WIN THIS WAR

"We're gonna win this war, that's what we're fighting for. We serve a God who came to save the day." That's right. We're fighting to win. We're also fighting to serve our God, who's been out on the battlefield waiting for us to take our place at His side so He can save our day, just as He has done for so many before us throughout the millennia. He's anxious for you to get out there and to take your place in the battle for purity with Him so that you can become strong through the fight, and so that you can take your place in a cloud of witnesses to His glory.

He has known you since the dawn of time. He has had this day and this battle marked off on His calendar for the two of you since then. He's been looking forward to it for a long time, and He has already taken the point position in your battle together by enduring the cross and setting the enemy to flight before you, saving you and saving your days:

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider Him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.
Hebrews 12:1-3

As long as you "consider Him" and draw close to this "God who came to save the day," you won't lose heart in the face of the battle. You are already a man genetically. You will now become a man in practice as you take back your field of ruin and as you learn to occupy your land for Him and for your loved ones and friends who are counting on you to fight. This reminds me of a story I told in my very first book, Every Man's Battle:

I came across a newspaper story about a World War II vet named B. J. "Bernie" Baker who was told he was dying of bone cancer. Given only two years to live, he told the doctors to fight the disease with everything possible. "Give me the treatments," he said. "I'll keep living my life." Meanwhile he and his wife found time for a motor-home drive to Alaska, a fishing excursion to Costa Rica, and several trips to Florida.

Nine years after the diagnosis, he was struggling with shortage of breath and loss of strength but said, "I'm going to keep fighting. Might as well."

Those words were not said in resignation. They were the words of a fighter, a real man, a man who had faced bombs and machine-gun fire in the South Pacific before returning to America and eventually starting Baker Mechanical Company with two pipe wrenches and a $125 pickup truck. (It would become one of the largest companies of its kind in America.) The cancer hit him hard, but he had no plans for surrender.

Might as well keep fighting. What was B. J.'s alternative?

To quit and die.

What about you, in your battle with impure eyes and mind? What's your alternative to fighting?

To stay ensnared and die spiritually.

When you talk to courageous men from B. J.'s generation, World War II veterans who embody the title of Tom Brokaw's book The Greatest Generation, they say they don't feel like heroes. They simply had a job to do. When the landing-craft ramps fell open, they swallowed hard and said, "It's time." Time to fight.

In your struggle with sexual impurity, isn't it time? Sure, fighting back will be hard. It was for me. When I began my fight, I fully expected to take a beating at first, and I did. My sin had humbled me. But I wanted victory over that sin and the respect of my God.

Your life is under a withering barrage of machine-gun sexuality that rakes the landscape mercilessly. Right now you're in a landing craft, inching closer to shore and a showdown. God has given you the weapons and trained you for battle.

You can't stay in the landing craft forever. Sooner or later, the ramp will drop, and then it will be your time to run bravely into the teeth of battle. God will run with you, but He won't run for you.

It's time to plunge ahead and go like a man.
Every Man's Battle, page 52

If we take this picture from the world's wars and view it through our experiences in our own Friday night wars on the football fields across North America, we can bring it even closer to home for many of us who have not had the awesome honor of serving in the military while defending our nation:

When I played football, I always owned the field, whether at home or away. I played as if the turf was mine, and I could go wherever I wanted. If anyone dared to try to stop me, they'd be fiercely punished with a lowered shoulder and driving legs.

I knew the sacrifices I'd made to get strong. I knew that I'd outworked everyone on the field during the months leading up to that Friday night. I promised myself that no single player could ever stop me, period.

My commitment was total. I said no when I was invited to the Saturday night keggers, and I ate and slept right. I knew my game plan and my coach's instructions top to bottom. I belonged on that field, and that field belonged to me.

Trash talk couldn't touch me. Well, almost. I'll never forget the trash talk I heard from Washington High's Darrell "The Mill" Miller when I was playing high school quarterback. The guy was a brute, a defensive tackle who got into a three-point stance and shouted that henceforth he was about to separate my bleeping head from my bleeping torso. You catch my drift.

Darrell could intimidate me at times, but mostly I chuckled at his profane promises and ignored the blasts of steam blowing out of his nostrils in the chill autumn air. It was all showbiz.

The real show plays at the point of impact, the collision of wills and the collision of power. The collision of sacrifices made throughout the years-my years of commitment meeting his years of commitment in a moment of time. At that moment, words meant nothing. Only the commitment that led to my strength, balance, and confidence mattered.

It's little different on the spiritual field of battle. Faith comes, in part, from the same things: your commitment to God and your obedience to your Coach.... Warfare is a normal part of a man's responsibility. Sure, when you were in sexual sin, you were in survival mode. But now you've fought your battle for purity and won. Now you can breathe freely again and now you're free to face this new challenge. What is every man's challenge on the other side of purity? To get out of survival mode and to become a man of valor....

Get after Satan....Don't you get incensed when you think about what Satan did to you all these years? Don't you get riled to see what he's doing to your friends? Give him some of his own medicine...You are truly an overcomer, and it is high time you make Satan pay.
Every Man's Challenge, pages 165-166

It's time to step up to own your field. It is time to occupy. Yes, fighting back will be hard at first. You'll take a beating at first, just like all of us do. Your sin will humble you, as it should. But if you want victory over that sin and the respect of your God and the apostles and all the other witnesses to God's grace that have fought on before you down through the years, you will have it.

How do we take and occupy our Promised Land in practice? Well, how were the Israelites called to do occupy theirs? To get some understanding, let's go to their story again as I told it earlier in Every Man's Battle:

When the Israelites left Egypt and were led to the Promised Land, God told them to cross the Jordan River and destroy every evil thing in their new homeland. That meant killing all the heathen people and crushing their gods to powder. God warned them that if they failed to do this, their culture would "mix" with the pagans and they would adopt their depraved practices.

