Mortifying Sin by Michael Tang

The Berean Men’s Accountability Group held its last session this past Saturday and will beginning a new session in September. The following entry is a reflections piece about the last 9 months of this group. For more information, please contact elder Vince Kim (vincentskim at gmail).

For you know what instructions we gave you through the Lord Jesus. For this is the will of God, your sanctification; that you abstain from sexual immorality; that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor. 1 Thessalonians 4:2-4

Today, many people in the Western church crave answers to the age-old question: what is God’s will for my life? Does God want me to be a doctor? A lawyer? A teacher? Does God want me to be rich? Who does God want me to marry? If these Christians with such itching questions would simply open their Bibles, they would no doubt find the answers in passages such as the one above. The apostle Paul could not have laid out it more clearly: God’s will for us is our sanctification, our ongoing growth in holiness. God wants and commands us to be holy, just as He is holy (1 Peter 1:16). Whether we are doctors or lawyers or marry this person over that person, the fact of the matter is that our primary concern in life should be holiness.

The calling to be holy as a Christian is a high one. We cannot downplay the epic title of being “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, and a holy nation” (1 Peter 2:9). Yet, despite countless instructions in the Bible to pursue holiness, the church today seems to be failing miserably in this area. It is that particular instruction that Paul gives us, to “abstain from sexual immorality”, in which we are so disobedient.
A poll published by Leadership magazine reveals that more than 40% of churched young people at the age of 18 and under have engaged in premarital sex. Another poll from ChristiaNet reported by Marketwire.com claims that 50% of all Christian men are addicted to pornography. Rick Warren’s website Pastors.com had a survey of over 500 Christian men at a men’s retreat and reported that over 90% had admitted to feeling disconnected from God because of lust, porn, or fantasy. D.A. Carson recounts in his book A Call to Spiritual Reformation about how “the directors of several mission boards in North America and Europe have quietly mentioned to [him] that they have had to deal with more problems of sexual immorality among missionaries during the past five years than during the previous thirty, forty, or fifty years”.

The situation is crystal clear: sexual immorality is a rampant epidemic in the body of Christ. Rather than seeing a healthy, pure body, the world beholds a church of Christ that is diseased with sexually immoral sins. More and more Christians are succumbing to the seduction that the world offers in its culture of movies, TV shows, and music.

Carson has a great analogy for the situation the church is in: a frog that jumps into boiling hot water will immediately jump right back out. However, that very same frog can be quietly cooked to death if the temperature of the water in which it is already lying slowly rises. Like this proverbial frog, our culture is slowly heating up and destroying the life and witness of the church.

The Men’s Accountability group at Berean Community Church is an ice-cold solution to counter the boiling temperature of our culture. It is a call for the men of the church to kill sexual immorality and to pursue after the righteousness and holiness of God (1 Cor 6:18).

When the group first started in October 2006, the brothers chose accountability partners with whom they would meet once a week to discuss their latest struggles and victories over lust. These weekly meetings were the means in which we confessed our sins and prayed for one another (James 5:16). It is in these weekly meetings where the partners would also discuss the readings of various Christian literatures. Over the past 6 months, we read Sex is Not the Problem, Lust is by Joshua Harris, The Mortification of Sin by John Owen, and Disciplines of a Godly Man by R. Kent Hughes. We also memorized various passages in Scripture that dealt with fighting against the temptations of sin (i.e. Romans 6, Psalm 51). Another helpful tool that was employed by most of the men was the computer program Covenant Eyes, which monitors all the Internet sites that we visit. The program sends a bi-weekly report to the accountability partner of all the questionable websites that were visited.

All the men involved in the accountability group would convene together every other month at the church office to discuss their latest progress in the battle against lust. Each brother would take turns sharing, going around in a big circle, and we would end these bi-monthly meetings by praying for one another. This was an opportunity for all the men to be open with one another and to observe the progress that God was allowing us to make in sexual purity.

Though the statistics of today’s church may be very daunting, we must remember the church of Christ is no stranger to sexual immorality; almost every one of Paul’s epistles has some exhortation to flee from lust. Paul would probably say the same thing to the church today as he said to the Romans in 1st century A.D:

So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace. (Rom 6:11-14)

Men’s Accountability is not for the purpose of just resisting sin; the ultimate goal is to kill sin. We are dead to sin and alive to Christ, and as living beings, we must daily work by the glorious grace of God to root the sin of sexual immorality out of our lives and ultimately out of the church.

If you have read up to this point, the Puritan John Owen has a simple question for you to consider:
Do you mortify sin? Do you make it your daily work? Be always at it whilst you live; cease not a day from this work. Be killing sin or it will be killing you.