Deliver Us From Evil

“No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and He will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation He will always provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.” –1 Corinthians 10:13

“And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.” –Matthew 6:13

“Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.” –James 4:7

It is very important to understand and lean upon the promise of 1 Corinthians 10:13. This passage teaches us that the temptations that come against us each day are “common.” They often feel particularly oppressive to us, but this is not the case. Temptations to anger, jealousy, lust, greed, depression/hopelessness, covetousness, and so on are common to all people. You are not alone in your struggle against sin! We must dwell upon the second part of the verse, that God is faithful! The Lord God knows our struggle and is faithful to hear our prayers and always provides a way that we might choose righteousness. The passage also points out that this is a way of endurance. The process of struggling against the common sin of the world continues on day after day. Sanctification (making progress in the growth of godly character) is an endurance event, but God is faithful!

It’s important to explore and understand the sources of temptation in our lives. There are three basic sources of temptation: the flesh, the world, and the devil. The first is our own corrupt nature. This is what the Bible refers to as “the flesh.” As you will hear in the sermon this week, the corruption of our first parents was passed down to all subsequent people on the earth. Every person is born into a state of moral corruption. We are not born basically good or tending toward good. We are born corrupt and must be trained to do good. This process is only truly possible after a person comes to salvation and the heart is born again unto spiritual life. Even after salvation, when spiritual life has begun in us, it will not be made perfect until heaven. While we live on earth there is still a real struggle in our soul between resident corruption and ever-growing godliness.

Second, temptation comes to us from the world. The world is the sum total of billions of individually sinful and corrupt people living together. The pressure and effect of combined wickedness can feel overwhelming and exert tremendous influence upon us to sin. This is partly where the local community of the church is so important. The local church is a community of people together pressing back against the darkness and corruption of this lost world. Temptation or encouragement toward godliness comes from the company we keep. The world, or bad company, corrupts good character (1 Corinthians 15:33).

Third, real spiritual forces of evil bring temptation and corruption to us. However, these spiritual beings are not all-present or all-powerful. They are influential, but all are subject to the power and purposes of Jesus our Lord. We are clearly directed by Jesus to pray against temptation and to be delivered from evil. This quotation is taken from the Lord’s prayer, a pattern of how our prayers ought to be offered up on a daily basis. The spirit and direction of this prayer are the opposite of seeking evil or placing oneself directly in the way of temptation. We should be actively purging our lives of evil influences and praying for the Lord to guard us from unseen evil influences.

In the end, we are to submit ourselves humbly to the protecting power of the Lord Jesus. He is the Good Shepherd. The Shepherd watches over and protects the sheep. We are the sheep of His pasture. We cannot successfully go our own way in our own strength. We are dependent creatures. Yet, in our humility there is striving. We submit ourselves unto God and resist the devil. We ask for God’s strength and strive to put to death resident evil and to keep untangled from outside evil influences. We keep our eyes on Jesus, casting off the sin that so easily entangles, and run the race of the Christian life (Hebrews 12). By God’s grace, and for His glory, we will make progress and one day fully enter His kingdom.

