OK, I want you guys to take a look at this chart and this one,
and most importantly this one here.
When I was 10 years old, I was listening to rock music on my
computer and by total accident, I first got my first exposure of
this stuff. Then at 13 years old, one of my
friends took me up to his brother's room and we watched it
for the first time. And then by the age of 15, I was
watching it nearly every single day.
And this pattern continued for many, many years until at my
peak, I was watching it three to four times a day.
I thought it would go away when I married the girl of my dreams,
a woman way out of my league. And yet even then, I was
secretly watching this stuff. Guys, if you're cringing right
now, please know this. There is no one cringing.
There is no one more embarrassed than me to share this story.
So why do I do it? I do it for one reason and one
reason alone. I now, in the Lord's grace, have
been able to break free from this.
And actually, every 8th of April, me and my wife, we go out
for a meal to celebrate how it's been another year of the keeping
me free from this sin. And I share this with you
because I believe as a guy who's a little bit older, I'm not in
Gen. Z, as you can probably tell.
I'm here now to tell you how you also can break free because if
God did it for me, the worst of sinners, the chief of sinners,
he can also do it for you. And that is why I'm here today
to tell you how. All right, take a look at this.
We're back to concrete facts again.
This right here is a healthy brain scan.
This is what your brain should look like for a normal brain.
And this is the kind of brain that consumes this stuff on a
regular basis. But here's the scary part.
You probably have never had your brain scanned.
So how do you know which brain you have?
Well, one of the big signs is this.
You cannot focus for very long. Your concentration span has
diminished to nothing. And that, for me, bothers me
more than anything because the person who needs to listen to
these next three tips is the same person.
You'll click off this video within a few seconds because you
cannot focus. So I plead with you.
I'm going to ask you, will you stick around and will you you
give me the opportunity to try and build some of these
principles that can help you finally break free and live a
life for the Lord Jesus Christ of holiness?
OK tip #1 you need to retrain your brain.
Imagine this scenario. You live next to a field and on
one side you've got a gate to the field and then on the other
side you've got a gate that leads to another field.
And every morning you walk, you follow the same footsteps from
this gate to the other gate. What is going to happen overtime
when you've got this thick luscious?
What is going to happen if you follow those same footsteps over
and over again? Eventually you're going to get a
nicely formed path. Did you know your brain is
exactly the same? Your brain works 3 pathways and
when you do something over and over again, you build a habit.
So if every day you do bicep curls in the morning at 8:00,
first thing in the morning, overtime, your brain builds this
pattern that, OK, Joe wakes up and he does bicep curls, he
tries to lift a few weights to try and get a bit of muscle.
And it works exactly the same way for good habits, but also
for bad habits. And what I'm telling you right
now is you have a habit of watching wrong things on the
Internet. You can't stop doing it.
But listen to this. If you're in Gen.
Z, do you know what your generation is called?
It's called the generation of social media.
You've grown up with Facebook when you were very, very young,
Instagram, TikTok. And what happens when you're on
these apps? You're on TikTok and suddenly a
dance video comes up and it's not good to see that.
It's not helpful to see that. Or you go on the Internet and
you're just scrolling through Google Images.
You see another unhelpful image, or maybe your friend sends you a
picture, or you've got an advertisement in the bottom side
of the screen, or even an advert in front of a YouTube video.
That's why I don't put adverts on my videos.
It's one of the main reasons I don't monetize.
You see all of this stuff. What do you need to do?
The very second you see that and you know that your heart has
been drawn away to this thing, what should you do?
Get on the floor and pray, Lord God, cleanse my mind.
If you've looked a bit too long and you know that sinners
entered into your heart, you say, Lord God, please wash me
clean. Wash me with the blood of the
Lord Jesus Christ. Have mercy on me.
And I literally, even though I've not watched this stuff,
even though I've not done the thing that goes with this stuff
for years, even to this day, I will get down on the floor.
Whenever I see something, an advert in the corner of the
screen on YouTube, I'll get my face into the floor and I'll
say, Lord, have mercy on me. Wash away my sins.
If my heart's been LED away, Lord, please just just cleanse
me. I want to be a pure vessel
before you. And if you do that over and over
again, honestly, it's quite a difficult thing.
And suddenly you've retrained your mind to think these things.
They don't lead to happiness, they lead to sadness.
Just as the Bible says, there is a godly sorrow that leads to
repentance. Let me let you into secret.
