In this sermon, the speaker emphasizes the importance of treating each other with respect and avoiding sinful behavior. He encourages the audience to honestly confront their own problems and seek counsel and prayer if needed. The central message of the Gospel is forgiveness and the opportunity for a new start. The speaker also emphasizes the need for discipline in various aspects of life, including thoughts, emotions, and relationships.

We want to think tonight about the whole question of how may we have purity of mind and heart. Because Jesus himself said in Matthew chapter 5, verse 8, it is the pure in heart who see God. So we want to focus very much on some of the ways in which our heart so often does not seek God, in fact seeks other pleasures that are ungodly. You remember Jesus Christ talking to the woman he met in John chapter 4. The woman who was sitting by the well. The woman who had lived with a wide variety of men. She'd married some of them, she was now living with one she had not married. And the Lord says that such people as her, the father is seeking to be his worshippers. God wants ordinary men and women, whatever their moral, emotional or sexual backgrounds, to be clean and right with him. It's good for us to be able to talk honestly on this subject. To focus particularly on the whole question of our own private sexual morality. How do we think about ourselves and other people? Because you and I know that being a Christian doesn't make the problems in this area simply disappear. I believe that sex is one of the major causes of spiritual problems in many, many of the young people whom I meet and deal with all the year round. Because as people are defeated in this area, so it leads to doubt and unbelief about the whole Christian life. And you are going out on teams. You're going to be going out to share the gospel within a few days' time. Is the gospel true for you? As you talk about the forgiveness of God to men and women, have you faced God in this area of your own heart and have you known forgiveness? As you talk about the way in which God can satisfy the human heart, I want to ask you tonight, is God satisfying your heart and your mind and your imagination in this area? People come on these crusades with all kinds of guilt feelings about what they've done in the past. And they need these things to be dealt with. They need to hear God's word on this subject. Often people have a real problem in accepting themselves as ordinary human beings, men and women. People have desires they don't know what to do with. Men and women regularly feeling deeply guilty about the problem of masturbation. Can the Bible help us? Does the gospel touch these areas of my life? Can I go and talk about God's love and God's forgiveness with my own heart in a state of rebellion and uncleanness? The Apostle Paul wrote to the Philippians. I want to hear, he said, that you are living a life worthy of the gospel that saved you. Are we going to be honest in our sharing with men and women this summer? Have we first allowed God's word to apply to our own hearts? So that's our subject for this evening. There are many, many books on the topic. Most of them do far better than I can hope to do tonight. There's a book here called Sexual Understanding Before Marriage. And I want to urge you to go and read at the book store. Let me make a bargain with you. Don't buy anything. Just go to the book store and start reading. I don't mind rows of you standing down that corridor reading the books. But you must make a bargain with me. As you stand and read these tremendous Christian books. If God speaks to you, even a little bit, you'll get it. You buy the book. You take the risk. You stand reading and if God speaks to you, you buy. When the Logos went to China, they were not finding it very easy, the Chinese men and women, to come on board and buy books. It was too much controlled by the government. And so little groups of Chinese Christian young people would get together. They would take it in turns. They would write out whole books. And then not buy it. There was one group that wrote out a whole new Bible dictionary of nearly a thousand pages. I ought to challenge some of you to at least stand and read and wait for God to speak to you. There's a book here by Jeannie Andrews. It's for girls. It's called Your Half of the Apple. So many magazines, television programs bombarding men and women with a completely false view of their own sexuality. Stand there and read it. Rows and rows of girls. And when you finish, you can pass it on to the next one. I believe God will speak to you through a book like that. This is called Givers, Takers and Other Kinds of Lovers by Josh McDowell. Josh McDowell knows the student mind. He's been preaching the gospel to students for years and years. He also knows how to write books for students. He writes thin ones. It's only just over a hundred pages. It's good. Hang on a minute. We're enjoying this. You've got a bite now, haven't you? There are books in French. This one is J'aime une fille. There are some books in German. Mein schönes Gefühl. My beautiful feeling. Liebe ist ein Gefühl, das man lernen muss. Love is a feeling you have to learn. In Dutch, Verlangen naar Tederheid. The picture on the front is... So, first get the book, No Turning Back. Then when you've got the message of that, start reading the other books. And if God speaks to you, get them. Now let's read from the book. Turn please to Matthew's Gospel, chapter 5, verse 27. You have heard that it was said, you shall not commit adultery. But I say unto you that everyone that looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart. And