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Ascot. In the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead.

Home to one of the finest racecourses in the world and the nation’s top social event – Royal Ascot.

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Entry point to the glorious 4,800 acre landscaped gardens that is Windsor Great Park.

Affluent small town, mecca for stylish shops and restaurants and home to a long list of celebrities and public figures,

And, it turns out, occupier of the number one spot in the 2025 UK Infidelity Index, as published by the dating site for those looking for extramarital affairs – illicitencounters.com.

Who knew?

But of course it’s not just the residents of Ascot who are into the idea of ‘playing away’ – as the euphemism has it. Pursuing sexual opportunities outside marriage.

The other big app operating in the same niche market – Ashley Madison – claims to have 80 million registered users worldwide. Its strapline?

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Life is short – have an affair.

There are 10 million messages exchanged daily on its platform alone. Its app generates revenue of $300 million per year.

Adultery is big business.

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For all the wreckage that it causes – psychological, family, friends, children, finances, everything – it continues to grow as option for people. Albert Arnaiz calls himself an infidelity coach. He says that globally 40% more women are unfaithful than 35 years ago. We are in Britain are behind the curve, apparently, but even here apparently 34% of men and women say they would consider an affair if they knew they were confident of keeping it secret.

What’s driving them? Different reasons, it seems: loneliness, escapism, resentment, grief, the thrill and intoxication of risk-taking, response to childhood trauma, and of course lust. And maybe some stage-of-life-related anxiety too. The statistics apparently show that the most likely time for someone to engage in an extramarital affair is when their age ends in a 9: 29, 39, 49.

Now we may find this idea of adultery distasteful or indeed shameful. But what actually is wrong with it - really?

Well let’s have a look.

We’ve been working our way through the book of Exodus as a church.

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It’s the story of Israel being rescued, redeemed, out of slavery, and established as the people of God. But in the middle of all that, they are schooled in what it will look like to live as the redeemed people of God. That schooling comes in the form of 10 commandments which seem so fundamental, and so agenda-setting for the rest of the Bible, that we are slowing right down and just taking them one by one over the course of this term here on a Sunday morning, so that we can consider them in the context of the whole Bible.

So today, we come to the 7the commandment. It’s just 4 words, ‘you shall not commit adultery’. But there’s so much in the background there, that we’re going to need to ask a series of questions about sex generally in the Bible; and also about us and how we engage with it.

So four questions for the Bible to begin with.

And here’s the first. How good is sex?

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There’s an old joke about Moses coming down the mountain with these commandments in Exodus 20. Gets to the bottom. Gathers all the guys round him and says: ‘Alright lads? D’you want the good news or the bad news? Good news is: I’ve got him down to 10. The bad news? Adultery’s still in there.’

Now you can see why the joke works. It works because at some level within our heads there are two assumptions. One: that any less sex than the sex we might want is a bad thing. And two: that’s what God wants for us: less sex.

And to be fair, that does seem to have been a message that some parts of the Christian world have given off over the years. In the Orthodox church, for example, you might be instructed to abstain from sex

• For a day before Sunday communion, so that’s generally every Saturday out.

• On Good Friday and every other Friday of the year

• On Ash Wednesday and every other Wednesday

• On any other holy day, whatever day of the week,

• And on every day of the 40 days of Lent

It’s not hard to see why the idea of God being anti-sex has got out there.

But that doesn’t really mesh with the picture the Bible presents.

In fact there’s an entire book in the Bible given over to celebrating the wonder of sex. What a good and delightful thing it is.

1 Solomon’s Song of Songs.

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2 Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth—

    for your love is more delightful than wine.

3 Pleasing is the fragrance of your perfumes;

    your name is like perfume poured out.

    No wonder the young women love you!

4 Take me away with you—let us hurry!

    Let the king bring me into his chambers.

There’s a taster at least. And that’s just the first four verses of the first chapter! It’s pretty tame. It gets an awful lot more explicit as the book goes on! And there’s no shame. No embarrassment.

Sex is a great thing. And it’s God’s idea. It’s part of his blueprint for human flourishing.

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The truth is, the Bible doesn’t have a low view of sex. It has a wonderfully high view of it.

