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All You Need to Know to Avoid Porn Today as a Christian Man

You can learn in 17 minutes all that you need to know to avoid porn today. But then comes the hard part. If you struggle with lust and sexual temptation, and if you view pornography habitually but long to quit, there are some basic things you must learn about yourself, sexual immorality, your brain chemistry, how to resist sexual temptation, why pornography is so addicting, and so on. But your challenge isn’t simply lack of knowledge, is it? Your challenge is lack of obedience, and lack of power.

Once you understand God’s will for your life in this area, and once you appreciate all of the divine resources that God puts at your disposal to help you gain victory over sexual sin, you have a choice—obey or disobey, abide in Christ or go it alone, walk in the Spirit or walk in the flesh.

Here’s all you need to know (and do) to avoid porn as a Christian man today. I discovered these truths over the span of two years of daily Bible study and meditation, and two years of seeking the Lord’s help for my five decades of sexual sin. If you ask me today to tell you the absolute essentials you need to gain and maintain biblical victory over pornography and sexual temptation, this is what I’ll tell you. Should take you 17 minutes to read. Then your battle starts (and victory awaits).

Examine Yourself

Understand yourself, your sin, and why you are in your present predicament.

  1. You view porn because it’s available, affordable, and anonymous. If porn was difficult to find, expensive to buy, and impossible to view without being publicly outed and shamed, you wouldn’t be in bondage. A large part of your struggle is none of your making. You face more sexual temptations in a year than most Christian men faced in their lifetimes. This doesn’t excuse your sin, but it helps to explain it.

  2. You view porn because it’s pleasurable. When you look at pornography, your body releases unnaturally high levels of dopamine into your brain, creating feelings of euphoria and bliss. Dopamine acts as a reward system. Your brain responds to dopamine by desiring the activity that triggers it. This is the primary reason that porn is so habit-forming—it makes you feel awesome by altering your brain chemistry, making you crave more porn with every use.

  3. You are tempted to view porn because you desire it. You can only be tempted by what you desire. As James says, “But each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Then, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, brings forth death” (James 1:14). You may hate porn and want to quit, but if you are tempted to view it, you desire it. Porn is a heart issue.

  4. You view porn because your heart is wicked. Jesus says, “For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies. These are the things which defile a man” (Matthew 15:19-20). Your heart isn’t wicked because you watch porn. You watch porn because your heart is wicked. You are your porn problem. To conquer porn, you must improve what your heart desires.

  5. You are hooked on porn through unbelief. Your failure to quit your compulsive use of pornography and to forsake masturbation and other habitual sexual sins is evidence of your unbelief. You don’t believe that your sexual immorality will lead you to hell. But Jesus says otherwise. He warns you that, if you refuse to pluck out your adulterous right eye and cast it from you, your whole body will be cast into hell (Matthew 5:27-29).

Be Not Deceived

Understand what your future looks like if you refuse to forsake porn.

  1. Pornography is progressive. Men who view pornography for any length of time need ever-harder forms of the product. They must graduate to something more wicked, more hardcore, more illegal, to get the same level of arousal they once enjoyed with milder stuff. Talk with any sexual offender serving time for rape, child sexual abuse or worse, and you’ll find a man who started his journey with softcore pornography at a young age—and kept going.

  2. Pornography is punitive. Unless you forsake porn and abstain from it, you will pay the consequences. Think loss of your testimony, your marriage, access to your kids. Think sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancy, getting fired, scandal, jail, your name on the Sexual Offender Registry. Pornography use increases marital infidelity by 300%. Roughly 40% of people who identify as sex addicts lose their spouse, 58% suffer considerable financial loss, and 33% lose their jobs.

  3. The ultimate penalty for consuming porn is the Lake of Fire. “Do you not know that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived, neither sexually immoral, nor idolators, nor adulterers, nor effeminate [homosexuals], nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 6:9-10).

