Legend has it that there was a day not so long ago when men were more sexually pure. There was a day when a man gave his word on his wedding day to forsake all others, and he did exactly what he said he would do. He stayed married and faithful to the wife God gave to him to cherish. In that day, it was expected that men would keep their word to their wives and to others. A man was as good as his word, as the stories say.
There was a day when a man would run from wicked women and avoid the porn store located on the dirty side of town. Some with grey hair still talk of the era when a man’s word was as good as gold. Then the war started. This wasn’t a conventional war with bombs, planes, and navy ships, raised by some faraway nation. This war was raised against us, the church and our culture, from the very pit of hell itself.
The enemy of our souls began a sexual campaign—or as we would later call it, a sexual revolution. This campaign would question the very core biblical view of sexuality. The vicious weapons of pornography, drugs, and sexual immorality were raised against our educational institutions and churches, and the onslaught spread throughout the land. The fight pitted sons and daughters against the truths and values of their parents and grandparents like no other cultural war in the history of mankind. These young people talked of free love, or rather free sex. Pornography was a right and sex was a right without consequences or responsibilities.
This mindset developed in many ways over the next decades. The Internet has taken this sexual combat to every home, computer, and cell phone. For most of us men, pornography is only a click away, and it grants the enemy’s army easy access to our hearts, lives, and families.
This has an impact on every church in this great nation and many nations around the world. Some churches are active in the fight against sexual sin, and some have no idea they are in a war; half or more of their men are dead inside because their silent sins are keeping them from reaching their full destiny in Christ.
You are engaged in this great war, you didn’t ask for it; you just happened to be born when the enemy declared murderous intentions on you and your family, church, and nation. You had no say, but you are called to help our God set free a generation. No church community in history has had to reckon with such an intense and sophisticated inundation of sexually perversity. And we are God’s only warriors in this battle. Our culture says we are crazy to believe God’s Word about sexual fidelity and purity, whether we are single or married.
If we win this war together, we might see a return to Christian sexual values in our culture. We might return to a day when sexual purity is the standard once again, and perversion is seen for the damaging entity it really is.
Sometimes, I feel we Christians are being kicked out of our American culture. Our God has been taken out of our schools, and his commandments have been taken out of our courthouses. Even his nativity scenes have been removed from some public places. I don’t know about you, but it feels as though we are being kicked out of our own land.
Consider each of these questions for a moment.
- If God were to look at America based upon its sexual immorality, especially its leadership in sexual immorality, what would God say? Unclean or clean?
- If God were to look at your state or your city based on its sexual morality, would he say unclean or clean?
- What if God were to look at your local church—remember, he sees all—what would he have to conclude? Unclean or clean?
- If he were to look at your life based upon your sexuality alone, what would he conclude? Unclean or clean?
I thank God for the blood of Jesus who paid for all my sins. Because of Jesus, God considers all of us as blood-bought men. I want God to be able to look at every man, church, city, state, and nation and declare us clean, smiling upon us all.