Worldliness Leads to Sexual Sin (Part 2)
The connection between a worldly lifestyle and sexual sin is very strong. Anyone hoping to overcome their sexual addiction must be willing to admit this, and then examine their lives and see where that connection is strongest and what God might be asking them to do about it.
This is part two of our interview with Luke Imperato on this subject. If you haven’t already read part 1, you can find the link to that article below.
Click here to check out Worldliness Leads to Sexual Sin (Part 1)
Nate: So, we’re talking about the connection between sexual sin and worldliness. I want to start off this half of our conversation by asking, what kind of guidance do you give to somebody who is trying to create a separation between the things of this world and their heart? I think it can sound like reading the Bible and praying are the only good things that you can do and everything else is dangerous and sinful. It is easy to fall into heavy legalism where you think that you have to get rid of everything and you have to basically become like a monk. How do you counsel someone who is thinking along those lines?
Luke: Well, first of all, I would say that it is truth to say that everything in this world is dangerous. The enemy is looking for ways into our lives and as soon as we leave our prayer closet, we’re in a war zone and the enemy is looking for ways to attack. So a lot of the things in this world really are dangerous. That doesn't mean that we'll always get hurt by them, but they are dangerous. I would say that the first step if you're looking to really get serious in your walk with the Lord, especially if you're struggling with sexual sin, is to start cutting things out of your life that are causing you to stumble.
If you asked yourself or if someone were to ask you what's the most important thing in your life, the Christian answer would be, “Well, you know, following Jesus, or following the Lord. That's the most important thing in my life.” Okay, good answer. But what does the reality of your life indicate? If you listed out the order of priorities – faith, family, career, hobbies, based on the time and attention you give each one, what would be the true order? If you find that your walk with the Lord is getting beat out by other things in your life, I think you need to be a little more brutally honest with yourself and realize that maybe your profession of faith is just talk and it's just an outward form of Godliness.
The book of James says that if you're hearing a lot of the Word but not doing it, you will be deceived. If you’re hearing the truth that the Lord has to be number one in your life, but you’re not actually implementing that in the reality of your life, the product is that you're going to be deceived. So, you need to understand that you have been deceived and realize that some things do need to change in your life. You may do an inventory of your life and say, “Maybe God isn’t the most important thing in my life, but I don’t feel like that is true.” According to James, you have been deceived. It would be better to just take God at His Word and admit that you may be being deceived.
<pull-quote>If you’re hearing the truth that the Lord has to be number one in your life, but you’re not actually implementing that in the reality of your life, the product is that you're going to be deceived.<pull-quote><tweet-link>TweetThis<tweet-link>
Get brutally honest with the Lord and say, “Hey God, you have to do a radical work. You have to change the way I see things. You have to really show me in my life where I'm wrong. What things do I need to cut off?” If you’re not willing to cut the things off that He shows you that you clearly need to, then I don't think you're going to find the victory over sexual sin that you're looking for. It's just not going to happen, because this world will foster every kind of sexual perversion and selfish lifestyle you could imagine. And you could even find that kind of teaching in a church, so if you're not really willing to make some serious decisions to cut things off, you're not going to find victory.
Nate: Yeah, I've used this illustration before - Let's say that a person has a pretty healthy lifestyle, but they drink a shot of poison once a day. How are they going to feel? They're going to feel miserable! You can work out, eat right and do a bunch of stuff, but you’re still going to feel miserable until you stop drinking the poison. And you may say, “Oh, but I really like it.” Well, okay, then there is literally nothing you can do to stop feeling the way you do until you stop doing the thing that is killing you. If you're not willing to give up Netflix, or if you're not willing to give up social media or whatever things are clearly leading you consistently into sin, you will be insane for the rest of your life, no matter how much you cry out to God, read the Bible, or go to church, because you're not following Him. He told you get rid of it and you're not listening to Him.
Luke: Yeah, when Jesus said, “If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out”, He was referring to sexual immorality. We have to be willing to do that when it comes to worldliness and the influences of this world.
Nate: Yeah, and it's just amazing that many people often worry about what they will do with their time if they give those things up. I know we can both say from testimony that once you are without it, and you experience the liberty and the joy of not having that cloud of lust hanging over your head, you just don't want to go back to it.
Luke: Yes. After living in that kind of freedom from the world you become very sensitive to worldly influences. If you watch an old movie or do something that you used to do, you will see that it makes you feel way different than it did when you watched it when you were enslaved to a worldly mindset. You can look back and see that things you were subjected to were much more worldly, much more sensual, and were alluring your flesh more than you realized previously.
