You're listening to A New Beginning with Greg Laurie, a podcast made possible by Harvest Partners, helping people everywhere know God.
Visit our website and learn more about Harvest Partners at harvest.org. Under the Pleasure. Chemistry majors know that liquids can be adhesive or cohesive. Some liquids stick to other things, while others cling together.
If you've broken a mercury thermometer and seen the little beads of mercury ball up together, you've seen cohesion. Well, when impure thoughts come at us, do we let them stick inside our minds, or do we repel them and cling to what we know is right? Today on A New Beginning, Pastor Greg Laurie brings good encouragement from the Lord's Sermon on the Mount. I remember the first time that I was tempted as a Christian. Now, before I was a Christian, I don't know if I even thought of temptation as, well, temptation. I thought of temptation more as opportunity, right?
I mean, why not go for, oh, that looks fun. Oh, I'll try this other thing. No, I'll do this other thing as well. So when I became a Christian, the believer told me, now, Greg, watch out, the devil's going to tempt you. And I'm like, the devil?
What do you mean the devil? No, Satan is going to tempt you. How will I know when I'm being tempted? They said, you'll know. So I'm in high school.
So this is, you know, 10 years ago, and a few more. So I go to class in high school, and there's this girl. I'd noticed this girl. Trust me, she never noticed me. Very pretty girl sat toward the front of the class.
And so after the class is over, I'm not making this up. This girl comes walking up to me and says, hi, what's your name? And I momentarily forgot my name. I was so stunned by her beauty and her blue eyes. I'm just like, I'm not really sure what my name is.
And I have no idea why you're even talking to me. And I was like a brand new Christian. I had my Bible there, and I had a little Jesus pin on, and she's talking to me. And she says, you know, you're cute.
Now I can't believe this is happening. You're cute. And she says, you know what, my parents are gone for the weekend.
Would you like to come and stay at my house for the weekend? I thought, this is a temptation from the devil. Why did I say that? Because stuff like this never happened to me. Trust me.
I know it's hard to believe. It just didn't. Now maybe it happened to other people.
It never happened to me. And I thought, this beautiful girl has been sent from Satan. So I told her no.
I want you to know. I said no to this girl. But it wasn't that easy. Okay?
And that brings up a simple point. Temptation comes in attractive packages. Right? Satan makes bad stuff look good. He makes wicked things look appealing. He makes deadly things look like they're going to be the best experience you ever had. He's a liar.
And he'll do whatever he needs to do to pull you down. So everybody gets tempted. But here's something to understand. It's not a sin to be tempted.
Did you know that? It's not a sin to be tempted. And I bring that up because temptation comes at the worst times.
Like in church. You're sitting here right now and all of a sudden this thought comes to you. Maybe it's an impure thought. Maybe it's a jealous thought. Maybe it's a hateful thought. Maybe it's a prideful thought. But whatever it is it comes.
Boom. And you think, I can't believe how twisted I am thinking this in church. Who says you even thought it? Have you ever heard of the fiery darts of the devil? They're like flaming arrows from hell that he fires at your brain. That doesn't mean you're a wicked person. Though you are. But what it does mean is that you don't have to let that thought into your mind. It sort of knocks at the door of your imagination. And you can say, no way. I'm not thinking about that.
Or you say, come right in and make yourself at home. That's up to you. So it's not a sin to be tempted.
Let me take it a step further. If you're not being tempted something is wrong with you spiritually. Why would the devil waste his time on someone that is not a threat to his kingdom? So if you've been coming under spiritual attack lately that could be an indication that you're on the right track. And that you're a threat to the devil.
So let's answer the question. Where does temptation come from? Now our immediate answer would be, well the devil of course. And there's truth to that. But we need to understand we play a key role in our own temptation.
Listen. Satan needs our cooperation in this area to give in to temptation where there is no desire on my part. There is no temptation. We blame a lot of things on the devil and rightly so.
