I have a little bit of a plan here for the next little while, but I’m going to need your help to flesh it out, and that’s why I prayed for you the way I did. There were some surprises on the survey to me, and they have altered the way I’ve thought about this morning. Let me mention one of them.

The Big Issues

About eight or 10 years ago, we had a men’s retreat and we took a survey as to what the big issues were, and the big issue was anger. And that’s not the issue in this gathering, if you’re telling the truth. It’s not the issue. It’s not anywhere near the top of the issues. It didn’t even come into the first nine, and that frankly blew me away. So either times have changed, or you’ve changed. You’re a different group, of course. Or it’s something else. I’m not going to minimize that because that’s still a big issue for lots of people, but that surprised me. Let me try to tell you the plan that I have here, and then I’m going to get your feedback a little bit along the way.

I’m going to tell you what the top issues are for you, according to the survey, and then I’m going to address what I think is a bottom line issue, a bottom line need underneath some of those. And then I’m going to ask for your help and your insight about some of them and why you think they are the way they are, why the condition is the way it is. I think I’ll end up talking about lust this morning. And then we’re going to have two testimonies, one from Rod Takata and one from Len Reed and then we’re going to do some small group work. That’ll pretty much take us up until lunchtime as we close with some worship.

There are 54 of you who are married, and 32 of you are single. Ten of you are 18 to 25, and 29 are 26 to 35, and 33 are 36 to 45, and 14 are over 45. Then I think some bad news — at least it sets an agenda for me for how to think about increasing our capacities as effective warriors — has to do with some of the degrees of time that you engage in the word. Question number three says: How frequently during the week do you spend time in solitude reading the Bible and praying? Only 15 of you do it daily. I find that shocking. There are 12 who do it six out of seven days, 15 who do it five out of seven days, 14 who do it four out of seven days, five who do it three out of seven days, 10 who do it two days a week, and 13 who do it one day a week or less. We’ll come back to that because it relates to other responses on the sin chart.

Another question says: If married, on average, how frequently do you or your spouse pray together alone, not including the children and not including grace at meals? Is there time where just you and a spouse do that? This is only the married people who are responding here. Seven do it daily. There are 38 who do it one day a week or less, and 21 of those 38 never do it or only in crises. So 21 married men, that’s almost half of this group, never regularly pray with their wives except perhaps at meals or with the children. I’m going to ask you why that is later on. I want some of you who are in that condition to be honest with me and tell me what the hangup is. What are the big obstacles to doing that? Because that’s important to do.

Marriage, Family Worship, and Lust

I’ll tell you the bottom line reason for why it’s important to do it. The main meaning of marriage in the universe as God created it is to model the relationship between God and his church, or Christ and his church. That’s the main meaning of marriage in the world. Now the world doesn’t have a clue about the meaning of marriage, which is why you can do anything you want with marriages. But the church, we people who know the word of God, who know the revelation of why he has done what he has done, we know why he created marriage. He created it as a drama of how Christ and his bride relate. Therefore, our job as leaders in the home is to work toward that. I will be the first to confess that our marriage does not measure up to modeling the beauty of Christ and his church, but that’s my goal. That’s why prayer together is important. That’s one of the reasons. There are other reasons, but we’ll come back to that.

Another questions says: If you have children at home, on average how frequently do you lead them and your wife in a time of Bible reading and prayer? Nine of the 54 married men said daily, and 27 said one day a week or less, 15 of those 27 do it never or only in crises. So 15 of the married men here do not lead children and wife in a time of Bible reading and prayer. We need to ponder what that will mean for these children as they grow up.

Another question says: How frequently do you give in to looking at sexually explicit material? The lust factor in this group is not unusually high. In fact, I broke it out in the questionnaire into four levels: fantasies, mental preoccupations, pornography, touching, and sexual intercourse. I tried to move it from the mind out to the body. On the question here about how frequently you give in, 56 of you said less than monthly, which was encouraging to me. As far as actually going out of your way to view sexually explicit material in magazines, TV, video, or internet, 56 out of the 86 of you said less than monthly, 16 of you said monthly, three of you said every two weeks, and six said once a week and so on.

Now I praise God for that. I really do. I praise God that at that level at least of fighting the battle, there is a significant measure of triumph, because there are people who simply live on pornography. And those of you who are in that category of sense of failure can learn from the other 56 that there are measures of triumph to be had in the battle against giving in to looking at sexually explicit material.

Feelings of Inferiority and Failures in Spiritual Things

Let me tell you what the top seven or eight battles were from the sheet where you circled a 1 through 10. By the way, you should really thank God for those who tabulated these. It took them till 12:00 last night, I think, two-and-a-half hours or so to do this. I didn’t realize I was creating such an awful instrument when I did this, and I’m sorry, and I love those guys for the work they put into this. It really will help me not only here but in the days to come.