  4. Your sin harms others. Each time you look at a woman to lust after her, you sin against four people: (1) God, (2) your spouse (current or future), (3) yourself, and (4) the woman you lust after. Many of the so-called “porn stars” that you watch are dead by the time you see them, either from suicide, drug overdose, or murder at the hands of their traffickers.

  5. You are not an addict. If you consume pornography habitually, you are a sinner, a voluntary slave to sin—not a porn addict. The longer you view yourself as a victim, an addict who needs treatment, recovery, and hand-holding, the longer you will take to repent of your sin and conquer pornography. “Christian porn addict” is an oxymoron, right up there with exact estimate, working vacation, and civil war. If you watch, read, or listen to pornography habitually, God calls you an adulterer, a fornicator, void of understanding, deceived, and wicked—but never a helpless addict.

Make No Provision

The key to biblical victory over pornography is avoidance.

  1. Pornography isn’t something you quit as much as something you avoid. You “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lusts” (Romans 13:14). You pluck out and throw away the eye that causes you to sin sexually (Matthew 5:28-29). You make a covenant with your eyes to not lust after women (Job 31:1). Porn isn’t something you conquer as much as something you stay away from.

  2. Sexual sin starts with the eyes. Men are aroused by what they see. The apparatus of the so-called Adult Industry (pornographic videos, hookup apps, porn websites, strip clubs and more) is built to give men a visual experience that enflames their lust. Adultery, sex outside of marriage, masturbation and other sexual sins always have a cause, and that cause is usually something erotic that a man sees.

  3. To conquer lust, conquer your eyes. Jesus says you must pluck out the right eye that causes you to lust after women, and then throw it away so that it can’t tempt you again (Matthew 5:28-29). Plucking out your right eye means removing anything that is valuable, helpful, or convenient (as your right eye is). It means avoiding every person, place or thing that you know tempts you to view pornography.

  4. Plucking out your right eye will hurt—a lot. There are magazines you can’t read. Movies you can’t watch. Websites you can’t visit. Beaches you can’t frequent. Electronic devices you can’t use in private anymore. Apps you can’t download. If anything in your life causes you to sin sexually, cut it off and throw it away. Attaining and maintaining sexual purity is annoying, inconvenient, difficult, and painful. But worth it.

  5. Aim for the prevention, not the cure. One of the keys to abstaining from pornography is developing healthy habits to replace this wicked one. This is what Paul has in mind when he tells you and me to avoid getting drunk by being filled with the Spirit. You avoid the one by doing the other. You avoid porn by doing something else.

  6. Get accountable to a person. The Apostle James says Christians sometimes need another believer to come alongside them to convert them from the error of their ways (James 5:20). So, get an accountability partner. Find a brother in the Lord whom you trust, ideally someone who has victory in this area, then check in daily or weekly to discuss your progress on your journey to sexual purity.

  7. Install accountability software on all your electronic devices. If you visit an inappropriate website with your laptop, or look at sinful images on your phone, or browse sexually immoral images on your tablet while at work, Covenant Eyes takes screenshots of your activity and emails them to your accountability partner. Then your accountability partner confronts you (in love and constructively, that is). The fear of getting caught in the act keeps you from doing the act. If you do slip and watch something pornographic, your accountability partner discusses your sin with you and gets you back on track.
Masturbation Is a Sin Because It Fails the Discipleship Test | Luke 9:23

Flee Sexual Immorality

The key to biblical victory over sexual temptation is flight.

  1. God commands you to “flee sexual immorality” (1 Corinthians 6:18). That’s three simple words, one giant step to success. It worked in Paul’s day. It works today. The cure for sexual temptation is a command you are to obey, an action you are to take: flee. Pornography is something you must act against with your body. You can’t escape sexual temptation by staying still. You must run away, escape, flee.

