In the first blog of this series, we talked about finding hope in the struggle against pornography and I want to continue that discussion in this blog. Most people who labor under the weight of porn hope to eventually experience victory and peace through gaining greater will power and discipline. From my experience, and talking with other guys in similar situations, probably one out of a thousand guys will be able to experience real freedom from porn independently. For most…
A few weeks ago I wrote a blog about the spiritual disciplines and talked about how I planned on writing a series of blogs about them. When I attempted to tackle the first of the three spiritual disciplines, quiet times, I found myself writing a couple blogs about the Bible. Those blogs technically dealt with the subject of quiet times, but they didn’t really bring to light why quiet times are important or rewarding. In this blog I want to…
For most of my walk with Christ, I’ve seen the spiritual disciplines as boring and not very important. I assumed that I didn’t need them to grow in my walk. Then I started to practice them on a consistent basis because of a church class and I realized that I had it backwards, I absolutely need them. I learned that without prayer, quiet times, and community my walk with Christ falters and that impacts everything else in my life. My walk…
Discipline is not something that we naturally have. While we assume that some people have natural inclinations towards discipline and that others naturally struggle with procrastination or laziness, all people share the same potential for a disciplined life. We have the same potential because discipline is a muscle and not a natural ability. I learned this first hand because at one point in my life I lost about 130 pounds over two years. Those two years were not easy and…