David hardly seemed a candidate for moral disaster. But the king was vulnerable, for there were definite flaws in his conduct which left him open to tragedy. Deuteronomy 17, which set down the standards for Hebrew kings, commanded that they refrain from three things: 1 acquiring many horses, 2 taking many wives, and 3 accumulating much silver and gold cf.
David did fine on one and three, but he completely failed on number two by willfully collecting a considerable harem.
The long hours of indiscriminate TV watching, which is not only culturally cachet but is expected of the American male, is a massive culprit of desensitization.
The expected male talk — double entendre, coarse humor, laughter at things which ought to make us blush — is another deadly agent. David was at midlife, about fifty years old, and his military campaigns had been so successful, it was not necessary for him to personally go off to war. The problem was, his relaxation extended to his moral life.
It is hard to maintain inner discipline when you are relaxing in this way. David was imminently vulnerable. David did not suspect anything unusual was going to happen on that fatal spring day. I think I will commit adultery today! Just when we think we are the safest, when we feel no need to keep our guard up, to work on our inner integrity, to discipline ourselves for godliness — temptation will come! They destroyed the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah. But David remained in Jerusalem.
One evening David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of the palace. From the roof he saw a woman bathing. The woman was very beautiful, and David sent someone to find out about her. The king strode out on the rooftop for some cool air and a look at his city at dusk.
As he gazed, his eye caught the form of an unusually beautiful woman who was bathing without modesty. She was young, in the flower of life, and the evening shadows made her even more enticing. The king looked at her.
And he continued to look. After the first glance David should have turned the other way and retired to his chamber, but he did not. His look became a sinful stare and then a burning libidinous sweaty leer. A lustful fixation came over him that would not be denied. Satan does not fill us with hatred of God, but with forgetfulness of God. When we are in the grip of lust, the reality of God fades. The longer King David leered, the less real God became to him.
Not only was his awareness of God diminished, but David lost awareness of who he himself was — his holy call, his frailty, and the certain consequences of sin. This is what lust does! It has done it millions of times. God disappears to lust-glazed eyes. Men, the truth demands some serious questions: Has God faded from view? Did you once see Him in bright hues, but now His memory is blurred like an old sepia photograph?
Do you have an illicit fixation which has become all you can see? Is the most real thing in your life your desire? If so, you are in deep trouble. Some decisive steps are necessary, as we shall see. Rationalization From deadly fixation, King David descended to the next level down, which is rationalization. This girl needs a little comfort in her loneliness. This is one way I can help her.
No one will get hurt. I do not mean anything wrong by it. This is not lust — I have known that many times. This is love. This is not the same as finding a prostitute on the street. God knows that. You are judging me.
She came to him, and he slept with her. She had purified herself from her uncleanness. Then she went back home. David was unaware he had stepped off the precipice and was falling, and that reality would soon arrive — the bottom was coming up fast. A year later David would repent under the withering accusation of the prophet Nathan. But the miserable consequences could not be undone.
And in doing so, he dishonored God as well, breaking, in effect, the first four Commandments. His throne never regained its former stability. The pathology is clear, and so are the horrible effects of sensuality. Both are meant not only to instruct us, but to frighten us — to scare the sensuality right out of us! The Will of God: Purity Sometimes people under the Christian umbrella simply do not buy what I am saying in regard to purity. They consider such teaching to be Victorian and puritanical.
Victorian it is not. Puritanical it gloriously is — for it is supremely Biblical. The Lord will punish men for all such sins, as we have already told you and warned you. For God did not call us to be impure, but to live a holy life.
Therefore, he who rejects this instruction does not reject man but God, who gives you his Holy Spirit. As the New Testament scholar Leon Morris has written: The man who carries on an act of impurity is not simply breaking a human code, nor even sinning against the God who at some time in the past gave him the gift of the Spirit.
