To truly love yourself you must hate yourself…

But if we confess our sins to him, he is faithful and just to forgive us and cleanse us from every wrong … ( 1 John 1: 9)

This may come as abit of a surprise to you but,…. you are actually a sinner. Don’t feel to put out by my harsh judgement, because if you are one of those people who find comfort in numbers then you will find it comforting to know that we are all dreadful sinners. The worst kind….absolutely horrible!!

In our relativist, conformist world we don’t get to hear much of how vile we are. We hear a lot of “Self-Acceptance”, “Don’t Judge Me”, “Love-Who-You_are” kind of comforting falsehoods designed to put us at ease with our tormented selves.

No matter how much we are crying out and begging for change, to be freed from the cold, captivity of self- loathing, to be released from the horror of our ways, we stoically press on and paste fake smiles, pretending that all is well, because the world is cheering us on to self destruction.

Ultimately in our numbing comfort, we find no real peace and no hope to carry us on. We are trapped in a gilded cage of self loathing while the whole world accepts us! We are lost in deep darkness while everyone around us sends us “light”and smileys. We hate ourselves vehemently yet we go on receiving accolades that egg us on in our futility, trapping us further in a vicious cycle. How lonely, despairing and confused life must feel at such moments.

For this reason, Christ came. Forgiveness of sins is at the heart of Christ’s mission and purpose here on earth. So desperate was our need for forgiveness that he actually had to die a condemned sinner in our place. It was neither for Himself nor for His Father, (God) that He sacrificed Himself, it was for us… whether we know we needed it or not… Whether we accept it or not, understand it or not, believe it…or not; there is forgiveness of sins available to anyone who is ready to receive it. We can only receive God’s forgiveness once we realise what horrible, sinful, vile and depraved people we truly are.

The Sheer terror of God

“And yet Lord, You are our Father, we are the clay and you are the Potter, we are all formed by your hand” … ( Isaiah 64: 8-9)

Why does the thought of God terrify us so much?

Before you deny this , think of this. Sitting alone quietly and searching through the contents of your heart. Think about probing your earliest memories and confronting your deepest fears and failures with utmost honesty. The very thought leaves you shuddering and breathless doesn’t it?

The very idea of a lamplight flooding into the deepest, darkest recesses of our souls, sifting through the stuff we have stuffed down the gaping holes of our souls and trying to untangle who we are and why we are the way we are, can be incredibly terrifying on a par with being asked to stand alone, buck-naked, in the spotlight on a stage of a theatre packed with an attentive audience staring back at us. To be exposed in the depths of who you are is not for the faint hearted.

This is who God is to us when we are confronted with the reality of His presence. Here are 4 things I can think of why when confronted by the reality of God’s presence, we experience sheer terror.

  1. God is able to see into you. He sees who you really are without the clothes, the facade, the accomplishments, the identity and status, the Good the Bad and the Ugly. God sees right through into the darkest reaches of yourself, that depth of your soul that even you yourself are afraid to take a peek into.
  2. When God sees that far into you, you also see that far and deep into the corners of your own soul. This is where it gets truly fearful. That Someone has invaded the fortress and flooded your inner darkness with light. There is Someone in there with you where you are at your most vulnerable and most helpless and you are not quite sure if you can trust them with who you really are.
  3. The third scary thing about Light flooding your dark soul is that you come face to face with who you really are. There is no man who has ever come away from this experience with appreciation, admiration or affection for what they see and learn about themselves. When God comes in, what ever you perceived to be your worth vaporises into smoke and ashes. You are confronted with the Infinite Perfection (Holiness) that is God and the horror of sheer infirmity, iniquity and imperfection that is Sinful You.
  4. Lastly the Terror of God’s presence is that once you are awakened to the awful horror of who you really are at the core, you discover who God really is in His being. You are confronted by an overflowing flood of Love and Mercy, Beauty and Grace that says ” I see you for Who you are and I accept you unconditionally as my Beloved….” With the acute awareness of how lacking and undeserving you are, you are overwhelmed by Loving Acceptance on the basis of His grace and nothing of your merit.

