Consider the people around you when you attempt to do something you know is not sinful before God but may not sound pleasing to onlookers. The goal is to protect the weak in faith from stumbling with an instantaneous action you do, not to live with the sole reason of pleasing others every time.
When you are saved, God gives you the Holy Spirit, who is capable of helping you put to death every sinful craving in your body, even to the point that it will not become a part of your thoughts.
The moment God saved you, He moved you wholly from the power of darkness to the kingdom of Christ. That was a permanent spiritual translation, and nothing can change that. But it is one thing to be in the Spirit and another to walk in accordance with the Spirit.
For unbelievers, their minds are purely governed by their flesh because they don’t even have the Holy Spirit to confront them of their wrongdoing. But for you, as a child of God, you decide what should govern your mind because you have liberty. However, scripture urges that you should not use your liberty to sin but to serve one another in love (see Galatians 5:13).
God frowns on sexual immorality, so He honours marriage. But He also knows humans are stubborn creatures who like breaching His laws, some for reason of comfort. That is why He charges people in some areas of life to do the right thing or face the consequences. Dear one, your body is God’s temple. Respect God enough to preserve it in purity.
In James 1:14-15, the Bible says temptation comes before sin. Those temptations are driven by one’s own desires (some of which may be demonically orchestrated). But without shutting down those desires, they entice you to commit that evil. And when you keep submitting to those bad desires, they grow till God eventually judges you with death.
As a pastor reading this, be careful to build a good administrative system that genuinely attends to the welfare of individual congregants. Every single human being is important, so don’t treat people as if they are numbers. But as a person, don’t love quarrel else you’ll keep speaking unwholesome words to people and can even affect their healthy relationship with you.
God, unlike humans, can be trusted. He is not a God who says one thing and does the other. What He says is what He does, and what He does is what He has said.
Just because you are born again doesn’t mean you’re less of a human. No! You are still a human with fleshly tendencies. But the power of God resident in you supersedes those desires. So when you put on Christ in your consciousness, the devil’s suggestive thoughts on fleshly lusts won’t have space to breed in your mind for you to even act on it.
Focused people who are serious about work struggle less with porn because their minds are occupied. So, probably one of the most effective ways to deal with porn is to be serious with your relationship with God and busy fulfilling your divine mandate.
When a person’s heart is corrupted, evil become his lifestyle. So, people, especially unbelievers, sin not because they intentionally decide to but because their hearts are corrupted by the evils in the world. Do they need help? Yes, but not character change. They need Jesus to cleanse them from within, and I must say that that is one of the primary reasons why the Church exists in this world.
Whatever you have, look after it well. Fight against little acts of compromise, lest you destroy something precious in your life.
