The Good Christian and P…

Those who are playing with the fire of pornography may think “It’s just me looking at pictures. I’m not hurting anyone.” They think if we can help them stop looking at the bad stuff that they will be okay. Sexual sin corrupts the entire man, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. A character overhaul is required for extended healing and freedom.

The following is an except from my first book The Road to Grace; Finding True Freedom from the Bondage of Sexual Addiction that shows the disaster that I, the Good Christian, had become.

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A little lust won’t hurt anyone” is one of Satan’s greatest lies. However, the man who has given himself over to sexual sin doesn’t realize he’s soaking all of his heart in evil. Blinded by darkness and corruption, he cares only about himself and what he wants; God and others matter only when he needs them. As his pride swells, lying, stealing, cheating and compromise spread into every area of his life. The prophet Isaiah provides a picture of those who are lost in the darkness of sin:

“We hope for light, but behold, darkness, for brightness,
but we walk in gloom. We grope along the wall like
blind men, we grope like those who have no eyes;
we stumble at midday as in the twilight, among those
who are vigorous we are like dead men. All of us growl
like bears, and moan sadly like doves; we hope for justice,
but there is none, for salvation, but it is far from us.
For our transgressions are multiplied before You, and our
sins testify against us; for our transgressions are with us, and we know our iniquities: transgressing and denying the Lord, and turning away from our God, Speaking oppression and revolt, conceiving in and uttering from the heart lying words.”
Isaiah 59:9b–13

Slavery to sexual sin “multiplies transgressions,” and no sin burns faster through the field of the heart than “lying words.” The man who’s living a lie (I’m a good Christian who would never touch porn) must hide his porn/sex addiction (lie #2) and lie again once his wife asks what he’s doing. He becomes skilled in the art of “conceiving in and uttering lying words in his heart;” able to craft a convincing fib at a moment’s notice.

One wife told me that when she walked in on her husband as he was watching porn on their TV at 2:00 in the morning, his response was, “Uhhh, I was channel surfing and accidentally ran into the Playboy channel.” In time, lying becomes so ingrained that it’s harder to tell the truth than lie.

The husband who lies and cheats on his wife with porn or affairs may be dishonest at work and church as well. If he steals from the family bank account to buy porn at home, it won’t be long before he’ll embezzle time or money from his employer. An angry but proud Christian sex addict who refuses to take responsibility for how he’s hurt his wife and kids will deflect attention to his co-workers at the office when confronted with a mistake he made there.

The tragedy in all of this is that his loved ones get hurt while a sex addict is in Multiplication of Transgression mode. When I woke up after my long dark night of corruption and sexual sin and saw the trail of wreckage I’d created, it made me sick.

I broke up a family.
When I was 21 and single, I had an affair with a married mother of three children that lasted for three years. Her husband was a friend of mine from work who invited me to live in their home. In my hunt for sex I didn’t care who I hurt; all that mattered was what I wanted. Their marriage ended in divorce, leaving my friend’s wife a single parent of three fatherless children.

As a Christian, I financed the sex industry.
Every time I had sex with a prostitute or acted out with porn, I was abusing someone’s daughter. Shelley Lubben, a former porn actress and prostitute who is now a strong Christian who ministers to others in the sex industry, writes:

“I was more apt to spend time with Jack Daniels than some of the studs I was paid to “fake it” with… none of us like doing porn. In fact, we hate it. We hate being touched by strangers who care nothing about us. We hate being degraded with their foul smells and sweaty bodies. Some women hate it so much you can hear them vomiting in the bathroom between scenes. Others can be found outside smoking an endless chain of Marlboro Lights. When we were little girls we wanted to play with dollies and be mommies, not have big scary men get on top of us. The same horrible violations we experienced then, we relive as we perform our tricks for you in front of the camera. And we hate every minute of it. We’re traumatized little girls living on antidepressants, drugs and alcohol; acting out our pain in front of YOU who continue to abuse us. As we continue to traumatize ourselves by making more adult films, we use more and more drugs and alcohol. We live in constant fear of catching AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases. Every time there’s an HIV scare we race to the nearest clinic for an emergency checkup. Pornographers insist giving viewers the fantasy sex they demand all the while sacrificing the very ones who make it happen. In other words, no condoms allowed. Herpes, gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia, and other diseases are the normal anxieties we walk around with daily. We get tested monthly but we know testing isn’t prevention. Besides worrying about catching diseases from porn sex, there are other harmful activities we engage in that are also very dangerous. Some of us have had physical tearing and damage to internal body parts.”

