One of the things I'm conscious of as
I stand here to speak is that there
are probably so many questions and perhaps problems
here tonight that I have no hope of
answering them all from God's Word.
The Bible itself is not at all a
secretive, hush-hush kind of book on this
topic.
The men and women of the scriptures were
real people with real problems.
And so with that sense of inadequacy, I
want to recommend some books where you can
follow up on these ideas and these biblical
teachings.
Some in English, some in German, one in
French.
Let's start with the German then.
This one actually is not on tonight's topic,
but it's a book that I mentioned last
night, Geistliche Krisen und Depressionen by
Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones.
As I mentioned last night, it was a
book that he felt God gave him in
a special way for our generation.
And I want to recommend that to those
of you from German background.
This one by a man who was a
missionary out in the Far East for many
years.
He is one of the best, most appreciated
missionary speakers in my country, Britain today.
And he's tackled a really tough subject.
Do you really believe that God will send
everybody who has not trusted in Christ to
hell?
Do you really believe that God will judge
the entire world in holiness and purity?
It's one of the toughest questions that you
can face, and if you face it, I
believe it may change your life.
I believe men and women outside of Christ
are on their way to an utterly lost
eternity.
And this book, Gott das ist nicht fair,
is addressing that problem.
Read Dick Dowsett's arguments from scripture.
Let God speak to you from his own
word about judgment and the future of men
and women who have not come into the
kingdom of God.
And then there's a book here by Rabbi
Maharaj, a converted Brahmin Hindu.
Some of you are going to work with
Hindus perhaps in London.
Others of you may meet people influenced by
Hindu beliefs and philosophies here in mainland Europe.
This book is about how that man came
to know the living God in the Lord
Jesus Christ himself.
Excellent story, but it will actually help many
of you in your evangelism in the days
ahead.
And then there's a book here that is
on very special offer tonight.
Put up your hand if you can read
and understand English.
Tremendous.
Keep your hand up.
There is one of these free for each
one of you.
It's George Verwer's book No Turning Back.
It's the Indian edition printed in Bombay.
And as something that you can remember your
summer with us by, we want to give
this book to you if you can make
use of it in English.
We're not going to sign them.
We're not going to pray over them and
guarantee you a special blessing.
We want to give it to you with
our love and pray that God uses the
message of this book in your lives.
You want one?
You go to the bookstore.
You ask for it.
You ask for it in English.
And then tonight's topic.
There's a book here by a woman called
Jeannie Andrews called Your Half of the Apple.
And it's designed to help the single girl
in this era of world history where we
get bombarded with every kind of influence from
the advertising world, the television world and so
on.
God and the Single Girl it's called.
And that's about half of you.
Do go and have a look at this.
And then in French, Walter Trobisch's famous book,
J'ai aimé une fille.
How was that?
Where are you?
You see that little man up in the
rabbit hutch.
If you hear noises like this.
You'll start the third world war you will.
Means he's laid an egg in French.
This book is private correspondence between Walter Trobisch
and a young man who was writing into
him with various moral sexual problems that he
was facing in his life.
You can get the same book in English.
John White, I think perhaps one of my
favorite Christian writers.
Eros defiled.
And then too finally this one is called
What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women.
I wonder how many of you men are
thinking one day possibly that you may be
perhaps by the grace and the leading of
God become a husband.
Marriage is one of the most educative experiences
you can you can dream of.
I made so many stupid bonehead mistakes as
a husband.
I wish I'd read this before I got
married.
I would still have got married but with
far more humility.
What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women.
It's got some diagrams in as but not
many.
This one I haven't read but I know
of the author, Josh McDowell, an evangelist among
students, university students particularly, not just in America
but some incredible meetings all over the world.
As I said before I spend a lot
of my time during the winter months preaching
in universities in Britain.
And as we preach the gospel of the
Lord Jesus Christ, if we don't give attention
to the question of sex and morality we
are not dealing with people where they really
are.
