I know what it’s like to lead a song service and put down the mic, only to indulge in homosexual acts hours after the conclusion of a worship service. I know what it’s like to be bogged down with shame—maintaining a closeted, secret life with no intentions of reaching out for help because of the fear of being condemned by others in the church. I know what it’s like to want to do right, but wrong keeps knocking on the door. But I also know what’s it’s like to be transformed by the power of God’s Spirit. Yes, I know what it’s like to experience total victory over homosexuality and pornography.
People continually ask me for advice for overcoming sexual immorality, mostly in terms of homosexuality. In my initial article “What This Pastor Told a Homosexual Man Who Wanted to Leave His Church,” I suggested that grace through faith (Eph. 2:8) was the gateway to freedom. You can view my initial article here. In addition to trusting and believing God for freedom, I do believe there are certain safeguards that must be in place to guard against sexual immorality, but no method or formula outweighs the power behind intimacy with Jesus.
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When you become intimate with God, you become engulfed by His nature, so much so that temptation is likened to an ant that manages to crawl on your body, and you just gently wipe it off with hardly any effort because you have no desire for it. Basically, when tempted, I didn’t have to pray tongues and war in the heavenlies because my relationship with Father God had become priority. I was too busy being in an intimate relationship with God. I was too busy abiding in Him: “Remain in Me, as I also remain in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it remains in the vine, neither can you, unless you remain in Me” (John 15:4).
Considerable amounts of ink and pixels have been spilled in recent months over the question of who is an American, who is unAmerican, and who is anti-American. There is an easy way to tell: Use the Declaration of Independence as your guide.
The Declaration is the most quintessentially American document ever produced. It defines in unmistakable and unambiguous terms what America stands for. Simply put, someone who affirms the truth claims of the Declaration is a true American. Someone who is indifferent to its truth claims is un-American. And someone who is hostile to its truth claims is anti-American.
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What, then, does it mean to be an “American?”
First, Americans believe in absolute truth. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, … ” said the founders. There is such a thing as truth, an American would say, and we believe in it, and we defend it. An American believes, as did the founders, that certain things are true and other things are false. There is none of this business of everybody having his own truth. In fact, the founders observed that there are certain truths that are so obviously true on the very face of things that they do not even require proof; they are “self-evident.”
Thus someone who is indifferent to the question of truth is unAmerican because he does not care about this fundamental American ideal. And someone who is hostile to the idea of truth, or who is hostile to the self-evident truths the founders affirmed, is anti-American because he has pitted himself against a bedrock American principle.
Second, Americans believe man is a created being, not an evolved one. The very first self-evident truth the founders embraced is that “all men are created equal,” and that there is a “Creator” with a capital “C” who has granted them certain fundamental, non-negotiable rights. In other words, an American does not believe that man emerged from the primordial glop with some kind of ancestral connection to baboons and chimpanzees. No, an American believes, as the founders did, that man has been created in the image of God and is distinct and far above members of the animal kingdom in worth, value, and dignity. Man is not just a “trousered ape” but is an entirely different order of being altogether—a being who has not just a soul but also a spirit.
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So an American believes man is a created being. Someone who is indifferent to the question of whether man is created or evolved is unAmerican. And someone who actively opposes the concept of a Creator and the concept of man as created in God’s image is anti-American.
Third, an American believes our rights come to us from God, not from government. An American believes that such rights are “unalienable,” which means that no earthly power has the moral authority to deprive us of any single one of these rights because they are a gift to us from God.
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So an American believes that our rights come to us from a Creator God. An unAmerican is indifferent to the question. And an anti-American vigorously contests that idea and believes that rights are a gift to us from a beneficent government rather than the Creator.
Fourth, an American believes that babies have a right to be born. An American believes that no earthly power—not Congress, not the Supreme Court, not Planned Parenthood, nor a hospital in England—has any moral or legal right whatsoever to deprive a baby in the womb or a disabled newborn of its right to live. An anti-American is someone who supports the killing of babies in the womb and tries to lock up the Americans who expose this evil. Thus they seek to deprive babies of their right to life and undercover investigators of their right to liberty.