But we too are responsible. I mean wouldn't it be great if the devil just took a month off every year? Wouldn't it be great if Satan started taking the month of August off? And I can announce it's just been revealed to me that the devil is gone for August. I don't know where he vacations. We know he likes warm climates. But he's gone. No devil for the month of August. You say, oh that's awesome.
You'd still get yourself into trouble. Because we play a role in it. Here is what the Bible says over in James 1.14. Everyone is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and is enticed. And when desire has conceived it gives birth to sin.
And sin when it is full grown brings forth death. That basically breaks down temptation for you. The five steps of temptation.
Number one. The temptation itself. Every one of you is tempted. Every one of you is going to be tempted. 1 Corinthians 10.13 says there is no temptation taking you but such is as common to man. Which means we all face the same kind of stuff.
And then over in 1 Peter. Peter says don't think it is strange when you go into fiery trials and times of temptation. It happens with all of us. Those temptations come our way. But again remember it is not the bait that constitutes temptation but the bite.
Let me repeat that. It is not the bait. It is the bite. So it is dangled in front of you. That's the bait. You don't have to take the bait. But if you take the bite now you are responsible bringing you to the second phase. You are under its power and frankly enjoying the experience. James 1.14 says you are drawn away by your own desires. So it is sort of like the temptation comes to your mind and you say, well I am not going to do it but I am going to just kind of take it for a test drive. Right? I am going to just kind of think it through.
And what would it be like? And you kind of play it out. And now the problem is already in full bloom because now basically you have bit on the hook. You are drawn away and you are enticed and then ultimately number four it gives birth to sin. Verse 15 says when it is conceived it gives birth to sin. There is a momentary euphoria in sin. So we need to understand that sin can be fun for a moment.
It is sort of like getting the sugar high and then coming down. By the way if you are a grandparent here is the role of a grandparent. Pick up your grandkids. Number one. Fill them up with sugar. Number two. Return them quickly to their parents.
Number three. Job done. You know there is that sugar high. The kids are excited.
They are climbing the walls. They are so happy and then they come down. And that is what sin is like. Oh this is fun. They lied to me. It is actually fun.
No I didn't lie to you. I told you sin is fun. Jumping off the Empire State Building is fun.
Until you hit the ground. That little momentary euphoria of sin can be fun. Sometimes it is not even fun is it?
Sometimes you think oh this is going to be so amazing and it is actually not even fun for a few moments. But even when it is there are the ramifications. First there is the guilt. That is if your conscience is working.
Then that dead feeling. And now you are separated from God. And sin has done its work and it brings forth death.
Listen. You are not separated in your relationship from God but you are separated in your fellowship with God. See if my son sins against me he doesn't stop being my son. He is just my son sinning against me.
When we sin against the Lord we don't cease to be a son or a daughter of God but we are a prodigal son or daughter or a disobedient son or daughter. Sort of like when you lose. There is no Wi-Fi. You can't go online. Or there is no cell service because you didn't pay your bill again.
Or whatever it is. But the point is communication is cut off. And so what you want to do is restore communication. And the way that happens is you have to admit your sin, turn from it, and ask God to forgive you. First John 1 says that we will confess our sin. He is faithful and just to forgive us our sin and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
So that is how basically sin works. We like to blame everyone for it except ourselves. But we play a role. Pastor Greg Laurie will have the second half of his message in just a moment. Emails, letters, and phone calls from listeners are so encouraging to us.
And they let us know the effectiveness of these studies. Hi Pastor Greg. I want to thank you for helping me learn and understand the word of God.
I also wanted to let you know how much I appreciate your sense of humor. Even in my darkest times when I listen to your sermons, I can go from crying to laughing. Keep up the wonderful work of God and God bless you and your family. What an encouragement to hear that Pastor Greg's teachings are helping this woman and many others like her.
Let us know how these studies have impacted you. Send an email to Pastor Greg. Greg at Harvest dot org. Again, that is Greg at Harvest dot org. In a few minutes, Pastor Greg speaks with author J. Warner Wallace about a new book that will keep us from being blindsided with tough questions when we share our faith. That is coming up in a moment.
