31 Days of Purity: Day Nine

Mike Leake

Day Nine: Friendship & Accountability

And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near. (Hebrews 10:24-25)

Friendship is a great gift from God. Spiritual friendship, a friendship shared in Christ, is an even greater gift. Proverbs assures us that “A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity” (17:17). A brother is born for the times when we are going toe-to-toe with our sin, battling hard against it, committed to putting it to death. In such times we need friends to pray for us, to support us, to speak truth to us, to speak the gospel to us. 

Sin thrives in darkness. When we find ourselves up to our neck in sin, our tendency is to run and hide, especially from friends. Our guilt makes us run from accountability and friendship. Don’t do that. See the godly friendships that God has given you as the gifts that they are. As you battle against sin and as you battle for sexual purity, invite a friend into your struggles. Invite him to pray with you and for you, invite him to ask you deep and difficult questions, invite him to travel with you on this journey. And when the 31 Days of Purity are over, that friendship will only be getting underway.

Father, I pray that I will pursue and value biblical accountability and genuine friendship. This life is too difficult and I am too sinful to do this on my own. So I pray that you would grant me that friend, that he and I would be like Jonathan and David, knit together, unashamed, each looking out for the other’s good. And I pray that I will be the kind of friend who loves at all times and the kind of friend who is there for my brother in times of adversity. Amen.

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Tim Chalies is husband to Aileen and a father to three children aged 7 to 13. He worships and serves as a pastor at Grace Fellowship Church in Toronto, Ontario, where he primarily gives attention to mentoring and discipleship. He blogs daily at challies.com, is a book reviewer for WORLD magazine, co-founded Cruciform Press, and has written four books.

Thought Shards 03.08.14

Mike Leake
  1. If an author cuts a significant portion from blogs that he previous written and pastes them into his latest book, but doesn’t site where it was from, it makes me feel like he is being dishonest. I don’t believe that it is technically self-plagiarism but it feels to me like using the same paper in your Introduction to New Testament class and your Systematic Theology 2 class. It just seems lazy. Cite it and I’m fine. Try to pass it off like it’s original and I feel dirty.
  2. I’m spending the weekend with my wife and kids in Nashville, IN. It’s a tremendous place to getaway and enjoy your family.
  3. The Mark Driscoll article that I posted on Tuesday made me sad. I received a ton of encouragement and people telling me that their feelings are similar to mine. That makes me sad because I wish that I was way off and there was no reason for concern. But there is, and that makes me sorrowful.
  4. There is a flippant response to sin that seems rampant in our day and it really bothers me. I’m convinced that we don’t “smart enough” for our sins (to use a Puritan term). We don’t want to engage in an unhealthy self-condemnation, nor listen to the voice of our Accuser, but we also don’t want to think that our covered sin was not costly.
  5. If you like the new Borrowed Light logo, thank Dawn Lamper. Check out her other stuff here. Also, thanks to Nick Horton for setting up all of the stuff behind the scenes that I don’t understand.
  6. Last weekend I went to the 9Marks @Southern event. I enjoyed it. I was very impressed with David Helm as a teacher. He was the only one of the speakers that I was not familiar with and his session might have been my favorite. This event just whetted my appetite for T4G in April. I can’t wait.
  7. Speaking of 9Marks @Southern, Albert Mohler’s talk is something that I’m still chewing on. One of the things that he discussed was the difference between a moral revolution and a moral shift. We are currently in a moral revolution as it concerns sexuality. A characteristic of a moral revolution is that what was once condemned is now celebrated. And here’s what really caused me to think…the other side of a moral revolution is that those that refuse to celebrate are now condemned. Something to think about.
  8. A good part of the Yankees season will depend on whether Tanaka is more like Hideki Irabu or early Hideo Nomo. P.S. I can’t wait for baseball season to officially begin.
  9. I’m hosting a Fantasy Baseball league on ESPN. We’ve got one more spot (or maybe a couple more if we decide to expand). If you are interested let me know in the comments (and shoot me an email).

