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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

“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.

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My wife and I have been married for fifteen years. I am on staff at a local church. We are a Christian family; we love our three children, and my wife home schools.

About a year and a half ago my wife discovered my Internet pornography problem. It devastated her, but in the following months so much more came out— frequent masturbation, an emotional affair with a woman at church, lusting over women. I looked up a woman I once believed I would marry and re-established a relationship with her on the Internet. Obviously, for my already heartbroken wife, that added significantly to the hurt, the pain, and the uncertainty for our future.

Throughout all of our married life I’ve been a very selfish man. My wife has never had my heart and in our sexual relationship she often feels treated like an object. Given such a poor relational history there’s so little for my wife to look back to as a basis upon which begin to rebuild our marriage.

I’ve not been very supportive as we have begun to struggle through this mess. At times I’ve dragged my heels about going for counseling and asking for help, and then I continued to lie to her and denied there was a problem. I have tried in my foolishness to get her to see that it is her problem because what I’m doing is not a big deal and that she just needs to get over it. When we did go for counseling at her insistence, it was pretty much pointless. I have attended some popular seminars on sexual addiction and read some books, but little has changed.

Last night we agreed that I should move out. This morning, for some reason, she’s agreed to try again.

The Wife’s Perspective

We have never had a good marriage. He has treated me like a sex object, kept me out of his life, isn’t a spiritual leader in our home and is pretty self-centered. I caught him looking at Internet pornography about a year and a half ago. I was crushed, but had no idea of the depth of the problem. Several months later I realized he was lusting at women, even in church.

I can’t get straight answers to my questions, and he makes me feel like I don’t even have the right to ask them. On the other hand, not knowing everything he’s doing is killing me on the inside. He told me he didn’t have a problem, that all the problems in our sexual relationship and marriage were my fault. It’s so easy for him to defend his actions and not care about me. He has repeatedly looked me in the eye and lied to me about his pornography problem. He constantly masturbates, has tried to have an affair and even looked up his old high school girlfriend on the Internet. I’m scared to death that there is more. He tells me that he hasn’t had sexual relations with anyone since we married, but I’m not sure that I believe him. He tells me he loves me and is sorry. I don’t know what is true or untrue.
We tried counseling and he has attended a seminar for men who struggle with sexual addiction but nothing is working.

I hate the thought of divorcing, but I also can’t bear the thought of living like this any longer. One minute I’m doing okay, and the next minute I’m bawling my eyes out and trying to hide from the kids so they don’t ask what’s wrong.

¹ The above article is a true to life situation typical of hundreds of couples who have come to Stone Gate in the last sixteen years. It is a composite of a real situation and any resemblance to people living or dead is coincidental.

There is no biblical prohibition that refers specifically to masturbation, and because of that fact there are a number of Christian leaders who endorse the practice. They assume that the practice is morally neutral, neither right nor wrong, but simply allowed when better forms of sex are not available. It is frequently recommended as a technique in cases of sexual dysfunction. In any consideration of endorsing the behavior, take into account whether the person(s) have decided to abandon biblical authority and create a new approach to sexual morality based on feelings, intentions and satisfying lustful desires. Second, consider whether the practice conflicts with biblical thinking on sexual morality. Third, carefully consider God’s design for sex. Fourth, ask yourself if you are more interested in justifying a behavior that you are unwilling to give up than seeking the complete will of God for your life. Fifth, seriously consider the following scriptures:

• “But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provisions for the flesh, to gratify its desires” (Romans 13:14).
• “Do not be conformed to the world” but rather “be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Romans 12:2)
• “. . . to abstain from the passions of the flesh” because they “wage war against your soul” (1 Peter 2:11).
• Belonging to Christ, we have “crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Galatians 5:24).

We are urged to “walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do” (Galatians 5:16-17).

In any discussion of masturbation, we must always consider God’s design for sex. God designed sex to be exclusive with another person of the opposite sex, a wife or husband. God designed sex to be profound, which masturbation is not; it is shallow. God made sex to be fruitful, but masturbation treats sex like a commodity rather than a capacity for producing life. God made sex to be selflessly God-centered, not self-centered and self-satisfying. God made sex to be complementary, joining a husband and wife in an expression of one flesh union.

Masturbation refers directly to the practice by which a person brings himself or herself to orgasm without anyone else involved. Male or female passions are aroused by the person themselves. It is non-relational, same-sex arousal, and same-sex fulfillment. Imagining a heterosexual relationship does not make the reality heterosexual. While not as serious a violation of God’s design as physical adultery, or prostitution or even sexual immodesty, it is still outside the biblical pattern and something to be avoided in order to be living consistently with the will of God and abstaining from sexual immorality (1 Thess. 4:3).

In summary, solitary self-stimulated sex should be considered wrong because:

• Sex is a part of a personal relationship with another person; masturbation is non-relational.
• Sex is to be exclusive; masturbation typically involves sexually impure thoughts.
• Sex is to be special and intimate; masturbation is frequent and shallow.
• Sex is to be fruitful (productive) in that man is designed to enter a woman and to create, both at a relational and reproductive level; masturbation treats sex like a commodity to be consumed.
• Sex is to take place within the context of selfless love; masturbation is designed to satisfy oneself.
• Sex is multi-dimensional; masturbation separates the physical from everything else.
• Sex is to be complementary; masturbation is non-unitive.