God's Beautiful Design for Women: Living Out Titus 2:1-5 - part 2Saying No to Temptation

Leslie Basham: Holly Elliff says you have to take adultery or emotional adultery seriously.

Holly Elliff: I would encourage those women who are listening who may have gone way past the point of toying with the idea and now you are actively involved with another man. Then I would encourage you like I did my friend not to take another breath without getting on your knees before the Lord and just saying to Him, “Father, a long time ago I committed my life to You. I cannot honor You unless I honor my marriage vows.”

Leslie: This is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss for Friday, November 7. In our series, God’s Beautiful Design for Women, we’ve gotten solid Biblical teaching and practical counsel about moral purity. We’ve heard how small choices lead to some big consequences.

Some of our listeners have had to grapple with these kinds of choices in their lives and are sharing what moral purity looks like day-to-day. We’ll hear from Debby Canfield, Kim Wagner and Holly Elliff. To start us off, here’s Amber Singleton.

Amber Singleton: I’m Amber Singleton. I don’t think my husband would mind my sharing this because he’s been with me when we’ve shared it with others. We had started dating early and married and were best friends. He went to medical school right after the birth of our third child. She was very difficult. She cried all day long every day. I was in the pediatrician’s office three and four days a week.

One day I was driving somewhere and one of the pediatrician’s cars passed. I am honest to tell you I cannot remember which one it was. But I remember my heart beating faster when I saw that car pass and I thought, “Oh, my goodness, that’s what my heart did when I was dating Ken and I would see his car pass. There is something very wrong here.”

I went home and I paged Ken and he called me. I said, “Honey, I don’t know what class you have next but I’m in a crisis and I need you to meet me for lunch if you can.” He missed his next class and came and met me for lunch. I said, “I have to tell you what has just happened to me.” So I explained and I said, “I’m not attracted to any of these people,” but I said, “I’m afraid. That was scary to me.”

Well, he had been making straight A's up to that point. He had been through one semester of medical school, and he never made straight A's again. We started having a date night once a week even though he was in medical school. We began to be best friends again, and he helped carry that burden of that problem.

So I guess the admonition would be the person you run to when you begin to have these wrong things is your husband.

Kim Wagner: I am so thankful for a drastic intervention that my husband took in my life when we had only been married a little over a year and had moved to Dallas. We were Bible college students. We were very financially needy. You know how that is, Holly. So we felt like the Lord had provided this great job for me in a high-rise building in downtown Dallas. Here I am this little girl from Arkansas working at one of the largest holding companies in the world.

As I would go to work every day, I would be dressed nice. You have to put on your nicest appearance and treatment toward others. Everyone there is treating everyone just so nice. There was an executive there—I was only 21, and he was probably 20 years older than me, a very nice-looking man. He started just passing by my desk more and more just to say little things to me.

I remember one day I came back from lunch and he had left a little cupcake on my desk with a little note. He was more and more giving me attention. I let him know, "I’m married to a Bible college student. I’m married." My husband would come up some days to have lunch with me. He would come carrying his little paper sack, and he looked just pitiful coming in from college with his little school books, and here this big executive would walk by.

It was quite a contrast if I was a worldly woman. I looked at that and I would see this successful executive that’s interested in me and here’s my poor, pitiful husband coming trudging up here every day with his little paper sack lunch.

The day the man asked me to go somewhere with him after work—of course, I turned him down—I came home and told my husband about all of this attention. Although we were so financially needy, my husband said, "If God wants us here at Bible college, He will provide and you’re coming home. You won’t work outside the home any more."

I’m so thankful for that protection in my life because even though my heart hadn’t started going to that executive . . .

Nancy Leigh DeMoss: It certainly could have.

Kim: It could have. Nancy, I think about how many women in the workplace—they may be there as believers; they have good hearts; they love their husbands; but that attention that comes, that treatment, that someone being interested in them. . .

If women are listening today and they find themselves thinking about how they’re dressing for work and how it will look to that man that’s there at the workplace; if they think about can I run into him at the copy machine, they need to go to their husbands and share that with their husbands. They need to share it with accountability partners.

They may need to take some drastic steps to remove themselves from that situation, even if it means financial poverty, to save their marriage.

Nancy: I can imagine a woman in a situation like this who might think if I told my husband this, it would seriously jeopardize our marriage, not that the marriage isn’t already being jeopardized. How can you give that woman assurance that that really is the right thing to do?

Debby Canfield: I remember probably—well, I’ve been married 30 years now—15 years into it we were around young men all the time. I was going through a time in my life when Steve was very busy. He was doing a lot, and I just felt like all I was worth doing was staying at home with the kids.

I was starting to feel sorry for myself. That’s really where it starts. Steve wasn’t giving me the affirmation and, of course, I was starting to see my focus leave from the Lord and start getting on my circumstances and feeling sorry for myself.

