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Tactics to Get Pure and Stay Pure (Part 6)

Last Updated: May 17, 2021

I finally mustered up the nerve to ask the older, wiser, spiritual mentor, “Why do I still want to look at pornography? I can give you a hundred verses as to why it’s wrong, but I still just want to look at it.” After asking a few more pointed questions, he made a shocking statement of fact: “Pornography is meeting a need in your life.”

“What?” I immediately thought he was off his rocker. I quickly replied, “The only need it is meeting is the need for lust. It provides the necessary stimulus for me to masturbate. I am such a lusty guy. The only ‘need’ porn is meeting is sexual.” I said it somewhat confidently, even arrogantly in my sinfulness.

He just stared at me. He asked me, “What is your earliest childhood memory?” I responded, “Fifth grade, my dad walked out on my mom, leaving her with five kids to raise.”

He asked, “What about before that? Fourth grade? First grade? Anything?”

I shook my head, “No.”

He asked me to describe the night my father left. Even that was blank.

He gave me the following assignment. “Go and ask your three older sisters and brothers and ask them for every detail that they can remember. I want a report of what the house looked like, the arrangement of the furniture, the color of the wall paper, where your Dad was standing, where your mom was standing, where each of the kids were located, who said what to whom and when it was said…I want every possible detail imaginable…”

Learning Not to Cry

It took a while, but I compiled a report. The major facts were remarkably consistent between my three older siblings. My mom was on the floor, crying, and literally holding onto my dad’s leg, begging him not to leave her. My dad was yelling at my mom to let go of his leg. My dad and mom both yelling at all of us kids to “Go to your rooms and stay there until told to come out.” My mom’s sister, my aunt was sitting on the fireplace hearth, laughing and saying, “Let him go, Avon, he’s no good for you. Out with the old, in with the new…” And these outbursts were followed up by more, weird laughing.

Then, my dad left. The only sounds to be heard were the sobs of my mom, the weird laughing of my aunt, and then deafening silence. The whole household was stunned. Our foundations were destroyed. My dad ran into the arms of another woman who was only seven years older than my oldest sister.

According to my siblings, I cried non-stop for three days. During that time, we got into a car and actually drove around town, looking for my dad’s car. On the fourth day, my dad came out to the house and sat in his car with his new “girlfriend.” When I went out to see him, he told me, “Everyone is tired of your crying. If you want to be a man, you need to grow up and stop crying. Real men don’t cry…Do you want to be a man?” I nodded my 10-year-old head yes. Internally, I made a vow, “Never cry again.” I didn’t realize it at the time but my dad had reached into my soul and taken my cry-box out and stomped on it. He effectively said, “Men don’t ever share emotions. Stuff everything that you are feeling. There is nothing more important in life than to be stoic, unemotional. People around you, your family does not like to see men cry, so stop feeling.”

Casting My Cares on…Porn

When I told the counselor my findings, the unveiling of my suppressed past, he challenged me again. He said, “The next time you find yourself looking for pornography, ask yourself this question, what emotional button is being pushed inside your soul?” I literally scoffed at him. My unofficial life theme was Simon and Garfunkel’s “I Am a Rock.” “I am a rock, I am an island, and a rock feels no pain, and an island never cries.”

I asked him, “What do you mean: emotional buttons?”

He said, “Things like anxiety, fear, confusion, maybe feeling out of control, or like a failure. Maybe things like joy or sadness, maybe shame or guilt; there are hundreds of different emotions that may be churning around in your soul.”

I was skeptical. But he would not let me go until I promised him that I would do an emotional self-examination of my soul when I was about to look at porn. Sure enough, a couple of weeks later, I was “acting out.” I was driving around, looking for a bookstore. As I parked the car and before I went in, the Holy Spirit brought the conversation with the mentor to mind.

I stopped and talked to God about my desire to look at porn. “Holy Spirit, please search me. Is there an emotional button that is being pushed right now that is somehow connected with porn?”

