Continuing this month’s study on ReflectionsTuesday, Pastor Ayo Agunloye returns to the subject of indulgence—part of the year-long Your Potter’s House theme of cultivating a heart fully after God’s own heart. Last week’s message exposed the subtlety of indulgence: how it slips in as a harmless need and only later reveals itself as a master.
This week the question turns from how indulgence works to where it attaches. If indulgence is a thing we choose that eventually begins to choose us, then it must fasten onto something. Pastor Agunloye names two of its most common targets—the body and the mind and media—and frames the whole danger in a single, sobering image: indulgence is a slavery we walk into by our own free will.
We chose those things in the first place; but later, because we indulged them, those things began to choose us—and when they choose us, we can no longer say no.
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This is a message that moves from vivid illustration to honest self-examination. It is best heard slowly, with a willingness to let God point to the specific places where comfort has quietly taken charge.
The Base Text: 1 Corinthians 9:24–27
The teaching is anchored in Paul’s picture of the disciplined athlete:
“Every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things… I therefore so run… I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway.”
Here is a man, Pastor Agunloye observes, who intentionally fought indulgence. Paul does not let appetite dictate to him; he rules his body, decides what it actually needs, and refuses to be brought under the power of anything. The principle from last week’s text, “all things are lawful… but I will not be brought under the power of any” (1 Corinthians 6:12), now becomes a daily, athletic discipline.
A Picture from the Poultry Farm
To make the point unforgettable, the pastor draws on his own experience raising laying birds. There is an optimal quantity of feed for a layer—calculated, measured, exactly what the bird needs to stay healthy and lay well over a long life.
Give the bird more than that, and the excess does not bless it; it harms it. The bird gathers fat, the passage through which the egg should come is narrowed, laying becomes strained, eggs break, and the bird’s productive life is cut short. The birds still cry for more—but to give in would be cruelty disguised as kindness.
“We have given you everything you need for today. Any more than this would become a poison to you.”
That, he says, is exactly what indulgence is: taking more than we need—of food, sleep, rest, entertainment, anything—until the excess that felt like a treat quietly becomes a poison.
Indulgence Is a Slavery You Walk Into Yourself
Pastor Agunloye then paints a deliberately uncomfortable picture of slavery so that listeners will feel a holy revulsion at where indulgence leads. He recalls the historic horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, and points to the very present reality of kidnapping across Nigeria—men and women who own homes yet are forced to sleep in the bush, held against their will. That is slavery in its plain, brutal form: a person forced to do what they would never choose.
Then comes the turn. There is also a chosen slavery—what he calls an “inverted” or “reverse” slavery. No one drags the person into it; they walk in themselves, drawn by what they want or what they can afford, and only later discover they cannot walk back out.
Indulgence is a slavery that human beings put themselves into.
The redeemed, he reminds listeners, have been delivered by Christ from the power of sin. Yet even disciples, where they keep no boundaries, can willingly hand themselves over to lesser masters—food, sleep, entertainment, or anything else they refuse to govern.
The First Object: The Body
The body is a powerful instrument for God—but it can just as easily become a stronghold for indulgence. Every appetite and comfort can either serve God’s purposes or enslave the heart.
The most common excuse, the pastor notes, is the language of entitlement: “I’ve earned this. I deserve it. I need it.”Each small concession seems reasonable, but repeated concessions slowly train the body to dominate the spirit, so that when the spirit is willing, the body is no longer available.
Discipline of the body is not legalism—it is preparation for the Spirit to move unhindered in your life.
He gently corrects a common misreading of Christian liberty:
Liberty does not make us free to become slaves. Liberty makes us free to be available for God.
Once Christ has broken the yoke of sin from our neck, He invites us to take His yoke instead (Matthew 11:28–30). A neck already bearing Christ’s yoke has no room for another. And since we have presented our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God (Romans 12:1), the body’s true Owner now decides how it is used. The call is direct:
Every indulgence you tolerate is territory lost in the altar of your heart.
