(Disclaimer: This transcript is auto-generated and may contain mistakes.) All right, James chapter one is where we started here. And my sermon topic for this evening is kind of broad. A lot of times I preach topical sermons. We kind of dig in depth into one particular topic, one sin, you know, something like that. But this evening is slightly different than what I do. Some of the stuff I've already hit on, you know, somewhat recently, especially with the first point, I'm gonna talk about adultery and fornication. I kind of brought up some of these already before, but I wanted to have one sermon where I just bring up some real practical rules that you can put in place in your own life to help guard against sin, right? Just, you know, a lot of what I'm gonna be covering here and there's no way I'm gonna cover every sin or anything like that. I'm just kind of picked out some major sins and some things that you can do that are very, very practical, where you can just, you know, put these things in place in your life to set up as a safeguard so that you don't find yourself going down these paths of sin because obviously we don't wanna get involved, especially in a very, very grievous sins, but we wanna try to live as righteously and soberly as possible. So we started off in James chapter one, and the part of the chapter I'm gonna focus in on here is verse number 14 where it says, But every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lust and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin, and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death. The end of sin is death. It's not a pleasant thing. I brought this up already earlier this morning in the sermon this morning, you know, God has set rules for us. He set up boundaries. He said, don't do these things. These are gonna be bad for you. God knows what's best for us. We don't wanna receive cursing in this life. We don't wanna be cursed by making bad decisions, by getting into sin. We wanna live a happy, joyful life where that doesn't mean everything goes your way all the time, but you can live a joyful life by having integrity, by living righteously, by knowing you're doing the right thing regardless of your outside circumstances. That will bring you joy. When you know you have meaning in your life, you know you're doing the right thing, you will be living a happy, fulfilled life. And that is the way that we wanna live. So in order to continue that way, we wanna be able to safeguard ourselves from getting involved with sin because at the end of the day, sin brings forth death. And you know, obviously as sinners, we have this flesh, we're susceptible to all types of sin. I mean, there's all kinds of lusts of our flesh that's gonna try to draw us in a different sin. So if we can establish just a way to live, where we could reasonably say, I'm gonna just safeguard against this. I mean, right now we have people today that are safeguarding and doing preventative measures to prevent getting a disease, right? And there's lots of things that we've seen out and about with putting up plexiglass plates and wearing gloves and wearing masks and doing all these various things. Because they perceive this virus is dangerous, they don't want the virus to kill them or to harm them. So they're doing preventative measures to try to reduce the risk of contracting that virus. Well, similarly, with sin, sin's like a really bad virus. We don't wanna get that. So we're gonna take some preventative measures to make sure that we could avoid those things altogether. And the first sin I wanna start going over is with adultery or fornication, right? I mean, it's essentially the same act. Now, whether you're married or not determines whether or not you're committing adultery or fornication. But this sin, the Bible says in James 1, that every man is tempted when he's drawn away of his own lust and enticed. And typically when it comes to a sin of fornication or adultery, people are drawn away with their eyes, right? You look on something or someone that you shouldn't be looking at, and then all of a sudden this sin conceives in your heart, and then this lust begins in your heart, and before you know it, people end up acting on those lusts and on those desires. That's why in the book of Job, in Job 31, verse number one, Job writes this. He says, I made a covenant with mine eyes. Why then should I think upon a maid? So if you can control, the thought here is, hey, if I can control my eyes, if I can control the things I look at, I'm gonna be way less likely to be tempted about thinking on a maid, right? Thinking on someone, say, other than my spouse, thinking on another person in a way that I shouldn't be thinking about them. If I could just control my eyes, right? This would be a huge step in the right direction. See, unfortunately, in the world, we have a culture that says, oh, hey, I could look at the menu. I don't have to order, but I could just look and feast your eyes, and people have this idea where they could just, it's okay in their minds to just gawk. Now, normally, this is a man thing for looking at women, but there's women that look at men too. I mean, don't kid yourself on that. This affects both genders equally. Well, maybe not equally, but it definitely affects both genders, right? It is probably more prevalent among men, but still, the stereotype you're gonna think of is guys just hooting and hollering and just kinda looking at women, and it shouldn't be. Now, we live in a world where people don't know how to dress modestly at all, and especially going into the summer, it's gonna be warming up. You've got a lot of women who think it's just fine to basically walk around in their underwear, and they call it a bikini, right, or whatever, and just expose all manner of skin that they would never do normally. I mean, if you just put on underwear in a day and then go off to work, I mean, no one's gonna go and do that. They'd be embarrassed or ashamed to go into the office just wearing underwear, yet you could have the same amount of people all around a swimming pool, and then they're gonna have no problem with that, wearing essentially the same thing. It makes no sense. It doesn't add up. And here's the thing. The less clothing that people wear is gonna lead to more lustful people looking on that flesh. Now, we live in this world. One rule you can make yourself is, well, I'm just gonna go and just live off in the middle of nowhere and isolate myself. But see, God didn't call us just to go and isolate ourselves and just be completely just 100% remote and have no contact with anyone. No, we need to live in this world but not be of this world. We need to be able to interact with people of this world because we're trying to preach the gospel, we're trying to get people saved, so in that mission, of course we'll be coming into contact with all manner of people. We're gonna have to deal with just the world at large. So because that's one of the