This is the next most terrifying thing about God. That for us mortals whose souls are shaped by pain, poverty, exhaustion, emptiness, loneliness, imperfection, sorrow, weakness, darkness, death, loss and lostness; find in God, Love, Kindness, Generosity, Mercy, Goodness, Acceptance,Compassion, Comfort, Peace, Life, Assurance and Rest is far too much to bear on our own. That’s why Jesus Christ is the perfect bridge between God’s perfect Love and Our Lost wandering souls.

Why you may be the greatest threat to your own marriage…

“Let no one separate them, for God has joined them together” ( Mark 10:9)

We’ve been having some interesting conversations with my teenage sons. We’ve been reading through the Book of Judges, and recently read about a guy called Jephthah who made a rash vow to God that cost him his only child, his beloved daughter.

This got us talking about the foolishness of men making passionate vows to God to secure their own success. On closer scrutiny, it became clear that far from being frivolous and foolish, we too like Jephath are not immune to making vows without a clear understanding of how far reaching the implications of the vow are to ourselves and our loved ones.

Consider marriage which is an example of a common vow we make to God today. We often enter into marriage with an almost similar Jephthah-like-zeal. We over-promise with little thought to what price we may have to pay in order to keep our vow.

Before we recuse ourselves from the responsibility of our marriage vows, it must be appreciated and accepted that a vow is a voluntary and personal act of free will. It is not binding if its born of coercion or compulsion by any external influence. What gives a vow its power to be self-binding upon an individual is that it is an independent expression of one’s will to take personal responsibility to act in fulfillment of the vow.

With this understanding , what then are the implications of marriage vows?

. ” What God has joined together, let no man separate them” .

When this common proclamation is made at weddings, we tend to to take the shallow view that this is a threat or admonishment to any interested third parties to banish any adulterous intentions. We fail to realise that we too who are bound in the covenant of the marriage vow are not to separate ourselves in any way from our spouse.

Do not withhold or separate yourself from your spouse.

For any married couple, this should be a sobering perhaps even scary thing to think upon. It just takes a couple of hurtful interactions of which marriage is bound to give you many to start withdrawing or withholding yourself from your spouse.

There are many legitimate reasons why a spouse may seek to detach themselves from their partner physically, emotionally and/or spiritually. Anger, unhappiness, dissatisfaction, resentment, boredom, guilt, shame, deception, distraction, personal ambition,…This endless list can make one partner in a marriage pull away for any number of justifiable reasons and thus separation starts to happen. The unseen reality is that sin has come between a couple and their covenant commitment. It is the nature of sin to kill any living thing it touches upon.

So where is hope for hurting marriages? The answer is not in fixing your spouse or tackling the troubled waters of your marriage.. that is to treat the symptoms without purging the real cause of illness.

The real remedy you are looking for is a cure for sin. The only cure for sin is believing in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sin ( not your spouses) ..and remember he who says they are without sin only deceives themselves.

Photo Credit: Kat Jayne from Pexels

You Need God More Than You Think

Yes, I am the gate. Those who come in through me will be saved. Wherever they go they will find green pastures -John 10: 9

I have been struggling with simple concepts we so easily take for granted. Words like rest and freedom have proved to be problematic during this season of slowdown thanks to the Covid Shutdown.

I have come to appreciate just how hard it is to rest and how impossible it is to be free, or at least live a life of freedom. I have seen beyond the superficiality of these terms, that rest and freedom are actually graces given by God and cannot be fully expressed or enjoyed apart from God.

Put another way, it is only by the Spirit of God that a human being can truly enjoy rest and find freedom. There is NO way, it is humanly impossible for our natural selves to appropriate the fullness ( or blessedness) of rest and freedom apart from the working of God in our hearts.

Here’s how I came to this realisation. I always imagined that once I got time from my busy work-life schedule, I would easily pick up on some pending pursuits. For example, I would write more ( which I clearly haven’t ) , I would read more ( I have become an ardent subscriber to Netflix) and of course I would find time to work out more ( I have picked up 4 extra kgs from staying home)

Ideally the Lockdown should have gifted us more time for personal rest and freedom to pursue forgotten interests that have been simmering on the back-burner of our lives. In reality, I have been caught up in a tension of feeling guilty at too much unscheduled time that is used rather “unwisely” , and the inability to convert the freedom of time into meaningful personal gain.

