The Ten Commandments ~ You shall not bear false witness

As we have been studying the 10 Commandments we have seen that in many of them there really is no grey area in how we define them. When God says don’t steal, he means – don’t steal, but this particular commandment about bearing false witness raises many questions about what God is specifically talking about here and what God wants from us in general. In a very strict sense, this commandment is about giving truthful and accurate testimony in a court of law. When this commandment was given, the legal system was based completely upon the eyewitness testimony of others. Moses and the people of Israel didn’t live in the CSI world we do today where we use DNA evidence, fingerprints and all kinds of forensic data to determine someone’s guilt or innocence. Coming up with a verdict and dispensing justice depended solely upon the testimony of the people involved and so the only way true justice could be served is if people told the truth. So again, just as we saw last week with stealing, the social fabric of Israel required trust and trust is based in speaking the truth, so in courts of law – people needed to tell the truth.


So giving accurate testimony in a court of law is what the commandment specifically talks about, but since Jesus always looked at the spirit of the law not the letter of the law, we have to ask ourselves what God is really looking for in this commandment. Is God only interested in the truth being told in a courtroom or does he want truth to be told in the living room and the bedroom and the boardroom and the classroom? Clearly I think God is interested in truth being spoken everywhere, so we need to confront the tendency we have to not always tell the truth.

The truth is, no pun intended here, but the truth is that we live in a society where lying abound and because they are all around us and because they often easily flow from within us, we have become desensitized to them. From politics to business to advertising to parenting we are surrounded by lies and we have gotten so accustomed to hearing them and telling them that we don’t even expect people to tell us the truth. In an article called The Great American Lies, Doug Mushro shares his top 10 list:

10. I’ll start my diet tomorrow
9. Money cheerfully refunded
8. Give me your number and the doctor will call you right back
7. One size fits all.
6. This will hurt me more than it will hurt you.
5. It’s not the money, it’s the principle
4. I just need a minute of your time
3. This offer is limited to the first 100 people.
2. We service what we sell.
1. The check is in the mail.

Now we could all add to this list our own personal favorites, but what this list begins to show us is that we hear lies all the time and don’t even think about it – which leads us to fall into the temptation of lying ourselves. When it pervades our culture, it begins to penetrate our hearts. There are so many different ways that we lie, we lie when we exaggerate the truth, omit facts, spin events to make us look good or others look bad, tell half truths, or deny to ourselves what is really going on. Even though this commandment specifically talks about a court of law, it also works to open our eyes to how pervasive and destructive lying is and how we need to ask God to help us become people who speak and embody the truth.

While we may not take lying seriously, we need to understand that God does. Look with me at Proverbs 6:16-19. This is a powerful passage because it outlines 7 things that God simply can not tolerate and 2 of those 7 things are lying: a lying tongue and a lying witness. A lying witness tells us that God is concerned about truth in a court of law, but when he says a lying tongue – God is taking it farther. While God does hate a witness who testifies falsely because it breaks down the legal system which weakens society, God also hates a lying tongue wherever it is. God takes lying seriously and the reason is because God is truth. 1 John 1:5 says God is light and in him there is no darkness at all, so in God there is no deceit and there are no lies so when we lie we separate ourselves from God.

We need to take this commandment seriously and to do that we first need to admit all the ways that we do lie. If there are big lies that we have told that need to be corrected – we need to set the record straight and trust that when we tell the truth - the truth will set us free. Look at John 8:31-33

While this talking about the freedom that comes when we know Jesus, I think we can also take from this that telling the truth will also set us free. If you have ever told a lie you know the bondage that comes with that lie. As soon as the lie is spoken, we literally become slaves to the lie and many times have to continue to lie to protect the first lie that we told. I shared last week about stealing candy, so this week let me tell you about the lie. My sister and I were in Jr. High and since both my parents worked we each had a key to get into the house after-school, but one day we both forgot our keys and ended up locked out. There was a window on the second floor was open and we could easily reach the window from the roof of the garages, so we got out the ladder, climbed on the roof, crawled in the second story window, unlocked the door, put away the ladder and pretended like nothing was wrong.

When my Dad got home from work he noticed that the ladder was not put away exactly the way he always did it and so he wondered who moved it. Now just a note to teenagers here – your parents notice these things. You may think that you have put something back exactly as it was after you used it, but trust me, parents notice everything so you might as well tell them the truth from the beginning. I wish someone had given my sister and I that advice, but they didn’t so when my Dad asked my Mom about the ladder and she didn’t knowing anything she asked us about it and we lied. Nope, we didn’t get out the ladder, don’t know what happened to it. But once we told that lie we had to keep the lie going as more questions were asked. We became slaves to the lie.

