As we open Proverbs 5 this morning, we come to a subject that can be difficult to discuss in church. The next three chapters speaks plainly about sexual desire, adultery, and faithfulness in marriage. These are very personal matters that can touch the most intimate parts of our life. They touch our hopes for love and our memories of being hurt. We need to approach them with care, and we need to hear what God says. I felt that difficulty while preparing to preach this chapter. I wanted to speak honestly without becoming either prudish or crude. Yet one reason we move through Scripture chapter by chapter is that we need God to address subjects we might avoid. As I studied, I began to see how these warnings raise questions about being human. Why does another person’s affection mean so much to us? What makes sexual intimacy so significant?
God made us to receive love and enjoy affection, so being wanted by another person can bring real joy. A kind word can reach us when we feel overlooked. The prospect of intimacy can speak to a loneliness we struggle to explain. That helps us understand why temptation can feel so persuasive. A forbidden relationship can offer attention and affection we sincerely want. We may still believe it is wrong, yet our feelings begin to argue with what we believe.
Our feelings usually argue in familiar sentences, “I have never felt this way about anyone.” “I have to be true to myself.” Each one lets the strength of a desire outweigh what we know to be true. Christians say these things too, though usually only to themselves. We simply stop asking what God wants, and let the desire grow in the silence. Proverbs 5 refuses to let our forbidden desires keep growing in the dark. The father admits that temptation often feels sweet, life-giving even, and then he makes his son look at where it leads.
We will not cover the entirety of chapter 5 today. We will hear the warning in verses 1-14. And if the Lord is willing, next Sunday we hear the call to marital delight in verses 15-23. Together, they show us how God’s wisdom guards a gift worth receiving.
Solomon speaks as a father preparing his son for adult life. He warns about an adulteress, a woman unfaithful to her marriage. His words apply to women tempted by men as well. The son remains responsible for his choices, however persuasive her invitation becomes. Listen to how the father prepares him.
Proverbs 5:1-2 NASB: My son, give attention to my wisdom, Incline your ear to my understanding; 2 That you may observe discretion And your lips may reserve knowledge.
The father begins by asking for his son’s attention. Discretion means learning to recognize what a situation really is. An invitation can seem generous while drawing you toward destruction. You need wisdom that sees beyond what feels attractive now. Notice the son’s lips in verse 2 are to preserve knowledge, while her lips in verse 3 drip honey. He must hold onto truth when another voice starts making sin sound reasonable. Therefore, the father gives this instruction to his son before he meets this kind of woman. Strong feelings are a poor setting for inventing moral convictions. The stronger our desires are, the less reasonable yesterday’s restraint sounds. Teachability is part of sexual faithfulness, and if you silence every warning, you leave desire free to make its own case. Desire seldom makes that case alone, because another voice is usually ready to help it.
Proverbs 5:3 NASB For the lips of an adulteress drip honey And smoother than oil is her speech;
The father freely admits that this temptress’ invitation is appealing. Honey tastes good, and oil keeps things moving smoothly. Her words offer pleasure without making the danger feel threatening. Perhaps she makes the son feel admired, understood, or unusually important. There is no use in pretending that the attraction feels unpleasant.
Someone may be thinking, “I find someone attractive, and sex feels good. Why make it so heavy?” The Bible agrees with more of that than you might expect. Noticing that someone is attractive is not sin, and God is the one who made sex feel good. Yet even our culture treats sex as more than a pleasant sensation. If someone passed around your vacation photos, you would shrug it off or might even be pleased. But if they passed around a private photo of you, you would feel violated. We rightly insist on sexual consent, because we sense that sex reaches the whole person. Or imagine the person you were intimate with saying, “It was fun, but anyone would have done.” No one wants to be interchangeable, because sex is about the person and not only the pleasure. Paul writes that someone joined to a prostitute “is one body with her” (1 Corinthians 6:16). He does not mean that sex automatically creates a marriage. He means the bodily union is real even when people refuse the commitment in which it belongs. The bride in the Song of Solomon (2:16) says, “My beloved is mine, and I am his” and sex was made to say that with the body. That is why its sweetness runs so deep, and why its misuse cuts so deep. Thus, verse 4 asks the son to consider “the end” of its abuse.
Proverbs 5:4 NASB But in the end she is bitter as wormwood, Sharp as a two-edged sword.