Or get details now at Harvest dot org. But today Pastor Greg is offering some important insights on how to resist sin and his message how to overcome lust and protect your mind. Let's continue. We use God's mighty weapons, not worldly weapons, to knock down the strongholds of human reasoning and destroy false arguments. We capture our rebellious thoughts and teach them to obey Christ. So when those thoughts come it is like, yes you can come right in. No you are not coming in.
You are not welcome here. So let's see what Jesus said now about how to deal with lust and immorality and how to keep our mind clean. Matthew chapter 5 verse 27. You have heard the commandment that says you must not commit adultery. But I say who even looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
Let's stop there. So Jesus is not talking about a casual glance here. He is talking to a person who is engaged in a continual act of looking. In this usage. In this context. This is not talking about an incidental or involuntary glance. But an intentional and repeated gazing with the express purpose of lusting. So it is not just oh wow look there is a pretty girl. Or oh there is an attractive guy. No it is not just that. Because you are going to notice that. No the difference is no there is a pretty girl or I am going to go find a pretty girl or an attractive guy with the intention of lusting after them.
It is a different thing. And this isn't just for men looking lustfully at women. It is also for women looking lustfully at men. Or men looking lustfully at men and women looking lustfully at women.
Just anything outside of God's order. And think of the pornography problem today and how widespread it is. Seventy-nine percent of 18 to 30 year old American men watch Internet porn at least once a month. Seventy-nine percent.
Here is the stat that surprised me. Seventy-six percent of 18 to 30 year old American women watch porn once a month. One expert described it as the pornification of mass media. You see now it is not something for many that is considered forbidden.
There is no shame about it. You see it joked about on sitcoms and you see movies like 50 Shades of Grey bringing it to a larger mainstream audience. And if you engage in these things. And let me just say if you are engaging and watching porn this is not going to end well for you. And you are specifically doing something Jesus has told you not to do.
And let me explain why. Pornography is creating a desire in you that cannot be satisfied properly. In any way. Because it is creating an unnatural desire. It is like you have an out of control fire and you are trying to put it out with gasoline.
It is just going to get worse and worse. And the Bible says can a man take fire into his lap and not be burned. And the answer of course is no.
I mean take the story of David and Bathsheba. Now you all know that David was not leading his troops into battle as he usually would be. But he was taking a little time off. And there is nothing wrong with taking a vacation. But there is never a vacation from the spiritual battle. Right.
The devil doesn't take a day off from it and you can't either. You have to keep your armor on at all times. What does that mean?
It means you keep your guard up and be aware that an enemy can hit you at any time. So David was kicking back on his rooftop veranda and he sees a beautiful woman ironically named Bathsheba taking a bath. And she was a really beautiful woman. And David saw her. Now there is no way I suppose he could have stopped from seeing her the first time.
Boom. There she was. So he needed to immediately go take a lot of cold showers and pray and get away from that situation. But instead he kept looking.
See the idea is you look and you look and you look. But then he took it to the next level and he gave a command. Bring that woman up to my palace. And then he had sex with her. And then she got pregnant. And instead of repenting of it he tried to cover it up and make it look like her husband got her pregnant. But her husband was out at battle serving the king. So David called him back and this guy wouldn't spend the night with his wife. So David effectively had the husband whose name was Uriah killed. And then he married Bathsheba thinking that he had pulled this thing off and no one would ever know. But the Bible says the thing that he did displeased the Lord and he was exposed and brought shame on his family and hurt his reputation.
And then even tragically he saw that same behavior repeated in the life of his children. If only we would think these things through. Now I'm just going to have this little fling you say. I'm going to have an affair. By the way I hate the word affair. It sounds like a cruise.
Nice. Now just call it what it is. I'm going to have an adulterous. I don't even want to call it relationship. But I'm going to have an adulterous fling with a person.
