For if you live according to the flesh you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.
Romans 8:13
There are two mistakes you can make as a Christian man wanting to break free of pornography. There might be more than two mistakes, actually. But there are two big ones that you must avoid.
The first mistake is thinking that your sexual purity is entirely up to you. You believe you are responsible for your sin, and therefore you are responsible for forsaking it. So far, so good. But you also think your victory is up to you. You must read your Bible more. You must pray more often and more fervently. You must mortify your flesh more thoroughly. In other words, you think conquering sexual lust is all up to you. This is a mistake.
The second blunder is to think that your victory over porn is entirely up to God. You believe that you are “powerless over your addiction.” You believe your life has become unmanageable. You have thrown up your hands in surrender, fully persuaded that only God can deliver you from the grip of pornography. You believe everything is up to Him. You are waiting for Him to deliver you. This, too, is a mistake.
Paul tells you that “if you live according to the flesh you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live” (Romans 8:13). In other words, if you live by the sinful flesh you die, but if you conquer your sinful flesh, you live. If you live according to your sexual lusts, you die. But if you put those lusts to death, you live. But notice how you put them to death—by the Spirit. That is, through the power of the Holy Spirit.
This means your sexual purity is partly up to you and partly up to the Holy Spirit. You don’t do it alone. And God doesn’t do it alone. Instead, you work with God, you cooperate with the Lord, as it were, to put to death the deeds of the body “by the Spirit.”
This is great news if all of your self effort has delivered few lasting results up to today. And it’s also good news if you have been waiting passively for God to intervene to deliver you from your sexual immorality. Deliverance from sexual sin requires effort from you and divine enablement from the Holy Spirit. “If by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.”
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