Men's Retreat at Black Rock—March 7–9, 2008
Personal Devotions—“Godly Leadership”
Character does matter. At least in God's eyes, it matters. To speak of leadership
without character is like drinking sour milk for nourishment. The nutrients may
be there but getting people to drink it is another story.
Our God places great emphasis on character in his qualification for leaders. The
writer of Hebrews calls upon God's people to:
Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome
of their way of life, and imitate their faith.
Hebrews 13:7
You lead by example, something to be imitated as you follow Christ. You illustrate
faith that knows and serves and seeks Jesus Christ by your life. Of the three components
of communication—logos (content: what you say), pathos (conviction: how you
say it) and ethos (character: who you are)—the greatest of these for authenticity
and effectiveness is ethos. Think about a dad drawing deeply on a cigarette instructing
his young son not to smoke. Scan the qualifications for ordained office in 1 Timothy
3 and Titus 1 and you'll find them heavily weighted to issues of character.
Character matters; it matters to God in whose service you are as a servant leader.
Jesus Christ is your exemplar, your standard for servant leadership.
Do you desire to be used of the Lord as a leader in your home, in the church, in
the lives of those around you? Listen to God's qualification of character:
Now in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and silver but also of wood
and clay, some for honorable use, some for dishonorable. Therefore, if anyone cleanses
himself from what is dishonorable, he will be a vessel for honorable use, set apart
as holy, useful to the master of the house, ready for every good work. So flee youthful
passions and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace, along with those who
call on the Lord from a pure heart.
2 Timothy 2:20–22
One key character quality for you as a leader is purity. A major assault on purity
by our enemy the devil in this day is pornography, in all its shades of darkness.
Begin each morning of the retreat using Psalm 139:23–24 as your prayer in
working through the following article in communion with God.
Saturday, March 8th “The Pornographer's Prayer,” pages 2-4
Sunday, March 9th “The Pornographer's Prayer,” pages 5-8
The Psalms in Spiritual Warfare
Psalm 36—“The Pornographer's Prayer”
© 2008 by Stanley D. Gale
You're alone in the house. Your wife is out shopping, the kids at friends. The glow
of the computer screen casts its eerie light in your otherwise dark den. Your search
engine of choice waits for your bidding, your wish its command. Your fingers hover
over the keyboard as your mind rummages through the catalog of the lusts of your
heart. Ask, and you will receive. Finally you decide where to start. You type in
the name of your favorite celebrity, adding the word “naked.” The keystroke
“enter” launches your request and escorts you into a smorgasbord of
sensuality, each site beckoning you to enter and find delight and life in its arms,
each description enticing you with its seductive offerings. No one will know.
Your palms sweaty, your heart racing, your body reacting—a twinge of conscience
speaks to summon you back. The Spirit calls to you from Bible passages you know,
some you've committed to memory as safeguards from the very path on which you've
embarked. But it's too late, not actually because you have yet to click on a site,
but virtually in that you have given yourself over to the tempter and inclined your
ear to his appeals to the heretofore unevictable tenant of your heart—lust.
The sultry enticements of folly have drowned out the voice of conscience. After
all, does God not forgive? Does not the blood of Christ cleanse from all unrighteousness?
With that reasoning, no turning back. The journey into sin comes all expenses paid.
God's Word abounds in wisdom to equip us and help us in spiritual struggles such
as these, all enabling us to stand firm in Christ or, having succumbed, to find
firm footing again in Him. God makes clear his will for us as his adopted sons:
For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality;
that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor, not
in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God; … For God has
not called us for impurity, but in holiness.
1 Thess. 4:3–5, 7
Desperate for help, for escape, we cry out to our God, an ever-present help in trouble,
a wise and loving Father to his children. One resource of divine power given us
by our Heavenly Father who desires that we be holy as he is holy is the psalms.