He is sinning against the God who is present at that moment, against One who continually gives the Spirit. This sin is seen in its true light only when it is seen as a preference for impurity rather than a Spirit who is holy. The Discipline of Purity Men, if we are Christians, it is imperative that we live pure, godly lives in the midst of our Corinthian, pornotopian culture. We must live above the horrifying statistics or the Church will become increasingly irrelevant and powerless, and our children will leave it.
The Church can have no power apart from purity. Accountability An important place to begin our training is with the discipline of accountability. This to be done with someone who will regularly hold you accountable for your moral life, asking you hard questions. If you are married, ideally you should use your spouse, but I also recommend another man, one who will give you no quarter in sensual matters. You need someone of the same gender who will understand your sensuality from the inside out — someone you can be completely honest with, to whom you can confess temptations and attractions.
You need someone who will help you toe the mark and keep your soul faithful to God. Mutual accountability is the ideal. In this connection I think of a certain salesman who regularly maintains accountability via phone contact with other Christian salesmen, and even works at scheduling trips to cities at the same time they will be there.
Pray daily and specifically for your own purity. I am amazed that so few men who are concerned about their lives pray about it. Enlist the prayers of your spouse and friends, and pray for others in this respect. Do not wait to be asked. Pray for the purity of your friends too. They need it, and so do you! Matthew Other helpful passages include Job , Proverbs , Mark ff.
Mind The discipline of the mind is, of course, the greatest of challenges and will be discussed more fully in Chapter 6. And Scripture regularly presents its discipline as a discipline of the eyes.
Here is where the most radical action is necessary. No man who allows the rottenness of HBO, R-rated videos, and the various soft-core pornography magazines to flow through his house and mind will escape sensuality! How do you think Job would live in our culture today? If their dress or demeanor is distracting, look them in the eyes, and nowhere else, and get away as quickly as you can! Refrain from verbal intimacy with women other than your spouse.
Do not bare your heart to another woman, or pour forth your troubles to her. Many affairs begin in just this way. On the practical level, do not touch. Do not treat women with the casual affection you extend to the females in your family.
How many tragedies have begun with brotherly or fatherly touches and then sympathetic shoulders. Whenever you dine or travel with a woman, make it a threesome. This may be awkward, but it will afford an opportunity to explain your rationale, which, more often than not, will incur respect rather than reproach. Many women business associates will even feel more comfortable dealing with you.
Never flirt — even in jest. Flirtation is intrinsically flattering. You may think you are being cute, but it often arouses unrequited desires in another. Reality Be real about your sexuality.
He fell within months! Face the truth — King David fell, and so can you! Divine Awareness Lastly, there is the discipline of divine awareness. Men, the heat of our culture oppresses us with its obsessions and pornotopias. Many in the Church have wilted. The statistics tell it all. In order not to become part of those statistics, there has to be some disciplined sweat. Are we men enough? Are we men of God? I pray we are! It is being stewed in the molten juices of its own sensuality.
Concerning your own church? Concerning your own personal life? Have you found this true in your own battles with temptation? What is the most effective way to prevent moral lapses? Is 1 Thessalonians too narrow to consider as binding on Christian men today?
If not, how can we put this passage to work so we will be victorious in our fight for purity? Considering the prevalent immorality of our culture, how can we possibly hope to keep our thoughts and behavior pure? Of ourselves? Their skin glows with amber luminosity from the flickering candles behind me. I see everything: the moist eyes, the trembling hands, the surreptitious wink, their mutual earnestness of soul.
Sometimes in my enjoyment I let it all blur for a moment and imagine the ultimate wedding where Christ will officially take us to Himself, and then I blink back to the living parable before me.
How will the couple fare over the years? Will she reverence her husband? Will he love his beautiful bride as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself for her? Will he love her with an elevating, sanctifying love? Will he love her as he loves himself? I pray it will be so. In March Dr. McQuilkin announced his resignation in a letter with these words: My dear wife, Muriel, has been in failing mental health for about eight years.