After a while, my Mom decided to go ask our neighbors if they saw anyone using our ladder and I knew that if we didn’t come clean at this point we would be in deeper trouble, so I caught my Mom before she got to the neighbors and told her what we had done. Now here’s the thing, we didn’t get in trouble for using the ladder; we got in trouble for lying and while the punishment wasn’t fun – I have to say that there was freedom in coming clean.

Once a lie is told you have to keep it going, often making up more stories, adding more false details and eventually we become slaves to the lie – when we tell the truth we are set free. There may be consequences to coming clean, but there is also freedom. If there are lies that we need to admit to and confess – we need to do it and trust that in time the truth will set us free. If nothing else, the truth will set us free to go deeper in our relationship with God.

So clearly we need to stop telling flat out lies, that’s easy to see, but there are many more subtle ways we don’t tell the complete truth and we need to guard against these as well. For example, many times we lie by simply only telling part of the truth and I believe that we are particularly prone to this type of lying because it has been part of our world from the very beginning. Once again, let’s go back to the story of creation, the serpent was questioning Eve about their ability to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and the serpent said, you will not die if you eat from the tree, which technically was true. When Adam and Eve ate from that tree they didn’t immediately drop over dead? No, so in some sense that serpent was right, but while they didn’t physically die in that moment – they did die spiritually. Their disobedience and sin severed their relationship with God which in time led to their death. So the serpent was lying by telling a half truth, but as we see from Adam and Eve, half truths are just as deadly.

What we see here is that from the very beginning of creation, half truths have been told and the result has been broken relationships with God and with those around us which means that we need to take seriously our tendency to think it is ok to only tell half of the truth. Whether that half truth is omitting some of the facts or spinning the truth to make us look good or others look bad, we need to be careful about half truths. It’s better to be silent or speak the full truth in love than to try and deceive someone by only telling half of the truth.

Denial is another destructive way we lie because it is lying to ourselves. We see the destructive nature of denial when it comes to addictions or problems in our live that we just don’t want to face. As long as we deny that we have problems with alcohol or gambling, we will never get the help that we need to overcome these addictions. As long as we deny that our marriage is in trouble or that our temper gets the best of us, or our family is in crisis – we will never get the help we need to experience the joy and life of healthy relationships. Again, we see that our denial, or lying to ourselves, only leads to bondage – but telling the truth to ourselves while painful, is the only way we can be set free.

Exaggerating is another subtle lie that can become habit forming. We might exaggerate how bad things are to get pity or how good things are out of pride, but both are subtle ways of lying that at the very least we need to guard against. In Matthew 5:37 Jesus says… and in James 5:12 God says… Both these passages show us that exaggeration can lead us away from God.

So we see how bad lying is and maybe we are at a place where we really want to stop, but how do we? The first step in living our lives within the boundary of this commandment is to admit the ways in which we have lied or are prone to lie. We have to identify the problem before we can overcome it, but once we admit it, how do we overcome our tendency to stretch the truth or to outright lie? The answer to telling the truth is to stay close to the one who is the truth. Any landscaper will tell you that the best way to get the weeds out of your yard is to grow healthy grass. The best way to stop lying is to live lives of truth and we do that by staying close to the one who told us that he is the truth – and that is Jesus Christ. The Bible is clear that not only is Jesus the truth but that Satan is the father of lies. In John 8:44 Jesus says this of the devil, when he lies he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. If our words or our life is defined by lies then we need to think about who it is that is giving direction to our words and more importantly who it is that is giving direction to our hearts, and if we want to turn this around we need Jesus who is Truth himself, dwelling within us.

I don’t about you, but these 10 Commandments are causing me to come face to face with the reality of my failure and sin, and this commandment causes us to look at how easy it is to compromise the truth, and while part of the answer isn’t to just stop telling lies, another part is to open our ears and our hearts to hear God’s truth. Can we hear this truth today:

The truth – Jesus Christ – shall set you free.
As far as the east is from the west, so far has God removed our sin from us.
God says, I have loved you with an everlasting love.
If God is for us, who can be against us.

It’s hearing and accepting this kind of truth that sets us free, and once we are free and living in the light – the darkness has no choice but to flee. So let us take hold of the truth of God’s forgiveness and grace, and take hold of The Truth – Jesus Christ - and allow God to first and foremost set us free and then direct our heart and our tongues into truth.

