March 13
“But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh in regard to its lusts.” (Romans 13:14)
This is an essential principle, especially in today’s internet age. When I was growing up, I couldn’t access pornography even if I wanted to. I wasn’t old enough to purchase it, and there was no way I would have been bold enough to walk in to a store to purchase it; I would have to interface with the clerk, ask for it, and feel the embarrassment of paying for it. There was a lot of shame involved in accessing it, and what is more to our point today, it took a fair amount of effort to go get it, and it cost money. You had three very powerful built-in deterrents from getting addicted to pornography.
Today, the internet removes all of these and makes plunging into harmful and defiling lusts easier than most people could have ever imagined back then. The shame is removed because I don’t have to let anyone know I am accessing it, not even a store clerk that I don’t know. Thus, the internet removes shame. Second, pornography of the kind that would have been very difficult even to find when I was young will come flooding onto your computer screen with less than a sentence of key strokes. Accessibility is endemic. Thus, the internet makes images and videos of all types of degrading passions readily accessible. Third, internet pornography has become so plentiful and available that one need never pay a dime for it (although it is extremely costly in terms of our spiritual relationship with the Lord, our eternal reward as Christians, our family relationships, and everything in this life that we hold dear).
Today, if a person is not very careful or very fortunate to have zero interest in such things, the most vile immoral practices can flood our minds and make us stumble with the smallest of effort and financial cost. Also, pornography is a sin that can continue to make us stumble days after we have viewed the images, and latches on to our hearts and minds in insidious ways; it is both addictive and cancerous at the same time, eating away our very hearts and souls.
We will discuss pornography specifically in the coming months, but for now we are making the point that those of us who are at all susceptible to such temptations HAVE to find ways to manage and limit our ability to access the internet, particularly these types of things. We must find filtering programs or programs that report every website we visit to another person. The problem with filtering programs is that there can be ways around them, so they restrict many sites, but the determined will find ways around them.
The internet and our modern communications abilities may promote many other types of sins as well that would have been much more difficult to engage in in the past. They can lead to inappropriate relationships and emotional attachments, they can lead to much more shopping and overspending, they can lead to much, much wasted time (even stealing time from our employers), and they can lead us into other temptations by exposing us to more and more images and information regarding the things that we ought to be running away from. Many of us are not strong enough to overcome the daily onslaught of temptations that the internet brings, and we need much help in these areas.
More on this tomorrow.