Ep 792 - How to win the spiritual battle behind porn addiction
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Hey, hey, what's up my man? It's Sathya Sam here. Welcome to Unleash The Man Within. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you're having a fantastic day. Uh, look, we're going to jump into some awesome content, but before we get there, we are relying solely on your ratings and your reviews to grow this show.
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So appreciate you guys and thank you in advance for your support, for your ratings and for your reviews. Okay, let's jump into today's content. So what we're talking about is how to win the spiritual battle against porn addiction. And, you know, I, I wanted to talk about this because I, I think a lot of my language and messaging in this podcast over the years, you know, we're on episode. So this is, this is, it looks like it's episode 792. Um, and I'm actually just realizing as, as I look at the date this is gonna get released, it's gonna get released on my birthday, so happy birthday to me. Uh, 34 years old, let's go. Um, okay, uh, In these almost 800 episodes we've done, we've talked a lot about not over spiritualizing this and really making sure we're paying attention to the practicals, to the neuroscience.[00:02:00]
Um, and we've talked about spiritual disciplines, we've talked about building your relationship with God. We've talked about some of the theology around purity and sexual integrity and even just the language between those two different words and why they matter so much. All that kind of stuff. What I wanna talk about today though, is just the nuts and bolts of spiritual warfare, spiritual battles, you know, all the stuff that comes with it.
So the, you know, the, the thing is, I know that some of you listening are maybe from a different branch of Christianity than I am. You know, I find myself in Pentecostal charismatic circles, uh, the last. I guess it'd be 10, 12 years now, maybe even a bit longer, uh, where there's a strong emphasis on the Holy Spirit.
There's a strong emphasis on, you know, worship and the presence of God and not that other branches don't emphasize those things or have a value for it, but it's emphasized uniquely, I would say, in, in these branches. Um, I think if we were to compare, you know, reform circles, you know, which I grew up in more reformed and conservative circles, um, and that really has laid the foundation for my [00:03:00] faith.
I love the reformed church so much and for so many different reasons. Uh, and if we were to compare, you know, how somebody in a reformed circle would go about the spiritual battle. Uh, versus somebody who's maybe more charismatic and Pentecostal, it would actually look pretty different. And so what I want to do today is trying to, I'm trying to come up with a, a couple of concepts or principles that are eclectic.
And what I mean by that is they, um, they cover, all the different opinions and views about spiritual warfare. And to me, what, what that really signals is we're going to be talking about some principles, some good old fashioned principles. Okay. Uh, there's one big principle that I want to get across today more than anything else.
All right. And it is simply this in our spiritual warfare. We want to make sure that we are magnifying the right things. Okay, magnifying the right things. David wrote in the Psalms to magnify the Lord forever. Magnify the Lord. What does it mean to magnify the Lord? You know, if you think about [00:04:00] a magnifying glass, it, it, it doesn't change the actual size of something.
Like, if I have an, if there's an ant here on my screen, and I were to take a magnifying glass to it, in the magnifying glass, the ant looks massive. But the actual physical size of the ant has not changed. It's just that in my view now, it's occupying a larger space. It's consumed more of my field of view.
And so when scripture instructs us to magnify the Lord, we can't make God bigger or better than He already is. He's as big and He's as good as it gets. But when we magnify Him, what we're saying is we're letting His goodness Occupy our field of view. And if we were to increasingly magnify the Lord, it means that he's occupying more and more and more of it.
Okay. So David said, magnify the Lord. I think that's a good [00:05:00] instruction for us to follow. I think what happens sometimes in this conversation is we actually end up magnifying the devil. And the conversations we have are all about what the enemy is up to. Uh, they're all about the schemes of the enemy and how he's trying to trip us up.
And I was trying to tempt us, you know, but he's not going to win the battle. And if you, if you hear some people talk about spiritual warfare against sexual sin or anything else, they spend 90 percent of their time talking about the devil. And to me, that's a huge problem. And I think honestly, whether you're Presbyterian, whether you're Reformed, whether you're, you know, Baptist, Charismatic, Pentecostal, Brethren, it doesn't matter where you land.
