Are you like the Apostle Paul? Do you ever cry out, “O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” Do you find that the things you want to do, you don’t do? And that the things you shouldn’t do, you do? Can you say along with Paul, “For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice?” (Romans 7:19). Do you wonder who will deliver you?
Then Paul has good news for you. Or, rather, God has good news for you, communicated through His servant, Paul, in the letter that Paul wrote to the church in Rome. In chapter seven you see Paul’s predicament and yours laid out. With your mind you serve the law of God, but with your flesh you serve the law of sin. You have God’s Spirit, and you want to follow His leading. But you also have your sinful flesh, and you want to follow it, too.
This is why you have such conflict with pornography as a Christian man. Men in the world who consume pornography don’t struggle. They enjoy their sin. But you, if you are born again, if you are redeemed, if you have the indwelling Holy Spirit, you struggle precisely because you have a new nature, a nature that pricks your conscience and tells you that looking at pornography and masturbating are sinful acts that you must forsake.
You know to do good, but you do the wicked thing anyway. That was Paul’s problem, too. The good news, of course, is that there is an answer to the question Paul poses. Paul asks, “O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” And then he immediately gives the answer:
I thank God—through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin. There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin: He condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.
Romans 7:25-26, 8:1-4
Who will deliver you from your body of death? God will. Who will deliver you from your sexual sin? God will. The remedy you seek for your pornography habit is not a drug or a therapy or a small group, but a person—the Holy Spirit. If the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, then He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal body through His Spirit who dwells in you (Romans 8:11).
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