Fifth, an American believes that bakers, florists and photographers have a God-given right to liberty, a God-given right to manage their business affairs according to the dictates of their own conscience. An American believes that he should not be required by government to do work against his will, which is slavery, or to do work that violates his own conscience, which is tyranny. An American in name only believes that such artisans should be punished, fined, put out of business or sued for everything they own. And someone who is indifferent to this issue is not a bad person; he is just an unAmerican one.
Sixth, an American believes that the right to private property is a sacred right, a gift from God, and that government is not allowed to deprive homeowners of their property or deny farmers and ranchers the use of their property (apart, of course, from the proper use of eminent domain or as a consequence of the commission of a crime). The founders would be appalled at the way in which the abuse of eminent domain and the use of environmental regulations have shredded this unalienable right. An American believes the right to private property is a gift from God. An anti-American despises this right and treats it as something that government can readily dispose of if it will serve the progressive agenda.
Some of you are ultra-conservative but I am not. I wear dresses and skirts just above my knees. I even wear shorts once in a while and some of my thigh shows. (One woman told me there is a verse about the thigh not showing so I asked her for it but she never responded.) I watch some TV (Hallmark, Fox News, The Duggars and The Bates Shows, and a few others) and go to the movie theater (but am careful about what I see – no nudity, sex scenes, vulgar language, etc.).
Recently, someone grabbed a picture that my daughter-in-law posted on her Instagram story of me with a skirt on with shorts underneath and some of my thigh showing. It was the Fourth of July and I was with my sons and their families and Ken. My legs were up on a footstool so more of my thigh shows than normal.
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If I knew my daughter-in-law was filming me and even if another man besides my sons or husband were around, I would have put my feet down on the ground but I didn’t know and had no clue that some woman would use it against me but this is what they do. They search and scour everything I write and every picture they can find about me (even from my children and their spouses) to try to destroy my ministry and make me into a hypocrite.
My family knows about it and they think it’s silly because they all know that I dress modestly. I never wear leggings unless I have a dress over it. I never wear low-cut tops, bikinis, short shorts, or a short skirt or dress. My modesty standards may not be the same as yours (some women were upset with a comment Ken made about some thigh showing) but that doesn’t mean we are wrong. I listen to godly men and what they consider immodest and dress accordingly. I don’t believe we need to wear burkas (as some women have told us) and cover our hair, faces, shoulders, and ankles. This isn’t what the typical man lusts after.
I have heard that some men have foot fetishes but this doesn’t mean we can never go barefoot. This is a problem with the men and yes, there are men who are perverts and will lust no matter what women wear but this isn’t our problem. It’s theirs. As godly women, we need to know how the typical man thinks and dress to not be a stumbling block to them.
Should godly women be in the military, police force, or firefighters? No, godly women should not be in any of these and I will try to explain why I believe this. In the Bible, only men were the ones to go to war and they had to be 20 years old or older. “Take ye the sum of all the congregation of the children of Israel, after their families, by the house of their fathers, with the number of their names, every male by their polls; From twenty years old and upward, all that are able to go forth to war in Israel: thou and Aaron shall number them by their armies” (Numbers 1:2, 3).
Women are the weaker vessel. “Likewise, ye husbands, dwell with them according to knowledge, giving honour unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel” (1 Peter 3:7). “The thing which the husband is specially to understand and take into account is that he is dealing with a thing less strong than himself…The weakness here ascribed to the female sex is primarily that of the body, as we shall see when we consider the word ‘vessel,’ though it may, perhaps, indicate frailty in other respects as well.” (Elliot’s Commentary) And I am sure the feminists will love Matthew Poole’s definition of this verse; “weaker than the husbands, and that both in body and mind, as women usually are.”
In past generations, EVERY ONE knew that men are stronger physically and emotionally than women. Men have ten times the testosterone than women do. Yes, men’s struggle is with their sexual nature but women’s struggle is with their emotional nature. Men and women are different. We are not the same. (It’s sad that I even have to write these words.)
