In the old days when boys and girls made out in the back seat of the car, parents were afraid the girl would lose her reputation or become pregnant. Today, boys and girls are sexting; sending, sharing, and trading pictures of their private parts. They not only watch porn, they also star in their own homemade porn videos. Boys think girls should look and behave like porn stars. In the relational and sexual world of today, young girls are being asked to write their names on their breasts and send pictures. If that isn’t horrifying enough, one twelve-year-old girl reported that, “If boys want oral sex, they will ask every single day until you say yes.” The reputation isn’t to be pure, but be sexy and boast of how and when you lost your virginity. Kids today don’t need to worry about pregnancy because they are having oral sex more often than intercourse, but with many more partners.

Fundamental to helping your children is to establish a spiritually, relationally, and sexually mature marriage. If there is a lack of maturity in any of those three areas, please get help. You can consider attending one of your Biblical Intensive Counseling Workshops in Wisconsin. If you have any questions about your particular situation, call and speak with Dr. Schaumburg personally.

Every parent, grandparent and church elder must address the problem by becoming more involved with their children and youth. Do you know what your kids are doing with their cell phones? Think about your kids; think about your grandkids. Talk to them. As their parent, you must be their primary resource about all relational and sexual issues. Earn their trust to talk about anything and everything sexual and relational. The spiritual, relational, and sexual immaturity of adults is costing the next generation their spiritual, relational, and sexual maturity.

As a follow up, read:
Raising Kids in a Pornified Culture

Secular counseling, and some Christian counseling, would describe the loss of control as the brain forming a new compulsive “bad habit,” a “disorder of compulsive relief seeking,” or an addiction. A bad habit is defined as “repeated reward-seeking despite negative consequences.” The entire process is seen strictly as a function of the brain with little or no willpower to change the bad habit. I asked Dr. Brian E. King, an expert in Applied Biopsychology who has conducted research on the biological factors that affect habits, “Why do you believe that everything we do is caused by the brain?” His answer was a quick matter-of-fact response: “What else is there?” My follow up question: So the brain is the only logical explanation as to why we do what we do?” He answered my question with a question: “Why are you continuing to ask me the same question? If you are implying a metaphysical cause, I can’t help you, I’m not a philosopher.”

Actually, I was implying a biblical explanation. Biblically, there is more to the process of loss of self-control. The Bible doesn’t give us scientific explanations for human behavior, but it does tell us the cause. As Bible believers, we can’t start or end with brain functioning as the only explanation for everything we do. What causes anyone to move from a sinful thought to a sinful behavior? “For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery” (Mark 7:21). The heart, not the brain, is seriously committed to our own well being, but primarily in a selfish way. Sexual sin, such as heart or physical adultery, is an automatic response to what the heart perceives will improve well being by bringing immediate increased benefit with less effort and without the fear of rejection than sexual intimacy with a spouse. Thus, temptation may come from any man or woman who makes an offer of benefit you can’t resist.

Minors often frequent chat rooms, and they can facilitate illegal sexual contact. Joe started looking at pornography at age 10. Married at age 21, the struggle continued and he eventually got involved in sexual chatting online. The offer of sex with a sixteen-year-old was too good an offer to turn down. Rather than being met by a teenager, Joe had a rendezvous with a female police officer. He is now serving a prison term, separated from his wife and children. Lust is more dangerous than we like to think!

Here is the real danger. You turn and look at a woman or man with lustful intent. You assume that no one knows what you are doing or thinking. Your spouse doesn’t know; no one around you knows; but you know that the intent of the look was direct and specific. You know what is on your mind. We also know what our Lord taught about lust. “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matt. 5:27, 28; see Col. 3:5). God is watching you! Lust in a digital world is being carefully watched by God. He sees the most dexterous and sensitive finger of your hand as you point, click or tap. He watches your every move; your eyes, your thoughts, your genitals, and your heart! Simply refraining from physical adultery does not fulfill the law of God. This is the real danger! Wanting sex with a minor makes you a criminal; but wanting sex with someone other than your spouse is unlawful in God’s court, and that unlawfulness is on the inside even when you don’t get caught. Lust is not just thinking about sex with the wrong person, it is eternally suicidal. “Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality . . . will inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor. 6:10).