I have found myself often pleading with God to help me overcome myself. Herein lies the root of the self-cancelling effect of the flesh on rest and freedom. In struggling to do what I know to be right, yet can’t seem to bring myself to do, I have lost the stillness of heart that would allow me the liberty of rest and the freedom to freely choose my choices devoid of any pressure, coercion, or social media influence.

Paul acknowledged this struggle in his book to the Romans. (7:15) when he said, ” The things I want to do, I do not, instead I do the thing I hate”.Its a struggle every human being can relate to. Our need for God is far deeper and far more basic than we think. It is only by God’s power that we can overcome the power of Self that stops us from finding God and enjoying the eternal blessings He bestows on His children like true free freedom and rest.

God in the time of Coronavirus

He causes things to happen on the earth, either a punishment or as a sign of His unfailing love ( Job 37:13)

I did not post any blog in 2019. It was a fast year. I barely had time to do anything but work slavishly at what many would consider the opportunity of a lifetime. (story for another day). But if 2019 was fast, then 2020 is right at the other far end of the pendulum swing……………The world stopped.

I now have more than enough time to write but have no words to put down. 2020 has stolen my imagination as well as my words. The sheer incredibility of living through a global pandemic and its sudden impact on life as we lived it is bewildering beyond words.

I want to write but I am paralysed by uncertainty on what to write about. I am floating in and out of time. Days are no longer defined by scheduled activities. The certainty of the most basic guide-posts of my time like church, work, meetings, appointments, school runs, weddings, funerals, have all vanished, leaving me unstructured, unplanned; much like a helium balloon randomly floating through air, not knowing when or where I will touch down.

Oddly, I find myself perfectly okay with this. Reading back through my journal in 2019, about 70 % of my prayers and pleas to God were for rest. Not just for me but for my family. We were caught up in a very fast life, barely having meals, up at 4 am and down at 10pm , over- scheduled kids, school and extra curricular activity, draining daily traffic jams, hectic travel schedules, too many social activities competing for our time and attention, and then suddenly….. Its all gone quiet!!

God has answered the cry of my heart beyond anything my mind would ever have conceived. We are all at rest and here I raise my Hallelujah to Him who causes things to happen on the earth, either as a sign of His punishment or of His unfailing love.

The Privilege of Being God’s Child

Now you are no longer a slave but God’s own child. And since you are His child everything He has belongs to you (Galatians 4:7)


My mum recently lost her mum. Gran passed away peacefully in her sleep in her early 90s. Being the last born that I am, and my mother’s only daughter, I really wanted to curl up with mum and have her comfort me like she always did.

She had just lost her mum, the one to whom she would probably have turned to for comfort was no longer there. She was gutted with grief; I could not place any other burden on her. Indeed, I became her burden bearer. I held her hand firmly in mine and walked her into the morgue to spend those last precious moments saying farewell, struggling to let go and learning how to live this new life without her mum. That was hard work, but it had to be done, and I am grateful for the grace God gave me to be that pillar of support for my mum.

So now I am left wondering where adults go to be children. When we shoulder the responsibilities of real life pain, where do grown-ups go to fall apart under the crushing weight of Life? Where is that sacred space to curl up into a safe pair of hands and allow yourself to be carried or cared for?
Grace has a new meaning for me. I have found that place that adults can become children without any judgment or condemnation. I have discovered a person in whom I can fall apart under the weight of Life’s load. A safe pair of hands that can hold me up as I collapse and cry.
My distress does not disturb God. It does not throw him for a loop. In fact I am the one making all the discoveries while He has been patiently waiting on me to awaken to to the reality that I need him more and more with every breath I take.
It is grace because discovering how truly weak and feeble I am has liberated me to appropriate more and more of God’s help and strength. God has more than enough strength to give me. I am grateful to be His child, because the Father is much closer to me than I ever believed possible. His care and compassion are more real than the pain and distress I bear. Here are some other wonderful discoveries I have about relating to God as a child relates to the Father:
God is completely worthy of Our Trust for every Need We Will ever Have

