over and rains a bit here, then moves on and rains somewhere else. So we think, well, that's what love is. I kind of love this person until someone else comes along, and then I love them, and I can't really help it. I just get love-struck, as though you don't have any control over it — it's just this feeling.
What we've done is we've watered love down to being nothing more than the things we desire or the people we desire, and we excuse it by just saying, "I just kind of fell in love." But I want to persuade you this evening that a great deal of what our culture calls love is not love at all. It is lust in love's clothing.
If you're here tonight and you wouldn't call yourself a Christian, I hope you'll find that this is not the kind of finger-wagging, telling-you-off that you might be expecting. I think the Bible has something to say about love and lust that, actually, deep down you probably already know is kind of true — you kind of already feel it's true — and the Bible affirms it. So I'm really glad you're here with us tonight.
Question One: What Is Sex For?
Now let's take the costume off lust by asking four key questions. The first question I want us to wrestle with is: what is sex for? Because it's not until we understand what sex is for that we can begin to understand why lust is actually just a cheap counterfeit to the real thing.
Paul writes this letter, 1 Thessalonians, to this young church, and in chapter 4 verse 3 he says something which to our modern ears seems pretty quaint and old-fashioned. Have a look — chapter 4, verse 3. He says, "It is God's will that you should be sanctified" — that is, set apart, different — "that you should avoid sexual immorality." It's this old-fashioned idea, we think, that it's God's will that we should avoid any sex outside of marriage, because that is sexual immorality.
Now, before we think about what God forbids, we need to understand what God gives. Sometimes people think that the Bible is just anti-sex, and that Christians are anti-sex, and that God is anti-sex. But that is simply not true. God made sex. It is his idea. He dreamed it up, he invented it, he created it. If you think sex is good, God agrees. It's his good gift. And the biblical sexual ethic gives sex far more dignity and value than our culture does.
Think about this with me. There are two ways we can relate to people. You can either be a consumer or you can be a covenant keeper. Those are the two bases for human relationships. You're either a consumer or a covenant keeper.
The consumer says, "I'm in this for what I can get out of it." That's a consumer relationship. I'll stay as long as you're delivering the goods. But if your prices go up, I'll find a cheaper supplier. If you put on weight, if you become boring, if you get sick, or if someone better comes along, I'm just going to get the upgrade. I'm not the bad guy for doing that — that's just the market.
That's the consumer relationship. And our culture has built an entire romantic culture on this consumer relationship and called it love. Sex has become the currency. It's become nothing more than a selfish transaction between consumers. You're in it for what you can get out of it. If it's good sex, stick around. If it's not, time to move on. That's how our world thinks about it.
But here's the thing. You think you're a consumer and that you're the one in it for what you can get out of it — when in reality you're also the product. Because at any moment you could be traded away. You're both the consumer judging the value of your partner, and you're the product being constantly judged about your own value by them. And if this consumer relationship is the only kind of relationship you ever know, then your whole life is like one big audition. You're always being measured up, you're never quite sure if you'll do enough, you'll never be able to relax, and the moment you stop performing, you worry that any kind of loyalty is just going to evaporate.
It's why the whole idea of "try before you buy" is a lie. The idea that before you get married, you should really live together, sleep together, to see whether or not you're compatible — it's just a lie. And it has become the norm. Couples live together on this kind of trial basis. But the problem is that the trial is never the real thing. The person you're testing compatibility with is always trying to impress you in case you end the relationship. And you're always trying to impress them so that they might hold on to you as well. Neither of you can actually just relax and be yourself, warts and all, in case your partner walks away. It's a kind of fake trial. It doesn't work.
And the statistics actually show that that's true. If a couple live together before marriage, the stats tell us that they're actually 48% more likely to be divorced than those who don't. Isn't that extraordinary? It's going to become like this accepted standard of norm, but it destroys relationships because the whole premise is built on this fake trying to impress each other.
And what's more, the consumer is never free. If you're in a consumer relationship, you're a slave to your own desires, your own feelings, your own hunger. And the product is never free either, because they're a slave to the opinions of the consumer. They never measure up. It's just this cheap and awful way to live, and yet it's become the norm in our society. The one-night stand, the summer fling, the try-before-you-buy — they're all just types of consumer relationships. You're in it for what you can get out of it.
If you're in a sexual relationship where your partner has made no commitment to you whatsoever, it's a consumer relationship. You're a slave to your own desires and a slave to their opinions of you. If they get bored, they'll move on. If someone better comes along, you're shoved aside. That's the consumer relationship. It's awful.
