23 | February | 2017 | Craig T. Owens

February 2017
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Pornography: Let’s #Endit

February 23, 2017 — Craig T. Owens

Today is the day the End It Movement is shining a light on the dark slave trading and human trafficking practices around the globe. One of the biggest things fueling slavery is when people click on pornography.

NOT COOL!

“However harmless or private pornography may seem, it is not.

Pornography blinds us to God (Matthew 5:8). It blurs our eyes to his goodness, truth, and beauty.
Pornography trains us to treat women as objects, as less than human. It portrays them as possessions to be used and enjoyed, and then thrown away.
Pornography fuels sex slavery—real people held against their will and raped repeatedly—all over the world, even in the United States, even in your city or the major city near you.
Pornography belittles real beauty—like the fear of the Lord (Proverbs 31:30)—and replaces it with a cheap and fading imitation.
Pornography makes sex small and momentary, like a cigarette, instead of massive and lifelong, like it is in marriage.
Pornography robs us of some of the delight we might have had with our spouse. It keeps us from experiencing and enjoying them and their bodies without a fog of images from our past.
Pornography quickly bankrupts trust in a relationship. It encourages us to lie and hide from others, to walk in darkness and then build walls around ourselves in the darkness.
Pornography grossly stunts our maturity, the development of our mind and our gifts—our abilities to understand God and love others.
Pornography pursues an undergraduate degree in selfishness, training us over and over to focus on ourselves, prefer ourselves, and serve ourselves.
Pornography keeps us from all kinds of ministry, disqualifying many and demotivating even more.
Pornography is teaching many children an awful, evil distortion of love and sex even before their parents explain the truth to them.” —Marshall Segal

We can make a huge step toward helping to #ENDIT if we can convince others of the damage pornography is doing to themselves, as well as to countless sex slaves around the world.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: End It, End It Movement, human trafficking, Marshall Segal, pornography, sex trafficking, slavery. Leave a Comment »

Thursdays With Oswald—You Don’t Have To Get Worn Out By Sin

February 23, 2017 — Craig T. Owens

This is a weekly series with things I’m reading and pondering from Oswald Chambers. You can read the original seed thought here, or type “Thursdays With Oswald” in the search box to read more entries.

You Don’t Have To Get Worn Out By Sin

To begin with we are not prepared to accept Jesus Christ’s diagnosis of the human heart, we prefer to trust our own ignorant innocence. Jesus Christ says, “Out of the heart proceed fornication, adultery, murder, lasciviousness, thieving, lying,” etc. (Mark 7:21-23). No man has ever believed that. We have not the remotest conception that what Jesus says about the human heart is true until we come up against something further on in our lives. We are apt to be indignant and say—“I don’t believe those things are in my heart,” and we refuse the diagnosis of the only Master there is of the human heart. We need never know the plague of our own heart and the terrible possibilities in human life if we will hand ourselves over to Jesus Christ; but if we stand on our own right and wisdom at any second an eruption may occur in our personal lives, and we may discover to our unutterable horror that we can be murderers, etc. …

Many a man out of havoc and sin and the clanging of the gates of Paradise on the irreparable past, has come to Jesus Christ with a life exhausted by sin. Why should he? We know what Jesus Christ can do for a man in that condition, but why cannot we see what He can do for the man who is not exhausted by sin? God does rescue the man who is down and out in sin, but there is no reason why any man should get there.

From Shade Of His Hand

In this book, Oswald Chambers is walking us through Solomon’s thoughts in Ecclesiastes. Solomon went to the highest of human ecstasies and lowest of human depravity to discover one thing: Nothing apart from a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ has any meaning at all.

If you have been worn out by sin, come to Jesus and find relief.

But don’t ever, ever, EVER feel like sinning is unavoidable, or that you have to have a “history” in order for God to forgive you. Come to Jesus before sin wears you out, and know the freedom of living a life victorious over sin!