if thy right hand cause you to stumble, plug it out, cast it from you. It is profitable for you that one of your members should perish, and not the whole body be cast into hell. And if your right hand cause you to stumble, cut it off, cast it from you. For it is profitable for you that one of your members should perish, and not your whole body go into hell. And then let's turn on to 1 Corinthians, chapter 6, verses 9 to 20. I want you all to follow these passages in your own Bible and make notes. Bernard, you begin reading at verse 9, and then in German go down to verse 20. I want you all to follow these passages in your own Bible and make notes. and then in German go down to verse 20. For this is the will of God, even your sanctification, that you abstain from fornication, that each one of you know how to possess himself of his own vessel in sanctification and honour, not in the passion of lust, like the Gentiles who know not God. that each one of you know how to possess himself of his own vessel in sanctification and honour, not in the passion of lust, like the Gentiles who know not God. For God called us, not for uncleanness, but in sanctification. Therefore he that rejecteth, rejecteth not man, but God, who giveth his Holy Spirit unto you. Therefore he that rejecteth, rejecteth not man, but God. Let us all bow in prayer. Our father we want to be biblical in our thinking, pure in our hearts, filled with your Holy Spirit, walking in the light with you, the great God of our Salvation. So speak to us we pray tonight through your word. Help us to concentrate. And Lord we know that you will speak to each person here in a different way. Give each person that listening heart tonight we pray. That we may all know how to respond to what you're saying to us through your word. In Jesus name, Amen. I want to begin by saying that we should not be naive about the first century and the Christians at that time. Don't imagine that that particular age was all Roman togas, sandals and virginity. Paul is writing this epistle to the Thessalonians from the city of Corinth. And we've just heard Paul exhorting these young Christians that they live a holy life. That was in verse 3. That they learn self-control, that was in verses 4 and 5. And Paul has warned the believers that they face the judgment of God, that's in verse 6. Now that particular age was very little different from our own. Immorality, fornication were just as widespread as they are today. Divorce was if anything even more common. Jerome, one of the early Christian writers, once wrote about a marriage he watched. And the woman was marrying her 23rd husband. And she was his 21st wife. In some parts of society they used to change partners almost every year. There was immorality at the very top levels of society. 14 out of the first 15 Roman emperors were known practicing homosexuals. The attitude to women at that time was that they were the mere possessions of men. They could be used, exploited and thrown away like a cigarette packet. Paul is writing to men and women who have come into the church from that kind of background. You read how he was saying to the Corinthians. You did this, you did that, you did something else. You were washed, justified, brought into Christ Jesus. Now the Lord wants us to be the salt of the earth. What does salt do? Salt acts as a preservative. It stops society from going so rotten. Salt also creates thirst. And God wants Christian men and women to create a thirst for righteousness, for clean living in the hearts of other people. Salt also needs spreading around. It's horrible in lumps if you get it into your mouth. The Lord himself said the big problem with salt is that it can lose its saltiness. They used to get salt from the Dead Sea. Big blocks of it would be piled up by the roadside down at the Dead Sea, waiting for transportation up towards Jerusalem. Sometimes the rains would fall. And the salt that had been hardened there by the Dead Sea would have all its saltiness washed out. What was left behind was mere rubbish chemicals. The Lord said if you have lost your saltiness as a Christian, your distinctiveness as a believer, you become like salt that's lost its savor, lost its flavor. The only thing that was left to be done with that kind of salt was they turned it into stuff for roads. Men and women and oxen and goats used to walk on it. Now the problem with many Christian men and women today, often in the churches from which we come, is that they are behaving in exactly the same way morally, mentally, emotionally as everyone else in the world. The way they think about each other is exactly the same as the unconverted man or woman out in the street. And the Lord says if you lose your saltiness, you're good only to be trodden upon. Now our sexuality is a gift from God. Our physical bodies are God's design. God has made us the way we are. Able to relate to one another at a deep, intimate, personal, physical and emotional level. You get lonely. You need friends. You feel good when people treat you in certain ways. And it's God's design that you should be like that. It's one of the most wonderful feelings in the world to be loved by another person just for yourself. And it is God that has made you and me that way. And yet this capacity for human, deep, emotional involvement with other people can easily be twisted and destroyed by Satan. What help will the Lord Jesus himself give us when he comes to this earth? God our creator. Sex is his idea. The human body is his design. So you and I have a right to ask God some questions when he comes to this earth. We want to know what he has said in the scriptures when he first