Chapter 7 Part 7

There are many of you who feel like you are in unbearable situations at home and you feel unloved and unwanted. For some of you those who are suppose to be protecting you are pressuring you to defile yourselves with them. And unfortunately for some your purity has been taken by these very same "protectors". Nothing could be further from the truth, you are beautiful and precious to God. Your heavenly Father knows your situation, He knows your pain. You may feel alone, but you are not. There are people who love you very much, especially God. Do not surrender to the tricks of the enemy. He will lie to you and tell you that you are worthless and nobody cares about you. There is no reason to stay pure, and besides everyone else is doing it. The world screams why should you be any different. Don’t you want to be popular and fit in? You are nothing special; if you want to belong, you need to defile yourself. This is your only worth; you are nothing more than a body to give for the pleasure of others. Well, you are special, you are one of our most important assets. The future of our people is in you.

“Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth.
I did not come to bring peace but a sword, for I
have come to set a man against his father, a
daughter against her mother, and a
daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.”
Matthew 10:34,35

The Lord tells us that we must choose ourselves to follow Him. This means that if your family is not choosing to serve God, you serve Him anyway. If they are not going to church and obeying God, you do it anyway. Go with the neighbors or talk to a pastor, God will place people in your life for you to find Him through. Though you may only be children you are still responsible to follow God. Seek God in your lives and He will make His presence known. Many churches have youth outreach programs. Begin at home by developing a relationship with God privately. As I wrote to the young men spend fifteen minutes a day seeking God and your life will change. He will lead you through whatever situation that may appear impossible for you. With God all things are possible, nothing is impossible for Him. The Bible says that if you draw near to God He will draw near to you.[1] This world is dying every day, you do not have to die with it. Young people you have a tremendous struggle ahead of you, but with God’s help you can accomplish anything! Sometimes following God will be difficult, but the rewards are worth the effort. You will be a better person and your life will be better for it.

Marriage is God’s perfect outlet for our sexual desires. To look at the world you would not be able to tell. Our whole culture screams sex, sex, and more sex and there is hardly a dissenting voice. Many of the same people who preach abstinence are the same people who own the media outlets that promote this casual sexual atmosphere. They are hypocrites and God will judge them. It is unfortunate but for the sake of material riches you the youth of our nation have become expendable. You are bought and sold daily. On the one hand it appears that you have value, but underneath you are only a profit margin. The enemy makes it look like your opinions are important, but only in how he can corrupt you. The whole world is becoming a commercial, a slogan. The world is not some office on “Madison Avenue”. There is a God and He will give to everyone according to their choices.[2] I am not trying to frighten anyone only trying to give you the truth. There must be a change for our people and it must begin with you. Choose purity and choose life. Do not believe the lies of this world, it does matter that you remain pure. You will feel better about yourselves and the world around you. Everywhere you turn it is about sex, the world would like for you to believe that it is no big deal. It is not important if you stay pure, it is some old-fashioned thinking. Talk to your parents and grandparents the world told them the same thing years ago. But it is important, your future will be determined by your choices. You only have one chance to be with the one you love in a loving marriage with purity of body, heart, and spirit. It is no wonder so many of our marriages do not last we come into them defiled. Do not waste it away without thinking.

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[1] James 4:8

[2] Matthew 16:27

Chapter 7 Part 1 Children

Chapter 7 Children

“Behold, children are a heritage of the LORD,
the fruit of the womb is a reward.”
Psalms 127:3

For me this is the most difficult chapter to write. As I look out at all the broken children and families that are in pain, my heart aches. Anyone who thinks there are no victims of fornication have obviously not spent time with the children of these illicit relationships. The Bible says that children are an inheritance of God, as a reward. They are to be treasured, they are our greatest resource. They are our future. Instead of treating them as the treasures they are, we treat them as inconveniences. How can we claim manhood when we father children we do not raise? Children we take no responsibility for. How can our women claim womanhood when they continue to bear illegitimate children without husbands? My heart goes out to all of the children. What lessons are they being taught? What values are they being taught? That it is ok to lay down with anybody and everybody with no responsibility or consequences. These consequences are human beings, they have names, and they are innocent children. When did a child become just something left over from some illicit relationship? Have we become so selfish that we can not see the damage we have done and continue to do? On the other hand, does anyone care? God gives us children to raise up for His glory and honor. We do not own them, they are given to us to take care of for Him. To train them and love them for His sake.

