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The Three NecessitiesBy Steve Gallagher
For many years I thought that the greatest problem in today’s Church was a lack of discipleship. If pastors would just take the time to work with individuals—encouraging, exhorting and training them—most of the carnality, worldliness and sin amongst Christians would evaporate.
I have since changed my thinking. The best discipleship in the world cannot help an unconverted person overcome habitual sin or become more godly. In the past five years, I have become increasingly more convinced that much of the work that goes on in the Church today is the attempt to make unbelievers act like believers. Vast multitudes of professing Christians have never truly bowed their knee to the Christ they claim to follow. If they are unconverted, the best they can hope to accomplish is to try to please God in the flesh—something that the Apostle Paul said was impossible. (Romans 8:8)
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| | Tweet This: The best discipleship in the world cannot help an unconverted person overcome habitual sin or become more godly. |
| | If this is true of mainstream Christendom, how much more is it true of that multitude within the Church’s ranks who are constantly juggling Christianity and lasciviousness? Those people whose minds waver back and forth between thoughts about spiritual matters and evil imaginations.
So it should go without saying that a person must experience a true conversion to Christ if he is to have anything more than a white-knuckle kind of freedom from his addiction. The first necessity is faith; not spurious faith, not temporal faith, not faith in oneself, but real faith: a vibrant, saving faith in Jesus Christ.
I believe the Bible is very clear about the fact that there are, what I would call “unsaved Christians;” i.e., people who profess Christ but whose lives have not exhibited the kind of change indicative of salvation. I’m not referring to baby believers; I’m talking about people who have been in the Church for years.
(Allow me to offer a word of caution here: Be careful about assuming that a person has truly been saved just because he has a history in the Church. One of the most dangerous mistakes a minister can make is to attempt to convince a person who doubts his salvation experience that he really is a believer. It is our job to point out the evidence of saving faith that the Scriptures describe. If the person has been truly saved, the Holy Spirit will be faithful to affirm it. (Romans 8:16) If the counselee is unsaved, then his salvation must become the primary focus of all future counseling sessions.)
As long as Self remains lodged on the throne of a person’s heart, he will not have the power of the Holy Spirit at work within him. If Christ has taken His rightful place of authority in the person’s life, then sin cannot hold him.
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| | Tweet This: As long as Self remains lodged on the throne of a person’s heart, he will not have the power of the Holy Spirit at work within him. If Christ has taken His rightful place of authority in the person’s life, then sin cannot hold him. |
| The second necessity is repentance: a very tricky subject with those who wrongly believe they are saved. If you tell the man he must repent of his sin, you are likely to hear, “I can’t tell you how many times I have repented of my sin!” From his perspective, he is expressing what he believes to be true. On countless occasions, he has “repented” after giving over to his sin.
But the proof is in the pudding, so to speak. Real repentance means that the person has quit his sin. So, in the strictest sense of the word, the person has not repented. He has made resolutions to quit—resolutions that usually spring forth from his own determination to stop his behavior. This type of repentance comes forth from “worldly sorrow,” as Paul coined it. A person cannot repent of habitual sin if he has not transferred his allegiance from Self to Christ. Every bout of “repentance” is doomed to fail. As you can see, we are still talking about whether or not the person has crossed the line into the kingdom of God. There is no doubt that this is the primary issue at stake. Until that matter has been resolved, the person cannot move forward spiritually.
Likewise, once he has truly been converted, he will enter the process of sanctification—where the Holy Spirit begins the internal work of transforming him into the image of Christ.
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| Jesus explained this process through the metaphor of a vine and its branches. “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away as a branch and dries up; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire and they are burned.” (John 15:5-6) If a person is attached to the Vine, he will continually receive spiritual nourishment.
A true believer will feel compelled to spend time with God on a regular basis. He instinctively knows that it is as he communes with God that he receives the inner strength to live the Christian life. On the other hand, a pseudo-Christian will probably not feel such compunction.
As the believer spends time in the Scriptures, he will, over time, find his warped perspectives about life (and sex) being straightened out. This doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time. Years of twisted perspectives about sexuality gradually become corrected as he regularly spends time soaking in the Word of God.
Prayer also plays a vital role in this transformation process. It is by sitting in the presence of the Lord that he learns to walk in the Spirit. Paul promises this person that he will not cave in to the temptations to act out sin. (Galatians 5:16) I can testify to the truth of this. Over the years, there have been those men who have left our residential program and fell back into their old pattern of sin. Without exception, before they returned to their sin, they had already forsaken their devotion time.
This article is a gross oversimplification of a process that is methodically laid out in my book, At the Altar of Sexual Idolatry. But my purpose here is to assure you that there is a tried-and-true roadmap to victory over sin that is available to all children of God. There is no reason that a true believer should ever be held by the cords of sin.
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| | Steve Gallagher is the founder and president of Pure Life Ministries. He has dedicated his life to helping men find freedom from sexual sin and the abundant life in God that comes through deep repentance.
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| Copyright © 2024 by Pure Life Ministries. Permission is granted to use, copy, distribute, or retransmit information or materials on this page, so long as proper acknowledgment is given to Pure Life Ministries as the source of the materials, and no modifications are made to such material.
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| | | We are excited to announce that over the next year, we are deploying teams for ministry in local churches.They will be available to speak at men’s retreats, young adult gatherings, Christian college chapels, as well as church services. Today, more than ever, people need to hear the good news that Jesus Christ still transforms lives—even those ravaged by sin!
If there is any way our speaking team can come along your church as a resource in this area, please contact Josh Rowand at events@purelifeministries.org to schedule an event for Fall 2024 or Spring 2025.
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