Money Can't Buy Me Love, No, No, No, No

...but you can purchase discipleship! Money can't make you a disciple, only the Holy Spirit can, but it can purchase a close facsimile to discipleship.

Money can buy you an Internet porn blocker and you can get an accountability partner to guard your behavior. It will not buy software to keep erotic images from being embedded in your heart's hard drive. You have a built in system to process normal images into eroticism. This is a gift from God to replenish the earth through the venue of matrimony. As a Christian you are not delivered from this process. As a Christian man only glorification will separate you from the process.

As a young man I listened to Wesleyan Holiness preaching about lust. The illustration of the spider and its web was used. They said much of Christianity consisted in cleaning up the 'cobwebs' left by the spider, however Wesleyan sanctification consisted in destroying the spider that spins the webs. This spider inside us is a combination of wheat and tares. If you destroy the tares you destroy the wheat. The sin of lust is so destructive that if necessary you could destroy the spider because any measure to avoid hell would have merit. (Matthew 5:29-30) As Jesus implied, that would represent an ideal not to be taken literally.

Jesus taught that the heart is deceptively filled with adulterous thoughts and therein lies the sin.
We are sinners saved by grace. Our sanctification consist in guarding the improper eye and hand coordination outside the proper gift of God. Admitting that tares grow among our wheat; casting off pretensions that we are above it all is a great step toward righteous living.

Confessing that this is a "heart issue" and not just a behavior problem causes us to turn our dependence on the Holy Spirit to purify us and provide internal accountability. He applies the Word in discipleship as we consider the wisdom of proven teachers. Our accountability must be the Holy Spirit and we don't have to spend money to buy programs that only serve to line the pockets of the rabbinate.

How in the world did we get to the mess of today's evangelical confusion of baptizing, teaching and discipleship. Teaching and disciplining are confused. A disciple is taught not discipled. Disciple is a noun and teaching is a verb. The earthly part of discipleship is baptism. We make disciples (actually confirm) by baptism. The Holy Spirit disciples personally each individual.
As it is now there are so many rabbis mentoring in so many different ways hindering the work of the Spirit who consistently applies the Word.

Your mentor could be a pervert! Your mentor could facilitate perversion! You can rest assured that if your mentor is successful he is wealthy!