“IT MATTERS”
Guarding the Gates to our Soul
· God is calling us to renew our dedication to His WORD….He is calling us to re-evaluate every tradition…everything we do…every word we speak…everything we see…everywhere we go…EVERYTHING and ANYTHING that keeps us from fulfilling His will
· A lot of the problems we have with sin and temptation….and with back-sliding and being lukewarm spiritually comes from the simple fact that we do not guard our spiritual gates…..
· In the Old Testament, doorkeepers were stationed at the temple and city gates. Any unclean person was barred from entering and defiling the entire camp.
· We have lots of gates…eye-gates, ear-gates, mouth-gate, nose-gate, skin-gate, foot-gate….Our five senses allow us to process this physical world…
· We have lots of gates….and our job is to guard them!
· Proverbs 4:23 “Above ALL ELSE, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.”
· Not our physical heart (though we are supposed to do that too!)…but our spiritual one
· The Word “heart” in Hebrew is “leb” (labe)…it is the word used for the feelings, the will and even the intellect of man, likewise for the center of anything….in other words…this word means our SOUL…..
· Our soul is made up of our mind, will, and emotions….our WILL=our actions, things we do….our MIND=meaning the things we dwell of think about…our EMOTIONS…our feelings
· Why is it important to guard our soul…because what your soul pours out is what determines how your life will be….a corrupt soul will pour out bad choices, negative talk, and corrupt actions…YUCK….we want to keep our soul PURE…and to do that, we have to GUARD it!
· There are three main gates to the SOUL….our eyes, ears, and mouth…
· The reasons their called GATES is cause they can swing both ways…as an entrance or an exit…gates can keep things in or out
· What we see, hear, and allow to enter into our spirits will determine the level of purification of our spirits
THE EYE GATE:
· Out of all our 5 senses..the Bible mentions two senses in particular…the sense of SIGHT and the sense of HEARING…
· The eye gate is the least guarded gate…it is super easy for information to pass through the eye gate….EX: watching TV mindlessly…..it is totally possible for me to stare at the TV and think about something totally different
· What we continually look at and listen to will PROFOUNDLY affect our thoughts and mood.
· Psalm 101:3 “I will set before my EYES no vile thing. The deeds of faithless men I hate; they will not cling to me.”
· What is wicked to the Lord?...sin
· Notice that that verse also says “the deeds of faithless men”…those would be people that don’t live for Jesus…think about some of the movies that are coming out nowadays (vampires, demonic things…) think of the TV shows…it is actually hard not to find a show about death, or witches, or mediums, or homosexual couples living together, or even man and woman couples living together not married, shows where parents are HONORED are very few, late night shows with crude jokes, talk shows about incest, rape, adultery, and all that mess……HOW MUCH of what we entertain ourselves with is EXACTLY what Jesus died for????
· THINK ABOUT IT THIS WAY: Illegal immigrants can sneak in through an unmanned border…but not necessarily through a manned border…when was the last time you even THOUGHT about guarding your eye gate???
· This Scripture says that we aren’t even supposed to LOOK at these things….we are supposed to HATE what God hates and love what God loves!
· Psalm 97:10 “Let those who love the Lord hate evil, for he guards the lives of his faithful ones and delivers them from the hand of the wicked.”
· Look what else the Bible says…
· Job 31:1 “I made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully at a girl.”
· Matthew 5:28 “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
· I believe this goes for the women too…how many times has a woman looked at a “star” on TV and lusted after him….even then comparing him to her husband…..not a good thing at all!!!
· The eye gate is the gate that men sin the most…men need the visual
· WOW….Satan totally poisons our thoughts through the eye gate…
· When we look at all these things through our eye gate….it is absorbed into our heart…the heart becomes so incredibly hardened and so callous to the things that it “sees” that it doesn’t even consider it a sin anymore…
· See how the devil works….so subtly….very slowly over a period of time…he doesn’t work us over quickly cause he knows we would catch on too fast and we would put our guard up…THINK ABOUT IT…..what do you now think is totally OK…that before you would NEVER have even given a second thought to?????....like that song from Fireproof the Movie…”it’s a slow fade”
· Defilement or contamination to your soul can come through your eye gate VICARIOUSLY …meaning that it is not evil that YOU personally committed…but you watch it being done by someone else….like even in a court of law…if you watched a murder happen and you did nothing to stop it…you are still guilty…
· This starts sooooooo slowly…..like before, you would never dream of thinking that living together before you are married is OK…but after watching your “favorite show” so much…where a man and woman live together that are not married…suddenly you find yourself being more tolerant to this…and then eventually you don’t even see anything wrong with it at all
· DEFILEMENT is a state or condition on which the blessings of God cannot rest….don’t you think that Satan knows that!!!!....One of his number one tactics, I believe, is to get the church defiled without them knowing it…because then the blessings of the Lord couldn’t rest on them…and then the devil is free to wreak havoc in our lives!!!
· One article that I read said that: It has now been scientifically proven that pornography prompts sexual abuse….one of the worst serial killers and rapist, Ted Bundy, said in an interview that “his whole start into murder and rape started with fantasizing with the soft porn he was looking at.”
· Do you see what it does…it plants corruption in the heart through the EYES…it destroys the soul and pours out evil thoughts, feelings, and actions…we have to make a CONCIOUS CHOICE….
