11.12 Give It To Them Straight

In addition to these gate-keeping precautions, I recommend that you talk honestly with your kids (your boys, in particular) about your struggles. My thirteen-year-old and I have had many discussions about how bad XXX videos are. One day, as we passed a XXX theatre, he said from the backseat, “Dad, you would never watch one [...]

11.11 Protecting Our Kids

So how do we build walls and guard gates for our kids? Build their walls by making sure they practice spiritual disciplines, and take time to talk about spiritual markers with them. Guard their gates by teaching them what is inappropriate and dangerous in computers, video games, magazines, T.V., movies and other media, and then [...]

11.10 Frog In a Pot

You’ve probably heard the metaphor about boiling a frog in a pot. If you put him into a pot of boiling hot water, he would jump out immediately. But if you put him into a pot of cold water and gradually increase the temperature, he will be boiled before he realizes what happens to him.

We [...]

11.9 Pornographer’s Marketing Tactics

No one knows marketing better than the pornographers. They have somewhere between $2.5 and $10 billion reasons to get their product to us.2 A friend of mine once went to a workshop on a prominent college campus, where the speaker extolled the genius of the pornography dealers. He talked about how cutting edge their marketing [...]

11.8 Build THEIR Walls – Guard THEIR Gates

What if your son were kept free from this draining fever in the first place, and all of his spiritual energy could be spent on God’s call in His kingdom?

~ Every Man’s Battle

I can’t conclude without talking about our responsibility to our children. If you’re a dad, your job is to build the walls for [...]

11.7 Diluting the Garbage

I did an object lesson once in a men’s group that illustrated this principle. We started with a small cup full of water and talked about how the clear water in the cup represented our minds as God created them.

Unfortunately, we allowed the vile and the vulgar to get beyond our gates. (I recognize [...]

11.6 Ferret Out the Criminals

In those days I saw men in Judah treading winepresses on the Sabbath and bringing in grain and loading it on donkeys, together with wine, grapes, figs and all other kinds of loads. And they were bringing all this into Jerusalem on the Sabbath. Therefore I warned them against selling food on that day. Men [...]

11.5 Rich and Lifeless

In Israel, there are two major bodies of water: the Sea of Galilee (a.k.a. the Kinneret) and the Dead Sea (though both are really lakes).  Although they are in the same country and connected by a common river (the Jordan), the two couldn’t be more different.  The Sea of Galilee is fed by the Jordan [...]

11.4 Nehemiah Cleans House

Some time later I asked his permission and came back to Jerusalem. Here I learned about the evil thing Eliashib had done in providing Tobiah a room in the courts of the house of God. I was greatly displeased and threw all Tobiah’s household goods out of the room. I gave orders to purify [...]

11.3 Tying Yourself to the Mast

In The Odyssey, Odysseus had his men tie him to the mast of his ship so that he wouldn’t succumb to the Siren’s alluring song as they passed the rocky Sirenum Scopuli islands. The Sirens were mythical sea nymphs who sang so beautifully that sailors would sail their ships into the island cliffs in an [...]