Tuesday, March 28, 2017
Fight Porn
At different times during that next decade of battling my sin, experiencing small victories and often as many defeats, I had the thought that marriage might cure me. In the back of my head, I thought I just needed a wife to satisfy all my sexual desire and impatience. So I allowed myself to dive into relationship after relationship, knowing I hadn’t dealt with the impurity that plagued me.
The reality was that no relationship could have ever solved my sexual sin — no relationship, that is, except for knowing Christ. I was looking to girlfriends, and to the hope of a future wife, to fill a craving only God could fill. I was focusing on self-discipline, dating, and marriage, when God was trying to teach me about joy and show me where to find real pleasure.
The Nap That Never Ends
Pornography seems to devour as much (or more) square feet of spiritual ground as any other threat to young Christians today. We need to take this weed more seriously wherever its thorny leaves begin to sprout. However harmless or private it may seem, it is not.
Pornography blinds us to God (Matthew 5:8). It blurs our eyes to his goodness, truth, and beauty.
Pornography trains us to treat women as objects, as less than human. It portrays them as possessions to be used and enjoyed, and then thrown away.
Pornography fuels sex slavery — real people held against their will and raped repeatedly — all over the world, even in the United States, even in your city or the major city near you.
Pornography belittles real beauty — like the fear of the Lord (Proverbs 31:30) — and replaces it with a cheap and fading imitation.
Pornography makes sex small and momentary, like a cigarette, instead of massive and lifelong, like it is in marriage.
Pornography robs us of some of the delight we might have had with our spouse. It keeps us from experiencing and enjoying them and their bodies without a fog of images from our past.
Pornography quickly bankrupts trust in a relationship. It encourages us to lie and hide from others, to walk in darkness and then build walls around ourselves in the darkness.
Pornography grossly stunts our maturity, the development of our mind and our gifts — our abilities to understand God and love others.
Pornography pursues an undergraduate degree in selfishness, training us over and over to focus on ourselves, prefer ourselves, and serve ourselves.
Pornography keeps us from all kinds of ministry, disqualifying many and demotivating even more.
Pornography is teaching many children an awful, evil distortion of love and sex even before their parents explain the truth to them.
Pornography is not a simple guilty pleasure. If we continue pleasing ourselves with it, it will take everything from us. Pornography may cost us Christ and everything he died to give us: forgiveness, freedom, life, hope, peace, and joy. Pornography quietly kidnaps millions and leads them to conscious, never-ending agony, away from God and the glory of being found with him. It enslaves men and women, starving them day after day and never feeding them a full meal, until they’re lost and hungry forever.
Pornography lulls us to sleep. But it’s not sleep; it’s death. It feels like a short, comfortable nap, but we never wake up. And pornography is force-fed to us in our society, pouring out of every pore of our media and technology. The weed has relentlessly spread everywhere, even where it’s unwanted, and it will kill us if we let it.
Nine Ways to Wake Up
One of the lightbulb moments for me in my journey to victory over pornography was realizing that it wasn’t only a self-control issue. The fruit of the Spirit doesn’t work or grow like that. Our broken desires for images or videos suggest all the fruit is rotting, not just self-control. Our fight for purity is not merely a fight for self-control. It’s also a pursuit and expression of love, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and joy. When we focus on will-power and self-denial and neglect the rest, we rob ourselves of most of the weapons God has given us for the war.
Every time we look away from immodesty, we look away in love for our (future) spouse, our (future) children, and the immodest person in front of us, someone made in the image of God.
When we refuse to experiment with sexual sin, we celebrate our peace with God, bought at infinite cost with the blood of his Son. We refuse to re-crucify him with more rebellion, and choose to rest in the forgiveness and life he purchased for us.
Not indulging in pornography or any other sexual activity before marriage may be the brightest billboard of patience today. No one in the world expects you not to click, but when you don’t, you quietly tell God (and anyone else who knows) that he and his plan are more than you could have ever dreamed for yourself. Sexual purity is as much or more about patience than it is about self-control, because God wants you to enjoy sex in the best possible way — in the safety and stability of marriage.
By rejecting pornography’s twisted, corrupted distortion of sex, we trade manipulation and abuse for kindness. Instead of learning to use people for our own desires, we teach the world how to live for the interests of others.
Pornography has hidden itself in countless fibers of the worldwide web, spreading wickedness into many corners of our world. When we refuse its invitation, we diminish its reach and influence, even just by one. And we give ourselves the opportunity, instead, to be an agent for goodness, to use social media as a channel for an entirely different message. We can fill the web with links to real truth and beauty, to articles, videos, and more that declare the greatness of our God and his love for us.
