In this sermon, the speaker emphasizes the importance of four essential steps in the process of finding justification in God. The first step is repentance, where individuals acknowledge their sins and ask God to take back the ground from the devil. The second step is equipping oneself with scripture to fight against the devil's temptations. However, the speaker acknowledges that even after taking these steps, some people still fail. The final and crucial step is making a new covenant with Christ, committing to no longer have secrets with the devil and seeking victory over secret sins. The speaker encourages couples to have open and honest conversations about their struggles and temptations, emphasizing the importance of addressing these issues within marriages.

So, let us begin to speak of the impure. The first and the most tragic is the offended. The offended little ones. Those who have, at some point in their childhood, been attacked and been hurt, and been abused, and been wronged, especially by those that they trust and that they love. These are not far-off things this morning. These are not unrealities from the newspaper. These are things that happen in our lives. They are things that have happened to people in this room. Some little boy or some little girl who is so hurt by someone they should have been able to trust. As we read file after file after file of children that come across our way, the most common link among all of them is a history of sexual abuse and molestation. And brothers and sisters, it is tragically and grossly more common than any of us would ever wish or desire to deal with. And I believe I know why. It would be no surprise to me if as much as 40 to 60 percent of the women that you know in your own personal life have been abused as children, if as much as 20 to 30 percent of the men that you know personally were abused as children, and the wounds that are caused. These wounds that are caused by rape, by molestation, by incest, are the deepest wounds that a man can carve on a soul. They're wounds that run so deep, and they cut so hard, and they bleed for so long. And that little child grows up. That little child prays for God to save them. And when God doesn't save them, they take all that hate and all that anger and all that frustration and all that misunderstanding, and they look at God and they say, what? That's why it's such an effective weapon of the devil. Because children don't understand. Because we don't understand. And you can see that I empathize with these children like we all do. The reason I empathize with them is because for eight years I've lived with a woman who was so badly hurt, and I've seen the pain in her heart. I remember what it was like when we were both young rebels, we'd just met, both angry at everyone around us, both out to fight and to destroy anything and everything. So tough on the outside, so angry, so rebellious. But I know that that girl, when we would sit alone together, we would sit and cry. That girl, that was so tough, that was so angry, that was so mean, that was so hard. These kinds of wounds are life-shattering, and it takes no less than a miracle of God, Jesus Christ Himself, to heal these kinds of wounds. He can heal them. Praise God, He can heal them. But it takes a miracle. To grow up with this guilt and this shame and this rejection and this blaming. Why did this happen to me? What did I do wrong? How could this have happened to me? Why did God let it happen? And they grow up that way, and it ruins their life. Inside, whatever kind of shell they put on on the outside, inside it ruins them. And as much as they try, they never get over it. And the most tragic, the most tragic thing about this is that those little victims, those poor little souls, so misused, they grow up and if Christ doesn't intervene, they become the ones that offend the very next generation. And thereby, Satan wins the victory over generations and generations, generation after generation of abused little children growing up to abuse other little children. And those little children growing up to abuse other little children. And it's the most vicious cycle that exists in human nature. And the heart-wrenching thing about all this, brothers and sisters, is that the devil, in all his wickedness and envy and malice towards you, wants these very same things for your children. Don't you dare think, don't you dare think that because we have plain homes, because you're a remnant home, because you're outside of the world, because you're away from these things, because you look different, because you do different, don't think that any of those things make your children immune from this. It happens in our types of homes. We talk to those that counsel these young, miserable, wretched, destroyed souls year after year in Bible school that come to them, begging for answers in their life over why they're so defeated and wrecked, over why they can't get anything straight spiritually in their lives. And they'll tell you that time and time again, these children grew up in good homes, they had a good church. But one time, when mom and dad weren't watching, when nobody was around, I listen, brothers and sisters, we have not been good in spirit of fear. I'm not afraid of his tactics against my children. And the Bible says to be wise as serpents, to see him for his tricks, to watch out for him, to be zealous of our children's purity, and to protect them from the things that we were not protected from. Innocence can never be returned. It's the one thing that the devil can take away that Christ cannot give back. Once you lose your innocence, it can never be returned. A life of searing your conscience and destroying shame, that can be returned. God can, after you're born again, return your shame so that you understand right and wrong, so that you understand what is shameful and what's not. But your innocence can never be returned to you, and it can never be returned to our children. The devil will come after our children. To the extent to which