In this sermon, the speaker begins by emphasizing the importance of honoring God with our bodies, as we have been bought at a price. He then directs the audience to 1 Thessalonians chapter 4, where he encourages them to take the word of God seriously and seek understanding from it. The speaker mentions a book by Josh McDowell, who has experience in evangelizing university students and addressing the topics of sex and morality. He also highlights another book by George Verwer, which is being offered as a gift to the audience. The speaker concludes by urging the audience to visit the bookstore and purchase key books that will be beneficial for their spiritual growth.

One of the things I'm conscious of as I stand here to speak is that there are probably so many questions and perhaps problems here tonight that I have no hope of answering them all from God's Word. The Bible itself is not at all a secretive, hush-hush kind of book on this topic. The men and women of the scriptures were real people with real problems. And so with that sense of inadequacy, I want to recommend some books where you can follow up on these ideas and these biblical teachings. Some in English, some in German, one in French. Let's start with the German then. This one actually is not on tonight's topic, but it's a book that I mentioned last night, Geistliche Krisen und Depressionen by Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones. As I mentioned last night, it was a book that he felt God gave him in a special way for our generation. And I want to recommend that to those of you from German background. This one by a man who was a missionary out in the Far East for many years. He is one of the best, most appreciated missionary speakers in my country, Britain today. And he's tackled a really tough subject. Do you really believe that God will send everybody who has not trusted in Christ to hell? Do you really believe that God will judge the entire world in holiness and purity? It's one of the toughest questions that you can face, and if you face it, I believe it may change your life. I believe men and women outside of Christ are on their way to an utterly lost eternity. And this book, Gott das ist nicht fair, is addressing that problem. Read Dick Dowsett's arguments from scripture. Let God speak to you from his own word about judgment and the future of men and women who have not come into the kingdom of God. And then there's a book here by Rabbi Maharaj, a converted Brahmin Hindu. Some of you are going to work with Hindus perhaps in London. Others of you may meet people influenced by Hindu beliefs and philosophies here in mainland Europe. This book is about how that man came to know the living God in the Lord Jesus Christ himself. Excellent story, but it will actually help many of you in your evangelism in the days ahead. And then there's a book here that is on very special offer tonight. Put up your hand if you can read and understand English. Tremendous. Keep your hand up. There is one of these free for each one of you. It's George Verwer's book No Turning Back. It's the Indian edition printed in Bombay. And as something that you can remember your summer with us by, we want to give this book to you if you can make use of it in English. We're not going to sign them. We're not going to pray over them and guarantee you a special blessing. We want to give it to you with our love and pray that God uses the message of this book in your lives. You want one? You go to the bookstore. You ask for it. You ask for it in English. And then tonight's topic. There's a book here by a woman called Jeannie Andrews called Your Half of the Apple. And it's designed to help the single girl in this era of world history where we get bombarded with every kind of influence from the advertising world, the television world and so on. God and the Single Girl it's called. And that's about half of you. Do go and have a look at this. And then in French, Walter Trobisch's famous book, J'ai aimé une fille. How was that? Where are you? You see that little man up in the rabbit hutch. If you hear noises like this. You'll start the third world war you will. Means he's laid an egg in French. This book is private correspondence between Walter Trobisch and a young man who was writing into him with various moral sexual problems that he was facing in his life. You can get the same book in English. John White, I think perhaps one of my favorite Christian writers. Eros defiled. And then too finally this one is called What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women. I wonder how many of you men are thinking one day possibly that you may be perhaps by the grace and the leading of God become a husband. Marriage is one of the most educative experiences you can you can dream of. I made so many stupid bonehead mistakes as a husband. I wish I'd read this before I got married. I would still have got married but with far more humility. What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women. It's got some diagrams in as but not many. This one I haven't read but I know of the author, Josh McDowell, an evangelist among students, university students particularly, not just in America but some incredible meetings all over the world. As I said before I spend a lot of my time during the winter months preaching in universities in Britain. And as we preach the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, if we don't give attention to the question of sex and morality we are not dealing with people where they really are. I should think probably over 80 percent of people who come to Christ in British universities in these days are involved in some kind of moral problem. And Josh McDowell has been working in that same kind of arena and he's written this book out of his experience. Givers, takers and other kinds of lovers. Hang on a minute. Do please have a look at the bookstore tonight, tomorrow, because we have got so many key books which I think it would be right for you to buy now even if you're not going to get opportunity to read them for months and months to come. They will never be cheaper and I have found in my own experience that I've bought books I've not read them for months and then perhaps even years later they have been picked up at just the right time. I'm glad I got them. Now let's read God's word together from Matthew chapter 5 first of all and verse 27. Matthew 5, 27 to 30 we will read first in German tonight. Now will you turn over to 1 Corinthians chapter 6. I'm going to read from verse 9. Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor male prostitutes, nor homosexual offenders, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor slanderers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God. And that is what some of you were, but you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. Everything is permissible for me, but not everything is mastered by anything. Food for the stomach and the stomach for food, but God will destroy them both. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord and the Lord for the body. By his power God raised the Lord from the dead and he will also raise us. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never. Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said that two will become one flesh. But he who unites himself with the Lord is one with him in spirit. Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own. You were bought at a price. Therefore honour God with your body. Now turn please with me to 1 Thessalonians chapter 4. And I'm going to ask that we read again in German from verse 3 to 8. Now Father we bow our heads and we know that these verses are living and true to our own experience. We find the things of which scripture is speaking real in our own lives. O God we want to settle down tonight and take your word seriously. We don't just want the thoughts of man, we want the teachings of your word. Help us O God in this next hour to understand and to know what you're saying from your holy word. That we might be rebuked and corrected and taught. That we might be fully equipped for every good work in the months ahead. And live lives that are satisfied and holy to your glory. In Jesus name. Amen. I think it's good to be able to talk quite honestly and openly about tonight's topic. We no longer live in days when these kind of things were were never spoken of from scripture. And I think if we're honest too we recognize that being a Christian does not immediately take away all sexual problems from our lives. For some of us it may even seem to make problems worse. I believe that sex is one of the major causes of spiritual problems among many young people. We begin to doubt whether God really loves us. Whether he really answers our prayers. Because we don't find life easy always. We begin to drift into the sin of unbelief. Sexual problems can be a major cause of spiritual difficulties in your life on the team. And we want to hear God's word together tonight. You see you're going out to preach the gospel aren't you? Within a few days you will out be out there on doorsteps in in in street theater situations proclaiming the gospel in the open air. What are you going to say? What is your testament? Have you met the living God? And has he been big enough and strong enough to meet the needs of your heart? Have you asked Christ into your life? And you want to share this testimony with other people? What difference has he made? Do you have a testimony of God's victory in these sexual and moral areas that you can share with people you meet? Because you better believe me that so many of the people you will meet this summer will have the very self-same problems and may ask you questions. Some of you perhaps troubled with guilt feelings left over from the past even as you sit here in the meeting. The moment you begin to hear these kind of scriptures your mind begins to play back memories of things that you did maybe only months or a year or two ago. And some of you perhaps have real difficulties in accepting yourselves as you are with normal desires, normal longings and feelings. What to do about the problem of masturbation? Something that very often makes men and women feel tremendously guilty and unworthy to serve the Lord Jesus Christ. Does our bible have anything to say on these problems? You're going to be offering God's word on the doorsteps. You're going to be urging hundreds of people to read God's word in the month ahead. You've begun to experience what God's word has to say in some of these deep personal private areas. First of all I don't want you to be naive tonight about the first century. We sometimes imagine that those early christians were all togas and sandals and virginity. Somehow they lived in the catacombs with little halos glowing above their heads and they had never actually lived in a society like our own. But these people came