I'm going to talk about the ninth commandment which says, • "You shall not covet your
neighbor's wife."
I want to start off with giving you a quote from Jesus from the book of Matthew.
He says, "But I say to you, everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed
adultery with her in his heart."
So, the ninth commandment teaches us to not lust.
So, what is lust?
Well, in order to understand lust, we want to compare it to love.
Love, for its part, recognizes the dignity of the human person.
In other words, a person should be loved, not used.
But, lust treats the human person as an object.
Lust also is one of the seven deadly sins.
What that means is that when it reaches the point of maturity in a person, it leads that
person to always choose lust over God, which means hell.
That is why we say it is deadly.
Lust also leads to war, both within the family and outside it.
Lust is harmful for a healthy marriage relationship.
So, the ninth commandment prohibits pornography as well as immodesty.
I'm going to read what the Catechism has to say about this.
This is from paragraph 2524.
"The forms taken by modesty vary from one culture to another.
Everywhere, however, modesty exists as an intuition of the spiritual dignity proper
to man.
It is born with the awakening consciousness of being a subject.
Teaching modesty to children and adolescents means awakening in them respect for the human
person."
So, I want to focus on this part here first.
"It is born with the awakening consciousness of being a subject."
what that means is that, we realize the importance of modesty when we feel what it is like to
be treated like an object.
That's not a good feeling.
We realize the importance of modesty at that point.
Also, the next line, "Teaching modesty to children and adolescents means awakening in
them respect for the human person."
Basically it teaches them human dignity.
That is very important.
The ninth commandment also prohibits the use of contraception and homosexual relationships.
These two things are both against the natural law, but they also have another problem in
their relationship with lust, which as I said before is one of the seven deadly sins.
Lust is sometimes the reason for these things.
These things open the door to lust.
They have a tenancy to teach or encourage lustful thoughts.
On the other hand, the possibility of having a child creates a sort of resistance to lust.
Consider this.
If a person is open to children then that person is of a mind of denying themselves
for another.
You have to be willing to deny yourself for another to be open to children.
And that way of denying yourselves for others is helpful for marriage.
That is the attitude that we want for a good marriage as well.
That creates a resistance to lust.
It's not treating someone as an object which is what lust is about.
Now not every relationship that fits in accord with the natural law has the possibility of
having children.
There can be people who can't have children, woman who are too old to have children and
so forth.
But there's a difference between the natural inability to have children and the proactive
effort actually remove the chance of having children.
In the natural case, that couple may still be open to children even though they can't have them.
Also, I want to add that there can be a good case, a good use of contraception when needed
for serious medical reasons, but only as long as the focus is to address those serious medical
problems, and the focus is not reducing children.
I want to give you another quote from Jesus.
This is the sixth of the beatitudes that he gave.
It goes, "Blessed are the clean of heart, for they will see God."
Notice here how Jesus makes the condition of being able to see God, that's heaven, being
able to see God.
The condition is having a clean heart.
So we should always pray to God for a clean heart.
To wrap up, I want to mention to you a very good resource that you should look into if
you want to know more about this and the details of why the church teaches these things.
This is called the Theology of the Body.
It was written by Saint John Paul II who was a pope not too long ago.
It just goes over every detail.
It is a wonderful resource.
So, I encourage you to look that up.
And with that, I've said all I have to say about the ninth commandment.
May God bless you.
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