So far I have been able to carry both her ever-growing needs and my leadership responsibilities at CBC. But recently it has become apparent that Muriel is contented most of the time she is with me and almost none of the time I am away from her.
Then she may be full of anger when she cannot get to me. So it is clear to me that she needs me now, full-time. But so does fairness. She has cared for me fully and sacrificially all these years; if I cared for her for the next 40 years I would not be out of debt. Duty, however, can be grim and stoic. But there is more; I love Muriel. She is a delight to me — her childlike dependence and confidence in me, her warm love, occasional flashes of that wit I used to relish so, her happy spirit and tough resilience in the face of her continual distressing frustration.
I do not have to care for her, I get to! It is a high honor to care for so wonderful a person. The memory of our visit is one of lingering beauty. Such beautiful Christlike love did not just happen! They are directives every Christian man ought to be familiar with, must understand, and, I think, even commit to memory — as I myself have. They are the foundational discipline of marriage — the bases for holy matrimonial sweat.
Marriage ideally produces two people who are as much the same person as two people can be! Christians in marriage have the same Lord, the same family, the same children, the same future, and the same ultimate destiny — an astounding unity.
An amazing bonding took place the moment I saw my newborn children and held them in my arms. They are from my flesh. I am close to my children, interwoven with them. Yet, I am not one flesh with them. This is, indeed, a mystery — which partially illustrates the even deeper marital union of Christ and the Church.
And this is why the text often uses descriptive language when speaking of Christ and husbands and the Church and wives at the same time. We must keep the mysterious nature of our union constantly before us if we are to understand the disciplines of marital love as they unfold — the discipline of sacrificial love, of sanctifying love, and of self-love.
This call to marital love was a bare-knuckled swing at the domestic commitment or lack of same of the men of the day — just as it is today. And honestly received, the punch it delivers flattens many Christian men. Death The reason the punch hurts is because it is a naked call to love with a willingness to sacrifice, even unto death. Recognizing this, Mike Mason, author of the classic The Mystery of Marriage, says pointedly that marital love is like death — it wants all of us.
I agree. If you do not understand this, you do not know what marital love is. It claims everything. Marriage is a call to die, and a man who does not die for his wife does not come close to the love to which he is called. Christian marriage vows are the inception of a lifelong practice of death, of giving over not only all you have, but all you are. Not at all! It is no more grim than dying to self and following Christ.
In fact, those who lovingly die for their wives are those who know the most joy, have the most fulfilling marriages, and experience the most love. As we shall see, this can mean a death to our rights, our time, our perceived pleasures — all liberating deaths.
This is a truly male thing, a masculine thing — for it takes a strong man to die. And His suffering was not only the cross, but it was and is suffering which comes from identification with His bride, the Church. Christ suffers with His bride, and husbands ought to suffer with and for theirs. Men, when you properly hitch your life to another, you are in for a wild ride with huge ups and downs.
Just as when you really love God you will undergo difficulties foreign to an unloving heart, so it is in marriage. You will share her experienced injustices, cruelties, and disappointments. You will experience her upsets, insecurities, and despairs. But, of course, you will also know an index of joys beyond the range of the unloving.
You will ride through some dark valleys, but you will also soar among the stars! Intercession On the evening Christ gave Himself up for us, John 17 tells us, He prayed in succession for Himself, for His twelve disciples, and for all of us who would later believe.
When He finished praying for His future bride, He went to the cross. Then came His death, His resurrection, His ascension, and His enthronement at the right hand of the Father, where He constantly makes intercession for us. Thus we understand that giving ourselves for our brides involves prayerful intercession.
If not, you are sinning against her and against God. Men, you ought to have a list of her needs, spoken and unspoken, which you passionately hold up to God out of love for her. Praying is the marital work of a Christian husband! Sanctifying Love Marriage under the Lordship of Christ is a mutually sanctifying relationship — it moves us toward holiness.