into the kingdom of God in the same kind of state that many of us come in. We just read some verses to the Thessalonians. We believe Paul wrote those from Corinth. That city was the the red light district if you like of the eastern Mediterranean. As Paul could look out of his window as he was writing that letter he could possibly see the hill of the temple of Aphrodite. The homes of thousands of prostitutes as he looked out across that hill. He writes to people who have come out of that kind of background themselves and are now struggling to live for Christ and yet with their memories and their histories. Turn back to 1 Thessalonians 4. What does God say? It is God's will that you my dear Thessalonian brothers and sisters should live holy lives. He goes on in the next verse that you should learn self-control. This doesn't come automatically. You don't wake up the moment after you've become a Christian and find that you have developed instant self-control. And then in verse 6 he speaks of the judgment of God on immorality. You see in the first century world fornication was as widespread as it is in ours. For many in Roman and Greek society divorce was just a command away. A man could say to his wife you leave me you go you are divorced that's the end of it. What else could she do but become a prostitute as many did? And people went from one marriage to another it seemed like almost every year sometimes. I was reading once the writings of the Latin early church father Jerome and he speaks of observing a woman getting married. She is marrying her 23rd husband and he is marrying his 21st wife. I don't know what kind of children those sort of marriages produced. Messalina who was the wife of the emperor Claudius. When Claudius was asleep at night in Rome used to put on a great black gown and go downtown and spend the rest of the night in immorality. Night after night this was known in Rome. 14 out of the first 15 Roman emperors were known practicing homosexuals. There was a totally different attitude to women at that time. When Paul was telling husbands in Ephesus to love their wives it was something utterly revolutionary. You can imagine Timothy reading out the letter to Ephesus. Paul has written this letter and he's reading it out to them in public and he says now husbands should love their wives just as Christ loved the church. Read that again. What did Paul say? Love my old woman at home. You must be joking. I've never loved her in my life. I'm not going to start now. I paid good money for her. You expect me to love her as well? Most of you women expect to be loved by your husbands if you ever get married. That is a revolution that results from the teachings of Christ and of Paul. Now what does God's word have to say to those kind of people meeting in the first century churches? Well let's go even further about it. What does Christ have to say? Because our bodily frame and our sexual abilities it's all coming from the mind of God. Marriage is God's idea. It's not dirty or nasty. Sex isn't something to be ashamed of in the scriptures and the God who thought up the idea of marriage and of intimate physical friendship he one day came to this earth. He lived with people. He watched their behavior. He commented on what they were doing. He gave solutions to their problems. And in Matthew chapter 5 the Lord says quite simply the key to your sexual behavior lies in your mind. Some of you find problems with your mind. You look on other people and you begin to lust after them. And the Lord says if you begin to do that you are actually already committing adultery in your heart and God sees your heart. Let's not play around with that scripture. God judges us to be an adulterer if we commit adultery in our hearts. The whole emphasis in the Sermon on the Mount is on the heart and the Lord gives one simple thing to do. If your right eye causes you to sin pluck it out. If your right hand causes you to sin chop it off. What does he mean? He cannot mean it literally. I mean there'd be all kinds of Christians going around like that. You only would have to sin twice and you're blind. If your hand does something wrong twice it would you're handless. What is Christ actually saying to us? He says look what is it that causes you to sin in your mind, your imagination, your heart? Particular people? Particular friends that you have? Particular places that you go? Particular films that you watch? If you want purity of heart you're going to have to chop off that influence on your life. Separate from that friend, you switch off that film, you don't read those magazines, you chop off those influences that are touching your mind and your heart. I hope you understand this isn't some little trivial thing in your Christian life because in verse 8 of that same chapter Jesus our Savior says the pure in heart will see God. What do you want in your life? Can I put that challenge before you tonight? Do you want God? You want to see him? You want to know him? You want to hear him? You want to recognize what he's doing? You want your whole being and personality to be filled with God? God in your life and God in your family? Then you're going to take an axe to these things that are coming in and influencing you. You know, you decide, you evaluate your life. Those are the instructions of your maker who is also your redeemer. It begins in the heart. Scriptures are revolutionary and real. I was working in a university mission back