  2. Sexual temptation is a process, not an event. The temptation to look at pornography starts with a trigger. You see someone, or read something, or hear something. That’s followed by an involuntary emotional response. You feel delighted, or disgusted, or curious, for instance. Then comes your first thought. If the trigger is a pornographic image, this first thought is likely whether you will continue looking. Then comes the chemical release, the dopamine that travels to your brain, and feels so pleasurable. Then your pulse increases, your breathing increases, you begin to get an erection. Then you have your second thought. Here you wage battle with your conscience, thinking up reasons for continuing to look at the porn, and reasons for looking away. Whichever thought wins this battle, that is the action you will take.

  3. Detour before the dopamine. As soon as you encounter something sexually suggestive, quit what you are doing and hop off the temptation train. The longer you stay on, the farther down the track you travel, and the harder it is to hop off as the train accelerates. That’s the thing about pleasure—you don’t want it to stop. But to conquer pornography, you must conquer your flesh. That means fleeing as soon as you are tempted, before that pleasurable release of dopamine kicks in. Your most reliable ally in this struggle is your penis. As soon as you feel it twitch, hop off the train. Unless you are with your wife, a growing erection always means sexual sin is preparing to derail your train.

  4. God always provides the way of escape. “No temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to man; but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also make the way of escape, that you may be able to bear it” (1 Corinthians 10:13). This way of escape is not a window to jump out of but a window of opportunity to seize, typically an opportunity measured in seconds. If you want to avoid sexual sin, take the way of escape that God always supplies with every temptation—immediately.

  5. Your smartphone is one of Satan’s devices. Roughly 70% of all pornography is accessed on mobile phones. If you know that the primary way you fall to sexual temptation is your smartphone, replace it with a dumbphone. Downgrade to a handset that has no web browser, no apps, no wi-fi—zero access to internet pornography. These devices exist. Don’t ask me how I know.

Put on the Lord Jesus Christ

Your ultimate victory over porn is the power of the risen Lord in your life.

  1. Devote the first hour of each day to the Lord. Before you check your phone or do anything else, open your Bible, and let God talk to you. Read at least one chapter daily, working your way through one book of the Bible at a time. Then close your eyes and talk to God.

  2. Keep a daily devotional journal. After your daily Bible reading, pick out one verse, or one thought, that impressed you in the passage. Write your thoughts in your journal. Look for a promise to claim, a sin to avoid, an example to follow, or a command to obey.

  3. Keep short accounts with God. If you sin sexually, confess your sin immediately to God. Ask Him to forgive you based on the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Don’t carry your regret and shame forward into tomorrow. “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).

  4. Pursue holiness. What is the goal of God for unbelievers? Salvation. What is the will of God for believers? Sanctification. “For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you should abstain from sexual immorality” (1 Thessalonians 4:3).

  5. Trust Christ. The temptation to look at pornography may be strong, but you have power over it. The desire to masturbate to sexually explicit images and videos may seem irresistible, but it isn’t. If you are a believer in Christ, born again and filled with the Holy Spirit, then Christ is your Sovereign. Sin no longer reigns over you—the Savior does (Romans 6:12). But Christ only reigns when you turn your back on sin and turn to Him. You must do this as an act of your will. Lust is something you are allowed to be disloyal to. You are allowed to disobey sexual temptation. So go ahead—disobey.

  6. View sexual purity as a walk, not a destination. You won’t find sexual purity on any map. So don’t expect to arrive at a place in your life where you experience zero sexual lust, zero sexual temptation or zero sexual fantasies. Your goal is to walk properly today (Romans 13:13). Don’t aim to eventually conquer your sexual urges and temptations and sexual sins. Don’t think that working your way through 12 steps of recovery will one day land you at your destination with a halo waiting for you. Sexual purity isn’t a destination you hope to reach tomorrow—it’s a walk you take with the Lord today.

Conclusion

Pornography will ruin your life—in this world and in the world to come—if you refuse to forsake it. My prayer is that these thoughts educate, encourage, challenge, and inspire you to defeat pornography and sexual lust today. You can do it. If you need help on your journey, subscribe to my free daily email devotional, or buy the book.

Need a daily kick in the pants to quit porn biblically? Buy the book, or subscribe to my daily kick.

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