Every time I downloaded porn or rented a movie, I, the good Christian, was funding and encouraging the rape and abuse of women in the porn industry. Sadly, the church may be the sex industry’s biggest customer. In her book Sex, Lies and the Media, Eva Marie Everson recounts the following story:

“My friend Jack Samad (with the National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families) shocked me with the story of his attendance at a religious convention. The manager of the hotel where he had been staying noticed the posters and other paraphernalia he had carried through the lobby early one morning and then back in again later that afternoon. He stopped Jack and asked him what he was doing with all that information on pornography. Jack told him he was part of the Christian conference being held in the city. The manager chuckled. “Get real,” he said. Porn movies in our hotel are accessed at a higher rate during Christian conventions than at any other time.”

I stole from my employer.
From 1981 through 1990, I worked at a company that sold machine shop supplies. During this time, I stole my employer’s time by watching a porn movie in an X-rated theater during working hours. One afternoon (when I supposed to making sales calls), I raced home to my condo to have sex with the married woman I was having the affair with. Phone calls with women during company time, coming in late because of a hangover, and other distractions drained my productivity even more. Then, when I quit, I printed a customer list at the office and took it home. I used this list later when I started my own business.

I was blinded by pride and cheated my customers.
In 1996, six years after I’d started my own business selling machine shop products, I decided to go outside my area of expertise (which was sales and marketing) and start a machine shop. I wanted to build a large company that many would be in awe of, a monument to Mike. A year and several hundred thousand dollars of debt later, it was a disaster. The machine shop lost money every month, and was dragging the company down. I contacted a vendor of mine (who was also a friend) and asked if he would consider buying the more than $250,000.00 worth of machinery and inventory of the machine shop. In exchange, I agreed to make $40,000.00 of sales a month for him of the product I’d set the shop up to make, on a commission basis. He bought the equipment, but I made little effort to carry out my end of the bargain.

I hurt Michelle deeply.
My adultery with porn and a prostitute shredded my wife’s heart, and that was just the beginning. Lust hardens a man’s heart and cripples him emotionally, so when Michelle would try to be affectionate I’d push her away. I wanted lust, not love. A man with a hard heart is a critical man, and I often made negative remarks about the way she did things, even if she’d done nothing wrong. She suffered with my rejection, cold heartedness and betrayal for most of the first 10 years of our marriage.

I wounded my kids.
On Christmas day 1998, about a month before God broke me (as was discussed in chapter four), Michelle videotaped our then family of four as we were opening presents. A few weeks later, we sat down to watch it.

In one scene my four-year-old son is seen ripping open a present. Bursting with joy, he turns to me to show off his new toy and says, “Dad, look what I got!” Although I’m sitting a few feet away, I don’t reply; I’m engrossed in looking at something and it appears I don’t hear him. “Dad… Dad… Dad!!!” he calls out again. I still don’t acknowledge him; the expression on my face is numb and blank. “DAD!!” he cries again; this time, with hurt in his voice. Michelle’s voice breaks in from behind the camera: “Mike! Sean’s trying to get your attention!”

I wanted to throw up; I was looking at a man who was so self-obsessed that he didn’t hear his four-year-old son calling to him from point-blank range. The person on that tape—me—looked like he didn’t care about anyone (other than himself). Had I purposefully ignored Sean? I could tell he was hurt by my cold response; did he question whether I loved him, or whether he mattered to me? God had put a mirror in front of my face, and the reflection staring back was painfully ugly.

With the exception of the affair I had as a single man, all of the above occurred while I was going to church every Sunday and professing my love for the Lord as a good Christian.

“But prove yourselves doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror; for once he has looked at himself and gone away, he has immediately forgotten what kind of person he was.”
James 1:22–24

If you’re in bondage to sexual sin, are tired of playing games, and want help, contact us.

For information on The Road to Grace, see https://www.blazinggrace.org/store/books/the-road-…