No one praises faithfulness to God when it looks like it costs you absolutely nothing. Even when it seems like everyone else your age is diving headlong into the shallow highs of lust, sexual activity, and pornography — and bragging about it — we can live (and wait) dramatically differently. There’s nothing strange or radical about falling in and indulging with the world, watching the sexually explicit movie everyone else is watching, or reading the sexually explicit romance novel all your classmates seem to love. What will stand out is our happy resolve to resist every evil in faithfulness to our King and Friend in heaven.
Pornography’s sex education encourages forceful manipulation and even brutality. It’s simply not real sex. Real sex — the sex that two people can enjoy for a lifetime without getting bored or offending God — is patient, selfless, and gentle.
Lastly, the battle for purity is not a battle against your joy — not stealing any real pleasure or happiness from you at all. It’s a battle for your joy, yes in heaven, but even now. You might be trading away a moment of pleasure, but you’re getting an eternity of it in return.
Refuse to Click and Choose More of God
Those who choose to see less today will see more forever. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8). There are things we see and indulge in this life that blind us to God. There is nothing more spectacular and satisfying than seeing and enjoying God, but we so quickly and cavalierly trade that experience for a few measly minutes of titillation.
Every time we expose and entertain ourselves with impurity, we’re sacrificing our awareness and knowledge of the highest goodness and fullest majesty and greatest love anyone has ever experienced. And every time we pass on pornography or other sexually stimulating material, we prepare ourselves to see and enjoy more of our greatest Treasure.
Jesus says, “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field” (Matthew 13:44). When we refuse to click in pursuit of greater joy in Jesus, we are selling what this world has to offer and buying a priceless treasure filled with true beauty and real happiness.
Come & Die:
"Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus."— 2 Timothy 2:3
No, you have not. We recruit soldiers by showing shiny weapons, technologically advanced machines and systems, adventurous locales, and strong, healthy men and women using them, engaging in them, and bravely enjoying them.
But not Paul. He will not whitewash the mission. As Christ says, “Count the cost” and “Take up your cross” and “Die to self,” Paul’s recruitment slogan is: Share in suffering.
In 2 Timothy 2:7, he writes, “Think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything.” He wants disciples of Jesus to consider what he’s just laid out for them, which is that Christianity is about suffering like a soldier, training like an athlete, and working hard like a farmer. One thing these three examples have in common is a stubborn commitment to a diligent daily grind for a payoff that is not instant or immediate.
“Think over what I say.” Mull this over. Consider this. Count the cost. So that when hardship comes — and as Gary Demarest says, “Following Christ causes problems” — you are not acting as if something strange is happening to you (1 Pet. 4:12). Instead, you have a vision of what will be, of the “eternal glory” (2 Tim. 2:10) that lay ahead.
When Shackleton advertised for recruits for his venture to Antarctica in 1914, he did it this way:
Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.
“When Christ bids a man,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer says, “he bids him come and die.”
Ah, but then he lives! Really, truly lives. He can’t be stopped. There ain’t hardly nothing you can do to him.
We might rewrite Shackleton’s ad thusly:
Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition guaranteed.
My Prayer For The Groom:
I pray that you will be lionhearted and lamblike in your servant leadership.
This week, Julia and I will have the privilege of participating in Julia's sister's wedding. We are excited to watch as they are joined together by God, family and friends. I have been to a few weddings since graduating from college and becoming a married man myself, and one of the charges which I like to give future husbands is the prayer that they would be lionhearted and lamblike in their servant leadership. Julia enjoys laughing at my little statement but in honor of the wedding tonight I wanted to take a minute or a few lines and explain what I mean when I charge husbands to be lionhearted and lamblike in servant leadership.
The reason I am using the title “Lionhearted and Lamblike” to refer to the Christian husband as head of his wife is because the husband is called to lead like Jesus who is the Lion of Judah (Rev. 5:5) and the Lamb of God (Rev. 5:6)—he was lionhearted and lamblike, strong and meek, tough and tender, aggressive and responsive, bold and brokenhearted. He sets the pattern for manhood.
Lionhearted:
A husband must be lionhearted in the area of protection and provision.
First, consider protection. In Ephesians 5:25–27 Paul shows the husband how to love his wife—that is, how to exercise the kind of servant leadership that Christ did:
Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.
