Eyes to See, Ears to Hear

The truth is that we really don’t have a church right now. The closest one to us is a 40-minute walk away in a nearby village. The ferocity of the sun rules it out as a possibility because it is too harsh for my baby’s mama. So, we lean mostly on downloaded sermons and personal time to nourish our spirits.

Today, we listened to Take It to the Limit, Part 5: A Time to Run from Andy Stanley’s podcasts. This is a series about setting up margin in your life and this particular sermon was on sexual morality. I decided to note some great boundaries (we call them hedges, too) that he shared. Dana and I have discovered the need and benefit of having boundaries and the margins they create. These are the ones Andy shared:

1. Do not chat online with someone of the opposite sex.
2. Do not eat alone with someone of the opposite sex.
3. Do not ride in the car alone with someone of the opposite sex.
4. Men let your wife choose your assistant if that person is a female.
5. Where there is a debatable relationship, decide up front to talk about it and expose it to your wife.
6. Pornography and clubs are not neutral forms of entertainment. They are paths to destruction.
7. Don’t confide in a member of the opposite sex or allow them to confide in you. It is better to hurt their feelings than to hurt your/their marriage.
   

Others Dana and I have implemented are:

1. Go to bed at the same time. If that is not possible, I will not be online while she is asleep.
2. Do not be in a private room alone with someone of the opposite sex.
3. Covenant Eyes, an online accountability program that logs everywhere I go online, is installed on my computer.
4. We are
   

A great summary question he said toward the end of the sermon is this…

How far would I want my spouse to go to protect himself/herself from unnecessary sexual temptation?

I pray all of us, men and women, can understand the severity of these standards and the consequences of the lack of them.

Run from sexual sin! No other sin so clearly affects the body as this one does. For sexual immorality is a sin against your own body. 1 Corinthians 6:18

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