Lausanne World Pulse – Themed Articles – The Danger of “Fruitfulness” without Purity: Thoughts on Personal Holiness and Ministry by a Younger Leader

By Michael Oh
April 2009

As I sift through a mountain of emails, I’ve learned to quickly dismiss forwarded “junk mail,” even if it’s from people I consider friends. At the same time I learn to recognize which email “clicks” might actually reap spiritual blessing. When I get an email from my dear friend Jim Chew, who works with the Navigators, I pay attention. Two years ago he forwarded an email from his other Navigator friend, David Lyons, who was quoting yet another Navigator leader. The blessing and challenge of that email made such an impact on me that I’ve saved it to this day. The email said this,

Years ago, I asked Jim Downing, one of the patriarchs of the Navigator work, “Why is it that so few men finish well?” His response was profound. He said, “They learn the possibility of being fruitful without being pure. God is slow to remove his hand on a man he has anointed. One day that man may sin, then experience God’s blessing. Then it happens again and again and he begins to believe that purity doesn’t matter. Eventually, he becomes like a tree rotting inside that is eventually toppled by a storm.”

When Accessibility Leads to Sin
With the advent of the Internet, Satan has overcome the greatest barrier to the effectiveness of one of his most potent weapons—accessibility. What in previous generations could only be obtained through complicated and stealthy means at a bookstore or through the help of older friends can now be accessed alone, unsupervised, free, and without limit. Satan’s isolated traps have now become a world filled with landmines, including in our very own homes. It’s almost like the de-Babelization of sexual sin, where the whole world is now connected for limitless exploitation and indulgence in sin. It is estimated that there are now over 500 million pages of pornography on the Internet.

According to the London School of Economics, ninety percent of children between the ages of eight and sixteen have seen pornographic images on the Internet—usually accessed unintentionally. According to a 2001 Christianity Today survey, as many as forty percent of pastors admit to visiting pornographic websites.

The severity of the challenge has been met with slow, but steady response from the Church and its leaders. Mention of pornography and sexual temptation is becoming less shocking and more prevalent from the pulpit and in small group discussions, at least among the younger generations.

There is still a long way to go for the Church and its leaders in being more transparent about such issues and in dealing with the most practical and sometimes shocking challenges facing Christians. There are literally hundreds of books now dealing with sexual sin. There is, however, a great need for more books in languages other than English and Spanish to help Christians in such struggles. There are Internet tools such as covenanteyes.com that help Christians in their struggles through technological accountability. If you currently struggle with such temptations, I encourage you to seek out help from trusted friends, mentors, and resources.

But what I want to address in this article is not the actual struggle with impurity itself that so many books already deal with; instead, I want to highlight what I think is even more dangerous than the struggles themselves. It is the danger raised in the “junk” email I got from my friend Jim. It is the danger of leaders learning “the possibility of being fruitful without being pure.”

Dr. Michael Oh is president of Christ Bible Seminary in Nagoya, Japan. He serves as the leader of the Lausanne Younger Leaders Team, as well as on the executive committee of Lausanne. Michael and his wife, Pearl, have five children.