In the words “gave himself up for her,” we hear the saving sacrifice of Jesus Christ. When Christ gave himself for us, he took our place. He bore our sins and became a curse for us and died for us; and because of all this we are reconciled to God and saved from—protected from!—his wrath. If there ever was an example of leadership that took the initiative to save and protect his bride, this is it. So when Paul calls a husband to be the head of his wife by loving like Christ when he leads, whatever else he means, he means: Protect her at all costs.
Second, a man must be lionhearted as provider.
Consider Ephesians 5:28–29:
“In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church.”
The words nourish and cherish are significant. The word nourish (ektrephei) is most often used in the Bible for raising children and providing them with what they need, but the part of that meaning that applies here is not that the husband is a parent but that he is a caring provider. It is used more in the sense of Genesis 45:11, where Joseph says to his brothers, “I will provide [ekthrepsÅ] for you, for there are yet five years of famine to come.” So the point is at least that the husband who leads like Christ takes the initiative to see to it that the needs of his wife and children are met. He provides for them.
Lamblike:
Lamblike leadership is also found in Ephesians 5:25, "Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her." Lamblike leadership is tied to husbands loving their wives with the same unreserved, selfless, and sacrificial love that Christ has for the church. Christ gave everything He had; including His own life, for the sake of His church and that is the standard of sacrifice for a husband's love of his wife.
A lionhearted husband will take a bullet for his spouse (protection) but the lamblike husband will die to self on a daily basis and lead her sacrificially. For example, a husband must be lamblike in the way he talks with his wife, shepherds his children and selflessly leads the family. The same man whose hands may be tough from work must take the time to tenderly massage his spouse. The same man whose words may be sharp with critics must be slow to speak and quick to listen to his spouse and children. A husband must take the time to nurture and build up his wife with words of affirmation and acts of kindness. Lamblike leadership reveals itself in the way the husbands "washes his wife in the water of the word", the way the husband handles the bills, house/car maintenance, and other demands which encroach upon the family.
In conclusion, the charge to be lionhearted and lamblike is a Biblical charge which will take a lifetime to fulfill. Being a husband is not easy (trust me I know), some days we fall down more than we stand, however there is encouragement. The encouragement is that Christ does not call us to do what he won’t empower us to do. Consider Philippians 4:13, “I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” Husbands are called to do some very hard things.
Leadership is not easy. But Christ will give you the strength. So be encouraged. Leadership is hard. But you’re a man! Therefore, I pray that you will be lionhearted and lamblike in your servant leadership.
A Modern Day Parable:
Sacrificial, unselfish love does that. It takes ugliness and produces splendor. It’s beauty for ashes. The love he displayed for her looked nothing like the love found in most romance novels. He did not tell her false things about herself just to get her in bed. No, he told her the truth. She was filthy and defiled, and he did not hide it from her. But his love had movement. It was action. His love transformed her himself. He forgave her unfaithfulness. He clothed her in beauty. And he did it in a shocking, necessary way. He laid down his life for her, even before she was pretty. He gave himself up for her, even before she became his and his alone. And this miraculous transformation cost him his life. When a perfect groom loves an imperfect bride like he did, something happens to the bride. She can’t possibly stay the same. His perfection becomes hers when he takes her filth with him in death. But this groom was no ordinary groom. Not only did his death produced beauty for his bride, but the groom held power over death. Death could not hold him. He beat it, and he reclaimed his bride. He reunited with his bride and promised never to leave or forsake her. This love, this action, shook the whole earth. When a perfect groom loves an unfaithful, undeserving bride like he did, it changes things.
What Does It Mean To Accept Jesus:
“You turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God.” (1 Thessalonians 1:9)
You and I are not integrated, unified, whole persons. Our hearts are deeply divided, more than we realize.
Our reality within is something like a board room. Big table. Leather chairs. Coffee. Bottled water. Whiteboard. A committee sits around the table. There is the social self, the private self, the work self, the sexual self, the recreational self, the religious self, the childhood memories self, and others. The committee is arguing and debating and voting. Constantly agitated. Divided. Upset. Rarely can the committee within come to a unanimous, wholehearted decision.
At some level, we feel the strain of our complicated selves. We feel stressed. We feel distracted, divided, pulled from one moment to the next by forces within we don’t even understand. We tell ourselves it’s because we are so busy, with so many responsibilities. But the truth is, we are just indecisive. We are held back, torn apart, by small thoughts of Jesus.
