25 May 2023
Resource Highlight: Women’s Ministry
This month, Harvest USA Director of Women’s Ministry Caitlin McCaffrey highlights two resources for women. Sexual Faithfulness: Gospel-Infused, Practical Discipleship for Women is available as a free digital download, and Sexual Sanity for Women: Healing from Sexual and Relational Brokenness is now on sale!
We pray these resources are a blessing to you and your church.
18 May 2023
How Do I Break Free from Patterns of Unbelief?
How can I believe that my heavenly Father truly loves me when he won’t take away my insomnia or chronic pain? How can I trust God with my future when my whole world has exploded at the revelation of my spouse’s infidelity? How can I possibly believe that God knows what’s best for me when he calls me to turn from desires that feel completely natural? How can I entrust my child to the Lord when they’re about to inflict irreversible damage on their body?
Living by faith is difficult. We all struggle every day to remember, believe, and make choices based on God’s Word and his promises to us in Christ. Words on a page can feel meaningless when painful circumstances don’t change. What helps us nurture belief in these hard moments, days, and years?
Unbelief Is a Matter of the Heart
Our flesh looks at these situations and says that God hasn’t given us sufficient evidence that he’s worthy of our trust. But faith is not a matter of evidence. Scripture gives us testimony after testimony of people who had abundant evidence to trust God but still chose unbelief. The Israelites saw God perform over a dozen miracles rescuing them from Egypt, culminating in the parting of the Red Sea. And yet, in a matter of days, they doubted God’s ability or desire to keep them alive in the wilderness. Jesus fed over 5,000 men with nothing more than five loaves and two fish. But later, the crowd refused to believe his explanation of the miracle. His followers drastically decreased after this incredible display of his power and sustaining kindness.
Faith is a matter of the heart, not the eyes. Apart from God’s grace, all of us are born with dead hearts that cannot believe what is evident in all creation (Rom. 1:19–20). But in the new birth, God makes our hearts alive, and we believe. This is saving faith. And yet, this heart transplant does not guarantee an easy road of faith. We still struggle, and so much of our struggle with sexual sin comes down to unbelief.
Every time we give way to temptation, we’re believing those deceitful arguments and choosing to live in a world that’s fundamentally untrue.
Lies about God, ourselves, and others become powerful arguments for giving in to sin. After all, our heart says, God doesn’t care, God won’t deliver me, God can’t meet me in this moment—but sex can. Sex always delivers, sex has never let me down, and unlike God, sex doesn’t ask me to believe, just feel. Every time we give way to temptation, we’re believing those deceitful arguments and choosing to live in a world that’s fundamentally untrue.
Where Does Unbelief Grow?
I’m convinced there’s one primary behavior that keeps us stuck in patterns of unbelief: isolation. A man in one of our biblical support groups worked in the mold remediation business, and he compared sexual sin with mold. It grows in the dark, in hidden places, where nobody sees it, and before you know it, it’s infected the entire house.
Why does sin love darkness? Because in the darkness, no one can challenge your unbelief. Over time, that unbelief has a compounding effect. You don’t only believe all the lies that keep you going back to your sin, you also believe the lies that keep you from confessing your sin to others: My sin is too heinous, too dirty to tell others. I won’t survive the consequences of my actions. I can live a double life without anyone ever knowing.
Where Does Faith Grow?
At Harvest USA, I’ve asked dozens of men what the most helpful thing about their experience with us was. They almost always say the same thing: “Having other brothers to walk with me in this battle.” The most helpful thing wasn’t our staff’s expertise or our profound materials, but other group members, week-in and week-out, hearing their struggles and reminding them of the truths of the gospel.
I just finished a 20-month group with 12 men. At the end, I gave them one specific warning: Don’t go back to hiding. Don’t isolate yourself after this group finishes. That is the fastest way to guarantee going right back to old patterns of unbelief and sin. Hebrews 3:12–13 says,
Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.
Notice the two words accompanying “evil” and “sin”: “unbelieving” and “deceitfulness.” Sin deceives us, leading to unbelief, which causes us to turn away from God—his precepts and his promises.
Isolation is the soil in which unbelief grows. But the body of Christ is the good soil through which our Father causes our faith to go from strength to strength.
One of the most powerful weapons to guard against unbelief is genuine fellowship with the body of Christ. This is where we’re known, exhorted, comforted, and pointed back to the truth over and over again. This passage assumes that even going one day without other Christians reminding us of the truth leaves us vulnerable to sin’s hardening effects on our hearts. Do we give other Christians that level of importance in our lives? You will if you remember that this life is a spiritual battle, and lone rangers are the first to get picked off.
Ultimately, Jesus is your closest friend. He’s the one who never stops praying for you that your faith may not fail (Luke 22:32). He sympathizes with how excruciatingly difficult it is to trust in our heavenly Father (Luke 22:44, Heb. 12:4). And he uses his people as his mouthpiece to remind you of his love, care, goodness, and power over your life. Isolation is the soil in which unbelief grows. But the body of Christ is not only an effective spiritual weed killer, it’s also the good soil through which our Father causes our faith to go from strength to strength (Ps. 84:5–7).
04 May 2023
The Slippery Slope of Small Sins
This post was written by Harvest USA Men’s Ministry intern Ben Pearce.
“Just one more drink,” the drunkard says.
“I’ll just look for a little while,” the porn-addict explains.
“It’s just a little sin,” Satan whispers in our ear.
The road to life-shattering sin is paved by little sins. Small, daily decisions shape our desires and habits. The apostle James notes, “each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death” (James 1:14–15). James is not arguing that wrongful desire is not sin—it is. But he is stating that the lusts of our hearts do not remain in our hearts. These desires give birth to sinful acts. Christians who dwell upon sexual fantasy in their minds cannot excuse themselves by saying it’s only in their heads. Our thoughts ultimately lead to action. Each moment we dwell upon our wrongful desires, we train ourselves to see them as acceptable.
The road to life-shattering sin is paved by little sins. Small, daily decisions shape our desires and habits.
