You’ve been there, time and time again. Wondering if you will ever get to the place where you will make a stand against answering the call to fulfill the lusts of your mind and flesh.
You find yourself watching women, watching men, or touching yourself. Or you hook up with that sister. You hook up with that brother.
You said that you would cut ties, or that you would never cross lines.
All for naught.
Each fall weighs heavily on your mind and you have reached the place of hopelessness.
I’ve been there. Millions of men have been there. Millions of women too.
Masturbation, sight and mental adultery, and porn was a very difficult habit to break in my life. It took a Word from the Lord at the time the Lord blessed me with a tremendous deliverance to get me to quit.
I learned that just because something is difficult it doesn’t mean that it can’t be broken.
The power of sin was broken on the cross, on the body of Jesus. But the human will to accept that fact and apply that fact to my mind and body proved more difficult to incorporate. A “what’s the use” mentality, and other notions, fueled my perverted passion to satisfy myself.
Put aside for a moment “trigger mechanisms, medicinal properties, pharmaceutical and endocrine chemical dependency adventures, love and esteem needs.”
All these things are great identifying points where sexual immorality is permitted, but the root cause of all sin is pleasure.
If sin weren’t pleasurable, you wouldn’t even consider doing it. But when we look at how the Lord is affected by what we do, we will either suppress how the Lord feels in pursuit of pleasure apart from God or we defy the Lord on the level of Zimri and Cozbi.
Too often, we look at the breach in the barrier and stand there, doubting if anything could be done to consider challenging what is in front of us. Christ made that breach so we could escape but we linger because to walk away after experiencing false pleasure after false pleasure is enough to look back……..like Lot’s wife.
When habits of the mind and body are established repetitively, to undo the training, one must find “grace to help in time of need.”
Your only chance is to completely surrender in total obedience to the grace of God.
There is a song called “Total Praise” by Richard Smallwood. I wish someone would create a song called Total Obedience.
These days, praise and worship songs of our times that exalts the name of the Lord are very popular, as they should be.
But equally important is the heart condition, before, during, and after the song is sung.
Anyway…..
The grace of God is not pleasant. Grace demands complete severance from the utensils of sin. Jesus called it…“cut it off…”
In Setting Captives Free, the course “Way To Purity” by Mike Cleveland, he called it, “radical amputation.”
That stuck with me. There are varying degrees of where men are with the grace of deliverance necessary to stay free.
What makes deliverance sticks for some is knowing that you are accountable to other men. This is very scary and prohibitive of men because men do not like it when other men stick their noses in their sexual business. We have no problem talking about male sexual conquest but to talk repentantly about sex……..no way.
That’s part of the secrecy of Secret Sexual Sins.
Secrecy is the breeding ground of sexual sins.
Reminds me of a man that was in a fatal car accident on the FDR in Manhattan. He was wealthy and married. With children. They found out that he was seeing a mistress for a few years because that’s where he was either headed or going to.
Secrecy is the breeding ground of sexual sins.
It’s the same with a very popular football player. Steve “Air” McNair. Father of three and married. His mistress shot him five times and committed suicide after Steve dumped her. Steve found another mistress and that was the tipping point for her. She had nothing to lose, was in financial troubles, and decided to end it all.
Secrecy is the breeding ground of sexual sins.
Reminds me of Jim Bakker, sleeping with a church secretary before being convicted of fraud. Jimmy Swaggart going to a hotel room to masturbate to a stripper. Both married with children. Reminds me of Pastor Henry Lyons who used National Baptist Convention money to pay his mistress to keep quiet and live a lavish lifestyle. The wife of Henry Lyons burned the house down, literally. The mistress died in prison and Henry Lyons spent time in jail.
Secrecy is the breeding ground of sexual sins.
Chances are, each one of these men have deep secret lives of porn and masturbation. Look at the late Dr. Tims. Where did you think he got the idea of hooking up with an exotic dancer. Look no further than the Internet and porn sites.
Some of you may be thinking that bring up these sins is unjustified.
Quite the contrary.
Put my name there and I am justified.
My secret life mirrors every man that has ever watched porn and masturbated in secrecy.
Very few articles or interviews will reveal the real hidden secret life of men and identify the root cause of scandals.
Masturbation and porn in the life of powerful men.
That’s why men run from the Lord. They never come to church because they do not want to be accountable. If they do show up in church, forget about talking about what is deeply hidden in the hearts and minds of men.