in England a few months ago and one of the men who was on the team with me had been with OM for five or six years before that and he invited a fellow along to one of the evening meetings and I can remember standing preaching the gospel and talking about the cross of the Lord Jesus particularly that night and this fellow was sitting down about where you're sitting. He came up afterwards to see me. He wanted to take a little booklet that I was giving out called Becoming a Christian. He didn't become a Christian. Not yet. And my friend went and invited him to the meeting the next night when I was going to be talking more about the resurrection. He couldn't come. He was organizing a big big party in the hall of residence where he was living. Everybody was going to get drunk that night so he didn't come to the meeting. My friend went and called on him at about 10 o'clock next Saturday morning and knocked on the door and walked straight in and found him just climbing out of bed with his girlfriend. My friend said, oh hello, glad to meet you. Took hands, all right. Sorry to interrupt you. Just came to invite you out to lunch. Quick as a flash you see. People were just getting up. Over lunch they got the gospel again and this time my friend began to spell out the cost of being a Christian. You're going to ask Christ to come into your life. Your body is going to become a temple of the Holy Spirit if you become a Christian. Your body is not some amusement arcade. It's the temple of God himself and he invited them both to come back to the meeting on Saturday night. They came and that night both of them trusted the Lord together. I was standing in a large Anglican church preaching the next night, the Sunday night, and it was absolutely full with men and women. As I ended the meeting I said now I want all those who have become Christians in the course of the meetings this past week to get up with East and yet they are going to face struggles, aren't they? They understand that becoming a Christian is committing themselves spiritually and physically to the God of holiness. Is it going to be easy for them in the days ahead? No, it is going to be like pulling teeth without anesthetic and yet they have joined the revolution. They want holiness in their mind, in their behavior, in everything about them and they're going to start reading the New Testament. Eighteen times in the New Testament God says fornication for the believer is out. My friends, these things do need to be faced. You need to face up to your own lives and remember Christ puts the key on your heart. You could join me sometimes as I talk to some of the messes they get themselves in. Don't you ever believe that Christians have a rough deal, they have a lousy time by being Christians and that people in the world somehow have it better because it's not true. The pain and the tears and the heartache and the agony for so many folk out there because they're not living on the basis of God's word. You remember we read verses from Paul's writing to the Corinthians and he's speaking of those folk. He says such were some of you. You've come from this kind of background too but you were washed. You were forgiven. You were justified. You were sanctified. You've become new men and women. And then he goes on to give them advice about how to live in the body. He doesn't assume that they will have no problems just because you've come into the kingdom of God. Now he says I want to give you advice about how to live pure lives for Christ. Some of you may face these problems on the team. Look at verse 12 of 1 Corinthians 6. Paul wants to ask you two questions. Let's listen to Paul counseling these Corinthians of all people. Ask yourself is your behavior helpful to your Christian growth? That's the first question. Patterns of behavior that you've got into is it helpful in your Christian growth? And secondly will it control you? Will you begin to find yourself gradually in increasing bondage to the pull and the chains of the flesh? Paul begins to imagine an argument with these Corinthians. They're sitting on those benches in that early church and from verse 13 onwards they start to quote Corinthian proverbs back to Paul. And they say look look sexual intimacy it's only natural because that is what the body is for. I'm made that way. I've got that capacity so it's just natural. I will do what feels right. Food for the stomach and the stomach for food. That's what the stomach is for, eating food. Paul says no. God made your body for his own holy eternal purposes. And you're not free to imagine that you somehow have rights of possession over your body. It's not yours. You've merely borrowed it temporarily. You have to give an account for the behavior in the flesh. Don't you begin to imagine as Christian men and women that your body is yours to dispose of as you like. God made your flesh for his own eternal purposes. And then in verse 14 they begin to seem to think about how Paul's getting a bit legalistic and he's asking too much. And Paul immediately reminds them of the God of the resurrection. Look do you find yourself sometimes powerless to cope with certain problems? What kind of a God have you got? Is he a God with practically no power at all? A God who doesn't really understand you? A God who doesn't have the power to enable you to live right? Is he a God who's called you to live as a disciple and yet he hasn't got the power to enable you to do it? By his power