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The Lord instructs husbands to be the head of their wives. “For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body” (Ephesians 5:23). They are over them to protect and provide for them. This is God’s perfect plan in marriage and in society; it is the men who are to be the protectors. Being in the military, a firefighter, or policeman takes strength. Unfortunately, feminists have bullied men into women being able fulfill these positions. We are called to be feminine with gentle and quiet spirits. These jobs are all masculine.
Can you even imagine what women in the military who are captured by the enemy must endure? I am sure it is horrible! Women are much more vulnerable and defenseless than men. Women are the ones who are raped. (Yes, some men are being raped today, too, in today’s perverted society but it normally takes several men to do this whereas it only takes one man against one woman to rape a woman.) How about a female police officer caught in the middle of a gang? What if a female firefighter had to drag a 200 pound man down from a second story on a ladder to save his life? Women cannot do this. It is all nonsense.
John Rice [a Fundamentalist Evangelist, editor of the Sword of the Lord, and author of such titles as The Home and Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives, and Women Preachers] wrote this about this topic. “A man is like God in a sense that a woman is not like God…God is always in the Bible, called He, never Her. He is called Father, not Mother, Christ is called the man Christ Jesus, not the woman…I do not mean that Christ is not the Saviour every woman needs, not that He does not know her every longing, feel her every sorrow, meet her every need. But God would not have had the Bible so full of it if He did not want us to notice that Christ was a Man, not a woman, and that man is therefore made in the image of God in a sense that cannot be true of women. So, in the home, man is deputy of God, and should lead the home for God.”
I love the fact that Christ was a man since men are our protectors. They are bigger and stronger. They are not led by their emotions and feelings as easily. They are more steady. I am happy that I am not the protector and provider of my family. Men have a much bigger responsibility than women have been given and a man’s nature is created for this and woman’s is not. Most men wouldn’t want to worship a female god. They want a strong and masculine God like the One we have been blessed with. He is perfect in every way!
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The only reason women have so much “power” today is because men have given it to them. They could have never gotten it if men didn’t allow it because men are mightier in strength than women. God originally created man to have power and dominion over the earth. He never has given this responsibility to women. He made men the Kings, Prophets, Priests, Disciples, Apostles, and Elders for a good reason and His purpose. This is His plan.
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Most women today would despise this teaching. It doesn’t bother me in the least because I love being a woman and I love God’s ways. God created men to be the leaders and women the followers, just our body makeup proves this point. We are the weaker and softer sex so we should be the more gentler one. Women are the more lovely of the sexes, especially when we wear some make up, fix our hair, and wear prettier and more colorful clothing. Men are highly attracted to women. Godly, good women bring a lot of beauty to this earth. We make our homes places of loveliness. We bear and raise godly offspring. As we do all of this, we bring honor and dignity to our husbands and to the Lord.
— Lori Alexander, The Transformed Wife, Woman is the Glory of Man, May 26, 2017
Anyone can take the place of an astronaut, an engineer, a doctor, or name any other career out there, but no one can take the place of a mother in a child’s life. If you are married and have children, no one can take your place and your time and energy should be going to caring for these important people in your life, not given to strangers who could replace you in a blink of an eye.
Dennis [Prager] also brought up something that happened in the Australian Parliament. A senator nursed her baby while the Parliament was in session. She has no problem showing her breasts to men while she is nursing her baby. Why not? Men can go shirtless and there’s no problem with it. Since men and women are now equal in every way, according to feminism, this shouldn’t be a problem, right? Wrong. They fail to realize that men will always have an attraction for women’s breasts. God made them this way: “Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant roe; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times; and be thou ravished always with her love” (Proverbs 5:19).
Then I hear of Ivanka Trump trying to convince her father, our President, to create another enormous government program to pay for childcare for mothers so they can have careers and not worry about the financial situation. All of these are lies that our culture keeps screaming at us and trying to pull us away from the life that God has planned for us!
God made you a woman for a reason. He gave you a womb to bear children. He gave you breasts to nourish your baby and satisfy your husband. He made you soft for your baby to cuddle with you and your husband to enjoy. He made you the weaker vessel and your husband stronger to provide and protect you. He made you love beauty so you could use your desire for beauty to make your homes places of beauty for your families and all who enter. It’s all a part of His wonderful and perfect plan for you.
