Archive for July, 2009
Real Repentance
July 24th, 2009 | 
Author: This does my heart good to read.
Which is more important, repenting of your evil behavior or your misshapen views on the unconditional love and acceptance of you Heavenly Father?
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Is Purity for Everyone?
By Jonathan Daugherty
I’m going to do something an author really isn’t supposed to do when titling an article with a question. I’m going to give you the answer right up front (and keep my fingers crossed that you will still read the rest of the article).
Is purity for everyone?
No.
I have been working in full-time sexual purity ministry since 2003. In that amount of time I have heard the stories of thousands of individuals struggling with sexually addictive thoughts and behaviors. There are an unbelievable number of people carrying terrible shame and secrets of trauma and abuse that is truly unfathomable. Many shed tears. Some have memory loss and debilitating emotional problems. All have felt afraid, angry, lost, alone, weary, frustrated, hopeless and myriad other emotions. We offer help to all these people, yet only a few ever embrace a new life of purity.
There are many reasons (mostly excuses) why so many people carrying so much pain never find lasting freedom and peace from their addictive lifestyle. The most common reason is because they remain fixated on their circumstance, convincing themselves that in order for them to live a life of purity, their situation must change. Maybe their spouse is threatening a divorce or a boss is dangling a pink slip in front of their nose. Whatever the case, those who don’t ultimately experience long-lasting freedom have found a reason (however fickle and false) to return to the dungeon of lust and self-centeredness. (keep in mind, this is a generality based on thousands of cases; there are always exceptions…)
But are these the reasons why I say “no” to the question, “Is purity for everyone?” Not really. The reasons above (namely, believing circumstantial change, rather than personal change, will bring about a life of purity) are only one side of the coin of why purity isn’t for everyone. The other side, I believe, is a much more basic, spiritual reason of why purity isn’t for everyone. Purity is only possible for those in right relationship with God.
Recovery programs that only focus on correcting and managing behaviors are not understanding the true essence of purity. True purity is a condition of the heart, the inside of a person, not merely how a person chooses to use their body. To deny the reality of a spiritual need in sexual addiction recovery is to miss the point entirely. A person is pure when they are pure all the way through. How then does one achieve this sort of purity? Only from God.
God uses a particular word to describe his own attribute of purity: holiness. God is holy, perfect and pure in every aspect of his being. God created mankind in his image, breathing into Adam something of the essence of himself. Therefore, Adam and Eve were holy; pure and perfect in their original design. Then (you know the story) sin entered the world through their disobedience, and spiritually Adam and Eve (and the rest of humanity to follow) were stained, broken, impure. Man’s pride marred God’s holy creation.
Thankfully, God didn’t abandon his creation. He made a way for humanity to be restored, to be made new in spirit. He sent Jesus Christ to pay the penalty we deserved for our pride and sinfulness, thus erasing our debt and exchanging it for his life in us. And the only requirement of us to receive this indescribable gift is faith, simply trusting in Jesus. In that moment of faith, God restores our spirit to his original design for us. He breathes life anew into our darkened spirit and the holiness of God pours in. In this new state, we are now able to understand and even partake in a whole new life of purity, true purity that is based on God’s character and holiness, not our own.
So, do behavior modification techniques have any value in sexual addiction recovery? Of course they do. We each have a will, even if we have no relationship with God. But no person can experience the fullness of true purity apart from a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. And, ironically, even those of us who do have a relationship with God still have a choice: fully trust God and embrace his life-transforming grace or trust in our own intellect and effort to attempt to do what only God can do through us.
Purity, therefore, is only for those who 1) Know God through faith in Jesus and 2) Lay down their pride and let God have his way in revealing His holiness (i.e. purity) through them.
Final question: Is a life of purity for you?
Reproduced with permission from Be Broken Ministries. © 2006-2009 Be Broken Ministries and its licensors. All rights reserved.
Confessions Are Good But…
The folks at XXXChurch.com have a good post about confession on their couples blog today. I am reposting it here.
Websters describes confession as such:1 a:an act of confessing a disclosure of one’s sin in the sacrament of reconciliation.
