Pornography does not cause pornography. It is a symptom of the condition of your heart. Consider a bicycle wheel with its hub at the center and spokes radiating outward. Your heart is the hub, and pornography is just one of the spokes on your wheel. This analogy points to two conclusions. First, if we want to change the direction the wheel moves, we have to apply pressure and attention to the hub. Second, the hub is affecting every spoke on the wheel, so its condition impacts everything.
The foundation of every breakthrough my clients have ever had in battling pornography is based on the recognition that they don’t have a behavior problem – they have a heart (hub) problem. Embracing this understanding will reorient the healing effort toward the source of your suffering. A successful strategy to defeat unwanted behavior must focus on heart change. When that happens, potentially every aspect (spoke) of your life is impacted. Getting to the heart of an addiction to pornography will usher in a change that will impact the way you see and live your life.
How do you change your heart, and what does it need to change into? The answer is – your heart must become like the heart of Christ. Does is not follow that if you have more of the heart of Christ, you will have less of a pornography problem? This is totally consistent with God’s plan for you. Romans 8:29 (AMP) makes it clear that God planned before the beginning of time to mold the hearts of all of His people to reflect the heart of His Son.
How does your character that progressively resembles Christ’s character make any difference in your struggle with sin? This question is answered in 1 Peter 4:1, which says that as we have the heart of Christ, we are “done with intentional sin.” The pathway to sustained behavior change is through heart change. Anything else is just a surface-level bandage to resist the temptation of sin, which often results in more bondage or substitute bondage.
Therefore, if you want to get free of pornography, you must submit yourself to the transforming work of God. The challenge in this commitment is the requirement of dying to who you are today and becoming someone new. The blessing in the commitment is discovering that you progressively process and experience your world with greater peace, joy and well-being. A more peaceful heart will have less desire to use pornography. Remember that loss of desire is what you are seeking not greater restraint.
If you are ready to cooperate with God’s plan of sanctification and receive His blessing in your life, pray this prayer out loud. Feel free to improvise as you feel led.
Dear God, I confess that I cannot overcome my pornography habit in my own strength. Forgive me for not submitting to your will to change my heart until now. I submit to your pruning of my heart so that I can progressively reflect inwardly the heart of your Son. I open my heart to the leading of your Holy Spirit to bring me conviction, and I ask for your grace to respond in a way that will honor and glorify You. I pray this in the name of your Son Jesus.
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Amen. Consistency in the Word will keep us clean. We must continue to examine ourselves to see if we are in the faith (2 Cor 13:5) and be washed by the Word (Ephesians 5:26). We must also crucify the flesh daily (Galatians 5:24). After the heart change we must consistently be taught, matured, and preserved by His Word and His Spirit or we risk familiar spirits coming back upon us worse than before (Matthew 12:43-45).
@cqwagner
There simply isn’t a way to achieve freedom without a heart transformation. You’ve given some great references on moving that direction. Now… we must reach into the lives of those around us and do the hard work of ministering to the need and planting the seed!