How then was I being lead away to sin by these carnal desires? John writes in 1 John 2:15-16, “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.” This passage in 1 John identifies 3 mediums in us by which the world exploits these desires – (1) the lust of the eyes, (2) the lust of the flesh, and (3) the pride of life. When Adam and Eve sinned in the garden it says about Eve: (Gen. 3:6) “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also to her husband with her; and he did eat.” When she saw that the fruit was good for food it was the lust of the flesh. When she saw that it was pleasant to the eyes this was the lust of the eyes. And when she saw that it was desirable to make her wise this was the pride of life. Let us have a look into our lives. We watch television and see that every other commercial has half-naked women in them or shows some form of flesh. The magazine ads have the same content and so do many of the billboards. The internet ads are filled with the same such ads. Our being is blanketed with areas where the sexual appetite can be enticed – through our eyes. 42% of songs on ten top-selling CDs in 1999 contained sexual content, 41% of which were "very explicit" or "pretty explicit" (Family News in Focus, July 2005). 83% of the programming most frequently watched by adolescents contains some sexual content (Gary Rose, CEO of The Medical Institute, as reported by Focus on the Family 7/8/2005).

We see pornography as a way to take away our loneliness or desire sexual gratification without the responsibilities associated with marriage. These and many other such related problems lead us to indulge in the lust of the flesh and we’re lead to pornography. We have access to the internet and can surf alone and after looking at pornography can erase the browser’s history and delete the cookies without getting caught. We can be so filled with the pride of life that we think we can hide it from everyone else and have them think more of us than we are. We think we’re getting away even though Jesus said that what’s done in darkness will be brought to light (Luke 12:3). These reveal how vulnerable we are to sin if these avenues remain exploitable. So what’s the solution to these three vulnerabilities? Luke 11:34, “The lamp of the body is the eye. Therefore, when your eye is good, your whole body also is full of light. But when your eye is bad, your body also is full of darkness.” The lust of the eyes fills the body with darkness – all sorts of things television and passing by the risqué covers of magazines by the checkouts at the grocery store seem like little, but these add up and fill the body with darkness that ‘make provision for the flesh’ (Romans 13:14). So what do we do? Luke 11:35, “Therefore take heed that the light which is in you is not darkness.” Jesus then speaks of ‘light within us.’ Luke 11:36, “If then your whole body is full of light, having no part dark, the whole body will be full of light, as when the bright shining of a lamp gives you light.” It is very practical to cut off the flesh’s provision. You can hide your eyes when you pass by the magazine aisle or you can use accountability software or a proxy on your computer. But, Jesus gives here something more – because it’s not always possible to escape the world’s corruptions at all times, Jesus says be filled with light. If we truly ‘put on the Lord Jesus Christ’ as Romans 13:14 says, and ‘Walk in the Spirit’ as Galatians 5:16 says, the common desires that war in our hearts competing for attention wont win because that attention is wholly focused on the real object of our affection, Jesus Christ.

Colossians 3:2-3 says, “Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth. For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” If our minds are set on Jesus Christ, the things of eternity, our hope, the glory awaiting us or just the things of God, our minds and bodies will be filled with God’s light. Over time, having a mind so saturated with these things, the desires and lusts will no longer have a hold over us. Galatians 5:16 fully says, “I say then: Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh.” To be presently in fellowship with God, having the thoughts of eternity filling our minds, we will not fulfill the lust of the flesh. In fact, the sinful thoughts we once entertained will begin to seem repulsive to us. As our eyes open to the realities awaiting us and the cost of the cross, Jesus’ own blood, to purchase them on our behalf, our heart will begin to yearn for the things of God and have a disinterest for the world’s eye-catchers.
I found that when I would fall into these sexual ‘bouts’ where I’d look at pornography and do all of the activities associated, I had to ignore or put off everything that God had taught me about sexual immorality. Romans 1:28, “And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient;” This verse applied to me. In order to look at the disgusting images I’d immerse my mind in, I had to give up ‘retaining God in my knowledge.’ So, focusing on Christ and the things of God first prepared me for when the temptations would come. I found that God would, by His own power and strength, cause me to keep His commandments and not fall into sexual sin. This is so much apart of the new covenant that God’s made with man through Christ Jesus, Ezekiel 36:27, “And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them.” God, by His Spirit, would keep my heart from enjoying pornography, and set me at liberty from giving into the pressing temptations leading me to it. Romans 8:1, Galatians 5:16, “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh.” This way, God had not only shown me that I was completely a fornicator and completely sin-sick at heart without Him, but He gets the glory because I’m being kept, daily, by the power of God’s Holy Spirit. 2 Corinthians 4:17, Jude 1:24, “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us. Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy…” When Jesus was being tempted by the devil in the desert in Matthew 4 and Luke 4, Jesus used the written Word to defeat what the devil was saying. The devil uses the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life – those 3 (1 John 2:15-16). The devil says ‘turn these stones into bread’ – the lust of the flesh. Furthermore, ‘see these riches of gold could be yours if you worship me’ – the lust of the eyes. And, ‘since you’re the Son of God if you jump the angels will catch you’ – the pride of life. Also, in each of these, the devil twists scripture in order to say them – many times I would twist spiritual understanding in my heart, giving into sexual immorality. I’d just say, ‘Well, God is forgiving and loving, I can just ask for forgiveness.’ Sometimes I wouldn’t ‘say it,’ or I wouldn’t directly think it, but that was the root cause of my thinking when I’d give in – and it’s twisted scripture that isn’t of God, and showed my lack of understanding of the Word – and so I’d trample the blood of Christ Jesus underfoot and proceed in my lifestyle that sent Him to the cross (Heb 10:29).

If we can’t be given a victory by God over this sin, then what then when the stronger temptations, even stronger than sexual immorality, come? When are we finally going to rely on God? Many people read the command ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’ and think, ‘Well, you better love yourself first, and then you’ll understand what it means to love others.’ A sufficient love of self mainly has to do with the love of God. 1 Cor. 13:5 says love “…seeks not her own…” Therefore, good self-love has little to do with loving self, but, as Paul put it in Phil. 1:8, how he “greatly longed after [them] with the affections of Jesus Christ.” This was the love of Christ in Paul’s heart – Jesus Christ, longing after them in His heart from His throne, igniting within the chest of Paul for the Philippians’ church. He spoke of having the Church at Philippi in his heart, and longing after them, of thanking God on every remembrance of them. This was no human love. This is the self-love that God wants us to have – that we bear the love and affection of Christ within us for others. As God turns the attentions of our heart from the vain things of this age and turns them to what’s important, we will begin to feel what’s in God’s heart – the love, compassion, tender – He replaces our need for entertainment with real joy and our needs for self-gratification with real caring. Overcoming sexual sin will not come from imposing laws or rules over ourselves – only the lasting, visible purity that honors God comes through walking in the Spirit, otherwise it produces no enduring results. Sure, I would go 1 week or a month without sexual temptation and then I would fall back into it – because I tried to put it down on my own will power with different rules. We can bounce our eyes when attractive members of the opposite sex enter the room, but when we look away our eyes will only find another person to feast themselves on.

We can discipline ourselves to look at women in the face and not look them up-and-down as we’re accustomed to doing as men, but this too will eventually break down. If the desire is gone and if the attentions of the heart are focused wholly on God, there will be none of that to rule over the behavior of the flesh. To see lasting results it must be overcome God’s way and in God’s power, not some earthly rule of thought or our own will. I would hear this like this before and would think that they didn’t apply to me because I thought I was doing it God’s way, but I’d give right into sexual temptations because it was really just my own ‘way’ that I’d just ‘spiritualized&rsqu o; and not realized it. Say, for example, I'm a new believer in Christ, a babe in Christ more like it. If I impose a law on myself that I'm not to watch TV because I'll be tempted by the sexual content of the commercials, it may work for a time. But, when I go to the computer, I'll fall into the sexual temptation there and the lustful, sensual indulgence over those desires that lead me there. Why? Because turning away from the television has no power over the desires for sexual content warring in my flesh. It isn’t a matter of just turning away, but of turning that attention to the things of God. As a sheep of Christ, I must know where Jesus is leading; it isn’t enough to simply stay away from the harmful things on the path. He will “lead us not into temptation” and provide us “the way out that we may be able to bear it” every time, but our heart’s attention must be on Him (Matt. 6:13, 1 Cor. 10:13). We must receive the grace from Jesus that gives us the strength to overcome these desires in times of temptation (2 Cor. 12:9).

says the eyes of a man are never satisfied (Prov. 27:20). If the desire for what is tempting you remains, it will not go away on its own, and you'll keep feeding it with more sexual content. Yes, you cut off the darkness when you cut off the TV, but unless the light is there to overtake the darkness that remains when that source is cut off the desires are still there to do war. Turn on the light, and the darkness flees, but the sexual content and desire for it is still in your heart until the light is turned on. Then, though you’ve imposed a rule over yourself, it doesn’t help to stave off the sensual passion that leads you to indulge over that sin. Though you’ve imposed the law over your flesh it still yearns to be satisfied. Though it was helpful, it wasn't enough. Colossians 2:23 says concerning this matter: “These things indeed have an appearance of wisdom in self-imposed religion, false humility, and neglect of the body, but are of no value against the indulgence of the flesh.” The answer then is: (1) Submit yourself to God. (2) Resist the devil, and he'll flee from you, in that order. James 4:7. If you follow certain regulations such as bouncing the eyes you will do number 2, resist the devil. But, number 2 alone would make that your resistance would be based on the flesh because the flesh's own nature is to wallow in its lusts, like a pig to a mire. The works of the flesh are lying, stealing, adultery, and all manner of sin! That's not going to help you.

Just resisting alone isn't enough – you need to do number 1, submit to yourself to God, in every instance of temptation. This is done through the citation of scripture, as mentioned before. You MUST do (1) before you do (2). Submit to God first. So, Colossians 2 says the doctrines and teachings of men and self-imposed religion and godliness don't help to [stop] satisfying the flesh (number 2 on my list, taken from James 4:7, refers to this passage at the end of Colossians 2). But, Colossians 3 starts out with something better. It talks not about the flesh and resisting, but a person, Christ. Verse 1 says if you're raised up with Christ seek those things which are above, where Christ sits. So, it's giving instruction – Seek things above. Seek. Seek what? Seek things where Christ is sitting. In Verse 2 of Colossians 3 it says “set your affections.” You've been setting your affections on pornography and sexual immorality. Well, here it says set your affections on things above. It then gives something else – “not on things on the earth.”

So, it's saying set it on nothing here on earth. So referring back to Verse 1, it's pointing to where Christ is sitting. Verse 3 adds “For ye are dead” – if you're saved, not only was Christ crucified, but you were crucified with Him. You were in Christ when He was crucified and God offered Him up in your place, substitionarily, to atone for sin. And your life is hid with Christ in God - your life is Christ's life. Then also you have risen with Christ. Since His physical death was your death because you were dead in your sins, then His physical resurrection is your life! You have resurrection-life flowing within you by the Holy Spirit at all times, which comes from your salvation. Christ is your life, giving life to our physical bodies, sustaining us. Verse 4 is the kind of thinking we need to SET our affections on – “When Christ our life appears we'll appear with Him in glory.” Another part of scripture says we'll look like Him, taking on His resurrected form.

(Continued in Part 3 - Proceed to next post)

Preparing To Love Your Wife
Paris Reidhead once said in a sermon entitled “The Will of God for You”, “We have found it very difficult to stand valiantly for Christ, not against swords that would be aimed at our heart, nor a whip at our back; nor stocks for our feet or hands, nor shackles that would bind us to a galley seat… We’ve had to stand valiantly against a raised eyebrow, or a curled lip, or a sneering word. And sometimes that raised eyebrow, or curled lip, or sneering word has sent us mortally wounded into the dungeon of our regrets that we ever identified with Christ.”