I’ll tell you how I decided to measure intensity of struggle. I took the 7, 8, 9, and 10 and added them up. I figured if you circled seven or above, there was some measure of intensity. And then I compared those totals to come up with which of the categories were the most intense. Lust did tie for number one, that is, the sexual fantasies and mental preoccupations with sexual things. Forty-five of you circled seven or above. But tied at 45 were feelings of inferiority that hinder courageous behavior. That was news to me — feelings of inferiority that hinder courageous behavior. I’m not just sure what kind of inferiority each of you means, but it will be good perhaps to talk about how that relates to our time in the word.

Right behind 45, is 44, and it’s a sense of failure in spiritual things that hinders fresh initiative. I would guess that that’s very closely related to a sense of inferiority that hinders courageous behavior. For a sense of failure in spiritual things that hinders fresh initiatives, 44 of you circled seven or above. That’s over half of you. And I would guess that that relates to the fact that there is failure in spiritual things. It’s not just a sense of failure. There is failure in spiritual things, to a measure, and we need to deal with real failure. Not just talk about our bad feelings about ourselves, but what have we done that makes some of those bad feelings legitimate?

Perhaps some of them are illegitimate. I was talking with Russ at the back there about this, and he said, “Maybe it was what you addressed last night in part, namely that at Bethlehem there are relentlessly high expectations raised in terms of passion, in terms of being utterly sold out for God. All of us, I would guess as you lift up say somebody like the Apostle Paul who says, ‘I count everything as loss for the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus, and I’m ready to lay down my life, and to live is Christ and to die is gain,’ and we sit there feeling like, ‘Well, maybe during one or two worship songs, I feel like that.’” So that may be part of it. We do at Bethlehem go hard after God and lift that up, which is why there might be some true and some false expectations raised there. Because if you begin to measure your passion by certain forms of it, you might beat yourself up unnecessarily. So that’s number three, a failure in spiritual things that hinders fresh initiatives.

Love of Praise and and a Critical Spirit

Number four, very close on the heels of that with 41, is a love of praise, strong desires for human approval and applause. A strong sense of inferiority and a sense of failure with a very great love of being liked and being approved and applauded makes for some measure of misery, I would think, among us. And there are some great temptations to be hypocrites, I would think. In other words, if you long to be liked, if you long to be approved, if you want people to tell you you’ve done a good job — and who doesn’t? — and if you feel inferior and inadequate, then the natural thing to do (not the spiritual thing) would be to fake it.

That is, don’t let anybody know your sense of inferiority. Do whatever you have to do outwardly to get the approval of the people around you that are the significant people that you want to approve of you. So I didn’t put down here “hypocrisy” or “struggles with hypocrisy,” but I think if I were to do it over again, I might. But it’s very interesting that dishonesty is one of the lowest struggles here. Maybe you thought of it in terms of lying about money or whatever, and that’s wonderful. I praise God that lying or not telling the truth is not, for 69 of you, is low. For 12 of you, it’s big. But that was significant, which means I would guess we’re a pretty straightforward and authentic bunch here, and you’re probably willing to say it like it is, even if it’s not great.

Number five, after love of praise, at 35 is a critical spirit. And that does not surprise me. I would have expected it, in fact, to be higher. It’s a critical spirit, a bent toward finding fault rather than verbally building up. Next is anxiety and worrying about the future, and there are 34. Next is impatience, which has 33. Next are guilt feelings, that amorphous thing that don’t seem to go away even when sins are confessed. Those are 30. And then there are 29 who said they were sullen and withdrawn. So the last one I’ll mention is that being sullen and withdrawn and losing the desire to communicate.

I’ll mention the four lowest struggles. Sexual intercourse — in other words the struggle to actually get in bed with somebody not your wife — is the lowest struggle. I thank God for that, though there were some for whom that is a big deal. Next is sexual touching, and here I had in mind the molestation of your children, your daughters, your sons — the temptation to touch your children inappropriately — and that’s low. Eight people are struggling with that, however, and that’s not just your children, of course, but others. I’ll tell you, next Tuesday I have to walk into a pastor’s office in this city with another pastor and confront him with child molestation because women have come to us and told us.

He’ll lose his job this Tuesday. He’ll never enter the pulpit again, unless this pastor and I are totally wrong in the assessment that we have of these women’s testimonies. His church will probably blow to pieces. Many of you probably know this church. Just to let you know that this is a big deal, that this is happening, and if it’s happening to you, you need to come out with it and confess it and not keep doing it. You need to just fix it. It’s better to lose your job and even spend a few years in jail, really.

