But this is no small task.
God’s Enemy, our enemy, strives to make us forget our claim to freedom and regress into our chains of sins. He wants others to suffer alongside him both in the present and in eternity. He wants pain and heartache for every human that he can ensnare and lure into his hateful grip. And he loathes that we are free of him.
Thus, though we are free, we are also at war.
But this is no small contest.
We are not merely fighting against a single entity shrouded in spirit, enticing us into shadow with whispers of illicit pleasures. We are fighting the culture over which he has a hold—a culture so backward that it defines chastity as a chain and self-desired-purity as a self-imposed prison. Media sends us an onslaught of messages that porn is harmless and what you do alone in private is your business, no one else’s—certainly not God’s. This propaganda comes in myriad ways—indirectly or explicitly—from all directions, even when we try to avoid it.
I know it’s hard. It’s a war I fight alongside the brethen. And some battles we lose or we see our brothers or sisters lose. We witness the casualties of those who reject God entirely in favor their erotic infatuations. We see those about whom we care fall into lies and surrender their bodies to sin. We lament, and we grieve. But we fight.
We fight.
Because as citizens of a Heavenly Kingdom, we do not merely choose God over Porn. We choose War over Bondage, knowing that we will taste ultimate freedom and victory throughout eternity, near to Christ, our Lord.
So, when it gets rough—when you think you have no escape route from your temptation, when your heat breaks over your brother’s stumbling (or perhaps even your own), when it’s just you and the computer and time to burn, remember that it’s not supposed to be easy. It’s ugly. War is ugly.
But it beats bondage every day of the week.
So, keep fighting, Christian. Keep fighting.