Immediately, the Spirit said, “Yes, you are fearful.”

I asked Him, “What about?”

I was and am a faith-based missionary. Once a month, we would receive our paycheck in the mail. Whatever money had been donated in the previous month would come to us and being “faith-based,” our income would vary sometimes as much as one to two thousand dollars per month. Every month, I would start to feel anxiety and fear as the date for receiving the paycheck would arrive. Immediately, I asked the Lord, “What am I supposed to do with these feelings?” Again, graciously and immediately, the Holy Spirit brought a verse to my mind that I had memorized. “Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you” (1 Peter 5:7, NIV).

Instead of going into the bookstore to look for porn, I spent the time in the car, praying and casting my anxieties onto Jesus.

A week later I again was looking for porn. Again, I stopped and asked the Holy Spirit to reveal if there was an emotional link to my desire to consume porn. Again, He revealed another emotion—feeling out of control.

This was a major breakthrough. I had never thought that my dad’s sins might impact me. I had always rejected the “psycho-babble” of blaming parents for everything thing. I did not want to go down that road. Yet, in my ignorance, my dad’s actions did affect me profoundly.

Within days of my parent’s separation, one of the other boys in the neighborhood showed me my first pornographic picture. Three other families on our street, all with boys my age, were undergoing divorce/ separation at the same time. In an act of solidarity, all the boys, aged between 10-15, would sneak out adult magazines that our dads possessed and bring them to a tent in my backyard. There we learned how to lust after women. Under the tutelage of Hugh Hefner, Playboy became the primary source of our sex education. But something deeper was going on. I learned to find refuge and escape in porn.

I didn’t know how to handle these deeply felt feelings, all the negative emotions that I felt when my dad walked out on my mom. My outlet was to cry, and I cried buckets. Then, at the exhortation of my father, I dried up. I learned to and trained myself to stuff every emotion. Instead of understanding them, processing them, talking about them, or even praying about them, I just ignored them or tried to anesthetize them. My chosen deadening agent was to run to pornography and masturbation.

No one around me knew my background. All the “accountability partners,” prayer partners, spiritual trainers and advisers—none of these knew this deadly truth that I had hidden.

The Thermal Layer

Another aspect of Naval warfare highlights this deep truth.

A submarine can stalk a surface ship while hiding under a thermal layer. The sub is already designed to be quiet and to operate in stealth. A “thermal layer” is when the temperature of the water drops quickly over a short distance of depth. When you add the environmental elements of a “thermal layer,” it effectively “cloaks” the submarine, making it invisible to sonar searches from the ship. Sonar from the ship will actually bounce off the layer, hiding the sub.

In the same way that a sub hides, I had learned to hide my “true self,” the core of my emotional soul under a layer.

I hid or stuffed every negative emotion that I felt. I developed habits of running to pornography as an emotional refuge and as an escape. I didn’t want to feel afraid or out of control. I didn’t want to hurt and became committed to doing anything to not hurt like I did when my daddy left our family. In my fantasy world, Miss January and February and August could give me “hugs” and I could escape momentarily whatever emotional pain that I was feeling.

When I would look at the image of a beautiful naked woman, I could fantasize that she wanted me. I could think, “I could satisfy her”…or she could and would please me…or that she loved me…or that if I were with her, it would prove that I was a man…or a hundred other false assumptions. Then, following up with masturbation and the joys and pleasures of orgasmic relief, the “feel good” hormones that God designed our bodies to feel with sexual expression, I could deaden the pain that I felt from negative emotions.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but as a 10-year-old boy, I was deeply, emotionally wounded. Porn became the balm to soothe my wounded soul. Every time I felt lonely, I ran to porn. Every time I felt abandoned, I found comfort in the company of porn. Every time I felt out of control, I could control my own body sexually by masturbating. Every time I felt any negative emotion that I wanted to escape from, porn was my ever-present companion.

