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Willing Christian singles are encouraged to fight the worthy fight of sexual abstinence until marriage in part two of this edited 2012 repost.
Originally Posted September 23, 2012
Yes, you will be tempted at times especially when your resolve to faithfulness to God and abstinence weakens. But purposely call on the Lord at those times (1 Corinthians 10:13; James 1:12-14)! Yes, you may yield to temptation and sin as the Ebony article commends T.D. Jakes’ movie, Jumping The Broom for accurately depicting (James 1:15). But you get back up from your failure in heartfelt confession and repentance being doubly resolved to walk in the love (it is your deepest motivation for obedience to God), victory of faith, obedience and power over all the lusts of the flesh God has called you to in Christ (1 John 1:8-10, 5:1-5).
Abstinence from sex before marriage is not some religious rule prudish preachers made up to practice in order to appear righteous or spiritual. God in His Word has made sexual purity before marriage a matter of honoring Him as its Author! He made man male and female and put them together in the lifelong covenant bond of marriage to fulfill His primary purpose for them to procreate (Genesis 1:27-28). Sex in marriage is the sacred vehicle by which God participates in the conception of a new human being. It is pleasurable as a gift to ensure the divine will would be accomplished. Beyond pleasure though, sex is also of the deepest expression of marital intimacy in oneness.
There is no double standard with God. Prospective male and female spouses are to save their bodies to exclusively share them with future mates. This leads to the difficulty of waiting for God to send the mate He has selected. This issue is hardest, in my opinion, for the person who was sexually active before becoming a born again believer in Jesus Christ. Virgins certainly know something about arousal and desire. However, not knowing exactly what they are missing in the actual act of intercourse, they will not have to deal like junkies with memories and phone numbers that could be called to find immediate gratification.
In my book, I talk about some sensible and supernatural things in the Holy Spirit that can be done to help one live celibate while waiting for God to bring the spouse He has selected. As was the case with Adam, it is God that we wait upon for our spouse (Genesis 2:18-22). That means faith and patience--even longsuffering because our Father knows best. Lack of faith in and patient waiting on God can lead to disaster both as a compromising single or spouse that has married outside of the Lord. A Bible on the nightstand and condoms in the drawer is a lowering of God’s standard of purity for Christian singles in a lack of faith, resolve and impatience.
While God’s love for us even when we are in sin is never to be questioned, the person in willful sexual immorality is claiming to love God as they blatantly offend His holiness. If “love does no harm to a neighbor,” then certainly our love for God is not to hurt Him (Romans 13:10; Ephesians 4:30, NKJV). I submit that this professing Christian’s love for God may be real as a sentimental emotion, but comes up way short of the love He wants. The standard of love God requires from us is proven by obedience and of His own love. Among its many superior attributes, God’s love is not self-seeking and never rejoices in iniquity (John 14:15-24; Romans 5:5; 1 Corinthians 13:4-7).
In typical, selfish human love, this person by implication is insisting that God accept their offense to His holiness and sexual sin out of His love. This is idolatry in an attempt to remake God into what they want rather than accepting Him as He is--the Holy One! The Father has already fully and finally shown His love for us and rejection of our sins in wrath at the cross of His Son. God only accepts us now through Christ crucified for our sins, buried and risen. He makes no special exceptions for anyone. Believers are to be completely respectful of that fact and run from sexual immorality to live in purity until and faithfully after marriage (1 Corinthians 6:12-20)!
Truly, our Lord Jesus Christ sympathizes with the plight of single Christians and wills to help if called upon (Hebrews 4:14-16). Nevertheless, after all else, writing about Christian singles the apostle Paul says, “…but if they cannot exercise self-control, let them marry. For it is better to marry than to burn with passion,” (1 Corinthians 7:9, NKJV). This is not to be understood as urging marriage to the first person that comes along. God’s minimum requirement for our yoking together with anyone is that they be an authentic fellow Christian (2 Corinthians 6:14-7:1). God will never send you an unbeliever to marry just to help you be sexually gratified.