things that we have to do, we have to deal with, we need to make other rules to try to prevent having this lust and even take foothold at all in our hearts. So if you can make a covenant with your eyes, the first rule would be, if something immodest or impure crosses your eye path, don't take that second look. You can't always control the first look. When you're out in public and there's people walking around or whatever, you may not have control over the things that come in front of your eyes. You're driving your car, someone's walking across the street or whatever, it's like, boom, there's something that maybe have a lady dress that guys shouldn't be looking that way. But you know what? You could definitely control that second look. You could definitely control how long you're allowing your eyes to just feast and indulge in your mind on someone that's walking in front of you. Look, you need to make that rule with yourself. And all of these things are self-imposed. These aren't church rules, by the way. These are self-imposed rules for yourself. If you're wise, you'll listen to these rules and try to apply these to yourself and be mindful and think, no, I'm making a covenant. He drove me a covenant with his own eyes. He didn't make a covenant with God. He didn't make a covenant with anyone else. He made a covenant with his eyes. He's saying, you know what? We're making a deal here and we're not gonna be looking on things that we shouldn't be looking on. We're not gonna be looking on maids. Now, that was one example of people who are just out in the world, right? But how about exposing yourself to maybe a similar type of image in a much easier way, though, like at home, right? Television, movies, internet. These are all areas where you're gonna be prone to having things pop up in front of your eyes. Now, when you're out in the world and driving or whatever, you can't always control that first look, but you know what? At home, you can. You actually can control that first look. It's just a matter of how much are you willing to not allow into your house. So you say like, oh, I wanna watch this TV show, right? And it's okay, it's pure, but what about the commercials? What about the advertisers that come up? You don't know necessarily what's gonna be coming up in front of your eyes. And these days, I don't even know if there is any TV shows that you can consider would be okay. I don't know. There's a million different channels and stuff out there. I'm not spending my time watching them all, so I don't even know what's out there anymore. I just know that the morality of our country that's been reflected in the media has not been on the rise. It hasn't been like getting better and better and better and promoting more family values and things like that. So I feel pretty confident saying that the amount of anything decent that you could find on the television has just continued to drop and drop and drop and drop. But in any case, I don't wanna go too deep into the movies and stuff, but you know what I'm talking about when you have people being depicted in certain scenes of men and women getting close to one another, or men, God forbid, but that type of stuff is out there too. You don't wanna, that's defiling in and of itself, seeing images like that, but even just having a normal couple on the screen, you don't wanna start going down that avenue to get your mind working and your flesh just kind of focused on things that are gonna go down that pathway. So that's one rule is controlling your eyes. Setting up, I have, like if you're on the internet, they've got a lot of cool tools, you got ad blockers and all kinds of stuff that you can do to try to help reduce any exposure to that. If you're on social media, sometimes you might have people you're friends with that are prone to putting stuff out there that's just, you know you shouldn't be looking at, you know what, do away with that. Or if you don't even wanna have the possibility of someone coming up, then don't get on there at all. There's a lot of good options that you can take depending on how serious you wanna be about this and I think there's very good reason to be serious about this stuff. Another rule that you can put in place for this to prevent adultery is if you're married, you know not to have friends of the opposite gender that you would consider to be like close friends. Now I would say this, I feel like I'm friends with everybody here to some level, right? On a surface level, obviously I care about everyone here, I love everyone here, but I'm not like talking to Mrs. Mosteller and we're going out to lunch and hanging out and talking to each other on the phone and texting each other or doing anything like that and that goes for every woman in this church or outside of this church. We set up, and my wife's the same way, she doesn't have any man friends that they just chat and hang out or go to coffee together or do anything like that. Now it doesn't mean that, oh if I were to have a female friend that I would just automatically just commit adultery, that's not what that means. But what we're doing is that for one, we value our relationship enough to set up these rules and set up these walls, set up these barriers, set up these boundaries to say, you know what, if I don't have any friends, the likelihood of that sin being committed goes way, way down if you don't even have, because what happens with sins like that is normally people start to get to know somebody, right? And they start building these relationships and they start building these emotional attachments and then they come across some hard time in their marriage or whatever and then they get this weak point and they've already established this other relationship and that's when this stuff happens. I mean, by and large, that's how the adultery happens and the fornication is people end up getting closer and closer and closer and closer until they cross the line and they've made a really horrible grievous error. I mean, adultery is worthy of the death penalty in the Scripture and anyone who's married understands what the implications would be if your spouse were to cheat on you. I mean, it's horrible. It's a horrible sin. So because, and a lot of the sins I've been bringing up are going to be pretty significant sins, definitely worthy of saying, hey, I'm willing to change some things about my life and make some sacrifices maybe of having some good friendship, whatever, but it's like, you know what, first of all, I don't have time for another friend, but I don't need another friend. My wife is my friend. I mean, she's my best friend. And if it's not like that in your relationship marriage, why don't you work on that instead of trying to seek companionship outside of your spouse? It's a very good rule to have. Now, some people, you know, the world will look at me as being crazy, but I don't care what they think because why don't you look at the adultery rates for the world? Why