It’s not that accountability would have saved these men because the person being held accountable must submit. You can’t check what is in the heart if the heart refuses to show up. That’s where the problem is.
When a man refuses to submit to measurable, confrontational, compassionate accountability, he can never be trusted.
But on the other hand, such accountability, depending upon who is doing the accounting, must be firm but fair. Not manipulative or coercive. Confrontation is like two pugilists and when one doesn’t want to be pushed, it is important to recognize that and know when to back off.
Accountability is never man assuming a God position.
Paul said this in Galatians 6:1……
“Brethren, if a man is overtaken in any trespass, you who are spiritual restore such a one in the spirit of gentleness, considering yourself lest you also be tempted.”
It’s learning how to help a person through a difficult moment of trials and temptation to help him get to a place of sustained victory. Then you have to let the Lord help him with grace to stand on their own. You can’t hold your son’s hand all your life because sooner or later, your time on earth will end. But what you instill within them must suffice and then you have to commit their life into the hands of a Faithful Creator.
It’s like being a dentist in a shark tank.
For some men, they cannot touch the Internet. The trap is set. It’s a “one thing leads to another” system.
When a woman is pictured with cleavage and legs, men click the image to see more. And then it leads to other places on the Internet all the way to free porn.
Yes, I’ve been there.
In my audio blog on Secret Sexual Sins on BlogTalkRadio.com, (here is the link blogtalkradio.com/prevailingword1) I shared a testimony that I downloaded so much Internet porn that when you click on one site, a cascade of images would rain on the computer.
So much so that my laptop couldn’t handle the downloads and froze the computer. I had to shut the laptop down and restart it all over again because the images were coming too fast for the memory to handle.
There are other men that cannot turn their eyes away from women. In the store, the mall, the street, driving the car, church, work, subway, and on the bus. As soon as you see them, the mind goes into “check him or her out mode.”
It’s a search and be destroyed mission.
While at a conference with preachers, here comes this young looking girl and in fitted jeans too. So my eyes went in another direction to avoid lusting and I observed where their eyes went.
Lust mode.
Why do I keep falling for the same thing, you are asking? It’s because we fail to realize that every part of us belongs to the Lord. God created all of our faculties and through the Word, we have an obligation to obey the Word. To stop the fall, we must obey the Word of God, without thought or question.
We must refuse to accept hopelessness and use it as an excuse to continue to fail.
We must identify what leads us from one place to anther and then make a Job 31:1 commitment with our eyes. A Matthew 5:28-30 commitment to not commit sight adultery. A 1 Corinthians 9:27 commitment to discipline and subdue the body, to literally beat our bodies into submission. A 1 Peter 5:9 and James 4:7-8 commitment to submit to God, resist the devil, drawn near to God and God drawing near to us, and cleansing our hands.
Ladies, you can reapply this or transpose this as you see fit for your sexual accountability group.
The first rule of accountability is to man up and own up.
The second rule of accountability is to obey the Word.
The third rule of accountability is never be proud of your accomplishments because you can fall at any moment.
The fourth rule of accountability is to please only one Person, the Lord.
The fifth rule of accountability is to maintain constant contact with a group of men you feel safe to trust with the secrets of your life.
Like Peter said….“if you do these things and abound, you will never fall…”
Finally, Sister Selena Mosley of Equipped For Change Ministries was challenged by an individual. This person stated that Sister Selena wasn’t delivered because she talked about homosexuality so much.
Well, the man in the tombs, who was possessed with an unclean spirit, was delivered by the Lord, the man spent time with Jesus and wanted to stay with Jesus. But the Lord told him to go and tell what great things the Lord has done for him and has had compassion on him.
Telling others about how great a deliverance the Lord gave us is what we are supposed to do. In fact, rarely do people fall when they chronicle and regularly speak of their deliverance.
Sometimes, when people do not talk about their deliverance, it’s part of their Secret Sexual Sins kind of living. I do not believe that people should be proud about “their” deliverance in terms of wearing it like a combat badge of honor. We don’t need fake heroes.
But on the other hand, others are looking for a testimony that is real and authentic. A genuine deliverance that give a person that is struggling, some hope that the grace of God does, in fact, work.
Sisters Selena Mosley, Janet Boynes, Kiana Kiwi-Dennis, Denise Jones,
Charlene E Hios, Costina Sheppard, Charlene Cothran, and all the other wonderful ladies in the Lord whom God has genuinely set free, keep telling your story.
Someone is listening.
