How can I be pure under all circumstances? How can I grow in knowledge, spiritual knowledge and depth? How can I be longsuffering no matter what? How can I show kindness, overcoming my natural inborn laziness and selfishness? Only by the Holy Ghost, only by praying, only by desiring these things, only by resisting whatever militates against them. Let conscience question us often about how we are doing, and do everything in obedience to God. Pray for the help of the Spirit, all by the Holy Ghost.
Today you have the internet and the images, and unclean things are everywhere, and the whole example of the world, and so much of its entertainment is sexual indulgence and impurity, and evil and lascivious thoughts. But we must never, never under any circumstances looking at foul and dirty images.
What a shame it is today that you hear so much about people passing round to each other by social media these various messages, little snippets of ministry, many of them being taken from this core of women ministers especially in the USA but also here – little snippets of highly sentimental, emotionally indulgent little comforts. Yes, there are comforts in the word of God, but this is what people love to pass around as though the Christian life is a pathetic, narrow little life of emotional self-indulgence. You read a passage like this and the apostle is saying, here are the conditions for blessing that we know how to stand up to trial and tribulation, and prove the Lord, and find his strength, and have his blessing and have his answers to his prayers. Not that we depend upon little snippets of emotional self-indulgence passed around mostly by lady preachers whom the word of God commands not to do what they are doing. But they disobey him and they set a sort of trend of weakening Christians and making them small and petty. Read a passage like this where you have both comfort and challenge in equal balance, and we are urged to stand and then we are given the help and the power to do so.
We allow ourselves perhaps to be irritated by small things in our wife, in our husband. She does not do this, or he does not do that. Where is the patience, the understanding of each other? Children too. You hear of parents who become overwrought and ill-tempered because of exuberant children. ‘By pureness, by knowledge, by longsuffering.’
There are people who have to work in circumstances they can barely endure, where what goes on around them and the talk and the uncleanness and so on is hard to endure, and they have to shut it out and set an example. Longsuffering. God will reward it, God will bless us, God will make us fruitful, and people around will notice.