Everett Fritz - Freedom: Battle Strategies for Conquering Temptation

FREEDOM

Battle Strategies for
Conquering Temptation

Everett Fritz

Foreword by Jason Evert

Ignatius PressAugustine Institute
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All Scripture contained herein is from the
Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition
2000 and 2006 by the Division of Christian Education
of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the
United States of America. All rights reserved.

Excerpts from the English translation of the Catechism of the
Catholic Church for use in the United States of America 1994,
United States Catholic Conference, Inc. Libreria Editrice Vaticana .
Used with Permission.

Cover Design by Christopher Murphy

Copyright 2015, Ignatius PressAugustine Institute.
ISBN: 978-1-62164-069-1 (PB)
ISBN: 978-1-68149-720-4 (EB)
All rights reserved.
Printed in Canada

A young man once told me that although he was sleeping with his girlfriend, he loved her so much that he would die for her.

Really? I asked him, Youd die for her?

Yep. If someone took a gun and put it to her head, Id tell him to shoot me instead.

No kidding, I remarked, youd take a bullet for her?

Absolutely.

Alright then, I said. If youre willing to die for her, then do it.

With a bewildered expression on his face, he asked, What do you mean?

Look, I told him, you dont need to protect your girlfriend from bulletsunless shes involved in organized crime or a drug cartel (in which case you need to make better dating decisions). You dont need to protect her from the mafia. You need to protect her from your lust. Thats how you need to die for her.

This young mans desire to die for his beloved was a noble one. In fact, I believe that God has programmed within every man a desire to make a heroic sacrifice of himself for others. We want to storm the castle, kill the dragon, and save the princess. However, the problem with this fairy tale notion is that it always places the enemy outside of us; the beast that needs to be conquered is always an external foe. Its a humbling realization when we discover that the battlefield is inside our very hearts.

Theres a war going on within every man between love and lust. One of the two will win, and to the victor will go the spoils: Whatever wins his heart (love or lust) will win his imagination, his eyes, his body, his vocation, and his very soul. Either the man will master his temptations for the sake of love, or his temptations will master him.

This may all sound over-dramatic, but lets be honest: Most of this war is unseen by the world. Its happening in a husbands conscience when he sees a pop-up ad on his laptop at night while his wife is asleep in another room. Its happening on a teens cell phone when no one can see his screen. Its taking place in every guys imagination and in his eyes every day.

Because the war is largely invisible to others, its all too easy for guys who are being slaughtered on this battlefield to live as if they have everything under control. Many young men feel as if their chances for victory are slim. Theyve tried to break free from the vices of pornography and masturbation, but they feel like freedom is nowhere in sight.

For this reason, its a surprise to me why a book such as the one youre holding wasnt written a long time ago. All I know is that its overdue. In Freedom , Everett offers a concrete game plan for how to break free from habits of lust. In it, he doesnt propose a litany of coping mechanisms. Instead, based on his many years of experience of working with young men in ministry, he presents a practical, hopeful, and fully Catholic call-to-arms for how to find victory.

As you will learn through this book, purity is not about annihilating your desires or simply keeping them in check. In fact, the goal of this book isnt simply to convince you to trash pornography or to defeat habits of sexual sin. Rather, by rejecting lust, St. John Paul II explained that we acquire the virtue of purity, and this means that we come to an ever greater awareness of the gratuitous beauty of the human body, of masculinity and femininity. This gratuitous beauty becomes a light for our actions.

Did you catch that? So often, we think that the body is the problem. But St. John Paul is saying that as we battle for our purity, well discover the beauty of the body, and that this awareness of beauty will guide our actions. Therefore, the goal isnt to continually avoid the sight of what is beautiful, but to learn how to see the beauty of the human person with the eyes of God. In other words, the ultimate goal of purity is to be free to love. If there has ever been a war worth fighting, this is it.

Make no mistake, Everetts book is an invitation for you to come and die. But do not be afraid. As Jesus promised, Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit (Jn 12:24).

The Reason for This Book

I have the honor of mentoring a small group of high-school boys who meet weekly to pray, study the Bible, and enjoy camaraderie. They also learn what it means to be Christian men, which is especially important in the present age, where the reaction to authentic Christianity and true manhood tends to run the gamut from sincere confusion to seething hostility. These two pillars of civilization tend to converge on issues of sexual morality that have come to define the battle lines in our culture wars: from abortion to homosexual marriage, divorce to cohabitation, pornography to the gender-bending the media are bent on portraying as just another lifestyle.

Once, one of the boys in our group wanted to talk about sexual morality during a typically freewheeling conversation. Basically, he wanted to know what it means to be chaste in this day and age, and if such-and-such behaviors were acceptable. (No, they werent, but well get to that later.) It quickly became apparent that more than a quick conversation was needed to answer all the questions this boy raised, so I decided to discuss sexual purity with the group in a thorough, in-depth manner. So I went looking for a book to help guide our discussions over the coming weeksone that could serve as a primer on sexual purity, which is indispensable to being a Christian man.

I was very specific in what I wanted this book to cover. In particular, I wanted a book that met three key criteria:

1. It had to address the topics of masturbation and pornography with the intention of mentoring young men through these issues and creating a detailed and specific action plan to guide them through the battle for purity.

2. God had to be engaged in this battledisposing a person to receive Gods grace and leading him to an encounter with Jesus Christbecause purity is impossible without God, the source of all purity.

3. The book had to be Catholic, specifically integrating the holistic and life-giving principles of Catholic moral teaching. Real purity is not about saying no to ones sexuality; it is about saying yes to Gods plan and living in harmony with how he created us. Never have I seen this better articulated than in Catholic moral teaching.

I wasnt familiar with a book that met all three criteria, but I was sure that someone had to have written one because the need is so real. I contacted every major Catholic chastity speaker that I knew and asked where I could find a book integrating discipleship, sexual purity, and Catholic moral teaching for young men. To my great surprise, none knew of such a book. One of the speakers said that he had a small booklet for young men with a few pages devoted to the topic of masturbation. So I continued to ask others, thinking that someone must know about the kind of book I was looking for. To my surprise, no one did.