It’s the world around us that takes a low view. Our society treats it – by and large – as just a recreational activity or an expression of a bodily appetite. You’re hungry? Get some pizza. You’re horny? Get some sex.

Or at least it tries to treat it that way.

Doesn’t work, of course. In the long run, that approach is always going to go against God’s design for us, and it’s no surprise that - as often as not - it leads to more pain than pleasure.

But the point here is: in the worldview of the Bible, sex is a good thing. A very good thing.

But that begs the next question, question number two: where is the best sex to be had?

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When you open up the Bible, you find the subject of sex being introduced right back at the very beginning. The creation of Adam and Eve.

Do you remember Adam’s exclamation when he first sets eyes on Eve?

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“This is now bone - of my bones

    and flesh - of my flesh;

It’s a remarkable thing to him: she’s like him but different to him. She’s compatible with him, but also complementary to him. And that dynamic becomes a defining thing for human society.

Next verse:

That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.

Do you see those three steps?

• The man / women dynamic means it will become normal for adults to form a new social unity – leaving father and mother – it’s what would come to be called marriage

• This social unit of marriage will become a lifelong commitment: he is ‘united to his wife’. Brought together, that is, as with glue

• And at the heart of that lifelong marriage, as a sign of the marriage and as a way of expressing the heart-mind-body unity of the marriage – is sex. One flesh.

That is the context for which sex is designed. So that is the place where the best sex is to be had. Within the loving commitment of a lifelong marriage of a man and a woman.

Not with somebody outside the marriage - because that ends up working against the building of the marriage. Not working for it. You think you can pull off separating sex from deep relationship, but in the end few can and it blows up everything and everybody around.

Not with somebody, or a series of people, before marriage – because that involves us training ourselves to make less of sex, and that attitude inevitably gets brought into marriage later on. Which is why sex before marriage leads statistically to a shorter and less happy marriage. And why sex with multiple partners beforehand makes for even shorter and even less happy marriages on average.

And not with yourself. Aka masturbation. When that becomes a habit, and even more if it becomes an addiction, you find you’re training yourself in a view of sex which makes it all about serving yourself, not serving someone else. So without realising what you’re doing, you’re learning a life lesson: that a sexual partner is a slave to your own pleasure. And it’s very hard to unlearn that. And marriages everywhere are suffering as a result of it.

In God’s purposes, lifelong marriage is the context for sex. And if we want to see human society prospering, we’ll do all we can to see our marriages, or our possible, potential future marriage, or other people’s marriages - become strong and lifelong.

So third question: how is sex degraded?

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Answer? Sex is degraded when it’s taken out of the context that God has designed for it.

Jeremy Clakson says the best car ever made for beauty and performance is the Jaguar E type.

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I don’t know if you agree. But it’s become a British icon. Here it is in what you might say is it’s proper setting. Speeding along a leafy lane beside a well-manicured country estate, gleaming in the dappled sunlight.

It’s a beautiful machine.

Take the same car out of that context though, and put it into a dodgy backstreet of London, and this is what you get.

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Or at least it’s what Google Gemini tells me you get.

It’s still a beautiful car, but the setting just cheapens it somehow, doesn’t it? It makes it a less pleasing sight. The car is demeaned by its new surroundings. It’s shamed. Disgraced.

And you’re not surprised when next time you look, the car itself is beaten up,

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damaged, spoilt.

Now, that’s what happens to sex when you take it out of the context God has designed for it.

It gets demeaned, shamed, and spoilt.

Now I know the commandment here seems quite specific: ‘you shall not commit adultery’.

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But the cultural situation is important. In the days of Moses, virtually every adult was married. Which means any sexual activity for an adult outside his or her marriage was effectively adultery.

As the law gets applies it to Israel, we hear verses like Leviticus 20:10

“‘If a man commits adultery with another man’s wife—with the wife of his neighbor—both the adulterer and the adulteress are to be put to death.

And Deuteronomy 22:22

If a man is found sleeping with another man’s wife, both the man who slept with her and the woman must die. You must purge the evil from Israel.

But do you remember from last week how Jesus reflected on the commandments? (Mathew 15:19).

