ADULTERY
Recently Leadership
Magazine commissioned a poll of a thousand pastors. The pastors indicated
that 12 percent of them had committed adultery while in ministry – one out of
eight pastors! – and 23 percent had done something
they considered sexually inappropriate. Christianity
Today surveyed a thousand of its subscribers who were not pastors
and found the figure to be nearly double, with 23 percent saying they had had
extramarital intercourse and 45 percent indicating they had done something they
themselves deemed sexually inappropriate. One in four Christian men are unfaithful, and nearly one half have behaved
unbecomingly! Shocking statistics! Especially when we remember that Christianity
Today readers tend to be college-educated church leaders, elders, deacons,
Sunday school superintendents, and teachers. If this is so
for the Church’s leadership, how much more for the average member of the
congregation? Only God knows!
R. Kent Hughes
Disciplines of a Godly Man, Crossway Books,
1991, p. 21-22.
It is a
morbid and depressing fact that when it comes to adultery, there are too many
casualties among pastors. Ministers are just as vulnerable as others. No area,
no country, no denomination is immune. The damage done in each case is
irreparable: the breakdown, as far as ministry is concerned, final. This is a
distasteful subject, but we cannot shirk it. The matter demands faithful
treatment. Let him who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall.
Erroll
Hulse
The Preacher and Preaching, ed. Samuel Logan,
p. 75-76.
Adultery is
an obvious violation of the rights of another. You are stealing what doesn’t
belong to you.
Sam Storms
Copied
from: Pleasures Evermore: The Life-Changing Power of Knowing God by Sam Storms,
© 2000, p. 231. Used by permission of NavPress – www.navpress.org. All rights reserved.
The monstrosity
of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are
trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all others kinds of union
which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union [of
marriage].
C.S. Lewis
In its most
technical sense, committing adultery refers to sexual intercourse between a man
and woman when one or both of them is married.
John MacArthur
Matthew 1-7, Moody, 1985, p. 302.
Even adultery
is not the unforgiveable sin. It is a terrible sin, but God forbid that there
should be anyone who feels that he or she has sinned
himself or herself outside the love of God or outside His kingdom because of
adultery. No; if you truly repent and realize the enormity of your sin and cast
yourself upon the boundless love and mercy and grace of God, you can be
forgiven and I assure you of pardon. But hear the words of our blessed Lord:
“Go and sin no more.”
Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, 1959, p. 261, Used by
permission from Elizabeth Catherwood (daughter).