don't you look at the divorce rates for the world? I have nothing to do with that. I don't want their advice. I don't care about their opinion. I care about my marriage and I care about being right with God and not committing some horrible sins. So we set up these types of rules in our life. Now, if you're not married, if you're married, you know, we don't have any friends. We have that rule. You know what, there's no, there is no Facebook messages going back and forth between me and any other person, any other female, right? And vice versa with my wife. Now, I'm gonna say this too as another rule. And a lot of these are gonna have some overlap, especially as we get into technology and things because technology, it's not like technology itself is evil or wicked or bad. It's just a tool. It's just a mechanism. It's a thing that you could use. You could use technology for good things. I mean, we're streaming right now to Facebook. We're streaming to YouTube. We're using this technology to try to do good things, try to promote good things. You know, we use those things, social media to keep in touch with family members and to allow to see relatives that we don't see very often, see their children, see them, what are the things that are going on, right? There's a lot of very good things that can come out of these tools. At the same time, there's a lot of risks. There's a lot of bad things that can be used. And one of the big problems with just the internet and this technology is it just kind of opens the door to making sin become that much easier to commit, right? When you can start establishing connections and relationships where you don't actually have to leave your house and possibly be seen by people and go and have these relationships, it takes a lot more effort to leave and go and meet up with someone and everything else as opposed to just being at home all alone at night, everyone's sleeping and you're sending off messages to people and it's just because it's so easy, it's gotten to the point where adultery is just getting out of control and these types of things because the lack of self control and the ease of being able to do that causes that. So what do we do? How do we try to prevent this? Well, one way to safeguard against that is to make sure, and again, I'm going back to, I know I was gonna start on the single people, I'm not there yet, I'm gonna continue to go on, I'm married. How about you share all of your information with your spouse? Like at any point, if my wife wanted to check my emails, check my text messages or do anything, she totally can and there's no problem with that. She has all of the whole vault of passwords that we have is all saved in one place and she has access to that. She can get into any computer that she wants. There's no hidden computers, there's no hidden phones, there's no hidden email addresses, there's no hidden social media accounts, anything like that and if there is, you ought to be able to find them, right? Being completely transparent and not having any secrets from one another just right off the bat is going to help and being able to limit that and just having pure honesty, there should be no covering up of anything within the household at all. So again, it gets hard because people are able to do things but I mean obviously requires your own integrity and I'm talking about you being honest with yourself to be able to make these rules for yourself to say yeah, I'm not gonna have anything that my wife isn't already aware of or knows about and can have access to at a moment's notice. No, oh, I'll show you that in a minute. I gotta delete a few things first, right? There's gonna be, here we go. You know, that's, there should be no space for that and if you know and that's why I like, you know, a lot of people on social media have shared accounts so like they have like one social media account and they both just use the same one and I think that's great because then you can have the emails going to both people, whatever. It's just, hey, and it also kind of lets people know too like I'm married, right? There's, we're together, this is a joint account and it's another safeguard that can help you. There's a lot of little rules or little things that you can set up in your life to help you just prevent these types of things. Another one would be the playing games. I know personally of someone who's gotten involved in a relationship that was married because they thought they were just, you know, it started off just playing some stupid games online because now you can play like, you know, and my wife and I play Words with Friends with you, like Scrabble, right? So we can start these games back and forth but a lot of these games have these chat features. Now I have my profile turned off. I have the chat turned off. I've got the, you know, people being able to see you on their list. I've got all that stuff turned off and I recommend you do the same thing, right? Because you don't need someone that's going, oh, hey, how's it going? And then you just start a conversation with someone you just don't even know and before you know it, they make you laugh and then you're looking forward to this time and then, you know, it's like, this is how these things happen. You think, that's the person that's crazy. You know, it's innocent. What could ever possibly happen? I know of a marriage that was almost completely destroyed where that exact thing happened. It started with just a game on a phone and the conversation started up and before you know it, it started turning a bad direction, a sinful, wicked direction and then this online relationship started and almost completely destroyed a marriage. And very well could have. This is not, and they're not unique. There's a sad part. It's not some unique, strange story. Those are the types of things that are happening these days that are destroying marriages and are allowing people to commit such horrible sins like adultery. So we need to be aware of this stuff and do the best that we can up front to just make these rules, institute these rules and say, nope, not gonna happen. There is no special chain. Because the best time to put these rules in place, by the way, for everything we're talking about is when you're strong. We're saying, like, my mind is so far removed from committing adultery on my spouse. Hey, this is the best time to just make these rules in place right now and just make it regular, make it routine, make it just, this is what we do all the time. You know, another example that we have set up in our life, again, to just kind of prevent these relationships from building is that we don't even, we won't even give car rides to, like, I won't even be found alone in the vehicle with a woman. And I don't care if it's someone from my work or someone from church or whatever. If I'm gonna have to go somewhere on business with a female, there's either gonna be another person in the, you know, some accountability there, we