How to Leave Porn Behind

Article by  Samuel James

My older sister sat across from me at the Taco Bell and listened carefully. She knew I was lying, but she was too concerned to be angry. As she questioned me about the double life I had been living, which had been unwillingly exposed to my family and friends, she calmly heard my mistruths and told me that she knew better.

For years I had been hiding beneath the identity of being a pastor’s kid in the church worship band while yielding myself totally to pornography. I was broken, but not broken enough, and still trying to put up a crumbling façade.

As she surgically deconstructed my lies, she knew I was broken. She knew I needed a path toward healing as soon as possible. So she looked at me and said something that still echoes in my mind eight years later: “I want you to pursue a radical lifestyle of repentance.”

“The sin of pornography goes much deeper than the singular moments of watching and downloading.”

This frightened me. What did she mean? Yes, I knew I had to repent. Yes, Jesus had used this destruction in my life to show me his gospel in a saving way for the very first time. I was ready (or so I thought) to turn from my sin. The solution seemed obvious enough: (1) I had to confess openly my problem with porn, (2) I had to get an accountability partner, and (3) I needed to see a counselor at my school (I ended up doing all three).

But her words “radical lifestyle” — radical, not garden-variety; lifestyle, not sporadic or occasional — suggested unknown depths of discipline. I squirmed in my seat, nodded, and quietly feared my future. Little did I realize how life-giving a “radical lifestyle” could be.

Why So Many Are Losing the Battle

If you had asked me, I would have said that my life was just fine as it was, except for the porn. But I’ve come to realize that this perception was wrong.

The sin of pornography goes much deeper than the singular moments of watching and downloading. It’s about entire daily patterns of unbelief, laziness, self-absorption, and much more. Thus, repentance from enslavement to pornography must seek more than behavior modification in one isolated habit. It must be a resolve to bring every piece of the heart’s architecture, every beat of the rhythm of life, into the light of the gospel.

Many Christian men are fighting a losing battle with pornography because they are trying to remove the sin without adopting a radical lifestyle of repentance. They know their spiritual lives would be sweeter without giving way to lust. They know their capacity for rich relationships with other believers would expand tenfold if they weren’t smothered by midnight shame. They know their Godward ambitions for vocation and missions and pastoring are being squashed by it.

They really do want it gone, but they want everything else to stay where it is — and then they are perplexed why it just won’t work, even with accountability partners and internet filters. It won’t work long-term because this is not how God designed us.

How Badly Do You Want to Win?

Repentance has a radical character to it precisely because repentance happens in the heart. Human beings are not equally partitioned creatures: one part intellect, one part body, one part soul, and so on. In his glorious, image-bearing design, God creates us with a center of existential gravity. The heart is that center.

“Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life” (Proverbs 4:23). God promised to give his covenant people new hearts that would lead to authentic and holistic obedience (Ezekiel 36:26). Jesus explicitly taught us that our external rituals pale in comparison to our inner heart-delights (Matthew 15:18). Because our heart orients everything else, and since real repentance happens foremost in the heart, turning away from heart-enslaving sin often has far-reaching implications.

“You need to make radical changes in parts of your life that you might not intuitively think need changing.”

If you are losing the battle against porn, let me exhort you, as a fellow fighter by God’s grace: You need to make radical changes in parts of your life that you might not intuitively think need changing.

What about your job? Could the chokehold that porn currently has on you be strengthened by your daily vocation? Sometimes companies require you to have a smartphone, or to be online, alone, during late hours. While God has grace for every situation and promises the opportunity to resist temptation, I’ve met more than one fellow struggler who would have been much better off had they laid down their vocation at the feet of Jesus, and chosen radical repentance instead. What does it profit a man to gain the world but forfeit his soul to the lust that will damn him?

Likewise, I’ve known friends, especially men, who don’t realize how their lack of industriousness (or their dead-end job) is actually feeding a sense of aimlessness that makes them more vulnerable to the lure of porn. But the gospel commands those who are born again to reckon themselves dead to sin and alive to Christ (Romans 6:11). If you aren’t being a faithful steward of your time in helpful, character-building work, take radical repentance with you to a different situation.

Consider too your hobbies. Most people who are serious about fighting lust know intuitively there are some movies and sitcoms they need to leave behind. A friend of mine was deeply frustrated at his lack of progress in this battle. He loved video games. But as he spoke and confessed that failure was still the norm, I started to realize that radical repentance for him would look like cultivating better, more life-giving hobbies. He was trying to negotiate with his old habits, instead of infusing them with radical repentance. His three hours of daily gaming were not neutral; they were actually artifacts of a cloistered lifestyle that had been tailored to resist valuable means of grace in the fight against lust.

Repentance Brings Us Gain, Not Loss

Radical repentance isn’t just subtraction; it’s addition too. One of the most helpful pieces of counsel I received was that I should start cultivating the skills, ambitions, and opportunities God had given to me, instead of merely sitting on the couch, retreating from life out of shame at the past.

“Radical repentance isn’t just subtraction. It’s addition too.”

What holy ambitions have you been ignoring while merely trying to keep your head above water? Don’t just passively sit on the forgiveness and new life Jesus gives you. Turn it into a new job, one that empowers you to work heartily and serve others. Turn it into new hobbies, especially offline ones that can take you outside your own head. Turn it into a new lifestyle of sacrificial giving and of “radically ordinary” hospitality. Sin has no power over you, because you are under grace (Romans 6:14) and bought with a price (1 Corinthians 6:20). Why not live like it?

Jesus offers much more than a cleansing purge. He offers an eternally springing fountain of himself that spills into every well in our heart. Trust me, whatever you lose in radical repentance is not something you want to keep. Radical repentance begins and ends with delight: delight in God, delight in what he loves, delight in his good gifts, and delight in his promise to never cast you away or leave you. Go to him — radically.

Samuel James serves as associate acquisitions editor at Crossway Books and managing editor of Letter & Liturgy. He lives in Wheaton, Illinois, with his wife Emily and son Charlie.

Article posted at: https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/how-to-leave-porn-behind

Bitter Root, Rotten Fruit

by Paul Tautges

Hebrews 12:15-17 warns,

See to it that no one comes short of the grace of God; that no root of bitterness springing up causes trouble, and by it many be defiled; that there be no immoral or godless person like Esau, who sold his own birthright for a single meal. For you know that even afterwards, when he desired to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no place for repentance, though he sought for it with tears.

Let’s take a few minutes to counsel one another about the corruption of bitterness and what steps we can take to kill this nasty weed.

What is bitterness and what does it do?

• Bitterness [harsh, distasteful attitude) springs from a shortage of grace (“See to it that no one comes short of the grace of God”). When I am bitter against someone for sinning against me–intentionally or unintentionally–then I am not functioning as a grace-dispensing believer.
• Bitterness is a “root” attitude of heart. Roots grow downward, getting deeper and more deeply embedded and entangled. If my shortage of grace is prolonged then my heart will become increasingly hardened toward others.
• Bitterness has fruit that grows upward and outward, touching others (“springing up”). When I am bitter it is impossible for me to be the only one infected. Others around me will also be poisoned.
• Bitterness “causes trouble.” When I have nurtured the root of bitterness in my heart its rotten fruit will cause further harm, and lead to further sin. It is an entangling sin.
• Bitterness, if not repented of, can harden the heart to the point of no return (“Esau…found no place for repentance”). A sober warning!