A person in this condition can “accept Jesus” in either of two ways. (By the way, I do not question the validity of “accepting Jesus.” I do not sneer at that concept, as some do. John 1:12 describes Christian conversion that way: “But to all who did receive him . . . .”) But one way we might falsely “accept Jesus” is just to invite him onto our committee. Give Jesus a seat at the table. Give him a vote too. Let him make his case, and then the rest of “us” will decide for or against. But, if this is how we accept Jesus, then he is just one influence among others, easily offset by the other voices, which yell and demand and threaten. This way of “inviting Jesus into your life” is common here in the Bible Belt, where I live. But it isn’t Christianity, as defined by the New Testament. It’s adding an element of religion, as a minor influence, into my already-complicated self.
The other way to “accept Jesus” is, struck by his glory in the gospel, to turn to him from the idols and say to him, “My life isn’t working. Please come in and fire my whole committee, every last one of them, and get them out of me. I hand myself over to you now. I want you to run my entire life. I want to serve the living and true God. Lead me into how that works.” Accepting Jesus this way is not complication; it is salvation.
Accepting Jesus is not just adding Jesus. It is also subtracting the idols.
Monday, March 20, 2017
The Fear of Death:
Jesus longs so intensely for you to have this gift that he pleads with the Father to give it to you:
“Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.” (John 17:24)
This supreme request is the great culmination of Jesus’s prayer in John 17. That you may receive this gift is the reason why he manifested the Father’s name to you (John 17:6), gave you the Father’s words (John 17:8, 14), and guards you so you will not be lost (John 17:12). It is why he prays that you will be kept from the evil one (John 17:15), know the joy of helping others believe in him (John 17:20), and experience the sanctifying wonder of knowing and living the truth (John 17:17, 19).
More than any other good thing Jesus asks from the Father for you, he wants you to be with him forever. More than anything else, he wants you to see and savor the glory that the Father bestowed on him from eternity past (John 17:5, 24). For he knows that nothing else you ever experience will provide you such profound and lasting joy and pleasure (Psalm 16:11).
What Do You Fear Most?
But Jesus’s fervent prayers for you come with a sober implication, one that makes you recoil, even fear. In fact, one day you might find yourself pleading with God to give you the very opposite of what Jesus wants for you. The answer to Jesus’s prayer eventually requires your physical death. Unless Jesus returns first, you must die before you experience the forever fullness of joy in his glorious presence.
We must endure what we hate and fear most in life in order to enjoy what we love and long for most.
Yes, we hate death and resist it — and we are right to do so. God originally created us to live, not die. Death is a curse we bear, the tragic wages of rejecting God and his kingdom (Romans 6:23).
Nowhere does the Bible encourage us to view death itself as a good thing. Death is not a good thing; it’s a horrible, evil thing. Anyone who has watched loved ones die can attest to its hideousness. Death is our mortal enemy (1 Corinthians 15:26).
How Is Death Gain?
If that’s true, why does God count precious the death of his saints (Psalm 116:15)? And why do his saints even call death gain (Philippians 1:21)? Because in that most horrible, most evil moment of the death of the Son of God himself, death as we fear it — the extinguishing of our life and the seeming loss of our soul and joy — was killed! Jesus conquered our great enemy when he rose from the dead (Romans 4:25; Revelation 1:18), and will ultimately destroy death forever (1 Corinthians 15:26).
In fact, so powerful, so complete is Jesus’s defeat of death that he speaks of it as if Christians no longer even experience it:
“I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.” (John 11:25–26)
It isn’t death itself that is precious or gain to us. It is the Resurrection and the Life, who has removed death’s sting and swallowed it up in victory (1 Corinthians 15:54–55), in whom we are receiving an eternal inheritance beyond our wildest dreams (Ephesians 1:11), and in whose glorious presence we will experience unsurpassed joy forevermore (Psalm 16:11). He is precious to us. He is our great gain in death.
Prepare Through Prayer
When our earthly assignment from Jesus is done (Acts 20:24), he will call us to be with him to enjoy most what we are made to most enjoy: him. This will make death gain for us on that day (Philippians 1:21).
Jesus is eager to give us this great gain, and he wants us to grow in our eagerness to receive it. How do we do that? Like he does. We ask the Father for it! We join Jesus in praying for the time we will finally see him in all his glory. We ask him to decrease the hold that the fear of death has on us due to unbelief in our hearts. And we ask him to give us such faith and longing to be with Christ that we no longer wish to live as long as possible here, but only long enough to faithfully finish our course (Acts 20:24). Because to finally be with our Savior will be so much better (Philippians 1:23).