The Ten Commandments ~ You shall not steal

I remember clearly the night I came home from church after working at our afterschool program in Altoona. It was close to 9:00 and after I pulled into the garage, which was underneath the house, I noticed that the door to the basement was open. Now this wasn’t a big deal since the wind often blew the door open, but when I got to the bottom of the stairs that led to the kitchen I was surprised to see the kitchen door open, that was almost never the case so I felt the anxiety build as I climbed the stair. When I stepped into the kitchen, everything was fine. When I stepped into the dining room – everything was fine and when I walked into the living room – everything was fine. Nothing was out of place and I began to laugh at my own paranoia. Then I walked into the study to check my phone messages and that room was completely torn apart. Paper was everywhere because the printer was gone, the computer was gone, a video camera was gone and books had been pulled off the shelves. When I went into my bedroom every drawer was taken out and clothes were all over the floor and every other bedroom looked the same. I had been robbed.


When the police officer showed up and took my statement, she was very kind. The first thing she told me that I hadn’t been robbed, I had been burglarized – this didn’t comfort me too much. Then she asked me how I thought they entered into the house. At this point I remember feeling somewhat embarrassed because I had to tell her that it was really all my fault because I never closed my garage door and the door from the garage to the basement didn’t have a lock on it and the door from the basement to the kitchen didn’t have a lock so it was really my fault that I was burglarized. I will never forget what the officer said, it’s not your fault, people aren’t supposed to steal. This officer understood the eigth commandment – you shall not steal, or burglarize, or shoplift, or rob.

Most of the time when we hear this commandment we think about a burglar prowling through a home at night, or a bank robber sticking up a bank, or we think about those surveillance camera images of masked thieves holding up convenience stores or this week there videos of men purse snatching. Or we might think about someone like Bernie Madoff caught in an investment scheme or involved in an insider trading scandal. When we hear this commandment we often just think about some hardened criminal and don’t think of it as something we would never do, but I have to say that I have been amazed by some people I have known who have broken this commandment.

A good friend of mine worked at a bank for a while and she waited on two women. One woman was very wealthy and one woman had nothing. One day my friend decided to deposit some of the wealthy woman’s money into the account of the poor woman. We aren’t talking about a lot of money and she didn’t think anyone would notice – the rich woman wouldn’t miss a few dollars and the bank would never know and then the poor woman would have a few more dollars. Even though she wasn’t keeping the money for herself, she was acting as a modern day Robin Hood, she was none the less guilty of stealing and the bank did notice and my friend ended up in court and on probation and in all kinds of trouble. We all know people who have written bad checks, shoplifted something as a child or teen, taken an item from work or cheated on our taxes and all of this can be defined as stealing – so this is a command we all need to take seriously.

As with all of God’s commandments – there really is no grey area here. When God says don’t steal – he means don’t steal in any way shape or form. We are not to take things that do not belong to us and use them for our own purpose or our own pleasure and the reason we are not to do this is because it breaks down the trust that is needed for people to live in relationship with one another. For communities to be healthy we need to be able to trust our neighbors and family and friends and stealing breaks down that trust. Again, think about when God gave this commandment to his people. The people of Israel were travelling as a group through the wilderness so they didn’t have homes and storage units and safe deposit boxes and so if they were going to make it as a people into the promised land, they had depend on each other which meant they needed to be able to trust each other and stealing in any form breaks down trust.

One of the reasons we can’t gloss over this commandment and think that it will never apply to us is that for some reason we are all prone to taking things that do not belong to us. Children aren’t taught to steal and yet they do it well. I remember being in 2nd or 3rd grade and was grocery shopping with my Mom. We walked down the candy aisle and there was a bag of Starbust candy that was opened and pieces of the wrapped candy were all around. I lingered near that candy while my mom shopped and when she wasn’t looking I took a few pieces of the candy and put them in my pocket. I remember walking out of the store and being incredibly relieved that sirens didn’t go off, but I was sick about what I had done.

We went into a drug store after that and I was so overcome with guilt that again I lingered in one of the aisles by myself and when no one was looking I took the candy out of my pocket and put it on a shelf. I know it made no sense, but at least I didn’t have the evidence on me so I wasn’t going to get into trouble. Now here’s the thing, I didn’t even like Starbust candy then and today I really don’t like them – maybe because of that moment - but no one taught me how to steal and yet I did it and we can all do it because there is an urge in all of us to want more. We might want more for our own personal pleasure, or we might feel like we need more for security, or status, or to feed our addictions – people steal for all kinds of reasons - but there is an urge in all of us to want more and if we don’t have the means to buy it or if the opportunity is just too tempting – we are all prone to simply take.