31 Days of Purity: Day Eight

Mike Leake

Day Eight: Satisfied in Christ

Be appalled, O heavens, at this; be shocked, be utterly desolate, declares the Lord, for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water. (Jeremiah 2:12-13, ESV)

There is a vast difference between drinking from a fountain of living water and drinking the stale murky waters of a broken cistern. No thirsty man in his right mind would turn down the cold, refreshing water from a flowing stream to drink from a muddy, filthy cistern. A broken cistern will never satisfy his thirst. He might take a small and tentative drink from that broken cistern if this is all that is available. But it is not. The man in Jeremiah 2:12-13 is rejecting living water in order to embrace lifeless cistern water. 

This is the foolish choice that we make whenever we pursue satisfaction in the broken cistern of sexual impurity. If we are to find freedom from sin and live in purity, we must learn anew where we can find true satisfaction and true refreshment. The Lord must transform our foolish hearts so that instead of craving cistern water, we pursue deep and lasting satisfaction in Christ.

Father, I thank you that one day, “I shall behold your face in righteousness”. And I thank you that on that day “when I awake, I shall be satisfied with your likeness” (Psalm 17:15). I pray that while I wait for that day that I would grow in my satisfaction of Christ. Change my heart in such a way that I seek to find satisfaction in him. Renew my mind so that I see broken cisterns for what they are. Create in me a heart that pursues satisfaction in Christ.

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Mike Leake is associate pastor of First Baptist Church of Jasper, IN. He and his wife, Nikki have 2 children (Isaiah and Hannah). Mike is the author of Torn to Heal and regularly blogs athttp://mikeleake.net

A Hypocritical Praying for Purity

Mike Leake

Today in our 31 Days of Purity Challenge we prayed that God would create in us a heart to flee areas of temptation. It is a call to get serious about sin. I really appreciated this in Tim’s devotional:

Flee, my brother. Learn how and when to run and do not be ashamed to do so. Do not toy with sexual sin. Do not make light of sexual sin. Do not laugh or joke about the very sins Christ died for. Do not allow yourself even the smallest taste or the briefest glimpse of what God forbids.

We also read Richard Sibbes’ sermon A Breathing After God in our Year with Sibbes challenge. I found what Sibbes said on page 222 very applicable to our prayer for today:

If a man pray, as St. Augustine, in his confessions, that God would free him from temptations, and yet is unwilling to have those loving [temptations] from him, he prays, but he doth not desire. There are many that pray; they say in their prayers, “Lead us not into temptation” (Mt. 6:13) and yet they run into temptation; they feed their eyes, their ears, and senses with vain things. You know what they are well enough, their lives are nothing but a satisfying of their lusts, and yet they pray, “Lead us not into temptation.” And there are many persons that desire that, that they dare not pray for, they desire to be so bad. But a Christian, what he desires, he prays for.

Sibbes is telling us that we are hypocritical and do not have proper desires if we are praying for purity and yet not pursuing purity by fleeing areas of temptation. Just as we read in Proverbs 6 if you walk by the harlots house—even if you are all prayed up—you are being a fool.

If you are in Christ you have been given the strength to flee areas of temptation. Taste and see that the Lord is good—indeed much better than the fleeting pleasures of sin. Let us repent of our hypocritical praying without Spirit-fueled action and obedience.

If you find yourself to be a hypocrite in this regard don’t give up hope and turn to yourself for rescue. Flee to Christ. Cast yourself upon His mercy and pray that He would change your desires. Get to the heart of the matter. Confess to him that you want and desire the sin that you know is killing you. Humble yourself before him and pray that he would stir up your affections.

And then smash your idol. Not to show the Lord how serious you are—but because Christ is more precious. Don’t forget what we’ve prayed in our other days and fall back into some pointless legalism—smash your idol because Jesus has already disarmed it on the Cross.

Smash it!

Smash it!

Smash it!