Porn and Pancakes in Peoria this Saturday is starting to heat up. We have a crew from CNN coming in for the event and it is also getting a lot of attention locally. Here is a story. There is still room left, check pornandpancakes for the info. Donny Pauling, David Dean, and Craig Gross will be on hand.
Peoria Journal Star – Peoria,IL,USA
When the Rev. Jim Cecy stays in a hotel, he puts a towel over the television and unplugs it.
That way, to turn it on and submit himself to the possibility of sexual temptation would require an extra effort.
“If I get up, I’m making a moral decision,” said the Fresno, Calif., minister.
During his hotel stay, he checks in with his wife and kids three times a day, often to pray with them. He keeps their photos in sight. If he does watch TV – say, for the news – he’s on the phone with his wife at the same time.
If Cecy is going somewhere – to Peoria, for instance, where he will offer his “Ambassadors of Purity” seminar Saturday at Bethany Baptist Church – and he knows he’ll be in the company of fellow Christian men, he’ll have accountability in place.
If it’s a location where he doesn’t already have such acquaintances, he takes along a friend to help him stay away from potential trouble.
Temptations of sex, power and money are out there, Cecy said, but men – and women – aren’t without hope.
Accountability systems are but one avenue to keeping a pure heart and mind, he said. Others are “understanding God’s design for sexuality,” staying with principles spelled out in the Bible, being in solid fellowship and helping others to be accountable, and dedicating one’s body to God daily.
Cecy will discuss all of those areas in the Saturday sessions, which will run from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Bethany, 7229 N. Knoxville Ave., Peoria. So far, he said, 400,000 men – including ministers, members of the military and police officials – have taken the seminar since he started it in the early 1990s. The training also has been extended to women, Cecy said. Men and boys from junior high age up are welcome.
Although pornography is one of the main temptations of the 21st century – Cecy estimated 2.5 billion pornographic e-mails are sent out on the Internet daily – it’s nothing new, the founder of JARON (Jesus’ Ambassadors Reaching Out to Nations) said.
“The new morality is really just the old immorality with a new name,” Cecy said. “There’s never been a time when people have not struggled with this. It’s always something the world is going to dish out.”
Yet, as if to underscore the pervasiveness of sexual temptation these days or the willingness of Christians to honestly address it, there will be another discussion of dealing with sexual temptation from a Christian point of view at a Morton church the same day that Cecy is in town.
Craig Gross of the Michigan-based XXXChurch.com will be the featured speaker at a “Porn and Pancakes” breakfast for men at New Life Christian Church in Morton, also on Saturday.
That event, also for males junior high age and older, will be from 8 to 10 a.m. at the church, 401 W. Edgewood Court.
Cecy said it all still comes down to “the fact that it’s a heart issue.”
“You can put a man on a desert island without any external stimuli, and he’s still going to struggle,” Cecy said. “The Bible says it’s out of the heart of man. Sexual sin begins in the heart, in the mind.”
But, he said, there’s hope.