We are all prone to take and the reason I say this is because if you think about it, stealing is the manifestation of the original sin. God said to Adam and Eve, you can eat from any tree in the garden except the tree of knowledge of good and evil, but when the serpent told Eve how good that fruit was and how if they ate it their eyes would be opened and they would be like God, she wanted to take it and convinced Adam to go along with her and while the sin may have been pride and a desire to be like God the sin manifested itself in stealing. So maybe there is something in all of us that still wants to take things that don’t belong to us and if that is the case, none of us can say – I have this commandment covered, we need to be on our guard at all times and in all places.

But it is not just stealing things from others that we need to guard against – Adam and Eve stole from God and maybe that is the bigger problem for us when it comes to this commandment. In Malachi 3 God accuses his people of stealing from him, look at Malachi 3:8-9. Here’s how the people were stealing from God. God made the heavens and the earth and everything in it. Psalm 24:1 says the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it. In Haggai 2:8 it says, the silver is mine, and the gold is mine, declares the Lord. So everything in this world belongs to God. Everything that we have in our possession and all that we work for doesn’t belong to us – it all belongs to God and as the owner God calls us to use his creation according to his purpose and plan and when it comes to our possessions there is one basic guideline that God calls us to follow and it is called the tithe. 10% of what we earn and what we have is to be given back to God – I say given back to God because it all belongs to him in the first place. The tithe was to be used to support the work of God in the world, to help spread the truth of God and call people to trust God, and the tithe was to be used to care for the poor and God’s people who were in need.

When the people did not bring their full tithe to the temple and give it as an offering to God – they were robbing God. When we are not willing to tithe today the same is true. When we aren’t willing to give God 10% of what he has given us we are stealing from God and the result of stealing from God isn’t just a weakened body of Christ and a limited and ineffective ministry of God in the world – the result of stealing from God is a broken relationship with God.

Remember, stealing breaks down trust, so when we steal from God it shows that we don’t trust God to provide for us and to meet our needs and in turn God can not trust us. Why would God continue to pour out his blessing and his abundance on us if he can’t trust us to use his resources according to his will and purpose?

But if God can trust us to use his creation the way he has called us to use it doesn’t it make sense that God will give us more and more of it? This is exactly what God says in Malachi 3:10-12. When we show God that he can trust us with his creation – he will give us more of that creation.

I have to tell you that I dream of the day that we take this call to tithe seriously because if we all did this, if all of God’s people did this we would be able to do so much for the mission of the church and we would be able to meet so many more needs of people both here and around the world. The tithe really adds up. 10% from all of God’s people is a huge amount of resources and it would make a radical difference in our world, but we aren’t there yet because we still struggle with this commandment, we are stealing from God and we steal because we don’t fully trust God.

But it is not too late to turn all of this around. We have seen in the past few weeks that although many of God’s people failed to keep these 10 Commandments – God forgave them and God redeemed them. God forgave murders and adulterers and then used them to build his kingdom and he did the same thing with thieves. In Luke 19 there is the story of Jesus turning around the life of a thief named Zacchaeus. Zacchaeus was a tax collector which meant that he not only collected taxes but he collected more than what was owed and he kept the excess for himself. He was stealing from the people and got rich doing it and then he met Jesus. After Zacchaeus heard the truth of God, after he received God’s forgiveness and grace he decided to live according to God’s principles and so he returned all the money he had stolen, but the story doesn’t end there. Zacchaeus doesn’t just return what he took, he gives back 4 times as much, he has been transformed from someone who only knew how to take into to someone who freely and generously gives and ultimately this is what God wants for our lives.

As children created in the image of God – God wants us to give because God gives. God gives freely, graciously and generously and that is how God wants us to live our lives. Adam and Eve got into trouble when they decided to take instead of give – Zacchaeus finds life and freedom when he decides to give instead of take and that is where life can be found for us. If we have stolen from God, from others, from our employer, from the government or from anyone we need to stop taking and start giving. It might start by giving back what we have taken and returning what we have stolen, but then we need to start living a life of giving – giving to God and to others. It’s time for us to trust God and give back to him what he asks for – the full tithe – and then thank him for all that he gives us each and every day.