have another person in the car also, you're going to a business meeting or something, or we're going separate. And yeah, sometimes it's inconvenient, but you know what? It is what it is. And when you make rules and you just live by them, you're not gonna go wrong. I mean, the whole point is just to not make exceptions and just stick to it because you care about, in this case, your spouse, or you're not getting involved in some grievous sin. Now, what other rules then if you're not married, because I was talking about not having friends of the opposite gender, obviously, if you're single, you're gonna try to make friends of the opposite gender, you're looking for a spouse, you're gonna wanna do things like that. So obviously, that's not weird or wrong or anything like that, you wanna be able to make friends. But when you make friends, you also want to make sure that you are not allowing yourself and opening up a door for your flesh to get involved in fornication, right? Say you meet someone and you really like, this is when it's time to set up the rules or even before that, you have the rules in place where you go, you know what? I'm not gonna be allowing myself to be put in a situation where I'm alone with someone of the opposite gender, alone in a house, alone in a room. Turn if you go to Genesis chapter 39. We're gonna see an example of this in Scripture. You have a good moral Christian believer, man. I'm gonna flee fornication. I'll have nothing to do with it. But like the Bible talks about the simple man who walks by the way by the strange woman's house. It's like, you know there's a hooker down there and everything else, but see the simple one is just gonna go right on and just, oh, it's not gonna affect me. It's not gonna bother me and I'm just gonna walk right by and everything else. And before you know it, the simple one's being taken off and seduced by the strange woman and then committing some sin because he didn't put up enough safeguards just to keep himself pure. It's the same thing even with dating and fornication. Look, don't allow yourself to be behind closed doors with someone of the opposite gender because all you're doing is making provision for your flesh and allowing yourself to come as close as you possibly can, hopefully without actually doing it, but you don't even wanna get that to that point because here's the thing with sin, the closer you get to fulfilling the lust of that sin, the stronger that's gonna become, the more you allow doors to be open to sin, the harder they're gonna be to shut. That's why you start early. You start with the rules. Don't let yourself get all the way to that position of going, oh man, now I've come this far because in your mind, your fleshly mind is gonna start justifying and going, well, I've already come this far. I might as well just go the rest of the way at this point. I've already screwed up. I've already made a mistake. I know I shouldn't have even gotten to this point. So whatever. And that's the way the flesh works. It's stupid thinking, but that's the way the flesh works. The spirit's gonna be like, no, stop! Now put the brakes on! But the flesh is gonna do whatever to just justify just, well, I might as well just keep going now. Already sinned once, already sinned twice. No, no, just stop. But the flesh is gonna get stronger when you're already at that point. So the whole point of these is to not allow that to happen. Now, this is an example not of, we have an example here of Joseph who was, he's a righteous guy, right? But he finds himself in a bad situation where Pharaoh's wife, or excuse me, this Egyptian, not Pharaoh's, this Egyptian's wife wanted to have a relationship with him. And he's like, no. Like, you're married, and your master has put me in this position, and he's treated me really well. I'm not gonna do that. Nothing to do with it. So this is going back and forth, but then there's one day he finds himself alone in the house with her. And let's see what happens in verse number 11 of Genesis 39. It's about a reason it came to pass about this time that Joseph went into the house to do his business. So he's just working, right? He's on the job. He's doing his business, and there was none of the men of the house there within. See, normally, I assume when he's doing his business, there's other people around, there's other people working, but now all of a sudden he finds him in a position where he's alone. There's no one else there. Verse number 12, it says, and she caught him by his garment, saying, lie with me. And he left his garment in her hand and fled and got him out. And it came to pass, now he did what was right. He got out of there, right? He's fleeing fornication. He's running away. And it came to pass when she saw that he had left his garment in her hand and was fled forth, that she called unto the men of her house and spake unto them, saying, see, he hath brought in in Hebrew unto us to mock us. He came in unto me to lie with me, and I cried with a loud voice. And it came to pass when he heard that I lifted up my voice and cried that he left his garment with me and fled and got him out. So she lies about it, trying to say, oh, he was trying to force me, he's trying to do this, and I screamed out for help. But there was no one else there to verify anything that was said. Now, a situation like this, again, it wouldn't have been better if he just wasn't alone with this woman in the house at all. Of course it would. And we don't know all the details. I don't know if he just realized she was there, didn't know, you know, whatever. But we can use this type of a situation as an example to say, things that you might not expect or don't intend on happening, when you find yourself alone with someone of that gender, these things can happen. You know, I even use this as another rule, and this wasn't even in my notes, but when I go out soul-winning, right? Because there's a situation. Now, one of the things that we do, and one of the reasons why we go out in pairs when we go out soul-winning is to have that added accountability. There's lots of reasons, right? I'm not gonna get into all the reasons we have silent partners and everything else. But one of the reasons is to have accountability, because you don't know who you're talking to at any given door. They may hate God. They may want to just bring some kind of harm against you. You don't even realize it. You're just going up trying to do the right thing. You're trying to win their soul, and then they may come back and try to bring up some lying accusation, some railing accusation against you. Well, if you've got another witness there with you, it's gonna bolster you and your claim and saying, hey, no, no, look, we did everything on the up and up. But sometimes, you know, you may find yourself soul-winning by yourself, and I've been there plenty of times, right? It's better to have someone with you, but it's not like it's a law that you cannot go, it's not