Let’s say you’ve done some growing. You’ve put away overt evils. No immoral liaisons. By grace you’ve worked and fought your way to a Level 8 battle. Pornography was around before, but now it’s the biggie. In some ways, pornography is a tougher problem than adultery. In one sense, it’s “not as bad,” because it doesn’t involve an accomplice or victim. But it’s harder to get rid of. Harder to set up protective barriers against.

Rape Crisis offers support for rape and sexual abuse on 0808 802 9999 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html One person may need to learn that sex is good, not dirty. You can relax rather than tense up. You can give yourself freely, rather than worry about what will happen to you. Pleasure will not betray you. Your spouse is faithful and can be trusted. Only larger, deeper, fundamental trust in God can free us to grant simple trust and generous love to another human being, who will in fact let us down and do us wrong in some ways.In your sanctification journey and in your ministry to others, you must operate on a scale that can envision a lifetime, even while communicating the urgency of today’s significant choice. “Disciple” is the most common New Testament term describing God’s people. A disciple is simply a lifelong learner of wisdom, living in relationship to a wise master. We love gazelles. Graceful leaps make for a great testimony to God’s wonder-working power. And we like steady and predictable. It seems to vindicate our efforts at making the Christian life work in a businesslike manner. But, in fact, there’s no formula, no secret, no technique, no program, and no truth that guarantees the speed, distance, or time frame. On the day you die, you’ll still be somewhere in the middle, but hopefully further along. When we lengthen the battle, we realize that our business is the direction. God manages to work his glory in and through all of the above scenarios! God’s people need to know that, so someone else’s story doesn’t set the bar in a place that is not how your story of Christ’s grace is working out in real life. b. Repentance Is a Lifestyle Historically, the behaviors mentioned have usually been evaluated and stigmatized as socially shameful. They have often been named as criminal acts in legal codes. To the degree that cultural values and laws mirror the call of love for others, rather than endorsing lust, they express the way that God sizes up human sexuality. Of course, when mores and laws change for the worse, such behaviors may even be reinterpreted as good, right, and sweet, rather than evil, wrong, and bitter (Isaiah 5:20). But God teaches us to see things for what they are. If such things happened to you, you might well feel hatred, terror, and disgust. You might feel guilt, shame, and self-reproach over what someone else did to you. Your thoughts of sex might be filled with loathing and despair, the furthest thing from lustful desire. This, too, is a rag soaked in the grease of nameless dirt. To those for whom sexual experience has resulted in unholy pain, Christ says, “I understand well your experience. I hear the cry of the needy, afflicted, and broken. Come to me. I am your refuge. I am safe. I will remake what is broken. I will give you reason to trust, and then to love. I will remake your joy.” Her friend later took her own life and Georgia was forced to see her rapist at the funeral. “He said to a group of us: ‘Which one of you did I bend over?’ He didn’t even remember it was me.” Now in her 30s, Georgia still questions whether her experience was rape. “I do think if I had had more education around consent and relationships I would have known that this wasn’t right,” she says. “I think about it most days, swinging between: ‘It’s my own fault, I could have said no,’ and: ‘He was a bastard for what he did to me, but will never see it like that.’”

A “smoldering cinder of evil.” A restless inner motion of sin. Jesus’ first beatitude is first for a reason. Awareness of an impoverished need for mercy is the opening motion of living faith. The better I know my Christ, the better I know my need for what he alone is and does. All this — from Level 1 to Level 40 — is the arena of sanctification. In heart, soul, mind, and might we are being conformed and transformed into radiant purity. A heightened view of our war brings with it a heightened view of the significance of our Jesus Christ. One of the deep truths of sanctification is that you get “better” and “worse” at the same time! But life is still very hard and lonely for her. He starts to console her with hugs. They end up in bed. The motives? Sexual, yes. But more significant in the early going was a warped desire to be helpful, to be admired, to make a real difference, to be important, to “save” her. When anyone who is not the Messiah starts to act messianic, it gets very ugly very fast. When you minister to a minister who has committed sexual sin, you might find that sex was only the poisoned dessert. The poisonous entrée might have been a very different set of deceitful desires, desires arising more from the mind than from the body (Ephesians 4:22; 2:3). f. Desires for Relief and Rest amid the Pressures of LifeThis subtle attentiveness correlates to the heart’s erotic attraction: “Is this person desirable to my eyes, worth further exploratory interest?” Perhaps this thought process rarely surfaces into conscious awareness. Perhaps you almost as instinctively say no, resisting the impulse to convert its intentions into a conscious lewd look. But the very existence of such atmospheric erotic intentionality subtly stains you. It is yet another aspect of our battle with darkness. It was not justification by faith, crucial as that is. We are oily-rag people. Christ is the garden of light. We are saved by his doing, his dying, his goodness. We are saved from ourselves outside of ourselves. No religious hocus-pocus. No climbing up a ladder of good works, or religious knowledge, or mystical experience. He came down, full of grace and truth, Word made flesh, Lamb of God. We receive. That’s crucial. But “faith alone” wasn’t actually where it all started.

