1 Peter 2:11 Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul. 12 Live such good lives among the gentiles that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.
Introduction
If you read the Bible from the beginning, by the time you hit the third book you come across an awesome command that should stop you in your tracks.
Leviticus 11:44 I am Yahweh your God; set yourselves apart and be holy, because I am holy.
And just in case that does not stop you in your tracks, God repeated it again in the very next verse.
45 I am Yahweh who brought you up out of Egypt to be your God; therefore be holy, because I am holy.
And just in case you missed it there, God repeats it again in Leviticus 19:2, 20:7, 20:26, 21:6, and 1 Peter 1:16. God has declared that without holiness, no one will see Him (Heb.12:14). Unholiness separates us from God; holiness opens the way to Him, and so we must be holy.
Holy means to be separated from evil and set apart for God. But what does that look like in day-to-day life? How do we separate ourselves from evil and yet still live in this world? This is such an important issue, and there is so much confusion about it that I decided to devote a whole sermon just to thinking through this one principle.
Legalism and Worldliness
There are two ways we routinely fall off the horse in this area of holiness. You can fall off one side into legalism, or fall off the other side into worldliness. I will start with legalism.
Legalism
We left off last time with…
Proverbs 4:23 Above all else, guard your heart.
Guard it from what? Any influence that might tug it away from God in the direction of sin. And how you go about avoiding those influences is a judgment call for each individual Christian. For example, one person might say, “I can’t watch a football game. With the kind of commercials that come on, and all the rest of it – by the time the game is over all my fleshy desires are activated and revved up, and my godly desires for prayer and Scripture and the things of God are barely there. And so for me, it is a sin to watch a football game.” Is that true? Is it a sin for him to watch a game? Absolutely! Of course it is sin to knowingly do some unnecessary thing that you know is going to draw you away from the Lord. Is it legalism for him to say, “I’m not going to watch any football games”? No, that is not legalism; it is wisdom.
Is it legalism for him to come to you and suggest that maybe you should not watch them either? No. There is nothing wrong with that. If he suspects those games have the same influence on you that they have on him, if he cares about you at all he is going to suggest that to you. That is not legalism; it is love.
It becomes legalism when he assumes that it is sin for you. It is fine for him to say, “I think you should consider whether it’s wise for you to watch those games.” But it is legalism if he just assumes, “It’s a sin for you to watch them just like it is for me.”
It is not legalism for me to avoid things that harm me spiritually, whether it be games, vacations, high salary, free time, the Internet, certain foods, certain friends – none of that is legalism. It is not legalism to strive with all your might to avoid things that are likely to have a bad influence on you. Legalism is when I impose my judgment calls about influence on you.
We all draw lines on how much exposure we are going to have to various negative influences. Television, movies, novels, news broadcasts, magazines, friends, work environments, music, etc. I had a job once where they played secular country music all day, and it had a terrible effect on my spiritual life. All day long I found myself having worthless, inane lyrics just running nonstop through my head. I could not think about Scripture or anything worthwhile. And I cannot imagine how anyone can listen to that music and keep their thoughts on things above, and so I always counsel people not to listen to secular music. But I would never point to someone and say, “You’re in sin for listening to that.” Nor would I ever look down on that person or think, “Oh, that person probably isn’t very serious about personal holiness.” If I had any thoughts like that at all – that would be legalism. Legalism is when you impose your judgment calls on someone else.
Remember - the purpose of setting up rules and boundaries for yourself is to prevent ungodly influence. And we need to remember that we are all influenced in different ways by different things. There are some Christians who, if they hang around certain people, will be tempted to start partying and getting drunk. Not me. I could be good friends with partiers and drunkards and it would not tempt me in that direction in the slightest. I cannot listen to secular music, but I can be friends with partiers. Maybe you cannot hang around partiers, but you can listen to secular music and still keep you mind on things above. So instead of me thinking you are a weak, backsliding Christian because of your music, and you thinking I am a backslider for my drunkard friends, both of us should understand that each Christian is influenced in different ways by different things and so we offer one another advice, but then trust one another to make our own judgment calls on how to protect ourselves from evil influences.