came. I don't speak to you as some super halo saint floating around on some kind of moral hovercraft. I could introduce you to many OM leaders who would testify that that last statement is unbelievably true. I am a normal, red-blooded, ordinary human male. So I want help from the same Lord Jesus Christ from scripture. The Lord says the whole key lies in your heart, your mind. You have heard that it was said you shall not commit adultery. But the problem says Christ is actually deeper than that. We want to deal with the way you think about people before you ever get near adultery. And Christ did not say that it is wrong to look at other people. Otherwise you'd have to go around with your eyes shut. How can it be wrong to look at anybody when God has given us the eyes with which we look? The Lord said it is wrong to look and lust. What you see with your first glance, you can't help if you walk around with your eyes open. What you begin to see with your second glance, that is a matter of your mind and your control in the long run. God's whole emphasis in the Sermon on the Mount is on my heart, your heart. If your right eye causes you to stumble, pull it out. The Lord cannot mean that physically. Otherwise there'd be a lot of Christians going around without any eyes. You'd only get two goes. And you're blind for life. If your hands offend you, chop them off. We'd have churches full of blind and armless, handless people. What is the Lord saying? He wants you to use your eyes. He wants you to learn to direct and control the thinking that goes on in your mind. Isn't this the problem? What is it that causes you to stumble? Is it certain kinds of films? Is it certain sorts of magazines? Is it certain friendships or certain places that you go? Is it certain times of your weekly routine? Have you allowed your mind to get so affected that you are no longer pure in heart? It is the pure in heart who will see God, says Scripture. And so we need to learn how to control the way we think. What help will Scripture give me for that? You know, there's a very discouraging thing about the Christian life. Some problems don't just go away when you pray. Let's be realistic. The problem of evil thinking, adultery in the heart, does not immediately get solved for life the moment you say one prayer about it. With some problems, it seems God almost says, you've got a problem, you fix it yourself. But He doesn't quite say that. But He does give you some disciplines, He gives you some practical instructions, He gives you something for you to do. The Lord says you are to control what comes into your heart and into your mind so that you are not being stimulated in the wrong way. Colossians chapter 3, verse 2. Paul says, set your mind, fix your mind, determine to put your mind on the things that are above. He begins in verse 5 to say, put off the old man. Put on the new person. You are to begin to learn to control your own mind, your own thinking. The scriptures are written for real people. I was recently at a mission, a university, evangelistic campaign back in England. I'd taken with me a friend who had been on OM for at least seven years. It was his first such evangelistic mission. And he invited a fellow to come along to a meeting one night. And at the end of the meeting I called people to come forward if they wanted to talk to me or take a booklet about how to become a Christian. And this fellow took a booklet. My OM friend said to him the next day, are you coming tonight again to the meeting? He said, no, I'm organising a party tonight, I'm going to get drunk tonight. My friend was sad. At ten o'clock on Saturday morning he went round to call on me. Knocked on the door. This was after a very late night party. Walked in and this fellow was just climbing out of bed with his girlfriend. So the OM chap said, sorry, I don't mean to embarrass you, but I came round to invite you for lunch. Gave this fellow and his girlfriend lunch. Gave them the gospel again. Explained something of the cost of becoming a Christian. Invited them along again to a meeting that evening. Now both of them listened to the gospel. And then they came along the next night. God really beginning to deal with them. Finally at the end of that meeting in a huge church in England. I invited men and women all over the audience to stand up if they wanted to accept Christ into their lives that night. Dozens of people stood up. But the first two to get to their feet were this fellow and this girl. Do you think it's going to be easy for them in the coming weeks? The patterns of behaviour that they've lived with for months that they can just change like that? They are going to have an experience like pulling wisdom teeth without anaesthetic. But God will help. As they begin to obey scripture. As they face up to the fact that there are certain circumstances they must be particularly carefully. Certain patterns of behaviour must begin to change slowly and gradually. God is going to work in their life. But God only works with our cooperation. God gets things in the right order you know. Supposing you are going along on a bicycle. And you fall off. And you damage yourself in two ways. You scratch the end of your nose. And you break one of your main blood arteries. Burst it, rupture it. Blood coming out. And you get carried into the hospital. Which wound are they going to deal with first? The nose or the blood coming out of your neck? God has dealt with your major problem already at Calvary. We are redeemed. We are forgiven. We are in God's family. Do you believe that? Say Amen. So what's the next problem he's going to deal with? Our character, the way we behave, the way we