Calluses Gone, Therefore We Stand

Today's Three-minute Bible Study
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Title: Calluses Gone, Therefore We Stand
Keywords: "callus"
Welcome to eXXit, the web site designed to help you stand strong in the face of sexual temptation.

Passage: Ephesians 4:18c-19*

18. …excluded from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart;

19. and they, having become callous, have given themselves over to sensuality, for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness.

Questions

1. What does Paul say is true about the person who is trying to find life outside of God?

 

2. In what possible ways might a person who is "callused" go in their pursuit of fulfillment?

 

Practical help

When you couple blindness (see verse 17) with alienation from God (v. 18), you wind up with people who are what the Bible calls "lost." Lost lives are described in verse 19.

A hardening process begins in the person who seeks fulfillment everywhere but God that ends in a callused heart — a heart that is unfeeling, hardened.

After trying and trying to find life and joy on his/her own, the lost person either despairs of ever finding joy, meaning, peace, and love and allows himself/herself to become dead inside OR he/she redoubles the pursuit of a rich life, even if the means of pursuit are thoroughly inappropriate.

As we near the end of 2003, we see both responses in people all around us. Some lost people are allowing all hope for richness to die, out of a fear of more disappointment. Others are misbehaving more and more, thinking that the meaning they crave is just around the next thrill. (When we understand what drives the despair and the misbehavior, we are moved to pray for them.)

We who have come to know God through faith in Christ, though, need not live as those do who are lost. Our hearts are not callused. In fact, they have been softened by the Spirit of God. There is no reason to pursue "life" in behavior that displeases God, and there is every reason to remain "alive."

Why should you and I avoid involvement with pornography? Because LIFE is to be found in a trusting relationship with God, not in the cheap, momentary thrill available in a dirty picture on the Internet.

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*"Scripture taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE®, © Copyright The Lockman Foundation 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995. Used by permission."