The opportunity of either seeing a live person or an image on the Internet is not the problem. The opportunity to look is external; the real problem of lust is internal. The “lustful intent” is more than sexual desire or appeal. The real problem is the desire that comes from within. Self-indulgent lust is difficult to control when the opportunity for more benefit, with less effort, comes along in the form of a person.

God intended that mature, meaningful, consistent, God glorifying sexual relations in marriage provide protection against temptation and lack of self-control (see 1 Cor. 7:1-6). But you can defile your marriage bed with the “passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God” (1 Thess. 4:5). The process of learning to make love takes time, thought, experience and spiritual and relational maturity. Too few Christian couples take the time or make the commitment. The wanting in lust, in marriage or out of marriage, is always about getting what we want, when we want it, and how we want it. Such self-indulgence must be replaced with what God wants in the marriage bed and out of the marriage bed!

Here is the biblical principle: Live to get what you want, and you will serve the god of self, but you will not be able to control your desires. “God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity . . . (Rom. 1:24). Paul repeats the point two more times, “God gave them up” (vs. 26, 28). God giving them up to sin, to no longer control their sinful desires, is a result of idolatry. Lust is neither a sexual addiction, nor a disease or merely brain functioning. Lust is a sinful rebellion that refuses to make God the center of all existence. The lack of self-control is brought by the refusal to honor the Creator as God.

The giving up to sin is a result of idolatry. Verse 24 is part of a paragraph that started with “For the wrath of God” (vs. 18). Only He knows the timing of His wrath, as unrepentant sinners are by that wrath carried away by their own lust into a bottomless pit of vile passions. God deals with sexual sins, like all sinners, by abandoning them to their own desires as a discipline action that might lead to repentance. God’s intervention is to smite in order to heal. “Striking and healing, and they will return to the Lord, and he will listen to their pleas for mercy and heal them” (Isaiah 19:22).

Psychologists like Dr. Brian E. King, by observing human behavior, strongly believes that it is extremely difficult to change a bad habit by willpower once it is formed in the brain. The observation is correct, but it is not the brain but the heart that is hard to change. Who can deliver us? Thank God that He can change the heart through Jesus Christ our Lord! I have great hope for a man like Joe, as I do for anyone who learns through the discipline of the Lord to be obedient. Six years is a long time, but six years in prison is less than a millisecond compared to all eternity. “But he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it” (Heb. 12:10b, 11). Lord Jesus, show your mercy to thousands, and tens of thousands more!

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Lot’s wife had the one of the best spiritual opportunities and powerful experiences of her day. Her uncle by marriage was Abraham, a godly man whom God used to rescue her when she was taken hostage. She was married to a godly man. She had the experience of seeing angels who came to rescue her from the wrath of God. Yet in the end she died without regret for her attitude. She lived for what she wanted in life, not God’s will. She never understood what it meant to “set your mind on things that are above, not on earthy things” (Col. 3:2). I would suggest that there are many people in the Church today just like Lot’s wife.

Lot’s wife was not a murderer or an adulteress, which when the Law of God was eventually given to Moses, required the death penalty. Her one sin is a disturbingly simple act; she “looked back.” The looking was nothing in and of itself. In reality, it revealed the condition of a heart secretly enamored with the world. The question we must carefully ask ourselves: “What is in my heart when it comes to worldliness?”

We see the progression so often as a child grows into adulthood. They start out faithfully saying their nightly prayers. As a teenager they are active in the youth group, memorizing scripture and going on missions trips. Early indications of a potential problem are innocent indulgences: heavily involved in sports, video games, texting their friends and interest in the opposite sex. In adulthood, their spirituality is lite. Their passions become a good education, a successful career, a fulfilling marriage, more money, more rewards, etc. Is there a bigger problem below the surface? On the one hand their faithful church attendance looks like they are walking away from sin as Lot’s wife walked away from Sodom. Notice carefully those around you, and you may see that they have looked back. We must also look at ourselves. “Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves . . .” (2 Cor. 13:5). You can be alive one moment, a flesh and blood breathing human being, and instantly become a “pillar of salt.” The image is a hopeless, worthless state; the reality is lost in hell. Suddenly there is no opportunity to repent. Don’t believe what others say, “God is too merciful to punish anyone eternally.” Jesus says, “Remember Lot’s wife.” “Repent or perish” (Luke 13:3, 5).