Casting My Cares on God

Now, fast-forward 20 years. I had become a believer. I love God and want to serve Him. I felt called to leave my career in the Navy to serve Him “full-time.” I had memorized vast amounts of Scripture to prepare myself for ministry. Now one of these verses started flashing in my brain. Psalm 62:8, “Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us.” The Holy Spirit whispered in my ear, “God can handle your emotions. Every emotion you feel, you can tell God. Pour our your heart to Him and stop pouring out your heart at the altar of porn.” The Spirit went on to say, “Every time you turn to porn to meet your needs, you are bowing down to an idol…You are committing idolatry by continuing to use pornography…”

I needed an internal overhaul. My soul was damaged and I needed to undo the carnage of the wrongful vows and decades of destructive habits. God was saying to me, “Instead of porn being your refuge, I, the Lord God who made you, I want to be your refuge. You can run to Me and pour out your heart to Me. I can handle all your emotions. I want you to share your emotional hurts with Me. Pour out all of your heart to me.”

I didn’t know how to do that. I didn’t know if I was “allowed” to pray that way. When I was scared, was it okay to tell God that? When someone was being mean to me, assaulting me verbally or with obscene gestures, was it okay for me to ask God to “smash him,” to hurt that person and to take vengeance on them on my behalf? Was it okay for me to tell God all my secret thoughts and longings? I had never been taught to pray that way. I had been taught to pray the exact opposite way. Even Jesus says, “Pray for your enemies.” I was confused. My prayer life was emotionally constipated.

As the Holy Spirit taught me about these things, He directed me to the Psalms. David was called a “man after God’s own heart.” I studied the prayers of David as recorded in the Psalms. David was an EMOTIONAL man and prayed emotional prayers. He asked God to “break the teeth of his enemies.” He asked that God would make “their wives widows and their children fatherless.” He prayed that God would “blot them out of the book of life.” These are emotional cries of desperation. Is this what God wants from me also? As I prayed and studied, the only answer that I could come up with was yes, yes, yes…God wants my heart. God wants my emotional heart. God wants to hear my complaints, my fears and my anxieties. “Pour out your hearts before Him, God is a refuge for us…”

God had to do some deep work in my soul that is still ongoing. I am a work in progress. First, I couldn’t even recognize more than 4 or 5 emotional feelings that I possessed. I had to study and think about what emotions I might or could be or should be feeling. I was totally emotionally ignorant and detached. Secondly, I asked God to heal me internally so that I would not have a “lag time” between feeling hurt and mentally recognizing hurts. Bad things would happen to me and I was so out of touch with my emotions that it would take 2-3 weeks before I felt the negative emotion. I asked God to shorten the lag time so that I could become mentally aware of my emotional state immediately. Then, I asked God to teach me to pray emotionally, to pray like David. I started praying the very things, using the same words that David used. I am learning how to “cry out to God,” how to ventilate to Him, I am learning how to “pour out my heart” to God. In essence, I am learning how to make God my refuge.

Learning this has been another key principle, a key tactic in learning how to overcome a lifetime of consuming porn. The mentor was right. Porn had been “meeting a need in my life.” It had met an emotional need. As a 10-year-old boy, I had learned to run to the poisoned waters of porn to satisfy the emotional hurts that caused thirsts in my soul. I didn’t yet know the Lord. Now that I knew Him, He was reclaiming the wounded part of me.

God was saying, “Trust in the Lord at all times, pour out your hearts before Him, God is a refuge for us.”

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 7 of this series.

  1. N.D

    @all I must confess that I have imensely benefitted both from the topic and comments in this blog. You all have done a great job.

    However I must mention that i came here to find a well to dry my thirst. was a bit dissapointed to find hurts and disagrements. I ask that apologies be rendered to offended parties. we are only sharpening ourselves so we can be better arrows for the Lord. We musnt allow the devil to rule our blogs with petty conflicts.

    We are supposed to be adressing weaknesses, and failures and celebrating broken bondages and addictions (helping eachother out of this well of porn) not cutting ourselves with words. Please lets not deviate from the purpose of this blog. Blessings

    • Luke Gilkerson

      @N.D. – Thanks for your concern. Don’t know if you saw the apologies that were exchanged on the 7th part in this series. Both David and Bob made amends.

