Lies I told myself kept me trapped on the compulsive hamster wheel of porn addiction for years. One of those lies was that I convinced myself that my secret sin was innocuous, I wasn’t hurting anyone. Mine was a victimless “crime” so to speak. What I did was done in private. After all, I was only looking.
What I failed to face up to was how the time I spent seeking the rush of lust was time taken away from my wife, my family and my relationship with God. The aenergy I devoted to staying up late to see something which might bring me some excitement was energy lost to all of the things which mattered most in my life.
I’ll never forget one of the things my wife said to me when after thirty years of marriage I told her about my secret addiction to pornography. She had no idea that I led this double life, but she knew something was wrong. She said I had become a very unhappy person. She said I was not fun to be with. She knew something was wrong but could not put her finger on it.
I made myself believe that my private sin did not touch my family yet in reality it was like a radioactive substance contaminating everything I touched. Why? Because it changed me! It made me a different person and certainly not a better person.
Facing up to this fact is sad but true. Porn was taking its toll on me which meant that porn was taking its toll on my marriage and my family. Not to mention what lust was doing to my relationship with our Lord Jesus Christ.
I never wanted to confess my sin to my wife because I knew she would be devastated to learn that I was looking at and lusting over other women behind her back. How could I at the same time make myself believe the lie that “what she doesn’t know” won’t hurt her.
Only the truth can set us free. And the truth is that while I claimed to be a man of God and claimed to love my wife and my children, a part of me could not let go of the love of self and seeking a thrill for my own personal pleasure.
James 1:8 says “Such a person is double-minded and unstable in all they do.” And that was me! I was living a double-life. In my heart I said my desire was to love the Lord and love all people, yet I continually gave in to the compulsive urge to view something provocative.
I don’t like pain. Yet pain was a blessing sent from God. It wasn’t love for God or love for my wife and children which drove me to finally seek help. It was the pain I felt from being enslaved to the devil and my own selfish desires. They were eating me up from the inside out. Impure thoughts were overrunning my mind and tortured me throughout the day. I thank God that my conscience never died, but that it accused me and tormented me until finally one day I knew that I just had to find help or what was already terrible could only get infinitely worse.
If you have been running from the truth allow it to offer you freedom today. Admit that your life is out of control. Admit that you are not the person you want to be. Admit that your family deserves better and that your Heavenly Father deserves so much better. Run from your sin into the arms of the only One who can save you.
Change is not easy. Believe me, I know. But change IS possible. Change takes time. After all I had spent decades repeating the same mistakes, day after day and those habits did not die easily. But with God’s help and brothers in Christ pointing me in the right direction, I began to do what the Bible had told me to do all along. I began to take every thought captive. I set down firm boundaries, running away from every hint of impurity and running to my Savior.
Thank God for God! And thank you Jesus for never giving up on me and for offering me a new life, a life worth living, a life with no regrets. Of course I still make mistakes. Just this week my wife told me I need to focus more on the positive things in life and serve the Lord and others with joy in my heart.
I’m so deeply grateful not to be chained to lust like I was in the past. Confessing my sin was hard but finding freedom and a new relationship with my wife has been amazing, a true gift from above.
May you and I walk in the light today so that slowly we can become the kind of people God wants us to be and the kind of people we want to be.
Would you like to learn more about unmasking lies and walking in the light? I invite you to take a look at my book: Jesus Is Better Than Porn
Jesus Is Better 