The covenant relationship is the opposite. In a covenant relationship, a person makes a free decision in advance to stop shopping around. You choose to bind yourself, to commit yourself to someone else. That's the biblical idea of marriage. And in God's design, it is within this covenant of marriage, this commitment, that sex is designed to be enjoyed.
So right back in the beginning of the Bible, Genesis chapters 1 and 2, we read about God creating mankind — he creates male and female. Adam and Eve are there in the garden in chapter 2, and they're both naked. The first thing that happens: they feel no shame, and Adam looks at his naked wife and writes her a love poem. God's not anti-sex.
And then God says, "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and the two will become one flesh." Not the two will become one transaction. Not the two will become some temporary relationship. No — the two will become one flesh. Two lives joined together into one before God through the act of sex. And God declares it good.
Here's God's design. Sex in the Bible is not the goal — it is the sign of a commitment between two people. A covenant in which two people give themselves to one another wholly and completely. Sex is designed to say with our bodies what our whole lives ought to say and how we live: I am wholly, unreservedly, irreversibly, and completely yours. And sex is an expression of it. That's what sex is designed to communicate to a person. I'm yours completely.
Committing yourself to one person like that can sound a bit like a cage — until you live in one. From the outside, it's like, "Oh, you're just kind of stuck in marriage," and that's how people talk about it. They kind of boo-boo it as though it's like this really bad thing. But when you're in it, you discover that it's actually one of the very few relationships on earth where you can finally take the mask off. Because you can be completely, fully known — warts and all, every failure, every flaw, every unflattering morning — and you can still be certain that you're not going to be traded in or returned, because of a covenant, a promise, an unconditional promise that your partner has made to you and that you made to them. And so there's no need to constantly try to win approval or to stay in favour. You're free. You're no longer controlled by your feelings or the opinions of your partner. Instead, you control your feelings and you commit yourself to another person.
And that's what Paul is talking about in chapter 4 verse 4 when he talks about controlling your own body in a way that is holy and honourable. He's not talking about a man who's just kind of white-knuckling his way through life trying to hold on to some joyless commitment. He's talking about a man who's free. Free to be himself, and free to give himself. And so he chooses to do that joyfully in marriage, or joyfully by abstaining from sex in his singleness.
In a covenant relationship, sex is no longer a transaction. It's a sign of a covenant. Sex is not about you or self-pleasure. It's about the other person and their pleasure. It's an expression of you giving yourself to them. What you do with your whole life, you give expression to in the bedroom. It's not you taking your partner, but you giving yourself to them. That's God's design for sex. It's not a consumer relationship which cheapens it to just a selfish transaction. It's a sign of a covenant relationship where sex is this unique and special expression of commitment, joining two people together wholly and completely.
When Paul says, "Avoid sexual immorality," he's talking about any sex outside of that marriage covenant — saying, avoid it, don't do it.
So what is sex for? It's a sign of the covenant. It's the body saying: all of me, for all of you, for good. Now hold on to that, because everything that flows from that — or is different to that — is a distortion of it.
Question Two: What Has Gone Wrong?
So, second question: what's gone wrong? Well, here's where we take love's costume off lust.
Let me first be clear. Lust is not noticing that someone else is attractive. God made you with eyes. I can see them. And God made a beautiful world and he gave us the capacity to see it. Noticing is not sin. Nor is sexual desire. We've already seen that. Sexual desire is part of God's good design for us as human beings. The desire for sex is not a wrong desire. So there is no need to feel guilty if you desire sex or if you notice that someone is attractive.
There's an old saying which you may have heard: you can't stop a bird landing on your head, but you can stop it nesting there. You can't help it if you notice someone's attractive, but you can stop that thought making a nest in your head.
Lust is when the heart moves in and starts building a nest. When you start to actually desire the person without regard for them or for God. When your noticing becomes wanting, and then your wanting becomes plotting. When you begin to feed and rehearse and nurture a desire that, if you were to actually act on it, you would break the covenant God designed — that's lust.
And here's why it's hard for us to see. It disguises itself as just a harmless desire. It's just feelings you can't control. No one gets hurt. It's just a fantasy. It's just in my head. It's no big deal. And if you feed what seem to be harmless desires, it then begins to disguise itself as love, and you start justifying it. You start talking about feeling a connection to someone who's not your spouse. You start talking about being understood, and you have a longing for someone who's not your spouse, and you say it's love — when it's just lust.
But if we understand what lust actually does, you will see that it is the exact inverse of real love. Love is a settled commitment to another person's good. Lust is a restless appetite for my own satisfaction. Love gives. Lust takes — and kind of calls it giving. Love says, "I'm yours." Lust says, "You're mine." Or even worse, "You'll do for now."
