Well, four weeks ago we began a two-part series on sexual temptation and the rains came down and floods came up and we barely got across the highway and many of you probably couldn't have made it that night had you wanted to.

And so I'm a little bit frustrated that it's been so long ago and that the two halves are separated by so much. And so I'm struggling with just how to do this tonight in 45 minutes or so. But what my plan is, is to present to you at least in nugget form 10 pitfalls for leaders that lead to sexual falling or sexual failure, sexual sin.

And then focus tonight, hopefully, on the protections.

In other words, the two halves of the message were leadership and sexual temptation pitfalls

and protections.

And the pitfalls is what we focused on for 45 minutes, four weeks ago, and then the protections is what I want to focus on tonight.

That is guidelines and things that the Bible commends to us that would help us avoid yielding to sexual temptation.

So that's my plan tonight and I hope we can do it in the time a lot.

Let me provide another little framework here for what we're doing.

I acknowledge that the incentive for doing this is the publicity that some of our media as well as other leaders have gotten in their sexual exploits.

And it just seems as though it is a topic that needs to be addressed and one that is near enough to affect any Christian leader.

And so I've come at it from the leadership angle.

Though I think the principles I'm going to be talking about tonight,

by and large will apply right across the board to human beings who have

any sexual drives or see the connection in their lives between the kinds of things in the lives of leaders and their own lives

which might cause sexual trouble.

And perhaps one other thing I could say by way of preface is that while everything I have to say tonight is a warning against

sexual abuses and sins, I hope I've said enough over the years here that I don't come across as Victorian in the sense that sex in

itself is bad. It is good. God made it and he made it to be enjoyed and used in marriage only. And that's the danger

we're talking about, the danger of falling into sexual fornication before marriage or sexual

adultery after marriage, those are the main things I have in mind when I think of temptation.

But please don't construe me to think that the reality of sexuality is an evil thing.

...