Gen3x

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Count the Cost!

The Ashley Madison hack has spurred a lot of talk about adultery. An untold number of its clients have already resigned jobs or been served divorce papers. A few have even committed suicide.

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We can justify anything if we try hard enough, right? But the only way to justify adultery is closing our eyes to the terrible costs it exacts in our lives and the lives of those closest to us.

We can all do the math for ourselves, but by my counting there are at least eight major reasons to run, not walk, from infidelity.

  1. It’ll cost your reputation. People in our culture disagree about morality, but there’s remarkableagreement about one sin: infidelity. It’s wrong and everyone knows it.No one’s handing out scarlet A’s today, but people will find out, and they will not forget—even if some are gracious enough to forgive.
  2. It might cost your job. Most affairs start at work, and many affairs end careers. If you’re in ministry, this is a given. You’re canned. You might get reinstated or hired at another church, but don’t count on it.Depending on company policy, you could get the axe in all sorts of other job environments, too—especially if you’re having an affair with a subordinate. You might as well update your resumé right now. Even Ashley Madison’s CEO is on the street after the hack and news of his own affairs.
  3. It’ll cost you money. The bad thing about losing your job is that affairs are expensive. Secrecy and coverups come at a price. But it won’t end there.Divorce lawyers aren’t cheap, plus roughly half your assets. And don’t forget alimony and child support.
  4. It’ll probably cost your family. Two thirds of marriages are toast after an affair, and most of those that survive take years of repentance, forgiveness, counseling, and healing to find any sort of restoration. Betrayal is a hard thing to overcome.The same goes for kids. If you have children, they’ll be confused and hurt by your betrayal. Kids suffer special difficulty in cases of infidelity because they’re usually stuck in the middle, holding a burden no one should have to carry.
  5. It’ll cost you friendships. Betrayal hurts all relationships, not just families. Don’t be surprised if close friends pull away when news of your adultery gets out—which it will.Some will take the side of your spouse. Some will feel so angry and frustrated they can’t stand to be around you. Others will find your new reality just plain awkward—especially if you insist your friends accept any relationships that comes out of your affair. Some will stay, many will not.
  6. It’ll cost you your emotional health. People start affairs because they get an emotional charge out of a new relationship. It doesn’t last, and the fallout is almost always emotionally damaging. The average affair lasts about six months, but the negative effects can last a lot longer.The strain of keeping secrets and maybe losing an entire life can be unbearable. “The person confessing to an infidelity experiences the full gamut,” says Pam Gerhardt: “guilt, self-loathing. . . . Leading a double life can become increasingly difficult for people engaged in affairs.”
  7. It’ll cost your legacy. If the average affair lasts just six months, are you willing to trade that for the kind of things you grandchildren will say about you?How will you be remembered when you’re gone, someone who loved and cherished his family—or a disappointment? Do you want to be remembered as a person who loved his wife and was faithful to his family—or as the one who squandered his legacy in a moment of indiscretion? Now’s the time to answer those questions.
  8. It might even cost your soul. I don’t need to go too far into this. If you’re a Christian, you know adultery represents a serious spiritual peril. Betrayal is the original sin, and it wreaks havoc in our hearts.

Adultery is not normal and it certainly isn’t inevitable. God made us for fidelity. But we live in a fallen world, and we can’t afford to be niaive. Nothing will destroy our life and legacy faster than an affair. We must count the cost.

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Rescue mission

On Saturday past I went on a church outing to the annual Portrush Air Show, the grand finale to the summer events here in Northern Ireland. The crowd was well entertained all day long with displays and stunts from various air planes, the highlight for most being the Red Arrows display team from the RAF.  But the one display that caught my attention was the air-sea rescue mission.

The scenario was a body had been swept away by the waves into the open sea and a coordinated rescue by a Coastguard helicopter and an RNLI lifeboat was launched to save this soul from drowning. It got me thinking – here is all this hardware, worth a couple of million pounds, manned by two well equipped and trained crews – not to mention the personnel in the control centre all working together to save one person from death and look at the church. It’s a rescue mission here on earth, fulfilling its primary purpose of saving souls. But is it keeping them saved? So many within its ranks are struggling, getting pounded by waves all day long, drowning in pornography, self-harming, filled with unforgiveness, bitterness, etc.  The Church is as well equipped and maintained as any rescue organisation, the only difference is that we don’t pull our resources together.  We don’t network and work as well with each other as the world does. It’s time to  get out of our denominations and look at the church as a whole body and not as separate parts.

Gen 3x

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Who Do You Traffick?

I would like to introduce the latest member of the team, Andrew. He has a passion to see men set free from pornography and people released from human trafficking, this is his first post I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Who Do You Traffick? Are you the demand

An interesting question isn’t it, probably never considered yourself a trafficker did you?

Maybe you’re unsure what trafficking is. Well human trafficking by definition is the illegal movement of people by any means, including coercing them, in order to exploit them for purposes such as sexual exploitation or forced labour.

On the 23rd of august 1833 a Christian movement succeeded in abolishing slavery in the British Empire. Something that was once accepted as right was now wrong.This was heavily enforced by the men of this empire stepping up and the navy was sent out to destroy all slave ships. Today on the other hand many companies in the UK have been found guilty of causing or ignoring human trafficking.

Human trafficking Generates 27.8 billion USD every single year yet to buy a slave today costs only 90 USD. Among females that are trafficked 70% of them end up in the commercial sex industry (porn, strip clubs, massage parlours). Every click on a porn website is counted and advertisers pay more for the sites most viewed. If you view porn at all the chances are high you are passively supporting human trafficking. Would you take that risk?