Paul was driven to tears over the people he knew that “walk as enemies of the cross of Christ” (Phil. 3:18). He describes them as having “minds set on earthly things” (vs. 19). No one in their right mind would choose to be an enemy of the cross of Christ. The choice is more benign; a heart, a mind, and then more than a look, but a life set on earthly things. We must save ourselves from the great delusion of a spiritual life that fails to go far enough and is always seeking to find its self among the dead things of the world.

Likely Paul was remembering Lot’s wife when he said, “The appointed time has grown very short. From now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away” (1 Cor. 7:29-31). The scriptures consistently instruct us to always live each day believing that Christ’s can come at any unforeseen moment. We must prioritize human relationships, material possessions, and worldly dealings.

John warns us of being devoted to a system that is opposed to God. “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If any one loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and the pride of possessions, is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever” (1 John 2:15-17).

What does it look like when the will of God is first, not television, not the Internet, not your iPod, not your hobbies, not your finances, or not your manner of dress? Do we even know? Any discussion of these and other issues begins with the heart, not legalistic restrictions and enforced rules. Getting to the heart of the matter is challenging, but this is where is begins. Can others around you tell you apart from your unconverted neighbors or coworkers? If there is little or no difference, maybe you have already looked back. Jesus’ warning is an expression of His mercy, designed to protect us. Let’s remember Lot’s wife!

The Bible holds the office of elder in high esteem. Whoever desires to be a pastor has set his heart on a noble task because it involves the oversight of God’s people through ruling and teaching. To do the job requires not only knowledge and wisdom, but also a well-guarded heart, for danger lurks in the elevated pedestal of recognition. It is here that sexual sin is most subtle and appears eminently reasonable.

Pastor Tom is a typical example. He was a pastor for more than 25 years when he began an affair with his secretary. He told me in counseling that while sexually involved with another woman he could still preach against adultery, counsel others to stop an affair, and then tell himself that God didn’t care if he was unfaithful to his wife because the church was growing. Such thinking is unreasonable, arrogant, and just plain foolish. Yet this story points to an occupational hazard for everyone who holds the office of pastor.

Why is such a high office so prone to sexual sin and therefore so dangerous?

It is true that sexual sin is pandemic in the culture, but the greatest danger of entering into temptation is within the four walls of the church building. With more than 50% of the congregation struggling with cybersex and new studies indicating that it is increasingly a female problem, the danger is real. On any given Sunday, how many sitting in the pew are truly spiritually and sexually mature? How many men and women routinely engage in heart adultery towards the opposite sex; even towards the man in the pulpit?

Some years ago a woman came to Colorado to see me for counseling. She shared her little secret about how she enjoyed visiting with her pastor because he always gave her a hug. She went on to explain that she went home and sexually fantasized about him and comforted herself. As I ended a rather painful counseling session, she asked me for a hug. If I had been ignorant of her sinful pattern I might have thought it was merely a caring gesture. I gently explained why a hug would never be a part of our counseling. Pastors need to think of Christian fellowship as an unseen danger. In looking with lustful intent, some have already committed adultery with the pastor during the worship service.

So we must take careful heed, for the pulpit offers neither shield nor immunity from any form of sexual sin. In fact, I think that most preachers are more vulnerable than their parishioners. Pastors are constantly bombarded with sexual temptations, yet we prefer to ignore the danger signs.

Ralph was a young pastor, preaching three services each Sunday morning in a church that had grown from a dozen to thousands. In his overwork he justified

neglecting his wife for the work of God, and continuing his life-long struggle with pornography. It started at age 11, looking at his Dad’s secret stash of porn magazines. Now it regularly involved looking at sexual images on his laptop and iPhone. Eventually this lead to sexual chats and then a sexual liaison with a woman across town. Today, fewer affairs start in the counseling office.