treat people. And that compared with the first problem is actually minor. You are already in God's hands. God wants you now to cooperate in the process of working out your own salvation. Turn to 2nd Corinthians. Chapter 6. Sorry, 1st Corinthians. Let's listen to the Apostle Paul counselling. I want to ask Stuart McAllister at the back if you can go and see if you can get the lights to switch on. Open the plastic box. Pull down all the switches. If the whole thing blows up, well, we'll go to bed. If they can hear me up in the control room. Anymore. Do the lot. The French have all just seen the light in some other way. Thank you, Stuart. Turn back to 1 Corinthians, chapter 6. I want you to listen to the Apostle Paul counselling the Corinthian believers. He has two questions to ask you. As you consider anything in your own life, in your own past experience. One, is it helpful to my Christian growth? And secondly, will it control me? He says, all things are lawful for me, verse 12, but not all things are helpful. I will not be brought under the power of anything. Paul talking to men and women who'd come from a background of ingrained immorality. Our Bible is full of examples of men and women who broke through Paul's boundaries and found themselves in trouble. Consider in the Old Testament. The story of David and Bathsheba. You know the story well. It was the time of the year when the armies go out to battle. For years now, King David had led his soldiers in battle. But then he begins to relax. We find him sleeping in the afternoon. But the army has gone out without him. He begins to wake up and stretch himself as the sun starts to go down. He walks to the corner of the flat roof of his house and looks over into the garden next door. And there's Bathsheba having a bath in the garden. They don't make Swiss springs like they used to. David is behaving like a normal, ordinary man. Men and women are different. I don't know whether you'd noticed. Not just in the question of shape, but in the way they react to things. We are actually different right down to the bone. Down to the last cells of our body. Men are turned on by what they see. Much more... The French seem to be enjoying themselves tonight. I'm suspecting that the translator is preaching his own message. Danny, try and keep your people quiet. If I say something funny, you be silent. Because my real purpose is extremely serious. Men are turned on emotionally by what they see. Women much more by the way you treat them, by the atmosphere, by the words that you speak. Some of you must forgive me if you've heard me say this before. The people who sell motor cars in motor magazines, they very often have a photograph of a girl with almost no clothes on, on the front of the car. Why do they do that? Because the stupid men think that if they buy the car, they get the girl with it. When did you ever, in the ladies' magazines, see them trying to sell washing machines by putting a man in his underpants on it? We're different. Now, we must recognize that. This means I am asking you, girls, please bear this in mind in the way that you dress. Because the men walking around this conference don't find it particularly easy, emotionally and morally, if you dress in very figure-hugging clothes. Some of you do it almost instinctively without being aware of what you're doing. But bear in mind that we men may find a problem with the kind of way in which you dress. It acts the other way too. The men must be particularly careful about the way in which they treat the girls and behave towards them. Not to say that some girls aren't, I mean, turned on by what they may see. Scripture teaches us that we must care for one another. Scripture is realistic. You've got every different kind of moral, emotional, sexual relationship in the book of Genesis. Let us begin to treat each other more like brother and sister. So what I'm saying is that although David sinned in the greater way, there was an element of fault also in Bathsheba. The silly girl shouldn't have been taking her bath out in the garden. But David saw it. And then things started in his mind. Began to lie. Began to cheat. Committed adultery. Followed it up with murder. Broke the family up. I don't know what Bathsheba felt in the long run being just a plaything of the king. Child was born. A week later it was dead. And the worst thing of all was that David who'd written such psalms, who'd led the nation in such praise and worship to God, a man of towering spiritual capacity, was reduced to weeping on the ground before God because his ministry he thought was broken, his life was ended. What he saw led to sin. And it cut him off from the Lord. Everything else that he'd ever known spiritually became mere theory at that point. Because the sense of the joy and the glory of God was gone from his heart. He'd wandered into the darkness. He felt deeply guilty for what he'd done. He had damaged and destroyed other people's lives. And God had told him that he was in a state of disobedience. The Bible is realistic. Just two chapters later you can see what happened then in his family. With great burdens on your back that could so easily have been chopped away. If you need counsel, if you want someone just to pray with about a particular problem, if you want someone to stand with you and share the Scriptures with you and apply it to your own heart, don't go limping on into this summer campaign with these things still undealt with. Because the central message of our Gospel and our Bible is that there is forgiveness. There is a new start. You can be clean. The Bible says, Blessed are those that hunger and thirst after righteousness. Can you