Lust has become not only acceptable in our culture, but actually encouraged as a good thing. Let me show you quickly three places it lives out in the open. And I want to be even-handed — it's not just a man's problem. Sometimes we make out it's just men who struggle with lust, and that's just not true.
Three Places Lust Is Normalised
Tim Capill: First: pornography. We're the first generation in human history to carry an infinite supply of pornography in our pockets. It's endless, it's free, and it's private. And we tell ourselves nobody gets hurt by it.
But I want to read you something. It's not from a Christian preacher. This is what the New Zealand Military Health Service says on their website. Here's what they say. When porn becomes the primary sex educator for young people, it shapes their attitudes and beliefs and redefines what they think sex even is. Porn watchers — men and women alike — are more likely to view women as sexual objects and to hold negative attitudes about gender. It pushes people toward earlier sex, riskier sex, more casual sex, more partners. And then it goes on — listen to this irony. Heavy porn users are less likely to enjoy ordinary intimacy, cuddling and kissing. They find it harder to move from the screen to a real partner, and when they do, they can find it harder to stay aroused.
The military's own doctors are telling us that porn doesn't just cheat you — it actually disables you for the very thing you actually want. You want sex, and porn destroys your ability to have it. It's just a cheap counterfeit. It promises to make you more of a person, but actually it slowly makes you less able to love a real person.
And it's not just a man's problem. Pornhub's own published figures show that in New Zealand, 40% of its users are women. A recent New Zealand study showed that 58% of girls aged between 14 and 17 years old have viewed porn. The stats are higher for men, but it's not just a man's battle.
Second place it's normalised: romantic fantasy. There's a whole genre of books absolutely exploding right now — you may have heard of it — called romantasy. They're romance novels woven with fantasy, and a great deal of it is extremely explicit. It's become so mainstream that last year, on the back of it, fiction sales in the UK passed a billion pounds for the first time ever. There's now a bookshop in London devoted entirely to selling romantasy as a genre, with a whole corner set aside for explicit sex. And in its first few days of being open, they had to close again because they sold out.
The publishing world's own nickname for this type of literature is "fairy porn." And the BBC reported that the appetite for it among young women — in the reporter's own word — is voracious. Readers buying the same book three times over just to have it in every different format. And it's become totally acceptable reading. Where pornography seems particularly appealing for men, erotic literature seems particularly appealing to women, and it's just normal. We just don't bat an eye.
But here's why I raise it. We would never let a Christian brother tell us that his pornography was harmless because it's not real — it's just pictures. We'd never say that. Because we know it's not true. Of course it's harmful. And yet we justify erotic literature because we say it's just words on a page, it's just my imagination, no one's getting hurt. But it's not true.
What it does is it trains your heart and your mind to feed on a fantasy of intimacy that actually no human being could ever match. It builds an expectation of a partner, of a wedding night, of a marriage, that's engineered to be unrealistic — just like pornography. A real husband has bad breath in the morning. The fictional guy never does. And so what it does is damage in two directions at once. It leaves you quietly dissatisfied with a real person you promised to love, or may promise to love in the future. And it hangs this impossible standard around the neck of a spouse or a future spouse who never agreed to compete with whatever you can imagine in your mind. No one gets hurt is just not true. You get hurt, and your spouse or future spouse gets hurt. It's lust. It's a distortion of God's good gift of sex.
The third place we see it — and again it's just normal — is on your TV screens in your living room. And I'm not just talking about the extreme stuff, just the normal stuff. Even adverts appeal to lustful desires. Movie after movie and TV show after TV show just tell the same story and depict sex as a consumer transaction. They portray normal sex as being thrilling, exciting, erotic, electric, on demand, always deeply satisfying. That's how it's always portrayed. And the more you watch it, you don't just get entertained — you start to become recalibrated. It starts to change the way you think. We start to dream of a marriage that will actually never be a reality. We start to think of our own marriage as somehow substandard, when it's not — it's just real.
Now, those are just three places in our culture where it's become normalised. And I think it's become normalised amongst us as Christians too. But this problem of lust is everywhere. Our eyes are just kind of drawn to people, and then we allow our hearts to follow. And every time we take God's good gift of sex and hollow it out, every time we become more accustomed to being consumers of a fantasy instead of covenant keepers in reality.
Question Three: Why Does It Matter So Much?