Most of us, by the time we get married, are like a well-furnished home — and a lot of furniture needs to be tossed out to make room for the other person. Marriage helps empty those rooms. Genuine marital love reveals rooms full of selfishness. As these rooms are cleared, one finds other rooms of self-centeredness. Beyond these are autonomy and self-will — an ongoing house cleaning. Marriage certainly did that for me. I had no idea how self-centered I was until I married! George Gilder, in his much-discussed book Men and Marriage, even argues that marriage is the one institution which tames the inveterate barbarianism of man.
There is indeed a mutual sanctification in marriage. This is what Christ will do through our divine marriage to Him, for at His return the washed and regenerated Church will be presented to Him in absolute perfection. This is the sealing of the romance of the ages. He is to be a man of the Word who lives a godly life, praying and sacrificing for his wife.
His authentic spirituality is meant to buoy her onward and upward toward the image of Christ. The man who sanctifies his wife understands that this is his divinely ordained responsibility. Even more, honestly, do you accept it? Marriage will reveal something about her which you already know about yourself — that she is a sinner. Marriage reveals everything: her weaknesses, her worst inconsistencies, the things others never see.
Loving your spouse is not to love her as a saint, but as a sinner. You see your wife as you see yourself, and you love her as yourself. This brings up some hard questions: Is my wife more like Christ because she is married to me?
Or is she like Christ in spite of me? Has she shrunk from His likeness because of me? Do I sanctify her or hold her back? Is she a better woman because she is married to me? Is she a better friend? A better mother? Men, our call is clear: sanctifying love. Self-love Greek mythology tells of a beautiful youth who loved no one until the day he saw his own reflection in the water and fell in love with that reflection.
He was so lovesick, he finally wasted away and died, and was turned into a flower that bears his name — Narcissus. We are repulsed by narcissism and carefully seek to avoid it. He who loves his wife loves himself. To love our wives as our own bodies is a grand and great thing.
She is me. How do we love our wives as our own bodies? How do we care for her as we do for ourselves? The answer involves three incarnations. The first is a physical incarnation. In Dr. Who are they, I ask myself, he and this wry-mouth I have made, who gaze at and touch each other so generously, greedily?
The young woman speaks. It is because the nerve was cut. But the young man smiles. Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth, and I, so close, can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works. Her body is our body, her comfort our comfort, her adornment our adornment, her care our care. A second way to love our wives as our own bodies is emotional incarnation. So many men make the emotional differences between men and women subject to degrading humor.
They belittle the female disposition, as if male stoicism were superior. They realize the differences, but make no allowances for them and do not attempt to understand.
No man can claim obedience to God and do this! It is a flat-sided masculinity which imagines that understanding another is a feminine trait. Actually such understanding of the complementary natures God gave man and woman is the mark of a fully developed, mature man. Then, of course, there must be social incarnation.
Of course, women have many social settings: the home, the office, the classroom. But I remember a profitable incarnation I experienced when my wife visited her sister in Connecticut for a week, leaving me in charge of our four small children. I fixed the meals, changed thousands and thousands of diapers, fixed hurts, settled quarrels, gave baths, cleaned up catastrophes, and cleaned them up again. I was at work before I got up and after I went to bed.
The experience so marked me that in my mind I invented a new kitchen, modeled after a car wash. The floors slope to a large drain in the middle of the room. A hose hangs on the wall, nozzle ready to spray things down after the meal. We are to devote the same energy, time, and creativity to our wives as to ourselves.
We are to cherish our constant souls. Envy the woman who is loved like this. Even more, envy the man who loves like this — for he is like Christ.
If this calls for anything, it calls for some holy sweat. It is a dynamic process between two people, a relation which is constantly being changed, which grows or dies. Commitment We must begin with the discipline of commitment. I have grown tougher with the years in my demands on couples who want me to perform their wedding ceremonies.
