"everything is lawful for me, but not everything is beneficial for me"... would you say that his verse is kind of like the elastic clause of the U.S. Constitution like for everything God didn't say is a sin in the bible in words like the stuff that we don't know is either right or wrong
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I have found in my own spiritual pilgrimage that it is always better for me to seek what is good than to worry about what is bad. I don't mean that in an absolute sense as though I don't care about my sin, but it seems for me that sin is overcome by desiring God rather than spending all my time worrying about my own weakness. I know I am weak. God knows I am weak as well. So that can be taken as a given in my relationship with God. But God is loving and compassionate and gives his Holy Spirit in the measure I desire God and to serve God.
Sometimes when I concentrate all my attention on my sin it is just another way of being self-centered. But when I concentrate all my attention of God then I find that he takes care of my sin even without me thinking about it.
What am I trying to say? I think it is that I do not ask what is lawful for me, but I seek to always choose what is best. My brother was asking me about a game he has for the Xbox 360. I told him that I just don't have time to play games. It is not that games are bad, but I need to spend my spare time seeking God or else my spiritual life starts withering away.
Last night I was praying the Compline prayers and it really struck me for the first time how the prayers help us to understand that our weakness is due to negligence and laziness. Now for me that means that I need to work at my spiritual life. I can't afford to worry so much about what I should be doing on the margins of my spiritual life. I have enough problem praying the Agpeya, participating in the Liturgy with attention, and making sure that I serve my wife and children as a husband and father.
What sort of things are you thinking of that are lawful but perhaps not beneficial? I can only afford to concentrate on the things I know are beneficial.
In Christ
Peter