The psalms give us utterance in the face of folly, hope to buoy our spirits reeling
from the wretchedness of our sin, truth to nourish our souls dry and weakened by
iniquity, guidance to take our hand and lead us in the freedom that is ours in Christ
and in the way of righteousness for his name's sake, and a way of escape in the
hopelessness of the tightening bonds of enslavement to which we have abandoned ourselves
first by a toe in the shallow end but now engulfed in murky water barely able to
touch the bottom.
For example, read and pray through Psalm 38 and see if it does not resonate with
the vileness of your sin, the effects of its guilt upon you, the conviction of God's
Spirit to reclaim you, and the cry to the Lord your God for help against the spiritual
forces of evil that lay siege to your soul.
Who dirty from frolicking in the cesspool of the profane or weighed down by guilt
from even countenancing such things cannot relate to words like these?
Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than
snow. Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones that you have broken rejoice.
Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities. Create in me a clean
heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.
Psalm 51:7–10
But the psalm I want to commend to you seems so expertly tailored to the misshapen
physique of sin related to pornography that it can be titled “The Pornographer's
Prayer.” I'd like us to take this psalm off the rack and walk through it together
section-by-section to see how it fits so well. Begin by reading through the entirety
of Psalm 36, draping it over your shoulders slumping with guilt, feeling the supple
texture of its fabric of grace and the tight weave of truth, in fellowship with
God who stands there to fit it to you his child.
As you lay yourself open to your God, subject to your Lord, the Holy Spirit will
speak though his inspired Word to your mind, heart and will to teach, rebuke, correct
and train in righteousness. Dialog with your Heavenly Father as you consider each
section.
Psalm 36
1 Transgression speaks to the wicked
deep in his heart;
there is no fear of God
before his eyes.
- ‘Wicked?’ You? You're a child of God. The ‘fear’ that knows,
respects and honors God is before your eyes. But God calls us to live in a manner
worthy of our calling.^ He says we must ‘no longer
walk as the Gentiles do…darkened in their understanding…alienated
from the life of God…hardness of heart…given themselves up to sensuality.’^ That's written to Christians, who ‘did not learn
Christ in that way.’^ But when we do what the Gentiles
do, we act as functional unbelievers, living as sons of darkness,^ walking in the flesh rather than
the Spirit.^ A lot of ink is devoted in the epistles to addressing
us in our functional wickedness, where we live contrary to our calling in Christ,
and where God woos us back as our Father.
- Transgression, including pornography, talks. It speaks to our heart, ‘deep’
in our heart trying to convince, cajole and capture. And, because of the sin that
remains in us, it has an audience.^ The sin that remains is an ally
of our enemy the devil,^ who appeals to it in
his temptings.^ So the first step in coming before God is to ask: To
whom will I listen?^ To whom
will I incline my heart? Where will I direct our eyes?
2 For he flatters himself in his own eyes
that his iniquity cannot be found out and hated.
- Flattery gets you nowhere—that's not true. Flattery gets us somewhere selfish.
It makes too much of us. It breeds self-confidence, presumption and false bravado.
We let down our guards. The seductress appeals to our male ego when she says, ‘I
have come out to meet you, to seek you eagerly, and I have found you…let
us delight ourselves with love.’^ That's Satan talking, playing
to your pride,^ trying to lure you away from Christ and ensnare you in
your sin, re-labeling lust as love.
- Self-flattery is even worse. It not only draws us into the trap of sin as we give
ear to the tempter, it captivates us so that we deceive ourselves into thinking
our sin will go undiscovered or that it's not all that bad.^ The fact that the sin is common
to man^ becomes misused as an excuse to justify or tolerate it.
In self-flattery we allow ourselves to set the acceptable limit, but first base
gets old, second base doesn't do it for us anymore…and before we know it
we've involved to a degree we never thought possible, ensnared. But our God bids
us to call sin ‘sin’ and walk humbly with him, knowing our strength
is found not in machismo but in meekness.^
3 The words of his mouth are trouble and deceit;
he has ceased to act wisely and do good.