you consecrate your life and your family and your church to God, the devil will come in and seek to desecrate your children and destroy them. We know that our children are the Lord's heritage. We know that they are our success. We know that they are our ability to multiply the gospel. We know that they are the power of their fathers to go out and do our work for us, to multiply everything that we want to do. We know that within our children's hearts is everything that we need to win for Christ. Within their little hearts is everything that God requires of us to fulfill what He wants from us. And we are fools if we do not know that the blessed children that sit here among us bear the glory of the bride of Christ as these young ones grow up, to gain the land that we have fought so hard to maintain, and to start from that point, and to battle on in their own families, and to reach so much further than their father's day. He knows it too. And so often what begins with children in innocent curiosity ends in tragic defilement. This happens with friends. It happens with siblings. It happens. Lust is a monster of such evil mean that to be hated needs but to be seen, but seen too oft. Familiar with face, we first endure, then pity, then embrace. And they can't find the grace to get over it. The reason they can't find the grace to get over it is because they do not bring the light into their sin and accountability with their brethren, with some authority, with someone who can keep them accountable to their sin. You know, it's not wrong to be tempted. It is not sin to be tempted. It is sin to give place to temptation in your mind or your heart. The devil will tempt you. The temptation is not the sin. But wherever in that split second, in that twinkling of an eye that you give place to that thought, that give place to that temptation, it becomes sin. And in that second, you must repent or this lust will become a cycle that you cannot control. When we were tempted by these things, when we suffered from these temptations, not even sin, but temptations, we were afraid to go to each other. We were afraid to confess our frailness. We were afraid to confess our weakness. We were afraid of hurting each other's feelings. That if we spoke about that kind of temptation in our lives, it would damage our relationship. It would hurt our feelings. And we were believing a lie from the devil. That's exactly what he wants. He wants you to hide with this thing and deal with it and wrestle with it and grapple with it and fight with it and struggle. And one thing he absolutely does not want is for you to take this to your wife or your husband. It's humility. Our message is covenant with Christ or secret with Satan. This is the secret with Satan. All these things that we've talked about, and there are more, we don't have time for. But all these impurities in your life, all these impurities in these power recesses that no one wants to touch. No one wants to think about. No one wants to put their finger on. No one wants to admit exists. Whisper is the secret to the devil. Whether it doesn't matter if you're innocent. It doesn't matter if you've not yielded to the temptation. It doesn't matter if someone else hurt you and you don't want to talk about it. You're too scared of the consequences. Whatever reason you have for not mentioning it. The fact of the matter is you have a secret with the devil and he likes that. It's his goal. It's his aim. Because when he has some secret in your life, some secret recess, even if someone else did it to you, when it's just between you and him, when he's the only one that knows and there's been no light brought in the thing, he can hold that thing in your heart and he can tug at it and pull at it and hide there and flick at it with guilt and shame and use it to blackmail you into deeper sin. He'll use that secret and he'll make it bigger and he'll conquer and he'll devour everything in your soul with that one secret because we gave him place. We gave him right to be there because that's the one part of our heart we wouldn't let the light of Christ into. And that secret is the power of the devil in the heart of the Christian. He wants any secret he can get. He'll take it wherever he can get it. It does not matter. It doesn't matter if you were innocent. It doesn't matter if you did no wrong. If it's a secret that only he knows about it, he will use it to destroy you in order to conquer the devil, in order to have victory. The darkness cannot remain and he'll give you any excuse not to break his secret. It wasn't your fault. You didn't do anything wrong. Why should you have to be ashamed? You didn't do anything wrong. Why is it your responsibility to deal with this? You were the innocent one. It was so long ago. No one remembers anymore. All that's under the blood of the lamb. And it is. You can have salvation and not have victory, brothers and sisters. You can be saved. You can be forgiven in your past transgressions and have not dealt with them in a way that enables you to walk on in the power of Jesus Christ. And if the devil has to, he'll permit you to get saved as long as he can keep you quiet. And this is the way he does it, by keeping that secret. It would be too shameful to talk about. It would be too shameful to bring up. I don't want to deal with those things. It would be too hurtful to bring up. And the devil says, do you remember how you cried when that happened? Do you remember the guilt you felt when that happened? Do you want to deal with that again? You don't want to cry those tears again. You cried them back there, leave them back there. You don't want to feel that pain again. You don't want to deal with that problem. And you pray and you feel that twang, that twitch in your mind. And that thing starts to surface. And he says, God is not like the devil. He will not beat you over the head with it. He is always faithful to speak. God is always faithful to speak, but he won't beat you over the head with it. He'll say, remember that time. And in your