Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:06]
A
Time magazine had a cover story last spring titled Porn and the Threat to Virility. I'm not being hyperbolic when I say that this is one of the saddest, most horrific articles that I have ever read. But it's not sad and horrific in the sense of war or some kind of a violent crime. It's sad and horrific in the sense that it narrates the kind of slow motion suicide that our culture is committing against itself. The article's about pornography use among young men. And at the heart of the article is the contention that there's a backlash actually against Internet pornography among young men who've been heavy users throughout their adolescence and young adulthood. And the author, Belinda Luscombe, she writes this. I'm going to read to you a little bit of it. She says, a growing number of young men are convinced that their sexual responses have been sabotaged because their brains were virtually marinated in porn when they were adolescents. Their generation has consumed explicit content in quantities and varieties never before possible on devices designed to deliver content swiftly and privately, all at an age when their brains were more plastic, more prone to permanent change than later in life. These young men feel like unwitting guinea pigs in a largely unmonitored decade long experiment and sexual conditioning. So the rest of Luscombe's article recounts what these young men have been consuming for the last decade and what the results have been in their adult relationships with real women. And many of them are simply unable to experience a response with a real live woman. They're only able to respond to pornography, and in fact, they prefer it. I was stunned by this article for a couple of reasons. First, we have not even begun to understand what this crisis means for our civilization. This is not a story about adolescent hijinks going a little bit too far. This is the story of broken men who have had their minds rewired to love darkness. And to understand this, you've got to wrap your mind around the scope of this thing. Pornography has been a pervasive part of these young men's lives for the better part of a decade. Now, I want you to remember two dates. 2007 and 2013. In 2007, broadband Internet access reaches over 50% of American households. 2013, smartphone ownership exceeds 50% of the population in our country. What that means is that at Some point around 2007, more Americans than not had access not simply to still images, but to moving pornography. And by 2013, more Americans than not had access to these videos of this content at any time, in any place. Through their smartphone. The average young man first encounters this material when he's 11 to 13 years old, which means there's a lot that were younger than that. That means that countless young men have spent the better part of the last decade with access to moving pornography. For many of them, everything that they've learned about sexuality has come from pornography. Their preferences have been shaped by this. This is a civilizational calamity because porn use eviscerates manhood. It doesn't teach men virtue and honor. It doesn't fill them with industry and entrepreneurial spirit. It mires them in passivity and morose, private self indulgence. It teaches them to view women at a distance and as objects to be used and discarded. It renders them completely unprepared for marriage and for fatherhood. And guess what? If you don't have marriage and fatherhood, you don't have a civilization anymore. All you have is ruins. So, yes, this is an unfolding civilizational crisis for us. But it's not just that. It's a church crisis. Let's have no illusions about this. This pervasive evil has invaded our own ranks. Ask one of the counselors here. Ask them what the most often counseled issue is that they have to deal with of all the other issues they have to deal with. Alcoholism, drug use, marital problems. They will tell you that nothing comes close to the number of professing Christians that they talk to who are in the throes of this particular sin. This ubiquitous evil in our culture has become a ubiquitous evil in our pews. We should have no illusions about that. And that means that we have this thing among us threatening holiness, witness, marriages, fatherhood, child rearing, and every other precious gift that the Lord has given to us. This isn't a small problem. This is potentially an existential problem for us because porn use undermines holiness. And the Bible says without holiness, no one will see the Lord. And none of us is going to be the exception to that. We're going to spend our time this morning unpacking a single verse. I want you to open up your Bibles to 2nd Timothy 2. In verse 22 in this section of 2nd Timothy, Paul is warning the congregation against false teachers. But right in the middle of it, you've got verse 22 where he issues this command to Timothy, and he says this, so flee youthful passions and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace, along with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart. Now, my mind has been on this text this week for more reasons than one. It's not just because there was an interesting article in Time magazine or because we needed a chapel message. This text has been on my heart because you have been on my heart. And I know that this sin is not something that's happening just out there. It's here in this room, and we need to confront it. You cannot pursue God and pursue pornography. That's my thesis. You can pursue one or you can pursue the other, but you cannot pursue both. This text is telling