- Entranced in titillations of your sordid field trip into darkness, running from
one obscenic outlook to another, you hear a car door outside. No time to shut the
computer down properly, no time to cover your tracks, you simply turn off the power.
Your heart pounding through your chest, you greet your wife as she pokes her head
in the room with as best an expression of innocence and normalcy as you can manufacture.
What will you say? How far will you go to protect your sin? At what cost?
- As a child of God you are ‘to act wisely and go good.’ But when you
deceive you act in the image of the one from whose grip you have delivered, the
one who stands opposed to God, the one whose native language is lies. Instead of
protecting our sin God wants to us to reject it and expose it, walking in our freedom
in Christ, that Satan might not blackmail us with exposure and so cause us to walk
in fear and dread.^
4 He plots trouble while on his bed;
he sets himself in a way that is not good;
he does not reject evil.
- Have you ever lain awake plotting and working out details for your dalliances with
death, making provision for the flesh and its lusts,^ generating a new wish list for your
search engine, your heart animated by the prospect of undiscovered delights? Rather
than setting our mind on things above where we have been raised with Christ,^ we fix our thoughts on evil.
Rather than walking by the Spirit so that we will not carry out the deeds of the
flesh, we reject God's Spirit.^ Instead of renouncing evil,
fleeing from it,^ we pursue and warmly embrace it, even nurture it as a
kept mistress.
- It's a lot easier to pull up a single weed than to deal with a lawn overgrown with
its spread. Because the days are evil, God calls us to be alert and careful how
we live.^ We want to make provision for that which is good and
noble and wholesome and holy, setting our faces toward good not evil, toward God
not the evil one.^ That begs the question: What seeds are you planting in
your mind that will take root in your heart and bear fruit in your life?
5 Your steadfast love, O LORD, extends to the heavens,
your faithfulness to the clouds.
- Now the psalmist shows us what real love looks like, not the wolf of lust dressed
up in love’s clothing. He directs our attention to a vast, boundless love.^ Even if our sin reaches to the sky, God's steadfast love
reflected in his amazing grace to us towers over it, reaching to the heavens, not
an excuse for sin but a reason for pursuit of purity.^
- Rather than cover up your sin through covering your tracks, excusing it, minimizing
it or any other bandage provided by the infirmary of the evil one, God's love in
Christ invites you to uncover it that he might cover it in the forgiveness and righteousness
of his provision of love.^
6 Your righteousness is like the mountains of God;
your judgments are like the great deep;
man and beast you save, O LORD.
- Here we are messing around with sin, walking in functional wickedness, living like
sons of darkness and disobedience and what does the psalmist point us to? He reminds
us of our God and his character. He is a righteous God. He desires truth and purity
in our inner being and obedience from the bottom of our heart.^ We're to seek first his kingdom and
his righteousness. In fact, righteousness is a family trait he wants us to pursue.^
- God reminds us where his justice is satisfied and his righteousness is found.^ That's what
the gospel is all about. God knows we're sinners prone to wander, prone to leave
the God we love and he tells us we need to leave Satan's bed and return to him through
confession and repentance.^ Real repentance aims for a changed
life,^ and life of righteousness.^
7 How precious is your steadfast love, O God!
The children of mankind take refuge in the shadow of your
wings.
- If your house was on fire and you could escape with only one thing, what would it
be? Now you know what's ‘precious’ to you. Precious is not a very masculine
word but it is a diagnostic word. It detects what you love, to what you ascribe
great value. Jesus is precious to the Father.^ You are precious to the Father,
beloved of God.^
- Now comes the glare of the Spirit's spotlight. What is precious to you? What do
find yourself delighting in? Whose embrace do you desire? Whose breasts satisfy
you?^ That's a biblical image not only for faithfulness to
your wife, but for faithfulness to your God against the seductions of Satan.
8 They feast on the abundance of your house,
and you give them drink from the river of your delights.