I should think probably over 80 percent of
people who come to Christ in British universities
in these days are involved in some kind
of moral problem.
And Josh McDowell has been working in that
same kind of arena and he's written this
book out of his experience.
Givers, takers and other kinds of lovers.
Hang on a minute.
Do please have a look at the bookstore
tonight, tomorrow, because we have got so many
key books which I think it would be
right for you to buy now even if
you're not going to get opportunity to read
them for months and months to come.
They will never be cheaper and I have
found in my own experience that I've bought
books I've not read them for months and
then perhaps even years later they have been
picked up at just the right time.
I'm glad I got them.
Now let's read God's word together from Matthew
chapter 5 first of all and verse 27.
Matthew 5, 27 to 30 we will read
first in German tonight.
Now will you turn over to 1 Corinthians
chapter 6.
I'm going to read from verse 9.
Do you not know that the wicked will
not inherit the kingdom of God?
Do not be deceived.
Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers,
nor male prostitutes, nor homosexual offenders, nor thieves,
nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor slanderers, nor
swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God.
And that is what some of you were,
but you were washed, you were sanctified, you
were justified in the name of the Lord
Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our
God.
Everything is permissible for me,
but not everything is mastered by anything.
Food for the stomach and the stomach for
food, but God will destroy them both.
The body is not meant for sexual immorality,
but for the Lord and the Lord for
the body.
By his power God raised the Lord from
the dead and he will also raise us.
Do you not know that your bodies are
members of Christ himself?
Shall I then take the members of Christ
and unite them with a prostitute?
Never.
Do you not know that he who unites
himself with a prostitute is one with her
in body?
For it is said that two will become
one flesh.
But he who unites himself with the Lord
is one with him in spirit.
Flee from sexual immorality.
All other sins a man commits are outside
his body, but he who sins sexually sins
against his own body.
Do you not know that your body is
a temple of the Holy Spirit who is
in you, whom you have received from God?
You are not your own.
You were bought at a price.
Therefore honour God with your body.
Now turn please with me to 1 Thessalonians
chapter 4.
And I'm going to ask that we read
again in German from verse 3 to 8.
Now Father we bow our heads and we
know that these verses are living and true
to our own experience.
We find the things of which scripture is
speaking real in our own lives.
O God we want to settle down tonight
and take your word seriously.
We don't just want the thoughts of man,
we want the teachings of your word.
Help us O God in this next hour
to understand and to know what you're saying
from your holy word.
That we might be rebuked and corrected and
taught.
That we might be fully equipped for every
good work in the months ahead.
And live lives that are satisfied and holy
to your glory.
In Jesus name.
Amen.
I think it's good to be able to
talk quite honestly and openly about tonight's topic.
We no longer live in days when these
kind of things were were never spoken of
from scripture.
And I think if we're honest too we
recognize that being a Christian does not immediately
take away all sexual problems from our lives.
For some of us it may even seem
to make problems worse.
I believe that sex is one of the
major causes of spiritual problems among many young
people.
We begin to doubt whether God really loves
us.
Whether he really answers our prayers.
Because we don't find life easy always.
We begin to drift into the sin of
unbelief.
Sexual problems can be a major cause of
spiritual difficulties in your life on the team.
And we want to hear God's word together
tonight.
You see you're going out to preach the
gospel aren't you?
Within a few days you will out be
out there on doorsteps in in in street
theater situations proclaiming the gospel in the open
air.
What are you going to say?
What is your testament?
Have you met the living God?
And has he been big enough and strong
enough to meet the needs of your heart?
Have you asked Christ into your life?
And you want to share this testimony with
other people?
What difference has he made?
Do you have a testimony of God's victory
in these sexual and moral areas that you
can share with people you meet?
Because you better believe me that so many
of the people you will meet this summer
will have the very self-same problems and
may ask you questions.
Some of you perhaps troubled with guilt feelings
left over from the past even as you
sit here in the meeting.
