Every Young Man's Battle: Stategies for Victory in the Real World of Sexual Temptation: The Every Man Series (7 page)

What do we mean by
“mixture”? Perhaps a good example is the muddled definition of
“sexual relations” that surfaced in the famous sex scandal
involving former President Bill Clinton. After the president stated under oath
that he did not have sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, he later explained
that he didn’t view oral sex as being in that category. So by his
definition, he hadn’t committed adultery.

That represents quite a
contrast to the standard Christ taught: “But I tell you that anyone who
looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his
heart” (Matthew 5:28). Why do we find it so easy to mix our standards of
sexual sin and so difficult to commit to true purity?

Because
we’re used to it. We easily tolerate mixed standards of sexual purity
because we accept mixed standards in most other areas of life.

Question:
What’s your aim in life—authenticity or
acceptance?

What’s the difference between those two? To aim for
acceptance is to live your life by the question, “How far can I go and
still call myself a Christian?” You want to
seem
to be a
Christian, but you also still want to be accepted by your friends at school and
in the youth group, without seeming weird or fanatical. Authenticity requires a
different question, which can be stated like this: “How holy can I
be?”

I was the perfect example of someone who wasn’t
shooting for Christian authenticity. I was teaching classes at church, chairing
activity groups, and attending discipleship classes. My church attendance was
exemplary, and I spoke the Christian language fluently. I looked authentic
enough when I compared myself with my peers.

But by using our peers as
examples and seeking acceptance, we merely cover our sinful tracks. Pete and
Mary attended my premarriage class, and Pete impressed me from day one. He
lapped up anything I said, nodding in assent at even the most difficult
teachings regarding the husband’s responsibilities, such as
servanthood.

At the end of the seventh week, Pete and Mary stopped me
after class. “Your discussion on sexual purity really hit home last
week,” Pete began, “especially when you said that viewing
pornography and X-rated movies won’t strengthen a couple’s sex
life. My first wife used to rent X-rated movies for me, and we’d watch
them together before going to bed. Eventually, that hurt us.” I nodded
while I waited for him to continue. “Mary and I won’t do this in
our marriage.”

So far, so good.

But I could see that
Mary, stepping in, wanted to express her viewpoint. “We’ve been
having an ongoing struggle over what we watch together,” she said.
“We’ll often rent a movie to watch at my apartment, but you know
how it is. Most of the popular movies have some pretty racy scenes, and
I’m feeling more and more uncomfortable with this. When it gets steamy, I
tell Pete we need to turn it off, but he gets angry, arguing that we’ve
invested good money in the rental and it’s a waste to shut it off. So I
head off to the kitchen to do some work while he finishes watching.”

Tears welled up in her eyes as she looked down. “I don’t feel
these movies are good for us,” she said. “I’ve asked Pete to
stop for my sake, but he won’t. We make it a practice to pray together
before he goes home, but after these movies, I feel dirty and cheap. These
movies are coming between us.”

Of course, Pete was embarrassed.
At least in this area,
he had stopped short of authenticity.
By the
standards of his peers, he knew he could watch popular movies with racy sexual
situations and still “seem” Christian, while being accepted as
well. That’s all he needed.

To his credit, Pete asked me what he
should do. I told him to follow Mary’s lead and not watch the sexy
videos, and he agreed to do so. That’s authenticity.

So…are you being authentic? I once asked Thomas, a youth pastor, to
describe the level of authenticity he saw within his young flock.

“Not much,” was his terse reply.

I asked him to
expound. “They seem to have great intentions,” he noted.
“They desire to be used by God. Trouble is, they won’t step out.
When I ask them, ‘Why aren’t you hungrier for God?’ I know
the answer already. They don’t want to stand out. They don’t want
to put out the effort. They just want to be accepted. They want more
of
God, but they don’t want to be more
like
God. To
them, sexual purity seems too high a wall to climb, so they give up. In
general, the desire to be like Christ is not really there.”

“Why is that?”

“If they were authentic,”
said Thomas, “they would say, ‘Christ saved me, so I want to be
pure.’ But most are lazy and apathetic about this, not willing to do what
it takes. It’s all emotion to them. They leave Wednesday night service
pumped up and wanting to be different, but by second period Thursday morning
they’ve given up. An authentic teen would say, ‘I want to be free
from sin.’ But most of my kids would say, ‘It would be nice to be
free from sin,’ but they won’t pay the price. An authentic teen
would say, ‘I want to be a man of God.’ Most of
my
guys
would say, ‘It would be nice to be a man of God if He would do it for
me.’”

Which are
you
going to choose?

Many
choose acceptance over authenticity because they feel that the latter has a
large price tag. They’re right about the size of the price tag. You empty
your wallet to become authentic. What’s worse, in spite of the price,
authenticity doesn’t necessarily remove the struggle against sexual sin.
I recently spoke with Tara, who had returned for the summer from a Christian
college. I’d heard that she had committed herself even more deeply to the
Lord. Intrigued, I cornered her to ask what was up in her life. She happily
gushed on about God’s plan for her life.

In time, she added,
“You know, I saw a group of guys down at my campus using your book
Every Man’s Battle
as a teaching tool. I was so excited to tell
them I knew you.”

“Great to hear that,” I said.

Then, after a pause, she leaned in with a stage whisper and said,
“I’m really in love with Jesus, but I have to admit that sexual
temptation is still a struggle for me with my boyfriend.”

“Of course it is,” I commented. “I understand completely.
But if you keep being authentic with God about how difficult it is, He’ll
meet you more than halfway.”

A smile came to Tara’s face,
and I wished her all the best.

Tara is ready
to fight. Are you?