The Father is sufficiently able to provide for the child’s every need. There are needs I have that no human being could ever meet. No matter how much they love me, there will be a time human help will not be available. I am sure mum would have loved to comfort me on the loss of my gran, but she was incapable of doing so. God the Father had sufficient grace and strength to carry a mother, her daughter and grand-daughter safely through the valley of the shadow of death. One made it peacefully through the crossing in to The Promised Land; two lived on to tell of the Father’s faithful love through it all.

Being a last born and an only girl comes with some sense of entitlement in how you relate with a parent. This is not entirely a bad thing. It helps you appreciate the privilege of position as a child. Being God’s child carries immense divine privilege.
Everything that God has, he has given to the Son, and it all belongs to us as well. His un-failing love, enduring faithfulness, matchless power and authority is all just a prayer away. None of it is given that we may appropriate the fullness of God for our own selfish need. All of who God is, is unreservedly lavished on us His children that we may overflow with His Goodness to others and bring indescribable blessing to a world that is hurting, desolate and despairing.    

Hell is NOT a place……

Then at that time, Jesus called out in a loud voice, ” Eloi Eloi lama Sabacthani”, which means , My God my God why have you forsaken me?!… (Mark 15: 34)
There is no place like Hell…..or heaven for that matter. Many times when we think about Heaven or Hell we think of a distinct location or place where souls go to receive the reward of their judgement. This is by no means an accurate description of heaven or hell. 
Please note, this does NOT mean that Heaven and Hell are NOT real. To make such a claim,  would not only be inaccurate and misleading but also a falsehood. The Bible is very clear on this one fact that both heaven and hell are very real, and do in fact exist and most importantly, of a certainty, every soul shall experience either one or the other. 
If Hell is not a place, what then is it? Its a state of being or existence. It is largely characterized by the absence of God and this should be enough to inject fear in every person. We can know this simply by reading between the lines of Jesus last words. 
By examining Jesus final moments on earth before the crucifixion, we can  construct an idea of what hell looks like based on 3 states of extreme suffering he endured.
Physical torment
Besides the cruel horror of being nailed by the hands and feet on a wooden cross beam, Jesus was also severely flogged by his roman executioners. As if this cruel blood bath was not enough, a crown of thorns was twisted together and placed  upon his brow. it is unimaginable what kind of physical pain he must have suffered so I shall not belabor the  gruesome detail, but suffice it to say, not once did Christ protest this cruel treatment. 

Emotional Anguish 
In his dying moments, some of the very real emotions Christ struggled with given the circumstances of his execution include; humiliation from being mocked, beaten, spat on, insulted and stripped naked, rejection and victimization from His own people who preferred his innocent death over that of a known criminal, loneliness and abandonment from those closest to him who were powerless to help him in the face of such a tragic injustice. Again, its interesting to see Christ maintains a calm, acceptance of his fate in the face of great emotional suffering.  

Spiritual Alienation 

It was when he was hoisted up, nailed to the cross that Christ breaks his calm silence. In great agony, he cries out in deep anguish asking God why He has forsaken Him. It is curious to note that at no point during his ordeal did he cry out in protest. He stoically bears all the pain of what he had grossly endured in his Physical body. 
Similarly, Christ did not lament the emotional torture he had just faced. He does not voice any complaint, plea or sigh that would give some indication to the turmoil he  underwent. 
However, something in his spiritual condition, provoked a loud cry of anguish from the man. It was the unseen suffering in his soul that caused him the deepest anguish. That God, the Father and Creator of Heaven and earth, turned his face away from the Son.  
The absence of God’s presence represented the worst form of suffering and anguish that Christ endured even beyond the emotional and physical torment. This should set alarm bells off for us. What would it mean to our souls to be cut off from God?!……..
From these events, we see that even extreme physical and emotional suffering pale in comparison to the horror of God abandoning a soul. This is the real definition of hell. That God has removed His gracious regard from you and left you to your own devices. That your soul faces the prospect of life and death without the promise of God’s presence by His eternal Spirit. That you no longer enjoy God’s providential  hand upon your existence whether you perceive it, recognize it or believe it to be so.
By contrast heaven too is not a place. It is a state of existence characterized by the very real presence of God and your soul is completely alive and captured into the fullness of  God’s wondrous Spirit.  Such is the sheer delight and eternal bliss for every soul that believes.  
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celebrity Christ Death Eternity God Life suicide

Before You Kill Yourself……..

