They led a double life. One was a worship leader, another a Sunday school teacher, two of them pastors, but behind the scenes all of them struggled with a sinful addiction they didn’t want anyone to know about. So they hid. Behind pulpits they professed Jesus to be their Lord. But behind computer screens and in adult video stores they bowed to another god.
In one month you can listen to their stories on the new documentary, Somebody’s Daughter.
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“237 Reasons to Have Sex” . . . This is the title of an episode that was aired on The Oprah Winfrey Show a couple weeks ago. This particular episode attempts to take an up-close and personal look at some of the attitudes about sex in our culture.
One of the highlights of the show is the prescription of “erotica” as sex-therapy for women.
I spend a good portion of my day reading thoughts from people who are caught in habitual sin. Many can’t seem to break free from the grip of pornography. Others wouldn’t call themselves “addicts,” but they are faced with the temptation to view porn on a regular basis: it is a real struggle for them.
Where are the Christians Peter describes in the text above, those who are “done with sin”?
The following is a guest post by Erik Raymond. Erik currently pastors the new south campus of the Omaha Bible Church, a ministry “aiming to establish a gospel-centered, cross-boasting, expository preaching ministry” in his county. Erik was born and raised in Massachusetts and moved to Omaha, Nebraska in 1995 (while serving in the Air Force). Erik lives with his wife Christie and four children in Omaha. You can read more thoughts from Erik at his blog, IrishCalvinist.com, where he seeks to “corral Christ centered thoughts and organize and articulate them in an edifying manner.”
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No matter what setting you find yourself in you must battle your heart. You may say, “I don’t struggle with porn.” Praise God! But friend, you do struggle with lust. Every one of us struggles with the continual waywardness of our own hearts and our insatiable desire for supremacy, worship and glory. I believe it was John Calvin who said that the human heart is an idol factory.
One of the key aspects of accountability is that it opens doors for communication. It “breaks the ice,” so to speak. It does this even for people who never get a high-scoring site, simply allowing the partner to ask the question, “How are you doing?”
Well, in this case, a son was indeed looking at pornography, and got caught by his dad, a pastor. Here are the dad’s words (given here with his permission):
From: [mailto:]
Sent: Tuesday, August 05, 2008 11:14 PM
To: resources@covenanteyes.com
Subject: Son spared.I would just like to say thank you for your service to our children. My 13 year old son, accessed a porn site without knowing that we had installed C.E. and my accountability partner confronted me immediately thinking it was me. Knowing it was not me, I immediately confronted my son. He admitted fault and what happened afterwards was a great breakthrough that brought us closer together, and more importantly brought him closer to God. This was truly a timely God-send.
My son confessed that he hadn’t felt God in a couple of years and we encouraged him to seek God. A couple of days later we attended “Jesus Culture” in [a nearby town] where about 2,000 teens and parents had an encounter with God. Last Friday, when a prayer tunnel was made, my son jumped up to run through it and
kept being sent back because it was not our section’s turn; after the third try he anxiously passed through it… You can imagine how proud and how blessed we are as parents.Again, thank you so, so much for being true servants. As for myself, I had a great break-through at the Promise Keepers event in [another nerby town]. I felt I didn’t need the filter anymore, but I’m so glad I installed it. One young life was spared the anguish and frustration from one of the greatest enemies of our time.
Again, thank you and I will refer others to your site.
A Grateful Pastor
I see by the date of my last post it’s been a while since I’ve added anything here. My life has always been busy, but now it’s tighter than ever. I found out a year and a half ago that I have cancer, a slow-growing but incurable form of lymphoma. Though incurable, the doctors are rather confident that it is manageable, and I will likely live a long time with it, maybe even to the point that it would eventually be considered to be cured. I actually have had no discomfort, and not even any symptoms other than a lump on my left temple that started the process.
The main problem is that I am in a clinical trial at MD Anderson in Houston, and I live in Michigan. The clinical trial requires me to be in Houston one week out of every four for chemotherapy (mild, I haven’t had any side effects). So I’m now squeezing 4 weeks worth of work into 3. In addition to that, the week I got back from Houston last cycle, I attended two weddings and four funerals, and basically lost another week.