There are Bethlehem members who are in jail because of this, one at least. It’s better to do that and come clean and get out on parole in five or six years and be new than to live with the horrendous, horrible, guilty conscience of molesting and having this impulse to touch little girls. You might be getting yourselves jobs or park board roles so that you can have a little in or working in the nursery or just giving into this very, very awful temptation. There are ways to triumph. I love the song we just sang, that there is a way. When there seems no other way, there is a way, brothers. God has a way. We love to say it as a staff on little things, “How are we going to fit this nursery and how are we going to do classes there?” There’s a way. God has a way for you to be free and to have your life changed.

The third lowest was covetousness and the fourth lowest was dishonesty.

Questions and Comments

Well, that’s the survey. Anybody want to make a comment on it or raise a question before I move into something else?

As I originally went over the survey yesterday and I thought about anger, I was immediately prepared to go on the high end of the scale, until I read “unforgiving hard feelings.” That caused me to go lower.

That may account for it. Anger, not legitimate indignation at injustice, but unforgiving hard feelings. Well, I’m still encouraged, because I’m not too worried about short-term anger that gets resolved in a relatively short space of time and doesn’t result in a hard heart and unforgiveness. I’m just not too worried about that. If you keep short accounts, provided you don’t hit anybody, your wife or your children inappropriately, I’m not too worried about that. But maybe you’ve put your finger on why it’s lower. Any other comments like that? Go ahead.

I think it was one where you’re talking about touching. I did not understand the word “fernale.

It’s supposed to be females.

I thought it was some big word.

Sexual touching of fernales? Are you kidding me?

I thought it was something different.

Okay we’ll scratch that one. It looks like fernales, doesn’t it? I wouldn’t want you to touch those fernales, guys. I never took a class on statistics or anything. I don’t know how to write these things. Any other helpful comments?

I think it’s good to see results like this, just to let you know that you’re not alone, if you think you’re on your own island.

That was my point of stressing it’s a fight last night, because you can see here that it is.

When we talked about prayer and not including grace at meals, what we try to do is make our pre-meal prayer significant, not insignificant. So I scored low on that one because I was thinking, “Well, gee, this isn’t a fair question because grace isn’t an insignificant thing unless it’s being treated that way.”

I hear you. And if you turn pre-meal praying into a significant wife encounter with God so that it’s more than thank you for the food in Jesus’s name, amen, then I wish you had put it at the other end. But you’re right. I was misleading there.

Well, maybe it’s better to just pray briefly and then after the meal have extended time.

That would sure qualify for what I had in mind. I didn’t want this to be skewed by saying, “Do you ever pray with your wife?” and everybody would say, “Yes, because we say thanks at meals.” That would have skewed my goal. That’s all I was trying to do. Go ahead.

I just want to encourage you to make a strong invitation. You’re saying some people are struggling with having intercourse with people other than their wife and touching children. I suspect there’s probably some people who are struggling with those things, and this is the first time they’ve told anyone about it, even though it’s an anonymous form. Maybe to give an invitation, they can come and talk with you or one of the other pastors, it might be an open door.

Let’s just do that right now. David Livingston’s here, and David Michael is here, and elders are here. Why don’t the elders stand? There’s a half dozen of us or so, just so we know who we are. I’m here now, in the free time afterwards, or you can call us and make an appointment. I want you to know that we’ve been in ministry long enough that we’re not surprised by much, and so we won’t cluck our tongues at any struggle that you have. I doubt that there would be any I haven’t heard before of the most horrendous kind. We would love very much to struggle with you. There is a future and a hope.

It just seemed like there’s a direct relation between the high things like inferiority and lack of courage and lack of Bible reading. I saw a direct relationship.

Right. I want to tackle that now.

You said that one of the highest was lust and yet one of the lowest was giving into pornography?

The first was lust, which I said was, “sexual fantasies and mental preoccupations with sexual things.” There were 45 who had a high struggle. Regarding pornography and looking at explicit material, there were 18. And 56 said it was less than once a month. So the measure of success that is being had is being had at the willpower level of not going into the bookstore or getting the video, or at least more often than once a month. Large levels of you are succeeding at winning at that level while being defeated as you judge it at the mental level. That is the key level for us to fight at.

It’s a wonderful thing to get victory over not committing fornication. It’s wonderful to get victory over not touching those we shouldn’t touch. And it’s wonderful to get victory over not looking at things we shouldn’t look at, but it would be best to go to heaven and be perfect, and next to have more measures of success over our thought life. I would like to, at the end of our time this morning, just talk to you about some strategies that I think can help you a lot.

What to Do with a Sense of Failure?

As I pondered feelings of inferiority and failure in spiritual things, and I saw the infrequency with which many pray and read the Bible daily, there were some things I wanted to address. There are 15 of you who are only reading the Bible and praying daily. If you’re married, only 7 are praying with your wives daily. If you’ve got children, 9 of you are doing it with children and so on.