The lack of Christian men in female filled churches is a major reason every Christian father and single woman ought to be standing with me to restore men by bringing them to Christ and the life of the aspiring strong man of God in His image! In all practicality, this will greatly expand the pool of single men worthy of marriage in the churches.4 That said, there are a few Christian men available to marry even now that are being overlooked by some sisters because they have set their standards patterned after worldly feminist ideology higher than God’s. As a result, some do end up waiting a very long time for “Mr. Right.”
There is a scene in Tyler Perry’s 2006 film, Madea’s Family Reunion where the matriarchs of the family (the old men present are portrayed as lust-filled and sexually perverted since they wickedly ogle one of their own young female relatives) call everyone together to aunt Ruby, the eldest. On land and in front of an old shack that used to house their slave progenitors who had purchased it, Cicely Tyson as Myrtle in the fictional family verbally chastises them. She rebukes the men for their gambling, fighting and abandoning their families; the young women for dressing sexually provocative. She does this after aunt Ruby had asked: “Is this what we paid for?” The question has lingered with me as I have labored in Christ to hold up a biblical worldview of the black experience.5
While in slavery sexual promiscuity was facilitated by the family destroying practices of our former masters and our own permissiveness in far too many cases, a number that became Christians sought to preserve and do marriage and family right. Christian singles: do not quit on God; you have a legacy of faith and patience in Christ they paid for with their lives! As fictional Myrtle declares, we their descendants exist to “thank God; giving Him the glory for getting us over.” Therefore, honor God and that legacy by keeping yourself pure until marriage; fighting the good fight of faith and patience. In the end, it will yield for you the rich blessings of God now and forever (1 Timothy 6:11-16)! The risen, living Christ continues His cry among American churches, "Who is on the Lord's side?"
4 This means many Christian single women must make an important decision at this critical juncture of history: continue pressing the usurping feminist agenda for the
home and in the churches with the result of seeing relatively few suitable men available to marry or repent and submit to God’s order for the home and in His house
to become aspiring great women of God attractive spiritually to the harvest of aspiring strong men of God He wills to bring forth with their supportive cooperation?
Read my November 16, 2014 Blog, Christian Women And Restoring Men, under the category, Instruction, to reflect more on this important decision.
5 Visit the Home Page of www.fromslaverytovictory.org to click through the short presentation.
Covert sexual promiscuity among black Americans and the paradoxical moral conservatism that developed along with it from slavery through the Civil Rights era is well known. However, what is now, quite overt sexual promiscuity has evolved with the “sexual revolution” of the wider culture since and is plainly seen consequentially, for example, in the high number of single parent households many have mostly attributed to the unsaved and nominal Christians. But as I was shocked to learn and wrote about in this edited two-part 2012 repost, a growing number of sexually active young blacks are boldly declaring their faith in Christ while also openly practicing what they fully know is sin!
Deeply troubled about this very apparent misunderstanding of who He really is, I also wrote to this group as the unchanging God full of grace and mercy led to give warning and helpful instruction. I make this repost hoping again to be heard at a time when the wider culture is attempting through media to make all manner of sexual immorality normal. So much is this the case, that in the January 30, 2018 episode of a new black American themed CW show called “Black Lightning,” the main character’s lesbian daughter is consoled in a hospital setting by her mother over the break up with her lover while the Gospel Music classic, “Mary Don’t You Weep,” plays in the background.
Surely, all of us over fifty remember either our mothers and/or grandmothers weeping to this song a generation ago not only as they thought hopefully for Mary overcome with grief for her dead brother, Lazarus, but cathartically, the plight of their own children facing the sometime deadly challenges of growing up black in an oppressive and segregated America. For the show’s producers, the network and black cast to allow this mockery of Christianity and the Christian black experience in the cause to further sexual immorality is wicked beyond words and marks the arrival of the next clear consequence of trying to have God and sin too! The guilty must snap out of satanic delusion and repent before it is too late; realizing the immutable, holy God never embraces, but judges sin.
