When the Not-Yet Married Meet: Dating to Display Jesus

Dating is dead.

So says the media. Girls, stop expecting guys to make any formal attempt at winning your affections. Don’t sit around waiting for a boy to make you a priority, communicate his intentions, or even call you on the phone. Exclusivity and intentionality are ancient rituals, things of the past, and misplaced hopes.

I beg to differ. It’s not that this new line of thinking is necessarily untrue today, or that it’s not the current and corrupt trend of our culture. It’s wrong. One of our most precious pursuits, that of a life-long partner for all of life, is tragically being relegated to tweets, texts, and Facebook pokes, to ambiguous flirtation and fooling around. It’s wrong.

Dating That Preserves Marriage

There is a God. And this God created and rules his world, including men, women, the biological compulsions that bind them together, and the institution that declares their union and keeps it sacred and safe. Therefore, only he can prescribe the purpose, parameters, and means of our marriages.

If fullness of life could be found in sexual stimulation, or if it was just a matter of making babies, the “forget formality and just have sex” approach might temporarily satisfy cravings and cause enough conception. But God had much more in mind with romance than orgasms or even procreation, and so should we. So must we.

When people in the world are expecting less and less of each other in dating, God isn’t — so among the single we have to work harder in our not-yet married relationships to preserve what marriage ought to picture and provide.

Mom, Where Do Weddings Come From?

Nothing in my life and faith has been more confusing and spiritually hazardous than my pursuit of marriage. From far too young, I longed for the affection, safety, and intimacy I anticipated with a wife.    Continue at Marshall Segal

A Christian Man’s Travel Plan

This week I’ll be traveling away from home to teach the book of Hebrews in Memphis, TN and then the book of Romans in Little Rock, AR. As I prep for my trip, there are three basic things that are on my mind: family, purity, and ministry. I thought I’d share how I plan for each of these when I’m on the road in case it might help you prepare for your own travels.

 

Family

Whenever I’m gone, I want to make sure my family knows that I love them and that I’m thinking about them. I do this with phone calls, but I also do a couple other things.

1. For my wife I write her a card for each day I’ll be gone. The card usually has a short prayer or a couple sentences telling her something I love about her, and then a verse of Scripture. It takes about 20 minutes to do these cards (depending on how long the trip is) and I’m pretty sure it blesses her more than I realize.
2. For the kids, I try to rally them together before I leave and show them on a map where I’m going. I ask them to pray for me while I’m gone and tell them what I plan to do while I’m there. I don’t always leave them something to open when I’m away, but I always bring them something back to let them know they were on my mind while I was there.    Continue at Garrett Kell

Dealing with Lust

They are as close as our skin, the troika of lusts described by the Apostle John: the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life (1 John 2:16). These inordinate and forbidden longings of the sinner are the fountain of sin, as James points out when teaching that God does not tempt us to sin: “But each one is tempted when he is carried away and enticed by his own lust. Then when lust has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and when sin is accomplished, it brings forth death” (James 1:14–15 NASB).

The natural man is in bondage to his lusts (Rom. 3:10–18), but at our conversion, because of our union with Christ, we are delivered from the dominion of lusts: “Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts, and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace” (6:12–14).

God, however, in His inscrutable wisdom, determined to leave within His converted sons and daughters a remnant of sin; and that remnant resides in the lusts. Hence, the same Apostle who announced that we are dead to the dominion of sin chronicled his struggles: “For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh; for the willing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not. For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want” (7:18–19).   Continue at Joseph Pipa

The Unique Struggle of Same-Sex Attraction

Not long ago, someone asked me how long I've been dealing with same-sex attractions. I was surprised to find a big, round number before me: 20 years. Of those 20 years, five and a half have been as a married man and as a father. I'm not gay: I'm a new creation in Christ. I am a Christian struggling with unwanted same-sex attractions (SSA). I am a pastoral worker and a Bible college student, and homosexuality has been a prominent part of my journey as a Christian. I wish that it were not so, though part of me knows that God has been using this struggle powerfully to bring me to himself.

SSA has shown me how God can work in a specific issue like homosexuality while also showing me glimpses of God's fatherly heart and sin's deep effects on other people. It's given me personal and emotional insight as well as pastoral understanding. I had hoped God would have shown me these things in another, less painful and grief-stricken way, but his ways are his ways, mysterious and otherworldly, and I'm not one to tell him how he can do his job. His path has brought me to see same-sex attraction (SSA) as something both unique and something not so special.

Same as Other Sins?