Wormwood is a bitter plant, and a two-edged sword wounds. The relationship that promises pleasure can become a source of grief. Because sex involves the whole person, its consequences reach beyond the bedroom. You entrust someone with an intimacy that leaves you exposed to rejection. When that intimacy deepens your attachment, you may begin expecting greater commitment. Yet the other person may want the pleasure without sharing your life. What felt like being wanted can become the pain of being discarded. Even sincere affection cannot remove that danger or make the relationship faithful to God. The honey of verse 3 and the sword of verse 4 together teach that…
Sex reaches the whole person, so both its sweetness and its wounds run deep.
The wound rarely stays between the two people involved. In adultery, a spouse discovers that the one trusted most has been living a hidden life. Children may lose the stability they depended upon without choosing any of this. The unmarried carry their wounds forward, and a future marriage may inherit them. These wounds may develop slowly, but immediate pleasure does not make them unreal. The honey tells you how the invitation tastes. But the invitation that promises to enrich your life leads you toward death.
Proverbs 5:5-6 NASB Her feet go down to death, Her steps take hold of Sheol. 6 She does not ponder the path of life; Her ways are unstable, she does not know it.
Sheol means the realm of the dead. All who follow her invitation are moving toward death, however alive she makes them feel. As confident as she is, her directions are worthless because she herself is wandering. The word for “unstable” describes someone wandering without a home. The same root describes Cain, who became “a vagrant and a wanderer” (Genesis 4:12). Yet she “does not know it.” Proverbs 4:19 said the same of every wicked path. I know many people who watched this road ruin someone we love and swore they would never walk it. But as the same desire came to them they slowly began to believe their road would end somewhere else. You are not the exception to where this road leads. You are only the latest person to believe you are. If we know this, why can a destructive invitation still speak so persuasively to our hearts? The answer lies in how God made us dependent on Him and in what sin has done to our desires.
God is the only being who has life within Himself. No one gave Him existence, and no one supplies something He lacks. When theologians speak of the aseity of God, they mean that God exists from Himself. Acts 17:25 says He does not need anything, “since He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things.” Imagine what that means for how God relates to others. He never needed anyone to notice Him. He has never wondered whether He is wanted, and no one’s rejection can make Him less. When Scripture shows God angry at His people’s unfaithfulness, it is not the anger of a wounded ego. It is holy love refusing to let His people trade Him for what will destroy them. This does not mean that God is alone. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have shared perfect love from all eternity. Jesus prayed, “You loved Me before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24). God did not create us to fill an emptiness in Himself. When He loves us, He is not looking for something He lacks. He loves out of fullness, to give rather than to get.
Our existence is entirely different. Everything about us is received. We receive existence from God. We receive bodies we did not choose. We receive names, language, families, cultures, histories, abilities, and eventually much of our understanding of ourselves through relationships with others. Before any human being sinned, God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18). Adam’s need for companionship was part of his good creation. God could satisfy Adam completely as his God while also providing human companionship. God Himself chose to meet Adam’s need through another person. Therefore, receiving affection from others means receiving something good from God Himself. So the deepest truth about our longing for love is that…
We were made to receive love, not to seize it.
Think about why being wanted matters so much. You can decide to spend an evening alone. You cannot decide, by yourself, that another person will gladly spend it with you. That person must choose to welcome you. When someone listens carefully, you receive evidence that your life matters to someone outside yourself. Being loved involves receiving something you cannot manufacture by wishing harder. That makes relationships precious, and it also makes us vulnerable. We cannot control whether another person will give what we long to receive.
Sexual attention can intensify that experience of being wanted. Someone appears to welcome you in a deeply personal, bodily way. Our culture tells us to look inside, find what we desire, and be true to ourselves. There is something right in that, because God cares about the heart and hates a double life. Yet our hearts want conflicting things, so which desire is the real you? And no one can bless himself and believe it. Many who insist on being true to themselves are waiting for someone’s desire to tell them who they are. But another person’s attraction cannot carry the weight of proving that your life matters. When you require that reassurance, losing the relationship can start to feel unbearable. You may then defend what God forbids because you fear losing what it seems to give you.
Marriage is one form of that companionship, with its own particular gifts. It is not ‘the’ measure of complete humanity. Jesus never married, yet His human life was fully good. An unmarried person is not half a person awaiting completion. Friendship, family, and the church also provide real opportunities to know and love others. Still, an unfulfilled desire for marriage can hurt. Faithfulness does not require calling that desire shameful or pretending the hurt is small.
