The following is a chapter from my book, The Way of the Rogue Christian; Living a Life that Counts for Eternity.
“Jesus did not say that everyone must cut off his right hand, but that “if your right hand causes you to sin” in your walk with Him, then it is better to “cut it off.” There are many things that are perfectly legitimate, but if you are going to concentrate on God you cannot do them. Your right hand is one of the best things you have, but Jesus says that if it hinders you in following His precepts, then “cut it off.” The principle taught here is the strictest discipline or lesson that ever hit humankind.”
—Oswald Chambers
“Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.”
—Ezekiel 16:49
“All things are lawful,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful,” but not all things build up.”
—1 Corinthians 10:23
Michelle and I got married in 1989. We watched a lot of movies in the early years. At least once a week we caught a movie at a theater. During the week, we rented videos from Blockbuster or Hollywood Video and watched them at home.
In the first year of our marriage, we saw a horror movie at a theater. Five minutes into the movie, I sensed that a thick, dark presence had filled the auditorium. I told Michelle we needed to leave immediately. She looked at me a little confused but left with me. One of my gifts is spiritual discernment; the demonic presence in that theater was intense.
For the first 10 years of our marriage, I was addicted to pornography and sexual sin. In 1999, God broke me free in a powerful encounter with Him. You can read that part of my story in my book The Road to Grace or at blazinggrace.org. When video games first came out in 1994, I got involved playing them on our desktop computer. At that time, going from a 5-1/4” floppy drive to a CD drive in a desktop PC with 128 megabytes of RAM was a big deal.
By 2000, Michelle and I had two young children and made the decision to shut off all incoming TV service to our home, including cable and network stations. Most of what we watched with our kids at that time was VeggieTales videos. I was still playing video games.
We were strict when it came to our kids having smartphones or tablets. They could pay for their own tablet when they turned 10, but Internet access would be turned off. At 13 they were given a dumbphone, mainly for communication purposes when they needed to be picked up at school. We allowed them a smartphone in their mid-teens if they paid for it. With my background of porn addiction, I didn’t want them to have wide-open access to the Internet on a smartphone until they were emotionally mature enough to handle it. At Blazing Grace we see that most men get hooked on porn between the ages of eight and 10. I didn’t want my kids to follow that same path. Over the years, I had many wide-open talks with my kids about the dangers of porn and sexual sin. They all know my story and the mess I made out of my life in the past. My desire to play video games faded, and I felt God calling me to set them aside. I haven’t touched them since the mid-2000s; I wish I’d never gotten started.
Last year I started praying and asking God to prepare my heart for eternity. It’s not that I’m asking Him to end my life but to give me a heart that’s worthy of a life of eternity with Him. Salvation is by Christ’s death on the cross and resurrection, so this isn’t a salvation issue; I want to be a blessing to Him. As I’ve asked the Lord to prepare my heart for eternity, He’s challenged me to spend more time in prayer. I aim for 40–60 minutes with Him in the mornings and then 20–40 minutes at night before going to sleep. There are also nights when He wakes me up at 2:00 a.m. or 3:00 a.m. to pray.
As I’ve spent more time in prayer, my hunger for God has intensified and my desire for entertainment has shriveled up. For decades I’ve been having time with Him in the morning, and since 2003 I’ve been going on solo retreats. It’s not that prayer is new, but that my investment in praying has increased. As soon as I wake up in the morning, I start praying. In the evenings I look forward to going after Him and enjoying His presence. My life has become one of divine discontent where I’m constantly hungry for more of Him.
I’ve traveled to third-world countries where the grocery stores are a fraction of the size of the mega-sized food giants we have in the United States with multiple selections of everything. A grocery store outside the United States might have several brands of ice cream, but US grocery stores have a whole aisle of them. The advances in technology have made us hyperconnected through social media, texts, emails, and other ways. We can download movies on demand. The entertainment and sports industries take in tens of billions of dollars every year. The billion-dollar arenas that professional sports teams and the big-name musical groups play in are state-of-the-art Jumbotrons with multi-million-dollar sound systems, clusters of restaurants, and top-tier staging and seating systems.
We’re saturated with ads that promote everything all the time in news websites, TV shows, billboards, smartphones, and social media. We’re bombarded with marketing materials every day. The Eagles’ song “Life in the Fast Lane” comes to mind, which describes a couple who partied hard and went after everything, all the time.