Here’s what I feel led to talk about first for a few minutes. What do you do with a sense of failure? I could start right now and say, “Shape up, for goodness sakes,” which I don’t think is where the gospel starts. If you have a Bible, let’s go to Micah. I hadn’t planned yesterday in my thoughts about this to go to Micah 7 or to talk about this at all, as a matter of fact. So this is a new strategy for me this morning, and I pray and hope that it is of the Lord. Micah is one of those hard-to-find little prophets there toward the end of the Old Testament. Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah. Page 876 in my Bible, which will do you no good at all.

How many of you remember the sermon Gutsy Guilt. Maybe 10 or 15. I preached on this years ago because this one summer when I was away wrestling with some things in my own life. This was an unbelievably powerful and encouraging word to me for a sense of failure, a sense of inadequacy, because the bottom line in the gospel is justification by faith. Justification by faith means that a holy, awesome God to whom you can never measure up declares you in Christ acceptable, righteous, holy, and loved freely by an act of faith in which you cast yourself upon him for mercy. If that ever gets ahold of you, you will be as bold as a lion in all of your inadequacy.

So I think we’ve got to go back to the basics here. We’re all inadequate. What else is news? We’re all failures. That’s who sinners are before a holy God, and we probably haven’t begun to feel how full of failure we are. You felt a little bit of it, but probably if we saw God in his holiness and greatness, those negatives would just be right down off the chart. I’m not really eager to stroke you first and say, “Oh, you’re really not as bad as you think you are. Come on, guys, don’t feel so bad about yourselves.” That’s not the biblical strategy. The biblical strategy is you probably haven’t begun to see how bad you are, but that’s quite irrelevant when it comes to how to be bold and strong in God on the basis of his absolutely free sovereign grace by which he justifies ungodly people.

Gutsy Guilt

So I want to just look at two or three basic bottom line glorious texts to help inadequate men forget about making that the issue and make God’s mercy and justification the issue in your competencies. Let’s read Micah 7:7–9:

But as for me, I will look to the Lord;
     I will wait for the God of my salvation;
     my God will hear me.
Rejoice not over me, O my enemy;
     when I fall, I shall rise;
when I sit in darkness,
     the Lord will be a light to me.
I will bear the indignation of the Lord
     because I have sinned against him . . .

I think probably those of you who are honest will feel, “I have sinned in my neglect of my family, or my children, or the word, or in my caving to sexual fantasies, or my failures to be a courageous witness. All right, I have.” And that puts you square where Micah 7:8–9 are. It says:

I will bear the indignation of the Lord
     because I have sinned against him
until he pleads my cause
     and executes judgment for me.
He will bring me out to the light;
     I shall look upon his vindication.
Then my enemy will see,
     and shame will cover her who said to me,
“Where is the Lord your God?” (Micah 7:8–10).

Now you have to get this, guys, because who of us does not feel every day in some way like a failure, like we failed somebody, or we failed ourselves, or we failed some resolution, or we failed God? Who does not feel that? And if our sense of being able to pick it up, go on, fight the fight, do a thing that needs to be done and bear witness to God and take up the battle again, if that depends on not having a sense of failure, we’ll never, ever rise. We’ll never rise. We have to shift our whole way of thinking. This is where the Gospel comes into the secular American mindset that tries with its secularized psychology to find ways of pumping our ego continually. What does the world have except self-esteem? It has nothing to offer but self-esteem, and therefore all kinds of classes and all kinds of strategies are constantly fed into your life to say, “You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay,” because you’re not going to make it if you don’t feel okay.

Far Better Than Self-Esteem

I’m saying there’s another way, and it’s profound. It comes out of the blue. It comes down from God. It’s radical. It’s different. It’s what blew Martin Luther’s mind. It’s what blew Calvin away. It’s what blew Europe apart in the 1500s, called the Reformation. They discovered justification by faith. They discovered a holy God coming to a hopelessly sinful human being and saying, not “you are okay,” but “I glorify my grace through justifying the ungodly.” And if you could get a handle on that, you would be as bold as a lion, failures not withstanding. It’s the grip of justification by faith alone that turned Europe on its head 400 years ago, and that caused this Catholic monk to have his whole life changed (Martin Luther) because he read these things. So let me read it again:

Rejoice not over me, O my enemy;
     when I fall, I shall rise;
when I sit in darkness,
     the Lord will be a light to me.
I will bear the indignation of the Lord . . . (Micah 7:8–9).

Isn’t it freeing not to say that God is never upset with us? I read a prayer the other day written by somebody down in Macon who gave it to me that says, “Once you’re saved, God never has any negative feelings toward you.” That’s not true. It’s not true. I love my sons. I love Benjamin with all my heart and Carsten and Barnabas and Abraham and my daughter Talitha. I would lay my life down for them. I accept them. I receive them. I want them. I work for them. I pray for them. I live for them. And I disapprove of much in their lives from time to time. Therefore, I don’t think it’s a contradiction of justification by faith to say, “I will bear the indignation of the Lord because I’ve sinned against him.”

