Now I don't know where I came across this,
but I believe that this was John Piper,
that basically pointed out;
he was taking fasting,
again which is a form of self-denial,
and he put fasting
and young people struggling with pornography
into the same little message.
I made it a slight little effort to find it
but I just I don't know where it's at.
But you know what he said?
He said you take young people today
who are so wired to just gratify everything;
we get sick we take the medicine,
get sick go to the doctor.
Soft.
We're supposed to get out of bed.
You know the scripture says consider the ant?
These fire ants are often out there...
you wonder how did all those piles get out there?
Well the reality is they were at work when a lot of us are still in bed.
Get out of bed!
That's one of the self-denials:
just get out of bed.
You don't need to sleep ten hours a day.
Get out of bed.
Stop with all the softness,
take up the cross.
But Piper said
these young people, instant gratification,
instant...
Again, I have been reading Adoniram Judson.
He often times would board a ship
and because of tides and winds they would often sit there for three days
can you imagine if you got on an airplane
and you had to sit on the airplane for three days before it took off?
Again we all be screaming like,
"What's going on!"
We would get off the airplane.
We would find some other way.
We don't have patience for that kind of thing.
We want our food now.
We want it the way it is.
"Send it back.
It's not cooked just like I want it.
It's not the right temperature!"
You know what?
When you have young people that are wired that way
you have parents that give them everything.
"Oh you want those clothes?
Here have those clothes."
"Oh you you want that cell phone?"
"Have that cell phone."
And you know more and more we get away from agricultural life
and this is one of the struggles I've had in the city
it's like I putting the children to work is hard
and so you grow up with this pampered generation.
That knows very little about hard work,
about getting out in rough conditions,
and what happens?
You've so trained that those young people to say yes to their appetites.
That when their body says,
"I want sexual gratification."
It's just like, "Yep!"
Just right there.
Brethren, if I could desire something of this church
that there would be...
not the kind of self-denial that you want to parade,
so that you can tell people you put stones in your shoes.
But brethren you don't need the softest towel.
You don't need the softest clothes.
You don't need the most comfortable shoes.
You don't need the most comfortable temperature in your house.
You don't always need to eat all the fancy food.
You don't need to live in the nicer house
or drive and have the more comfortable car.
You know it can almost be like,
"Ah! That automobile doesn't have air conditioning we need to fix it."
Well you know that isn't necessarily something that needs to be fixed
for your automobile to do what automobiles are supposed to do.
Look I'm the first one to like air-conditioning.
I know the heat down here about kills me.
But brethren we are soft.
And the truth is that there's decisions that we can make
to keep our body under like Paul did.
Take up your cross daily.
Adopt a course of habitual self-denial.
Basically what Piper was getting at is this:
when young people actually develop
the habits of fasting,
that kind of self-denial,
it makes it a whole lot easier to say no to these bodily appetites
when it comes to sexual problems.
And I just wondered, hearing that,
Hmmm. I wonder if a poll could be taken
and everybody was totally honest,
and we knew all the facts,
if the young people most likely to fall into some kind of sexual temptation,
are likewise the ones that are least given to fasting.
I wonder if that correlation is real.
I suspect there's reality to it.
This excerpt comes from the full sermon, "A Threefold Cord: Secret Prayer, Doing Good, and Self-Denial."