Each week, I round up the best resources, articles, and videos I find that are relevant to finding freedom from porn and sexual addiction. Please note that by posting a link here it does not mean I agree with everything in the linked article. It just means I found it interesting enough to share.

XXXChurch | Can a Christian Ever Really Be Free from Porn?

“You see the Gospel message is not one of getting our crap together so we look good. It’s about laying our crap out for all to see and learning that our strength has nothing to do with how we appear, but rather in our honesty and openness to be real.”

Gospel Coalition | Do Paul and James Disagree on Justification by Faith Alone?

“Why do Paul and James sound so different? Why does it appear at first glance they contradict? We need to remember that letters were written to specific situations facing specific churches. Paul wrote to churches where people were tempted to trust in their works for salvation, while James wrote to those who were disposed to think intellectual assent could save them.”

Inklingations | The Other Woman

“I’ve read a lot of Christian books and heard a lot of Christian speakers talk about strategies for avoiding adultery. But I don’t believe I’ve ever read an entire chapter or listened to an entire session by a Christian on strategies for avoiding having an affair with work. Why is that?”

Challies | 10 Ugly Numbers Describing Pornography Use in 2017

“As Christians we can and must be prepared to help those who are struggling with it and to assure them that they can be forgiven and freed. As parents we can and must take action to protect and equip our children so we can help them overcome and avoid it.”

For the Church | Christian Life Beyond the Quiet Time

“So this is the primary purpose of that quiet time: not to primarily focus on the things to do, but to primarily focus on the reality that the work is done. Spiritual formation will take off with much more energy and much more joy when we are centering first on the finished work of Christ in our quiet times and only secondarily on the ongoing work of obedience.”

Speak Life | If You Had Been Here

Each week, I round up the best resources, articles, and videos I find that are relevant to finding freedom from porn and sexual addiction. Please note that by posting a link here it does not mean I agree with everything in the linked article. It just means I found it interesting enough to share.

KeyLife | Love for Losers

“There is no comprehending the logic of God’s love. It doesn’t follow our broken rules. It sounds stupid to help those who can never help you back. It seems foolish to we unaware criminals who worship justice. But to those who recognize that they’re withering away in this world, it’s butter, baby. And it’s free.”

EternityNews | My brokenness is no more or less broken than yours

“This is an issue the church has to confront more today than it ever has, at least in living memory. I am disappointed by the lack of grace and thoughtfulness that I often see in the words spoken by some Christian leaders, when speaking about this issue. It’s something I care about personally, not just because of my own attraction, but because I know a lot of people who suffer the effects of these comments and words.”

XXXchurch | 3 Reasons Why Porn Hurts Your Spouse’s Self-Esteem

“Porn addiction causes more damage to the people around you than you think. But there is hope and there can be healing, my husband and I are proof of that! So don’t give up.”

Communicate Jesus | 5 Challenges Experienced by Christian Men Today

“In the culture at large, confusion and shame abound and being a man is frequently communicated as an identity not to embrace but to apologise for. In the media, men are accused of male privilege, male chauvinism, mansplaining and misogyny. A friend is currently enrolled in a gender studies class at university and he told me that in every class the lecturer provides the same reason for the world’s problems – men.”

Southern Seminary | If Jesus already died for my sins, why do I need to pray for forgiveness every time I sin?

Each week, I round up the best resources, articles, and videos I find that are relevant to finding freedom from porn and sexual addiction. Please note that by posting a link here it does not mean I agree with everything in the linked article. It just means I found it interesting enough to share.

Blogging Theologically | Everything Sad is Coming Untrue

“That is the good news of Easter, friends: Christ is risen—and everything sad is coming untrue. That is the good news we celebrate not simply on one day of the year, or even every Sunday, but every day!”

For the Church | Brother, I Wish I Would Have Known

“I never told anyone about my addiction. I went to class, talked about Jesus, attended church—all the things seminary students are supposed to do. And no one was ever the wiser, at least not to my knowledge. I often wondered when God was going to kill me for making such a mockery of his name. But instead of that, he woke me up one morning with a life-changing thought.”

XXXchurch | 3 Ways Pornography Distorts Your View of Yourself

“Ask anyone who has struggled with pornography addiction, and they will tell you it alters how they think and what they think about. It becomes not just a craving that needs a fix like a drug, but images force their way into your mind and stay there, nearly impossible to get out.”

Cranach | Exploding Myths about Cohabitation

“University of Virginia sociologist Bradford Wilcox has published a study of the effects of cohabitation, couples living together without marriage. He especially looked at the impact on children when their parents are not married.”

Streetlights | Romans 8

Each week, I round up the best resources, articles, and videos I find that are relevant to finding freedom from porn and sexual addiction. Please note that by posting a link here it does not mean I agree with everything in the linked article. It just means I found it interesting enough to share.

KeyLife | What is Christianity Ultimately About?