      Generally speaking I allow people to make the comments they want to make on the blog (unless they are profane) because I believe there is something we can gain from dialogue (as was the case for both David and Bob), even if the dialogue begins in disagreement. This is why we have a blog to begin with, not just an e-magazine where no one can leave comments. As you look through this blog you will likely find many times when people disagree with each other. I hope this doesn’t dissuade you from reading.

  2. David Frazier

    @David – So basically you have managed to call me a self-righteous Pharisee, proud, haughty, judgmental, in denial of my own brokenness and frailty (a.k.a. absence of poverty of spirit) a sterilizer of another’s faith, fundamentalist detractor, a “white-washed tomb” clean only on the outside, hiding from God, a de-humanizer of the Gospel, ignorant of what it means to walk with God, oh yes and a “pure unadulterated legalist.

    Wow! I must repent to you. Since you ARE holding the gavel!

    –When I blog, I do not write to be right. I design my blog to generate feedback. I write to learn from others hoping to see where I do not understand. Luke Gilkerson did and does that very well, and I indeed learned significantly. Apparently you were not satisfied with that and wanted to make sure everyone knows how much “you” know, how right you are, and how wrong I am. You, as opposed to Luke, have not even attempted to gracefully or gently teach me. Nay, you have vengefully and wrathfully lashed out with anger and malice to tear me down. If you feel or think that is what I was doing in my previous blog, you are entitled to do so, but that is not the case. If that is the way it came off, then I am wrong and beg forgiveness. Nonetheless how are you not guilty of being and doing everything in which you accused me?
    Luke managed to enlighten me. You chose to bash my character and my spiritual walk. So the shame you poured out on me is equally returned.
    Furthermore, you have managed to take everything I said completely out of context, twist it, and form it into a sword in which to cut me personally to ribbons. . . All just to make “your” point in exhibition.
    When I am wrong, and that is quite often, I am glad to be wrong. I love to learn, and I love having nothing, being nothing, and wanting nothing apart from Jesus. I long to see Him lifted up because He is SO WORTHY! I can like Peter earnestly say, “Depart from me Lord, I am an unworthy man.”
    However, what I am amazed at the most is how you know so much about me and my walk. I have never met you, Dave.

  3. David

    Let me clarify one point. Mr. Frazier wrote quoted the following:

    ‘When a man is seen revolving around emotions and feelings, it is highly indicative he has not experienced Jesus’ cross. Another sheer sign of this is when that same man speaks much of God and spiritual things but speaks nothing of what the cross of Christ means.’

    I’d like to state that I do believe being wrapped up in (and dominated by) your emotions can be indicative of not knowing Christ, but in this case it just doesn’t apply. In the context of everything Bob wrote, it seems he is pursuing Christ — he’s searching his own heart, he found desires that manifested themselves in sinful ways, and he’s bringing those desires to God in repentance. Only God can know his heart for sure, but there seems to be fruit! That’s why I say this is a haughty judgment that comes from people who are in denial about their own human brokenness (and frailty). Because despite the fact that Bob wrote all of this in the context of relationship with Christ, pursuit of God’s will and a desire to be free of sin, Mr. Frazier has the audacity to say it’s “too emotional” and that Bob didn’t say Jesus’ name enough times.

    Pure, unadulterated legalism.

  4. David

    Bob — Thank you for this post. I am ashamed of people like Mr. Frazier (and the many, many folks like him who fall to the right side of the evangelical horse and de-humanize what a relationship with God really looks like. That said, I am also ashamed of the people who fall to the left side of the horse and make it all about emotions and feelings and ecumenicalism without clinging firmly to the truth that God has revealed to us).

