Ben Stuart has dedicated his life to encouraging young adults to live their lives for God. In a message delivered at a Texas convention last week, the pastor of Passion City Church in Washington, D.C., and author of “Single, Dating, Engaged, Married: Navigating Life and Love in the Modern Age,” implored young adults to not waste their time on things like pornography and video games.
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“The real world is on fire,” Stuart said Thursday at the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission’s conference, according to The Christian Post.
Given this, he argued there is no time to waste on the imaginary worlds of pornography and video games.
The ERLC’s conference called “The Cross-Shaped Family” worked to educate on what the Bible says about family life.
“Family Life can be difficult with broken people in a broken culture,” the event description reads. “This is a conference for parents and pastors, for lay leaders and youth workers, for young and old to come and learn what the Bible has to say about families that live on mission for God in the 21st century.”
Stuart argued that pornography and the visual world of TV and video games are increasingly harming the state of young Christians minds, as well as distracting them from the call of God.
“The average young person today by the time they turn age 21, has spent 10,000 hours playing video games. Takes less than half of that to earn a bachelor’s degree. So I beg young men, don’t spend your time-saving fantasy worlds while the real world is on fire,” the pastor said.
Instead, Stuart implored youths to “pursue an undistracted devotion to the Lord.”
“The average American spends 7.5 hours looking at a screen every day,” he noted. “Don’t spend your life watching other people’s lives on a screen and miss out on your own. God has given you this time to leverage it for His purposes.”
Pastor Stuart, who has been outspoken on the dangers of pornography, highlighted the detrimental effects it can have on all people. He argued that pornography is one of the reasons there has been a decrease in the marriage rate, because “we have a young generation awash in pornography.”
“All the studies we’ve seen say it makes them presume sexual exclusivity is unrealistic, hold cynical attitudes about love, affection, and marriage,” he said. “It’s also encouraging the self-reported awkwardness you see among young people as they even deal with the opposite sex. We have young people who are in crisis.”
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In 2016, Pastor Stuart also spoke at the ERLC national conference, encouraging young people to stay pure until marriage in a talk titled “God, Guys, and Girls – Pursuing Sexual Purity in a Porn Culture.” In this talk, he urged young singles to stay pure until marriage and gave tips on how to stay away from things like pornography.
To learn more about Ben Stuart’s advice to young Christians, check out his book, “Single, Dating, Engaged, Married: Navigating Life and Love in the Modern Age” here.
(H/T: The Christian Post)