Sometimes when I sit down to write my daily email I get the idea for the day from an email that I read from my inbox. This morning I read an email sent to me by a college student who attends a Christian University and struggles with porn. He wrote;
“I’ve fallen back into the habit of watching porn, and I’m just tired. I don’t really feel guilty or anything anymore, it’s more of just a tiredness and I can’t do anything about it.”
Numbness can actually be a feeling that your body produces when you are doing something wrong, or someone is doing something to you that is harmful to you. It is very painful to be a Christian, knowing God’s desire for us is sexual purity, and yet to have access to hardcore porn or in a relationship that has become sexual.
Your desires become inflamed and you feel there is nothing you can do to stop medicating yourself with sex and porn. It is like when a child first touches a hot stove and immediately jerks back his hand because pain blasts off from the skin and tells the brain to pull back the hand. It is being burned and the natural instinct is to pull away.
However, if someone keeps doing that day after day the sensitivity decreases and the skin becomes numb or even calloused.
The same thing happens to our heart and conscience. Plus, if the action involves an intense amount of pleasure and desires, it is even more deadly because the hardening of the heart is a slow and gradual thing. The lusts of our flesh begin to not only anticipate the pleasure to happen again but even begins to crave the sexual rush.
Proverbs 4:23 says;
“Guard your heart above all else,
for it determines the course of your life.”
We see this in so many ways in life which proves the point. Kids love sugar because it tastes really good. You do not have to teach a kid to like candy, it is automatic. I actually have a video of my first granddaughter at the age of 1 eating her first Oreo cookie. With no prompting on my part I handed her the cookie and after looking at it for about a second, she pulled the cookie wafer pieces apart and started to lick and scrape the icing off into her mouth.
Now sour things produce the opposite effect. Sour is something of an acquired taste. Some people like sour candy but not me. Sour bad … sugar good is my motto.
So, when we become more and more addicted to sexual candy it is only normal that our conscience or heart begins to harden to the things of God and lust after the things of the flesh. We know these sins are destructive, but we desire them anyway. A numbness sets in as we keep telling our conscience to shut up.
As our sexual acting out moves from fantasy to porn, to actually having sex with others we start to be driven with a lust for more. More frequency. More depravity. Deeper and deeper into the darkness we go and soon we realize that what we thought was something we can handle, and our control is now out of control and handling us.
The answer, repent, do a 180, and return to God. You have done that right? Maybe even hundreds of times, but you are in despair because each and every time you find yourself being driven back to get another sexual fix because life has become unmanageable without your sexual drug fix.
Listen, I know because I have been there. It is a horrible addiction in which so many find themselves entangled. Perhaps you are feeling that desperation and thinking that God has abandoned you because of a long line of broken promises. You live in shame because of your secret life of sin and feel you have nowhere to turn.
However, you do have somewhere to turn, and it is to 180 Ministries. You will not be able to find freedom by living in secret and trying to win the battle on your own. You KNOW that because of your repeated efforts have always failed. We are a community of Christian men and women who can help each other recovery. Tomorrow I will go into greater detail on how our community can help you.