Weed-killer for Bitterness

• Forgive from your heart those who have hurt you (Matthew 18:35).
• Bless those who have hurt you; overcome evil with good (Romans 12:19-21).
• Actively choose not to remember sins committed against you. Actively choosing not to remember is different than forgetting. In Jeremiah 31:34, God says he will “remember no more” the sins of his people. This is not memory failure, or forgetfulness. This is God’s conscious choice to no longer hold our sins against us. We must do the same with the sins of others.
• Destroy “lists of sins” committed against you, mental lists or actual, written lists (1 Cor. 13:5).
• Make peace with others, as much as is in your power (Rom. 12:18)

Listen to the sermon by Paul Tautges:  Listen to the related audio sermon here.

Do Not Consume One Another

Article by Howard Eyrich

Galatians 5:15 "Do not consume one another".

The same Scriptures that provide us with the positive protocols about which we have written also delineates five practices that we should avoid in order to glorify God in our marriages and enhance a joyful relationship.

In this essay we will consider the protocol found in Galatians 5:15. It says this: “Do not consume one another.”  Let me suggest six ways that couples typical say or do that contributes to consuming one another. The first one is angry outbursts. Angry outbursts have a deleterious impact in several ways. They provoke anger in your mate. The anger may be a defensive anger, an anger of disgust or a retaliatory anger.  For example, Jim and Sally sat in the counselor’s office attempting to provide their counselor an understanding of how their marriage demise had spiraled. As Jim was reporting an incident for the sake of illustration, Sally responded with defensive anger. Immediately Jim shut down and withdrew.  Angry outbursts diminish affection, cooperation and hope that things can ever change.

A second way we consume one another is by an attitude of demandingness. Demandingness is often the outgrowth of unmet expectations. It is not unusual to hear in the counseling office an accusation that sounds something like this. “You are supposed to be the provider for this family (which often means I expect you to enable us to live at the level of our peers) and I am not to put up with your feeble attempts.” Or, a husband may say, “I thought when I married you that you were supposed to be available for my sexual needs. I did not see where the Bible limits that to once a week and if we are going to make it you will have to get with the program.” Now these illustrations may be simplified and overstated, but they are examples (and will be heard at times in counseling).

A third way of consuming one another is by sheer selfishness. Yes, demandingness is a form of selfishness, but this is more pervasive. What is in view here is a self-centeredness that touches all of life. Sometimes this is a malady of which the individual is totally unaware. For example, a person who was raised with the proverbial “silver spoon” in the mouth may well develop a self-centeredness that not only impacts the mate directly, but also impacts every other relationship. This person’s mate finds him/herself energy drained in attempts to manage the collateral damage with the children, the Sunday School class and even with his/her friends. The mate is consumed in the process.

Yet another practice that is consuming is sulking. The mate of a sulker finds him/herself consumed with the task of figuring out what is generating the displeasure of the mate this time. Often these attempts elicit some the anger response discussed above further exasperating the consuming of the mate.

No one appreciates being manipulated. But when manipulation is characteristic of a mate, it becomes consuming. If this trait is a character trait, it will often go unnoticed in courtship, but once engaged in living intimately it will surface. I once had a young couple in counseling where this is exactly what happened. The wife said, “If I had caught on to this when we were dating I would have broken the relationship. It takes all my effort to be alert to your tricks.

Lastly, we can consume one another by distrusting. In a relationship in which trust is absent, mates find themselves consumed with being self-protective. If I am not trustworthy, my mate is consumed by me. Her/his conscious energy is poured into the action of discernment.

So, when Paul writes, “Do not consume one another”, we once again have instruction from the hand of God as to how to live within the church and especially within the marriage in a manner that contributes to our happiness as an outgrowth of glorifying God.

The Dead End of Sexual Sin

Article by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

Unbelievers don’t “struggle” with same-sex attraction. I didn’t. My love for women came with nary a struggle at all.

I had not always been a lesbian, but in my late twenties, I met my first lesbian lover. I was hooked and believed that I had found my real self. Sex with women was part of my life and identity, but it was not the only part — and not always the biggest part.

I simply preferred everything about women: their company, their conversation, their companionship, and the contours of their/our body. I favored the nesting, the setting up of house and home, and the building of lesbian community.

