Be Like Forest Gump

I bet you've never heard that before. "Be like Forest Gump." You have to have seen the movie to know what I mean. But there's a reason, a entirely spiritual reason to why we all need to be like Forest. But before I explain this, I'd like to first share with you part of my past. As Leonardo DeCaprio said numerous times in Inception, "There's something you must understand about me." When I was ten years old, I unwittingly stumbled across pornography. It twisted, changed, skewered, and morphed my young and innocent mind into a sick and lewd mind. You have to go through what I did to understand precisely what I mean. What I've done is in the past, and I'm trying to recover from it. I still slip up, but that's part of the recovering process. Unfortunately, those images are burned into my mind. I just have to simply try to think of them, and I can instantly think about almost every single image I ever saw online. I'm sure I spent hundreds of hours surfing webpage after webpage, and I can recall nearly every image. That's just the way guys are wired, and I know two dozen more young men who can vouch for what I'm saying. It's just how it is.

Sexual immorality is like an injury. I know injury can be an awkward word often reserves for big boo-boos or athletes, but sexal sin is like an injury. Picture yourself with a skull fracture. You have a head injury, and you desperately need recovery and healing, otherwise you'll die. A key step to healing is to protect that head injury. You must guard it, keeping infection and bad things away from it. If you guard it and look after it long enough, that fracture heals and it is better than new! Dealing with sexual sin is the exact same thing. When you become introduced to sexual immorality, your mind has been injury. If you want healing, you must guard youself, protect your mind, stay away from impurities lest you become infected with disease. How? How can you keep yourself from looking, doing, wishing, thinking?

Philippains 4:8 says, "Whatever is true... noble... right... pure... lovely... admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things." That's saying to think about pure things, things that aren't lewd or impure. If you train yourself over time to focus on pure things, you'll become trained to not have sinful thoughts. There are a few good techniques to train yourself. First, you must be trained to bounce your eyes. This simply means to avoid looking. But why not look? After all, it's only window-shopping, I'm not buying! I'm only looking at the menu, I'm not ordering! Jesus said in Matthew 5:29, "If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away." Kind of gross, right? I hope He wasn't being literal, otherwise I would be eye-less. He was encouraging us to not even look, because looking is the start of a downward spiral. The second is to replace evil thoughts with good ones. Jesus stated, "I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart."

Here is where we must be like Forest. Paul wrote that we should "flee from sexual imorality." Flee! Run, get away, take a walk, clear your head, turn off the TV, unplug the computer, sit at a different table. Do whatever it takes to stay away from sexual immorality. Run, Christians, run.