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Dr. Dallas Willard recently posted a very compelling article on his website about pornography and spiritual formation. True to form, his words do not merely impart information, but impel action and give practical application.
He uses his “VIM” model as a framework to understand the nature of pornography use and how to stop through devotion to Christ.
VIM stands for Vision, Intention and Means. Use of pornography represents a wrong vision of God and His creation (ourselves and the objects of pornography), which drives our intention to use pornography and gratify ourselves sexually, which leads to pursuing the means to act out those intentions. Replacing each element of VIM with a new vision, intention and means is laid out as a way to achieve freedom.
It really is an interesting read. Check it out here…
Leave a commentHere is the balance of John’s story. He shares his story of drug and pornography addiction, and God’s saving grace. He is also open and honest about continued struggles with pornography after coming to Christ. The journey of faith is not perfect, but it continues to blossom as we follow God’s lead and rest in His grace!
You can watch Part 1 of John’s Story here…
Leave a commentJohn Glisson, founder of Pure Community Ministries and The Purity Report, shares his story of drug and pornography addiction, and God’s saving grace.
He is also open and honest about continued struggles with pornography after coming to Christ. The journey of faith is not perfect, but it continues to blossom as we follow God’s lead and rest in His grace!
If you are struggling, you don’t have to languish in the dark. There is hope! Sign up on The Purity Report and start letting God into those dark places in your heart where He can forgive and heal you!
We became entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
You’re blessed when you get your inside world–your mind and heart–put right. Then you can see God in the outside world.
Matthew 5:8 The Message
“No matter what we do or where we hide, we can’t escape our essential design. We long to be free of shame’s restraints, immersed in the passion of giving and receiving. We long to live a sacrificial life that matters today and tomorrow.”
- Dan Allender Ph D
It is a good idea for us to review our Step Four inventory along with our sponsor or counselor. When doing this review with an open mind and heart, we can begin to see how difficult emotions can be triggers for our addictions. While emotions can be our triggers, our character defects are the building blocks of addiction, and our self-centeredness is the cement which holds our addictive nature together. We will never find the freedom to recover and live well until we remove all of these addictive components from within us.
In reviewing our inventory, we can see how our character defects began innocently when we were children. They were our means of survival. We learned to manipulate to get our needs met. We lied to protect ourselves. We hid our emotions to avoid embarrassment and shame. We rationalized things in order to escape ugly realities that were too much for us to bear alone. Our character defects are really ineffective tools for coping and control. They are our methods of minimizing pain and diffusing threats that we see coming our way. Without realizing it, our character defects have become a kind of strategy to care for ourselves when are afraid that no one else will.
We may feel afraid when we think of losing our defective coping mechanisms. After all, we have, at least to some degree, subconsciously thought that our character defects were important for us to survive. Thinking this way, we will subconsciously mourn the thought of having our character defects removed from us. Because letting go of our character defects can be painful, it is important that we lean on those who have been working at recovery longer than we have. Those who have more experience will understand our pain and fear. Fearing the loss of a coping mechanism is understandable, but it is essential for us to grieve these losses without complaint so that we can effectively move on down the path of recovery.
Exercising courage makes it possible to learn new and healthy ways to live our lives without resorting to the addictions that we have relied on in the past. With courage, we trade our destructive emotions and addictions for the simple gift of gratitude. Gratitude posts a guard at the door of our hearts, which is to be accessed only by God and those whom He allows. Gratitude will help us to be thankful for life as it is, not how we wish it or expect it to be. Today and every day, we stand at a crossroad. But we don’t stand alone. Our recovery fellowship stands with us. Even better, the Source of all power, God, has joined the battle for us to live a new way, to become new people, to be free.
Insights and Inspirations for Christian Twelve Step Recovery?
By David Zailer and The Men and Women of Operation Integrity
Chapter Six Segment Five
Copyright David Zailer, 2008
Operation Integrity
24040 Camino del Avion #A115
Monarch Beach CA 92629
1-800-762-0430
operationintegrity@cox.net
2 CommentsCatalyst has posted a short article from Gayle Haggard, wife of Pastor Ted Haggard. It is entitled Falling from Grace.