“As a pastor, I’ve seen way too many people pass out. They tried. They worked hard. They studied. They served. But it never seemed like enough or they never did it good enough. So, finally, in a fit of honesty and integrity, they threw their hands up in the air and quit. Their performances weren’t good enough, and they knew it.”

Wm. Paul Young | Lie #3: God is in Control

“There is an impassable chasm between a God who takes ownership for Creation along with the havoc we have produced—and One who authors the evil itself. The first you might learn to trust, the latter… twisted lip service at best.”

Gospel Coalition | 5 Christian Clichés that Need to Die

“One-liners aren’t always helpful. Sometimes, in our desire to simplify truth, we can trivialize and even obscure it. And to obscure the truth is to tell a lie.”

Strength to Fight | How to Build a Healthy Accountability Group

“At the centre of a healthy accountability group is vulnerability and truth. Practicing confession to your brothers or sisters is a gift from the Lord. Confession is the refusal to allow sin to dwell in darkness because in darkness it festers and begins to spread and grow. Confession is an act of humbling oneself before God and others.”

Grace Community Fellowship | The Effect Of Brokenness

Each week, I round up the best resources, articles, and videos I find that are relevant to finding freedom from porn and sexual addiction. Please note that by posting a link here it does not mean I agree with everything in the linked article. It just means I found it interesting enough to share.

AndSons | What Does “Masculinity” Mean?

“A deep, prevailing experience of disorientation is one of the great afflictions of our age—it cuts the heart—and if we’re going to get a handle on what the hell is going on, we’re going to have spend a little time defining the core elements of our experience, like man, masculinity, success, freedom, virtue, community, so that a few definite objects can hold down our life the way stakes hold down a tent.”

Christianity Today | False Intimacy: A Discussion on Pornography, the Brain, and Our Faith

“There’s a generation coming up, says Struthers, who’ve come of age with the Internet in their homes and have a dependency to pornography—it’s a self-medication. If we use a medical model, the young people today have almost an inoculation to pornography, it’s like a dead sexuality. They get little bits of it and it makes it difficult to enjoy true, embodied sexuality.”

Borrowed Light | Something I Never Noticed in Matthew 7:21-23

“No more hiding. No more distance. No more self-focus. But a heart that actually trusts the Lord. A heart that loves Him so much that you don’t just want to know facts about Him, or be a casual observer, or just know Him but to actually be known by Him.”

The Bible Project | The Book of Job

Each week, I round up the best resources, articles, and videos I find that are relevant to finding freedom from porn and sexual addiction. Please note that by posting a link here it does not mean I agree with everything in the linked article. It just means I found it interesting enough to share.

Patheos | Megan Phelps-Roper Talks About How and Why She Left Westboro Baptist Church

“This has been at the front of my mind lately, because I can’t help but see in our public discourse so many of the same destructive impulses that ruled my former church. We celebrate tolerance and diversity more than at any other time in memory, and still we grow more and more divided. We want good things — justice, equality, freedom, dignity, prosperity — but the path we’ve chosen looks so much like the one I walked away from four years ago…”

Wm. Paul Young | Lie #1: God loves us, but doesn’t like us

“Even those who don’t believe that God exists are desperate to know that love does and that love knows who we are. More, we are driven from within to take the risk to ask of someone or Someone, Do you find anything in me that is lovable, that is enough, that is worthy of being loved?”

CovenantEyes | 6 Common Myths Wives of Porn Users Believe

“Porn is about escaping real life and entering into a fantasy world. It’s for numbing out—the exact opposite of what sex is designed to do, which is to be a way to engage intimately with your spouse. Your offering of more opportunity to engage does not satiate his need to numb out.”

9Marks | Singleness, Same-Sex Attraction, and the Church

“On the one hand, we should help our same-sex attracted single friend know that their struggle with sin may feel unique, but it’s not fundamentally different. Each individual we pastor or disciple is an image bearer who experiences the consequence of the Fall: original sin, indwelling sin, and actual sin.”

TrueFace | Two Roads

Each week, I round up the best resources, articles, and videos I find that are relevant to finding freedom from porn and sexual addiction. Please note that by posting a link here it does not mean I agree with everything in the linked article. It just means I found it interesting enough to share.

Brad Hambrick | Manipulative Repentance: 8 Red Flag Phrases

“In this post, I hope to accomplish two things. First, I will attempt to clarify two common misperceptions about manipulation. Second, I will discuss a series of phrases commonly used in repentance which can be red flags that the remorse being expressed will not lead to healthy relational restoration.”

Preston Sprinkle | What Is A Christian Sexual Ethic?

“Most people today view marriage as a contract between two consenting people, who commit to loving each other until they fall out of love with each other, in which case they can break the contract and go about their way. When consent is the only rule, two adults can pretty much use marriage anyway they see fit.”