So the way to avoid legalism is by realizing what is a direct command in the Bible and what is a judgment call. No stealing, no lying, no adultery, no murder, no swearing, no complaining – those are all direct commands. If someone does those things you can and should point to that and say, “That’s sin.” But things like where to draw the line on entertainment, or when to speak up about a problem and when to keep your mouth shut, or how often it is OK to miss church– the Bible does not give any direct statements on any of those things and so they are judgment calls. And Romans 14:1 is very clear: Do not pass judgment or look down on anyone for their judgment calls.
Worldliness
So what about the other error? The legalists focus on externals and neglect the heart, and then some people see that and respond by saying, “External things don’t matter – we’re just going to focus on the heart,” and so they say, “Go ahead – watch TV, rated-R movies, listen to secular music, drink, smoke, go to parties, go to bars – go ahead and do anything that isn’t explicitly forbidden in Scripture. Just make sure you guard your heart in the process.” And those people lose sight of the fact that all those external things can have a very, very powerful influence on the heart.
Their motto is, “If the Bible doesn’t prohibit this, then I’m free to do it!” Is that true? If the Bible does not prohibit something, then I am free to do it? There is no verse in the Bible saying, “Thou shalt not watch an R-rated movie,” therefore I can watch any R-rated movie I want? There is no verse in the Bible that says I can’t go to a party, so I can go to whatever party I please? No. There are all kinds of things out there that can influence me in a sinful direction. And if I am not diligent to discover what those influences are, and how they affect me, that means one thing – I am not very serious about holiness. If I do not guard myself against the influences that will tend to have a negative effect on my heart, then they will have that effect, and I am going to suffer decline in my spiritual life.
For most of us, the opinion we have of our own ability to resist ungodly influences is way too high.
“Oh, that doesn’t influence me at all. That has no effect on my heart. I can handle that. It won’t do me any spiritual harm. I’m superman in that area.”
We think we are so spiritually mature and so wise and discerning – hardly any worldly influence could have any effect on us.
Even a man as strong as the Prophet Jeremiah had to isolate himself from unbelievers when they started partying.
Jeremiah 15:17 I never sat in the company of revelers, never made merry with them; I sat alone
Even a man as strong as David had to put limits on who would be his companions.
Psalm 101:4 Men of perverse heart shall be far from me; I will have nothing to do with evil. 5 …whoever has haughty eyes and a proud heart, him will I not endure. 6 My eyes will be on the faithful in the land, that they may dwell with me; … 7 No one who practices deceit will dwell in my house; no one who speaks falsely will stand in my presence.
And if you think you are so spiritually mature that you can sit in front of a screen and watch all kinds of vile things and it will have no influence on your heart, you must be more mature than David.
Psalm 101:3 I will set before my eyes no vile thing.
Worldly influences are just that – influences, and no one is above being influenced.
And that is especially true in the area of doctrine. Be very, very careful what kind of teaching you expose yourself to. Do not listen to some false teacher just because most of what he says is really good. When there is a wolf and you are a sheep, you do not just pick out the good and reject the bad – you run for your life! So many times a young man will go to a liberal seminary thinking he is going to remain firm and steadfast in the faith. And three years later he comes out questioning every essential of the gospel and the very reliability of God’s Word itself.
Let me just warn you – I do not care if it is liberalism, or a false religion, or atheism, or evolutionism, or postmodernism – if you allow yourself enough exposure to their ablest defenders, you will be influenced toward their way of thinking. And if you doubt that, you probably just have not run in to their ablest defenders yet.
God made our hearts capable of being influenced. Just because we have steadfast resolve to remain faithful to the truth does not mean it is going to happen. Only God is unchanging. We are constantly changing. When you travel through life it is like you are in a car with no brakes. The car never stops. It can be steered, but never stopped. And so every moment of every day it can take a wrong turn. God made us that way – capable of being influenced. He made us with steering wheels, and there are a thousand forces trying to get us to make wrong turns. And if you are not vigilant and alert and watchful and careful and diligent to avoid those influences, it is only a matter of time before your heart will be moving away from God instead of toward Him.
1 John 2:15 Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
Revelation 18:4 Come out of her, my people, so that you will not share in her sins
2 Corinthians 6:17 "Therefore come out from them and be separate, says the Lord. Touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you." 18 "I will be a Father to you, and you will be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty." 7:1 Since we have these promises, dear friends, let us purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body and spirit, perfecting holiness in fear of God.