As an unbelieving professor of English, an advocate of postmodernism and poststructuralism, and an opponent of all totalizing metanarratives (like Christianity, I would have added back in the day), I found peace and purpose in my life as a lesbian and the queer community I helped to create.

Conversion and Confusion

It was only after I met my risen Lord that I ever felt shame in my sin, with my sexual attractions, and with my sexual history.

Conversion brought with it a train wreck of contradictory feelings, ranging from liberty to shame. Conversion also left me confused. While it was clear that God forbade sex outside of biblical marriage, it was not clear to me what I should do with the complex matrix of desires and attractions, sensibilities and senses of self that churned within and still defined me.

What is the sin of sexual transgression? The sex? The identity? How deep was repentance to go?

Meeting John Owen

In these newfound struggles, a friend recommended that I read an old, seventeenth-century theologian named John Owen, in a trio of his books (now brought together under the title Overcoming Sin and Temptation).

At first, I was offended to realize that what I called “who I am,” John Owen called “indwelling sin.” But I hung in there with him. Owen taught me that sin in the life of a believer manifests itself in three ways: distortion by original sin, distraction of actual day-to-day sin, and discouragement by the daily residence of indwelling sin.

“How should we think about sin that has become a daily part of our identity?”

Eventually, the concept of indwelling sin provided a window to see how God intended to replace my shame with hope. Indeed, John Owen’s understanding of indwelling sin is the missing link in our current cultural confusion about what sexual sin is — and what to do about it.

As believers, we lament with the apostle Paul, “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me” (Romans 7:19–20). But after we lament, what should we do? How should we think about sin that has become a daily part of our identity?

Owen explained with four responses.

1. Starve It

Indwelling sin is a parasite, and it eats what you do. God’s word is poison to sin when embraced by a heart made new by the Holy Spirit. You starve indwelling sin by feeding yourself deeply on his word. Sin cannot abide in his word. So, fill your hearts and minds with Scripture.

One way that I do that is singing the Psalms. Psalm-singing, for me, is a powerful devotional practice as it helps me to melt my will into God’s and memorize his word in the process. We starve our indwelling sin by reading Scripture comprehensively, in big chunks, and by whole books at a time. This enables us to see God’s providence at work in big-picture ways.

2. Call Sin What It Is

Now that it is in the house, don’t buy it a collar and a leash and give it a sweet name. Don’t “admit” sin as a harmless (but un-housebroken) pet. Instead, confess it as an evil offense and put it out! Even if you love it! You can’t domesticate sin by welcoming it into your home.

“God’s word is poison to sin when embraced by a heart made new by the Holy Spirit.”

Don’t make a false peace. Don’t make excuses. Don’t get sentimental about sin. Don’t play the victim. Don’t live by excuse-righteousness. If you bring the baby tiger into your house and name it Fluffy, don’t be surprised if you wake up one day and Fluffy is eating you alive. That is how sin works, and Fluffy knows her job. Sometimes sin lurks and festers for decades, deceiving the sinner that he really has it all under control, until it unleashes itself on everything you built, cherished, and loved.

Be wise about your choice sins and don’t coddle them. And remember that sin is not ever “who you are” if you are in Christ. In Christ, you are a son or daughter of the King; you are royalty. You do battle with sin because it distorts your real identity; you do not define yourself by these sins that are original with your consciousness and daily present in your life.

3. Extinguish Indwelling Sin by Killing It

Sin is not only an enemy, says Owen. Sin is at enmity with God. Enemies can be reconciled, but there is no hope for reconciliation for anything at enmity with God. Anything at enmity with God must be put to death. Our battles with sin draw us closer in union with Christ. Repentance is a new doorway into God’s presence and joy.

Indeed, our identity comes from being crucified and resurrected with Christ:

We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. (Romans 6:4–6)

Satan will use our indwelling sin as blackmail, declaring that we cannot be in Christ and sin in heart or body like this. In those moments, we remind him that he is right about one thing only: our sin is indeed sin. It is indeed transgression against God and nothing else.

