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.

The Gospel Coalition | Real Church Gets Real Messy, and That’s Good

“When we start walking in the light before the Lord, we are surprised to discover one another at a deeper level. When the walls fall down in every appropriate way and we stop playing church and guarding our appearances, we enter into fellowship. We find out how much we have in common.”

CovenantEyes | My Child Has Been Exposed to Porn: 5 Critical Truths You Need to Know

“If you haven’t checked your kids devices for a while (including texts), do it today. If you haven’t told your kids how much you love them, and that they can tell you anything, do it today.”

The Atlantic | The Dark Side of Going for Gold

“On August 21, more than 11,000 Olympic athletes will leave Rio, some carrying medals, others lugging the weight of falling short of expectations. Despite their varying degrees of success, many will have the same surprise waiting for them back home: a feeling that life suddenly seems ordinary.”

Steve McVey | Why You Don’t have to Carry Shame Anymore

“Renounce your sin and run into the loving arms of your heavenly Father, giving up both your sins and your self condemnation to Him. Lay it all at His feet and allow Him to simply love you. Judgement day for you is finished. It was over at the cross when Jesus declared it to be so. God has nothing to say to you now other than words of love and acceptance.”

Key Life | A Christian Isn’t…

“It is not what we do or don’t do (as good as some of those things above are). It is not a list. It is not a matter of doing. It has already been done (“It is finished…”). It is a matter of being. It is a matter of who and Whose we are.”

Keller, Moore, DeYoung: How to Speak to Our Culture About Sex

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.

Communicate Jesus | Accountability Software – Comparing 6 of the Best Tools

“With accountability software, you choose the people you would like to receive reports and alerts on what you have viewed online. This is a powerful incentive to resist the devil in those moments of temptation.”

Gospel Coalition | How Self-Help Can Become Self-Hurt

“I soon found myself spiritually empty and a bit insecure. Instead of measuring my identity by the cross, I chose cheap metrics of likes, followers, and comments. And there were never enough to satisfy my heart. Even worse, I lost focus on the reason for writing the book in the first place, which was to help people connect their faith in Jesus and their work.”

J.A. Medders | Faith and Works are Friends

“When we talk about faith and works needing a peace treaty, a negotiating of two sides, we are stumbling into the very thing we are to avoid like a rabid dog in your neighborhood. Cheap Christianity.”

Randy Alcorn | Do We Miss the Humor of Christ When We Read the Gospels?

“Those who heard Jesus speak knew His keen humor—and they were endeared to Him. The humor of Jesus is far more apparent if we understand His culture and engaging personality. There’s nothing disrespectful about noticing that many of Jesus’ statements are, by design, happily outrageous.”

qPolitical | After Nearly Dying, Michael Phelps Admits The Secret That Saved His Life And Made Him Swim Again

“…the 31-year-old swimmer recently revealed how he almost committed suicide in September 2014 — but everything changed when God stepped into his life in the most extraordinary way.”

Sho Baraka: Mercy On Me

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.

R.C. Sproul | 3 Types of Legalism

“Some people seem to be preoccupied in the Christian life with obeying rules and regulations, and they conceive of Christianity as being a series of do’s and don’ts, cold and deadly set of moral principles. That’s one form of legalism, where one is concerned merely with the keeping of God’s law as an end in itself.”

Gospel Coalition | 5 Lessons My Parents Taught Me About Sexuality

“There were certain truths they impressed on me—some implicit and some explicit—that were crucial for catching a Christ-centered vision of sexuality. Five stand out most brightly when I reflect on the past 18 years.”

Lifeway | Sin, Discipline, and Not Being the Next Pastor Who Falls

“In the last several years, we have heard story after story of pastors being removed from ministry. There are big names like Driscoll, Tchividjian, Patrick, and Noble. There are others names that are known by fewer, and even more names of men not known at all. The trend is unsettling.”