We must distance ourselves from anything that has a contaminating effect on us spiritually. Does that mean we have no contact with them at all socially? Not at all.
1 Corinthians 10:27 If some unbeliever invites you to a meal and you want to go, eat whatever is put before you without raising questions of conscience.
Even if he is a pagan idol worshipper, a thief, a liar, a practicing homosexual, a Satanist – if it is not the kind of relationship where he is going to influence you, then you can go to his house for dinner if you want.
1 Corinthians 5:9 I have written you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people-- 10 not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. 11 But now I am writing you that you must not associate with anyone who calls himself a brother but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or a slanderer, a drunkard or a swindler. With such a man do not even eat. 12 What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside?
If the non-Christian is not pulling your heart in the wrong direction, you do not need to back away from them. The issue is always the heart.
Neglecting the Heart
And if you understand that, it will keep you from both legalism on one side and worldliness on the other because the problem with legalism and the problem with worldliness is the same problem. In both cases they are neglecting the heart. The legalist neglects the heart by becoming focused on the safeguards rather than the reason for the safeguards.
It starts out with, “I don’t want to set foot in a movie theater because being in that place tends to have such a bad spiritual influence on me.” But over time it degenerates into, “Setting foot in a movie theater is sin.” And then they get so focused on that safeguard that they can pat themselves on the back for their holiness because they would never set foot in a theater, but they go home and watch all kinds of garbage on a DVD. They do not break any of their external rules, but on the inside they are as worldly as they come.
That is what happened with the Pharisees. The Pharisee movement started out as a good thing. They were men who were committed to holiness and avoiding worldly influences, so they pinpointed some external things that had a negative effect on their hearts, and they committed themselves to avoiding those things. That was great. But then over time their focus was just on those external things and not on the heart anymore, and other things came in and corrupted their hearts– even to the point that they had no problem being cruel to their own parents or deceiving people, just as long as they were keeping all the external rules.
And that has happened through church history. One hundred years ago preachers were preaching whole sermons against card playing and dancing and Sunday newspaper delivery. Like the old joke about why are the Baptists so against fornication? Because it could lead to dancing. (I don’t mean to pick on Baptists – there are legalists in every denomination.) That joke really captures the problem of legalism – the safeguard becomes more of an issue than the sin itself. We need to always remember – safeguards are good, but they are only good if the purpose is to actually guard your heart from worldly influences.
What about the other side – worldly people? They have the same problem – neglecting the heart. They say, “The Bible never says, ‘Thou shalt not go to a bar,’ therefore I can go if I please.” So they go and they allow all kinds of worldly influences to have access to their heart so that they are drawn toward sin.
In both cases it is a failure to guard the heart.
Psalm 1:1 Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers. 2 But his delight is in the law of the LORD.
It is not enough to do verse 1. If all you do is avoid unbelievers, but your heart is really in love with the world – that is not holiness. It is just secret, hidden, legalistic unholiness. But on the other hand, if you want to get to verse 2, you have to follow verse 1. If you want to have a heart that maintains delight in the LORD, you have to avoid the counsel of the wicked and the way of sinners and the seat of mockers. You cannot have friendships with them that are so close that they influence you to their way.
Jesus called us to be in the world and not of the world, but so often we are of the world and not in the world. In our hearts we become contaminated with worldliness so we are of the world, and at the same time we distance ourselves from them so much that we cannot reach them with the gospel, so we fall short of the command to be in the world.
If you want to see a perfect example of this principle, look at Lot – Abraham’s nephew. He was such a good example of this principle.
2 Peter 2:7 he rescued Lot, a righteous man, who was distressed by the filthy lives of lawless men 8 (for that righteous man, living among them day after day, was tormented in his righteous soul by the lawless deeds he saw and heard)
I have heard preachers just go off on Lot as a compromiser, because he was living in Sodom. I cannot understand how someone would call Lot an unrighteous compromiser when Peter calls him a righteous man three times in two verses.
