Does God Still Love Me If Am Using Porn? ~ blog

If there is one thought that should be the loudest message we learn from the Bible it is the reality that God loves us. Yet, I know for me when I was deep in my addiction to porn and sexual sin no matter how much I knew of the love of God in my head I did not feel it in my heart. I am guessing you have in the past or are even experiencing in the present the same feelings.

I wonder where those feelings are coming from and more importantly how can we get them to stop. Have you ever noticed when you feel that way? They are less likely to be felt or heard when we are worshipping or communing with the Lord in prayer. They tend to come in times when we are alone, having been beaten again by our lusts while we are stewing in our self-loathing.

Let’s call it satan’s stew. Like the frog in the kettle who is slowly being cooked alive by the heat being increased ever so slowly…we are being tempted a millimeter at a time. A thought here. A glimpse there. Perfume in the elevator going to the office or a billboard along the highway. And God forbid we should ever drive or walk past a Victoria Secret sign or store. These are the spices being added to the stew. Slowly and methodically the cook is turning up the heat

Rarely is it so blunt as suddenly finding yourself in front of a porn shop unless you were attending Rudy Giuliani’s press conference in Northeast Philadelphia last November? (Sorry I could not resist that one… BTW the owner says business has quadrupled since Rudy came to town.)

We interpret our continuing to fall back into sexual sin as our being weak, a failure, some kind of pathic loser. We internalize it or maybe it is just another flaming arrow hitting our heart instead of being extinguished by our shield of faith…which we left in our home closet…again. Either way, our continuing in sexual sin tempts us to draw several wrong conclusions.

  • We can believe that God has stopped loving us because it just feels that way.

  • We begin to doubt that we have lost our salvation.

  • We might even doubt that we were ever really saved at all.

We can be like the starving prodigal son longing for the slop he was feeding the pigs and while returning home was thinking of a way to get back into his father’s good grace and love. His sonship, he felt, was gone. Everything he had inappropriately taken had been squandered away in riotous living. But being a slave living on the farm back home was better than living with the pigs. He could not even imagine that his father would still love him.

Imagine his shock when the two of them were close enough to recognize each other and his father did what many would have felt was extremely inappropriate. The offended father should have stood his ground and taught this wicked and ungrateful son to come crawling back only to be escorted to the slave quarters.

He got his inheritance way too early and squandered it away in riotous living with booze and prostitutes. Yes, he could come home but great acts of repentance and punishment should need to be applied…right???

No, the beautiful twist to this parable is not the father standing his ground to maintain the respect of the crowd. Absolutely not…it is the father who is running to the son. Who does not care about societal dignity when his son who was, in essence, dead…is now coming home!!!

His dirty body and tattered clothing become covered by his father’s full-length camelhair topcoat. His weary and worked to the bone ring finger becomes the resting place for his father’s signet ring. And even his calloused and filthy bare feet get a new pair of Air-Jordan’s. He isn’t welcomed home and sent to the corner of shame. He is welcomed home with the biggest party he and his brother had ever seen.

So, what is our Father’s heart feeling toward us after we have gone back to our sexual sin? Jesus told three parables in Luke 11 and the prodigal son is the last one. There is the lost sheep whom the Good Shepherd, leaving the 99 goes and rescues and brings it back to the fold. There is the lost silver coin which no matter how lost it was…is found because the owner never gives up looking.

And, of course, there is the son whose father allowed to take his inheritance knowing full well he was not ready to handle the freedom that money could buy him and the brothel doors it would open. But instead, it gets wasted and the only thing it does buy is the chains of addictions.

Certainly, his foolish choices would have evaporated his father’s love for him. But they did not and neither have ours. You see the love of God our Father, Jesus our Lord and Savior, and the Holy Spirit our Comforter was never something we earned or gained by anything on our part.

His love for you preceded your entire life and even preceded time and the creation of the Universe. Look at these words that tell us the truth not clouded by feelings of guilt.

In love He predestined us to adoption as sons and daughters through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will…”

Listen, my friends…our Father’s choice to love us unconditionally, knowing full well every sin we would ever think, say, or do was something He did because He is merciful and gracious. His love cannot be earned nor can it be maintained by our obedience.

He did not save us in the hopes that we would make ourselves Holy.

He saves us so that He could transform us into godly followers of Jesus.

His salvation to all of us is a gift that we cannot be earned. His salvation to all of us is the result of the death of Jesus on the cross paying for all of our sins. And there is nothing…absolutely nothing that will ever separate you from the love of God. He has always known, before the creation of the universe everything you would think, do, or say and He decided to cause you to go from being spiritually dead in your sins to being spiritually alive in Christ.

Our sonship is never lost. We are never disowned or rejected…so why not stop slopping the hogs and lusting for pods of your own vomit and come back to the Father and the family of brothers and sisters who can help protect you from ever going back.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *