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by
Jay Stringer
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May 3 - June 13, 2019
We do this, at times, for good reasons: We do not want our hearts seduced by the things of this world. Most of us truly want to honor God with our lives. But saying no to sexual perversion is not an adequate paradigm for recovery.
my brain has been transformed and renewed.
When we pay attention, sexual fantasies are messengers from our souls to reveal our deepest longings.
The specifics of your sexual brokenness can reveal your unique way to healing.
Unwanted sexual behavior is any sexual behavior that continues to persist in our lives despite our best efforts to change it.
The longer our unwanted sexual behavior persists unaddressed, the more likely it is that we will feel unwanted as well.
The overwhelmingly standard evangelical response to sexual brokenness has been to address it through the lens of “lust management,” even declaring war against it. This approach has oversimplified and trivialized a far more complex issue within human sexuality.
I think we can all agree this cannot be what God had in mind for sex and community. 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.
Our inability to succeed in purity only compounds our pain. And then, in our pain, we default to the same ineffective treatment plan. We spend time in prayer, fast, pursue accountability, and hope that God might change us. The complexity is that the underlying issues that drive our sexual lust and anger do not get examined.
Sexual failures, Internet searches, and browser histories expose our sin, but far more, they are road maps. Sexual brokenness pinpoints the location of our past harm and highlights the current roadblocks that keep us from the freedom we desire. If we are willing to listen, our sexual struggles will have so much to teach us. You may not like the “map” you’ve been given, but to navigate your way out of unwanted sexual behavior, you will need to pay closer attention to what it desires to show you. One evening of deliberate curiosity for your sexual fantasies will take you further into
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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.
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.
the research shows that our sexual struggles are not random or capricious. There are always reasons. If you want to find freedom, it begins by identifying your specific reasons.
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.
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.
Contrary to what we often conclude at the height of our sexual brokenness, our sexuality is not an impediment to knowing God. Sex shows us just how much he is committed to giving us beauty and pleasure. Sex, if we allow it, will awaken us to the deepest reservoirs in our souls for pleasure and connection.
When I spend time with people experiencing lifelong struggles with unwanted sexual behavior, especially pornography, I’m always struck by how little they enjoy sex.
Whoa, guy, I think you went too far with fantasy.
Evil hates the beauty of sex, and because it cannot abolish its existence, it works to corrupt its essence. Evil succeeds every time we think of sex and subsequently feel damaged, ruined, and out of control in lust.
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. It also knows we are far more likely to be at war with our desires than to pursue greater beauty for our sexual stories.
Evil seduces us away from personal growth and into an escape that will paradoxically inject us with greater shame.
sex is about the flourishing of creation, not the release of tension, the medication of pain, or the power to control another.
The gospel teaches us that we are beloved before any sexual sin or addiction entered into our lives, and we remain so, even at the height of our brokenness.
When sin and addiction language helps reveal and connect us to our belovedness, the desire to change comes from our pursuit of beauty, not our self-contempt or latest strategy to combat sexual desire.
Discussion of sin should serve the strengthening of Christian faith, not the weakening of it. “Our concepts of sin should never be fashioned or deployed in a manner designed to harm people, to break their spirits, to marginalize them, to destroy their sense of belovedness, or to constrain the conditions of their flourishing.”[5]
When sin is discussed in our culture, we often imply that it occurs when we do “bad” things. A proper biblical understanding of sin, however, recognizes the relational separation that drives our unwanted behavior.
Sin is anti-law, anti-righteousness, anti-spirit, anti-life, essentially anything against the regime of God.[8]
“In the biblical worldview even when sin is devastatingly familiar, it is never normal. It is alien. It doesn’t belong in God’s world.”[9]
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.
Those whom we deem most evil are so damaging precisely because they are skilled at using empathy for exploitive means.
Through this lens, porn users, sex buyers, and adulterers would be seen as under the influence of evil, which seeks to traffic their longings for legitimate experiences and convert them into desires that will lead, in the end, to pain.
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. The Father who waits for us is not ashamed of us. On the contrary, he is a cheerful and indiscriminate host.[14] He offers invitations to everyone, particularly those whom society deems most unclean, unworthy, and perverse. What should make us most
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dysfunctional dependence
“Emotional isolation, powerlessness, and stress are exactly the conditions that promote the neurobiology of addiction.”[17]
One of the greatest insights into this reality came from a study of Vietnam soldiers who became addicted to heroin during their deployment. When the soldiers left the horrors of combat and arrived safely in the United States, 95 percent of them stopped their addiction.[18]
“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 understan...
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Addicts know that indulging in their unwanted sexual behavior will result in self-contempt. Every time. In my view, our self-contempt is not a by-product of unwanted sexual behavior; it is the very aim of it. Through this lens, unwanted sexual behavior is not primarily an attempt to remedy or self-soothe the pain of a wounded child. It is attempting to reenact the formative stories of trauma, abuse, and shame that convinced us we were unwanted to begin with.
In other words, we are not addicted primarily to sex or even a disordered intimacy; instead, we are bonded to feelings of shame and judgment.
In this way, unwanted sexual behavior is not seeking medication but rather a familiar poison to deaden our imagination that so...
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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.
Your life story set you up to experience the bondage of unwanted sexual behavior, and owning this story with a heart of curiosity and agency will provide the way out. Your sexual behavior is unwanted because you intuitively know it does not bear the beauty you were made for. God is not ashamed of us. He wants you to know a beauty you never could have conceived of at the height of your despair.
should
one survey found that one in three women watches porn at least once a week.[1]
your unwanted behavior has likely left you with a sentiment similar to Lindsay’s. 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. What I’d like you to consider is that your contempt for your failure is the very thing that blinds you from seeing the factors that set you on an inevitable trajectory toward unwanted sexual behavior.
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 cannot walk with Jesus into healing if we remain loyal to protecting the people and communities that most contributed to our harm.
Where do you feel uneasy? When do you feel disloyal to your family? When do you feel self-contempt?