2 Peter 2:7 … Lot, a righteous man … 8 (for that righteous man, living among them day after day, was tormented in his righteous soul…
Lot was righteous, righteous, righteous. What was it that Lot did that was so righteous? Nothing. Those verses do not mention a word about anything Lot actually did. They only talk about how he felt. He was tormented. When he saw all the evil around him, he hated it. Physically, he was right there in the city. But spiritually, His heart was a thousand miles away from that city. If Lot had been a legalist, he would have been living outside the city in a cave somewhere, but his heart would be craving all the sins of that city all day long. And he would pay himself on the back for not living there, even though his heart was living there. That is what Legalist Lot would have looked like.
What about worldly Lot? If Lot had been worldly, he would have allowed friendships and other influences in Sodom move his heart so that eventually he stepped right in to their sinful culture.
Neither one of those happened. His heart remained holy – separate – set apart from the sin there, to the point where he was tormented in his righteous soul by all the evil that he witnessed in that place. And yet he lived among them. That has always been the mark of a righteous man.
Practical Application
So how does this look in the United States in the year 2012? What are some specific, practical applications of this? I would like to take the rest of our time just exploring what this looks like in three specific areas: dating & relationships, education, and entertainment. Those are three areas where this tends to be a lot of confusion in this area, so let’s see if we can apply the principles of the Word of God in those three areas. Because I think if we can understand how the principle applies in those three areas, we will be able to apply it in any area.
Dating & Friendships
In my judgment, dating an unbeliever should be completely out of the question, because the purpose of dating is to explore the possibility of marriage, and Christians are not to marry unbelievers (1 Cor.9:5, 1 Cor.7:39). And the excuse is always, “But I want to reach her for Christ.” Most of the time that is just an excuse. It is not mainly that you are concerned with evangelism; it is mainly because you think she’s hot and you want to be with her.
And even if it is genuine – ladies, if there is a non-Christian guy, and you really care about his soul, the worst thing you could possibly do is date him. Because if he is really into you, he will go to church, read his Bible, join a small group, make all kinds of commitments, become a deacon and everything else to make you happy. And is it all genuine? There is no way to know. Not even he knows for sure. If he is in love with you, you put him into a position of not even being able to know for sure how genuine his commitment to the Lord is, because he has so many other emotions and motivations swirling around inside him. The only way to find out how genuine it is, is when you either break up or get married. And the great majority of the time when either one of those happen you discover it was not genuine. So if you really love him you will not make it harder for him to know if his commitment is genuine.
But besides that, a dating relationship is the kind of relationship where influence goes both directions. He will influence you. And if he is an unbeliever – even if he is a solid, upstanding, law-abiding, boy scout unbeliever – still, the Bible says he is in the lap of the evil one (1 Jn.5:19). All unbelievers – every last one of them – is in the darkness, their hearts are wicked, they are on the side of the devil, and they do not trust or love Jesus Christ. So we must not subject ourselves to their influence, because…
2 Corinthians 6:14 … what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? 15 What harmony is there between Christ and Belial? What portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? 16 What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God.
How could you claim to love God and then date someone like that? And the same goes for close friendships. Do we befriend unbelievers to win them to Christ? We do at a shallow level, but we must never develop such close, deep friendships with them that they are influencing us spiritually. And you know you have crossed the line in a friendship with an unbeliever when you see that they are starting to influence you spiritually instead of the other way around.
Education
I bring up education because I believe the public school system is one avenue where the world has had sweeping influence on people in the church, and that influence is largely ignored by many Christians. This avenue that the world has into our children’s hearts is probably a more extreme and harmful influence even than television. We take our kids, starting at age 5, and drop them off at a government-run institution that is committed to secularism, naturalism, evolutionism, pro-homosexual agendas, and in many cases, outright hostility against Christianity, and without any parental supervision we leave them there to be indoctrinated all day long, five days a week, beginning in their most vulnerable and formative years and continuing all the way into young adulthood.
Now, I realize not all teachers are secular, naturalist, evolutionist, anti-Christians. Many teachers are committed Christians with a biblical worldview. And I bless God for those teachers. I pray we can get more and more Christians in the government school system. But the reality is, just like everywhere else in the culture - the Christians are vastly outnumbered. And so your child will sit under a whole bunch of unbelievers before getting one Christian teacher. There is no question that a child who comes up through the government school system will receive a tremendous amount of pressure to buy into worldly ways of thinking – both from their teachers and from their peers. And if your kids come home from school and tell you some wrong idea they were taught at school, you can correct it. But they are not going to tell you everything they heard all day long, and a lot of the influence in the area of attitudes and values – the influences from those things are so subtle the child will not even have any conscious awareness of them. So you won’t even know to correct them.