· Now you might say….I don’t look at porn….well….how many people watch the soaps…where everyone is committing adultery and has been married at least 5 times and its all supposed to be the way “life really is”…or you watch shows like “big brother” or whatever it is…where everyone is sleeping with everyone else….or those stupid talk shows like Jerry Springer where the guests are sleeping with the other guests wife and tells them about it on national TV in graphic detail!!!!!.....that’s soft porn!!!!
· EX FROM FOX NEWS: “Texas College Campus Divided Over Bible for Porn Campaign”…Atheist students at UT at San Antonio announced that any student over the age of 18 will receive pornographic materials if they trade in religious materials. Leaders of this atheist campaign allege that porn is no worse than what’s written in religious texts. A university spokesman says that this controversial cause is completely LEGAL, though he admits a majority of the students on campus do not agree with it. It’s called the “smut for smut” campaign…trade your Bible in for porn.
· WOW…..and somehow we don’t thing Jesus is coming back soon…we need to think again….how much more defiled can our world become?
· Let’s look at some of the people in the Bible who didn’t guard their eye gate this and it wreaked all kind of havoc in their lives…
· EVE: she LOOKS at the fruit that she was forbidden to eat…
· Genesis 3:6 “When the woman SAW that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the EYE, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.”
· DAVID: He looked on Bathsheba and it caused him to murder and all kinds of death in his life
· 2 Samuel 11:2-4 “One evening David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of the palace. From the roof he SAW a woman bathing. The woman was very beautiful.:
· He ended up committing adultery with Bathsheba and even killed her husband….this caused a curse…
· 2 Samuel 12:10 “Now, therefore, the sword will never depart from your house, because you despised me and took the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your own.”
· Because David didn’t guard his eye gate…it caused corruption to come into his heart…and out of his heart poured forth feelings, thoughts, and really bad actions that he ACTED ON
· Jesus said our eyes are really important…
· Matthew 6:22-23 “The EYE is the lamp of the body. If the EYES are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your EYES are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!”
· Have you noticed how violent EVERYTHING has become….? Just like in the days of Noah…God destroyed the earth because VIOLENCE filled the earth…we LOOK at violence all the time….our kids do too…through video games…desensitizing them….defiling them
· We gotta realize that when we open our eye gate (or any other gate for that matter) up because we are LOOKING at violence, pornography, homosexuality…whatever….it seems like we must have no idea what we are doing….do we not realize that the demonic realm is very LEGALISTIC….when you watch this stuff…you are giving the demonic realm an open door to torment you and afflict you….and YOU have given them a legal basis to do it…ESPECIALLY since you now know what you know…but even before then…when we sinned in ignorance…
THE EAR GATE:
· The EAR Gate…or HEARING causes our mind to work more than just by “seeing” something…
· This is because when you HEAR something and don’t see it.. .your mind can run free and imagination can run wild….when we look at something…the finished product…there is no room for imagination and therefore less involvement by the mind…this is why watching a movie of a book that you read is always a disappointment…because the movie can never fully capture the total imagination that your mind took when reading the book!
· 1 Thessalonians 5:22 “Avoid every kind of evil.”
· To do that…we have to watch everything we listen to…music, TV…even other people and their talking….
· Especially CUSSING…that stuff makes my skin crawl…it always has even when I was a young kid…I just can’t stand that yuck stuff!!
· Ecclesiastes 7:21-22 “Do not pay attention to every word people say, or you may hear your servant CURSING you—for you know in your heart that many times you yourself have CURSED others.”
· O MY…how many times in your HEART have you cursed someone???? We have to soooooooo watch that…cause eventually out of our mouth that curse will come!
· This is why you are not supposed to hang with people who CUSS..cause eventually that stuff will start coming from your mouth…
· But it’s not just bad words that God doesn’t want us to listen to…some people will not want to listen to TRUTH…
· 2 Timothy 4:3-4 “For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their EARS away from the truth and turn aside to myths.”
· It’s a super dangerous thing to turn your ears away from the truth…according to this verse…these people apparently at one time HAD the TRUTH…they KNEW IT…then they made a CONCIOUS decision to turn away from it….
· James 1:22 “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. DO what it says.”
· Check out this example from the Old Testament…Numbers 13:26-33 (REPORT ABOUT CANAAN)….look how easy it is to defile your ears…to start believing a negative report that is totally contrary to the Word of God….”Then men went back to Moses, Aaron, and the entire Israelite community in the Wilderness of Paran at Kadesh. They brought back a REPORT for them and the whole community, and they showed them the fruit of the land. They reported to Moses: We went into the land where you sent us,. Indeed it is flowing with milk and honey, and here is some of its fruit. HOWEVER, the people living in the land are strong, and the cities are large and fortified. We also saw the descendants of Anak there. (giants). The Amalekites are living in the land of the Negev, the Hitites, Jebusites, and Amorites live in the hill country; and the Canaanites live by the sea along the Jordan.” Then CALEB quieted the people in the presence of Moses and said, “We must go up and take possession of the land because we can certainly conquer it!” BUT THE MEN who had gone up with him responded, “We can’t go up against the people because they are stronger that we are! So they GAVE A NEGATIVE REPORT to the Israelites about the land they had scouted: The land we passed through to explore is one that devours its inhabitants, and all the people we saw init are men of great size. We even saw the Nephilim there. (the offspring of Anak were descended from the Nephilim). To ourselves we seemed like grasshoppers, and we must have seemed the same to them.”
· Do you see what happened….the negative report DEFILED the WHOLE NATION….because they believed it!