    That said, I want to encourage you to keep writing about your experiences, and your walk with Christ. Many of us reading this blog understand that we are a mess on the inside; our hearts are deceitful and oftentimes we do the very things we don’t want to do. God created us to have emotion, and the presence of sin means that we often use it in the wrong way. But in no way does that mean that you are “revolving around emotions and feelings” which is “highly indicative [you] have not experienced Jesus’ cross.” Those are proud and haughty judgments coming from people who are in denial about their own human brokenness (and frailty). Denying the fact that we are emotional is to deny the manner in which the Lord composed us, and more importantly to deny one of the primary vehicles that Satan binds us up in lies and false belief. We should be very aware of our emotions, both in the way they draw us near to the Lord and the way they impede us from living the way the Father commands.

    Your tactic on going to Him in the midst of our tribulation to inquire about our own ugliness is SO encouraging. It seems like a really effective way to lay our burdens down at the cross. Because in the end, all God wants is for us to walk in fellowship with Him, and to love and worship Him with all our hearts. He has so much to teach us and reveal to us about the things in our lives that get in the way of that ultimate goal; sometimes all we to do is just ask and the Holy Spirit, like you aptly described, is waiting to give us the answer. That is real faith my friend. And I appreciate your example.

    I am grateful for the wisdom you share. The bedrock of our faith will always be in Jesus Christ, His cross, His atoning blood, and His resurrection. But now that He has paid that price for us, our job is to live lives worthy of the calling — our spiritual act of worship. Clearly it is not us who do that, but Christ in us. Our job is to simply worship Him, rely on Him, obey Him and submit our lives to His will; your article has been effective in addressing some of the ugly truths that get in the way of that.

    So please don’t let fundamentalist detractors dissuade you from sharing, and please don’t let them persuade you to “de-humanize” the Gospel that is being lived out in your life as Christ perfects you. Anybody who maintains that we must put up an affront with God (as if our sinful hearts didn’t already betray us) is not acquainted with the attributes of God. Mr. Frazier acts as though we could hide something from God by not speaking aloud the desires of our hearts, and furthermore that if we cover our own ugliness up with a prayer like “bless my enemies in superabundance” that God will be somehow convinced of our piety. He’s not.

    Let’s face it: We’re broken. If you’re praying for everyone around you to be demolished then you need to repent of your own wrath and anger. But to think that if we don’t reveal what’s in our heart out loud to God, that somehow we’re sinning less, is a ridiculous assumption. Instead, I say God DOES want to hear your heart; he wants you to cast everything on Him; He wants you to turn to Him in your sin. But do it with repentance! Do it claiming the blood of Christ as your forgiveness. And after you’ve done it, ask the Holy Spirit to cleanse you and to change your heart so that you one day will love those who curse you! Pretending our sin doesn’t exist and then covering it up with some falsely pious prayer accomplishes nothing. Instead, if we bring our ugly hearts to Him in repentance and then ask Him to equip us to follow Luke 6:28, THAT’S walking with God.

    Don’t let people like Mr. Frazier “sterilize” your faith into something that just looks good on the outside. God wants us — our whole heart, our whole mind and our whole soul — to worship Him. And He wants to change us in the process.

  5. David Frazier

    @Luke – as always, I thoroughly enjoy your input. Good stuff. It is not about being right in any regards; it’s about learning and growing in grace, and each time I blog this happens for me. Thanks

    • Luke Gilkerson

      @David – Thank you! I agree. Thanks for your insightful comments.

  6. Dave Begley

    If this is part 6 it would be helpful to have a link to the first 5 (especially for someone who is new to this blog.) I tried searching and can’t seem to find them.

    • Dave Begley

      Never mind, I found them. (Don’t know what I was doing wrong on my earlier searches.)

  7. David Frazier

    @ Luke – I’m going to have to disagree with you on this one Luke. Why would I want to read his other articles after reading this one that has so many doctrinal errors? But what do I know? I’m not trying to be popular or right in myself. I do know that spiritual confusion is normally born out of reluctance or refusal to die to self and pick up the cross.