Many of today’s songs include rampant sexual imagery. You can’t go to a news website without getting hit with pictures of women with most of their clothes off. Porn has gone mainstream. The United States is the largest producer and consumer of pornography in the world. Satanic images, products, and messages are also everywhere. The Drudge Report, one of the largest news media sites in the world, recently linked to an article on Why Women are Becoming Witches.
Life in the suburbs provides the illusion that all is well. Our culture markets comfort, and we expect it. No one should feel bad, even for a moment. My wife works at a hospital emergency room and tells me stories of people who come in with a cold or a headache. We don’t do suffering in America. Is your mood a little low? We have pills for that.
It’s hard to be a Christian in a country that shoves everything all the time down our throats 24/7. It’s also hard to be a Christian in many of our American churches. Many churches have one or more video screens at the front of the auditorium. Sunday morning services mean loud rock music with Christian words and a sermon. The atmosphere is comfortable and casual. People stroll in with coffee cups, watch the performance, and go home.
Sermons inform and entertain but are bereft of challenging and equipping people to live in a land where everything all the time has corrupted them. Surveys show that at least two-thirds of Christian men and 30% of Christian women are viewing pornography (see the porn statistics page at www.blazinggrace.org for more information). We’re losing or have already lost our youth. A recent survey showed that 43% of Millennials don’t know about God, don’t care, or don’t believe God exists. Only 16% of Millennials believe they will go to heaven because they confessed their sins and accepted Jesus as their Savior.
A recent Barna Group survey showed that only 6% of Americans have a biblical worldview. We’ve allowed comfort and everything all the time to pervade the church to such an extent that we no longer challenge people with a faith worth giving everything for. Without that, the church is just another entertainment option.
Remember, the road is narrow, and the Christian way of life is hard.
“Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.”
—Matthew 7:13–14
Much of what everything all the time offers is not sin. It’s okay to watch clean movies, spend time online, listen to music, check email or text messages, watch a sporting event, enjoy moments of comfort and rest, or go on vacation. It’s not always a matter of right and wrong but rather how much time is spent in prayer and making our lives count for eternity compared to how time is invested in everything else.
Many don’t realize how everything all the time has seduced us. When is the last time you came away from church feeling challenged or convicted to go away alone with the Lord for two days, spend an hour in prayer every day, go after Him with all your heart, or face your sin? Are we being challenged to thin out our time with entertainment in order to have more of God and His power? Are we being challenged to live a life of purity, and are we equipped to break those strongholds?
How about our eating habits? For many, food is a source of comfort, but eating sugary, salty, fatty foods doesn’t provide love or peace. Millions of Americans are overweight and shortening if not wasting their lives, living at the doctor’s office or having surgeries because of the food-porn in their pantry. Counterfeit comfort produces a wedge between us and God that prevents us from living a life of impact.
The Lord doesn’t force Himself on anyone. We can have as much of everything all the time as our flesh craves, or we can go against the grain of cultural Christianity and go all out with God. Giving God a little time on Sundays and immersing ourselves in everything else the rest of the week puts us at risk of drifting off the narrow road. The pursuit of comfort is one of the greatest threats to a passionate love relationship with the Lord.
I find it interesting that when COVID-19 hit, the entertainment and sports industries were immediately shut down. Was God clearing the deck so we would see our desperate need for more of Him?
Consider asking God to show you if there’s anything you need to thin out in your life so you can have more time for prayer and seeking Him. Spending hours each day on a smartphone, social media, or other entertainment and several minutes per day in prayer isn’t a good sign. Remember what Jesus said about lukewarm Christians in Revelations 3. We live in dangerous times, and an increasing number of professed Christians, including pastors, are falling away or walking away from church.
I don’t want to be misunderstood. I’m not saying you should give up every form of entertainment, shut down the Internet, stop listening to music, live in a cave.
“As for the rich in this present age, charge them not to be haughty, nor to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy.”
—1 Timothy 6:17
“There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God.”
—Ecclesiastes 2:24
We can enjoy the blessings God gives us. Matthew 5:29 tell us that if something causes us to sin, cut it off. Some Christians get off on telling people to cut everything out of their lives. I know of ministries that tell people addicted to porn that they need to immediately turn off all electronics. That doesn’t line up with God’s Word, and it’s not the heart of this chapter, which is divine discontent—stoking the fires of hunger for more of God.
“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.”
—Jim Elliott
See the Way of the Rogue for more information.
