Understanding and Overcoming a Porn Struggle

Perhaps the greatest challenge to forming good marriages today is pornography. The pervasiveness of explicit images and story lines miseducate men and women about relationships, love, sex and marriage. Additionally, pornography saps vital energy from the pursuit, cultivation and growth of healthy relationships.

If your path to marriage has been affected by pornography (and that’s now the case for most singles), then today is the day to seek redemption for your path. The purpose of the articles referenced below is to help you understand and overcome a struggle with pornography.

Understanding the Seduction of Pornography by Albert Mohler Jr.

The pervasive plague of pornography represents one of the greatest moral challenges faced by the Christian church in the postmodern age. With eroticism woven into the very heart of the culture, celebrated in its entertainment, and advertised as a commodity, it is virtually impossible to escape the pervasive influence of pornography in our culture and in our lives.

At the same time, the problem of human sinfulness is fundamentally unchanged from the time of the Fall until the present. There is no theological basis for assuming that human beings are more lustful, more defenseless before sexual temptation or more susceptible to the corruption of sexual desire than was the case in any previous generation. Read article

Behind Sex Addiction is a Hunger for God by Brent Curtis and John Eldredge

We put our hope in meeting a lover who will give us some form of immediate gratification, some taste of transcendence that will place a drop of water on our parched tongue. This taste of transcendence, coming as it does from a nontranscendent source, whether that be an affair, a drug, an obsession with sports, pornography, or living off of our giftedness, has the same effect on our souls as crack cocaine. Read article

An Individual Approach to Recovery by Daniel Weiss

One of the most common questions asked by a person after acknowledging his sexual brokenness is:

“Can I fix this by myself?”

The unspoken (but no less serious) part of this question is:
“Do I really have to tell anyone about this?”

It doesn’t matter who asks the question—young or old, male or female, parent or teen, married or single; most of us want to hide that broken part of us in the back closet of our lives, away from prying eyes, ridicule, and embarrassment. Read article

Repentance for Sexual Addiction by Dr. Harry Schaumburg

Repentance essentially means to change direction. It means to turn away from a focus on yourself and your own autonomy and toward God. Read article

How to Develop Effective Accountability by Rob Jackson

Our most basic need in life is relationship with God and others. Within these relationships, we can safely discover our blind spots and receive new input and teaching. Sadly, however, it’s in our human nature to hide ourselves if we sense disapproval from others. Read article

1. mhoover said the following on February 23, 2010 at 10:20 am

   

   Thanks for posting these articles on a sensitive subject. They should be read by all the men here. I would add a few things:

   The key step in dealing with and breaking bondage in this area is to call it what is. Looking at pornography is wickedness. There are many ways that the world tries to get us to justify this sin (“if I was only married…”, “I’m not looking at the really bad stuff…” etc). But you need to know that your soul is in danger while you mess around with it. You need to name it for what is before the Lord. Read Proverbs 5 and ask yourself whether you have hated discipline and been ensnared by the cords of your sin.

   And then you need to own it to someone else who can provide REAL accountability. Someone who won’t just pray for you and listen, but will really hold you to account. Someone that will help you immediately understand the gravity of the situation. Like your mother. Or an elder or pastor at church.

   You’ll know you’re serious about dealing with this if you can do these two things. Sin thrives in the dark, and owning it before the Lord and before other people will shine a lot of light that it won’t be able to survive. And remember that the Lord is willing and able to take anyone out of this and put him back together again. God bless.
2. Joanna said the following on February 23, 2010 at 3:08 pm

   

   There’s also a free e-book written by Tim Challies, a Christian blogger, on overcoming porn. The title is called “Sexual Detox” and it can be found at http://www.challies.com.
3. aliu said the following on February 25, 2010 at 1:16 am

   

   Along with that, a resource from Mark Driscoll:

   http://relit.org/porn_again_christian/
4. SilverFire said the following on February 26, 2010 at 10:35 pm

   

   Probably the best book I’ve ever read on this is “Every Man’s Battle: Winning the War on Sexual Temptation One Victory at a Time.” It gives step-by-step guidance on how to keep yourself pure. That is crucial for overcoming.

   Porn preys on the lonely, the intelligent, and the not-as-social. Too often fellow believers treat the porn addict worse than murderers, because they don’t understand how it works, nor the damage it causes to a guy’s identity.

   Christians who fall into porn are not only outcast from the world, but outcast from the church; they are much like the abused, trying to cover up their bruises but hoping someone will notice and be able to relate to them…