Rather, they begin online, where physical and emotional relationships easily develop. The tragedy is that such dalliances are avoidable.

In decades of counseling hundreds of pastors dealing with the fallout of unfaithfulness, I have learned a lot about sexual sin, but one thing stands out in my mind: In ministry, unfaithfulness is an occupational hazard. If a pastor understands this hazard he will be better prepared to avoid disaster.

First, each man called to ministry must fully understand the occupational hazards related to internal corruption. The root problem is not your family of origin, but original sin. Spiritual and sexual maturity requires that we “put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry” (Colossians 3:5, italics added). Internet filters, avoiding counseling a woman alone, and taking your wife on trips out of town are helpful but they don’t address the reality of sin. If we only set boundaries we are only looking at the problem through the eyes of reason. Sexual temptation always makes one’s thinking unpredictable, uncontrollable and irrational because it comes out of the heart, not just from the object of lust. If the life of God indwelling you does not rule the heart, the sin within will kill the life of God in you, while maintaining a public image of spiritual maturity. While it is the pastor’s duty to help others mortify the power of indwelling sin, it is the failure to do so in one’s own heart that creates the greatest danger to the servant of God. Lose this battle, and you could lose the war within.

Second, each man called to ministry must fully understand the occupational hazard as it relates to the pedestal. The more public your ministry and the more esteemed your preaching, the more dangerous and effective the schemes of our enemy. There are two natural elements that are accentuated in public ministry. First is arrogance in finding satisfaction in self rather than the glory of God. This is a deadly poison. It will ultimately kill your ministry and your life. Right along with arrogance comes natural abilities, gifts and accomplishments that we allow to feed the soul more than the Word of God. Both of these elements are a setup to engage in risky thoughts and behaviors, believing all the time that you can get away with it. How in the world did Ted Haggard think he could conceal his identity from a male prostitute?

Third, each man called to ministry must fully understand the occupational hazard as it relates to relationships. The pulpit is a lonely place. Pastoring is more than a full-time job and the pastor’s wife and family are easily neglected. Ask yourself, “How do I handle the compliments from women?” A woman with a compliment and a need for attention is a force that doubles the temptation. Know this fact, that such an object immediately excites lust lying dormant in the heart. Don’t go near this door of opportunity; let your wife’s evaluation of you as a man be the only one that counts.

Given these hazards in ministry, we need to become actively aware of the issues, challenges, and have an effective prevention strategy to avoid being caught in this web of consuming desire and destruction. I strongly believe that to be sexually mature you must be spiritually mature, and to be spiritually mature you must be sexually mature. In other words, don’t separate your sexuality from your spirituality, nor your spirituality from your sexuality. Prevention is possible when we recognize that everything we do in ministry relationally and sexually must point to one purpose, the glory of God. Our entire motivation is to be set on fire for life by the driving desire for the glory of God. If ministry and relationships have that one purpose, then our masculine sexuality will serve that one purpose with all women, including our wives. It is not about me! It is about God! When we truly grasp that reality, ministry, relationships, and sex are in the service of God, for the glory of God. When pastors hear that calling, and maintain it, their lives can become imbued with a vision that guides them personally and in ministry.

Source: Challies.com

We would all agree that a “sex addict” is controlled by evil desires. More accurately, a sexual sinner is control by what they want. What about the rest of us? Paul said “we all once lived in the passion of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind” (Eph. 2:3). All of us, whatever our family of origin, have this same influential sinful background. We all lived in the passion of our flesh, doing what we wanted. That is, we were controlled by what we wanted. The biblical view is that sin comes from within. Past events may trigger sin, but they don’t create the triggers. We are internally driven by a commitment to carry out our own desires. The desires that controlled us were the desires of the body and the mind. The truth is that those who are not really following Christ are controlled by what they want. Outwardly a Christian, there is no change from the inside out, just a level of external conformity!

Every man wants respect. That desire is often expressed in having a successful career or ministry. Is he controlled by what he wants? Our true motives are not a deep mystery. Wrong motives and desires will never bear the fruit of righteousness. There will be bad fruit exhibited in handling competition, criticism, neglect of wife and family, along with anger and depression. This is the fruit that indicates that the man is controlled by what he wants.

