Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing

by Jay Stringer

How many of us have ever asked God to help us understand our lust?

It is my conviction that the God of the universe is neither surprised by nor ashamed of the sexual behavior we participate in. Instead, he understands it to be the very stage through which the work of redemption will be played out in our lives.

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.

HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED why God made us so sexual, especially when it often seems to plague us with shame? I’ve wondered the same thing. What I am struck by is the reality that sex was God’s idea. And I have to believe that because he invented it, he knows the power it will render in our lives.

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.

The creation-forming power of erotic love highlights the Achilles’ heel of evil. Evil cannot create anything out of nothing. It can’t clothe a tree with an abundance of beautiful leaves, it can’t make hops or grain for beer or spirits, and it can’t create the beauty of a human life. But what it can do is promote deforestation, seduce us to drink to the point of alcoholism, and through the production of pornography degrade women and dissolve the integrity of men and women. The kingdom of darkness is extremely clever, maniacally focused on efficiency. It’s been scheming longer than any human empire to mar the things that most reveal God. It wants to destroy the rain forests, promote systems of greed, and pit nations against one another in killing sprees. But worst of all, it wants to destroy our bodies, to mar the very qualities that make us most like God: our beauty, our ability to give and receive pleasure, and our desire to know and be known.

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 overshadows this belovedness, the inevitable outcome is clinical and theological approaches that rely heavily on behavior modification. 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.

If you want to understand why you are addicted to something, you have to understand the conditions that keep your addiction in place.

The human heart is an “idol factory.” . . . [It] takes good things like a successful career, love, material possessions, even family, and turns them into ultimate things. Our hearts deify them as the center of our lives, because, we think, they can give us significance and security, safety and fulfillment, if we attain them.[1]

When a religious community practices shaming, the eradication of desire, and silence, it colludes with the effects of sexual shame and trauma.

For most children and adolescents, however, their first exposure to pornography was not a discovery but an introduction.

Many men express anger at their wives for their apparent fickleness with desire, but beneath the surface is intimidation. A man intuitively recognizes that a woman’s desire is far deeper and more complex than his own. Although she may have ebbs and flows of sexual desire, the holistic longing she has for intimacy will often far surpass his own. Confronted with this reality, a husband can see it as an invitation for personal and relational growth, or he will default to an angry disappointment that his wife’s arousal does not function in the same masculine manner. For men to change, they must exchange blame for the opportunity to grow.

Rather than fighting lust or shame, let your sexual brokenness motivate you to find greater meaning in life. If you want to fight, don’t fight to eliminate desire; fight to discover meaning.

Lust and anger are the primary tributaries that flow into the river of unwanted sexual behavior. I have never met someone who struggles deeply with lust who is not also battling with unaddressed anger. You can lust for pornography, but in the background, you might be angry at your spouse for not being sexual enough. You can be angry that a friend did not invite you to a party, and almost immediately you find yourself lusting for a hookup to override the experience of betrayal. Lust is important to address, but it is like a car battery: It starts the engine, but we need anger to fuel our drive through unwanted sexual behavior.

Want to find out why you’re so compelled to pursue unwanted sexual behavior? Figure out what’s made you so angry.

I am convinced that one of the reasons we have not seen more progress in the reduction of pornography is that it seems very few people outside of Jesus and pornographers seem to understand that the heart is seduced by behaviors that allow lust and anger to be indulged. Pornography traces the human heart’s trajectory from lust to a demand to control beauty and, if you stay long enough, to a desire to see the body and face of a woman degraded.

Strip responsibility and reciprocity from sex, and you have pornography.

Resignation derails you from the necessary work of maturity. I do not believe the kingdom of darkness cares terribly much whether you drift off to pornography yearly, monthly, or nightly. It knows that once you’ve resigned to small doses of toxins in your heart, your potential to enjoy the fullness of life is compromised.

Perversion occurs through associating sexual lust with the anger embedded in our hearts.

