confessions of a recovering porn addict

John Owen once said, “Be killing sin or sin will be killing you.” For many years the sin of pornography was killing me and my marriage. It was a foothold for Satan to feed me lies. This sin was kept in the dark and freedom was hard to find. I would ask Jesus for help and his spirit would prompt me to confess and I never would. Often I would wonder why Jesus would not cure me. Doc Gooden once said about recovering from cocaine addiction, “No one can cure an addict who won’t help himself.”

Jesus is not a magic bullet to cure sexual sin. He offers forgiveness and cleansing to a walk in a new path guided by the light of His word, but I must choose to take the narrow path.

What Is a True Christian

The true Christian is one whose religion is in his heart and life. It is felt by himself in his heart. It is seen by others in his conduct and life. He feels his sinfulness, guilt and badness, and repents. He sees Jesus Christ to be that divine Savior whom his soul needs, and commits himself to Him. He puts off the old man with his corrupt and carnal habits, and puts on the new man. He lives a new and holy life, fighting habitually against the world, the flesh and the devil. Christ Himself is the cornerstone of his Christianity.

J.C. Ryle in Holiness

Why We Shouldn’t Want Our Best Life Now

It is a melancholy fact, that constant temporal prosperity, as a general rule, is injurious to a believer’s soul. We cannot stand it. Sickness and losses and crosses and anxiety and disappointments seem absolutely mindful to keep us humble, watchful and spiritual-minded. They are needed as the pruning knife to the vine and the refiner’s furnace to gold.

J.C. Ryle in Holiness

J.C. Ryle on Christian Growth

Here is the whole reason why  many professing Christians never seem to get on. They are careless and slovenly about their private prayers. They read their Bibles but little and with very little hardiness of spirit. They give themselves no time for self-inquiry and quiet thought about the state of their souls…

Let us patiently hold on our way, remembering that “we serve a precise God,” that our Lord’s example is to be copied in the least things as well as the greatest, and that we must “take up our cross daily” and hourly rather than sin.

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Both quotes taken from Holiness

Jesus Is Better Than Sex

Jesus never had sexual relations, and he was the most full and complete human that ever will exist. Sex is a shadow – an image – of a greater reality – of a relationship and pleasure that will make sex seem like a yawn.

John Piper on Hebrews 10 in a message entitled, “The Present Power of a Future Possession.”

Taking Faith Based Risks

Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom you believed, even as the Lord gave to every man? – 2 Corinthians 3:5

God gives opportunities for evangelism, we do not make them by creating the perfect seeker sensitive scenario. I need to be vigilant to share the Gospel because opportunities are there. The harvest is plentiful and God is calling me to go out in faith. He is faithful and will provide the increase. If my heart is in tune with his then I will see myself an ambassador called to proclaim his name.
All I have to do is proclaim His name and by His hands and feet. He will do the rest; He must do the rest. On my own I can do nothing. That frees me go to forth boldly knowing that the work and results are in His hands. He provides the grace to do the work. Therefore my working is a resting in him.

Heavenly Father, I am so deficient in being your ambassador. Too often I am more concerned about others think instead of living for an audience of One. Help me to grieve for those I know are going to hell. Enlarge my heart to see the Gospel as so magnificent that I can not help but to tell others. Make my heart like yours so I can tell others about you

What the Cross Teaches us about Suffering

You simply cannot look at the cross and see the suffering of Jesus on behalf of rebellious sinners like you and me without accepting that God sometimes ordain pain

Tullian Tchividjian in Glorious Ruin

Submission and Conformity to God’s Will In Suffering

Conformity mean to “stand perfect and complete in all the will of God.” It means to delight to do God’s will, to run with eagerness and ardour to carry out His plans. Conformity to God’s will involves submission, patient, loving, sweet submission. But submission in itself falls short of and does not include conformity. We may be submissive but not conformed. We may accept results against which we have warred, and even be resigned to them.

Conformity means to be one with God, both in result and in processes.  Submission may be one with God in the end. Conformity is one with God in the beginning, and the end. Jesus had conformity, absolute and perfect, to God’s will, and by that He prayed. Gethsemane was the single point where there was a drawing back from God’s processes, extorted by insupportable pain, fear and weariness. His submission was abject, loyal and confiding, as His conformity had been constant and perfect. Conformity is the only true submission, the most loyal, the sweetest and the fullest…

We are to be put into the crucible to be refined. Christ was made perfect in Gethsemane, not by the prayer, but by the suffering…Through many an hour of darkness and of hell’s power, through many a sore conflict with the prince of this world, by drinking many a bitter cup, we are to be made perfect. To cry out against the terrific and searching flame of the crucible of a Father’s painful process is natural and is no sin, if there be perfect acquiescence in the answer to our prayer, perfect submission to God’s will, and perfect devotion to His glory…

We can cry out in the crucible, and can cry out against the flame which purifies and perfects us. God allows this, hears this, and answers this, not by taking us out of the crucible, nor by mitigating the fierceness of the flame, but by sending more than an angel to strengthen us…

The prayer of submission must not be so used as to vitiate or substitute the higher and mightier prayer of faith…

We are ever ready to excuse our lack of earnest and toilsome prayer, by a fancied and delusive view of submission. We often end praying just where we ought to begin. We quit praying when God waits and is waiting for us to really pray.

-E.M. Bounds on The Gethesemane Prayer in The Reality of Prayer

A Prayer For 2014

Father, may this be a year of considering our lives worth nothing to us, if only we may finish the race and complete the task The Lord Jesus has given us – the task of testifying (by word and deed) to the gospel of your grace (Acts 20:24). – Scotty Smith from Everyday Prayers

The Sign of a Good Church

Blessed is that church who has praying leaders, who can see that which is disorderly in the church, who are grieved about it, and who put forth their hands to correct the evils which harm God’s cause as a weight to its progress. – E.M. Bounds