The first “little” sexual sin many of us indulge in is fantasy. This is hard to battle. As we reject one pernicious thought, another is right around the corner ready to entice our heart. Suddenly, the lies of the enemy become too sweet to reject. He who said, “You will not surely die” was a liar from the beginning (Gen. 3:3, John 8:44) and is still a liar now. Yet, although we’ve been warned, Satan’s whispering influence stirs our hearts. With full moral culpability, we all too often feast upon the banquet set before us.
As with all sin, fantasies gradually cease to satisfy, giving birth to larger sins (James 1:15). A man frequently begins by letting his gaze linger on women in public or on images in magazines and social media. His heart hardens and desire increases. Those lingering glances last just a little bit longer than they did at first. Before he knows it, he’s not satisfied with what he sees in these brief moments and seeks something more explicit. Though he may be married, he engages other women in inappropriate conversation or begins viewing explicit pornography. Conversations become flirtatious; pornography ceases to satisfy. Suddenly, a man realizes he’s committed adultery. Broken, he may cry “I never thought I would do this!” as loudly as he’d like, but he himself paved the way for his great sins.
So, what should we consider when we’re struggling with “little” sins?
- Christ Died for Small and Large Sins
John teaches us that Jesus Christ “is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2). When we’re told that Christ died for our sins, we’re not told that he died for our greater sins only. God’s wrath burns hot against all sin, even the most minor. Even for just a bite of forbidden fruit (Gen. 2:17) or a mouthful of forbidden honey (1 Sam. 14:43), God has warned that “the soul who sins shall die” (Ez. 18:20). While God does differentiate between small and great sins, his Son died for all sin without differentiation. Thus, as Christians, we must remember the weighty truth that every sin we commit, however small, is a sin for which our Lord Jesus Christ died.
This weighty truth cuts both ways. For the repentant Christian, his great hope and security is the reality that his sinful thoughts and desires are covered by the forgiving blood of Jesus Christ.
This hard and glorious truth should be a deterrent for us. The marred body of our Lord was wounded for even our most seemingly minor thoughts, words, and actions. The fantasies we indulged for even a fleeting moment had to be paid for by the suffering of our Lord. No sin comes without suffering.
- Take a Long View
The ongoing, unrepentant pursuit of small sins will ultimately consume us. Neither Satan nor our own flesh are satisfied with little sins; “negligible” sins are just the top of an increasingly steep slope. The Preacher of Ecclesiastes characterizes the foolish sinner in this way: “The beginning of the words of his mouth is foolishness, and the end of his talk is evil madness” (Eccles. 10:13). Unresisted sin gains a gradual foothold upon the soul. These advances are not easy to discern—we give in, just a little here and a little there. Before we realize it, we’ve habituated our soul to sin. Every advance weakens the will to fight until, finally, we eagerly fall to what was before unimaginable. Christian: Be alert! “Therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall” (1 Cor. 10:12).
For the repentant Christian, his great hope and security is the reality that his sinful thoughts and desires are covered by the forgiving blood of Jesus Christ.
Sin is never isolated. Our Lord says, “For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander” (Matt. 15:19). Every thought and action we do not surrender to Christ today trains us for disobedience tomorrow. Every small sin we commit takes us further down the slope to the cliff of larger sins. We must prepare ourselves to resist the temptations of Satan and our flesh—to recognize when our desires deceive us, making us compromise “just a little.” Are we willing to cut sin off at its root?
- You Are Secure in Christ
If you’re trusting Jesus, sin will not win. A repentant sinner is secure, despite all his struggles with sin, because his obedience is rooted in Jesus’s obedience. Paul, who cried, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” also declared “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 7:24, 8:1). Christian, let your eternal security in Christ compel your fight against sin. Resist the slippery slope of small sins by looking to Jesus—he is our solid ground.
Friend, are you caught in a sticky relational concoction? Intoxication, entrapment, love, hate, fear, romance, addiction—it’s a garbled mess that once felt wonderful, like life itself. But now this friendship, “bromance,” or “you’re my person” connection isn’t feeling so great. You’re neck-deep, attached, and dependent on someone’s affection, attention, touch, and need for you. You want out, yet you can’t let go. Maybe this relationship started with Jesus in the mix, but he’s not the one filling, fueling, or guiding it anymore.
Jesus knows what’s happening and isn’t backing off or going anywhere, though I would guess he may seem distant right now. That’s one of the costly consequences of displacing him with something else; our desires slowly orient toward and are reshaped by the object of our hope. You know, deep down, that this relationship isn’t right, yet you’re scared to surrender it. Your heart has been hijacked from devotion to Jesus.
Still, he loves you. Your Savior is on a rescue mission through your dissatisfaction with the creation you’ve displaced him with.
I’ve been here before and have journeyed with others who are where you are today. I hope these words will guide you to pause, cry out to God, and take a step toward true freedom, healing, and wholeness. Please, don’t stay stuck by refusing his rescue. There’s a lot at stake!
A Prayer to Help You Face a New Direction
Father in heaven, I pray for my sister or brother reading this who knows deeply that this describes them. The bestie, the dating relationship, the coworker, counselor, counselee. . . someone has become like the air they breathe; how do you live without air? But God, this person isn’t essential. That’s a lie, yet it feels so real. So, Lord, I want to start by asking you to bring your comfort and hope to their heart through your Spirit. Flood their mind with the merciful assurance that they aren’t the first person to be in a relationship that enslaved rather than nurtured wholeness, joy, security, and holiness. It’s good to know that even sinful relational addictions are common to all of us and your truth really can set us free.
Your Savior is on a rescue mission through your dissatisfaction with the creation you’ve displaced him with.