In it she has a great quote…
…my husband has been referred to as a “disgraced pastor” and described as having fallen from grace. I am reminded of Galatians 5:4 where the Apostle Paul clearly defines what it means to fall from grace. He emphatically states, “For if you are trying to make yourselves right with God by keeping the law, you have been cut off from Christ! You have fallen away from God’s grace.”(New Living Translation) Here Paul appears to be saying it is not the one who stumbles who has fallen from grace, but the one who thinks himself righteous on his own account.
My mind is always blown on Easter. Just the thought of a dead man being raised back to life after three days is mind boggling. Of course, that is exactly what we celebrate today. Jesus has conquered sin and death and lives forever as a testament to God that the price for our rebellion against Him has been paid.
Jesus invites us into his resurrected life. However, the way to that life is to follow his example. If we are to experience the joy of his resurrected life, we must also endure death at the cross. It is not a physical death, but surrendering to the reality that Jesus suffered on our behalf.
There are a lot of areas of my life where I want to experience Jesus’ life – my relationships are first on the list. Even my sex life makes the list. But I am reminded on Easter that in order for something to be resurrected, it first must die. Am I surrendering my life and all that it is about to Jesus so that it is his resurrected life that makes it live rather than my dead, sinful “life?”
Bottom line:
For something to be resurrected, it first has to die!
Leave a comment
The Purity Bytes Podcast (on iTunes)
Byte-sized chunks of wisdom about sexual purity…
Episode 7: Overcoming Temptation
So what do we do about temptation?
In this episode, we talk about temptation – where it really comes from and how to overcome it.
2 CommentsThe devotional blog, My Love Notes From God, has a thought-provoking post today. It talks about how our culture today looks very similar to ancient Roman culture in its view towards sex. One quote in particular should not go unnoticed.
And let’s not forget the old, commonplace sin of adultery. Blushing over that sin is definitely a thing of the past. Truth be told, adultery is one of the most insidious of them all. It has decimated families and is the likely culprit that has given rise to much of the aforementioned perversion.
The idea that adultery becoming so commonplace has given rise to so many of the other views we have on sex had not occurred to me before. Looking at a swath of 50 years, it is probably right on the money. Broken families result in broken lives Broken lives result in all sorts of coping mechanisms, escapism and risky behavior, particularly in the area of sexuality. Sex is used as an attempt to be loved an accepted because so many of us missed that growing up. It is very easy to equate intimacy with sex and fall into a trap. Multiply that over decades and millions of lives and it’s not hard to see how we ended up where we are culturally.
The guys over at XXXChurch have posted a short video of a guy, Brandt Russo, who has a unique ministry to the homeless. Brandt openly shares about how his struggle with porn addiction affected his ministry. View the video here…
From Operation Integrity
Everything that we do in a worthwhile recovery effort begins with “we.” We cannot allow ourselves to be alone if we hope to have a worthwhile recovery experience, because no one recovers from their addictions alone. We have to have help. While each of us will have a different story to tell, all of our stories end up pretty much the same way; addicted.
In our addictions, we become isolated by our secrets and by our shame. We feel guilty about the things we’ve done and we feel shameful about the secrets we’ve kept. We often feel like we are little more than a huge mistake that must be kept hidden from others at all costs.
In our efforts to combat our sense of aloneness, many of us have participated in various groups that were based on commitments of religion, social service, virtue, promise keeping, and faithfulness. We participated in these groups with full sincerity, always working with great diligence so we would not fail. We thought that if we could make ourselves to be of great importance we could solve our own internal pain. But we could not. Our best efforts were never good enough for us. No matter how much we excelled in our good works, our own sense of failure continued to grow. Whatever we did, no matter how good or worthwhile it was, it was never good enough. We thought we had to be perfect. It seemed to us that if we could get it right, whatever it was, then we could get ourselves right too. We always worked harder. To us, things were never good enough. We became perfectionists. Then, we would even find failure in our greatest achievements. Strange as it sounds, no matter what the successes we achieved, or the failures we experienced our addictions seemed to become ever more attractive. And, paradoxically, the harder we worked to overcome our addictions on our own the more our addictions ruled our lives.
Left with few, if any, viable opportunities for change we admitted we needed help. And, we took the first step in getting help by seeking out a recovery fellowship, a place where it was safe to admit that we were not in complete control of lives. Desperate, we admitted that we had been unable to overcome some very serious problems with our behavior and that our life was beyond our ability to manage. In making our admission we began to set aside our own ego-centered independence in order to seek out a connectedness and fellowship that could do for us what we had not been able to do for ourselves.
Alone we are dying, but together we can recover and live.
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