A question from Michael: “Pastor John, how can I talk to my 6-year-old son about hell? When any loved one has died who has also been a Christian, I have told him they have gone to heaven. But if somebody dies who is not a Christian I do not want to lie and say they have gone to heaven, but I do not know how to teach him about hell. He has extreme anxiety about death and I am afraid talking about hell may make him more anxious. He also gets very upset when he makes any kind of mistake or when I have to correct him. I do not want him to worry that if he disobeys that he will be sent to hell. How in the world can I teach him this?”
Let me start by turning the tables and saying, we should be one hundred times more concerned about a 6-year-old who has no fear of death [Yes, because it is absolutely “normal” for children to fear death and hell.] and hell than we are about a child who fears death and hell. One of the reasons we may not feel that is because when a child has no fear, we tend to go along as though all is well. He’s such a happy little fellow, and she’s such a cheerful little girl. [Pity the happy, joyful, well-adjusted child, right?] When a child has anxieties, nightmares, fears, then all of our parental instincts and mind go into gear, and action, because we want to help them, not realizing perhaps that the child with no fear needs even more help from parental vigilance and concern than the child with much fear.
I want to encourage Michael that the problem he is dealing with is a good problem to have. If he were not dealing with it, there would be more reason to be concerned than there is now. How do we help a 6-year-old child deal with the terrifying reality of hell and death? The main thing is to realize that God intends for our real and wise fear of hell to be a means of clarifying and establishing in our hearts at least five great realities.
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1. The fear of hell is a golden opportunity for treating God as big and glorious and utterly real. It is hard for human beings who are sinful to feel the reality of God, but if God is the one who created hell, and whose majesty makes hell just and understandable, then this is a golden moment. The reason hell is so terrible is because God is so great that despising him is so evil that it deserves this terrible punishment.
In other words, the horror of hell is a signpost concerning the infinite worth and preciousness and beauty and goodness and justness of God. If he were small, if God were small, hell would be lukewarm. Because he’s great, scorning God is a horrible thing. This is a golden moment for how to teach a child about how real and how great God is.
2. The fear of hell is a golden opportunity to teach about the nature and the exceedingly great seriousness of sin. Hell is all about the outcome of a life of sin, and therefore a child needs to understand what sin is. Sin is all about falling short of God’s glory; that is, failing to see God as glorious and to honor him and thank him as glorious, and to follow him and praise him and glorify him. We need to make sure that our children see the direct connection between hell and sin.
The great and frightening tragedy of growing up feeling no fear of hell is that in a life like that, children will not be able to see sin as serious. It just won’t ever get to the point where sin is ugly and outrageous, because they haven’t schooled themselves on the penalty for sin, namely hell — that they will not see it as a great and horrible offense against God. Fearing hell is a golden opportunity for bringing our children into the light concerning the horrible darkness of sin.
3. The fear of hell is a golden opportunity to bring the child to an awareness of the reality and justness of God’s final judgment. This is a great and central biblical teaching that all human beings will stand before God to give an account of their lives someday. Hebrews 9:27, “Just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment.”
What a gift for a child to grow up deeply convinced that the whole world will face judgment someday. This will give seriousness to the child’s life. Parents worry far too much that their children will be unhappy in the fear of judgment when they ought to worry that their children will be happy with no fear of judgment. Hell is a golden opportunity to bring children into the light and the reality of God’s final judgment.
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Don’t run away from this opportunity. Don’t miss this golden moment of using the fear of hell as a means of clarifying and establishing the truth of 1) a great and glorious God, 2) a horrible nature of sin, 3) the reality and justice of future judgment, 4) the greatness of the cross and Christ’s rescue from hell, and 5) the glory of a fearless life of faith.