Lord Jesus, it helps to know that, in our weakness, you are praying for us. You always live to intercede for your beloved children! Cause my sister to know that what seems to be a ‘mini-marriage’ with her girlfriend isn’t marriage nor a true friendship. Help my brother to know that you’re sympathetic to his desire for someone with whom to go deep, to have a safe emotional connection—but no mentor can be a replacement for you, our Good Shepherd, who has a unique and irreplaceable voice. Please, Lord, counsel the spouse who’s terrified of being found out; they didn’t mean to get tangled up in this emotional affair. Convince her, persuade him, that this relationship will lead to devastation rippling out in many directions. Obedience through letting go will be costly, but our repentance awakens our hearts afresh to your love and goodness.
I cry out to you, God, on behalf of those resonating with my prayer that your Spirit will convict unbelief and energize faith today. Forgive us for recreating love into something of our own making. You know that to disentangle from a sinful relationship will hurt and is frightening. And yet also, Lord God, you know it’s supremely worth it because you’ve not created us to be addicted to creation. You want us to love and be loved in human relationships as we look to you as our true Friend—you are Love incarnate. Please be a sun, shining light on the next step, and a shield to protect from the enemy who would deceive and destroy. Give courage, humility, and a will to want your holy pleasure. I pray through Jesus for my brother and sister who need your help. Amen.
Three Steps in the Right Direction
Recognizing you’re in a relational mess is humbling, yet it’s a sign of God’s love. He is rescuing you through self-awareness. But awareness isn’t enough; there are steps to take.
- You can’t do this alone. And that does not mean you should text or meet up with the person you’re involved with! That mistake is like two people caught in quicksand grabbing at each other, only to sink deeper. Wise humility leads you to reach out to another mature Christ-follower.
- Intentionally put space between yourself and the person you’re involved with. This distance may need to be permanent and comprehensive. Your helper will guide you in this but, like most addictions, unholy and unhealthy dependency needs to be starved out. This is what it means to love and follow Jesus: letting go through faith and repentance of any sinful attachment. It will hurt and the grief will be deep, but Jesus is an expert in healing broken hearts. He uses the pain of repentance for beautiful purposes.
- Seek out a discipleship or counseling relationship that can help you understand how you got into the mess and help you grow in the richness of God’s beautiful way of doing relationships. This is our inheritance in Christ as resurrection people! Jesus didn’t call you to himself only to give you bland, superficial, disconnected relationships with people. Of course, we’ll have relational conflicts, disappointments, and losses in this lifetime. But when you absorb the commands and promises of God’s Word, it’s evident that our Father has created his family to love one another deeply.
This is what it means to love and follow Jesus: letting go through faith and repentance of any sinful attachment.
Brother, sister, friend: you’re not alone. Jesus knows what you need. He is not pointing a shaming finger at you but invites you to come to him, step away from this person, and collapse before him for the help you need. Then, take the next step!
Ellen’s 31-day devotional book, Toxic Relationships: Taking Refuge in Christ, will guide you in relational growth centered on Jesus.
In this fallen world, we’ve all experienced suffering, distress, and anguish—and we’ve all sought relief in sinful ways (Rom. 3:10). Maybe you’re seeking relief from a stressful job through secret pornography use. Perhaps experimenting with opposite-gender clothing makes you feel secure in a harsh world, or an unholy relationship has become your refuge when you feel forgotten and unknown by your spouse.
Men and women walking away from sinful patterns often lament the loss associated with leaving their sin behind. This makes sense because that choice sin feels vital. What our sin provides often feels like life to us; through it we experience comfort and pleasure. We feel loved, significant, in control.
What happens when we give those things up? Does Jesus provide the comfort and pleasure sin once supplied? Can God’s comfort and deliverance really compare with sin’s attractions?
The Psalmist’s Testimony
Psalm 116 introduces us to someone in agony. We can likely relate to the psalmist’s urgency and need: “I suffered distress and anguish” (v. 3), “O Lord, I pray, deliver my soul!” (v. 4), “I am greatly afflicted!” (v. 10), “All mankind are liars!” (v. 11).
Men and women walking away from sinful patterns often lament the loss associated with leaving their sin behind.
Yet we also see the perspective of one who has been delivered: “For you have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling; I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living” (vv. 8–9). He has received God’s comfort—and it delights his heart.
What God’s Comfort Doesn’t Provide
- Control
God doesn’t give his glory to another. He is Lord of all. He’s in control of everything and his ways are perfect. Our hearts long to be “little lords” and control our universe. When a single woman feels the sting of loneliness, she takes control over her feelings by watching things she knows are ungodly. When an older man doesn’t have the sexual intimacy he desires with his wife, he seeks control by chatting with much younger women online. In contrast, the comfort God gives is not something we can turn off and on to modulate our discomfort on demand. Receiving God’s comfort requires a heart willing to submit to his ways rather than grasping for control.
- Immediacy
Modern life trains our bodies and minds for immediacy. One hundred years ago, no one would’ve believed that I can now take a small device out of my pocket and, within an hour, a person I’ve never met will deliver donuts to my door. A big draw toward sinful patterns is the immediacy of relief they provide. In the words of a former Harvest USA staff member, “God’s comfort doesn’t always rush with excitement in the same way sexual sin does.” We must endure a painful period of learning to fast from sinful comforts to receive the true comfort of God.
- Escape
Our sinful patterns operate as a functional “escape valve.” We can simply opt-out of feeling sad, uncomfortable, or angry by soothing our hearts with sexual sin. The way of Christ is a way of self-denial and affliction. Who wants to sign up for that!? But take heart. God does provide a way of escape from temptation (1 Cor. 10:13). He also provides himself as a refuge for our souls. But how do we taste his comfort?
How Does God Comfort Us?
- By His Spirit
“I will not leave you as orphans, I will come to you” (John 14:18). How tender and personal is the comforting ministry of God’s Spirit! The Holy Spirit also gives counsel (John 14:26), promises to be with us forever (John 14:15), and, ultimately, points to Jesus (John 15:26). Are you willing to let go of your own ways of seeking comfort to receive the far-surpassing comfort of God’s Spirit?
- Through His Word
David says, “I rejoice at your word like one who finds great spoil” (Ps. 119:162) Why would David write this? We see the answer in Jesus’s words to the Pharisees: “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life” (John 5:39–40).