I knew I was going to cover this video today and I pray to God
give me wisdom on what to say and the very first Bible verse I
read in my private devotion this morning was this Bible verse.
Are you ready for it? 2nd Corinthians 7 verse one.
Therefore having these promises, beloved, let us cleanse
ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting
holiness in the fear of God. So all day long you want to be
cleansing yourself, asking God to clean you, to wash away any
sins. And this even happens when I'm
walking down the street. Obviously I can't get down and
put my face in the floor and kneel down and do that active
effort which is very difficult to do.
But I can do this when I'm walking down the street just
privately in my mind say Lord forgive me.
The old Saints of the past, they used to call it this, keep short
accounts with God. In other words, if you've ever
done a business, you know you've got to keep an account of
everything you've done and you've got 2 choices.
Either you can do your accounts at the end of the day.
Now if you're a painter you can say right, I've got £50 for
painting this wall and yesterday I've got £30 for painting that
door. You can do it that way or like
most people do, they have all of their accounts.
They let it build up and at the end of the year they then have
to trape through all of these accounts and it takes forever.
And you and I want to be the wise one who does it at the end
of the day, or even at the very moment, keep very short accounts
of God and tell him that you've sinned immediately or tell him
your mind has seen something that's unhelpful.
And that way you can stay close to the throne of God all day
long #2 learn while you can. When I was 21 years old, around
that age, an older Christian man, a preacher, rang me up and
he said to me, Joe, you need to try and memorize as much
Scripture. You need to try and learn as
much biblical teaching, get as much doctrine inside of you now,
because when you are 30 years old, you will struggle to
remember. And he said the things that I
remembered before 30 have stuck with me for the rest of my life.
And I thought, what total hogwash.
That's nonsense. Over 30, you're trying to tell
me you don't learn anything. And no, he was isn't trying to
say that, but there is something to be said about that.
Even now I'm in my well, I actually turned 34 tomorrow.
I know that's probably the most shocking thing for this entire
video, but even now I struggle to remember things like I did
when I was in my 20s. I remember sermons, I remember
lines. I can remember entire things
that were just so easy back then.
So if you're a Gen. Z, if you're a young person
right now, you need to really capitalize on this.
Don't be wasting time just filling all of your mind with
TikTok videos which will get stored into your memory and then
you won't have the same room to remember the things of God.
Here is an absolutely vital verse if you're 1A young person
and if two you struggle with sin.
Psalm 119 verse 9 says how can a young man cleanse his way by
taking heed according to your word.
And then verse 11, your word I have hidden in my heart that I
might not sin against you. So in other words, if we hide
the Word of God, if we bury it deep inside of us, suddenly sin
will not be as easy to commit because we've got God's Word
inside of us and it protects as it builds A barrier against sin.
There was a little girl and every day her mother used to
dress her in the most beautiful, pristine white dresses.
But the mother would say to the little girl, when you go out and
play with your friends, I want you to be so careful that you do
not get any mud on your dress. So away went the little girl.
She was having lots of fun playing with her friends,
skipping, dancing, doing all this fun.
Then she'd come home, knock on the door.
Do you think that little girl had a clean dress or a dirty
dress? What do you think?
It was covered from head to toe in mud.
She'd got it really dirty. And this pattern repeated itself
every day. The mother would say, here you
are. You're in this beautiful white
dress. Don't get it dirty, Keep it
clean. And every day the little girl
would come home and it was dirty until one day something changed.
What changed? That little girl grew up.
She became a woman. And suddenly the spirit of the
mother was in parted to this younger girl, to this little
girl. So my dear friend, if you
haven't realized yet, that little girl is you.
You see the Lord God, he wants you to have his desires.
He wants you to learn his mind, his ways, his thoughts.
And the only way we can do that is by getting in the word of God
every single day. So if you're not reading the
Bible and you're wondering why you're struggling so much with
sin, that is why. So first thing in the morning,
get out of bed and get in the word Bible before breakfast and
make sure you can get the word of God into you before the world
gets into you first. Finally #3 and if you remember
one thing from this video, remember this.
It is not too late for you. I've got a friend and he tells
me that when he falls into sin, he feels like for a week, 2
weeks, a couple of days at least, cannot approach God in
prayer. He cannot think about God.
