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Renewing our minds is not about turning off our minds. It is about turning to pursue the deepest affections God has
That is to say, it can actually build new pathways and new associations!
When we pay attention, sexual fantasies are messengers from our souls to reveal our deepest longings. And these longings are good.
Unwanted sexual behavior is any sexual behavior that continues to persist in our lives despite our best efforts to change it.
The Society for the Advancement of Sexual Health conservatively estimates that between 3 percent and 5 percent of all Americans can be classified as addicted to sex.[1]
This represents an alarming nine to sixteen million people. Additionally, 64 percent of thirteen- to twenty-four-year-olds
olds intentionally watch pornography at least once a week.[2] By the time ch...
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young adults, 62 percent of them will have received a sext (sexually explicit image via text), and 41 ...
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Porn use will nearly double the probability of a couple’s getting divorced.[5] Approximately 35 percent of all Internet downloads are porn related.[6] Porn sites receive more monthly traffic than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined.[7] Porn is a $97 billion industry, with
as much as $12 billion of that coming from the US.[8] About 57 percent of our pastors and 64 percent of our youth pastors struggle or have struggled with pornography.[9]
The reality that more than half our faith leaders and the great majority of Christians view pornography should indicate that our strategies have proven ineffective.
The complexity is that the underlying issues that drive our sexual lust and anger do not get examined.
How many of us have ever asked God to help us understand our lust?
Despite the overwhelming grip of shame and guilt, I do not believe that sexual fantasies are something to condemn.
It begins by listening to our lust.
One evening of deliberate curiosity for your sexual fantasies will take you further into transformation than a thousand nights of prayerful despair.
Present sin is the doorway to the wider work of the gospel to bring healing to the wounds of the past and comfort, even power, to the difficulties of the present. Therefore, the sooner we assume a posture of curiosity for our sexual brokenness, the more we will prepare our hearts for the redemptive work ahead.
God approaches us for our joy, not due to his disappointment in us. His heart is to exchange beauty for ashes, joy for mourning, and praise for despair (see Isaiah 61:3). There is no depth of shame that the love of God cannot reach. There is no story he cannot redeem. The paradox of the gospel is that our failures do not condemn us; they connect us.
The formative experiences of our childhood (loneliness, pain, sexual arousal, secrecy, and relational ambivalence) are all being repeated in our unwanted sexual behavior as adults.
There are always reasons. If you want to find freedom, it begins by identifying your specific reasons.
Until these specific drivers are transformed, the use of unwanted sexual behavior is often necessitated.
She asked me how I had come to this conclusion and noted how odd it would be for me to be involved with the population of men and women I work with without addressing a great deal of my own sexual life.
Blankets of shame and condemnation lifted because my therapist was inviting me not primarily to stop my lust but to engage the sexual story I was set up for.
I left the session and wrote down this sentence: “If we fail to engage the ways we were sexualized in the past, we leave open the high probability that these patterns will become more pronounced in the future.” Sexual struggles reveal the truth of our stories in ways that will constantly surprise us.
What I want to underscore is that the voice of the Lord is never filled with accusation or frustration. God’s presence invites us to greater reflection as to how our unwanted lives became the way they are today.
Let’s think about that: God is the designer of erotic pleasure. The clitoris, for example, is the only organ in the human body that serves no other function except for providing an avenue to sexual pleasure.
Sex is one of the most important means through which we will discover the heart of God.
I am asking you to consider the possibility that evil has been plotting against your sexuality throughout your life.
It has completed massive research on us and knows we are far more likely to pursue shameful sexual behavior when we are experiencing difficult emotions.
Approaches to healing that are centered on what is wrong with us will never lead to the type of transformation we desire and deserve.
When sin and addiction language overshadows this belovedness, the inevitable outcome is clinical and theological approaches that rely heavily on behavior modification.
I believe we need a model that integrates sin and addiction.
Sin is a relational category highlighting our separation from God. “To be in sin is to be alienated from God.”[6]
The gospel tells us that our belovedness will never change according to our wanderings. But our belovedness is intended to change our wanderings.
The irony of sinful sexual behavior is that it is actually against sex. It is not that we want too much sex; it is that we want too much anti-sexual behavior. We know the beauty and power of sex, but we also know when we are pursuing a deviant imitation of a beautiful erotic life. It is not possible to become too sexual for God. It is possible, however, to grow increasingly trapped in anti-sexual behavior.
The intelligence and exploitive power of evil come from twisting the good gifts God has given. Nothing about sin is created out of nothing; all its power is trafficked from goodness. “Goodness,” said C. S. Lewis, “is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.”[11]
Satan himself, as C. S. Lewis explains, is God’s Satan—a creature of God who can be really wicked only because he comes from the
shop of a master and is made from his best stuff.”[12]
The good news is that in Christ, all our sin—past, present, and future—has been atoned for. Therefore, the purpose of addressing sin should never be
to corner heavy-laden people with further evidence of their moral failures. Sin language helps people to name their pain and invites them to consider how good yet humbling it would be to return home.
Can we really be that loved and desired at the depths of our failures? Sin is an opportunity to be loved abundantly.[15]
World-renowned addiction expert Dr. Gabor Maté wrote, “Emotional isolation, powerlessness, and stress are exactly the conditions that promote the neurobiology of addiction.”[17]
The results suggested to researchers that “the addiction did not arise from the heroin itself but from the needs of the men who used the drug.”[19] If you want to understand why you are addicted to something, you have to understand the conditions that keep your addiction in place.
When you are involved in unwanted sexual behavior, one of the most maddening dimensions of your life becomes your fight with freedom. You long for liberation, but you also experience a strange comfort in the misery and pleasure your unwanted behavior provides.
Jeffrey likened his fear of freedom to a book he read in college about the Soviet Gulag, a massive system of forced labor camps where some eighteen million people were passed through.[21] One prisoner who escaped decided to turn himself back in. He told his fellow prisoners, “Freedom isn’t for us. . . . We’re chained to this place for the rest of our lives, even though we aren’t wearing chains. We can escape, we can wander about, but in the end we’ll come back.”[22] Jeffrey and so many battling sexual brokenness continue to participate in slavery because the prospect of life without the
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She was not aware that one survey found that one in three women watches porn at least once a week.[1] Another study found that 56 percent of women twenty-five years old and younger and 27 percent of women older than twenty-five years old seek out porn.[2]
You should have been able to fix the issue by now, and if you can’t, you assume there is something deeply flawed in you. This is the language of self-hatred.
I have never met a client who at some level has not minimized the role their family and community of origin played in the development of their behavior.
The choice of unwanted sexual behavior is never accidental. There is always a reason. Your path to freedom from unwanted sexual behavior begins with finding the unique reasons behind yours.
The vast majority of men and women I’ve worked with tend to condemn themselves for their initial involvement with unwanted sexual behavior. This is like indicting yourself for a cancer diagnosis when you grew up next to a leaking nuclear waste facility. We tend to blame ourselves rather than study the conditions and relationships that most inform our sexual struggles.
