BACKSLIDING TO HELL by Mike Peralta (best books to read in your 20s txt) 📕

Lord had placed upon is life. 1st Corinthians 7: 7-9. Most men and I believe most women do not have that gift. At the same time God clearly states that we are not to walk in any sexual sin. Sex is a gift that is not to be opened until you are married, sex is a gift that He gave to bless a husband and wife not us singles. Yes, God gave me a sex drive and I thank God He did, but it is not my master, Jesus is.

Here is part of the key, is Jesus your Lord? Are you subject to His will and not to your own?

When I went to God seeking deliverance from drinking it never happened. I could not understand why. I begged God but alcohol was my master. I sought Christ to get a problem out of my life. I did not give up my life to get Christ's life. It was I that lived not Christ Jesus that lived in me.

When I finally realized that masturbating was every bit as damming as being a drug addict, and had just as much control of me, and was just as destructive to me and those around me, just as grievous to my Lord and Savior who died for me that I could be free, it was then that I saw what I had to do. I had to go; I had to die, so Jesus could have that area of my life and live through that area of my life.

When I started to seek God just to know Him more, just to draw closer to Him, and know and love the One who made me, He began to show me why I drank and took drugs. God is a loving Father and He wants to remove anything that separates Him from His children. He started to show me the roots of the problem were as I had always focused on the fruit of the tree. He then helped me pull up the roots and the tree died.

It is the same with masturbation don't go seeking God just to get rid of the problem. Don't seek God just to get something from Him, seek Him to get to know Him. He knows it is a serious problem and He wants you free of it more than you do. If you are truly born again from above, you are a part of His body. He wants to impart His life in you. He may show you a lot of roots you will have to pull. There may be some things you may have to repent of that you never tied into the question of 'why does this urge to sin win in me?'

There is a major difference between the sin of being a drunk or a drug addict and the sin of masturbation. I did not have a God given desire to get drunk and puke all over. I learned that all on my own. I do have a God given desire to find the woman God has for me and get married. Masturbation is the abuse of that gift. I'm already cheating on my wife and I'm not even married yet. If like Paul I had the gift to be single I would not have that desire at all. Many people say they have that 'gift' but are trying to stamp out the desire when God wanted them to have a wife and they live a lonely miserable life or they secretly sin.

Yes it is a God given desire but His will was never for it to be your master. Here is what I did. First I made a decision to give God all of my life. I thought I had but I had just given Him bits and pieces before I realized what I was doing and grew tired of the 'piece game'. And here is what you must do, you must totally surrender, give it up, and abandon yourself to God. Jesus said, "If a man puts his hand to the plow and looks back he is no longer fit to be my disciple." The more I really got to know Jesus and His character, the more I became determined to let nothing come between us. God and His will became the primary focus of my life. And now it is the only focus of my life.

If I am to marry, that will be great, if I am to remain single, then that will be great too. I asked God to take the desire away. He didn't but I would have been perfectly content if He did.

Let me just put in here that I learned not to care what people think about me. The whisperers, why does he not get married and do this or that? I am not going to stand and give an account to those people I will to Jesus Christ.

I also realized that this sin would take me to Hell. When you deliberately sin you deliberately reject Christ. We do not know the day or the hour or the second of the rapture. Ask yourself what you want to be doing when Jesus returns for His bride without spot or wrinkle. Laying there masturbating was not on my list.

I determined to fight it. It is an abuse of a God given gift. It is abnormal sex. Not only is it grievous to God but you are also teaching yourself abnormal sexual behavior.

It will be a battle, you have trained yourself to get your quick fix every bit as much as drug addict needs a shot or a snort or a hit of his drug. Your flesh will want it. Remember, Gods Word says to walk after the Spirit not the flesh. When the thought or desire first enters your mind the battle is on. If you had an enemy that was trying to kill you and you hear the sound of a bullet entering the chamber of his gun you don't stand in an open field and decide what to do, YOU MOVE, you react, you get to some cover and you get ready to fire back. Someone once said "you can't keep a bird from flying over your head, but you can stop it from making a nest in your hair." You can't stop the thought from entering your mind but you don't have to dwell on it, MOVE.