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I wonder if you noticed how he expands on ‘adultery’ with that broader expression ‘sexual immorality’. That’s the broader expression Paul, writing for slightly different cultures again, chooses to adopt as his normal way of describing sex outside marriage.

You can’t miss the gist: any expression of sex apart from the context of lifelong marriage degrades it.

And Jesus is very clear: that includes even sex in the heart. Lust – looking at or imagining another person with a view to sexual arousal. In other words sexual immorality can occur even when there’s nobody else in the room.

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One of our problems today is that the technology of recent decades removes nearly all the barriers of previous generations for both physical sex and heart sex:

• The contraceptive pill separates sex from children and therefore makes physical sex outside marriage easy

• And the internet opens up access to any sexual imagery you could want so makes heart sex even easier

But it all is just so degrading. However glamorous or intoxicating or pleasurable it may feel in the moment, what it’s really doing is taking a good gift of God, and removing it from it’s natural habitat, and plonking in a seedy backstreet, and inevitably leaving it to get wrecked and beaten up.

• How good is sex?

• Where’s the best sex to be had?

• How is sex degraded?

And final question for the Bible: what is sex actually for?

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Stand outside Westquay and ask passers by what sex is for, and I imagine most people would either walk in the opposite direction very quickly (!), or else look at you blankly.

What’s it for? Well, doh! It’s for pleasure. It’s for fun. It’s a recreational activity. It’s not difficult.

Well, yes it is those things. True. But is that all it’s for? I think that’s quite a shallow, thin answer, isn’t it? The Bible gives a much richer, thicker answer to the question. In fact 3 answers.

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The gift of sex in context is given to unite. It bonds. It glues. It’s a way of building and strengthening marriages: one flesh.

We’ve seen that. But it is the reason why sex outside marriage causes such devastation. You ever tried ungluing a mug or whatever you’ve glued? It doesn’t end well.

And sex in context is given to create. It’s for children. Which does raise questions about long-term use of contraception, or marriages that are not open to children. But that’s for another day.

But more than that, sex in context is given to image.

Right through the Bible, the idea of young love is used as a picture of God himself and his relationship with his people.

Take Ezekiel 16, verse 8 – as just one example among many.

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… When I looked at you and saw that you were old enough for love, I spread the corner of my garment over you and covered your naked body. I gave you my solemn oath and entered into a covenant with you, declares the Sovereign Lord, and you became mine.

It’s graphic language, isn’t it? But the ‘you’ there is not an individual: God is speaking to Israel as a whole. He’s describing his relationshipwith his people. That idea of faithful, husbandly love is a repeated theme in the Bible that’s used to help us understand what God is like in that relationship.

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In a sense, it’s no different from the other commandments, I suppose. We honour our parents, because God is a father. We don’t murder, because God is a god of life. We don’t steal, because God is a generous provider. We don’t lie because he’s a God of truth. And so on.

Here, we don’t commit adultery, because God is faithful in his love. In other words, sexually pure marriages broadcast the nature of God to each other and to the watching world.

That’s why we don’t all sign up to Ashley Madison or whatever. Adultery and other forms of sexual immorality destroy relationships. And it degrades the gift of sex. But those things are small fry compared to this: it dishonours God himself. Drags his name into the gutter.

But let’s come onto us. We’ll be much briefer here. But we do need to bring it home a bit. Because there is a danger that we somehow think this is a commandment for someone else. That we’re not really the target audience for this one. We’re not really at risk of breaking this one. So let me ask these four questions of all of us here this morning.

Question 1: Am I really feeding my marriage?

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This one is specifically for the married, I guess. But if you’re single, you might one day be married, and even if you’re not, you might want to pray for those who are.

Here’s the thing. Adultery doesn’t begin the moment you walk into a bedroom with someone you’re not married to. It often begins when you’re in a bedroom with the person you are married to.

If you continually make yourself sexually unavailable, then you are at least contributing to an environment where the inclination to adultery can blossom and flower and grow.

That’s not to say the physical adultery will be your fault when your partner gets to that point. This is not victim-blaming. But it’s just good sense and actually basic obedience.

I’m sure you know Paul’s instruction to married couples:

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Do not deprive each other except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.