us how to pursue the narrow way that leads to life. I think there are at least three imperatives implied by what Paul is saying in this verse. And this is where we're going. He's telling us to flee youthful lusts, pursue the fruit of the spirit, and to embrace Christian fellowship. So the first thing is to flee youthful lust. Look at verse 22 again. So flee youthful passions. Now, before we can figure out what Paul is commanding Timothy and us to do in this text, we got to figure out what he's telling us to flee from. Now, the ESV renders this kind of generically as passions. Other translations render it more specifically as sexual passion or lust. Still other translations observe that the context is talking about false teaching. And so fleeing youthful desires has to do with those desires that motivate false teaching in their false teachers, in their error. Still other people think that youthful desires refer to youthful sins of judgment and temperament. And those people say that sexual lust doesn't even seem to be the focus here. And so you can see that in some of the other translations, one translation says, run away from the evil things that young people long for. And so some of these translations don't think that this text is actually referring to anything sexual at all. And so if that's correct, then you might think this text doesn't really have anything to do with what we're talking about this morning. I disagree with that point of view, and I have reasons for that. Every commentator that I have read Mrs. I think an important connection here that's crucial to understanding what Paul means by this term that's translated as passions. That word that's translated as passions in the ESV is the Greek word epithumia. It's a term that simply means desire. That's what it means. It refers to the human experience of longing or craving for something. It's the longing or the craving in our heart that motivates us to make the decisions that we make. And if you'll remember, In Romans chapter 7, Paul has given a chapter long meditation on what he thinks about desire or epithumia And I think that what he says there should inform what we think he is saying here in second Timothy 2. 22. Because he says in Romans 7:7, I would not have known about desire except that the law was saying, you shall not desire. Paul says everything he knows about desire. Epithumia. He learned from the law. And in particular he learned from the Tenth Commandment, which says, you hear it translated often as you shall not covet. It's just the term in the Greek translation. You shall not desire. That's what the command is. And Paul says, I learned about desire from the law. Wouldn't have known about it except that the commandment said, you shall not desire. That means, if we want to understand flee youthful desires, I'm arguing we have to understand the Tenth Commandment which says this. You shall not desire your neighbor's house. You shall not desire your neighbor's wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox or his donkey, or. Or anything that belongs to your neighbor. When Paul singled out the tenth commandment in Romans 7, he did so because it may very well be the hardest of all the commandments. Why? Because the other commandments address our deeds. The 10th Commandment addresses our desires. The other commandments say things like, you shall not kill, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal. But the 10th Commandment says that we aren't even supposed to desire those things. Why? Because your desires aren't neutral. They always have an object. And if you desire something that's sinful, anything sinful, sexual or otherwise, your desire itself is sinful. That means that even if you never actually committed adultery with another woman, for example, even if you never stole anything, even if you never killed anyone, the 10th Commandment says that if you have desires God commensurate with those deeds, you have already sinned. Now think back to second Timothy 2. 22. Paul says, Flee youthful desires. Same term. Same term from Romans 7. That's a quotation from the 10th Commandment. That means that the desires that we must flee from are any desire for something that God has forbidden to us. It's certainly not limited to illicit sexual desire, but it certainly does include illicit sexual desire. But notice that Paul says, flee youthful lusts. Why does he use that term, youthful? Is he trying to say that these forbidden desires are only experienced by young people? No, I don't think that that's what he means. They're youthful desires in the sense that they are undoubtedly disciplined. In other words, maturity and experience usually have a moderating effect on the way that we experience our desires. But the younger you are, and the less experienced you are, the less self control that you bring to your desires. We all need, we all know what this means because we know what it's like to see children interacting with their desires. Not long ago I saw this played out in Spadesville among my own children at my house on Friday nights we have this thing called Friday Night Fun night, where we just get pizza and watch a movie or sometimes pizza and games. And one night not long ago we got the pizza and on the way home I picked up some donuts and some cookies, Oreos. And we get home, we eat the pizza and they're watching the movie and at some point they hear me shuffling around with the desserts. All four kids show up instantly. They're 10, 6, 8 and 4. Okay, they're little and they're immediately surrounding me and there's this cacophony of voices immediately demanding, I want two donuts, I want two