Michael Kelley | Kids, Asparagus, and the Command of Jesus

“In the end, though, our kids are compliant. They will eat it. Sure, it will be with plenty of drama as they force feed it to themselves one bite at a time, washed down with gallons of whatever drink they have, but after a couple of hours they will get it down. Because they are compliant, they will obey my command and go through the mechanics of eating what I tell them to eat.”

Key Life | Radical Grace… is Radical

“I mean exactly what I teach and, no matter how shocking, heretical and radical it sounds, it’s exactly what the Bible teaches about grace. In fact, it is the essence of the Christian faith. In our efforts to be religious, right and righteous, we sometimes forget how shocking and counterintuitive the message really is. Telling Christians that God will never be angry at them no matter what they do, where they go or how badly they screw up can be disconcerting.”

Living Out | Peter’s Story

Each week, I round up the best resources, articles, and videos I find that are relevant to finding freedom from porn and sexual addiction. Please note that by posting a link here it does not mean I agree with everything in the linked article. It just means I found it interesting enough to share.

Wm. Paul Young | Lie #25: God is Disappointed in Me

“God knows you, completely, fully, and with unrelenting affection. You don’t surprise God. God delights in you, as you delight in your own children; God also grieves for and with you when you act inside your lies and darkness—but not because God expected more of you.”

Benjamin Corey | There’s Only Two Types Of “Christian” (And You Should Be Able To Tell The Difference)

“It doesn’t matter what kind (denomination) of Christian you are; there are still only two types: one is the member of a Christian religion, and the other is someone who is actively living like Jesus.”

Relevant | 5 Misconceptions About Waiting for Marriage

“The Bible speaks a lot about renewal and restoration, and if you have had sex in the past, don’t let that fact, and the shame that may accompany it, determine your future.”

CovenantEyes | 6 Ways to Raise a Sex Addict

“A child who doesn’t feel unconditional love usually doesn’t experience a lot of affection and non-sexual touch. Having never developed a strong attachment to a caregiver, sex addicts do not have the skills to have an intimate relationship as an adult. Healthy touch and intimacy can actually be uncomfortable.”

AndSons | What to do When You Find Yourself Hating Your Life

“I can honestly say now that looking back over the 30 years since I was 26, I am so profoundly grateful God did not tell me everything that was going to go down. It would have been overwhelming; I wouldn’t have been able to take the next step or the one after that. What he gave me was the next step, each step of the way. What you get is a conversation; what is offered is simply the next step.”

The Bible Project | 1-3 John

Each week, I round up the best resources, articles, and videos I find that are relevant to finding freedom from porn and sexual addiction. Please note that by posting a link here it does not mean I agree with everything in the linked article. It just means I found it interesting enough to share.

Gospel Coalition | Three Lies We Might Easily Believe

“It is very much in the Devil’s interests that we despair. If he can get us to believe any of these three demoralizing lies that he loves to whisper into our thoughts, our powers for Jesus are greatly diminished. And each one seems to us quite plausible.”

Paul Robinson | Living with Trolls as a Codependent Addict

“As a former addict, an addict who is a Christian at that, anytime my addiction took a hold of me it evoked strong feelings of shame and guilt. These feelings similarly didn’t exist in a vacuum but in the middle of relationships and how I responded to everyday life. So you know, everything. It produced a strong co dependency in me where I needed others to be cool with me, since I was definitely not cool with myself.”

Experimental Theology | Lovin’ On the Freakshow Sitting Next to You: The Church According to Twenty One Pilots

“Both Jesus and TØP have friendships with ‘heathens,’ relationships with the criminal, the immoral, the broken and the insane. They bring these ‘heathens’ to the church. And the request is for the church to welcome these “heathens” with gentleness and compassion. Take it slow, church, don’t make sudden moves. People are fragile and weak. What you see on the outside will tempt you toward judgment and harshness. But you don’t know half of the abuse.”

Twenty One Pilots | Heathens

Each week, I round up the best resources, articles, and videos I find that are relevant to finding freedom from porn and sexual addiction. Please note that by posting a link here it does not mean I agree with everything in the linked article. It just means I found it interesting enough to share.

CovenantEyes | How to React the First Time Your Child Admits Watching Porn

“A parent’s first reaction is so critical. The first words out of our mouth, the first body language we express, has an enormous impact on any future success we may have helping our child. It’s worth thinking about and trying to plan for.”

Relevant | Feelings Don’t Rule Our Lives

“What do you do when your emotions are so out of alignment that you can’t see straight? When your thoughts betray you, accuse you and confuse you? When both the world around you and the world within you are equally devoid of hope and happiness? What do you do when your soul hurts?”

Gospel Coalition | I Am Not Disgusting. I Am Not Alone. I Am Redeemed.

“I realized I didn’t have some kind of unusual disease; I was just human. I didn’t have to try to be straight in order follow God’s will for my life. I knew my sexuality described so much of me, but I discovered it didn’t define me. As a Christian, Jesus defined me, and he looked at me with love.”

TrueFace | Shedding Masks