Good men, God-fearing men are very very important. We all heard “cut off the head”, right?!?! The enemy knows this so he makes it a point to destroy relationships between man and woman. Satan hates the man that knows not only to protect the woman from the dangers of the natural world but also from the more dangerous supernatural world. These men are rare, the ones that lead families etc. in the ways of God. They’re on another level placed there by their continued submission to God. Promoted by God for His glory. So that woman must get on his level. Not the level he put himself on but the level God is placing him on. Samson was messing with females that weren’t on his level and it cost him his life and anointing. The woman can’t jump ship when the trials and tests hit the home. She shouldn’t tell the man to “curse God and die” like Job’s wife did, because she blames him for all the drama and pain in her life, yet he was blindsided by it all too. A woman that submits to God and a man of God will be honored by her husband. He will brag on her at the gates, lol. God created an order, a structure. Women say they want good men but for some reason they keep throwing their lures in the same wrong pond(club, bar etc). Murky water! God’s pond crystal clear but get your level up ladies by seeking Him and He just might grant you access to peaceful waters.
— EmJay, Seeking His Kingdom, A Word to the Ladies From EmJay, April 25, 2017
How are godly women to win their disobedient husband? By being in subjection to them without a word while they (their husbands) behold your chaste conversation coupled with fear (1 Peter 3:2). This “coupled with fear” stood out to me recently so I went to the commentaries to figure out what this meant.
Pulpit Commentary: “The close connection with the word ‘chaste, and the parallel passage, Ephesians 5:33 (‘the wife see that she reverence her husband’), make it probable that the fear here inculcated is reverence for the husband – an anxious avoidance of anything that might even seem to interfere with his conjugal rights and authority.”
Most husbands can only dream of having a wife who feared them in this way! Unfortunately, the majority of wives today have no desire to fulfill their husband’s “conjugal rights” or allow him to be the “authority” in their homes. What are conjugal or marriage rights? Conjugal rights would include not depriving their husbands of sexual intimacy since this is a strong need that the majority of men have and their wives are commanded to fulfill it according to the Word. It also includes treating their husbands with respect and reverence. Wives are to be their husband’s help meet and take good care of their children and home as well. Godly wives will want to do these things for their husbands and do their best to obey their husbands in everything!
Included in this list of conjugal rights of a husband as a godly wife, would be to build her home up instead of tearing it down with her own hands. Part of building her home up would be pursuing peace within her home. Most husbands don’t want to fight with their wives. They also want well-disciplined children who are pleasurable to be around.
“Coupled with fear; with reverence of their husbands, giving them due honour, and showing all proper respect; or with the fear of God, which being before their eyes, and upon their hearts, engages them to such an agreeable conversation.” (Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible)
Ultimately women, we will one day answer to God for how we treat our husbands for when we reverence and fear our husbands, we are showing reverence and fear towards God. Knowing this, we won’t argue with our husbands because when we are arguing, we are showing disrespect and are usurping our husband’s God-given authority over us. We need to be agreeing with them a lot more than we are disagreeing. If we disagree, we state our opinion once and then let it go. Hammering them over the head with our opinions all of the time is not showing them the respect they deserve.
“Fear—reverential, towards your husbands. Scrupulously pure, as opposed to the noisy, ambitious character of worldly women.” (Jamieson-Fausset)
Women of the world today are incredibly noisy. They want to be known, their voices heard, and their wants fulfilled. They march for godless principles, watch ungodly shows, and speak filth. This is opposite of what the Lord wants from us. We are to be known for having meek and quiet spirits. We rest in the Lord’s will and are at peace, not fighting for what we want but living out godly values instead. We trust the Lord to handle things so our faith becomes strong and we pray continually.
Most likely if you are living together, you are also sleeping together. But the thing is, sex is not just physical, but also spiritual. When you have sex with someone who is not your spouse, you are not only taking something from that person that isn’t yours and sinning against your own body, but you are ultimately sinning against God. He created sex to be an act of worship to Him, representing the union of a man and woman who love each other the way that God loves the church and has covenanted with her. Outside of marriage, you can’t reflect that picture; in fact, you actually defile it. So my purpose in saving my virginity is not to simply give a nice gift to my husband on my wedding night, but to please my greatest love — the Lord God who made my body and my soul.