Steve McVey | We do some silly things to try to impress God

“Legalistic religion denies all of that and turns His gifts into our obligations. It strips us of joyful intimacy and has the gall to turn God’s grace gifts to us into religious duty.”

Rosaria Butterfield | No free passes

“The church should function as a family for people who look at their sin patterns and feel very strongly that they need to live in singleness to obey the Lord in fullness. Instead of taking the singles in our churches and saying, “Wow, you need to be fixed or fixed up, and we need to do that right now,” we need to respect people and include them in our families in real ways because we are brothers and sisters.”

Dr. David Powlison: How specific should a husband be in confessing lust to his wife?

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.

Mike Leake | How to Give the Devil a Foothold

“There are many places where the devil could get a foothold in a person’s heart or in the life of a church. Yet, there is one particular place where we are warned against not allowing the devil to gain a place, and that is in our unresolved anger.”

Matt Moore | I am not Homosexual . . . or Heterosexual or Bisexual or Any-Other-Kind-Of-Sexual

“I understand that my perspective and approach to all this sexuality terminology stuff doesn’t fit nicely into a box. I understand that, to the world and even to some Christians, it sounds crazy. But as aliens in this world, shouldn’t our perspectives be a bit alienish?”

Art of Manliness | Christianity’s Manhood Problem: An Introduction

“Why does a religion started by a carpenter and his twelve male comrades attract more women than men? Christian churches are led predominately by men (95% of Protestant senior pastors and 100% of Catholic clergy are male) and are criticized by feminists as bastions of male patriarchy, power, and privilege; so why is the laity paradoxically composed largely of women?”

XXXChurch | Is Masturbation a Sexual Sin?

“These are not bad questions in and of themselves, yet they often leave us scratching our heads more than giving us a clear direction. So I would like to propose a few different ways we can think and talk about masturbation.”

Gene Veith | Young Men Living the Dream

“This prolonged delay of marriage and relational commitment often means a perpetual adolescence in other areas of life. Love and sex are arguably the best incentives for men to assert their adulthood. But in the comfort of their parents’ homes and their gaming systems, young men get to live out their fantasies without the frictions of reality. What does that sound like? It sounds like pornography.”

KeyLife | God Loves You…So Come Home

“This parable says to come on home. Even if you have a limp, even if blood is all over the place, even if it’s a long distance to travel, come on home. The loving Father waits.”

John Lynch: Only Grace

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 | The 5 Most Common Struggles of Porn Users

“Even though porn promises connection with seemingly unlimited partners, the porn user knows deep within their souls that these connections are false; they only serve to heighten the sense of loneliness within the user.”

Richard Rohr | Transformation is More Than a Change of Mind

“Transformation is not merely a change of morals, group affiliation, or belief system—but a change at the very heart of the way you receive, hear, and pass on each moment.”

Steve McVey | What happens when you make a mistake?

“You belong to God and it is His responsibility, not yours, to insure that you stay the course. That fact is inherent to the very meaning of the word grace, which suggests it’s all up to Him, not you. You may make apparent detours in life, but God’s love for you is great enough that He won’t allow you to veer off His assigned path and wander out of His will for your life.”

AndSons | The Prophecy All Around You

“Meanwhile we fantasize about that boat we’d love to get, or the trip to Patagonia, the chocolate éclair or the girl in cubicle next door. Of course we do—we are made for utter happiness. But the restoration of all things—now that would change everything.”

Babylon Bee | Report: Every Single Person At Church Doing ‘Fine’

“Prayer requests for the week included several reports of distant friends and family that were struggling with sin, but nobody in the church reported needing prayer for themselves. ”

Winston Smith: What is the Role of Self-disclosure in Dating?

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 | Your Sin Is Not What You Think

“The bottom of sin, the root of all sins, is such a heart—a heart that prefers anything above God; a heart that doesn’t treasure God over everything else, and everyone else.”

World Religion News | God Believes in You, Even if You Suffer from Relapse

“The more a person fights urges and temptations, in this case against porn, the stronger the Lord’s guidance and protection will get. That is a good way to look at things.”

