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Sexual Purity Support & Recovery Group

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Grateful for Grace

We must not see grace as a provision made after the law had failed. Grace was offered before the law was revealed. Indeed, grace was offered before man was created! “You were bought, not with something that ruins like gold or silver, but with the precious blood of Christ, who was like a pure and perfect lamb. Christ was chosen before the world was made, but he was shown to the world in these last times for your sake” (1 Pet. 1:18–20 NCV).

Why would God offer grace before we needed it? Glad you asked. Let’s return one final time to the charge card my father gave me. Did I mention that I went several months without needing it? But when I needed it, I really needed it. You see, I wanted to visit a friend on another campus. Actually, the friend was a girl in another city, six hours away. On an impulse I skipped class one Friday morning and headed out. Not knowing whether my parents would approve, I didn’t ask their permission. Because I left in a hurry, I forgot to take any money. I made the trip without their knowledge and with an empty wallet.

Everything went fine until I rear-ended a car on the return trip. Using a crowbar, I pried the fender off my front wheel so the car could limp to a gas station. I can still envision the outdoor phone where I stood in the autumn chill. My father, who assumed I was on campus, took my collect call and heard my tale. My story wasn’t much to boast about. I’d made a trip without his knowledge, without any money, and wrecked his car.

“Well,” he said after a long pause, “these things happen. That’s why I gave you the card. I hope you learned a lesson.”

Did I learn a lesson? I certainly did. I learned that my father’s forgiveness predated my mistake. He had given me the card before my wreck in the event that I would have one. He had provided for my blunder before I blundered. Need I tell you that God has done the same? Please understand; Dad didn’t want me to wreck the car. He didn’t give me the card so that I would wreck the car. But he knew his son. And he knew his son would someday need grace.

Please understand; God doesn’t want us to sin. He didn’t give us grace so we would sin. But he knows his children. “He made their hearts and understands everything they do” (Ps. 33:15 NCV). “He knows how we were made” (Ps. 103:14 NCV). And he knew that we would someday need his grace.

Today’s devotional is drawn from Max Lucado’s Second Chances.

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From Salads to Casseroles

Originally posted at: https://applyingmybeliefs.wordpress.com/2016/06/19/from-salads-to-casseroles/

by applyingmybeliefs

For those that don’t know, there is an organization called “The American Society of Addiction Medicine” (ASAM).  This organization and their website are primarily for physicians of course, but does have some useful and interesting information for us non-medical people.  They have a short and a long definition of addiction on their website:

Here is the short version:

Addiction is a primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry. Dysfunction in these circuits leads to characteristic biological, psychological, social and spiritual manifestations. This is reflected in an individual pathologically pursuing reward and/or relief by substance use and other behaviors.

Addiction is characterized by inability to consistently abstain, impairment in behavioral control, craving, diminished recognition of significant problems with one’s behaviors and interpersonal relationships, and a dysfunctional emotional response. Like other chronic diseases, addiction often involves cycles of relapse and remission. Without treatment or engagement in recovery activities, addiction is progressive and can result in disability or premature death.

This and the long version can be found here:

http://www.asam.org/quality-practice/definition-of-addiction

As I read this something quite odd struck me.  This definition calls addiction a chronic disease, which I had heard before, but I had a new thought.  I thought, “Why don’t churches look at this the same way they look at cancer, or heart disease or other significant chronic illnesses?”  What is different?

As I pondered this, I came to a place I had come to before.  At some level we in the church, mostly silently, believe that addiction is caused by sin, or even if we don’t struggle with that we are just plain uncomfortable with talking about glue sniffing or porn or hoarding or the many other addictions that are within our culture.  And I also thought this, “Why don’t we also assume that heart disease or cancer are caused by sin?”  There is much evidence that diseases like these are linked to the actions of our lifetime, for example colon cancer is linked to eating too much red meat to a certain extent; is this a product of the sin of gluttony at some level?

Anyway, my musing took me in a direction I didn’t expect, but felt the need to share.

In the church we care for each other.  One of the great things churches do is to provide meals for those who have significant temporary troubles, including illnesses.  We get a care calendar together and families volunteer to provide meals for a defined period of time.  I was fortunate to be on the receiving end of this one time, as my wife recovered from some surgery.  We had salads, and pasta dishes and chicken cooked many ways and of course the casseroles.

As I pondered this, I realized I had never heard of a church providing meals to a family who had put their son in a drug rehab.  In cases of the major disease of addiction, which can devastate a family as deeply a cancer diagnosis can, the church doesn’t seem to provide care in this way.  This could of course be partly due to that hidden thinking about addiction and sin from both the family affected and the church body.

Is this one of the reasons addicts and their families don’t recognize churches as caring places?  Should churches endeavor to develop a care calendar for families affected by addiction?