A husband and wife are not just friends – they are brothers and sisters in Christ, if they are in fact right with the Lord and saved. If I get angry with a friend, I can de-friend them and we can go our separate ways. But even in the natural, my biological brothers and sisters are my siblings no matter what happens or how I feel towards them – they’ll always be my brothers and sisters. Therefore, in the spiritual, it’s different for us, too.

We're tied to one another by the blood of Jesus Christ. This is just like being brothers and sisters by blood – we’re brothers and sisters by the blood of Jesus Christ (Matthew 12:50). Marriage is also a spiritual gifting of God to the church (1 Cor. 7:7). If we ever become mad with one another it has to end and end in forgiveness. The nature and pleading of Christ through the New Testament for His beloveds to love one another deeply from a sincere heart, to honestly fellowship and love one another, is too strong for us to disregard this. We must forgive one another. There must be great forgiveness in marriage. Ephesians 4:32 says, “And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you.” How many times in one day can you forgive your spouse?

How long should you be patient with their faults? Peter essentially asked Jesus this same question in Matthew 18:21-22, “Then Peter came to Him and said, ‘Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven.’” This doesn’t mean that we can stop forgiving and being patient after 490 times like some religious law, but that Jesus wanted to teach us that we’re to be wholly compassionate and patiently interested and concerned in forgiving and loving the marriage partner past their faults even to the point of forgiving them so many, many times, because God has forgiven us with the shedding of His own blood (Rom. 4:7, Col. 2:13).

The girl I had originally written the letter from which this writing is based wrote back to me: “I also wanted you to understand why I would shy away from talking to you. You see, every time I talked to you about some issue I was having or something I just wanted you to listen. Talking is my way of letting things out and not letting it build up and depress me or make me uptight. It was really hard/hurtful when you would always try to find a solution or Godly advice. Nothing wrong with these things and I know you meant well. But you didn't listen to me. I just wanted you to understand where I was coming from and why I behaved so. I just hated arguing. Perhaps at those times you weren’t the right person to come to. Anyways, I thank you for your concerns and your advice. My prayers are with you and I hope we can move on as friends.”

I never listened to her but I tried to be “Mr. Fixit.” Many times God just listens to me in prayer and I know He will always listen to me. As a husband, apart of “nourishing and cherishing” the wife (Eph. 5:29, 1 Thess. 2:7) is listening to them, not attempting to solve their problems. Lets have the same gentle, loving tender care that Jesus has for His Church with the wife God’s called us to serve.

It is so exemplary of the relationship that we have of Christ. C.H. Spurgeon, the great preacher, once said, “…your relationship to Christ is that of a spouse, and you must pour out your very heart to Christ. No, don’t go and pour out your heart to your neighbors, nor your friends, for, somehow or other, the most sympathizing heart cannot understand or share all of our heartaches. There are sorrows, which the stranger cannot help us with; but there never was a heartache or pain which Christ could not help us to overcome.”

Marital Intimacy
Joshua Harris said in one of his sermons, “…Sex and our sexuality as men were created by God. It was His idea. He’s not embarrassed by it, He’s not ashamed of it - He made us men by every sense of the word. And He came and He lived a life of holiness and demonstrated for us what’s possible now for us as we’ve been reclaimed from the power of sin to serve Him in holiness…

The world’s mindset and their opinion of Christians and many Christians is this idea that sex is something Christians can’t talk about or that we’re embarrassed about or that we are ashamed of in some way, and that’s not true. Christians are the ones who can truly understand sex because we understand who created it, and we understand its purpose in the context of the covenant of marriage… we understand the value and the beauty of what God has made for us. “

Thank you so much for your attention to this study. God bless you and keep you.

Cheers,
Isaac D.

Thank you so much for your attention to this study. I hope and pray that God glorifies Himself through your testimony as He did mine. God bless you and keep you.

Cheers,
Isaac D.

Pre-Marital Relationships

Introduction
I'm writing this to clear up odds and ends from confusion on pre-marital relationships so that the sanctity and cleanness that comes with a marriage can be protected. As Christians marriage is so important to God and He wants us to do it His prescribed way so that we don’t hurt ourselves, our spouse, or our children. If it was just a letter on marriage to married people, you could be free to ignore and skip over this whole writing or trash it as you desire, but because this has to do mainly with the single man’s walk and fellowship with God as it pertains to marriage, and not just the married man, I plead your attention to this letter.

Some parts of this letter may make you feel uncomfortable, awkward, or may even bring up certain pains or bad emotion from past relationship or family experiences, but the content of this letter is very important and behooves your attention and this letter should help you. It is a letter of godly edification and comfort.

My motivation for writing this letter is but sincere concern without accusation of any wrong-doing. No emotional twists of the arm – these are not words of emotion but wisdom and godly, scriptural understanding informed by wise counsel. I have nothing to say to you contrary to the will of God. I intend to lay out for you what I have learned from God and what God has used to renew and to wash my mind clean of anything that could have held me in bondage to sexual immorality, fornication, lusts, and quite possibly in the long-run, marital infidelity or adultery, so that you or anyone who hears you or looks to you for wise counsel won’t have to encounter the same. My intent and agenda is that if God is (or is not) calling you to a marriage in your future, you do not fall into the same traps I should have fallen in (except by the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ); It is that your former relationships in the past will not affect the holiness, sanctity, and integrity of uprightness of the marriage God desires for you in that call (if He is calling you) or your present-day walk with Christ, and the intentions are the same for someone who’s already married – that God would erase anything from your history before you were married that is presently affecting your marriage.

If I have said anything, it is so that you can dwell in the sanctification of God in all purity and holiness without any damage from a broken relationship from the past, and that you can be cleansed from them for the godly marital relationship God desires for you in the future. I intend to quote scripture that God has used to build me up and wash my thinking clean as a single man, bringing my thoughts captive to the obedience of Christ, hoping that God will do the same for you. I intend to write to you about going about a godly, biblical pre-marital relationship.
The style of writing is towards someone who is single and hasn’t yet married.

But for a man already married or has been married in the past and is no longer married, reading about marriage written this way and looking at it and examining it with this approach should also be a tremendously edifying help. Though reading about marriage may sometimes make many men feel uncomfortable at the start, I imagine, it is also a very important understanding of our walk with Christ because a great part of the mystery of the relationship of Christ to the church revealed in the New Testament that runs throughout the Bible is related to the relationship of marriage. I intend to back up and reinforce everything that I’ve said with scripture, but if I have said anything in this letter that you already know, or that sounds so simple, I repeat it not to insult your intelligence but for godly edification and reinforcement.

Everything that I say, I will give an account for at the Judgment seat of Christ, and will not say anything that I consciously thought is going to engender strife or anything ungodly in your fellowships with others in the Lord or cause someone else to be offended or in pain, but that those relationships be built up, that people are encouraged, and we have a godly look at our approach to loving others.

I’ve been studied marriage as a single man for about a year and a half. I’ve listened to many helpful sermons, from Paul Washer, Josh Harris, Ravi Zacharias Al Mohler, and Wayne Grudem, to name a few. I’ve read many articles and have prayed about and turned over in my mind the godly wisdom I’ve received on marriage. God’s made it so that I’ve lived out many of the things I’ve written in these letters. For example, one week I found out that Jesus said that a marriage can be lawfully ended because of sexual immorality. Matthew 19:9 says, “And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery: and whoever marries her who is divorced commits adultery.” Sexual immorality is not only adultery after the marriage but fornication that could have occurred before the marriage.

By nature, when two people marry, they bring their belongings from their two individual houses into one house. The same is true spiritually and emotionally. If I bring emotional problems or hurts into marriage that I had from some girlfriend, it could affect the way I treat her and I wouldn’t even know it! I was shocked at the idea that I could bring the garbage ends of bad relationships in the past into a godly marriage. Frequently Jesus stressed the importance of being made right with a brother that we’ve wronged and how if we don’t forgive, why should God forgive? God’s forgiven me my sins and washed me clean of them, but the idea that I still had bad thinking left over from the past that I could bring into a ruin a good marriage made me worried.

I didn’t want to have a wife suffer because though she’s godly she’s hard to live with and it was easier to deal with the very loose woman I was with before who was living in sin. Not only does it affect that relationship, but my relationship with my future children. I began to see my present life with my mother and sister and step-parent as a classroom to prepare me for the future family God’s calling me towards. Jesus said in Matthew 5:23-24, “Therefore if you bring your gift to the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar, and go your way. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.” Because I knew that God was calling me to marriage and to prepare I began immediately to write letters to the women I had dated in my past. One girl I wrote a 14 paged letter to that was more evangelistic because she was a false convert and grew up in the church but never really gave her life to Christ. One was my first kiss, who never wrote me back. And another went to a girl who was actually saved. Most of the content written herein was extracted from this letter. God had convicted me to write her a lengthy letter.

I was in love with her when I was about 19 years of age. It was very early in my faith and I was a relatively young believer. I knew her for about 7 years at the time and I wanted to marry her, yet I was struggling with a life of sexual sin. I had an avid prayer life, read scripture daily – many times 4 hours a day, and was completely devoted to God. Despite this, I had fallen into what had enslaved me before I was saved, a secretive life given to pornography. I don’t know what would have happened, but if I would have married her I’m sure I would have brought her down with me in my sinful fall and from what my heart was being turned to I would have hurt her tremendously and disappointed her. My heart was distracted – not only was pornography taking my eye’s attention, but she was also a distraction from God, and I was too blind and had too little discernment to understand this. I lacked “understanding&rdqu o; and would have “destroyed my own soul” (Proverbs 6:32).

I was convicted over 1 Thessalonians 4:6, that I would have “taken advantage of and defrauded” her, that if I really cared about her I would have guarded and protected her. What’s worse, I started seeing someone else a time when she emotionally trusted in me. If sexual immorality can legally end a marriage, it certainly can end a pre-marriage. God’s forgiven me and she’s forgiven me, and the godly wisdom and wise counsel that were in that letter along with the wise counsel and advice of the many people who God’s used to help me I write here. As a young man at the time, I had relatively little understanding of biblical marriage yet I wanted to have one. This letter is the output of many hours of thinking and prayer and study and I pray that God will help you with the content herein.

Now, before we get to the heart of what I’m trying to say to you, please, please, consider how important the whole matter is. First, an illustration: very recently I was sitting in my living room when I heard some cursing outside. I went to be nosey through the blinds and I saw three women walking, and a man pulling the third woman very roughly. He threw her down on the ground and she hurt her arm. The other two were prying him off, but as a man he overpowered them. He forced her to walk with him, and pushed her to his car. She resisted. He stuffed her in and locked the door. When he went to get in, she opened the door and ran, only to be stuffed in again. Her friends called 911 and an ambulance. They walked with her, but the man followed her. Eventually, he got her in the car again and drove off with her, her friends resisting. 3-4 police cars and an ambulance showed up shortly after he left, and the police raced the streets looking for him for a half-hour or so afterward. I watched this man do these horrible things. He was an immature boy to have done these things.

I could have gone out there and raised my voice or given him a good shove and he might have backed down, and stepped out of the way. He knew what he was doing to his girlfriend was wrong. If I would have incited a fight or have provoked a physical altercation by going out there, it would have been quick I’m sure. Instead, I watched and prayed from the window, disappointed that I didn’t do anything – everything in me wanted to go outside and do something about it, but I didn’t. The Lord answered my prayers, because when I went to go to my car and leave for Wednesday worship service at church, there were the same three women, walking down the street, talking about what had happened, cursing. This happened right in front of my house and it is very eye-opening to the sensation that we need to be awake, right now, to what is really going on with all of this relationship business. It not only affects you and me but everyone who listens to us for the rest of our lives.