“Train up a child in the way he should go, And
when he is old he will not depart from it.”
Proverbs 22:6

How are we training our children? Are we leading them in the way of everlasting life or into the way of destruction? Each one of us must ask ourselves these questions, God certainly will. We must recognize the harm being done to our boys and young men. We neglect their training. We are so concerned with our own personal gratification that their needs are secondary. Children come into this world full of curiosity and wonder. They come to us without sin. If it were not for our inherited sinful nature, they would be given to us in purity. If allowed to follow their own desires they like us will choose to follow the world. Thus, the need for parental direction and involvement, except when the parents themselves are pursuing the things of the world then that value system is conveyed to the child. Because many of our children have not received the training they should have been given, today they are lost in a fallen world. They do not have the male role model training we were supposed to give them. Because we have pursued our own agenda of selfishness and childish pleasures they have not gotten what they needed or deserved. Therefore, we have children raising other children. Some of our young women were raising their brothers and sisters and felt that they might as well have their own since they are being mothers anyway. We do not have to be geniuses to figure out how that has been working out.

“Children are the crown of old men, And the glory of their father.”
Proverbs 17:6

The scripture is so appropriate for today. The crown of old men it says, we as old men of the last few generations should be ashamed of the crown that we are wearing. Many of these young men and women have received none of the tools they need to compete in this world. They have received none of the wisdom of their ancestors and now have a very difficult time coping with the world they find themselves apart of. For many of them they want to hide from this world through drugs or street crime. Instead of planning how to succeed through education they have chosen the fast buck of crime and drug dealing. There have been many ancestral heroes who have died for the opportunities they now take for granted and refuse to pursue. These words though written thousands of years ago ring true today. The honor and the adoration of children is their father. This is not only true for our earthly fathers but also for our heavenly Father. Today many of our children are being raised without that honor and reverence. In God’s perfect plan for the family a child is to be reared by both a father and a mother. It is funny how we will break something like a doorknob and then use something such as a piece of rope to open the door and say see how well the door works since I fixed it. The door may be operational, but that is surely not how it was designed to work. Granted there are those who have managed to succeed raising children as single parents and I applaud them, but that does not change the fact that something is still broken. The doorknob is still broken, yes, we are getting in and out of the house but the fact still remains the doorknob is broken. Our relationships are broken is the issue not whether we can patch something together to keep moving forward. The issue is how can we repair them and save our children? The father’s relationship with the children has a different component than the mother’s relationship to the children. The father is supposed to represent the head of the house, the leader. In our broken households, the head is missing. Every good soldier knows that if you remove the head the body dies. Moreover, our body (our community) is dying right before our eyes. Many single mothers do and have done a tremendous job under very trying circumstances and they must be commended, but that does not excuse the fact that we are still in desperate need of a solution to the epidemic we are currently facing. In this patched up worldly system the child is missing the authority and discipline that is best administered from the man. You notice I said a man, not the little boys that make babies and do not raise them that so permeate our communities today. Any one blessed enough to have been raised in a two parent home can attest to this. Because so many of our people have not been given this example they tend to minimize the benefits of this experience. When I was growing up all the mother had to do was mention the name of the father and order was immediately restored. Let the fathers begin to act like fathers and discontinue to act like the children they should be raising.

