One of the foundational concepts regarding the addiction of pornography is choices.
No one wakes up one day and decides they will become addicted to pornography, just as no one wakes up one day and decides to rob a bank or murder someone. The choice actually occur over an extended period of time and is the result and mix of life’s circumstances and many different little decisions made over time.
Fundamentally, however, you could boil all these little choices into one big question:
It’s a choice of eternal life and death.
Crucify yourself and choose Him daily.
It’s a start, anyway.
[via Adam4d]
Adam Shields says
I totally agree that we can be freed from sin through the power of Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives.
But my concern with this cartoon isn’t that we can be freed, but that without clarification it could seem that we have to be freed from porn before we are saved by Christ. I think that is not actually the way it usually works with other addictions. An alcoholic that is saved is not instantly freed from the power of alcohol addiction. (I realize that you are not claiming with this comic.)
But that same alcoholic can be saved and still suffer with the issues of addiction throughout their lives.
Brennan Manning, someone that you would have no question debating their salvation, talked about the fact that he fairly frequently relapsed into his alcohol addiction even after he was a well known Christian speaker and writer. And even now it is only that he is too sick to literally get any alcohol on his own that he says really keeps him from drinking.
Paul as well talks about still having a thorn in his flesh. That may not have been an issue of sin, but it is quite often thought to be.
My real point is that a person with an addiction has an addiction. They are not kept from salvation. I would agree that a person with a serious addiction should not be place in a role of leadership of a church. But that does not keep them from being saved and a real part of the church. Sexual sin keeps us from all that God wants for us. But so does all other sin.