By Pastor Ken Keeler
“For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ…” 2 Corinthians 10:3-5
The statistics about pornography are shocking. Every second, more than $3,000 is spent on it and nearly 30,000 Internet users view it. Every 39 minutes, a new pornographic video is created. The pornography industry pulls in about $100 billion in annual revenue worldwide. At least 4.2 million websites, or 12 percent of the total, are pornographic. Every day, Internet users make 68 million pornographic search engine requests, or about one-quarter of the total. While men are the main consumers of pornography, one of every three visitors to an adult website is a woman.
We are shaped by our thought life. That is why what is going on in our head is very important. We saw in Part 1 of this blog: 1) We need to realize we are in a spiritual battle, vs. 3; 2) We need to apply by faith the proper spiritual weapons, vs. 4.
Now we want look at applying the right strategy for victory, vs. 5 “We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.” The idea here is to continually be tearing down the negative thoughts that lead to sin, by force, by the power of Christ.
We must get tough with anything that comes to our mind that is against God’s truth. But this is only half of the right strategy. We must also be “taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.” We are to bring them under the control of the Holy Spirit in line with His Word.
In order to have freedom from sin’s control over our mind, we need to remember that victory over the power of sin is won at the threshold of our mind, not in our mind. At the threshold, it is still temptation, but once we accept the thought and let it in our mind and dwell on it, it becomes sin. It is far, far better to deal with the temptation at the threshold then to try to deal with it after we let it into our mind.
Remember the old vacuum cleaner salesman who came to the threshold of your door and sought entrance into your home to sell you one? If you let him in, you are in trouble, because you will have a hard time getting rid of him! It is much better dealing with him at the threshold by saying an authoritative “no!” and slamming the door shut!
So, when the power of sin sends tempting thoughts to the threshold of our mind we need to slam the door shut by saying an authoritative “no!” to them to defeat them and take them captive to Christ by the Holy Spirit’s power within us. In part 3, we will apply this by using the 4 “R” Approach.