head, you'll hear, remember that time. And then you'll hear the devil say, so many are duped. So many are stopped at that point. So many have mediocre success in their Christian lives because they hear that. And they stop and they let it go back to bed and they don't deal with it. And Satan uses all those impurities, all those things, so he can mess up God's plan for victory. I've talked about the problem. I've talked about the sin. And I've talked about how the devil uses those things in the life of a believer to conquer him, to defile him, to destroy him, to make him inadequate, to make him useless before his God. The first step is to repent of your secret with Satan. Recognize that that which you have harbored in your heart, again, for whatever the reason, that which you have hidden in secrecy, that which you have never spoken a word about, that which has been hidden in darkness in the recesses of your heart, is a secret with Satan and will destroy your life and repent of it. And to repent means to turn around and go the other way. And so if it's a secret, the way to repent is to bring it to light, confess it to Christ, confess it to your husband or your wife. Do it tactfully. You can hurt people with confessions. Do you understand that? You can hurt people with confessions. Be gracious. Be gentle. Don't say more than you have to, but make sure that there is light and there is accountability in what has happened in your past. Especially among husbands and wives. These intimate conversations must be had. We don't like them. We don't want them. They're not fun to sit through. But the fruit of what happens when you sit down and get honest with your husband and wife will do more good for your marriage than you could have ever imagined. So repent of it and bring it into light. Secondly, you may find more than you bargained for. You may have expected to tell a secret and you'll realize that when you start to bring that thing into light, especially in the case of there are ways to get over bitterness and anger. And by the way, that anger, as we've said before, is a good indication that there's some lust problem, that frustration at the sign of an unfulfilled lust somewhere in your heart. Mark that. Jesus, I implore you. The second thing is to ask God. Ask God to take back the ground that you yielded to the devil with that secret. Do you know that you're either possessed by the devil or by God in your soul? The recesses of your heart, they're occupied by one or the other. And if you've yielded ground to the devil as a Christian, you've not yielded your own ground. It wasn't yours to yield. It was God's. He paid for it on the cross. You belong to him now. And if you've yielded up some piece of ground in your soul, in the depths of your heart to the devil, to destroy, to conquer yourself and your family and your church and to do evil to God, if you've allowed that, don't think you've given up your own ground. You've given up God's ground. And that is defiling God's temple. And that is the one thing that Jesus became furious about defiling God's temple. Ask God to take back the ground. It wasn't yours to yield in the first place, but it's his to take back. Not yours. He must do that work. Number three. Once God has taken the ground back, that does not mean that the battle is over. It does not mean that you will never suffer temptation again. It does mean that you can have victory. It doesn't mean that you won't be tempted again. And so the way to begin to fight this new battle is to resist the devil. The way to resist him is to equip yourself with the word of God. What I would implore you to do is find scripture passages. Find one for yourself to deal with in temptation. Let's look at one here in first Corinthians six. Just a couple examples. There's multitudes you can find anywhere. Find one for your own life to say to yourself when you're tempted. Make that scripture a part of your name. Make it so that you know it front, back, sideways, up and down. Make it so that it is a part of your soul to know this verse. Here's an example. First Corinthians six eleven. And such were some of you, but you're lost. You're sanctified. You're justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the spirit of our God. And when those temptations come, you say to yourself, I'm saying I'm sanctified. I'm justified in my God. It's essential that you have these three things, that you have these things to give to yourself and to the devil and to the Lord and make them a part of yourself. Now, I've seen people that have done all three of these things. They've repented. They've asked God to take back the ground. They've given themselves scripture. They've equipped themselves for the fight with the devil. And still they fail. And there's one more step that's essential. Every part of this is essential. The last one especially, the fourth one is to make a new covenant with Christ. Because after you repent from your secret with Satan, there's a vacuum. There's a need to be committed somewhere. So after you repent of that secret, after God takes back the ground, you make a covenant, a new covenant with Christ. A covenant not to have secrets anymore with the devil. A covenant like Job says, I've made a covenant with mine eyes. Why should I think upon a maid? There's victory in all these secret sins. There's a way to be made free and will as soon as I am here. But what's more important than that, what's more important than what's said here today is that each family, each husband and each wife go home and talk about these things together in a real, open and honest conversation. Where are your temptations? Where are your struggles? What secrets are you kept? And I don't care how good you think your marriage is. I don't care if you think there's no problems. I don't care if you think everything's all right, especially you men. You go home and talk to your wives and find out for sure. Be a man enough to do it. Make sure. Make sure there's no place for the devil in your marriage and in your heart.