    @Bob Reehm writes – [I am learning how to “cry out to God,” how to ventilate to Him, I am learning how to “pour out my heart” to God.]

    –Crying out to God = “God, have mercy on me, a sinner” (Luke 18:14, the parable of the tax collector).Complaining to God is not “pouring out your heart to God,” I’m sorry. It looks to me that this article depicts that this guy has a knack for wresting scriptures to support and justify his codependency to emotional tyranny. He WANTS to administer justice but understands enough to know that he cannot do that. So he just asks God to do the justice he FEELS needs to be done.

    –Lament, or more accepted as ‘crying-out to God,’ is stating our needs spiritually, physically, emotionally, and financially/provisionally, to God. First and foremost, lamenting, or contrition of spirit, puts us in the correct position before Him; prostrate like the tax collector. Seeing ourselves as unworthy and empty seems to many Christians today as a spiritual dilemma, something that does not seem right and so contradicts their own feelings about what God expects about the spiritual condition of His people. We will never receive God’s mercy into our hearts as the supreme essence of Who He IS, until we accept the fact that we are doomed, and condemned to an eternity of wrath, insatiable lust, God-less oppression, and torment without it. Furthermore, we will never appreciate it fully enough to surrender our lives to dust and ashes and give our lives to the filling of all the needs of our greatest enemies, let alone our fellow Christian, until we see ourselves as the cause of such an immeasurably costly mercy

    @Bob Reehm writes – [He asked God to “break the teeth of his enemies.” He asked that God would make “their wives widows and their children fatherless.” He prayed that God would “blot them out of the book of life.” These are emotional cries of desperation. Is this what God wants from me also? As I prayed and studied, the only answer that I could come up with was yes, yes, yes…God wants my heart. God wants my emotional heart. God wants to hear my complaints, my fears and my anxieties.]

    –The prayer should be, “Lord flood the one I am looking at in my heart with need-fulfilling mercies. Bless them in superabundance, physically, emotionally, financially, and spiritually. Take the blessings you had prepared for me and give them to that one. Do to them the mercy that you have done to me, and even more so. Favor that one at my expense. Do for them instead of me. Amen”
    This is the prayer of mercy!…not wrath, vindication, complaint, ventilation, etc.

    –“Pouring out your heart to God” is allowing the Holy Spirit to search your heart, and in agreement with where your heart is not in line with Jesus and His Word, by what He shows you, you own it and repent.”

    –Protest to God? This sounds almost disrespectful in a sense. Its dictionary definition describes it as expression of objection and disapproval. In the first line of the next section, David is still protesting to God. (Psalm 44:23) reads, “Wake up, LORD! Why are You sleeping? Get up! Don’t reject us forever!” WOW! Honestly, I do not know if I would ever use those words to God…“Wake up!” But if honesty and sincerity says from the heart, that this is the way it indeed feels, then anything less than the truth of this condition is a deception toward God. If you honestly feel like God is sleeping through your situation, then it is right to tell Him so, since He already knows anyway. However, let me say that almost any time you feel like God is sleeping, the most likely case is, He is probably only sleeping because YOU are. Otherwise how could the same author write in (Psalm 121:3-4), that He never sleeps or slumbers?

    Protesting to God is seen with a clearer understanding when it is seen as being apart from the dictionary definition. You may ask how God could tolerate someone telling Him that they are disapproving of Him, or taking objection to Him. But like I previously stated, let us see what it looks like in God’s eyes; the One Who sees deeper than any human eye can see; the One Who sees into the heart and not the appearance of man. God knows that “we are but dust,” His Word says in (Psalm 103:14). God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, nor are His ways our ways, (see Isaiah 55:8).
    God knows that whatever we see in Him we should see in ourselves. For He made us in His own image, and it is His very will for us to reflect His glory and be conformed to His image, as we see in (Matthew 5:48/Luke 6:36). “Therefore, be perfect/merciful as your heavenly Father is perfect/merciful.” God reveals to us the very nature of how and what we have been before Him, by exhibiting the illusion of what we are charging Him with. If we say God is unmerciful, it is because WE have been unmerciful. So, God saw it as a good thing that David would protest to Him of having been “sleeping.” God knew that by allowing David to vent his perception of God to God, that it was only a matter of time before David would see his own folly of being spiritually lethargic, the very thing of which he was accusing God.