Originally Posted September 16, 2012
One more article published in the May 2012 Ebony Magazine that caught my attention focused on Christian black American singles and their attitudes toward having sex outside of marriage. Entitled, Single, Saved--and Having Sex, the article written by Chevonne Harris appeared in the Love And Relationships Connect section of the magazine.1 A set up tag line reads: “A Majority Of Young Christians Are Foregoing Abstinence, Even As They Keep The Faith.” While a few men are cited in the article, it is written with a decidedly female audience in mind right down to the graphic art seemingly showing two females embracing on a bed while in shadow a solitary woman is draped over a pew in apparent sadness.
This article showcases again the liberalizing trend of especially many young black Americans away from the historic faith of the Bible and our faithful Christian slave forefathers. To struggle with sex as a Christian is not new. I confess my own struggle (key word here is “struggle”) with living celibate as a young Christian in my book, The Strong Man Of God: Back To Basics.2 So, let no one read me as unsympathetic. However, it is one thing to struggle and another to just flat out go for it without concern about biblical prohibitions or consequences. This is a new attitude among historically morally conservative blacks claiming to be Christians the article is reporting on as a current trend.
Citing Relevant Magazine as its source, the article states, “As many as 80% of young, unmarried Christians have had sex.” In Ebony’s own polling at one Ohio church, 54% of 192 single Christians were practicing abstinence while 46% were not doing so even as they retained their belief that sex before marriage is a sin. The attitude of the Christians represented in the new trend of unapologetic sexual promiscuity is expressed well in the article by 34 year old Yolanda Jordan when she is quoted as saying: ‘“Just because I have a Bible on my nightstand and condoms in the drawer doesn’t mean I love God any less or that He doesn’t love me.’”3
Professed Christian John Fitzgerald has “ended relationships because of the woman’s decision to remain abstinent.” He adds, ‘“Yes, it’s wrong, [but] I’m still doing it.’” Author, Sophia Nelson, admits the Bible’s clarity about abstinence until marriage, then offers, ‘“that is not the reality of what’s going on.”’ Moreover, she says, “‘It is unrealistic in the 21st century to expect celibacy until marriage.’” She cites how sexualized society is, the trend to marry later and the “double standard” of tolerating Christian male sex outside of marriage that is unfair to women to support her claim.
Ebony’s article did reference a Creflo Dollar publication explaining the world’s turn away from honoring God’s Word on abstinence until marriage as due to “selfishness.” I would generally agree with this assessment and remind struggling Christian singles as a result, it is not about you. God knows all about your physiology--He gave it to you! He has also given you ready access to His power to be the master over your own body (Galatians 5:22-25; 1 Thessalonians 4:1-8). God has given Christians no commandment that He has not also given us the power through the Holy Spirit to obey (Ephesians 3:14-20; Philippians 4:13; Colossians 1:9-12).
However, you must have a made up mind as an aspiring strong man or great woman of God to please Him in obedience, not yourself in sexual gratification. As it concerns the times, you have been called out of the world to Christ and no longer are to follow its thinking and practices (Romans 12:1-2). Regardless of the culture or century, the will of God in Christ remains the same. Every type of sex outside of marriage between a man and woman is sin for all time and all who willfully practice disobedience to this, will eventually be visited by God with judgment (1 Corinthians 3:16-17, 5:1-5, 6:9-11; Galatians 5:19-21; Hebrews 13:4, 8). Why would you foolishly put God to the test (Acts 5:1-11)?
1 Find the article at Ebony.com.
2 The Strong Man Of God: Back To Basics is available through all major internet booksellers, by order from your favorite brick and mortar bookstore and in the Strong Man Store.
3 A footnote informs readers names in the article had been changed.
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