Take every thought captive to Christ get you mind on God and what He's called you to do. Get under the cover of the Almighty. The flesh may say to you 'I want it, I want it', again and again. And it can be strong, it may the first time you really ever battled your flesh before, if it is, consider it a revelation, now you understand a little better all those scriptures about fighting the flesh, so fight it.

As I said, especially at first, it can be a real battle but it is a real man, a grown up man, a man of God who is in control of his flesh, one who does not let his flesh control and dictate to him. A real man fights, it is trying to kill you, and sin does not show mercy. You are commanded by God to treat it the same way. I don't care if it attacks you so powerfully that at three in the morning you get up and wax your car to get your mind off it, if that still doesn't work buy a bigger car, buy a fleet if you have to but you can not give in.

Quit watching movies and TV. shows with sexual content, any sexual content, quit the books, the magazines.

Romans chapter twelve verse two: "Do not be conformed to this world (this age), [fashioned after and adapted to its external, superficial customs], but be transformed (changed) by the (entire) renewal of your mind [by its new ideals and its new attitude], so you may prove [for yourselves] what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God, even the thing which is good and acceptable and perfect [in His sight for you]."

Your friends might give you grief and say it's only a PG or R rated movie even 15 year olds go to them. Yaw, they do and look at the fruit.

Your mind is a container; God gives you the power to renew it. If you keep putting trash in it, it is a trash container and all you are doing is giving your enemy more bullets to fire at you. Put Godly things in and it will become a Godly container. Get back to basics. Read Gods Word and fellowship with those that are serious about serving the Lord and not hiding their own sin, confess your sins one to another, bring it to the light, it's the devil who works in the dark. Pray and ask for God to reveal His will for your life and I mean every part of it. Then do it. Jesus said, "Where I am my servant shall be." Not the other way around. Gods has a plan for you He thought up before you were born, get to it. If you want God to reveal more of His will to you, you first have to do what He has already revealed. Why would He show you more of His plan when you have not obeyed what you already know?

Remember its Heaven and Hell serious. Staying in and repeating a known sin is your choice and you are choosing it over God. God will give you the victory but you have to fight the battle.

As you do these things and anything else the Lord may show you the attacks become less fierce and farther apart. But always be prepared. You have to as Paul said "die daily" and Romans chapter six verse eleven and twelve. "Even so consider yourselves also dead to sin and your relation to it broken, but alive to God, living in unbroken fellowship with Him, in Christ Jesus. Let no sin therefore rule as king in your mortal, short-lived, perishable, bodies, to make you yield to its cravings and be subject to its lusts and evil passions."

I have also been asked to write an article on dating and courtship because the next question I usually get from single men is how do I find a wife? If they have read the Word they usually quote 1st Corinthians 7:27 emphasizing the "seek not a wife" part with a pained look on their face.

Dating and courtship is a whole different study and I will write more on this later. But in brief I will share this since masturbating is sin and it's good to know what is not. The gift of sex is for married couples, that they may express in the physical the love God gave them, for each other to be shared between them alone.

First if anyone can find anywhere in the Word of God that dating as we understand it today is scriptural I would like to see it. It is not. That does not mean you can't meet and get to know members of the opposite sex. But the Word is clear that you treat them as sisters.

"Treat older women like mothers and younger women like sisters, in all purity." 1st Timothy 5:2.

Read the in all purity part again. You don't decide you like her and drive off to Lookout point even if she wants to. Trust me you don't want the girl that is willing to break her vow before God and you are doing the same. In fact if you really love and respect her you would never put her in a place where there could be even a hint of sexual immorality. The devil is a liar and the accuser of the Saints he does not care that nothing has happened between you and her. He will slander her and you if you give him the chance. A Godly husband