a Baptist law that you cannot go soul-winning by yourself. Sometimes you do that. So what I do is if I'm talking to someone, I've been invited in sometimes, because sometimes you've got soul-winning, and people are just, oh, hey, it's hot outside, it's cold outside, it's raining, whatever. Why don't you step inside? I'm just trying to be friendly, hospital, whatever. If I'm out soul-winning by myself, and there's a woman that says, well, hey, why don't you come inside? I never do it. Never once. Again, it's another one of those things where one, you might find yourself in a situation like Joseph, where someone might, you might preach something to them, and then they don't like what you say, and then they just wanna lie about you. It happens. People try to lie, and you have no accountability then. You're just like, well, were you in her house? Yeah. You can say you didn't say that or whatever, but at that point, now it's just your word against theirs, and you've put yourself in a bad situation to begin with, right? So the rule would be, hey, I'm gonna stay out in public view. I'm never stepping foot in that house. Now, if you have other people, if you have accountability, even then, sometimes, I still don't always like going into a female, like if it's just a female by themselves. I still prefer not to enter their house, even with another soul-winner with you, but at least then you've got someone else, you've got another witness to be able to do that. So these are the types of things that we need to be thinking of and making up your rules for yourself on what are you going to do, and you make the rules up in advance so that way you're not questioning yourself at the time. Well, should I do this or not? I've already thought about it. No, I'm not gonna do this. Done. So with Joseph, like I said, he was just trying to do his work, but you can apply this with couples that are trying to get to know each other. So a man, a woman. Look, don't allow yourself to be in a situation where you can make provision for the flesh and end up going farther than you intended on going. Now, I have rule three and rule four. I've already gone over these, the social media stuff, communication with games and stuff like that, as well as giving your spouse access to absolutely everything, your bank accounts, phone, email, whatever. You ought to be able to have full access to everything within your relationship. This leads me on, so that's adultery and fornication. I know I just preached on this subject a few weeks ago, too, but let's move on to the next one, which is somewhat related, and I don't touch on this a whole lot. It's kind of an uncomfortable subject, and again, with trying to keep in consideration little ears and things like that is a subject of pornography, people looking on things that they shouldn't be looking on, and the rule I've set up for this is ultimately, it still is applicable like everything else with the fornication stuff, is preventing your eyes from seeing things. We went over that, but setting up some accountability, because this is one of those sins where I think that people, it's a secret sin, because this is one of the things that, again, the internet has made it easy for people to get involved with, and media and other things, advertisements, try to suck people down that road, getting these emails and everything else, trying to lure simple men into this area, this terrible, wicked sin of viewing things that you ought not ever to be viewing. Now, this affects a lot of people. I have no idea what the actual number is, but you see reports online, and I didn't get any statistics, but I've seen them before where it's just like tons of people get involved with this stuff, and I do know this. I know that you need to set up accountability for yourself, and this goes back also to having shared accounts and things like that with your spouse if you're married, or if you're not, if this becomes a problem for someone, you get software that will allow other people to get notified of your activity. You can set up content filters, and you can have someone else have a password. If that's something that impacts you, or whatever, if this is a problem that someone's struggling with, there are rules you can set up where it's literally gonna be a filter between everything that you do online, on your phone, on your computer, whatever, to try to prevent these things from happening. I'll tell you what, pornography's a really wicked sin, and it's gonna lead you down a dark path that you don't wanna end up going there. And whatever you have to do to keep this from being a big deal, or to even getting a foothold in your life, you need to avoid this at all costs. Just like fornication, you gotta flee fornication. You gotta stay away from this. I've talked with some people where it's like, they just can't get control of this, and it's just gotten really bad for them. And you know what I'd say for that? Cut your internet. Get rid of your phone. Get rid of your computer. Okay, these are the types of things that you're gonna need to do to just cut it out. I mean, it's the same thing with whatever it is. If you've got a problem with worldly music, if you've got a problem with worldly music, you gotta probably tear the radio out of your vehicle or whatever. If it gets that bad, just take the extreme measures, whatever you need to do to stop it. But these are the things you need to stop. So those are all kind of related. I have on here another sin is drunkenness, right? Booze, drugs, things like that. We're gonna be getting yourself into altered states of consciousness. The Bible says in Proverbs 23, 31, look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth its color in the cup, when it moveth itself aright. So a practical rule that you can set up for yourself is following the Bible where it says, hey, don't even look at it. And people who've had problems, especially if you've had maybe problems in the past, but even to prevent having a problem, even if you've never had a problem with them, you know what? This is still a wise rule to put in place is say, I'm not going to look at it, just like the Bible says. I'm not gonna go to liquor stores. I'm not gonna go out to the bars. I'm not gonna sit down at the bar and eat dinner or go to a restaurant that has a bar and just sit down at the bar and be like, well, I'll just eat here. Don't put that stuff in front of you because the sin starts with the eyes. Just like with fornication, the drugs and alcohol is gonna be a similar thing. You're gonna look on it, desire it, just like Achan, what did Achan do? In the book of Judges, he saw, he coveted, and then he took it, right? He saw the Babylonish garment and the silver, and then he coveted them, he wanted them, the desire was there, that lust conceived in his heart, and then he ended up taking of the accursed thing and it ended up destroying him. You allow the women to come and cross your eyes. That's gonna allow the