Nate: One thing we've said a number of times is that God is not only calling us out of the world, but he's also calling us into Himself. Can you talk about that just a little bit.
Luke: Yeah. That is actually really important, because if I don't have hope of where I'm going, and if I don't have any inspiration or a goal, it's very hard to get motivated to do something. I think that's true for many people. If my only takeaway in this conversation was that these are all the things I can't do, while in some degree, it actually might be helpful, it really doesn't give you the full picture and it leaves you feeling fairly hopeless. And that's not the heart of God. He says, “At my right hand are pleasures evermore.” He loves us and He is full of life and joy. We have to remember that the destination that the Lord is taking us to at the end of all of this is full of life and joy for eternity and the true enemy is our flesh, and the world just breathes life into our fleshly and carnal nature. So, when the Lord is saying, don't do this or put this off, it's because it's slowing me down or hindering me from growing closer to Him.
In Ephesians 4:22 Paul starts off by saying that we are to put off concerning our former conduct, the old man, which grows corrupt according to deceitful lusts. He’s talking about the lust of this world. He's saying put those things off and essentially avoid their influence in your life. I take it as a warning because it's dangerous. But he doesn’t stop there. Paul says in Ephesians 4:23, “Be renewed in the spirit of your mind.” You need to spend time with the Lord and have Him renew your mind and put the truth into you. That's referring to quiet time with the Lord, a prayer time, and a devotional time or a time of worship where you are spending time with the Lord and He is renewing your mind. But Paul goes on to say that if you do that, there will be a result. And that’s a good thing. He goes on to say in verse 24, “Put on the new man which was created according to God in true righteousness and holiness.” And he goes on in Ephesians 5 saying, “Though, once your heart was full of darkness, now it is full of light from the Lord.” Our behavior should show that.
It’s similar to Galatians 5 where Paul talks about the fruit of the Spirit. He lists all of the fruits, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, etc., and at the end of listing them he says, “There's no law against these things.” Does anyone have a problem with the fruit of the Spirit? Well, no, we want love, joy and peace in our life. We want self-control and gentleness. We want all of the fruit in our lives that comes as a result of receiving the Holy Spirit. God is saying in His Word that in order to have that kind of fruit coming forth in your life, you need to put off your former life, and all of the things that so easily entangle you and feed your lusts and the things of your flesh.
And I would throw something in there as well to someone who is living in sexual immorality and is just beginning to make the decision to fight against sin. A lot of the decisions that you make are going to be more radical now than they will be, let's say five or ten years down the road. Initially you need to cut everything off. That may mean getting a phone that has no internet access. That may mean not owning a laptop. That may mean that you can never shop alone and you have to check in with your pastor every other day. At first it’s like, “Man, this is a whole lot.” As time goes on though, those things that you used to be enslaved to will lose their hold on you and they won't have the same grip that they used to in your life. As time goes on, you'll find that you're walking in more and more victory and more and more freedom.
You will also learn a lot during this process. You will learn what many of your own weaknesses are. When you stumble or fall into sin you can then realize that you need to get more radical and cut more worldly influences out of your life. You may need to just make adjustments as far as when you are allowed to have access to certain things or maybe the Lord calls you to abstain from certain activities that you may even really enjoy for a period of time. If you keep living a life like that, after a few years, I'm telling you, you will see that you have more freedom and your heart is being renewed. You won't desire worldly things like you used to and it won’t be as much of a temptation as it used to be. So, it may seem you are being radical and life is super restrictive right now, but that's okay because you have to take that initial plunge.
Nate: Yeah. And that's good too because really what's at the heart of it is not all the rules but the fact that what you are doing without restriction is causing you to be mastered by something. What we're not saying though is that after six years you can start living the same kind of life you're living now. In reality, you won't want to. You may even say for a period of time, “You know what, I'm not going to watch baseball at all, because I am being controlled by my love for it.” Well in five years maybe you can watch a baseball game, because you can enjoy it now without it controlling you. That's the point. What is controlling you? And once the Lord begins to control you, then you can enjoy some things in a way that is still honoring and pleasing to Him and you're just living in freedom.
Luke: And also, your lifestyle will match up with your profession of faith, and that's a beautiful thing when you know that you don't have to live a double life anymore. It’s beautiful when the reality of your life is showing that you love the Lord and He's your treasure. The Lord can see when someone comes to that place and at that point there are blessings that He can give you. You can have a life in Christ that gets to the point where the world is dead to you and you are dead to the world. That's what I'm striving for and hoping one day to get to, where the things of this world don't have a hold on me anymore. That's a step into eternity and that's not going to go away.