I woke up this morning thinking about suicide. I am not suicidal; I am stumped!  I am quite saddened and surprised by the celebrity suicides that have taken place in the last week. Donald Trump famously called our corner of the world a rather bad name but it was not quite without reason so I can easily forgive him this.
You see for us in this part of the world that the equator slashes in two equal halves, death is a fact of everyday life. When you wake up in the morning you cannot say, with 100% certainty, you will do the same tomorrow. Our societies just aren’t designed to give us that level of confidence or comfort.
So you wake up in the morning with a throat infection, go to hospital and are admitted for a tonsillectomy. You end up having brain surgery performed by a student doctor because some hospital orderly couldn’t be bothered to check your file and there just aren’t enough neurosurgeons to perform surgery anyway. (True story!)
You send your teenage daughter to presumably one of the best all-girls boarding schools in the country and the next thing you know you’re watching the night news and learn that several girls have perished in a fire at her high school dorm because they were locked in like criminals. Ironically, the same school that locks girls  in their dorms to keep them safe from  their teenage  “criminal” selves, could not be bothered to have enough security measures in place to keep out rapists who breached the perimeter fence and subjected the students to a 3 hour rape ordeal  as matrons and security guards slept through the whole episode.
In this context of real every day stories that happen, the suicide of wealthy, famous people is hard to take in as just a form mental illness. The senseless absurdity of the life we live sickens our minds and hearts to no end. Somehow, choosing death in the face of such compelling daily circumstances still seems such a fearsome fate. Because death stalks us at every turn, we choose to struggle on with life living quite literally on nothing.
Even in this Hobbian life, we can’t quite say that death would be a more preferable choice simply because we don’t know that to be true. No one we know has come back from the Dead to tell us what to look forward to. In fact, there’s only one known person in the whole history of humanity who has ever come back from the Dead successfully without succumbing a second time to mortality.
Dead for three days and alive even today after thousands of years, this man’s experience was witnessed by several people who were willing to put their life on the line rather than deny what they saw with their very own eyes. His personal experience of Life, Death and Life-After-Death can therefore be considered the only credible authority on the subject. Thankfully, he leaves us in no doubt as to what we can expect after death.
The summary of it is this. There is Life after death. Our bodies are canisters that decompose on our demise but they are not really who we are. We are a sum of many parts. The part contained on the inside of this shell called a body is a Soul. The soul is made of other parts as well. There are intellectual parts known as our minds. There are parts that give us the ability to determine our own actions known as the Will.  And then there is the emotional bit of us that make us sentient beings.
This composite called our souls is humanly indestructible. We can put an end to our physical bodies, which is what suicide accomplishes, but we cannot put an end to our souls. Suicide may free us from temporary suffering but it cannot be guaranteed to free us from eternal suffering. Suicide could well be a case of jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.
So where is Hope for humanity? Jesus Christ is that man that was dead three days and came back to life. He was not just a man; he is also fully God, that’s why he could defeat death and still lives on today, tomorrow and into eternity. His reason for living among us as a human being is so that He could prove to us that He is the only way we can have Life, both in this sad world we live in and in the Life ahead of us when we die.
He is God, the Giver of Life and Creator of our souls in His very own image and likeness. As the only known person to have conquered death, only by believing in him can we find Life in all its fullness, even eternal life. It’s the obvious choice for anyone facing the dreadful dilemma of choosing death over a depressing life. Choose Jesus Christ. It’s all Gain.