Confession is an amazing gift given to us by God in order to acknowledge or wrongful actions. Just being able to confess something to him can make you feel like a load of bricks have been lifted off of your shoulders. Just look at some of the confessions on the xxxchurch.com website and you will notice that many feel great relief in doing so. The feeling of getting something out into the open can be such relief to your soul.
The only problem with many of us is that once we have confessed our sins to God that is all we do. So many of us, me included have confessed our sin of pornography and our affairs with it many times. I had confessed so many times to God that it was now becoming routine with all of the confessions running into one another. Confession is an awesome gift given to everyone. The only thing is what do you do after that? For me I would usually be good for little bit then turn right back around and dive head first into the sinful nature of looking at porn instead of removing it from my life like I had told God I wanted to do.
Year after year my addiction kept getting more and more out of hand.  Time after time, I kept confessing to Him about this. The thing is I was only confessing to God and not to anyone else around me who I had destroyed if they could see it or not. As a married man I needed to confess my struggles to my wife and ask for her forgiveness. As a leader of a small group I needed to confess this sin to them asking for their forgiveness.  Some day when my children understand I will once again have to confess this to them as well and ask for their forgiveness. Some may think why would I have to ask this of my children. The thing is porn took me down so many dark road that I ended up spending more time with porn than I did my own children. For me I will not have closure of this sin until I do this.
The point is that confession between you and God is good and needed but, unless you confess to others around you it will be next to imposable to remove this sin from your life. Maybe you have noticed that 99.9% of the people who have gotten over this addiction did so by confessing to others as well as God. You will also notice that most of their stories reflectupon a time when they confessed to God and no one else spending more time in their sin.
If you are struggling with pornography and want out please confess it to God and then to another person who will help hold you accountable. If you know your spouse or someone else is trapped by this sin please talk to them about it. Do not be the one who sits by and watches as they flush their life, marriage, or career down the toilet.
If you are looking for resources to help please look at the resource pages at xxxchurch.com. If your a wife whose husband is struggling with this issue and would like to talk to someone who understands what you are going through please visit the Partners For Purity web site. They have been were you are now and can help you heal in this process as well.
An Open Letter to Pastors
A blog post entitled, “An Open Letter to Pastors“, was shared with me and I thought it well worth sharing. It is one pastor’s warning to other pastors.
The blog post was precipitated by the recent moral failure of a pastor who lives in my community – Cherokee County, Georgia.
Check Under the Hood
After being in recovery for a while, you realize that addiction of any sort, porn/sexual addiction included, is an attempt to meet legitimate needs through illegitimate means. The way we define sexual addiction on the Higher-Calling.com FAQ further explains this perspective.
With that in mind, I have come to believe that temptation to engage in acting out behavior is like the check engine light on the dashboard of my car. The pull toward pornography is an indicator that I need to check under the hood.
In recovery terms, this is known as identifying your triggers. The acronym HALT is a well-known list of common triggers (Hungry, Angry, Lonely or Tired). This article further explains HALT.
It is very helpful to identify triggers in two categories: visual/physical or emotional. HALT identifies two physical triggers (hungry or tired) and two emotional triggers (angry or lonely). Seeing a person or picture with certain physical attributes or wearing specific clothing can visually trigger arousal.
Emotional triggers are much more difficult to identify. In part this is because addicts are generally not connected to their emotional selves and therefore have a hard time identifying and expressing their emotions. Shame is probably the most powerful triggering emotion for addicts. Often confused with guilt, which is the negative feeling tied to wrong behavior, shame is a much deeper sense that we are fundamentally worthless and unacceptable. Anything that triggers our shame is sure to kick off a strong pull to act out.
Being aroused by certain physical/visual or even emotional stimulus is not abnormal. However, addicts take it a step further and engage in acting out behavior. Acting out repeatedly over time hard-wires our brains to associate arousal of any sort with our acting out behaviors. All arousal, regardless of the trigger, leads us to the same place.
Coming back to our metaphor, these triggers are glaring check engine lights on the dashboard of our consciousness. They indicate places where we may need to grow, establish accountability, forgive ourselves or others, or simply confess past sins in a safe place. The point is to not let the “service required” indicator go unnoticed.
Take a few minutes to reflect on what is going on under the hood the next time you are triggered to act out. It is an essential element of keeping the engine of our sobriety running smoothly.
