unbelief/lust stops you having intimacy with God. You replace that intimacy in your heart with desire for infinitely inferior intimacies, intimacies without honour and holiness. Intimacy that doesn’t know and isn’t guided by the power and beauty of God. Pathetic, flawed intimacy that says of another person, or an image of another person, “you exist for my pleasure but not for my honour, or the good of my soul, or to help my delight in God, or to encourage me to take my eternal future seriously.”
Wrong affections in our hearts only get expelled by the power of better ones. And so the instruction of this passage on how to fight is to receive God who gives the Holy Spirit. And so I urge you whether you are married or single, young or old, to take hold of him in this matter today. To imbibe his word, to think about his greatness every day, to seek him for his help. If I can say it reverently, get your soul ravished by his splendour and perfections and promises rather than by the sordid rubbish the world offers.
Read moreConfidence in Christ
As Gordon so wonderfully points out, moral living is a by-product. Not a by-product of moralism preaching, but of knowing Christ. We are sanctified by grace. Its all of Jesus. If we don't get this it is so easy to assume that moral behaviour = faith, rather than moral behaviour flows from faith. Trying to get the outward conformity to moral principle without the inward transformation of the heart by grace is a hopelessly doomed exercise. Our hearts are hard-wired in exactly the opposite direction.
Read moreRelative Morality
If relative morality tends to the negative precisely because it is relative, biblical holiness is awe-inspiringly beautiful and positive precisely because it is not relative. God is the most beautiful being. People are morally beautiful to the degree that we submit to him, delight in him and model his character.
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