The Scriptures are a precious comfort because they bear witness about Jesus, in whom we have eternal life. God’s Word reveals Christ to us! Read his Word and pray, “Lord, show me the beauty of Christ in the Word.” This will bring great comfort to your weary soul.
- Through His People
The Church is designed to be a source of help, comfort, and encouragement to the Christian. God’s people are the hands and feet of Jesus to be used by God to comfort and help weary and afflicted believers. Safe Christians can provide a refuge in your pain and remind you of the truth when you’re struggling and weary with sin.
- By Faith
The life of the Christian is a life of faith (2 Cor. 5:7). Therefore, much of the comfort we receive is by faith. This seems to be one of the most difficult pivot points in getting free from ensnaring sin patterns. How our hearts long for the immediate, physical, and familiar when we’re suffering and need comfort. Take heart, brother or sister in Christ. You will one day see Jesus face to face! You will have the comfort you long for in all its fullness. Your Savior will personally wipe away your tears (Rev. 21:4).
What If I Don’t Feel It?
Practically speaking, this may all sound unrealistic. I can appreciate skepticism if you’ve never had an experience of victory over temptation through the felt comforts of Christ.
Sinful comfort feels immediately satisfying, but it’s an illusion. It will only draw you deeper into loneliness and despair. God’s comfort sustains, protects, and nourishes your soul.
At one point, I deeply struggled to receive Jesus’s comfort—his real comfort—and longed to know what others were speaking of. I clung to Hebrews 12, where we see two benefits of submitting to the Lord’s discipline. It yields the “peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it” and, more stunningly, causes us to “share in his holiness” (Heb. 12:10–11). I had to embrace the mindset that I was being trained by the Lord himself. I began looking to a future yield, to this precious “peaceful fruit of righteousness” that my heart increasingly desired. This takes endurance. It means taking individual steps of faith—without the feelings—as you wait for your “spiritual muscles” to grow in your practice of communion with Christ through exercising your faith.
Sinful comfort feels immediately satisfying, but it’s an illusion. It will only draw you deeper into loneliness and despair. God’s comfort sustains, protects, and nourishes your soul. Pray honestly and ask, “Lord, teach me to receive the comfort only you can provide.” The Lord longs to answer when you call out to him.
“Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you, and therefore he exalts himself to show mercy to you.” (Isaiah 30:18)
09 Feb 2023
Will God Really Comfort Me?
In one of our women’s biblical support groups recently, we were discussing the role of faith as it relates to receiving God’s comfort. The group members and I all confessed that we don’t always walk by faith and believe that God will comfort us in the manner and timing we want. A question emerged: Are we willing to forsake our false comforts to receive by faith what God promises to give? Could God’s promise to comfort really be true?
At the heart level, these women’s questions revealed deeper questions about the character of God himself. It’s a worthy endeavor to pursue questions that press us into what we truly believe about God’s commitment to be Father, Comforter and Home to us.
False Comfort or God’s Comfort
Have you ever felt the tension between what God says about himself and your daily, lived experience? Have you wondered if the comfort God provides will truly be enough for you in your temptation and pain?
In Psalm 116 we find the psalmist in dire circumstances: being confronted with death and hell itself (v. 3). What words might you use for your circumstances—do they feel like death? Or hell? Perhaps you’re losing your marriage, your health, or facing the pain of past sexual abuse. Maybe you’re suffering the loss of a loved one, a child walking away from the faith, or your decades of unmet longings for love and relationship. At Harvest USA, discipleship for sexual strugglers takes shape as we learn to allow the grace of God to train us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions in order to embrace self-controlled, upright, and godly lives (Titus 2:11–12). Part of that grace of God is undoubtedly his comfort and mercy.
How do we go from being people who regularly pursue sinful ways of escape or reward to those who seek and receive God’s help when our hearts long for comfort in the pain of this life? Or another way one ministry recipient put it: “Does God’s comfort actually work?”
I Love the Lord
In the opening two verses, we see the psalmist reflecting on what God has already done (past tense) and how it has impacted his present manner of life:
I love the LORD, because he has heard
my voice and my pleas for mercy.
Because he inclined his ear to me,
therefore I will call on him as long as I live. (Ps. 116:1–2, my emphasis)
Why does the psalmist love the Lord? Because when it really counted, he banked everything on God’s promise, and God did indeed hear his voice and pleas for mercy. Furthermore, how did the psalmist learn to live as a result of this experience of God’s help? The Psalmist has come to believe something about God’s character—that God inclines his ear to him.
Have you ever had a safe relationship where someone has inclined their ear toward you—maybe a parent, friend, pastor, or spouse? You can be certain they’ll listen and care when you bring a concern to them. This is the very heart of God toward all his children! As a result of exercising his muscles of faith by calling out to God in desperation and seeing God provide real help, the psalmist has learned a new way of living his life: calling on God as long as he lives (v. 2).
Make Room for God’s Help
To whom or to what do you currently call out when you suffer distress and anguish? Has a #1 friend, boyfriend, or girlfriend become your source of salvation from distress? What about escapes like pornography, building a fantasy life, or solo sex? Have these become your help in anguish, boredom, or stress?
Friend, you can bank on God being who he says he will be. He promises to comfort you, and he will. His character—his everlasting goodness—will never change. When was the last time you risked giving up false comfort, with your only hope being God’s character and promises? In the Church today, I fear we don’t often see the power of God displayed in our lives partly because we don’t take risks resting on God’s promises. We have our plans, programs, and safe ways of living, but these come at the expense of seeing how the Lord will provide as we live by faith in real time—with our real desires, longings, and expectations.
Has your conception of God and his loving power toward you become miniature and domesticated? Andrew Murray says it this way:
Oh that God would by his grace show you what a God you have, and to what a God you have entrusted yourself—an omnipotent God, willing with his whole omnipotence to place himself at the disposal of every child of his!
