Determine Your Story

Determine Your Story

Dear Champions,

The short excerpt is by Andy Stanley, and the Scripture is Philippians 3:13-14 But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.  2 Corinthians 5:17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!

If you are single determine the story that you want to tell your future spouse now and then live in such a way so that you can tell that story.  Everybody has a story to tell, and many people lie. They lie because they don't like their story that they wrote, and they were afraid that they would lose their partner and opportunity if they told their true story.  The true story eventually comes out, so decide now what kind of story that you want to tell.  

One story could be that when I first heard truthfully what God designed for sex, from that point forward, I was waiting for you and wanted to honor God with my body specifically in the area of my sexuality.  As I have learned to honor God with my body before I say I do to you, I am ready to honor God with my body once we say I do.  As I learned to practice self-control before I said I do to you, I am ready to practice self-control after I say I do.  I have been from that moment preparing for you.  That's a good story, and let me tell you what I know about you.  That's the story that you want to hear, isn't it?  Choose a good story, and live it out.

You're going to have to decide ahead of time what honoring God with your body looks like.  What will I do and not do with my body when it comes to relationships.  You need to pre-decide, and when the temptations come along, you say that I have already decided that I don't do that.  I don't spend the night, I don't sleep over, I pre-decided.  When you pre-decide, you're pre-deciding something about your future.  As big as a sacrifice as that may feel like now, giving up something now for something better later is not a sacrifice.  It is an investment.  When you decide to set sexual and moral standards, every time you apply those standards you are investing in a future relationship.  Every time you say No you are saying Yes, and you are making an investment into your future.

God loves you so much that He has spoken into the area of sexuality.  He is waiting for you to run into His direction and make some difficult decisions and then to trust Him.

Champions, have a great week!-David Vining

Exclusivity

Exclusivity

Dear Champions,

The short excerpt is by Andy Stanley, and the Scripture is 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 Do you not know that your bodies are temples 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 honor God with your bodies.

A myth about sex is that practice makes perfect.  Some of you have thought, "I need to know something about this and get pretty good at it so that I don't look stupid.  It's not like learning to play the violin.  If you want to learn how to play the violin you have to practice.  Did you know that you will be able to figure out sex without a single lesson or without a single practice session?"  

Romance in marriage is fueled by a sense of exclusivity, not a skill that you have developed.  Exclusivity is, "I have waited for you; and you have waited for me, and we will figure this out together."  It says that I only have eyes for you.  I have been praying for you and waiting for you before I had a face or a name to associate with you.  I am able to give all of me to all of you.  That fuels romance in marriage and not a skill set, practice or experience. 

Practice makes perfect is just a lie, and it gives you and your partner something to compare each other to, and on the other side of I do that is not an advantage. Romance is fueled when your husband goes on a business trip, and you don't worry.  You know his history before he married you, and you are assuming that it's a continuation after he married you.  It's when your wife is out with her girlfriends; and she does not call, and you don't worry.  You know her history before she married you, and you are assuming that it's a continuation after she married you.  It's that exclusivity that builds and fuels romance in a marriage.

If that's true, then what would you expect God to say to you about sex?  Have as much as you can and then when you get married flip a magic switch and suddenly be committed to one person.  Is that even possible?  Is it no wonder that so many people are so unfulfilled sexually in their marriage when they have messed with the intimacy factor of their sexuality before they said I do.

Champions, have a great week!-David Vining

Intimacy

Intimacy

Dear Champions,

The short excerpt is by Andy Stanley, and the Scripture is 1 Corinthians 6:16 Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, "The two will become one flesh."

Intimacy is to know and to be fully known.  When God created sexuality it was not simply about creating more humans.  It was to be the ultimate expression of intimacy-full on, passionate, fearless, know me as I am, no fear of comparisons and no fear of criticism.  It is fragile and powerful, and God gave it to the human race as a gift. As powerful and as fragile as it is, it can be broken.