And now here's what you need to know. Your sin will find you out. And it's going to catch up with you in some way shape or form. We don't think about the destruction it could bring to a marriage and destroy it. We don't think about the implication it has when it affects our children. And then one day our children grow up and they repeat our behavior and they raise their children and they do the same thing and then their kids repeat their behavior. We don't think of that long term. We just think of our own selfish impulses in the moment.
It all starts in the mind. So be practical. You know if a scene comes on in a film that you should not be watching did you know you can actually get up and leave your seat? But I paid for it.
Yeah. So get up and walk out. Better yet demand a refund. Maybe you should do a little research on a movie before you go watch it. If you're watching something on your TV and this scene comes on you shouldn't be seen. You don't have to go reverse. Did I just see that?
Reverse. No no no. Don't watch it anymore.
Turn the television off. Mind you of a story years ago. Our son Christopher was probably around 11. And Jonathan was probably around 1. Maybe Christopher was 12 and Jonathan was 2. But Jonathan was still in a high chair.
So I'm not sure exactly. But he was very young still. So Christopher is eating cereal and watching cartoons and TV. He's late for school so my wife Kathy says, Christopher turn off the TV. Go upstairs. Make your bed and get ready for school.
He just keeps eating cereal watching the cartoon. She comes back and says, Christopher did you hear what I said? Turn off the TV. Go upstairs. Make your bed and get ready for school.
He ignores her again. She says it a third time. Christopher turn off the television. Go upstairs. Make your bed and get ready for school.
And she comes back a fourth time. Jonathan climbs out of his high chair. Walks over. Turns off the TV and says, go make your bed.
He's like this big. Go make your bed. Christopher amazingly gets up and goes upstairs. It worked right? So he got the message. Sometimes the best thing to do is just turn it off. Now this obviously includes conversations with members of the opposite sex. Don't engage in sexually suggestive conversations. This obviously includes texting.
Which is sometimes called sexting right? Don't do that. Don't send photographs of yourself without clothes to people.
Do I have to tell you this stuff? People do this. You know every now and then you hear about a celebrity had her phone hacked and the person has nude photos of her. And is threatening to post them. Don't carry nude photos of yourself on your phone. Even better never take pictures of yourself naked. Don't do it. Yeah.
These are very practical suggestions now. Because you are just headed down a road that is going to lead you to a miserable end. So you know think about these things. Think before you send that text.
And then let's remove this from sexual things and just everything. I posted something on Twitter the other day. I said think before you tweet. Think before you tweet.
T-H-I-N-K. Run it through this grid. T. Is it true? H. Is it helpful? I. Is it inspiring? N. Is it necessary? K. Is it kind?
If it isn't don't tweet it. So we bring all of these thoughts into the captivity of Jesus Christ. Practical encouragement today on A New Beginning. Pastor Greg Laurie is presenting a message based in Matthew 5 called How to Overcome Lust and Protect Your Mind. Hopefully you were able to hear today's full presentation. If not, if any interruptions occurred, you can get a replay by going to harvest.org. Just look for the study called How to Overcome Lust and Protect Your Mind. You can stream it while you're there online or download an MP3 for later. Again, go to harvest.org. And then we're so happy to make available a fantastic book to help you share your faith.
It's called Person of Interest by retired cold case detective J. Warner Wallace, Jim Wallace. Jim, you point out there's a relationship between what's true and what matters. You say few of us order our lives around and make decisions based on our belief in Bigfoot. If we don't believe something's true, then it doesn't matter. As we share our faith, it's important to remember that an unbeliever may not think Christianity matters to them because they don't believe it's true. We need to start at that point, don't we?
Yeah, there's no doubt about that. It's been said that one of the biggest challenges to theism, the belief in God, is atheism, right? The belief that there is no God. But I think it's actually a bigger challenge, and that's what people have started to call apotheism.
In other words, that there isn't a sense of urgency about this. Why would I care about this? If it isn't true, why would I even give my life to this? This is why we really wanted to focus on, you know, does Jesus matter? Well, it turns out he matters in all the areas that really matter to me as an atheist. Look, as an unbeliever, I only became a believer when I was about 35. Walked into a church, had no interest, didn't think it was even worth debunking.