God raised the Lord from the dead and he will raise us also. The power that's at work in our life is God's resurrection power. And we can ask for bits of experience of that power working in our mind and our desires and our habits as we go forward. And then the Corinthians turn to him and say well surely it doesn't it doesn't really lead to any harm does it? I mean something loving and tender and private there's no harm in it. No harm says Paul? I'll tell you who it harms says Paul. Four people get harmed by your immorality. Christ is harmed. You are harmed. The Holy Spirit is harmed. God the Father is offended. Verse by verse as Paul goes through the chapter. Because you have been joined to Christ. You know you are actually part of Christ's body. Is your behavior helpful to your Christian growth? Will it control you? The Bible is full of biblical examples of people ignoring those two questions that Paul puts. You think back in the second book of Samuel chapter 11. David and Bathsheba. It says there was a day when the armies went out to battle. It came the time of the year when a king's place was to be at the head of his army. When a war was on. When there were enemies to be confronted. King David was asleep on his own bed. He got up in the afternoon and stretched himself and strolled over to the the top of the wall of the top of his palace. And he looked down into the next garden. There was Bathsheba having a bath. The stupid woman. Having a bath where she could be seen from the king's palace. You see men are completely different from women. Right down to the last chromosome of their bodies. Men are turned on sexually, physically far more by what they see. Women not so much by what they see. Compared to the men. Much more by the way they are spoken to, touched, the way you treat them over a longer period of time. This is why, look, when magazines are trying to sell cars, big new flashy cars. How often do they have almost naked ladies sitting on the front of the car. And the silly men they sort of think at the back of their mind that if they buy the car they somehow get the as well. When did you last see them trying to sell washing machines to housewives with a man in his wife front sitting on the front. The sight of a man in his underwear doesn't greatly do much for a woman who's thinking of buying a washing machine. Men and women are different. And the story of David and Bathsheba among many others proves it. Now you cannot, you men, help what you see with your first look. You're only in control of your second look. Unless you're to walk around with your eyes shut all the time. This is why people in the newsagent shops, they put all the pornography at male eye height. Because they know the way that you are. This is why we appeal to the sisters here to remember that when they dress, especially when the weather gets even hotter. David took Bathsheba. I don't know what she thought about becoming the play thing of the king. That whole family was broken up. Her husband was killed in a few days. She got pregnant. Child was born, lived a week and then died. There was agony in the palace. David fasted and wept for a week. This was the beginning of the moral problems that came again and again and again and again in David's family. Simply because David crossed that boundary line. Two chapters later you can read of Amnon and Tamar. Fellow falls in love with his half-sister. Totally infatuated he believes he's madly passionately in love with this girl. He rapes her and the very next verse it says that he then began to hate her with a hatred that far exceeded the love with which he thought he had loved her. Our Bible is realistic. It's realistic about the mistakes that even great men like David who have written psalms for our encouragement. Beautiful pieces of scripture. Let's begin by remembering this. The central truth of God's word. One word. You can be forgiven. You can come back home again. You can know the Lord afresh. You can hear the Lord say as he said to David, your sin is forgiven. Let's begin to think of some of these things as we draw to a close. Some of you battling with sin in your lives that has never been faced, never dealt with, unforgiven. Every year we get people who come on these campaigns and they've come from the very midst of relationships that they actually know are wrong. And you may have come afraid that God was going to speak to you about that friendship, that relationship. Come into the light. Let the Lord speak to you. You're going to have to quietly but decisively break that thing and turn and know the forgiveness of God. Sin not forsaken. I really wonder whether it's forgiven. Are you willing to break from the past and know the forgiveness of God as a settled reality in your heart? Have some of you been nurturing lust in your own heart? You have particular blue movies that you play in your mind at certain times. Are you willing to turn from that? Some of you have perhaps been gripped with fear and worry about who you're going to marry. Whether you will really find a relationship that's deeply satisfying. Whether God could possibly have somebody ever in the whole world for you. Are you willing to leave the sin of worry? Because I believe that thought, if you let that settle on your heart, that becomes sin. Some of you perhaps still trouble with things that have happened in your past. We've seen folks who've come emotionally so bound still by the fact that they might