Chapter 6 Part 8

Because of our freedom of choice, we as men and women can choose to ignore God. A lion cannot choose not to be a lion, but a woman can choose not to be identified as a woman. A man can choose to no longer be identified as a man. This ability to choose sets us apart from all other members of creation. We can use our choices to glorify God or to glorify our own selfish desires. This “so called” independence is really a separation from God and from one another. What those who participate in fornication do not understand is that the very things they think it will resolve (loneliness, lack of love, etc.) are the actual byproducts of fornication. After you have committed it you become separated from God an feel guilty. That guilt causes a separation between your partner and you. You both begin to see each other in a different light following the act. The man looks at the woman as a whore and you look at the man as a dog. A relationship begun in this manner cannot succeed for long. There will always be a deep seated animosity on the part of both people. As the relationship continues and there are more disappointments, that resentment grows. In the heat of an argument these resentments come to the surface and we say things we later regret. Where do these things come from? I believe they come from those early feelings of guilt spawned by fornication. The man thinks if she were truly a "good woman" she would not have let me have sex with her and the woman thinks if he really "loved me" he would have wanted to keep me pure.

“Now Jacob kissed Rachel, and he lifted up his
voice and wept. Now Jacob loved Rachel;”
Genesis 29:11,18

The above passage describes how Jacob traveled five hundred miles without a map to find the wife that God had chosen for him. And when he found her, he wept. She touched his heart and he feel in love with her. When they met and married she was pure, a saved woman. Their love was to last for many years and through many tribulations. Through it all their love instead of diminishing it grew stronger. Instead of resentment, they had respect. Women if you only knew how men would treat you if you only would remain pure. If you would choose abstinence over sinfulness and worldliness, the desires of your heart would be met. The man that you desire to find would be there. A man that would love you and cherish you as a special treasure, because you would be special. What is special about someone who has been with everybody or even anybody for that matter? What it says about you is that you respect yourself enough to wait, that you have something special worth waiting for. When you lay down in fornication, you are making the ultimate compromise with your most precious gift. What you lose in the moment (purity and innocence) can never be gotten back. Once you give it away its gone. I have countless stories about women who were pressured into fornication only to regret their decision later. By then it is too late. Do not allow the morals of others to dictate to you what is right and wrong. You are a child of light, walk in the light.[1] The only way to overcome the world is by faith in God. We can never defeat sin of ourselves, it is too powerful and cunning. The Bible says, “We battle not against men, but against dark unseen forces.”[2] If we could defeat these forces ourselves there would have been no need for Christ and His redemptive death. For us to resist the overwhelming tide of this permissive culture we need the belief that God not only rules in heaven, but also in this earth as well. Your choice will depend on what you know and believe about God. The Bible says, “Greater is He that is in us, than he that is in the world.”[3] But faith alone is not enough, we must put that faith into action. Our actions demonstrate if we indeed have faith. Our choices demonstrate whether we have true faith.

Do not believe that because you have fallen that you must remain in that state. Because we serve a God of second, third, and fourth chances, we always have the opportunity to repent and return to God. A good case in point in the Bible is the prostitute Rahab. Though she was a fallen woman and not a member of the tribe of Israel, her faith in God placed her in God’s community. Her faith in God allowed her to be included in the lineage of Christ. She was also the great grandmother of King David.

“Likewise, was not Rahab the harlot also justified by
works when she received the messengers and sent
them out another way? For as the body without the spirit is
dead, so faith without works is dead also.”
James 2:25,26

You see Rahab was a citizen in the city of Jericho, in the land of Canaan. The promise land that God has promised Israel, her people were the current possessors of that land. She lived in a heavily fortified city with twenty foot walls, but when the spies of Israel came into her house she had a decision to make; whether to trust God. She made the choice to trust God more than the fortified walls of her city, more than her people, more than everything around her. She chose to have faith in what she could not see despite all evidence at the time being against that faith. She found the courage to go against her own society to follow God, just as we must do. We should also find the courage to go against what this society is telling us when it goes against what God has told us. She had heard of the power of God, that He had delivered the children of Israel from Egypt. Here is this unbelieving pagan prostitute willing to gamble her life and the lives on her family on a belief in a God she had only heard about. And God seeing her faithfulness rewarded her and her family. How much more will God reward you and your family because of your faithfulness to Him? For our faith to be rewarded we must make decisions based on that faith in our everyday lives.

