 You don't even watch it or not even tempted to watch it. That's great. But today I'm gonna share with you something that is just as dangerous that you might be allowing into your life even now. That might sound extreme, but let me explain. Before we jump in, my name is Isaac David and this is The Daily Disciple where I equip you to follow Jesus daily. I make videos every single week, so subscribe so you don't miss any of them. Okay, let's get into it. Now when we think about somebody that's addicted to pornography or they use it quite frequently, maybe they call themselves a Christian, maybe they are a Christian, there's this fight going on within their soul, there's this fight going on actively because they realize, hey, I have a problem. This is not cool with me and this is not cool with God. So there's that understanding that something needs to change here. Maybe that doesn't mean that they're actually beating it or they're overcoming it in the moment. Maybe they're falling into it more often than they're actually finding victory. But in their heart, they know what's going on. They know this is a problem and they're making steps. Maybe they're just small steps, but active steps to overcome it. So they're getting desperate. They're making things, they're doing things that might seem a little bit more drastic to people looking from the outside, but to them it's necessary and it's worth it because they understand the severity of the problem. There's that understanding of what is truly going on. That situation is still dangerous, but at least they understand that there's a problem. When we go and look at us here, the ones that would say, hey, I'm not addicted, I'm cool, I'm fine. We don't realize there's a problem, but there is. Something is subtly seducing our souls and what is it? Think about how much time you spend in consuming media of all kinds. So we're talking social media, we're talking TV, we're talking movies, we're talking music. Maybe you have a job that you can listen to podcasts or music all day. If that's the case, the vast majority of your day, you're spent consuming media. Maybe if that's not the case, even still you're off time, you're hours when you're at home or you're doing the dishes or you're taking out the garbage or you're just doing nothing, you're consuming some kind of media. You're scrolling on TikTok, you're scrolling on Instagram reels. You're like in photos, like you're taking in your consuming media almost all the time. Now I wanna ask you, and I want you to be honest with me, make a rough estimate of how much of that content that you're consuming is sexually provocative material. Think about it for a second, okay, how much is it? Maybe think about the podcast you listen to. Maybe it's not directly or overtly sexually provocative. That's the whole point of the video, but is it included in there? Is that included in the podcast? Is that part of the jokes that they're making? What about the music that you're listening to? What percentage of it is it? And when you think about it, maybe you'd say, oh, maybe like 5%, maybe like 10%, 25%, maybe maybe maybe even like 3%. I wanna ask you a serious question. Like what do you think that material is doing to you? What do you think those sexually provocative jokes are that music or the imagery used? It's like, is that good for your soul? Is that good for you? You'd probably say, well, if you're a Christian, you say, I know that's not good for me. I know that, I know that's not gonna be building me up, but it's such a small portion. If I were to give you a cup of water and I were to offer it up to you and say, hey, I just poured this glass of water for you. I know you're pretty thirsty, you can go ahead and drink it. And you bring it up to your mouth and just as you bring it up to your mouth, I say, oh, well, yeah, by the way, I actually got like a spoonful of toilet water that I just poured in there as well, just to add a little bit of spice to it. I hope that's no big problem. You would be rightfully disgusted because it doesn't matter that 99% of this water is good. It's been contaminated by something that is disgusting. Now I get it, it can be easy to make excuses for the type of content that we're consuming. Hey, it's only like 2% of what's going on in this podcast. It's not a big deal. I'm a strong Christian, I can deal with it. I just kind of skimp past that stuff. It doesn't affect me. It's all good. And I was in the exact same boat. I listened to numerous comedy podcasts throughout my late teens and just as I was at work listening to these podcasts and I find them so funny and I really enjoyed the humor in it. But then there'd be times, maybe 10 minute periods, five minute periods where they go on tangents of really kind of sexually perverse lines of thinking and they laugh about it and then maybe they'd move on to something else. Now, if somebody were to ask me at the time, I was like, why are you listening to that? I would say, hey, I get that that's not the best thing to listen to but at the same time, I'm a strong Christian. I know that that's wrong. I wouldn't say anything like that and it's not a big deal that I'm listening to it. Like it'll be over soon. So it's not a big deal. You know what happened that really caught me off guard? Is I began to start to laugh at those things that they were saying. And I began to kind of think up my own jokes in that context too. My own dirty jokes or laugh at other people's dirty jokes in person. Things that I would never laugh at before but because I had trained my conscience to be okay with it that this is something that I can consume in good accord with God that I'm okay. The Bible talks about guarding your heart and we got to be honest with ourselves when we say, are we really guarding our heart? Are we letting intruders in through the back door or through the window because it's not a big deal or there's not that many of them. It's like, no, but really, why are we doing this to ourselves? We know that these passions wage war on our souls. We know that God hates sexual immorality. He hates those jokes. He hates that imagery. He hates sexual perversion and sexual distortion of God's good design. So why are we gonna play into it? Is it just for our own personal enjoyment just because we're having a good time? How like lately do we value our relationship with God if we're gonna just let this impede on our relationship with him? Maybe you like me think about being married one day and you think, you know, when I'm married I will do everything