Is your religion fueling your sexual addiction?

FIGHTING PLEASURE WITH GREATER PLEASURE

Porn is a sin of the imagination. We need to counter it by enlarging our imaginations. The answer to porn is to believe the truth. But that’s so much more than an intellectual process. We need to let the truth capture our imaginations: to mediate, ponder, wonder at and sing the truth. We need to feel the truth, glory in the truth, delight in the truth. Discipline yourself to start each day by cultivating your affections for God. Remind yourself of Christ’s goodness, glory, grace and greatness until your heart is warmed again by those truths and Christ is supreme in your heart. “Guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life” (Proverbs 4:23 NLT).

One Christian who’s struggled  with porn concludes:

Modern conservative evangelicalism fuels sexual addiction because it has come to focus on the externals of religion, not the affections. By externals I mean such things as confessions, dogmas, personal priorities, church growth strategies, church attendance, training courses, evangelism, Bible study groups and so on: things that are visible in the believer’s life. By affections, I mean those things that cannot be heard or seen directly-fears, loves, joys, delights, hates, anxieties: the currents that swirl in the waters of a believer’s heart; the hidden desires that lie deep beneath our decisions…If we are going to help people struggling with sexual addiction, we need to recognize that the manger in which their sin is cradled is not the intellect, but the heart, the seat of their desires. They therefore need something more than mere information: they need to be wooed by the true and pure lover that their heart secretly seeks.

Jesus offers living water. Battling porn in our lives is not an exercise in denying pleasure. It’s about fighting pleasure with greater pleasure.

Quote taken from “Closing the Window: Steps to Living Porn Free” by Tim Chester