cookies, I want. They're pushing each other out of the way, they're yelling over each other. And what happens in a moment like this is that they get louder and louder, each one trying to make his desire known, but they're trying to speak over one another another and being rude to each other. And it gets really out of hand. It's youthful desire because they are not mature enough to realize that maybe their desire for food, for cookies and donuts is not the most important desire in the world. It's youthful desire because it's undisciplined. They lack self control to think, you know, before I start demanding what I want, maybe I should make sure my siblings get some first. Or maybe I need to make sure there's enough for everyone before demanding my share. Or maybe yelling out my desires isn't the wisest way to pursue what I want. So when you think youthful desires in second Timothy 2, 22, think about the desires that anyone really of any age can feel, but that may be more or less intense because of maturity and self control. That's the issue here. Flee youthful lusts therefore means fleeing from uncontrolled sinful desires. And that includes sinful sexual desires. Viewing pornography is the opposite of fleeing youthful lusts. It is the embracing of youthful lusts. It is retreading well worn paths of evil desire for things that God has forbidden. And for some people, even in this room, they would be paths that you began to walk when you were very young. And every walk down that path is an open rebellion against God's law. In the tenth Commandment, which Jesus himself reaffirmed for us in in the Sermon on the Mount. It is a surrender to youthful patterns of undiscipline and godlessness. It is a surrender to indwelling sin, the very sin that God calls you to repent of and to mortify. We have this thing built into us to rationalize and to sort of excuse things because they become more common. And someone might say, well, I'm not actually committing adultery or fornicating with another person. I'm just looking at these images. That excuse doesn't work. Flee the desires is what Paul commands. The looking and the searching is precisely what's forbidden. The dabbling is forbidden. It's precisely what God says you must flee from. And I think practically that means at least two things. Number one, you have to flee from the situations that provoke this sin. You Romans 13:14 says, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, make no provision for the flesh in regard to its lusts, desires, Epithumia. This means that you do not do the things, get with the people, go to the places that you know are going to arouse these kinds of desires in your heart. The desires are actually already there in a sense. The question is whether or not you're going to provoke them through undisciplined conduct, or whether you will have the self control not to make provision for the flesh. So you've got to flee from those situations that provoke you to this sin. But you've also got to be willing to take radical measures to flee from this sin. Jesus says that when it comes to sexual sin, you have to be willing to gouge out your eye or cut your hand off in order to keep your desires in check. Because it would be better, he says, for your eye or your hand to be destroyed than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. He says in Matthew 5. Now, I don't think it literally means that you have to cut off your body parts, but it does mean that you have to undertake radical measures to not make provision for your flesh. That's what it means. It might mean not owning a television or not having cable or Internet access at your house. It might mean owning a flip phone, not a smartphone. Somebody might say, well, I know I'm having problems with this from time to time, but I have to have a smartphone. To which I would want to say, I think with Jesus, then you might have to go to hell, cut off your hand. Do not be a fool about this. Lose your smartphone, save your soul. I know how serious a guy is about repenting of this sin by how much he's willing to let go of to fight it. Jesus demands that you, you give everything. You don't hold back anything. That's what it means to flee youthful lusts. The second thing, you've got to pursue the fruit of the Spirit. Look at verse 22 again. So flee youthful passions and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace. Paul often has this put off, put on balance in his ethical exhortation. It's the case here. What he's saying is that being a Christian is not just about being against something, it's also about being for something. In this case, we are called to shun evil desire and instead to pursue its opposite, righteousness, faith, love, and peace. Three of those four virtues are actually listed as fruits of the spirit in Galatians 5. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control. Against such things there is no law. So when Paul commands Timothy and us to pursue righteousness, faith, love, peace, therefore he's commanding us to pursue what the Spirit is already doing in us. If we're Christians, that means he's not calling you to do this alone. This is what the Spirit of God is already working inside of you to do. This is why Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead to empower you to do. Philippians 2. So then, my beloved, just as you've always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God who is at work in you, both to act and to will, according to his good pleasure. That means that your active pursuit of these things is not at odds with grace. I'm tired of hearing that, that our active pursuit of holiness is somehow at odds with grace. It is the evidence of grace in your life. Your active striving against sin is not legalism. It is the evidence that the Holy Spirit is having his way with you. The absence of that striving is evidence of the absence of the Spirit. So you can't simply just stop doing the bad things. You have to start pursuing the good things. Because you aren't pursuing abstractions, you're pursuing God. And when you pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, that's evidence that you're pursuing Him, a person, your God. So you can't just be putting off, you've got to be putting on. It's not just shunning the evil desire, it is pursuing with all of your passion, the better thing. You know what I've noticed? When I exercise. I get on the treadmill. And when I'm on the treadmill, it hurts. And if I'm just on the treadmill, I can't stay on very long because all I can think about is the pain. But if I open up something on my iPad that I can read the Bible or a video or something, I find that even though I'm feeling pain, I'm thinking about this other thing and my mind moves to the other thing, and I can endure because of the other thing. It doesn't make the pain go away. It just refocuses on something better. If you're trying to flee pornography and your efforts consist merely in stopping one thing, without the active pursuit of righteousness, you're going to falter. You're going to focus on what you think you're missing, instead of engaging your heart and your mind in something that is much better and weightier than what you are giving up. The fight for holiness is a fight for joy, what Thomas Chalmers famously called the expulsive power of a new affection. It's leaving off an inferior thing to pursue a better and more satisfying thing. In practical terms, that means that you don't just sit on your couch staring at your computer, wondering how long you can hold out. It means you get up and get to work. You pursue righteousness. You do the things which make for good character. You work hard. If you don't have a job, you get one. If you're single, you take an extra shift. Save money, start a business, Add value to the economy. Bless others. The proverb says, it is by his deeds that a lad distinguishes himself if his conduct is pure and right. Don't leave yourself one minute to waste on pursuit of youthful lusts. Pursue love. Seek out ways to bless people in your life. Mow a widow's lawn. See if there's somebody, an elderly person in your church that needs a ride to the grocery store. There are a thousand different ways that you have within your ability to bless people and that you ought to be pursuing love with them. Pursue faith. Do the things that make your heart grow large with expectation and thankfulness for your Savior, Jesus. Read your Bible. Pray heaven down into your life and into your relationships, with your in your relationships and into your work. Listen to the word preached. Pursue the means of grace that God has given you that sustain faith and confidence. King Jesus, you've got to pursue these things. If you give yourself to those things, you won't have time for online immorality. You will learn self control and love and goodness and a thousand other beautiful things that God wants to do in your life. So you flee youthful lust and you pursue the fruit of the spirit. And the last thing is you embrace Christian fellowship. Look at the verse, flee youthful passions, pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace along with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart. That last phrase is not a throwaway phrase. There is something precious here. That last phrase is telling you how to pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace. It's telling you that you must not do it alone. It is telling you that you're supposed to be pursuing these things with a group of other people who are also pursuing these things. Those who call on the Lord from a pure heart. That's the church. But notice that it says that they are people who call on the Lord from a pure heart. These are not people calling on the Lord from an impure hypocritical heart. They're not people who are saying that they're one thing while actually doing another. They are striving to walk with Christ in integrity and holiness. Paul is saying that you must pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace with those people. You're not supposed to try to do this by yourself. You have to realize that the church is God's plan for your sanctification. You have to realize that the means of grace are not here at Southern Seminary. We do good things here, but we're not the church. All of that is at the church. Encouragement, accountability are at your church. You don't have these things by yourself. Sanctification is not a private effort. We need each other in this. There's a reason there's so many one anothers in the scripture. So if you're really serious about purity, you need to get in the church and you need to get with God's people. And you don't just need to sit and listen and leave. You need to invest your time and your energy to become a part of the life of your church. Join a small group, make friends, make best friends. Share your life with these brothers and sisters and ask for help and give help. When you do that, you will begin to forge the kinds of relationships that matter and that get you out of private little sin ghettos. So you flee youthful lust and you pursue the fruit of the spirit and you embrace the fellowship that leads to sanctification. I want to give you just a few, a handful of practical things here as I finish. About some things that you maybe