WARNING
PREACHY…
I was thinking today about things that
changed my life. I came up with three
things and I know there were more but these were the three that first came to
my mind…
2 Corinthians 12:7-10
First,
I recognized the strangle hold that pornography had on me…
In 2004 I moved to New Jersey for work. I wasn’t a Christian at that time but the
move felt to me like the opportunity for a brand new life. As I packed things to take with me the one
thing that I certainly was not packing was my years of collected porn mags and
videos. At that time I realized that my
porn habit was more of an obsession that a normal bad-habit. I realized that having grown up on the stuff,
wrong understanding of women had formed in my brain and so I bequeathed my
whole “collection” to my best friend (sorry Scott) and was leaving for Jersey
with no intention of obtaining anymore of the stuff.
It took years for me to see that my
exposure to porn really was a form of sexual-abuse. I actually thought, at the time, that women
all meant “yes” when they said “no” and secretly desired to be abused and
sexually mastered by men. It took me quite
a while to realize that the majority of women were not like the women who were ‘acting’
interested in me in the movies. I had a
tough time realizing that pornography was a pure fantasy-land for men and it
had terrible effects on countless men and women. Even as a non-Christian I recognized that
there was something wrong.
To this day, porn is the one thing
from my past life that still beckons me.
I was addicted to many things but this is the one thing from my past
that I actively have to fight against.
While I don’t like it, it is a thorn in my flesh that keeps me humble while
it allows me to understand others with addictions of their own.
1 Corinthians 15:16-17
16 For if the dead do not rise, then Christ is not risen. 17 And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your
sins!
Second,
I took seriously a desire to know the truth…
When I was new in New Jersey I was not
getting into porn nor was I hanging out at the local booby-bars so this left me
with tons of time to just look at the ocean and think. In my time of thinking I wondered what was really true about God and life. I remember praying a simple prayer: “God, if
you actually exist, I want to know who you are.” I did not really care who God was, I just
wanted to know who he was. In fact, I
expected God to be a form of Buddhism or something: anything but Christian
because I didn’t want my mom to be right.
I started looking into world religions
and I realized that all of them made their claims of being true; but only one
of them claimed to be true because of a dead man rising back to life from the
dead. I was struck with the resurrection
because if a dead man actually came back to life from the dead then I needed to
seriously listen to that guy. And the
fact that the Bible instructed me to ignore the Christian claims if in fact
Jesus did not rise from the dead - this was a big one for me: because all other
world religions claim to be true just because
they say so.
I was stuck because the Christian
claim was different and now my life has been significantly improved because of
it.
Thirdly,
I learned to manage and budget my money…
How we use our money is the clearest outside
indicator of what we really believe. ... If someone is a true disciple of Jesus
Christ, the evidence will be found in that person's everyday life - including
his or her use of money. ~Larry Burkett
Getting rid of porn and accepting the
truth of Jesus were huge impacts on my life, but after that was learning how to
budget; and it has been no-less significant to my life.
Before I learned to budget, I lived
pay-check to pay-check. I paid my bills
but just barely. Car insurance was the
tough one with its every six-month payment that I never really had and
scrambled to come up with. I was maxed
out on my credit cards, I had a car payment, and if there was any money extra
it was always used to feed myself, buy cigarettes and beer, and go to Atlantic
City. I was taught a good work ethic
from my parents but money management was not something that I had ever really
learned. I actually believed that the
only way to be out of debt in this world was to die and not exist anymore.
At that time I started listening to a daily
radio show by Larry Burkett called Money Matters. It was a radio show that talked about the Christian
principles of handling money. Larry
stressed the necessity of the budget for responsibly managing money and even
though it was a foreign concept to me I realized that he was correct. Then he talked about how to get debt-free
which was a concept that I did not believe possible in our culture, but he talked
a lot about how to do it and so I tried it; that was in 1994. By the end of 1995 I became debt-free and I
never looked back. Today I have a little
minor debt but something that will be gone within the fiscal calendar year and
because I budget I always have a month’s expenses in the bank with a good
cushion for surprises.
These are among the top three things
that completely impacted my life. I know
there are more and maybe even some other things that were more influential that
I don’t even know about, but these are the ones that came to mind
immediately. I share them because I know
that I am not the only one who had been negatively impacted by pornography, or
not taking the idea of the truth of life seriously, or even never having
learned how to properly manage my finances and I thought it might help you to
consider your own situation.
My prayer is that you too might find
peace in your life by learning things that you may not have thought of before.
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