Our dependence explains why affection reaches so deeply into our lives, but sin explains why we can pursue it wrongly. In Genesis 3, human beings rejected God’s command and claimed the right to decide what was good and we still do that. A good longing becomes sinful when we demand its fulfillment on terms we choose against God. “I want to be loved” becomes “I must have this person’s love, whatever obedience requires.” We start treating the strength of our desire as authority to overrule our Creator.
Notice the change. Wanting companionship does not make us guilty. Wanting an intimacy that is not ours to have, and cultivating that desire, does. Feeling lonely does not authorize us to seize whatever relieves loneliness. The sin lies in the forbidden desire and our refusal of God’s rule. We were made to receive good things from Him. We were never promised every good thing immediately, or through whichever person attracts us.
Obedience can therefore require trusting God while a longing remains unmet. That is painful because it means admitting that we cannot arrange every part of life ourselves. Temptation offers a shortcut around that dependence. It promises that taking this relationship will finally give us what we lack. But you cannot trust God as your provider while treating His wisdom as an obstacle to receiving His good.
Picture a married woman whose coworker listens well and makes her laugh. Her husband seems preoccupied with bills, schedules, and the children. Being noticed feels good, so she begins seeking more time with the coworker. Soon she shares disappointments she no longer brings to her husband. She guards these conversations because she knows they would trouble him. The longing for attention is understandable and the growing secrecy reveals the direction she has chosen. She is also comparing selected moments with the burdens of a shared life. The coworker does not yet have to endure conflict, exhausted evenings, or responsibility for her household. He may seem wonderfully attentive within a relationship that carries few ordinary obligations. That difference does not prove he would make a better husband. The same temptation works with the sexes reversed. Your feelings may explain why the invitation attracts you. They cannot tell you whether following it is faithful. Hear the father’s next command.
Proverbs 5:7-8 NASB Now then, my sons, listen to me And do not depart from the words of my mouth. 8 Keep your way far from her And do not go near the door of her house,
He now addresses “my sons,” extending the warning to all who listen. His command concerns the road before it concerns the bedroom. Keep far from her. Do not approach her door. He wants his sons to stop arranging opportunities for temptation. Distance allows them to act on wisdom before desire becomes harder to resist. The father’s strategy is distance before resistance, because…
Faithfulness is kept far from the door, not won at the threshold.
We can keep feeding an attraction while telling ourselves, “Nothing has happened.” Yet we may already be cultivating lust, concealing intimacy, or betraying trust. A dating couple keeps staying together later, becoming more physically involved. Each evening ends with a promise to be more careful next time. Yet they repeat the circumstances that make obedience harder. Verse 8 directs them to change those circumstances. If being alone together repeatedly becomes an opportunity for sexual sin, they need to change how they spend time together. Promising restraint while preserving the same opportunities leaves the problem untouched. You may need to seek help from a mature Christian who will speak honestly. These particular precautions are applications of wisdom, not additional biblical commands.
For a married person, distance may mean ending conversations that cultivate attraction outside marriage. Even conversations about legitimate struggles in marriage can become dangerous when we begin seeking emotional intimacy with someone to whom we are romantically attached. Ordinary friendships between men and women can honor God, and appropriate counsel can help a troubled marriage. But flirtation, romantic expectations, and deception reveal a different direction. You may recognize that direction, or you may excuse it as harmless friendship. Consider what you are encouraging through these conversations. Are you inviting romantic attention or concealing exchanges because they reveal your intentions? If so, continuing because the attention feels good is choosing to approach the door.
If you have already crossed a boundary, you can still turn back. Further involvement will make repentance more costly, so act now. Stop the secrecy and seek wise pastoral help about truthful disclosure. If your marriage needs attention, bring that need into the light. Your spouse’s failures do not make him or her responsible for your betrayal. Even a satisfying marriage cannot remove your capacity to covet another person. Faithfulness includes taking responsibility for your own heart. Refusing to turn back puts more of your life at risk than you may realize.
Proverbs 5:9-11 NASB Or you will give your vigor to others And your years to the cruel one; 10 And strangers will be filled with your strength And your hard-earned goods will go to the house of an alien; 11 And you groan at your final end, When your flesh and your body are consumed;
The father describes what the son stands to lose. His vigor, years, and hard-earned goods pass into other hands. The “cruel one” may be the wronged husband or someone who exploits him. The precise circumstances matter less than the cost. What promised to enrich his life consumes what he worked to build. His body wears down, and he groans over the outcome. His lament turns from what he has lost to the instruction he rejected.
