Losing Your Life While Losing Porn

I think too often Jesus is received as someone we add to our lives just to make everything better. So we receive Jesus to feel more comfort, or we receive Jesus so that our relationships will be more functional. Jesus is too often seen as a life enhancer instead of a life transformer. And I believe this is a big reason why so many men and women in the church struggle with pornography, because they see Jesus as someone who exists to serve them and make life easier. And when he doesn’t show up the way we expect him to, then other saviors quickly fill in the gap. And if we’re honest, we all can be guilty of this approach to life. Jesus just doesn’t seem to deliver as quickly or as tangibly as food, entertainment, or sex.

Pornography is a big problem, but it’s not the root problem. It is only symptomatic of the deeper problem: that we are still trying to save our lives on our own terms instead of losing them for Christ’s sake.

When we read the Gospels, it is undeniably clear that Jesus did not come to merely be an add-on to our lives. Instead, Jesus calls every disciple to give up everything in order to follow him. In Luke 14:33, Jesus says, “Any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.” The only proper way to receive Jesus as Lord and Savior is to give him our entire life and say, “Lord, this is all yours. Your will be done in my life. Do with me as you please.”

Our lives are not easily given up. This is why becoming a true disciple of Christ is only possible by the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit transforming our hearts. But when this transformation takes place, we come to recognize two things: that God can be trusted with our lives, and that whatever he calls us to give up is actually rubbish compared to knowing Christ.

People turn to pornography because they want comfort on their own terms and in their own timing. They want to escape from loneliness. They want to feel affirmed or desired by others. They want a sense of being alive in the midst of dreary circumstances. But when Christ is received as Lord of all of our life, those desires that pornography promises to satisfy are overcome by a new, pervasive, all-encompassing desire that Jesus would reign supreme in our entire life. And that new, growing desire for Christ’s glory in our lives leads us to a willing death to self, so that we might live to Christ.

And as we receive Christ in this way and trust him for his life to flow through ours, we see on the far side of faith that Jesus is the only one who truly satisfies. The lies of sin are exposed for the empty promises that they are, and we see that God truly is offering us contentment in him that perseveres and upholds us, even through the valley of the shadow of death.