    • Luke Gilkerson

      Hey David,

      To answer your first question, the reason why you would want to read the other articles is because the title of the article implies it is part of a series. The title assumes you’ve read the others so you are sure to read this one in context.

      I admit I am also not always comfortable praying the way the psalmists often did, and yet this is Bob’s point exactly. Often “crying out to God” the way the psalmists did means we say exactly what we feel, even if it is not coming from sanctified emotions. While I agree our prayer life should develop out of a holistic understanding of God’s word, and while I agree we should always strive towards seeing things from God’s point of view, the human heart is not always so predictable or subdued.

      Like you said, “God knew that by allowing David to vent his perception of God to God, that it was only a matter of time before David would see his own folly of being spiritually lethargic, the very thing of which he was accusing God.” Exactly. So should we not also mimic David’s prayers with the same end in view? Instead of venting our emotions of rage, confusion, and revenge toward others destructively or through some form of sinful escapism (like pornography), we vent them to God. This is exactly what David did, and in the process, the Spirit changed his heart.

      Even the perfect human heart of Christ, under the strain of all he was about to endure on the cross, did not begin its prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane emotionally embracing God’s will for the hours ahead. Rather, He “prayed that if possible the hour might pass from him” (Mark 14:25), because his soul was overwhelmed with sorrow (v.34). Even Christ in his sinlessness did not want to drink the bitter cup the Father would give Him (Matthew 26:39). Of course, the second and third times Christ returns to his knees, we see His prayer change, stating not “if it is possible,” but “if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done” (v.42). Though He was the Son of God, in the process of prayer, he was learning obedience from what He suffered (Hebrews 5:8).

      If we don’t give others the same freedom to express the cries of their heart, even if their emotions scream something contrary to the truth, we do not allow them to learn the same obedience.

      With that said, there is much Bob says here that I would never say the way He does. I agree with you: if our emotionalism in prayer does not turn, as it did in David’s prayers, to the wonder and majesty of God, a recognition of our depravity, and a wholehearted embrace of God’s will, then we have not really made God our refuge. We’ve only wallowed in the muck of our own stagnant emotions. Bob’s post does not bring out this truth.

      I take his post as simply a testimony of just one of the Lord has taught him, of course, in the context of everything else he’s written about in previous posts.

  8. David Frazier

    Uhm…yes. I was looking for Jesus in Mr. Reehm’s emotional discourse and I couldn’t find Him. I remember an old hymn, “O Victory in Jesus…” Francois De Fenelon said in so many words, ‘When a man is seen revolving around emotions and feelings, it is highly indicative he has not experienced Jesus’ cross. Another sheer sign of this is when that same man speaks much of God and spiritual things but speaks nothing of what the cross of Christ means.’

    • Luke Gilkerson

      @David – Bob does say, “Instead of going into the bookstore to look for porn, I spent the time in the car, praying and casting my anxieties onto Jesus.” While I agree this article does not specifically state how Christ is central to the rewiring of Bob’s emotions and affections, Christ is not absent either. I recommend you read his other articles to see how he explains other, more foundational principles of sanctification and how they relate to the cross and Jesus Christ.

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A young woman singing with a microphone in church.

Defeat Lust & Pornography

I Was the “Perfect” Christian Girl and Addicted to Porn

I was introduced to pornography toward the end of elementary school. As…

3 minute read

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Editor's Picks

A teenage girl alone at night with her phone.

Defeat Lust & Pornography

I Thought I Was the Only Girl to Ever Struggle With This

The struggles I have had with pornography have been long and hard.…

3 minute read

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A young woman singing with a microphone in church.

Defeat Lust & Pornography

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