Breaking the Habit

This is poison! Your secrets keep you sick!

We are broken, on more than one level, but especially in our sexuality, we are broken. Our addictions leave us bleeding out through an open wound, and it's starting to scab over. All of our secrets and schemes to hide our sin are nothing more than band-aids covering a gunshot wound; we're losing more ground than we're gaining. What addiction, what sin could be so serious that I would compare it to a gunshot wound? The answer is pornography, and ultimately lust. You might think that a gunshot wound is an extreme metaphor for something like lust and pornography, but it was Jesus who stated that if your eye caused you to sin (sexually, as it were), then you should gouge it out (Matthew 18:9). If the God of the universe considers lust something severe enough to compare gauging out one's eye to the kind of precautions we should take, then maybe it would be prudent to examine the effects of pornography and lust in our lives.

When dealing with pornography it serves one to remember: pornography is an addiction. This is not a habit, like biting your nails or twirling your hair, which can just be stopped through repetition. Pornography is an addiction; therefore, in order to fight this, we need to think like a reformed alcoholic or drug addict. Since you wouldn't tell an alcoholic in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting to go sit in a bar or buy lots of liquor and just stare at it, why do we think we can saturate ourselves in sexually stimulating environments, and not be led into temptation? If pornography is any images, videos, or stories that stimulate sexual excitement, then it's not just the hardcore pornography that we tend to think of, but also certain movies, TV shows, magazines, chat rooms, or even things like sending nude pictures through text messages or the internet. Your addiction to pornography isn't harmless; it will eventually lead to the entire corruption of your sexuality. God wants you to experience a fulfilling sexual life, but on His terms (refer to last week's blog post). Pornography is a downward spiral that begins with an image, movie, or story, and ends with an addiction that no amount of sexual stimulation can quench.

Lust is an infection caused by a wound we suffered at some point. At one point in your life you stopped thinking of the opposite sex as gross, and eventually you were introduced to sexual stimuli. It could have been a magazine, a movie, a website, or maybe just something you heard someone talking about, either way at some point you suffered an injury that altered your mindset about sex. After this, lust began to infect that wound, and you began to think of the other gender and sex in general, in a totally different light. Lust corrupts our hearts, minds, and a drive for intimacy that God has given us. We start to view the opposite sex as nothing more than objects to get sexual pleasure out of. As the infection progresses, sexual fantasies and images flood our thoughts, and we feel completely helpless. Sometimes we view lust as a misdirected sex drive, which can be focused into something healthy. Our mindset is that once we get married we can focus our sexual desire on our spouse, and that sexual temptation and lust will cease to exist; however, ask any married person, they will tell you that lust doesn't stop the moment you say "I do". This is how we know that lust is an infection and not just misdirected sexual desire, because we can't end sexual temptation by focusing our desires on our spouse.

So, how do we fight against pornography and lust? You run for your life! You have no chance in a fight against sexual immorality, the Bible tells us to run from it (1st Corinthians 6:18). The moment you wonder if you should sin sexually, you start losing ground. You need to understand that you don't even have the right to sin, because your body was bought at a price (1st Corinthians 6:20). The first way to evade your sexual desires is to starve your addiction, by removing any kind of sexual stimulation from your life. Maybe that means that you have to get a computer out of your room or maybe you need to stop chatting or text messaging certain people or maybe you have to stop watching a certain TV show or movie. Whatever it is you have to get it out of your life, because this pornography is a path that leads to destruction. Second you have to clean your infection, and the only way to do that is by telling someone. You can't do this on your own; your secrets are the poison that keeps you sick. Tell a parent or an adult that you trust or one of the leaders in our student ministry about your struggle with lust and/or pornography. The longer you struggle alone, the more difficult it will be to stop. Lust and pornography harden your heart and mind to the kind of sexual life that your heavenly Father wants you to have, stop covering the gunshot wound of your sexuality with the band-aid of your secrets, you're losing too much blood.


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Pray
That God will give you the courage to speak to someone about your struggle with lust and/or pornography.