stand tonight and say, Yes, I'm really hungry for righteousness in my own life. I want every relationship of mine to be righteous. If I am to prepare for marriage, I want to go God's way. I don't want to stand before my Lord Jesus Christ. And all I've got to show him is a life of laziness and carnality coated with a few Scripture verses. Blessed, says the Lord, a special blessing for those who hunger and thirst in their heart for righteousness of life and holiness of mind. Paul speaks to those Corinthians. Some of you are fornicators, he looks. He can see them sitting there in the crowd as he writes in his imagination. Some of you were adulterers. Some of you were homosexuals. Some of you in the church were like that, says Paul. And yet you were washed, you were sanctified, you were cleansed, you were forgiven. You could go on with a testimony of how God met you and forgave you. What are you going to say to someone this summer if they start to talk about their particular problem and it's just like yours and you've never seen it dealt with? Are you going to have any Scripture for them that's fresh and new and alive in your own heart? Do you have a gospel that's full and complete? Because although you know the experience of temptation, you know also with God that you want purity. And you started out on the road of discipline, discipleship in this area as well as every other. Let me step back a bit and ask a question. Why couldn't God have arranged things differently? Why are we allowed as young men and women to have these problems? It would be so good if the moment we became a Christian, we went to heaven. Or we became instantly holy. But it's not true. Why has God left us in this present situation? See, in our western world, the age of sexual maturity is actually dropping. A hundred years ago, only 13% of girls at the age of 16 had started adulthood as a woman. Now at the age of 16, the figure is 97%. It's estimated that the age of puberty drops six months with every generation. And yet at the same time, the age at which we get married isn't getting any lower. In some countries it's getting higher because of economics. And so a huge gap area is opening up in the middle. And most of you are living in the gap. Why has God allowed this to happen? Why has God arranged this so? I've already said sex is a gift. And like every other gift in scripture, it's temporary. You may have gifts of tongues, gifts of faith, gifts of evangelism. They're all temporary. They will all end when the Lord Jesus comes back. And like other gifts that we get given, it is designed to develop our character. God has given you your gifts, spiritual and physical, in such a way as to develop your character. That's not a difficult idea for you. Parents do it all the time. Parents pay for their children to have piano lessons at the age of three so that the child will grow up to be, you know, a musician. My wife comes from a long line of engineers from Scotland. And so at the age of three, she gave my son a toolbox. I wanted to give him a football. You see, what we do with gifts, we develop people in the way in which we want them to go. Parents do this with children all the time. Is God any different? God has given you your different gifts so that your character will develop in certain ways. Some of you have gifts in administration. Some have gifts in evangelism. Some have gifts in encouraging one another. And I can tell you one thing. Every single one of you will get the gift from God of either being married or of being single. It's a gift either way so that your character will begin to grow in a certain direction. How does the gift of marriage develop? I could invite some of the married people who are grinning away at the back and we could have testimonies all night on how marriage develops your character. You learn to be patient. You learn to respect the other person. You learn to love the other person in ways that make sense to them. You learn to be kind to the other person and to serve them. As you get drawn closer to another person it is a revelation. You know the amount of mess that appears in your bedroom, you men, when you get married to a girl. Little bottles and squirty tubes and pins and bits of cotton wool. You wouldn't have believed the world could have contained so much. That the way in which my character began to change just in very simple things when I got married. Just a simple matter like tidiness with clothes. You know when I used to get undressed before I got married you're all watching now to see if I'm going to do it. I used to just throw stuff down on the ground. You know what I used to do with my trousers? I just used to drop them down like that. And there they would sit. Just on the ground. It was perfectly... I mean I just used to step back in in the morning and... They didn't move. Now I got married. I got a full living. God has given us each other so that we may grow more like him. And yet so very often we grab what does not belong to us. Treat each other with disrespect. Your consciences at the start of this campaign can well be troubled by those kind of things. Let me summarize. In five points. Let's begin with an honest facing of your own problem. Has God been speaking to you tonight? Something that you'd like counsel or prayer about? Maybe you don't need to talk to me or Judith or one of the other country leaders. Maybe you know what you should be saying to the Lord in response to his word. And you just need to go and take a walk around the ground. Pray. Tell the Lord what you want in your life. Repent and turn from sin. But there is no possibility of progress in this area without you being willing