He calls us to rise up, by the power of His indwelling presence, and get the job done.” His standard of purity doesn’t come naturally to us. When He calls us to ‘be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,’ He’s asking us to rise above our natural tendencies to impure eyes, fanciful minds, and wandering hearts. … Our Heavenly Father also exhorts us to be men. So what do we do? We must choose to be more than male. Yet our maleness is a major root of sexual sin. In its proper place, maleness is wonderful. They’re beautiful to us, and we’re sexually gratified when we gaze at them, often daydreaming about the night ahead and what bedtime will bring. For instance, we want to look at our wives and desire them. “If we get into sexual sin naturally-just by being male-then how do we get out? We can’t eliminate our maleness, and we’re sure we don’t want to. … It’s critical to recognize visual sexual impurity as foreplay.” God views foreplay outside marriage as wrong. Foreplay ignites passions, rocketing us by stages until we go all the way.
“For males, impurity of the eyes is sexual foreplay…because foreplay is any sexual action that naturally takes us down the road to intercourse. When this sexual drive combines with our natural male arrogance and our natural male desire to drift from the straight life, we’re primed and fueled for sexual captivity.” This traitorous tendency pushes our sexual drive to ignore God’s standards. … Your body often breaks ranks, engaging in battle against you. “Your body isn’t reliable for any spiritual battle, much less the battle for sexual purity and obedience. … As we ask ‘How holy can I be?’ We must pray and commit to a new relationship with God, fully aligned with His call to obedience.” … If we don’t kill every hint of immorality, we’ll be captured by our tendency as males to draw sexual gratification and chemical highs through our eyes. Obedience is hard, requiring humility and meekness, very rare elements indeed. A spiritual battle for purity is going on in every heart and soul. “We have countless churches filled with countless men encumbered by sexual sin, weakened by low-grade sexual favors-men happy enough to go to Promise Keepers but too sickly to be promise keepers. “I was asking myself, ‘How far can I go and still be called a Christian?’ The question I should have been asking was, ‘How holy can I be?’” We want to shoot for the fixed standard.” … Excellence is a mixed standard, while obedience is a fixed standard. “While in business it’s profitable to seem perfect, in the spiritual realm it’s merely comfortable to seem perfect. We easily tolerate mixed standards of sexual purity because we tolerate mixed standards in most other areas of life.” “Why do we find it so easy to mix our standards of sexual sin and so difficult to firmly commit to true purity? Because were used to it.
“Your purity must not depend upon your mate’s health or desire. Fellas, we can be the men that God desires us to be! Check out some quotes from this powerful book.
Guys, you need to read Every Man’s Battle (check out my book review to find out why I say this).