But you see, here’s gutsy guilt. Here’s this phrase: gutsy guilt. I’m guilty. God disapproves of my committing that sin. He disapproves of that, and he is indignant that I did that. But I’m sitting here now, and I’m feeling that. It’s dark, it’s heavy, it’s like a cloud. I’m in there until and I’m sitting here, only I’m saying inside, “I’m going to sit here until he pleads my cause and executes judgment for me.” Now is that not amazing? You’re supposed to say, if you don’t understand it, “I’m going to sit here, and he’s going to execute judgment against me, and I’m a goner.” And that’s not what it says. It says, “Until he pleads my cause and executes judgment for me. He will bring me forth to the light, and I shall behold his deliverance.” That’s gutsy guilt. We realize we failed. We realize God is justifiably indignant at us. He has not broken off our salvation. He has not withdrawn as our Father and our Savior and our Lord. He’s just like a father disapproving of his child’s behavior here, and there’s a cloud that has settled in.

What family does not have that from day to day? Spank, cloud, hug, kiss, usually quick turnaround healing, especially if they’re young. When they become teenagers, it doesn’t happen that quickly with discipline. There are these clouds of darkness that can settle in, but it doesn’t mean there’s no longer a relationship there. And a kid who knows his father’s love will say, “I will bear this until he pleads my cause and executes judgment for me and brings me forth to the light.”

Question and Answer

I have a different version of that. I wonder what your thought is on that version of it: “Because I have sinned against him, I will bear the Lord’s wrath until he pleads my case and establishes my right.”

I think that’s basically the same. You’ve taken the phrase “established my right?” I suppose the one puts the emphasis on maybe a right that you can lay claim to as a justified sinner. When we go to God as justified sinners, we lay a claim on the judge’s table. What is it? It’s the cross. That’s our claim. Or in the Old Testament, it would have been just the sheer unexplained mercy of God manifest in the sacrificial system. When I go to God as a guilty sinner under his disapproval and lay my right on the table, it isn’t owing to anything in me. We all know this. It is owing to the Son. We pray, “Father, forgive me for his name’s sake. Accept me for his name’s sake. Bring me out of this darkness for his name’s sake.”

I own in Christ a right. This is what I call it gutsy dealings with God. This is gutsy guilt, where you go to God and say, “I’m a sinner. You have now disapproved of me. You are disciplining me in whatever situation, and I believe with all my heart you are for me, and you will bring me out of this. And I lay my right on the table, namely Jesus and his righteousness and his blood and his sufficiency covering all the deeds I’ve ever done wrong.”

Isn’t there a legitimate place for remembering our sins?

I agree entirely. There is. In Ephesians chapter 2:12, he’s saying to saints, “Remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth . . .” So there’s one kind of remembering. The remembering of our sin is legitimate up to this point. This is the way I would put it. Paul said, “Forgetting those things which lie behind, I press on to lay hold on that which was laid hold on me” (Philippians 3:12–14). So you have Ephesians 2:12 saying, “Remember where you came from.” And you have got Philippians 3:12 saying, “Forgetting those things which lie behind.” Is that a contradiction? I don’t think it is, if you take it like this.

To the degree that remembering sin endears you to the grace of God, remember it. To the degree that it incapacitates you and nullifies the grace of God and confidence in your life, forget it. In other words, there is a legitimate function of the memory of sin, and there’s an illegitimate function of the memory of sin. And illegitimate is when that memory is paralyzing you, and the legitimate is when it is making you thankful that you’re saved and loving the grace of God more and feeling more confident that anybody who would forgive that would surely help me in the future.

Would that be something along the line like a lesson learned? We touched on this pornography thing. The only thing that keeps me away from it is the lessons I’ve learned of what it does to me if I keep going back to it. And because of the fear of that falling away, I flee that.

That’s an added reason for why there is a place for memory, that is you learn lessons from sins that you’ve committed. They got you into such misery and discouragement and broken relationships and so on that to remember the sin is to remember the lesson and have an incentive to fight it more successfully. Definitely.

I think one thing we need to deal with is that God will forgive all the time, because as one continues to fail and not live to his expectations, there is a sense of why does it matter anymore? How am I assured that God continues to forgive?

There is the biggest rub: how to maintain assurance that God will go on forgiving me. I think the assurance at that level of repeated failure comes not from looking at the measure of our success but at the cross. And if somebody comes into my office and documents years of failure, years of failure, and they’re saying, in essence, “I’m not sure that I’m saved because a saved person is supposed to gain a better measure of success.” That’s the toughest of all questions. The answer to that is not to say, “Oh, everybody does it, and so you’re in the same boat with everybody, and so surely you must be saved.”