Christ at Jacob’s Well
The clearest model of a disciplined body is the Lord Himself in John 4. Arriving at the well, Jesus was genuinely hungry, thirsty, and tired—He had laboured under the sun, and rest, food, and water were His real and deservedneed. Had He taken them, it would not have been indulgence at all.
But at that very moment an opportunity to win a soul appeared. So He put the soul before His own comfort, telling the disciples who returned with food:
“I have meat to eat that ye know not of… my meat is to do the will of him that sent me.”
He would not let even a legitimate need rule Him when the kingdom called. The lesson lands plainly: there is a time for everything, and indulgence is what happens when appetite or comfort forces us to do at the wrong time what should be done—more profitably—at another.
What the Athlete Denies
Returning to the base text, Pastor Agunloye lingers on the runner. We watch an athlete perform for a few seconds or minutes and call it talent or gifting—but behind it lie years of denied appetite, disciplined sleep, and chosen diet.
We see the few minutes of performance. We do not see the years of what they denied themselves.
We cannot, he warns, expect to achieve something great for God while keeping our indulgences intact:
You cannot eat your cake and have it at the same time.
The Second Object: The Mind and Media
The mind is the battlefield of the heart. What we allow into our thoughts, attention, and imagination shapes our desires, our decisions, and our devotion. And this is where indulgence most often enters today—through media, entertainment, idle curiosity, and endless scrolling.
The phone and the internet are good things, the pastor stresses. But without boundaries the relationship reverses: instead of going online to do something purposeful, the feed begins suggesting what to watch and read next, and the user becomes a victim of the very thing calling to them—time, energy, and attention quietly drained away.
The remedy is the renewing of the mind:
“Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” (Romans 12:2)
Discipline of the mind is not restriction—it is liberation. It releases the heart to love, obey, and delight in God without competing masters.
Not Every Open Door Leads to a Palace
Here the message confronts the modern slogan of total freedom. People walk into addiction precisely because they believe they are free—“nobody should control me”—and that very freedom becomes their bondage.
It is not every open door that leads into a palace. Some open doors lead to a prison.
Freedom to enter a place is not the same as freedom to leave it, the pastor notes—so the wiser use of freedom is often the freedom not to enter at all.
He offers two practical handles for guarding the mind:
- Birds and nests. “You cannot control what crosses your mind, but you can control what your mind dwells on.” You cannot stop a bird from flying over your head, but you can stop it from building a nest there.
- Sowing and reaping. Be careful what you give your attention to, “because what you sow in your life, you will eat” (Galatians 6:7). A thought given attention is a seed planted; in time it germinates and bears fruit.
The closing instruction mirrors the one given for the body: examine what dominates your thoughts, identify the mental indulgence, confess it, and deliberately redirect your attention toward Scripture, prayer, and spiritual reflection—so the mind becomes a stronghold of God’s purpose and a training ground for a heart after God’s heart.
Final Reflection
“The Objects of Indulgence” takes last week’s warning and makes it concrete. Indulgence is not an abstract danger; it lays hold of specific things—our bodies and our minds—and turns good gifts into quiet masters.
The thread running through every illustration, from the over-fed bird to the scrolling phone to the disciplined runner, is the same: whatever we refuse to govern will eventually govern us. And the freedom Christ purchased was never freedom to drift into bondage; it was freedom to belong wholly to Him.
The body and the mind are meant to be altars and training grounds for God—not playgrounds for fleeting desire.
The episode closes in prayer:
“May the Lord help us to discern indulgence from afar—to refuse it, to avoid it, to prevent it before it becomes a master, in Jesus’ name. Amen.”
And with a final charge from Scripture: “If today you hear His voice, harden not your heart” (Hebrews 3:7–8)—to be not hearers only, but doers of the word (James 1:22).
This is a message to act on, not merely admire.
Listen again. Search honestly. And ask God for the grace to lay down the small comforts before they quietly take the throne.