Single people, you know married people who broke and abused this. You know married women that are numb to the intimacy that was designed to go with sex.  You know married men who because of their habits, now that they are married they can't find intimacy in sex and wonder what's wrong with them and what's wrong with their partner.  They are both looking outside of their marriage wondering if they married the wrong person.  The real issue is that when they were single and were dating they thought that sex was just physical and they could do whatever they wanted to do with their body.  Someday they assumed that they could meet the person that they wanted to spend the rest of their life with and that magically everything was just going to be fine. They were wrong, and hurt themselves.

When you have sex with a person there is a sense of permanence, and you become one with that person.  God designed it for you to become one with one.  When you continue to become one with person after person you damage your intimacy factor and your ability to experience what God intended for you to experience.  You disconnected sex from what it was intended to be for.

Champions, have a great week!-David Vining

P.S.  Remember that  Jesus dealt with sexual sin very compassionately, and the sin that He dealt with most harshly was the sin of self-righteousness and pride.  When we put our trust in Him, we are getting to heaven only on His perfect record of righteousness.  Jesus lived the life we should have lived and died the death we should have died.

The One We Feed the Most

The One We Feed The Most

 

Dear Champions,

The short excerpt is by me, and the Scripture is Philippians 4:8 whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.

Thirty second Super Bowl commercials this year costs $3.8 million.  See if you can recognize these slogans.

 

"Make a run for the border."  "It's the real thing."  "We run the tightest ship in the shipping business." "You're in good hands."  "Have it your way." "Where's the beef?" "Like a rock." "The choice of a new generation."  "You'll love the stuff we're made of." "Get a piece of the rock."  "Like a Good Neighbor"  "Get in the Zone"  "Built Tough"  "What's in your wallet"

 

Many of you can name what was being advertised, yet none of you tried to memorize them.  Back in the summer of 1980 I worked outside with the radio on every day, and I still remember an advertisement song that said to dial 1-800-525-1234 Best Western.  I just dialed the number for the first time in 33 years, and I got Best Western.  I never tried to memorize that number.

 

There is a story that says that if you put a frog in boiling water that it will jump out.  However, if you put the frog in lukewarm water and slowly turn up the heat, it will eventually boil itself to death.  The message is that if we keep watching or listening to unwholesome stuff, gradually we will not even recognize that it is unwholesome.  Our value system will just slowly change and adopt the value system of our culture.

 

The point is not that we have to be legalistic and only watch certain kinds of movies or listen to certain kinds of music.  It is not that we need to read Scripture all day long.  An owner of a german shepherd and a doberman pinsher was asked which dog would win if they got in a fight?  The owner replied that it was the one that he fed the most.

 

All of us are influenced by what we put in our mind.   What will influence our mind the most depends on what we feed the most.

 

Champions, have a great week!-David Vining

 

Bad or Good

Bad or Good

 

The short excerpt is by me, and the Scripture is Matthew 9:12-13 Jesus said, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice.'For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners."

 

This time of the year I am recruiting students and adults for a Young Life trip that we take every March to Southwind down in Florida.  It's actually a middle school trip, but we bring high school work crew and leaders.  Our high school leaders must be professing Christians, but no one else needs to be.  Young Life's mission is to reach kids that aren't Christians.

 

As I recruit Christian leaders not all them choose to go with us.  Many are going on a vacation with their families, and some have various other reasons such as trips with their friends or college visits, etc.  A Christian high schooler told me once recently that she didn't want to go because she didn't want to be associated or seen with the kinds of folks that go on our trips.  I tried to explain that we weren't a Christian youth group, but an outreach to folks that aren't Christians.  I didn't change her mind. 

 

Some people are out doing stuff with the opposite sex that they aren't supposed to do until they are married, they are getting high on alcohol and drugs, and they are cheating in school and doing other stuff that is not very wholesome.  They need Jesus.