The only way I know to help a person at that point is to make a clean break, withdrawing assurance from their own exercises, and to go straight to the cross and linger there and read descriptions of the massive sacrifice and the unbelievable payment that was paid and the horrendous suffering that he endured and to ask, “Why? What called for this?” And we say, “Surely that is sufficient. Is that not sufficient for you?” And we seek to have a new love for Christ born out of that and new fresh resolutions and powers to get on with the fight.

A helpful thing that was said to me was that the evidence of being born of God, of being his child, of being justified is not perfection but direction. In other words, going against God, away from God this way saying, “I don’t care about God, I don’t care about his law, I don’t care about doing what he says or relating to people the way he says relate, or worshiping with his people, or reading his word. I don’t care about those things. I’m off to satisfy my desires.” That’s one direction. And then the other direction is, “I want you, God, I need you, God, you’re my only hope.” And on this road there are stumblings, and those stumblings are not the same as the other direction. These stumblings and fallings are fought with 1 John 1:9 and 1 John 2:1–2, which says:

My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.

So we do need that assurance. We need it. We need to live so that our lives over time begin to confirm the authenticity of our faith. But when that falls into question and we begin to ask the most horrifying question of all, “Am I saved?” the answer there is not primarily to consult your track record, though that may supplement, and your understanding of your own track record may be very wrong. I really believe that’s true for a lot of people. But the main place to turn at that moment is to Christ, to the cross, to the glorious promises of the Gospel until the Holy Spirit lays those things mightily on your heart again. You feel like the glory of the cross will be magnified as you cast yourself on it now afresh, and he will be sufficient to love you and care for you. You are truly believing that he is your all in all, and you have the strength now to get up and go on fighting.

I really feel inadequate a lot of times, and I look for recognition and stuff, but specifically I realize it’s because of my past. I will bring back to my memory what happened to me in Stockton, California or what happened wherever. But God doesn’t do that. The verse I claim is Isaiah 38:17, and I really love it. I read this to people all the time. I read it myself. It says, “Behold, it was for my welfare that I had great bitterness; but in love you have delivered my life from the pit of destruction, for you have cast all my sins behind your back.” Sometimes when I feel like I’m just not making any headway here in my walk with the Lord because of the past, I have to think about how God treats my sin. And then I don’t feel like so much of a failure anymore, because as far as what he looks at, those things where I made a mistake are behind his back. He won’t bring them back up in front of my face anymore, according to this verse.

And I think that’s true. It says in the new covenant promise in Hebrews that he forgets. He casts them into the deepest sea.

Can he really honestly be sovereign and know everything and forget my sins?

No, not ultimately. My answer to that is exactly the same as my first question over here. God will do the same thing that we should do, if it would be good for us on judgment day. The Bible says that we’re going to give an account for every idle word. Every time you’ve ever said “damn” or “shit,” you’re going to remember that on judgment day. But when you remember that, it’s going to be to the glory of the cross of Jesus Christ covering it. So the point is that forgetting means they are as good as forgotten to the degree that they will never be brought up against us, but that they might be brought up for the sake of glorifying his grace in forgiveness. So he does not forget in the sense that he ceases to be God and can’t remember what he did yesterday or what you did yesterday.

He’s only forgetting them in the sense that they are functionally forgotten with regard to condemnation. None of your sins will be brought up to condemn you. On the judgment day, those who are in Christ will have to read what’s in the books, and some of it will be very shameful. But God will take them all, and he’ll throw them in the round file, throw a match in there, burn them up, and we will feel more deeply thankful when we see that big conflagration of all of our horrible sins at the judgment.

Our Daily Need for the Word

Now I’m looking at my clock here, and I want to make room for these testimonies. I want to make room for you guys to minister to one another in small groups as you pray for each other and share some things. I want three things to happen before Rod and Len come, and they’ll come in just a little bit.

First, I want to say something about the word in your life and the word with your families and with yourself. Second, I want Ben, my son, to say a few words about how God awakened and enlivened him to Christ in recent days. It’s so that you’ll see that coming out of a pastor’s family where we did devotions daily and all the rigor was applied, there had to be other things too. I believe in a steady-state, rugged, do-it-every-day kind of ministry, and I believe in God’s sovereign intervening in utterly unexpected and wonderful ways like retreats or other things. And Ben, I think, has a few things he could say. I haven’t even asked him what he’s going to say or whatever. And then third, I have a word about lust. These are more like seeds than they are anything else.

Brothers, somehow you are giving in to the thought that it is not crucial for your life to be in the word every day. I’m talking to 71 of you at least, out of 86. You say you’re not in the word every day. You are buying in somehow, or just coasting in, to the belief that that’s not as important as eating. Raise your hand if you typically go a day without eating any food, raise your hand. You’ve got three fasting people in this thing. The rest of you have somehow bought into the claim that food is important for you. It probably has to do with desire, called hunger. My job here and all my life is to help beget that hunger for the word.