The moment you begin to hear these kind
of scriptures your mind begins to play back
memories of things that you did maybe only
months or a year or two ago.
And some of you perhaps have real difficulties
in accepting yourselves as you are with normal
desires, normal longings and feelings.
What to do about the problem of masturbation?
Something that very often makes men and women
feel tremendously guilty and unworthy to serve the
Lord Jesus Christ.
Does our bible have anything to say on
these problems?
You're going to be offering God's word on
the doorsteps.
You're going to be urging hundreds of people
to read God's word in the month ahead.
You've begun to experience what God's word has
to say in some of these deep personal
private areas.
First of all I don't want you to
be naive tonight about the first century.
We sometimes imagine that those early christians were
all togas and sandals and virginity.
Somehow they lived in the catacombs with little
halos glowing above their heads and they had
never actually lived in a society like our
own.
But these people came into the kingdom of
God in the same kind of state that
many of us come in.
We just read some verses to the Thessalonians.
We believe Paul wrote those from Corinth.
That city was the the red light district
if you like of the eastern Mediterranean.
As Paul could look out of his window
as he was writing that letter he could
possibly see the hill of the temple of
Aphrodite.
The homes of thousands of prostitutes as he
looked out across that hill.
He writes to people who have come out
of that kind of background themselves and are
now struggling to live for Christ and yet
with their memories and their histories.
Turn back to 1 Thessalonians 4.
What does God say?
It is God's will that you my dear
Thessalonian brothers and sisters should live holy lives.
He goes on in the next verse that
you should learn self-control.
This doesn't come automatically.
You don't wake up the moment after you've
become a Christian and find that you have
developed instant self-control.
And then in verse 6 he speaks of
the judgment of God on immorality.
You see in the first century world fornication
was as widespread as it is in ours.
For many in Roman and Greek society divorce
was just a command away.
A man could say to his wife you
leave me you go you are divorced that's
the end of it.
What else could she do but become a
prostitute as many did?
And people went from one marriage to another
it seemed like almost every year sometimes.
I was reading once the writings of the
Latin early church father Jerome and he
speaks of observing a woman getting married.
She is marrying her 23rd husband and he
is marrying his 21st wife.
I don't know what kind of children those
sort of marriages produced.
Messalina who was the wife of the emperor
Claudius.
When Claudius was asleep at night in Rome
used to put on a great black gown
and go downtown and spend the rest of
the night in immorality.
Night after night this was known in Rome.
14 out of the first 15 Roman emperors
were known practicing homosexuals.
There was a totally different attitude to women
at that time.
When Paul was telling husbands in Ephesus to
love their wives it was something utterly revolutionary.
You can imagine Timothy reading out the letter
to Ephesus.
Paul has written this letter and he's reading
it out to them in public and he
says now husbands should love their wives just
as Christ loved the church.
Read that again.
What did Paul say?
Love my old woman at home.
You must be joking.
I've never loved her in my life.
I'm not going to start now.
I paid good money for her.
You expect me to love her as well?
Most of you women expect to be loved
by your husbands if you ever get married.
That is a revolution that results from the
teachings of Christ and of Paul.
Now what does God's word have to say
to those kind of people meeting in the
first century churches?
Well let's go even further about it.
What does Christ have to say?
Because our bodily frame and our sexual abilities
it's all coming from the mind of God.
Marriage is God's idea.
It's not dirty or nasty.
Sex isn't something to be ashamed of in
the scriptures and the God who thought up
the idea of marriage and of intimate physical
friendship he one day came to this earth.
He lived with people.
He watched their behavior.
He commented on what they were doing.
He gave solutions to their problems.
And in Matthew chapter 5 the Lord says
quite simply the key to your sexual behavior
lies in your mind.
Some of you find problems with your mind.
You look on other people and you begin
to lust after them.
And the Lord says if you begin to
do that you are actually already committing adultery
in your heart and God sees your heart.
Let's not play around with that scripture.
God judges us to be an adulterer if
we commit adultery in our hearts.