A Word on Marriage
Before we address pre-marriage, let us take a look at marriage. 1 Corinthians 7:17 Paul speaks of God calling us to marriage, that God’s distributed it to the body – marriages bought with the blood of the Lamb at Calvary. This passage speaks of marriage as a ‘gift’ from Christ. The main points in the New Testament on marriage are (Genesis 2:24) Matt 5:27-32, Matt 19:3-12, Mark 10:1-12, 1 Peter 3, 1 Corinthians 7, Heb 13:4, and Ephesians 5.
Let us look at the basic foundational understanding of what marriage is. Getting this clear biblical view of marriage will help us to analyze what God would have us to do outside of marriage and to straighten out some of our worldly thinking. Jesus said concerning marriage in Mark 10:6 that it is to be between a man and a woman, “But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female.” God made two genders that have distinct physical and psychological differences. God instituted a way for them to be united with one another.

That united relationship is marriage (Genesis 1:27, 2:24). Jesus emphasized that two have been made as one flesh by God in Mark 10:8-9, “And they twain shall be one flesh: so then they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.” Malachi 2:14 defines a wife as the ‘companion’ and calls her the wife of thy youth, or the wife of thy covenant. Stripped down, marriage is a covenantal and functional relationship. Two of differing genders are covenanted to each other honoring God’s institution of marriage at the creation. This holy institution transcends culture – no matter what cultural ritual is used to enter into the covenant, or however that covenant is split, the covenant is honored under God’s holy institution of marriage which was done at the creation so every man is held accountable and things like adultery, fornication, and the misuse of marriage apply to every man no matter what culture they are from.

Genesis 2:18 says the wife was intended to be the complement to the man. Because of sin and the fallen state of the world (Romans 3:23), the redeemed relationship of two married individuals who are saved by the blood of Christ is most representational of God’s intended meaning and purposes in marriage. Ephesians 5:32 says concerning marriage, “This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church.” Marriage was to be a shadow of the roles of Jesus Christ and the redeemed Church relating to one another. As such, marriage is also a spiritual gift of God to the church (1 Cor. 7:7), which Christ purchased with His own blood for everyone to be redeemed (Ephesians 4:8). Marriage ends at death and is only restricted to this domain of life with God; men are ‘like the angels’ in the eternity and neither marry or are given into marriage (Matt. 22:30, Mark 12:25).

Charles Spurgeon, commonly called “the prince of preachers” once said, “Marriage is not a relationship by blood or by a common ancestor. It is contracted between two persons who may, during the early part of their lives, have been entire strangers to one another; they may scarcely have looked at each other in the face, except during the few months that preceded their wedding. The families may have had no previous acquaintance; they may have lived on the opposites sides of the earth. One may have been rich, and in possession of vast domains, and the other may have been poor, barely able to make ends meet. Genealogies don’t regulate it: differences don’t hinder it. The connection is not of natural birth but of voluntary contract or covenant. Such is the relationship, which exists between the believer and his God.”

Galatians 3:28 says, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” In our existence as created beings, man and woman have been created equally in the image of God. If Galatians 3:28 isn’t convincing enough, please see Genesis 5:1-2, Genesis 1:27. So, man and woman are equal in personhood and importance as beings but differ in role, authority, and relationship in conjunction with one another. In the latter regard of differences of how they relate to one another, man and woman are not egalitarian or equal, but complimentary. These latter differences are subject to change, and may be different on the other side of eternity – for example, Jesus said we’d be like the angels and not marry (Matt. 22:30, Mark 12:25).

The husband is only head over the wife in this life. I don’t think this difference was that we’d be gender-less because Jesus ascended to heaven as a male and came back in a resurrected body as a male, but that the functional roles of authority in marriage wouldn’t apply in the eternity and possibly some other attributes. So, man and woman are like hands. You were created with two hands that are equal to each other. They are equal in weight and both come with 4 fingers and 1 thumb. The fingers match and everything on one hand is on the other hand. Yet, they are different. They are chiral – one hand doesn’t fit on top of the other and are oriented differently wholly in structure. A pair of hands has a right hand and a left hand. Even though they’re equal in their existence, they’re not identical, and function differently. One hand is dominant over the other and we are ‘right-handed&rsquo ; or ‘left-handed.’ We may write and eat with one hand and wave with the other. One hand supports the rod when its cast and the other reels the fish in. If they weren’t equal you would have a hand and a foot in the same place. If they weren’t different you would have two left hands or two right hands.

With men and women, we have psychological, physical, and emotional differences, but we are equal in the sight of God in Christ Jesus. Wayne Grudem in his book Systematic Theology writes, “The fact that God created two distinct persons as male and female, rather than just one man, is part of our being in the image of God because it can be seen to reflect to some degree the plurality of persons within the Trinity” (“Man as Male and Female,” Pg. 455). Genesis 1:26 says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion…” This isn’t an exact representation of God’s being because God is triune. Man and woman are two persons and two beings, but God is 3 persons and yet 1 being. But, it expresses the plurality of God as distinct persons, and is just one of the ways God reflects this plurality in the roles of a redeemed life. Grudem adds, “Though the unity is not exactly the same, the unity in a family among husband, wife, and children, does also reflect to some degree the interpersonal unity yet diversity of persons among the members of the Trinity.”

For example, in 1 Cor. 11:5-16 Paul details role-relationship distinctions in the Church with how we relate to God “that should be reflected in the way they dress and act in the assembled congregation” (Grudem, Pg. 457). The man was created for the specific expressive role of being representational of God and the woman for being representational of man, because she was taken out of man. Grudem also argues that no matter the societal view of the differences in gender, scripturally in God’s view man and woman are both of equal value and importance.

There is a difference in representational roles and authority; the man is to be the head of the wife and was first made in God’s image, but in the personhood of a man over a woman who is made in the image of God out of the image of God there is to be no view that the woman was created to be inferior to the man in being. Yet, the husband and wife roles are not equal, but complimentary. The wife is subject to the husband and the husband is head over the wife. Jesus has taken the entire Church body to be His bride and enjoys even now a spiritual and emotional union with us that will only get stronger as we draw closer to eternity (Ephesians 5:23-32, Rev. 21:2, 22:17). 1Cor. 11:3 says, “But I want you to know that the head of every man is Christ, the head of woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.” The relation that husband and wife shadows, the relationship of Christ and the Church, itself shadows the relation between Christ and the Father.

The headship that the husband has over the wife is exemplary of the headship the Father has over Jesus Christ as Ephesians 5:23 says, “For the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church; and He is the Savior of the body.“ The Son is subject to the Father. 1 Cor. 15:28 says, “Now when all things are made subject to Him, then the Son Himself will also be subject to Him who put all things under Him, that God may be all in all.” Yet, the Son is completely equal with the Father (Phil. 2:5-6, Heb. 1:8, 10). The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are co-equal. The difference in the Trinity is how they relate to one another.

This relationship the Father has with the Son is distinct from His relationship with any other being (Hebrews 1:5) because the Son is fully God and the Father is fully God, being one in being yet distinct persons. Yet, the husband and wife being not only two distinct persons but two distinct beings, shadows this relationship by shadowing the relationship between Jesus Christ and the Church. So, the headship that the husband has over the wife has its definition and source in God’s own being to the Son. What it foreshadows didn’t start with the New Testament. It didn’t start with the creation of Adam or the institution of Adam, but in the eternal being of God.

So, the marital relationship’s distinct roles and functions show this: the husband is head of the wife and the wife is subject to her husband. The Father spoke creation into existence (Genesis 1:1, 1 Cor. 8:6a), through the Son the work of creation was carried out (Col. 1:16, John 1:1-2, 14, Rev. 3:14, 1 Cor. 8:6b, Heb. 1:2), and the Holy Spirit sustains creation (Genesis 1:2b, Acts 17:28); All three persons were present at the time of creation, co-equal and co-eternal. But, they differed on how they related to one another. In the same way, Jesus is subject to the Father and the Holy Spirit is subject to the Father and the Son. So, you’ll find Jesus saying things like in John 14:28, “You have heard Me say to you, 'I am going away and coming back to you.' If you loved Me, you would rejoice because I said, 'I am going to the Father,' for My Father is greater than I.” The Son can do everything the Father can do (John 5:19), but willingly subjects Himself to the Father (John 6:38). He has the right to sit at the table, but willing chooses to serve (Luke 22:27). This subjection to the Father is the way Jesus chooses to author the faith we follow and relate to us – in Acts 4:27 Jesus is called the “holy servant” and in John 20:17 Jesus could finally declare God the Father to be our Father and God, as He is with the Father.

The differing role of each partner includes functional duties typifying the role of Jesus Christ on the part of the husband and the role of the Church on the part of the wife (Ephesians 5:32). The husband-wife relationship is symbiotic – each role is mutually beneficial as opposed to be parasitic where only one partner benefits from the role of the other. Because each marriage partner is redeemed, these roles are not to be thought of as religiously kept regulations putting one in bondage to the other, but as an opportunity to serve in the liberty that comes with following Christ. Galatians 5:1 says, “Stand fast therefore in the liberty by which Christ has made us free, and do not be entangled again with a yoke of bondage.” God didn’t give marriage to yoke or enslave us to a worldly bondage but to serve Him.

We serve and belong only to Christ now that we are saved, being bought with a price (Matt. 11:29-30). Galatians 5:13 adds, “For you, brethren, have been called to liberty; only do not use liberty as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.” So, the relationship of love that God calls a husband and a wife to have for one another is one of liberty and the freedom bought for us in Christ. Because each partner in the marriage is redeemed, the functional responses of each are empowered by God (Phil 2:13) when not done in the flesh nature of the other partner (Gal. 5:17). It is then God who makes the redeemed marriage work. In 1 Cor. 11:11 Paul says, “Nevertheless, neither is man independent of woman, nor woman independent of man, in the Lord.” They’re equal in being/personhood, differing/complimentary in role, but interdependent. So, 1 Peter 3:7 will call the husband to honor the wife and Ephesians 5:33 will call the wife to respect or reverence her husband in a marital relationship.
What is the purpose of a godly marriage? God wants to transform us into the image of Christ, getting us ready to be presented to Jesus Christ as the bride in eternity. Romans 8:29 says, “For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren…”

Paul Washer once said, "Now, how does God use marriage to conform us to the image of His Son? Now listen to me - we have to be very careful with our words here - but it's nonetheless true. God says He will not allow me to be tempted beyond what I can bear. That's what the bible says. God has given me a wife who is strong in all the areas where she must be strong in order for me not to be tempted beyond what I can bear. God has orchestrated those strengths in her. Now, God has orchestrated the weaknesses in my life. He has sovereignly worked and given me a woman that is weak in all the areas where I most do not want her to be weak. Why – To drive me absolutely out of my cotten-picking mind? No, why has He done that? Because He wants to conform me to the image of Christ! And what does that mean? The very things you sing most about and appreciate most about Jesus Christ are the very things you don't want in your life! What is the main thing? Unconditional Love... See, you're in a marriage and you see these weaknesses in your wife and because of those weaknesses, you think that you're locked into a dead-end marriage - It has no purpose, there's no reason, you just lost out, you made the wrong choice, all these other things... Now, if you'll believe God, those weaknesses can cause your life to be filled with more purpose than you ever imagined! She's weak in an area - she's a certain way in an area that you wish she was totally different and it actually not only bothers you, it hurts you. But now you know something! God has orchestrated that, giving you such a woman, so that you will learn to love even though she doesn't meet even the most important conditions that you have! That's what God desires... That's what He desires. And you will find joy and rest in laying down and destroying those silly humanistic speculations, following the Word of God. The sovereignty of God - there's not a maverick molecule in the universe.”

Now that we have a good doctrinal basis about marriage to found pre-marriage on that is thorough enough to relate the information, let us move on.