I don’t want you to do this thing out of guilt and duty alone. We need discipline, but that won’t cut it for the long haul. The same way you hunger for pizza, you need to hunger for the Bible, and that comes from a reordering of the way you understand the word. Romans 10:14 says, “Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word.” Brothers, your faith will be weak without the word. Galatians 3:5 says:

Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith . . .

You have to hear the word with faith. John 17:17 says:

Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.

If you want to be holy, you have to be in the word, which is truth. John 8:32 says:

You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

You have to be in the truth if you want to be free.

The Full Armor of God

Have you ever read the armor in Ephesians 6 and calculated how much of it relates to the word? You have the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. What’s the belt? The belt is the truth. What’s the shield? Faith in what? The promises of God or the word of God. Then you have the breastplate of righteousness and helmet of salvation. The shoes, what are they? It’s the gospel or readiness to bear witness to the gospel. So the belt, the shoes, the shield, and the sword are all truth issues. These are truth issues.

The way Satan is defeated in our life is by being immersed in truth. Gird yourself with truth. Take the sword of the word, the shield of faith in truth, and the feet ready to run on gospel truth. But I just tell you, I have devoted all my life to the truth and the gospel, and I have read it probably as much as anybody in this room. If I miss a day, I feel it. There’s something about spiritual strength that is not residual. It’s like medicine that if you’re a diabetic, you do it daily. You don’t do it once a month or weekly, and there’s a reason for this. Flesh, devil, world, television, advertising — that input never stops. It never stops. It’s on the billboards, the newspaper, the radio is secular, godless talk about he’s not there. To fight and stay alive in that atmosphere, brothers, we need to be there. Preach that to yourself.

Comments on Hindrances to Bible Reading

Tell me, what are the biggest hindrances to reading the Bible yourself and reading it with your wife? Go ahead. I want to hear 3, 4, or 5 of these.

This goes back a little bit for me. I was raised Catholic. I was never, ever taught any of this stuff. I had no influence whatsoever. And for years trying to do it out of duty it didn’t work. Just recently God has awakened me to be able to do it on a level that you are saying where I need it and want it. And right now for me it’s a schedule issue. I work third shift, and I work days, and we just can’t get together to do some things, but it is increasing. I’m able to sit down with my children now, and there was some kind of breakthrough. But for years it’s been the duty-driven thing, and I never got it. And I don’t understand what happened, but maybe that’s an issue here.

Yeah, you just said a whole lot of things. You’ve said the background thing. That’s a big issue. How many of you grew up in homes where you read the Bible every day with your parents? Raise your hand. That’s one of the reasons. It looks like about 10 or 15 maybe. So there’s one huge thing, patterns were set in your life that are not there. They’re not there. Then it’s the duty thing, and some of you are just, you’re in process. We’re all in process. But some of you’re right where Doug is, where it’s a new thing to realize that it’s not only, okay, it’s wonderful to do things because you enjoy them. I think there’s some people who’ve been taught that if you enjoy it, it really isn’t a good religious thing to do. It’s just part of that old lust thing again. I’m trying to help people discover that’s not the case. And then you brought up the schedule thing. Wives and husbands are going everywhere. Give me some more input here.

It goes back to the inadequacies. I never went to a Bible college. I didn’t go to seminary. How can I possibly understand it on a higher level?

You mean that’s functioning as a hindrance to personal reading or reading with family, or what are you saying?

Well, personally, and then sharing and teaching from that.

It’s hard to share, witness, or teach if you feel like you don’t have a good grasp on things. I suppose it would be a disincentive to personal Bible reeling if you’re coming up confused every day. You read the Bible, and you come out of the paragraph and you’re just thinking, “Why did they bash the children?” There are those kinds of things. So that clicks with me. I feel that.

I think one big issue is hardness of heart. I went to a Bible college where it was required to do devotions every day, and you had a set time. If you didn’t, you’d have to do work hours. It was a very regimented type of place. You could do that every single day, and at the same time not grow spiritually. It’s like a hardness of heart, that you don’t allow the words to really penetrate into you.

Amen. You can be put in a regimen where you’re forced to do it every day and become hard as nails in the doing of it. And that’s why I prayed the way I prayed at the beginning here. I know I could probably have you all stand up at the end of today’s session and resolve to read your Bible every day until the end of the year, just until the end of the year. And we could all form little accountability groups and blah, blah, blah, blah. And nothing would be changed in six months. Nothing.

I’ve had an all-or-nothing mentality where I feel like I should either memorize it or study it deeply or not read it at all. What I’m trying to do is just read the chapter a day. Several times you said that the Lord can use that devotion that you just read to minister to somebody that’s sick or whatever. And that’s what I want to get back to. But my mentality through Intervarsity has been inductive Bible study or memorization intensely or else forget it.