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Africa Christ Europe France Gassama Spiderman God love Mali Mamadou Migrants prayer refugees

This one thing has the power to change the world……

” With us is the Lord our God to help us and fight our battles” 
(2 chronicles 32:8) 
I found such great comfort from the recent social media sensation called the “Malian Spiderman”.
In case you missed it, this is the story of an African migrant who scaled a 6 storey building in 30 seconds to save a child who was dangling dangerously from the balcony.

I am one of those people who annoyingly look for spiritual truths from everyday life. Sometimes, in fact many times, its  almost impossible to perceive any spiritual value from the apple that fell out of my shopping cart, or the motorbike rider who carelessly ploughed into the side of my car

But then there are times, …. Bless my soul,  that God sends you a real sign saying, ” I am still Here,..” and “I am still Capable of Causing Good to conquer Evil”  So I am here today to do my happy dance on this blog because God is very much alive and well in our world and He’s still causing Good  to result from evil.

Mamadou Gassama was just but an illegal migrant like countless thousands of other migrants escaping the desperation and helplessness they was born into. Trying hard to fit in, blend in and disappear all at the same time, his days were probably marked by one futile job search after another as only an identity-less and un-welcome person would know. His entire existence didn’t count for much, much less possess anything worth counting in his pocket.

Imagine then how bewildering it must be that in a short span of 48 hours, you go from being Mamadou to Malian Spiderman. You wake up one morning an aimless pauper and the next day at sun-up you are preparing to meet the Prime-Minister in the Elysee Palace. In  the intervening hours you have undergone a life changing transformation from Suspect Man to Super Man. You were trying hard to fit into society, now you not only belong, but your acceptance is celebrated by a grateful nation. From jobless to a secured job offer. From migrant to citizen. From nobody to somebody everybody is talking about the world over.

In a world of ice cold skepticism, this is truly a miracle….and here is why. Overnight, the refugee camp of tents pitched under a tunnel in the city of Paris was cleared by the national government and the migrant occupants of this tented shelter moved into permanent shelter awaiting document processing for asylum seekers. What many had longed for, hoped in and given up on suddenly became possible because of one man’s courage and compassion. 

In his characteristic unthinking selflessness, Mamadou said that the real reason he did such a daring thing was that deep down he loves children. And by that one moment of sheer, unscripted, raw confession, he accomplished a change of heart towards migrants. These are real people with real feelings,capable of acting on emotion just like the rest of us. No PR campaign could ever have forged so powerful a human connection. 

Only God can take one man’s self-less act and cause it to overflow into such a Gift That Keeps on Giving. To the little boy’s family that was spared the grief and guilt of such a needless death, to the changing fortunes of desperate migrants lodging in tents under a tunnel, to hard hearts that were gently won over by an extravagant act of love and compassion.

There is a man who once gave his life  to save perishing souls. Unlike Mamadou, mankind’s rescue could only be accomplished by his sure death. Just like Mamadou, Love still robbed death of its victory. 

Jesus Christ demonstrated the full extent of God’s eternal love and compassion towards mankind by his willing death and glorious resurrection. We the wandering migrants of this earth are now The Accepted and Beloved Citizens of Heaven because of  this eternal sacrifice. 

3 ways the church today is endangering itself to paganism

“…..their eyes were opened and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness. So they strung fig leaves together around their hips to cover themselves” (Genesis 1:7) 