The problem of unfaithfulness also illustrates my point. Betrayal and deception always go together when a spouse is unfaithful. No longer wanting to be deceived, a wife, discovering her husband’s unfaithfulness, wants to know the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. She wants the honest truth, but is she controlled by what she wants?

We all have desires, but sinful desires often disguise themselves as our expectations, felt needs, goals, wishes, and longings. Legitimate desires can conceal the truth that we are ultimately controlled by what we want. When we follow the desires of the body and mind we can fall into sexual sin. But those same desires of the mind can rule a person as strongly as an “addiction.” In fact, legitimate desires for money, reputation, security, love, success, comfort, looks, career, and meaningful marriages are so subtle and deceitful that we easily justify such desires and end up being controlled by what we want.

How do we know if we are controlled by what we want? The wife wants the “honest truth.” Yet once that honest truth is told, despair often increases. “How do I know you are being fully honest with me?” “How do I know you will be honest with me in the future?” If she is being controlled by what she really wants—never to be deceived again—she will not find peace. “A sinful fear is the craving for something not to happen” (David Powlison). What is the true motive of her heart? If a wife wants her husband to change and be sexually pure in order to control her fear—getting what she really wants—she will reveal the true motive and desire of her heart by being manipulative, fearful, angry and suspicious. This is the fruit that is certain indication that she is controlled by what she wants. On the other hand, if her desire is to be faithfully loved by her husband and to have him right with God, she will reveal the “hidden person” in her heart and the “beauty of a gentle quiet spirit as she loves and respects her husband. Such beauty, with love and respect is the fruit that reveals that God is in control.

The problem in the heart isn’t that we want something. We could want something good, something bad. In either case, the core problem is that we demand to have what we want. Everyone who has been betrayed must forgive the past without attempting to control the future so that it never happens again. The desire is right, but being controlled by the desire destroys the relationship. It will put the person in a position of suspicion and fear and leave them spiritually and sexually immature.

I can hear all the objections: “What’s wrong with wanting my husband to be faithful?” There is nothing wrong with desire! No one wants pain, rejection or abandonment. What is wrong is when that desire rules you rather than God. That results in the obvious outward displays of anger, complaining, and despair. Real truth brings peace and contentment in all circumstances. True followers of Christ in difficult circumstances “walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to Him, bearing fruit in every good work” (Col. 1:10). A husband and wife in the difficult circumstances of marital unfaithfulness can, through the work of God in their hearts, come to see what rules them. They can repent and find God’s grace that brings real change from the inside out. God doesn’t take away our ability to desire. He has promised to change what we really want; to want what He wants. We can have new desires and motives that rule our hearts and dramatically change behaviors and relationships.

Recommended Resources

Radical: Taking Back Your Faith From the American Dream, by David Platt. This book is radical because it will challenge you to look at how we have manipulated the gospel to fit our needs. What does the Christian lifestyle actually look like? Pastor Platt gives sound biblical answers.

The Sovereignty of God, by Arthur W. Pink. Are you confused about the sovereignty of God? This doctrine is so “diametrically opposed to the natural pride of the human heart” we need to by faith develop it in our hearts as a sound doctrine and then live responsible lives.

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“Grotesque schizophrenia” – That famous comment on American churches of the 1940’s came from Sayid Qt’b, a leading Muslim radical and one of Osama bin Laden’s favorite writers. He was not describing today’s churches, but the “white picket fence” congregations that he saw in Colorado long before the seismic sixties had left their mark. Twenty years later, Theodore Roszak described the Californian churches similarly as “privately engaging but publicly irrelevant,” a historian’s rendering of the schizophrenia the devout Muslim scorned, and which social scientists had long called the “privatization” of religion in the modern Western world.

Devoted followers of Christ can only wince. At the heart of our faith is an insistence on Christ’s lordship over all of life. Yet each of these observations describes something that is lethal to faith as well as shameful: a failure to integrate faith and life that is a betrayal of Jesus and a body-blow to the integrity and effectiveness of faith. Yet no enemy and no hostile philosophy have done this damage. We have done it to ourselves by conforming to the shape of the modern world and failing to be transformed.