sin to enter. You're gonna start coveting, and before you know it, you're gonna be acting on it. You allow the booze to just go ahead and just be right in front of your eyes and be easily accessible. Before you know it, you're gonna find yourself giving into it. Don't even make that provision for your flesh at all, so avoid those things altogether. I mean, even at the liquor store, or I mean, excuse me, at the grocery store, you shouldn't be in a liquor store, or even at the grocery store, just don't walk up and down those aisles. Stay away from it, look, it's a real simple rule. It doesn't even really have to change your life that much you just move over an aisle if you need to go, oh, look, there's the milk down there. Oh, wait, oh, yeah, I'm not gonna go this way. I'm just gonna go this way. Right. A lot of these things, you know, don't be too proud to be like, nah, I'm just gonna go this way anyway. Look, a lot of these things are really, really easy to do. Yep, I'm just gonna go this way. Good with that, no problem. That's a real simple one. How about when it comes to this drunkenness and drugs, not listening to the music, that glorifies that type of behavior. I know for me personally, growing up, I was into all the psychedelic rock and all this other stuff. That was a big influence on some of the big mistakes that I made a little bit later in my life. Looking up to, listening, glorifying these, you know, these idols of these rock stars and the life that they were living and stuff was glamorized. And then before you know it, you know, I'm getting involved in some of this stuff and it's like, that desire was created by listening to the wrong things and not having the right things, you know, to steer me the right way. It's just, oh, you're out there and you know, whatever. I'm not gonna get too involved in that, but why don't you make a rule for yourself? I'm not gonna listen to that garbage. Because what goes in your ears is gonna impact your mind, the way you think about things, it does. And then rule number three that I have here for that as well is in addition to, you know, not walking down the aisles, not going to liquor stores, we don't go to gatherings and events where booze is being served. So if we have family picnics or family gatherings or parties or anything like that, our families know like if there's gonna be booze there, we're not going. And if they do, what we'll often do, we'll try to do is say, well, we're gonna go early. We're gonna go spend some time with you. You know that we're not drinking, so we wanna go and spend some time with you for whatever the reason is, but as soon as that stuff starts pouring and coming out, we're gone. We're out of there, right? And some people, you know, our family, thankfully, hasn't really had much of a problem with this at all, but none of them are really that into it. But you know, other families, they are. It's a big deal for them and they get offended. Oh man, I can't, you know, like, sorry. But if you care about this, right, and you care about this in your life, I'm gonna make sure this has no impact on my life and on my kids' lives. So we're not even gonna allow that to be considered normal at all, that, oh yeah, this is just what people do. They get together for a birthday party for fun and then everyone just gets drunk. No. Not normalizing that, not even being around that, and I don't wanna be tempted with that, you know what I mean? Like, these are just real simple rules that you can set up in your own house, in your own life, to try to avoid these sins. Now how about raising godly children, right? Because you wanna be able to raise godly children. What kind of rules can we set up with them as well? Number one, I brought this up this morning in Mother's Day sermon, is just on discipline, first and foremost. The Bible reads in Proverbs 13, 24, he that spareth his rod hateth his son, but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes, that word betimes means early. And the earlier you get started raising your children and not sparing your rod, the easier it's going to be as they continue to grow. And it's gonna make it easier when you get started early and having the proper discipline. That's gonna help you raise godly children. But rule number two in your house, if you wanna prevent your children, you know, when I say raising godly children, preventing them from getting into sins also, right, is gonna be controlling friendships. Turn, if you would, to Genesis chapter 34. And you know, parents have a responsibility for their children, and there are many aspects of a child's life that you oughta be in control of. Now as your children begin to grow and get older and older, you gradually allow more and more freedoms, but you know, and you need to determine what those are gonna be. But at the same time, you know, you need, you're trying to teach your children wisdom, you're trying to give them all the right things, all the right tools they're gonna need, because one day they are gonna be on their own, they are gonna be gone. But as a parent, you need to watch over that and really be careful who your children are becoming friends with. We see in Genesis 34, Dinah, and Jacob was a good guy, right? Jacob was a pretty good dad, but he allowed this daughter to go off basically and make friends with the world, so to speak. I mean, this is the applications being done here. If you look at verse number one, Genesis 34, the Bible says, and Dinah, the daughter of Leah, which she bare unto Jacob, went out to see the daughters of the land, and this is when they're in Shechem sojourning, it says, and when Shechem, the son of Hamor, the Hivite, prince of the country, saw her, he took her and lay with her and defiled her. And then it says, and he loved her, and he wanted to marry her and stuff, but basically what happened is, Shechem commits fornication with Dinah. And I don't believe that this was forced. Nowhere does it say that she was forced. Some people have said that because it says, well, he took her and he lay with her, but the Bible's pretty clear when it's talking about people being forced, right? And that was not the case here. And normally what you see is when people are forcing someone else, usually after the act, they hate that person, because you hate them anyways by forcing yourself on them, just like with Amnon, when he forced Hamor, he might have nothing to do with her after that. It's not like he's looking to then get married to her. So here we have Shechem who, you know, he takes a hold out of her basically, and he lays with her. Doesn't say he forces her, just he lays with her. And then he wants to get married to her and everything else, but she's defiled, why? Because she commit fornication. Now, it's no coincidence that verse one says she went out to see the daughters of the land, and then before you know it in verse two, she's committing fornication. So she goes out and makes friends with these other girls