I wanted to post a part of the book review my friend and Pastor Bruce Roeder has done on this excellent book. It is much too long to post in one blog, but I am giving you the first portion today. The book is titled, Delivered by Desire, By Pastor Daryl Wingerd.
You can find Pastor Bruce at Missio Dei Fellowship, in Kenosha, WI.
He has two blogs and I suggest you check them out! My Ministry Blog My Stuff That Interests Me Blog
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My wife and I like to poke around in antique stores or second hand stores and the other day we stopped at a second hand store in a small town in Wisconsin.
I usually aim for the book section to see what I might get in the history department. As I made my way through the books I spotted a niche in the shop and headed for it hoping to find more books. Instead what I found was a niche full of porn! It took about 2-3 seconds for me to totally realize what I stumbled upon but having realized it I quickly exited the niche. Flee youthful lusts comes to mind here!
My wife must have seen me enter the niche since she met me on the way out and said she had just stumbled upon the niche just prior to me and was on her way to warn me.
We’re not naive so we were not shocked to see the store have a porn niche but we were surprised since I cannot recall ever seeing a wall full of hard core magazine stuff at a second hand resale shop. What was equally troubling was the fact that the young lady behind the counter was no more than 16 or 17-years-old and I’m thinking what kind of dad would let his daughter work in a place that sold hard core porn?
I read in one of my counseling books on porn that magazine porn has declined in popularity but that is due to the INET rather than anyone turning away from the porn industry. This means that the second-hand store was selling the magazines as vintage collectible porn. It’s sad there must be a market.
As I’ve noted in a previous post on the subject of porn the church is not immune to porn nor is it limited to men only. The INET has made porn available for everyone and more and more women also use it. This has led to a widespread acceptance of porn as normal and probably explains why a dad didn’t mind his 16-17-year old daughter running the risk of some guy buying a stack of old porn mags.
The church though is fighting back and there a number of free resources available for people who struggle with this desire of the heart that feels like a disease addiction.
Two the best are by Tim Challies and Mark Driscoll. Look at my previous post and follow the links for your free copy.
But what I want to do for the rest of this article is tune you into a book by Pastor Daryl Wingerd titled Delivered by Desire-The Encouraging Truth About Christians and Sexual Purity. This book is not free but is well worth the $15.00 price tag.
The first thing about this book I noticed is the title, Delivered by Desire with the word by struck over the word from.
This is not merely clever but says something profound. Often time’s men feel trapped by porn and as a result pray that if only the Lord would deliver them from sexual desire their problems would be over.
The Lord can certainly do that if He chooses but the prayer request misses the point. Sexual desire is not evil and God ordained the marriage bed as something holy (Heb. 13:4). A man should desire his wife sexually as well as she for him (1 Cor. 7). The desire is not wrong; what is wrong is when the desire becomes a desire for something outside of what God intended.
Wingerd’s title then begins to apply the only heart solution there is to the problem of porn. I must desire Jesus more than I desire porn. The more I desire Jesus then the more I will fight the temptation of wandering eyes. Fleeing like I did in that second hand shop is an obvious strategy and very much like Joseph did with Potiphar’s wife. In other words guys, don’t linger, run for your life, flee immorality as the Scripture puts it.