A new thread really worth reading has been started on the Higher-Calling.com forum. Below is the first post.

A friend of mine showed me this little note that they read at their
recovery meetings. I was struck with the line about religious denial:

“I see now that in all my religious striving and psychotherapy I was
waiting for the miracle to happen first, that somehow I should be
zapped or “fixed”, unable to fall or be tempted again. I thought that
if a person just had the right religious belief, he was automatically
“a new creature; old things are passed away; behold, all things are
become new” – that all thought of lust would be removed, much as a
surgeon would excise a tumor. The “religious solution” was one of the
subtlest strategies in my arsenal of denial.”

“I didn’t realize that the essence of being human is to have free
choice. God doesn’t want to remove the possibility of falling; he wants
me to have the freedom to choose not to fall. I’d been praying
self-righteously all along, “Please God, take it away!” not realizing
my inner heart was piteously whining “…so I won’t have to give it up.”
There was belief without surrender. That belief availed nothing! I had
never died to lust.”

“This program doesn’t tell us how to stop – we had done that a thousand
times – it shows us how to keep from starting again. We had it
backwards. Before, we always wanted the therapist, spouse, or God to do
the stopping for us – to fix us. Now, we stop, and then, in our
surrender, the power of God becomes effective in us. “

Can you relate to the sentence: “my innner heart was piteously
whining…so I won’t have to give it up?” My cry for deliverance &
a miracle was simply to avoid pain and avoid the embarrassment of going
to a meeting or avoiding the confessing to my wife. I wanted to use God
just like I had used everything else in my life. But God won’t be
controlled.