4. Center your love, your energies, your everything on the Lord and your wife.
(The Lord does not mind being lumped together with her. He planned it that way. See Ephesians 5:25ff.)
The biggest safeguard against sexual transgressions in the lives of ministers is a good relationship with one’s spouse.
After numerous cautions against sexual sin, the writer of Proverbs counseled his son, “Drink water from your own cistern, and fresh water from your own well” (Proverbs 5:15). In the margin of my Bible, I’ve written: “Focus on your wife, son!”
Read on past verse 15 and he gets more explicit that that, with verse 19 being one you probably won’t read in church, but it definitely communicates!
5. Have an accountability partner or a mentor.
Or both.
If you are truly wise, you will have someone—usually an older, mature minister—to whom you can say anything. Such a veteran pastor has seen it all, has the scars to prove it, and has come up a winner.
(The one thing you do not want in such a mentor is someone who has never suffered! Spurgeon said, “God gets His best soldiers out of the highlands of affliction.”)
Once you find such a friend, you must meet with him frequently enough to be comfortable in speaking what’s on your mind. He must be a man of prayer who will pray with you and for you later. There is no way to overemphasize this.
