Purpose
Leadership Library Spotlight
by on Nov 4th, 2010 at 11:50 pm
Book: Wired for Intimacy: How Pornography Hijacks the Male Brain
Author: William M. Struthers
“One underlying problem for many men is not pornography, but a wrong understanding of how they are made. They think of themselves as a soul trapped inside a body, enslaved to it.” p. 115
“Sexual intimacy is not like every other biological function. It has significant consequences at every level of our existence: neurological, psychological, social and spiritual. And given that each one of us is a bio-psycho-socio-spiritual entity, it is no surprise that our sexual nature and how we express that nature has such wide-reaching implications.” p. 167
Pornography is one of the least-liked and most relevant topics for Christian men. We love to pretend that we haven’t seen it. We like to project the idea that we don’t like it. We wish that we could be unaffected by it. Well, I’m a married man who is pursuing purity for the sake of my God, my family, and my ministry and I can say that I have seen it before, I liked what I saw, and I have to admit that it has the power to crush me. Therefore, it’s best to view this topic through the prism of reality and not through the eye-holes of a façade.
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Leadership Library Spotlight
by on Nov 12th, 2010 at 12:10 am
Book: The Good News We Almost Forgot: Rediscovering the Gospel in a 16th Catechism
Author: Kevin DeYoung
“No doubt, the church in the West has many new things to learn. But for the most part, everything we need to learn is what we’ve already forgotten. The chief theological task now facing the Western church is not to reinvent or to be relevant but to remember.
The word, catechism, to conservative Christians can cause one of two reactions. Those raised in churches where catechisms were employed might cringe from flashbacks of their strict training in these instructional documents. The other group, of which I am a part, has been trained to resist any hint of Roman Catholicism, and the term sounds so … well … Roman Catholic.
In both cases, we are cheating ourselves of a wonderful opportunity to learn about God and the gospel through a device that has been employed for centuries. Kevin DeYoung attempts to erase the stigmas that have attached themselves to one particular catechism, the Heidelberg Catechism, so that they beauty of its message can be understood and embraced.
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Leadership Library Spotlight
by on Dec 9th, 2010 at 1:15 pm
Book: Closing the Window: Steps to Living Porn Free
Author: Tim Chester
“Our sexuality is supposed to be like Niagara Falls. The rocks constrain the water, forcing it into a powerful surging rush. Porn makes sexuality like the Mississippi Delta. The water there is not constrained by anything. It’s spread out wide and thin and muddy. The Bible gives us safeguards, not to protect us from sex but to protect sex from us, not to stop us being spoiled by sex but to stop sex being spoiled by us!” p. 122
“Using porn is a bad way of preparing not to use it when you’re married!” p. 25
“We become Christians through faith and repentance. We continue and grow by ongoing faith and repentance. And this means that we counter porn through faith and repentance. Battling porn with faith means embracing the truth about God in place of the false promises of porn. Battling porn with repentance means turning from self to worship God.” p. 63
Before I start this review, I want to thank InterVarsity Press for generously providing this resource to this ministry. They believe in biblical manhood and allowed me access to this resource so that you can be encouraged, trained, and aided in the guarding of purity.