October 17
“Therefore, brethren, be all the more diligent to make certain about His calling and choosing you; for as long as you practice these things, you will never stumble; for in this way the entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ will be abundantly supplied to you.” (2 Peter 1:10-11)
We are wrapping up our series on Overcoming Immorality, Pornography, and Lust. The goal here is not to read some good thoughts and hope that somehow, someday, they will be useful to you. I doubt if I retain just a few percent of what I read and what I hear unless I take concrete steps to make it a part of my life. That is what I am trying to help you do with these assignments and tasks of thinking through many aspects of your life.
I doubt that you will get any lasting benefit from reading these words and not taking concrete action. I am recommending a lot of daily effort, diligently performing actions that will take a lot of work at first but which will become a joy and an exciting journey as you learn to walk with Christ in the years to come. I am recommending all this work because I believe that it is necessary and useful. Never underestimate the wiles of Satan and the weakness of your flesh. Never underestimate how strong our fleshly desires are and how they can come raging back if we are not diligent to put them to death daily. These pages of things to do and review each day are my attempt to help you renew your mind each day and keep before you the eternal reasons for putting to death your flesh. In my experience, only when I am actively focused on Christ am I able to defeat my sinful passions and desires.
I recommend typing each of these areas of review and printing out clean copies. If you are not able to do that, then make nicely written pages. What I did with my review areas is print them out and laminate them front and back (I use a local print shop to do the laminating). In light of the fact that writing these things out will involve a dozen or more pages, you may want to put these in a three ring note book or other binder. In fact, as you study the Word you may want to get a spiral bound notebook and put it into the three ring notebook along with these laminated pages. The spiral bound notebook is for jotting down observations and insights, prayers and good thoughts, as you study the Word. Make it sort of a Bible study – Journal combination. That is what I do, and it works well for me. When you fill up the spiral notebook, you can replace it with another one.
As one can imagine, this will involve a lot of work to print out all of these things and put all of this together, but I believe in the end you will have a pretty clear road map of where you are going and why. I believe that you will see success to the extent that you put the effort into doing these things regularly. I truly believe that if you are daily in the Word and in prayer, and if you daily review scriptures specifically related to immoral lusts, the character qualities you want to become true of you, the transformations you need to make, the consequences for failure, the reasons to overcome and rewards for obedience, and your disciplines and goals, then you have put yourself light years ahead in your struggle to overcome immoral lusts and addictions.