So that's where it's gone wrong. Third question: why does it matter so much? You could rightly be sitting there thinking, why on earth are you talking about this problem? Aren't there more important things? I'm thinking about global poverty, there are wars, there's injustice. Why are you talking about what we read and watch? Why is it such a big deal? Shouldn't the church be addressing more important things?
It's a fair challenge. And Paul in 1 Thessalonians addresses it head on. Because Paul says something about lust that lifts it clean out of the category of just a private habit and into something eternal. Have a look at verse 5. He says we're not to be like the pagans who do not know God.
Do you see what he's just done? He's connected sexual sin not just to your body or your willpower, but to your knowledge of God. He's saying that at the root, lust is not mainly an appetite problem — it's a faith problem. It's not just a physical problem but a spiritual problem.
Here's what he means. Every time I turn to lust, I am making a statement of belief. I'm saying, "God, what you have given me is not enough. What you're offering isn't good. God, your design for sex isn't right. I'll take it from here." And so you see lust, underneath the costume, is actually an act of rebellion. It's a moment where I look God in the face and decide he cannot be trusted to satisfy me, he doesn't know what's best, and so I'll take over.
And that's why Paul says the pagans do it — not because they want sex more than the rest of us, that's not true — but because they don't know God, and so of course they go looking for pleasure elsewhere. When a Christian lusts, we are briefly pretending that we don't know God either.
And that is why Paul reaches for such heavy language. Verse 6: he says the Lord will punish all such sins. Verse 8: he says to reject this teaching is not to reject a human being, but to reject God. This is not just Paul being squeamish about sex. This is Paul telling us that lust, left to run, is a road that actually leads away from God himself.
Jesus said it even more starkly. In Matthew chapter 5, in that famous Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says that if your eye causes you to sin — he's talking about lust — gouge it out, because it would be better to lose the eye than to keep it and be thrown into hell. Now he's speaking in hyperbole — he's not actually promoting or condoning self-harm. He's making a point. He's saying: this is serious. What you do with your eyes and your desires has eternal consequences.
Lust matters. It's not harmless. Left unchecked, lust leads to destruction because it is a rejection of God, who created sex to be rightly and properly enjoyed within marriage. And so elsewhere, Paul says simply: flee from sexual immorality. Not try a bit harder to manage it. No — flee. Run from it like you would from a burning building, because you've understood how serious it is and what's actually at risk.
The biblical counsellor Edward Welch defines lust like this. He says: "An earthly desire that doesn't take no for an answer is a lust that surpasses your desire for Jesus himself."
Now let that sink in for a moment. An earthly desire that doesn't take no for an answer is a lust that surpasses your desire for Jesus himself. The problem is the desire has stopped taking no for an answer. The desire has become your master. And anything in your life that refuses to take a no from you — anything you can't say no to — has quietly, politely become your God. Become the thing you serve.
So you see, lust is not some small issue the church should be embarrassed to raise while the world burns. Lust is one of the issues underneath the issues. It's a rival God in our hearts. And that is exactly why the answer is bigger than just trying harder to be better.
Question Four: What Is the Solution?
So let me finish with the fourth question: what's the solution? Because I imagine that right now there'll be some of us — perhaps many of us — who are caught up in lust. Whether it's pornography or fantasy or just the constant battle of your mind. And if you've followed me this far, you might be expecting that the way to end is for me to tell you: grit your teeth and stop lusting. Just stop it. Cut it out. You should feel a bit more guilty. Feel worse about yourself. You're a horrible person. Try harder. Come on. Pull your socks up. Make another purity pledge.
But friends, that's not where Paul goes. And it's not where Jesus goes. You cannot beat a rival God with willpower. You'll never nag a lust out of your heart.
Two hundred years ago, a Scottish preacher named Thomas Chalmers preached a sermon with a great title. It was called "The Expulsive Power of a New Affection." And his point in the sermon is this: you cannot empty the human heart of a love simply by ordering it to stop loving. The heart doesn't work like that. The only way an old love ever actually loses its grip is when a stronger and better love moves in and takes hold. You don't defeat a desire by hating the desire. You defeat it by out-loving it.
One of our problems in the battle against lust is we think we'll beat it just by hating it more. "I hate it more, then I'll beat it." No, no, no. You need a much greater love. And then your love for lust, your love for porn, your love for fantasy will just diminish — it will die away.
So when you put Chalmers' sermon next to the quote from Welch, you kind of get the whole picture. Because Edward Welch diagnoses the problem: lust is a desire that has surpassed your desire for Jesus — that's the problem. And Chalmers gives us the solution: the answer to a rival love is not self-hatred, it is a greater love.
