Written by T. M. Suffield |
Thursday, March 3, 2022
God has branded believers as his, putting his mark on us; made it clear that we’re the real deal, and guaranteed our protection in transit to the age to come. The Spirit is God’s maker’s mark on us. It shows us that he is committed to us, and that his promises are reliable. For this to be helpful, it has to be visible to both you and others that you have been sealed.

How do we know we’re in? How do we know that God loves us and will preserve us to the end?
It’s got nothing to do with Bourbon, before you get too excited.
There are three ways that we know that we know him. I’m talking about what we commonly call assurance, the certainty that you are a Christian, you do know Jesus, and that you’re in. That’s what you need when your back is against the wall and you desperately need to know that death is beaten, that sadness will wither, and that Jesus wins. You’ve been taught it, you’ve read it, you declare it, but you just need to know. That’s assurance.
Deductive Assurance
The first way is what I would call ‘deductive’, what we typically call logic. This is when we read in the Bible that if we trust Jesus and follow him then God will not count our sins against us, and instead considers us as though we were his Son. We then think through whether or not we trust Jesus and are trying to follow him—”yes, as best I can, but a long way from perfectly.” Therefore, I must be one of Jesus’ followers and I can trust that God will be true to his word. We know with our heads that it’s true.
Inductive Assurance
The second way I’d call ‘inductive’. This is where we infer things from what we observe. We see progress in our lives since we met Jesus and continue to see that progress. We keep changing for the better in ways that we couldn’t make happen ourselves. Sometimes this requires the long view, but this is proof that what we think is true is true. Therefore, we must be one of Jesus’ followers and God is already being true to his word. We know with our lives that it’s true.
Direct Assurance
The third way I’d call ‘direct’. It’s not based on logic, but on experience. It’s when we meet with God in a powerful way and know—just know—that he loves us, is for us, and counts us as his children. It proves that everything I’ve read that is true in general, and that everything I’ve seen that seems to be true in my life, is specifically, intimately, individually true for me. Therefore, God loves me, so he is true to his word. We know with our hearts that it’s true.
This direct assurance I’ve written on recently: the feeling of joy that proves the ‘knowing’ of hope to be true.
We need all three: the head, the life, the heart. Each one proves the others. The direct heart experience is the one that does the heaviest lifting in hard times. It’s the one that is most fitted to carrying us through life, but it needs the other two to authenticate it.
If you’re missing deductive assurance, then go back to the Bible, ask Jesus, do you really believe this stuff? If you’re missing inductive assurance, then go to Jesus in prayer—ask him to show you how your character is developing and your faithfulness increasing. Ask your church family too, our friends often see us clearer than we see ourselves.
Read More

The goal of male sexuality is Biblically defined, joy-filled, fully-satisfying, covenantally faithful, kingdom building enjoyment of one woman, for a lifetime, to the glory of God. That is what it is. And before you exclaim, “Oh wow! Now the Puritanical fun police are back in town to limit all of our freedom”, you must remember that all freedom is limited. You will either live according to the limits God has given in His Word, or you will live within the debased limits of a debauched human society. You will either align yourself with how the creator made you, or give yourself over to a carnal human imagination.

