If you are addicted to porn right now you don’t have to worry.
This is good news because it means the person you were created to be has still to appear. The life you were designed to live hasn’t begun to play out yet.
But it can.
Porn drags us back in every way imaginable. It doesn’t just ruin our relationships with our family and friends or our relationship with God. It causes us to get stuck in the moment, in the present hatred we have for ourselves and our present despair.
Which means that we forget the past and we can’t look forward. Porn is all we know. We can’t remember what it was like not to struggle and we can’t imagine what it will be like to never struggle again.
But as much as you might tell yourself or start to believe it, God does not want you to struggle.
But I believe to beat porn we need to both look back and forward. Which is exactly what Jesus told the Samaritan woman he met at the well (John 4)
Jesus met a woman who had gone her whole life addicted to sexual relationships, jumping from one husband to another. When you jump from relationship to relationship like that, or from pornsite to pornsite, you are clearly searching for something.
But like the woman at the well we never find what we are looking for. It never arrives. To really beat porn we need to be honest about what it is we are looking for.
We need to take time to stop and look at what the deep issues are that are causing us to turn to porn. Often there are deep unmet needs and hurts from our past that we need to fix (for a great book on this check out “Breaking Free: Understanding sexual addiction and the Healing Power of Jesus” by Russell Willingham. I honestly can’t recommend this book enough. It has allowed me to address junk from my past that I never even knew was there and has changed my whole outlook on beating porn. Do yourselfa favour and get a copy!).
But I digress. We need to evaluate these natural, God created needs and realise that there is only one way we can meet them.
And that is through Jesus. By acknowledging that we don’t need to feel accepted by the women or men in porn because Jesus has accepted us completely and unconditionally already.
When Jesus offered the woman at the well water that would mean she would never be thirsty again, he wasn’t just saying something nice about how we loves us and will always be there for us.
He was going deep into our wounds and saying ‘that wound you have, that hurt and feeling of loneliness or even that feeling which you can’t describe but can feel somewhere in the recesses of your being; not only can I fix it, but you can trust me to always fill it. So much so that you won’t ever need to jump from one guy/girl/ porn movie/sexual relationship/abusive relationship to the next ever again.’
That is a big thing and one that sometimes we can’t quite believe when we are in the middle of our porn controlled, destructive lives.
But that doesn’t make it any less true.
And when we allow Jesus (and other people) into these areas we can start to look forward. We can start to look at the hope that our lives can count for something. That we don’t have to waste hours or even whole days and weeks consumed by porn. That we aren’t a mistake.
That God has been with us the whole time.
AA encourages alcoholics to take one day at a time. This is true and important. But what if we took our past days and allowed Jesus to use them to fix our future days.
Starting today.
One day at a time.