- Judging by your heart rate, pornography makes you more alive, makes life fuller
and more exciting. That's kind of like getting high, isn't it? Yet, the euphoria
is nothing but a lie, a mirage, a deception. When you come down from your binging
you find yourself empty, hollow, dirty, defiled, weak, withered and self-loathing.
And like addiction to a drug, you get your fix and say ‘That's it; no more.’
But there's always the craving for the bottomless pit of ‘just one more time,’
as you seek to restore the alleged ‘bliss,’ the ‘blessedness’
of Belial.^
- God, however, tells you of what will really satisfy you, what brings genuine, sustained
delight, an abundance of blessing.^ It all has to do with Jesus,
with knowing him, loving him, seeking him, serving him.^ As guys, we're big
on junk food. Talk about the ultimate junk food! Actually, pornography is death
food, poisoning us as it separates us from abiding in Christ as the Vine of life.
And in our foolishness we gorge ourselves with it, while God's banquet of blessing
stands in his goodness and steadfast love spread before us in the presence of our
enemies.^
9 For with you is the fountain of life;
in your light do we see light.
- In Christ, God's face shines upon us and brings us peace. Pornography acts to eclipse
the light of God's face. Just like with the eclipse of the sun, the light is still
there. But we can't see it, nor can we walk by it. Our heart grows cold without
it. God calls us from the abusive and debilitating slave driver of pornography to
the beauty and grace of the light and life of our God.
- God's light is our light—the light of his love, the light of his kingdom into
which he has brought us, the light of his word that directs our steps in a world
filled with perils and pitfalls. Just as we find the shadow of protection in God's
presence, so we find the light of direction in his hand.^
10 Oh, continue your steadfast love to those who know you,
and your righteousness to the upright of heart!
- This prayer is kind of like asking the sun to keep shining. It does shine and it
will shine. But when you climb out of the cesspool of pornography, when you turn
back to God from your dalliance with the adulteress of Abaddon,^ that's a natural
fear. Has God taken his love from me? Has he had enough of my philandering? God
reminds you that he set his love on you while you were a sinner.^ His love came to you in the first
place while you were in arms of Satan. You know him because he first knew you. And
if God has truly captured you with his love,^ nothing will be able to separate
you from that love for you in Jesus—not your sin, not Satan, not anything.^
- Notice, though, what the psalmist calls you. He calls you ‘upright of heart.’
That's how God sees you in Christ, clothed with a righteousness not your own.^ And because that is your status
in Christ, that's also your goal. You are to live in light, in freedom, in obedience
as a son.^
11 Let not the foot of arrogance come upon me,
nor the hand of the wicked drive me away.
12 There the evildoers lie fallen;
they are thrust down, unable to rise.
- As manly as you think you are, you're not strong enough to deal with the sin of
your life. Lest sin overtake you, lest Satan overcome you, you need to be strong
in the Lord and in the power of his might.^ God is your refuge and strength.
You can do all things through Christ who gives you strength.^ Apart from him you can
do nothing.^ Do you get the idea?
We're back to the principle of conducting spiritual warfare in weakness, ours that
is, so that we might find our victory and our strength to deal with Satan's temptations
in Christ.^ Only in Christ can you master sin.
- The devil is a liar and the father of lies. He is the ultimate scam artist. But
his plans will perish. He will be cast down.^ With that in mind, God calls
you to walk in the way that will bring blessing not curse, life not death, feast
not famine, delight not despair, fruitfulness not barrenness,^ that you might know the abundant life
to which your Lord Jesus has brought you.
The divine Couturier expertly tailors this psalm to the physique of the sin of pornography
and to whatever personal and particular dimensions your sin has now or could ever
take. As you don the whole armor of God to take your stand against the seducer of
your soul, the adulteress for your affections, firmly ensconce yourself in the strong
arms of your Savior, Jesus Christ, whose love for you is real and proven and relentless
and everlasting.
Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before
the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus
Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and
now and forever. Amen.
Jude 24–25