Our society already revolves around sex. Church people are not exempt, from advertising to tv shows. That is like telling a drug addict to avoid partaking when they start passing out free Oxy's on every corner to help society find purpose. LOL.
Did you read that fully one third of born again men have serious inappropriate content issues? Simply avert their eyes?
I was a serious inappropriate content addict for decades and the only advice I got from church was 1) pray 2) read the Bible 3) go to church 4) trust God. That was before accountability partners came into.... and out of.... vogue.
If we as Christians were walking in victory, as we are promised, and our shields of faith were quenching every single arrow satan launched at us, averting our eyes would be a piece of cake. The problem is, the church as we know it is not walking there but is compromised with the world we are supposed to walk in but not be a part OF.
So where is the root of the problem? It is that we are still walking in the old man that we were, and do not believe the clear promise of God that He will cause us to will AND to do of His good pleasure.
God is even now awakening His own to the exceeding greatness of His power to usward who believe, and when He does, and we see what God is actually offering us, abiding in Him where we do not fulfill the lusts of the fles, we will be amazed that we were satisfied with religious husks that set no one free.
Blessings,
Gideon
My friend Gideon, I hope you will not take this too harshly, but it is hard not to read things like "Simply avert your eyes?" in a dismissive fashion, which is not appropriate to say of a command given by our Lord.
The command is as simple as it is difficult, and nothing that our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ has commanded is outdated -- certainly not because born again men (or whoever; those are just the ones you picked in your reply) can't seem to bring themselves to stop watching inappropriate contentography.
In my Church anyway, we do not have such a thing as "accountability partners" or other western fads such that it is possible that they go out of style. We have the timeless advice of the scriptures that all things are permissible but not all things edify, and the words of the ancient and modern desert fathers which counsel against the irresponsible use of our bodies and minds. Abba Lazarus El Anthony from Australia, the modern anchorite who lives in the cave of St. Anthony in the Egyptian desert, put it best in a video I saw a few years ago aimed at young people struggling with this issue because of the internet. Very simply, to the best of my recollection he said: "You can go anywhere, you can do anything, but remember:
you will die." A sobering warning, but never untrue. We will all die and face judgment. We need to keep that in mind in
whatever we do, keeping in mind also the medicine we are given from the Divine Physician of our souls and bodies in the form confession and direction from our spiritual fathers, the support of our brothers and sisters (who obviously don't need to know any specifics from us regarding our sins, but can still help in praying with us and for us in a similar manner to the concept of 'accountability partners', I'm sure), and most of all the holy body and blood of Christ. "The holies are for the holy!", yes, as is proclaimed in our liturgy, but also for those who are
becoming holy (all of us), the grace and peace of the Lord Jesus Christ is manifest in us through the struggle and its positive conclusion when the man or woman puts away the habits of the flesh and begins to truly put on Christ. The mastery of the passions is no small thing and Lord knows I am not there, but the ascetic struggle is one to jump into with a full heart and with both hands armed with faith that the Lord will not abandon us when we come to Him in prayer and supplication. Remember St. Paul in his letter to the Romans and his despairing of "this body of death" he lived in. That is the human condition, then and now. Christ says we can do better and be better, and gives us the way to do so. It is our job to follow Him, even as the demons call to us on all sides of the path.
In the Orthodox Church (and the Catholic Church, and many of the older Protestant churches), anyway, we have the examples of those who have successfully run the race in the saints, who conquered their own demons. And so we pray together with Abba John the Short
"Lord, send me enemies -- and strength for the fight!" That's what this is. The war of man against himself. Some win it and become saints. Some lose it and become something else. In no case is it an accident. It is a matter of strength, which God has in abundance and desires to give to all of His people. But we must take it of our own desire to live as He wants us to. That is indeed where the struggle lies.
In the famous book
The Gulag Archipelago, celebrated Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn observes that the line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. Let us pick one side and stay on it, and let it be the good one no matter how heard it is to not jump back and forth whenever we feel pulled to do so. Fight! Fight like your life depends on it, because (not be too dramatic, but) it does!