What does the Bible say we should do with our kids?
Deuteronomy 6:6 These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. 7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 8 Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.
We are to be teaching the Word of God to our children throughout the day, all the time.
One of the biggest arguments people will offer for why we should send our children into the government school system is that if we teach them ourselves, those kids are going to be sheltered. That argument has always left me scratching my head. Sheltered? That is bad? Can you think of any other context in life where the word “shelter” refers to a bad thing? Every context I can think of where you might see the word “shelter” – it is always something good. One of the attributes of God is that He is our shelter. Imagine your little 5-year-old was out in the street in front of your house, and it started hailing really hard, and huge gusts of wind, and the poor kid is getting battered and pummeled, so you call and say, “Come on into the house!” – and your neighbor sees that and says, “Oh, you’re just sheltering that kid”? What would you say? Of course I am sheltering him – that is the parent’s job! Are we going to say, “It’s OK to shelter your kids from hail, and from wind and rain, but not from false teaching about God or worldly ideas or sinful peer pressure? It’s OK to shelter their little bodies – just not their hearts”? If you shelter your child’s body and not his heart, that is child neglect. A parent who leaves his child out in the hail storm but protects him from the world is a more loving parent than the one who protects him from the weather and exposes him to the world.
Another big argument that comes up is that if all the Christians pull our kids out of the government school system, we will leave them without a Christian witness. So the idea is we need to send our children into those schools to serve as evangelists – starting at age 5. We would not send out a missionary without years of training, but our kids? Send them out there at age 5. Most kids are not even saved at age 5. Are we sure we want to send in unsaved 5-year-olds to do some of the most difficult evangelistic work there is? Even if they are saved – how much training and skill do they really have in evangelism? They are going up against teachers who are adults and peers who outnumber them 50 to 1. How effective is this evangelistic strategy? How many people do you know who became Christians through the gospel preaching of one of their friends in first grade? I came up through the government school system and in thirteen years of school I can count the number of times someone at school shared the gospel with me on one thumb (with room to spare).
Now, once your children are saved and mature and strong in their faith and trained in evangelism well enough to share the gospel with others without being influenced negatively by unbelieving peers, if you want to send them into the public schools at that point for the sake of evangelism, I think that is great. But if we really want to have an impact on the school system, probably what we should do is instead of sending our children in there – we should go in there. If it is something even a child can do, it should really be a piece of cake for us as adults, right? We need Christian teachers, principles, administrators, board members, lawmakers, and judges. And most importantly of all, people who will just go into the public schools and share the gospel directly – like Sue Wetterlin, who conducts a Bible club every week in a secular elementary school. And if you want to do that, talk to Marny Goldberg – she will get you set up. Kids flock to those clubs. And the only thing preventing us from having them in more and more schools is the lack of volunteers. The schools are wide open.
But in my estimation, putting a child in a government school all day really does put that child at considerable spiritual risk. I doubt any loving parent would even dream of putting their child in that much physical danger. So think carefully about what you do with your kids’ education. And if you do decide to put them in a government school, make sure you really work hard at teaching your kids an “us vs. them” perspective. This is us, they are over there, we love Christ, they are against Christ, we are in the light, they are in the darkness, we are different. Make sure they know they are not to fit in morally with the culture there. And prepare your kids for persecution, because probably the most persecution they will ever face in their life will be K-12 in the government school system.
Pitfalls of homeschooling
There are some pitfalls to homeschooling as well. One would be to turn it into legalism, so that everyone who does not homeschool is a questionable parent. The decision of how to educate kids is not a decision God has required you to make for other people’s children. We do not want to be legalists who impose our judgment calls about safeguards on others. Other people have their own lives and their own situations, and while it is perfectly fine to try to persuade a friend of your point of view on this, it is not OK to assume you know what God is calling them to do, or to look down on them for what they decide to do.
Another pitfall I have observed with homeschooling is the tendency to elevate the family above the church in importance. For many homeschoolers the family is supreme above everything, and commitment to family is used as an excuse to have little or no involvement in ministries in the church.