that are from, basically these heathen girls just out in the world, and then she ends up doing like they do, because the other thing that we learn from this story, you say, well, Pastor Williams, didn't that be a little judgmental? How could you say that the daughters of the land were that bad? Well, when it talks about Shechem, it says that he was more honorable than basically like anyone else in that area where he wanted to marry her and kind of do the right thing, which tells me that other people were just committing fornication. It wasn't that big of a deal, and they weren't honorable, but at least he's like now trying to marry her and trying to make up for still going out of order anyways, but he was more honorable than the other people. This was a problem because they didn't have the fear of the Lord in that community among those people at all. They were not, that's not what they believe. So when it comes to your children and their friends, you gotta keep an eye on the influence that they're gonna have, and your friends influence people. Your friends will influence you. Your kids' friends definitely, especially when you're younger, you got your impressionable. They often pick up other habits from other people. You gotta keep an eye on that. Now, it doesn't, it's up to your discretion, obviously, they're your kids, but like everything with parenting, it's work. Don't get too lazy or lackadaisical or flippant into just thinking, oh yeah, whatever, it'll be okay, because oftentimes just one wrong friendship can do a lot of damage. It was Amnon's friend that gave him the bright idea of putting himself in that whole situation with Tamar to be able to end up committing the sin that he never should have committed ever, but that was all the influence of his wicked friend. Friends have a lot of influence on people, and that's something that you need to be able to do, is set up a control on who your children are being friends with so they don't get these just real wicked people as friends. Rule number three I have for raising godly children is controlling your access to the internet. And you know what, in my household, there's gonna be nothing sent, and right now they don't even have access. Like my children have no access unless they're gonna do like a FaceTime with their grandparents, which is done on my wife's phone. They have their devices, but there is no web browser. We go through the trouble, and I go through the troubles of setting up all the parental controls and making sure that there's nothing that's gonna get through because, and I'll tell you what, it's getting harder and harder and harder because there's lots of different ways, there's new things coming out. There could be updates on the devices that you don't even know, and other apps that become available, and like you really gotta be diligent on this, and one of the best ways to control is just be like, nope. And I know the kids don't like to hear that at all. No kids like to hear no at all. But I'll tell you what, I put up all the devices that had been given to our children like about a month ago, and it's like not even a thing now, because they go outside. I mean, think about it, when you were kids, when I was a kid, we didn't have any devices. We didn't have any phones, we didn't have any of this stuff. We had an Atari, right, or a Nintendo, but that's the extent of it. You're not going online and doing all this other stuff and have all this accessibility. No, you can still grow up and grow up normally and be just fine without having all the access to all that stuff. But it is extremely important. Another example I know, again, I'm not gonna use anybody's names, someone I knew in the past, where their daughter had gotten, you know, made some friends online with some people that ended up completely destroying her faith. She was raised in a Christian home and just completely just like turned atheist. Just having wrong friends and too much access on the internet, where the parents just thought, hey, because she was a really well-behaved, you know, good kid at home, and just thinking, well, there should be no problem, right? But she was still young and got her head turned around and all kinds of problems. And it just happens way too many times. It's not worth it. I mean, just think of the risk. It's not worth it to allow all this access. And like I said before, as my children get older, you know, I'll give more freedoms and I'm gonna start to allow to have more things. But you know, when it comes to internet, it's all being filtered through me. And as parents, you ought to be able to, if you don't know about it, learn about it, get it set up in your house where you have the filtering on your network that nothing comes or goes without you knowing about it and that no one can go in there and just delete stuff because you've got access to it. That is worthwhile, whether you're a techie person or computer person or not, there's software out there that makes it really easy for you, okay? It may cost a little bit of money, but you know what? It's worth it. If you're gonna allow your children to have any level of access at all to the internet, for their sakes, invest in it. Because what happens too is that it may not be your kid that's the problem. It may be some predator targeting your kid from the outside and you need to know about that too. And when kids are young, they have no idea, those thoughts might not even be going on in their head, they don't know how to deal with it and that's also how kids end up getting groomed online too and then really bad things happen. This stuff, this stuff happens. So let's set up the rules. Obviously, I know everyone in here that children loves and cares about their kids just tremendously. It's worth it. Take heed to some of these practical rules that you could set up. And then I have for rule number five for raising godly children, I require daily Bible reading and regular church attendance. And as long as I have kids in my house, I don't care how old they are, those are gonna be rules that I have for my kids. You gotta read your Bible every single day and you're coming to church. And obviously they're gonna listen and learn and what I teach them, but still it's like, that's on their own. And you set up whatever rules you wanna do but these are rules that I have instituted in my house that this is what happens every single day and you're getting used to this routine. There's no question, there's no argument, it's just a rule. Now you can't control, ultimately you can't control how a person is going to, what their faith is gonna be like, but there are some things you can control to help push things along in the right way. So again, I'm gonna do my best to try to make sure that everything I do is going to achieve that end of raising godly children. And then the last sin I have on here as we're getting out of time here is again, is related, I think mostly with technology is the gossip and busy