Young Men and Purity

Ps. 119: 9 How can a young man keep his way pure?
By guarding it according to your word.

I am finding this longest of chapters to be a gigantic quarry of precious truths. Each verse is a veritable treasure of its own.

The first thing I notice here, and it is not printed but is suggested, is that David is humble enough to ask the question. If a young man desires to be pure and is seeking to ask God to direct him in the ways of purity, that is a good first step. If we think that we can be pure on our own, or that maybe we are already pure enough, we are going the wrong direction to be pure.

As young men, as stated in Titus, we are not sensible in and of ourselves. God is the one who gives the desire for purity and He is the one who does the work of purification. Which is kind of interesting, when you think about it. Only He can give the desire and only He can do the work, yet we are to strive after it. We are to keep trying to be pure, to keep asking God to make us pure, to keep being disciplined in our daily quiet time and God will bless us by giving us the desire for more purity and then also by giving us more purity.

What kind of "way" are we to walk in? A pure way. But the pure way is the narrow way, and the narrow path through this crazy world is hard to find, and we certainly will not just happen upon it. Spurgeon says that without a good map we will be certainly lost, and even with a good map we may be lost, but when the Word is our map and God is our pilot we will never be lost. But we have to keep the "map" in front of us, we have to study the "map" and then we have to go to our "pilot" and pay attention to the directions He is giving. When we try to do this on our own, we will surely be lost.

As young men we are to guard our way. Fight to keep our way pure. We know the sin that so easily besets us, and we are to use all the weapons of The Word to fight against that sin. The heart is deceitful and desperately wicked, who can know it? We must ask God to show us our heart for what is truly in it. We must ask others what they see in our hearts. We must go to the Word so that the Holy Spirit will show us our hearts. Then and only then can we start to get a glimpse of what our "way" looks like and what measures we will need to take to keep it pure.

God has given us weapons like; a conscience, fellow Christians and prayer to aid in keeping our way pure, but the best weapon is the Word. The Word empowers all the rest the weapons. It is the fuel that makes them go. We need to be in God's Word to keep ourselves pure and God's Word needs to be in us to keep us pure.

The young man is prone to wander, prone to lust and prone to insensibility. His Word can make us pure if we follow it, read it, love it and apply it to our lives.

Some practical questions and steps to take in guarding young man's hearts.
Encourage them to be in God's Word early and often. This will potentially give them more of a desire for it later.
Ask them questions about how they are doing with lust.
Look at the web pages they are going to.
Check their PDAs and hand held game devices for porn sites. If it has a connection to the internet, they can get porn on it.
If they are having trouble falling to temptation, have them report their web connections to your computer.
Don't let them watch programs on TV, or go to movies, that are going to tempt them.

When we see the uselessness and deceitfulness of sin, it is easier to resist the temptation because we can then see it for what it is, but that doesn't happen overnight and generally doesn't happen at a young age. Pray for the young men around you that God would make clear to them the futility of lust and in turn show Himself glorious and best. He can do this, but we must ask Him to move in our hearts.