We need to remember – it is the Church, not the family, that is the body of Christ and the household of God and the temple of the Spirit. And your calling in the world, in your secular job, and in your family is important, but none of it is as important as your calling in the Church, because as the body of Christ the Church is the primary means through which Jesus Christ does His work in this world. Your relationships in your prayer group will last a lot longer than your family relationships. Marriage and family relationships are temporary – for this life only. Spiritual relationships are eternal.
So, is it possible that you could send your kids into a government school without it having negative spiritual influences on them? I personally cannot see it, but I don’t know everything. And if you make that judgment call, that is between you and God. But just make sure you think through the spiritual dangers.
College
And do not think those dangers are only there in elementary school. They get worse and worse the farther you go in the system. Few, if any, influences in our culture cause more people to turn away from Christianity than the university. A kid is raised in a godly home, goes through Sunday school from the time he is a toddler until he graduates high school; he is a leader in the youth group – then he goes off the college and by the time he graduates, he has not set foot in a church in over three years, and if he has not renounced the faith altogether his mind is filled with doubts about God’s Word, and in his lifestyle he is captive to all kinds of sins of the flesh. That phenomenon is absolutely epidemic in our culture. The percentage of people raised in church who turn away from the faith in college is absolutely staggering.
And we always think the solution is to do a better job preparing students. I am all for doing a better job preparing students, but maybe that is not the only solution. Maybe in many cases the solution to the problem of the bad influences in college is simple – don’t go to college. I think way too many people go to college. I do not see any reason to go to college unless you are sure you are going into a field that requires that. Our culture worships education, and so they make it sound like if you do not go to college you are throwing your life down the toilet. And yet look at the people who come out of college. First of all, it usually does not even pay off financially. Most people with college degrees spend years of their life paying off student loans working jobs that they could have gotten without that degree. The higher pay scale they get because of their degree never does add up to enough money to cover what that degree cost. Vodie Bacham has an excellent webinar on this titled “Harvard or Heaven?” I highly recommend that webinar available at collegePlus.org.
So most of the time it does not even pay off financially. But much more to the point for us is the spiritual damage that is so often done. Nowhere will you find a more concentrated collection of anti-God, anti-Christian activists than in the university. The percentage of professors who are agnostic or atheistic is much, much higher than the percentage of the general population. And the “higher” the education, the worse it gets. Forty percent of professors at community colleges are sure that God exists, and only twenty percent of profs at universities are sure God exists. We have an education system in the United States that does a masterful job at turning people into fools. It is an anti-God system from kindergarten all the way through the post-graduate level.
Does God call some of us to go to college or universities? Yes, He does. But do not do it just because everyone else is doing it, or because this world pressures you to do it. Only do it if you are called to do it. And if you are, then make sure you are prepared, and that you have your defenses up twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week while you are there, because you are going right into the heart of enemy territory where the adversary has every advantage. Professors mock Christianity and make the truth of God’s Word look dumb. They make the folly of human wisdom look brilliant. They are good at it, they have practiced it for years, they are older and more skilled in rhetoric than you, and they have control of the classroom – it is a very difficult thing to make it through with your faith intact, much less to actually grow spiritually in the process. So when it comes to education, remember – above all else, guard your heart.
Entertainment
What about the third category – entertainment? When it comes to TV, movies, music, concerts, video games – do I have to preach about that? Or can you finish the sermon from here? There is so much that could be said about this, but our time is almost gone, so I will just say this:
Psalm 101:3 I will set before my eyes no vile thing.
Does that mean you have to walk down the street with a blindfold? No. But it does mean you avoid watching things that pull your heart the wrong way, or that excite fleshy desires. Let me just close with that wonderful statement from Susanna Wesley: "Whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes off your relish of spiritual things; in short, whatever increases the strength and authority of your body over your mind, that thing is sin to you, however innocent it may be in itself."
Benediction: Hosea 6:3 Let us know the LORD; let us press on to know him. As surely as the sun rises, he will appear; he will come to us like the winter rains, like the spring rains that water the earth."
1:25 Questions
1. What three or four influences are most likely to have a negative effect on your heart spiritually?
2. What safeguards could help protect you from those influences?
3. What is your attitude toward Christians who do not abide by those safeguards?
