Pornified Mind: Reclaiming your thought life—Part 3
To begin reclaiming your mind from the accumulation of porn’s images, you are going to have to do the hard work of “putting off” patterns of behavior that keep you enslaved. But oh, it is so worth doing so!
Read Dave’s related blog on Renewing Your Mind from Pornography.
If you’ve been engaging pornography for any length of time, you have a toxic waste dump in your mind that takes time and intentionality to clean up. In this short video series on renewing your mind, we talked about the importance of taking thoughts captive, which means considering them in God’s presence. In the last video, we talked about specific ways to engage God, turning temptation into opportunities for worship. In this video, I want to briefly consider the importance of intentionally putting off things that keep you stuck in old patterns of thinking.
By the end of our intro group at Harvest, as men grow in sexual obedience, they usually begin to experience conviction in other areas of their life. First, they start intentionally battling against their roving eyes. They realize that this low level of exploitation of others, reducing them to commodities to consume, is part of their problem.
Further, it impacts their cultural engagement. Some men realize that listening to sports radio with the incessant ads for strip clubs is a hindrance to keeping their minds focused on Christ and his kingdom. Many have a growing conviction that various forms of entertainment, like movies and cable shows depicting nudity and sexuality, not only entice them to sin but are actually dishonoring to God. They become spiritually attuned in ways they hadn’t been for years, since they’ve been searing their conscience through their sin.
Conversely, men who continue to indulge their flesh in these seemingly less significant ways struggle to make real traction overcoming their enslavement to pornography.
So I have some questions for you. Where do you need greater conviction? How might your use of entertainment be part of the problem, keeping you stuck in a pornified way of viewing the world? Are you actively fighting against the second look when you see someone you’re attracted to? And as we’ve been discussing in the past couple videos, are you more quickly engaging God when that happens? Are you living with an increased awareness of his presence?
Romans 12:2 says, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” This means an important part of renewing your mind is breaking the ways we’ve been fitted into the world’s mold.
You need to realize that pornography has radically warped your worldview in all kinds of ways: views of sex and sexual activity, diminishing the intrinsic value of humanity, and pricing people according to their sex appeal. Until you start intentionally distancing yourself from all the ways this twisted worldview is being reinforced, you will not experience a renewed mind, and you’ll stay stuck in these patterns of sexual sin.