The whole emphasis in the Sermon on the
Mount is on the heart and the Lord
gives one simple thing to do.
If your right eye causes you to sin
pluck it out.
If your right hand causes you to sin
chop it off.
What does he mean?
He cannot mean it literally.
I mean there'd be all kinds of Christians
going around like that.
You only would have to sin twice and
you're blind.
If your hand does something wrong twice it
would you're handless.
What is Christ actually saying to us?
He says look what is it that causes
you to sin in your mind, your imagination,
your heart?
Particular people?
Particular friends that you have?
Particular places that you go?
Particular films that you watch?
If you want purity of heart you're going
to have to chop off that influence on
your life.
Separate from that friend, you switch off that
film, you don't read those magazines, you chop
off those influences that are touching your mind
and your heart.
I hope you understand this isn't some little
trivial thing in your Christian life because in
verse 8 of that same chapter Jesus our
Savior says the pure in heart will see
God.
What do you want in your life?
Can I put that challenge before you tonight?
Do you want God?
You want to see him?
You want to know him?
You want to hear him?
You want to recognize what he's doing?
You want your whole being and personality to
be filled with God?
God in your life and God in your
family?
Then you're going to take an axe to
these things that are coming in and influencing
you.
You know, you decide, you evaluate your life.
Those are the instructions of your maker who
is also your redeemer.
It begins in the heart.
Scriptures are revolutionary and real.
I was working in a university mission back
in England a few months ago and one
of the men who was on the team
with me had been with OM for five
or six years before that and he invited
a fellow along to one of the evening
meetings and I can remember standing preaching the
gospel and talking about the cross of the
Lord Jesus particularly that night and this fellow
was sitting down about where you're sitting.
He came up afterwards to see me.
He wanted to take a little booklet that
I was giving out called Becoming a Christian.
He didn't become a Christian.
Not yet.
And my friend went and invited him to
the meeting the next night when I was
going to be talking more about the resurrection.
He couldn't come.
He was organizing a big big party in
the hall of residence where he was living.
Everybody was going to get drunk that night
so he didn't come to the meeting.
My friend went and called on him at
about 10 o'clock next Saturday morning and
knocked on the door and walked straight in
and found him just climbing out of bed
with his girlfriend.
My friend said, oh hello, glad to meet
you.
Took hands, all right.
Sorry to interrupt you.
Just came to invite you out to lunch.
Quick as a flash you see.
People were just getting up.
Over lunch they got the gospel again and
this time my friend began to spell out
the cost of being a Christian.
You're going to ask Christ to come into
your life.
Your body is going to become a temple
of the Holy Spirit if you become a
Christian.
Your body is not some amusement arcade.
It's the temple of God himself and he
invited them both to come back to the
meeting on Saturday night.
They came and that night both of them
trusted the Lord together.
I was standing in a large Anglican church
preaching the next night, the Sunday night, and
it was absolutely full with men and women.
As I ended the meeting I said now
I want all those who have become Christians
in the course of the meetings this past
week to get
up with East and yet they are going
to face struggles, aren't they?
They understand that becoming a Christian is committing
themselves spiritually and physically to the God of
holiness.
Is it going to be easy for them
in the days ahead?
No, it is going to be like pulling
teeth without anesthetic and yet they have joined
the revolution.
They want holiness in their mind, in their
behavior, in everything about them and they're going
to start reading the New Testament.
Eighteen times in the New Testament God says
fornication for the believer is out.
My friends, these things do need to be
faced.
You need to face up to your own
lives and remember Christ puts the key on
your heart.
You could join me sometimes as I talk
to some of the messes they get themselves
in.
Don't you ever believe that Christians have a
rough deal, they have a lousy time by
being Christians and that people in the world
somehow have it better because it's not true.
The pain and the tears and the heartache
and the agony for so many folk out
there because they're not living on the basis
of God's word.
You remember we read verses from Paul's writing
to the Corinthians and he's speaking of those
folk.