The Ten Commandments ~ You shall not commit adultery

As we consider this seventh commandment, let’s remember that one of the reasons God gave the 10 commandments was to protect the bonds of relationship. The first three commandments were all given to protect our relationship with God, the command to keep the Sabbath was to protect our own health and well-being by making sure that our bodies, minds and souls get the rest they need, and the last 6 commandments were given to help protect the bonds of relationship with our family and the community around us. This particular commandment, you shall not commit adultery, is not just given to protect the bonds of marriage, but to help preserve the community as well because the family is the foundation of the community and adultery doesn’t effect just one marriage and family, but many times two or more.


So God gives this command not to keep us from having fun or to set some arbitrary moral line in the sand, God gives this command to protect the bonds of marriage and to help preserve the family. The family structure is important to God because it is the foundation on which the rest of society is built. We heard a few weeks ago that the family is the first school, the first hospital and the first church that we will all experience. We learn how to interact with the rest of society through our family so the integrity and the strength of the family is important which means that the integrity and the strength of a marriage is important and for marriages to be strong there needs to be no adultery.

To understand why adultery is so destructive we need to go back and look at what marriage is really all about. If we look at the story of creation we see that God made Adam but then said it was not good for him to be alone so he made a helper suitable for him. In Genesis 2:24 it says that a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. I’m not sure we fully understand what this one flesh means to God, but through the covenant of marriage and through the physical act of consummating the marriage through sex – two become one. Physically, emotionally but even more importantly spiritually – two people become one in the eyes and in the heart of God so when one of the partners in marriage physically unites with another person - when they commit adultery – the integrity of that bond is compromised and it creates brokenness and pain, not just physically but emotionally and spiritually as well. So the reason God says no adultery is because it weakens the bonds of marriage, which in turn weakens the strength of the family, which in turn weakens and destroys the community and society in which we live.

Now this command is pretty clear, in fact in Hebrew the command is just two words – no adultery, and adultery is defined as having sex with a person who is not your spouse and before we start trying to define what sex is so we can see just how far we can go without breaking this command, let’s add to this command the teaching of Jesus. Just like we saw last week with murder, Jesus expands our understanding of this commandment and tells us that God isn’t just concerned about our actions but about the attitudes of our heart and the thoughts of our minds because it is those two things that lead to our actions. So in Matthew 5:12 Jesus says…

This teaching of Jesus changes this commandment drastically. While before we might have felt pretty confident because we have never had an affair and cheated on our spouse, how many of us can say we have never looked with lust at another person? Suddenly we all stand guilty and condemned before God, but remember there is forgiveness for the sinner; in fact, when Jesus was confronted with a woman caught in adultery he offers forgiveness. Look at John 8:3-11. So whether we are guilty of adultery or guilty of lust – God offers forgiveness and grace and we need to hear Jesus say to us, neither do I condemn you, but we also need to hear the words, Go and sin no more.

While it is important for us to accept the forgiveness and grace God offers so we can work to restore and rebuild our relationship with God and our spouses, we also need to work on the sin no more part. There is no easy way to say this, but if you are currently having an affair – you need to end it today and seek some help. I know a man who had been having an affair for years and his wife knew all about it but he refused to stop. He convinced himself that to leave his wife would cause her pain, and he didn’t want to do that, but somehow he failed to see that his affair itself was causing her pain. That’s one of the things that happens when we begin to justify our sin – we become blind to the reality of our lives. And if we can lie to ourselves that an affair is ok, we can lie to ourselves about anything and believe it. If you are currently having an affair – stop and get some help. Get some spiritual help, get emotionally help, get help and support from trusted friends, but stop today and get some help.

If you are considering having an affair – don’t do it. If you think that entering into any kind of intimate physical or even emotional relationship with someone other than your spouse will solve your problems or help you feel more fulfilled you are wrong, it will only create more problems. The better thing to do is get some help for your marriage and the underlying problems that are leading you to even think about adultery. Marriage is not easy – it is hard work and it can be painful and messy, but the rewards of staying together through the good times and the difficult times can be tremendous.

There really is no grey area in this command, when God says no adultery – God means no adultery and we need to take this command seriously and do what is necessary to honor God and the covenant we make in marriage. We need to end adulterous relationships if we are in them, but we also need to guard our hearts and lives so we don’t fall into the temptation to enter these relationships in the first place. In his book on the Ten Commandments, Win Green has what I think is one of the most profound statements on adultery I have heard, he says this, make no mistake, we break the 7th commandment because we have already done something much more serious – we’ve broken the 1st commandment. We’ve allowed something (or someone) to come between us and God.