to protect my marriage. I will do whatever it takes to make sure that it is strong and it is healthy and I'll do whatever it takes. But then we turn to our relationship with God here and now when we say, ah, well, I enjoy watching this or I like watching this movie. I know it's got plenty of nudity and I know it's like, not, you know God glorifying it all but still like it's not a big deal and you know God's okay with it right over. Really, we're so passionate about this idea of protecting our future marriage or our current marriage and our spouse and yet when we turn to God in a relationship with God we're just so quickly to just let things impede on it that are gonna cause walls of just disconnection between us and God that it could put strongholds in our life that are like, man, I gotta kind of sort through this muck and this mire. I can't really see God that clearly right now because I'm still enticed by sin and my affections are towards sin and not to God. I had to be really honest with myself and I gave up pretty much all the comedy podcasts that I was listening to because they were just so filled with sexually provocative jokes and it just wasn't good for my heart, wasn't good for my soul. That's not, those aren't the kind of things that I want my brain to be thinking about or my mind to be going or for me to laugh at. I don't think that's God glorifying. That was tough because that really brought a lot of enjoyment and pleasure to my life and the idea of giving it up was kind of sad. Hey, and maybe you think I'm blown stuff out of proportion, Isaac's not a big deal, man, I guess you're just not really a strong Christian, man. It's okay, you know, you gotta do what you gotta do but it's fine for me. Like, okay, if that's how you feel, that's okay. I don't need to try to convince you, ultimately, that my standards are the perfect standards. All I'm saying is I want you to be careful because these things are not neutral. It's not that it just kind of goes in one ear out the other. It is impacting you. I think about when a few years ago, I was really not eating well. I was eating like junk food all the time. I'd binge at 12 p.m., I'd get home and I'd just go crazy on chips or whatever else, like multiple peanut butter sandwiches. It was just, it was a wreck, right? And I didn't feel good when I woke up in the morning. I felt awful. I was gaining a bunch of weight. I was not working out at all and it was just awful. I was fueling myself with something that actually didn't really nourish me and the idea of giving it up was really burdensome. I was like, I don't want to stop doing this. This is great. And when I'm in the moment, it's awesome. It's part of my routine. I really enjoy it and it's probably not that big a deal. I'm young and most of the other aspects of my life are fine. But here's the thing. I did get to the point where I realized this is gonna have side effects later on. Like I can't see what it's doing to me now but I know it's not good. So I stopped and what happened? Well, initially it was hard, right? But then eventually it became less and less burdensome because I stopped craving the junk food and the binging that I did before. And instead I was actually just enjoying the results of actually being nourished, of eating good food and feeling full and feeling refreshed and not feeling awful all the time. And that brought a lot of joy and kind of perpetuated this positive cycle of wanting to continue on that path. Instead of if I were to just continue and say, well, it's too burdensome. Like I don't want to give up the stuff I already have. You need to realize first that maybe you don't see what it's doing to you now but you gotta look longer down the road. You gotta look further down the road to realize have a little wisdom here and say, okay, this isn't neutral in my life and this isn't a positive thing that I'm taking this in. So why am I gonna do this? Why do I want to just continue to invite this in my life? I'm not saying you can't watch videos anymore or listen to podcasts, but I'm saying let's reorient our attention and our affection off of these things that are not gonna be good for us onto things that are. This is how the Bible addresses the sexual temptation that we might experience. For the lips of the forbidden woman dripped with honey. Her speech is smoother than oil but in the end she is a bitter wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death. Her steps follow the path to sheole. The key point of this video honestly is that we gotta stop putting pornography in its own box and everything else in like a, okay, you know, Christian discernment type of box. No, no, no, it's not just that pornography is waging war on our souls and it is the seductive woman that has honey on her lips and that is leading you to death. It's not just pornography. Actually, that box is a lot bigger than we would expect but instead we kind of numbed our conscience because oh, it's not on the porn website. No, it's just on YouTube. It's not a big deal. It's just on TikTok. It's not a big deal. Instagram. No, no, no, we want a sensitive conscience. Something that we know where, okay, God, this is not honoring to you. I'm gonna look away from this. I'm gonna scroll away from this. I'm gonna block this person. I'm gonna unsubscribe from here. I'm gonna stop listening to this podcast because I care about walking in holiness. I choose holiness over honey, over instant gratification. I want a lifelong legacy of choosing God over sin. And God is going to empower me to do that. When I walk in the spirit, I will not gratify the desires of the flesh but we need to pray to God. We need to ask him, hey, God, this is where I'm at. I'm sorry for not really acknowledging that this has been a sin in my life. I'm making excuses for it. I'm sorry for that. And God, I wanna follow you in this area. Empower me by your spirit to do that every single day. That's where you begin in repentance and a renewed faith in God for him to strengthen us as we seek to follow him daily. Thanks so much for watching this video, guys. If you enjoyed it, I ask you to check out the link in my description and check out Patreon today. It is the way that people support my mission of equipping people to follow Jesus daily. If that's a mission that you wanna get behind, if you enjoy the content, if you want access to all sorts of exclusive rewards, you can check that out down below. I would love to see you there. It would be a huge blessing. Until next time, I'll see you later. God bless.