Approach to a Pre-Marital Relationship
“An excellent wife, who can find? Her worth is far above jewels.” Proverbs 31:10
Recreational Dating - Though dating within itself is not inherently good or evil (Matt 15:17-20) - recreational dating or singles having a dating relationship with someone else just for fun can be reasoned from scripture to be a sinful practice. A friend of mine who is married reasoned that since it’s a good, undefiled thing from scripture for him to have recreational sex with his wife then recreational dating must be a good thing, too.

But, for the single man who dates outside of the constraints of being married to the one he is dating, this isn’t very wise, because it's out of its context, marriage. He was right, the bible doesn’t forbid but commands the married man to satisfy his wife in marital intimacy and says that this is undefiled (1 Cor. 7:5, Heb 13:4). But, the motive of the heart of a person who is single that is to date for recreational purposes, not with the intention of marrying them or testing the spirits to see if they’re called to marry, always seems to have a lustful intention behind it. Pre-marital dating would be acceptable biblically.

The motivational pursuit of heart should always be for marriage – boyfriends and girlfriends and a dating relationship is already found nowhere in the bible, and having them just for the sake of having them or having fun socially – how can you justify doing that to honor God? It not only dishonors the spouse God will provide in His call, but it dishonors God – you treat His holiness and purity that He’s given you in Jesus wrongly, and you defraud the person you are dating (1 Thess. 4:6). Also, we can’t take fire into our lap and not burn our clothes, as the proverb says in Proverbs 6:27.

We can’t date someone with worldly motives in our hearts and a worldly pursuit and expect to keep ourselves morally and spiritually pure. One reason in 1 Cor. 7:2, 9 that Paul gives for marriage is for that reason – we’re to marry to avoid fornication or lack of self control. This doesn’t mean that God is leading us to marry someone primarily for our sexual release (though His provision in this regard is a part of marriage), because marriage relative to us is about serving the other person, panning out the roles of Christ and the church. So, recreational dating is dangerous and can be a sinful practice, but pre-marital dating is God honoring and a good, godly endeavor.

Now, back to Hebrews 13:4, "Marriage is honorable in all, and the bed undefiled: but fornicators and adulterers God will judge." It gives two extremes - one is marriage. The other is the area outside of the context of marriage. This not only means fornication or "whore-mongering&quo t; which are before marriage but adultery which is during marriage. Your spouse is God's provision for you for marital intimacy (a.k.a. sexual intercourse). Taking not only the act of sex but the desires, thoughts, and emotions associated with it outside of the context of that covenantal marital relationship that God has honored is to bring judgment upon oneself. So, marriage is God-honored, but outside of it, it brings judgment. And the reason it brings judgment is because it transgresses the 7th commandment, you shall not commit adultery (see Matthew 5:27-28 also).
I'm not imposing a legalistic law on dating and marriage but of the distinction of what's pleasing to God and what is sinning against God.

This is because it is very hard to date someone for fun or recreation without sexual attraction or the sexual side associated with it. If you can see someone without the carnal desire or sexual appetites or of their attractiveness and do that in faith, it wouldn't transgress the law (which is black and white) it would then be a thing pleasing to God. So, the act isn’t sinful but the motive and intentions of the heart. 1 Thessalonians 4:6 says that no one should defraud their sibling in Christ on matters relating to our sanctification and purity, leading them on into thinking those emotional thoughts and feelings, intended for two people who will marry, are mutually expressed between the two of you. Leading someone on isn't right. When the relationship is just for one person’s recreation we’ve defrauded them. Marriage is a mutually beneficial relationship. The motives towards that person should be clear and your intentions clear and the relationship defined. It must be done in faith while not defrauding or deceiving that person on your motivation and intentions for seeing them.

The feelings and emotions that come that are intentionally there to lead you to marry that person. They are to be given to your future spouse. If you can date someone free of those emotions, since the motive isn’t a transgression of God’s law because of the clean and sanctified motive of heart that it isn’t sinful, it is okay as long as it is a work done in faith that it really is okay with God. Romans 14:17 says that the kingdom of God isn’t in ‘meat,’ or legalistic and rigidly imposing laws on what to do and what not to do on every little thing but in righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. If it’s a good thing it is a good thing, but the person doing it, with these clean motives, has to do it in faith that it isn’t out of his carnality and isn’t a sinful thing that he “does behind God’s back for his own pleasure” so to speak. Otherwise, don’t do it. Romans 14:22-23, Paul says, “Do you have faith? Have it to yourself before God. Happy is he who does not condemn himself in what he approves. But he who doubts is condemned if he eats, because he does not eat from faith; for whatever is not from faith is sin.”

Paul says in 1 Cor. 6:12 that all things are lawful for him but not all things are profitable, or expedient or helpful. Dating might be an allowed practice that isn’t a sinful practice if you do it with the right motive, but it isn’t a profitable or wise practice. Even though you don’t think your motives are unclean or are pure, what do we know?! We don’t know our own hearts many times and the heart is wickedly deceptive and barely knowable (Jeremiah 17:9). What might have started out friendly and clean could quickly turn into something carnal or sexual. Even in public it can become something sensual and fleshly very quickly that leads the both of you astray and sexual temptations to ensue for the both of you. You would not only have defrauded your date into thinking it would have been a clean or fun thing, but have caused them to stumble. Recreational dating, then, is “making provision for the flesh” (Romans 13:14).

Also, for example, what if the spouse-to-be that God is really calling you to marry sees you dating that person and reconsiders how they think about you? It would then be detrimental to the godly marriage you would have had and lead to jealousy or mistrust carried into the marriage. So recreational dating even with a good motive is an unprofitable, unwise practice. All of those emotions and feelings developed are there for a good reason and are the basic ingredients that lead to two being cleaved to each other by God in an honorable relationship. You abstain from carnality and lust so that you can present her to yourself “not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing” but “holy and without blemish” just like Christ and the church (Ephesians 5:27). It’s okay to test the spirits whether they are of God, but dating is dangerous. Exercise the maturing discerning of knowing what's right from wrong (Heb. 5:14).

You don't need to even have touched the dating partner to have had sinned. Jesus even said 'whosoever looks upon a woman to lust after her has committed adultery with her already in his heart' in Matthew 5:27-28. Even the strongest of Christians can stumble (Prov. 7:26) when they're tempted. To tell you the truth, I can't date someone and not have sensual regards towards that person in dating them. I couldn't do it in faith. And so I don't date. I can trust that God will lead me to my spouse and marital partner regardless. Matthew 6:33, "But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these shall be added unto you." Phil. 4:19, "But my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus."

Pre-Marital Dating – I have found very little doctrinal instruction or detail on an approach to a pre-marital relationship with someone in scripture, which could mean that God wants us to be very careful about it. There’s no talking about boyfriends or girlfriends. There’s little talk about ‘going steady’ or dating and many other social constructions in our modern day culture. There are two views on a biblical approach to a godly pre-marital relationship today. Either we adhere to a counter-cultural, straight-edged, yet very biblical counter-cultural tradition of going through various levels of godly authority that parallels a less extreme form of an arranged marriage that mirrors the Old Testament betrothal and marriage system commonly called biblical courtship. Or, we use the current world system of pre-marital relationship of dating but made biblical and godlier commonly called biblical dating. Either one is a biblical grounds for pre-marital dating that could be considered godly. So, the reason why recreational dating would be considered sinful in nature is because of the motive of the heart – The single brother in the Lord dating his sister in Christ just for the fun of it is taking those marital emotions and feelings that are supposed to be consummated on the marriage bed and putting them in a recreational dating relationship outside of marriage. The distinction in pre-marital dating is seeing that person and courting that person with the intention in heart of marrying that person, which is not a worldly motive (Heb. 13:4).

Since the context is in the pursuit of marrying that person and marriage, and his attentions are towards honoring God in that pursuit, though he is single it is an honorable thing for him to pursue. There is a world of difference between Biblical dating or courtship and recreational dating. Pre-marital dating is the right context for dating because you’re not searching for a mate, you’re “testing the spirits” to see if the one presented to you is the one God actually wants you are to marry (1 John 4:1).

I don’t look. I don’t search. I don’t date. I trust that the Lord will provide me with a wife in due season (Gal. 6:9). Searching for her or attempting to find out who that would be is just unwise and may be harmful to my relationship with God because I'd have to divert my attention and affections away from Him in order to do it. I can have faith in God knowing that in His call He’ll provide me one in due time (Matt 6:33). I divert that focus and attention to Jesus Christ and to remaining in purity until then. God even asks for our affections (Col. 3:2). Also, the bible says to the single man who’s been separated from a wife not to seek a wife point-blank. "Art thou bound unto a wife? Seek not to be loosed. Art thou loosed from a wife? Seek not a wife." It says not to go searching, because remain single has advantages for ministry. But, it says in Proverbs 18:22, "Whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing, and obtaineth favour of the Lord."

There's a big distinctive difference between finding a wife and searching for one. When you date, you’re searching for one. But, God has said in Matthew 6:33, “But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.” In this passage Jesus was talking about natural needs. This includes a wife and our needs for companionship and intimacy. If you really trust in God, you won’t have to search, but just as God provides you food, clothing, and a place to stay He can provide for you a wife. But, the question is, will you be ready for God’s call to marriage?

Pre-Marital Relationships in Scripture
First, God wills us not to be yoked together with unbelievers (2 Cor. 6:14). If somehow that happens, and God saves someone but their spouse is unsaved, or the spouse thought they were saved but weren’t, there’s instruction on that situation in 1 Cor. 7:12-16. There are a number of great reasons for this. One reason is for godly seed. Malachi 2:15 says, “But did He not make them one, having a remnant of the Spirit? And why one? He seeks godly offspring. Therefore take heed to your spirit, and let none deal treacherously with the wife of his youth.” Another is the fact that both partners are redeemed and can then imitate Christ (Eph. 5:1) in the marriage and God is best glorified.

1 Tim 5:1-2 – treat younger women as sisters, with all purity. It’s not about boyfriends or girlfriends, but about brothers and sisters in Christ in all purity. God’s will is that if He has the person you’re going to be married to in the future for the rest of your life in the same room with you, that you love her like a sister in the Lord, giving all purity, and fellowship with her, loving her sincerely and deeply with the love of the Lord Jesus Christ. And if God’s revealed to you that that isn’t the person you’re going to marry, God’s will for you is the same – that you love her like a sister in the Lord, giving all purity, and fellowship with her, loving her sincerely and deeply with the love of the Lord Jesus Christ! And no matter what is going on in your fellowship with your brothers and sisters in Christ, you know already that God wants you to “seek first His kingdom, and righteousness,” (Matthew 6:33) being “content with what you have” (Phil. 4:11-12, Heb. 13:5). This agrees with 1 Corinthians 7:17, 20-21 where Paul in the whole chapter instructs the church on what to do about marriage.

And if I don’t love the person I’m going to marry as I would want other brothers in the Lord to love her if we were married, while I’m not married to her, I’d be hypocritical to complain about things like trust issues in the marriage. The marriage bed is undefiled, marital intimacy being a godly thing (Heb. 13:4), its acceptable and encouraged by God and “Happy is he that condemns not himself in that thing which He allows,” (Romans 14:22), but I don’t want to bring any ill emotions or feelings into it from past or for it to come under spiritual attack.

Hebrews 13:5 – be content with such things as ye have for he will neither leave nor forsake us, which includes being content with singleness. I figure that if I’m not content with my singleness, when I get married, I might be tempted by the thought that I didn’t enjoy singleness enough – like those people who want to go back and ‘sow their wild oats.’ But no, I can say that I was content with my singleness when God wanted that for me and put my hand to the plow in marriage, so to speak, without looking back. I can then be content with marriage when in a godly marriage.