He says such were some of you.
You've come from this kind of background too
but you were washed.
You were forgiven.
You were justified.
You were sanctified.
You've become new men and women.
And then he goes on to give them
advice about how to live in the body.
He doesn't assume that they will have no
problems just because you've come into the kingdom
of God.
Now he says I want to give you
advice about how to live pure lives for
Christ.
Some of you may face these problems on
the team.
Look at verse 12 of 1 Corinthians 6.
Paul wants to ask you two questions.
Let's listen to Paul counseling these Corinthians of
all people.
Ask yourself is your behavior helpful to your
Christian growth?
That's the first question.
Patterns of behavior that you've got into is
it helpful in your Christian growth?
And secondly will it control you?
Will you begin to find yourself gradually in
increasing bondage to the pull and the chains
of the flesh?
Paul begins to imagine an argument with these
Corinthians.
They're sitting on those benches in that early
church and from verse 13 onwards they start
to quote Corinthian proverbs back to Paul.
And they say look look sexual intimacy it's
only natural because that is what the body
is for.
I'm made that way.
I've got that capacity so it's just natural.
I will do what feels right.
Food for the stomach and the stomach for
food.
That's what the stomach is for, eating food.
Paul says no.
God made your body for his own holy
eternal purposes.
And you're not free to imagine that you
somehow have rights of possession over your body.
It's not yours.
You've merely borrowed it temporarily.
You have to give an account for the
behavior in the flesh.
Don't you begin to imagine as Christian men
and women that your body is yours to
dispose of as you like.
God made your flesh for his own eternal
purposes.
And then in verse 14 they begin to
seem to think about how Paul's getting a
bit legalistic and he's asking too much.
And Paul immediately reminds them of the God
of the resurrection.
Look do you find yourself sometimes powerless to
cope with certain problems?
What kind of a God have you got?
Is he a God with practically no power
at all?
A God who doesn't really understand you?
A God who doesn't have the power to
enable you to live right?
Is he a God who's called you to
live as a disciple and yet he hasn't
got the power to enable you to do
it?
By his power God raised the Lord from
the dead and he will raise us also.
The power that's at work in our life
is God's resurrection power.
And we can ask for bits of experience
of that power working in our mind and
our desires and our habits as we go
forward.
And then the Corinthians turn to him and
say well surely it doesn't it doesn't really
lead to any harm does it?
I mean something loving and tender and private
there's no harm in it.
No harm says Paul?
I'll tell you who it harms says Paul.
Four people get harmed by your immorality.
Christ is harmed.
You are harmed.
The Holy Spirit is harmed.
God the Father is offended.
Verse by verse as Paul goes through the
chapter.
Because you have been joined to Christ.
You know you are actually part of Christ's
body.
Is your behavior helpful to your Christian growth?
Will it control you?
The Bible is full of biblical examples of
people ignoring those two questions that Paul puts.
You think back in the second book of
Samuel chapter 11.
David and Bathsheba.
It says there was a day when the
armies went out to battle.
It came the time of the year when
a king's place was to be at the
head of his army.
When a war was on.
When there were enemies to be confronted.
King David was asleep on his own bed.
He got up in the afternoon and stretched
himself and strolled over to the the top
of the wall of the top of his
palace.
And he looked down into the next garden.
There was Bathsheba having a bath.
The stupid woman.
Having a bath where she could be seen
from the king's palace.
You see men are completely different from women.
Right down to the last chromosome of their
bodies.
Men are turned on sexually, physically far more
by what they see.
Women not so much by what they see.
Compared to the men.
Much more by the way they are spoken
to, touched, the way you treat them over
a longer period of time.
This is why, look, when magazines are trying
to sell cars, big new flashy cars.
How often do they have almost naked ladies
sitting on the front of the car.
And the silly men they sort of think
at the back of their mind that if
they buy the car they somehow get the
as well.
When did you last see them trying to
sell washing machines to housewives with a man
in his wife front sitting on the front.
