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Kindle Notes & Highlights
But none of us can claim an innate spiritual advantage. In reality, we are all equally disadvantaged. None of us naturally seeks after God, none is inherently righteous, none instinctively does good (cf. Romans 3:9-18). Therefore, as children of grace, our spiritual discipline is everything — everything! I repeat . . . discipline is everything!
spiritual discipline frees us from the gravity of this present age and allows us to soar with the saints and angels.
Sensuality is easily the biggest obstacle to godliness among men today and is wreaking havoc in the Church.
Men, it is the “legal” sensualities, the culturally acceptable indulgences, which will take us down. The long hours of indiscriminate TV watching, which is not only culturally cachet but is expected of the American male, is a massive culprit of desensitization. The expected male talk — double entendre, coarse humor, laughter at things which ought to make us blush — is another deadly agent. Acceptable sensualities have insidiously softened Christian men, as statistics well attest. A man who succumbs to desensitization of the “legal” sensualities is primed for a fall.
Just when we think we are the safest, when we feel no need to keep our guard up, to work on our inner integrity, to discipline ourselves for godliness — temptation will come!
Is my wife more like Christ because she is married to me? Or is she like Christ in spite of me? Has she shrunk from His likeness because of me? Do I sanctify her or hold her back? Is she a better woman because she is married to me? Is she a better friend? A better mother? Men, our call is clear: sanctifying love.
Men, our wives must be able to rest in the fact of our fidelity. Everything about us: our eyes . . . our language . . . our schedules . . . our passion must say to her, “I am, and will always be, faithful to you.”
Let us bow to God’s Word: “[A]ct like men, be strong. Let all that you do be done in love” (1 Corinthians 16:13, 14, NASB)
Helpfully, God’s Word provides us with an outline for a fatherly workout — in one pungent sentence: “Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4). This outline is easiest remembered as a “do not” and a “do.” The “do not” is: “Fathers, do not exasperate your children”; the “do” is: “instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.”
What awesome power we have! Our children all want the “aura and armament” of their fathers. Men, their hearts are turned to us! And our Lord wants our hearts to be turned to them. We hear this truth memorably stated by the angel Gabriel when he announced that part of John the Baptist’s mission in making a people ready for the Lord was “to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children” (Luke 1:17). Now that Christ has come, this is a perpetual result of His saving work. When a man truly gives his heart to Christ, it is turned toward his children. Men, submit to Christ — allow Him to turn
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C. S. Lewis said, “Friendship . . . is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all others.”