If God didn’t call you to marriage and didn’t send anyone for you to be married to – would you be satisfied with singleness? Would you continue to remain pure? Or do you think what’s in your heart is that you would in desperation find someone to marry yourself rather than waiting on the Lord to call you to marriage and provide for this need? That’s a motive that was in my heart that I had to come to terms with and overcome - we’re to bear the cross of Christ as Disciples of Christ – for Christ. We’re to be satisfied with what God gives us – whether the call to be single or to have a family. Paul said he had to learn this (Phil. 4:11) – “…for I have learned…”

The Call To Marriage – Paul never married, but spoke about his singleness in 1 Cor. 7:7 that it was a benefit for him. He could minister and do the things of the call without being distracted by the cares of a family life. Peter took his wife with him. 1 Cor. 9:5 says, “Do we have no right to take along a believing wife, as do also the other apostles, the brothers of the Lord, and Cephas?” This must have been more burdensome for him in his ministry. Continuin on in 1 Cor. 7:7 Paul speaks about gifts being given. God will give someone the gift of celibacy or give someone the gift of marriage. It’s a call. It really is – I’m not just overemphasizing the sovereignty of God versus our free-will to choose, but this is biblical instruction. In 1 Cor. 7:9, he said that if we cannot contain, we’re to marry. God will distribute the gifts as He desires, because Christ builds the church (Matt 16:18). Some aren’t called to marriage, but some are. The test is – can we remain single for life – not that we’re going to, but that it reveals in our hearts where the true motive for purity is. Does it rest in God, and are we being pure for God offering up a sacrifice, or for another reason? When we’re strongly tempted sexually outside of marriage, only the former will survive enticement. The latter will fail – every other motivation for purity will fail, but if we have faith in Christ and keep ourselves pure for the love of Christ (see John 14:21), we’re kept by the power of God unto salvation (1 Peter 1:5) and it is God who is able to keep us from falling (Jude 1:24).

Patiently Awaiting a Spouse – The promise of Jesus in Matthew 6:33, “But seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these shall be added unto you.” This includes the need for companionship or a godly spouse. God will provide even a wife in due time if we are called – the spouse, the house, the job, all come with God’s call to marriage. If we try to build it, we have to maintain it, but when God builds it, He maintains it. When it’s done through God’s power and not ours not only is God glorified in it, but it’s no longer left up to the power of the flesh to uphold and sustain. God’s yoke is easy and God’s burden is light (Matt 11:30).

Bring Purity into Marriage – 1 Thess. 4:1-8 – God’s will is that we possess our bodies in sanctification, honor, and holiness, abstaining from uncleanness and fornication, and not defraud one another. It cannot be repeated enough that the bible says in Hebrews 13:4 that marriage is honorable, it’s a holy thing! The marriage bed is undefiled, and so the act of sexual intercourse in a marriage is bridal love – marital intimacy then is not a sinful thing, but a godly activity. It says it is undefiled, but fornicators (or whoremongers) and adulterers God will judge. So, sex with your wife is honorable before God, but sex before marriage or sexual relationships with other women during marriage God will judge, and is sinful, as Heb. 13:4 continues on to say. The apostle Paul even gave instructions on marital intimacy and encouraged it (1 Cor. 7:4-5)! Marital intimacy is a holy and godly thing, but I had made the thought evil and sinful in my mind by my abuse and corruption of it through internet pornography and sexual immorality. I needed to hear and really study and apply my heart and ear to the Lord and let Him wash this away in me so I could think about it clearly.

We’re to carry the purity we’ve practiced in our singleness into the marriage (1 Thess. 4:1-8, Heb. 13:4, Ephesians 5). So, really, we’re not ‘saving ourselves for our future spouses,’ rather we’re being kept by the power of God in purity … for God – and eventually going toward the call of marriage. Our purity is for God first. If our purity is for God, we’ll be delighted to keep it The hope and promise of marriage is good because God’s said that marriage is honorable, but the reasons for our purity are rooted in our sanctification before God, and occupying this temple of the Holy Spirit in purity as a sacrifice that honors God (1 Thess. 4:1-8), not just to avoiding adultery. We must learn to submit ourselves to God, and resist the devil (James 4:7), otherwise, how can we carry that into a mature, godly relationship that God blossoms into marriage?

Settings Thoughts In Order – John Calvin once said that the heart can be an ‘idol factory’ and marriage is an area that is no exception. There’s nothing wrong with the godly desire to get married (Hebrews 13:4) but I once got frustrated over it because I doubted God’s ability to bring it to pass. I didn’t want to do this or wrestle with my past, failed history with women and cling onto things that I’ve repented of and God’s forgiven me of when God desires a “new thing.” "Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs" (Jonah 2:8). It was very important to me to clear my plate of past and old, dead works and rather than carry what I did with a certain lady in high school into a godly, adult marriage, carry purity and genuine love for my wife into it – a love that’s more than satisfying some chemical in my brain, but has its foundations and roots in God’s very character and being. Let us now look at this business of idols.

But the Spirit explicitly says that in later times some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons, by means of the hypocrisy of liars seared in their own conscience as with a branding iron, men who forbid marriage and advocate abstaining from foods which God has created to be gratefully shared in by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with gratitude; for it is sanctified by means of the word of God and prayer. (1Timothy 4:1-5 NASB)
This passage talks about forbidden marriage and abstaining from certain foods. Why don’t I think it’s wrong to eat pork anymore under the New Testament? Why don’t I feel condemned eating seafood now that I’m a Christian? I was raised Rastafarian and believed it was a sin to eat pork. When I was saved, and had thoroughly read Paul’s speech on God sanctifying foods, I discarded that as not true and started eating those things. The truth truly set me free, even in my diet. I still don’t eat pork – not because I think it’s a sin, but because I think it tastes bad. But, it mentions forbidding marriages in the last times within the same context as abstaining from foods. The conclusion drawn is that everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected…”if it is received with gratitude.”

Proverbs 18:22 says that, “Whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing, and obtaineth favour of the LORD.” If it is a good thing to want to be married, and it’s “sanctified by means of the word of God and prayer,” then it’s okay to think about being married as someone who’s single and trying to be satisfied with the singleness God’s given. But, those thoughts of marriage are never to take you away from God and a relationship with God, or that God has to compete with your heart’s attentions, because Jesus said in Luke 14:26-27, “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple.” We are to love God above all God’s given us, while loving those He’s given us.

This includes loving God more than your spouse, sort of like Samson in Judges 14:6.
God comes before dads, moms, kids, spouses, and all other relationships. Marriages can wait, but God wants us to live for Him today. “But seek first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all these shall be added unto you.” Matthew 6:33. “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.” Matthew 6:34. Marriage is honorable, but it’s the sinful things that need to be dealt with. Not only must God be the center of our attentions before and within marriage, but we’re called to avoid walking by the works of the flesh.

"When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry" (Colossians 3:4-5). Thoughts that plague marriage are ones that stem from selfish motives, earthly desires and ambitions, and things that would catch our attention away from God. "When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry" (Colossians 3:4-5). Sexual immorality, lust, evil desires, and greed are from the flesh, stem from earthly and sensual wisdom, and can cause idolatry even of marriage. These need to be dealt with, and the thoughts brought to the obedience of Christ (2 Cor. 10:5). Romans 8:5 says, "Those who live according to the sinful nature have their minds set on what that nature desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires.

If a man is truly seeking first God’s kingdom and His righteousness, trusting in His provision, he can rest assured that the desires of his heart in marriage are godly, but it is very easy to slip into ungodly thoughts on marriage. I found that it was hard to wait for God’s provision. Verses like this give me a sigh of relief: Galatians 6:9, “And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.” There will be a season, if God’s calling you to marriage, where you will be married. Maybe not right now, but in due season – just concentrate on the Kingdom and His righteousness, because there are things that you can do now if you are single that will improve on or make ready for the marriage when that due season comes. Psalm 145:16 says, “Thou openest thine hand, and satisfiest the desire of every living thing.” If so, then God can satisfy our godly desires for marriage.
    & nbsp;   &n bsp;   &nb sp;   &nbs p;     ;         & nbsp;   &n bsp;   &nb sp;   &nbs p;
The Marriage Bank – How long will you have to wait for a spouse? You will have to wait until the time appointed by God (Ecc. 3:1).

Think of it – how many men have noticed you from across the room, and given you that long stare? How many times have you returned it? You look across the room, and they give a face that lets you know that they’re interested in you. It’s so easy to do. You exchange a thought, on a certain level. And then you might carry on as if it never happened, and never hear from them again, or they’ll walk over where you are and pretend to do something and really they’re just desperate for a chance to get to talk to you. Women do it to me all the time, and I know how it feels. I wasn’t as keen to noticing all of what was going on around me with this, and didn’t notice that it was what was happening, until I resisted it – then the reality of these temptations and exchanges of emotion become so apparent and obvious and their hold over me and the yoke of bondage that Christ needed to break was revealed. Those feelings that are associated with that kind of behavior are relieved when they release on a person – with smiles, talking and wanted to be with them. Those emotions are to be consummated on the marriage bed.

They’re to be released between a man and his wife that drive them to love one another, but we tend to give them willy-nilly to every passerby. God doesn’t want this. When you meet someone new, the first thing that should be done is to resist temptation. Not only the sexual temptations or lusts, but releasing the emotions before its time. This is Song of Songs 2:7, 3:5. I’ll cut-and-paste this quote, “I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please.” The italic means that it’s not explicitly in the text – it could either say ‘my love’ as in my lover, or, ‘my love’ as in the emotion I feel for that lover. Don’t stir up those emotions – put them on the shelf for now until you can pray about them, and you’re sure that God is honored in it. If you allow them to release too early or too soon, before it’s godly to release those emotions, you’ll cloud your discernment and in prayer, you’ll be focused on your own will rather than God’s will, and something that would have been godly and holy can turn into something deceitfully sinful yet okay on the outside. God’s will is that we be living sacrifices, keeping ourselves holy in purity.

Our purity is a sacrifice to God (Romans 12:1, 1 Thess. 4:1-8). We’ll feel condemned with someone we love if it’s in impurity, but the solution is Romans 8:1, 4, 1-18 – if it’s of the flesh, we’ll feel bad about the relationship knowing that it’s wrong because it doesn’t honor God, but if we know for sure that it’s of the Spirit, we know there’s no condemnation, and it’s not a sinful or lustful thing! I can then kiss my spouse without any shame, because the union isn’t just a marriage, but because we’re saved, it’s a marriage that mirrors Christ and the church, and is spiritual in nature, is a call of God I’ve answered - Ephesians 5 – and we did it in the Spirit, not operating in the flesh.

    & nbsp;   &n bsp;   If I love my wife because she’s beautiful, what happens when a sister in Christ more beautiful than her comes by? If I love her because of her great passion for Christ or for evangelism, what happens when a woman of the Lord more fired up with more sincere tears comes by? If those are the gems and jewels on her that attract my eye, then when another one comes by with bigger, shinier gems and jewels, it’s going to turn my eye for sure. It has nothing to do with anything inherent to the one God’s called me to marry – because if we’re both saved, we’re going to have weaknesses that we’re going to have to love each other past. Some will be deep and will annoy us and bug us to death, but what keeps us together, and the foundation of our marriage, is faith in the Lord Jesus.

This can also be said of a pre-marital relationship: if they look like a completely perfect match for me in every which way, yet God hasn’t called me to marry that person, I’d be operating on the flesh and defrauding them by attempting to go about a relationship that God hasn’t called me to, and I couldn’t do it in faith (1 Thess. 4:6, Romans 14:23, Gal. 3:22), because it wasn’t by God’s call. Of course this can happen, and God would even love us and help us past the mess that we get ourselves in, but when has straying away from the set path that God has placed us on to follow Him ever been better when we’ve strayed away?