But the Israelites were not careful to destroy everything. They found it easier and easier to stop short. In time, the things and people left undestroyed became a snare. The Israelites became adulterous in their relationship to God and repeatedly turned their backs on Him.

As promised, He removed them from their land. But just before the destruction of Jerusalem and the final deportation of her inhabitants, God prophesied this about His people in their coming captivity:

Then in the nations where they have been carried captive, those who escape will remember me-how I have been grieved by their adulterous hearts, which have turned away from me, and by their eyes, which have lusted after their idols. They will loathe themselves for the evil they have done.
(Ezekiel 6:9)

When we entered the Promised Land of our salvation, we were told to eliminate every hint of sexual immorality in our lives. Since entering that land, have you failed to crush sexual sin? Every hint of it?
Every Man's Battle, Page 27

It's clear, isn't it? It is the fight that prepares us to occupy. It is the lack of fight, the "stopping short," that brings the "mixture" that prepares the snares for our feet.

Our God gives us a single, overarching scheme for winning on this battlefield:

Flee sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore, honor God with your body.
1 Corinthians 6:18-20

We are commanded to flee. It sounds funny on the surface, but if you flee, you will win and you will occupy your land and own your sexuality completely. What does fleeing look like in practice?

It's learning how to "bounce your eyes" away from all the sensuality in your world around you:

I made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully at a girl.
Job 31:1

It's learning how to "starve your mind" from the lust that so easily engulfs your brain with the flames of passion:

If my steps have turned from the path, if my heart has been led by my eyes, or if my hands have been defiled, then may others eat what I have sown, and may my crops be uprooted. If my heart has been enticed by a woman or if I have lurked at my neighbor's door, then may my wife grind another man's grain, and may other men sleep with her.
Job 31:7-11

It's learning how to take every thought captive:

We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.
2 Corinthians 10:5

Finally, it's in learning to expand your heart in love. You must learn to form genuine intimacy with the Lord in worship and prayer, and you must learn to love your brothers in Christ and help them carry their burdens in this fight, as well. In other words, you must actually live out the two Great Commandments:

"...Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."
Matthew 22:36-40

This song Win the War carries much of the battle plan in its lyrics. "I'm on the outside, I need a breakthrough. Fall to my knees and meet with You. Living water floods my soul...it's been renewed. How does a young man keep his ways pure? By hiding Your word in our hearts and placing all our faith, our trust, our hope in You!" My books, of course, can teach you how to do these things in detail.

As you step into battle, don't forget that it is the lack of fight that creates the snares for our feet, just like it was with the Jews in Canaan. It's because we let the little things slide that we end up singing, "I'm surrounded by these walls and I feel them caving in. How do I end up here, time and time again?" We end up there time and again for a simple reason: We have been told to fight fiercely and to flee sexual immorality completely and we've been told to eliminate every hint of sexual immorality in our lives, but we don't. Since entering that land, have you failed to crush sexual sin? Every hint of it?

You already have all the strength you'll need to own the field because of Christ' new life living inside of you, but perhaps you are still doing things that compromise that strength. The game-speed chaos in your relationships with girls may be rocking your sense, but is it the smaller, under-the-radar things that are doing you in?

On the sexual field of play, most of the things that compromise your inner strength sneak up on you from the outside, without notice....Guys don't like to hear that their "innocent" porn habit could be an addiction, but that's the right word.
Tactics, Page 35

Those "hints" that you ignore will birth the snares for your feet. In hopes that you don't miss them and take them too lightly, take a look at the following list:

• Do you tell off-color jokes? Do you like to use double entendres and make word plays with double-sided sexual meaning?
• Do you channel-surf hoping to catch a glimpse of something racy on television? Do you catch yourself watching voyeuristic shows?
• Are you pushing regularly at your girlfriend's sexual boundaries?
• Do you have behaviors that you can't share with your girlfriend?
• Do you have a secret compartment or private place you hide from your girlfriend?
• Do you linger over lingerie ads in the newspaper and the department store ad inserts on Sunday morning?
• Do you watch women's figure skating or women's beach volleyball on TV, although you have little sporting interest in the competition?
• Do you rent videos or go to movies and watch other people having sex?
• Do you turn on exercise shows just so you can enjoy those close-ups of participants' breasts, rear ends, and inner thighs?
• Do you gaze at the glistening athletic bodies of joggers wearing tight nylon shorts?
• Do you admire the cute girl passing by, whistling to yourself and saying, "Nice rack"?
• Do you talk a bit dirty with a person of the opposite sex in an Internet chat room?
• Do you fantasize about that woman from the chat room?
• Do you daydream sexually about that girl at work in McDonalds?
• Do you dream hot scenes at night with that cute girl in French class?
• Do you ever think, "God understands my sexuality...He knows how lonely I am. He knows I need these cyber-girls right now"? (A word to the wise: God doesn't think that way.)
• Did you chafe and get defensive or angry as you read through this list?

You need to stomp out every hint of sexual immorality if you expect to occupy your land and avoid the snares of the enemy. You will have victory as you do:

How long will finding purity take for you? I don't know, but that isn't the important question to God....The far more pertinent questions-and their answers-would be these:

• Have you fully engaged the battle?
• Does your heart fully agree that you have no right to live any way other than the way Jesus lived?
• Are you ready to win or die trying, no matter what anyone else thinks about you?

Once you can say yes to all three of these questions, the time frame becomes irrelevant to Him. You will own the sexual field of play soon, and that's good enough for God.
Tactics, page 27