So if you’ve tried to reach me by phone or email, I simply haven’t had time to catch up, and probably won’t!
Incidentally, I heard of a wonderful ministry, Angel Flight Network in New York that arranges for patients all around the country to hitch a ride on corporate jets. It turns out that Dow Chemical Corp. flies every day from an airport near my home to Houston. As long as they have room, which they have so far, they allow my wife and me to fly with them at no cost. Wow, that ends up being a huge savings. I’ve already made 7 trips to Texas this year (most of them I paid for before knowing about the Angel Flights), and I have at least 6 more this year.
Well, I’ll try to keep my posts more up to date…
The following is a guest post from Robert S. Scott Sr. “Bobby” is the Pastor-Teacher of the Los Angeles Community Bible Church and general editor of Secret Sex Wars: A Battle Cry for Purity. He received his M.Div. and Th.M. from the Master’s Seminary and is now on the teaching faculty of the Los Angeles Bible Training School. He blogs at Truth in the City.
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In the real life and death drama of Apollo 13, after hearing an explosion in their space capsule 200,000 miles away from earth, crewmen James A. Lovell, Jr. and John L. Swigert recited one of the most famous understatements in history: “Houston, we’ve had a problem.” Those placidly stated yet chilling words sent the world’s greatest scientists and engineers at the NASA mission control center in Houston scrambling to find solutions. Under the unrelenting leadership of NASA Flight Director, Eugene Kranz, failure was not an option.
To borrow their alarming understatement, we’ve had a problem, too, here in the African American community. While comprising only 12% of the U.S. population, African Americans now account for nearly 50% of all the new AIDS cases. Decades ago, former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop warned that this trend amongst African Americans was genocidal. Despite the billions spent looking for secular answers, the death count keeps rising. So I pray that this blog post will find its way to a different Houston, a network of Christian leaders who will relentlessly scramble to find biblical solutions and refuse to accept failure.
We often get comments from wives who are struggling with their husbands’ use of porn. If you are interested in hearing from a couple that has dealt with this in the past, please listen to the interview of Tony and Pam Vuke. In this interview they share their story about Tony’s pornography addiction, and how Pam then had to deal with the emotions stemming from his confession.
I really appreciated Tony and Pam’s honesty in this interview. Pam shares about her process of learning to trust Tony again, how painful it was, yet how thankful she is that his addiction came out into the light. Their story is one that highlights the need for raw honesty in marriage. She also offers a message of hope to women who feel like their husbands do not want to change.
The following is a guest post by Erik Raymond. Erik currently pastoring the new south campus of the Omaha Bible Church, a ministry “aiming to establish a gospel-centered, cross-boasting, expository preaching ministry” in his county. Erik was born and raised in Massachusetts and moved to Omaha, Nebraska, while in the Air Force in 1995. Erik lives with his wife Christie and four children live in Omaha. You can read more thoughts from Erik at his blog, IrishCalvinist.com, where he seeks to “corral Christ centered thoughts and organize and articulate them in an edifying manner.”
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As a pastor I have the opportunity to talk with many men about the dangers and the destructiveness of sexual sin. There are doubtless myriads of temptations and options available to pursue satisfaction of these temptations, however, the root issue is always the same. Furthermore, the solution to dealing with lust is also always singular.
In this post I want to highlight what lust is, why we lust and how to fight lust. The post is not intended to be exhaustive but it is intended to be practical and intensely biblical.
At the 2004 Desiring God National Conference, the theme was “Sex and the Supremacy of Christ.” I recently posted a review of a book of the same title which was based on the messages given at this conference. Some of you aren’t avid readers yet, so I wanted to pass along recordings of some of the messages.
Why did God create sex? What does it mean to celebrate the goodness of sex while fighting lust? What does it mean to be single yet sexual? What does real intimacy in marriage involve? How does God heal our sexual brokenness and addictions? This series of messages begin to tackle some of these questions. They really provide a great foundation for a “theology of sex.”