That might turn out to be the most miserable marriage, where the person who was completely incompatible for you had God’s blessing upon it. So even though a part of approaching someone may be evaluating their ‘inner person’ as 1 Peter 3 puts it, or their character, or looking for the virtues of a godly man or woman, we’re not to be out looking for men or women, or have a list of features that we’d like in someone. It’s not to say that that is wrong, but unprofitable (1 Cor. 6:12-13). We’re to walk by faith, not by sight (2 Cor. 5:7). We’re responding to God’s call. Apart of this call is that if God’s given us a time of singleness before the marriage, we’re to be faithful in it – seek first His kingdom and His righteousness (Matt 6:33), clothe ourselves in compassion/mercy, kindness, humbleness of mind, gentleness/meekness, and patience/longsuffering (Col. 3:12), practicing love in all of them (Col. 3:14).

(Continued in Part 2 - Proceed to next post)

 by Isaac D. (isaac.tblog.com)

 Introduction
In our day and age, there is a lot of data bombarding us constantly. There is such a constant streaming of content to us from all sorts of sources – television, internet, phones, people, advertisements, signs, and so on – that we tend to take it all in and absorb it without much consideration. The daily input are such a constant in the world surrounding us that they have become like white-noise, a common fact of life to be ignored by the mind. A passivity to the things that pass before our eyes can endanger our souls as we become complacent and approve of the things that are often worldly and ungodly. When someone thinks of ‘purity’ they tend to think of what someone doesn’t do.

We tend to think that if someone doesn’t drink, smoke, or curse, they are pure of those things. Contrary to that thinking, Jesus Christ is the very presence of purity. He embodies goodness, righteousness, and uprightness. He is love incarnate. He is the very definition of what’s right. He is fully God, though fully man, yet He never did wrong. This is the man we are called to be imitators of. If Jesus would have come in the glory of His Father in His first coming, we wouldn’t have been able to follow Him – the epitome of glory, girded in splendor, the beauty of His holiness, none can fathom. But, He came down to become the author of salvation for everyone who would believe so that we could “be imitators of God as dear children” (Ephesians 5:1).

Recently, I was talking to a friend who is struggling with an addiction to pornography. In my sincere care I went to talk to him about it and began by mentioning how it could hurt a future godly relationship that God may call him to later on in his life. I began talking to him about marriage. He did not understand why I mentioned marriage and how it related to his sexually immoral habit. He didn’t see the connection between a secret, sexually immoral lifestyle and the godliness of marriage. He just could not see the connection between the two. Suddenly, it struck me, Proverbs 6:32, “Whoever commits adultery with a woman lacks understanding; He who does so destroys his own soul.” This verse seemed so relevant to the lives of the both of us – the sinful practices involving pornography that I once struggled with and that was his was present struggle.

We could ‘divorce,’ as it were, in our minds the act of sex from marriage and think about just the act, which was intended by God to be an intimate act between husband and wife. As single men we were struggling with something that God intended for us to only ponder with regard to marriage and we had completely separated it in our minds from the honorableness and holiness invested in Christian marriage. I asked him, “Say God had you go downtown tomorrow and meet someone special that you know He is calling you to marry and there is an instant connection. Say you both decided to marry by the end of the week. But, marrying her doesn’t take away your present struggle, it only makes it harder. If this were to really happen, how would you deal with your state of sexual immorality in that marriage?” He began to see the seriousness of his struggle. He realized that he would not only continue in sin, but hurt the person he would marry. Inwardly beats the heart of an adulterer that would endanger his future marriage. He was not only sinning against God and needed to repent, but God also has to give him victory over sexual immorality because it would be detrimental to a godly relationship in marriage later on. Not only is it sinful, it is detrimental. It hurts not only his life and his relationship with God but other people in godly relationships. He ‘destroys his own soul’ (Prov. 6:32b) and the consequences from it effect him and his family for the rest of his life. When we put sex in its proper context it is a lot easier to think about it and weight it morally.

George Barna of the Barna Group found in the year 2000 that the divorce rate in the Church is between 21% and 34%. These statistics are alarmingly high and are just as high as the divorce rates for the rest of the world. If we are lights of the world as Christ says it is so important that we begin to start looking at marriage as important. Though a number of factors may be responsible for such high divorce rates, could it be that the Church has fallen victim to a rising acceptance of sexual immorality and complacency for the unabashed display of sexual content being paraded today? 47% of Christians said pornography is a major problem in the home. What do the other 53% think? Paul said in Ephesians 5:3, “But fornication and all uncleanness or covetousness, let is not even be named among you, as is fitting for saints.” Today there needs to be a call to return to the substance of such a passage among us. Unfortunately, leadership isn’t immune.

In 2000 Christianity Today survey, 33% of clergy admitted to having visited a sexually explicit Web site. Of those who had visited a porn site, 53% had visited such sites “a few times” in the past year, and 18% visit sexually explicit sites between a couple of times a month and more than once a week. Out of 81 pastors surveyed (74 males 7 female), 98% had been exposed to porn; 43% intentionally accessed a sexually explicit website (National Coalition survey of pastors, Seattle, April 2000). In March of 2002 Rick Warren’s (author of the Purpose Driven life) Pastors.com website conducted a survey on porn use of 1351 pastors: 54% of the pastors had viewed Internet pornography within the last year, and 30% of these had visited within the last 30 days. In his book "The Sexual Man", Dr. Archibald Hart revealed the results of a survey of some 600 Christian men, on the topic of masturbation: 61% of married Christian men masturbate; 82% of these have self sex on an average of once a week; 10% have sex with self 5-10 times per month; 6% more than 15 times per month; and 1% more than 20 times a month. 13% of Christian married men said they felt it was normal. 44% of churchgoers want to hear more scriptural teaching from their pastors on the subject of sex. 22% of pastors feel they should spend more time on the topic. 85% of pastors say they speak about sexual issues once a year; while 63% of churchgoers say their pastors do so.

Among those churchgoers who say they want their pastors to preach more about sexual issues, 47% say their pastor speaks about it once a year, an even bigger difference of opinion. A CTI analyst was quoted saying "Perhaps this desire for more biblical exposition on sexual issues exists because pastors are not speaking forcefully or clearly enough, while exposure to sexual images and messages in today's media is ever more heightened." 57% of pastors say that addiction to pornography is the most sexually damaging issue to their congregation. Almost 9 in 10 pastors reported counseling a layperson on sexual issues once a year or more. Many struggle with this habit while married. In 2001, in a study of 7037 adults, two thirds of those who visit websites with sexual content say their Internet activities haven't affected their level of sexual activity with their partners, though 75% report masturbating while on line (Divorcewizards.com).
In a poll of 1,000 respondents, 50 percent of Christian men and 20 percent of Christian women were found to be addicted to pornography (Conducted by ChristaNet.com, a popular Christian marketplace website).

A 2006 study reported by Morality in Media found that 73 percent of U.S. adults think that viewing pornographic websites and videos is morally unacceptable. 44% of males ages 18-34 said that viewing pornography is morally acceptable with males age 35-49 being the largest consumers of the pornography industry. There are 68 million search engine requests for pornographic material and 2.5 billion pornographic emails sent out per day. How many of those requests were made by those who profess to be saved? Of the 4.2 million pornographic websites, 100,000 of which offer child pornography, there are 72 million worldwide visitors to them monthly. 1 in 3 visitors are women. Every second $3,075.64 is being spent on pornography. Every second 28,258 Internet users are viewing pornography. Every second 372 Internet users are typing adult search terms into search engines. Today we can sin at the click of a button. US porn revenue exceeds the combined revenues of ABC, CBS, and NBC.

The pornography industry is larger than the revenues of the top technology companies combined: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Apple, Netflix and EarthLink. With internet pornography sales making $4.9 billion in sales, we can certainly see that it is a very large issue. As lights of the world, are we powerless to stand up to big industries such as these and stand up for what is holy and for what is right? Because of Christ, we are not powerless. How does this present condition affect close relationships within the Church like our marriages, children, or fellowship with other Christians? 90% of children ages 8-16 have viewed pornography online, most while doing homework, and 80% of 15-17 year olds have been exposed to hardcore pornography multiple times.

If we won’t take action for our spouses, will we take action for our children? It is so easy today to live in a secretive life addicted to online pornography, masturbation, and lusting after women. It is so easy to grow up thinking about women as sex objects and believe Satan’s lies, obscuring a right view of women and sexuality among young men. I was such a young man. It’s also so easy to develop these habits later on in life and live a secret, shameful life of sexual sin that hurts yourself, your family, and worst of all hurts God. You’ve been redeemed by the precious price of God’s Son’s own blood; don’t follow the way of the world in its darkness, which leads to destruction. “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed” John 3:19-20. As God’s lead me to share the Gospel I’ve encountered many situations where it is apparent from conversation that the reason why they resist the Gospel and don’t give their heart to the Lord is because they are trying to justify keeping a sinful lifestyle in the back of their minds as they hear Gospel truth. It’s not to be this way in the Church.

This was written primarily to deal with the issue of sexual immorality, but it could not be written without regarding pre-marital relationships because the two go hand-in-hand. Many preachers preach on marriage, but I haven’t heard of many these days that are preaching very specifically on pre-marital relationships and the foundational beginnings of a godly marriage. The understanding behind them are wrapped up in each other and straightening out how we think about each will protect the sanctity of and lead to the health of marriages God has ordained for His church. Both of these topics must be mentioned within the subject of marriage. Marriage was instituted before the Law of Moses and before the 7^th commandment, right after God created man (Gen 2:24-25) and it was good (Gen. 1:31). And it still is! (Heb. 13:4.) They were naked and unashamed to be naked (Gen. 2:25) and sex was undistorted by sin, but the world and man’s sin has perverted and corrupted what God deemed “good” ever since. Hebrews 13:4 says, “Marriage is honorable among all, and the bed undefiled; but fornicators and adulterers God will judge.” Speaking about sexual immorality specifically on how it pertains to marriage will align our minds on protecting what has always been good with what we’ve always known is wrong.
The two extremes of marriage and sexual immorality began to be very clear once I had studied them in the Word and had begun to reconcile my mind to the scriptures that condemned the thinking that lead me to pornography. After God gave me a victory from sexual immorality, and as He prepared me for His call to marriage, I began to gain understanding. “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding.” Prov. 9:10. The median age for the first use of pornography is 11-13 for boys and 12-14 for girls. I started around the age of 13 and was enslaved since then. I was saved in July of 2003.

What is the difference between a man locked up in his room with his computer fixated on pornography, cloaked in secrecy, fully immersed in his own lusts, and a man staring at his firstborn child intimately surrounded by his loving family? The difference is enormous and almost unspeakable. I make such a comparison between two extremes so diametrically opposed to one another so that the plainness of the goodness of God’s command to regard sexual matters with an eternal perspective would be clearly seen. Let us be men that can inhabit our bodies in cleanness, in sanctification, in purity (Romans 12:1-2, 1 Thess. 4:3-5), offering ourselves up as sacrifices to the God who’s saved us, whether in our singleness or in our marriages. 

