Overcome Porn: The 40 Day Challenge Sample

Day 20: The exciting topic of boredom

We’re halfway through Overcome Porn: The 40 Day Challenge, and we’re talking about the exciting topic of boredom.

There is a life-numbing boredom seemingly born of the modern age—a “So what,” “Been-there-done-that,” kind of boredom. It is a way of looking at life devoid of all wonder, contentment, and passion. In the idleness of itching for entertainment and novelty, porn is an easy fix.

Pornography carries with it a buzz and an excitement both chemically and emotionally. The attraction of this buzz as a cure for boredom is what brought many of us to our involvement with pornographic material in the first place, and it is what so easily drags us back.

So how do we learn to cultivate an internal capacity for boredom? How do we recapture wonder, passion, and curiosity?

Here are a few thoughts from author and speaker Rick James.

• Repentance is demonstrated by moving in a new direction. Wage war against sloth. Pursue community. Confess your laziness. Awareness of sin should not be confined to where we committed evil with our time, but where we’ve wasted it.
• Embrace boredom. Boredom is an impetus to action. Rather than seeking to medicate or entertain our boredom, we need to cultivate active, creative alternatives. Find ways to stimulate your creativity, intellect, and relationships. Read a book. Go out in nature. Join a gym.
• Praise and thanksgiving provide immunity to boredom, bitterness, frustration, apathy, laziness, cynicism, and a host of other heart diseases. Giving thanks and praise throughout the day for the most mundane of things cultivates contentment and gratitude.
• Scrimmage with the flesh. Fasting from eating food for a few days cultivates a habit of saying “no” to your flesh and your desire for gratification. But because eating isn’t a sin, if you fail, you haven’t morally compromised yourself. It’s like playing a scrimmage game with your flesh.

Remember the old saying, “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop”? It came from a period of time when people recognized the sin of sloth and the spiritual liability of boredom. If we seek to stop the passive late-night web surfing, we must cultivate new, creative, active habits to replace the old.

Action Step

Read 2 Samuel 11:1-4. What was David supposed to be doing? How might boredom have fed into David’s adultery?