If masculinity were an island, and men its citizens, then attacks would be coming in all directions. Multiple invading armies would be closing in, countless bombs and bullets would be expended, cities would be leveled, leading to the choice of whether or not the men would surrender. This is exactly what happened to Japan in 1945.
In 1945 the US and her allies had all but won the most devastating war ever conducted. Millions of bullets, grenades, tanks, bombers, and blood had been spent trying to defeat the three pronged axis of evil which was comprised of Nazi Germany, Facist Italy, and Imperial Japan.
By 1945 the Allied troops had defeated both Italy and Germany. The autocrat Benito Mussolini had been captured and hanged in the Italian streets on April the 28th. Two days later Adolph Hitler committed suicide in an underground bunker in Berlin. And this signaled the end of the war in Europe. But, while the writing on the wall was certainly clear, the island of Japan persisted and refused to surrender. They would fight with valor, glory, and honor even if all of them would perish.
By May, B-52 bombers were torching Japanese cities like Tokyo and others with devastating fire bombs. Maries were capturing various Japanese strongholds, like Iwo Jima and Okinawa, in the pacific theater with massive Japanese casualties. And the United States, who had been secretly developing the weapon to end the war, was moments away from dropping it should the Japanese persist in their opposition.  This is exactly what happened.
On August the 6th of 1945, a new era of warfare was unleashed upon the world when one “Little boy” atomic bomb liquified Hiroshima in seconds. Between the initial blast and the nuclear fall out it is estimated that as many as 135 thousand people were killed with a single blast.  Three days later, with similar devastation, another atomic bomb vaporized Nagasaki, effectively ending World War 2, the bloodiest war in human history. With the Russians closing in on the Western front, and the US able to level entire cities and mass populations with a single bomb, the Japanese had to surrender in order to survive.
While all metaphors break down, and while there is no direct comparison between World War 2 and the attack on men, my point in bringing up this story is to show how some weapons can end wars instantly. They can vaporize your ability to fight. They can poison the population. And they can render the nation morally paralyzed to continue. This is what pornography and abberant sexuality has done to masculinity, and if we have any hope of rebuilding, and creating a healthy culture of men, we need to know full well what the Bible says about male sexuality. We need this so that we can avoid future attacks, raise up faithful and healthy future men, and also so that we can win the war that is being waged and see Christ’s Kingdom advance.
To do that, we will lean on what we have seen in the previous weeks, and will build towards a Biblical sexual ethic. We will look at the God-ordained goal of male sexuality and the God-ordained result of male sexuality. In the end, we will know what the Bible says, so that we can effectively wage war in this generation and beyond. Let’s begin.
Disclaimer, I will speak frankly from this point onward.
The God-Ordained Goal of Male Sexuality
The goal of masculine sexuality is not an a-sexual midnight masturbation session in front of a 4k OLED screen. The goal is not playing hopscotch on the calendar so you do not impregnate the girlfriend you have no intention to marry. The goal is not an endless reel of lustful fantasies about the women you know and work with that you will either indulge in private seedy delight or will carry on with pulverizing shame. The goal of male sexuality is Biblically defined, joy-filled, fully-satisfying, covenantally faithful, kingdom building enjoyment of one woman, for a lifetime, to the glory of God. That is what it is.
And before you exclaim, “Oh wow! Now the Puritanical fun police are back in town to limit all of our freedom”, you must remember that all freedom is limited. You will either live according to the limits God has given in His Word, or you will live within the debased limits of a debauched human society. You will either align yourself with how the creator made you, or give yourself over to a carnal human imagination. One of these limits brings life, the other brings nothing but vulgarity, vexation, and venereal diseases.
True freedom is experienced in limitation, not in unbridled hedonism. Think about it this way, the freest and most joy filled people who will ever exist are the future redeemed people who cannot sin in New Jerusalem. They are the people who are finally free to worship God, without the constant drive and pull to sin. And while they are substantially more limited than we, having no further ability to explore fallen lusts, yet they are infinitely more joyful and free than we.
The mere fact that we are limited does not stifle our ability to experience joy and freedom. What stifles these things is being bound to the wrong standard. As a fish cannot survive in canola oil, so the masculine sexual drive was not designed to live in sexual perversion.
So, what does the Bible say we were designed for? First, we were made to endure a profitable period of abstinence.
A Profitable Abstinence
Before marriage, we were not designed to gratify any sexual desire in any way, with any person, or any thing, at any time lest we invite judgment from God. We see this standard all over the Scripture. For instance, Job tells us in chapter 31:1

I have made a covenant with my eyes; Why then should I look upon a young woman?

Job is admitting that visual stimulation is a particular struggle for the man, who was designed to be aroused by the naked body of a female. And yet, while this is a God-given design feature that will cause a marriage to flourish, we are not allowed to enjoy this kind of stimulation before marriage. Job argues that we must protect the covenant of marriage and our covenant with God by making a covenant with our own eyes not to lust after a woman. He is saying that the old adage, I can look but not touch, is entirely wrong! It is an egregious sin, and if you indulge it, it will ruin your relationships with women, with your wife or future wife, and with your God.
He is telling us that, before marriage, every woman’s body is off limits to us. Her figure must not even dilate the eyes of our desire. After marriage, that desire is opened to a single woman who will delight our eyes exclusively for a lifetime.
That means, practically speaking, we do not turn our eyes toward the uncovered woman on the television and make excuses that we are only watching for the story. It also means we do not turn our eyes to the covered women at our workplace and think it is innocent because it is just looking. We do not gawk at the women who dress provocatively in public and we do not visualize what is under the clothing of those who adorn themselves with modesty. We do not linger over lingerie ads, stare at the woman on the beach, or navigate 3 clicks past holiness on that website. If we are unmarried, we fight lust, we subdue it, we kill it, and fight so that it would not be awakened until its proper time  (Proverbs 8:4), that being covenant marriage.
If you will fight that fight, in faith, by the power of the Spirit, for the glory of God, for your own benefit, then you will reap bountiful blessings in your future marriage that will contribute to a lifetime of unfettered pleasure. If you heed your sin, and drown your eyes with oceans full of lustful images, you willingly invite dysfunction upon your own head and sinful decay into your bed.
Paul says in Colossians 3:5

Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. – Colossians 3:5

Before we move on, I think it is important to point something out in this passage. Paul does not command mortal combat upon our sexual sin as a way to impress God with our purity. We do not grind out beleaguered holiness, or begrudgingly guard our eyes, minds, and hearts, just to lay at His feet our best, which is filthy, soiled, and polluted rags anyway. If that were the goal, we may as well eat, drink, and give ourselves over to whatever lusts we want because our best would never be pure enough to please Him.
We do not wage war to prove to God who we are, we wage war because we are enamored by who He is.
Read More

The very thought of life apart from Christ’s cross stirs fear, terror, and awe. Since God is love, he took our sins upon his son, thereby immediately removing them from us as far as the east is from the west. While we fear God because of who he is, we need never fear his approach because his wrath and anger toward us have been turned aside at Calvary.

I was still in my teens, but I vividly remember the preacher’s words. “When the Bible speaks of the fear of the Lord, it doesn’t mean to be afraid of God, but to respect him. We must never be afraid of God because he loves us.” The preacher had a point and there was palpable relief felt in the congregation upon his declaration. It sounded like God’s love somehow canceled out any fear of God which might trouble us.
But I continued to wonder, how does the softening of fear into “respect” square with the well-known verse in Proverbs 1:7, “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, something which fools despise”? The question remained. What does it mean to “fear the Lord” especially when failing to fear the Lord is to be a fool who lacks knowledge?
I figured I would settle the critical point by doing a bit of research (one of my very first efforts at biblical studies). A commentary on Proverbs told me that the “fear” (yirāh) of the Lord means exactly what I thought it did–to be afraid, terrified, or in awe. There was no justification for understanding “fear” as mere respect, however important it was not to overlook God’s love for sinners. I discovered the word “fear” appears frequently throughout the Old Testament, often connected to wisdom as its source. Wisdom, in turn, is found in knowing who God is–witnessing his awesome power, coming to grips with his holy and righteous judgments, as well as understanding that God brings all things unto the ends for which he has appointed them. In this sense, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. That is what the author of Proverbs was getting at. Fools, on the other hand, ignore God who reveals himself as a “consuming fire” through his word and in his deeds (Hebrews 12:29). If wisdom arises from fear of the Lord, the height of foolishness is to pretend that God who is all-powerful, holy, and sovereign, does not reveal himself and grant us wisdom.
The fear of God is not a mere abstract theological speculation resulting from observing natural phenomenal like lightening or earthquakes. From the time of Abraham until Israel’s Exodus from Egypt and the Conquest of Canaan, God’s people repeatedly witnessed God’s presence with them through his supernatural power over nature. This is especially the case in the way in which God brings judgment upon his enemies–the fate of the elite Egyptian chariot units in the waters of the Red Sea comes to mind. The people of Israel also witnessed God’s awesome presence with his people as they made their way from Egypt into the promised land of Canaan (i.e., the pillar of fire by night and the cloud by day). Joshua recounts how the people of Jericho were terrified once they became aware that YHWH was leading his people (Israel) toward them (Joshua 2:10-11). YHWH is to be feared because of who he is.
But how do we resolve the apparent discrepancy between a God who is to be feared, and one whom the Scriptures also tell us “is love” (1 John 4:8)? What the preacher of my childhood completely missed was the fact that we need not weaken the force of the biblical affirmation that God is to be feared in order to preserve the fact that God is love. There is a biblical way to solve the conundrum which preserves both biblical points–God is to be feared and he is love. The solution is a proper understanding of the biblical covenants and a bloody cross.
God is to be feared because we have all rebelled against him. We are all guilty before him because of our sins–guilt for Adam’s sin imputed to us, as well as guilty for our actual sins (Genesis 3). After our first parents sinned in Eden, they were terrified by YHWH’s approach. The reason for their terror? God is perfectly and absolutely holy. Adam and Eve were once innocent. But the guilty rebels were soon cast from Eden, unable to enjoy God’s presence and terrified of his wrath. From that moment until now, God is to be feared, because he is holy, we are sinners, and all human sin must be punished.
Read More