 

But there is another group of people that are doing the right stuff.  They are waiting for marriage to have sex, they aren't getting high on drugs or alcohol, they are in church every week, and they are dotting their i's and crossing their t's.  They also need Jesus.

 

The scary part about the good and moral group is that they can't see that they are sick.  They are full of self-righteousness, they don't love or care about the people that Jesus came to save, and they are blind to the fact that they are just as bad as the folks getting high and doing unwholesome stuff.

 

Here's the point.  Whether we are good morally or bad morally, we all are messed up and need Jesus.  All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.  The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 3:23, 6:23).

 

Have a great week!-David Vining

Love and Justice

Love and Justice

Dear Champions,

The short excerpt is by James Dobson, and the Scripture is included.

By granting us freedom of choice, God gave meaning to our love.  He sought our devotion but refused to demand it.  However, the moment He created this choice, it became inevitable that He would eventually be faced with man's sin.  I've heard Christians speculate on what might have happened if Adam and Eve hadn't disobeyed God.  The answer is obvious.  If they had not sinned, a subsequent generation would have.  After all, if no one ever made the wrong choice, then there was no true choice to be made. 

But Adam and Eve did sin and thereby confronted God with the most serious dilemma of all time.  His love for the human race required that He forgive.  But in spite of God's great love, His justice required repentance and punishment for disobedience.  So herein was a serious conflict with God's nature.  If He destroyed the human race, His love would have been violated:  but if He ignored our sins, His justice would have been sacrificed.  Yet neither aspect of His nature could be compromised.

God proposed a solution.  If he could find one human being who wasn't worthy of damnation-a man or a woman who was not guilty-then the sin of every other person on earth could be laid upon that one and He could suffer for all of us.  The solution was for God to send His own Son to bear the sins of the entire human family.  Jesus harmonized the conflict between God's love and justice and provided a remedy for fallen mankind.

Thus Jesus said as He was dying, "It is finished!" meaning, "I have carried out the plan of salvation that God designed for sinful man."  And that's why God turned His back on Jesus when He was on the cross, prompting Him to cry in anguish, "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (  Matt. 27:46, KJV ).  In that moment, Jesus was bearing the punishment for all human sins down through the ages, including yours and mine."

Champions, have a great week!-David Vining

 

Not Just Physical

Not Just Physical

Dear Champions,

The short excerpt is by Andy Stanley, and the Scripture is 1 Corinthians 6:18 Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body.

What you do now can set you up for success or failure later.  The myth about sex is that it is only physical.  In other words, if nobody gets pregnant or gets a sexually transmitted disease and nobody gets hurt, then have a great time because it's just physical like ping pong or football.  Sex is not just physical.  If you treat it as if it is, then you hurt yourself and eventually if you get married you hurt your partner.  Some married people around you are dealing with the consequences of bad sexual decisions.  They can't connect the dots and see the connection between what they did when they were younger and the consequences of what they're dealing with now.  

Your sexuality is actually connected to your personhood and soul.  When a child is sexually abused and becomes an adult and begins to realize what happened to them, why is it so difficult for them to shake that off?  If sexual behavior was just physical, then just shake it off and move on.  Why is it that rape is so much more devastating to a woman than just getting beat up?  Why is it that a woman will report being beat up, but why does she feel like she has to carry the secret of being raped throughout her entire life and can't tell anyone?  Why is it that men with the deepest sexual issues usually have uninvolved or missing fathers?  Why is it that most people's greatest regrets are sexual?  As soon as someone wants to meet with me and says, "I have never told this to anyone before," it always has something to do with sexuality? 

We live in a culture that wants to make sex as simple, surface and physical, but the reality is that it isn't just physical.   There's no category of sin like sexual sin when it comes to the ongoing consequences in a person's life.  God loves you so much that He has spoken into the area of sexuality.  He wants to redeem you from your past and from your sin.  He is waiting for you to run into His direction and then to trust Him. 

Champions, have a great week!-David Vining