I've got a good friend, Lee Strobel, with a case for Christ, and Lee and Leslie. Leslie became a Christian first. He was out to prove her wrong. No, I wasn't out to prove it. Why would I investigate the Easter Bunny? Nobody does that, okay?
This is just so patently false, it's not even worth my time. But it turns out that as I examine the things in my own life that matter the most, which would have been education and science and the arts. I've got a background in the arts.
I was an architect before I became a police officer. These are the things that matter to me, even in terms of a spirituality that's non-Christian. Well, it turns out that all of those areas, Jesus matters in those areas. It's Christ followers who shaped art the way we know it today, that shaped music the way we know it today, that shaped education and science. As a matter of fact, no one's had a bigger impact on non-Christian religions than Jesus of Nazareth.
So all those things that matter most to us as a culture, it turns out we owe a debt of gratitude to Jesus of Nazareth. I think when people realize that, at least it might initiate this effort to decide who is he? Let's just investigate who this guy is, because it turns out he changed the world. So Jay Warner Wallace, Jim, who's sitting next to me right now, is a Dateline featured homicide detective. So he's approaching this from a different perspective. He's worked on actual cold cases. He knows what he's talking about.
He's presented the evidence to juries and seen people convicted for their crimes. So he's approaching this from a different angle. But one thing you said to me, Jim, I found interesting, is this almost is like a kid's book for an adult. And as I looked through it, you mentioned you have a background in design, as do I. And you've illustrated it pretty much, looks like almost every page or at least every other page, maybe every page, has an illustration of some kind, which makes this very digestible. It's like, wow, I can wrap my mind around this. You've really broken this down in a way that just an ordinary person could understand it.
Well, it is like a kid's, it's like a graphic novel in a sense, right? The idea is, I think we're in a generation of people, myself included, we have become so conditioned to seeing it. And you even use that expression, you know, I see what you mean.
Jurors will do this, right? Well, yeah, I got it once I saw it. Once you found a way of showing me, this is why it's so hard to argue against videos.
Videos show us what happened. And so I wanted to be able to illustrate it in a way that people could see. There's over 400 illustrations.
And so we spent probably about three months just illustrating the book. But the idea here is to help jurors, whoever reads the book, to see what we're talking about. Yeah, so the juror is the reader.
And maybe you know somebody that's not a believer. This would be a great book to put in their hands. But it's also a great book for the believer to equip them, to respond to the questions that nonbelievers ask.
It's called Person of Interest, written by J. Warner Wallace and is a former cold case detective. And we wanna offer this to you for your gift of any size here at A New Beginning, just so you can be better equipped to share your faith with other people. So for your gift of any size, we'll send you a copy of Person of Interest by J. Warner Wallace. Yeah, it's such an effective tool for helping you share your faith and really for helping you understand why you believe what you believe.
It's brand new. In fact, the publisher kindly supplied us with some advanced copies so we can make them available ahead of the official release date. And we wanna send it to you to thank you for helping to make A New Beginning available to others here in your community and elsewhere around the country. You're investing in helping others come to know the Lord. One listener wrote and said, Dear Pastor Greg, your program on the radio is what brought me back to a closer walk with the Lord Jesus. Thank you for all you do.
I still listen to you often. So thank you for sending your investment today to A New Beginning, Box 4000, Riverside, California, 92514. Or call us anytime 24-7 at 1-800-821-3300. That's 1-800-821-3300.
Or go online to harvest.org. Well, next time, Pastor Greg uncovers more practical insight from Matthew 5 about how we can stand against the onslaught of temptation that so often comes our way. Be sure to join us here on A New Beginning. This is the day, the day when life begins. Hey everybody, thanks for listening to A New Beginning. This is a podcast made possible by Harvest Partners. So for more content that can help you know God and equip you to make Him known to others or to learn more about how you can become a Harvest Partner, just go to harvest.org.
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