Proverbs 5:12-14 NASB And you say, "How I have hated instruction! And my heart spurned reproof! 13 "I have not listened to the voice of my teachers, Nor inclined my ear to my instructors! 14 "I was almost in utter ruin In the midst of the assembly and congregation."
The man had teachers who warned him, but he treated their correction as an obstacle. Now he sees that the instruction he resisted was meant to protect him. When desire is persuading us, a warning can sound like an unnecessary restriction. We can become so concerned about what obedience would deny us that we overlook what disobedience could take away. The warning asks him to surrender a forbidden pleasure to preserve the life that pleasure threatens. He rejects that surrender, but he cannot escape the cost. His strength and hard-earned goods pass into other hands, and his ruin is now exposed before the community. What he pursued in private has brought public shame and damaged his standing among his own people. He refused to surrender the pleasure, and now he grieves what pursuing it has cost him. His regret reveals that…
Forbidden pleasure takes more than it ever gives.
Think about who stands to lose when the secret comes out. Your spouse must decide whether to believe anything you say. Your children may wonder whether you ever really believed the lesson you taught them were legitimate. They may use your example in the future as an excuse to justify their own unfaithfulness or tolerate a serial cheater. Your brothers and sister in Christ are discredited by your sin. You gave the world a reason to believe that Christians are hypocrites and have no real power over sin than anyone else. Exposure can undo in a day what took decades to build, and that is only the loss you can see.
Suppose no one ever finds out and nothing visible is lost. Something has still been taken. You have lost the freedom to be fully known, because your intimate relationship must stay hidden. The people who love you most now love a version of the person you pretend to be. The disguise wins their approval while keeping you from the satisfaction of being known and loved for who you really are. You know that they are responding to what you’ve shown them. Their affection therefore cannot settle your deeper uncertainty about whether you are lovable when honestly known.
Even if the relationship becomes public and the two lovers eventually marry, its history will affect their trust of one another on some level. Each has witnessed each other’s willingness to betray a spouse. Having been chosen does not erase the question, “Could I eventually receive the same treatment?” The deception that protected their closeness can become a reason to question it. And suspicion makes that closeness harder to enjoy.
Furthermore, you will not be able to fully thank God for the enjoyment you derive from the forbidden relationship, because you know He didn’t authorize it. You may thank Him that the consequences were not worst. But there is a high chance that will struggle with a nagging insecurity in the back of your mind towards God. And every day you practice hiding, you become someone who hides more easily. Adam and Eve lost something before they lost Eden. They lost the ability to stand before God and each other unashamed.
Paul names sexually immoral people among the unrighteous who will not go to Heaven when they die. I have no doubt that that thought terrorizes many. I realize that some of us may be carrying guilt over our sexual sin. Others may be struggling with being betrayed and carrying wounds we did not choose. But there is hope still. Paul tells Christians about three different types of wounds Christ heals when you trust and hand your life over to Him.
1 Corinthians 6:11 NASB Such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.
“Justified” means God declares us not guilty before the highest court in the universe. We deserve God’s judgment, yet Jesus lived the obedience we failed to give and took the punishment we deserved when He died. Then He rose again. Everyone who turns from sin and trusts Him is counted right with God at once, before his life is repaired. No one can condemn you if you have truly entrusted yourself to Christ.
“Washed” means we are made clean and no longer have to feel the shame of our past. Sexual sin can leave us feeling dirty long after we know we are forgiven. At a dinner where the host scorned her, a woman known for her sexual sin wept at Jesus’ feet (Luke 7:37-38); yet He did not pull away. He endured the shame of the cross so that we need not keep carrying ours.
“Sanctified” means God has set you apart as His own, and what He sets apart He goes on to change. Paul said the man joined to a prostitute is one body with her, but he adds, “the one who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with Him” (1 Corinthians 6:17). Trusting Christ joins you to Him in a bond deeper than any sexual union, and His Spirit begins renewing a mind that sin has trained.
Forgiveness changes your standing at once, but cravings and memories usually change slowly. So, if your head still feels broken, the cross has not failed. Jesus says in Matthew 12:20 “A battered reed He will not break.” That means that He does not crush people who are already bent and barely holding together. He doesn’t get exasperated with your brokenness and decide to finish the job of breaking you completely. If you were sinned against, He is the God who “heals the brokenhearted” (Psalm 147:3). We were made to receive love, not to seize it. At the cross, the love we tried to take by betrayal is given to us by the One we betrayed. He gave Himself to make unfaithful people His own. So if you are near the door, turn back today. If you have gone through it, come to Him confessing, because His promise to His people holds even when we fail.
