The most powerful way to fight sin is love!
5—Sin is Spiritual Adultery—Fight it With Intimacy With God.
5—Sin is Spiritual Adultery. Fight it with LOVE—AFFECTION FOR GOD. (Mark 12:28-31)
Luke 7 she loves me much because she has been forgiven much
John 21 do you love me? Three times… one for each denial.
James—spiritual adultery.
The Greatest Weapon Against Sin is Intimacy With Christ
Training children: Relationship with us: fear-favor-fellowship. Relationship with God: fear-favor-fellowship. The stongest incentive for obedience is love-intimacy.
The Central truth and it’s placement: in my personal experience and my opinion, the most powerful way to defeat temptation is to see sin as a threat to my fellowship with God and displace it with communion.
Psalms 4:7 You have put gladness in my heart, More than in the season that their grain and wine increased.(abound)
Psalm 16
Psalm 27
Psalm 42
Psalm 63
Psalm 73
Psalm 91
John 15:4 Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me.
1 Corinthians 1:9 God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
2 Cor 6:14-7:1
Philippians 3:10 that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death
1 John 3:6 Whoever abides in Him does not sin. Whoever sins has neither seen Him nor known Him.
The Language of Devotion/Intimacy in Christian History. Saints of God—lovers of God through the centuries.
Augustine ‘Thou movest us to delight in praising Thee; for Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee?’
Paschal “There once was in man a true happiness of which now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present. But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.” Maybe you have heard that expressed like this: “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man.”
J.I. Packer says that the Puritans differ from evangelicals today because, with them: communion with God was a great thing; to evangelicals today it is a comparatively small thing. The Puritans were concerned about communion with God in a way we are not. The measure of our unconcern is the little that we say about it. When Christians meet, they talk to each other about their Christian work and Christian interests, their Christian acquaintances, the state of the churches, and the problems of theology – but rarely of their daily experience of God.
Owen (Communion with God). The Holy Spirit produces joy in the hearts of believers directly by himself without using any other means. As in sanctification he is a well of water springing up in the soul, so in comforting he fills the souls and minds of men with spiritual joy. When he pours out the love of God in our hearts, he fills them with joy, just as he caused John to leap for joy in Elizabeth’s womb when the mother of Jesus approached. This joy, the Holy Spirit works when and how he wills. He secretly injects this joy in to the soul, driving away all fear and sorrow filling it with gladness and causing it to exult, sometimes with unspeakable raptures of the mind. –John Owen
Charles Spurgeon, When a man pants after God, it is a secret life within which makes him do it: he would not long after God by nature. No man thirsts for God while he is left in his carnal [i.e., unconverted] state. The unrenewed man pants after anything sooner than God: . . . It proves a renewed nature when you long after God; it is a work of grace in your soul, and you may be thankful for it.