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[1] Ephesians 5:8

[2] Ephesians 6:12

[3] 1 John 4:4

Chapter 6 Part 7

You were created to reflect the femininity of God as the man was created to reflect the masculinity of God. They are different sides to the same God. Do you know that you were also created in the image of God just as the man was? The woman was created to help the man take care of the earth. More importantly, you were created also to fellowship with God. You and the man were created from the same essence of God. The Spirit of God dwells in us both. The Spirit dwells in you to help the man to be fruitful and multiply in a Godly relationship. From the beginning of time it has been this way and will continue until the end. In God’s perfect design for us just as it was not good for the man to be alone so it is not good for the woman to be alone. Only men and women were designed to fellowship spiritually with God and with each other. That fellowship was broken by the “fall” in the Garden of Eden. Not only was the fellowship with God broken and damaged, but also the spiritual connection between man and woman. This damage persists to this day. We do not relate to each other the way God originally intended for us to.

Just as the command of God represented a choice to them in the Garden of Eden, so we have choices today. God could have created us to worship Him without choice, but that would not be true love. That would be like the animals worship God. The animals worship God by being what God created them to be, the fish worships God by being a fish. True love is when we can love anybody in the world but choose to love the person we are with. I can eat from the tree you commanded me not to eat from, but I choose to obey you. Thus, I demonstrate my love for you in the choices I make. Christ Jesus told us, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”[1] So love requires action on our part. If we profess love for God we are required to keep His commandments. There are no loopholes. I remember being in church and seeing the same men and women every Sunday taking the altar call to repent or rededicate themselves. There should come a time in the life of a believer when his life begins to manifest the life of Christ. Some would say these are backsliders. I would venture to say that you cannot backslide until you have truly repented and been saved. We cannot continue to commit the same sins weekly or daily and claim salvation. True salvation requires, no demands a change in our lives. God loves me too much to leave me the same way He found me. It becomes a matter of my choices. Am I choosing obedience to God or obedience to Satan? Christ Jesus says, “Whoever commits sin is a slave to sin.”[2] A slave means that sin is my master and has control of me. A slave loses control of his life and all that entails when he becomes a slave. We of ourselves can do nothing against this addiction to sexual immorality. In the final chapter we will discuss the ways to break this cycle and begin to stop this epidemic.

When it comes to making choices, we demonstrate our love based on our choices. We demonstrate our love to our wives and husbands not because we cannot commit adultery, but by choosing not to. By choosing the love of our mate over the momentary urge to satisfy our selfish desires we show our love. We may say we love someone or something, but it is our choices that reveal our true feelings. Love requires sacrifice, when we decide that we love someone we make a conscious decision to be with that person, forsaking all others. By our being with our mates we are choosing not to be with anyone else, there in lies the sacrifice. For many today they want the relationship, but without the sacrifice. The choices give love meaning. If I can continue to be with others and still be with you where is the sacrifice and the choice. Without choices there is no meaning to love. You can make someone do what you want them to do, but you cannot make someone love you. Sometimes we don’t even know why we love what or who we love, we just know we do. Our choices in this life say much about who we truly are, not who we claim to be. The key to many of the bad choices we make is a spirit of rebelliousness. The world calls it independence, but it is rebelliousness to God. Anything I do independent of God is a sin, no matter how noble it may be. We are saying we know better than God what is best for us. I know better than my parents what is best for me. If you choose to harm yourself this is probably not a rational or sane decision. If you are making these choices it is probably not you who is making them but the sin that dwells in you. Normal people usually do not make decisions that they know will lead to harm for themselves. Choosing to have sex as a young teen is a harmful choice, it can and usually does lead to pregnancy. An unwanted pregnancy has “harmed” a large number of young women and men. Any woman who is not married at any age choosing to engage in sexual activities is making a harmful choice. The harm is not only the possibility of pregnancy and sexual disease, but also the harm that the sin does to the spirit and the fellowship with God.

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[1] 1 John 14:15

[2] John 8:34