According to popular pornography sites, each time men log on to the sites, they spend on average about nine minutes using pornography. Nine minutes. Women spend about a minute more. It strikes me that if we truly longed for beauty, connection, enjoyment, and pleasure as much as people claimed, we would be spending far more time pursuing it. The evidence suggests something to the contrary. We pursue pornography not because we are pursuing beauty but precisely because we prefer to consume and control it. With time, pornography will become a form of restitution in which we demand that the object of our lust suffer the loneliness, anger, and confusion we do not know how to suffer.

Let me state unequivocally that I believe that pornography exists predominantly due to male violence against women. When masculine anger is sexually hijacked, it moves into degradation of the feminine.

The fantasy world created in pornography or prostitution requires a woman to be reduced to an object or commodity. In pornography, a woman’s rank as a co-revealer of the image of God is reduced to a gender that exists to submissively serve the errant longings of men.

Pornographers know that men move from hearts of lust to demands to possess beauty and, if they stay long enough, to the desire to see the bodies and faces of women degraded. The heartbeat of the pornographic world is to seduce men through their lust in order to offer them the ability to deface the beauty and life-giving power of women.

Pornography offers us an imitation version of the justice and rest found in Jesus alone. In pornography, a victim is chosen to suffer violation in order to offer the porn user revenge and escape. In the gospel, humanity chooses an innocent victim to suffer death. In Jesus’ atonement, we are paradoxically offered the justice and rest we most desire. Both pornography and Jesus appeal to the deepest longings in our hearts. Only one offers freedom. We can see, then, the effective idolatry taking place in pornography use. Rather than accepting the willing self-sacrifice of a God who offers to atone for our sins, we seek out an alternative sacrifice—a victim both unwilling and inadequate—and bring our lust and anger there instead. Rather than submit ourselves to a loving God, we have submitted ourselves to (and implicated ourselves in) evil.

Anonymity, affordability, and availability reveal how ineffective a mere desire to stop your unwanted sexual behavior would be. Forces you may not even be aware of are at work against you. To counteract these forces, heart change and practical actions will need to be pursued.

Let me be clear that the sex industry is never ultimately to blame for your involvement with unwanted sexual behavior. Instead, it functions much like a squatter in a vacant home. If you are not committed to taking responsibility for the integrity of your life, there are many squatters who will be glad to take over.

Pornography is not any less damaging than street prostitution; it merely distances the user from the debasement and exploitation these women undergo every day. As researcher Melissa Farley noted, “Pornography is pictures of prostitution.”[6]

Shame is the painful experience that something you have done or failed to do has made you unwanted or unworthy of belonging. My research found that shame was the most consistent key driver of unwanted sexual behavior. Shame convinces us that we are unwanted, and we pursue behavior that confirms it. To find freedom, disarm the power of shame. The more you feel shame, the more you pursue pornography.

A failure of integrity does not begin when we look at porn; it begins the moment we begin to care less about the things that matter. When we experience anxiety, we need the integrity to work through it rather than flee to our patterned ways of escape. When we want passionate sex lives but sense that our spouses are removed, we need the integrity to stay in kind, intentional conversation. When we find ourselves in mundane jobs we dread, we need the integrity to pursue the vocation that deeply matters to us. Integrity fortifies all aspects of our lives to pursue the desires, talents, and ambitions God wove into our hearts. Unwanted sexual behavior is not the root cause of a lack of integrity but rather one of the many symptoms.

The joy of repentance is found in turning from entitlement to the pursuit of what we truly deserve. Entitlement is an attitude that we have an inherent right to get what we were deprived of. Repentance refocuses us not on what we demand but on what we deserve. Repentance is faith that God truly desires to give us what is best for us. You will notice that entitlement and repentance feel different in your body. Entitlement will make you tense and rigid until you get what you demand. Repentance fills you with anticipation for the joy and rest that are to come. As the years go on, you will be less seduced by counterfeit and entitled comfort.

“You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.”[3]