Are we willing to forsake false comforts in order to receive the comfort offered in Christ? The sober reality is this: if we’ve never sought God for help and comfort, and when we lay down familiar ways of coping to bank on God’s promises, we are stepping into a loss of control and a realm of relative unknown. Some call this a “leap of faith.” Compared to the known euphoria of sin, God’s comfort can feel like a letdown.
Yet God’s Word shows that the process of godly sorrow and repentance from our sinful ways of coping leads to salvation without regret (2 Cor. 7:10). God’s comfort is like gold—precious and everlasting—compared to the flimsy shine of dollar store tinsel. The pursuit of God’s promises, by faith, leads to reward (Heb. 11:6). Dear Christian brother or sister, will you, by faith, seek the true comfort God provides? As our Savior promises, “Behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:20b).
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Are you a woman seeking freedom from sinful comfort-seeking? Harvest USA’s women’s ministry wants to serve you! Reach out at appointments@harvestusa.org. This process is confidential.
12 Jan 2023
Exiting the Highway to Porn
Brother in Christ, do you ever feel there’s a switch in your brain that gets turned on, and once that happens, it’s only a matter of time before you find yourself back in the gutter of pornography? Does porn feel inevitable? Sister in Christ, do you experience triggers, such as suggestive posts on social media, that lead you onto a highway to porn with only one exit: “Give In to Temptation”?
Many people fall into the belief that once desire has been awakened, the only way to silence that nagging voice is to give it what it wants. They believe the porn interstate has one way off, and that’s to give in.
But before you reach “Giving In,” you’ve flown past earlier exits that don’t involve sinning. The sooner you get off this highway, the stronger you’ll become next time you make a wrong turn back onto it.
Use Strategic Speed Bumps to Slow Down
While many people feel they “fall into” porn, there were dozens of decision points along the way that led to that destination. Slowing down is critical to seeing those earlier exit ramps. To do this, we need to place speed bumps on the highway to porn.
Speed bumps include anything that makes pornography difficult to access. If porn is right in your pocket on your phone, you’re flying down the highway at 150 mph. No wonder you missed all the other exits! Speed bumps force you to slow down. These may include filters and accountability software on all internet-enabled devices, removing all social media, or perhaps getting rid of a smart phone altogether. It sounds painful to limit your access to many good things, but I hear testimony after testimony of the peace and freedom many people experience when they couldn’t look at porn due to lack of access.
Before you reach “Giving In,” you’ve flown past earlier exits that don’t involve sinning. The sooner you get off this highway, the stronger you’ll become next time you make a wrong turn back onto it.
The reason these measures are speed bumps and not brick walls is because there’s ultimately no guaranteed way to restrict access to someone who truly wants to find pornography. People will go to great lengths and spend incredible amounts of time and money just to get their next fix. Where there is a will, there typically is a way.
But the fatal flaw I hear from so many is that because speed bumps don’t guarantee success, they don’t even try them. This is a lie from the depths of hell. Any distance you can create between yourself and access to sin is to your advantage. It gives time for the Holy Spirit to work in your heart and turn you from sin. Putting speed bumps up also shows you’re sober minded about what’s at stake in the battle against sin. Scripture explicitly commands us not to make any provision for the flesh (Rom. 13:14). Your willingness to limit your access to porn shows you take sin seriously.
Earlier Exits Off the Highway to Porn
Believe it or not, this highway is chock-full of exits that don’t involve sinning. Once you slow down, you’ll see they’re everywhere! What are some of these earlier exits?
- Switch locations. Pornography prefers privacy. An obvious exit is to leave your private room and find a place with other people. If you’re the only person at home, go for a walk or study at the library. For those who work remotely, take your work to a café, remove all curtains and blinds from your home office, and maybe take the door off.
- Reach out for help. Don’t expect one person to be everything you need when it comes to reinforcements. As soon as tempting thoughts enter your mind, out yourself. Text six friends and then systematically call each one until one of them picks up. Fight the lie that says you’re annoying them. The sooner you bring those tempting thoughts into the light, the less power they have over you. James wasn’t lying when he promised, “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you” (James 4:7).
- Access truth. The most obvious decision here is to open your Bible and flood your mind with truth (Phil. 4:8). But there’s a plethora of creative ways to do this if you’re hesitant to pick up your Bible in those moments. Always have an audio Bible on-hand and fill your airwaves with God’s precious promises. Turn on Christian music or listen to a sermon or Christian podcast. Perhaps you have “Fighter Verses” in your wallet or posted on your wall—these are specific verses you’ve found particularly strategic when you’re tempted to sin.
- Reach up to God. According to Hebrews 4:16, we’re called to enter God’s throne room of grace in time of need to receive mercy and find grace to help. You know temptation to look at porn is not just any old “time of need,” this is DEFCON 1—imminent nuclear war! You also know your resources to fight this temptation are limited and ineffective on their own. You need divine help. Grace is not only God’s gift of forgiveness, it’s also his power that he freely gives you in Christ to battle temptation. But you need to come to him for it. You need to get on your knees and pray for his help. Pray to God for eyes to see him in his glory, so the “things of earth grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace.” Ask God to make you sober-minded to the devastating consequences of pornography. Ask him to meet you in your trials that so often underlie the temptation to escape them.
Brother, sister, you can always get off the highway to porn, even when you feel you’ve gone too far.
- Find someone to serve. Pornography is the epitome of selfishness. It’s exploiting someone else for your own pleasure. A powerful weapon against selfishness is to proactively find ways to serve. Serving others is much more fulfilling and doesn’t leave you with guilt and shame. Looking at pornography in the morning can ruin your whole day, sometimes your whole week. But serving someone else in the morning can brighten your day and become the highlight of your week. This doesn’t have to be extravagant. It can be as simple and powerful as praying for people in need, calling a friend who struggles with loneliness, or doing the leftover dishes in the sink.