But Satan is dead wrong about the most important matter. In repentance, we stand in the risen Christ. And the sin that we have committed (and will commit) is covered by his righteousness. But fight we must. To leave sin alone, says Owen, is to let sin grow: “not to conquer it is to be conquered by it.”

4. Daily Cultivate Your New Life in Christ

God does not leave us alone to fight the battle in shame and isolation. Instead, through the power of the Holy Spirit, the soul of each believer is “vivified.” “To vivify” means to animate, or to give life to. Vivification complements mortification (to put to death), and by so doing, it enables us to see the wide angle of sanctification, which includes two aspects:

“Sin is not ever ‘who you are’ if you are in Christ.”TweetShare on Facebook

1) Deliverance from the desire of those choice sins, experienced when the grace of obedience gives us the “expulsive power of a new affection” (to quote Thomas Chalmers).

2) Humility over the fact that we daily need God’s constant flow of grace from heaven, and that no matter how sin tries to delude us, hiding our sin is never the answer. Indeed, the desire to be strong enough in ourselves, so that we can live independently of God, is the first sin, the essence of sin, and the mother of all sin.

Owen’s missing link is for believers only. He says, “Unless a man be regenerate (born again), unless he be a believer, all attempts that he can make for mortification [of sin] . . . are to no purpose. In vain he shall use many remedies, [but] he shall not be healed.”

What then should an unbeliever do? Cry out to God for the Holy Spirit to give him a new heart and convert his soul: “mortification [of sin] is not the present business of unregenerate men. God calls them not to it as yet; conversion is their work — the conversion of the whole soul — not the mortification of this or that particular lust.”

Freed for Joy

In the writings of John Owen, I was shown how and why the promises of sexual fulfillment on my own terms were the antithesis of what I had once fervently believed. Instead of liberty, my sexual sin was enslavement. This seventeenth-century Puritan revealed to me how my lesbian desires and sensibilities were dead-end joy killers.

Today, I now stand in a long line of godly women — the Mary Magdalene line. The gospel came with grace, but demanded irreconcilable war. Somewhere on this bloody battlefield, God gave me an uncanny desire to become a godly woman, covered by God, hedged in by his word and his will. This desire bled into another one: to become, if the Lord willed, the godly wife of a godly husband.

And then I noticed it.

Union with the risen Christ meant that everything else was nailed to the cross. I couldn’t get my former life back if I wanted it. At first, this was terrifying, but when I peered deep into the abyss of my terror, I found peace.

With peace, I found that the gospel is always ahead of you. Home is forward. Today, by God’s amazing grace alone, I am a chosen part of God’s family, where God cares about the details of my day, the math lessons and the spilled macaroni and cheese, and most of all, for the people, the image-bearers of his precious grace, the man who calls me beloved, and the children who call me mother.

Rosaria Champagne Butterfield is a former tenured professor of English at Syracuse University. After her conversion to Christianity in 1999, she developed a ministry to college students. She has taught and ministered at Geneva College, is a full-time mother and pastor’s wife, and is author of Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert (2012) and Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ (2015).

Originally posted at:  https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/the-dead-end-of-sexual-sin

Forgiveness Is a Marathon

Article by Vermon Pierre, The Gospel Coalition

It’s the kind of video you watch with silent awe. There on your screen is Dylann Roof, clad in an orange jumpsuit, his stare cold and flat. As you watch, you soon hear the voices of the family members of the people he murdered at the Emanuel AME Church prayer meeting. They’re in a courtroom, speaking to him via closed-circuit video. The murders have happened only a few days earlier. Memorial services are still being planned. Pain and loss are clearly present as you hear the emotion in the voices of these family members.

But the words they speak to Dylann Roof are words of mercy and grace. Instead of anger and hate, they offer him forgiveness.