The sight of a man in his underwear
doesn't greatly do much for a woman who's
thinking of buying a washing machine.
Men and women are different.
And the story of David and Bathsheba among
many others proves it.
Now you cannot, you men, help what you
see with your first look.
You're only in control of your second look.
Unless you're to walk around with your eyes
shut all the time.
This is why people in the newsagent shops,
they put all the pornography at male eye
height.
Because they know the way that you are.
This is why we appeal to the sisters
here to remember that when they dress, especially
when the weather gets even hotter.
David took Bathsheba.
I don't know what she thought about becoming
the play thing of the king.
That whole family was broken up.
Her husband was killed in a few days.
She got pregnant.
Child was born, lived a week and then
died.
There was agony in the palace.
David fasted and wept for a week.
This was the beginning of the moral problems
that came again and again and again and
again in David's family.
Simply because David crossed that boundary line.
Two chapters later you can read of Amnon
and Tamar.
Fellow falls in love with his half-sister.
Totally infatuated he believes he's madly passionately in
love with this girl.
He rapes her and the very next verse
it says that he then began to hate
her with a hatred that far exceeded the
love with which he thought he had loved
her.
Our Bible is realistic.
It's realistic about the mistakes that even great
men like David who have written psalms for
our encouragement.
Beautiful pieces of scripture.
Let's begin by remembering this.
The central truth of God's word.
One word.
You can be forgiven.
You can come back home again.
You can know the Lord afresh.
You can hear the Lord say as he
said to David, your sin is forgiven.
Let's begin to think of some of these
things as we draw to a close.
Some of you battling with sin in your
lives that has never been faced, never dealt
with, unforgiven.
Every year we get people who come on
these campaigns and they've come from the very
midst of relationships that they actually know are
wrong.
And you may have come afraid that God
was going to speak to you about that
friendship, that relationship.
Come into the light.
Let the Lord speak to you.
You're going to have to quietly but decisively
break that thing and turn and know the
forgiveness of God.
Sin not forsaken.
I really wonder whether it's forgiven.
Are you willing to break from the past
and know the forgiveness of God as a
settled reality in your heart?
Have some of you been nurturing lust in
your own heart?
You have particular blue movies that you play
in your mind at certain times.
Are you willing to turn from that?
Some of you have perhaps been gripped with
fear and worry about who you're going to
marry.
Whether you will really find a relationship that's
deeply satisfying.
Whether God could possibly have somebody ever in
the whole world for you.
Are you willing to leave the sin of
worry?
Because I believe that thought, if you let
that settle on your heart, that becomes sin.
Some of you perhaps still trouble with things
that have happened in your past.
We've seen folks who've come emotionally so bound
still by the fact that they might have
been raped when they were younger, relationships with
step-parents.
Let's face it too, there are folks very
often who want to come on these campaigns
who are homosexual.
And the Bible speaks of those things too.
And I'm not promising you an easy road.
But the same message of God's power, God's
forgiveness, if you will come back and walk
in the light, is for you.
And so I'm going to ask at the
end of this meeting, that if there are
folk here and God is speaking to them
through scripture tonight, that you don't go on
into the conference without seeking counsel.
Maybe some of you know what you've got
to do.
Maybe you just need to take a walk
round the grounds and just thank the Lord
for his forgiveness.
Get quite clear in your mind that you're
right with him and you have a gospel
that touches this area to preach.
Some of you maybe will need to come
and talk.
That someone might pray with you.
That another brother or sister who's a little
bit further down the road can give you
some help and some advice and some care
and love.
Why couldn't God have arranged life differently?
Why do I have to live in the
body now, perhaps unmarried and yet with tremendous
sex drives?
You know the age of sexual maturity is
getting lower, steadily, as generation follows generation.
You know a hundred years ago, a hundred
years ago, only 13% of girls had
reached sexual maturity at the age of 16.
Now that figure is 97%.
The sociologists calculate that the age of menstruation
is six months younger with every passing generation.
