The Law of Moses

You may ask: what does the Law of Moses have to do with overcoming pornography?

Perhaps, a lot!

It was suggested to me that to really overcome my addiction, I should completely eliminate access to the Internet from both my home and from my cell phone.  My first reaction was that I wanted to be able to depend on Christ to become free from this addiction.  I didn't want to depend on an artificial barrier like zero access.

I thought that just eliminating access from home or from my phone, would give me a false sense of recovery.  And, therefore, not having learned to control my actions, I would easily give in to temptation in any other environment.

So I asked my bishop about that.  His response surprised me.  He said many of us need to live the Law of Moses before we can live the higher law.  He followed up with an example from his own life.
The subject was “Chore Charts” for their children.  He said that his wife did not like to manage the chore charts. It was a lot of work for her.  But their experience had been that without those charts the chores would never get done.

Those chore charts were the Law of Moses for his children.  Of course, once the children had really mastered the responsibilities outlined by those charts, then and only then, could they be expected to master the “Higher Law.”

It’s the higher law that is embodied in the statement “I teach them correct principles, and they govern themselves.”  Perhaps many of us, including me, are not quite ready to live that higher law.

So back to my addiction and the Law of Moses: perhaps I need to be schooled in the basics like eliminating the Internet from most of my current environment before I can rely on Christ to remove those temptations from my thoughts and my life.

Thanks to a wise bishop, I am now doing just that. By the time I left the bishop's office my smart phone had become dumb and two days later I removed the Internet from my home.

P.S.  It has just occurred to me that many of those in the 90-day program are having success for the first time because the 90-day program, for them, is the "Law of Moses."  It has detailed requirements that they can check off.  And once they are successful in completing those requirements they can then move up to the higher law.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That is some great insight, i have never thought about it that way, but it totally makes sense!