The all-or-nothing mentality functions in a lot of different ways. If I’ve missed two days this week already, or if I didn’t get the memory verse last week, what’s the use? That’s a deadly mentality. Len?

I believe that love of prolonging this for the theory of “one day.” It’s comfortable.

Yes, it’s comfortable to stay in bed instead of getting out. But you see there, here again it boils down to motives, doesn’t it? It’s the discipline thing and the joy thing. It’ll feel a lot like discipline at that particular moment. It’s like making a meal, I suppose. You’ve got to slog in the kitchen and get the dough. My wife made some of the most delicious biscuits last night. Oh, I could eat one right now. It’s so good. But she had to get out the recipe, which she got in Macon, Georgia, and she had to get the ingredients together. And she had to get the big heavy mixer out, and she had to get all the pieces and pour them in there. She had to force them into little things. She had to put them in the oven. All this, and we consumed those things in five minutes. They were gone. Now she has to feel in all that process, “This is worth it. This is worth it. I’m going to enjoy them. They’re going to enjoy them, and I’ll be happy because of that.” And so to get out of bed in the morning, you’ve got to have some confidence this is going to pay off.

Maybe on the same level as growing up with it, it was just a habit. If I had devotions yesterday, I’ve got a better chance of having them today. If I didn’t have them yesterday, not so much.

I do believe habit-forming is good. The farmer gets out there, and he digs his row day after day, because a well-plowed garden or a cared-for garden will bring up fruit. He doesn’t see the fruit every day, but he knows he’s got to keep doing it.

I can be sitting down there instead of focusing on good things, I’m being distracted.

Exactly. Distraction is a mega, mega issue. One little thing, put a pad of paper with you. Just take a little piece of paper and a pencil. As you’re reading the Bible or praying, and either your own flesh or the devil is just firing things at you that you have to do that day, instead of saying, “Get out of my mind. Get out of my mind. Get out of my mind,” just stop, write it down, and now you’ve got it. Forget it and go back. I do that every morning, because I am a mega distracted person. A pastor has 1,000 things he can do and so many things. And the devil is always saying to me, “Don’t forget this. Don’t forget that. Don’t forget this. Don’t forget that.” Well, either you’re going to live utterly distracted, or you write them down and back to the text.

David and I remember a great story where he came over to my house as an associate pastor at Olivet Baptist Church. And there was a guy there in our Sunday school class, and David in his inimitable way said, “Oh, what have you been reading lately?” And the guy said, “Nothing.” And David said, “You don’t read at all?” He said, “No.” The end of the discussion.

Actually I feel that by talking about how excited I was about this ministry, both at the church and then I was with InterVarsity helping to put together something at the university. I called Keith to read and how exciting it was to have the authors there and all these students and so forth. And so then I turned to Brian and said, “Now Brian, tell us about some of the things that you like to read.” And he looked at me blankly.

Duty and Delight

Now look, there’s a bunch of you in here that are feeling real bad right now because you don’t read. You put on this thing that less than once a month you read anything. Not everybody is a reader. Not everybody is a scholar. You don’t have to be a high school graduate, and you can have dyslexia with a vengeance and still read a verse a day and pray over it and thank God for it and memorize a phrase in it like, “Behold what kind of love the Father has for us.” Stop. I’m going to take that with me all day long.

I’ll just be honest with you. I’m reading the Bible. I read through the Bible every year, so you have to read four or five chapters a day, but that is not what keeps me alive. What keeps me alive is phrases, little sentences memorized for the day, one little phrase I take with me like a lozenge under my tongue and I say it over and over again to myself.

So don’t let the all-or-nothing thing get you here. Ransack the Bible. Ransack it. That is say to the Bible, “I won’t let you go until you give me a lozenge.” Because many of us read the chapter appointed for the day and nothing hit us. Go to another chapter. Get yourself something for the day. Ransack it. In other words, be intentional. Break out of the duty thing that says, “You’re supposed to put in 20 minutes or you’re supposed to put in 10 minutes, or you’re supposed to put in a chapter or five chapter.” And then you’re done, my conscious is clear, off to work. You don’t remember a thing you read. It has no spiritual impact on you except clearing your conscience that you did it.

Now, over time, that’s deadly. That’s deadly. You must come away with something that you taste as precious to you, so that if your workmate at school or work says, “Did you read your Bible this morning?” you say, “Yeah.” If they say, “Well, what’d you get?” you have an answer. Now, I won’t embarrass you about this morning right now, but that’s a pattern that you need to develop, and it’ll change the way you read the Bible, because it’ll insist that the meal be good. What if you had to come to the meal every day and all they served was anchovies or spinach or barf? What would you do? You wouldn’t come back. You’d go to a different place, which is what many of you’re doing. You’re going to a different place than the Bible.