There is an enormous gap opening up.
We become sexually capable and yet we cannot
get married, perhaps for years.
Now why is this happening?
Why has God planned life to be like
this?
What has he got to teach me as
I live in the gap?
Scripture is clear that sex is a gift
from a loving God and like every other
gift, it's temporary.
The only gifts that are not temporary is
the gift of salvation.
Your other spiritual gifts, they're all temporary.
You've got gifts of teaching, gifts of evangelism,
gifts of administration, gifts of showing help to
people.
When the Lord comes back, they all finish.
You won't be standing up doing much teaching
in heaven and there won't be need for
much evangelism in heaven.
Your spiritual gifts are temporary but your character
is eternal.
I hope you don't get all caught up
thinking about spiritual gifts when you should be
majoring on the growth of your character in
Christ-likeness.
And like every other gift, it needs to
be given back before it becomes useful.
You need to give your gifts back to
the Lord and ask him to use you.
And if God has given you any spiritual
gift, it is so that your character may
grow.
Supposing you've got gifts as an evangelist and
you can go out and you can preach
and people will be converted.
That's tremendous.
Praise God for that.
You can be a greater evangelist than Billy
Graham and you can go home and be
a miserable, lousy husband.
You can treat your kids badly and God
in some strange way will continue at least
for a long while to use your gifts
of evangelism.
The fact that God uses your gifts says
nothing about your character.
You can have gifts in administration, gifts in
teaching and yet they've been given to you
so that as you use those gifts your
character actually grows more like Christ.
The evangelist is going to get involved with
people.
The evangelist is going to get mentioned to
people.
They're going to come into his home, they're
going to destroy his furniture, they're going to
eat his food, they're going to wake him
up any time of the night.
And he's going to learn patience and he's
going to learn love and his character.
A man who's got gifts as a teacher
is going to have to spend hours and
hours when other people are asleep in bed
studying God's word, getting God's truth.
In his character he's learning discipline, he's learning
self-control.
It's exactly the same with the gift of
sexual ability.
God has given you this gift so that
you can give it back to him so
that as you live in the body your
character can be formed.
You are to learn to love and serve
other people.
You're to learn to think about other people
unselfishly.
This is part of the essential hollowness of
masturbation.
It is a totally selfish activity.
It involves nothing that I can think of
to the glory of God.
But the worst of all is that it
is actually very often training your mind to
think about other people in a selfish, exploitationary
way.
And you will find actually as a preparation
for marriage it's a disaster.
Because you will become selfish and demanding and
that will be a groove into which your
character fits.
God is very wise.
God has given you beauty.
He's made you interesting.
You're all a tremendous bunch of people.
And yet you face this problem, you live
with it.
So that you can cooperate with God's Holy
Spirit in your thinking and in your character
you begin gradually to become more and more
like Jesus Christ.
God's gift.
A gift from a loving Heavenly Father.
He's given it to his young children so
that you might grow up to be like
him.
How many gifts do parents give to children
so that the children will actually grow up
to be more like the parents?
My wife comes from a long line of
Scottish engineers and mechanics.
So at the age of three she gives
my son a toolbox.
Why does she do this?
Obvious.
She's trying to push my son in the
direction of her family so that he grows
up like her lot.
I want to give him a football.
I want to give him a hockey stick.
Parents give their children piano lessons.
Not that the children ask for them but
the parents want the children to learn to
play the piano.
You see parents giving gifts so as to
train up the children in a certain way.
What a great God we have.
Put us all together as brothers and sisters
and given us the gift to relate deeply
and intimately even sexually to one other person
so that we will learn by his grace
to become like him.
My time is gone.
Let me give you what I call a
Chinese takeaway summary at the end.
You don't have Chinese takeaways in Germany.
Five principles and then we'll end.
The first is that we must be absolutely
honest in facing up to our own problems
because our God is light.
God is light in in him is no
darkness at all.
Don't live in the darkness if you want
to go on with God.