Key Life | Why Do I Still Feel Guilty?

“There are so many Christians who have been forgiven who don’t feel forgiven. I have listened to so many confessions by Christians who ought not to be confessing. They have been carrying around a burden of guilt for years, and they have been doing it needlessly. If you still feel guilty when you ought not to feel guilty and if you suffer from false guilt, you need to do three things for release.”

XXXChurch | Is Looking At Porn The Same Thing As Cheating?

“In a large majority of cases, when a woman discovers her partner watching pornography – whether she expresses it or not – she feels a sense of unworthiness. Our pornography use crushes their self-worth. She believes she can’t compete or measure up to the fantasy women we lust after, and it creates a sense of shame within her.”

Russell Moore | How Can You Help a Friend Struggling With Sexual Immorality?

“Not long ago I received an email from a new Christian. This person wanted to know how she could help a friend realize that her lifestyle was sinful and destructive, without being too harsh, judgmental, or overbearing. This is a question that all Christians have to wrestle with if we seek to live faithfully as believers.”

Living Out: Vaughan

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 | It’s Time to Confess Your Porn Addiction (3 Ways to Prepare Your Significant Other for the Truth)

“It is my belief that an honest conversation with our partners is a vital and important step into the actual death that is necessary within each person if they are going to step into the sacred journey that is the pilgrimage to health and healing.”

CovenantEyes | How Science Helped Me Understand My Porn Use

“For decades, opponents of pornography fell into one of two categories–religious conservatives or feminists. Now, with over 24 years of Internet usage behind us, many doctors, psychologists and scientists are starting to consider the real possibility of a correlation between prolonged pornography use and adverse brain development, fractured relationships, and overall poor mental health.”

For the Church | Identity Theft: Losing Our Christian Self-Consciousness

“God has created the identity of His church. It is far beyond what we claim of ourselves. In fact, we may have a harder time than Gideon believing we are who we are. But failure to believe what is true about ourselves will keep us from doing mighty deeds for God.”

Randy Alcorn | Our Best Life Yet to Come: The New Earth, Our Eternal Home

“Mankind was designed to live on the Earth to God’s glory. That’s exactly what Christ’s incarnation, death and resurrection secured—a renewed humanity upon a renewed Earth.”

And Sons: Risk vs. Courage

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.

Tim Challies: 8 Ways Satan Convinces You To Question Your Salvation

“Though Satan can never rob a Christian of his crown, yet such is his malice, that he will therefore tempt, that he may spoil them of their comforts.”

Steve McVey: The Biggest Reason We Don’t Feel Close to God

“The specifics of our circumstances are probably different, but most of us in the modern church face the same basic temptation, namely that of allowing ourselves to become so busy with life that we miss the promised abundance of the Life that God has given us.”

Barnabas Piper: How did Rape Become a Culture for Young Men?

“How did we get here? What led young men to believe that sex is a thing to be forcibly inflicted on young women? What led them to see themselves so dishonorably and to view women so cheaply? Sin unchecked, sex commoditized, and selves worshiped. Young men live without boundaries and with no sense of who they are or what place sex has in life.”

Desiring God: Can I be Blotted from the Book of Life?

“Let me say that again. Being in the book, having your name in the book, keeps you from doing what would get you erased from the book if you did it.”

XXXchurch: Will I Die If I Don’t Masturbate?

“If someone asks me about whether masturbation is a sin I usually answer like this: Why does it matter if it is or not? If it is, are you going to be able to stop doing it? If it’s not, then what’s the problem?”

Gospel Coalition: Parents, Tell Your Kids They Are Sinners

“As we talked about his sin, I reminded him of the gospel. God sent his son Jesus to die on the cross so we could be forgiven of our sin. Because we’re forgiven, we should live differently—not for his acceptance, but from his acceptance. We say no to ourselves and yes to God because he loves us and is making us more like himself. And when we look like Christ, the world sees a glimpse of the greatness of God.”