So often there’s no challenging voice calling
us to obedience and authenticity. Instead, we move nearer our peers, often
sitting together on the middle ground, a good distance from God. When
challenged by His higher standards, we’re comforted that we don’t
look too different from other Christians around us. Trouble is, as we’ve
seen, we don’t look much different from non-Christians either.

When we look like non-Christians, we haven’t been taking God’s
standards seriously. It’s proof we’ve mixed in our own standards.
Mixture can destroy a people. When the Israelites left Egypt for the Promised
Land, God told them to cross the Jordan River and destroy every evil thing in
their new homeland. That meant killing all the heathen people and crushing
their gods to powder. God warned them that if they failed to do this, their
culture would “mix” with the pagans and they would adopt depraved
practices.

But the Israelites weren’t careful to destroy
everything. They found it easier to ease up and stop short. In time, the idols
and unrighteous people who were left undestroyed became a snare. The Israelites
became adulterous in their relationship to God and repeatedly turned their
backs on Him.

As promised, He removed them from their land. But just
before the destruction of Jerusalem and the final deportation of her
inhabitants, God prophesied this about His people in their coming
captivity:

Then in the nations where they have been carried captive,
those who escape will remember me—how I have been grieved by their
adulterous hearts, which have turned away from me, and by their eyes, which
have lusted after their idols. They will loathe themselves for the evil they
have done. (Ezekiel 6:9)

When we entered the Promised Land of our own
salvation, we were told to eliminate every hint of sexual immorality in our
lives. Since entering that land, have you failed to crush sexual sin? Every
hint of it? If not, you’ll someday loathe yourself for that failure, like
I did. I didn’t crush my sexual sin, and I became ensnared.

Israel’s King Josiah was only twenty-six years of age when he faced
a similar situation of neglect for God’s standards. In 2 Chronicles 34 we
read how a copy of God’s Law—long forgotten—had been found
during a large-scale renovation of the temple. Then King Josiah listened as
this Law was read aloud to him, bringing inescapably to his attention
God’s standards and the people’s failure to live up to them.

Josiah didn’t say, “Oh come on, we’ve lived this way for
years. Let’s not get legalistic about all this!” No, he was
horrified. He tore his robes as a sign of grief and despair. “Great is
the Lord’s anger,” he said as he immediately acknowledged his
people’s negligence and sought God’s further guidance. God quickly
answered with these words about Josiah’s reaction:

Because your
heart was responsive and you humbled yourself before God when you heard what he
spoke against this place and its people, and because you humbled yourself
before me and tore your robes and wept in my presence, I have heard you,
declares the L
ORD
. (2 Chronicles 34:27)

At this point,
notice how Josiah immediately led the entire nation in a thorough return to
obedience to God’s standards:

Then the king…went up to
the temple of the L
ORD
with the men of Judah, the people of
Jerusalem, the priests and the Levites—all the people from the least to
the greatest. He read in their hearing all the words of the Book of the
Covenant, which had been found in the temple of the L
ORD
. The
king stood by his pillar and renewed the covenant in the presence of the
L
ORD
—to follow the L
ORD
and keep his
commands, regulations and decrees with all his heart and all his soul, and to
obey the words of the covenant written in this book.

Then he had
everyone in Jerusalem and Benjamin pledge themselves to it; the people of
Jerusalem did this in accordance with the covenant of God, the God of their
fathers.

Josiah removed all the detestable idols from all the
territory belonging to the Israelites, and he had all who were present in
Israel serve the L
ORD
their God. As long as he lived, they did
not fail to follow the L
ORD
, the God of their fathers. (2
Chronicles 34:29-33)

No mixture there. Knowing that God’s
standard is the standard of true life, Josiah rose up and tore down everything
that opposed God.

But it certainly wasn’t easy.

And what about
you? It won’t be easy for you, either. But now that you’ve heard
about God’s standard of sexual purity, are you willing, in the spirit of
Josiah, to make a covenant to hold to that standard with all your heart and
soul? Will you tear down every sexual thing that stands in opposition to God?
Will you aim for authenticity and obedience, where you’re truly called to
go?

If you’ve been living a life of mixed standards, you
probably have mixture in your
sexual
standards as well. It’s
likely you have at least a hint of sexual impurity in your life. In that case,
you’re not ready to pay the price of true obedience—like avoiding
the sensuality found in many Hollywood films. Like avoiding sexy thoughts about
the “goddesses” at your school. Like training your eyes to look
away from string bikinis, full-busted sweaters, and the hot-looking babes who
wear them.

A spiritual battle for purity is going on in every heart and
soul. The costs are real. Obedience is hard, requiring humility and meekness,
very rare elements indeed.

We were told about James, a respected teen
in his youth group, who refused to promise to stay sexually pure when pressed
to do so. “There are too many unforeseen situations out there for me to
make such a promise,” he said. Translation: “I want to keep my
options open.”

James has stopped short. Have you?

The
point is this: Sexual impurity has become rampant in the church because
we’ve ignored the costly work of obedience to God’s standards as
individuals, asking too often, “How far can I go and still be called a
Christian?” We’ve crafted an image that may seem sexually pure,
while permitting our eyes to play freely when no one’s around and
avoiding the hard work of purity.

From my (Fred’s) college days,
one man’s example of this still serves as a warning to me. During my
freshman year at Stanford, I became homesick. A dorm buddy who grew up in the
shadow of the university felt sorry for me and asked me to his parents’
home for dinner. They were extremely wealthy, and their home was stunning. What
a great night! Not only was I served my first artichokes (which fascinate me to
this day), but the mother was a strikingly pleasant host. That evening I
learned that the father, a prominent local businessman, held a high position in
their church and believed in the importance of family time.