I had lunch a couple of days ago with a young lady who asked me to be a special kind of friend to her. Inwardly I am cringe-ing at the number of younger women who come to me and ask to be mentored. Its kind of like a back-handed compliment. “You are an OLDER woman,….and I think I can learn a lot from you”.
Its a bittersweet feeling to be forced to acknowledge that you are no longer the generation of firm, supple thighs, tight abs, dewy skin and youthful optimism. We are of them that must moisturize daily or your skin could easily start a wildfire in the midday sun. We are the “New Salt” generation. Freshly seasoned from the folly of youth and gracefully settling into middle-age.  
Anyhow, the deeper reason for my angst at being a friend and mentor to younger women is the very real fear that I have made some spectacular messes in my life and I by no means feel that I have fully mastered the lessons to never repeat the same foolish mistakes of my youth. 
The struggle to settle into this new season of my life has opened my eyes to seeing God’s grace in a new light. My new understanding of grace still bears the age old principles of what God’s grace is. However my new found discovery is how very easily we as the modern church have skedaddled (love this word, always wanted to use it in my blog) away from the very thing that ushered us into the favored position of God’s children and have replaced grace with good. In short, we have set up a kind of modern paganism in the church and its killing God’s children instead of giving them life. 
Developing “New” Strategies to Tackle Sin 
Given the state of moral decline in society today, the church must feel extreme pressure to do something about sin. This the first and greatest danger posed to the church. The misconception that the moral breakdown so prevalent in our generation is new to our generation and therefore we need new ways and strategies to cope. 
That is a false indeed almost pagan assumption. Human nature and the propensity to sin presents nothing new. In fact it was for this very reason that God sent His son Jesus Christ. God in His foreknowledge of man’s sinful human nature found in Christ the full remedy for every evil condition of man’s heart. There is no new knowledge, insight, strategy that the church or any other institution can formulate to solve the deep issues of sin in man. 
To teach people that accountability and boundaries and all these wonderful, high sounding non-sense we sprout at young people in hopes of encouraging them to sexual purity without pointing them to the doctrine of grace through Christ Jesus is false and inf act downright pagan practice.
Applying “False” Standards For Acceptance 
This one is a personal favorite of mine. A close friend of mine once shared how a pastor who was counseling her and her fiancee in preparation for marriage asked them if they were sexually active. Being good, honest Christians, they answered in the affirmative and confessed how they struggled with the guilt of the fact. 
The pastor seized on this and gave them statistics on how something like 85% of couples who fornicated were most likely to divorce or end up in adultery. For those reasons, he threatened to stop them from attending pre-marital classes, (which are an “unstated” pre-requisite before the church solemnizes matrimony between a couple) if they did not stop having sex before their weddding.
Being a Researcher, my first thoughts were to interrogate those statistics further…. what was the sampling size, what methodology was used, when and where was the study conducted etc. But that again is also to fall into the same trap as the pastor……filtering issues for the familiar tree in the forest and missing the bigger picture. 
You can stop a couple from having sex before marriage by using fear of failure facts. In fact you can even frustrate their desire to get married. But you cannot police what happens later in their life. How is it that the pastor by-passed the real sense of guilt and shame this couple was struggling with and chose to knuckle down  on the very sore standard this couple obviously felt they had fallen short of. 
That was a perfect opportunity to point back an already self-confessed sinner back to Christ and the reality of His restoring grace. It was an opportunity to make a case for salvation through grace and not good works. Their helpless struggle would have provided a wonderful place to remind this discouraged, christian couple on the doctrine of salvation by grace and not works. What the pastor however managed to do was entrench legalism at the expense of grace. 
Making More of  (Human Good) Institutions and Less of Christ (Divine Grace) 
In defense of the Pastor from the above point, I can empathize with his need to defend the church’s position on matters of morality. But the church must never forget that it derives its moral authority by an act of divine grace and that has everything to do with Jesus Christ. 
Today, many churches place more emphasis and pay keen attention to the observance of their moral codes and regulations that they lose sight of the desperate need in every man to find solace in Christ. It is this very real human need that makes people seek out churches. They are looking for an answer for their moral and spiritual loss and poverty. 
The church today endangers its very own existence by obscuring the path to peace with God. It does this by making more of its rules to regulate human behavior, structures that attempt to present a morally acceptable standard for its congregants and less of Jesus Christ the forever blessed son of God who is the only acceptable standard of righteousness before God. 
This “churchy” standard of morality is the modern day equivalent of stringing together fig leaves to hide away our nakedness from God. Jesus Christ alone and his active presence in the life of a believer through his Holy Spirit is the only way we can find a morally upright life. 
Our part as believers is to persistently believe in Jesus promise to perfect us at our best and at our worst of times, pursue an abiding relationship with God through faith in His Word, and persevere through our personal struggle with sin by trusting in the active presence of God’s Spirit in us.The church must never lose sight of its role to teach these truths.