[Steve Myers] I ran across some startling statistics about pornography in our world today. Did you know that the most popular porn website receives 4.4 billion views a month? In fact, that stat was from 2012, so it’s already old. What would it be today? Some of these statistics are amazing. Thirty percent of all data transferred across the internet, they say, is porn. Now here’s a surprising one. Oftentimes we think this is just a male problem, just a guy issue, but it’s not that way any longer. There was a study that was published in the Journal of Adolescent Research – they found that forty-nine percent of young women agree that porn’s acceptable. Forty-nine – almost half! Almost half say it’s acceptable. But the issue is, it’s unacceptable. It’s unacceptable. God’s Word says this sexual immorality is unacceptable. He tells us we’ve got to come out of this world. We can’t be like those one in five women who use the internet for sexual purposes. That’s what the stats say. Sixty-seven percent of men say it’s perfectly acceptable, there’s nothing wrong – they don’t even see that there’s a porn problem. But you know, all you have to do is look at this world, and we can see those contributing factors over and over and over again.

As we’re striving to be Christians, we know God’s Word says it is unacceptable. Now God doesn’t leave us all on our own with any strategy and not be able to fix this thing, because we can fix it. There’s an interesting passage that Paul tells the young minister Timothy – it’s over in 2 Timothy 2:22. It’s an easy one to remember because it’s all twos – 2 Timothy 2:22. Here’s what he tells Timothy: “Flee youthful lusts”. So he starts out with a strategy here. The first one is flee. Or we could just say, we’ve got to run. And he says we’ve got to run away, right? We’ve got to run away, he says, from lusts. So we’re running.

In fact, it doesn’t stop there. He also tells us then, keep running. But we’ve got to do it a different way. He says, “Pursue” – which is kind of like running – but notice what he says to pursue. He says, “Pursue righteousness, faith, love, peace.” So it’s not just enough to try to run away from porn. But he says, if we just run away, it’ll probably catch up with us. We’d better be running toward peace. We’d better be running toward purity. We’d better be running toward those things that are going to make a difference in our life. So not just running away, but we’ve got to run toward.

In fact, it doesn’t stop there. He talks about a third way to run. He say’s we’ve got to run with – he says, “Pursue righteousness, faith, love, peace, with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart.” Don’t ever think that you’re alone in this struggle, because we’re not. Find those who can help and run with them.

So let’s utilize this strategy. We don’t have to be buried by porn. We can come out of that. With God’s help, we can run – run away, we can run toward God, and we can run with those who are of the same heart and mind.

That’s BT Daily. We’ll see you next time.