You remember that woman in John chapter four
as Jesus was sitting beside her at the
well.
A woman with a history.
She'd had various husbands.
She was now living with a chap she
wasn't even married to and yet she was
spiritually hungry.
That living water that you're talking about I
want that.
I want something to satisfy me deep down
deeper than I've ever known before and the
Lord said you go call your husband.
Just very simply and quietly he put his
finger as perhaps he the same Lord has
been putting his finger tonight in your life
on sin.
You can't go on
with the Lord if you're facing in the
opposite direction.
We begin with honesty.
Secondly real repentance.
Not just feeling sorry.
Don't just take a walk for half an
hour tonight before you go to bed feeling
a bit sorry for yourself.
Lord it hurts but I want holiness.
I want to be obedient.
The pure in heart shall see God.
Oh God I want to see you and
know you.
Real repentance is a real turn and then
thirdly don't carry on feeding your problem.
Some of you will have to how shall
I put it demythologize your fantasies.
Brothers and sisters as they really are.
In one way that's one of the advantages
of OM team life.
You begin to see other brothers and sisters
much more realistically.
You know it's easy to fall in love
with a girl if every time you're going
to see her she has known that you
were coming for two hours before.
You didn't get it.
Don't worry.
Fourthly I think this is so key.
We need to begin to learn to live
the disciplined life.
Disciplined in your feeding, disciplined in your sleeping,
disciplined in what you do.
I find let me tell you something secret
about me and then it'll stop being a
secret.
I find in many ways I function best
as a Christian when I am slightly tired.
I think that's perhaps why God keeps me
for 360 days a year tired.
If I've got too much energy if I'm
just full of beans I'm liable to do
anything but if I'm tired I press on
with the things that matter.
Some of you fellows you sleep too much,
sleep too much, you eat too much, you've
got sex problems, you wonder why.
We need to get ourselves under the whip.
A disciplined life under control and then finally
let us all remember that God loves us
and accepts us now tonight just as we
are.
Maybe you don't like yourself very much.
You don't like what you've done.
You don't like how you look.
You look at how your future is developing
you don't like that either and then you
begin to think that nobody else likes you
and worst of all God probably doesn't like
you.
God loves the unlovable.
We get trained by the advertising world to
think that we have to deserve love.
Only we wear a certain kind of clothing,
certain kind of perfume, drive a certain kind
of then people will love us.
With God it's untrue.
God loves you just as you are.
Do you ever get up in the morning
and sort of stagger through to the mirror
and you just take a horrible look at
your horrible self?
God doesn't think about you like that at
all.
He likes to see you up.
He doesn't mind you being sleepy.
He knows about your past.
He has been watching over you and praying
over you for years and years.
He loves you.
We need have no fear throwing our lives
again on the altar of sacrifice before the
Lord Jesus because of who he is.
Then when now?
I'm going to ask that if you need
to talk with someone perhaps to just pray
with someone just to open up something that's
been on your conscience for a long time.
That you just take the opportunity tonight.
Go to someone you know and trust.
Go to a country leader.
Come to me if you want.
Find someone in order that you might talk
with them and get loving care and counsel
and help from them.
Because if God's word doesn't meet our needs
at this point how are you going to
go and stand in the streets of France
and Belgium Austria and urge people to read
a gospel, read a bible that you don't
really believe in?
God is so good.
We need have no fear whatever of him
but walk with him in the light to
the end of your days.
Oh God thank you for your word and
your message.
Lord we want to be those that are
so eager to hear what you have to
say because we know that we're better off
listening and obeying.
You're a God of glory.
We want something of that glory to mark
our lives.
We want that glory to mark our teams.
We want to go that same road as
those Corinthians and those Thessalonians to learn self
-control and discipline as we walk with you.
Oh God thank you that your gospel is
not just a little thing.
Not just believe in Jesus and go to
heaven.
You want to change our characters that we
might live with you for all eternity.
Continue to lead us we pray this evening
in Jesus name.