I tell them that wedding vows are a volitional commitment to love despite how one feels. I tell them that if there is the tiniest thought in the back of their minds that they can get out of the marriage if the other person is not all they expected, I will not perform the ceremony. Those which look back to the wild promises they vowed in the marriage ceremony are the ones who make it. There is no substitute for covenant plus commitment.
One thing the Church can count on is the fidelity of the Bridegroom. And this is the one thing a wife whose husband loves like Christ can rest on. Under this lock is deposited security of families, the union of affections, the repairer of accidental breaches. Everything about us: our eyes. They indicated that even more, they would like their husbands to listen.
Elevation Next, I strongly recommend the discipline of elevation. After all, Churchill could not be expected to say Julius Caesar or Napoleon. But he also said it for everyone who has a good marriage. A commitment to building up your wife is of greatest importance. Men, if you think what your wife does is less important than what you do, you are wrong, and you have big problems.
Compliments on her kindness and her daily provisions should be commonplace, as should showing her respect by observing common courtesies. Deference Along with this, the discipline of deference must be carefully practiced. Many men never forego a planned pleasure for the sake of their wives. Years ago, in the Midwest, a farmer and his wife were lying in bed during a storm when the funnel of a tornado suddenly lifted the roof right off the house and sucked their bed away with them still in it.
The wife began to cry, and the farmer called to her that it was no time to cry. She called back that she was so happy, she could not help it — it was the first time they had been out together in twenty years!
In Psychology Today did a survey of couples, asking them what keeps them together. Your calendar reveals what is important to you, so write her calendar into yours. Surprise her. Be extravagant. Men, when was the last time you opened the door for her.
In the fire of new love, marriage seems as easy as falling off a log. Actually, it is as easy as staying on a log. It requires careful attention, developed skill, and work. Men, are you working on the second most important relationship of your life God is first? Sweat any lately? No perspiration, no progress.
No pain, no gain. What does your love for your wife demand of you? Are you willing to pay the price? Do you generally feel what your wife is feeling — her joys and sorrows, her mountain peaks and deep valleys?
How often do you pray for your wife? With her? What can you do to make this more of a habit? What are you doing currently to help your wife draw closer to Christ? List at least six specific things you will do within the next two weeks to help your wife grow spiritually. What does it really mean to love oneself, biblically?
How will such an attitude show itself practically? How do Colossians and 1 Corinthians , 14 apply to your marriage? Be specific. Read Ephesians , then write a few paragraphs on the spiritual meaning of Christian marriage. What does the relationship of Christ and His Church teach you about your marriage? It had been so hot that I had taken my round little wife to the ocean — Huntington Beach, to be exact — to cool off.
There I hollowed out a place in the sand for her tummy, and we stretched out under the sun while the cool breezes of the Mar Pacifica refreshed us, as we both unwittingly began to sunburn. It was midafternoon when we headed back to the heat and smog of L. We soon looked like Maine lobsters. After dinner, as we lay smarting on the hot sheets of our bed, labor began, and that is about all we remember of our sunburns.
My wife was occupied with another kind of pain, and I was so excited I forgot about mine. That night brought one of the greatest events of our lives — for God gave us our firstborn, a beautiful little girl we named Holly. I remember everything, even the color of the hospital walls. It seems like only yesterday. Another event has lodged in my mind with similar vividness. July 23, , twenty-three years later, in another hospital in far-off Illinois, my baby Holly gave birth to her firstborn, a beautiful little boy, Brian Emory, and his father held him with the same rapture.
Today, as a grandfather of six with promises of more to come , it is increasingly apparent that my most treasured possessions, next to life in Christ, are the members of my family. Someday, when all is gone, when I can no longer see or hear or talk — indeed, when I may no longer know their names — the faces of my loved ones will be on my soul.
At mid-life I am finding increasing satisfaction in my family and in their families. All my children are serious Christians and want to make their lives count for Christ.