I think we can all agree. God is superior to the devil and the only way that we win any kind of spiritual war is by the hand of God. It's the grace of God. It's the hand of God. It's the power of God at work. And we know that his power And [00:06:00] his might are exponentially stronger and more superior than anything the enemy could ever muster up.
So where am I going with all this? Well, why would we spend our time talking about what the devil is doing when we could spend our time talking about what God is doing? Because once we start to focus our attention on what God is doing in this situation, Things start to become a lot more interesting.
Number one, we feel a lot more hopeful. Very important part of the recovery process. Uh, but number two, is we actually begin to move forward. You know, it's hard to become more like Christ when you're busy spending your time on the enemy. Right? It's hard to actually move into the things of God if your attention is focused primarily on the devil.
So I'm not, I'm not trying to say we ignore the devil. Okay, hear me out. I'm not trying to say the devil doesn't exist and we can just act like he's not there. We, we have to be vigilant. We have to be militant. We have to be on guard [00:07:00] because he's cunning and he's crafty and he is going to try to trip us up.
But literally like that's the extent of it. We serve a God who's 10 steps ahead of him, who's already defeated him. We, we have been given authority to, to at least take, take a stand against the sinful things that the enemy would try to entice us with. And so, is there, is there a battle at times? Sure. But, God's not, not there like threatened by the enemy like, Oh no, you know, he's tempting Sathia all over again.
You know, what's going on? Like, God's, God's pretty chill about it because he knows he's already won. He knows he's bigger than the enemy. And he knows that the enemy is just a little pawn on his chessboard. Where, where am I going with all this? Where are we landing here today? Plain and simple. What I want to tell you is in your spiritual pursuits, okay?
And in your your attempts to win the spiritual battles focus on the magnitude and the Magnificence of our great and glorious God [00:08:00] because it is God who gives you strength to fight the enemy It is it is God who allows us to become more like Christ so that we can resist the things that are not of Christ It's God.
God does it all. And, and we would be wise to pay attention to what he's doing in our hearts and in our lives and making that the focus of recovery. And when that becomes the focus of recovery, then we're not threatened by the enemy. We don't even really care about what he's up to. Because we become so engrossed in what God is up to.
And to me, this is the healthiest approach I've seen. We've had to really like we've had to undo a lot of bad thinking In some of our clients because they're so obsessed with what the enemy is doing That they can't see anything else, you know, God could be doing a hundred thousand things right in front of their face They wouldn't even see it because they're so obsessed with the enemy.
That's a problem And it doesn't matter if you've been struggling for six decades and porn is ruining your life every single day You Stop focusing on the enemy. Trust me, [00:09:00] focusing on God alone will dramatically shift things in your life. Okay? The last thing I want to mention, okay, really quickly, is that strengthening your relationship with God is the best spiritual warfare.
Because when you are connecting with God, you know, whether it's prayer or it's worship or it's Soaking or it's fasting or it's stillness and silence and solitude or it's reading the Bible or it does not matter Whatever the thing is if you are drawing closer to God that is going to fix your attention on him, right?
It's just inherently going to divert your attention and your energies on him So that he is, you know, the object of your focus and your your affection and your attention And naturally in building that relationship, you're going to be less interested in what the enemy is up to and much more interested in what God has in store for you.
So that's everything for today. I hope you found that helpful. Uh, we've done some other content on spiritual warfare. If you want to go check that out and get a little bit more into the [00:10:00] nuts and bolts and, you know, Deliverance and all that kind of stuff. Uh, we do talk about those things, you know, we have a value for them, but I want to keep it a little bit broader today.
I hope you got some value and if you know somebody who would benefit from this, please make sure you share it with them. That really helps us grow the show. Guys, thank you so much for listening. We'll talk soon. Bye bye. [00:11:00]