The illegal drug ‘industry’ is also supported by human trafficking as it is the method of trapping, controlling and restraining possible slaves. Drug addicts are easily coerced into sexual situations. How else could someone take away the pain involved in repeated, often violent sexual acts (most commonly observed in pornography)?

Many men, women and worst of all children who are trafficked have fallen prey to predators who are waiting for a weak spot, in an emotionally damaged person in poverty; 89% of women in the sex industry say they want to escape but have no other means of survival and 90% were abused as children.

God considered all people to be valuable and this was shown by the Lord Jesus Christ’s actions when he communed with the criminals, the unwanted, the disabled, the poor, the prostitutes, the sick and dying, those guilty of being traitors or treasonous against their country, those in the establishment and against it. In the bible we find God condemning slavery time and time again with the most famous example in Exodus. Here God frees the Hebrews, lead by Moses, from the violent slavery of the egyptians…But that required a man to stand up and speak out against it in God’s name. Yet how can we stand up with such hypocrisy in our midst. Pornography hasn’t just enslaved others, it has enslaved us! In John 8 Jesus says – “Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin. And the servant abideth not in the house for ever: but the Son abideth ever. If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.”

We must start with ourselves:

If you are aren’t a Christian you need Christ before you can defeat your master – sin. Psychology will only lead you so far. You don’t need a crutch you need a the great physician. Only Christ can heal you, so don’t worry who you are now or what you’ve done, the battle is long and hard but the saviour has already won the war.

If you are a Christian you need to follow Gods word. Romans 6 says – “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?” and continues to say, “even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection: Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin. For he that is dead is freed from sin.” – Its telling us that as Christians we can’t just ignore the sin in our life, we need to recognise our sin and put it to death. It continues to explain how to do this – “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof. Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God. For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace.” – We need to remove the sin from our path and draw near to God. This could mean prayer, accountability, repentance to those we have hurt, or even simple things like removing computers or TV’s from our bedroom. If it removes the temptation for your body to sin or brings you closer to God it will act as a weapon for your battle against the things that your body seeks yet you now hate. Check out the Quitters check list for help with this

Lastly don’t forget who you are now in Christ and what you stand to lose “Being then made free from sin, ye became the servants of righteousness. I speak after the manner of men because of the infirmity of your flesh: for as ye have yielded your members servants to uncleanness and to iniquity unto iniquity; even so now yield your members servants to righteousness unto holiness. For when ye were the servants of sin, ye were free from righteousness. What fruit had ye then in those things whereof ye are now ashamed? for the end of those things is death. But now being made free from sin, and become servants to God, ye have your fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life. For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Romans 6)
Your healing in Christ WILL happen and your healing WILL free countless men and women all over the world held in bondage to the perversion that has destroyed sex.

Gen 3x

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Why is it not getting better?

This year we had the privilege of setting up a stand at New Horizon the largest Christian event in Ireland. We had the opportunity to share with many people the aim of our work and also listen to their struggles. The openness and the honesty of those who talked with us was humbling – from the teenagers and adults who didn’t know where to turn to for help, to the concerned mothers seeking how to get tooled up on advice.  The spectrum was wide and varied. However, what did surprise us was the number of Pastors who came to share their struggles and it got me thinking.

Faith based anti-pornography ministries have been in faithful service for around 25-30 yrs. They are better equipped than any generation before them. Some of them have unlimited budgets, programs, courses, books, facilities, retreat centres, the best technology, accountability software, internet-filters and free on-line mentoring, well able to match any major corporation but still the success rate is as low as 5%.

Even with all this wealth of resources at our disposal, more Christian men today entertain pornography than any time in the past. So why is the trend not reversing? Unfortunately all of these combined efforts are not pushing back the enemy’s assault against the body of Christ. Relying on these resources could just be  the problem. Too many ministries rely on their resources instead of a relationship with Jesus. No matter what the condition of your heart or how much porn is on your brain, a close intimate relationship with the Saviour will correct it all.

We don’t claim to be the biggest ministry or the best. We certainly aren’t the best resourced but we do hope that when you read through what we have written in GTF you will finally understand that a life away from the Lord can only lead to a life of hardship and misery.

Gen 3x

 

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Do You + Porn Encourage Human trafficking?

Prostitution has been dubbed as one 0f the oldest professions in the world, and the runner up to it must be human trafficking.  One of the earliest recorded accounts of human trafficking some 3743 yrs ago comes straight from the Bible and can be found in Genesis 37.  Joseph is sold by his brothers to a caravan of Midianites for 20 pieces of silver.

Supporting and funding human trafficking is the last thing that you would associate with many Christians.  The church is very vocal on all types of slavery, such as domestic, forced-labour, agriculture, organ-donor and sex work.

But here’s the thing, a simple google search can reveal that up to 70% of men and 30% of women in the church struggle with pornography and it’s right across the board from leadership to the occasional attendee and if you consider the size of the church we’re not talking about a couple of hundred or a mere few thousand men, we’re looking at millions maybe 10 of millions and more.

The Church needs to waken up to the extent of those struggling with pornography or more women will continue to be trafficked into a world of physical violence, psychological torture and sexual exploitation because every time you click onto a pornography website you help boost the ratings.

The Church’s passivity to tackle pornography head on, along with the believer’s refusal to seek out help, may just be the support and encouragement that the human traffickers are depending on.

Gen 3x