Overcome Porn: The 40 Day Challenge

Pornography is inherently selfish and hurtful—to your body, to your relationships, and even to the performers. If we want to truly rid our lives of pornography and its effects, then we need to flood our lives with porn’s polar opposite, and one of the grand unifying themes of the Bible: love.

But first, we need to understand what love is.

The Love of God

One of the most common Hebrew words to describe God’s love in the Old Testament is hesed, and it’s virtually untranslatable. In Inexpressible: Hesed and the Mystery of God’s Lovingkindness, author and songwriter Michael Card lists 112 possible translations for the word, including faithful love, lovingkindness, and mercy.

It’s repeated throughout the Psalms: “His hesed endures forever.” Moses calls on God’s hesed to beg God not to destroy the wandering, scared Israelites in Numbers 14:17-19. In Hosea’s marriage to Gomer, Hosea is to show hesed to his wife in a picture of God’s hesed to the unfaithful Israel.

Michael Card uses these passages to loosely define hesed as this:

“Hesed is when a person from whom I have a right to expect nothing gives me everything.”

Or, if you prefer, you can use Sally Lloyd-Jones’ definition from The Jesus Storybook Bible:

“A Never Stopping, Never Giving Up, Unbreaking, Always and Forever Love.”

While we don’t have a direct parallel translation for hesed in Greek New Testament, the same principles of this love for us are clearly at work throughout. Reread 1 Corinthians 13 and contemplate it as a description of God’s behavior towards us: “God’s love for us is patient and kind; God’s love for us does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude.”

This is the love that sent Jesus to the cross for our sake.

His Love, Our Calling

This is the same love that we are to show to others. Jesus himself says that after loving God, loving your neighbor is the second-greatest commandment (Matthew 22:37-38). In fact, when Jesus quotes Hosea and informs the Pharisees that they don’t understand the phrase “I desire hesed and not sacrifice” (Matthew 12:7, quoting Hosea 6:6), he is making it clear: we show we love God by loving one another.

It doesn’t matter how religious we are. It doesn’t matter how many hours we spend reading the Bible each day, or how often we attend church. As important as those practices may be, if we aren’t living as a servant to those around us, we are not showing our love for a God who lived as a servant for us.

This love is the Fruit of the Spirit. This love is the heart of flesh we are given instead of a heart of stone. The Bible is clear that God himself is ultimately in charge of our transformation, but we are still invited to “work out our salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12), and that means practicing this amazing love God has shown for us by loving others.

This may be easier said than done, especially since we’ve been mentally conditioning ourselves for self-love and self-gratification alone. So how can we counter years of porn-training by practicing love?

There are many ways to practice showing hesed to others, but we’re going to look at two ways closely.

Loving Our Families

Our families are among the immediate victims of our porn use. If you’re married, you’ve been pitting your spouse against thousands of “perfect” porn bodies—a physical standard no single person can possibly reach. If you’re not married, your porn use is setting up your hypothetical future spouse for failure.

Our marriages are supposed to be pictures of Christ and his Bride, the Church—an image embedded throughout the entirety of scripture, but particularly in Ephesians 5:15-33. If you’re not married, are you practicing faithfulness on your own by serving your parents or siblings, and serving in the church? Women, are you modeling the same faithful submission all believers are to show out of reverence for Christ (not to abusive behaviors, of course)? Men, are you putting aside your own physical desires to serve your spouse in material ways (doing the dishes, helping to clean, etc.)? Are you nourishing her as you would nourish your own body? In other words, are you loving your wife the way Christ loves the Church—the way Christ loves you?

Loving the Downtrodden

Watching porn means using—and abusing—other peoples’ bodies for personal pleasure. Often those people are struggling in the first place; by performing in porn, they may even be pushing themselves deeper into despair and addiction.

This, again, is the opposite of the love God wants us to show others. James 1:27 says, “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.”

What if, instead of taking what we can from other people via porn, we started serving those who will never give us a return? This may mean volunteering in a soup kitchen, or signing up to do regular welfare-checks for an elderly widow in your church. Maybe it means being a host family for an international student. Maybe you can help run a Bible study in a jail. Or maybe right now it means dipping your toes in the water of service by sending regular monetary contributions to a local food pantry, and physically writing the check instead of automating the donation so you remember to pray for them.

Your porn viewing was secret for the reward of self-pleasure. Make your service to others a quiet service too—not for people to pat you on the back for how awesome you are, but to remember that you have nothing God needs, and yet He loves you anyway.

This is the love by which Jesus displays his love for the world. And this is the love that can transform a heart of stone into a heart of flesh—even hearts like ours.