Luke 12:32 “Fear not little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”
1. If you are not experiencing the “lilyness” of your wife, you will not much know the “brambleness” of other women. More light means shadows flee.
2. There are dimensions of sexual delight/joy that we cannot and will not know except through the portal of a radical sexual purity. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” (Matthew 5)
3. It is not right to be moderate or controlled in our longings for God, and neither is it right to be moderate or controlled in our longings for our spouses. We must not settle for moderate affections because like it or not, the true worth of an object, whether a person or a thing, is revealed by our delight in them or it. What an accurate way to check the pulse of your marriage.
4. It glorifies God that we are changing creatures, changing in the sense that we are being renewed day by day. This being so, we ought to be able to look at last month’s version of ourselves and see that we are moving further into Christlikeness and therefore further from what we once were.
(This is an excerpt from a sermon given last April on friendship with Jesus Christ. See May 1, 2008 for the whole sermon)
I would like to begin by giving you a brief sketch of the life of John Paton, missionary to the New Hebrides, a man whose best friend was Jesus Christ.
When Paul sent me the draft of the fifth chapter of his book, entitled Pity Party, I was extremely impressed.
The human heart is a factory of desire, (to borrow from John Calvin) and we will always take sips or want to take sips from the broken cisterns of this life (however well-disguised and unsatisfying they are) in so far as we do not drink from the fountain of living water, Jesus Christ himself. Note the sentence, “We will want to take sips.” That is the deeper issue, the fact that our heart’s desires are so inclined to corruption and not to Christ. That we are generally okay with our adulteries being a massive affront to a high and holy God shows us just how depraved we really are.
But as Christ becomes a living and increasing, rot-consuming presence in us, so will we find the broken cisterns, the baited hooks less attractive and our ears increasingly tuned to a sweeter sound. And so God the Father says, “This is my beloved Son; listen to him.” Mark 9:7
And might I add, “Turn down or turn off the tv and the Ipod and the Internet and the radio?”
On Friday February 29, 2008 my friend Paul Lanier died, finally succumbing to Lou Gehrig’s disease, after a nine year battle.