Why is winning so difficult? What an easy slide it was into an addiction to pornography, I wish my natural inclination was to chase purity just as hard as it chased destruction.
I have always struggled with disciplines. I am the last minute guy it’s feast or famine when it comes to exercise, bible study, prayer, sermon prep, maintenance. While the thought of being ‘found out’ was my greatest fear it was by no means my greatest battle to sexual freedom, that battle was reprogramming my life through implementing new spiritual, physical and emotional disciplines.
Implementing physical boundaries concerning access to the internet seems like an easy discipline but when you are tired, depressed or just alone it is amazing what you will do to get your fix. I couldn’t do it on my own, the disciplines I needed in my life required accountability, transparency and a huge amount of effort and self control, which if I had already possessed I wouldn’t be in this mess.
I needed help so I started to build an army, friends who knew my addiction, a pastor who asked the hard questions, a wife who continued to pull out of me healthy connections, computer programs that kept me away from those sites….
Discipline is defiantly in the answer to our addiction but you will need an army to help you as if we could do it ourselves we would have long before now. Be real, be hurt, and be ready for healing, wholeness and a new lease on life. Discipline is hard but once built provides many barriers of protection to a sometimes weak and selfish heart.
Battling sexual addiction with the right weapons, such as good disciplines and an army, will ensure you don’t end up like the traveller in the Eagles song ‘Hotel California’ who couldn’t kill the beast.
Mirrors on the ceiling,
The pink champagne on ice
And she said ’we are all just prisoners here, of our own device’
And in the master’s chambers,
They gathered for the feast
The stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can’t kill the beast