Brother, sister, you can always get off the highway to porn, even when you feel you’ve gone too far. Remember, “God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it” (1 Cor. 10:13). As you grow in sanctification, you may still find yourself back on that highway—but the early exit signs will become much clearer. The more you take those early exits, you’ll find yourself less frequently on the highway at all, instead opting for the scenic route of God’s glory, beauty, and grace.
“I said I would never do it again.”
“I can’t believe I’m back to the same old sin patterns.”
“Why can’t I stop doing this?”
“I thought I was past this.”
Why do we pursue sexual sin, particularly after we’ve come to loathe the impact it has on us, our spouse, our ministries, and our relationship with the living God? Have you ever said with the Apostle Paul, “Wretched man (or woman) that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Rom. 7:24)?
There are many reasons why we pursue broken sexual choices, but I would like to focus on one core motivation: unfulfilled longing for something transcendent. Our hearts are designed to long for something intimate, life-giving, and hope filled. Sexual sin makes many promises, but it can never give us these things. Even godly sex within marriage, as glorious a gift as it may be, fails to be the ultimate fulfillment our hearts deeply—and rightly—long for. Speaking of the folly of idolatry in his commentary on Isaiah, Ray Ortlund says, “It’s absurd to try to derive an ultimate experience from a less-than-ultimate resource. That’s false worship” (293).
This blog follows a previous post entitled, “Single Christian, Are You Enjoying Your Union with Christ?” and takes a deeper look into union with Christ.
Two Distinct Realities: Union and Communion
Before discussing the nuts and bolts of how to enjoy your union with Christ, it’s important to make a distinction between two concepts: union and communion.
Union with Christ is a position Christians enjoy as a result of the work of Christ on their behalf, uniting them completely to himself. It is passively received; it is not something merited, achieved, or fought for. It is an act of sheer grace from God’s benevolent heart down to the Christian. Marcus Peter Johnson describes union this way in his book One with Christ:
To experience fellowship with the Son is to be made alive in Christ, justified in Christ, sanctified in Christ, seated in the heavenly realms in Christ, built up into Christ, and given fullness in Christ. Those joined to Christ are “members of Christ,” “crucified in Christ,” “included in Christ,” “baptized into Christ,” and “the body of Christ.” They eat and drink Christ, they are one with Christ, Christ dwells in them and they dwell in him; they can do nothing apart from him (39).
When reading this definition, you may be tempted to think, “Well, that’s great, but I live in the real world and certainly don’t feel like I’m on cloud nine, united to Jesus all day, every day!” How are we to reconcile the glorious truth of our irrevocable union with Christ with our day-to-day reality, which, if we’re honest, often feels dull, disappointing, or at times even hopeless?
Understanding the dynamics of our communion with the triune Godhead may shed light on the frustration of this dissonance between what we read in Johnson’s definition and what we experience in our daily lives.
Communion with God is the felt experience of the life of God intersecting with our own; it’s the sense that we relationally interact with God himself through the varied means of grace. We share in the life of God and relate to him in the many ways he represents himself as father, king, intercessor, comforter, counselor, refuge, friend, high priest, elder brother, great physician, husband, and sympathizer with our weakness. This isn’t even an exhaustive list of all the ways God describes his communion with his people! Contrary to our union with Christ, our communion does ebb and flow. It is subject to our weakness, efforts, striving, and lack thereof. We may experience profound joy in communion with Christ and we may experience seasons of weariness and discouragement. Even mature believers go through times when they struggle to have rich communion with God.
Our communion with God—or lack of communion—is one key to the “why” behind our sinful behaviors and attitudes. John Flavel says it this way:
The soul is so constituted that it craves fulfillment from things outside itself and will embrace earthly joys for satisfaction when it cannot reach spiritual ones. The believer is in spiritual danger if he allows himself to go any length of time without tasting the love of Christ and savoring the felt comforts of a Savior’s presence. When Christ ceases to fill the heart with satisfaction, our souls go in silent search of other lovers (vol. 2, 438).
Growing in holiness and purity is not merely the “putting off” of unwanted behaviors, though it is not less than that. It is also the “putting on” and pursuit of God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Seeking deeper communion with God—the one who loves our souls—is a death blow to the pet sins we nurture because it brings the satisfaction we were longing for when we chose to pursue sin in the first place.
Acknowledging the Mystery
There is a degree of wonder and mystery involved in comprehending our union with Christ. When we pursue Christ, we’re endeavoring to do what only the Holy Spirit can enable us to do. In this life, we enjoy and commune with Christ by faith.
We must observe a posture of humility because, after all, we’re talking about communing with—enjoying, relating to—the living God. This is his world. All things are for him and through him and to him (Rom. 11:36), on his terms. Thankfully, we have a gracious God who wants to disclose himself to us—to be known and worshiped in Spirit and in truth. He is not hiding, so knowing God is not a scavenger hunt. Take heart! God relates to us intimately. He is deeply personal and specific, so there’s not a “one size fits all” method to unlock the secret to true communion.
It’s helpful to acknowledge that pursuing communion with Christ in a faithful way may differ for each Christian based on their season of life. A mother of young children, a man in hospice, a young professional, a pastor, and a teen all may have different habits of communion with God.
A dear brother in his nineties said that singing and playing his piano in worship to Christ has become more primary as Bible reading grew more difficult with age. Similarly, a mom with school-aged kids shared that in her single years she experienced her communion with God as primarily a silent, meditative time alone in the Scriptures. She laughed as she remarked, “I can’t remember the last time there was silence in our home!” As you seek after communion with God, seek first to be faithful in that pursuit. Rather than unlocking the secret to a transcendent experience, communion with God can grow even in the ordinary moments of daily life.
Why do we pursue sin in the first place? Often, it’s because we’re not pursuing our indescribably satisfying Savior. We try to fill our desire for transcendence with cheap trinkets when we have all the depth of the riches of wisdom and knowledge of God in Christ (Rom. 11:33). Indwelling sin can’t hold a candle to communion with God.
In the next installment of this blog series, I’ll discuss ten practical ways you can pursue deeper communion with Christ.