have been raped when they were younger, relationships with step-parents. Let's face it too, there are folks very often who want to come on these campaigns who are homosexual. And the Bible speaks of those things too. And I'm not promising you an easy road. But the same message of God's power, God's forgiveness, if you will come back and walk in the light, is for you. And so I'm going to ask at the end of this meeting, that if there are folk here and God is speaking to them through scripture tonight, that you don't go on into the conference without seeking counsel. Maybe some of you know what you've got to do. Maybe you just need to take a walk round the grounds and just thank the Lord for his forgiveness. Get quite clear in your mind that you're right with him and you have a gospel that touches this area to preach. Some of you maybe will need to come and talk. That someone might pray with you. That another brother or sister who's a little bit further down the road can give you some help and some advice and some care and love. Why couldn't God have arranged life differently? Why do I have to live in the body now, perhaps unmarried and yet with tremendous sex drives? You know the age of sexual maturity is getting lower, steadily, as generation follows generation. You know a hundred years ago, a hundred years ago, only 13% of girls had reached sexual maturity at the age of 16. Now that figure is 97%. The sociologists calculate that the age of menstruation is six months younger with every passing generation. There is an enormous gap opening up. We become sexually capable and yet we cannot get married, perhaps for years. Now why is this happening? Why has God planned life to be like this? What has he got to teach me as I live in the gap? Scripture is clear that sex is a gift from a loving God and like every other gift, it's temporary. The only gifts that are not temporary is the gift of salvation. Your other spiritual gifts, they're all temporary. You've got gifts of teaching, gifts of evangelism, gifts of administration, gifts of showing help to people. When the Lord comes back, they all finish. You won't be standing up doing much teaching in heaven and there won't be need for much evangelism in heaven. Your spiritual gifts are temporary but your character is eternal. I hope you don't get all caught up thinking about spiritual gifts when you should be majoring on the growth of your character in Christ-likeness. And like every other gift, it needs to be given back before it becomes useful. You need to give your gifts back to the Lord and ask him to use you. And if God has given you any spiritual gift, it is so that your character may grow. Supposing you've got gifts as an evangelist and you can go out and you can preach and people will be converted. That's tremendous. Praise God for that. You can be a greater evangelist than Billy Graham and you can go home and be a miserable, lousy husband. You can treat your kids badly and God in some strange way will continue at least for a long while to use your gifts of evangelism. The fact that God uses your gifts says nothing about your character. You can have gifts in administration, gifts in teaching and yet they've been given to you so that as you use those gifts your character actually grows more like Christ. The evangelist is going to get involved with people. The evangelist is going to get mentioned to people. They're going to come into his home, they're going to destroy his furniture, they're going to eat his food, they're going to wake him up any time of the night. And he's going to learn patience and he's going to learn love and his character. A man who's got gifts as a teacher is going to have to spend hours and hours when other people are asleep in bed studying God's word, getting God's truth. In his character he's learning discipline, he's learning self-control. It's exactly the same with the gift of sexual ability. God has given you this gift so that you can give it back to him so that as you live in the body your character can be formed. You are to learn to love and serve other people. You're to learn to think about other people unselfishly. This is part of the essential hollowness of masturbation. It is a totally selfish activity. It involves nothing that I can think of to the glory of God. But the worst of all is that it is actually very often training your mind to think about other people in a selfish, exploitationary way. And you will find actually as a preparation for marriage it's a disaster. Because you will become selfish and demanding and that will be a groove into which your character fits. God is very wise. God has given you beauty. He's made you interesting. You're all a tremendous bunch of people. And yet you face this problem, you live with it. So that you can cooperate with God's Holy Spirit in your thinking and in your character you begin gradually to become more and more like Jesus Christ. God's gift. A gift from a loving Heavenly Father. He's given it to his young children so that you might grow up to be like him. How many gifts do parents give to children so that the children will actually grow up to be more like the parents? My wife comes from a long line of Scottish engineers and mechanics. So at the age of three she gives my son a toolbox. Why does she do this? Obvious. She's trying to push my son in the direction of her family so that he grows up like her lot. I want to give him a football. I want to give him a