Whatever It Takes, Lord
Someday Jesus’s prayer for us to be with him will overrule our prayer to be spared physical death. And when it does, we will know such joy and pleasures that we will wonder why we ever felt any reluctance to pass through the valley of its shadow (Psalm 23:4).
Whatever it takes, Lord, increase my faith and joy in the truth that death is gain for me, so that I can “let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also.” Do not let the fear of death cause me to resist your will for me, and let me die in a way that declares that Christ is gain.
The Danger of Religious Ritualism:
The prophets also warned the people about this. Their social injustice—exploitation of the poor, the orphan, the widow, the stranger—would also bring about God’s judgment. But why were God’s people so confident that judgment would not befall them? In a word (or two): religious ritualism. They were convinced that simply going through the motions of worship was sufficient to keep God happy and secure his blessing. Idolatry, social injustice, and religious ritualism.
Malachi, whose name means “My Messenger,” confronted God’s people about these same three sins. Even though he preached to Judah many, many years after Jeremiah, the people of God continued to sin against him in the exact same way. Despite having experienced the horrors of exile and having seen God’s faithfulness in returning them to their land some years later, the people go back to sinning in the same way as their forefathers.
In Malachi 2:11 we read, “Judah has acted treacherously, and a detestable thing has been done in Israel and in Jerusalem. For Judah has profaned the Lord’s sanctuary, which He loves, and has married the daughter of a foreign god.” God’s people were warned against marrying those who worship foreign gods because the result would be their own idolatry. This happened to Solomon (1 Kings 11), to Israel in the wilderness (Numbers 25), and now we see it again. Marriage to those who worshiped other gods is particularly pernicious because it inevitably leads to the people themselves worshiping other gods.
In addition to idolatry, Malachi castigated the people for social injustice. In 2:17 we read, "You have wearied the Lord with your words. Yet you ask, ‘How have we wearied Him?’ When you say, ‘Everyone who does what is evil is good in the Lord’s sight, and He is pleased with them,’ or ‘Where is the God of justice?"
In response to this attitude that God is unconcerned with justice, he states that he will judge their own injustice: "I will come to you in judgment, and I will be ready to witness against sorcerers and adulterers; against those who swear falsely; against those who oppress the widow and the fatherless, and cheat the wage earner; and against those who deny justice to the foreigner. They do not fear Me,’ says the Lord of Hosts.”
As before, the broken vertical relationship (idolatry) has led to a broken horizontal relationship (social injustice). And God is imminently concerned that his people treat others well because his people are to be a light to other nations. Of course this includes proper worship (the vertical relationship), but it’s also highlighted in how His people treat the least of these around Him.
And, just as before, the people believed they had nothing to fear because of their religious ritualism. They thought all that was needed to earn God’s favor and avoid his wrath was to go through the motions of a relationship with Him. The Lord says through Malachi, “When you present a blind animal for sacrifice, is it not wrong? And when you present a lame or sick animal, is it not wrong? . . . You bring stolen, lame, or sick animals. You bring this as an offering! Am I to accept that from your hands?” (Malachi 1:8,13). See, the priests thought that simply going through the motions of religious sacrifice would be sufficient to please Yahweh and avert his wrath, but such was not the case. They displayed a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be in relationship with God and love him fully.
God’s people have been committing this trifecta of sins for quite a long time. It’s these sins that the prophets of the Old Testament preached against before the exile and again after it. And it is these sins for which Jesus in the New Testament castigated the Pharisees. They misunderstood what it meant to have a right relationship with God. As a result, they trusted in their adherence to religious acts to secure a relationship with God, all the while despising him by ignoring the “the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy, and faith” (Matthew 23:23).
And here’s the thing: we continue to commit these same sins today. The thinking so often goes that we can place our hope in our job, bank account, or any number of other things, just as long as we go to church on Sunday, give our tithe, and maybe read the Bible here and there if we need an emotional boost. And don’t worry about the poor, the orphan, the widow, the immigrant, or the refugee because, after all, we went to church this Sunday and we even gave a tithe. Yet this type of thinking is startlingly dangerous—it led to exile in the Old Testament and the rejection of Christ in the New Testament. Let us learn from God’s words through Malachi and seek out a true relationship with God characterized by Jesus’s words in Matthew 22:37–38: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and most important command. The second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.”
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