There was one particular boy, he was, and he kept day in and day out saying, “Oh, you just look so young for your age.” When you’re starting to get older, that felt pretty good. Every time I’d come in, he’d just say, “You just look beautiful.”

Satan was using those little things. I thought, wow, I’m not getting too old yet. I still got something in me. I’m not just a wife and a mother, feeling sorry for myself. But immediately, because of spending time with the Lord every morning, the Holy Spirit just gripped me and He said, “You’re letting go. You are tearing down the hedges that you and your husband had put up years ago by allowing yourself to accept this affirmation from somebody that’s one of your children’s age.”

So I immediately went to Steve thinking he is going to hate me. He’s always put me on this pedestal. But he sat there and he said, “God’s going to get us through this.” I realized that I had let a root of bitterness in my heart start years before, which my husband shares in the revival services about early in his life as a teenager and on he struggled with pornography. He didn’t share that with me until after we were married. So I thought I really had dealt with it.

Sometimes we deal with it on the outward but we kind of stuff it and then we take it out just at the right time. I realized that I had not really dealt with that hurt totally and totally forgiven him. So when I was getting my focus off of God and somebody else was giving me affirmation, I thought, well, Steve did this to me. So instead I said, "God, forgive me for the bitterness that I’ve been holding towards my husband that has opened the door to this temptation. "

So we went to lunch and I sat and I told Steve what was happening—that he was affirming me and what he had said and how many times he had said it. I mean I just opened it all up. Like I said, we prayed and I needed that accountability. I needed to get honest because a secret holds so much power. If I hadn’t have, I don’t know what would have happened.

He forgave me, and most of all God forgave me as I went to the Lord and repented of that sin of accepting those compliments. I just asked God to be there for me and to get me through this and to go back where I had to ask Steve to forgive me for the bitterness that I had been holding for several years not even realizing it.

Nancy: Had you in that first instance opened that door, maybe not to an affair, but just to entertain further than you did . . . I think when you step over a line, the next time it becomes easier to step further in the wrong direction. So each choice in those little areas becomes a building block for how we’re going to respond in future situations.

Holly: I think that’s where dealing with the temptation on the front end before it has opportunity to blossom into sin is what’s so critical. I mean, the cupcake on the desk was a temptation. You had not done anything to merit the cupcake on the desk. That was a temptation. Had you chosen to take up that invitation to go somewhere with him, you would have walked into sin. You didn’t make that choice. You dealt with it when it was still at the level of temptation before it had time to grow into sin.

Nancy: Now some have taken the temptation. They took the cupcake. They took the compliments. They opened the door and they’ve gone for the bait. They’re listening to you women say, I had these opportunities to go for the bait but by God’s grace I didn’t. You’re thankful, and you were delivered from that situation. It could have been a disaster but it wasn’t.

But there are a lot of women for whom they’re in it, and it is a disaster. Give some hope and help and encouragement for a next step for her.

Kim: Well, Nancy, what you said earlier about I know that there are a lot of women that may fear going to their husbands to share this with them. It may be that women might share with their husbands and that husband may not receive them in the way that Steve did Debby or my husband did me and may not take that protective stance.

But I would encourage women no matter how their husbands receive it to go to their husbands in humility. The first thing go to God and repent if they really want to get rid of this. That’s the issue. There may be some women listening to this that know they need to do it ,but they don’t really want to get rid of it. So women, if you know you need to do it, right now ask God to give you that desire to get rid of it. Ask Him to grant you repentance and show you how ugly that sin is and that that sin is one of the sins that crucified your Savior if you’re a believer.

So at that point then, in humility, ask God to give you humility to go to your husband and tell him you’re going to him out of love for him and love for God and the desire to be right with God and confess it to him. Tell him you need him to be your protector.

Nancy: Now at that point you have to keep in mind that for a lot of women there has been some disappointment. If they thought their husband was the greatest guy on the plant at that moment, they probably wouldn’t be accepting the cupcake from the executive. So there may be some issues of bitterness, disappointment that need to be dealt with as it relates to their own marriage.

Holly: I would encourage those women who are listening who may have gone way past the point of toying with the idea and now you are actively involved with another man. If you name the name of Christ, if you say you belong to Him, then I would encourage you like I did my friend years and years ago not to take another breath without getting on your knees before the Lord and just saying to Him, “Father, a long time ago I committed my life to You. I cannot honor You unless I honor my marriage vows.”

You may be at the point where you have absolutely no sense of love for your husband at all. He may have disappointed you or hurt you and you feel like you have every right to walk on your marriage. But let me encourage you, if you are a child of God, to allow Him to grant you repentance, to recognize this for what it is, which is a deception of the enemy that is drawing you away from truth. Ask God to grant you the ability to see it for what it is, to take the blinders off, to see it as sin, and to go to your Father and ask Him to help you take steps back in the right direction to restore your home, to restore your marriage. He will grant to you what you need if you come, as Kim said, in humility and ask for forgiveness.

