I just saw one of our church’s fun, family-first moms who posted, “Eggs, bacon, french toast sticks, and ice cream for breakfast. Hello, Summer.” Who doesn’t want a never-ending summer filled with morning menus like that?! Have you noticed how the warmer months tend to bring with them not just school breaks, family vacations, and generally more down time but also an increase in triggers that entice and inflame our destructive lusts?

May I challenge you with what the Lord has been working in my mind and heart about this summer directly from the lips of one of Great Britain’s most gifted writers of the nineteenth century, Oscar Wilde, whose stain glassed memorial I saw in Westminister Abbey last year. Wilde fell into sexual sin and wrote with painfully insightful, poignant reflection:

“The gods have given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease.… Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in search for new sensation.… I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber, one has some day to cry aloud from the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace.”

Oscar Wilde who left his wife to engage in homosexuality.

From the above quote, here are a few seasonally “warmer moments” during which to be especially on guard:

  1. When you have gradually reduced the one, true God of heaven into the “gods that give me what I want when I want” with enough cajoling and manipulation.
  2. When you have big chunks of leisure, non-structured time on your hands.
  3. When it has been days, weeks, even months since you have done something motivated by only love of God or neighbor with nothing in it for you.
  4. When you feel like you “have everything” and/or “have done everything.”
  5. When your imagination curiously longs for something new and different…no matter how low or perverse you have to stoop to find it.
  6. When you grow careless about how your priorities and passions harm or mislead the lives of others around you.
  7. When you regularly have unresolved wrong towards others.
  8. When little digressions of carnal thoughts, words, and actions no longer matter in your eyes.
  9. When you attempt to compartmentalize what you think about and do in secret from the rest of your life and relationships.
  10. When selfishness becomes sovereign.
  11. When you lack self-awareness and honest feedback loops from others who will tell you when you are wrong.
  12. When your intrinsic character before God doesn’t match your reputation before man.
  13. When your personal pleasure and gratification is your number one priority.
  14. When you are willing to risk everything that is sacred and precious in your life to squeeze “just on more fix” out of this present world.
  15. And the most dangerous…thinking that you are the exception to the consequences of all of the above.

Another man who joins the conversation as one disillusioned with extreme doses of that which is carnally intoxicating but disappointingly hollow, is Solomon who states in Ecclesiastes 10:18, “By much slothfulness the building decayeth; and through idleness of the hands the house droppeth through.” In other words, continued laziness devoid of careful, regular maintenance of personal morals causes a “house” or individual life/family/ministry to leak and eventually fall apart.

You and me, in even our best moments, are not the exception to this truth. Would you admit where the extra fluidity and down time of summer are giving your flesh subtle latitude that will not age well as the summer continues? Stop overlooking where your phone scrolling and web browser history are not as sanctified as they should be. Take an careful assessment of where you are not just resting but lazily mismanaging time and energy. Be honest about where your eyes as not as guarded as they should be towards the summer styling of dress and pop culture around you. What about your mouth and/or thumbs and their tendencies towards gossip and slander? Be honest about the music and media that are laying the soundtrack of your summer moods, thoughts, and actions. Would you join me in making these warmer months less about our flesh and more about God’s Spirit? The following warning is from a place of nothing but sincere love: to not do so is to put everything/everyone we influence in danger of an abiding, intense heat much greater than anything this summer can throw at us physically…something from which the Gospel of Jesus could have delivered unregenerate Wilde and can still gloriously deliver us.

It is your choice and there are only two options as laid out in Jude:

Option One: Jude 7,19 “Even as Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire…These be they who separate themselves, sensual, having not the Spirit.

Option Two: Jude 20-25 “But ye, beloved, building up yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Ghost, Keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life. And of some have compassion, making a difference: And others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire; hating even the garment spotted by the flesh. Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy, To the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen. “

As Pete Scazzero concludes, “A necessary condition for growing into a mature disciple is having the courage to meet the unvarnished truth about ourselves head-on instead of running from it. In other words, the pathway to God inevitably intersects with self-knowledge.”

Photo by Гоар Авдалян on Unsplash