What do you think?

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My Recent Couple’s Counseling Session

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NEW Tuesday Morning Telemeeting!

Beginning Tuesday, March 13th at 7:00am CST, we are starting a second weekly Castimonia Telemeeting!  The Telemeeting will be held weekly every Tuesday at 7am (central standard time).  At this time, this Telemeeting is only for men who struggle with any type of sexual impurity.  A women’s only meeting might be formed in the future for women who struggle with sexual purity.

I look forward to hearing from you this coming Tuesday!

Tuesday Morning Telemeeting
 Time: 7:00AM – 8:00AM (CST)
Location: Telemeeting Call In Center Call In
Phone Number: 641-715-3818 (US Residents)
Access code: 407885
Click here for International Dial-In Numbers

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The conversation we’re not having about porn

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2016/05/26/the-conversation-were-not-having-about-porn

By Alexander Rhodes

Alexander Rhodes is the founder of NoFap, a platform dedicated to providing tools and support for people who want to quit porn.

Recently, a nonbinding resolution declaring pornography a “public health crisis” passed by unanimous vote through Utah’s state House and Senate, and was signed by Gov. Gary Herbert. In response, droves of Internet commenters tore into the legislators and the activists who pushed for its passage. Often, they discounted the resolution as theocracy or moral policing masquerading as public health policy, ignoring any evidence-based merit it might have.

While people are entitled to their skepticism regarding the backgrounds or motivations of those behind the resolution, this does not address the reasoning behind its arguments. In reality, criticisms of pornography transcend religion and morality.

Internet pornography is a very recent development, especially when compared with humans’ evolutionary timeline — and our brains have yet to adapt. Porn producers are hard at work each day developing audiovisual experiences that are ever more abundant, ubiquitous, novel and stimulating. Just as fast food franchises hacked our appetites by developing synthetic flavors, aromas and textures that target our brain’s reward system — leaving us with an obesity epidemic — porn producers are learning to hack our libidos with new technologies like HD video and virtual reality. It’s not unreasonable to pause and ask ourselves how their handiwork might be affecting our lives.

The negative effects of over-consuming Internet pornography is a well-documented phenomenon. Combine this with porn’s wild popularity and you have a recipe for a genuine public health concern. Individuals with porn problems are members of relationships, families, workplaces and communities, so individual porn problems trickle up to become societal problems. After all, we treat drugs, alcohol and gambling as serious issues not because everyone who partakes in them has an addiction but because the problematic few have a deleterious effect on our communities as a whole.

In recent years, discussions on pornography’s effects have been popping up throughout the Internet. The frequency of these conversations has escalated as the first generation of people raised on Internet porn is reaching adulthood and beginning to experience the detrimental effects of going through puberty using porn.

Thousands of individuals, often young and male, are reporting that using porn multiple times per day trained their brains to associate their sexualities with pixels on their computer screens, rather than sexual activity with human beings. They are reporting that they have a decreased interest in seeking out human partners, and if they do so, they often cannot achieve sexual arousal during partnered sex, have a decreased sensitivity to pleasure or cannot experience an orgasm without porn or porn fantasy. Interestingly enough, when these people remove one variable from their lives — using porn — most of the time their symptoms are reduced or reversed.

Their discussions have finally drawn the interest of researchers, clinicians and journalists. In reaction to their complaints, some good research is underway on the effects of porn addiction, such as the 2014 University of Cambridge study that used brain imaging to show that the porn-addicted brain reacts to porn cues the same way the drug-addicted brain reacts to drug cues. Yet some critics say there’s not enough evidence to support the idea that porn addiction is a public health problem, or even a real disorder. While there is already plenty of research available that confirms the existence of porn addiction, further research will require funding, ethics committee approval and willing test subjects.

These things require public interest, which requires open discussion about the subject — discussion that has been previously restricted to online forums and confidential sessions between clinicians and porn-addicted clients. If “Internet gaming disorder” is documented in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, why not “Internet pornography addiction”?

Utah’s resolution doesn’t call for an explicit ban on porn, but the open language calling for “policy change” is sufficiently vague to leave us all wondering. Is the best approach to porn addiction through legislation? Certainly not, if that legislation leads to outlawing people’s right to consume pornography. Intimacy, sex, love and what we do with our genitals during our free time aren’t areas for a government to regulate. However, legislation aimed at raising awareness, facilitating open discussion and enabling research is worth exploring.

Pragmatically, the resolution in Utah is great for the porn-recovery community. It served its purpose of sparking discussion about this under-discussed topic. While Utah’s declaration may cause disagreement, at the end of the day we don’t serve society when we avoid complicated, taboo subjects for the sake of comfort. We need to talk about these things openly to solve problems and progress as a species. And yes, that includes porn.