body and railing. Because this is another real common thing and people get involved with this, it doesn't have to be online. Again, there's nothing new under the sun. All of these things are mentioned in the scripture before there was any technology that we have today. It's part of human nature, part of human sin nature to do these things. It's just become so much easier to do with the advent of the internet. Again, when you can just sit at home, you don't even have to be in front of anyone else, sometimes even anonymously. People can just go off and do this stuff, but I'll tell you what, it's wicked. And I'm just going to say this much, for this I have only one rule listed down for, you could make up a lot for yourself, but here's what I said, because this is more for just you individually to deal with yourself. If you know that you have a problem with speaking out of hand, maybe railing or being a busy body and getting involved in stuff, if you know, you say, you know what, yeah, that's me, I've struggled with that before. That's something that I know I'm guilty of and I've tried not to do it, but I still just can't help it. I get involved in things I shouldn't get involved in and I spend too much time just digging in and reading what everyone else is going on and all the gossip and everything else. If you're finding this for yourself, you're doing it online, delete your Facebook, delete your whatever, whatever it is, just get rid of it. You may be like, no, but even if you use it for things that are okay, it's not worth it. It's not worth it to be involved in a sin to have it, you know what, just cut it out altogether. Maybe there's a little bit good in there, but you don't want the bad at all because the bad's gonna corrupt, the bad's gonna fester, it's just gonna make things get worse and worse. You know what, just cut it off. Just be done with it, done. Set that rule up for yourself. Maybe years down the road, you get past that, you overcome that and you go, hey, maybe I'll look at getting back into this, maybe. But you got a problem with it, cut it off, done. Just like I was saying with the pornography, with the internet or whatever, you're like, you know what, you got a problem with that, done. Just cut it off, completely remove, have no phone, have no computer, whatever, right? And it's the same thing with the gossiping, being a busybody, all that stuff. If that's a problem with you, just completely cut it out. And if you have problems with people, one, the Bible tells you, if you're receiving this gossip and stuff, that you're supposed to have an angry countenance. You're supposed to give them a nasty look and say, I'm not gonna be involved with this. Don't allow yourself to be carried away with the sins of others. And hopefully that'll help them receive a rebuke. Now, the last point in terms of Galatians chapter five, Galatians chapter five. The main points of the sermon were try to give you just some ideas as a starting point for establishing rules in your life to help you just be safeguarded from committing some bad sins. Again, we're scratching the surface. There's so many more things that you can do. There's so many more sins that you need to be aware of. You know, but just to have this mindset and to leave here and go, you know what? Maybe I don't have a problem with these particular sins we went over, but I do have a problem with this other sin or that other sin. Be thinking, well, what rule can I set in place for myself to just say, yeah, I'm not gonna do this anymore, right? And make it a real thing, not one that's just like, just you're satisfying yourself in your head. Like, oh yeah, I'll just make this rule and you don't really follow it. Be real with it, right? This whole sermon is to try to help you, to try to help you come up with these things, to establish it in your own life, to help you not get involved in this type of sin. But the best way of all, but the hardest way of all to avoid all these sins is found in Galatians chapter five, verse number 16, where the Bible reads, this I say, then walk in the spirit and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. You're gonna keep yourself from saying just walk in the spirit all the time, right? Easy. Don't you love how simple that is? I mean, God's word is simple. It's easy. Just walk in the spirit. Easier said than done, but no. But this is true though, absolutely, amen. This is true, walk in the spirit. So what I would say is, if you can get yourself not having the idle time because you're increasingly spending more time on the things of God, increasingly spending more time reading, increasingly spending more time praying, and that's why we do these challenges, right? We're trying to increase the time we're spent doing this. That will just automatically help you to not have as many problems with the sin because you're not gonna find that you have the time to even get involved with this stuff. And you try to fill your time so that I'm just walking in the spirit. You don't got the time to walk in the flesh then. So hopefully these things, something is a help for you this evening. If this is all just real elementary and basic and say, pass the rhythms, I'm already doing all this stuff, just try to think about, well, what is the area in your life? Because you're not perfect. Where can you set up your own rule? Where can you look and say, you know what, I'm really gonna analyze this and think about this, and this is what I've been struggling with. And here's what I'm gonna put in place to make sure that I don't go down that path again, that I don't end up committing that sin again. That's the point, is to come up with something practical. The morality, the sin thing is actually pretty easy to identify. Scripture is very simple in that regard of just this is right, this is wrong. Adultery, fornication, whatever. You start listing all these sins, the drunkenness. This is easy to see that those are sins in the Bible. That's easy. It's making sure that you don't do those things is the harder part. So focus on whatever it is that your problem is. Say, I'm gonna set up this rule for myself because I don't wanna be involved with that anymore. Let's have a word of prayer. Dear Heavenly Father, Lord, we thank you so much for all the instruction and the wisdom that you give us in your word. I pray that you please help us to just honestly be able to establish some rules for ourselves to help us to not allow any provision for our flesh. We know that we have a sinful flesh. We know that it's a daily battle, a daily war where our spirit is fighting against the flesh, dear Lord, and I pray that you would please help us to have the wisdom to not have to fight some of these battles because we've set up enough rules in our lives to avoid even having to deal with some of those fights, dear Lord. God, increase our wisdom and understanding and just lead and direct our steps. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.