This subtle but profound form of worldliness underscores how the modern world has done more damage to the church than all the persecutors in history – seducing us and shaping us even as we enjoy its blessings. And it needs to be taken seriously by all Christian pastors and leaders concerned with winning back the West today. Despite a band of voices speaking out on this issue over the last generation, and a large body of literature confirming it, a full realization of the scale and source of Christian captivity has still not sunk in for many.

Privatization, of course, is only one of many examples of the distortions of faith under the impact of the modern world. Earlier, when the first observers began to realize how much faith was changing under modern conditions, they concentrated on three major trends – secularization, privatization, and pluralization – and discussion has raged ever since on what has really happened and why. Some advocates of secularization, for example, used it as a cover for secularism, and their predictions that religion would disappear have proved monumentally wrong.

But we cannot dismiss the observation too lightly. While religion has not disappeared, it has been seriously distorted even where it is numerically strong – as in the United States. Secularization theory is accurate in seeing how faith in the modern world has virtually lost touch with the supernatural and become preoccupied almost completely with the saeculum, the “here and now” of this present age — which is why so many evangelicals are virtually atheists unawares or practicing atheists.

Today, under the conditions of the advanced modern world, the damage to religion is expressed somewhat differently – in describing the fateful shifts from community to individualism, from authority to preference, and from exclusiveness to syncretism. Take the second, for example. Instead of faith being decisive and authoritative, it has lost what Karl Barth called its “binding address.” The once-automatic link between belief and behavior has been eroded, and faith now operates as a preference. How else are we to explain a troubling fact? Never have evangelical statements of biblical authority and inerrancy been higher and clearer, yet never has evangelical behavior on the ground been more lax and corrupt. Indeed, in some areas evangelicals are approaching a meltdown of true Christian behavior.

This modern equivalent of what Luther called “the Babylonian captivity” of the church can be analyzed in various ways. But the implications are as important as the individual cases. Let me state four plainly.

First, the deepest problem of the Western church is the Western church. It is not the fact of external rivals, enemies, or traitors, however many or serious they may be in any of our societies. The religious right, among others, has been seriously off the mark on this point.

Second, the greatest captivity of the Western church is the shaping power of “modernity” – the entire spirit and system of the modern industrialized, globalized world. In other words, our challenge is not just intellectual but institutional, and the current vogue for concentrating on a more consistent Christian worldview is a massive case of missing the point. It is not alien worldviews that have done us in, and we will not regain strength solely by recovering a clear Christian worldview. Poor though our “thinking Christianly” is, it is our living, not our thinking that is the deepest problem.

Third, because of the nature of our Western problem, we cannot take refuge in the spectacular growth of the church in the global South. Real, utterly remarkable, and heartening though this growth is, the global South is almost entirely pre-modern. In other words, their challenge is still to come, and they are little help in tackling the core of ours. Our challenge, which will be one day theirs too, is to recover the lordship of Christ over the whole of life with such integrity and effectiveness that we become the first faith in the modern world not only to survive but prevail.

Fourth, it is utterly futile to attempt to escape the captivity of modernity by using only the keys offered us by modernity. “All truth is God’s truth,” and the Lord himself commanded the Israelites to “plunder the Egyptian gold,” though not to set up a Golden Calf. But never has it been more urgent to follow Hudson Taylor’s counsel to do “the Lord’s work in the Lord’s way,” and not in the world’s latest way — or as the church growth movement trumpeted, “on new grounds.” We have a problem in our reality, not just our image and perception, and our real need is reformation, not “re-branding.”

Let no one be beguiled by numerical growth, or political influence, or national power and prosperity. The modern world represents both the greatest opportunity and the greatest challenge the church has faced since the apostles. If ever there was a time to “let God be God” in reality and power, in our lives and not just our words, it is today. But that of course is the central cry of reformation as well as all true disciples.

© 2006 Os Guinness. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction of this article without permission is prohibited.