Are you discontented with what God has given to you? Kevin Swanson explains in this video that all too often, our eyes are ever-wandering and not content with what God has given to us. Covetousness is to seek after or pursue something that has God has not given to you. When we seek something that God has not intended us to have, we sin. Pride causes us to believe that we are entitled to whatever we desire. Specifically, he identifies that men frequently covet other men’s wives or other women who are not their wife. He declares that we are to mortify our sinful flesh that seeks after things that God has not given to us. He lays out two steps to bring about change. First, there must first be a change of mind that involves a rejecting of the idea that we can freely covet and lust after what God has not given us. Second, there must be a confession, an open confession of sin. If men have lusted and coveted after other women, they must have the honesty and humility to confess to others their sin and also call their sin for what it is. We cannot attempt to downplay the sins of covetousness and idolatry. Philippians 4:11-12 (NKJV) – “I have learned in whatever state I am, to be content: I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound. Everywhere and in all things I have learned both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need.”

Men seek more material things and men covet other men's wives. Men's eyes are fluttering around looking towards sexual objects and material objects and they're not content with what God has given them. To seek out some other sexual object, to covet something else, is to go after something that God has put a sign on it, not for you. He has not identified that to belong to you or to be a gift intended for you. But when you're seeking something that God has put a sign not for you on, you are sending the sin of covetousness and idolatry as well.

That's why adultery and fornication is also associated with idolatry, because we are going after those things that God has not given us, and we're seeking all of these things as if we are, again, our own God and must have whatever we desire. And that is, again, a form of idolatry. Four out of five sins in Colossians, three of which were to mortify, refer to sexual sin. So this is a big one and I think it applies to pretty much any red-blooded American male out there. We are to mortify that sinful flesh that seeks after those sexual objects not belonging to us ergo not our own wife.

It's for the same reason you tell somebody tempted to incest that he is not to lust or desire his own sister. Same reason why you turn to homosexuals, he's not to desire one of the same sex. It's the same reason why you turn to any red-blooded American male and say, if it's not your wife, there is a sign not for you on it, on her, and you are not to lust after her. So first of all, there must be a change of mind, a metanoeo, about other women or pictures of other women. There must be a true sense that there is a not for you sign on all these women, whether it be sisters in Christ or neighbors or pictures of movie stars or whatever it is, God has said that is not an object of your sexual fulfillment.

You have to receive that because God said that. So, first of all, there must be a change of mind concerning all of these women out there and all of these pictures that sell other women as a sexual object. Secondly, it must be a confession. It must be an open confession of sin. Men must have the honesty to stand up in front of the church body or stand up in front of the elders or stand up in front of their wife and say, I have looked at these women to lust after them in my heart.

And I have committed the sin of self-gratification. And I'm claiming it to be a sin. I'm calling it for what it really is, a dastardly, wicked sin in the sight of God, and in my eyes as well. Thank you.