Guys, you need to read Every Man’s Battle (check out my book review to find out why I say this). Fellas, we can be the men that God desires us to be! Check out some quotes from this powerful book.
“Your purity must not depend upon your mate’s health or desire. God holds you responsible.”
“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. We easily tolerate mixed standards of sexual purity because we tolerate mixed standards in most other areas of life.”
“While in business it’s profitable to seem perfect, in the spiritual realm it’s merely comfortable to seem perfect. It is never profitable. … Excellence is a mixed standard, while obedience is a fixed standard. We want to shoot for the fixed standard.”
“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 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. 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. … 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. … 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.”
“Your body isn’t reliable for any spiritual battle, much less the battle for sexual purity and obedience. … Your body often breaks ranks, engaging in battle against you. This traitorous tendency pushes our sexual drive to ignore God’s standards. 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.”
“For males, impurity of the eyes is sexual foreplay…because foreplay is any sexual action that naturally takes us down the road to intercourse. Foreplay ignites passions, rocketing us by stages until we go all the way. God views foreplay outside marriage as wrong. … It’s critical to recognize visual sexual impurity as foreplay.”
“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. For instance, we want to look at our wives and desire them. 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. In its proper place, maleness is wonderful. Yet our maleness is a major root of sexual sin. So what do we do? We must choose to be more than male. We must choose manhood. … Our Heavenly Father also exhorts us to be men. He wants us to be like Him. 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. His standard of purity doesn’t come naturally to us. He calls us to rise up, by the power of His indwelling presence, and get the job done.”
“The hands of Jesus…never touched a woman with dishonor. … Jesus not only never touched a woman with dishonor, He never even looked at a woman in dishonor. Could I say that? … ‘Oh, don’t be so hard on yourself,’ one might say. ‘It’s natural for a male to look. That’s part of our nature.’ But what you’re doing is stealing. The impure thought life is the life of a thief. You’re stealing images that aren’t yours. … When we’re thieves with our eyes, we’re embezzling sexual gratification from areas that don’t belong to us, from women who aren’t connected to us.”
“When God looks around, He’s not looking for a man’s man but for ‘God’s man.’ His definition of a man—someone who hears His word and acts upon it—is tough, but at least it’s clear.”
Watch for more quotes soon…
“How strange is it, that when I have the fullest convictions that prayer is not only my duty—not only necessary as the appointed means of receiving these supplies, without which I can do nothing, but likewise the greatest honor and privilege to which I can be admitted in the present life—I should still find myself so unwilling to engage in it. However, I think it is not prayer itself that I am weary of, but such prayers as mine. How can it be accounted prayer, when the heart is so little affected—when it is polluted with such a mixture of vile and vain imaginations—when I hardly know what I say myself—but I feel my mind collected one minute, the next, my thoughts are gone to the ends of the earth. If what I express with my lips were written down, and the thoughts which at the same time are passing through my heart were likewise written between the lines, the whole taken together would be such an absurd and incoherent jumble—such a medley of inconsistency, that it might pass for the ravings of a lunatic. When He points out to me the wildness of this jargon, and asks, is this a prayer fit to be presented to the holy heart-searching God? I am at a loss what to answer, till it is given to me to recollect that I am not under the law, but under grace—that my hope is to be placed, not in my own prayers, but in the righteousness and intercession of Jesus. The poorer and viler I am in myself, so much the more is the power and riches of His grace magnified in my behalf. Therefore I must, and, the Lord being my helper, I will pray on, and admire His condescension and love, that He can and does take notice of such a creature….” —John Newton
Craig T. Owens 