Communicate Jesus: Christian Men Need to Talk about Sex

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.

Desiring God: The Real Battle for Sexual Purity

“One way to tell if you’re measuring success by an outer-cleanness versus an inner-cleanness is if you obsess over how many days it’s been since you last sinned. That mentality presupposes that your issue is one primarily of behavior, and not of the heart. But God always seeks a change deeper than our behavior.”

Storyline: What Matters Most When You’ve Screwed Up

“I can be certain that I am right—or I can have faith that I may not understand the whole picture. I can be certain that things will always be this way—or I have faith that things can change.”

Gospel Coalition: You Can’t Mess it Up

“God brings about his plan amid our messes. It’s like we burn down the house and yet God still makes the flower grow amid the ashes.”

XXXChurch: 5 Questions to Ask Yourself When Your Boyfriend Looks at Porn

“It isn’t easy, this journey we’re on. Relationships aren’t easy in a porn-saturated world, but we don’t have to accept porn addiction and we don’t have to ignore it. We need to be able to work together with our partner in fighting it.”

Key Life: Is Grace Too Good to Be True?

“Have you ever thought that God’s love, forgiveness and grace are all just too good to be true? Sin, struggle and emotions can color the truth. Life can get in the way of truth…and so we begin to doubt. But it’s really true. You are loved, forgiven, accepted and cherished. As God’s child, you live in his grace. It’s all Good News.”

Six Seeds: What Your Phone Reveals about Your Marriage

“When a spouse is defensive or secretive about his/her phone, it’s usually a symptom of some kind of unhealthy behavior. It’s not aways infidelity, though inappropriate interactions with the opposite sex are certainly common among people who keep passwords from their spouse.”

The Bible Project: Ecclesiastes

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: Grace Can’t be Earned, only Given

“Somewhere along the way, she’d picked up the notion that she needed to pay God back for his gracious work in her life, as though that were possible. She’s not alone in this, of course. There are many people who act as though their deeds can cancel out their debt to God, or that they can earn his favor—even among those who profess to be Christians! Grace cannot be earned, only given. Grace is scandalous, after all.”

Forward Progress: 3 Misunderstandings of What it Means to Repent

“Whether we want to admit it or not, when we are trying to follow Jesus, we will find ourselves repenting over and over again. I’d propose, then, that we have at least three common misunderstandings about it means to repent.”

Gospel Coalition: Pornography as a Public Health Crisis

“Although pornography has been identified as a public health concern for more than three decades, the increase in access and the ubiquity of pornography has increased concerns about the effects of pornography on communities.”

CovenantEyes: 4 Secrets the Porn Industry Hopes You Never Find Out

“I get that you have reasons for turning to porn. My husband did too. And right now, you may think no one suffers a single consequence for what you’re doing. Maybe you’re not married. Maybe you are, but your wife doesn’t seem to care or you’ve successfully kept it hidden. Maybe porn seems to be a safe release for you because of how you’ve been treated and burned in the past. But maybe this isn’t just about you.”

XXXChurch: Can Prayer Actually Help My Porn Problem?

“I think prayer can be one of the most difficult parts of following Jesus. Often, there are no concrete answers, and how do you even know if God has even heard your prayers in the first place?! Thankfully, there can be so much more to prayer if we let it. Perhaps we even need to open ourselves up to a new way of viewing both prayer and God. Here are a couple of ideas that might just help.”

Brad Hambrick: 10 Step Progression for Restoring Broken Trust

“Movement through this progression will be a dance between your spouse’s efforts at change and your willingness to take relational risks. Your spouse’s growth alone will not create trust without your willingness to take a relational risk. Your willingness to a relational risk alone without your spouse’s growth will not produce lasting trust. The dance may not be one step by your spouse followed by one step by you. But unless both of you are moving you’re not dancing.”

Living Out: Ed’s Story