For men and women coming out of sexual addiction, they must pass through the post-sexual addiction wilderness (for a fuller explanation of what this wilderness is like, see my previous blog).
The post-sexual addiction wilderness is a particularly treacherous and painful section of the larger wilderness of the Christian life. The author of Hebrews sees the entire Christian life as a trek through the wilderness. In Christ, we have been delivered from slavery to sin, but until Jesus returns, we are called to strive to enter into His rest. The Promised Land is coming for all who endure to the end.
The greatest danger you will face in the post-sexual addiction wilderness is the temptation to give up your journey toward freedom and wholeness. The wilderness can be long.
You could be suffering with the consequences of your sin. You might have lost everything in your pursuit of pleasure. Your wilderness might be a litany of sufferings that you sought to escape through sex. But without that numbing agent, the pain is back, and it could feel unbearable.
Or you might be in the wilderness of idolatry. Sex was a means for you to experience the satisfaction of your deepest longings: to be loved, comforted, affirmed, safe, connected. Without sex, the idolatrous desires you have lived for are still crying out for satisfaction, and you don’t have any quick solutions to silence them. In this wilderness, you feel disappointed, scared, and frustrated.
The greatest danger you will face in the post-sexual addiction wilderness is the temptation to give up your journey toward freedom and wholeness. The wilderness can be long.
Here is a hard truth: There is no turning back! You either enter into God’s rest, or you die in the wilderness. Those are your only options.
But here’s the good news! The wilderness is not endless. There is a destination you’re moving towards. That destination is perfect Shalom with God and His people in a perfected world. But that perfect existence often doesn’t seem worth it, because, at this moment, you feel like you’re about to die in this wilderness.
God is with you and for you in the wilderness. The wilderness is not merely something to endure; it is your testing and training ground. As the author of Hebrews writes, “For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it” (Hebrews 12:11).
Let me offer three encouragements for those who are struggling in the post-sexual addiction wilderness.
Learn to Wait in the Wilderness
Like any addiction, sexual sin’s biggest enticement is the instant gratification it offers. The biggest lie sexual temptation tells you is that if you don’t give in now, it’s only a matter of time before you do, so why continue to suffer when you can feel better now? But God wants to use the wilderness to train you to think differently. He wants you to give control of your life back to him, and wait for his hand to feed you.
God’s delay in your relief always has good purposes. He wants to train you to trust Him, to abide in His presence in the midst of your suffering. He wants to conform you to the pattern of 1 Peter 5:6, “Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you.”
This is the pattern of our Savior Jesus Christ. Jesus humbled himself, even to the point of death, until the proper time when the Father exalted him in his resurrection and ascension. Waiting on the Lord requires a humble acknowledgment of his good purposes in your suffering. We worship and follow a Savior who trusted his Father even when he became the object of his Father’s wrath. Christ was alone on the cross, but we are never alone in the wilderness.
Let the Wilderness Shape Your Priorities
When life is easy, we give little concern to the basic necessities. I don’t wake up concerned about food, water, or shelter. My attention goes to many things that are not necessities in sustaining my life. But if you’re stranded on a desert island, every day you are consumed with survival. Your priorities are all connected to avoiding death.
God is with you and for you in the wilderness. The wilderness is not merely something to endure; it is your testing and training ground.
The post-sexual addiction wilderness is an opportunity to reprioritize your life. I have been amazed to see the lengths men will go to save their marriages from the destruction of their sexual betrayal. Time, money, and energy are poured into their marriage in ways that for most people would seem excessive. But that’s what you do when your marriage is collapsing. You don’t count the cost, because anything is worth saving it. Just imagine how healthy our marriages would be if we invested in them in times of stability, and not only in moments of crisis.
The same is true for your relationship with God. We don’t prioritize prayer and his Word because we don’t feel our need of him. But in the wilderness you can taste your desperation. You know you can’t go one day without Jesus. I’ve seen men who are on the brink of losing everything, they’ve been kicked out of their house, and they turn to God. That lonely, dreary hotel room is transformed into holy ground. Their suffering brought them to their knees, but this is where God meets them, on their knees. And over time, it’s His love and presence that keeps them on their knees.
Lastly, the wilderness should reshape your priorities for fellowship. We so often live isolated lives because we believe we can do the Christian life on our own. We don’t feel our need for accountability or true discipleship. But in the post-sexual addiction wilderness, you know you’re in a battle for your life, and you must prioritize finding others who will fight alongside you. You’ve seen the dangers of isolation; you see how predators love to pick off ones who have strayed from the pack. So now you’re not just looking for a few friends to hang out with, you’re looking for comrades in war who will fight for you!
Jesus Went Through the Wilderness for You¹
Hebrews 6:19-20 tells us that Jesus is our forerunner, who has gone on ahead of us into the Holy of Holies as our high priest. Jesus intercedes for us now in the wilderness because he first made it through the wilderness himself. Jesus was on the brink of physical starvation, and Satan tempted him to abandon trust in his heavenly Father by turning a stone into bread. Then in a greater way, this same temptation to abandon the Father’s mission came on the cross, when he was given the opportunity to come down and save himself. Jesus survived the wilderness without a single misstep. He received the victor’s crown and has entered into His Father’s rest.
This is important for your wilderness wanderings for two reasons. First, Jesus succeeded where we all have failed. None of us make it through the wilderness perfectly. We all have moments of turning stones into bread. The only reason we have any hope of making it through the wilderness is because we are united to the only One who did. Our acceptance and standing with God is solely based on what Jesus accomplished in the wilderness on our behalf.
Secondly, because we are united to our forerunner, we can have every confidence that he will lead us safely home. We must make it through the wilderness, but we are also given amazing promises that we will make it because he will bring us through it. He has already blazed the trail for us. And by his indwelling Spirit, we can walk in step with him (Gal. 5:25), day by day, until we finally enter into our eternal Sabbath rest.
