The Challenges in Addressing Sexual Immorality - Radical

The Challenges in Addressing Sexual Immorality

Why is addressing sexual immorality so difficult for Christians? What are the challenges that uniquely accompany internet-centered sexual immorality? In this video, Heath Lambert explains two avenues in which sexual immorality exists, and how Christians can faithfully address it. As Christians seek to overcome the challenges that accompany addressing sexual immorality, they must first recognize that it’s not a new problem – it has existed since the fall of Adam and Eve. However, the dawn of the internet has made sexual immorality more secretive and harder to catch. Internet history can be cleared, but sexual immorality will ultimately come to light. Christians are tasked with bringing darkness to light, not allowing darkness to remain hidden.

  1. In the Garden
  2. On the Internet
  3. Bringing it to Light

Yeah, so the problem of sexual immorality and sexual impurity is not new. The sin is as old as Adam and Eve when they ate the forbidden fruit, and they looked at each other, and they realized that they were naked.

Addressing Sexual Immorality in Today’s Culture

So, there’s actually something about sexual immorality that’s hardwired into the sinful nature of human beings. Different cultures in different periods of human history have had different manifestations of that sexual immorality, but it’s not new. This is something that every civilization, since the dawn of time, has struggled against.

What is new today is our technological ability to purvey our sexual immorality. So, a sociologist by the name of Al Cooper, he looked at the internet, and he said, “Internet pornography is the crack cocaine of pornography,” because it is so available, because it is so anonymous, and there is just so much of it. It’s so pervasive.

Don’t Hid In the Dark

And, so, in the old days, if you wanted to be immoral, you had to be immoral with a person who was in the room. You had to go up to them and ask them if they wanted to commit adultery, and they might say no to you. Or even if they said yes, now everybody’s having to cover their tracks and hope nobody finds out with. Even with the advent of pornography in the middle of the last century, you have to walk up to a counter and ask some person standing there if you can have this awful material behind the counter, and they think whatever they think about you.

But with internet pornography, all that’s different. You can commit adultery with a harem of women online, and nobody has to know. Delete the internet history, close out the window, and you’re good, it seems, for a while.

And, so, what the new challenge is, is our technological ability to purvey immorality and our ability to hide it in the dark for a longer period of time.

Heath Lambert, M.Div, Ph.D. is the Executive Director at the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors and also serves as the Executive Pastor for Discipleship and Family Life at First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, FL. He is a faculty member at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Boyce College, where he has taught since 2006. Heath is also a founding council board member of the Biblical Counseling Coalition.

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