Then he would feel terrible — his conscience would go snow-blind for only half an hour at a time! He prayed. He fasted. He sought to discipline himself. He planned constructive things to do with his time, and to do with and for others. He got involved in ministry to teens. He tried things that aren’t in the Bible: vigorous exercise, cold showers, dietary regimes. Briefly, he even tried the advice of a self-help book, trying to think of masturbation as “normal, everybody does it, so give yourself permission.” His conscience, wisely, could never get around Jesus’ words about lust in the heart (Matthew 5:28). So that morning when my roommate asked me excitedly: “Do you think you’ll see him again?” I said: “I hope so.” That part wasn’t a lie. My limited understanding of consent and sexual violence at that time, and my overall sexual inexperience, meant I believed I was to blame for what had happened, that perhaps I just didn’t know “how sex usually is”. On top of all that, I had feelings for the guy. We often underestimate just how radically biblical faith relies on grace. Grace means that what makes things right comes to you from the outside. It’s the sheer gift that someone else gives to you. You don’t get it by jumping through certain religious hoops. You are forgiven, accepted, saved from death outside of yourself and because of Another. Listen to how a man of faith dealt forthrightly with his former sins.

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Second, it is noticeable that female sexuality in America has taken on cruder forms in recent years (or, at least, is far more willing to be brazen). Open lewdness and frank immorality have replaced coy, suggestive hints of availability. Male or female, the rule seems to be, if you want it, go for it. For example, female athletes increasingly display the openly obscene behaviors that were once the prerogative of male athletes: gutter humor, mooning, streaking, sexualized hazing and initiation rites, predatory sexual acts, an atmospheric grossness. Three-quarters (78%) said they were born submissive. “I don’t know why. I was born that way.” “I was like 5 when I started having BDSM fantasies.” “At a young age, long before I felt any interest in sex, I daydreamed being blindfolded, tied up, and whipped.” For you, sex is no longer bright, iridescent, cheerful, generous, matter-of-fact. It is not a flat-out good to be enjoyed with your spouse or to be saved should you ever marry. You might live with such guilty feelings in your singleness. You might have brought them into your marriage. Perhaps you are afraid of relationships because you know from bitter experience that you can’t be trusted. Perhaps it’s hard to shake off the train of bleak associations that attach to sexual feelings and acts. As Tom and I kept talking, I found out why God owes him a wife: “I’ve tried to do all the right things. I’ve served him. I’ve tried accountability. I’ve memorized Scripture. I’ve tried to be a good Christian. I do ministry. I witness. I tithe . . . but God hasn’t come through.” In other words, the “right answers” for fighting sin are also the levers to pry goodies out of God. Tom’s words sound eerily like the self-righteous whine of the older brother in Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son: “I’m good, therefore God owes me the goodies I want.” All along, he isn’t casting his real cares on the God who cares for him; he isn’t “anxious for nothing” (Philippians 4:6, NASB), but anxious about lots of things. After two straight all-nighters, just under the wire, they finish the project. They made it. He made it. Success. Finally he has a free night, with no deadlines, no jungle of intramural combat, no tomorrow to worry about. But after a month of living “stressed-out,” he feels no relief. He finds no satisfaction in achievement. So he surfs the Internet, revels in pornography, forgets his troubles. What’s going on with him?