He can't come before God because he feels so unclean at what he's
done. And I know he's not the only
one. You know, you've got people,
people who say I can't share the gospel because I'm living in
this sin. I can't go out to church.
I can't take communion. I can't do any of this because
I'm sinning and, and I know I've, I've, I've messed up.
If you've ever thought like that, you absolutely have to
hear this verse in the book of Micah, because I think there'll
be some people who've never ever heard of this.
And it's talking exactly about you.
Do not rejoice over me, my enemy.
When I fall, I will arise. When I sit in darkness, the Lord
will be a light to me. I will bear the indignation of
the Lord because I have sinned against him until he pleads my
case and executes justice for me.
He will bring me forth to the lights.
I will see His righteousness. So come on, Joe, tell us, what
does this verse mean? Well, put very simply, this
verse is telling you that you have an enemy who laughs, who
rejoices over you when you sin. Do you know what the name Satan
literally means? It means adversary.
It means the accuser. And what Satan does whenever you
sin, he through his many minions will make you think, He will
influence you to think you're too far gone.
God doesn't love you anymore. How can you say you're a
Christian? How can you say you love God and
yet you've gone to that sin over and over and over again.
You're a fake, you're a fraud, you're a hypocrite.
When God sees you on the day of judgement, he will say, depart
from me. I never knew you.
All of these things will come to you in that moment.
And yet what does this verse say?
No boldly you will say there is one who will plead my case.
There is One who loved me enough to bleed and die on a cross,
knowing all of my failings, knowing all of the rottenness
that's in me, He still loved me enough to die for me.
Who is that man? Is the God man, Jesus Christ,
who bore in his body your sins, past, present and future.
All of your sins were put on him and there on that cross, He was
punished in your place so you can be forgiven and washed
clean. And if you're someone who hides
from God after you do these sins, can I ask you a very, very
serious question? What was the cross all about?
What was that all about when Jesus died there?
We're trying to somehow clean ourselves up before God.
The message of the Bible is we're saved by grace.
And if we come to Him and we say, Lord God, wash away my
sins, we have an advocate with one who is righteous, the Lord
Jesus Christ. He will plead our case and he
will wash us again and He will give us a second chance because
God is in the business of second chances.
My dear friend, I hope you are listening to this right now.
I hope this is sinking in. I am by number means saying we
should be light or we should be easy on sin, but I am saying
this every time you do sin, get your face on the floor, humble
yourself, bow down before him and say, Lord have mercy on me.
I'm a Sinner and do it instantly.
Don't hide from him. Come to the cross straight away.
Hey, this next part's a little bit important, so you might just
want to catch this, but I want you to get a pen and piece of
paper now and I want you to write two things down South.
You can just remember this video.
We might never see each other again.
YouTube might never recommend this video to you again.
You might never see me again, but I want you to remember this.
If you've got this piece of paper, the first thing I want
you to write down is this. When we sin, we do not lose our
salvation, but we lose the joy of our salvation.
As David wrote in Psalm 51, restore to me the joy of your
salvation. So when we sin, we don't lose
our salvation. We lose the joy, we lose the
intimacy, we lose the peace of God.
And then the second thing I want you to write down is a quote by
a very famous preacher called Charles Spurtun.
He once said as numerous as your wanderings, so numerous your
restorations will be. What did Spurgeon mean when he
said that? He was saying yes.
You might wander many times, many times you might fall into
sin, but remember this, the Lord God is willing to restore you
just as many times. As long as you come to Him with
a true, humble and contrite spirit, He can restore you.
So never forget that. Keep fighting the sin, keep
being ruthless with it. Remember that overtime,
eventually, if you get into the Word, if you keep turning from
this sin, eventually the Spirit of God will come into you and He
will dwell in you and He will give you new desires and a new
heart until you can walk victory.
And maybe who knows, you and your wife, you and your husband,
if you're a lady and you're watching this, you can go out
for a victory meal every year to say, look, this is all what God
has done by grace. He's delivered me from this sin.
Guys, just be honest with me. Was this video helpful in any
way? If it was and you'd like to see
more videos like this, please do subscribe.
But hey, now, if you are one of those people who admits that you
have messed up your concentration span and you want
to strengthen it, you want to be able to focus more than a few
minutes, Here's a challenge for you.
Can you watch a full Bible documentary 30 minutes long?
I made one all about the nation of Iran and I think you'll find
it very interesting. Just click here right away.