I realize that my children are what they are by the grace of God and that for me and them the road has not ended. I have mutually fulfilling relationships with all my children. They are independent of me, but they desire my company and counsel. We have mutual respect. They call me, and I call them, and we all live for the holidays when we can be together. I have shared all this because, though I have not been a perfect father, I have learned some things along the way which I must pass along, man to man, to those of you in the midst or at the beginning of fathering.
Men, the mere fact of fatherhood has endowed you with terrifying power in the lives of your sons and daughters, because they have an innate, God-given passion for you. It has bewildered me, even thrown me into depression. It is mysterious to me exactly what it is I wanted from my father. I have seen this longing in other men — and see it now in my own sons, their longing for me. One seeks to return not to the womb. A boy wants the aura and armament of his father. It is a deep yearning, but sometimes a little sad — a common enough masculine trait that is also vaguely unmanly.
What surprises me is how angry a man becomes sometimes in the grip of what is, in essence, an unrequited passion. The terrible fact is, we can either grace our children, or damn them with unrequited wounds which never seem to heal.
The Making of a man of God is an inspiring message of my own personal walk of faith in the Lord and principles that you can learn from that have molded me to be a vessel fit for the Masters use. This molding and journey is still on going and I look forward to share more in the near future. God has allowed me to experience certain principles that have worked for me and many other great men and women. Pursuing God really is an adventure—one that can get extreme, one you'll never tire of.
Becoming a young man after God's own heart is a lot like climbing a mountain. You'll find all sorts of challenges on the way up, but the awesome view at the top is well worth the trip. Real success in life—the kind that counts with God—starts by discovering God's priorities for you.
These include Students are often tested to evaluate their academic knowledge, but few Christian schools use objective measures to determine if a student has become a true disciple of Christ. Unfortunately, there are few organizations that provide metrics for measuring biblical knowledge, let alone any sort of comparative evaluation of students engaging in the Christian disciplines, forming a biblical worldview, or actually being impacted spiritually by the programs of the school. No matter whose statistics one chooses to believe, the inescapable truth.
Home » Disciplines of a Godly Man. Author : R. Spiritual disciplines are to the believer what medical school is to the doctor. Tell me how to be good. I already know how bad I am. Spiritual strength, like surgical skill or athletic excellence, requires training and practice. By presenting each discipline with a concise overview, several examples, and application ideas to get you going, this powerful guidebook will help you develop the maturity every man of God was designed to reflect.
This informative book explores the ideological practices that construct the Promise Keepers movement, while investigating the fundamentals of the Promise Keepers' belief system. Based upon non-participant observations of events as well as in-depth interviews, The Promise Keepers: Politics and Promises studies the movement from the inside, providing a better understanding of this evangelical phenomenon.
Examining the group from its modest beginning in of seventy men joining together in prayer, Bryan Brickner discusses the meaning of the movement in a social context. This book will be invaluable to scholars of religion, gender studies, and political theory.
The Making of a man of God is an inspiring message of my own personal walk of faith in the Lord and principles that you can learn from that have molded me to be a vessel fit for the Masters use.
This molding and journey is still on going and I look forward to share more in the near future. God has allowed me to experience certain principles that have worked for me and many other great men and women of God and I am going to share them with you so that you can also rise to who God created you to be.
These keys are going to inspire you to greatness and I pray that you will never settle for anything less than what God intended for you. Pursuing God really is an adventure—one that can get extreme, one you'll never tire of. Becoming a young man after God's own heart is a lot like climbing a mountain. You'll find all sorts of challenges on the way up, but the awesome view at the top is well worth the trip.
Real success in life—the kind that counts with God—starts by discovering God's priorities for you. These include Includes new and revised content. Students are often tested to evaluate their academic knowledge, but few Christian schools use objective measures to determine if a student has become a true disciple of Christ.
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