Video coming soon. The video teaching for Day 11 is still in production. Read the full lesson below, it will be added here as soon as it is ready.
We're covering the sacrifices required to win Level 2. We've talked about giving up self-pleasure and self-trust. Today's the third: sacrificing your comfort and convenience.
"Tear it out and throw it away"
Jesus said one of the most jarring things He ever said, and people have been trying to soften it ever since:
"If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away."
Jesus isn't literally telling you to mutilate yourself. He's using extreme language on purpose, because He knows us. He knows we negotiate deals with evil. He knows we want to win the battle while keeping all our options open and all our comforts intact. He knows we'll find the most painless version of repentance possible and then wonder why nothing changes.
So He overstates it, deliberately. He's saying: stop negotiating. Shock the system. Whatever is feeding this: remove it.
Paul says the same thing with a different word: "Flee youthful lusts." Not manage them. Not reduce your exposure by a reasonable percentage. Flee: the word means run like the building is on fire, the kind of run where you don't stop to grab your jacket on the way out.
Notice something in that verse about the eye and hand: it says your right eye, your right hand: since most people are right-handed, that's your best hand, your strongest eye. That's comfort and convenience. The things you've kept close because giving them up would be genuinely inconvenient, genuinely uncomfortable, genuinely costly. And that cost is exactly the point.
Install a filter today, not tomorrow
If you don't have a filter on all your devices (laptop, phone, work computer), do it today. This matters enough that we'll talk about it again tomorrow too, but don't wait until then. Run, don't walk.
You don't have to white-knuckle this alone.
Join men walking the same six levels, installing the same safeguards, inside the community built for exactly this.
Two reasons men resist this, and why neither holds up
First: many men leave options in place because, way down deep, they want to keep the option to fail. It gets dressed up in different costumes:
- "I can't do that, it's my work phone."
- "It'll probably block some sites I actually use for work."
- "It might give false positives and freak out my wife or accountability partner."
- "I'll do it next week, I've got to finish this project first."
Call it what it is. You're falling victim to your own betrayal, because it feels like medicine for some stress or pain in your life: your little "me time" option when you're tired, the thing you keep in your pocket because it's yours and you don't want to let go of it.
Second: some men feel like removing access and options is weakness, that a strong man should be able to have access to everything and just choose right through sheer willpower.
That is not strength. That is pride dressed up as strength.
Joseph didn't stand in the doorway with Potiphar's wife and negotiate. He didn't try to manage the situation with maturity and self-control. He ran so fast she was left holding his coat. He sacrificed his dignity in that moment: sacrificed looking composed and in control. He got out.
What do you need to get out of?
What comfort, what convenience, what easy access have you been protecting because giving it up feels like too much?
That's the sacrifice today. Make the decision. Not tomorrow. Today.
This is Day 11 of Victory Over Pornography. Continue to Day 12 →