¹This section, and the application that Jesus went through the wilderness on our behalf, and succeeded where Adam, Israel, and we have failed, is taught by Dr. Lane Tipton in his lecture, “Covenant History and the Tale of Three Sons.” Listen to this lecture here: https://reformedforum.org/rf14_03/
28 Feb 2019
The Post-Addiction Wilderness
There are legitimate reasons why people find themselves ensnared in a sexual addiction. It is a mistake to overlook the suffering in an addict’s life and only focus on their moral failings. Pleasures that spiral into a sexual addiction usually find their fuel from a desire to escape pain. Whether it’s the pain of loneliness, broken relationships, physical suffering, trauma, or the daily stressors of life, a downward descent into habitual sin patterns is often accompanied by a decreased ability to handle life apart from the numbing power of sinful relief.
Unfiltered life becomes too difficult to bear. Whatever that suffering is, it is something that an addict cannot face or put up with, and life feels more manageable with a sinful numbing agent.
The men and women who struggle over and over with sexual sin may get to a point where they are ready to seek help. They have grown disillusioned with the empty promises that sin offers. Like the prodigal son, God in his mercy brings them to their senses, so that they can taste and smell the foulness of their behavior. They see the chains they have willingly shackled themselves with, and they finally desire a life of freedom.
The men I work with at Harvest USA are desperately longing for freedom. When they think about a life free from the destructive behaviors they are engaged in, they are filled with hope and anticipation. This hope for a new life is evidence of the Holy Spirit’s power beginning to renew their minds.
But since addictions are usually a means of escaping or numbing painful experiences, what happens when the numbing agent is removed?
This is the post-sexual addiction wilderness.
When God rescued Israel out of slavery from Egypt, they weren’t teleported to the Promised Land. They had to pass through the wilderness first. God’s people were terrified of the wilderness. They were unsatisfied in the wilderness. They longed to go back to Egypt, back into slavery, because it offered a predictable life and more food than manna. They pined for false security rather than exercise faith in their true security, Jehovah Jireh!
Pleasures that spiral into a sexual addiction usually find their fuel from a desire to escape pain.
Israel had a say in how long their wilderness wanderings lasted. 40 years was not the original course for Israel. Their extended stay was a result of their own unbelief. The same is true for those coming out of sexual addictions. It will not be a simple re-entry into reality. Everyone must pass through the wilderness.
But the choices we make in that wilderness impact the length and quality of our stay there.
I want to talk about three different kinds of wilderness experiences for people coming out of sexual addiction.
The wilderness of consequences
Sinful behavior has cost some of you deeply. You may have lost family, homes, jobs, and your circle of friends, almost everything you hold dear. It is these tragedies that have finally brought you to your senses. Even the thought of going back gives you nightmares because of how real the consequences are now. This is a wilderness where God does amazing heart transformation and literally brings life into dry bones.
The wilderness of consequences was God’s severe mercy for you, losing so much. You needed this wake-up call. But now, you find yourself in a barren wasteland of your own making. In this wilderness, you are wrestling with intense feelings of regret, sorrow, loneliness, and hopelessness for your future. You know you dare not go back to your sin, but you also don’t know what moving forward looks like.
This is the wilderness described in Psalm 6, where David cries out, “I am weary with my moaning; every night I flood my bed with tears; I drench my couch with my weeping. My eye wastes away because of grief.”
The wilderness of suffering
For others, the wilderness of post-sexual addiction is not the direct consequence for their sin, but the wilderness they sought to initially escape through their sin. Fleeing sexual sin and turning to the Lord does not mean the circumstances people sought to numb through sin have gone away. God calls us to face and experience this kind of suffering, too. In this wilderness, there are two very real struggles simultaneously happening.
But the biggest temptation in this wilderness is to swap a sexual-numbing agent for something else to kill the pain.
On the one hand, you have the painful struggle of sexual withdrawal. Your body is used to getting sexual satisfaction, and denying yourself will be accompanied by a sense of real anguish. But along with that pain, you are now also experiencing the unfiltered pain of whatever circumstance you were using sex to escape from.
But the biggest temptation in this wilderness is to swap a sexual-numbing agent for something else to kill the pain. It could be alcohol or drugs, but it could also be more socially acceptable things, like binge-watching TV shows or over-eating. This seems harmless by comparison, but it can be a dangerous, insidious temptation. Why? Because it is easy to fool yourself into thinking you have made deep heart progress, while you have only swapped one addiction for another. The goal in the wilderness of this suffering is to seek God in such a way where you are acknowledging that he must become your deepest source of comfort. For God to truly comfort you as the God of all comfort, you must by faith wait on him, and resist the temptation to quickly numb your pain through false means which usually deadens your desire to go to God with your suffering.
The wilderness of idolatry
The last wilderness is similar to the wilderness of suffering but with one key difference. Both are places of pain and suffering, but in the wilderness of suffering, your suffering is not the result of your sin. For example, God is not calling you to repent of your physical suffering or trauma that you experienced. But in this last wilderness, the wilderness of idolatry, you suffer because there is an idol in your heart that is not being satisfied.
For example, often pornography is a false means of feeling affirmed by others. In a fantasy world, everyone affirms you. This is what many people live for. If a false means of affirmation is taken away, the idolatrous desire in your heart will still cry out for satisfaction. This can result in feeling miserable and depressed. You weren’t happy in your addiction, but now you feel God isn’t coming through for you now that you’ve cut out that sinful behavior.
If this is where you are, you haven’t grasped the depths that your repentance needs to reach. This is often the wilderness that is most difficult to endure. Not because the suffering in this wilderness is more painful than the others, but because it’s only white-knuckling behavior modification. You haven’t yet forsaken the idols that still remain in your heart.
If you believe that life is found in the satisfaction of your idolatrous desires, then you will only hold out in repentance for so long until you turn back to the only source that you know to give you that sense of life, which means turning yet again to your addiction.
Post-sexual addiction living is not a simple, smooth transition from slavery to freedom. It’s a journey that often leads people into a wilderness. But this journey is all part of God’s loving transformative purposes. It is in the wilderness where God abides with his people, where they learn to trust him, and where they experience his provision of life!