Lord, deliver us from evil,

Pastor Vic

Get to Work! “We urge you, brothers, to do this more and more, and to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you, so that you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one.”1 Thessalonians 4:10b-11 This past Sunday, I spoke to you about the Lord God commissioning Adam to work before sin entered the world. It is vital to grasp that for men and women, work is nota part of the curse of sin, but a major part of God’s purpose for our lives. We are each gifted for work and should actively, and to the best of our ability, use those gifts in work toward the end that God created us. There is a crisis in America today of young men not entering the workplace in full and skilled employment. Every year the numbers of young men entering college, skilled trade schools, legitimate entrepreneurial business, or entering military or police service continues to alarmingly decline. The doctrine of work certainly applies to women as well, but its application is different and young women are not facing the same crisis as young men at this moment in history. This generation of young men will never reach the full potential God has for them and will never function as the godly husbands they could be apart from fully embracing work. Embracing hard and full-time work is the primary path to financial independence and is used by God to train self-control, diligence, courage, faith, selflessness, and leadership into every young man that will rise to the call of vocational work. I would like to explore some thoughts on this subject. These thoughts relate to parents and their sons. This relationship is joined, and as a rule, rise and fall together. Parents should be raising their sons with a mindset toward independence and marriage. Independence precedes marriage, but independence is not making a way for aloneness. Independence makes a way for a new family to be formed; to leave father and mother and cleave to one’s wife. One of the problem sin our modern day is the over-abundance of choices for young men. I believe it is wise that young men be required to work from their teens forward at some gainful employment outside of the house. This is basic training that work produces income, which allows for freedom of action and the opportunity to give. It’s basic training on punctuality, trainability, financial literacy, and following commands. Once a young man gets working, it’s not too hard to keep the momentum going. After high school, again, the number of options can become overwhelming. College should not be the de facto next step. I suggest you break down the options into basic categories: professional work, corporate business (including military /police / fire), trade work, and entrepreneur.  Help your son assess where his gifts and interests are located, and start exploring the options. You can read more about this from a chapter I wrote related to these issues: HERE. Each area can provide full-time career-based work. Each area has a path of requirements that must be worked toward for success. Each is competitive and will involve failures to be overcome. A young man may start in one area and end up in another, but not working full-time should not be an option. A start in the military or police may lead to an opportunity for college expenses to be covered. A trade summer job may lead to apprenticeship and licensure. Working for a small business may give the vision for also pursuing your own business. Each life will be slightly different, but there are basic paths to success. Either way, help your sons think through the options and help them through the first doors to get started. I remember clearly requiring my oldest son to sit through a full interview and application, even though a friend of mine was giving him his first job. It made my son answer tough questions and feel the weight of sitting in the boss’s office. It gave him the opportunity to check the “I’ve never been convicted of a felony” box on the application and consider what would have happened in the interview if he had to check that box. Halfway through each of my boys’ first summer of work, the work stopped being fun and they wanted to quit – but a man of his word and a diligent man does not quit what he has begun before a natural/ respectable point of closure. They each had to finish out the summer and give a proper two-week notice before moving on.               Let’s also look at some common pitfalls that need to be avoided. The number one pitfall I see for why young men do not launch properly into full-time work, and thus independent manhood, is that parents enable them to not work by continuing to feed, house, and pay their bills as if they were small children. The Bible is clear, “If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10). This means very basically, if a person is able to work, but due to laziness will not work, their literal hunger pains should drive them to work so they can eat. This is the word of the Lord. If you are a parent enabling an able-bodied young man to work less than full-time (or two part-time jobs joined), so they can lay around playing games (video or otherwise), watch movies, or some other non-productive way of living – you are the primary cause of their laziness. You are enabling their failure to work. The second pitfall to avoid is the failure to press them forward. Pitfall number one is avoiding a problem, but you must counter laziness with intentionally pressing your sons forward into opportunity. Like all of us, it will take time to find their way, but the unbroken expectation is that they will find their way. This involves active conversations, hard deadlines, networking conversations, personal character, person hygiene, and reviews of their life and direction. You must actively push baby bird out of the nest! Not flying, is not an option. Third, parents and sons must work together  to avoid debt. Starting the debt snowball at a young age can cripple young adulthood and cause major long-term stress. We live in an advertising, debt oriented, materialistic culture, where we feel entitled to have what we want. Our young men must learn early to live within their means and live with financial self-control and wisdom. This is particularly related to parent encouraged, or enabled, student loan debt. Student loans are debt like any other debt, in that it must be paid back. Consider very carefully the amount of debt that you encourage your son to enter at a young age. Let’s walk by faith believing that work was created by God, and that work is both good and essential. Let’s pray for, love, encourage, and also press, inspire, and launch our young men into independence. May this independence lead to marriage and joyful stable families. Let us parent with courage and by faith, Pastor Vic

“You shall not murder.”
Exodus 20:13

This is the sixth of the ten commandments given by Almighty God to guide and direct the moral life of all people. This command does not only stand over Christians, but over all people. The command not to murder is given to restrain the hand of the person that would take another life for reasons outside of justified war and self-defense. Murder has a clear definition that is prosecuted in courtrooms all over the globe every day. Murder is defined simply as “the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another.”

The first part of this definition relates to the unlawful nature of killing. In all such cases the moral law of God stands as the foundation for human civil law. No person or court has the right or authority to declare as good what God has declared as evil. The authority of human governments and courts is a delegated authority from God.

The second part of this definition speaks to premeditation – an action taken with planned thoughtfulness. The opposite of this would be striking and killing someone with your car after spilling coffee on yourself and swerving. This would not be a planned action, although you are still accountable for the death, it is not at the level of planned murder.