Sexual Immorality

Introduction
Jesus said that if you look at someone to lust after them, you have committed adultery with them already in your heart (Matt 5:27-32). This same text left me with no room for excuse to say, ‘Oh well, it is human nature, I cannot help it.’ Jesus said that if my right eye causes me to sin pluck it out because it is better to enter into eternal life with one eye than to with both eyes go to hell (Matt 5:29). That is such a hard command, especially to someone who, with his eyes, was constantly checking out women, and made pornography a daily habit. There will be no excuse on the Day of Judgment, because by my conscience, I knew what I was doing was wrong (Romans 2:14, 15). The law is written on every man’s heart to know right from wrong, good from evil, so that God can judge everyone, even those who’ve never heard the law, leaving everyone without an excuse on Judgment Day – the work of the law is written on our hearts and when we do wrong, our conscience bears witness (Romans 2:12-15). I broke God’s law and sinned against the maker of those laws, God. Sin is transgression of the law (1 John 3:4). However, at the time of my struggles, I was unmarried and so it was not ‘adultery’ but it was just as equally fornication, and a single man with this heart is an adulterer at heart, even though he is single. The Bible makes very clear: a fornicator cannot enter into the kingdom of God until they are washed, sanctified, and justified in Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 6:9-11). No porn-addict, someone who has made pornography his daily habit and lives in a lifestyle of sexual sin, will pass through the pearly gates.  I lacked understanding. The bible gives no assurance of salvation to someone who professes to know Christ, yet lives a lifestyle of sin that sent Him to the cross. My struggles with a sexually immoral lifestyle restarted after I was saved and followed me into my salvation, yet there was abundant fruit constantly in my life of a genuine conversion and of a totally, drastically changed heart, which I had to consider when examining myself. I struggled with it, for a season, but God delivered me. I have great assurance of my faith before God. The whole matter of salvation concerning whether you can lose your salvation or whether you never had it is very complicated, and I will not attempt to detail it here, nonetheless, no matter where anyone in the faith stands, the Word clearly tells you to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12) and to “examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith; test yourselves” (2 Cor. 13:5). The season of my sexual sin had to pass now that I had come to know Christ. Because, “… let everyone who names the name of Christ depart from sin” (2 Tim. 2:19b).

“But whoso committeth adultery with a woman lacketh understanding: he that doeth it destroyeth his own soul.” Proverbs 6:32. I lacked understanding, and so I was able, for a time, to reconcile in my mind a life of sexual sin and a godly life. Yet, I knew it was wrong. I certainly knew it was not the will of God. Christ not only gives the power to overcome sin by walking in the Spirit, but a renewed mind and heart – taking away the pleasure of sin. I began to hate the sin that I once loved as an unbeliever, and I truly experienced the freedom Christ bought for me at Calvary, taking off the yoke of sexual immorality and putting on the one of love and joy and peace in the Holy Spirit. Today, women try to entice me, or flaunt themselves before me and strut, and I literally feel sick to my stomach at their passes.

I have spent time with God in walking with Christ to the point where my heart takes no pleasure in the very idea of entertaining a lustful thought. Words like love, joy, peace, patience, uprightness, gentleness, faith, kindness, self-control, took meaning. Concepts like wisdom, understanding, discernment, knowledge, discretion, discipline, correction, took form and were no longer empty but meaningful to me! This verse best explains this part of my walk with Christ that I had shared with you where there was so much struggle, “Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” Phil. 2:12. The intention of this teaching is not to bog its reader down with pharisaical laws and impose rules, but towards liberty, allow the scriptures to speak for themselves on these issues. It is not to make religious laws that build up the walls the grace of God sets us free from, but to offer wisdom and understanding that lead me to depart from my time of sexual sin.

“Augustine’s understanding of grace is this: Grace is God’s giving us a sovereign joy in God that triumphs over the joy in sin. In other words, God works deep in the human heart to transform the springs of joy so that we love God more than we love sex or anything else… Grace is the giving of a sovereign joy that triumphs over ALL competitors… Loving God in Augustine’s mind is never reduced to deeds of obedience or acts of will-power… Delighting in God above all things and in all things for the sake of God… Joy is the essence of love!” – John Piper

How to Use This
    & nbsp; I asked my friend who is struggling with pornography addiction why he hadn’t read his bible and really studied on how to be set free. He said, “I will be honest. I am too lazy to do that. Honesty counts for something, right?”

    & nbsp; I said to him, “Then your laziness is what's keeping you in sin. Then your laziness is why you willingly pick up a yoke that Christ has already broken. And enslave yourself to it.” D.L. Moody once said, “When I study the Bible, I prepare myself to talk to others. When I read the Bible, God talks to me.” It's good to study the bible. But when you read the bible, spending time with God, just reading, saying, "Lord, what do you want me to know?" Every area of your walk with Christ is built up. You're edified. You'll pray harder, want to witness more, even think clearer. If you do nothing more than reading this then just going through this and reading the verses and looking up passages that are quoted can be used by the Holy Spirit to do a lasting work within you. You’ll be built up for the next round of temptations and trials that plague your walk with the Lord. By God’s Spirit you will no longer fulfill the lusts of the flesh (Galatians 5:16).

It's not, "Do your best and Jesus does the rest." The work that frees you from this sexual sin was already done – By Christ. 2,000 years ago. And He needs nothing from you. One scripture you will see that is quoted very often is Philippians 2:13, “For it is God who works in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.” The fact is you can’t do it on your own. Overcoming a temptation that I harbored at the very core of my nature couldn’t have been done on my own power and that is why God is most glorified in me. Expect the same!

Call to Flee Sexually Immoral Behavior
My pornography habit started when I was 13. It began with scrambled pornography when my family first hooked up basic cable. It then escalated to the internet when I found I could get several varieties of pornography at the click of a button. I lived it out very secretively, hiding from everyone a life of youthful lusts and masturbation to my absolute shame. 2^nd Timothy 2:22 says, “Flee also youthful lusts: but follow righteousness, faith, charity, peace, with them that call on the Lord out of a pure heart.” This epistle, even though it’s addressed to Timothy, Paul speaks of ordaining in every church in his epistles. So, God’s will is that we all flee youthful lusts – every believer. This includes internet pornography, masturbation, and lust of the eyes. Joshua Harris said in one of his sermons, “God wants us to worship Him and glorify Him in every part of our lives and that includes our sexuality. We have to understand that sex is not our enemy – lust is the enemy. Lust is craving sexually what God has forbidden… desiring and pursuing what God has said no to… No man should arrogantly assume that he is above the temptations or the effects of lust.”

These practices are unclean: Jesus said in Mark 70:20-23, “He went on, ‘What comes out of a man is what makes him unclean. For from within, out of men’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance, and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a man unclean.’”

1 Thessalonians 4:1-8 speaks very powerfully that it is God’s will that we abstain from fornication (v. 3), that we know how to live as Christians who aren’t immersed in sexually explicit material which is to say living in sanctification and honor (v. 4), and that this isn’t apart of our lifestyle as Christians (v. 5). This passage goes on further to say that it’s also our obligation that other Christians around us know that we are to live this way, according to verse 6. This means that if you’re checking out women at work, and making sport of it, you’ve defrauded whoever you’ve joked about it with that it is a sin and he that finds this and many other sexually explicit or lustful practices to be morally acceptable “despises not man, but God, who has also given us His Holy Spirit.” The bible makes it clear that our sexuality is to be exercised within marriage, towards one person, the spouse. Any sexual behavior beyond that marriage is sexual immorality.

So, sex before marriage or fornication, violates the 7^th commandment and extra-marital sex outside of that marriage to someone who isn’t your spouse is adultery, violating the same commandment. Anything sexual, even desires and thoughts, outside of the context of marriage is a violation of God’s law, the 7^th commandments, and thus sin.
So how do you define a ‘sexual addiction’? It is an uncontrolled, obsession, compulsion in sexual thoughts or actions. Such preoccupation becomes idolatry. Associated with "fleshly desires" and "besetting sin" (Rom. 13:14; Gal. 5:16; Heb. 12:1) which the bible condemns (I Cor. 6:13,18; Eph. 5:3; Col. 3:5; I Thess. 4:3); Fornication is sexual intercourse with unmarried partner outside of God's covenantal basis of marriage relationships. (Exod. 22:16; Deut. 22:28,29; Heb. 13:4); Adultery - sexual intercourse with betrothed or married person other than own spouse, contrary to the faithfulness and loyalty of God's character. (Exod. 20:14; Prov. 2:16-19; Matt. 5:27-28; Rom. 13:9).

Living in sexual immorality only leads to death. Examine your profession of faith by these passages of scriptures: Romans 8:5-7 says, “For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. For to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. Because the carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be.”
Galatians 5:19-21 says, “Now the works of the flesh are evident, which are: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like; of which I tell you beforehand, just as I also told you in time past, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.”

Ephesians 5:3-7 says, “But fornication and all uncleanness or covetousness, let it not even be named among you, as is fitting for saints; neither filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor coarse jesting, which are not fitting, but rather giving of thanks. For this you know, that no fornicator, unclean person, nor covetous man, who is an idolater, has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. Therefore do not be partakers with them.”
You may be saying, “God knows I’m going to sin and fall,” and this may be so, but God’s will is never that anyone saved live in a lifestyle of sin. There’s no “allowable” sin – Jesus Christ had to suffer and die for every one of them.

To sin and repent from it is good, but if you can casually live a lifestyle of sin with no conviction you show you aren’t in a right relationship with God. Are we living for God or for our own pleasure? Do we serve God or do we serve ourselves? We aren’t called in Christ to be addicted to pornography or to live an oppressed life giving into various temptations. Galatians 5:13 says, “You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather serve one another in love.”

Overcoming Sexual Immorality
So what do you do when you're being tempted sexually? You know when it happens – the arousal that comes, that leads you off to want to satisfy the lust. You could be doing something on your computer when it comes and you try to fight it, and it's as though you've already given into it in your heart, so you just go and do it. What's the first thing that you do when that happens? The first thing I did was entertain the lust until I gave in. I was fighting it on my own power without realizing it. This was unfortunate for me because I’ve already proven myself to be a fornicator at heart, always ready to give in! So, I would go a few days without ‘caving in,’ and then I’d fall in again and be back into the habit.

It wasn’t until I saw how Jesus handled temptation in Matthew 4 and Luke 4 did I really begin to see the difference between a Spirit-empowered life and my more me-centered struggle. I would immediately study Matthew 4:1-11, Luke 4:1-14,  1 Thess. 4, Psalms 119:9,11, 1 Tim. 5:2, John 14:21, Colossians 3:1-all, James 1:14, James 4:1-10. The simple way this is done is by having scripture stored up in your heart – Psalm 119:9 says, “How can a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed according to Your word.” Verse 11 then says, “Your word I have hidden in my heart, that I might not sin against You.” The only way that temptation will be defeated is by giving heed to scripture pertaining to our sexual sin and by having it immediately ready in our minds and hearts, having studied them, for when the temptations come. Jesus in Matthew 4 and Luke 4 countered all of Satan’s sensual temptations, twisting of scriptures and lies with direct quotes from Deuteronomy, the book of the law. Jesus definitely set the example of ‘meditate on this book of the law day and night’ (Joshua 1:8).

He chose to cite the written Word to directly counteract Satan’s temptations. This is exactly how we will defeat temptations – through having God’s written Word in our hearts. I hope that after you have finished reading this you will have looked up passages and read the scriptures quoted herein and be familiar with ones that have been particularly helpful to you. Commit these to memory. Once they are in your mind, the ‘transformation&rsq uo; and sanctifying work of these passages is immediately at work on our thinking (Romans 12:2). Let me explain. The Holy Spirit is the third person in God’s triune being, fully God. The Holy Spirit is the Author of scripture, and the words of written scripture themselves are directly the voice of the Holy Spirit. So, whenever you properly interpret the written scripture, it is a direct leading and guiding of the Holy Spirit because the written Word reveals God’s will for us and what He wants us to do. It is revelation of God. 1 John 4:1 calls us to “test the spirits to see whether they are of God.” So, wherever we have thoughts in our minds that contradict what God wants to be in our minds in scripture, we know that it is not of the Spirit of God, because the Spirit of God will only tell us what He’s authored in the written Word.