hockey stick. Parents give their children piano lessons. Not that the children ask for them but the parents want the children to learn to play the piano. You see parents giving gifts so as to train up the children in a certain way. What a great God we have. Put us all together as brothers and sisters and given us the gift to relate deeply and intimately even sexually to one other person so that we will learn by his grace to become like him. My time is gone. Let me give you what I call a Chinese takeaway summary at the end. You don't have Chinese takeaways in Germany. Five principles and then we'll end. The first is that we must be absolutely honest in facing up to our own problems because our God is light. God is light in in him is no darkness at all. Don't live in the darkness if you want to go on with God. You remember that woman in John chapter four as Jesus was sitting beside her at the well. A woman with a history. She'd had various husbands. She was now living with a chap she wasn't even married to and yet she was spiritually hungry. That living water that you're talking about I want that. I want something to satisfy me deep down deeper than I've ever known before and the Lord said you go call your husband. Just very simply and quietly he put his finger as perhaps he the same Lord has been putting his finger tonight in your life on sin. You can't go on with the Lord if you're facing in the opposite direction. We begin with honesty. Secondly real repentance. Not just feeling sorry. Don't just take a walk for half an hour tonight before you go to bed feeling a bit sorry for yourself. Lord it hurts but I want holiness. I want to be obedient. The pure in heart shall see God. Oh God I want to see you and know you. Real repentance is a real turn and then thirdly don't carry on feeding your problem. Some of you will have to how shall I put it demythologize your fantasies. Brothers and sisters as they really are. In one way that's one of the advantages of OM team life. You begin to see other brothers and sisters much more realistically. You know it's easy to fall in love with a girl if every time you're going to see her she has known that you were coming for two hours before. You didn't get it. Don't worry. Fourthly I think this is so key. We need to begin to learn to live the disciplined life. Disciplined in your feeding, disciplined in your sleeping, disciplined in what you do. I find let me tell you something secret about me and then it'll stop being a secret. I find in many ways I function best as a Christian when I am slightly tired. I think that's perhaps why God keeps me for 360 days a year tired. If I've got too much energy if I'm just full of beans I'm liable to do anything but if I'm tired I press on with the things that matter. Some of you fellows you sleep too much, sleep too much, you eat too much, you've got sex problems, you wonder why. We need to get ourselves under the whip. A disciplined life under control and then finally let us all remember that God loves us and accepts us now tonight just as we are. Maybe you don't like yourself very much. You don't like what you've done. You don't like how you look. You look at how your future is developing you don't like that either and then you begin to think that nobody else likes you and worst of all God probably doesn't like you. God loves the unlovable. We get trained by the advertising world to think that we have to deserve love. Only we wear a certain kind of clothing, certain kind of perfume, drive a certain kind of then people will love us. With God it's untrue. God loves you just as you are. Do you ever get up in the morning and sort of stagger through to the mirror and you just take a horrible look at your horrible self? God doesn't think about you like that at all. He likes to see you up. He doesn't mind you being sleepy. He knows about your past. He has been watching over you and praying over you for years and years. He loves you. We need have no fear throwing our lives again on the altar of sacrifice before the Lord Jesus because of who he is. Then when now? I'm going to ask that if you need to talk with someone perhaps to just pray with someone just to open up something that's been on your conscience for a long time. That you just take the opportunity tonight. Go to someone you know and trust. Go to a country leader. Come to me if you want. Find someone in order that you might talk with them and get loving care and counsel and help from them. Because if God's word doesn't meet our needs at this point how are you going to go and stand in the streets of France and Belgium Austria and urge people to read a gospel, read a bible that you don't really believe in? God is so good. We need have no fear whatever of him but walk with him in the light to the end of your days. Oh God thank you for your word and your message. Lord we want to be those that are so eager to hear what you have to say because we know that we're better off listening and obeying. You're a God of glory. We want something of that glory to mark our lives. We want that glory to mark our teams. We want to go that same road as those Corinthians and those Thessalonians to learn self-control and discipline as we walk with you. Oh God thank you that your gospel is not just a little thing. Not just believe in Jesus and go to heaven. You want to change our characters that we might live with you for all eternity. Continue to lead us we pray this evening in Jesus name.