Jesus holds out free and full forgiveness, but also a cleansing and purifying that you desperately need. He offers you true joy and satisfaction in place of the fleeting, defiling pleasure of sin.

The following is a letter I wrote to a brother some years ago. It has been anonymized and lightly edited.

Dear Brother,

You have been on my mind for a few days and so I have been praying for you. What prompted it was that I listened to an interview podcast episode with a pastor who struggled with porn for years while in ministry. It was really amazing, but it made me think of you. You were honest and open enough last year to let me into this area of your life. I don’t take that lightly, and I thank you for taking that important step. But unless there have been developments I don’t know about, it doesn’t seem like there has been much traction or forward progress in this area of your life.

Assuming things are more or less the same as they were when you shared this struggle with us, I have a few things I want to share with you.

1. I Am Not Better

I write to you as a fellow sin-struggler. I write to you as one who knows what it is like to be stuck in that cycle of sinning, repenting, self-loathing, promising God to do better, and falling again. I write to you as someone who spent years turning to broken cisterns filled with filthy stagnant water over and over. This is the language in Jeremiah 2:13-14 “Be appalled at this, you heavens, and shudder with great horror,” declares the Lord. “My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.”

This was my reality and (if you are still continually turning to pornography and sexual sin) it is yours as well. And with this intake of poison over a long period of time come serious effects and consequences. The most dangerous of them all is blindness. You are deceived, and cannot see, your real and true spiritual state. That is probably why your initial reaction to this letter may be negative. Sin and Satan have got a deep, deep hold on your heart by now. So I have been praying that you will have a few moments of clarity as I share some good but difficult truths with you.

2. You Can be Free

One of the worst deceptions you are believing is that you are going to be stuck here forever. If I was to boil down the Bible’s teaching on sin to a single truth, it would be: The gospel exists to defeat sin! Really, sin is nothing compared with the power of the gospel when it starts to work in a heart. Jesus came and died and rose again to deal with sin. Not just the guilt of it, but the power and grip of it in your life. Countless thousands have experienced true and lasting and supernatural freedom from the chains and slavery of habitual sin, and you can too. “For if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36).

I believe that you have experienced the gift of forgiveness, but it seems to me that you have yet to really experience the joy, happiness, and delight, of walking in the light of the fellowship with God that your forgiveness is meant to lead to. I stress those three words: joy, happiness, delight. Listening to that interview with that pastor, I was reminded in fresh ways of just how delightful Jesus is to our souls compared to everything else we try and find satisfaction in. And it reminded me of how miserable it is to be a slave to sin.

Aren’t you just sick of it?

This misery is what those verses from Jeremiah are about—we compulsively dig our own filthy broken cisterns which end up just holding muddy rain water that tastes good only in the moment, while just behind us there is “the spring of living water” that we have forsaken and which truly satisfies the deepest longings of the soul. As C.S. Lewis wrote, “It would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

3. Spiritual Power

One of the worst effects of giving in habitually to willful sin (making choices by habit or addiction that you know are sinful), is that it saps you of spiritual power. It is like a cup with a hole in the bottom. You never can stay full even when God’s Spirit moves in you and revives you because “the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh.” Yes—“So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh” and “Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit” (Gal 5:16, 17, 25). How can I be filled with this Spirit when I am continually grieving it? “And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption” (Eph 4:30).

It is one thing if I mistakenly trip my friend. I can honestly apologize and be reconciled easily. The tripping was real but it wasn’t a personal rejection or attack. But it is another thing entirely if I slap my friend across the face and call him a pathetic loser. I cannot so easily apologize and be reconciled, since the sin was so personal. It is like that in our relationship with God too—how can I come to Him for the millionth time about the same sin and say I’m sorry? Am I really? I know I’m just going to do it again. My repentance feels shallow and fake, and perhaps it is. Intimacy with God is therefore impossible, and I would rather not face the pain of that distance, so I numb it with distractions.

In this state, I have almost no spiritual power. How can I genuinely share the hope and joy of the gospel when I am not able to enter into it myself? How can I lovingly rebuke my brother for sin when I am secretly indulging it in my own life? How can I look my son in the eye and promise him that virtue, integrity, honesty, and purity are so much better than vice and sin when I am not walking in those virtues myself? So I stay silent, and the voice of my conscience grows quieter and quieter, and in a thousand little ways I therefore fail to minister to those God has placed around me, and my spiritual impact is reduced to almost nothing. What a victory for Satan! Here is a soldier in God’s army that has been rendered almost completely ineffective. Brother, don’t let this be true of you.

4. Looking Ahead

I want you to think ahead with me. You have two paths set before you. You will definitely walk down one of these two paths. The first path is the one you’re currently on, and the second is quite different. You’ll have to forgive me for being very blunt here.

Let’s imagine the first. You get this letter, you give it a reading, but things don’t change. You’re middle-aged now, so in just a few years, you’re officially a dirty old man, still looking at pictures of much much younger naked women. Let’s be honest—it’s a pathetic picture of manhood that you would not wish for your sons. Hopefully the perversions of your lust haven’t taken you down any darker paths, but they very likely have since that is the law of diminishing returns.

I know it’s painful but follow this through with me. In a few short years, you are confronted with the devastating reality that you are lusting after women the same age as your daughter (who is by then a young woman). You are confronted with the devastating hypocrisy of your actions. Namely, you want men not to lust after your daughter, not to degrade her and fantasize sexually about her (the very thought of it enrages you—as it should), but you are doing that exact thing to other men’s daughters, some of whom are probably brothers in Christ who are heartbroken about what their daughters have gotten caught up in. What else? Your marriage will certainly not be any better, and you will not be any more satisfied, despite giving away more of yourself. You will continue reaping the fruit of the seeds you’re currently sowing, only with compound interest—the cost will continue to rise and you will continue to be more miserable.

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