For example, Satan quoted scripture to Jesus and said that God the Father promised that if He would be hurt, He would send angels to help Him. But, it was a twisted misinterpretation of that scripture and the wisdom behind that thinking in that passage wasn’t what the Holy Spirit authored. Jesus, knowing this, contradicts his lie with a truth from Deuteronomy that no one is to tempt God. For us, this works the same way. Whenever we are tempted sexually to pursuit a lustful endeavor in our hearts, immediately we can think of what God has written in the Word for us, such as Colossians 3:1-5:

Col 3:1  If then you were raised with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God.
Col 3:2   Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth.
Col 3:3   For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
Col 3:4   When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory.
Col 3:5   Therefore put to death your members which are on the earth: fornication, uncleanness, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.

This will always work because God’s Word never returns to Him void or not having accomplished the purpose God wants. When we recall these passages, we submit ourselves to the will of God revealed in these passages. So, temptations are defeated by submission to God. Romans 13:12 speaks of putting on God’s armor of light to counteract the works of darkness we once lived in. Ephesians 6:10-18 expounds on the armor of light and its different parts and how when armored with these spiritual weapons we can withstand the ‘wiles’ of the devil. Each piece of the armor is protective – the shield of faith, the belt of truth, the shoes of the peaceable readiness of the Gospel, the breastplate of righteousness, helmet of salvation, prayers and supplications, and the sword of the Spirit which is the Word of God.

Each piece of the armor is defensive and for protecting us but the sword of the Spirit is the only offensive piece. The sword of the Word of God is what we will need to use to defeat sexual temptations. So, I recite many of the verses contained within these pages against temptation in my mind. This always defeats sexual temptation, no matter how strong they may be, and is a direct work of the Holy Spirit. This is through the Spirit mortifying the deeds of our sinful nature (Romans 8:13). Through submitting to God, we mortify the members of our nature with these desires (Col. 3:5). We need not think of this as a “work” of self-effort on our part because scripture is direct revelation of God’s Spirit (1 Tim. 3:16), and the Word sanctifies (John 17:17) and we can be confident that this means by which the flesh is overcome is our “response” to the equipping of power of God’s grace directly addressing our immediate demands at the times of our hard temptations and trials.

This will not be easy and you are doing supernaturally (by God only) what is against your nature. Prayer is SO very important. When it is too hard, crying out to God, like David did so many times in the Psalms, may be your only last-ditch plan B. God will always be there for us – Jesus Christ’s soul offered up on the cross for ours is our guarantee.

Don’t ever get tricked into believing the lie that you’ll never be able to resist temptations or that because of your human nature you’re always going to fall into it. What does the Word of God say? 1 Cor. 10:13 says, “No temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to man; but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also make the way of escape, that you may be able to bear it.” Who should we believe – the world, ourselves, or God? Let us believe our God – He always provides the way of escape from temptation and will always remain faithful to give us the power we need, by His Spirit, to overcome sexual temptations. As God tests our faithfulness to offer up the sacrifice of purity (1 Thess 4:3-4, Romans 12:2) it is like Israel following the Spirit of God through the wilderness. Eventually they reached the Promised Land, but not without hard temptations. These temptations weren’t from God because God tempts no one and cannot be tempted with evil (James 1:13).

Don’t get me wrong, I struggled hard with overcoming this sexual temptation with God. I was driven many times to my face on my bathroom floor over my sin and my struggles and how I kept giving in over and over again. But, after wandering around that wilderness and being tested, God overcame it and I have been living for almost 3 years free from the desires of pornography and other lusts that enslaved me for so long. The season of my struggle had come to an end. Though I still have to fight off sexual temptation, it is a lot easier than before. Though His victory is so thorough and I’ve never once had a relapse or fell back into those previous habits, I know the Lord always wants me to be on guard.

There is no magic formula for overcoming sexual temptation because it is a Spirit-empowered grace-driven constant work within us where God is transforming us into what He Himself is like from the inside out as we walk with Christ. In fact, it is a daily pursuit in our walk with Christ that we will constantly cast down temptations and resist the flesh, but the promise is that every time this is done and the more times we submit ourselves to God in this, the more our hearts will be conformed to His Word and the easier it is to resist temptations.

The more opposition we face in our walk with Christ the more we are conformed to the image of Christ and come closer to reflecting God’s character (Romans 8:29). Resisting these temptations, by God’s power, will transform us, renewing our minds in His Word, changing our thinking and making us more like Jesus Christ (Romans 12:2). God will always do His part (1 Cor. 10:13), and will always be faithful to provide the way of escape from temptation. But, this is a process empowered by God’s Spirit – we cannot do this on the power of our own nature and it is the Spirit of God constantly working within us who helps us (Phil 2:13). Resisting the devil only comes after being wholly, unconditionally surrendered to God (James 4:7). God calls us to in our minds call to remembrance scripture that He has taught us in our quiet times with Him when we are tempted.
Our goal in all of these struggles is to be like Christ.

Romans 12:1-2, “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.” We want to present ourselves to God in thought, word, and deed a living sacrifice. “Reasonable service” can also be translated as “your spiritual act of worship.” So how do we get there? Verse 2 says, “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” It is going to take some refashioning of the mind to conform to Gods will rather than what we learned in the world. Resisting temptation and denying desires that feel so natural is often awkward, but as new creatures in Christ, learning to operate in the Spirit rather than the flesh, we desire what’s supernatural and what’s above our nature to do. It may take some exercising and reconditioning of the body to accept what the mind is telling it.

It may take bringing the body into subjection, beating it into submission, like Paul in 1 Cor. 9:27. But we do so to obtain an “incorruptible crown” (1 Cor. 9:25). We have such precious promises from God to hold onto if we continue in this righteous pursuit. James 1:12 says, “Blessed is the man who endures temptation; for when he has been approved, he will receive the crown of life which the Lord has promised to those who love Him.”

In my struggle with youthful lusts, one big piece of understanding from the Word that I was missing was that you just force yourself to not do the evil you keep falling into. Or that you stop doing the sin first, and then you go to God. Though in James 4:7 the Word speaks of “resisting the devil,” it puts “Submit to God” before the command to “resist the devil” and so we’re called first to submit to God before we resist. Then, God gives the power in order to defeat the temptation.

He does this so that He gets the glory (2 Cor. 4:7), so that we can gladly say that it’s God who’s keeping us by His power (Jude 1:24) and that it’s God who works in us to will and to do of His good pleasure (Phil. 2:13), so that people will see and say, ‘he has no desire to check women out – that can only be God at work.’ And God gets the glory. We are to submit to God first – it’s not that we get rid of doing the sin on our own first, and then we go to God, but that we go to God first, and through Him, He fights our battle with sin for us within us as we resist the devil. When we submit ourselves to God, then comes the power of God over the bondage to sin.
And what the Lord used to call me out of sin and lead to my deliverance was that one day I read Romans 13.

Ro 13:11	¶ And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.
Ro 13:12	The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light.
Ro 13:13	Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying.
Ro 13:14	But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof.

Paul starts in Romans 13:11 that its “high time” to awake out of sleep – these are the last days, and our salvation is nearer than when we first believed. Our salvation is nearer than when we believed. This brought great urgency. The night is far spent. It’s done. Every day is a day closer to when Christ will return to redeem the church! This is serious, and the stakes are high – Christ is coming soon and we must be ready, in purity, for His return. The reality of His return and the coming kingdom and the imminence of His return must be in our minds as we study sexual immorality.

And then the instruction comes in verse 12. It says, “Therefore,” meaning, because we’re going to be presented to our Lord Jesus. Cast off the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light. Walk honestly means to walk properly. There must be a purposeful casting off. Not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling or jealousy. This passage mentioning the armor of light leads us to Ephesians 6 where it gives this whole exposition of this armor that we’re called to wear in Christ Jesus.

Romans 13:14 – “But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lusts” (emphasis added). To make provision is like feeding a pet. Provision is πρoνο&i ota;α in the Greek, which means “providential care.” God doesn’t want us to feed the flesh, to turn off what’s fulfilling its lusts.

I found that personally in my own life that the commercials on TV were fulfilling the lusts of the flesh, and I had to give it up. Keep from the temptations that feed and strengthen the lust of the flesh in your thought of mind as well as what you put before your eyes. Starve what gives maintenance to your lusts. The small things you do can be “snacks” that supply the flesh what it needs to entertain lustful thoughts. It’s like a war between two countries. On one side of the valley is the spirit valiant army with shining armor that represents everything good and on the other side is the seething flesh army that only wants to win the battle so the other side can lose!

They war and fight one another. Say you decide to read a magazine that has models scantily clad in outfits that leave nothing to the imagination. The flesh army was just provided with a fresh round of provisions and are strengthened enough to continue fighting against the spirit army. They might win the battle, and you may be lead to sin. This isn’t what you want. If the flesh army is starved and cut off, it’s so much easier for the spirit army to win, especially since you’ve given them the fresh provisions of prayer, bible study, faithfulness to God, kindness to others, and good clean thoughts.

Romans 13:14 says, ‘put ye on’ the Lord Jesus Christ. This relates back to Galatians 5:16, “This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh.” And it is so plain! Walk by the flesh, do the works of the flesh. Walk by the Spirit and you bear the fruits of the Spirit. If you walk by the Spirit, you will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh because you’re not walking by the flesh, but by the Spirit, so you won’t do the works of the flesh! I mean, it seems so simple, but the Holy Spirit empowered it and brought it to life in me. Considering Romans 13:12 tells us what to cast off, the Lord now wants to dress us and put on what’s appropriate for the kingdom. A search of the bible for “put on” gives 46 results. Here are some:

1. “…and let us put on the armor of light…” Romans 13:12
   
2. “…that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness…” Ephesians 4:24
   
3. “Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand…” Ephesians 6:11
   
4. “…And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of Him that created him…” Col. 3:10
   
5. “Put on therefore as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering…&rdq uo; Col. 3:12
   
6. “…above all these things put on love, which is the bond of perfectness…&rdquo ; Col. 3:14
   

Galatians 5:25, “If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit.” So, but by submitting myself to God and resisting the devil through that submission, I live by the Spirit, and if putting things into subjection to God, walking by the Spirit. I had to constantly put on the Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to His Lordship in bearing the cross, because this isn’t just a wrestle against flesh and blood and sexual temptation from the desires in my body – but it’s a fight against spiritual wickedness and darkness of this world (Ephesians 6:11-12).

It says that we’re to put on the armor of light spoken about in that passage for that purpose. I know that by understanding the Word I’m hiding it in my heart, which it says in Psalm 119:9 & 11, ‘Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against you’ – that it keeps us from sinning against God. You can quickly go through Ephesians 6 in a study of the armor of light. In doing so, the Lord washed my mind clean and turned my heart from that sin by His power, to be kept by the Holy Spirit every day since from the sexually immoral mind to which I had given myself into slavery.

The problem was I had the desires for sexual sin in my heart as James said that lead astray and entice (James 1:14). It’s like a field – a field of weeds grows wildly. You cut up the weeds and they grow back. Same was happening in my heart. The weeds are desires. Well, God’s Holy Spirit revealing to us the Word in revelation of God is like weed-killer – it hits it at its core roots. You fill your body with light in submission to God walking in the Spirit; you take away the desires that war in the flesh.

You take away the desires and you take away the darkness that fills your body. Matthew 12:35 – good comes out of the good treasury of the heart, evil things out of the evil treasure of the heart, and no one bears good and bad fruit, only good fruit from a good tree and bad fruit from a bad tree – Luke 6:43. If the heart has images of pornography or a faulty understanding that says God is too forgiving to consider that sexual sin serious, it’s going to want to fall into that darkness. But when the heart’s filled with light, the actions follow, and you’ve de-weeded the garden of the heart, so to speak, according to those same scriptures.

(Continued in Part 2 - Proceed to next post)