[Steve Myers] Loving pleasure is one of those bites that can be a dangerous one that will take our spiritual life right down to nothing. It's all around us in this world. It's everywhere. We're encouraged to love pleasure, even the advertisements for potato chips, "One is never enough." And that attitude pervades our world today. The Proverbs put it this way. When you look at Proverbs 21:17, it reminds us, "He who loves pleasure will become poor." And it's not just talking about monetarily. Talk about our attitude. Talk about our Christian character. We will be poor if this overtakes our life. 

And of course, we're challenged this way day in and day out. So we can binge on movies for hours on end. Pleasures are all around us. It's encouraged everywhere. If we fall into this dangerous bite of loving pleasure, we will find the demise of our spiritual life. So throughout scripture, we find the antidote to this bite. In fact, there's a powerful one that's mentioned over in 2 Timothy 2:22. As a young minister, the Apostle Paul was encouraging Timothy to watch out for this dangerous bite. 

In fact, he gives the antidote to help us to avoid that snakebite of loving pleasure. Notice what he says in 2 Timothy 2:22. He says something powerful. He says, "Flee youthful lusts." So there's the bite. We have to flee that bite. And what do we do instead? "Pursue righteousness." So it's not just avoiding those pleasures, but we'd better be doing something instead. So we run away from those things but we have to know what we're running towards. So he says, "We flee," we run away, but then we pursue. We pursue righteousness. We pursue faith. We pursue love, peace as well. And he says, "With those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart."

And so, what we've got to do is look at our life. If we're standing still or regressing, we're going to be bitten by this snake of loving pleasure. But when we're running away from those wrong attitudes and wrong behaviors, be sure we're running toward those Godly traits, those Christ-like characteristics. Those characteristics of righteousness, faith, love, purity, that's what we have to be chasing. So take a look at your life. Are you vulnerable to this bite? If so, get on the move and run toward these things, toward that antidote, to taking us down with loving pleasure.

That's BT Daily. We'll see you next time.