The single best thing we can do if we want to preserve our marriage and protect our hearts from the temptation of lust is to make sure we are always working on our relationship with God. That is why the first three commandments all have to do with protecting that relationship. If our relationship with God isn’t right – nothing else will be and no other relationship will be healthy and strong, but if we are right with God, if we are living in God’s will and drawing upon God’s grace and power we will find the strength to live within the boundaries that God has set for us. So the daily discipline of prayer and scripture reading and worship and service and giving of ourselves to God will do more to help us than anything, and if you really want to preserve and protect your marriage then pray, read scripture, worship and serve God with your spouse. If you constantly place yourselves before God together – God can do more to keep you focused on each other and not on others.

One of the great joys of being a pastor is officiating at weddings, and I was able to do that again this weekend, but it can also be a bittersweet. The very first wedding I did lasted about 6 months. They weren’t members of the church and when things got difficult there was no one to help. The second wedding I did has lasted 18 years and it is still going strong. I have seen them go through highs and lows and incredible challenges during that time, but they are still together and one reason is because they have been active in the church and they still are. Studies show that couples who are involved in some kind of small support group are more likely to stay together than couples who aren’t and I share this information with every couple I marry. I encourage them to be part of the church, but even if it is not part of the church, be part of some group where together you can find support and encouragement for those times when things will get hard, because things will get hard.

So working on our relationship with God is the foundation on which everything is built, but we also need to work on keeping our hearts and minds and eyes fixed on the right things. Let’s go back and consider Jesus teaching. He says, when you look lustfully at someone you have already committed adultery. Now the word lust here means a strong desire or longing combined with an evil intent. We aren’t talking about looking at someone and thinking that they are attractive, we are talking about looking at someone with thoughts that are impure in their intent and God is concerned about these thoughts because many times it is these impure thoughts that lead to sinful actions. The best biblical example of this is the story of David and Bathsheba. David was kind of Israel and was married but committed adultery with Bathsheba, but it’s not like the act of adultery just suddenly happened, it never just suddenly happens, it all begins with lust. 2 Samuel 11:2-4a.

This affair started because David saw Bathsheba bathing and she was beautiful, but you know what, it really started even before that. Go back to 2 Samuel 11:1. You see, David should never have been in Jerusalem in the first place, he should have been out with the troops. He shouldn’t have been in Jerusalem and he shouldn’t have been out on the roof in the middle of the night, but he was. David put himself in places where he was going to see things he shouldn’t see and those poor choices are what led to the lust and the adultery.

What we learn from David is that when Jesus says Go and sin no more and warns us about how we look at those around us he is telling us that we need to be careful about where we put ourselves and what we allow ourselves to see. We live in a world where we are bombarded with sexual images at every turn. TV, internet, billboards, magazines – we are bombarded with images that encourage us to think about sex and all of these images begin to condition us to look at everyone around us the same way and while we may not be able to go through life with blinders on, at the very least we can work to keep ourselves out of tempting situations.

Like David who knew he shouldn’t have been in Jerusalem and knew he shouldn’t have been out on the roof at night – we know those places where we shouldn’t go. We know the TV shows we shouldn’t be watching, internet sites we shouldn’t visit, and magazines we shouldn’t buy and if we aren’t able to keep ourselves from these things, we need to ask someone to hold us accountable.

The problem for David was that he sent all of his officers out to battle – he sent his support staff away and had no one to help hold him accountable and keep him from those places where he shouldn’t go. We will never be able to go and sin no more on our own, we need God, which is why we need to work on our relationship with God, and we need the help and support of trusted friends. If, like David, you are already caught up in situations or habits that you know are not healthy then again I encourage you to seek some help. Don’t continue to walk the roof at night alone thinking you can handle it, ask God for forgiveness and ask those around you for help.

While the world around us might see nothing wrong with lust and even celebrate inappropriate sexual interactions, God does. God is serious when he says no adultery and Jesus is serious when he says that it is what we see with our eyes and what lies in our heart that will get us into trouble, so we need to work at keeping our eyes and hearts pure and we need to work and even sacrifice for faithfulness and integrity in our marriages. It is not always easy to do this, but if we will, we will experience the blessing of life and the fullness of love, the love of a spouse and the love of God.