Thursday June 7, 2012

Being accountable helps us to avoid adultery and adulterous thoughts.

Find an accountability partner and start praying     together about your struggles.

 

Read Deuteronomy 22:13-21; Matthew 5:27-30

 

Premarital sex has almost become a given in our day.  Causal sex and having many partners before “settling down” are lauded as good things. Chastity, fidelity and virginity are mocked by movies, ridiculed by society and dishonoured by most of the music of the world. Yet a large percentage of these people, both men and women, want to marry (or date) someone that has all the qualities that they themselves have worked hard at avoiding.

 

But just like teenage obedience, God is very very serious about these issues of fidelity and virginity. Adulterers in the Bible were put to death. It is not a measure of love lacking but a measure of the seriousness of the issue in God’s eyes. If a woman was found to be adulterous after her wedding, she too was put to death. One assumes that the same applied to the husband.

 

The Old Testament had incredibly high standards of morality. Jesus has raised the bar even higher for New Testament believers. According to Jesus, to even look at a woman (or a man) lustfully is akin to committing adultery with that woman (man) in one’s heart. The coming of the Holy Spirit means that Jesus could lift the bar to the proper intention of the law to cover the things the Torah could not cover. The filling of the Holy Spirit equips and enables believers to take every thought captive, to be pure in heart and mind and to love God with one’s heart and soul and mind and strength.

 

Prayer:

¥ Pray for purity in your congregation. Pray that each and every person in your congregation would have a passionate desire to be pure in heart, pure in mind and pure in words, actions and thoughts. Pray that this desire for purity would be driven by the Holy Spirit’s workings and promptings.

¥ Pray that God’s Spirit would be leading and guiding each person in your congregation into service, to ministry and to sacrificial giving.