Debby: God really does bring beauty from ashes. I’ve seen it over and over.

Holly: If we had time, the four of us sitting right here could tell story after story after story of women who made the choice of surrender and asked God to restore their heart and restore their love for their mate and God has done that. I wish I could introduce you to those women and have them tell you now what they have reaped as a result of obedience and surrender to the Lord.

Nancy: What about the woman who made those wrong choices. She’s been through those doors. She has come back to the Lord, has repented, but as she looks back on her life she still struggles with the guilt of having made those wrong choices.

Debby: I think the first thing I would say is renew your mind. I know I had to go to the Word of God. And I had to start memorizing Scripture. If it starts in the mind, what you put in your mind is going to come out in your actions. So I went to the Word of God and started renewing my mind with the Word of God.

I think the other thing is that I started believing what God said in His Word. I chose not to believe that God was a liar. But when He said He puts my sin as far as the east is from the west, He does that. He chooses to forgive us our sins, and He chooses to remember them no more. He could, but He chooses not to.

As I was talking in the last summit with a young girl who had gotten involved with immorality with a boy, a missionary’s daughter. That was her problem; she couldn’t forgive herself. I reminded her that sometimes it’s like a chalkboard, and God puts our sins on that chalkboard.

When we go to Him in repentance and humility, as Kim was talking about, and ask God to forgive us, which He already has because of what Jesus did, He erases that and He remembers it no more. So we don’t have to listen to Satan when he brings that lie to us.

Kim: Debby, I think that just from maybe a practical thing, a beginning place for women, you mentioned the Word of God and memorizing the Word—and I agree with that completely. I think for them to do a study on grace.

Debby: I did one on forgiveness.

Kim: Yes. I think there’s a lot of believers no matter if they’re a Bible scholar, but we will never plumb the depths of God’s grace. As you get into the Word of God and study grace and then make little note cards for yourself that you keep everywhere that talk about God’s grace, God’s forgiveness, His over-abundant willingness as our heavenly Father to bring us back to Himself.

For women that are mothers, if they think about how if their child was to come to them and say, “Mommy, will you please forgive me?” wouldn’t they just immediately offer grace to that child and immediately forgive?

Women, you may be still struggling over some deep, dark sin that you’ve committed. If you’ve gone to your heavenly Father and asked His forgiveness, He has forgiven you. He desires just to have a loving, intimate relationship with you, and the enemy doesn’t want that to take place. So the enemy is the one that brings condemnation and guilt after you’ve already been freed from that by the grace of God. It’s really to demean what Jesus Christ did on the cross when we don’t appropriate His grace in our lives.

Holly: I think it’s real important to remember that there is a huge difference between conviction of sin and condemnation from the enemy. When you are sensing just an oppressive bombardment from the enemy saying, "You are so crummy. You did this terrible thing. God will never love you, restore you, use you again." You recognize that for what it is. Those are fiery darts from the enemy designed to keep you in a position where you can’t see that God is longing to restore you and use you.

What happens is if you can recognize that, then when those fiery darts come, you hold up the shield of faith. You turn back to the Lord and say, “God, I thank You for Your forgiveness and that I am no longer under condemnation from the enemy.” Then just practically gather some gals around you who know your heart who will hold your arms up on those tough days, who will commit to pray for you, like my friend that calls me from another state.

Make sure that on days when you’re struggling that you let them know that. Just call them and say, “Okay, I’m really feeling condemned or accused today. Would you just pray for me?” Let them pray for you over the phone. It doesn’t have to be a big, long ordeal. In an instant, you can go from feeling condemned and accused to recognizing that you are being restored.

So don’t be afraid to take God at His Word, as Debby said, and allow the Lord to restore you so that this thing which was once a huge, dark secret becomes a platform in your life for you to be able to turn around to someone behind you and say, “Look, this is the way. I’m going to show you to walk through this because I’ve been there.”

So maybe even in ways that I could not do, you will be able to minister to that person out of your life and say, “God can restore. God can redeem, and let me tell you how He did it in my life.”

Leslie: That’s Holly Elliff talking with Nancy Leigh DeMoss along with Debby Canfield, Kim Wagner, and Amber Singleton. They’ve been very transparent about the tough choices that a pure life sometimes requires. Each of us go through seasons where we have to decide is my marriage more important than anything else? My job and career? My desire to feel accepted? Even my choice of pediatricians?

Our guests today have been reflecting on Nancy’s helpful teaching from Titus 2:1-5 in the series, God’s Beautiful Design for Women. If you’re wondering if a certain relationship is inappropriate or your not sure where your boundaries are, I hope you’ll review this week’s teaching from Nancy. It’s available at ReviveOurHeartsRadio.com.

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Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss is an outreach of Life Action Ministries.