can do to flesh this out. Some things to think about and to do. First thing is this. If you're Having an issue here. You need to confess your sin, confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another. James says, if we confess our sins, he's faithful and just to forgive us of our sins and cleanse us of all unrighteousness. Your secret sin is an open scandal in heaven. And what you're hiding now is not really hidden. And what you're hiding now may not stay hidden very much longer. Yes, confess this to God, but you need to find a trusted friend that you can confess it to. Confess this to. Second thing is this. You need to pursue accountability. You've got to flee youthful passions with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart. If you've got areas in your life that you are intentionally keeping in the dark, you've got to blow the lid off of that yourself. You've not only got to confess your sin, but you've got to attach yourself to people who can help keep you accountable. And those people can't be people who are mired in the same problem that you are. They have to be people who have proven faithfulness in this area and can actually pull you forward in constructive ways. And I would add that you should pursue this accountability with somebody in your church. Your accountability ought to be under the purview of the discipline and the order of your church. This means something to us. This is not just a view of polity. This is how we become holy and conform to the image of Jesus. Otherwise, your accountability has no ultimate teeth to it. Third, you need to cut off your hand and gouge out your eye. Be willing to take extraordinary measures to beat this. There is nothing that you can lay down that the Lord won't replace with more joy. If you lay down your smartphone, if it takes that, then you need to do it. If you need to lay down cable tv, then you need to do it. Don't hold anything back. Get serious about this and get this right. Fourth thing, you need to realize what's at stake. Jesus said, enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction. And many are those who enter by it. For the gate is small and the way is narrow. That leads to life and fewer those who find it. If you're looking at pornography, you are walking down the broad road. You're not walking down the narrow path that leads to life. And so you have to ask yourself this question. Where do you think this is going to lead? Well, I'm in seminary. I've got a testimony. You're not exempted from what The Scriptures say about holiness and about the transformation that the Holy Spirit is working in us. If you're on that road, it does not lead you to life or to anything good. And if you go all the way down it, at the end of it is not blessedness and eternal life, but destruction. So everything is at stake in this. I believe the stakes are really high, higher than we often want to let ourselves imagine. Jesus said, no man can serve two masters. You can serve God or you can serve an idol. You cannot serve both. Think about what this means for marriage. If you use this material, you'll destroy your marriage. If you're married now, you'll be destroying a marriage that you're not even in yet. If a young woman comes to me and says that she wants to marry a guy who has a problem with this, I'm going to tell her, you shouldn't marry him. I think you know this, but I just want to make sure. You're not qualified for ministry. If this is a part of your life, you're disqualified. Fifth thing, quickly. Define struggle in terms of victory, not in terms of defeat. I hear a lot of guys talk about this as a struggle. What they mean by struggle is that they try hard not to look at this material. Then they fall, they try hard again, then they fall again. They try some more, and then they fall some more. And so for them, struggle means entrenched patterns of defeat. That's just not biblical struggle. It's not what the Bible teaches. Biblical struggle is not embracing patterns of defeat, but increasing patterns of faithfulness. Test yourself on this. If your struggle is just patterns of defeat with no progress, you're not doing biblical struggle. Don't call it that. You need to take even more extraordinary measures to see progress if that's where you are. Last thing I'll say is this. Let's not accept this as normal. This is not normal. This is extraordinary. Unfaithfulness named among the people of God, and it's killing us. Don't accept this as normal. Treat this like you would a cancer. It must be excised, destroyed, killed. Listen, the grace of the Lord Jesus is sufficient for this. I'm not here trying to hang condemnation over anyone that's listening, but I do want us to see what's at stake. Flee youthful lusts. God has enabled you to do this. The Holy Spirit of God is working in you to do this. If you know him. Unless you don't. Let me pray for you. Father, I pray that you would cause your people to rise up in faithfulness and in resolve to honor your with every part of their being. Father, we know our desires are so broken, so often set against your purposes. We also know that Jesus purchased not just our forgiveness, but also our faithfulness. And so we ask you to have your way with us. Change us, make us holy, make us pure. Let there not be any impurity named among us. And Lord, cause righteousness and joy and peace and love to spring up that we would bear witness to another kingdom, and that we are not under the control of the hostile powers of this age, but to show to the world that we are under the control of our King Jesus, who loved us and gave himself for us, and in whose name we pray. Amen.