 

In many ways SSA is similar to other forms of temptation. In God's view of sin being equally offensive as other sins, homosexuality is not all that special. For example, in 1 Corinthians 6 Paul says:

Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

For some, this is good news: homosexuality is no worse than other sins in the eyes of God, as all sin is equally punishable. I'm no better or worse a person for having SSA. I'm no more or less broken than anyone else simply because of the particular manifestation of my brokenness. I am no more or less saved because of it, and I need no extra portion of the Holy Spirit.   Continue at Haydn Sennitt

How Far is Too Far? (Part 3)

Earlier this week, Gerald Hiestand expressed the need for pastors and ministry leaders to develop a more thought-out premarital sexual ethic. Research shows that only 20% of Christians remain abstinent prior to marriage. As evangelicals, we are often ready to take a necessary stand on homosexual ethics, yet the issue of heterosexual purity is compromised for nearly 80% of us. And so we want to begin a conversation that may feel offensive, overly conservative, or at a minimum, uncomfortable. Nonetheless, we think it’s an important one to have. We encourage you to begin by reading Gerald’s post and How Far is Too Far Part 1 and part 2 for an introduction to this series of posts.

How far is too far? Perhaps this is the wrong question, but it’s one that is asked nonetheless. Gerald Hiestand and Jay Thomas give a thought provoking answer in Sex, Dating, and Relationships. What does it mean to adhere to the New Testament’s vision of sexual purity? Here’s a short excerpt:

Don’t eat the cake.

Imagine that a man comes home from work one evening to find that his wife has baked a cake. As he walks into the kitchen, she sees him eying the cake and explicitly states, “Don’t eat that cake; it’s for our party this evening.” He nods in understanding, and she leaves the kitchen. As soon as she leaves, he cuts himself a large slice and places it on his plate. And then, bite by bite, he chews the cake and spits it back onto his plate. Having thus chewed the entire piece (but not swallowed, mind you), he scrapes the chewed piece back into the empty space on the cake tray. At this moment his wife walks back into the kitchen and looks at him in horror. “What are you doing?!” she exclaims. “I told you not to eat the cake!” He looks at her calmly and says with an assuring voice, “And indeed I have not. You see, dear, I define eating as ‘swallowing.’ And since I didn’t swallow the cake, I didn’t eat the cake. In sum, I did not have eating relations with that cake.”   Continue at Crossway

Men are Tempted to Lust – Women are Tempted to be Lusted After

"Men are tempted to give themselves to pornography, while women are tempted to pornography." – Al Mohler

Porn is a two-way street.

Pornography is not just about a man who is seeking a sexual object to devour with his eyes and heart.

It is also about a woman who wants to be “devoured” by the eyes of another man.

She may think it is more innocent than it really is, which is why one lady wrote to me, making an appeal to the Christian community.

She wants us to do more about revealing the whole truth about porn. 

Let’s free associate: when I say the word “porn” or “pornography” what do you think about? I asked my wife this question and she said, “naked women.” I think most people would answer similarly.

One of the most misunderstood and unspoken perceptions about pornography is that it is mainly a problem isolated to the Internet, adult movies, and magazines. The problem with this kind of thinking is that it narrows the interpretation of porn to something that can marginalize the Bible.

While the Bible does not talk about porn the way we think about it and experience it today, it does talk about lust. And lust is the real issue. Once you re-categorize the problem from porn to lust, then the blinders come off and the breadth and severity of the problem is revealed. The Bible then becomes more helpful regarding this pandemic issue.

I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. – Matthew 5:28 (ESV)

What many women do not realize is that millions of husbands, fathers, brothers, and leaders are tempted to lust. We are either tempted by or we are yielding to lust throughout our day–willfully looking or tempted to look at scantily and tightly clothed women.  Keep Reading>>>

An Image Naked Enough

I say pornography is occultism because I believe the draw toward it is more than biological (though that is strong). The satanic powers understand the “the sexually immoral person sins against his own body” (1 Cor. 6:18). They understand that the pornographic act severs a one-flesh marriage union at the very point of intimate connectedness and instead joins Christ, spiritually, to an electronic prostitute (1 Cor. 6:16). They also know that those who unrepentantly practice such things “will not inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor. 6:9-10).

Pornography is, in one sense, no different from any other form of sexual temptation. But in another sense it is even more insidious. Pornography brings with it a kind of pseudo-repentance. Immediately after it is “over,” the participant feels a kind of revulsion and self-loathing. Whereas an adulterer or a fornicator can at least rationalize a kind of transcendent “love” behind his sin, even a conscience thoroughly seared over rarely wants to write love songs or poetry in celebration of his pornographic self-satisfaction. Read it all HERE