He rescued her from the filth and called her baby Grace because she had been left for dead and by the grace of God she was delivered from sharing the same fate of the pornographic magazines and the bottles that the man found her in. She was rescued from the dump, and once the newspapers and television news reported her story, she took Savannah by storm, and the baby, who’s own mother rejected had couples lining up to adopt her and claim her as their own.
Baby Grace’s first week is a metaphor: a picture of our own lives, when like her, many of us were discovered in a dumpster spiritually speaking, surrounded by the filth of our sin: alcohol, drugs, or pornography. We were pitiful, helpless, needing rescue… And by the Grace of God, Jesus was there. He is the worker, who hears the cry and sifted through the garbage to rescue his people. He cares about and has the power to redeem you from things like alcoholism, drug addiction and pornography. Some of you are so spiritually weak that you can’t help yourself. You can no longer resist the temptation because it’s been so long since you’ve been close to God that your spirit is weak and vulnerable. Some of you are in need of a Savior to lift you out of the dump you’re in.
Some people believe church is an atmosphere free of sexual temptation; that no one in the church could possibly be dealing with sins as dark as pornography, or sexual addiction, but I want you to know that these things are a lot more prominent than you might think.
* Last year, US porn revenues exceeded the combined revenues of ABC, NBC and CBS (over 6.2 billion a year), and they’re still growing… Child porn alone generated $3 billion.
* 70% of Internet porn traffic occurs between 9am – 5pm, during the workday, AT WORK!
In fact, in 1 month, employees at IBM, Apple, and AT&T spent a total of 13,048 hours on the penthouse magazine website. Last year, America lost $83 billion in productivity because pornography viewed by people “on the job.”
According to the Counsel on Sexual Addiction Compulsivity, 6-8 % of Americans are sex addicts.
Addiction to sexual stimuli isn’t just an isolated problem any more, friends. It’s an epidemic of huge proportions, and every few months it gets worse because Internet use doubles every 100 days.
Sexual stimuli affects everyone. It hunts us down on television, in magazines and over the Internet. You don’t have to want it to find it. It will find you and lure you into its addiction. It’s called the crack cocaine of the spiritual realm because, like cocaine, pornography is highly addictive in nature. A perfectly innocent Internet user can be browsing the web, come across a pornographic picture, follow his or her curiosity and within minutes be hooked on hard-core porn.
THE WAY IN: How does sexual addiction begin?
There are 3 ingredients that cause sexual addiction to take root.
1.Isolation- Most sin happens when you’re alone. Furthermore, we are most vulnerable to sin when we are ISOLATED FROM GOD! Believers are vulnerable to temptation when we are not walking in the Spirit.
Galatians 5:16-So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.
Take a look at King David’s life. He started out as a shepherd, isolated with God in the wilderness. He developed a passionate relationship with the Lord, because he spent time with the Lord and he knew the power of the Lord on a regular basis: Time away with God.
He was faithful with little, so God gave him more. He defeated Goliath and became famous. Up till then, isolation was the only ingredient. But when he became famous, temptation entered the picture.
By the age of 30, David was made King of Israel and all his responsibilities as king slowly began sapping his time away from the Lord, and what had become time of isolation with God became time of isolation Away from God.
2: Temptation- Little by little, David became spiritually weak until his ability to resist temptation to sin was zero. His relationship with God was starved to death by the responsibilities of life, and by the time he finally strolled out onto his balcony one night for some peace and isolation he was a spiritual weakling: a sitting duck for temptation.
Bathsheeba strolled outside naked for a bath. Two ingredients were present, which came together in one, volatile, explosive mixture: isolation from God and sexual temptation, and David was defeated. Notice how addictive it was! One glance is all it took and he was hooked. Next thing you know he was willing to kill in order to fulfill his desire to have sex with her.
1 Corinthians 6:18-20-“Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.”
3: Access- Today, men and women have as much power as King David. Anyone with a computer can sneak a peak of porn any time we want: night or day. For most explorers, it escalates into hard porn in a matter of just minutes and burns unforgettable images into the minds of men, woman and even children for the rest of their lives.
Those three ingredients: Isolation, Temptation and Access are the elements: the Molotov cocktail of the spiritual realm that lead us into extremely dangerous and volatile sins such as pornography and sexual addiction.
How do I resist this temptation and stop this from destroying my life? Consider the consequences often; legal, marital, social, emotional, physical and the list goes on and on.
Matthew 6:22-23- “"The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!"
TAKE IT OUT! Take out the element of temptation and willpower. Matthew 5:27-29, "You have heard that it was said, ’Do not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.”
Add the element of the Spirit of God to strengthen you by spending time with Him. If you feel yourself being tempted remove yourself from the temptation and pray, pour over the scripture, He will give you the strength to overcome it.
Confess it to others- “My best porn deterrent is called The Club. My wife will beat me with it if I ever look.” You MUST confess the problem to your spouse, and to a friend, who can keep you accountable. WHY? Typically, the addict becomes isolated from family, acts differently, has to hide the secret lifestyle. This is damaging to the whole family.
Brokenness brings in the renewal of a right relationship with God and family.
Matthew 21:44- “He who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces, but he on whom it falls will be crushed.”
David’s brokenness and repentance is what brought Him back into right relationship with God.
Psalms 51:2-3- “Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me.”
Would you be comfortable with your spouse knowing every thought you’ve had about them, or about someone else throughout your entire marriage?
Have within the past 7 days you taken a second glance at a hot body? Did you have thoughts you’d be ashamed to mention in front of your spouse? Only God knows… He knows your heart, every secret corner. He hears every thought and knows very deeply about your every motive.
Our goal in Christ is to love God to such a degree, that no one and nothing compares to the relationship we have with Him. Do you remember when you were in love for the first time? Do you remember experiencing infatuation that convinced you no one else mattered as much as that person you felt so strongly about?
An incredible thing happens when we take time to Get Away With God and have encounters with Him. We grow more passionate about Him. We realize how meaningless and selfish life is without Him in it, and the ‘things’ we thought were so important before become less interesting.
Our relationship with The Lord is like a marriage, and a marriage is a trust, where two people decide to be faithful. When one of the marriage partners runs after someone else, the trust is broken, and we call the person an adulterer. This is what happens when we place other things before God: we become adulterous. We betray God and ourselves when we sin against Him.
Romans 6:19- I put this in human terms because you are weak in your natural selves. Just as you used to offer the parts of your body in slavery to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer them in slavery to righteousness leading to holiness.
The simple answer to sexual sin is Jesus. But the road back home from sexual sin to Jesus is not a simple road; and the path to recovery, as with that of any life controlling habit, is difficult and often times very painful. But we have a Heavenly Father that will give us the strength to overcome anything through Him!
May You Be Blessed With Peace And Understanding
