So you can see the spiritual impact – relationship with God damaged, demonic spirits can enter, conscience is damaged, becomes vulnerable to condemnation, and demonic soul ties are formed. It’s quite a load of stuff isn’t it? But that’s not all.
Remember what I said, something comes into you. So, when God says: you be careful about this sin, because something would change inside you. Something would change, that’s not easy to change back again. So He said: that’s why you keep yourself pure. You will change. Something will happen inside you, and it’ll take some effort to get this damage fixed up.
Now let’s have a look at what happens in the soul. We’re talking about the soul of man. Proverbs 5, 6, and 7 talks quite a bit about sexual sin. Let’s have a look in Proverbs 5:3-5 for example. “For the lips of an immoral woman drip honey, and her mouth is smoother than oil; but in the end she is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death, her steps lay hold of hell.”
Notice what it’s saying there – it’s talking about sexual sin. It says: it’s smoother than oil, lips dripping honey, sweet. What it’s saying is that it’s very sweet. When you start down the path of sexual sin - it’s very sweet; but you see, the end is bitter. Starts sweet; ends bitter. You’ll find that bitterness becomes a problem when people have been involved in sexual sin. Bitter men, bitter women; feeling used in the sexual relationship - expecting intimacy and love; and instead, being rejected and abandoned; so the end – bitterness. When you’re ministering to people, be aware there’ll be bitterness there.
Proverbs 5:5 – “Her feet go down to death, her steps lay hold of hell.” Notice death and hell are spiritual powers. Death causes people to be isolated. Hell torments people. So the two spirits are found very commonly connected to sexual sin: Death – which isolates and numbs; and Hell – which torments. Proverbs 5:22 – “His own iniquities entrap the wicked man, and he is caught in the cords of his sin.”
So that’s Proverbs 5. Let’s have a look at Proverbs 6:32-33 – “Whoever commits adultery with a woman lacks understanding (or heart); for he who does it, destroys his own soul. Wounds and dishonour he will get, and his reproach will not be wiped away.” Isn’t that amazing? The impact in the Bible is very clear. Talking specifically about adultery, and He said: you will get wounds and shame come into your life.
You think about now, public exposure of adultery, anywhere you’ve seen it in the media - it brings tremendous dishonour, and it brings tremendous pain. Everyone despises it. Even if no-one talks about it, when it comes out to the open, people are dishonoured and shamed and wounded.
Let’s have a look in Proverbs 7:25-27 – “Do not let your heart turn aside to her ways, do not stray into her paths; for she has cast down many wounded, and all who were slain by her were strong men. Her house is the way to hell, descending to the chambers of death.”
So, this passage again says of the issue of wounds; and refers again to death and hell. If you want to look at the whole process of temptation, you can see it outlined in Proverbs 6. What I want you to pick up from here is that: there is damage caused in the soul. Wounds, or blows, or cuts to the soul. So exactly what happens? Your soul, we think, is your mind and emotions and your imagination and your will. Let’s have a look at some of the things in the soul.
Firstly, defiling pictures - pictures and memories of sexual experiences. See, your memory works like this – whatever you see, or have experience of, your mind retains a picture of that. If there’s intense pleasure associated with it, or intense pain, it’s more deeply imprinted; and if it’s repeated, it imprints even more. The nature of sexual sin is that whenever people are involved in sexual intimacy, chemicals are released; and thought trees form in the mind; and they are very strong because of the immense amount of chemicals released.
There are pictures in your mind, and you can’t get rid of them - they will come back when you’re praying, come back when you’re having intimacy with your spouse. They just keep coming back - because they’re in you. They’re in your brain. Now, you can do something about them. I’ll show you a little bit later what you can do about the pictures.
Demonic spirits get on them, and use them to manipulate you. You could be having time of worship, and whoosh the picture comes back, then condemn you; because the area of your brain that’s involved in worship, and with God, is the same area involved in sexual intimacy. That’s why when you’re trying to worship God, the part of your mind that gets involved, is the part involved with intimacy - that’s why those pictures come up. If there’s a healthy relationship in marriage, the pictures don’t come up. If you’ve got unhealthy or ungodly sexual relationships, up come the pictures to block your intimacy with God.