The third part is killing another human being. Animal life certainly has value, and we should treat all animals with a humane kindness, but killing a dog or a bird is not morally equivalent to killing another human being.

We must face squarely the moral question of whether abortion is murder.

I think this question is most clearly answered by looking at the definition of murder in reverse. First, is an unborn child a human being? The answer is absolutely, yes. From the point of conception, the fertilized embryo has the future potential of full flourishing human life. Dependence does not lessen the humanity. An unborn child is dependent on its mother’s body for nourishment. The child is not less human for this. An infant child is dependent on the constant daily care of mother and father. The child is not less human for this. The elderly infirmed person has their situation reversed, dependent upon their child for care in their old age. The elderly person is not less human for this dependence.

Medical practice understands this, that’s why Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICUs) exist in the best hospitals around the world. Parents with sick, prematurely born children need special care for these ultra dependent children. There is a limit to this care as modern medicine is not able to reach the level of care that only the mother’s body can provide for the first half of gestation. Unborn children are certainly human beings. They are not some other form of being or less than human. Children are human at conception; they do not become human through the willful decision of the mother to give birth to the child.

The second part of the definition of murder has to do with premeditation. Abortion is a deeply premeditated act. It involves discovering pregnancy after a sexual act. It involves considering the life altering consequences of giving birth to a child. It involves willfully choosing to set an appointment, do paperwork, give intimate access to one’s body so that another can take the life of the baby. Abortion is not accidental, but a willful premeditated act.  

The first part of the definition of murder speaks to its lawfulness. Currently in the US, abortion is not deemed legal nationwide. Abortion legality is determined state-by-state. The states where it is legal are states that have a majority of citizens that reject basic Christian morality. The people that make up these states have rejected God’s definition of life and personhood, and chosen to find identity in sexuality.

All people root their identity in something. Identity is the foundation by which you define yourself as a person. Christians define their lives by relationship to Jesus Christ and discipleship to His ways. Those who define their lives by sexual expression (toward a certain type or sex of people) or through hedonistic sexual pursuits, do not want their self-expression curbed or derailed by the birth of children. They are willing to change civil law to declare evil as good, and change language to speak of unborn children in dehumanizing ways, and speak of murder as healthcare.

As designed by God, heterosexual sex is inherently related to the bearing of children. A sexual act is a procreative act. Modern secular people are striving through medical technology to harness and control the procreative aspect of sexuality, but this cannot be done without tremendously negative side effects – physical, physiological, and spiritual. Birth control drugs cannot be taken without the risk of serious physical side effects to the woman. The entire fertility cycle of a healthy woman cannot be hormonally stopped without other effects on the body and mind. Methods of permanent sterilization taken upon young people are usually understood, even by the non-Christian, to be unwise. Even those who don’t want children in their younger years recognize that they may one day value children.

The issue is that various methods of non-permanent birth control are imperfect. As a part of the heavily sexual culture we live in, millions of unwanted babies are conceived every year. Murdering these children cannot be the answer, but America aborts over one million unborn children year after year – every year. We are choosing death rather than submit ourselves to God’s will and purpose related to sexual morality. The conscience of the nation is seared.

We must come to a place of believing in the salvation and goodness of Jesus. As disciples of Jesus Christ, we can be forgiven of our sins and enter God’s good ways. This involves for most people marriage, children, and family. Marriage is a blessing. Children are a blessing. Raising children in the context of marriage is not easy, but it leads to sanctification and deep relationships. God uses our children to work in our lives as parents. Through our children God works to teach us selflessness, patience, love, service, humility, character, and spiritual leadership. Through children we gain heritage, traditions, beautiful memories, and shared joy.

As Christians we MUST be a people committed to life from the point of conception. We must not give way to this culture of death and unrestrained sexual expression. We must find our identity in Jesus Christ. We must forgive those who have aborted their children when they ask for and seek forgiveness from Jesus. Our grace must mirror the unconditional grace of Jesus. We must celebrate and remain within the marriage boundaries of sexual expression. We must nurture and protect our children, and we must be willing to take into our homes unwanted and orphaned children.

Let us be a people that cherish, protect, and love children,
Pastor Vic

Note: It should be noted that there are exceptional circumstances where the life of the mother and the life of the child are pitted against each other and a medical choice of life must be made. This circumstance does not fit the definition as framed above. This is an exceptional circumstance, but the exception does not cancel the rule of seeking life.