Now I know that all sorts of things get in the way here.

• Stress from work,

• Illness

• Fatigue from looking after young children.

• Low libido

• Poor mental health.

• Sexual dysfunction or medical issues of one kind or another.

• Trauma from the past

• Hormonal issues

• Lack of time and connection with each other

• Different sleep schedules

The list goes on, doesn’t it?

And it’s ok. I get it. From time to time, things will get in the way. That’s just normal.

But I want to suggest very few of the things on that list give us a free pass for the longer term. Most of them can be addressed to some degree if we actually want to address them enough.

And the Bible expects that we will. In Proverbs 5, there is an explicit encouragement to retain sexual mutual enjoyment for the long term.

18 May your fountain be blessed,

    and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth.

19 A loving doe, a graceful deer—

    may her breasts satisfy you always,

    may you ever be intoxicated with her love.

Always, forever.

Those of us who are married are called to feed our marriages.

Question 2: Am I really starving my lust?

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Lust starts with seeing, doesn’t it? And of course you can’t stop yourself seeing, but you can stop yourself turning your head.

You can’t stop yourself noticing, but you can stop yourself indulging.

You can’t stop yourself getting on a train and randomly finding yourself sitting next to an attractive person. But you can stop yourself seeking out that person when you notice that you’re secretly hoping to bump into them again.

You get the distinction there, surely?

And I think that’s what Jesus is getting at in Matthew 5.

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27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’[e] 28 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

In other words they haven’t just seen; they’ve looked. In fact they haven’t just looked, they’ve indulged thoughts of a romantic or sexual nature.

The challenge with lust is to nip it in the bud, before it’s even become lust. A fire takes fuel and oxygen to burn. Starve it of either, and it’ll go out. And it’s the same with lust, isn’t it? It needs to be starved. Deliberately and mercilessly.

I mentioned earlier that so many barriers have come down due to society and technology. Our challenge is to try to put some back again.

What might that mean? Well there are some obvious ones, I suppose

• Well, don’t go on holiday or hang around in a house for an evening with someone you’re attracted to, or who might be attracted to you

• Don’t keep sharing a house with a housemate with whom you sense a spark. Move out, And if you’re in a shared house and know someone in that position, please don’t wait to be asked before you volunteer to swap houses with them. Help them. This is serious!

• If you’ve ever, even once, accessed pornography on your phone or your computer, install accountability software to recreate some kind of social barrier to accessing it again

• If you’re going on a work trip with someone there might be a spark with, stay in control, don’t drink, act frosty if necessary

• If you’re in the train situation I described earlier, for goodness sake change trains!

You get the point. We need to cut off the oxygen from this fire, any way we can, even when it’s just a spark. And we may need to help each other with this.

Question 3: am I really seeing the future?

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One of the trickier challenges to deal with in this area of sexual fidelity is when there actually isn’t any particularly sexual chemistry with someone. But there is some form of emotional dependence or connection developing. They’re leaning on you. They’re talking to you about private things. They’re messaging you.

It requires a large dose of alertness, self-awareness, self-honesty, and actually courage to deal with something like that.

But if we’re serious about, we will act wisely. And what does that look like? It looks like fleeing.

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Flee from sexual immorality. (1 Cor 6:18)

That is look ahead. See where this road leads. Allow yourself to see the possible future of this currently innocent-seeming relationship.

And flee. Because attraction grows subtly. Trust and friendship and dependence is so flattering and affirming. And therefore so dangerous.

Am I really seeing my future?

And final question: do I really care?

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It can feel so weird, can’t it, when you start taking the most basic precautions to keep yourself from sexual immorality. You start to feel like a bit of an idiot. Because nobody else is really fussed.

But that’s when the test will come, and that’s when we’ll find out the answer to the question: do I really care about sexual purity?’

It’s whether we’re prepared to take decisive, absurd-seeming, radical action – to preserve that sexual purity.

How did that teaching of Jesus go on?

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if your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. 30 And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.

There may be tough calls to make.

Are you prepared to cut off your phone or computer and throw it away?

Are you prepared to cut off your job and your career, and all that comes with it, for this?

REMEMBER: THERE IS GRACE

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