Many were amazed by what they witnessed from these family members. And it is amazing. But it most certainly was not easy. I fear that in our era of short video clips and changing Facebook and Twitter feeds we’re prone to quickly highlight a video like this yet fail to fully understand or appreciate all it represents.

We need to slow down long enough to consider what it takes to offer this type of forgiveness, and what it takes to continue in this spirit of forgiveness. Indeed, many of us have moved on from this story. Yet the family members and Emanuel AME community cannot. The tragedy will always feel near in their memory.

They have chosen the path of forgiveness, but let’s recongize that this path is costly, and this path is long and difficult. 

Forgiveness Is Costly 

Forgiveness doesn’t come cheaply or easily. It always comes at great expense to the one wronged. In some cases, it comes with permanent cost. The wronged parties must “take it on the chin,” allowing themselves to be physically, emotionally, or spiritually wounded by the offending party instead of seeking an equal measure of revenge. Christians do this in imitation of Jesus, who faced sinful rebels and yet still suffered and died so that we might be forgiven and reconciled to God.

We rightly celebrate what Jesus did, but let us remember that it resulted in him bearing permanent scars on his body. Within God himself, there is a constant memorial to the heavy cost of forgiving us.

It’s a bit trite, then, to point to Emanuel AME Church and tell those who have suffered a significant injustice that they need to “get over it,” to forgive instead of responding with anger.

Actually, anger is the natural, instinctive reaction to being sinned against. Think of your own reaction the last time you felt taken advantage of or misunderstood. The movie Taken is popular not because the main character decides to forgive and reconcile with those who kidnapped his daughter; it’s popular because he takes angry, bloody revenge on them. In many tragedies, such as the recent shooting of Marines in Chattanooga, Tennessee, we don’t blink an eye at the many outcries for immediate retribution against the perpetrators.

So it should shock us when we encounter a situation in which a victim doesn’t take revenge. When someone chooses to forgive, we are watching someone pay an enormously heavy and personal cost.

Historically, the black church has arguably paid this bill more than most other communities in America. We should never take this forgiveness for granted. We should marvel and thank God every time we see it.

Forgiveness Is Long and Difficult

Though Charleston has already faded from the news, it won’t ever fade from the view of those who personally experienced this tragedy. We applaud what they’ve done, share it on social media, then move on to the next thing. But Emanuel AME will have to live out the spirit of forgiveness every day. Forgiveness is neither easily offered nor easily lived. It requires daily “working out”—a daily willingness to look at the scars of injustice and choose to press deeper into grace instead of turning back toward anger and revenge. Over time, the land of anger and revenge will fade farther and farther from our view.

But we don’t get there quickly, especially when the wound is deep. This is why forgiveness is more like a marathon than a sprint. Some stretches are harder than others. At times we go uphill against strong winds. When loved ones vanish from your life because of racist hatred, the act of forgiveness will be continual and tiring. The cry How long, O Lord? by many African Americans arises out of the burden of trying to preserve and maintain faith in the Lord when the end of the race feels a long way off.

Our Bank Account

The example of Charleston victims’ families isn’t a “silver bullet” talking point for us to win arguments about whether racism really matters today or about the right view on the Confederate flag. Instead, their example should be honored with reverence and considered with care. It should encourage us to look first at ourselves, to count the heavy ongoing cost of showing grace to others—especially those who have hurt us most.

Thankfully, our bank account of grace is not empty but full, since someone was willing to pay the greatest cost before any of us ever could or would (2 Cor. 8:9). May this sacrifice lead to more thoughts, more words, and more actions of Christ-bought grace from us to the world around us. 

Vermon Pierre (MDiv, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) is the lead pastor for preaching and mission at Roosevelt Community Church in Phoenix, Arizona, and a Council member of The Gospel Coalition. He is the author of Gospel Shaped Living. He and his wife, Dennae, have four children.

Originally posted on:  https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/forgiveness-is-a-marathon/