So you see, the real question is not "how do I stop lusting?" The better question is: do I actually know and believe that God is better?
Think honestly about what you're really reaching for when you reach for the counterfeit and allow yourself to lust. When you reach for the book or the screen or the remote — what is it you're really looking for? Friends, it's almost never really sex. Underneath it, there's a deeper hunger. Maybe it's loneliness. It's a longing to be wanted, to matter to someone. Or maybe it's comfort — it's an escape from stress that you can't deal with otherwise and can't switch off. Or maybe it's boredom, and you just want to feel something on a grey, flat day.
All of those hungers and all of those desires — they're real. They're not the problem. They're real desires. The problem is you keep taking them to a well that's never held water, and you keep trying to drink from it when it will never satisfy you. You try to solve the desires with a solution that will never help.
But the message of Jesus is this: bring your hungers to him, and he will satisfy you.
If what you ache for is to be loved, to be fully known and never returned, then hear that that is precisely what God offers you in Jesus. He knows you completely — lust and all, he knows it all — and he went to a cross for you rather than trade you away. He died because he loves you.
If what you ache for is comfort from stress or distraction from hardship, then remind yourself that God is your refuge and strength, and that even in hardship he will never leave you or forsake you.
If what you ache for is sexual pleasure, then trust the God who invented sex and who tells you that the deepest enjoyment of it is inside the covenant he designed — not scattered outside of it, where it becomes destructive.
The solution to lust is not feel more guilt and try harder. No — the solution is look somewhere better for your joy.
And notice how Paul ends the passage, verse 8: God gives you his Holy Spirit. Friends, that reality changes everything. Sexual purity is not something you manufacture by your own effort and then hand up to God — "Look what I've done, I've beaten porn." No, it's something that God supplies. He doesn't just command the covenant life of purity and then walk away. He moves in to make it possible. You are not on your own trying harder to be better. God has filled you with his Spirit to help you. And the Spirit, if you ask him, will help you believe the word of God and will fill you with a greater love than lust.
Three Practical Steps
Okay, so how do we walk out of here tonight? Let me finish with three practical things, because this is a battle and no one wins a battle alone. We fight it together as brothers and sisters.
Number one: drag your sin into the light. Confess your sin to God first. He already knows about it. You can't hide it from him. He already knows. And he's waiting for you to bring it to him so that he can forgive you and help you turn from it. Sin does its best work in the dark. So don't only confess it to God — I want to encourage you tonight to confess it to a trusted friend or two as well. We're not in this alone. The moment you tell one trusted friend, it loses half its power. So find that person this week, or tonight. Confess your sin and pray for one another.
Second: watch out for one another in love. We're in this together. That means we pray for each other. It means we keep each other accountable in appropriate ways. It means we encourage each other, we pray for marriages, we pray for single people. We're in it together.
And I want to be really careful here, because what I'm about to say can be said badly and heard badly. My purity is my responsibility. I can never lay the blame for my own heart on what someone else does, says, or wears. Jesus is crystal clear that the problem of lust lives in me and lives in you. The problem's in us, not in other people. We can't blame them.
But if I know that my brother or sister is in a fight, then real love will gladly think carefully about whether I'm making their fight harder or easier by how I dress, or how I speak, or how I act in front of them. Not because I'm ashamed of the body — God made it and called it good — but out of a simple love that would never wave a drink of booze in front of an alcoholic. Friends, we carry each other, we help each other. And that's the whole point of being a church family rather than a collection of individuals trying hard to fight alone in private. We watch out for one another in love.
And then thirdly: trust Jesus. And that's where I want to land. Not try harder, but trust Jesus. Will you believe that the God who designed sex is actually good? And that his covenant really is better than the culture's consumerism? And that being fully known and kept is worth more than being endlessly sampled and traded? And will you believe that Jesus really is enough?
Because if you really believe that, you'll flee from sexual immorality — because you'll see it for the destructive practice it is, and you'll see the goodness of God and his design. The battle against lust and pornography and fantasy is a battle of faith.
Lust wears love's costume because deep down we all know love is the thing worth wanting. We all do. We all long to be loved, wholly and completely. That's what we long for. And lust will never give it to you.
But the good news of the whole Bible is that the love we so long for as human beings has a name. And he went to a cross to keep a covenant with you and with me. And he promises free and complete forgiveness for whatever sexual sin you have, whatever desire you're trying desperately to fill — he promises to satisfy it. He's willing to forgive because his love is real, not like the lies of lust.
So friends, trust him, and pray for God's help to keep doing that. And let's pray for each other.