Sorry I don’t fit your pattern of thinking. All I suggested was that time spent on meaningful work does not allow for time spent on meaningless waste. If that is smug, well, I guess you have a different notion of what smug is than I do. I guess anyone who thinks differently than you might be smug. That’s one way to win people over.

Dang.

Your understanding of sanctification is troubling Chris and leaves out the role of God’s people, the church. We are certainly called by our one mediator to help the weak, admonish the idle, bear each others burdens, restore those in sin with gentleness, encourage the fainthearted and be patient with all. We are to bring back wandering sinners to the truth.

Some reading that may be helpful – Ecclesiastes 4:9-11, Proverbs 27:17, 1 Thessalonians 5, Galatians 6, James 5

I’m done here

What I mean by “therapeutic church” is the notion that one man can help another man “put to death” the sin nature and the sins that flow from it. This is what you suggested in your opening note. But, if a man meets Christ, he does not need another mediator to help him out.

I just want you to be helpful to the men around you in your church, the lost men in your neighborhood who need Jesus. That is all. We help others by pointing them to the cross…but we need a hearing with people to do this. I pray people are hearing the gospel from you, seeing the fruit of the gospel in you and living out the gospel with you.

Blessings brother

So, how do YOU change men’s hearts? Can you? All you can do is point the way to Christ, and when men find Him, they won’t care about the thing “out there”. The issue isn’t porn, it is the disposition of the heart — an absence of the fear of God, and a love of the flesh. Who can break a man of that? Only the Holy Spirit.

I am not dismissing sin, I am only dismissing the approach and the way the problem is being framed — a way which does not seem to be solving the problem. “Bang head here.”

The Tim Challies article was great, it was exactly what i needed to hear.

Regardless of how busy someone may be, if the heart issue of lust is not dealt with, busyness is an irrelevant matter.

You have the time to comment on blog posts, so is it really that hard to comprehend where a guy finds time to get on his computer and look at porn?

It is an issue of many sins. But brother, if you are going to help young men walk with Jesus, put to death sins of this nature, you need to engage this issue and not just dismiss it as “these guys” problem. I could miss your tone from the email, but you sound very smug and self-righteous about this issue. If there are young men in your church, if there are males period, there are people struggling with this issue around you.

I have ministered with students and men under 25 (non Christian and Christian) for the last 13 years and I tell you this is not a small problem. Lost people accept porn as normative, Christians typically try and hide it. Either way, we have to engage this with honesty and the gospel and not dismiss it like you seem to be doing.

Get on the wall and in the game for those guys who you see as just lazy and lustful. Speak grace, hope and tough truth to them – not just your judgment. I mean do this with real people, not hypothetical ones. Walk with them out of their shame into the light of Christ.

Thanks man

If you are working a full-time job, taking care of your family and talking with your wife, how do you fit it in? Besides having hobbies, hanging with the brothers or making something, like a garden or a piece of music is time consuming too. So, is this an issue of laziness as well as lust? I mean, don’t these guys work?

When I was 20, there was plenty of dirty mags and films about, but today the comparison would be like a Lake Superior porn compared to an Atlantic Ocean of porn.

It is a Porndemic for sure. May the Holy Spirit fill us with His wisdom, power, self-control, and love for the good things of the Lord. Amen.

Have a blessed weekend and Lord’s day.

Before we start making up words by conjoining Pandemic with Porn, it would be good to find out what in the world they are talking about. The next thing you know it will be “Swine-orn”.

Again, the problem is the heart, and this was an issue before the internet. “If one lusas after a woman…” No need for “data” on that one.

Nevertheless, allow me to correct myself: the research itself may not be shoddy, but the conclusion that everyone in their 20s has looked at porn doesn’t necessarily follow. It’s shoddy reasoning, if that’s in fact what they’re suggesting.