in an interview in Playboy, and you are a Southern Baptist, you get in trouble. People laugh at you. People think you are odd. People don’t want to understand you. You almost lose the campaign.

That’s what happens when you take this ‘following the words of Jesus’ process too seriously.

Or maybe it’s not taking it too seriously.

In Matthew 5:27-30, Jesus says that he isn’t really interested in technical obedience, in being able to say “But I didn’t touch.” What he understands pretty clearly is that when we are thinking about something, we aren’t thinking about something else. When we are thinking about green, for example, we aren’t thinking about blue. When we are thinking about “Lost” we aren’t thinking about “CSI: New York.” When we are thinking about ice cream sundaes, we are not thinking about successfully completing marathons.

When we are thinking about that girl’s body we are not thinking about loving our wife.

In fact, when we take a second look or a third look toward her, we are taking a second step and a third step away from understanding more about our wife, about how to love her in the same way, with the same intensity and purity that Christ loves the church and gave himself up for her.

Adultery is violating the marriage covenant. And the violations start when you turn away, not when you touch someone else.

It’s funny. I think, “How would Jesus know? Why so much intensity that he uses the image of gouging out an eye or chopping off a hand?”

Because I’m pretty sure he wasn’t really wanting people to do that.

But maybe the answer is in the image I quoted, the one from Ephesians 5 about Christ loving the church.

Maybe, just maybe, he understood being the rejected one.