to be honest and listen to what God is saying. Has God given you great gifts that you are in fact misusing? Has God given you a mind but you're abusing it? God has given you an ability to relate to another person and love and serve them. And yet you're training your thinking in selfishness. This is the essential hollowness of masturbation. You are training your own mind in a selfish attitude towards others of God's creatures. The Lord Jesus himself says whatever causes you to stumble, deal with it. Radically. Cut it out. You begin to affect what comes into your mind. You learn to set your mind on the things that are above. There are only here that need to honestly face up to that problem. Say, yes Lord, I know that I've allowed my mind to begin to think about certain people in a way that's not glorifying to you. The Lord Jesus as he spoke to that woman by the well brought her gently to face up to the reality of her own sin. You call sin what God calls sin. If you've been worrying about the future, who you might marry, worrying whether God can be trusted to look after that precious thing which is your life, maybe you need to face up to the sin of worry and fear. Maybe if you've become emotionally dependent upon another human being and together you know that you've been sinning before the Lord God who saved you, you need to face up to that. The Lord brought this woman to the point of recognizing her own moral sin. That's the beginning. Secondly, real repentance. In 2 Corinthians chapter 7, Paul makes the difference between two kinds of feeling sorry. Verse 9, I rejoice, not that you were made sorry, but that you were made sorry unto repentance. You were made sorry after a godly sorrow that you might suffer loss by us in no way. Godly sorrow produces repentance unto salvation. A repentance which brings no regret. Don't just feel sorry for yourself if you in fact need to turn back to God. A sorrow that leads to no regrets. A sorrow that leads to godliness. A real turn is involved in that kind of repentance. And then thirdly, stop feeding your fantasies. In one way OM is going to be a very realistic experience for many of you. Actually living on mixed teams can do damage to fantasies. If you've got a problem in the way your mind works, don't feed it. Starve it. And then fourthly, begin to practice a disciplined life. Discipline in how much you sleep. In what you let your mind think about when you're doing nothing else. In how much you eat. Discipline in your moods and your emotions. Discipline in your reactions to what other people say to you or the way they look at you. And discipline in your relationships to other people. Love is patient. Love is kind. You know, I have a real problem with impatience. In the early days of my marriage this was a tremendous problem. When I see a particular way to do something or something that needs to happen, and I have hurt my wife and my children and therefore myself so many times. I've prayed, Lord it would be better if my tongue just flew out of my head one day when I said something and was gone forever than that I should carry on like this. And it hasn't happened yet as you may have noticed. God is helping me gradually with his word to learn a bit of control over my impatience. Scriptures like love is patient love is kind are becoming more and more helpful to me in my marriage. Because if somebody does something that just annoys me I go Do you want to go to Belgium and join the drama team? They can really help you they can teach you a lot. The scriptures the scriptures applied in the crisis help you to grow. If you're committed to obedience. So what's the area of problem? Is it your worry? Is it your eyes? Is it your up and down emotions? Ask the Lord for practical help from his word. Begin to learn to discipline your life in accordance with scripture. And the final principle Remember however you feel that God accepts you and loves you right now tonight as you are. You know sometimes we wish we were better. We think if only I could get this relationship problem sorted out or I did not have that characteristic then God would love me. It is not true. You are accepted in Christ. God loves you the way you are. He wishes you would love him a bit more. He wants you to spend more time with him so that you become more like him. He wants you to grow more pure in heart. He wants you to hunger and thirst after righteousness. God has spoken to you of sin. You get right tonight. If you need friendship and help and counsel then please ask for it. Ask someone that you know and trust and get it. If you have got great disagreements with what has been said then talk it out. Because we all want our lives to be based on scripture. We want nothing to be held back from God's control. You want your life your future your tongue your imagination to be God's to command. You want to serve him. Maybe this is one area that you have been holding back for some time. You came on this campaign ready to serve the Lord in ways that were under your control. And yet the Lord wants to deal with you in these areas first. Welcome the Lord's word into your heart and act without delay. Let us pray together. Father we do thank you that you don't just give us standards and then leave us to suffer. Thank you that you come alongside us. Teach us how to live. You teach us how to care for one another. You want to teach us something of what the Lord Jesus went through on earth as a man among men and women. That we might have a testimony that we can pass on to other people of what it means to walk uprightly in the light of God. Continue O God to deal with our hearts that we be pure before you. In Jesus name. Amen.